I remember the days when I had a live yoghurt culture lurking in the kitchen. That was bad enough, but I don’t think I would have let a Kombucha loose in the house; ever.
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Short And Sweet…
…that was the snow that fell today around us. It’s already melting, alas, but it was pretty while it lasted…
3 responses to “Short And Sweet…”
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As ever, I love your photos Geoff
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btw – there was the first of a series of programmes on tv tonight which aims to follow giften children into adulthood. there were ten kids with iq’s from 150 – 170. fascinating.
I suspect your iq is up there if you had it tested. when I qualified for mensa as a teen, my mother said ‘Oh. well that goes to show they’re not that smart’ Heck eh? lol. thanks mum.
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Mothers, eh? They can say the daftest things… I assume that the programme was on Channel 4? That’s one channel that I haven’t found among the hundreds on the satellite… shopping – check, god – check, porn – check, dreck – check; but no C4…
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The Book Of Rules
The Taliban’s Book of Rules contains some breath-taking precepts:24) It is forbidden to work as a teacher under the current puppet regime, because this strengthens the system of the infidels. True Muslims should apply to study with a religiously trained teacher and study in a Mosque or similar institution. Textbooks must come from the period of the Jihad or from the Taliban regime.25) Anyone who works as a teacher for the current puppet regime must recieve a warning. If he nevertheless refuses to give up his job, he must be beaten. If the teacher still continues to instruct contrary to the principles of Islam, the district commander or a group leader must kill him.26) Those NGOs that come to the country under the rule of the infidels must be treated as the government is treated. They have come under the guise of helping people but in fact are part of the regime. Thus we tolerate none of their activities, whether it be building of streets, bridges, clinics, schools, madrases (schools for Koran study) or other works. If a school fails to heed a warning to close, it must be burned. But all religious books must be secured beforehand.And while I’m reeling from this I come across:19) Mujahideen are not allowed to take young boys with no facial hair onto the battlefield or into their private quarters.Er, what?(hat tip to Norm)One response to “The Book Of Rules”
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I’m still working on that one too.
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Jaw Drops…
…I’m sorry, but this makes me want to scream. "Their money"? So that makes it OK then? With financial advisers like this, who needs people slitting your veins?Leave a comment
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Read…
…mark, learn, and inwardly digest. The Method is the Message (if I might paraphrase Marshall McLuhan a tad).Leave a comment
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The Vista Experience
Last month, I mentioned the beautiful book reader for Windows Vista released by the British Library. It gives an inkling of how the user interface experience might evolve now that the Vista platform is out in the market. I see that Microsoft has started to collect examples of innovation using Vista at the Vista Innovation Café.Leave a comment
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Anaesthesia Can Be Fun…
BBC Four had a fascinating documentary on last night called Medical Mavericks. Presented by Michael Mosley, last night’s episode was devoted to the history of anaesthetics, and the range of colourful characters who discovered them. It turns out that many of them experimented on themselves first, a practice not without obvious dangers. Not to be outdone, we were shown Mosley being given nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and describing the results. He was also given a device with which he could self-administer electric shocks. Clearly unpleasant when he had not taken the gas, but once he had, the sight of him giggling and merrily pressing the button repeatedly was quite amazing.He traced the story of the pioneers – Humphrey Davy (who discovered nitrous oxide, but failed to appreciate its anaesthetic properties, instead he and his friends used it as a recreational drug), Horace Wells (nitrous oxide), William T. G. Morton (ether), and James Young Simpson (chloroform).Excellent programme and I look forward to the rest of the series. If it comes your way, do try and watch it. I don’t think you’ll be put to sleep by it.Leave a comment
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Life Imitates Art
The news item that an astronaut has been charged with trying to kill her rival in love is already bizarre enough in itself. But then, as pointed out over at the Ballardian, the news story bears a number of hallmarks of the typical motifs of J. G. Ballard. Spooky.At least it’s a better referent to his work than the twaddle written by Liddle recently. See Obscene Desserts for the full story and riposte. Oh, and as far as I’m concerned Mr. Liddle lost any claim to be talking sense some while back. I now classify him as being in the Jeremy Clarkson pigeonhole: best avoided, at all costs.Leave a comment
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Donut Robot 42
One of the things that used to fascinate me as a small child was watching a doughnut-making machine go through its paces. It was in a local shop, and I would stand for long periods just marvelling at the mechanism and the process. When I was eight, I tried to do a deal with my parents that if I helped them during the summer season in their hotel, then I would be paid for my work in the form of a doughnut making-machine of my very own. Alas, they didn’t agree to the terms of the contract. So I never did get a machine of my own.However, such obstacles mean nothing to Derrick. Thanks to eBay, he now has a Donut Robot 42 of his very own.I’m insanely jealous.Leave a comment
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mr. deity
Thanks to Brent Rasmussen, over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, I’ve now discovered mr. deity. It raises a smile or three with me, anyway, and Jesus sure is cute.Leave a comment
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The IQ Bell Curve
Here’s a fascinating article about an 11 year-old boy who happens to have an IQ of 170. He’s clearly much further to the right on the IQ bell curve than I am. Probably almost as far as it is possible to be…Leave a comment
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Metadata Woes – Part II
I mentioned some problems I was having with Microsoft’s Photo Info tool. I’m not the only one. The internal design of the tool appears to be a bit of a mess. Check out this thread, and then read the summary here. The phrase “don’t touch it with a ten foot bargepole” springs to mind.
What appears to be even more dispiriting is that reading the Photo Info tool FAQ [Note: no longer available on the Microsoft site], I, and others far more knowledgable than I, get the distinct impression that the Microsoft developers are saying that they are right in their design, and the rest of the world is out of step.
What’s the old joke? Q: How many Microsoft developers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None. Microsoft simply declares darkness to be the new standard.
The thing that really concerns me is: how much of this mess of misinterpretation of metatdata standards is in the heart of Vista, rather than simply in an add-on tool? If it’s in Vista, we’ll probably never get it out, and we’ll just have to get used to darkness.
Update 13 September 2007: It seems as though I owe Microsoft an apology. I’ve had some further communication with Robert Wlodarczyk of Microsoft, and we’ve got to the bottom of the issue. The problem lies, not with Photo Info, and the Windows Imaging Component, but with IDimager – the metadata tool I use. It produces an invalid XMP string. This is not picked up by any of the other metadata tools that I’ve used (Lightroom, Expression Media, PhotoShop Elements), but WIC is much stricter, and throws an error. The developer of IDimager will correct the issue, so everyone should be happy…
5 responses to “Metadata Woes – Part II”
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Too soon to say that Microsoft will not correct this issue and tell the world to live in darkness.
So please let’s help them to solve it. My experiment is simple.
1) Take a picture in JPG and make a backup of the Exif data (incl. MarkerNotes).
I use Exifer from Friedemann Schmidtt for this. CDLpro is another option.
2) Edit the JPG in editors like MS P.It or Adobe PSE5 and save. You’ll notice that
the MarkerNotes are gone. They can ne put back using the backup and ExiMerge.
(ref. Walter Mangum from Pyzaz Inc.).
3) Add tags, labels using PhotoInfo or Vista’s Photo Gallery. Now the Markernotes are gone,
but CANNOT BE UPDATED from the backup. Some Exif field show up wierd data too.
Basically these MS tools mess up the Exif data.
4) Add tags, labels using Adobe PSE5 Organiser and force them to be save them in the JPG file.
MarketNotes are untouched. It simply puts it in the IPTC container of the JPG file.
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Above post mentions No Name. Don’t know why but is should be "RoelSan@hotmail.com"
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Roel, I have sent Mike Tedesco (a Microsoft photo evangelist) examples of the problems back in January. Despite a reply from him saying he was working with the Dev team on the issue, and promising to update me with the results, I have heard nothing, nada, zilch since then. I sent him a reminder in April, and still haven’t heard anything. So I am not convinced that they have any interest in solving the issue, and little enthusiasm for whipping what appears to be a dead horse.
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Picture of the Day
This is probably the last time that I will mention comet McNaught (which I never did manage to see with the naked eye), but here’s a spectacular picture from Australia showing it caught between fireworks and lightning.Leave a comment
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Inappropriate Professions
The Angry Professor writes about a student, Hans. Read it, particularly the kicker at the end. Talk about the blind leading the blind…Leave a comment
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Holiday With A Difference
Pruned draws our attention to a somewhat bizarre holiday experience, and then riffs on how this might translate to other venues. Me, I thought Paintball was stupid. I’ll stay at home, thanks very much.Leave a comment
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Punks In Niqabs
Not Saussure illustrates his post on the recent Policy Exchange report on Islamism with a wonderful photograph – you must go and look at it. Punk rockers for the multicultural age. And while you’re there, read the rest of the post. As he says, the best thing to do is to keep a sense of perspective.Leave a comment
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Office 2007
I’ve been looking at the various versions of Microsoft’s Office 2007, trying to decide whether I can really justify an upgrade. I use Office 2003 Professional at the moment, but to upgrade to the 2007 equivalent would set me back a whopping 280 quid or 420 euros. And then I have three machines to upgrade. Frankly, that’s horrendous.But then I noticed something interesting about the Office 2007 Home and Student version. If you read the fine print of the license, it can be installed on up to three PCs (or licensed devices, as Microsoft’s lawyers want to call them). That then becomes about 100 quid or 150 euros to give a basic set of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote on the three machines. That, I think, can be justified.It’s interesting that this ability to install on up to three devices in the home doesn’t seem to be much trumpeted about – I couldn’t find any mention of it on the main Microsoft pages for the Home and Student version.OK, I don’t get Outlook 2007 in this version (Microsoft for some reason have substituted OneNote in its place), but I only use that on one machine, and I can soldier on with Outlook 2003 quite happily – I don’t think that Outlook 2007 is frankly much of an advance, certainly in my non-Exchange environment.If I subsequently move across to Windows Vista on that machine, then I can consider moving from Outlook 2003 with the Windows Mail and Windows Calendar applications that come with Vista. Although I’ve already discovered that Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to do that. There are no import and export functions covering that scenario. I will have to transfer all my contact information one by one – and even then the fields in Vista’s Contact Manager are not fully compatible with Outlook contacts, so I’ll have to re-create some information.It’s a similar story for the Outlook Calendar entries – I have to move them across one by one.Update: I found out how to do this; but the Contacts export still eludes me. Yet more evidence, if any was needed, that Microsoft product groups live in their own little worlds.Leave a comment
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The Sun in the Sky
This is an excellent animation showing how the sun apparently moves through the sky during the changing seasons.(hat tip to Alun)Leave a comment
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