I should add that editing the link in this post on the iPad has been almost impossible, because of the current clunky system.

A polling station at a school in Strasbourg, April 22, 2012. The first round of the presidential elections.

Al-Jazeera is very objective, and provides great coverage of the Third World. The same cannot be said of Fox News, which is very right wing, the voice of the Rupert Murdoch and the Tea Party.

But hardly anyone in the US gets a chance to find out how good Al-Jazeera is.

I fInally got an answer from Comcast Customer Service today, weeks later:

I understand that you are requesting Al Jazeera English programming be added to your Comcast channel lineup.

Comcast is always working to provide programming that is of interest to all of our customers. In certain markets, Comcast offers international packages, some of which include Arabic programming; but we do not have an agreement with Al Jazeera English, so we cannot carry their programming. However, Al Jazeera English’s programming may be viewed via live stream from their web site: http://english.aljazeera.net

We regularly examine our channel lineups and talk with a wide range of programmers to ensure that we are bringing the content that our customers want the most. Our goal is to provide a wide choice of quality cable networks and local broadcast channels reflecting the diverse programming interests of our customers. In addition to requests from customers, the following factors play a part in our decision making process:

* FCC regulations, such as requirements to carry all local broadcast channels
* Requirement by local broadcasters to carry their affiliated cable networks
* The number of access channels required by local government
* Customer satisfaction with networks carried in other systems
* Customer satisfaction with similar networks
* Importance of the network to our diverse community
* Level of interest across a percentage of our customer base
* Per-subscriber programming fees charged by the network versus the value added to the line-up.

Your feedback is important to us. While we cannot honor every request, we do take each request into consideration in planning future changes to the lineup.

Naturally this is very disappointing. It is also extremely misleading, Al-Jazeera is pleading to get its programming on in the US. See:

http://www.aljazeera.com/demandaljazeera/

And while it is true one can watch Al-Jazeera English on the web (as well as via apps on an iPhone or iPad), this isn’t the same as seeing it on your TV, and the same argument could be used to pull Fox News off cable and refer interested viewers to their website.

Note: Not only can you watch Al-Jazeera English live at http://www.aljazeera.com/watch%5Fnow/ , if you watch it through an ios device, you can play it through an Apple TV onto your television.

Election in France – Battle of the posters, originally uploaded by radiowood2000.

Rival candidates for the French presidency fighting for poster space, Strasbourg, April 16, 2012.

Top row: French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his primary challenger, Socialist Francois Hollande, bottom row: the Greens' Eva Joly and the the utlra right wing National Front's Marine Le Pen

In one week people here in France go to the polls in the first round of the presidential election. The two candidates with the most votes will face off in the second round. There’s extensive coverage in the media, and posters are up, but compared to the US, and even Sweden, the number of campaign posters is pretty modest.

Posters for the Left Front candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon

As I write, the thread on the SWTOR Customer Service forum about the disastrous new patch (that took four hours) and the seven hour task of fixing it, is 72 pages (ten posts a page) long. Initially people were remarking about yesterday’s content disappearing, and wondering when BioWare would respond. Now that BioWare has “fessed up” and tells we won’t be able to play for six more hours, the thread has degenerated into a flame war.

The initial sides seem to have been those who were upset that the game they subscribe to is offline, and those who point out that after all it is only a game and not to get so upset. Both reasonable positions, but one wonders why some people have to start calling each other idiots because they don’t agree? I saw a lot of this on the Star Wars Galaxies forums. People seem to tend to say things online that they probably wouldn’t say if they were talking in person.

In fact, they probably wouldn’t make such comments to each other in-game (although they did in SWG, but the conversation interface was a lot better there).

I should point out that not everyone in the forum thread is flaming. Civil interactions continue as well. The best recent comment was from someone who wondered why BioWare didn’t submit today’s minor patch to its Test Server to see what would happen. After all, that’s what the Test Server is for.

The world’s narrowest street passage?, originally uploaded by radiowood2000.

Very narrow passage in Niedermorschwihr, on the Route des vins in Alsace, France.  Video:

Objects in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum from Troy VII, most likely setting for the Troy of Homer’s Illiad.

This pottery fragment is very interesting. It is identified as locally-produced Mycenaean ware. Might this have been left behind by Agamemnon and the Greeks?

The Blue Mosque in Istanbul, April 2, 2012.

]]> http://radiowood.com/?feed=rss2&p=611 0 http://radiowood.com/?p=600 http://radiowood.com/?p=600#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 22:08:19 +0000 George Wood http://wood.nu/?p=600

Harry Potter is finally available on eBooks. Only through the Pottermore website, but Amazon is trying. Sort of….

I’ve written before that I would have been more likely to buy Harry Potter eBooks a couple of years ago, somewhat less likely to have bought them when JK Rowlings’ Pottermore website promised to sell them last Fall. Less so now when they are finally here.

But depite the delay I bought them all, though it was a bit difficult, and I can see others not doing do after all this time,

When the iPad launched in Sweden there were no eBooks in the Swedish iBooks store. So I turned to Amazon and their Kindle app. Apple lost me, as all of my eBook purchases have been from Amazon. But all these books have been from the American store. Amazon.co.uk refuses to sell me Kindle books.

Not exactly so with Potter. I clicked at Amazon.com to buy all the books in one package, but it just sent me to Pottermore. Then they wouldn’t sell the eBooks to my location…until I changed from English (US) to English (UK). That worked fine (so I now own the properly titled “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” rather than the dumbed down American “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”). Strangely they billed me in dollars rather than pounds…

That was OK, but what was irritating was despite my buying the whole package, I had to download each of the seven titles, one by one.

Primitive user interface Pottermore!