Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
Via the Language Log, I’ve come across the Harvard Sentences – lists of English sentences used to test audio equipment. Reading these lists takes on a surreal, Borgesian quality – I get glimpses of some strange other world…
The effect is subtly heightened by the occasional mis-spelling; sentence 10 in lists 5 and 7, for example.
Reuters reports that Obersalzberg has reopened as a luxury retreat. This strikes me as just a trifle bit tacky this close to the second world war. Next target for the marketeers is Sadaam’s Baghdad Palace? You probably want a few centuries before it’s safe to consider places like this as a tourist draw. E.g. Chichen Itza.
Update: The Observer newpaper reviews the hotel.
Brilliant item in the Annals of Improbable Research today: Don’t Look, Don’t Tell.
These days, Carl Sagan’s polemic against a demon-haunted world seems to me, in my hours of darkest imaginings, to being more like a candle blowing in the wind, rather than a light in the dark…
As one of the book’s reviewers said: Carl, you are sorely missed.
I’ve mentioned The Apprentice before in my blog. As promised, I was there on the sofa for the second episode last week. The programme delivered the requisite "peeking from behind my fingers" quotient. As well as, I have to note, some very pleasing eye-candy in the form of Timothy, shown wearing only a towel at one point. Martin, my husband, who generally loathes business programmes, also snapped to attention at this point (look, if you came to this blog expecting to read only intellectual items – sorry – Martin and I are only human)…
Anyway, the unlucky one who got fired in this episode was Lindsay, who, it turns out is yet another ex-Shell person. I have to say, that judging by the tale spun on the programme, I (and probably yer average viewer) felt that she got what she deserved. For someone billed as a "Communications Manager" she seemed to do precious little listening to her team – who were convinced that her pet project the "Secret Signals" toy was a poor second best to the sexy alternative: a toy robot. Undaunted, she pressed on, and duly took the hit.
And yet, and yet – it seems that once again the meta-message is Don’t Trust the Meeja. I contacted a mutual friend, who is still with Shell, and she told me that the programme’s editors artfully cut the show to build a picture of Lindsay and the others that they wanted to convey. They apparently cut out the entire discussion on the financial side of things, which would have made the choice more obvious to others (Secret Signals was way cheaper to make than the robot, and hence would have been more profitable when you look at costs and profits). However, the BBC’s editors decided to cut all of that, and hence made it seem that all she wanted to do was follow her own idea…
The Meeja – doncha just love them? And don’t get me started on what the bloody meeja studies graduates have done to that once fine BBC programme: Horizon…
Oh well, I’ll be back on the sofa again to watch The Apprentice – but not tomorrow night – I’ve got another date in Dekxels with another ex-colleague to talk about life, work and information technology… Now, if I can only master my DVR, I might be able to record it.
OK, I admit it, you don’t have to go very far before you come up against one of my boundaries in knowledge. My excuse is that there’s so much stuff out there and three score and ten doesn’t even start to come close to the time that I would need to rectify it.
And so it was that ten days ago I read a piece in the Observer on Rufus Wainwright.
I’d never consciously heard the name before reading the article, although, in my defense, I had heard of his mother Kate McGarrigle. In fact, I think I’ve even listened to some of her folk songs in the dear and distant days of my youth. And I’m pretty sure that I’d heard of his father, Loudon Wainwright III (I point to the ‘III’ as the clincher that made it stick in the memory cells – a family that is so dumb as to use the same name three times in a row has to be dysfunctional somewhere along the line).
Anyway, the article was intriguing – Rufus sounded like a real bundle of twitching contradictions mixed in with musical talent inherited from his parents. The whole family seem to have had their share of angst – as his sister drily observed: "It wasn’t the Von Trapp Family". And Rufus is queer, to boot. OK, I thought, I must listen to some of his music.
Today, Want One arrived from Amazon, and I’ve been playing it all day. Loved the opening track: Oh What A World – with its mixing in of Ravel’s Bolero. I think I’m going to listen to more of the young Wainwright. I suspect my order to Want Two will shortly be placed with Amazon.
Brian Sedgemore MP tearing into the complacent British government over the eroding of civil liberty by using the false spectre of terrorism.
Boing Boing comes up trumps again and points me to (drumroll) The Hamster-Powered MIDI Sequencer.
I swear, you couldn’t make this up if you tried…
Thanks to the Language Log, I came across a new example of psychological interference today: the Stroop Effect. Try it – although if you suffer from colour blindness, it may not work…
Coincidentally, the word "stroop" in Dutch means syrup – and that aptly sums up the feeling of trying to walk through a vat of syrup when doing the Stroop test.
#3 in an occasional series.
OK, I know it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but what is it about marketing people? They clearly come from another planet from the one I live on. To illustrate the point, take the latest jewel from Microsoft’s Marketing Department: MSN.:Found. Note the weird punctuation in the title; note the "let’s be hip" feel; note the fact that none of these people are real; note that I’ve just been sick in a bucket.
Douglas Adams had the right idea about marketing departments.
That’s the headline of a story carried by the London Times about research that has been carried out by the University of East London that seems to show that gay men and women (both straight and lesbian) share the same strategies in map reading, and that these are different from those of straight men.
Personally, I think that the sub-editor responsible for this headline has an agenda. It’s a crap headline – we just use different strategies from straight men. Actually, reading the story, we (gay men) appear to adopt the best of both approaches, so far from being "as bad as", we are, in fact, better than straight men, straight women, and lesbians. So there!
The UK’s Guardian newspaper reports: “From the Royal Navy to The Simpsons, everyone is taking a line on gay marriage. Duncan Campbell looks at how US and UK film-makers are tackling the issue.”
The UK film is "Andrew and Jeremy Get Married", a documentary directed by Don Boyd (who also worked with Derek Jarman). I note that Jeremy (Jeremy Trafford) is also an ex-Shell man. I look forward to seeing the film.
Tying a couple of threads together, I’m currently reading the book containing the last diaries of Derek Jarman (Smiling in Slow Motion), which was published posthumously. The enormous humanity of the man – coupled with a complete refusal to suffer fools (and the establishment) gladly – shines through; despite the pain and suffering he was going through in his last years of life.
So reports Reuters about the pope’s new book. What a charming man he is. Excuse me while I go and turn the other cheek. No doubt his imminent successor will be cut from the same cloth.
I Sing the Body Electric is the title not only of a Walt Whitman poem, but also a wonderful short story by Ray Bradbury. The story concerns three children, whose father invests in a robot nanny to bring them up after their mother dies. The kicker is that at the end of their lives, when they enter their second childhood, the robot returns to look after them once more. It’s a story that has always affected me deeply, for reasons that I never could understand.
Today, I read about Japanese toymakers who are designing new dolls designed not for the young but for the lonely elderly — companions that can sleep next to them and offer caring words they may never hear otherwise.
Life imitates Art
The Guardian has a weekly supplement devoted to the Life Sciences. This week it has an interesting article about why people have religious faith – suggesting that it may be a survival mechanism. Being atheist myself, I’ve long been intrigued by the religion meme.
The article mentions Professor VS Ramachandran, who is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and adjunct professor of biology at the Salk Institute. The good professor is one of those people who can convey complex scientific concepts with clarity – a trait that is not as common as I would wish. He also is a natural wit, and does irony beautifully. An example: he was featured in a recent Horizon programme on synaesthesia (Derek Tastes of Earwax), and talking of the origins of language, with a completely deadpan face, he came out with: "How do you start with the grunts and groans and howls of our ape-like ancestors and then evolve all the sophistication of a Shakespeare or a George Bush?"
Came across two stories today about Gays and the military services. First, today’s Guardian reports that the UK Navy is entering into a partnership with Stonewall and actively seeking gay recruits in the Pink Press: Navy’s new message: your country needs you, especially if you are gay. While this might seem quite shocking and the end of civilsation to some unreconstructed admirals in the British Navy, it’s old hat to the military (and police) services here in The Netherlands.
The second story concerns the first homosexual couple in the New People’s Army to be wed by the Communist Party of the Philippines. The Philippine Daily Enquirer carried the story earlier this month.
#2 in an occasional series.
Last week, the BBC broadcast the first episode of a series called The Apprentice. It will follow the fortunes of 14 applicants (seven men, seven women) who are all fighting for a single job with Alan Sugar, a well-known (and tough) British businessman. Each week, the applicants are split into two teams, and each week someone from the losing team will be eliminated from the competition. The programme’s format hails from America, where the businessman in question was Donald Trump.
At first I thought that I wouldn’t watch it, because I don’t care to see naked greed. However, I have to confess that within 10 minutes I was completely hooked, simply because the 14 individuals were all so appallingly mendacious. It became one of those shows that I watch through my fingers spread over my face.
But the thing that marked out the experience was the language used by the contestants. All the well-worn phrases of management-speak were there: "I like to lead from the front." "I like to think outside the box." "It’s most important that we work as a team." – This from the leader of the women’s team, who consistently undermined any attempt by her fellow team members to act as a team. She rapidly became the star of the show – the gulf between the homilies she trotted out and her every action was terrific (in all senses of the word) to see. I could have sworn that she had taken lessons from David Brent.
I’ll be there on the sofa for the rest of the series, alternately laughing and crying, and eternally grateful that I no longer have to rub shoulders on a daily basis with people like that.
I’ve been photographing things since 1966. I started with 35mm (I’ve dallied with both negatives and slides). In 1997, I acquired an APS format camera and used it alongside my 35mm camera. The convenience of the APS camera (a Canon IXUS) meant that my Olympus 35mm camera was only used on “special occasions” when higher quality was essential. In 2001 I ventured into digital territory, replacing the APS camera with the digital format. I still kept the 35mm for the “special occasions” up until I acquired a 4 megapixel camera in 2003. Since that time, I’ve been taking digital format photographs exclusively.
All the above means that I have a lot of photos, in various formats, to manage. The first step for me was to scan all the “analogue” formats (35mm negatives, slides and APS) into digital format using a film scanner. I’ve now completed this, and, together with the native digital photos, have ended up with 12 GB of photos. This may not be a lot compared with some (I bet if my brother were to do the same he’d have ten times as much), but it’s enough to make me want to find a decent way to catalogue and organise them.
I’ve been looking around for a decent (and low-cost) software program to help me manage them. At first, I thought the answer was Microsoft’s Digital Image Library, a decent enough program that is packaged with a pretty good editor (Digital Pro). DIL allowed me to assign and group by keyword, as well as by other attributes (e.g. date/month/year). The keywords end up as metadata in the image file (and not in a separate database), so that in theory, they can be used by other applications. Sure enough, Windows Explorer could display the keywords, so the potential for the keywords to be used by other applications was there. So I went through my library, assigning keywords, and gradually the library took shape.
Then, last month, Google released version 2 of its picture librarian and editing software: Picasa. What was more, it was (and is) free. Naturally I downloaded it, gave it a spin, but then discovered what I thought was the fatal flaw – it didn’t recognise any of the keywords I had assigned to the image files using Microsoft’s DIL. Sigh – I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of assigning all the keywords again to all of my files.
So for the last month, that’s where it has rested. Until today.
Today, I returned to thinking about whether I should be using an online image library service. I’d looked at Flickr and Smugmug a while back, but hadn’t really thought about it in depth. Today, I starting looking at them again, in order to see if I could choose one over the other. Flickr has certainly got the technorati hyped up about it – and it does have some nice features. But, a) it’s still in Beta, and b) it does not offer a real storage/backup service – it’s primarily a photo sharing service. Smugmug, on the other hand, was set up by professional photographers with the aim of being a secure storage space for your image files, as well as enabling you to share them with friends and family.
It was while I was looking at and comparing the two, that I suddenly realised that I did not want to go through the hassle yet again of assigning keywords to every file that I uploaded.
It was at this point that I learned about the IPTC IIM (International Press Telecommunications Council Information Interchange Model) – a way of assigning metadata that is embedded into an image file. Then I learned that Adobe had taken this concept and produced an XML-based version: XMP. Smugmug supports XML/IPTC. Flickr has acknowledged that it needs to do the same.
I also came across another free software program: PixVue, which hooks into Windows Explorer and allows me to add IPTC/XMP metadata to all my image files. It’s a brilliant little application. I can even make templates to apply a set of metadata in bulk to files, so this should ease the task of re-assigning all my keywords. And the XMP standard ensures that all of the metadata I assign will be preserved – no matter where the files end up: on another Windows machine, on an online storage/viewing service, or on a friend’s Macintosh or Linux box. [Note 1: Pixvue is no longer available. It stopped development in 2007]
Then came the point of realisation: Microsoft’s Digital Image Library does not support IPTC/XMP, but Picasa version 2 does.
Right, that’s it: it’s Picasa for me from now on. Picasa is a very slick application – the search facility (which DIL does not have) is amazingly fast. DIL is dead as far as I am concerned. I only hope that Microsoft realises that they should add IPTC/XMP support into their next version of Windows (Longhorn). [Note 2: Microsoft did add support for IPTC/XMP in all subsequent versions of Windows. Hooray.]
Having worked with computers, I’ve got resigned to the fact that the moment you decide to invest in a computer, the manufacturer seems to bring out a new version that is twice the speed at half the price.
Yesterday, Thursday, I discovered that the same effect works for other consumer goods.
On Wednesday, I had finally taken the plunge to invest in a digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera. I’d got my shortlist down to two: either a Canon 300D or a 20D. In the end I went for the cheaper 300D, reckoning that I could not justify to myself the additional cost of the 20D, despite its higher specification – for example, 8 Megapixels versus the 6.3 Megapixels of the 300D.
And of course, yesterday, Canon announce the introduction of the 350D – a camera that incorporates most of the 20D’s features into the 300D line at a cost between the two. Bah, humbug!
I spend far too much time in front of my computer at the moment, and I see that Dell is not going to make it any easier with the introduction of a 24" LCD screen at a knockout price.
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