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Green press trips

Press trips are all very nice. Who doesn’t enjoy flying off to far-away destinations, even if you don’t get to see much except the inside of a hotel at the other end? There is, however, a problem for any journalist who worries about green issues. All those plane flights can overwhelm all your good work when you’re at home. In fact, probably just one trip will result in your using up your CO2 allowance for the year. What to do, what to do?

Turns out that some of the airlines operate a carbon neutral policy. You just go to their web site, work out how much CO2 your trips have pumped out, pony up a little cash and the airline will put that money towards offsetting those CO2 emissions in an approved scheme. It should all result in your trip not having put out any net CO2 at all.

That’s the theory anyway. No doubt someone will point out that it’s all a con, doesn’t work, etc. I’d like to think it does until I hear evidence to the contrary. So I’m off to the BA web site’s offset scheme right now to pay my carbon tax for my last two press trips. I’ll have to see if BMI does an offset scheme for my little holiday in Glasgow.

The trouble with this though is that I’m now paying for my press trip, which offends my natural inalienable journo’s right to freebies. Hopefully, it’s tax deductible at the least. Maybe in future press-trip organisers will pay for the carbon offset, too. How about it PR people?

UPDATE: Turns out you can do carbon offsetting for almost anything at Climate Care; return trips to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Monaco worked out at £15 in total to offset, which isn’t bad, is it?

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Pilger stuff

John PilgerJohn Pilger’s one of my personal journalistic heroes (although I occasionally disagree with some of his politics). So I’m always happy to see more Pilger articles. There’s an interview with him in today’s Press Gazette, but I’ve also noticed he’s contributing to the Guardian’s Comment is Free section. That, incidentally, has an RSS feed, making it easy to spot when he writes something new – which would be a handy feature of the Carlton Pilger site if they did it, given that you can’t sign up for their email newsletter any more.

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Living in fear of the iMac

My iMac wouldn’t start up yesterday. Well, first it just turned itself off while I was in the middle of something. Then it wouldn’t start up again – most of the time, I got nothing other than a glowing light when I pressed the On button; sometimes I got as far as the Apple logo.

I’d had the mysterious shutdown happen to me before, but this was the first time it wouldn’t restart afterwards. All things being equal, I figured it was a hardware problem, particularly once I found the iMac wouldn’t even boot into Target disk mode when connected via FireWire to my PowerBook. So I unplugged all the peripherals. Nothing. Final resort: I took out the extra 1GB of RAM I’d installed the first day I got the iMac.

Hooray! It worked. The iMac booted just fine.

I would then have tried to get Crucial, the company from which I bought the memory, to exchange it, but it was 8am and no one was in yet. So I waited and carried on using the iMac.

I tell you something: don’t even think about using a new Intel Mac without boosting the memory beyond 512MB because it’s unusable otherwise. A complete dog.

Anyway, deciding there was no way I could work in a glacier, I took a risk and decided to put the RAM chip back in. This time though, I swapped it with the chip that Apple had included in the first slot.

The results:

  1. The iMac works just fine again and is actually usable
  2. It seems a little/a lot faster than it did before the whole disaster occurred. Maybe the Crucial memory is faster than the Apple memory and it’s being used by the system for most operations, rather than the Apple memory.
  3. I’m mystified about what caused the freeze. Maybe the iMac had overheated and all that moving the iMac around, unscrewing the memory hatch, etc, cooled it down a bit. Or maybe one of the chips wasn’t quite seated properly and when I swapped the chips, I seated them correctly.
  4. I’m now working in constant fear my iMac is going to have another hiccup. After that incident with Linux a week ago, my backup strategy is becoming meticulous.
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Where are the teachers going to come from, Gordon?

Following on from my little rant about Gordon Brown’s new plan to force immigrants to learn English, this particular item of news from Private Eye came to my attention today:

“Since November, immigrants wanting to take the UK’s citizenship tests must be able to demonstrate an ‘acceptable degree’ of skill in the English language. But how are people supposed to learn it?

”An interim report from a study by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education has uncovered ‘enormous problems’ with the availability of English classes for speakers of other languages (ESOL). As demand for the classes has risen (by 65 percent in the past two years), little has been done to boost the number of courses and there is a national shortage of qualified ESOL teachers.

“Many areas have long waiting lists for courses and the inspectorates looking after colleges and adult education services say ESOL is ‘probably the weakest curriculum area’ in the whole learning and skills sector.”

So not only has Gordon come up with a policy that is really just an extension of an existing one, albeit a stupid extension that couldn’t possibly work in practice (how exactly are unemployed immigrants going to be able to afford these English lessons? etc, etc), he’s overlooked the fact that there’s no one to actually teach English anyway. Assuming this isn’t pointless posturing to attract the Daily Mail vote but which he’s never going to actually implement.

It’s his hands on the economy, folks, and soon he’ll be looking after the whole country…

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Pictures from Monaco

Here are a few pictures of Monaco. Average temperature yesterday was 25ºC. As you might expect, since I had approximately 15 minutes to explore Monaco during my whole time there (deadlines is deadlines, as they say, and although I could have stayed the night, there’s an article I need to write today, and a few interviews that need conducting), most of these are from within 100 metres of the Meridien hotel in which the press briefing was being held. All the same, I think you can see that Monaco’s really, really nice, particularly in June.

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Be wary of the PowerBook battery

I bought my laptop about three years ago. It’s a PowerBook G4 12“. There have been things wrong with it since day one, including an odd tendency to crash at random intervals, no matter what operating system I’m using, if I happen to have moved it recently – obviously a useful feature in a laptop.

However, it’s been getting worse. The ”7“ key keeps falling off; there’s some great big black marks on the wrist-rests, either caused by fused toner cartridge or by the G4 superheating its outer coating to the point where it starts to carbonise. The battery life has also dropped off, and until a couple of days had dropped to about an hour and half during normal usage and less than 40 minutes if I’m playing a DivX. I had bought an extra battery at the same time as the laptop, but about a year ago it started to refuse charge.

Miraculously, though, I tried charging it again yesterday and it works just fine. I’ve now gone from under 40 minutes of battery life to over three hours. The moral of this story, then, is always to buy a spare battery, but to avoid using it until your main battery has gone pear-shaped. And also, never trust Apple to produce a battery that has any kind of longevity in everyday use.

UPDATE: Incidentally, finally having battery power again meant I was able to test the Notebook feature of Word 2004, which allows you to type notes as Word records via your Mac’s microphone. It’s actually pretty good. The quality was fine, the file didn’t get too large and you’re able to play back the audio at (almost) the corresponding points to your typing. I’ll be using that feature again, I think.

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Business class on BA

So I’m at the gate, ready to board the flight back to London from Nice from my press trip. I’ve been impressed by Nice’s clever plan of having two lines for boarding – one for rows 24 and upwards and one for everyone else. Certainly speeded things up a bit. When what should happen but the person checking my boarding pass frowns. I’m not coming up on her system. She passes it to her colleague, who searches her system and delights me by informing me that I’ve been upgraded from “Euro traveller” to “Business class”.

“Excellent,” I think to myself. “I’ve never been business class with BA before. I wonder what it’s like.”

Well, I’m writing this on the plane right now and I’d have to say, not much different from economy.

Does it have more leg room or more space? No.

Does it have WiFi access? No

Does it have power sockets in the arm rests for laptops? No

Surely it must be quieter and more conducive to work in some way? Well, that screaming baby on the other side of the plane isn’t making it seem very conducive to work.

In actual fact, the only differences I’ve spotted so far are that I could have used the under-equipped lounge if I’d known that I was going to be upgraded (I actually did get to use the lounge, but only because Jeff Kimbell at Dell smuggled me in on his card); and you get better cutlery with the meal. The meal itself isn’t that much better, particularly since they substituted the usual functional block of cheese they provide for the biscuits with some icky blue cheese that they can probably smell in China from this altitude.

Maybe it’s better on the long haul flights, but for the short hauls, economy is as good as business class, I reckon, and a damn sight cheaper.

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Force immigrants to learn English?

The Beeb is reporting that everyone’s favourite potential PM, Gordon Brown, is trying to win the “psychotically racist” vote by suggesting that not only should all potential immigrants to the UK have to learn English, if they refuse, we should force them to learn it.

Wow. Whose exact benefit is that for? The immigrants? Could be, but why force them if it is? They’ll do it of their own volition, surely.

If it isn’t, who wins from this plan? TEFL teachers and precious few others, that’s who? And how do you force people to learn a language?

“You! What’s that called? Tell me… No? It’s a ”loaf of bread“. Are you going to remember that? Are you? If you don’t get 100 out of 100 on your next vocab quiz, I’m going to send you back to where you came from! Now here are your flashcards.”

Brilliant.

But here’s a question: why are we stopping with immigrants to Britain and English? How about people who relocate to other parts of Britain? Should we make Glaswegians who move to the home counties practice a slightly posher accent to make them more intelligible to the sheltered shire classes? Should we force surfers who move down to Newquay to learn Cornish? How about anyone who buys a holiday home in North West Wales being forced to learn Welsh? And let’s not get started on forcing the Northern Irish to learn Gaelic…

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Weirdest idea for a Las Vegas casino yet

We’ve already learnt about one new Las Vegas hotel and casino this week. Now here comes another one. But it’s the weirdest one yet. It’s based on the magazine Maxim.

On one level, you can see where they’re coming from: Las Vegas isn’t called the “city of sin” for nothing. But a hotel designed primarily for teenage boys without much experience of women? Is that going to pay back the $1.2 billion needed to build it?

Still, maybe it’ll be like the Excalibur: there are plenty of people who stay in the Excalibur who aren’t there for the dragons and knights, but because they need a relatively cheap place to stay on the Strip that isn’t too shabby. I imagine the same might be true for Maxim Hotel and Casino. It’s actually going to have a reasonable nice location – close to Circus, Circus – since the north end of the Strip doesn’t yet have any of the top-grade hotels that the south and middle have been accumulating since the start of the 90s. Unless you count the Stratosphere, which I don’t.