Mask of the week is a Canadian transformation mask. Closed:
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Author: Harry
I’ve spent most of the afternoon browsing around the web looking for the best way to fix the wireless network* so that it works everywhere it needs to. I’ve now officially lost the will to live. Here’s a calming picture of some bunnies:
*The problem is that the current router (a Belkin F5D7630, since you ask) isn’t very flexible or upgradeable – you can’t plug in an antenna, and Belkin’s own range extender thingy doesn’t work with it. So whatever I do is going to involve buying a new base station. My instinct is to just buy Apple stuff, since all the computers are Macs and will play nicely with it. An Airport Extreme base station and an Airport Express to act as a range extender would (probably) sort out the problem. And they look pretty. But they’re more expensive than the competition. There are various MIMO/Pre-N routers whch should have greater range and might sort out the problem – but if they didn’t, I’d be back where I started, except 60 quid down.
My sister is going on holiday to Egypt in a few days to do a Nile cruise. Of which I am quite jealous. Anyway, I was looking through bookshops today for books that she might like to have with her, and I decided that what she really needed was a field guide. A good field guide is a reference book and identification aid in one, and that’s just what you might want, going round the Valley of the Kings.
The format would be like the best bird guides, i.e. pictures on the right-hand page and the corresponding text on the left. But instead of the book being divided up into ‘pipits’, ‘waders’, ‘hawks’ and so on, it would be split into ‘sarcophagi’, ‘deities’, ‘columns’ or whatever. You could use it either in a museum or a site, just to give you a starting point for making sense of what you see.
I wonder if there are any other areas where the field guide idea would work well? It feels like an idea with legs, but I suspect there are only a limited number of things which are sufficiently visual and sufficiently easily classifiable for it to be helpful.
I’m sure this is old news to a lot of you, but humour me.
I’m amazed by how much it has changed my listening experience, having all my music on the computer. I didn’t actually intend to put all my music on the hard disk when I got the computer – the CD player is within easy reach of my desk anyway, and I don’t have an mp3 player – but I tried it out mainly because I wanted to play with the software on my new machine. What makes the difference isn’t the way that all your music is at your fingertips, although that’s nice. It’s that I have a whole load of albums which I like, but don’t particularly want to listen to all of at once. The simple fact that the computer mixes up tracks from different albums breathes life into your collection, just because you don’t have to take the decision to listen to a whole hour of acid house, or Breton folk, or early blues, or whatever it might be.
I thought that if was going to make a lot of use of the playlist function it would be making playlists like ‘funky stuff’ or ‘easy-cheesy’ or ‘Americana’: specific selections to suit my mood. In fact my main playlist completely ignores genre and mood; it consists of a combination of:
high-rated songs that haven’t been played for four days
unrated songs that haven’t been played for two weeks
current favourites
Oddly enough, the fact that the playlist might go ‘Charles Aznavour – The Prodigy – Bob Marley’ isn’t as much of a problem as I would have expected. I thought that switching between wildly different kinds of music would just be annoying – but actually I quite like the variety.
I’ve added a list of music I’m currently listening to in the sidebar on the left. It uses a neat little WordPress plugin called WP-Scrobbler that grabs the info from your Audioscrobbler feed. So that list on the left automatically updates as I listen to music thorough iTunes. Or at least I think it updates every six minutes.
The default setting is to give the song title, artist and date and time for each song. That seemed like too much information, so I’ve got it just giving the last eight artists. But if you click on the name of an artist, it’ll link you to the Last.fm page for the particular song I listened to.
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familiar language in the news
A report in the Times today about the riots in France said this:
Magid Tabouri, 29, leader of a group of youth workers at Bondy, next to Aulnay, said he was suprised that the eruption had taken so long. “It has been simmering with all the exclusion, mistreatment and social misery and collapsed education,” he said. “These families have been forced to the margins and are being kept there. It’s a gangrene that has grown for years. We will soon be seeing urban guerrilla war.”
M Tabouri reserved his harshest words for M Sarkozy and his campaign against the “scum” of the estates. He also deplored the failure of left-wing governments to confront the rejection of the immigrant generations. He suggested a small start: the police should be barred from using the informal and disrespectful tu that they routinely apply to young residents of the estates.
That reminded me of a story from Australia a few months ago (the Guardian). A senior civil servant made a rule that security staff at the parliament in Canberra should address visitors as ‘sir’ rather than ‘mate’. Naturally, there was a national outcry, protesting that this struck at the very heart of Australian identity. If a bloke’s not free to address another bloke as ‘mate’, why did all those men die at Gallipolli? And so on. Former PM Bob Hawke came out with this gloriously punchy soundbite: “In a sense we’re living in an age where the concept of mateship has been damaged to a fairly large extent by a lot of the approaches of this government.”
Obviously the situations aren’t comparable in all sorts of ways, not least that the power relationship between a gendarme and a young man in the banlieues is rather different than that between a security person and an MP. But I still have some sympathy with that Aussie civil servant, and for basically the same reason that I have sympathy with M Taboury. Someone who is asking you to let them search your bag, empty your pockets and walk through a metal detector is impinging on your privacy and being a nuisance. That’s a good reason why they should make a special effort to be respectful when they do it. They can still be friendly and chatty; “G’Day, Sir” strikes me as a perfectly reasonable compromise. The fact that they’re just ordinary blokes doing their job seems to be beside the point; their job is intrusive and I think a little bit of extra politeness serves as an acknowledgement of the fact.
But, on the other hand, I’m not Australian. When in Rome, horses for courses.
The French tu/vous thing is interesting, but I’m not going to comment because I can’t speak the language.