I cannot understand how on the one hand the government through taxation seeks to help the worst off while liberalising the gambling laws with the other when the evidence suggests gambling addiction hits the worst off worst of all.

If you agree – and particularly if you live in the UK – please sign the Campaign Against Super-Casinos Expansion’s online petition.

I wrote a fairly extensive post about the gambling bill when it first came up in 2004 with some of the evidence against it.

This art ‘event’ –The Sultan’s Elephant looks like it was a great event. It is exactly the kind of thing (along with fireworks and the Thames Festival which I like to see my tax money going towards.

It’s like some kind of sadistic exercise in massively multivariate calculus. You need to be able to afford it of course (impossible on the face of it), you need to choose a neighborhood (based on schools? transport? social cachet? shopping areas?) but that’s just the beginning. Do you need a house or do you want a flat? In a block or in a converted house or perhaps in a new development? In good condition or needing work? Can you live with a ‘bedroom’ 2 metres wide? Do you need a garden or will a roof terrace or a balcony do? Do you care if it is leasehold (yours for 99 years – or less) or freehold? Do you want to try to increase the amount of space in your place to be by adding a loft conversion? If so what would that cost and would the neighbors let you? (Actually you will never know until you buy…)

The Internet has helped a lot – | can normally find out floor plans and exact property locations online. I can even look up the quality of the local schools and the social class of the neighbors using upmystreet! But I have found in recent flat visits that rooms that are smaller ‘on plan’ look bigger when you see them, so you can only go so far online. Plus helpfully estate agents calculate the overall size of flats differently – some count bathrooms, some don’t for example. And London houses being what they are you often get irregularly-shaped rooms so the dimensions can be deceptive. One unusual place we have looked at has about 40% ‘marginally useful space’ which makes the place feel better (or helps with storage) but which don’t help in terms of places to put beds, chairs etc…

Still, after about two weeks of intensive searching I think we will have found our new nest soon – just about the time when the child we are buying it for makes an appearance!

Update:  We are buying the ‘quirky’ place above and I am warming to it – particularly given the amount of potential it has for improvement. So it is possible to find a flat in London. You just have to be prepared to spend a fortune and two solid weeks nearly full-time running around looking at a series of more or less unsuitable properties.

As for the school situation – our situation is unusual in that we want to bring up our child in a bilingual school environment which may mean private schooling (much though that goes against my principles). So location doesn’t matter so much (though in fact the nearest primary school is in the top 25% of schools nationally according to the league table so we wouldn’t have to move to get a good school anyway.)

In theory the backup I made using Synk onto my firewire disk should allow me to plug the external disk into my Mac (or any recent Mac?) and have it boot up off that disk, making my work environment exactly as it was at the moment of the backup. I tried something similar the last time my PC crashed but that never worked properly and I ended up having to copy  things across and re-install applications.

I found a colleague with a Mac today and tried my backup – my heart in my mouth – and it seems to work just as advertised! (At least on the basis of a few minutes clicking around).

So there will be a week of chaos while my machine is being repaired after which I should be able to go back to an almost completely normal life (technologically speaking). Thank you Apple and Synk!

(Not me but I feel a bit like the above)

1) Our first baby is due in 5 days.

2) My (increasingly distant) hope is to upgrade from MPhil to PhD in two and a half months and to get as much work on the thesis done as possible before the baby disturbs my concentration.

3) We just found, agreed on and put an offer on a new place to live yesterday

4) Last night my wife managed to stab her finger – not seriously but seriously enough to go off to hospital to get it looked at and…

5) my iBook’s hard disk just up and died on me! Fortunately (?) I have some experience with hard disk crashes so when my disk began to show signs of dying (rattling noises etc) I backed it up pronto. But since I don’t now have a working Mac and since my backup is on a Mac-formatted Firewire drive I just realised I can’t access most of those files until I get my Mac back in ten days time. But in ten days time I suspect I may have other things on my mind than my iBook! Fortunately, I also copied a few critical files onto my wife’s PC and hopefully can therefore continue to work. As soon as my teeth stop grinding…

P.S. Don’t be surprised if because of the above – particularly 1) – this blog is not updated for a week or so. I don’t expect I’ll bore you with baby pictures – those will go up on the private blog…

Me on Brussels’ main square

Originally uploaded by David and Delphine.

My wife and I returned yesterday from our last short break as a twosome (for visitors who didn’t know, we have a boy due on or after April 22nd). There’s a small photo album here – warning – it may not be safe for the sensitive to view at work as it contains a picture of ‘comedy’ breasts made of chocolate. Gotta love that Belgian sense of humour!

P.S. I have edited my R hand navigation bar (which has, I like to think, something for everyone – do check it out periodically). The latest thing I’ve added is a feature I think is really handy – Send me an Odeo which is just a quick and easy way for you to record and send me a voice message if you have a microphone on your machine – even easier than typing a comment! I think this or something like this is likely to replace many of the normal ‘social’ comments – where friends just want to say “that’s funny” or “congratulations on your upcoming child” but don’t need to send a link or contribute anything lengthy or deep. It’s free to use and to add to your own site (no I have no relationship to the company!).

I have also provided a link to make it easy to bookmark this site using any of the dozens of ‘social bookmarking’ services out there (including del.icio.us and my personal favourite, Netvouz).

blog.org is five years old last week. Well kind of – I had a weblog even before Feb 1st 2001 on a service that died, taking the postings I had made with it (“Groksoup” – no longer at the site or even in the Internet Archive). I seem to have started this blog without much ceremony – just started doing what I mostly still seem to be doing – providing links to sites I consider useful, giving tips on Internet-related stuff and occaisionally talking about politics (mostly Internet-related politics). I hope you still enjoy it in ten years in whatever form it takes and by that time you will be looking at “blog.org from Professor David Brake”!

“Due to a whale in the Thames services may be subject to delays”. And yes it’s true!

I should have blogged this sooner. It’s not as funny now that the whale is dead. I stuck it up on my Flickr account right away but forgot to cross-reference it here. You might find it interesting to check out or ‘subscribe to’ my photo feed there – particularly if you know me. I tend largely to take pictures of odd things I see around London that intrigue me. There’s a little ‘jigsaw’ of pics from it on the navigation bar at right…

Strange twilight at Canonbury Station

Originally uploaded by D & D.

It’s fairly well known when the longest and shortest days of the year (the Solstices) are in a given location (this year the Winter Solstice in London will be 21st Dec). But for complicated reasons (see this post for explanation), the sun started setting later here around the middle of this week. So if like me your primary concern is when the sun sets and not when it rises, the long dark tunnel of winter is already giving way to spring – in my head at least…

“Teh Newbian Institute for Madder Skillz” or to translate to non-gamer-speak “The Institute for Novice Game Players teaching Improved Skills”.

I love games but I am basically crap at playing them (I guess because I am 25 years away from my ‘peak’ gaming age)

From Penny Arcade