A chance, in these last warm days of Autumn, to store energy for the final metamorphosis…
Year: 2007
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Compare and Contrast
Joel turns over the iPod and the Zune and reads the fine print. What he says is, on one level, perfectly true. Apple captures a feeling and Microsoft just sucks in the attempt.But, on the other hand, the statements make me feel as though both marketing departments should be first up against the wall, come the revolution. They strike me as written by a bunch of tossers… Apple because they deliberately fuck with your brain, and Microsoft because they are so completely clueless. -
We Band of Brothers
James Anderson (Andy) Thomson gives a most thought-provoking talk on the motivations of suicide terrorists. Well worth watching. -
A New Party Game
I can’t resist passing on this idea for a new party game. The fact that I scored extra points for using the word turgidity has absolutely nothing to do with my enthusiasm. It’s simply a great game… honest. -
Winter’s Coming
One thing about having a large garden is that there’s always work to be done. As a result of the storm last January, we had a lot of wood that needed to be chopped into firewood. We spent a couple of days this week doing just that with the aid of a hydraulic cleaver hired from a neighbour, and a friend who spent a day with us toting wood in a wheelbarrow (thanks, Carolien!). She also took these photos…Here’s me using the cleaver…
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More Metadata Woes
I’ve mentioned before that managing my digital photos is not exactly problem free. I’ve just noticed the latest little problem.
For some reason, Microsoft’s Vista insists on lying to me about the time when a photo is taken. It tells me that the photo was taken one hour later than it actually was. Let me illustrate this. I have a photo that I know was taken at 08:16 am on the 23rd September 2007. I know this a) because I took the photo at that time and b) the EXIF information created by the camera and attached to the file says it was taken at 08:16am.
OK, so then I review my photos within Windows Live Photo Gallery, and I notice something odd. WLPG swears blind that the photo was taken at 09:16 am. Here’s the evidence:
Except it wasn’t. It was taken at 08:16 am. OK, so then I look at it with Vista’s Windows Explorer. This seems to have come down with schizophrenia: while the details pane at the bottom shows the incorrect time of 09:16 am, the cursor pop-up shows the correct time of 08:16am…
What on earth is going on here? Well, it turns out that I have installed Microsoft’s own Photo Info plugin onto my Vista. And Photo Info replaces Windows Explorer’s own cursor pop-up with its own more detailed pop-up. So Photo Info gets it right, but Windows Explorer gets it wrong? It certainly seems that way…
So, Microsoft’s Photo Info tells the truth, while Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Explorer lie through their teeth. Wonderful. My suspicion is that the fact that we are currently in European summertime has something to do with all this. I wonder what I will find next month when we are back to wintertime?
The moral of the story is that bug-free software is as rare as hen’s teeth.
Update 6th October 2007: I think the cause has been tracked down. Photo Info seems to display the value of the EXIF metadata field for the date/time when the photo was taken. However, Vista’s Windows Explorer and Windows Live Photo Gallery doesn’t use this. Instead, they look at the XMP metadata field for the date/timestamp. Now, EXIF has a single absolute value, whereas XMP uses GMT plus a timezone offset. The XMP value had been written by IDimager – and the developer has acknowledged that Daylight Savings Time wasn’t being accounted for. That’s now been fixed, but I’ll wait to see what happens when we revert to Wintertime at the end of the month before I conclude that the issue has been resolved…
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Life’s Too Short
Geoff Arnold reminds me why I’ve stopped reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Life’s too short to waste on reading tosh like this. Geoff shows up the emptiness of it by quoting wise words from Frederick Crews. -
Medieval Art
Continuing on with the slightly prurient theme of the last post, I also stumbled upon a posting on Nigel Warburton’s art and allusion blog with the irresistable title of Genitalia in Marginalia. It turns out that that is what the art historian Michael Camille wanted to call his book Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Warburton’s post has prompted me to order the book.I see that Amazon lists a book of Camille’s that is due to be published next March: The Gargoyles of Notre Dame. I’m assuming that this will be a posthumous publication, since Camille died of a brain tumour in 2002 at the age of 44. It’s interesting that the gargoyle that graces the book’s cover is the same one as in this photograph of Camille. I also like the way in which Camille turns the image into a mirror – is the gargoyle the reflection of Camille, or is it vice versa? -
And Today’s Theme…
… is apparently: Rubber. At least, that’s the conclusion I came to after reading Improbable Research followed by A Good Poop. And, realising that the preceding sentence is open to misinterpretation, I’d just like to point out that there are two web sites mentioned in it. -
RIP Ned
Ned Sherrin has died. Over the years, his work (the groundbreaking TW3, Side by Side by Sondheim, etc.) has given me much pleasure. I met him once, many years ago, at his Chelsea flat – he was charm itself. He will be missed. -
Poster Propaganda
Via J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, I simply must draw your attention to this online exhibition of Chinese propaganda posters. They’re a communist version of Norman Rockwell turned up to 11… Thoroughly unsettling. -
Fame and Dan Whatsit
Stephen Fry continues his blog with a terrific musing on fame. I’m pleased to see that he and I are in total agreement over the literary talents of Dan Whatsit. -
The Meme of Unread Books
Nicholas Whyte points out that you can search through the contents of LibraryThing to produce a list of the top 10,000 unread books. Here’s the first 100. Those in bold, I’ve read; those in italic, I’ve started but couldn’t finish…- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
- Anna Karenina (132)
- Crime and punishment (121)
- Catch-22 (117)
- One hundred years of solitude (115)
- Wuthering Heights (110)
- (No title) (104)
- Life of Pi : a novel (94)
- The name of the rose (91)
- Don Quixote (91)
- Moby Dick (86)
- Ulysses (84)
- Madame Bovary (83)
- The Odyssey (83)
- Pride and prejudice (83)
- Jane Eyre (80)
- A tale of two cities (80)
- The brothers Karamazov (80)
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
- War and peace (78)
- Vanity fair (74)
- The time traveler’s wife (73)
- The Iliad (73)
- Emma (73)
- The Blind Assassin (73)
- The kite runner (71)
- Mrs. Dalloway (70)
- Great expectations (70)
- American gods : a novel (68)
- A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
- Atlas shrugged (67)
- Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
- Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
- Middlesex (66)
- Quicksilver (66)
- Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West … (65)
- The Canterbury tales (64)
- The historian : a novel (63)
- A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
- Love in the time of cholera (62)
- Brave new world (61)
- The Fountainhead (61)
- Foucault’s pendulum (61)
- Middlemarch (61)
- Frankenstein (59)
- The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
- Dracula (59)
- A clockwork orange (59)
- Anansi boys : a novel (58)
- The once and future king (57)
- The grapes of wrath (57)
- The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
- 1984 (57)
- Angels & demons (56)
- The inferno (56)
- The satanic verses (55)
- Sense and sensibility (55)
- The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
- Mansfield Park (55)
- One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (54)
- To the lighthouse (54)
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
- Oliver Twist (54)
- Gulliver’s travels (53)
- Les misérables (53)
- The corrections (53)
- The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel (52)
- The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
- Dune (51)
- The prince (51)
- The sound and the fury (51)
- Angela’s ashes : a memoir (51)
- The god of small things (51)
- A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
- Cryptonomicon (50)
- Neverwhere (50)
- A confederacy of dunces (50)
- A short history of nearly everything (50)
- Dubliners (50)
- The unbearable lightness of being (49)
- Beloved : a novel (49)
- Slaughterhouse-five (49)
- The scarlet letter (48)
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu… (48)
- The mists of Avalon (47)
- Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
- Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
- Cloud atlas : a novel (47)
- The confusion (46)
- Lolita (46)
- Persuasion (46)
- Northanger abbey (46)
- The catcher in the rye (46)
- On the road (46)
- The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
- Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of… (45)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into … (45)
- The Aeneid (45)
- Watership Down (44)
- Gravity’s rainbow (44)
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Draganflyer
Ah, that’s a bit better, the Draganflyer radio-controlled helicopters are a bit more reasonably priced than MicroDrones. Still out of my price league, though… -
Cleaning Gutters
It’s getting to be that time of year when the gutters need frequent cleaning to keep them free of leaves and debris. My eye was caught by the iRobot Looj. Perhaps that’s more practical than a MicroDrone…
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
