Who Killed The Electric Car?

With the high price of oil, the cost of a litre of gásoleo or gasolina in Portugal went through the roof. Drivers near the border with Spain were flocking to petrol stations (bombas) in Spain, leaving the stations in Portugal deserted. Now the price of a barrel of oil has come down, and although the major retailers Galp and Repsol have reduced their prices, it still costs a lot more to fill a tank with petrol than it did just a few months ago.

With the holiday season in Portugal in full swing, Portuguese who work outside the country have returned home for the summer. A lot of them have had a shock, with basic essentials far more expensive than they remembered. One emigrant (as they are called), commented that the price of petrol was over 120 times more expensive than was paid when they were last in the country in 2004.

So it was interesting to find an article which seems to have been missed by much of the Portuguese media:

When fuel was at it's most expensive, in around the middle of July, José Socrates, the Portuguese Prime Minister, signed an Article of Understanding with a Nissan-Renault alliance to produce an infrastructure for the production and charging of electric cars. Socrates is reported as saying that the government wants Portugal to be:

"a laboratory for future electric cars... So that we are not at the mercy of others."

After a four-month discussion phase, the intention is that Portugal will develop a national network of recharging stations, and the cars will be available in 2001. No details were readily available of the cars themselves, aside from it being a five-seater vehicle with a top speed of 90km/h and a capacity of 160km on a full charge.

Technorati Tags: Electric cars,Green cars,Nissan,Project Better Place,renault,Portugal,Socrates

International Day of the Orgasm

Today is 31 July, which means it is the International day of the Orgasm.

Technorati Tags: awareness,day,harry,international,met,orgasm,sally,when

The 50€ laptop is here

In Lisbon today at noon, in the presence of the prime minister, local officials, and representatives of Intel, the first 50€ laptop will be launched. News was leaked yesterday, by local officials and the government, who promised to order 500,000 units for all primary schoolchildren starting in September, at the heavily subsidised price of 50€.

For the Portuguese government, this cannot come to soon. The country has been in the grip of an economic crisis for the best part of a year now, with no apparent end in sight, and despite everything they have done, and to be fair they have been as much of the cause of the crisis as the solution, the creation of 1.000 new jobs in Matosinhos, near Lisbon, can only be good news.

The new computer, called Magellan (Magalhães), is intended to be the flagship of Intel's Classmate PC. Originally, Intel was a part of the One Laptop Per Child programme, which aimed to create low-cost PC's for education in third world countries, but disagreements at the start of the year meant they went their own way, and developed the Classmate PC.

In brief, the Magellan is a small laptop with a 7-inch TFT screen and no hard disk. It contains a 900MHz Celeron M CPU, with 256MB of RAM and runs Microsoft Windows XP Embedded Version 2002, with Service Pack 2. To give additional memory, the computer contains a 1Gb flash memory drive, but also has two USB ports, one for additional memory, and one for a wifi adaptor. It also has an ethernet connection and headphone sockets. For a full review see here.

The Portuguese government has been supporting new technology in schools as a part of it's e-schools programme (“e.escola”), which has subsidised laptops to students (discounting the VAT) and a deal for schoolchildren where they could buy a laptop for 150€ plus a monthly 15€ fee for wi-fi internet access. This deal, to provide the Magalhães to all primary school children, is part of a new programme called “e.escolinha", or little e-schools.

Technorati Tags: laptop,50€,olpc,intel,cheap,magellan,Magalhães,classmate,windows,e-schools,e.escolina

MyBlogLog

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

On Ronaldo and being Portuguese

The weather has taken a turn for the worse today. Last night the clouds came in and when we woke up there was rain falling. The high temperatures and orange alert in the north have given way to sub-20º temperatures and accidents on the roads. When a little snow falls in London, the whole capital grinds to a halt. When a little rain falls in Portugal, the drivers keep driving as if the sun was out and end up slipping and sliding all over the place.

Portuguese believe that it is their right to be tanned. When the sun comes out, the first destination of any Portuguese is the beach. At weekends, cities are deserted, the lines of traffic snaking toward the seaside are never ending and the beaches heave with people looking for a space they can erect their umbrella. Getting to the beach, to achieve that perfect shade of mahogany, becomes an obsession.

So it was interesting to see an article on the Daily Mail website ("Becks vs Ronaldo: Who is the biggest metrosexual of them all?") comparing the attention that Beckham and Ronaldo pay to their grooming, with an earlier article saying Ronaldo

has spent so much time on sun loungers and by the pool that he could almost be mistaken for the Cuprinol man from the television adverts for the wood preservative... The £100,000-a-week star, who is recuperating from ankle surgery to cure a long-term injury, passed the healthy looking bronze stage some time ago, but is still soaking up the rays on a daily basis."

Well sorry guys, but Ronaldo is Portuguese, and like him, if you spend the bulk of the year in rain-swept and sun-free Manchester, you'll take every opportunity to get a tan. Portuguese will lie in the sun until they can't tan any longer, and then they will lie in the sun some more, mocking us poor English for our factor 15 protection while they lather themselves in factor 2, or olive oil as I prefer to call it.

Today the weather in Portugal is a little dull, everyone in the north of the country is looking towards the sky for the clouds to clear. As soon as they do, the beaches will be filled again, the bars on the beach will be happy, and normal service will be resumed. A Portuguese without a tan is not a Portuguese.

Technorati Tags: Ronaldo,Beckham,Portugal,tanning,sun,beach,obsession,rain

Tensions remain high in Quinta da Fonte

Following the disturbances in Lisbon last week, in which shots were fired between the gypsy and immigrant black communities, tensions have remained high, despite the Câmara Municipal and the Police advising people that they should be going home.

In the days following the shootings, which was caused by a dispute between two rival groups, the Police saturated the area, and made a few arrests. Four of the arrests were made at the Câmara Municipal in Loures, where some of the gypsies have been congregating, when police found four guns in the camping gypsies.

According to reports yesterday, more gypsies are going to the area from all over the country, presumably in support of the residents of Quinta da Fonte. This will not please the local Câmara or the Police, as they will be anticipating an increase in tension just at the time they are trying to defuse it.

Há Caracóis (We have Snails)

Cleaning the car this morning (it was becoming a disgusting shade of yellow rather than it's usual white) we spotted on the neighbour's wall hundreds of little black dots. Amazed, these were hundreds upon hundreds of caracóis, snails: on the wall, on the plants, everywhere.

Like in France, and I believe in Spain, caracóis are a Portuguese delicacy, and are eaten by the plate-load, in café's and restaurants across the country. Outside the shop, there will be a poorly printed, or hand-written sign "Há Caracóis," "we have snails" (or more precisely, "there are snails"). Now these aren't the beautiful, hand-reared, French snails, cooked in a beautiful garlic butter and served with a fine wine, but small wild snails, soaked in salt water, boiled and eaten either with a beer, or with the poorest glass of 50c wine that is available.

Personally, I can do without them, they are far too bland, and if not prepared properly contain 'coco', which is basically a mixture of snail crap and earth inside the shell. As you can probably guess, when first eating these, I also ate the coco, which is a bit lumpy and hard, and not very nice. So my opinion is biased.

Technorati Tags: há caracóis,snails,we have snails,escargot.