alexander’s mixed message

a message stick, alexander downer, a usb drive and a Memory StickWhat was Australia’s illustrious Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer trying to say in parliament the other day? Apparently, a video of Douglas Wood and his Iraqi dissident captors was delivered to Australian officials by “message stick”. Does this implicate Australian Aboriginals in the sorry tale? (perhaps in retaliation for not saying sorry!), have the ancient ways of transmitting information become TCP/IP compliant? Certainly a challenge for hackers to crack that one!

Alas, I think not. I don’t even think he was referring to a Sony trademarked Memory Stick, but instead to a generic, USB flash drive. Seems the digital world is moving too fast for Al, so for his benefit (and any others for whom the confusion persists), I have prepared this small picture… on the left is a Message Stick of Central Australian origin. On the right are the Sony branded item and a generic Flash drive.

Oh, and that’s Alexander in the middle. As he seems to be losing his memory, I thought he’d appreciate a picture to help him remember who he is.

one wheel & madness

I was telling a story today when someone at the table said “that’s the sort of thing you should have on your blog!”, so I thought I’d better follow through with it.

I can’t remember why, but a while ago I found myself looking at a totally insane video on the interweb showing a couple of deranged frenchmen hurtling on their cycles down loose, stony hillsides and across logs and creeks. It would have been extreme stuff on mountain bikes – but these were UNICYCLES! That’s right – one wheel! It pushed the whole thing over the line into complete and utter madness.

Marcel et sons OrchestreAnyway, apart from a deep admiration for their complete disregard for life and limb, one of the videos had a wild, alt/french/ska soundtrack… a perfect match for the action. I followed the credit in the movie to the website and they are now my new favourite band! Marcel et son Orchestre – give them a try! I only understand the barest snips of their rapid fire french, but it’s so upbeat and infectious that it doesn’t matter at all. The only problem is buying it: I’ve only found the albums on amazon.fr.

Sadly, it seems the website where I found the original video [www.monotrail.fr.st] is no more, but!! magpie that I am, I must have decided to save a copy of the video. It’s a 3.1Mb wmv file (not my choice!). I hope they (Tom, Jeremy, Ludo and François) don’t mind me posting it here… let me know guys!

annoying mobiles taken to the next level

It’s not politically correct to admit it, but I hate public transport. It’s bucketing rain this morning so I didn’t ride my bike (powered or unpowered), I caught the tram.

I don’t like the waiting, the fact that when I do, it’s usually cold and wet is a bummer, but I can put up with all the logistical problems, what really bugs me is the other passengers. There’s always someone with a new and surprising way of annoying their fellow passengers.

This morning’s nutter was armed with a mobile phone. It’s annoying enough listening to half of someone’s conversation on a tram, but I’m not such a grouch that I let it bother me any more. This morning, however, the woman with the offensive communication device had it on speakerphone! That’s right, we got both sides of the conversation! I believe it was her sister, I wonder if she knew she was being broadcast to the other 60 or so passengers within earshot? I think not, if she’d known, she would have tried to say something intelligent.

Actually, not to diminish the story, but it reminds me of another recent and disappointing encounter with the new breed of mobile phone. We were sitting in a cafe next to a trio of young lads, when one of them pulls out his mobile and starts playing music through it like it was the world’s smallest ghetto blaster! Imagine it, the 5mm speaker going beserk as Nirvana’s Teen Spirit squeezes it’s way out of the overloaded circuitry with so much distortion that it seems likely to explode – we should be so lucky!

the world’s worst website?

I know, it’s a big call but rainbowprimates.com incorporates unimaginably awful design, the very worst elevator music, a ‘terrorist alert’ indicator and a christian chat room! What more could you want?? This site will leave you utterly speechless. It’s so bad you will almost forget to be outraged at the basic idea of selling monkeys to be dressed up as quasi-babies by empty headed americans.

that eye in the sky

I admit it, I’m a bit of a map nerd… I just love ’em – the more detail the better. You can learn a lot about a place just by looking at a map. You can learn even more by looking at an aerial photograph, and google maps has got lots of them! So far, the high res images are only in the more populous areas of North America, but striking images can be found over the whole of the continent. In fact, it’s a bit addictive – a bit of a time waster!

If you can’t be bothered with trawling through masses of photos and just want the juicy bits, check out Google Sightseeing, a winderful blog with daily updates of cool things that can be found on google maps. I’ve even had one of my submissions shown!

Oh, and before I go, here are a few of my favourites: the boneyard, the grassy knoll, the hollywood sign and Yazgur’s farm. Cool, eh?

Nikon’s encryption bungle…

I was amazed by recent reports about Nikon encrypting the raw files in their high-end digital cameras… what were they thinking?

The glare of publicity has been aimed at this story since Thomas Knoll, the ‘creator’ of Photoshop attacked Nikon for the practice, which appears to impose some ownership by Nikon over a photographer’s creative work. For more years than I know, people have bought Kodak film, had it processed by Agfa chemicals and printed on Ilford paper… that is the freedom that photographers are used to. They are not going to put up with being told to use a particular (Nikon) Image Capture software ($us99) to access their highest quality, raw images.

Sure enough, less than a week later, “A Massachusetts programmer has broken the code“. Implications for big players like Adobe who still don’t want to be sued are uncertain, but it is inevitable that either Nikon gives in, releases the encryption code somehow, or suffers the consequences. If the savage opinions expressed on forums and comments pages are turned into actions, Nikon will have some serious customer relationship rebuilding to do.

Doing my bit for the National Debt…

Yes, I’ve been busily consuming… spending money. I confess to being a bit of a technosucker. I’ll usually find a justification for some gadget or another if I really want it.
I never could justify an iPod. Not heavily into my music, not really in need of a portable hard disk or even an organiser, but Mrs woo bought me a shuffle for my birthday, so I was naturally delighted.
Firstly, the shuffle is fantastic – I’ve turned into an avid music listener… exploring parts of my music library I haven’t visited for years. BUT… the earbuds are (literally) a pain! They fall out unless you jam them into your ear so hard they hurt. Never mind the 12 hour battery life, one or two was all I could stand. Until I found Griffin Earjams. Believe me, if you have an iPod G3 or later or Shuffle, you owe it to your ears to get these. They only cost me $18 over at centre.net.

the social bookmarking experiment…

I’ve recently joined the wave of web users to try online bookmark tools – specifically del.icio.us – known as a ‘social bookmarking’ tool.

Del.icio.us is simple and, for what it does, it works very well. The social aspect is the real revelation though. You bookmark a page and see that others have also bookmarked it, so you get to explore things that have interested them. I have already found dozens of excellent sites I would never have found in other ways.
Still, I’m a picky bugger, and I find it lacking polish and integration.

I have now dropped del.icio.us in favour of Furl. This is state-of-the-art in online bookmarking. In beta, run by Looksmart and (at the moment) free, it has all the appeal of del.icio.us, but with added extras like: bookmark importing (yay!); page snapshots; export to bibTex, endnote etc.; smarter handling of the social aspects; superb integration with firefox and IE; integrated contact management; several different feeds for my weblog (coming soon!) etc…

While I was ferreting around I found another excellent tool that people might like to explore… Connotea. This is a much more hard-core academic bookmarking tool, though still in development. A level of polish and integration somewhere between del.icio.us and furl, but definitely one to watch. The only problem with connotea was that I felt a bit low-brow posting my ‘fun’ urls, when everyone else on the site was posting scholarly journal articles… the latest postings show up on the front page!

I still feel there is plenty of room for improvement and further integration that would significantly benefit the academic user/researcher/student, but I feel these tools are going to change the way we look for new information, having huge implications for search engines, metadata etc. If you think about it, they are profiling you, then finding other users with similar interests and then offering recommended urls based on that information – you are multiplying your searching and filtering powers for every user that you silently collaborate with. Compelling stuff!

Send a link from Safari

I love Apple’s Safari browser. There is a level of polish not even available in the wonderful Firefox, however, I’ll admit it’s sometimes a little short on functionality. One that annoys me is the lack of a quick ‘send link’ function to email a URL to someone. All fixed now!

Drag my ‘mail this‘ link to your Safari bookmarks bar to provide a functionality similar to that in Firefox/Mozilla. It also works in those browsers if you’d rather a clickable link than the default menu item.

Bollywood and Jane

Bride and Prejudice ThumbnailJust been to see “Bride and Prejudice” at the Nova. It was great! what a laugh – what a riotous party of a movie.

One of my criterias for music I like is that it should sound like it was fun to make – if you can hear the musician’s enjoyment coming through, it’s bound to be good. This is a movie that fits the criteria. The actors practically beam enjoyment as they go about the story.

From what I recall of the Jane Austen novel I studied in year 10, it was surprisingly close to the structure of the story, if not the setting. Also, I never remember getting the impression that Jane Austen particularly enjoyed what she did…

Get a few friends together – leave your critical thought at home and go and see it!

upgrade time!

Ok, the observant ones among you will have noticed that my website looks different. I have upgraded the blog software, wordpress, which went swimmingly well. Not wanting to push my run of good luck too far, I am going to leave the look and feel for another day. Til then, you can enjoy the default (and very sweet!) kubrick theme.