France, Poltiics

One week to the French elections

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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

Social Media Course

Flame wars in the online game community

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Over on my blog about Star Wars online games, I’ve been following the current extended outage of Star Wars the Old Republic. This follows an attempted minor fix of a major update that kept the game offline for hours yesterday.

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.

 

General

From the Sack of Troy

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

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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?

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Tech

Buying digital Potter

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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!