I really want to memorise a nice large sudoku puzzle then while sitting on the train going to work, proceed to fill it out really quickly in a seemingly random order just to annoy the hundreds of commuters who always do them every morning and evening.
Today was a sad sad day for George bush’s speech writers. In response to the underground nuclear test conducted by North Korea today he said “Once again, North Korea has defied the will of the international community, and the international community will respond” (See here). Now unless I’m very much mistaken when America wanted to invade Iraq (and wherever else) it was presented with very strong opposition by said “international community”. In fact the UN refused to agree to the war, hence the coalition was formed and no UN troops went in. Funny how often i feel the phrase “doubt standards” to be appropriate when talking about America.
It’s also interesting that America (and everyone else for that matter) is so concerned about North Korea using nuclear weapons, yet America is the only country to ever use them offensively. Oooo, do i feel the same phrase coming on again….
Microsoft are the devil in corporate form. They are a big, horrible, nasty company that is trying to make our lives as hard as possible, who want us to be forced into their slow, poorly built, proprietary technologies and products
It’s easy to blame the big guy isn’t it. I mean it goes without saying that the bigger the company, the more interested they are in shafting you for everything you’ve got, right? It’s almost like one of those passed down unwritten rules that no one even considers to challenge
I for one don’t think MS really falls under this stigma, in fact, I for one think MS is actually a rather impressive company. As proof of this about a year ago I listened to a talk by an MS intern (year placement) who had been working for them for 2 months. He was full of nothing but praise for them. On the basis of his talk I was actually fired up enough about the company to apply to work there. As it happens I stopped the process half way because I had found a job that better suited my needs, but had that other opportunity not come up I would have worked at MS without hesitation.
Now let’s make no mistake here, I have been working on MS kit since back in the days of command line DOS and trust me, I have had my fair share of cursing it in irate fits of rage. Brought on by all manors of strange bugs (normally when the Windows 95 sysdm.cpl file blowing up on me or explorer under XP during some huge network filecopy). Despite my hate for MS on many occasions I am still left sitting here wondering why people hate them so much.
I mean, lets look at what they actually do, both right and wrong for a moment. Take the new version of Office for example:
• The new ribbon interface is a stunningly innovative way to deal with the vast plethora of features Office has accumulated these days in a way which is both simple and elegant to use.
• They are moving to an open XML document format which allows other companies to build their own Office applications that are fully compatible (not the glorified hacks OO uses).
• They are building in huge levels of (optional) DRM just as businesses have asked for.
• They are trying as hard as they can to include PDF support if Adobe will let them.
But this is no real surprise is it? Office has always been one of the great examples of what something looks like when it’s right. Even the historically anti-MS Mac conferences uttered a fairly startling applaud to the news that Office was going to be released for the Mac.
Let’s move away from Office then, how about something a bit more hardcore… Anyone who has tried to dev in VB or C# will always sing praises Visual studio as one of the most powerful IDE’s around.
How about Windows Media Player. Now knock this as you may, but find me a media player that has the same level of features and such a useful and powerful library. iTunes may be all silver, Winamp may be small, real player is full of ad-ware… but at the end of the day, looks and size are nothing without the functionality to make people look at them
Perhaps we should move away from software. I would talk about their hardware, but there isn’t much to say there, it’s second to none. Perhaps we should go onto attitude. Have you looked at the vast number of low level server tools they give away for free?
I had a quick wander on their site the other day to see how much out there really was. I was quite stunned. I follow quite a lot of what they do and even I hadn’t realised there was that much out on the market.
Tools such as SQL server express. They know one of their main markets is businesses who will (quite rightly) have to pay for the full server version, but they also provide for the cheap consumer who just wants to try things out and build small personal applications. They even provide the likes of visual C# express for free and through their asp.net wing, web matrix. Need a fresh install of another OS? How about Virtual PC 2004? The list just goes on and on.
Now if their cut down enterprise kit/home user stuff is impressive what do you think their real enterprise kit is like? I doubt many of you get to play with a copy of Server 2003 or SQL Server 2005. I use both products (plus a whole heap of other stuff like source safe, Visual studio, Enterprise manager) every day. Crash? What’s that? I haven’t seen any of those products crash (ever) under anything but limit testing where I am trying as hard as I can to crash them (and trust me, I can crash anything). So all in all their stuff for businesses is rock solid. I actually can’t see any serious business moving away from them, ever.
Of course the home user market is an all together different place to deal with and has always required a different approach. So what does MS do for the home user then? Well for one thing (and this is a big one) they let you use almost any hardware you want. Well, that’s all very well, but for most people they get the manufacturer to pick the hardware. Ok then, how does this grab you. You can install an application first made to work on Windows 3.1 or under DOS 6. Well, you might ask do you actually want to do that. I mean who wants to run some bit of software that you bought back in the days when the internet was new? You want the newest most up-to-date software don’t you? I for one want to use software I already know works that I have already bought and I know will work with all the other applications I run. So under Windows you just run it. Simple as that. Ok so when Vista comes out we will have to drop a few 16 bit apps, but come one, we have to let go sometime.
The biggest thing that I think MS does for the home user market is functionality. They give people a fair bit of power and the options to do with it what they want. Last I looked people don’t want to be held back. They key to the way they delivered this functionality was that they keep it just under the surface. It’s there and people can dip into it if they want, yet on top is a fairly simple to use interface (and it’s only getting simpler). Now you could say this is the method that Apples uses with its Mac, and you would be right, but like with most things the key is the balance. You don’t want to sacrifice simplicity for functionality and vice versa. Myself I think Apple went a bit too far down the simplicity route. You have to do what Apple thinks you want to do, or you have to open up a shell prompt. With windows I almost never need to delve into a command window these days, I just use the advanced button in the settings box…
Now as someone who uses both a PC and a Mac I feel the need to do a few comparisons. Not least because in the current computing climate Apple is seen as the great savour coming to put right what MS made wrong.
Well, a quick glance at the news tells me Apple is going money grabbing. They are busy suing everyone under the sun who uses the word “pod”. They have claimed that people are going to be confused and are going to think the service comes from Apple. Well, lest I see everything that comes from Apple is pretty black and white (if you will excuse the pun). I can’t see many of the names being taken to court being confused with Apple service. If you ask me these sounds very much like an old MS trick.
So while Apple is for some unknown reason clamping down, MS appears to be opening up. I mentioned a while ago that Office was moving to XML formats. This will allow competitors to use the Office formats without any incompatibilities. Now if that’s not opening up to competition I don’t know what is.
In fact, while Apple seems to be closing down a lot of it’s technologies (they’re kernel springs to mind) MS is doing more for developers.
As a quick mention on copying, don’t think for a moment that Apple only has original ideas. Bother Apple and MS owe a lot of what they have to Xerox from the early days. If you look at the way the market is moving these days its’ no surprise they have a lot of similar features. None of the companies desktop OS’s have anything particularly original, it all comes from the corporate market and mainframes which have been around a bloody long time ago. Even in recent years things like Apple’s frontrow came after windows media centre
Now some of the Apple fanatically inclined will of course call bullshit and rant and rave about how wrong I am, how the evil corporation it trying to kill us all etc and how they steal everything from the mighty white. I will let you now I am writing this very post with MS Word on an Apple Powerbook…. Make of that what you will.
I have now managed to build up such a level of fear around me that my door just opened as I walked up the stairs.
I like IT people. I like them for one great attribute that seems rare these days. It’s an attribute that anyone can have and it costs nothing. It even requires no work whatsoever to acquire. They are quiet. Simple as that. They do not feel the need to shout across the room to make sure everyone hears they have just come out of meeting that will change the business forever, stand in time as a revolutionary moment in the businesses life. They just get on with the job and talk at a required level. This is the problem with other people in the city. They are big, brash, loud in order to be heard and promoted. Interestingly and rather coincidently they are also all wankers. The sort of people you would meet in the street and be glad you don’t have to see them again. They don’t just get the job done like in IT, they talk about the job, decide how important it is, argue with their alpha male attributes how each part of the job should be done etc. Then out they come from their meeting still spewing business “buzz words”. This issue has never really existed in IT. If you are good at your job then let you keep doing it and just give you different titles to get you up the pay grades. If you are crap at IT they put you out of the way in management where you do the least management. Oh how I wish all industries would be like IT (without perhaps the painful speed it moves at).
I like digital cameras. I especially like mine. It allows me to take photograph after photograph without so much as a whisper of a cost. It runs off rechargeable batteries and requires no further investment past a computer for storage. Ok, so pictures can take up a fair bit of space after time and they do require backing up to prevent loss, but it’s not like I don’t have to do that anyway with my computer. As you might expect from me, the computer itself was not something I had to purchase for the job, I had one already. In fact, most people have one already and for those that don’t they can either buy one at the dirt cheap prices you can get them for nowadays or just use the facilties at the camera shops (that used to do film processing).
I think it would be fair to say that digital has a good number of advantages over its older film rival. Now that’s quite something coming from a camera user who had his first camera at age 4 and a half and was using an SLR at 8 and then by 11 had his own SLR (fully manual or course).
It seems though that this wonderful idea hasn’t just turned my head, it’s turned a lot of other peoples heads. You can’t go anywhere without seeing people snapping away with their minute bundles of silver joy suspended from a neck cord or wrist strap. Walk round London for the best part of 10 minutes and you will have seen more stereotypical Japanese tourists with cameras snapping than you can count on the fingers and toes of a gecko.
It is safe to say it’s here to stay. Surely this must be a good thing….right….?
Photography to me and most who have been doing it for any length of time is a form of art, the challenge is to capture and image no-one else has seen and no-one else will be able to see again. The photographer is hunting for that moment in time at a specific place because it holds some sort of significance (or because their finger slipped). Any decent photographer uses their eyes 99% of the time with their camera by their side ready for the other 1%. I wonder if the average tourist considers their photographs to this extent before they mindlessly snap away at an unsuspecting inanimate object. Now I’m not saying that your average tourist should aspire to be a photographer and think about the shots they take, carefully composing each one in advance, but it would be nice to see them put down their cameras and actually look first.
Now this is the point at which I hark back to the “good old days” because when you had film it cost money. The only time I would ever take two photos of the same thing was when I was 99% sure the photo I had just taken had not worked and it was still worth having. Such times include going over a bridge in Italy whilst on a train and just as I took the photo I was sure I had got one of the upright posts of the bridge in it. Thank god for instinct, as I took another shot and sure enough when I got home there was a picture with a huge great post in the middle of it followed by a stunning picture of a mountain lake. That said, that was just two pictures and I probably didn’t take more than about 100 images for the whole of those two weeks. Now I can and have taken over 100 in a day (record stands at just under 300). Now great as this is I often get the feeling I’m spending all my time desperately trying to capture the moment I’m missing.
A while ago a young photographer from Brighton tried to have a day where people didn’t use their cameras. As far as I understand it was a bit of a damp squib. Seems times change faster than the click of a shutter.
Ok, this has been going on so long I’m not sure where to start.
About a month ago we got a letter from our ISP (Tiscali) informing us that some “network enhancements” were being conducted by BT on the 24th of august and that we may lose connection for about 2 hours on that day.
Well, suffice to say these network enhancements didn’t help us much. From that day we had a very slow connection (around dialup and slightly under (as apposed to the 2 Meg we should have and had until then)). Well, Friday evening I phoned up Tiscali (as the letter said to and gave a number). Well, I went through the joys of their Indian support script (run this speed check, check for spyware, close p2p blah blah blah reset line blah blah
Well, that was fair enough, I accept that they have to run through these checks as I expect most issues they get calls about are nothing to do with them at all and are the users fault. I was also happy to hear this idea of progress. Next day was not so good, connection stayed about the same all day until about 6pm when it suddenly started disconnecting every 40 seconds (or so). So I called them up with the information to add to my outstanding issue (just so when I got a call they would be up-to-date). Well, they tried to make me pass through all the bullshit and after a while I gave up with them and they said that the engineer would call in 24hours and that it had been added as a note.
Ok, so big day comes and no call. Ok, perhaps they are busy, leave it another day. Nope, still no call. At this point speed seemed to return to a nice 2Meg, so I just guessed they fixed it and hadn’t bothered to phone me. Now as nice as it is to know what’s going on, I don’t care if my connection is working as it should.
The bliss didn’t last long though. That Thursday evening it went down in speed again. I decided to leave it for the morning. Nope, still no change. I made a call when I got home from work (about 6pm). They once again insisted that I went through all the speed checks, config and spyware etc. I explained I had done all this and that they should read my profile. They were persistent and at this stage I didn’t care, as long as it got sorted. They said that it had apparently been passed to level 2 tech support and they had not been able to fix it. It was now going to be passed to level 3 (in the UK thank God) who were apparently the highest level. I was also told they would phone us (the UK people) by 9pm that evening.
At 9:35pm that evening I made a call to India again and after a whole bit of speed checks etc (it seems they will not talk to you unless you run a speed check and confirm you know what a virus is…) they explained that the UK group finished at 9pm. I concluded that the UK group had just decided sod it, leave that for the next day. The Indian guy said that I would get a call on that Monday. So that would bring us up to the last Monday past. Well, as you might expect that Monday call didn’t happen so I called up that evening and complained (and refused to do any speed tests (by this point had they been sitting in front of me when about to ask me for a speed test, they would not have dared. I think they were even edgy about telling me when in India…)). Anyway, they told me that they would get a supervisor to chase the UK group and also (after a lot of badgering by me) that if I called the billing department then they would be able to give me the number for the UK group so I could rip shit out of them myself.
Well, the next day while at work I called the billing number and they claimed they didn’t not have the number and that the India tech support might have it. I then blew what I considered to be a reasonably long slow burning fuse at them. I did try about half an hour later just to check if it was just that person deciding not to tell me the number. Can’t hurt to try….
Ok, so I then got home that day and there was a message on the answering machine from (a very Indian sounding) tech support drone. They said they would call back to on Saturday at 11am. So from then to today I have brewed, I haven’t had the energy or the hour it takes for one of my called to them to spare.
Today, after a quick visit to town for some shopping I rushed back to be in at 11am (the house has had people in all day) and still not call. It is now 12 hours on from then and still no call. I haven’t phoned this evening because I have a life to lead when I’m not on the phone to Tiscali. Monday morning they are getting an earful. I have not take shit from them for over 2 weeks now, but Monday things are going to get ugly.
Oh, and as a tribute to how this is so not my fault, I know someone very near us with similar problems (and he is getting about the same level of customer service).
Heads will roll, and if you know me you will know it will not be mine.
Two years ago I made a choice. I decided to buy an AMD chip over an Intel chip. At the time the AMD chips were lean, quick, cool, quiet. Comparatively Intel seemed like the fat, complacent middle-aged man to AMDs youthful sporty student who was done with the learning and was taking on the world. The AMD was everything I wanted and a little more. It seems times change. While AMD was resting on its laurels it seems, Intel was having its midlife crisis. It emerged with that same vigour to take on the world it once had. As I browse the statistics on the current offerings it seems all that blood sweat and thermal grease paid off, Intel has once again stormed the charts, not by a little but by a lot. I think it’s safe to say my love affair with the n00b has ended and I’m back on the straight and narrow. And at these prices I’m willing to dip more than just a toe in Intel.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2014646,00.asp
I hate people who don’t indicate, I hate people who indicate at the wrong time, I hate people who don’t realise their indicating, I hate mopeds, I hate flowery curtains, I hate small mice, I hate people with loud ring-tones, I hate sandals and socks, I hate oil/moneydriven US presidents, I hate small dogs, I hate stereotypical tourists, I hate 6 year olds with mobiles, I hate Nissan Micra’s, I hate small monitors, I hate loud people in churches, I hate shelves above my head, I hate pens that don’t work, I hate table cloths, I hate Apple’s marketing, I hate silver cars, I hate go faster stripes (except on the 2005 model of the Dodge Viper in blue), I hate foam mattresses, I hate peach jam, I hate fones4u adverts, I hate fish, I hate cyclists who think they own the road, I hate road owners, I hate fluorescent lighting, I hate button cell batteries and I find chatty pensioners on buses mildly annoying.
As has always been the case I update my journal in blocks. Sometimes I go weeks at a time without a single entry, other times I have several in a single day. It would also be fair to say that this is not a diary. Although at time it resembles one as I write what is on my mind, it is not what I strive for it to be.
I came back from holiday several weeks ago and although I have had the physical time to update it, I didn’t have the mental energy. Suffice to say working in the real world is a lot harder than you might expect. Also take into account I have a job which requires me to sit on my arse all day. I still come home shattered. Myself I consider this a tribute to how overworked my poor little grey matter is.
Anyway, to the subject in hand. I decided to take my laptop with me to Austria so I could write down some of the thoughts I had while away in a format I find easier to read. Therefore I present the first that I wrote in mild frustration having just got back from an Austria restaurant.
The French have the best food my arse! Today I type from the reasonably cold country of Austria having spent the last 2 days travelling by road through England, France, Germany and finally Austria. We stayed the night in a French city and as is customary when hungry, ate a meal there that evening. I had like any bloody minded English person would (when presented with a curious and wholly inadequate menu) ordered steak, chips and salad. Armed with the knowledge that the French understanding of “medium” is distinctly not cooked I asked for well done. Perhaps next time I shall just ask for done. It seems for all their culinary prowess they are incapable of just simply cooking something. I don’t want it under cooked, I don’t want it burnt to a cinder (as was the case this time), I just want it cooked through. The chips were passable, but to be quite frank, it’s not like it takes skill to operate a deep fat fryer. Tonight we arrived in Austria, and being a Saturday evening no shops were open, so we went out. We found a stunning little hotel restaurant with a nice waiter who even spoke English to us when was our German was not quite up to scratch. The food we got was something else though, it really was. Myself I do not really eat pork; I normally find it to be tough, dry and tasteless. I could eat what they served me every day without complaint, it was truly very nice. So what I don’t understand is why are the French seen as the culinary masters when their far below the excellent standard set by all but the Germans?
Yes, I am back from 2 weeks of holiday in Austria and yes the only photo I have posted in my gallery so far is this one. As I know (by my spam to real email ratio) that not that many people care about me I shall not most the big juicy post I have lined up for my return, but more of a passing comment (given the late hour in the day).
I have been using solely my Powerbook for the last 2 weeks and one thing has occurred to me. Apple and almost every Mac user I have spoken to in the last few months is desperate to tell me that now Macs can run Windows too. I have yet however to see anything about people getting OSX to run under Windows or even on PC’s. Now perhaps it has been done, or perhaps I have missed these articles, but if either is the case then it is certainly being kept a big secret. So if OSX is such a great OS then why does no-one on a PC seem to want to make it work. Or to put it another way, if XP is so crap, why is everyone (including Apple) telling me I can now run it on their machines. There is no way on this earth that I would want to pay more and sacrifice so many options just so I could run Windows on Apple hardware, so why. And if OSX was so great then surly people would be desperate to make it work on PC’s so we could all have the benefits of OSX with PC cheap power and flexibility.
If I were being optimistic I would say it hasn’t been done because people recognise that the idea behind Apples kit is that it’s proprietary so it all works together. But to be realistic, I don’t think it has been done because no one thinks it’s that great an OS.
And my wasn’t that a garbled mess words…
Ok, hands up who has tried the new Office 2007 Beta?
I for one have stayed well away from it for a very good reason. I have been bitten by beta software before, so badly in fact that it is one of the reasons for my recent(ish) reinstall.
I have been bombarded by stuff about it and I had just been itching to try it out.
Well, for once MS came to the rescues with a very neat idea.
http://www.runaware.com/microsoft/en-us/office2007/td
It’s an online test environment. Now don’t be sceptical like I was. I though this was going to be some poor webpage with JavaScript all over the place to give the appearance of Office.
Oh how wrong I was. It seem this is actually a virtual copy running on a real machine. There are test files, you can save data, you can use the whole of all the applications fully at a half decent speed.
In fact, I actually managed to prove quite how real it was when I managed to Crash Excel:
Just to prove quite how good it was, it then just had to do what I last expected:
And then the final icing on the cake….I logged off the machine. I then tried to go back in and I got this:
Don’t think for one second I’m going to review it though. It was cool, lots of fun, but I didn’t have a long enough lunch break to decided it it was really worth me getting.
I think it would be safe to say that I’m a bit of a technophile. To prove so I have a picture to show my complaints that the modern alphabet may not last me much longer…
I also have quite strong views on what technology I like and what works for me. Salespeople (note the PCness of it all….) both love me and hate me. They love me because when I go into the shop I tell then exactly what I want. Not a spec, but a product. Conversely they hate me because that means I don’t budge, however much they tell me another product is better. I am one of those people who will research to huge amounts before hand and then when I make a decision I’m happy with what I get.
For example, I bought my camera about 7 months ago. In fact I wasn’t quite perfect on this instance. I had narrowed my purchase down to 2 camera’s. I found one in a shop and had a go on that. I then went (with
Another item I did something similar with was my phone. I have a Siemens ME45 which is over 5 years old. It is the first phone I got and still my only phone. At the time it cost £300 and as a tribute to my product picking skills it actually went up in price for a few months after I bought it. It beats hands down the poor bit of plastic I see tethered together with superglue nowadays. Interestingly I have never seen another one before. A good friend of mine was working in Germany (and in the home of Siemens) and he did see one. Apparently the guy was also looking for a new phone but could not find a better one.
Anyway, after all that procrastination…
I am finally looking at getting a new phone. I can’t stand not having something new anymore. It’s more than that. They now have features that I actually want (I have no lust for polyphonic ringtones, flashing cases and micro pictures).
I am looking at getting a O2 XDA Mini S. It’s a smart phone:
It supports push email, wireless and sports a half decent camera. The main reason behind looking into it is I actually use email more than SMS, so I want something that supports email in a way where I can use it like SMS.
It will never be as hardy as the Siemens, but few phones go out in the rain, drop 10M onto concrete and are used as a toy to play catch with and live to tell the tale, let alone have a few minor scratches that are now quite hard to find.
I shall just have to let it go. Gone are the days when things were made to last.
Ok, I’m literally fuming over an article I have just read. Well, it’s not even the whole article, it’s a single line of it that has irked me into typing almost instantly.
The article is this one on the American military’s new idea for a way to re-arm its planes whilst in the air: http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9615
According to this article (which I have no reason to disbelieve) the patent being submitted gives a clue as to why they are working on such an idea. It reads “The nations of Europe, for example, lying closer as they do to areas of turmoil such as the Middle East, are often reluctant to take hard stances against terrorists who lie within an automobile ride from their borders”.
Now this comes at a time when in my head I am having one of my “pissed off with America” times. I do these every now and again, normally triggered by me reading about yet another things being done in the states that I disagree with. Here though it is pushing me over the edge. It talks about reluctance like its clear cut they should be blowing the shit out of everywhere with too many Z’s and Q’s in the name. It’s this general vibe of superiority that the country gives off that really winds me up. I just don’t understand how they have been allowed to get this far.
I suppose I better explain why I am so annoyed. Yesterday I had an argument with an American over the US’s involvement in the UN. I am one of those that say the US should be thrown out of the UN. I do not see what right they have to prance about like they own it when they disobey every ruling and law put forward by the UN. Then of course Americans as a whole say how useless the UN is because it has no power blah blah blah. WTF? It has as much power as you let it. If the US took it seriously then it would have the power it required to make the real changes it should be capable of.
I constantly live in hope that one day the “worlds biggest super power” will wake up to the double standards it lives by on a daily basis and either fall on its knees and beg, or fall, kicking and screaming the whole way down.
– one mightily pissed off blogger
I know many of you hate my computer related entries, but don’t let that stop you from reading them. If all goes to plan this will be more psychological than anything else.
I’m always having arguments with Mac users. They normally take the view that their OS and computer is as good as it gets and they don’t seem to understand how I could want to use anything else. Myself, I like to consider myself to be the realist. Having now been doing a little work in the real world I can now confirm that anybody who says Macs are going to take over PC’s (Windows and Linux) have their heads so stuck up their arse they are not sure which way is up. Have you ever heard the phrase “If it aint broke, don’t fix it”? In other words, don’t meddle with something that works, let it be and let it keep on doing its job.
Now lets talk about something Apple just don’t do. They don’t provide backwards compatibility (with the exception of unusable crash-happy emulators). Now this is crucial functionality to remain to work in a business is an essential part of that business. After all, do you really want to spend all your worldly wealth on re-doing something that worked fine when you started? I know for a fact many large companies still run the same mainframe systems they did 20+ years ago.
Now yes, there is a wonderful counter argument to this point. It is that Apples strategy does not apply to the business market. It is looking at home user who for one reason or another don’t need backwards compatibility (or are so clueless they don’t realise until it’s too late). As with any argument I have I like to have a structure, in this case I shall go for the “build em up and break em down” approach. You see, Yes, Apples market model might work if the people that used business machines were a different set of people to home users. Guess what, the two are more than just linked.
Mac take over the world? My arse.