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:
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 emailled 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:
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.
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
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)
After the US election, I looked at the numbers for the results and saw that they were actually quite close, then looked at the results shown on a colour-coded US map and saw a lot of red (Republican), especially if the map was colour-coded by county. I knew that many of the areas where Kerry won (blue) had a denser population, but it was hard to see this on the maps that every TV station, newspaper article, and web site were showing.
These US election result maps are different to the ones you’ve probably seen. They scale the actual shape of the US to reflect each state’s or county’s population. All of a sudden the closeness of the election is made clear in a simple, if twisted, graphic.
I wonder if anyone did anything similar for the Australian election?
I just watched the trailer for the next (last?) Star Wars film. Almost the entire first half was footage and audio from the original Star Wars film (the film everyone else now calls “Episode Four”, but what most of my generation just call “Star Wars”) and the other previous films. The trailer looks great, with lots of shots that suggest some fun scenes. One shot that caught my eye was a brief one of C3PO standing in what looked like the hallway of the Tantive IV Rebel Blockade Runner, a ship we first saw in the opening shot of the first film. Interesting…
Will it be a good movie? There’s no doubt that it will be a great moment when Anakin Skywalker puts on the Darth Vader mask, breathes like Darth Vader, speaks with James Earl Jones’ voice, and is backed up with John Williams‘ Darth Vader Theme - I hope that moment is handled well. But will it be a good movie? Hmmm… It’s got Chewie in it (and a whole load of other Wookies). It’s got a big lightsaber fight between Anakin and Kenobi. Hmmm… Yes, it will rock. Yes. It will. It will (performs Jedi-mind-trick on self).
The trailer reminded me of my trip to Sydney in December 2002 where I saw the Star Wars exhibition. I took a few snaps with my 2MP digital camera of the props, costumes, and models on display. Here are some of them:
(click for a larger version)
At one of our favourite picnic spots, the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens, I took a few snapshots.
(click for a larger version)
(click for a larger version)
We just ate at a wonderful Turkish resaurant, complete with belly dancer. Absolutely delicious. Er, the food that is. Well, and the belly dancer. I had my Canon EOS300D digital SLR with me:
(click for a larger version)
I like The Onion, it’s a funny site. But when I read this short article entitled “Nerd Has Most Obscure Crush Ever” it caught my eye. The article starts:
And at this point I thought to myself, “Surely, if she had a crush on Peter Tuddenham, it wouldn’t have been for his Slave voice in particular, as that was only one of the characters he gave voice to, a character that only existed in the final fourth season. Surely she would have developed her crush because Tuddenham also, and more famously, did the voices for the original ship’s computer, Zen, in the earlier seasons, as well as the voice for the portable super-computer Orac throughout the whole series (well, except for Orac’s first episode, where the actor who played Orac’s creator did the voice).”
Then I started to wonder if the author of the piece knew of this error and only put it there to entice B7 fans out into the light. At this point I realised that thinking all this, even knowing this information, meant that I was a bigger sadder nerd than the fictional Ms Manzo, so I went to bed.
Another political survey, another dodgy result (though this one is about right). I got a 22, which is pretty much what I thought I’d get. Though some of the questions are pretty arbitrary.
 The Ladykillers |
I’ve been a big fan of The Ladykillers for a long time. My initial interest in the film was because Peter Sellers and Alec Guinness were in it, so I eventually tracked it down many years ago on late-night television. And it’s true that Guinness is terrific as Professor Marcus, and Sellers, in his first feature, showed a lot of promise - even if he was still a bit inexperienced.
 Mrs Wilberforce takes a nap - maybe for good? |
But what I didn’t expect, when I first saw it, was to be so impressed with the whole cast - Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker, Danny Green, and most of all Katie Johnson as Mrs Wilberforce. This little lady, who was seventy-seven at the time, gives a quiet and almost minimalist performance that gently but firmly dominates the film, despite (or because of?) the fact that she is surrounded by the relatively over-the-top antics of the male cast. She is perfect, and this is a nearly perfect film.
I recently rediscovered and rewatched the film thanks to three things: Kareena buying me the DVD of the film (what an amazing new transfer compared to the versions I have seen!); news of a recent remake (the trailer makes it look like it could be rather bad, but if it leads people to the original, then it’s a good thing); and stumbling across a great web page that compares the locations in the film to how they look now (I’ve always found that sort of thing interesting). Here’s a review that contains no spoilers for the second half of the film.
I’ve rediscovered still photography thanks to my two mega-pixel Canon digital camera. The camera doesn’t really offer full manual controls, but it’s so easy to experiment with I’ve taken literally over five thousand photos with it (yes, most of which are awful).
I’ve placed some of my less-awful digital photographs on a seperate server (the deviantart service). You can view them here:
They mostly consist of panorama images created by stitching several digital images together using several pieces of panorama software (mostly I just use the one that came with the camera).