Pica Pica

First, the good, because it deserves praise. “Six Impossible Things Before Dinner” a sort of mind-reading show presented by Philip Escoffey in the Studio at the Sydney Opera House. I say “sort of” because – well, you would have to go to see it. Highly entertaining, totally baffling. Just two tips for you: 1) go, and 2) stay to the end.

And now the bad. Before the show we decided to eat in the “Opera Bar”. Drinks bought and food ordered, we sat with our identifying number (197) on clear view at our table, and waited for the food to be brought. The food order was very simple, but it was quite some time before anything arrived – but it was not what we had ordered. The waitress wandered off to try and find the proper recipient for what she had in hand.

After a few minutes a waiter approached, and asked us whether we had been given the number 197 at the bar, which of course we had. He was about to leave, but I asked him what was happening to the food we had ordered, since the wrong order had been brought to this number at our table. He said “Oh that’s coming, it’s on its way, it will only be a minute”. It felt like a brush-off.

Evidently it was indeed a brush-off, as still nothing happened for some time, until I felt compelled to ask if somebody could check what had happened to our food, explaining that entirely the wrong dish had been brought to us at number 197. More time went by. Finally we are approached again, and asked again what we had ordered. We are told “It’s just on its way, it will be here in just a minute”, but when we ask what “a minute” really means, there is no clear answer, except that we are asked if we would like another drink in the meantime. We decline, since we hve a show to watch, and ask for our money back. We leave.

The shame of this is, as so often, not the original mistake. Mistakes can happen, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that a busy kitchen serving fast-ish food is a fertile ground for mistakes. But if the original mistake had been acknowledged and acted on, I would hardly be bothering to write about it now. If, having brought the wrong dish to our table, and presumably having found out where that dish was really meant to go, somebody had gone to the kitchen and asked where the right food for 197 had got to, we might scarcely have noticed that anything was wrong. At the latest, the time when I asked what was happening to our food should have been the signal for somebody to say “I’m sorry, we’ve made a mistake, please hang on”, to go to the kitchen and to make sure that our food was being prepared. It was the brush-offs, the “it will be here in a minute”, when it is quite obvious that, as far as the kitchen was concerned, 197 was gone and forgotten long ago – that is what made it annoying.

I am, of course, informing the Opera Bar of this little story, and will let you know of any response.

PS. I must tell you that I received a prompt and unreserved apology from the management. We look forward to going again!

It is rare that I walk out of a restaurant, food uneaten, simply because the quality is so low.

I remember that in 1971 I had ordered sweet and sour pork balls in a Chinese fast food place on the corner of Fosse Road North and King Richard’s Road in Leicester, but found them too disgusting to eat. In 1998 I left of the Parkway Hotel in Dunmanway, West Cork, for a similar reason. Allowing for the possibility of something having slipped my mind, I am willing to grant that the same thing might have happened somewhere, sometime in the 1980s. So the events of last Sunday were about the fourth such event in nearly 40 years.

We decided, spontaneously, to go out to Norton Street (Leichhardt) for lunch. We started at the “cheap and cheerful” end, and decided to go into a cafe/restaurant known as Grind. “Grilled fish and chips” sounded interesting enough, and we both decided to have it. Before sinking to describe the food, I will mention that the waitress, who spoke hardly any English, made a genuine attempt to be charming.

The food came. Being “cheap and cheerful”, although far from dirt cheap, I could just about accept that the salad was uninteresting, and that there was too much on the plate, presumably in order to make it look as if there was more food there than was really the case. I could just about, although with disappointment, accept the stick-like little “chips”, the sort produced with the least care and attention possible. The fact that all the other food was plonked on top of the chips has no excuse, but would not cause me to walk out, merely not to go back. The main part of my fish did not taste too bad either. However, on the top was a curious spirally-flowery cut piece of fish, whose taste can fairly be described as utterly foul. Only a death-wish would have inspired one to eat it. It is impossible to believe that anyone in the kitchen knew what it tasted like.

We wondered whether to make a scene, but decided for the “quiet life” option of commenting if we were asked whether the food had been all right. So after a few minutes of toying with what was on our plates, I went to pay. No, nobody did ask whether we had enjoyed the food, not even the common courtesy of that question, let alone the genuine concern that should have resulted from customers leaving with their plates nearly full after five minutes.

As an amusing coda to the incompetence of the staff, the bill was for $41.30. I gave the waiter at the till a $50 bill and a $2 piece. He opened the till, shut the till, open it again, put some money in, took it out again, shut the till. Clearly it was beyond him to work out that I needed a $10 bill and 70 cents. He then turned to the “manager”, gave him my $52, and asked him to “sort it out”.

I should mention, in case the managers and staff were different that day, that this happened at lunchtime on Sunday 27 December.

We then went down the road to a French place for delicious food, served with care, and costing very much the same.

 ”Australia is becoming the Iran of the South Pacific”

Crikey tells us that Reporters Without Borders has written to the PM urging him to abandon the invidious filtering scheme:

Quoting from Crikey:

The letter, signed by RWB Secretary-General Jean-Francois Julliard, spelled out the organisation’s disquiet with the broad criteria and uncertain goals of the censorship plan. In particular, they felt the lack of judicial oversight was a key problem:

Firstly, the decision to block access to an ‘inappropriate’ website would be taken not by a judge but by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Such a procedure, without a court decision, does not satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. The ACMA classifies content secretly, compiling a website blacklist by means of unilateral and arbitrary administrative decision-making. Other procedures are being considered but none of them would involve a judge.

Read more through the link above. Remember, this is not about the few unpleasant things they are talking about banning now – it is about the way they want to take power to secretly ban anything they feel like. Fascism is an easy insult, but it it not an exaggeration here.

You might also enjoy and learn from this spoof site.

So the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy has announced that he will introduce legislation before next year’s elections forcing ISPs to block a secret blacklist of “refused classification” (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.

The debate, thank goodness, has got vigorous. The issue, of course, is not the tiny number of sites – probably revolting and abhorrent in many cases – that are the ostensible target of this move. OK, there is indeed a question as to whether any information should ever be blocked – perhaps it should not. If we grant, for argument’s sake, that it should there is indeed a question as to whether we grant the little catholic boy Stephen Conroy the right to control the choice of what that blocked information is – in fact I don’t. And there are questions about whether it will bring any significant gains in terms of its ostensible target – probably it will be almost useless. And again, indeed, there is a question as to whether it will also block perfectly acceptable sites – the evidence suggests that it will.

But these are trivial questions. They suggest that the proposals are useless and stupid, and that makes us smell a rat.

The truly worrying thing is the proposal that the government will arrange, in secret, for otherwise public information to be banned, for reasons that it will keep secret. We will not be told what we are not allowed to see. An unelected committee will not tell us what is banned or why. We will be led to believe that, for instance, the blocks are being applied to child pornography. But further down the line, perhaps not under this government or even the next, you can just bet that some special circumstances will require a “small, temporary, provisional” extension of the blocked material. “National security” will demand, for instance, that sites explaining government involvement in environmentally unsound projects are blocked; or that sites that challenge the reasons for going to war will be seen as traitorous – WMDs, anyone? Perhaps sites with pictures of the PM cavorting naked with his/her illicit lover will be blocked; and we will not be allowed to know where it will end.

We therefore have a civic duty to learn about and use the technical tricks needed to circumvent these things. We should learn to encrypt the most innocuous e-mails, learn to anonymise ourselves when we wish our aunt a happy birthday. Otherwise we are conniving in the government cover-ups of the future. Does anybody believe they won’t want to?

The back story: we had two computers, a desktop and a laptop. Internet connectivity is through a wireless router provided as part of the package by Telstra (the dominant telecommunications company here, formerly owned by the Australian government).

The main story, in bullets:

• Laptop computer meets very serious accident.
• Order and receive new one from Dell.
• New laptop will not connect to Internet.
• Spend an hour or two on this – it becomes clear that although the laptop sees wireless networks belonging to neighbours, it simply does not see our own.
• Contact Telstra support. Spend two or three hours on the phone to them. They cannot fix the problem. They blame the new computer, and the fact that it is running Windows 7. They say “We do not support Windows 7 yet, it is too new”. They also say that they do not support the router any more, because it is too old.
• Contact Dell support.
• Spend considerable time on the phone to Dell. Eventually one of their technicians says “If your computer cannot see your router, perhaps your router is set to be invisible. Try changing these settings: xxx”.
• This works.

Coda:

A week or so later, somebody rings up from Telstra, wanting to know if the problem was solved. I tell them that yes, it works now, but no, it was no thanks at all to Telstra. I point out that although it was outside the scope of Dell’s responsibility, they spotted that the failure to see the router might be due to the router being invisible. The caller says that he is just looking for some feedback. I suggest it would be a good idea if their support staff knew about the equipment they are supposed to be supporting.

“And is there anything else I can help you with?” I decline the offer, but I do remain polite.

Today I combed the cat:

When I got up this morning I found this picture of peaceful coexistence on the couch:

I run three blogs. None of them is wildly active. Some of the posts have received a few comments – thanks for the interest!

Until now I simply had a system in which unknown posters have to have their first post approved by me. Once I have approved a post from you, you are then able to post without further checks. This works automatically, it’s simple and easy. So far I’ve only had one human idiot whose posts I rejected.

It’s the non-human idiots that are the problem; every day I have to mark a large number of spam posts as such, and then delete them. It is to be believed that the vast majority of these – perhaps all – are machine-generated: spambots! I’ve therefore just added a “captcha” system. Most readers will be familiar with this kind of thing – you have to recognize an oddly written sequence of letters or numbers, perhaps a word. This is very hard to program a machine to do, so mostly only humans will get past.

I think I have set it so that it is only if you are an unknown user that this will appear. Like the freedom to add messages without me having to check them that known users, with a history of at least one approved comment, already have, it’s only the first time that you should have to face this small hurdle. If you have any problems with it – please let me know!

Happening as I do to know a couple of enthusiastic concertina aficionados here in Sydney, and happening as I do to have known Dick Miles when I lived in West Cork, I have from time to time been asked what he actually plays like when it comes to the jigs and reels and polkas and slides and hornpipes of the dance music. Alas, I was not enough of a concertina lover to appreciate the finer points at the time. I will say that I did rather like the way he would accompany a sad traditional song on the ‘tina, but when it came to the diddley-di we love I didn’t listen closely.

But recently I’ve been importing old material from cassette tapes (remember them?) and mini-disks (a technology that was never quite at the right place at the right time to catch on as much as it might have deserved) into computerised files. And what do you know? An MD of an entire session, recorded at Casey’s in Baltimore on 14 May 2005! What else do you know? I’d almost forgotten about it, since the postioning of the microphone caused the concertina – yes, Dick Miles’ concertina – to dominate the other assortment of tooters, scrapers, bashers and pluckers.

There are 10 short clips. I’m open to correction on the names of any of the tunes, especially the first, which I think is Dan O’Keefes:

 [audio:01_1.mp3]

The Road to Lisdoonvarna:

 [audio:02_2.mp3]

McMahon’s reel:

[audio:03_3.mp3]

Off to California:

[audio:04_4.mp3]

The Ballyvourney Polka:

[audio:05_5.mp3]

The Plains of Boyle:

[audio:06_6.mp3]

The Fairies’ Hornpipe:

[audio:07_7.mp3]

Brosnan’s #1:

[audio:08_8.mp3]

The Frost is All Over (harmonica):

[audio:09_9.mp3]

The Stack of Barley:

[audio:10_10.mp3]

Ten clips in one:

[audio:dick_miles.mp3]

Of two very different kinds. Insectoidal:

To add to the samsaric tragedy of it all, having watched green more or less kill black and taken this picture, I accidentally brushed the table with the camera strap, and black fell to the ground, not to be found again.

Wild mammalian games probably appeal to most of us, as mammals, more:

She has no teeth, but you still need to treat the claws with respect!