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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
Way back in December, 2006, I wrote a short post on my Random Notes blog about what it might be like to have athlete’s fingers, rather than athlete’s foot. Curiously enough, this particular post has turned up in search results on Google and other places with great frequency. I’m not sure that anyone really can get athlete’s fingers, or athlete’s hands, and the idea of having such an irritation isn’t pleasant, but people seem to go looking for information on it all the same.
Humans are a pretty itchy lot at the best of times, and apart from the very common itchy back we get itches in all sorts of other places, some of which probably ought not to be scratched in public. Well, not in the sort of public where people are likely to look askance at you.
There was an ad on TV for a while, using the idea that certain real men’s men (the sort that go off to the rugby on a Saturday, or fart in front of their family, or would never be seen dead wearing certain colours) might actually be different if we saw them in other circumstances. The last shot of the bloke, after he’s just raided the fridge and is eating whatever it is he’s got without using a plate, is of him casually scratching his bum. (You get the impression that if his wife had seen him doing it, his life insurance rates might have gone through the roof. ) Perhaps it was an attempt on the ad-maker’s part to make bum-scratching a little more respectable.
Photo by Jason O'Halloran
Scratching ourselves is one of those things we share with the animal kingdom – it’s the sort of thing that makes evolutionists proudly proclaim that we’re really just glorified animals after all. And in regard to scratching, it might be said that we are.
You’d think, if you put ‘scratch’ and ‘Internet’ into Google, you’d come up with a fair amount of focus on how we get rid of itches. In fact, you get all sorts of other things, which is rather amusing.
Scratched glass boosting data speeds. Scratching a developer’s personal itch (which isn’t about physical scratching). Scratch-off nears its twenty-year milestone (presumably it’s some kind of Lotto). Acting as a kind of impromptu DJ by: getting “yourself one (or two) of Art Lebedev's new Plastinkus scratch pads, which supposedly sound just like you're scratching the real thing. While that claim may be somewhat dubious, at about four bucks apiece they're certainly at least worth taking a chance on, and you can even get 'em in no less than forty different color combinations. Now, if we could only get our business cards printed on them.”
Fixing a scratched CD. Cats scratching trees, furniture, poles. A small ‘scratch’ that makes the Internet 60 times faster. Starting a business from scratch.
Hold on: where’s the stuff about scratching the places we shouldn’t scratch? Way down the list, apparently!
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I was in the Milford Gallery the other day and found that they had a screenprint by Karl Maughan (whose name, I just realise, I’ve been spelling for some years as Maugham – which might explain why anybody else looking for his name on Google and using that misspelling finds a post on my other blog!).
I like Maughan’s work, but not so much in screenprint format. He invariably paints wonderful bustling garden scenes full of rhododendrons in full bloom. The abundance of bushes fill up the paintings until they look as though they’re going to move out of the frame. (You can see a number of his paintings on the Milford Gallery site.)
In the screenprint version, however, the colours are muted instead of full, and it’s a bit like going into the rhododendron dell in Dunedin’s Botanical Gardens and finding it’s too cloudy a day to appreciate the colours.
Even the reproductions on the Gallery’s site, wonderful as they are, don’t give quite the quality of the originals. I guess that’s only to be expected.
The Net is superb for being able to find paintings that you’ve perhaps seen only once or twice in reality, and catching up with them again. A few years ago, most artists weren’t nearly as visible on the Web. Nowadays you can sit at home and catch up with an enormous number of them. Even though reproductions are never quite the same as the real thing (any more than they are in books) it’s still wonderful to be able to view them at all.
It would be interesting to take a short and relevant segue into talking about acne cream at this point, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to meld Maughan and acne together without insulting him in some way, and that’s not something I’d like to do. (Some other artists I’m less circumspect about ‘insulting’!) So we’ll forget the acne cream tangent and finish just by saying: Do go and look at the Maughan on the Milford Gallery site. I’d be interested to hear what you think.
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I've only ever heard of faucets in relation to what we call taps - those things that spew forth water at varying speeds. But Inrete, an Italian company devoted to help and support large enterprise customers in their IT network needs offer a service called Faucet PVR. It's a web-based personal video recorder that can capture any time range on the all the major on-air clear broadcast channels available in Italy.
I thought personal video recorders must be something similar to VCRs, but of course they're much more sophisticated than that. But Wikipedia, that increasingly helpful online encyclopedia, says: A digital video recorder (DVR) or personal video recorder (PVR) is a device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive or other memory medium within a device. The term includes stand-alone set-top boxes, portable media players (PMP) and software for personal computers which enables video capture and playback to and from disk.
With Faucet PVR, the recordings are all reside on the Faucet servers. Users can access and download what they have selected to video record. Faucet does not record indiscriminately. It provides an interface to a web-based digital video recorder that each individual can use to record his preferred television shows.
So there you have it. Always there's technology that you haven't picked up on!
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I came across this crazy video on a blog belonging to someone who calls herself simply, Mom. She wrote a comment on one of my posts yesterday, so I checked out her blog....as you do. It goes by the name of Family Adams Magazine - and she has a couple of review posts of M Night Shyamalan's latest movie, The Happening - with spoilers. So don't read these if you're intending to catch up with the movie at some point.
But more recently than those reviews, she's posted the video I was talking about. It's sung throughout to the tune of The Times They Are a-Changing, and the words are subtitled at the bottom in case you miss any of the subtleties
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Some frustration over the last few days.
I was working on the Internet the other night when various sites became unavailable. One or two stuck with me, but after I closed the browser down, I couldn't get anything to load up again
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Rather amazingly I was alerted to a video about Australians invading New Zealand by the Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog, which usually writes about stuff related to Christianity. I mean, the last several posts have been on such topics as Pope Benedict’s visit to Oz and the best of the biographies of the man; Faith; Alan Jamieson talking about his recent book, Chrysalis and the way it looks at Christians who, for one reason or another, no longer go to church; and St Brendan.
Apparently on a talk show in Oz, they proposed that a couple of ad agencies should do a short video promoting a reason for Australia to invade NZ. The two agencies came up with quite different approaches, both of them very well done…and funny. (Australians being funny? Yeah, I know it’s hard to believe
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I had reason to come across the site, isthisyourname.com, again tonight, and thought, after having checked out the name that came up, it might be interesting to see what results I got by putting my name in.
Of course the stuff that comes up is really pretty ridiculous - like, do I need to know what my name is in ASCII binary? Probably not
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This should really have gone on my other blog, WorkReport, since that usually talks about things green, but I put it on here by mistake and couldn't be bothered to shift it again.
The only person I’ve known with the surname of Pickens was the actor Slim Pickens (perhaps most famous for riding a nuclear warhead at the end of Dr Strangelove). I’m not sure if T Boone Pickens is any relation, but he sure talks in the same way
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I don’t have a lot to do with memory cards. I think the only card I ever use is the one that goes in the digital camera. (It’s an XD for those people who have to have this sort of info.) It’s fairly small but apparently by no means the smallest available.
Seemingly there’s a much smaller card than this. It’s called the micro SD and it’s 15mm × 11mm × 0.7mm. About the size of a fingernail, apparently. (A fingernail rather than a thumbnail, that is, and presumably the fingernail of a person with smallish fingers
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My son alerted me the other day to a blog post about type designers, including one New Zealander, Kris Sowersby. The article itself is worth checking out, if only for the great type faces or fonts that are on display.
But I went to Kris’s site as well. There, under Retail typefaces are four styles: Newzald, National, FF Meta Serif, and Feijoa. I can’t reproduce them here, unfortunately, because I can‘t transfer the fonts to this site. So go to the site itself and take a look.
Next in line are the custom typefaces, that is fonts made for particular customers. Hardys, Hokotohu, Victoria Sans and Serif, NZ Rugby Chisel (ain’t that a name!), Rewards and Eliza. Hardys was made for Constellation Wines in Australia; Hokotohu was made for the Hokotohu Moriori Trust (Moriori as opposed to Maori. The Moriori were an earlier people in NZ, and seem to have been pretty much wiped out
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The Internet is full of toys of all sorts. One I discovered the other day was the Google Zeitgeist. This mightn’t be what everyone else calls a toy, but it appeals to me, with my leanings towards stats and such.
The site is broken up into sections and the one I happened to have a link to was the one that looked at the top searches for Who is…? What is…? and How To….?
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Got the word from Firefox Mozilla today: I am one of 8,002,530 people who downloaded Firefox 3 in a single day, and helped Firefox set a new Guinness World Record.
8,002,530. Crikey, that's around twice the population of New Zealand, or 002 percent of the world's population...I think
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