Crouching Leopard, Hidden Vista – What’s wrong with the Penguin?

I’ve been tinkering with Linux distributions for many years, since the install hell days of Redhat 4 many years ago but I’ve never settled on Linux as a base operating system.  As time goes by and I find the inner geek demanding less and less attention I spend less time with Linux and today’s article on Download Squad entitled ‘How to enable DVD playback on uBuntu’ made me wonder why.

Most Linux distros up and running are really good; they have slick graphic effects to rival any crouching leopard or hidden vista, come with many useful out of the box tools and are generally easy to install these days … so what’s the problem?  Why would my wife (J) never ever run Linux?

At the end of the day I think it boils down to ease of use, ease of setup and what comes out of the box.  J loves the Macbook period. One minute post-install and she can play with her photos, watch a movie, connect effortlessly to the Internet, check her email and chat to friends with the built in camera.  Applications are a simple drag-and-drop-to-your-Applications-folder for her, there is no need to teach her command line apt-get or worry because she has library dependency issues that require a 400Meg download to resolve first.  She doesn’t have to hack a new system to include Microsoft codecs or run a host of command line options to enable standard DVD playback when our little boy wants to watch a movie.  Upgrades are a single click affair and she doesn’t run the risk of her entire system crashing or worse her Gnome or KDE unable to start after an upgrade leaving her with a black screen and a blinking cursor.

As I get older and the demands on my time increase I also want to be able to sit down and write a blog post or wizz up some wonderful photo effects in Photoshop without fighting to get the program or OS to where I want it to be; sitting for ages fixing dependency issues or compiling software for my hardware platform just no longer holds any appeal. 

Perhaps I’ve found other toys or outlets for the inner geek but I want my system to work reliably, look beautiful and be powerful enough for my needs.  Until linux distributions get closer to this ideal, realise people want to do more with their computers post-install than bang a spreadsheet together in OpenOffice and put the effort into working to overcome the geek requirements of linux and most users’ fear of ‘what if things go wrong?’, Linux will (in my opinion) never be a viable competitor to Microsoft or Apple.

I am Disappointment

I’ve just finished watching “I am Legend”, a movie which has outstanding moments and great disappointments. Will Smith plays Robert Neville a military doctor who thinks he is the last man on earth after a virus wipes out most of the Earth’s population and turns the other large percentage into mindless killing machines with a high UV problem not even extra-strength sunblock can help.  A large part of the beginning story involves his relationship with his dog and how the edges of a normal human canine interaction have become a little blurred around the edges (after he is the last human as far as he knows) and the isolation is not doing nice things with his mind. That was good, a little contrived in parts, but the slipping edges of sanity was well portrayed.

The other part I thought had great potential was when Neville realised these creatures were not stupid at all and seemed organised and had the ability to do awesome things like try and trap him the way he had trapped on of their own.

Then 3 things happened which flushed the movie down the toilet.

[****** SPOILERS BELOW *********]

1. The dog dies. WTF! Ever since fracking Bambi the animal dies in almost every movie and I think it sucks. It doesn’t add pathos or emotional weight to the movie, it’s a cheap appeal to sentimentality and it really bugs me. That being said it is my personal preference that the dog or pet should be hallowed ground and untouchable by the director – the other 2 items were what actually ruined the movie for me.

2. The end scene sees the zombies once again acting like complete savages and only hint at all the earlier build-up of these creatures having mutated into something more than mindless eating machines.  Why go to the effort of building our expectations that these creatures are something more sinister than run-of-the-mill drooling biting zombies if that’s how you’re going to portray them in the finale anyway?

3. The entire story was about a medical disaster [virus gets out of hand in the human population] and then it’s like someone lets a creationist church group with red crayons run around in the script as a warning against man’s tinkering in God’s playground. It turns into this puerile mess where the lady who saves him at one point in the story is actually on a mission from God [the Christian version] and is being sent by the big-almighty to a safe colony in Vermont.  On the way the celestial-he gets her to pop round to Will’s house for the cure for humanity; then Will gets to die to save them … what a hero! BARF! VOMIT! come on!

One of the best lines I’ve read comes from John Beifuss’ crit of the movie where he says:

In the infantile prioritizing that occurs when Hollywood wants to be ‘inspirational,’ the hero’s Everyman crisis of religious faith is supposed to be as important to audiences as his struggle to save humanity from extinction.

The damn religious stuff only came like a stinky curve-ball in the last few minutes, someone thought ‘this is a story about the trials of a man in an empty apocalyptic  world … jee that sounds like Noah or a case in need of serious religious reflection let’s be sure to throw a sprinkling of God in here somewhere.’

…… blah!

Photoblog moving to Ipernity

I have to say that Yahoo (Flickr) has really peeved me.  All my blog postings that include links to pictures that are still public have mysteriously all turned into little white blocks with ‘Not Available’ in them.  Click on the picture and you will be taken to the picture in question.  This all happened mysteriously when I moved my pictures to Ipernity photo sharing and although I doubt the 2 are related it has given me the much needed impetus to consolidate.  I love wordpress but the having to post your picture, write a post, get the picture link, insert into said post slog has to end.

Ipernity gives me the ability to blog, upload video, photos and a host of other wonderful functionality and it for this reason I will move the photoblog to:

http://www.ipernity.com/blog/stuartforsyth

Non photography related posts will still appear here from time to time.

Lightroom is light years ahead

 As anyone which a love of digital photography knows, your choice of photo management software is an important one.  Mac users have been spoiled to date with tools like Apeture; windows users have had to settle for bare-bones choices like Picasa or ACDSee.  Adobe recently released Lightroom and I have been trying it out for a while now; my verdict – I’m blown away.

Lightroom has all the usual folder and tag based photo management of Apeture but it’s develop module is where the software really shines.  With lightroom you can do away with having to have Photoshop for the large majority of the corrections and adjustments you need to make to your digital photos.  As with Apeture the adjustments you make are non-destructive and you can snapshot versions and create virtual copies to edit independently. 

The Lightroom tonal curves adjustment is way superior for a beginner and mostly prevents you doing the kind of stupid things to curves that you can in Photoshop; you know what I mean – move the little curve node a touch to the left and you’re left with a photograph to make your eyes bleed.

One of the most underlooked items in the Lightroom tone curve and hue/saturation/luminosity area is the ‘adjust the curves by clicking in the photo option’.  to be fair I didn’t even know it existed until quite recently.  It is the kind of tool that should be writ in huge bold letters on the startup splash screen of the program.  In the top left corner of the tone curve area you will see a tiny little circle, click it and move your cursor into the picture.  clicking specific areas of the picture and dragging up or down applies the adjustment. 

In my first example below I clicked the little circle which turns into a little circle with arrows above and below.   Now I click in the picture at the location of the first red arrow.  You’ll notice that the area of the photograph I am interested in adjusting falls into the highlights area (second red arrow) and that any adjustments I make will affect the highlights area as denoted by the shaded area around the dot on the line.

 

In my second example I wanted to increase the saturation of the yellowish wall to give it that fresh just been painted look.  Now I could have gone to the saturation area and just increased the yellow alone but the wall is a combination of yellow and orange and that at first glance may not be immediately apparent.  By using the ‘adjust the curves by clicking in the photo option’ you move into the photo and to the area denoted by the red arrow and clicking and dragging upwards will then auto increment the yellow and the orange saturation sliders up by their relative amounts.

There are so many more features in Lightroom that it takes some time to become familiar with them, or in my case even know that they exist.  I may in future posts go through some of them with you but it was this little click and drag feature; so seemingly obscure and unbelievably potent at the same time that I wished to share with you today.

Lightroom is one very well thought out and functional bit of software heaven, if the ease of adjustments are not worth the price for this incredible piece of software then I don’t know what it.

More information on Lightroom is available at the Adobe website.

 

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Lightroom, Apeture, Photography, Photos, Software

30 Boxes – first impressions

30 boxes seemed to be doing clever things with ajax before google calendar and appear to be a bit more than the usual yawn (yet another web2 nice-to-have). Coming to 30 boxes recently from Google calendar I am probably less impressed than I should be but 30 boxes does have a couple of very strong things going for it. 30boxes does tagging, we like tagging, tagging is essential for those of us obsessed with GTD. 30Boxes also has a very clean, uncluttered interface and nice simple actions for sharing information and managing tasks. There are some pretty nifty ajaxy views of your data and I really like the roll-over pop-ups of all my tasks. 30Boxes does not seem to suffer from the bloat of Google calendar and works in all browsers (shame on you Google!) which means I can now have my favourite calendar in Opera without the ‘this browser is too stupid’ message. 30Boxes also won the web-calendar award in PC magazine knocking the Google behemoth into second place.

However the feeling I’m getting from the net lately is a bit of a David and Goliath story gone wrong. Like any large corporate offering, people jump ship because the new thing is from an Apple, a Google or a Microsoft leaving the little guy abandoned, copied and not a little peeved. I like 30 boxes, I like their brave claim to do anything Google does and do it better. I’ll certainly try it for a bit and see how it goes, if anyone has had any success stories with 30Boxes or thinks it is just another yawn, please let me know.  Read some of the buzz about 30Boxes here.

p.s. I’d like to see the whole shared calendar thing in 30 boxes … hint hint!

hasta la VISTA baby

Vista is gone, it’s nag will bother me no more nor will it’s failures to run my critical software.

I know I waxed lyrical when I first installed it, touted it’s eye-candy prettiness but then I started using it and was mortified by what I experience.

Initially I couldn’t get the majority of my critical software to work; I couldn’t even get it to run Microsoft software or support Microsoft hardware. It didn’t like my Microsoft webcam and would blue-screen every time I had in incoming skype call. I couldn’t run Microsoft’s own development tools like Visual Studio and my other software all broke like bad pre-alpha software – either spilling their guts and memory all over the place or failing silently and miserably. I trolled the Internet looking for a way to disable the crippling Vista nag and I succeeded; however I was completely unprepared for the crippling nag to warn me I’d turned off the first crippling nag!

The most annoying thing for me was that with every new piece of software I placed on the pc, VISTA would run slower and slower until it crawled along like a geriatric tortoise in tar. The tech podcasts and websites are now calling for 4 gig of RAM and hybrid hard-drives (not too my knowledge commercially available yet) to make VISTA run properly. What’s the point? For a little eye candy? The debate is still raging about whether VISTA adds any real security benefit and it’s live applications are a joke. Microsofts antivirus came in stone last in a recent poll failing miserably to stop viruses or malware.

Vista is probably the worst of all operating systems out at the moment. It klunks along like an over-skinned over-worked version of XP which won’t run properly and lacks all the elegance and finesse of mac os or the breadth of application of XP. All I can say is thank god I didn’t spend my hard earned cash on this product; the only down side is I don’t have a vista box and dvd to burn at my next barbecue.

 

I will therefore continue to run, in order of preference:

1. ubuntu linux

2. Windows XP

 

My next computer will most likely be a mac.

Dexter, twisted and fascinating on so many levels

A new television series has hooked me, more so than it probably should. For those of you not familiar with Dexter he is an affable, even likeable, policeman who works for the forensics lab of the Miami police department. Apart from being adopted and hints of childhood trauma, he seems perfectly normal; enjoys popularity amongst his colleauges, has a sister to whom he is close, has a girlfriend and holds down a good job. The problem is that Dexter is a psychopath, a fact he hides well using a lifetime of entrenched learned behavior used as a tool to integrate into society. Let me clarify a little on the term psychopath, he is not your average ‘eat your liver with fava beans’ type psychopath; in the series this distinction is made very clear. Sure he is completely dysfunctional, has murderous urges and is emotionally barren however he does not pray on the helpless or the ‘innocent’ – a term I choose to use rather loosley. Dexter does however allow his aberrant personality full sway when it comes to the careful selection and killing of the real underbelly of society, the sociopaths and fellow less controlled psychopaths and it is this moral dillema, this socially unacceptable yet thoroughly understandable dichotomy that I find so fascinating.

One cannot help but empathise with Dexter, obviously a terrible past trauma has led to the total destruction of his normal coping mechanisms, he – through the tuition of a loving father has learned to channel his destructive impulses into something different. On a certain level this show reminds me of The Equaliser; a series I followed as a child about the detective Robert McCall who was available for hire to ‘equalise’ situations and bring justice to those for whom the normal channels of justice and retribution had failed. Mcall used brain over brawn and in the end always got the bad guy – Dexter is no different apart from the fact that he really enjoys the killing bit at the end and it here that my decades of well honed morality run into a proverbial brick wall.

I sit now and wonder whether the moral issues presented in this program aren’t there to test our grasp on what we find right and wrong and where the boundaries lie in terms of an almost societally or biologically programmed sense of morality. The experiment that comes to mind is famous in psychological circles – for some the decision is easy, for others much harder:

experiment 1:
You have control of a switch on a railroad station. An empty train, completely out of control is hurtling towards five people on the track. If you act quickly you can press a button which will divert the train onto an alternate track on which only one person is walking. If you do nothing, 5 people will die. If you flick the switch one person will die, but 5 will be spared. What will you do?

Experiment 2:
You are an emergency room doctor. Five trauma patients urgently need organ transplants to live. In the waiting room is a healthy young man who has all the organs necessary to save these five people. Would you sacrifice the live of this man to save the five?

The question really boils down to what is the difference between the two experiments? Marc D. Hauser, a professor of psychology at Harvard university notes that humans may be endowed with a moral faculty evolved to generate intuitive judgments about right and wrong. He suggests that morality and decision making might have a biological aspect that, like most human traits, were shaped by evolutionary as opposed to cultural or societal forces. If he is correct, this decision making accumen would come from the unconscious mind and thankfully be immune to cultural influence. As an atheist I love Hauser’s statement that ‘the influence of Sunday school may pale in comparison to the effect of thousands of years of genetic programming.’

One of the keys to understanding the dillema is that of intention. People ‘judge’ it morally worse when harm is intended as a means to an end as opposed to an unforeseen side effect. The second key to understanding this problem is that of action, harm caused by direct action is worse than harm caused by omission. The last key is the one of contact which states that harm caused by direct contact is worse than equivalent harm caused by non-contact.

It is the third one which plays out for me most in conflicts like the Iraq war; it is one which is made to seem so easy in movies and the media. It is easier to sit in an air-conditioned control room and press a button in an almost arcade game manner; ending the lives of many enemy combatants [such a cushy term] or civilians. It would be harder to take a knife and butcher those people directly.

Morality for humanity is often worn as a garb, a raiment if you will to conceal what lies within. We aren’t that far removed from out primate ancestors and still destructive impulses lurk deep with the remnants of our reptilian brain. Morality is often used as a garb of disguise until the lie is uncovered, the preacher expounds it while committing fraud and sleeping with the prostitute. Morality is malleable, it shifts, it is hard to pin down.

I guess it is for these reasons that I enjoy Dexter. It makes me think about societal boundaries, about morality and the greater good. Is it better off to kill the psychopaths before they hurt others – most would probably say yes, is it ok to enjoy killing the psychopaths …. now the waters become muddy.

Whatever your moral standpoint, Dexter will challenge you on these pre-conceived and very poorly thought about ethical questions; it gives you a good hard poke in your moral center which I find both refreshing and vastly entertaining.

Podcast Review – The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe

Two days ago I introduced the Infidel Guy debate hour podcast.  Today, I’d like to take the time to introduce you to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.  The skeptic’s guide is presented by the New England skeptical society, an organisation dedicated to:

the promotion of science and reason, the investigation of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, especially within New England, improved standards of education for science and critical thinking skills.

Their podcast is available here and is presented by a hilarious and dynamic panel of skeptics hosted by Dr. Steven Novella.

This podcast gets into my top 5 podcasts for it’s unrelenting snake-oil busting and sense of humour.

ORIGIN

The rebirth of the future from the ashes of the past…A young boy named Agito enters a forbidden sanctuary where a glowing machine resides. This machine preserves a young girl named Toola, who has a mission entrusted to her from the past. Three-hundred years into the future, the Earth’s environment has been ruined by the interference of mankind, and in between the 300 years, the forest has come to life and is at constant war with man.
It is an unsteady peace in an unnatural time. Only by searching their souls and examining the past will Toola and Agito realize the origin of all things and unite mankind with the forest.

A post apocalyptic vision of humanity, having lost the grace their past technological achievements, and caught within an uneasy truce with the forces of nature is a common theme in anime Studio Ghibli made these themes famous in Nausicaä and later in Princess Mononoki. Final Fantasy took the theme of Gaia to a new level and now Origin makes its début in a world where nature is so much more than just nature.

Origins, Spirits of the Past is a gritty and beautifully animated movie in the spirit of the classics that have gone before and although some themes are now familiar – even a little cliché- this movie somehow makes it fresh and takes an original spin on the genre. In a way it is sad that movies like this have such big boots to fill, Nausicaä is a classic, it breadth of storyline and visual scope are mind-blowing even by today’s standards and like all that follow in the footsteps of legends Origins will be compared to Nausicaä and found lacking. In its own right however Origins is a superbly made movie and will not disappoint anime fans of the ‘nature vs technology’ genre.

South African’s can buy Origins at animeworx, Australian’s at Madman Entertainment

Official Origins site: http://funimation.com/origin/

Wikipedia stub: Origin

LOST the Plot?

Up until the end of season 2, LOST was a cracker of a show. The survival of this band of airplane crash survivors intrigued me, as did this seeming semi-sentient island and the bizarre overtures of Jekyll and Hyde style scientific research centers. The Dharma initiative, run by the mysterious Hanso foundation, was part of an appeal that left the viewer wondering who these shadowy people were and why the interest in the island and survivors.

Season 2 peaked with the hatch implosion and the abduction of Jake, Kate and Sawyer by the “others”. It ended well – season 3 should have wrapped up the show; there was so much story line potential.

season 3 however has been a complete and utter let-down. The producers of LOST, no doubt happy with the prospect of lining their pockets ad-infinitum have put together the most asinine drivel. ‘The others’ live on another island close by and regularly hold book club. Sawyer and Kate are forced to live in rusty abandoned bear cages (except for when Kate wants to climb out for a little Sawyer nookie) and they presumably live on bear treats (yet do not end up looking like bedraggled survivor contestants) – why anyone would have built bear cages on this other island in the middle of no-where is both unanswered and dumb – perhaps they were for the tropical polar bears (right ….). The only character I ended up liking – Mr. Eko – got killed by a big black finger of billowy smoke and every question is now only answered by more questions. The producers feel that if they pose enough questions and kill off a couple of characters every season you’ll remain interested.

Wrong guys – your show has become deadly boring and season 3 is an utter disappointment.

LOST and the decline of Western civilization

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times recently wrote:

Anyone who thinks it’s a good sign that “Lost” is back has not spent enough time at the Web site of James Randi, a skeptical scholar of the pseudoscientific and the supernatural. A fan recently posed this question online at randi.org: “Is a fascination and increased belief in the supernatural a sign of social decline?”

By itself, “Lost” may not be a harbinger of the decline of Western civilization. But alongside “Heroes,” as well as “Medium,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Raines,” [let's not forget Supernatural or the X Files] a new NBC drama that begins in March and stars Jeff Goldblum as a detective who solves murders by appearing to commune with dead victims, the collapse looks pretty darn nigh.

“Lost,” on ABC tonight, is the most intriguing of all the series that traffic in the supernatural, mostly because it defies its own illogical reasoning. As the third season resumes after a three-month hiatus, nothing about the fate of the plane wreck survivors marooned on a paranormal island (or is it an archipelago?) makes much sense. But the real mystery of “Lost” is not the Dharma Initiative, the Others or why some characters are named after British philosophers (John Locke, Edmund Burke). It’s whether the writers actually have a cohesive story line that ties together all the unexplained subplots.

I am afraid I have to agree with her.

GTD with Thunderbird

I jumped on the GTD bandwagon a few months ago and have found it an invaluable tool in managing my day to day activities. I carry around a moleskin diary which contains most of my daily task processing, it has an inbox, next action, projects and someday section all nicely arranged and tabbed. I have hacked the purist GTD system a little and included relationships and dependencies for my tasks which allow the capture of a cascade of tasks that need to happen in a certain order almost like a mini gant chart.

For my electronic processing I use thunderbird (version 2+). I gave Outlook 2007 a go but it was really too unwieldy for me. Outlook wants me to do things its way, send mails the way it likes with no support for CSS layout anymore since the changing of the rendering engine from internet explorer to word. You also cannot send .exe files or any other suspicious file types which, though understandable, is a little annoying considering I am often emailing software and updates to colleagues. The cataloguing in Outlook 2007 is an improvement over 2003 but is still quite 2-dimensional and Thunderbird leaves it with grit in its mouth since version 2.

So here is a little look at my thunderbird:

I use a wonderful thunderbird plugin called GMailUI which gives me all my favourite Gmail hotkeys including the ‘y’ key for archiving (see the archive folder).

The folders under inbox are all search folders and are blisteringly fast. The search folders can be programmed to look in various physical locations and obey a very nice selection of rules. Once a task is tagged complete for example, it falls out of the action view and into the complete view. I also like to have 3 priority categories for my action tag which allows me to sift through actions in order of precedence.

Combined with my moleskin, thunderbird has eliminated all the stress that comes with managing hundreds of todos.

Harris’ Words May Fall on Deaf Ears

I have just finished reading the excellent Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Harris, like Dennett and Dawkins is part of the trio of vocal proponents of atheism that have sounded a trumpet call against theistic intolerance and ingrained religious ideologies, The format of this short letter to Christianity is simple in it’s construction yet delivers witty and biting arguments against outdated theistic belief as well as the vacuous platforms of “reason” and pseudo-science used by believers in the so called “intelligent design” movement.

The book is succinct, eloquent and thought provoking. It is neither apologetic for it’s stance nor does it mince words when talking of the fundamentalist madness found in both Christianity and Islam. As in The End of Faith, Harris calls attention to the role of religious moderates as a breeding ground for these fundamentalists. It is yet another in the current deluge of mind-expanding, myth busting books and it is thus very sad that I feel it will only be read by the converted.

I believe very few Christians will ever read this book, fewer still once the evils of the unholy trinity of Dennett, Dawkins and Harris have been expounded from the pulpit. Few champions of intelligent design will get to hear Harris’ excellent point that many biological entities and organic systems are in fact very badly designed. Although we represent the leading edge of the wave of natural selection with those creatures that adapted poorly relegated now to the dusty antiquity of the museum, surely an omniscient and omnipotent designer would have built biological system perfectly and thus perfectly created creatures, barring the odd whimsical flood of mass extinction, would not die out or suffer embarrassing and all to frequent plumbing problems.

Creationists will never take to heart the point that the bible – the purported outpourings of a universally omniscient mind – is full of errors and by now scientifically embarrassing statements like the very poor approximation of pi that had (at the time of it’s writing) already been calculated to a number of decimal points accurately by the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. Indeed the following statement by Harris is both humourous and revealing:

It is absolutely true to say that if the Greek mathematician Archimedes has written the relevant passages in I Kings or II Chronicles, the text would bear much greater evidence of the author’s omniscience.

Surely, Harris asks, the bible would contain some great ideas about mathematics, or the very structure of our universe – it is a big book – surely a place could have been reserved for a cure for AIDS or Cancer – perhaps a little explanation to grieving parents explaining cot death or miscarriage. Indeed modern writers of fiction could do a better job at replicating the mind and thoughts of an omniscient creator although their creative efforts would be very hard pressed in the areas of injustice, bloodiness, viciousness and intolerance.

So this excellent book will not be read by the moderates who have half donned the mantle of their own pernicious brand of religious elitism, some will go on believing the world is a mere 6000 years old – an event that happened after the brewing of beer or the domestication of the dog. The moderates will continue to harbour, through ignorance, the extremists who believe that paradise awaits with martyrdom and murder or that this beautiful world on which we live will become a battle ground of fire and pain in the coming battle between the very binary concepts of good and evil. Our religious leaders will continue to incite to violence and will continue to push us closer to Armageddon than at any time in our history.

We are the sole guardians of our genome; this, now is the foundation for all that humanity can ever achieve or aspire too. It is time we grew up and took some sane and considered responsibility for that fact.

Welcoming Home a Star Walker

Monte Blanc StarWalker Range

Though I spend a lot of time at a keyboard, I sometimes feel I could never write anything of real significance there. People often talk of a Muse, an inspiration to write, I believe this muse is something almost organic – something that flows from you in a direct connection arching it’s way down through complex neural interactions and out through the nib of your pen. It is not an experience one can have tapping at a keyboard, at least not easily for me.

I therefor have, and always have had a love of beautifully crafted writing instruments. It is a vice I am more than happy to indulge from time to time and there is nothing more unique, more exquisitely crafted or more satisfying to write with than a Monte Blanc.

As a belated anniversary gift, my wife and I bought each other a Monte Blanc, I was given the StarWalker ball pen to match the fountain pen in the same set that has enjoyed many a quite interlude of writing in this busy technological world in which we live.

There are those who would think it a waste of money, saying a plastic bic would do the job as well but that would be true in only the most shallow and disconnected of ways. To write with that which has been hand crafted, made by the hands of the most skilled craftsmen, the most competent nib makers, engravers, those who understand the balance of a pen – imbued by each craftsman with an identity, a Soul? – is an experience that is unique.

A Ferrari and a Hyundai both get you from A to B but the experience, especially for those who appreciate it, is worlds apart.

Flock: The Social Web Browser.

Flock is an amazing new web browser that makes it easier to share media and connect to other people online. Share photos, automatically stay up-to-date with new content from your favorite sites, and search the Web with the most advanced Search Toolbar available today.

Flock is something new for me, how it has gone unnoticed till now is a mystery but this social web browser is something special. It is built upon the Mozilla browser, a plus for Firefox fans, and for bloggers or just plain working in your Flickr account it is an absolute must.

It has a built-in blog editor, web snippets, drag and drop image processing and is integrated very closely with Flickr making it the perfect tool for monitoring new images in your favourites or adding and processing your own images. It also has enhanced bookarking and the ability to save bookmarks to del.icio.us or shadows.

In a nutshell it is Firefox on steroids for the blogger or photographer.

Runs in all your favourite flavours of operating systems – Windows, Mac OS and Linux. This posting and all Flock related activity is done from my trusty uBuntu box. Go and check it out: http://www.flock.com/

This site also has a very comprehensive review of what Flock is and what it offers.
http://paulstamatiou.com/2005/10/21/flock-under-those-feathers/

My Favourite Web Comics

With the new comics available on the web I am consistently amazed that paper syndications still re-hash the same old garbage day in and day out. Really!, who cares about “Hi and Lois” or “Beetle Baily”, for God’s sake how can a modern generation relate to the war time drollery of Beetle Baily. In an effort to redress this imbalance in the comic-sphere (sorry I couldn’t resist – so many cheesy phrases to choose from, so little time ….) I want to introduce you to a few of my favourite web comics.

Ctrl-Alt-Del : Working in technology and enjoying my gaming there is something I can definitely relate to in Ethan.

Inverloch : Elves, fantasy, dark magic, quests, beautiful art work and a great story. Start the series here

No Need For Bushido : Ancient Japan, Ninjas, sword play, samurai, seppuku – all close to my heart – bloody and visceral. Start the series here

Calvin and Hobbes : Remember what it was like to be a kid.

Slightly more raunchy is Flipside : Maytag, a nymphomaniac jester girl with split personalities… Bernadette, a respectable swords-woman who is kind yet fierce… it’s a story about relationships, sex, and compromise. It’s a romantic fantasy adventure with a lot of action, and a small dose of horror. Start Here

Then some of the normal, yet excellent 1-3 pane comics,

Madam and Eve : Pokes fun at South Africa, excellent political satire

The 5th Wave : Tech related humour

With the unbelievable variety on offer, don’t be limited to the black and white, grainy 3-pane in the local rag.
TopWebComics has a lot more on offer.

If I have left any out, please comment and I will do a follow up post.

BlogMailr Fixes Double Posting Issue.

BlogMailr seems to have sorted out the double posting niggle and I am happy to say that I am able to post to my blogs once more. BlogMailr is by far the easiest method of posting to my two blogs and I haven’t needed any of my off-line editors for a while now. The ability to post from email – mostly gMail in my case – allows me a consistent user experience regardless of the OS I am using (Windows XP / uBuntu). It is undoubtedly one less thing I have to worry about when I relegate Windows to the trashcan for good.

http://www.blogmailr.com/
If you haven’t tried it, I recommend you do.

KeepVid

If you’ve ever come across something funny on metcafe or youtube you may have wanted to download a local copy to share with Yuletide abandon with friends and colleagues. The short answer is “you can’t! or at least not very easily” – you see video sites reckon each pc having to download 200 meg to protect their content is a reasonable idea – I say what a crok of @#%$$.

Welcome then to KeepVid, a wonderful new web offering (note how I deliberately avoided the words web 2) whereby you drag a “keep this” button to your browser and then in future, when you find or see a video you’d like to keep you click it – and you get a download link.

Easy as pie and works like a charm.

BlogMailr … So Close

The behind BlogMailr is an excellent one. We all spend so much of our time with our respective email offerings that it is a natural way to compose and post to your blog. The folks over at BlogMailr offer a solution whereby you should be able to post to a number of platforms with just a simple email. They propose that it is easy to add tags and graphics to your postings – my experience started off well but then went off the rails.

The one overwhelming problem plaguing this new offering is that of multi-postings, this is irritating to say the very least. One email becomes 2 or 3 posts and then you have to go into the clunky wordpress (in my case) admin area and start deleting. Blogger beta I later found out has a very mature email to blog ability as well as the ability to post directly from Google Docs. Another issue I found was that graphics would be posted very inconsistently, sometimes I got the image in my post, most times all I got was the filename.

It seems that until BlogMailr sort out their technical issues I will have to make another plan. I really hope for their sake that it is soon. it would be a pity for an excellent idea to be so quickly sullied.

Seamus Heaney – Digging with the Pen

by Adam Kirsch

One of the most revealing questions you can ask about any poet has to do with his sense of responsibility. To whom or what does he hold himself responsible in his writing? The poet who replies “Nothing” – who believes that the concept of responsibility is foreign to the totally free realm of art – is likely to be a bad poet. If there is nothing – no reader real or imaginary, no idea, value, or principle – with the right to hold the writer to account, then there is no way for her to know when she is writing better or worse, when she is getting closer to her ideal or straying from it.

That is why a genuine artist almost always wants to feel answerable to something. Not necessarily a person or a group, because any concrete audience is all too likely to constrict the imagination, to encourage flattery or evasion. But there is liberation in feeling responsible to an ideal reader – the best poets of the past, perhaps, or the unbiased readers of the future; or to an ethical principle – speaking truthfully, bearing witness, offering sympathy; or to an aesthetic ideal – the radiance of beauty, the genius of the language. Not until you know what a poet feels responsible toward can you know how he wants and deserves to be read.

The strength and the challenge of Seamus Heaney’s poetry lie in its willingness to admit all these kinds of responsibility at once. To get a sense of Heaney’s temperament, just look at the titles of the major essays and lectures about poetry that he has produced over his long career: “The Government of the Tongue,” “The Redress of Poetry,” and “Crediting Poetry,” the lecture he delivered in Stockholm after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. These are unapologetically ethical terms, and they suggest a poet deeply concerned with the correct use of his gifts. Indeed, few poets have ever interrogated themselves more strenuously than Heaney; again and again in his poetry, we find him confronting himself, or being confronted by a neighbor or reader, with his responsibilities as a man and a poet.

More here …
http://harvardmagazine.com/on-line/110639.html

F.E.A.R

F.E.A.R is one very scary game. It is not to be trifled with late at night with the sound up high – this will lead to violent paroxysms of the limbs and cardiac palpitations of monumental proportions. For the fans of the First Person Shooter genre’ you can’t ask for more – the movements are fluid, the graphics and sound outstanding and the combat AI of the enemy is intelligent, responsive and adaptive. The storyline flows well and the X-Files spookiness at every turn adds a whole lot more than the usual run and blast campaign.

Once scene saw me creeping through the dimly lit, quiet innards of a wrecked building trying to find a server room. There were noises in the ceiling, a raspy sort of Predator cackling and footsteps that seemed to follow me for an age when suddenly an enemy combatant was thrown through a window in front of me and this translucent thing fluidly landed in the hallway beside him, looked at me big malevolent eyes and then disappeared ….

F.E.A.R ranked 9.1 on Gamespot