Well, it didn’t take long for the euphoria over Barack Obama to evaporate. His choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration is a slap in the face for many people. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
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Parasites on the Brain
A couple more heart-warming stories from this wonderful world of Nature that we find ourselves in. First, the Puppet Master’s Medicine Chest and then, complete with video, a story about a tapeworm in a woman’s brain. Verily, the evolutionary landscape is wondrous to behold.Leave a comment
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Windows Live Wave 3
I see that the latest versions of the standalone applications (including Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Writer) have now been released. This download page is still currently describing the applications as “beta”, but the applications themselves seem to have dropped that moniker from their titles.
I’m pleased to see that at least one bug in Windows Live Photo Gallery that I reported to Microsoft over a year ago has finally been corrected.
I’m using Windows Live Writer to create this post, and one thing that I want to check is how it handles image metadata. While it’s very easy to use WLW to insert images into your blog, the previous version seemed to be stripping out image metadata, and therefore creating orphan works, which I think is a very bad idea. So, here’s a test image, which in the original has my copyright information and IPTC Coreinformation as metadata embedded in the file.
Once an image is published in my blog, it can be downloaded from there as well. Let’s see what has happened to the metadata…
Yep, all the metadata has been stripped out – copyright, creator, keywords – everything. That’s not good, in my opinion.
2 responses to “Windows Live Wave 3”
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I am one of the developers of Windows Live Writer. You are correct we don’t support this right now.Thank you for the feedback though!Also, keep in mind that if you publish a photo album using the new version of WLW it will save the metadata when it uploads the pictures that are part of the album.I’ll keep your feature request in mind as we move into planning for our next release.
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Brandon, thank you for your comment. I hope that you will support preservation of metadata in future releases. After all, WLPG does it – and for all resolutions, too – so similar behaviour from WLW would be more than welcome.
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Postcards Home
One of the careers that my father had was as a ship’s engineer. He began with the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company on the ships that crisscrossed the Irish Sea. The Island at that time (the 1920s) was a popular holiday destination, which meant that during the summer months, far more ships would be sailing than in the winter. At the end of the season, the junior engineers would work on the overhaul of the laid-up vessels. When the overhaul on a ship was completed, the men were paid off, and as my father wrote:
We walked round the town until the next vessel had her overhaul. This happened every year, and meant that over 100 men could be out of work for between 12 and 16 weeks. This did not appeal to me – I had seen too much of it, and I applied for a seagoing job with the Ellerman Line. I received a letter offering me a post as 4th Engineer on the City of Wellington from the Ellerman Line and this is what I really wanted because I would then begin to get my 18 months sailing time in before I could sit for my 2nd Class Marine Engineer’s Certificate.
I left Douglas on the 11th November 1925 and joined the City of Wellington on her maiden voyage round the world. Our first port of call was St. Johns, Nova Scotia, where during the war a munitions ship had blown up and destroyed the town.
From there, the ship (and dad) visited Boston, New York, Newport, Panama, Honolulu, Yokohama, Kobe, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Suez, Gibraltar and Rotterdam. Dad bought postcards when he had the chance. Some he would send home – usually to his younger brother, Doug – but others he kept for himself, to remind him of where he had been on this, and subsequent voyages. After his voyaging days were over, he put them in an album where they’ve been ever since. They are a wonderful record of places and peoples that in many cases have changed beyond recognition or even vanished completely.
Dad wrote of Yokohama:
The massive destruction of the town by the earthquake in 1923 was there to be seen, and I will always remember the forts at the entrance to the harbour and the large blocks of concrete tossed higgledy-piggledy about.
I love the fact that the publisher of this postcard has pasted in, not very convincingly, some ships in the foreground…
This is just a small selection of about 250 postcards. I think I’ll post a few more illustrating the places he visited in other voyages another time.
3 responses to “Postcards Home”
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Geoff, what a find! Thank you for sharing these – I look forward to seeing more. I’m also curious, what postcards he has that match up with places you’ve visited (and/or photographed) – a sort of "then and now" montage – is there much overlap?
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Mike – that’s a thought. But while there are a few places we’ve both visited (Boston, New York, Gibraltar, Tokyo, Malaysia, Rotterdam), there are only a couple of places that overlap with photographs, and unlikely to be any with actual locations that overlap. Still, I’ll take another look. I can, of course, take new photos in Rotterdam at the actual locations, and that’s a project I’ll definitely do next year. And if I ever win the lottery, I would definitely like to re-visit Japan, and track down the locations in his series of postcards from there.
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[…] got a pile of postcards and old photos that I inherited from my father. Many of the postcards he collected from places that he visited around the world, when he was a merchant seaman in the 1920s and 1930s. There are also lots of postcards of places […]
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What Makes Altruism Good?
A very interesting and thought-provoking post by the Barefoot Bum. Go read.Leave a comment
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A Sense of Perspective
As an atheist, I could imagine myself as a deist, but by no stretch of the imagination could I possibly imagine myself as a theist; certainly not with any of the mainstream flavours currently on offer. In a comment to a posting on Pharyngula about the latest example of religious brain rot, Emmet Caufield makes the following comment:What non-literal Christianity asks you to believe is that Yahweh sat on his hands and did fuck all for ~13.3 billion years, piddling about on the margins of physics to ensure the development of a bald ape with a big brain on an insignificant rock, orbiting a piddly star in an unremarkable galaxy, then 197,000 years later suddenly revealed himself to a small group of semi-literate desert goatherds in an obscure part of the Middle East, behaved like a complete prick for about a thousand years, then decided that he would incarnate himself as one of the bald apes and have himself tortured and nailed to a tree in order to appease himself for his own displeasure at the, entirely fictitious, landmark event of two particular apes using their genitals for their entirely natural evolved purpose. You believe this shit? It’s beneath ridiculous, a transparently preposterous concoction of primitive codswallop that any person claiming to be rational should be ashamed to believe.Christian theology is intellectual masturbation, the product of perverse attempts by weak-minded fools to continuously reshape the silly myth of ancient desert aborigines into something palatable to the modern moral zeitgeist, rather than throwing the whole mess of contemptible nonsense down the nearest toilet, where it belongs.Allegorical my hole. It’s asinine. The whole damn lot of it.I can appreciate the exasperation. Mythology can be high art, and useful as allegory, in the same way as fables and fairytales. Believing that it’s literally true is basically refusing to use that brain that you’ve ended up with through the process of evolution.Leave a comment
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Spoing!!!
That’s the sound of my irony meter exploding. I did warn you here and here that irony was at dangerous levels. However, the latest pronouncements by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor have pushed it beyond breaking point. Where to start? Well, as usual, Ophelia flenses his bollocks with her usual efficiency, so I’d advise you to go and read her answer to his statements.
Just to be clear, I’m perfectly happy for the Cardinal to carry on making his pronouncements. But he shouldn’t be surprised or “hurt” when we react in this way to his words. We’re not being unfriendly, we’re just calling them out for the self-serving, lying nonsense that they are.
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Advent Calendars and Nightmares
Over at Obscene Desserts, John Carter-Wood muses on the pleasures of Advent calendars, and, in particular, on the unfolding story that is contained within one that he purchased at his local supermarket. Do go and read about the adventures of Otto, who clearly is up to no good, and who, one suspects, is going to come to a sticky end.
John draws the parallel between these modern day toys-with-stories and with the Germanic tradition of the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter (in English translation known as Shockheaded Peter). I had both books as a child, and Struwwelpeter in particular scared the living bejeesus out of me.
When in 1999, I saw the junk opera Shockheaded Peter at a performance in Amsterdam, all the old feelings of being simultaneously both scared and exhilarated came flooding back. It’s a great shame that a video recording of the production was never made, it was a terrific production (in all senses).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOVSp-fYUQc
At least the music from the production is available on CD. Aurally, it’s just as strange and scary as the opera was visually…
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Irony Still At Dangerous Levels
Following on from recent pronouncements from Catholic abbots, I find that my irony meter is still on the borderline of exploding into millions of tiny fragments with this. I think it’s the claim that Islam is the "religion of peace, tolerance and compassion, that sanctifies the human soul, and whose universal message is one of mutual peaceful coexistence among all the peoples of the world, regardless of their ethnicities, race, religions or languages, and which calls for kind reasoning and dialogue with all their fellow human beings" that tips me and my irony meter over into a parallel universe…Leave a comment
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Swearing in Sign Language
If you remove one means of expression, the human brain will find another. Funnily enough, I find this uplifting.Leave a comment
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Body Swapping
Neurophilosophy has a terrific post on the research work being done on the sense that one’s body belongs to one’s self. It seems surprisingly easy to trick your senses into believing otherwise.Leave a comment
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The Etymology of “Go Forth and Multiply”
This is a wonderful piece of research on the word "fuck" and all who sail in her.Leave a comment
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Dykes To Watch Out For
That’s the title of a comic strip that Alison Bechdel has been doing, oh for ever, it seems. Actually, it began back in 1983 and has been delighting its audience ever since. Now she’s brought out a compedium: The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For. It’s gone straight on my "to read" list. The New York Times gives it a glowing review, even Alison is taken aback.And if you haven’t read Fun Home, her brilliant, morbidly funny and disturbing memoir of growing up in the family’s funeral home business, then you should really track down a copy. It’s better than Six Feet Under.Leave a comment
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Saudade
Saudade is a Portugese word that is defined as ‘a feeling of nostalgic remembrance of people or things, absent or forever lost, accompanied by the desire to see or possess them once more’ (Correia da Cunha,1982).
The psychiatrist Carlos E. Sluzki writes beautifully and movingly about one of his case studies, an elderly Mexican woman who received weekly visits from her two sons, even though they were both long since dead. Do go and read this article, you won’t be disappointed.
(hat tip to Mind Hacks)
4 responses to “Saudade”
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Saudades is more than that. Saudades allows us to carry the past into the present and thus makes a place in out future. Sluzki is Argentinian and you can’t really understand saudades unless you’re a brasileiro, but he makes a good attempt when he says, ‘it gives us the authorization to re-engage in our joy and creativity.’ But it also gives us permission to bring our past, with all its unfulfilled hopes and dreams into our present and so into our futures. When we say, Ai! Que Saudades!’ we don’t just long for the past; we bring the past into the present and make it real.The year before he died, my father made one last trip back to Brasil, the land of his birth. Meeting up with one of his nephews in Rio, he went to Colombo, a coffee house in Rio where his mother used to take him as a child in the 20’s and 30’s. It was as resplendant in its Belle Epoque glamour as it was when he was a boy. He got on his cell phone and rang his sisters in Oklahoma City and said, ‘Guess where I am?’That’s saudades.
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Thanks, Coboró, for the elucidation and the vignette. As Sluzki says, the word is perhaps untranslatable, but hopefully we’re now within striking distance of getting a handle on it…
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Geoff,You wrote, read the case study by Carlos E. Sluzki, you won`t be disappointed. You are right. Absolutelydelightful.Teddy Lloyd
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Teddy, you’re very welcome.
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Windows Live
You may have noticed that my Windows Live Space (a.k.a. Geoff Coupe’s Blog) has changed its appearance today. Microsoft has just rolled out major changes to its Windows Live Services. I can’t say that I’m particularly happy about them. Management of comments on the blog has just got really difficult, and it was badly designed before.It looks as though Microsoft is trying to build a Facebook clone. I don’t want a Facebook clone, I just want a nice simple blog. Sigh.2 responses to “Windows Live”
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You know, my offer to help move these all to a more comprehensive blogging package (WordPress, Movable Type, etc) still stands. Just sayin’. And for what it’s worth, I use Windows Live Writer to publish to my WordPress blog when I get the urge to write.
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As Vicki Pollard would say: Yeah, but no, but yeah, but no… I’m not sure that a "comprehensive" blogging package is what I’m looking for. Windows Live Spaces has been OK for me up to now. It’s just that Microsoft has moved all the furniture around (or, as I commented on their team blog, sent it off to another country), and what was relatively straightforward is now buried in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Frankly, the user interface design team must have been asleep at the wheel on this one.
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Do You Know What Time It Is?
I know that I’ve grumbled before about the fact that Horizon – the BBC’s once-proud flagship of its science programming – has become a shadow of its former self: dumbed-down beyond belief, or needlessly sexed-up with flashy graphics and bizarre camera angles.Well, I’m really pleased to be able to say that last night’s episode: Do You Know What Time It Is? showed a return to the form of the classic Horizons. Presented by physicist Professor Brian Cox, it was both engrossing and mind-expanding. Simply brilliant.Leave a comment
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Filming Red Mars
A short story that conjures up the juncture between the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars and science fiction film. Wonderful.Leave a comment
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Irony At Dangerous Levels
Whilst I do have some sympathy with what Father Jamison is saying here, I do think it’s a bit rich for a representative of the Catholic Church to be lecturing us on the exploitation of spirituality and the corruption of children’s minds. Mo obviously agrees with me.Leave a comment
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Ridiculous Fashion
As I’ve mentioned before, the fashion industry is an area of human endeavour that I’ve never quite understood. Today’s exhibit from the Rijksmuseum demonstrates that the industry has a long history of being not entirely sane. It’s a wedding dress that is two metres wide. While presumably the bride could advance grandly down the aisle in the church, I have visions of her mincing sideways through the doors at home before the event, and I just wonder how she actually made it to the church…The Rijksmuseum bills the dress as "one of the most impressive items of clothing in the collection". I’d be inclined to call it one of the most ridiculous. And what’s with the piece of sacking over the head of the mannequin? That truly is a bizarre choice by the museum’s display staff.Leave a comment
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