| Category: Media At The Billabong the Professor writes: Once again, just for emphasis, Marr in his own words: “I began to write Sir Garfield’s life with a single purpose: to pin on the man his responsibility for the crimes of 11 November 1975” |
| Category: Iraq (again, again!) Bargarz pointed me at at Paul Wolfowitz's speech of last Wednesday. A terrific read to get a more positive idea of what is going on in Iraq. No source is to be trusted on its own but I put this way above anything written by the likes of Robert Fisk. |
| Category: Iraq (again!) Bargarz points at a Daily Telegraph article about the brothers Hussein which clearly states: The brothers' bodies will be kept at the morgue until a member of their family comes to claim them. |
| Category: Iraq On a slightly more serious note, Kev Gillett points out a few hard facts (archives currently not working, scroll down) and then points at a terrific Flipping Turtle (?) article. Good clarifying writing! (Note to self: must investigate these turtle people) UPDATE: And Steven den Beste's recent essay got an airing at Opinion Journal. |
| Category: Iraq I had to read a fair way into this to be sure that the Taliban weren't going to get $15m a head for the brothers Hussein. UPDATE: Except it wasn't Talibanni's men after all! |
| Category: Pitchers I have seen A Mighty Wind and it is good. Very good. It's very much the same as the other films this mob have made, but, as with them, it works. 9/10 |
| Category: Unions Coke is it (or not) for these wheel spinning unions. "Hugs and kisses aplenty" for these actors who need more money. They can still afford champagne, though. |
| Category: Science I looked up Semi Conductor on Google and number three came up as Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics. Ya gotta love that. |
| Category: Fillums A Mighty Wind has its first Melbourne showing next week but will be previewed (who can make sense of these entertainment nuts?) tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday at the Nova. I say it's a "must see". |
| Category: Pitchers So I watched Not Another Teen Movie, and guess what, Lacey Chabert was in it. I still like her Lost in Space costume best but she was pretty good in her small role in NATM. Mia Kirshner does a really good job in the Cruel Intentions takeoff. Cameos by Mr T and Molly Ringwald make for a bit of fun and having I Melt With You (the main theme from Valley Girl) liberally sprinkled throughout was pretty good, too. Forty three years old and still watching high school flicks. Kinda sad, huh? Oh, the high school it was set in was John Hughes High School. 7.5/10... probably more if I had spotted all of the references. |
| Category: Politics Peter Costello comes clean on what he meant by: "I want to see Australia be everything it can possibly be. I want to see it prosperous and strong and secure and tolerant and I want to be able to see it fulfil all of those objectives and I want to make a contribution to that."It is interesting that while reading the speech and imagining the treasurer saying the words, I didn't "see" "the smirk" once. Quite an impressive piece of writing, IMHO. |
| Category: Kulcha Independent Classics put on a terrific range of shows throughout the year. My mob are definitely going to see Peter and the Wolf the Saturday after next. |
| Category: Science Seven scientifically supportable views of when human life begins. Pointed out by a Yobbo, Sam Ward |
| Category: Media In the best traditions of The Age newspaper, We Were Wrong. Found at Fight Fire With Fire. |
| Category: Yartz Yobbo points out some interesting facts about The Whitlams. I'm disgusted. UPDATE. Also see Fight Fire With Fire and scroll down to July 08, 2003. |
| Category: Audio I expressed concern over what Adobe were likely to do with the Cool Edit products now that they have bought the technical assets of Syntrillium. The news is in and it's not all bad. The downside is that they appear to have dumped my workhorse, Cool Edit 2000. The good news is that I can upgrade to Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) for about half what it was going to cost me (even less with the A$'s recent strength). |
| Category: Copyright On July the 4th, the Boston Globe used the Declaration of Independence as its editorial. The following appeared below the text: © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.I found out about this in Lawrence Lessig's blog. Read about Lawrence and read his blog. Also, read about The Creative Commons project. |
| Category: Nano-technology Some time ago I posted a comment on Bill Joy's sanity. Someone far more intelligent and less prone to ad hom attacks than me has come up with a nice book review that slips into a report on a debate he had with Bill on on the dangers of nano-technology. A great read! |
| Category: Iraq An interesting article in The Tennessean with an alleged link between the "regime" and Osama bin Laden. But what was Uday thinking when he published the list and the preface? I would love to hear about other mentions of "the list" in the media. |
| Category: Crime Court TV's Crime Library should help kill time, if you like it better dead! It has vast quantities of hard core crime content. |
| Category: Useless The Windows Media Player 9 Series Fun Pack has to be the most useless array of rubbish ever. It allows w.bloggar to detect what music you are playing and automatically insert artist, title and genre into each blog entry at time of posting. Who tells them to think these kooky things up? |
| Category: Mathematics This mob have some really interesting products. Interestingly, they seem to work on a wide array of operating systems including Solaris and Linux. I'll certainly be downloading the suck it and see. Point - Their Mission Statement is refreshingly blank Point - As is their System Requirements page Point - Available in more than 13 languages (huh? can't they be more specific, they are meant to be mathematicians!) |
Category: ScienceBe very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. The so-called coriolis effect has no influence on draining sinks and tubs. I found the page at kidsnewsroom.org which, while lacking style (it is plug ugly), is a terrific resource. Amongst other things it has a html tutorial and a whole bunch of projects submitted by students. I do wonder why they call themselves kidsnewsroom.org when their domain name is kidsnewsroom.com, though. Alistair B. Fraser prepared the Bad Meteorology section of the site. It includes a good greenhouse effect FAQ. Well worth a look. Alistair insists that you view some of his work using "Netscape Browser 4.7.6". Good luck finding it! |
| Category: Fillums Daddy Day Care: mercifully short. It did have Lacey Chabert who played Penny in the Lost in Space movie but unfortunately it was a small role. I remember Eddie Murphy historically as being a funny guy, must be a bad memory. Someone at imdb.com said "make a wish on a falling star". One interesting fact is that DDC compressed time. The ~90minutes went by pretty quickly in my head. I quite liked the story in Sinbad (which we saw last week) but it stretched time horribly. That might be because it was at Northland(s) whereas DDC was at the Wonderful Westgarth. My eight-year-old said (in his very irritating Mary-Kate and Ashley voice) "We are so going to get Daddy Day Care when it comes out on DVD". I think not. Oh, BTW, Sinbad had that awful animation hotch-potch where the backgrounds are nicely textured CGI's and the foregrounds (major characters) are like Clutch Cargo without the "lips trick". |
| Category: Kulcha While Googling for another Bro, I came across Phil Brophy's flash website. I wish all of the links worked because many of them would have great memories. |
| Category: Scientiffica I wish these guys would get on with it so we can all sit back and do squat! This is a dream patent, come on get on with the applications for it you geniuses. |
| Category: Oxymorons My favourite oxymoron is left-wing intellectual. Slatts points out that a whole bunch are gathering in Adelaide this week. Talk about putting all your eggheads in the one basket! |
| Category: Academia The academic world wonders why it does not get much respect from non-intellectuals like me. When they stop giving PhDs to air-headed clowns like this bloke we might be able to consider a change of mind. Tim Blair gives it a lite fisking but it really doesn't deserve any more than that. |
| Category: Audio Miller Puckette is the msp in Max/MSP. Max/MSP is a fantastic Macintosh tool for audio processing and performance. It is on its way for the PC but may be some time. While we wait for Oates, you may wish to look at Miller's pd. |
| Category: Psychology Bargarz points at a great test for sanity. I've seen it before, Bargarz has seen it before, but it still works for us everytime! |
| Category: Technology Technologists with too much time on their hands can be |
| Category: Technology Not real sure, but I guess I have around 6 or 7 Remote Controls on my coffee table at home (Semi has twice that amount!). Here's an elegant (if locally compatible (I'm guessing we'd miss out on TV Guides)) solution. And they've just released a Mac version. |
| Category: Web I'm not sure I really understand what Half Bakery is but it sure has some interesting reading. |
| Category: Blogosphere Gary Sauer-Thompson has a blog. I'm guessing Gary would rate way different from me (18-14) on Yobbo's Australian Political Quiz but he writes well and is worth a read. I guess even DB would approve of Gary's political stance. He is worth a post anyway because he links to us. Yobbo is Sam Ward. I love his take on Tim Blair's beer money fund how-to. He also appears to have some connections with the Liberal Democratic Party who I am really close to on the test. As Slatts says, that's scary in a Groucho Marxist sort of way! |
| Category: Audio Why would I ever want to get advertising off tramtown when it points at so many microphone shops and manufacturers? |
| Category: Audio Studio Projects (who have a website that is a bit off the pace at the moment) have some new mics, including a really nice large diaphragm stereo condenser that has the sensible option of being able to move one of the diaphragms to get different angles. They say: The LSD-2 is comprised of two separate dual-membrane solid state microphones contained within a single housing. Its capsules are mounted in close proximity on a vertical axis - the upper capsule assembly having the ability to rotate 270 degrees horizontally, relative to the lower capsule. Two C&K three-way switches control the polar response, high pass filtering and -10dB pad for each capsule (The switches on the front of the body correspond to the lower fixed capsule, while the switches 180° opposite on the back of the mic control the rotating upper capsule). It is the combination of capsule articulation and independent pattern switching which allows a user of the LSD2 to achieve all manner of coincident pair stereophonic recording techniques. Due to the close proximity of the capsules, there is no phase cancellation resulting from time delay between the two signals. This translates into excellent mono compatibility.Point: If you know your onions it would be quite sensible to use this as a Mid+Side mic as well. Point: Locals might like to look here. Point: The Microphone University at DPA is a good reference if a little biased to their product range. Also see tonmeister.ca and the Stanford 192a site. Disclosure: I have a couple of B3's that I absolutely love and they were very nicely priced. Recommended (as Jerry Pournelle used to say in Byte). |
| Category: Excuses My internet connection has been down and Telstra would not believe that it was a network problem (both cable TV and internet out of action puts it off my property by my reckoning). What proportion of blog entries are excuses for not posting and what proportion are complaints about ISPs? Just one more question that might never be answered. |
