Barcelona Stinks

Anyone who pays attention to my Flickr badge (in the sidebar) will notice that I took a trip to Barcelona. I doubt I'll bother going back.

Perhaps it was the fact that I spent more of the trip working in the hotel than seeing the sights, but I was unimpressed. Though nobody else seems to share that opinion, I think that a long weekend would be enough to exhaust all that the city has to offer a tourist.

I return with two overwhelming impressions - the smog which hung over the city all the time I was there, and the unpleasant smells at every turn: sulphur from the chemical plant, rotting rubbish, drains everywhere except the highest points, polluted mud blowing in from the sea. Yuck! Perhaps in the rainy season both these problems disappear...

Lost his Head, Lost his Job

After the second miserable performance in a row, both from the Portuguese football team and tactically from the coach, Felipão comes to blows with a Serbian player. What an idiot! There is really only one course of action available to the FPF - to fire him on the spot. Of course, they probably haven't got the balls for that, though they applauded such a stance from Scolari himself in dropping João Vieira Pinto after the World Cup punching incident. They may like to take into account the recent awful performances by the team, who apparently don't know how to defend any more - shame that sitting on one goal leads seems to be the cornerstone of Scolari's strategy.

What does Luis Filipe Scolari think he was doing? There's really one conclusion - he was presenting his resignation!

Six years on

I never imagined writing about the happenings of September 11, 2001, but six years on, it's still on everybody's mind - it was the topic of discussion at lunch, exactly the time of the attacks.

It was the last day of my 2001 summer holidays that for some reason ended on a Tuesday. I took the kids to school, played 18 holes of golf, drove home, grabbed a beer and collapsed exhausted on a kitchen chair in front of the TV. To my amazement, the first tower was burning, and shortly I saw the second plane hit the south tower, live on CNN. I stayed glued to the TV for the next two hours.

Six years later, I have personally only been affected by the travel restrictions, mostly when travelling from the UK. I never had great interest in travelling to the US anyway. I can sympathise with the Islamic fundamentalists' view of US foreign policy and particularly of the Bush administration and the great leader himself. But obviously, their tactics have to be condemned.

So where does that leave us? There's no way of stopping the terrorist psychopaths - there are just too many potential targets to defend. The US and particularly its troops will continue to pay for meddling where they should have stayed away. And people on both sides will gradually forget both the events and the arguments, just as they did with Vietnam, until some future leader, probably in pre-school right now, thinks that war is a good solution for some other imagined threat.

Porn Flickr

It's well known that if you give somebody a tool, they will frequently use it in a way not originally intended. That is particularly true with software - I have users at work who word-process in Excel and Powerpoint, and present long complicated calculations, worked through by had and typed into Word.

Now, to me Flickr is for photo sharing, which means that I post photos of my own that I want people to see and, when I find other people's images interesting, link to them on my Flickr favorites page. I think that's what Flickr intended too.

But zapping round some of the collections, just clicking on pics I like and who posted them and their favourites, I find a huge proportion of people who appear never to have taken a photo, just using Flickr as a photo store, often for their porn collections. Porn will conquer all, as is well known on the internet. So Flickr's censorship campaign was pointless. But I understand their frustration in seeing their wonderful photo sharing site being used like that...

Wrong training

I could never be professional politician, obliged when in opposition to use everything that comes to hand to take shots at the party in power.

Last weekend, the Orange Dwarf (Luís Marques Mendes) appeared to harangue the government about the high level of unemployment among new graduates. Let's analyse this in more detail...

Graduate unemployment is the result of universities producing students whose skills do not match those required by the market. Portuguese universities produce huge numbers of graduates whose skills, either in subject matter studied or depth of knowledge acquired, do not satisfy potential employers. Is that the government's fault? It depends how much freedom the universities have in defining their degree subjects.

Then we have to consider which government is to blame. A graduate degree takes three or four years. This PS government has been in power for two! So surely the government that is to blame for these particular unemployed graduate was the previous PSD administration. Perhaps Mr MM should stick to more recent problems, or just save us and not say anything at all.