Tram Town
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
| Category: Technology 50 Best Movie 'Bots, Klatu, Barada Nikto. They seemed to have forgotten one of my favourites though, Hymie. |
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Saturday, July 28, 2007
| Category: WHWTMSITW ... but Sandy Szwarc is definitely not surplus to requirements. In this article she demolishes the idiotic notion that you can catch "fat" from you friends. I wasn’t even going to write on this “study” because it elicited nothing more than thinly veiled hate speech and was such junk science I was certain no one would take it seriously. |
Friday, July 27, 2007
| Category: Music Ice Cream Man (ding ding) ring your bell (ding ding). (trying to buy it and failing as we speak). |
| Category: Fruit Steve Jobs is a bigger fruitcake than originally thought. He suffers from Koumpounophobia |
Thursday, July 26, 2007
| Category: Meeja/RDC Weekly World News is apparently (almost) no more. Vale. We still have Viz I guess but it's just not the same. |
| Category: InterWeb "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". It was discussed at length by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte during last week's episode of Security Now. In particular they discussed some clever ways for 'bots to get around CAPTCHA-based security and some interesting applications of the technology in the field of book scanning. Security Now is one of my favourite podcasts and, if you are new to computer security and need a full understanding, you could do a lot worse than listening to all 100+ episodes. Just One Guy's Opinion™. |
| Category: Law In the proceedings of the Old Bailey I found this trial of James Bissett who, having been found guilty of theft, was setenced to transportation for seven years. I don't think it was my old dad, though, because this trial took place in 1752 (the year we misplaced a substantial portion of September). |
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
| Category: Transport Forget the Stupid Segway (which no-one wants anyway), I'm gonna commute on a Cruzin Cooler, it's obviously crusin' cool! |
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
| Category: Shopping I went here yesterday and was pretty impressed with both their knowledge and stock on hand -- I reckon I'll go back when I get the chance. |
Monday, July 23, 2007
| Category: History In response to a post over at Diogenes' Lamp entitled The special beauty of industry and decay I have produced this short photo essay. This is a drawing of the West Coburg Progress hall from the book Coburg, Between Two Creeks by Richard Broome:  It operated as a cinema for many years from 1927. I think it stopped being a cinema in the early 1990's. It is now a dance studio. This is what it looks like now:  Here it is from another angle showing the old ventilation system:  Reflecting the current usage is the left hand window display (also reflecting the amateur photographer!):  About 150m west of the Progress at the Coburg West Primary School crossing is this traffic light controller:  |
Sunday, July 22, 2007
| Category: More... This article by the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, has some interesting observations to make regarding the attempted environmentalist takeover of global governance. Included: As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.Sorry for all the must reads this morning, Jack, but this is a must read. |
| Category: Cooling The Martin Durkin article in yesterday's Oz reminded me of Tom Lehrer who, on people who bemoaned their lack of communication skills, noted "If a person can't communicate, the very least he could do is to shut up". To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not appear to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data confirms this. This is clearly awkward. The least one should expect of global warming is that the Earth should be getting warmer.It's a must read, Jack. Meanwhile from the Blair bunker up at Sydney's Telegraph comes this column which has negative things to say about the Australian of the Year. |
Friday, July 20, 2007
| Category: Space TFF I'm sure glad that I won't be involved in going to Mars in the near future 'cos, as near as I can tell, the landings gonna be an absolute bugger. |
| Category: Music Some young kid plays The Simpsons Theme on two guitars at once! What d'ya reckon Semi? Guitar Synth or pedals (do they still use those)? (Now if it was pedals....) |
| Category: Museums Sometime ago, we brought the Michaels Camera Museum to the attention of TramTown's massive readership. Yesterday, just over one block west of that museum, I discovered the Wunderkammer. It presents a fairly small offering to the streetscape and it is not very big inside but it truly is the wonder chamber that its name suggests. It has apparently been there since last September but I had not noticed it. According to the very pleasant and welcoming lady on the front desk, it was a smaller operation in Carlton prior to that. The best thing about this museum was that it had an operating Stirling engine in the front window. One peek at that and I was sold. See the magnificent Animated Engines site for information about how a Stirling engine works. You will love that page I reckon, Jack. |
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
| Category: Meeja Over at Will Type for Food (the blog that says what you say we say you say we say you say we want it to say) is an interesting piece of work entitled "News Story So Controversial It Disagrees With Itself". |
Monday, July 16, 2007
| Category: Technology Idiot Toys has some interesting insights into technology but is also quite a bit mucky and contains Childish Humour. It is British though -- I read it most days -- your mileage may vary. |
| Category: Fillum Companies Over the weekend we went to see that Pixar Exhibition at ACMI in (I don't think it's hideous) Federation Square. It's a must see! We easily spent two hours there before the crowds drove us away. We'd tried to go the previous weekend but the queue stretched around the block. We got there around 1030 last Saturday and it was great until about 12'ish when it became unbearable -- go early! It opens at 10:am (and avoid school holidays (if you have kids, take them out of school on a weekday -- it's educational after all)). The Zoetrope and Artscape are individually and separately worth the overall price of admission alone. (the latter being 48fps, very high resolution (Semi will correct me for saying that) and 6.1 sound) We liked it by the way. |
| Category: OS's/Technology Fascinating article on the OS, architecture and chip-sets running on Apples' iPods/Phones.MacOSX all? (Geek warning) |
Sunday, July 15, 2007
| Category: Subversion Just for the record, TramTown is apparently blocked to Chinese web surfers. We are on the "wrong" side of the Great Firewall of China! Here is the URL of the testing site: http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/test/ |
Thursday, July 12, 2007
| Category: Technology Ya' know, if I was gonna buy a MacMini and wanted to fitout two screens on it I'd probably use one of these Matrox boxes as they seem to be (mostly)compatible with the MacMini. They seem to cost ≈ $A400. |
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
| Category: Flight A bloke ties a whole mess of balloons to a piece of outdoor furniture and flies 310+K! I know what I'll be doing this weekend. |
| Category: Computers Worse than Failure (Curious Perversions in Information Technology) is a fascinating site that I am going to read in great detail. This item was brought to my attention by Tim Blair and is a good read for all (ignore the jargon, Jack). |
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Monday, July 09, 2007
| Category: Woof This beautiful animal has an official name of Spotty:  Once she has had a small operation and implant, we will be picking her up from Bendigo late Thursday afternoon. Despite the official name, she may well end up being known as something else. From comments in that link: ...in the Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon”: “Her name was McGill, and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy.” |
Sunday, July 08, 2007
| Category: In yet another terrific posting, Sandy over at the Junk Food Science site has noted that New Scientist has managed to find a connection between Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming™ and The Obesity Epidemic™. I used to read New Scientist most weeks and really quite enjoyed it. It was always left leaning but so is most mainstream media. Nowadays it is little more that a News of the World for catastrophists sucking at the taxpayer teat. |
Friday, July 06, 2007
| Category: Awareness Al Gore's son, Al Gore, is doing his best to raise awareness of global warming by driving a Prius in a manner which will gain him publicity. The 24-year-old son of former Vice President Al Gore was arrested for drug possession on Wednesday after he was stopped for speeding in his hybrid Toyota Prius, a sheriff's official said.Can a Prius go that fast? Tim Blair points out that the 100mph measured speed on this occasion is a personal best for the boy. He was previously booked at 97mph during the last months of the 2000 presidential election. From my investigations, however, it is unlikely that that could have been in a Prius; hence daddy's election loss... or something. |
Thursday, July 05, 2007
| Category: Inspired My boys watch a lot of horrible, horrible stuff on The Disney Channel. One of the shows they watch is Cory in the House. In one episode there was a requirement for a sickly sweet and cute but AWFUL song. The writer came up with this gem: What's the cutest thing in the world?It ended about there, unfortunately. It has been selected by a commitee as our YouTube of the [select time period] |
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
| Category: Telly I've been enjoying the most recent incarnation of that Delia Derbyshire show but, sorry, Kylie Who? Next it'll be Barry Humphries! (oblique Kath & Kim reference) |
