The situation seems to be a sort of cold-war echo. Ukraine, after all, used to be integral to the Soviet Union; it's bordered by Russia, which broods away to the East, and the rest of Europe shimmering with promise on its Western frontier.
The protestors, who started out as peaceful, are all in favour of a stronger, progressive link with the shiny modern freedom of the European Union. The President, Viktor Yanukovych, is not. He'd much rather cozy up with Mr Putin in his snowy Russian palace of nostalgia and rule Ukraine with a disciplined iron glare.
The problem is that the 46 million Ukrainians don't much care for being told what to do any more, and even less so now that their government is firing bullets at them. They (on the whole) would like to decide the direction the country takes themselves, like a proper democracy. Mr Yanukovych isn't in the mood for listening to the pipe-dreams of the powerless when he's steering the ship. Conflict is inevitable.
It's fascinating to me how quickly these things escalate, especially here in the 21st Century. This tense ripping apart of a country from East to West, this clash of big ideas about How Nations Should Be Run is the hallmark of the last Century, not this one. It's long past the peaceful stage. Protestors are shielding themselves behind makeshift barriers, fire rages bright and hot through the shells of blackened vehicles and bullets tear across the rubble-strewn Independence Square. People are dying.
When you see the golden tops of Kiev's beautiful buildings and the black smoke billowing between them, you can't help but think about that terrible old clash of ideas and where it always leads.
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Meanwhile, here in Theale, things are a little more peaceful. We deal with less important collisions of opposing ideologies: like whether or not vertical text is acceptable in a software user interface. I proposed 'no' as I'm fond of the idea of not having neckache. The developers countered with 'yes' as it saves space and we've already done it once before. In the light of the problems faced by Ukraine, this
seems like the triviality of trifles. Still, you can find yourself in trench warfare over trifles, can't you? I suddenly wished I could be more like David Bowie and be cool enough to stay out of it.
I argued that these weren't justifiable reasons for doing it again and that they were outweighed by the localisation cost (imagine the length of vertical Japanese strings!) and the uncomfortable experience of rotating your head to read them. This is a negative experience for our customers and will only seek to devalue the product, I found myself pointedly tapping out on my keyboard. It's funny how these things escalate. Pomposity had taken over my fingers all of a sudden.
In the end they reached a kind of compromise.
They're going for diagonal.
Weird.
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