We Brits find it greatly amusing when foreigners, and indeed fellow Britons, mix up the words ‘England’, ‘Britain’, ‘Great Britain’ and ‘United Kingdom’ up believing they’re synonymous. A couple of days ago, I myself was guilty of not knowing what ‘Britain’ is and I am no closer to discovering it.

If you don’t know, the United Kingdom is located in the British Isles (which contains about 6000 islands) and comprises four constituent countries (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). In addition to the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland (Southern Ireland) is an independent sovereign state within the British Isles.

There are also 3 Crown Dependencies (the Isle of Man and the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey) which are not part of the United Kingdom but are held by the Crown in Right of the United Kingdom. On some matters, such as tax, post (to a degree!) and housing, these dependencies are independent from the UK but in others (such as defence) they are not.

Pretty confusing, eh? So how many countries are in the British Isles? It really depends whom you ask… some will say 2, some will say 5, some will say 5 plus the Crown Dependencies (well they won’t… but you get the idea!).

But what precisely is Britain? Great Britain is an island which contains the vast majority of England, Scotland and Wales (there are outlying islands). Great Britain, however, is not Britain because it is deemed necessary to prefix it with ‘Great’. In terms of international relations, and nationality law, the word British generally means belonging to the United Kingdom (British Embassy, British Citizen, British Empire) as opposed to belonging to the Republic of Ireland. So, Britain is used synonymously for the United Kingdom but is this appropriate (is Northern Ireland part of Britain?).

I’m even confused now so let’s do some nice bullet points:

1. The British Isles consist of several thousand islands. The largest are Great Britain, which contains the bulk of Scotland, England and Wales, and Ireland, which contains Northern Ireland and the sovereign Republic of Ireland.
2. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Irelands are constituent countries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. All of these constituent countries, with the exception of England, have devolved parliaments.
3. The Republic of Ireland is a sovereign state following it leaving the Union in the earlier part of the 20th century.
4. Both the UK and Republic of Ireland are member of the European Union.
5. In addition to the countries mentioned above, the UK have Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man as Crown Dependencies which are not part of the UK or the EU (making them tax havens).

Tags: britain, uk, ireland

I’m a Web 2.0 but I must admit since I have converted to OS X, I am using online utilities much less. No longer do I use Gmail’s webmail (and that was the only reason I used Google Docs!).

I see the benefit of Google Docs but if I require a document to be portable, I’ll put it onto my USB pen or into a WebDAV folder. I used to only use Google Docs because it nicely integrated into Gmail!

How many of my readers actually use online office suites? If you do, are you a Linux, Windows or Mac user (or heck, an AmigaOS one if you’re so inclined!).

A proper post is coming on Wednesday!

Tags: online office, google docs

How many of your friends believe that you, being the computer fan which you are, will idolise Bill Gates as some sort of nerd god?

Why do the public not realise how much nerds hate Bill Gates? Is it their use of Microsoft products or the media they watch, listen to and read?

Think how much praise Gates receives over his philanthropy, despite the business tactics he used to get this money he donates, but how little they criticise him for the anti-trust lawsuits etc.

Her Majesty awarded Gates a KBE, which you would have thought would have been controversial due to the lawsuits which were in progress at the time. No major news outlets found it concerning and many were indeed worried that we didn’t have a British Bill!

How many nerds admire Bill Gates or Microsoft? Nerds have hated Gates ever since An Open Letter to Hobbyists and whilst I admire him trying to reach out to the computing community, he obviously could not relate!

Still most non-nerds regard Gates as the Nerd God probably because he’s the only person in the tech industry they’ve heard of (unless they read tech columns in their terribly non-Web 2.0 newspapers!).

Tags: microsoft, bill gates

I visited the post office today to return the Skypephones which 3mobilebuzz had kindly loaned me. 3mobilebuzz also kindly provided me with two pre-paid Special Delivery bags to return them in. You would think this would speed up the process of sending them back and that’s where you’re wrong.

In addition to the pre-payment, 3mobilebuzz put about £1.25 of stamps on each bag. It turned out they didn’t need to but it deeply confused the employees at the local post office. It took 2 employees roughly 10 minutes to realise that all I wanted to do was to send them (”No, I don’t need more insurance”) which really annoyed me. To their credit, they remained courteous and polite throughout this riddle!

A few months ago, I had a different (and opposite) experience:

I was trying to send a DVD to my good friend Dan and being the organised type of person which I am I used Royal Mail’s Online Postage service. Sadly, I underestimated the weight of the package and when I tried to hand it over at the Post Office I received evil glares.

It took the elderly post office employee several minutes to realise she could stick stamps onto a prepaid envelope (she had to confer with 2 other staff members first) and when she finally realised this she did everything she could to charge me more (such as claiming it was thicker than 25mm when it obviously was not) and trying to sell me insurance. She took a patronising tone when she obviously did not realise that you could print postage online!

Another issue which is happening with the Post Office locally: they plan to shut their main post office in a town of well over 100,000 people and move it into the basement of a chain shop in a shopping centre!

You would think the Post Office would be up-to-date but it’s only this year when they’ve started offering broadband!

Any of you had problems with the Post Office (not the Royal Mail) in Britain or indeed in your nation?

Tags: post office, royal mail

I downloaded something off USENET overnight and I was very disappointed to find that it would not play. A 300MB file only contained one frame which said This video can only be played in DomPlayer, Visit Download.Domplayer.Com. This struck me as suspicious; DomPlayer obviously was not a codec and why would I need a certain player to open an AVI?

A little bit of research revealed that:

1. DomPlayer is malware; being flagged by several anti-virus suites
2. It costs $3.75 to use!
3. The video file probably doesn’t contain what I’m after but probably contains garbage

DomPlayer place bogus files on P2P networks, especially BitTorrent, and con users out of their money and privacy and waste their bandwidth (and time)!

Basically, if you’re unlucky enough to download a bonus video, do not pay… download another!

Tags: bittorrent, piracy, domplayer