Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:
|
|
|
Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
I had an offer yesterday to write about playing poker - for cash - online, but since I don't know the first thing about poker, and since I don't encourage myself to play for cash in a game I know I'm not likely to win, I'd prefer not to encourage anyone else either.
I got a book out of the library a couple of days ago - The Modern Con Man: how to get something for nothing, by Todd Robbins. I thought at first it was a joke, a book that was being tongue-in-cheek, but, in spite of there being a lot of humour in it, it's primarily a book that sets out to show you lots of ways to con other people into giving you something - especially free drinks in a bar. Maybe I'm missing something, but I found that the more I read the thing, the more offensive it seemed to be.
This is how it's described on Amazon: Whether it’s winning $50 on a bar bet, scoring seats closer to the fifty-yard line, or finagling a free meal, The Modern Con Man ensures that aspiring low-risk grifters will always come out on top. Filled with humorous facts and tables, a glossary of con terms, illustrations, the history of the con, and easy-to-follow swindles, this is the perfect gift for the hidden flim-flam artist in your life.
Don't you think that there are enough people being fooled out of their money without this sort of rubbish being presented as though it's somehow a good thing? Con men exist in society from the top to the bottom. Who needs them?
Anyway, back to the subject of online games. I've just seen that you can now get your virtual Cobra golf clubs out and play online golf. For money, of course. Big Cash Prizes! Oh, yeah, for the con men who set up the games online - or for those who are really clued up as to how to play this sort of stuff.
I can think of much better things to do with my money. Encourage my Affluenza - if I want to be selfish, but preferably giving it to someone who needs it; I know plenty of people either in my immediate whanau (extended family, for those who don't speak New Zealandese), or friends who are in need, or people overseas who are in need. I certainly don't find it essential to give it away to con men or online gamesmen. Spare me from them.
Photo by Philip Ritz
Shared on
I had a bit of a clean up of baggage and luggage and stuff that was cluttering my office floor yesterday (it being Labour Day) and came across a Netguide magazine that I’d bought earlier in the year but had never really checked out.
A letter to the editor mentioned a couple of sites that sounded interesting, so I’ve just been checking them out. The first is Voxforge.org (not to be confused with Voxforge.com which appears to have been started in 2004 and abandoned). Voxforge’s aim is be a place where you can become part of a service where you offer your voice for free and open source recognition engines.
Voxforge then makes all submitted audio files available under the GPL license, and compiles them into acoustic models for use with Open Source speech recognition engines such as Sphinx, ISIP, Julius and HTK.
GPL, for those, like me, who have never heard of it, is a General Public License. With normal copyright an author has the right to control copies and changes to a work. With a GPL license (also known as "copyleft") a user receives the right to copy and change a work. It’s all part of the process of making the Internet ‘free’, an important word in cyberspace.
Using Voxforge appears to be pretty straightforward: you read and record some text, and upload it to Voxforge using either your computer or a program like Audacity, or via that old-fashioned instrument, the telephone. There are some other slightly more complicated ways to do it too. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like fun.
The other site is called OpenStreetMap.com. The letter writer claimed that in some places it’s more accurate than GoogleMaps, and that it’s a way of updating places that don’t get much attention on Google. I can’t say I’ve found GoogleMaps to be anything but satisfactory, but then maybe I’ve stuck to well-known places, and haven’t tried mapping up in the Andes, or along the Amazon as yet.
OSM seemed a bit complicated to get going on, and, when I found my home address, I noted that the avenue beside my house was listed as a street, so obviously there’s ongoing work to do. Plus it was rather slow to load the Edit module.
Shared on
I've been reading Seth Godin's blog recently on a daily basis. (Get the email notification whenever he writes something new.)
If I remember rightly I was alerted to it by some other blogger telling me about the book,
Tribes, which Godin published reasonably recently, and which has its own follow-up pdf file where hundreds of people delineate their own 'tribe' experience. A tribe being any small community/group of people who get together for a common purpose.
Amusingly, if you go to the post in which Godin writes about the book, you'll find he's obviously had to update it a few times.
The first paragraph has two updates in it, just for starters.
My reading of Tribes is now available on iTunes as a three hour audio book for less than a dollar. (update: now the bestselling audio book in the world. Price matters, apparently). [You missed it! It seems as though it's now $6. Still a bargain...]
Okay, so the book is now $6. I'm not much into listening to people reading to me - when I walk, for instance, I prefer to think my own thoughts than have someone blathering along in my ear. (Not that Godin blathers - he's been a familiar figure in my reading for a long time.)
My wife likes listening to stories and such when she's walking. And certainly Godin tells stories - though perhaps not enough for her taste!
Godin's next paragraph says:
Or, if that's too much, Audible is using the audio book as a freebie promotion, but I think you need to register.
Yes, you do need to register, and install their software, if you haven't already got iTunes 3.0 on your computer. I presume you can listen to this audio on your computer, but sitting listening to a computer talking isn't too much fun...I'm not the most kinesthetic person in the world, but I do like to move around a bit. My bum gets sore just sitting at the computer.
Yesterday I actually bought my first e-book: Voices of the Virtual World. At first I thought all my payment had given me was a bunch of audio files, which I knew from the advertising wasn't what I'd ordered. However, after experiencing one of my denser moments, I finally realised I'd missed seeing the download pdf file icon (it wasn't very obvious), and now have the book installed on the computer. Plus several of the audio files.
In the end, as Godin says:
The souvenir, dead tree, printed hardcover edition is easier to take to the beach (B&N).
I can only agree. Easier to read in the bath, too.
He mentions a Kindle version, but it seems that while Kindle is very usable in the States, it's not so much here in New Zealand. My tame geek says that in the States you can actually download to your Kindle pretty much from anywhere, as they say. Here of course we don't have quite that kind of wireless access.
Shared on
I usually write about work–oriented matters like jobs on my WorkReport blog, but of course these days a good number of people look for jobs on the Net rather than in the newspaper, so it’s perfectly applicable to talk about them here instead. In fact, when I was looking for a job back in late 2006, early 2007, I spent a good deal of time on a site called Seek, which was actually helpful in providing job descriptions and ways of applying. The local newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, also provided a job-seeker service, long before it got its act together and starting putting the paper online in a way that was actually readable. (For at least a couple of years it basically had nothing more than the paper’s layout as it was prepared for the printers available.)
I haven’t had to go looking for a job since I was employed by Delta in Dunedin for four months (started as a temp and got kept on, and then was offered a job the day after my wife and I decided to go to England for a holiday!). When I came back from England I already had a different job to go to, which was a relief.
I must say that looking for jobs, whether it’s via the newspaper or online, is still a pain. I applied for so many jobs during my last period of unemployment and got so few interviews (about two, I think!) that it became quite discouraging. This, in spite of the fact that older people are now being regarded more favourably in the job market, and in spite of having had some forty years experience of working. Some people still look at someone older and think they can’t possibly keep up with the new technology
[ Click here to read more ]
Shared on
Still playing around with the idea of seeing words out of their context, I can see people who do searches on Google (or any of those other almost-forgotten search engines) as strollers, that is, people who stroll by and look for something. Of course, strollers - at least in US terms - are what we here in New Zealand would call baby buggies.
Strollers, or baby buggies (whichever you please) have become complex pieces of engineering. Whereas they were once devices in which you bunged your toddler and whipped him or her off to the shops, folding it up (the stroller, not the child) when you got there, and tucking it under your arm (again the stroller), modern versions are so complex that so much time is spent in untangling them - and the child - that little shopping ever gets done. If you get to the shops at all
[ Click here to read more ]
Shared on
The phrase 'used tape drives' meant nothing to me when I first saw it today. Being a person who'd grown up when tape decks and cassette players were the norm, I immediately associated the phrase with such antiques, but of course it means backup tapes for computers. And presumably these drives don't use used tapes (ones someone else has discarded). The 'used' relates to the drives, rather than the tapes. Such is the English language, that you can mistake the meaning when it's out of context.
And talking of odd phrases, over on my other blog, on Blogger.com, the phrase 'athlete's hand' leads more people to my site than any other phrase. (I can't see 'used tape drives' cutting it quite so much, for instance
[ Click here to read more ]
Shared on
One of the odd things about the Vodafone mobile connect I leased in England while we were over there was that we had to unlock it to get onto certain sites, including the one I play Scrabble on. You'd hardly have thought the Scrabble site was a menace to anyone, unless it's Hambro themselves, but seemingly the mobile connect thought it was. It classed it as being a site akin to something children shouldn't go to, or that might contain something of a sexual and therefore disturbing nature.
Having been married for 34 years, I don't find sex particularly disturbing. Interesting, exciting at times, but only disturbing if my wife decides she isn't interested or excited about it...!
[ Click here to read more ]
Shared on
One of my concerns while performing in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, was that I might have a mental blank like I did in the last Narnia play I performed in, The Magician’s Nephew. There was a long scene early in that play in which, as Uncle Andrew, I discussed my plans for sending the children to an unspecified place (unspecified because I didn’t know where it was myself).
In one performance, the young fellow playing Digory inadvertently skipped a few lines of dialogue, which meant, if I’d carried on from what he’d said with the correct following line, I would have been in the wrong place on the stage, and we’d have missed a bit of action.
Instead of managing to cover this up (as I had on a previous night when a totally different thing went wrong), I suddenly blanked out completely: couldn’t hear the prompt, couldn’t figure out why I was standing in the wrong part of the stage, couldn’t get my brain to do anything. Eventually we picked up and moved on, but there were twenty or thirty nasty seconds of inertia.
Fortunately, nothing similar happened in Dawn Treader. In fact, everyone managed to produce the right lines (or sometimes a close equivalent of them) every night. On my part this was quite an achievement, because in the previous play I’d done this year, I’d struggled to get a couple of particular lines in the right place, night after night. This might have been because I had a lot on my mind during that production, and couldn’t just concentrate on what I was doing. Or it might have just been that I needed to get my mind back into the routine of being able to spout forth memorised lines
[ Click here to read more ]
Shared on
More Posts
213 Posts dating from January 2007
Email Subscription
Receive e-mail notifications of new posts on this blog:
Mike Crowl's Blogs
13012 Vote(s)
199 Comment(s)
284 Post(s)
|
|
|
Add Comments
Read More
Comments (4)
