Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

Neither Barack Obama nor Hilary Clinton have ever enjoyed much credibility in these quarters, but I do continue to be surprised by the extent to which their supporters exhibit selective blindness when performing critical analysis of their actions.

Obama is set to announce Clinton as his Minister of Foreign Affairs (or Secretary of State, as it's called in the US). On the face of it, it's a curious choice.

Obama previously criticised Clinton for her support of Bush's illegal war in Iraq. Of course, she immediately withdrew her support once public opinion swung the other way, but back when the American public was still being led up the garden path with fairy tales of Iraq being an Al Qaida hotbed, she was as vocal as anyone about the absolute necessity of invading Iraq.

Clinton, on the other hand, whilst campaigning for the Democratic party presidential nomination, criticised Obama for being naive, inexperienced and generally not up to the job of president. She also condemned him for his willingness to sit down without preconditions and talk to the likes of Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.

So, you could conclude that she doesn't exactly see eye to eye with Obama on foreign policy, but she's still prepared to work under him as the Secretary of State? Isn't that a little disingenuous?

It's not as strange as it seems, of course. You just have to remember that most politicians are duplicitous, conniving megalomaniacs with only their own interest at heart. Then it all starts to make sense.

Clinton has a history of modifying her stance on anything and everything in order to increase her popularity with the general public, thereby improving her chances of career advancement. If the sum of 2 + 2 was a hot political issue and she believed the result to be 4, you can rest assured that her public statements would repeatedly emphasise that the result was, in fact, 5, if that's what her advisors were telling her the unwashed masses wanted to hear.

Taking the job with Obama, therefore, is nothing more than cynical self-interest. Even if she considers Obama to be an incompetent baboon, there's no way she'd ever turn down a chance to occupy a powerful office like that. It's all about the power, you see. Political ambition is all she has left in her vacuous life.

And what does Obama now have to say about Clinton, a woman who voted to send her country headlong into an unwinnable war in Iraq without even first demanding to see the evidence the proponents of said war claimed would unequivocally justify their actions?

He says this: "She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world's leaders, who will command respect in every capital, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world."

It's hard to know how a woman who can support starting a war without caring to see the evidence that would supposedly justify it can command anyone's complete confidence, much less that of the man about to run the world's most powerful country.

In fact, what's the worst possible job you could imagine giving to someone whose judgement has already been demonstrated to be woefully, negligently bad? Minister for Foreign Affairs, is the one that springs to my mind.

Not only does Obama have bad foreign policy, he now has an equally bad foreign minister to enact it. You can at least give the man credit for a perverse consistency, I suppose.

Watch out, Afghanistan. The next four years are going to be harsh.

Three more leaks in the conservatory came to light during the week, after snow and wind probably drove moisture into nooks and crannies not normally reached by the more usual watery precipitation.

Just when you think you've had all the necessary maintenance done...

Yesterday, we had the old shed floor ripped up and replaced by a new one. The old one was rotten and our feet had already gone through it in several places. Walking around in there had become hazardous, as one had to watch out for the potholes. The new hardwood floor beams should hopefully stop the plywood plates on top from succumbing to the moisture in the air.

We've also had a new stone sill placed in the doorway, because the old one was rotting away.

Considering that we had a new roof, including beams, put on the shed last year, much of the structure is now new. Only the outer walls, doors and ceiling are the ones that were in place when we purchased the property.

Our first floor garden balcony was also ripped up and inspected yesterday. The balcony wall had its top recovered with mortar.

In an effort to prevent future leaks from the balcony, we still need to have a waterproof roofing surface burned into place on top of the concrete floor. This work will probably be done between Christmas and New Year, while we're in the US.

Before we go to America, we also need to have a window replaced and the grout along the conservatory window frames renewed. Some of the frames themselves may also need to be renewed. This work is currently scheduled for the last workday before we leave for the US, which makes me slightly nervous, but I choose to acquiesce to the schedule of the people doing the work, rather than risk their being unable to find a slot early in the new year.

I hope next year's maintenance costs are low, because we've had an expensive twelve months: a new garden, repairs to the brickwork all around the house, boiler problems, etc. And the damaged dining-room ceiling hasn't even been repainted yet, although our insurance will hopefullly ultimately cover that.

Not everything to do with the house this week has been devoid of an element of fun; quite the opposite, in fact.

Pakjesavond for me came a day early this year, when the long-awaited installation of the gear for our new TV room finally took place.

The new TV room has been my project since we got back from our summer holiday. It started with an order for a new couch, a couple of side tables and a lamp, and ended with the largest single order of audio-visual equipment I've ever done.

The room is now wired for sound with two KEF iQ70 speakers at the front, an iQ60c centre speaker and two wirelessly driven iQ50 speakers at the back, on either side of the couch.

The subwoofer is a T3 from REL. I have a couple of their [Quake](http://www.rel.net/t3.htm] subwoofers on the ground floor and have been very happy with them.

To handle the music, a new model ZP90 controller provides our seventh Sonos listening zone.

The centrepiece of the room is an absolutely stunning Sharp LC-65XS1E television, mounted on the wall. Its picture quality, particularly the purity of the black in films, is breathtaking.

A Sony BDP-S550 provides the ability to watch BDs (Blu-ray Discs) and DVDs. The DVD function has been made region free, as we own a lot of foreign (mostly region 1) discs.

Normal TV viewing is courtesy of a UPC HDTV cable box, but only a few channels are currently offered in HD over here, including one from National Geographic and another from Discovery. Even then, not all of the programming is in HD, but when it is, it looks simply amazing.

Rounding out the experience is a Sony Playstation 3, which I've barely had time to mess with yet.

All of the above is currently hooked up to a Rotel RSX-1057 receiver, which drives the 5.1 speaker system described above. The receiver itself is actually on loan, because I'm still awaiting the arrival of a brand new RSX-1550 unit, which has support for the new Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD lossless audio codecs (needed for Blu-ray), as well as HDMI 1.3a, which enables Deep Color support.

In anticipation of the arrival of all this gear, I patched the room's network ports through to my main switch, so the Sonos, the Blu-ray player and the Playstation all have wired Internet access. All the ports on my main switch are now in use, though, so any further expansion will require the purchase of a new switch.

All of this new equipment added another five remote-controls to our already extensive collection, so I purchased a second Logitech Harmony One universal remote-control to manage the new stuff. I really like the relatively new Harmony One model and find it to be a big improvement on previous models, such as the 885 that we used to use.

To celebrate the arrival and installation of this grand new cinema set-up, we watched our very first film on Blu-ray, the director's cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which had been beautifully remastered and looked as if it hadn't aged a moment. The difference in picture quality between Blu-ray and DVD is impressive, but DVDs are still good enough that you really don't know what you're missing until you've witnessed a Blu-ray.

Anyway, I'm like a child in a toy shop with this new set-up. It's like my birthday, Sinterklaas and Christmas all rolled up into one.

I received an invitation from my bank to attend an exclusive concert by Dutch chanteuse, Trijntje Oosterhuis, on Wednesday evening.

Now, this isn't the kind of thing I'd normally want to be seen dead at (especially with the stipulation of a tenue de ville dress code), but it offered the ideal opportunity to try out my latest gadget, an Edirol R-09HR digital recorder.

I last recorded a concert about 19 years ago. I couldn't even tell you know which concert it was, but it must have been some time in 1989 or 1990.

Back then, the Sony WM-D6C analogue cassette recorder and ECM-929LT microphone, also manufactured by Sony, were de rigeur for recording concerts (a.k.a. bootlegging, although this term has now become very unpopular with many who do it). In the interim, much has changed.

I missed the whole era of DAT and later MD, and have now returned to the field at a great time, because making recordings has never been easier. Not only do we now all record digitally, so there are no concerns about loss of quality and introduction of noise as successive generations of the original master tape are copied, but with flash memory as large as it now is, it's the most obvious thing in the world to record straight to an SD card.

And so it is that I can now make 16 bit, 44 Khz (or even 24 bit, 96 Khz) recordings with ease. There are no moving parts that might break, the batteries in the recorder therefore last longer, I don't have to rush to turn the C90 tape over half way through the set (taking care not to run out of tape halfway through a song), today's recorders are smaller than ever, today's microphones are even smaller, etc.

And, whereas my only editing tool used to be the Pause button of the recorder, everyone with a computer now has a choice of sound editing suites at his or her disposal. As a Linux user, that pretty much means Audacity in my case.

For anyone interested, the other equipment I now use for my recordings consists of two DPA 4060 omnidirectional microphones and a DPA MMA6000 microphone amplifier.

The fruit of my labours is now available in FLAC format as a torrent, thanks to DIME. The recording turned out very well, especially considering my total lack of experience with the new equipment.

Like I say, Trijntje Oosterhuis isn't exactly my idea of good music, so I doubt I'll be listening to this concert very often, but it was good practice and provided the chance to become familiar with the new gear without having to worry about messing up a recording that actually mattered.

The hors d'œuvres were nice, too.

Guitar Hero World Tour on the PS3 is like crack cocaine. The rest of the world has become irrelevant and life is now all about getting my next hit.

Sunday sees us fly to the US for the usual Christmas bash in Providence. I wonder if it's as cold there as it has been here. I haven't bothered to look.

Last weekend, we squeezed in a weekend trip to the Weihnachtsmarkt in Cologne. I'm not generally big on Christmas -- being an atheist rather defeats the purpose -- but even I enjoy the atmosphere of the Weihnachtsmarkt.

Somehow, it just doesn't feel like Christmas without a chance to eat a gluttonous cocktail of Krakauers, crêpes and waffles, washed down by Glühwein, and then have it forcibly squeezed back out of you by the seething, swelling hordes that ooze like molasses through the narrow aisles of market stands. And I even got to push our pram up against the shins of these people, just for extra kicks.

And so it was that we drove across the border to our easterly neighbour, where I was once again able to publicly rape the German language without fear of retribution.

The weather stayed mercifully dry and it wasn't too cold. Eloïse had a lovely time, especially on the merry-go-rounds at several of the markets.

I bought a pair of shoes and a couple of wooden candle holders for the dining table. Sarah bought quite a few things, making for a very successful shopping trip.

I've made it sound quite bad, but I had a good time. And I do mean it when I say that Christmas really wouldn't feel the same without a trip to the Weihnachtsmarkt. Nowhere has quite the same atmosphere at Christmas.

The phone just rang. At this hour, it had to be a wrong number or some very bad news. The incoming phone number was unrecognisable; it certainly wasn't a local fixed line or mobile phone.

It turned out to be the anticipated wrong number. The conversation went something like this:

Me: "Hello."
"Hello. Is Graham there?" enquired a voice with an American accent.
"No."
"Graham's not there?"
"No, you've called the Netherlands."
And here it comes: "OK, well, you have a good one, Mr. Netherland."

And that was that.

Sometimes, you just have to smile.

We're in Providence, which is covered in a picturesque mantle of snow.

The most remarkable thing about the flight to Boston (via Reykjavík) was that Icelandair planes now have a powered USB port at every seat, so you can connect and use your portable devices while they recharge. It's a small touch, but a very welcome one when travelling on long flights. You need never run out of juice again.

Eloïse is thoroughly enjoying the Christmas preparations, which have so far chiefly entailed making biscuits with Oma.

I've thoroughly enjoyed two lunches so far at The Edge.

It all started with the Nikon Coolpix 950, which I purchased shortly after moving to America in what must have been April 2000. Not only was it my first digital camera, it was my first camera of any description. I wanted to record my experiences whilst in Silicon Valley, which, with my European work background, felt like the Wild West.

The 950 provided a good few years of sterling service. For example, it faithfully registered the progress of our honeymoon across Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Hong Kong in late 2002, even though technology had marched on and much better cameras were available by that time. It had one great advantage, namely that it used standard AA batteries, which was a godsend when overnighting for days at a time without any electricity. The more modern cameras of the day were resorting to proprietary battery packs, which needed to be charged.

My next camera was a Minolta DiMage 7Hi, which I kept for only a year or so, before replacing it with a Minolta A2. I got a good price for the 7Hi on eBay.

The A2 was to provide many years of faithful service. I particularly loved its ability to record a voice caption as each shot was taken. Many of the albums in our gallery wouldn't be nearly as well captioned if I hadn't had those five second WAV files to rely on, once we'd arrived home and were sorting through our snaps.

It wasn't until the A2's viewfinder gave up the ghost at the end of our trip across the United Arab Emirates and Oman that I made my first foray into the daunting world of the digital SLR. At the recommendation of my friend, Peter, I purchased a Canon EOS 400D.

A couple of one-day courses ensued in order to learn how to get the best from the camera. I wouldn't say that they turned me into a good photographer, but I at least learned the basics of operating an SLR.

I've really enjoyed using the 400D and invested in a trio of good L series lenses for it, but I've always lamented the fact that it didn't possess a full-frame sensor, such as the EOS 5D.

Given my level of skill, there was no justification for the expense of a 5D and, in any case, it was actually lacking some of the handy features that Canon had built into the 400D, such as automatic sensor cleaning to remove dust. The 400D was therefore more than ample for my needs.

A few months ago, in a separate development, I finally decided to succumb to the temptation of a digital video camera, mostly because we wanted to make short films of the children and the camera on my Nokia E90 phone, whilst surprisingly good, wasn't really good enough.

After the usual thorough research, I'd decided on the Sony HDR-TG3E and was on the verge of buying it when Canon announced the release of the EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR.

The Mark II of the lovely EOS 5D adds a lot of nice new features, not least amongst which the ability to record full HD video. The combination of a full-frame digital SLR and a good video camera in a single body was irresistible, and I quickly vowed to acquire one when they became available.

Well, the EOS 5D Mark II has been slow to trickle into the shops, so it wasn't until we were leaving for the US that I spotted one in a duty-free shop at Schiphol. Boarding of our plane was about to start, so there wasn't much time to deliberate. I snapped it up and brought it with us to America.

The new camera has necessitated the purchase of a UDMA compact flash card in order to get the most from the EOS 5D Mark II's high speed internals. I've also had to splurge on a BG-E6 battery grip, because I found its cousin, the BG-E3, to be indispensable on the 400D. Besides, the revised EOS 5D has a new battery management system for its expensive LP-E6 batteries (which are out of stock everywhere at the time of writing).

I've only taken a few shots so far, but I can already see the difference the full-frame sensor makes to my EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens. Cool features, such as peripheral illumination correction for each lens owned by the photographer, help one to exact the very best performance from one's expensive glass.

I haven't made any HD videos yet, as I'm still reading the manual. Yes, believe it or not, I actually do read manuals before I let myself loose on new hardware. I'm a rare breed, I know.

We head off to Iceland on Monday, where I'll be able to put the camera through its paces over New Year. I'm intrigued to see how the results compare to those obtained with the 400D on our last trip to Iceland.

We're in Iceland again, Reykjavík, to be precise. We arrived here at about 06:30 this morning after fewer than five hours of flying time and much -- I repeat, much -- less sleep.

As flight destinations go, Iceland has got to be one of the worst, if you happen to be arriving from the US. It doesn't matter whether you're flying from the east or west of America, you leave in the middle of the American evening and arrive in the middle of the American night.

Equally awkward, you arrive at the crack of the Icelandic dawn, which means that if you didn't sleep on the plane, you've got a good twelve to sixteen hours ahead of you before you can go to bed at a time that will put you on local time by the next morning. The first day thus becomes one of determined endurance.

Our hotel this time, as on past occasions, is the ever-pleasant Hótel Borg. Needless to say, our room wasn't available when we arrived -- the previous guests were probably still asleep in it -- so we headed out in the darkness to find breakfast.

Eloïse wasn't amused at not being able to go to bed, but we managed to strike a bargain. When we finally settled down to breakfast at the very lovely Grái Kötturinn (the Grey Cat) on Hverfisgata and Eloïse was rewarded with a cup cake. Ignoble bribery, yes, but judiciously applied, it gets the job done in a crisis.

Fully refuelled, we spent a rewarding day taking photos, doing light shopping and drinking coffee. Most of the shops will only be open between 10:00 and 12:00 tomorrow, so we needed to get our Icelandic shopping out of the way today. Sarah's bought some wool and I've added a handful of new CDs to the collection. We also bought a new Finnish winter hood hat for Eloïse.

Everywhere we go to eat or buy something is somewhere we've been before. Reykjavík is so familiar to us now. I was even recognised as a previous customer in a CD shop this afternoon.

In the end, we didn't get into our hotel room until 16:30, which was good, because we didn't have enough time to unwind so much that we didn't want to go out again. We had only a short while to take the weight off our feet before we had to go out for dinner, which was partaken at charming little Hornið, around the corner.

After dinner, I went off to take a few photos with our new EOS 5D Mark II, which performed very well in low light. The shots I obtained this evening are the best night shots I've ever taken, which admittedly isn't saying very much, but these look really quite good.

Bedtime now. We're really looking forward to New Year's Eve here and tomorrow is expected to be a long day.