Opinions

I have plenty of opinions. This blog is full of them. Most people have strong opinions about a variety of things. It's natural. What I don't have any opinions about, strong or otherwise, are some of the people that grace the small screen. My work colleagues however, do.

I am literally surrounded my people who consume television with a passion that is incomprehensible to be. My colleagues frequently vent opinions of those who stared in last nights reality/sitcom/drama program with such feeling and critical analysis that I am left stunned by the passion it has elicited. So and so is a bitch. Can you believe what she/he/it did? Last night was the reveal all, I can't believe you missed it. How can they do that? And so on...

And it is not limited to tv. They have very definite opinions about anyone who falls in the famous category. How the act (on and off screen), what they wear, who they date, how they speak etc. They have strongly held views on people they have never met and who they have learnt about from half a dozen films and/or a few dozen magazine articles.

I am not damning them for this passion. I do not judge them as I too have had strong feelings about tv programs, although not I suspect, the depth of feeling my colleagues do. At one stage I had four hours worth of taped shows to catch up on. It was about then, when I considered the "chore" of getting through the four hours, I decided I would enjoy tv programs, but not let them "rule my life". No tv program was going to decide what I did and when. I don't damn my collegues for their passion, but I do not choose to indulge myself.

Of course between family, work and study I don't have much time for tv anyhow. I probably average three or four hours a week (and some of that is Playschool!). So I will content myself with getting a passionate blow by blow summary of last night televisual extravaganza with my morning cup of tea. I may even learn to enjoy it. It's addictive isn't it?

And the password is...

I have a bucketload of passwords. Off hand these are just the computer passwords I have to remember;

I have a password to login to my works computer network
I have a password to login to a Admin account on the same network
I have a password to login to specific quota services on the network
I have a password to login to my works financial system
I have a password to login to my internet banking
I have a password to login to Uni computer account
I have a password to login to Blogger
I have a password to login to my new GMail account
I have a password to login to login to my invigorate stats
I have a password to login to my Footy tipping comp
I have a password to login to my home email/internet account
I have a password to login to Xerox online ordering
I have a password to login to NY Times
I have a password to login to Health Insurance site

That's over a dozen. I'm sure there are others but that is it off the top of my head. Only two of these have the same password and many (quite rightly I suppose) force me to change the password every three months. Those ones also tend to enforce strict alpha numeric and length requirements for passwords.

I'm not alone in this I know. I'd just like to state it's a pain. Is there something better (which is secure)?

Mac learning curve

I feel I'm way behind the learning curve on my Mac.

I've just submitted an assignment for Uni which I did on Final Cut Pro 4. Now I have previously mentioned I love Mac software - it's all easy, friendly, cute, cuddly etc. That may be true for any "i" software but FCP is a real bitch. At first it makes no sense. Then after a short while it seems to make sense and you think "Ok, I get it now." You are wrong. You don't get it.

I spent hours just trying to export my FCP project which ran to 13 seconds. This was no Hollywood blockbuster or even a short film for some contest - it was a simple 13 second assignment. I suspect the problems stemmed from the Photoshop file I was using but I can't be sure. FCP help doesn't reveal anything about the error messages I was getting. Neither does the Apple web site. Neither does Google. I managed to get something to spit out through a series of compromises, but I was not happy.

The second part of this rant regards not FCP, but my Mac (A dual 1ghz G4 with 1gig ram). I think there is something amiss with my mac. I don't really know because I don't have enough experience with macs. I'm too used to Windows. The mac seems slow. I've spoken to a few people who might know but they seem unfazed by my accounts of slow speeds. Everyone thinks there computer is slow. On the weekend it took well over ten minutes to burn a 480meg cd. I didn't time it, but I wish I had. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong. I drag the files to the cd icon. It then takes quite a few minutes to "copy" them to the disk. I then drag the disk to the trash/eject/burn icon and it then takes quite a few more minutes to burn the sucker. What the #*$% is it doing in that first "copy" faze?

Also the two internal 80gb HDD's seem slow. If I copy stuff off a data DVD it can take hours. If this was a pc, I'd know where to look but with a mac and don't know where to begin. This, combined with the fact I'm too busy/lazy to learn at this stuff at the moment, means I'm well behind the mac learning curve.

Not so ClearType

I looked at a link from Zeldman this morning on Web typography. Through it I discovered a few interesting things about aliased and anti-aliased fonts. I also discovered Windows (XP at least) offers ClearType.

Using an obscure setting in the Control panel you can set your screen fonts to render in ClearType. From what I can gather this is sub pixel anti-aliasing and it makes every font on the screen look nice and smooth. A bit like a printed page and a lot like text in pdf's. I have no idea how they achieve this feat of technical wizardry but it does transform the look of your whole system.

Trouble is, it is hard to read.

My eyesight isn't great. I don't wear glasses, but it is not all that good, so this may be just me. When I turned on ClearType my first reaction was "beautiful" followed shortly after by "Gee - it's kinda hard to read". ClearType seemed to get rid of any black in the font and replace it with grey. I seem to need that extra contrast to help legibility, especially at small font faces.

Word is some new form of ClearType will ship in the new Windows OS (Longhorn?). Looks like I'm going to need glasses.

Firefox

This morning when I got into work I booted up my PC and opened 12 separate web pages. Thank god for Firefox. Firefox is a browser from Mozilla which is sort of a open source off shoot of the old Netscape browser. As an alternative to Microsoft's internet explorer it is fantastic as well as free.

For me the major feature is tabbed browsing. To open those 12 pages, I just opened Firefox and Ctrl clicked on the 12 pages I wanted from my bookmarks. I had already seen a brief outline of the content of some of the blogs I read via SharpReader (a RSS reader) so it was easy to open the ones I wanted up plus some other news info sites I try to visit when I can. The beauty of it all is I can load all 12 pages at once and move around them reading bits and pieces while I wait for other pages to load. If I want to check another site I can Ctrl click a bookmark and get another new tab. Its fast, easy and standadrds compliant.

Having said that I still keep Internet Explorer 6 as my default browser. I use Firefox daily but some sites are made with only IE in mind so I need to keep it there. Also I seem to have a PDF problem with Firefox, in that it crashes when I try to close a page with a PDF document open on it. But I think that is more to do with my system (which has Acrobat 5 and Acrobat Reader 6) than with Firefox

So I can recommend that if you want more bang for your buck when surfing, get Firefox.

Close Shave

Back in mid December I stopped shaving. I'd never grown a beard and I thought it was about time to give it a shot. It looked pretty scraggly for over a month before it started to fill out a little. It ended up reasonably thick in the 'goatee' area but thin on the sides. Various people said they like it and about the same amount said they didn't.

Eventually it had filled out all it was going to and I had a pretty good idea of what I looked like with a beard. It was OK but the main attraction had been the lack of shaving. While I was definitely spending less time shaving, I still had to shave below the beard line a few times a week and should have been getting it trimmed more than I did.

For the last week or so I have thought it has been time it went. I found the time today to walk down to the barber today and opted for the 'hot towel shave'. It was quite an experience. First he removed most of the beard with electric clippers. Then I got some sort of eucalyptus 'pre shave' rubbed on. Next a very comprehensive lather with shaving soap. Then the shave. He was very careful (thankfully!) and very thorough and he took about 15 minutes to shave. Next came the hot towel. It was whacked on my chin and he gave my face a disconcerting vigorous rub. The towel had some scent (bay rum?) on it and I had it shoved into my pores with some force. Then was some more eucalyptus (post shave I assume) and a spray of after shave accompanied by a few slaps on the cheek.

The whole thing had taken about 40 minutes (about 30 minutes longer than a normal haircut) and was such a singular experience I almost want to grow another beard to experience it again!

Triumvirate of values

When I was younger I developed a theory of my life I called (rather grandly) my Triumvirate of values. The theory was there were three main areas in my life and they naturally tended towards equilibrium. The areas, which show my preoccupations at the time, were work/study, social life and my car.

The way it worked was if my car was running well and work or study was going well then my social life was crap. If social life and study were up my car was breaking down. The equilibrium state was either two up, one down, or all three at a mid level (work/study just OK, social life not bad, not good, car running but perhaps panel damage).

It was rare for all three to be down or all three up. And if that were the case I always knew things would be changing soon and generally it was the car that upset the balance.

Now ten years later my car is again upsetting the balance. It's been into service twice in the last month, costing a scary amount in very necessary repairs. I've spent money of general servicing, brakes (twice), a expensive air flow meter, a harmonic balancer and on getting the dash lights finally working. Now the radio display sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

And today, my wife who had the car, was involved in a minor accident. Nothing major I'm told, it's drivable etc. But my car is once again upsetting the delicate balance of my stupid old Triumvirate. Bummer.

Hello said Fred

The carpark attendants name is Fred. He works afternoon to night shift at the carpark where I park, about a block from work. He is a nice guy, early 60's probably who works in a boring, low paid job with shitty hours. And he likes to talk.

Since he started working there, I have always said Hello or Goodbye. As the months passed that grew into a brief exchange along the lines of "How was your day?" as I left the carpark at night. And now it is growing towards full blown conversation. Fred is interested in traffic, the weather, religion, cars people drive, other people who park there, the restaurants that back onto the carpark, politics, dogs, international affairs, the latest news headlines - pretty much anything and everything.

This is understandable. He must be bored out of his mind working there. Trouble is - and I know this is uncharitable - I just want to go home. I don't really want to have even a two minute discussion on religion, I want to go home. It has got to the point where I hope someone will queue up behind my car so I can cast a meaningful glance backwards and say "Well, I'd better go now." I'm even beginning to try and hurry to my car and get to the boom gates before others so that I can use queue excuse.

Oh, the alienation of modern life...

Ikea

On Sunday I helped out the world's richest man. No, nothing to do with Microsoft - due to currency fluctuations that title is no longer held by Billy Gates. Instead Ingvar Kamprad, the guy who founded Ikea, is number one.

My contribution to his vast wealth was the profit he made in selling me our new coffee table, improbably named Bankesta. I think Ikea must have to hire a team of people just to make up names for all it's stuff. Every little thing they sell has its own name and not "Blue Plastic Jug" but something like Kringald (colour blue). They do a good job of finding so many names that sound kind of Scandanavian and kind of right but don't actually mean anything.

Anyhow after an hour or so playing with screw drivers I had assembled our Bankesta. It replaces a coffee table that was built for us as a house warming gift five years ago. It was a great table but it didn't have two key attributes that the Bankesta has. Storage (the Bankesta has two big boxes underneath) and rounded corners. The old table had sharp pointy corners that were great for jabbing kids and adult alike. We tried putting corner protectors on them (purchased from Ikea if I recall correctly) but due to the beveled edge they kept falling off.

It has occurred to me that another reason why Ingvar may have toppled Billy from top spot was that if I wanted to upgrade my home pc to a newer version of windows I wouldn't spend an hour or so with screw drivers getting a finished product. Instead I'd spend fours hours trying to upgrade encountering one small glitch after the next only to end up with a system that runs slower than the one I had (unless I spent more money on hardware of course - that old vicious circle).

And that is why I still run Windows 98 on my home PC.

It doesn't really hurt.

Well it seems that all those villains out there downloading free music over the internet aren't actually hurting cd sales all that much, if at all. A draft report by a couple of mathematicians analysed behaviour of downloaders and discovered they weren't going to go out and buy the cd's they downloaded - they were just attracted by the price - it was free!

I suppose that means that those downloading villains who really like a artist tend to go out and buy the cd rather than searching for the free download. Those who are a bit more ambivalent will get the download. Sort of like your own private radio - if you want to listen to it, you'll download it. But if your are a "fan" you'll buy it. When I was younger if I just wanted to listen to it, I'd either listen to a radio station that played that sort of music or get a tape of it off a friend if I could.

This report is really going to mess up a few law suits. Yes what they are doing is illegal, but no, it isn't costing the record companies much in the way of revenue.

Hockey and manual cars

I played hockey on Sunday. For the first in six months I walked onto a hockey field and then hobbled off an hour or so later. My whole body, in particular my legs, aches.

I really enjoy hockey but, as my free time is tight, I generally only play during regular winter season and I don't really train, just turn up and play on weekends. For the last few years I've felt like this after my first couple of games.

On the weekend I played left half. A good position to start as it shouldn't involve too much running and I could coast a bit. After ten minutes everything was going OK, but then I did a short sprint to get in front of my player and intercept a ball. It worked and I passed it off OK, but then my left thigh started telling me it wasn't happy. In fact it was rather upset about this whole sprint thing and it wouldn't be letting me do that again. By half time, after a few more attempts to move with some speed my right leg had joined in the protest and now my left leg was becoming quite insistent.

Since walking off the field at full time (we won - yay!) various muscles in my body have been reminding me just how foolish I am. I accept all this (as I can't do anything about it) and have been walking, sitting, lying and generally moving very gingerly as a result.

Now this morning I took the Saab back to the garage to have a few things fixed up (I won't bore you further with the details, something about a new flux capacitor or something). I was given a loan car for the day.

"Are you OK with a manual?" I was asked.

"Yeah, no worries".

A manual car poses no real problem in theory. While I drive an automatic I am fine with manual cars as well. But once I got in I realised my left leg was now going to have to press the clutch to the floor - not once but many times on the way to work - and it wasn't all that keen.

I now ache some more. Curse manual cars!

Lemons

I've been re-reading Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart and enjoying it greatly. I first bought it a few years back and then I lent it to someone. It was only last week that I found it again, not in my bookshelf but someone else's. That's the good thing about borrowing and lending books, what goes around comes around. While this person had my book, I no doubt have some of theirs. Or if not theirs then someone else's. That's just how it works.

Still I wonder how many other books that I enjoyed and passed onto friends remain out there waiting for me to rediscover them.

Photo Blog

I'm barely keeping this blog alive (in terms of entries), but I want a photoblog. I saw this one recently and it reminded me that I really like the idea. I tend to think I'd struggle to do a pic a day or anything as well crafted as some of those out there but we all have to start somewhere.

I know I could turn this into a photo blog of sorts but it would require some server space somewhere for the photos and quite a bit of tweaking and even then it isn't going to look as nice as some of the photoblogs out there.

I going to have to look into getting a domain, some hosting and some sort of cms.

Site Stats

Since I set up this little blog I've been using Extreme to see if anyone other than me has been reading it (it appears not).

Now, in order to get a really clear idea of who isn't reading my site I've signed up for another free service, RE_INVIGORATE.

At first look it seems really cool. So if anyone reads this then I'll let you know...