Month: February 2011

Secret Life in Lavender (Currently Uploaded Video)

This one shows, to the background of a couple of Thai songs which are highly unlikely to get me done for using music the way that western music is prone to do, some beautiful insects using the lavendar bush next to our holiday cottage. There were bees and hummingbird moths in this film, there were also cabbage white butterflies, hoverflies and other insects on that bush during our week, but nothing as impressive as the hummingbird moth Macroglossa.

Underneath it one evening I also found a toad, which I allowed to remain there undisturbed.

It’s amazing how much life can exist around one bush of lavender.

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Airport shocker

Departure hall of Terminal 2 opened in 2006
If'I'd remembered it in this hall before handing in my case, all would have been well...

OK, this one’s hot off the press, as I am writing about something that happened about ten minutes ago, and I’m writing this from one of the machines in the lounge at Prague airport.

A few days ago I gave a lecture about cross-cultural management to students of Susquehanna University in Prague. At the end of the lecture I was given a bottle of fine Moravian wine.

I forgot that I had this bottle in my briefcase, but naturally the detectors as I passed from streetside to airside at Prague found it.

Now clearly they all recognise me as having been through there eighty or so times before, so there’s no terrorism alarm bells ringing, and you can see how they’re in two minds about whether or not just to let me get on with it. But in the end the three of them say no, they have to do things by the book, which mean that the wine is thrown away.

I’m there saying to them, just take it and drink it yourselves, it’s a sin to throw it away. And of course as they know that I’m a regular, they also know that there’s no risk I’m trying to poison them, give them an exploding oesophagus, or anything like that.

It’s not the loss I’m bothered about. I could make that up just by drinking the free wine that’s flowing like milk and honey (there’s milk and honey too, in the fridge) here in the Lounge. It’s a bit early in the day for me, though, and I’m actually not a big fan of alcohol despite what readers of my blogs and viewers of my vlogs may think.

It is a bit sad that it happened to a present. But most of all it’s  pity to see something like that just thrown into a bin and not enjoyed by anybody. When anyone can see there’s no real risk there. It’s just the over-zealous application of a rule book.

That’s the real shock. That’s what’s really saddened me and sent me running to the production corridors of WordPress to get it off my chest.

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Top 30 Languages to learn for 2050

Map showing countries and autonomous subdivisi...
The Turkic linguation - to a greater or lesser extent mutually intelligible languages. However often not the preferred business languages of their regions, hence only 12th place in this economic utility-based prediction.

Here are my 2050 predictions, originally shared on http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com :

1. Chinese (all types)
2. English (all types)
3. Arabic (all dialects)
4. Russian
5. Spanish (all types)
6. Japanese
7. German
8. French
9/10.Portuguese and Korean(if there is Korean unification, Korean takes the higher slot)
11. Italian
12. Turkish and mutually intellible forms of Turkic Continue reading “Top 30 Languages to learn for 2050” →

Atheist chats with theist. (Some Skype chat from this evening – experimental piece)

Blaise Pascal first explained his wager in Pennsylvania

In my search for new blogging and media techniques, tonight, while chatting to a radio friend Fat Steve and noticing that the chat had become a nice cameo piece, I got his permission as you will see to try the following:

[22:44:09] Fat Steve: Davey, I was reading a thread on Amazon and this guy on there reminded me of you

[22:44:54] David J. James: In what way? Continue reading “Atheist chats with theist. (Some Skype chat from this evening – experimental piece)” →

Would you like to get a new inexpensive email software plug-in that tells you who messages sent to you have been BCC’d to?

Screenshot of ALPINE 1.10, showing received ma...
Can this show you the BCC information hidden in the headers on incoming mails?

Call me paranoid if you like, but from time to time I wonder whether emails that have been sent to me might have also been sent to other people using the BCC or “blind carbon copy” function. Maybe it’s just a harmless informing of someone else as to what’s going on, or maybe someone has made a wisecrack that I didn’t notice about me in the text, some private joke about me which has gone whoosh over my head, and he and his mates are all creased up in paroxysms of LOLs and ROFLs and maybe even one or two ROTOFLMFAOs about it.  One can never be too sure.

There are various ways of determining whether an e-mail sent to you has also been surreptitiously sent to another person, but none of them until now involve smart software embedded as a plug in on your e-mail client which “decodes” the headers in a shadow copy of the sender’s .msg file which it calls down from the server.

Until now, one has had to resort to needing a court order and taking it to the sender’s administrator (best done with a lawyer) threatening the sender at gun or knifepoint to tell you or show you (best done without a lawyer) or just to check the sender’s screen when they forget to lock their machine while going to the toilet (best done with a lookout on the corridor). Until now, you haven’t been able to just install a plug-in to a normal e-mail client which enables this function at the click of a button marked “disclose BCC recipients”. Continue reading “Would you like to get a new inexpensive email software plug-in that tells you who messages sent to you have been BCC’d to?” →