Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Vista Security hole... I know but this is also funny
Apparently if a wav file is downloaded and played at sufficient volume and quality on a machine running Vista where speakers and microphone are enabled, the machine may respond to commands issued in the wav file. There's also a technet article about it. Funny stuff!
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Development
This video on YouTube is of a fascinating lecture about development across the world (as in economic / social development, not computer development) presented as data on charts. Presented by Hans Rosling
Friday, February 23, 2007
Funny ads from IKEA
A sense of humour is good when advertising your products. IKEA furniture isn't great, but it's cheap and anybody can enjoy these ads (all videos) - woman has lost something in her untidy house. Visit from the girlfriend. Little Boy finds a new toy
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Drug Patent Politics
This sounds pretty awful. Novartis, the Swiss drugs company, is challenging the patent law in India and if they are successful, the price of some drugs could skyrocket. A woman who reported a rape was arrested and refused a morning-after pill in Florida.
Friday, February 16, 2007
You Are What You Eat Revisited
An interesting (and substantial) article in the New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan about the rise of "Nutritionism" and decline of nutrition in the American diet. Before and After retouching shots of models from (Flash Movie) Christiane Beaulieu
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Monday, February 12, 2007
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I've just finished a book by Jonathan Safran Foer called "Extermely Loud and Incredibly Close", which I found very moving. I was on the tube as I got to the end of the book and I could feel tears coming. Reviewers have criticised the book for its whimsicality and there are elements of that, but overall I thought it was a great read.
I'd read Safran Foer's previous book "Everything is Illuminated" and found it interesting but mixed - he tells the story in several different voices, not all of which are so easy to read. The main voice is a very entertaining one though, a young, naive "translator" (that's what he calls himself) called Alex.
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" uses some of the same devices as the earlier book - various voices, some of which are heavier going than others and a foreground character who this time is a clever young boy with apparently autistic tendencies. In the first book Safran Foer dealt with Holocaust survival and in this one his main character's father dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Oskar (the young boy) describes his grief as "heavy boots" and he thinks up inventions in order to stop himself thinking of bad things. At one point he has the idea that there should be a channel under everybody's pillow to drain their tears to the reservoir in Central Park. Each morning a special report would tell everyone the emotional state of the city and occasionally, on the worst days, everybody would be called upon to bring sandbags to shore up the banks of the reservoir and stop it from overflowing. If you think that kind of metaphor is silly or cloying, don't read this book. I found it lovely.
In "Everything is Illuminated", the author himself appears, looking for the person who saved his father from the Nazis. There is a parallel in the later novel (perhaps there being so many close similarities is a weakness, well, let's see if the next one is the same); Oskar goes on an impossible quest in search of the lock which fits a key he finds in his father's closet. He has many wonderful adventures which in the end seem to have become therapy for Oskar and when he comes to the end, he realises that the search made him feel closer to his father than reaching its conclusion.
Dealing with the trauma of the aftermath of 9/11 is obviously very hard for a novelist and I guess it's inevitable that writers will do it obliquely (for instance by using the voice of an autistic child). One scene that I thought benefited from this was where Oskar gives a talk at school about the experience of people in a Japanese city hit by an atomic bomb. His schoolmates are grossed out by the horrible details while Oskar enthuses over technicalities. We see Oskar's isolation from his schoolmates and in the process a question occurs; how do we feel about 9/11? Because there were no survivors and hardly any remains, there are no similarly gruesome stories for 9/11, just the haunting phone messages and the images of falling bodies. Oskar has his own reactions to both these motifs.
Many people will find this book too trite to handle its subject, and the author crass for turning 9/11 into entertainment, but as I say I found parts of it very moving. Oskar is sent home from school on the fateful day and plays five messages from his dad on the answerphone. He replaces the answerphone with an identical one so that he can protect his mum from the messages, but feels compelled to keep playing them. Later we hear that the fifth message was his father repeating "Are you there?" eleven times. Oskar was in the house and heard his father leaving this message, but was unable to answer the phone. he carries a burden of guilt for that. You finish the book wondering whether he would shed that burden.
I'd read Safran Foer's previous book "Everything is Illuminated" and found it interesting but mixed - he tells the story in several different voices, not all of which are so easy to read. The main voice is a very entertaining one though, a young, naive "translator" (that's what he calls himself) called Alex.
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" uses some of the same devices as the earlier book - various voices, some of which are heavier going than others and a foreground character who this time is a clever young boy with apparently autistic tendencies. In the first book Safran Foer dealt with Holocaust survival and in this one his main character's father dies in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Oskar (the young boy) describes his grief as "heavy boots" and he thinks up inventions in order to stop himself thinking of bad things. At one point he has the idea that there should be a channel under everybody's pillow to drain their tears to the reservoir in Central Park. Each morning a special report would tell everyone the emotional state of the city and occasionally, on the worst days, everybody would be called upon to bring sandbags to shore up the banks of the reservoir and stop it from overflowing. If you think that kind of metaphor is silly or cloying, don't read this book. I found it lovely.
In "Everything is Illuminated", the author himself appears, looking for the person who saved his father from the Nazis. There is a parallel in the later novel (perhaps there being so many close similarities is a weakness, well, let's see if the next one is the same); Oskar goes on an impossible quest in search of the lock which fits a key he finds in his father's closet. He has many wonderful adventures which in the end seem to have become therapy for Oskar and when he comes to the end, he realises that the search made him feel closer to his father than reaching its conclusion.
Dealing with the trauma of the aftermath of 9/11 is obviously very hard for a novelist and I guess it's inevitable that writers will do it obliquely (for instance by using the voice of an autistic child). One scene that I thought benefited from this was where Oskar gives a talk at school about the experience of people in a Japanese city hit by an atomic bomb. His schoolmates are grossed out by the horrible details while Oskar enthuses over technicalities. We see Oskar's isolation from his schoolmates and in the process a question occurs; how do we feel about 9/11? Because there were no survivors and hardly any remains, there are no similarly gruesome stories for 9/11, just the haunting phone messages and the images of falling bodies. Oskar has his own reactions to both these motifs.
Many people will find this book too trite to handle its subject, and the author crass for turning 9/11 into entertainment, but as I say I found parts of it very moving. Oskar is sent home from school on the fateful day and plays five messages from his dad on the answerphone. He replaces the answerphone with an identical one so that he can protect his mum from the messages, but feels compelled to keep playing them. Later we hear that the fifth message was his father repeating "Are you there?" eleven times. Oskar was in the house and heard his father leaving this message, but was unable to answer the phone. he carries a burden of guilt for that. You finish the book wondering whether he would shed that burden.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Problems with the Vista User Interface
Steve Wiseman over at IntelliAdmin laments Vista's problems in this piece called "The 5 Sins of Vista"
Fortune Cookie Website
Blogthings will tell you all sorts of things about yourself and all free. It's like a fortune cookie machine that will spout on various subjects, such as What American City You Are, and Are You a Drama Queen or King?. It does also have a Fortune Cookie Generator, which told me "A man can keep his youth by giving her money, furs and diamonds".
I made a password generator in Excel, maybe I could do something like this with it. I remember David Bowie used to create the lyrics for his songs by chopping up lines of text and juxtaposing them.
I made a password generator in Excel, maybe I could do something like this with it. I remember David Bowie used to create the lyrics for his songs by chopping up lines of text and juxtaposing them.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Driving With a Shattered Steering Column
I was talking in an earlier post about how problems with your house can seem mysterious, obscure and hard to solve. As often happens when I make such a statement, I then recalled a case that suggested the same could happen with cars. I remembered a problem we once had with a car, that could also have been much more dangerous in retrospect. There were just two of us (my partner and I) at that point and we had a yellow Mini. Our previous car was also a Mini but had been wrecked by a BMW driving slowly into the back of the car behind us in a traffic queue. The Beamer driver was just bending down to pick something up with his brakes off. His car pushed the car behind us into our mini's boot and his insurance didn't match the quality of his car. To fix the dented boot would have cost more than the car was worth, so we gave it to a scrap metal merchant for twenty quid.
So the next car (another Mini) we got was a bit nicer and more reliable, except after a while you could feel it pulling the steering wheel a bit to the left as you drove. You could keep pulling it back and it didn't seem like a bad problem because the car still ran alright, but we took it to the garage several times trying to get it fixed. The garage tried wheel tracking and replaced the bearings and said it would be OK, but it wasn't. We must have been driving it for six months or so after first noticing the problem when we took it back in again and said the things they had tried so far had not worked. They looked again and this time said they had found that the head of the steering column was shattered. After we'd let it sink in we felt relieved that we'd kept trying to get it fixed!
So the next car (another Mini) we got was a bit nicer and more reliable, except after a while you could feel it pulling the steering wheel a bit to the left as you drove. You could keep pulling it back and it didn't seem like a bad problem because the car still ran alright, but we took it to the garage several times trying to get it fixed. The garage tried wheel tracking and replaced the bearings and said it would be OK, but it wasn't. We must have been driving it for six months or so after first noticing the problem when we took it back in again and said the things they had tried so far had not worked. They looked again and this time said they had found that the head of the steering column was shattered. After we'd let it sink in we felt relieved that we'd kept trying to get it fixed!
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Plumbers and Builders
I've had a bad relationship with plumbers and builders. I'm trying to think of the word that means a relationship isn't working very well, (is it disfunctional?) This probably stems from the fact that I'm not a confident handyman, not well-endowed (steady...) in the arts of manipulating resistant materials. "Resistant Materials" is what woodwork, metalwork, and plastics are now called at school, instead of just woodwork and metalwork (see, we didn't make anything except model airplanes with plastic when I was at school). I wasn't good at making them do things at school and didn't develop much in the way of DIY post-education. When we moved into our current house, I met our next door neighbour, nice guy, and the first thing he said to me was "Are you 'andy?" So I thought he'd misheard my name, but he meant was I good with tools.
I was about to say that this lack of ability with hammers nails and saws has led us to pay for some bad work, but actually we've probably been lucky, because most of the work we've had done seems to have been good. So why the dissatisfied feeling? Well, it is often difficult to get them to come round to do a quotation and then sometimes they're just too busy to do the work, though I must admit to once having got a plumber out to fit a washer on a bathroom tap that I had broken by trying to fix it myself, on a Bank Holiday. He did come out and fix it, but it was expensive. I know not to try to fix plumbing on Bank Holidays now. Or, it could be that half the time we don't know what the problem is, so we try various fixes for the same problem that don't seem to fix it, for instance damp walls are a mysterious phenomenom that can apparently be caused by all sorts of things, and if only we could know the spefically relevant thing we'd be happy. Fixing car problems has been less difficult, why should that be; are cars more insulated from Nature? Or just always newer and subjected to that endless cycle (spiral?) of renewal, ditching your old car and buying the newer model with all its improvements; better brakes, side-impact bars, better fuel consumption, whereas fixing our house is like keeping a rusty old Ford Cortina on the road. And perhaps that I don't feel at all guilty about not being any good at fixing cars.
Actually what prompted this post - become whinge was a story over on the Velo-Gubbed Legs blog about nmj's boiler engineer being very young. She talks about standing over his shoulder while he worked and that reminded me (obscurely) of my daughter when she was small, standing behind a plumber that we had got to work on our heating. The plumber was recommended to us by friends. He was middle-aged and had a family (he was the guy that came out on a Bank Holiday; at that time I asked him about his family but he wasn't too bothered. I know I'd hate to work on a Bank Holiday, but he seemed happy enough to get away). So my daughter was following this guy round watching what he was doing, she was fascinated (twelve years later she's a lot more self-concious), but I'm not sure what the fascination was, probably just curiosity; I think she was too young to be concerned that he was doing a good job. I must ask her whether she remembers that plumber - she did have a bit of a thing for older men (I mean when she was four), she loved meeting a Father Christmas at my sister's house. She followed him around until he gave her a kiss, then went back for a couple more.
I was about to say that this lack of ability with hammers nails and saws has led us to pay for some bad work, but actually we've probably been lucky, because most of the work we've had done seems to have been good. So why the dissatisfied feeling? Well, it is often difficult to get them to come round to do a quotation and then sometimes they're just too busy to do the work, though I must admit to once having got a plumber out to fit a washer on a bathroom tap that I had broken by trying to fix it myself, on a Bank Holiday. He did come out and fix it, but it was expensive. I know not to try to fix plumbing on Bank Holidays now. Or, it could be that half the time we don't know what the problem is, so we try various fixes for the same problem that don't seem to fix it, for instance damp walls are a mysterious phenomenom that can apparently be caused by all sorts of things, and if only we could know the spefically relevant thing we'd be happy. Fixing car problems has been less difficult, why should that be; are cars more insulated from Nature? Or just always newer and subjected to that endless cycle (spiral?) of renewal, ditching your old car and buying the newer model with all its improvements; better brakes, side-impact bars, better fuel consumption, whereas fixing our house is like keeping a rusty old Ford Cortina on the road. And perhaps that I don't feel at all guilty about not being any good at fixing cars.
Actually what prompted this post - become whinge was a story over on the Velo-Gubbed Legs blog about nmj's boiler engineer being very young. She talks about standing over his shoulder while he worked and that reminded me (obscurely) of my daughter when she was small, standing behind a plumber that we had got to work on our heating. The plumber was recommended to us by friends. He was middle-aged and had a family (he was the guy that came out on a Bank Holiday; at that time I asked him about his family but he wasn't too bothered. I know I'd hate to work on a Bank Holiday, but he seemed happy enough to get away). So my daughter was following this guy round watching what he was doing, she was fascinated (twelve years later she's a lot more self-concious), but I'm not sure what the fascination was, probably just curiosity; I think she was too young to be concerned that he was doing a good job. I must ask her whether she remembers that plumber - she did have a bit of a thing for older men (I mean when she was four), she loved meeting a Father Christmas at my sister's house. She followed him around until he gave her a kiss, then went back for a couple more.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Guantanamo: Set Them Free
Guantanamo Bay is an illegal detention centre run by the US Government. They run it in a different country in order to avoid judicial regulations in their own country. Amnesty International is campaigning for the closure of Guantanamo or the fair trial of its prisoners, but the camp continues and the suffering continues. Join the (Flash movie) Amnesty Flotilla and call for the closure of the prison.
More Best old Music
Thinking back over what were my favourite things in music, these songs stick out from the seventies and eighties. Here's a bunch of YouTube links:
Golden Earring "Radar Love" (What a cool groove. I never owned this single but it was always one of my favourites - and check out the skin-tight jumpsuits on those guys!)
Elvis Costello "Watching the Detectives" (for skanky rhythm and lyrics sharp as a stick)
P.P. Arnold "The First Cut is the Deepest" (for as much soul you could get from a little piece of vinyl. I thought that song was written by Steve Winwood or Jim Capaldi, but apparently not - Cat Stevens wrote it!)
Chaka Khan "Ain't Nobody" (Great disco shakes. Mmmm what a fabulous bass line. Sorry I couldn't find a better quality clip.)
Evelyne Champagne King "Shame" (Brill riff, sparkling and fizzy)
Parliament Funcadelic "One Nation Under a Groove" (For the funkiest funk ever)
All these are still great songs, I get a rush just thinking about each one; it's just a pity I couldn't find good links for them all. I did find several great links on TheBurnleyBoy YouTube channel
Golden Earring "Radar Love" (What a cool groove. I never owned this single but it was always one of my favourites - and check out the skin-tight jumpsuits on those guys!)
Elvis Costello "Watching the Detectives" (for skanky rhythm and lyrics sharp as a stick)
P.P. Arnold "The First Cut is the Deepest" (for as much soul you could get from a little piece of vinyl. I thought that song was written by Steve Winwood or Jim Capaldi, but apparently not - Cat Stevens wrote it!)
Chaka Khan "Ain't Nobody" (Great disco shakes. Mmmm what a fabulous bass line. Sorry I couldn't find a better quality clip.)
Evelyne Champagne King "Shame" (Brill riff, sparkling and fizzy)
Parliament Funcadelic "One Nation Under a Groove" (For the funkiest funk ever)
All these are still great songs, I get a rush just thinking about each one; it's just a pity I couldn't find good links for them all. I did find several great links on TheBurnleyBoy YouTube channel
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Give a Water Buffalo
You know those gifts for poor families that you can by proxy, like where you pay for a goat for a family in an African village or something like that? Well apparently sometimes nobody actually gets a goat; the money goes into a development pool. So if you thought you were sending a direct gift, well not actually. There's a guy called Robert Thompson who lives in Yunan province in China. He's American and he went there with his Chinese partner to get married. He's also a violinist and he's doing a tour over there. Anyway he saw a story on Philip Greenspun's blog about this guy who bought a water buffalo and then realised nobody actually got a water buffalo. You can see the comment from Bob Thompson under the blog post and then you can see the resulting video (pretty professional) on Thompson's site. I came across this on Jason Kottke's site.
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