Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

Maintenance on one's own house, at least when that house is an old one, never really stops. To quote Neil Hannon, it's like "painting the Forth Bridge with a toothbrush". By the time you get to the end, it's time to start again from the other end.

Last week, a membrane was sealed into place on our bathroom balcony, hopefully eliminating the seepage responsible of the brown stains on the ceiling of the conservatory.

I do hope so, because today, the painters were in to paint the ceiling of most of the ground floor.

Back in October 2008 and while we were away in the US, we had a leak in the pipes by the boiler in the loft, which caused the boiler to cleverly empty itself via a very indirect route onto our dining-room ceiling.

The actual area that sustained damage was only a few square metres, but because our dining-room flows seamlessly into our kitchen in one direction and our living-room in the other, the entire surface area of the three rooms needed to be painted. Happily, the insurance is coughing up for this little job.

And so we had them do the ceiling of the conservatory, too. Everything's looking pristine again and the smell of water-based paint fills the ground floor. As it pours with rain outside, I find myself hoping that the roofer did a good job and really did cure those conservatory leaks. The balcony is located directly above the conservatory, so if it's not watertight, the conservatory gets it.

Even now, almost a year and a half after moving in here, this house is still yielding surprises. Take, for example, the last time the heating people were here to do their annual maintenance on the heating and air-conditioning systems.

They alerted us to the presence of an unused heat recovery ventilation unit (I must admit that I had to look up the English name for a warmteterugwinapparaat) in the crawlspace under the house. It had never been plugged in, because there was simply no socket in the crawlspace.

So, when the electrical people came to do their annual maintenance on our alarm system and security cameras this week, I had the electrician run electricity to this device. It's now quietly humming away, hopefully providing us with better air than we've been hitherto breathing.

Can you believe that this machine was just sitting there, lurking in the inhospitable nether regions of our house, unused for all the years it had been in situ? No-one had had the gumption to run electricity to it. Presumably, the previous owner of the house had paid good money for it. Perhaps he didn't even know it was there; or perhaps he didn't care. We'll never know.

I also had the electrician fit a fluorescent light in the cellar, so that we (and the heating people on future visits) can see around down there. All I can see now is piles of rubble, other debris and evidence of subsidence; not recent, I sincerely hope.

Speaking of casting light and banishing the darkness, I also had them fit a fluorescent light at the back of the loft, so that the boiler area is now also illuminated. Up until now, there was light only at the front of the loft, by the folding stairs. Again, this will primarily benefit the heating people, who have been a regular fixture at this place for one reason or another since we moved in. They've already made two visits to us this year alone, to fix yet another problem with the boiler, unrelated to any we've experienced before.

More outside maintenance on the house is planned for this coming Wednesday. I just keep ticking the boxes.

We've succumbed and thrown in our lot with the plebs. Yes, we've purchased a Nintendo Wii; and yes, we purchased it primarily so that we could use the ubiquitous, yet paradoxically scarce Wii Fit.

Not exactly hidden, but, shall we say, slightly opaque costs before we got started were an extra remote-control, an extra Nunchuk, a set of component leads (for better quality video) and a LAN adapter (for on-line gaming without the high latency of a wireless hop).

With that little lot in place, we were ready to rumble.

The Wii, whose remote-control is fitted with motion and velocity sensors, really does present an altogether more physically consuming video game experience. In that regard, it represents a quantum leap forward in video game technology, placing it on a entirely new evolutionary track. In the world of video games, the Wii is a genetic mutation, a fish that has crawled onto land.

Of course, pioneering new technology has its pitfalls, and there are moments when the control is not precise or sensitive enough for the complex motion used in some simulations. The Wii, as revolutionary as it is, does have moments when it feels like the prototype of a new class of video gaming experience; and that's essentially what it is. That it doesn't feel like that more of time time is a testament to the great work of Nintendo's engineers.

So, whilst the Wii has intensified the interaction between man and machine, its most important contribution is arguably to pave the way for the next generation of this type of console, which is likely to bring many refinements. In the interim, perhaps we'll see a second generation of remote-control for the Wii.

Nintendo were so focused on delivering an entirely new kind of physical experience, that the actual graphics and sound have become secondary to the controls. Here, it's all about how you play and not how it looks or sounds.

If one wants blazing HD graphics, the Wii is not the console to buy. By today's standards, its output is low resolution and the standard kit contains only composite cables, so the picture quality isn't the best, either. For the best results, you need a set of component leads.

The best native resolution you'll get from the console in the PAL world is 480p from a progressive scan display. Plugged into our AV receiver, that's upscaled to 1080p, which looks good, but certainly wouldn't win any awards for realism.

If you want the pinnacle of old-style video gaming technology, you're still going to want a PlayStation 3. It and the Wii are so different that justifying owning both is easy. Indeed, with a game like Guitar Hero, the PS3 is on even footing with the Wii, when it comes to an all-consuming tactile experience. On the other hand, Guitar Hero is available for the Wii, too.

I called the Wii a rod for my own back in the title of this entry, because of the aforementioned Wii Fit and Konami's arcade favourite, Dancing Stage Hottest Party. I've played games before that left my heart racing and beads of sweat on my forehead, but no game has ever left muscles over my whole body feeling stretched.

In fact, it's hard to call the Wii Fit a game in the traditional sense. What Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training is to mental agility training on the Nintendo DS, the Wii Fit is to the physical. The games even have a similar structure, calling upon the user to choose a few exercises each day, before undergoing a handful of randomly chosen tests to determine one's virtual brain or bodily age.

For us and many like us, the Wii is a strange mix of relaxation and exertion. Sarah really likes it and has taken to the Wii Fit's daily training regimen. Even Eloïse has started to play it.

There's really only one area where the Wii falls flat on its face and that's with regard to memory. It comes with only 512 Kb of internal storage, which is going to fill up quite fast. To alleviate that problem, it has an SD slot, but it's incompatible with SDHC cards. That effectively limits one to memory cards of 2 Gb or less, which is lame beyond reproach.

You're also going to consume a lot of AA batteries, which is what the remote-controls use. You can use NiMH rechargeables, of course, or custom battery packs and a charging station. We opted for the latter.

Speaking of Guitar Hero World Tour, I've now scored 100% on quite a few songs at medium difficulty. Most songs I can play at 90% or better, with many at higher than 95%. I completed career mode some time ago and am currently at the 14th rank.

You'd think that would mean that I should be playing at the hard level, but I still get booed off stage on most songs, because too many difficult new elements are introduced. I need to play in practice mode, I suppose. Nevertheless, when I play against people on-line, more often than not, I emerge victorious.

This game just never seems to lose its appeal. Nevertheless, I took a moment to make my first PlayStation Store purchase a few days ago: Lumines Supernova.

When deciding late last year which video game console to buy, I chose the PS3 because the next instalment of Lumines was going to be coming out on that system. Incidentally, several years ago, I also bought a PSP (PlayStation Portable) just to be able to play Lumines and I scarcely played another game on that system until Lumines II made its debut. As you might suspect, since that day, Lumines II has permanently occupied the cartridge slot of my PSP.

Lumines Supernova hit the Playstation Store in the US just before Christmas, but we Europeans have had to wait just over a month for it to become downloadable over here.

I haven't explored the game's new modes. In fact, I've played the normal single player game only once, but I can tell you that it looks and sounds great on a 65" screen with a good audio system. It feels a bit odd to play it with a PS3 controller, but that's because I'm so used to the PSP. I daresay I'll get used to it.

Now, if someone could find a way to combine Lumines with Guitar Hero...

With two children and a household to maintain, there never seems to be any time to blog. There's nothing monumental to say, of course; just the trivia of daily life. On the other hand, it's precisely the trivia of another that many people find so fascinating.

Our house has had some more work done: the sealant around the glass panes in our conservatory has been completely renewed. We've had a lot of rain lately and I'm pleased to say that it does, indeed, appear that the ground floor leaks are now all a thing of the past.

Of course, you solve one problem and another one soon appears. Alarming cracks are appearing across inner walls in various rooms and if I place a marble on the floor in the dining-room, it rolls to the other side of the room. Hmm. The joys of owning a house built on a bog. I hope I won't soon be blogging from the bottom of a pile of rubble.

Anyway, we're off to the Canary Islands this afternoon to escape the end of the Dutch winter.

Greetings from Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, to be precise.

From the moment we rolled into town, our hire car's fuel warning light flashing madly to tell us that our tank was down to its last vapours, it's been pretty crazy here.

We got in late Saturday night on a delayed flight. Then, we had to pick up our hire car and strap in the child seats that had been left on the back seat of the car for us. Of course, it was pitch black in the car park, so we couldn't see what we were doing and the car seats were models with which we weren't familiar.

We headed straight for Santa Cruz in our juiceless vehicle, Sod's Law ensuring that there wasn't a petrol station in sight anywhere, except perhaps on the wrong side of the motorway.

Once in Santa Cruz, all of the major thoroughfares turned out to be closed for Carnaval, which is said to be second only to the big one in Rio de Janeiro. The crowds were out in their thousands, most of them in flamboyant fancy-dress, and it became clear that reaching our hotel was going to be a nightmare.

To cut a long story short, we didn't reach our hotel until close to 02:00 and then found that it had no parking facilities whatsoever; not even an arrangement with a local car park. Finding a place to legally park at that time of night in the thick of Saturday's Carnaval turned out to be a major challenge, although Eloïse and Lucas were, at least, mercifully asleep as we kerb-crawled around the neighbourhood in search of a slice of tarmac long enough to accommodate our Opel Astra.

Once parked, we dragged our entourage of children and suitcases along the streets back to the hotel and checked in, although we would still have to undergo a change of room before we could finally get our arses into bed.

The last couple of days have, as I said, been raucous. The locals aren't shy about dressing up and many of the costumes are very elaborate. You normally need to order a stripogram to see women dressed like some of those we've seen about town. I heartily approve.

As is the case anywhere in Spain, Tenerife is a meat lover's paradise. The streets are lined with the skeletons of dead vegetarians.

Daily visits to the heladerías (ice-cream shops) and zumerías (juice bars) are a must and, in fact, we go more than daily. The fresa con leche (strawberry juice with milk) is to die for.

English speakers are in surprisingly short supply, allowing me the opportunity to dust off and sand down my very rusty Spanish. If linguistic rape were a crime, I'd be languishing in prison by now.

One local menu offers "shattered eggs" and a strangely appealing seafood dish called "octopussy", although we didn't actually stop to partake of such delicacies.

Whilst the gladiators, nurses, pirates, witches, drag queens, catwomen, knights and other colourful characters have their undeniable appeal (especially for Eloïse), we feel as if we've seen enough of Santa Cruz in the two days we've been here, so we're moving on tomorrow to La Laguna.

The weather here is very amenable, a kind of permanent early summer. There's almost no variation in temperature, day or night, January or July. Any quaint notion of season is utterly superfluous here.

It's good to be travelling again.

Here we are in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, where it's rainy and quite chilly at around 11°C. People may come here for the sun, but the place is no stranger to rain, either.

We arrived here yesterday from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, via the Anaga Rural Park, where we stopped to do a couple of short, but pleasant hikes at Cruz del Carmen. After doing the Llanos de los Loros trail through the laurel forest and one other trail, whose name I can't remember, but which was conducted in the pouring rain, we stopped for some tasty fare at a roadside restaurant and then continued along the winding road to La Laguna.

La Laguna is an unassuming place, home to the islands' only university. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site and is pretty enough, but from my point of view suffers from a dearth of good restaurants.

As in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, there are far too many snack bars serving hamburguesas and other fast food. Dinner last night ended up being rather average pizza and chapatas, followed by churros and hot chocolate. The dessert somewhat compensated for the main dish. Actually, Sarah wasn't as vocal about the food as I was.

Another thing about Spain is that it still has pre-enlightenment smoking policies, i.e. every establishment makes its own rules. This very liberal policy means, of course, that the non-smokers have to suffer, and so we do. It's either that or not eat.

Siesta, too, makes life as a tourist a little difficult. Nothing's open in the afternoon, which wouldn't have to be a problem, except for when the rain is coming down in buckets outside. So, we came back to the hotel this afternoon, had a bath and will be heading out again soon.

Tomorrow, we leave La Laguna behind and head further.

There are very few tourists in this part of Tenerife. They all stay down in the south, where all the sun, beaches and pie and mash are to be found. Most of the few tourists who make it up here seem to be German, with a few English and Dutch thrown in for good measure. It's harder to spot the Spanish tourists, of course, although I'm sure they're here in force.