I sometimes think Optus sales reps will say almost anything to make a sale or get the customer to commit to another two-year mobile phone contract.  You know the people I mean, the ones that call you offering to make your mobile plan cheaper (why call -  just do it!), or sell you a plan for a wireless adapter/dongle thingie for your laptop, that sort of thing.  I’ve had unpleasant experiences with them in the past.

Promises Promises

This time around a sales rep called and offered to waive the last five months of my two-year mobile phone contract and send me out a new phone if I commit to another two years.  Nothing wrong with that, so I accepted.

But he also talked me  out of waiting for an iPhone and into getting a Nokia N97 on the promise that the new v2 Operating Software for the N97 was great.  The sales rep even claimed to own an N97 himself and to have upgraded the OS, and praised all the cool new features v2 offered.  Since I already own an iPod Touch, I went for the Nokia N97.

Delivery

Well, the phone arrived, and it’s a great unit, plus the 3G coverage out where I live is vastly better than my old phone’s reception.  So I have no real complaints with the phone itself at all.

BUT there is no upgrade to software v2 available for it in Australia under Optus — not by using the PC application, and not using the phone’s built in updater.  This kind of deception (dare I call it lying?) to make a sale leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.  And it’s so pointless — there’s nothing really wrong with the current OS on the phone, but I was sold the new OS, and was delivered the old one.  It’s basic customer service — If I pay for X, don’t deliver Y.  It’s made worse when watching a video that shows the significant differences between the two versions:

My phone runs like the one on the left of screen in that video.  My attempts to get an answer out of Optus about why the firmware isn’t upgradeable is an exercise in futility.  They connected me to “Nokia Australia” in the end (the nice lady at Nokia “Australia” had a mild Indian accent, but maybe she was in Australia), and after a ten minute circular conversation she eventually put me on to the local Nokia Customer Care Center in Brisbane.  Now those guys responded very quickly to my email, but all they could do was inform me that, yes indeed, the upgrade is available to generic N97s, but not the Optus ones.

So the score is Optus 0, Nokia 1, Me 0.  Perhaps Nokia should let Optus know they have sales reps making promises the Optus network can’t deliver (yet).

Not The First Time

Almost a year ago I had a similar annoying experience where an Optus sales rep called me and promised to send me a wireless dongle but to also lower my mobile fees by the same amount as the internet service attached to the dongle – effectively making the wireless plan free.  Of course I said yes, but shortly later someone else rang to confirm the deal and they denied that such a generous offer was possible.  So I withdrew my acceptance (which they weren’t happy about), but the dongle arrived anyway.  I wasn’t home to receive it, so it went back, and after a couple of confusing calls I later did get a call apologising for the mix up.

They also assured me that the sales rep that made the “generous” invalid offer no longer worked there.

But after today, I’m not so sure.

I just tried Omegle (chatting with strangers) for the first time.  I don’t think I’m the target audience.  This is the transcript of my first (and probably last) conversation on Omegle:

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

I think I now get what Omegle is really for.

ZoomIt

ZoomIt is the best PC-desktop-screen-zoomer-inner-thingy I’ve ever seen – and it’s free!  Great for zooming in on presentations or during software demos – both of which I do at home and at the QSFT.  I wish I had found it earlier.  Here’s a quick video of me using it (be sure to select HD mode when viewing it).

I’ve been looking for a smooth screen-zooming tool ever since I saw uber geek Chris Prillo use one on his desktop when demonstrating software and websites during his YouTube videos. His PC is probably more powerful than mine, but I could see he wan’t using the standard Windows magnifier, which magnifies a screen area into a separate window – his zoomer was zooming the whole screen into itself.  ZoomIt seems to offer the same effect, and as well as being free, it’s also tiny – less than 300KB, allows you to draw and write on the zoomed in desktop, and on Vista the magnified desktop is “live”, rather than a freeze-frame.

And yes, Mac lovers, this desktop zoom effect is standard on recent Macs – I know, I know.

It probably only works for people my age or older, but this YouTube video of the opening credits for Star Wars done in the style of the TV series Dallas made me smile.  I particularly like the way the creator used a shot of Tarkin turning around for his credit – Old School!  The whole thing was inspired by this Star Trek one.

I’m currently building a small recording booth in my study using mostly IKEA furniture, so this article on MusicRadar How to Build Your Own Studio in 11 Easy Steps was a well-timed read for me (even if not all of their eleven steps seem that easy to me!).  I like their idea of plonking a whole new pre-built building down and fitting it out from scratch, but that’s not an option for me right now, so I’m using one side of my study/granny flat, some large IKEA cupboards, and some padding from IKEA and Clarke Rubber.  I’ll post photos of my progress as I go.

It’s not designed for music production, with sound proofing strong enough to acoustically isolate a drum kit.  I just need the ability to record voice and Foley performances without the sound of my PC fan and hard drives chattering coming through onto the recordings.

It’s coming along, but it’s taking longer than I expected (of course) and the booth door is still going to be a challenge.

Proposed Sculpture

Scaled Sculpture

Thanks to twitterer JamezRC, I saw this article about an oddly elongated, and slightly controversial,  sculpture being built in the UK, and as soon as I saw the picture of the proposed design (on left) I, it struck me that it was just a normal head that had been stretched in software before being created.

So by squashing the image by about 66%, I ended up with a normal looking head (on right) – I wonder if the face belongs to a real person?

The Scream

Even as a kid, I knew there were sound effects out there that were being used over and over again in films.  Certain rock-falling sounds, certain gunshot sounds, certain horror sound effects.  Before I started to take a strong interest in post production I could tell that there were sound effects that “did the rounds” amongst sound mixers.

Tonight a student asked me about one of them and he reminded me that this one had a name – The Wilhelm Scream.  For a history of the scream (”screams plural actually) read this brief history from HollywoodLostAndFound.net, where you’ll also find a list of films that it has appeared in. To hear a few different takes of the scream in medium quality, check out this freesound page.  Anyone my age or younger who has watched (and rewatched) films edited and/or mixed by Ben Burtt will instantly recognise the scream(s), but I didn’t realise until tonight how far back its history went – all the way to 1951.

Now if I can just figure out a way to incorporate it into a future project, I’ll be happy.

Despite appearances, this website is not dead.  Behind the scenes I use my web server all the time for sending files to fellow filmmakers and clients, but I haven’t updated the actual pages for years (only two updates in almost three years).  So today I loaded up a new theme (Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll), tweaked it a bit with my own images, and added a Twitter widget to the side panels.

Time will tell if I update it regularly.

Maisy

We’ve seen a couple of snakes on the property in the last few weeks, but today I heard the dogs (Jed and Maisy) barking and went out to discover their latest kill – a green snake. Combined with the large brown snake Kareena saw yesterday, and it’s definitely snake season here…

I have not updated this website for over a year now, partly because I spend less time online than I used to, and partly because I’m writing a lot less than I used to. Despite no updates in over a year (and the website being offline for abour six months), my website still gets a healthy number of hits – proof of the power of Google.

But my very late (or very early) New Year’s resolution is to write every single day, even if it’s only a “blog post”. I have never considered myself a “blogger”, even though I’ve used blogging sytems to run the MavArt site for I think over six years (first Greymatter, then MovableType, now WordPress). I use these blogging systems because they allow me to change the look of the site without changing its content, and visaversa. But being a “blogger” implies a certain dedication to regular updates and posts – a dedication I’ve never had.

But, my New Year’s resolution is to write every day, so I’m going to write every day, even if it’s just a little blog post or review on my website – like this one.

This post, as well as qualifying as my writing for today, is also a test of the idea of using my Palm Treo 650 phone to type and upload blog posts. I’ve owned several Palm handheld computers and loved all of them, even the crappy plastic one that fell apart, but when I first got the Palm Treo I disliked the weeny little keyboard it had. I ‘d gotten quite good at the stylus-based Graffiti system for entering text on my other Palms, and clicking on the tiny little qwerty keyboard on the Treo seemed a lot slower.

But I recently discovered that I’d been pressing the keys the wrong way – using the tips of my index fingers, fingernails, or even the stylus pen in an effort to only press one key at a time. Now I realise that by pressing the keys with the end of my whole finger/thumbs, it may press more than one key, sometimes as many as four, but the PalmOS almost always guesses correctly which key I meant.

And if you’re reading this then I guess I figured out a way to upload it…

I get a lot of spam emails. A lot. Most of them I never see due to my spam filter, but recent email problems meant I had to sort through them by hand. During this dull process I noticed that, as always, spammers disguise their real names with phony ones. But I also noticed that some spammers are getting a bit more creative and apparently using some sort of random access to a database of names/words to make up an endless variety of fake names.

Some of the results are quite goofy and Goonish/Pythonesque. Some recent ones were:

• Eight R. Straggles
• Stratagem B. Shipyard
• Fatalist H. Faraway
• Grunt P. Foreclose
• Beards T. Lively
• Gamma F. Transfusion
• Constance V. Barrage
• Swooned H. Stimson
• Resettle D. Outrigger
• Dogcatchers G. Abbess
• Checker G. Canards
• Balminess Q. Crawl
• Threatenings L. Chortle
• Sandy L. Gasping
• Flap C. Kerouac
• Nonfiction H. Miraculously
• Shrieking P. Delano
• Superficial I. Incumbent
• Dillydallied H. Yevtushenko
• Heliport S. Persecuting
• Handgun H. Deficient
• Churlishness H. Folk
• Striker M. Vistas
• Denver G. Commonwealth
• Discotheque H. Artificer
• Appeasement E. Percolated
• Injection V. Brenda
• Projectile S. Scuzzier
• Feting U. Deleterious
• Stereo Q. Sectarianism
• Infringement R. Swampiest
• Hesiod A. Probationer

The ones in bold are the ones I like so much I’m going to try and use them in a script or even in conversation. Such as “Wasn’t that written by the poet Grunt P. Foreclose?”, or “Wasn’t he killed by the gangster Shrieking P. Delano?”.

When two friends on opposites sides of the country independently emailed me links on the same day to the same cool video clip, I knew it must be worth checking out. And it is – it’s a demonstration of “Multi-Touch Interaction Research – a touch-screen technology based on a “frustrated total internal reflection sensing technique” (no, I don’t know what that means either). But check out the video demo at either of these two links (same demo, just different pages).

Multi-Touch Interaction Research at their NYU home page (its downloadable there), or:

Streaming version at YouTube.

The future of computing? Maybe – It would breathe new life into the tablet PC market I bet. Especially if they can get the system to be able to determine which finger you are using at any time, so that commands/modes can be mapped to certain fingers. I can see this one day making the computer mouse look as cumbersome as punched paper cards.

UPDATE: But not everyone agrees that it is a useful technology – see the discussion on the demo here. Personally, as a Wacom tablet user/lover, the uses for this are quite obvious to me,and there will doubtless be less obvious uses and improvements over time (the computer mouse did not always have a scroll wheel).

If this is real, I for one think it’s extremely impressive. It’s the Hawaii Five-O Theme, played on the hands (manualism) via Google Video. He squeezes his hands to gether to make… um… farty sounds that form recognizable tunes. It looks like the most fun that can be had with your hands without sending you blind…

Oh. My. The TACMAV. Oh. Yeah.

A foldable, electric model aeroplane that can both fly around under direct remote control or fly itself guided by it’s own GPS, while filming its surroundings using two colour video cameras, all fed back to a toughened tablet-based computer.

I want one!

Note, the first image on the page, despite its size on the page, is actually a very large image and will take time to download on some connections.

Thanks to slashdot I’ve just discovered Google Maps. An amazing repository of digital satellite images that cover the whole globe (not all of it in great detail). You can zoom in, drag the map around with your mouse, and it all seems to load pretty fast.

Searching for Australian cities and areas seems broken, but manually dragging the map around can find some interesting (to me) locations. Such as my old school, where I live now, where I teach, my favourite Brisbane park, and, just for kicks, some pyramids. If this sort of information is available for free to the general public, what must the military and secret services have access to?

Heh – a website where you can make your own South Park character. Lots of options for customising your character, and the results really do look like they came from an episode of the series. I guess the image at right is what I would look like if I was a child character on South Park. (click the image for a larger version)

UPDATE: Please note – the link above leads to an external website. I have nothing to do with that site and I did not create the South Park Character maker flash program. I just thought it was cool, so I linked to it.
To be able to save images of your south park creation

• press the “PrtSc” key on your keyboard. This takes a screen shot of your screen and places it in memory.
• Then paste the screen shot into your favourite image editor (photoshop, Gimp, etc), or even into your favourite word processor (Word, Open Office Writer, etc).
• Then crop/trim it till you just have your character.
• Then save it to your hard drive.

There does not appear to be any built-in saving feature on the site.

1 September 2005: Link updated.

22 April 2006: Update added.

19 September 2007 : Link updated again.

Here’s a cute idea from one of the boffins at MIT – hold a time travel convention! After all, you only need to hold one convention as time travellers from all ages could attend the one event, as long as they found out about it. So now everyone is supposedly spreading the word so that one day in the future, time travellers will see the invitation and decide to pop back to 2005 to attend. I found the link via Instapundit.

Here’s an idea – anyone with an identical twin sibling could have some fun. One of you show up ot the time travel convention looking normal and sane, but complaining about how few people there are attending. Then your twin rushes in wearing a futuristic suit and tells there other self “You fool, the convention is in another parallel universe, not this one, they are waiting for me… us!”, and then rush out.

Kareena bought me a magnetic poetry kit, Shakespeare edition. Great fun. For some reason, this was the first poem I created on the fridge:

I like playing with online chatbots now and then, but although they are starting to look a lot better, they seem to me to be getting no smarter at all. Read the rest of this entry »

We spent the weekend at Ninderry Manor for Kareena’s birthday. Had a great time, the hosts were wonderful, the food was amazingly good. We did a bit of Japanese calligraphy, a bit of reading, even a bit of watercolour painting. And I took a few snapshots.

(click for a larger version)