Brian Smith in South Florida

2009-05-12T17:10:00.002-04:00

Wired Magazine has a nice article about FoldIt, and my teammate "Cheese", a young lad and his family, who are all on my FoldIt team. It's a dramatic re-telling of our successful efforts in the CASP competition.

2008-12-17T20:15:00.002-05:00

FoldIt News

I'm enjoy playing this game called FoldIt, which I've written about on the blog before. It's a puzzle game which contributes real results to research into the folding of proteins in nature; a very tough problem in biology.

The first results of our collective efforts have come through, and not only did the concept of "human-directed folding" succeed, but my team (Another Hour Another Point) was a big part of it!

http://fold.it/portal/blog

We won one of the puzzles and scored in the top 3 of several others, and the developers have concluded that a pack of untrained game-players match the perform of folding experts, so they can be freed of this work and do something else instead while the Geek Hordes do most of the folding work! This is very exciting :)

2008-11-15T10:55:00.002-05:00

The last scheduled Space Shuttle night launch was yesterday, so being a fan of space exploration in general, I thought I'd better put my foot down and finally make it to a shuttle launch. What kind of space fan lives in Florida and doesn't see a launch at least once?

I'd had a particularly bad day at work - my Great Dane Patch had his first "accident" at work due to a very bad tummy upset, so I spent my last hour apologizing and scrubbing the carpet. I'm going to pay closer attention to this in future, and leave him home if he's had any problems in that department, since I know how lucky I am to be able to bring him to work every day.

Anyway, after that awful mess I decided to treat myself and try to make it to Titusville for the 7.55 pm launch. The weather was good and they said there was a 70% chance of a successful launch, so I zipped home, grabbed the camera and hit the highway.

Traffic was heavy at first, due to a closed lane, but it soon opened up and I reached the Titusville exit at about 7.30 pm. Driving into town I knew there was little chance of reaching Spaceview Park, and it was curious how natural it seemed to just turn off the road into a strip mall parking lot when the car in front of me did so, and the car behind me did the same thing. Obviously we were all there for the same thing.

I turned the radio to a local station that was covering the launch and lowered the windows so I, and the neighbouring cars, could hear some commentary. I put the camera into spot metering mode, attached the 80-200mm zoom and pushed the ISO rating to 800, forcing the camera to use the fastest shutter speed it could. I'm glad I did that, otherwise it'd be streaky-time, and you don't get second shots at this kind of event.

The buzz in the crowd went up at the 30 second mark and when the final 10 second countdown began everyone stood up. When the moment of liftoff came, the whole sky in front of us lit up like dawn, then an amazingly bright spot appeared and climbed to the skies. It was a clear night, so we were able to watch it all the way up, until it was just a bright spot. We could even see the SRBs seperate and begin their tumble back into the ocean. The sound of the launch didn't hit us till about 45 seconds after it had begun, and it was a big bass rumble that seemed to come from the whole sky at once.

There are a lot of things not to like about the Shuttle program, but it's an impressive sight when it launches!

2008-11-01T09:44:00.002-04:00

A Few Days More

In a few days, Barack Obama will be elected the next President of the United States. This is good. I don't think the Republican party will have the capacity to handle this loss in a rational way, though. I think they'll declare that they lost because McCain wasn't hardcore enough, wasn't conservative enough. They'll retreat into a neo-con fantasy world and complain about Every Single Thing that Obama and the Democractic Congress do, and conspiracy theories about ACORN and dead people voting will flourish.

Still, I've seen a couple of blog postings worth passing enough, that stood out from the pack. Here's one by a certain "Lady De Rothschild", one of the few prominent Hillary Clinton supports who switched over to McCain's side. Her ideas are very sad, but check out the comments section!! That's where the action is :)

And here's a scorcher from Helen Philpott of "Margaret and Helen". Andrew Sullivan linked to them a few days ago. I agree with Helen when she says in a more recent posting that she's surprised the election is close at all. I'll leave to the more learned to write about why McCain has *any* support outside of those who still support George Bush (low 20% range, last I looked). I'm pretty open minded but I just can't see how anyone could pick McCain over Obama. I'm sure they'd say the same in the other direction, I suppose :)

My regular reading, in case you'd like to see where I get these ideas from, covers: Andrew Sullivan, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Think Progress, Glenn Greenwald and Huffington Post. On TV there's the Daily Show and Colbert, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann.

2008-09-04T20:01:00.003-04:00

Hurricane Ike

I just took a look at Weather Underground and see that Ike's 5-day path puts it barrelling down my driveway. *Gulp*. Hopefully the path will change in the next few days, but if it doesn't then please rest assured this is a new house built with the most recent hurricane resistance standards and it should pull through just fine. I bought flood insurance too, so I'm covered if anything at all should happen :)

Sept 6th Update: It looks like this one is going to miss us. Ike is going to pass over Cuba instead and my part of South Florida is almost out of the cone of uncertainty.

2008-09-01T16:28:00.003-04:00

Tablature for Brandi Carlile "Follow"

I first heard this song in a torrent released by the SXSW festival in 2006. What a great voice she has, and this song has such a good melody that I kept meaning to work out the chords and the picky bit at the start. So, here it finally is :) Looking at the videos on YouTube I notice she uses a capo, so adjust accordingly if you want to. Her wiki page loads much faster than her official site.

Tablature
The opening part is just a series of nice arpeggios picked on the highest three strings. You start in the shape of a D chord on the 11th fret.


"Follow...."

bar 1  bar 2 bar 3  bar 4  bar 5  bar 6    bar 7 
10     10     10     7      7     10        7
11     10     9      9      8     11        8
10     10     10     9      9     10        9

"Hold out...."

B D#m B7 E Em B Em
F# A#m F#7 B Bm F# Bm


Lyrics
Follow your heart and see where it might take you
Don't let the world outside there break you
They know not who you are inside
They have never felt your hell
Don't ever let them crack...

B                                   D#m
Hold out I know you feel it getting cold out
                             B7
Without the blanket for your soul now
                             E
Before you know it you'll be frozen
    Em               B
You have to see this through
        Em
There's no one here but you

CHORUS
F#                     A#m
I feel the rain coming down
   F#7                         B
It reminds me of who I used to be
    Bm                 F#
But now that's nothing more
       Bm
Then a memory

Don't go, to sleep and cry because tomorrow
If you let it it will swallow
You up and none of this will matter
Will matter anymore

CHORUS
I feel the rain coming down
It reminds me of who I used to be
But now that's nothing more
Than a memory

CHORUS
I feel the rain coming down
It reminds me of who I used to be
But now that's nothing more
Than a memory

Follow your heart and see where it might take you
Don't let the world outside there break you
They know not who you are inside
They have never felt your hell
Don't ever let them crack...
Your shell...

2008-08-22T22:37:00.004-04:00

Sold My Wii

I'm now Wii-less. I bought a Nintendo Wii just after it came out (use www.wiitracker.com if you still think the only way to get one is to drive to stores and ask. Sheesh.) I bought Excite Truck to go with it and played the heck out of that game and reached #5 on an online high-score tracking site (it's not built into the game). I liked Wii Sports a lot too, of course, especially bowling, but after Mum and Dad's visit a while ago, it just sat there. I'd bought the recent Zelda game too, but didn't enjoy it much. I think Nintendo took too long to get online games working -- they didn't even put online high scores into games, let alone internet play, until quite recently. In fact, it was the huge competitive boost I got by putting my Excite Truck scores into Cyberscore.net that pushed me towards buying an Xbox, who's games are more online than the Wii's.

I realized that the second hand market is still red-hot for the Wii and if I was going to sell it, sooner would be better than later. If I really want to get a Wii again I'm sure Nintendo will start building them in enough quantity that the used price will drop in a year or two.

So it's just the Xbox now, which is used mostly for playing videos off my PC. I have a big increase in my Space Giraffe highscore just around the corner, which I've been meaning to get back to for about a month. Oh, and I moved a record player into the living room too; make of that what you will :)

2008-08-22T22:25:00.004-04:00

No More Prosper For Me

I've decided to stop investing at Prosper.com. Maybe its the credit crunch and the general near-recession in the economy, but my borrowers are dropping like flies. If all my current lates don't start making payments soon, I'll be almost in negative returns. I'm still showing a 19% return, but that's only because most of my borrowers are still current and also Prosper.com doesn't sell the loans off as quickly as they used to. I think that's because they'd have a hard time selling them, so they just hang on and hope their collections agency will eventually convince the lates to start paying again. Not much hope of that...so far my 7 hard-core lates have made half a payment between them. Yes, one of them made half a payment. Many of those 7 made either 1 payment or NONE before dropping out. One guy declared bankruptcy after just 2 payments.

Don't lend at prosper.com; it's too hard to pick the winners.

I'm still *fairly* confident that I'll be able to start investing there again under two new conditions: the economy has to turn around and I should pick slightly less risky loans (yes, I went hell-for-leather on risk, I know). Also, avoid ANYONE involved in real estate.

2008-08-22T22:09:00.004-04:00

Got a G'zOne Cellphone

I've had an old cellphone from work for about three years, a Samsung a650, and thought it might be my turn to upgrade to a shinier model. Luckily it was and I got a G'zOne.

I'm not sure why we need to get something dust and water resistant, but hey-ho, it's all good. What confused me a little though was how you pronounce it's name, and why is the "O" capitalized. "Gee zone", "guh-zone"...could it be a Narn from Babylon 5? "Gee Zone" seemed right, so I left it at that.

As I was reading the manual though (ooh, voice command, spiffy!) I realized there's a British pronunciation that would not be obvious, or even comprehensible to most Americans: "G'zOne" = "Giz One". As in "Give us one", as in "Give me one". It's common in English slang to use the word "us" to mean "me", especially if the speaker is a young, cocky lad.

I had to admire the layers of interpretation put into this name by the manufacturers: I wonder if it was intentional?

2008-05-18T11:01:00.002-04:00

Protein Folding with FoldIt

I have a new obsession :) Those who know me well have seen me do this many, many times. A new shiny thing comes along and I'm absolutely bonkers about it for a few weeks before moving on to the next thing. My new favourite is called FoldIt and it's a protein folding simulation.

Wow. Protein folding....mmmm...cancel the trip to Disney kids, lets fold protein instead! Whatthehell?

It's a game built around a real scientific problem, that of predicting what physical shape a teeny-tiny protein will fold into in nature. This is important because their shape determines their function, and by knowing the exact shape of a protein, you'll be able to tell what it will do inside a living being. It might cure you or kill you, or do nothing. Or cure cancer. The fly in the ointment is that it is astoundingly difficult to know what shape a protein will take. As you play the game, it calculates your score based on how much energy it takes for the protein to hold that shape (lower is better), and your score is immediately shared online against every else's best score, so there's a real feel of friendly competition.

By learning to play the game, you're also taking part in an experiment to see if human intuition about the way shapes fold together is better than the current automated 'brute-force' approach used by computers, which basically try every position they can think of and see which one is best. This takes a very long time and gets ridiculously slow on large proteins.

You can see videos of the game in action here and when I got a chance to ask one of the developers if the game had worked; if we'd come up with good protein designs quickly enough, he said they'd been blown away by how well we'd done. He didn't have time to elaborate, but I'd say that's good news. We'll soon be put into the CASP challenge, a biannual competition to see who's software can compute protein shapes the most accurately. It'll be very interesting to see if a swarm of barely trained people playing with shapes can beat the automatons, won't it?

It's really got into my brain and I've played it a lot this week: there were two nights I skipped dinner! I've got the current high score on a few of the current puzzles and top ten scores on several others, so I guess I've figured out some tricks that work pretty well. Eventually the developers want to figure out how to capture those "tricks" and put them into their software (which you can run on PC at home without even knowing its there - do it!)

2008-05-18T10:41:00.002-04:00

Problems with giveio.sys on a reboot

There was a brief power interruption early this morning and afterwards my PC wouldn't start again (ARGH!) I went through the usual steps and the safe-mode startup gave me what I thought was a clue. The last message it gave before freezing up again was that it was loading a driver called giveio.sys, which was installed by a fan speed controlling program.

A quick google search revealed a bunch of people reporting the same thing. I followed the suggested fixes but nothing worked. I realized, though, that this was a red herring! I'm typing this on my resuscitated and fully working PC because I noticed something else was ACTUALLY wrong.

Loading giveio.sys was the last successful thing the boot process managed to do. It could be that it was trying to do something else that it didn't tell you it was trying to do and that's what froze up!

If you have this problem too, try the following:

1) Insert your Windows XP CD-ROM into the CD drive
2) Start the PC and let it boot from the CD.
3) Choose the "Repair" option - you'll be taken to the "Recovery Console"
4) type "c:" and press enter, then type "dir" and press enter.
5) Do the same with your other hard disks (d:, e: etc)
6) One of them (it was my windows drive) might not report its directory contents - instead you'll get "an error occurred during directory enumeration", meaning the disk is discombobulated.

Type "chkdsk" when you're "in" this drive and let it do its thing. Mine took a few minutes and when it was done I could do a "dir" command successfully. Type "exit" to leave the console and reboot, and you're back in action.

There's an interesting lesson to be learned here about reading log files; one I've seen confuse users in my own working life. If your software is about to try something that might fail, you should show that's what you're doing. Otherwise users will naturally assume that the last thing on the log file (giveio.sys in this case) is actually at fault, especially if you don't include a message that says you successfully completed that LAST task.

2008-05-07T22:24:00.002-04:00

Thomas Barnett presents a talk at TED entitled The Pentagon's new map for war and peace. It's the first thing I've seen that makes me think the U.S military might one day stop making things up as they go along.

Many of the other presentations at TED.com are brilliant, so pick an area of interest and get into it.

2008-03-20T22:41:00.002-04:00

Do you want a colossal amount of free music? These are torrents containing a track from each band at the annual SXSW film, which is held in Austin, Texas every year.

http://hewgill.com/sxsw/

If you don't yet have torrent software, I recommend utorrent. Yes, it's legal to do this, don't worry! I do this every year and pick out my favourite tracks, make a CD and enjoy it for a good long while.

2008-03-01T14:59:00.008-05:00

My Experience With Prosper.com

Fantastic!! Prosper.com is one of a handful of companies that allow people to lend and borrow money directly from other people. Unsecured loans of between $1000 and $25000 dollars can be set up through Prosper.com, and lenders can distribute as little as $50 at a time. By lending equal amounts to a lot of people, lenders can spread their risk out and make it less likely that they will make a loss.

Lenders can pick through thousands of listings using a powerful search engine and no, you're not just reading a "story" from each borrower: you see a summary of their real credit profile, showing you how many delinquencies, how much money they have borrowed, their debt-to-income ratio, and a lot of other real financial data that you can use to help determine how risky it would be to loan this person money. The person's explanation for why they are seeking a loan is also shown, and they are strongly encouraged to post a basic monthly budget.

I began in September 2006 by investing a few hundred dollars in five or six different people. Over the next eighteen months I built this up to around $1500 across 24 people and only one defaulted on their payments. Looking back on that loan description now I saw all the warning signs that I now recognize pegging the person as a bad risk :) The rest have been very steady in their repayments aside from the occasional hiccup, but everyone is up to date with their payments and returning (according to a calculation at lendingstats.com) a very healthy 22.8% (it goes up slightly each day too!).

It came as a surprise, though, that out of all the lenders who are well-diversified (more than 20 loans) and have been in the system for a while (6 months), I'm actually the most successful!! Out of 9100 lenders who's average loan age is 6 months I'm #1! :) This may not last forever, of course; there are two lenders in the 3-month bracket who may overtake me soon, but still, I'm very pleasantly surprised at how well I've picked the loans I made so far.

I have recently decided to put more money into my Prosper.com lending and now have around $2000 and 30 loans, with more in the pipeline. Just to keep things from going overboard, I'm only putting in money I've made from my eBay and Amazon sales, and have developed a new lending strategy or two that I'm testing out. If they are successful, I'll increase that lending again.

Prosper.com has become a safer lending environment since I began. They added more real financial data about potential borrowers, thus making it easy to spot potential problems before they happen. They also beefed up their security and collections processes. They even added warnings to naive bidders who might be about to bid on a loan at too low an interest rate - it gets a bit technical at this point, but it all adds up to more confidence on my part that I'm making a good investment.

It's still a risky one though - the loan is unsecured and should, for the moment, be considered a "non-core" investment in your savings plans. If you've ever read about keeping 5% of your portfolio for "play money", to invest in the latest fad on Wall Street, or penny stocks, or an emu farm, consider Prosper.com as an interesting place to invest some of your money. I'm very glad I did!

If you'd like to join Prosper.com, please click here, or use the graphic at the top of this blog. We'll each get a $25 bonus and I'll be happy to get you started with information on how I choose loans to lend to.

2008-02-05T09:28:00.000-05:00

Shopping - The Hard Way

I went to the post office this morning to send out a book someone bought from me. When I got there I saw a woman, perhaps in her early forties, with an 18 month old child in her arm waiting for help. I asked if she was in line or not, and she said no, she was waiting for someone to give her a cart. She sounded rather put out that none of the post office staff would help her carry her parcels in, nor get her a cart.

As I thought about offering to help her carry her stuff in (I like helping people!), a dolly was brought out...."Don't you have a rolling cart? I can't use this with her..."

"I'll help you out," says me, and we go out to her white Hummer and pull out four or five boxes, one is quite large, the rest medium sized. One set of "stuff" is a bunch of toys in a plastic wash basin wrapped in plastic food wrap. It's about 3 feet long, 2 feet wide....She's hoping to get a box from the post office for this item, but I told her they probably won't have any of that size.

So we're in line talking about the stuff and how she's going to have to ship it priority for it to reach her son in New York by the weekend. Her son is having a baby and she's sending this array of toys. I warn her that priority mail can be expensive, especially on such big boxes. She didn't seem too concerned, but did say "Oh my...it'll probably cost me as much to mail it as it did to buy it all!"

I'd assumed that the toys were all hand-me-downs, but no, she'd been out and bought it all new, packed it, brought it to the post office and was about to pay through the nose for shipping. Do you see what's wrong here?!

"Why didn't you buy it online and just have it shipped to him?" I asked, ever the practical one. "I mean, Amazon has free shipping if you buy more than $25 of stuff, and you'd been click-click done in ten minutes. "Oh, that wouldn't be as much fun!" she laughed, pointing out with light sarcasm how enjoyable the crowds, lining up, getting price checks etc. can be. Two other ladies in line nodded and agreed...

I got the feeling they all thought I was right, but didn't want to give up their allegiance to shopping the old-fashioned way. I don't know why they'd do this (assuming I'm reading them correctly), but this lady seemed to have gone through the whole process in the hardest, and most expensive, way possible. I can only assume the current financial crisis hasn't reached up to her yet, but many people's lives have been hit hard, and attitudes to money are starting to change.

If you didn't know this already, its an interesting statistic: 70% of the American economy is made up of people shopping. Not companies buying aircraft or equipment, just you 'n' me wearing out shoes and passing time at the mall ("Recreational Shopping"?!). Americans have shown a remarkable willingness to spend more and more of their income on "stuff", and then to go further...they took out loans against the rapidly rising value of their houses, and spent that too, confident that living in debt was not a problem....until it was.

To me, this is a situation that can't go on much longer, and it seems to be coming to an end. This New York Times article says people are starting to live within their means, not buying anything on credit, not incurring more debt...just using good old cash, and saving for the things they want. This is much more sensible and is also a sustainable way of life - surely its better to have an economy built on something that CAN continue, rather than something which can't, isn't it?

2007-12-16T18:21:00.000-05:00

A Good Saturday

A lot seemed to go right for me yesterday. For instance, after two weeks of trying to put a new computer together, I found a local computer shop that had a part I needed and took my dysfunctional assortment of parts in and got their help. I now have a working PC again, and this old laptop I'm using can take a little break. My XBox 360 now plays DivX video files, so it can play all the video stuff I have been digitizing from my old tapes.

On the non-computer side of life, we gave another performance of our Christmas concert with the Symphonic Band of the Palm Beaches. The crowd were very enthusiastic and we got one and a half standing ovations. One and a half? In the first one, only the upper balcony stood up, so nobody downstairs got the hint and joined in :) I played my part in "Russian Christmas Music" better than last week and got compliments from the other trumpet players, and an invitation to practice some duets with one of our top guys! He lives pretty far away, though, so I don't know if we'll be able to meet up.

I didn't notice it until last night, but this program of music had a lot of very exposed playing - long sections where only one or two people are playing. It is said that it is more difficult to play slow music than fast music, but I think we did very well. My part wasn't difficult, particularly, but quite exposed and I could feel my pulse racing and my throat pressing up against my bowtie as I played those long piercing notes.

During the intermission I saw a gentleman in the percussion section looking through a set of collectible playing cards. This was an unusual sight, but I told him my favourite game, NetRunner, was designed by the same man who designed the cards he had. "NetRunner? Oh yeah, I love NetRunner too!" What a surprise! I thought I'd never meet anyone who'd heard of it, let alone played it, but we're going to start playing regularly next year.

Next Friday I begin my long trip back to Australia! I'll be there until the New Year so if any of my old friends want to meet up for lunch or dinner, I'd be delighted!

2007-12-10T12:13:00.000-05:00

Going To Auctions

Auctions are a lot of fun and, if you're careful they can be a good way to make money too. I started going to my local auction house after stepping out of a nightclub one evening (yes, I went to a club!) and hearing the auctioneer's sales patter, which I'll try and reproduce here: "we've got a dishwasher, GE, guaranteed to work I'll give you 24 hours...and whatamIhear...shabadadadahundreded dollars...gimme a hundred a hunhunhunHundreddollars shabadabadbadafifty dollars hey gimmee fifty say fif-fif-fifty dollars who'll give me TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS FOR *THAT* DISHWASHER!! Anybody? Anybody somebody sommmmebody maybe anybody? Throw that one in too - twenty five dollars you're getting TWO dishwashers, guaranteed to work! You tell me folks, they're here to be sold. Tell me where else you'll find a deal like that!?.

A minute later he was offering three dishwashers for $10 and nobody took them. It was 11 o'clock at night, there were maybe 20 people there and this guy was trying to shift appliances to a tired audience. I looked around the room at the paintings, shelves of random household contents and thought "...this looks interesting."

I came back that Wednesday, and the next Sunday and learned how it works. You can hold up a couple of fingers and offer a price - you don't have to wait for him to come down that far. He doesn't have to take it, though, and might say "I'll come back to you." If you wait long enough he might make a big pile of stuff nobody else wants and sell the whole lot for one price. I did this and got a box of interesting objects for $3 that I split up and sold for $30 (and counting).

I also learned that it's easier to to sell common household items and "stuff" than to look for antiques. I've done really well on simple things like insulating window film (bought 25 boxes for $3, total and sold them for around $150), wine bottle totes ($400 for a HUGE amount of them, made $1200 and counting), LED baseball cap lights ($2 each, selling for $5).

Haulers
Here's how the *ideal* scenario works, and it involves "haulers", travelling salesmen who come to 3-4 auctions a week with a truck loaded with overflow from warehouses, business closures and the Home Shopping Network! Write down items they're selling that you can easily store and ship, along with the price. When you get home, look them up on eBay and Amazon. If the price is higher, there's a chance the hauler will sell the same items next time he is at the auction - you can even put in requests ahead of time through your auctioneer (as I have found out.)

Sales can be seasonal - Christmas is an excellent time for little toys and gadgets like the cap lights. I bought 60 on Sunday and have sold 13 this week. They're small, strong and won't get damaged in shipping.

Be Patient
Remember that most items in the auction house won't sell right away - there's simply not enough time to get to them all, especially stuff on the back shelves. Write down interesting items, go home and research the current market prices on eBay and Amazon. If you think you can buy it cheaper than that, ask them to put it up at the next auction, take it home and try your luck. And if you get caught in a bidding war, just let it go. There's always more bargains to be had later.

Try and keep your house neat and the stuff you bring home organized, or it'll be a real drag. Ship items promptly and well-packaged - a good reputation on eBay and Amazon is a valuable thing.

And lastly, there's a great social atmosphere at auctions. You'll make new friends, trade tall tales about the one that got away, and see arguments, disputes and fights...I saw the cops get called once :)

2007-12-08T11:52:00.000-05:00

I Resurface

Goodness me, it's been a long time since I was here. I've been doing a lot of interesting stuff lately but I didn't know if I should write about it or not. But my public demands it, so here I am again.

Money! Moneymoneymoney. The getting of, and keeping of money seems to be what we center a large portion of our waking lives around. So why are so many people quick to spend it all?! The US has a quite low rate of personal savings; people here are simply bombarded with messages telling them to spend it all, that they "deserve" to own everything their heart desires, and stuff they didn't even know they wanted. This is a bad, bad thing and should be subverted whenever possible.

I've found a really good way to do this regarding furniture and other household items. Buy them at an auction. Our local auction house meets twice a week and you can get major appliances, dining room sets, piles of plates, sofas and chairs etc for pocket change. You just need to resist the urge to "buy new because only dirty, poor beggars buy second-hand". That message is what retailers want you to believe so they can make their ridiculous markups on new furniture. I'll write more about auctions later, but I'll one thing - you can make easy money buying little household items and reselling them on Amazon.com.

The eventual aim of taking care of one's finances properly, is that you'll very seldom have to think about it. Once you're financially stable, it should take care of itself quite well with, perhaps, a monthly checkup. And if you're young, you have an irreplaceable asset on your side: time. The richest billionaire on the planet cannot buy more time in the market, and that's what you have at your fingertips. The sooner you start investing, the better off you'll be.

To finish off, here's an email I wrote to a friend that summarizes the simple advice it takes to get one's finances in order. This is mostly aimed at those who are carrying debt - the best investment you can make is to pay it off, especially if it carries a high interest rate - anything above 10%.

Assess the State of Play
So, let's see, I think the first order of business is to write down what you know about the state of play. How much comes in, how much goes out, what are your assets and your debts. What interest rates are you paying on those debts? List them from highest to lowest interest rate, grit your teeth and start making extra payments. There's not much point saving money in the bank if your car's debt is piling up at a high interest rate.

For your assets, remember to value them at how much they'd sell for today, not how much you paid for them. Hopefully you won't need to sell anything in order to get the books balanced, but it's always an option. A good example would be the car. You can use kbb.com to get an idea of its current value...hopefully more than $8K :)

Choose A Plan of Attack
Once you know how the money is flowing, let's see how bad the situation is? Ideally you want to be able to save 15%-20% of the money that's coming into the house. Saving means money that is locked away as an investment and not spent unless it's a really dire emergency. So, is that achievable? Or are you breaking even? Or are you actually losing money and dipping into savings each month?

Your answer to that will affect how hard you attack the next step - if things are cruising along, you don't need to adjust much. If things are dire, it's time to sell the car, buy a junker, cancel the cable and get a night job delivering pizza. You're probably somewhere in between, though.

Look for easy adjustments. Can you easily lower any bills or bring more money in? Cancel some cable premium channels (or the whole thing!)? Cancel magazine subscriptions? Is there any "low hanging fruit" - easy changes you can easily fit into your life without trouble? I cancelled my cable and reduced my internet dsl speed to the minimum as part of my adjustments. I don't rent DVDs, I borrow from the library. I buy lots of food on sale (and from the auction!) and make sure to eat it before expiry. If you're throwing food out then you're buying too much. Do you bring lunch from home or buy it at work?

Tell your sons what the whole financial picture is like, and what they can do to help. Hopefully they're upstanding young men and will volunteer to make some sacrifices and help you out as much as they can.

Also look into other ways of bringing more money into the house - can you ask for a raise? If one is coming, can it be bigger? Ask your boss what'd you'd need to do to get a bigger raise or a promotion in, say, 3-6 months time. Have a yard sale - if your house is full of stuff, a yard sale is a quick way to clear out junk and make a few hundred bucks. If you have time in the evenings, look up DVDs,CDs, books etc on Amazon and other stuff on eBay to see what the going price is. It's time consuming, but the best way to get top $ for your items. I'm making about $200 a week selling out my old video games, CDs and books - this won't last though, all the good stuff is going quickly. (New note - this has gone up to $500 a week, gross income, and it's at least $300 profit.)

Final piece of advice - DON'T DIG THE HOLE ANY DEEPER! If you need to buy anything at all ask yourself (a) do I *really* need this? (b) can I get buy with a second hand one, or a cheaper model? (c) can I buy it at auction for $10 instead ( i.e bed, mattress, memory-foam mattress topper) ?! Don't embark on any risky schemes or high-risk investments and don't believe anything any "guru" says about real-estate, penny stocks etc.

My advice is, hopefully, generically useful, but the library will have lots of books on personal finance (and they're free!). Take an hour to go look through and pick one that makes sense to you - they all say much the same thing. "Spend less than you earn, and invest the rest!" is the core message and it works every time :)

My gut feeling, without knowing the figures, is that your top priority should be clearing your debt as fast as possible, especially anything with a high-interest rate. If you're not contributing to your 401k, it's probably a good time to put it at least the amount your company matches - that's 100% interest right there, tax-free!

Some websites
Instant Home Budget - http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/instantbudget/instantbudget_101.jsp
Some budget worksheets - http://www.personalfinancebudgeting.com/budget_worksheet.php

If you google for "personal finance budget" you'll get lots of good hits.

Dave Ramsey's website is not much help, but his show is excellent. Weeknights @ 8pm on *shiver* Fox Business Channel.

Lots of good advice here - http://www.allthingsfrugal.com/m_money.htm

COPF : http://carnivalofpersonalfinance.com/ is a weekly collection of the best personal finance blog entries from around the web. Pick and choose the good bits.

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/ is a good read - the articles are about various things, but will get you in a good mindset for saving. There's lot of blogs about saving money; look around until you find one you like. The weekly carnival will lead you to lots of good ones.

2007-06-01T22:10:00.000-04:00

So Long, Hangu Nam

I just flew back from a week in Jackson, Mississippi and on the flight I sat next to a young man from Korea who had been an exchange student. Hangu was keen to practice his English so we chatted on and off for most of the flight. Having spent 6 years in Saudi Arabia and 4 in Germany when I was young, I know part of what he went through, although I was with other English-speaking people 99% of the time.

He was very pleased when I correctly guessed his age at around sixteen; he said most people thought he was in college. I thought it was a little odd that he was happy to be picked as younger -- don't most kids want to be thought of as older than they are? I think he must have had a hard time getting along with other high school kids in small-town Mississippi, or maybe adults who assumed he was a better English speaker than he actually was. I later realized that the student who'd recently killed 32 people at his college was also Korean and I wondered if some small-minded people had given Hangu a hard time about this. He was happy that I knew something about Korea too, that Hyundai and Samsung were Korean firms, not Japanese - I guess that a lot of the people he met did not make much distinction between countries of the Far East.

Hangu had been in America for 9 months and was flying to Philadelphia to stay with his aunt for a week before heading back to Korea. I assumed he was staying there after his exchange year, but he quickly corrected me: he loved going to school in the US and had applied to attend another high school in Atlanta. Korea has very long school days, thanks to the "Cram Schools" which can see a student's day run from 6 am until MIDNIGHT...for three years! Surely this is no way to raise kids?!

I asked Hangu what was different between America and Korea. He said Americans loved to eat fried food...*all* the time! "Too many cheeseburger!" But he knew it was a Southern thing and it was less common in the rest of the country, though in Korea he had much less food like that. Americans were also much more religious; one of his host families had taken to him to their baptist church. He went along to learn about it, and to be polite of course, but was a bit surprised when the preacher "tried to convert me". I'm not sure what the "conversion" consisted of - Hangu may not have picked the right word for what could have been anything from a brief chat to a full-on dunking attempt.

He asked me about the book I was reading, Lonely Planets, which I told him was about astrobiology and the search for alien life. He told me his thoughts on the subject (we agreed) and I noted to myself that his English had got steadily better throughout our conversation. When we'd started it was very simple questions and I spoke slowly and used very little slang, and the simplest words to get my point across, and he'd seem to miss some of those, but by the end I was almost at normal speed and using more complex sentences, which he seemed to have no trouble with. When he couldn't think of a word, though, he would press his forefinger against the middle of his forehead as he thought.

At the end of the flight he politely said he'd very much enjoyed talking with me (he said "Yes, sir" or "No, sir" to a lot of my questions) and I returned the compliment. I helped him identify which gate he needed to go to for his connecting flight, and he was on his way. I hope he gets to stay here in the US and complete his schooling.

Oh, I remember he was not 100% polite all the time; when we talked about Korean companies I pulled out my phone to show him it was a Samsung. He almost laughed at it - "that is nearly seven years old model; it is ancient!" - and he showed me his sleek black model with pop out bits and bobs. I told him mine was paid for by my boss, and I didn't get to choose which one I got :)

2007-05-29T20:16:00.000-04:00

TV Writers Need a New Gimmick

I just watched the season finale of Lost and I feel the need to rant. If you haven't seen it, bug out now.

So yet another character gains an advantage and doesn't lock it in. How many friggin' times am I going to see someone shoot/hurt/knock down their enemy, then walk away and have a conversation with somebody else, only to turn around and see the enemy at their throat again. Are writers just getting lazy? Take Lost, for example, where the characters have been trapped on the island for months and terrified by "The Others". Charlie and Desmond shoot one of them down, a very bloodthirsty one, but instead of taking an extra two seconds to shoot him again, or push him into the pool where he'd die for sure, or just jump on his head and make sure he's dead, the writers leave him alive, and he takes his revenge at the end of the episode.

I feel insulted if the writers of the show expect me to suspend disbelief this far. I don't think the characters are *that* stupid to not lock in their advantage when they have the chance. If I was trapped and scared and managed to knock down my enemy, I can promise you they would not stand up ever again. I like to watch smart characters, but I can only conclude these characters are not. Or that the writers are lazy. I'll go with that. On the show "Heroes", Hiro did the same thing after stabbing Sylar - ignore the body and fail to finish him off. BTW Do you buy that Sylar let Hiro charge him from twenty feet away and didn't stop him? Me neither.

The finale had a few too many of the "You must do I tell you, but I won't tell you why" moments, mainly from Ben and Locke. Ben has, of course, done this many times before and seems genuinely perplexed that the Losties won't take his advice, after he's kept them in terrified isolation and killed some of them. Can't anyone on this show communicate properly? If it's so important that things be done your way, just explain it. Or explain why you *can't* explain it. Anything *but* repeat the order while commiting random acts of kidnap and violence.

Are the writers trying to drag this whole thing out by having people not ask obvious questions. Like the new character, Naomi, who parachutes onto the island and says her boat is waiting offshore. Did anyone ask her who sent her, or is it going to be a big surprising reveal that her intentions are not good? I hope more of the Losties get taken out of the gene pool, because such incuriosity and bovine acceptance is frankly infuriating to watch.

And the way they shot it, he could *totally* have got out of that chamber before the end.

If you're a fan of the show and haven't seen Lostpedia yet, you're missing out!

2007-05-28T11:10:00.000-04:00

Can't Catch a Break

I bought a Nintendo Wii a little while ago and I like the sports game that came with it. I was most interested in the bowling game, but that's turned out to be harder to master than I thought. Here's a frustrating game I played - I got a spare in every frame, including a tricky split in the 6th, and not one solitary strike. Even the last bonus throw in the 10th resulted in a nine!

Have you ever heard that joke by Steven Wright about buying a humidifier and a de-humidifier, putting them in the same room and let them fight it out? I saw this principle in action at an office a couple of days ago while I was running errands. The a/c was set rather low in this office building and the staff in the lobby had no control over it. So they fought back with a small heater down by their feet. A few years ago I'd have laughed it off, but the energy usage is nothing to laugh at. I hope they get their a/c sorted out, but its more than likely they'll just keep things as they are. As long as the power bill stays where it is and there's enough profit to handle it without blinking, they'll leave the settings alone.

I spent a week in Jackson, Mississippi for work, where we installed some new software I've written. It's a billing system, which again demonstrates a principle I've noticed. Most software in businesses is built to move data from one place to another; simple as that. I wonder if anyone has, or will, come up with a computer language specifically designed to make such a task easier. I love writing in Delphi, an object-oriented extension of Pascal, but you do have to re-invent the wheel somewhat with each project, building objects and structures which do much the same task as the last project you wrote.

I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment, called Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life. It's a summary of the science which informs our speculation about life, so that when we go to places such as Mars and Europa we'll be able to make intelligent guesses about what sort of life we'd find there. Recommended if you like reading about science and history.

2007-05-12T12:25:00.000-04:00

Negotiating the Vending of some Cheesy Comestibles

I like cheese, but I'm not sure how to feel about Pasteurized process cheese food. Are you? If you hadn't noticed yet, many of the sliced cheeses you buy at the supermarket is labelled with some starkly plain wording, untouched by the hands of the marketing department. Cheese food, cheese product, imitation cheese and pasteurized process cheese product...all these terms seem chosen to scare off anyone who reads the package and thinks "But...I just want to buy some cheese!"

Luckily for us, Steve Ritter wondered the same thing a few years ago and wrote down what he found out. It turns out they each describe a cheese made from different blends of cheese, fat, moisture, curds, whey etc. It doesn't appear than any of them are hideously unnatural, but I'm surprised they use such odd, direct terminology to describe each of the "non-cheese" varieties. I know a lot of businesses go out of their way to make sure their products have "nice" names that won't cause potential buyers to hesitate if they read the packaging carefully.

I ended up buying some sliced Havarti today - real cheese :)

Other than that, I had a very productive morning - I ran several errands and did the laundry and grocery shopping, and tonight I have the final concert of the band I'm in, and then we take a break for the summer. We have to show up early tonight to have a band photograph taken - this happens every five years, so I'll post a picture when I get a copy.

2007-05-04T14:15:00.000-04:00

Getting Better Mileage From My Car

When I first bought my car, a 2000 Saturn SL2, I got excellent mileage. Low 30s near home, 40 and up if I did a lot of highway driving. Over the years it seemed to drop away - I used to get around 320 miles on a tank and lately I'd been having to fill up around the 260-270 mile mark. I wondered what was happening?

The last time I took it for an oil-change I asked the mechanics what it might be. They said it was just part of cars ageing, and for a while I left it at that. But in the last month or so I've been on an efficiency kick, seeing if there was anything cheap and easy I could do that would make better use of what I buy, and reduce my carbon footprint. I'm recycling more, I bought CF light bulbs and raised my a/c temperature a little bit...but not too much :) Everyone who knows me knows I don't enjoy heat at all :)

So I thought about my car again - was there something I could do? A quick net search turns up plenty of web sites (like this "real world" test report) and I noticed a one easy change right away - don't accelerate so hard! I'm accelerate fairly quickly at the lights and thought it didn't make much difference, but it really does. On my last full tank of gas, which just ran out today, I made sure I took about 12-15 seconds to get up to my target speed, and I kept my speed to 55-60 wherever I went, even on the freeway.

Bottom line: I got 320 miles on this tank, using about 10.5 gallons. That's over 30 mpg, which is about a 20% improvement from my previous results. Every little bit helps :)

2007-04-15T09:30:00.000-04:00

I went to a neighbourhood meeting on climate change yesterday. It was part of the national "Step It Up 2007" program, which saw over 1400 events around the country designed to teach people about climate change and hopefully get the U.S Congress to notice and increase their efforts to curb our impact on our environment. Here's what I wrote for the site afterwards.

About 20-25 people came to the church to hear three speakers, each of whom spoke for 15-20 minutes. Deacon Steve started with a message putting the issue into a moral framework; the "stewardship" approach that has thankfully taken hold in so many churches around the nation.

Next up was Associate Professor Bill O'Brien (Environmental Studies) who took us through the science. He emphasised the scientific consensus and how long it had taken to reach that. He described the IPCC process and how cautious the scientific establishment is about announcing large-scale findings. A simplified description of "radiative forcings" followed and a quick tour of several graphs, and a good look at different explanations for global temperature rise and why each was discarded, leaving human-driven climate change as the only explanation that fit all the data.

He also looked at a couple of the lingering questions that still get raised sometimes: discrepancies in data sets that were not eliminated until quite recently, such a satellite and weather ballon temperature readings that showed cooling instead of warming (in case you didn't know, it was design differences or calibration problems).

Graduate Rob Bates took the stage next to give a summary of what we could all do to help reduce our carbon footprints. He drew on the "Low Carbon Diet" book by Dave Gershon to give us a list of what we could do and a handout summarizing it was passed out.

Questions from the audience followed and it was a very interesting session. Almost all the questions were of the "but what about X" variety, where X was another possible explanation for increases in global temperature. X included volcanic activity and a warmer sun (Mars is warming slightly). There was also some mistrust of the UN (an "anti United States organization", and more than one question asking where the debate was; that the presentation seemed very one sided.

The questions were all answered well, I thought and the questioners were not aggressive; they were, shall I say, "skeptically curious", and rightly so. There's a lot of information to absorb and if a scientific body pokes it head out and says "we've discussed this since 1990 and yes, we all have to change, hard, now" then not everybody was ready to hear all the information at once. One gentleman asked what global warming actually was - just a 1 degree rise in temperature didn't seem much to worry about. The answer given was that climate change could be seen as an instability in the climate, making the future unpredictable - this is bad in a world of 6 to 9 billion people mostly depending on things to stay much as they are.

I commented privately to Prof. O'Brien that he seemed to stay away from the "catastrophe" scenarios - the melting Russian permafrost, the frozen methane on the Arctic ocean floor, the stopped Gulf Stream. He said that was on purpose, given that you didn't want to terrify people into acting (or worse, into NOT acting), and I agreed.

One suggestion I'd make to Rob is in his list of things we can do at home. He mixed the easy steps with some rather extreme ones (ride bikes to work, don't dry clothes with a dryer). Although he prefaced each of those with a "if you're really keen, you could...", I think it would've been better to just list the easy steps (change to CF bulbs, turn off lights when you leave room, raise a/c temperature when you're out and at home by as much as you can stand) and *then* move on to intermediate steps and then, if time allowed, some "hairshirt" steps for the hardcore carbon reducers. Give the overall light tone of the event, I think just the easy steps would have sufficed, but their mention was a little diluted by the "heavy" stuff.

Overall, a very good event and hopefully one that will have ripple effects in that church and its congregation.

I've done some of the easy stuff at home; I changed most of my light bulbs to compact flourescents and rearranged my PCs so that the main one is switched off most of the time. I also signed up for the power companies "Green Power" program and bought carbon offsets for the house and car from Terrapass.com. If you have room in your budget (probably around $10 a month) why not call your power company or look on their website for a green power program, or purchase carbon offsets. The more people reduce carbon emissions, the better off our children and grand-children will be.

If you still need convincing, please take a look at this FAQ. It's a good explanation of the questions raised by climate skeptics and why they are wrong.

And no, you don't have to ride your bike to work, or leave the a/c off in the summer :)

2007-02-17T12:10:00.000-05:00

My Dog, the Cosmological Wonder

In the early years of the 20th century there was much discussion about the origin of the Universe and the matter it contained. The dominant theory was the "steady state", which supposed the Universe had always been here and that new matter is continuously being created, which is why the universe expands. Eventually it was replaced by the Big Bang theory (a name originally given by one of its detractors, who thought a "Big Bang" was a stupid idea), and has not been taken seriously for decades.

But I offer new evidence in support of this dusty idea - my dog is a site of continuous and steady of matter, specifically, a steady stream of fur that comes off his neck no matter how long I brush him. It's astonishing, and it never looks any thinner or produces less fur as I continue to brush. Cosmologists may apply to come and study this phenomenon for just twenty bucks and a plate of dog biscuits.

2007-02-03T12:47:00.000-05:00

Your Body's a Wonderland

And it's true, technically. We all know there are bacteria and little microscopic creatures that live on and inside our bodies, but did you know how many there are? I saw a documentary on quorum sensing (a recently discovered phenomena whereby populations of bacteria communicate and organize themselves) and the scientist they spoke to said there are ten bacterial cells for everyone ONE of our own! There's more of THEM in YOU than YOU !

While it's a bit icky to think about, clearly its not a problem, because you're still alive and healthy. It got me wondering, however, about a few questions this leads to.

1) Do we need these creatures? Have we co-evolved with them for so long that we now depend on them? Perhaps we are descended from a being that, if it had not carried a helpful bacteria in its gut, would not have survived. But it did survive, and reproduce, and now we all depend on that bacteria...is it possible we'd not survive without it?

2) What happens if you leave the planet to live in a spaceship? Does your bacterial load keep itself replenished, or do you have to be on Earth to pick up vital new critters? And what if you were born on a spaceship? Could you get this bacteria from other people, or is your health going to suffer?

3) Do all our bacterial buddies have the ability to sustain their populations if we left the planet? What if some of them died, and their job was to keep some of the others in check? Will we be injured by the remaining bugs?

I wrote to a science writer at The Register, an English newspaper, who had answered a question on these bugs recently. His answer just confirmed that yes, these things lived on us and their quantities were vast, but he wasn't asked about their function, or what might happen if (a) something goes wrong, or (b) we leave the planet. He said my questions were very interesting and he's going to publish an answer in the paper when he gets some expert advice on the answers. Should be interesting :)

My own guess is that nothing much will happen. I think the populations are mostly self-sustaining and our body chemistry and immune systems are sophisticated enough to compensate if anything goes out of whack. And there's a whole pharmacy of drugs to help us too, if our un-enhanced systems can't cope. People have lived in space aboard Mir and Alpha for over a year and while they have problems with bone-density and muscle atrophy, I haven't heard of any bacterial/micro-fauna problems.

There have also been people raised in sterile conditions (the so-called Boy in the Bubble) who can live without these bacteria having populated their bodies, so it seems we don't "need" those bacteria - our unadorned "native" body has all it needs to survive and digest food.

Still, these creatures, especially the tiny animals, look really cool (though a bit scary) under microscope. And, just to finish on a cheery thought, when you die, it is THEM who will go to work on consuming your remains.

2006-12-25T22:01:00.000-05:00

Playing the old games

In the last few days I've been playing an old Gamecube game I bought about three years ago. It's called F-Zero and it's an absolute blast, one of the fastese games I've ever seen, but very very difficult to play right. Over the years it's been a game I've played hard for a few weeks then hit a wall where I just couldn't get any further and set it aside, but somehow each time I've come back to it, I've improved. What a great design this game has, that it actually teaches you to get better over time, while still keeping some parts of itself just out of reach, enough to keep you trying to accomplish all the goals you can.

I think it is rare to find a game that does this. I own, or have seen, many games that "feature" hidden items/levels/characters and turn into a "collect them all" splurge that is usually boring. Wiser game designers than me have spent a lot of time and money trying to find what keeps people playing certain games over and over again (F-Zero, Advance Wars, Mario Kart DS) and getting bored with others, but there's no formula that guarantees an interesting experience.

I think what I most enjoy is games where you are NOT forced to replay long sections of the game (where long means > 1 minute of content) if you've made some mistake, or lost a life. If I make a mistake in any of the games I've mentioned above, I have a feeling that if I try really hard on the next few turns, I might be able to make up the time I lost. It's a small point, but clearly it has worked on me. Actually F-Zero is a bit of a counter-point to that, because when you are racing unfamiliar tracks, or racing on higher difficulty levels, it can really kick you in the teeth.

So, after three years of playing it on and off, I've finally beaten all four grand-prixs on "master" difficulty, and unlocked the final set of hidden tracks. I also raced several of the tracks in "time attack" mode where you just try and go round faster than your previous best time, and set a whole lot of new record times, including some tracks I've been trying to improve on for over a year - suddenly tonight it all seemed quite easy. It's twitch-racing at its finest.

All that is left is the absolutely terrifying "story" mode, where you have to accomplish several seemingly impossible tasks in a pre-built ship (in the rest of the game you can build your own). I'm playing these on the easiest difficulty level and they are still kicking the crap out of me! The real kicker is you just know there's raftloads of 14 year olds out there that can do these missions blindfolded!

I hope everyone had a good Xmas day. Patch and I went over to a friend's house for lunch and to let his daughter's see what it is like to have a real dog in the house. Apparently this was a test for them to see if they'd handle it well, and I think they were very good to him. He got a lot of attention from all the guests, some nice leftovers and a couple of "doggie icecreams".

2006-11-14T08:46:00.000-05:00

Stupid Galactica
I was mostly enjoying the new TV show Battlestar Galactica, but the last episode was full of really lame writing. You can throw the money you want at a show but if the story is bad, if the characters and their actions are not believable then it's just a kids show with better effects (and that's probably an insult to kids).

Spoilers ahead, so bug out if you want to remain pure.

Two incidents jumped out at me, the first was minor, the second major. Firstly when the troops boarded the crippled Cylon base-star and began finding dead Cylons lying around they asked each other "what happened here!?" a BUNCH of times. When some of the Cylons began waking up, coughing and spluttering, staggering around, they asked a lot of "what's going on!?" AGAIN. Not one of them said "maybe they're sick" and when the word "disease" was spoken by one of the Cylons, they all seemed really, really surprised. These are not rocket scientists and I'm going to remember their inability to spot the damned obvious later on. It surprise me that they didn't go aboard with breathing gear and biosuits etc, given that SOMETHING had crippled a base-star and disease was a possibility. If Galactica doesn't carry any, which is certainly possible, or bio-gear isn't part of standard procedure when heading into an unknown area (hello Trek!) then I expect our dumb heros to stumble into more situations like this in future.

The real stinker, though, was the lame-ass death of the Cylon prisoners at the end. If you were in charge of a plan that could end the war with one action, wouldn't you protect every part of that plan? But no....lets leave 5 Cylon prisoners that we NEED to be alive, alone in a room that any morally confused crewman can access. This was a Rumsfeld-level of dumbness and I think Adama should hire a 5-year old child to provide Planning Oversight. Also, why did the prisoners not have guns to their heads at the second the fleet jumped into range of the Resurrection ship? Why the minute-long walk by the soldiers TO the unsupervised prisoners? In that minute, a lot could have gone wrong with the fleet being attacked by Cylons.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. This crap would never have happened on Babylon 5, which is back in production, thank goodness.

Oh, and Helo's moral dilemma with wiping out the Cylons with biological warfare? STFU Donny, you're out of your league. You don't compromise with wiping out an enemy that IS all military and has no "civilian" population. You don't relent against an enemy that has killed 99.99% of humanity and shows no signs of wanting to spare the remaining 50 000 people left alive. They're not human, they're your enemy. And by the way any comparison to terrorism and meatspace politics are null and void: terrorists may be psycho, but they live in and among civilian populations. You can't "kill 'em all and let God sort them out" - it's morally wrong when you can't tell them apart from non-combatants. But Cylons are all fair game and so far I've not seen anything from the writers of this show to change my mind.

2006-11-11T15:02:00.000-05:00

Reality Pushes Back
The 2006 elections are over and the Democrats won, thank goodness. I've lived in the USA since 2000 and it was kind of depressing to see how the whole country, especially the media, had been hoodwinked by the Republican party. The distortions and half-truths were instantly and uncritically parroted by most of the news shows, and Republican "framing" was the status quo on all discussions. This is well documented at a site called Media Matters and I'd urge you to read it; I also hope they continue their work even if the target is a Democrat, because in government (not politics, but GOVERNMENT), nothing matters more than a full accounting of all the facts and evaluating them with a mind to bringing the most happiness to the most people.

"Reality pushes back" is a favourite phrase of mine. It means that you can only lie about the facts in a given situation for so long, before reality pops your bubble. Any example you can think of where someone lies, or tells half the story on any subject, is prone to having the truth revealed, because facts never stay hidden for long. The Republicans used this tactic on a wide range of subjects: fear, gay marriage, terrorism, the intentions of the Democrats and I was surprised that they were able to use it for so long. "Gay marriage will destroy traditional marriage!" they cried, hoping nobody would notice that many other countries around the world allow it and are doing just fine. The state of Massachussetts has allowed it since 2004 and the hyperbolic claims of looming disaster have obviously failed to materialize. Remember, if you make a ridiculously overblown claim that fails to come true, *someone* is going to notice and remember that you are not to be listened to. Slowly but surely this is becoming a non-issue for many people, especially the young. In 50 years time it'll be as un-remarked as interracial marriage is today.

Reality has pushed back on a grand scale, with the Republicans attempts to scare the populace into trusting ONLY them fell on deaf ears. Their loud and repeated claims of impending disaster should the Democrats take power USED to work, but enough people looked at their track record and came to the conclusion that the Republicans have had 5 years of screwing up everything they touched, putting party before country, making decisions based on ideology instead of facts and REAL expert advice, and therefore their attempts to put words in other people's mouths should be ignored. And they were.

I hope this horrible flirtation with ideologically-led policy making will be seen as a historical anomaly, and taught in civics classes as a warning to future generations about what happens when critical thinking is under-utilized, when a party appeals to fear and abuses power and leads the country astray. Even if someone else dares to try it, I hope they get smacked down a lot quicker than the current adminstration was, which is STILL trying to get around the U.S Constitution (see their warrantless domestic surveillance program).

Whew, ok, I feel a lot better :) I didn't really used to be interested in politics but when I see a government so disdainful of reality it makes my blood boil. And if you only have time to read one blog about American government, make it Glenn Greenwald's work. His clarity and passion are a sight to behold. And if you really like it, kick him a few bucks to help him keep going - the ideas he examines and discusses are the kind of thing that fortify your political mind and help you spot bad ideas when you see them.

2006-10-28T07:42:00.000-04:00

I took Patch for a walk around the lake yesterday and this hawk landed near us just as I left the house. I only had the shorter of my zoom lenses mounted so it was lucky that it was quite a confident bird, letting me walk pretty close to it to take these pictures.

Yes, that's a snake it is holding in its claws! Is this an omen, or what?!

2006-10-27T20:03:00.000-04:00

Contemporary Music

I've been watching "Leaving Home", history of 20th century orchestral music, hosted by Sir Simon Rattle. It's a very interesting tour through the forces that have shaped contemporary music, but even though I've got quite a well-trained ear, this stuff is quite hard to listen to, and very difficult to enjoy in the traditional sense that we "enjoy" music. I'm not going to be whistling the tunes anytime soon, so is it any good?

I'm in two minds about it, but in the end I fall on the side of "No, it isn't." For the sake of efficiency you simply have to establish some kind of criteria, if only for your own sanity, as to what music is good and what is bad, otherwise you'll end up supporting every useless collection of notes somebody writes and claims is An Important Musical Statement. The obvious next question is "so who decides what is good and what is bad?" And then you're going to be lost in a sea of answers from every corner of the room.

I, for example, especially like Tchaikovsky and Debussy, and after that it mostly goes a bit too strange and angular for my tastes. I could live without most of what Mozart wrote, and the less Handel I hear, the better. I like ambient electronic music such as Brian Eno and Peter Namlook and I *know* other people can't understand why I'd listen to such droning rubbish. But Eno and Namlook sell a lot of records and, I think, keep themselves in business, whereas a lot of modern music has to be subsidised to keep it alive. The phrase "arts funding" raises a lot of heated arguments about the purity of modern art vs. using the public purse for music that doesn't stand on its own while the hospitals need kidney machines.

There's no easy answer, and I'm certainly not going to solve it, but I wanted to note that some art dies. Yes, it's sad, but while every form of human artistic expression has the right to exist, not all of it has to be displayed or played more than once. It's important, I think, that as much of it be preserved as is possible especially since it's so easy now to record and store music and pictures.

I suppose, in the end, history will be the judge. While every artistic thought and deed can be recorded more cheaply than ever in history, our descendants will be the judges over what gets played in their concert halls, displayed in their galleries, or left in the archives, no matter if it was popular or even noticed when it was first created.

2006-10-14T07:59:00.000-04:00

The Ferrari In My Dreams
Why would I dream about a sleek, red Ferrari ? Is there such a thing as a "Ferrari 16E", and does it really only cost $16K? It was all through my dreams last night, zipping around tightly forested mountain curves, parking in well-guarded lots and taking me to a concert by The Church in Malta (now I *know* it's a dream!) where the band dressed all in black and engaged in strange choreography and sang songs more random than usual.

I'm not a car person; I drive a Saturn SL2 that is cheap, reliable and I'm told is quite dull as cars go. "But a car is just an air conditioner on wheels!" I reply, while my subconscious dreams of a better ride with the top down. I note that the dream did touch upon one real aspect of my waking life...it's cheap :) I've been on a money kick lately, saving money where I can, cooking for myself at home, watching the stock market and my 401K and investing at Prosper.com just to see if it works.

Prosper is a person-to-person lending site, where a borrower explains how much they need and tries to find people willing to loan to them. Lots of lenders each kick in at least $50 and the interest rate (measured as simple, not compound) is slowly bid down and down until a comfort level is reached that both sides are happy with. People with great credit scores usually get around 9-10%, high risk people around 29% *if* they get funded at all. My 10 loans should average around 17% compounded ROI, including the risk that some will default on the loan. I started a month ago and the two loans who's first payment was due today have both done so. It's all about finding people who's credit is bad because of past mistakes but who's life is now in an upswing. Good job, paying their bills and debts and they're using prosper to cut the size of those bills down. My brother is trying it too.

I'm resurrecting Mercury MailRoom, my shareware program, by dropping the price to $20 - maybe some interest will arise this time. And I've added advertising to my Church site - its on track to making about $5/mth at the moment.

BTW The image is a fractal I created with Ultrafractal - image source available on request.

2006-10-13T16:54:00.000-04:00

Google Buys YouTube

Opportunity to share ad revenue?

I find it very interesting that the immediate reaction in a lot of the blogs/news sites I read is to comment that copyright issues are going to kill YouTube. I wonder, though, might not the large media corporations see this as an opportunity to collect some money instead of just whacking another mole?

Why doesn't Google just pay the copyright owner a portion (presumably a BIG portion) of the advertising money garnered from each page that shows content owned by that corporation? I know there'd be some "edge" cases where this is unclear, such a remixes/mashups etc, but there's a lot of videos on YouTube that are straight video and audio captures of a TV show or movie. That seems a clear cut case.

I'd like Fair Use to be remember, of course. A short excerpt from a film or tv show should be seen as PROMOTION of that show. If the poster links to some official site for that show, shouldn't that be good enough to make everyone happy?

Sadly, media corporations haven't been paragons of lateral thinking thus far. They still think DRM is a good idea (it isn't) and seem hell-bent on controlling every machine that might play their content, even if it kills demand for it. I don't see Blu-Ray and HD-DVD flying off the shelves, do you?

2006-08-29T18:29:00.000-04:00

Waiting for the Storm
It's a quiet day today, sitting in the house waiting for Tropical Storm Ernesto to come and visit. The airconditioner's dull perpetual roar, and the first Jack Frost album are the only sounds I've heard for the last hour; the storm is slower than expected and leaves me sitting on the couch wondering if I'll make a dash to a restaurant or get started in thick rain that's too dangerous to drive in.

Truth be told, this storm is a damp squib. Deanne and I have sat through hurricanes that meant business, category 3/4 monsters that whipped our 40-foot tall palm trees around like rag dolls. Ernesto doesn't look like it'll reach cat 1 (73 mph), so our day off work tomorrow might be cancelled and we'll be back at our desks. Contrast that the to the stomping our office got two years ago when power was down for days. So I've left the storm shutters off the windows and the large plant pots sit unsheltered in the back yard. I'm daring the storm to try picking one of them up. It's easy to be cocky when you've got several billion dollars of weather prediction satellites on your side. Without it I'd be standing at attention with mop and bucket in hand, ready to take on the rising or falling waters.

I watched a movie, began typing up a photocopied Jack Frost interview for Shadow Cabinet and did a little work this morning. I think I'll walk Patch before the storm gets here; the house will shrug off a 60 mph storm, but it'd be hard to have his nightly walk in it!

Update Next Day: The storm didnt strengthen between Cuba and Florida, so it arrived quite weak. The furniture in the backyard didn't even move :)

2006-08-24T15:56:00.000-04:00

My Problems With Planet Earth

There are two senses in which the above title applies, and both came to the fore yesterday when all my appliances revolted and I watched two episodes of the BBC documentary series "Planet Earth".

First the documentary: I have always enjoyed a good documentary film, especially when it teaches the viewer something new. I used to love astronomy/cosmology documentaries until they started to fill them with flashy graphics instead of good information. They seemed to think you'd learn more by watching long segments of flashy computer-rendered "exciting" scenes, rather than perhaps a still image with someone explaining it. There are exceptions, of course: I really liked the four-part "Origins" program hosted by Neil Tyson on Nova, but the new Planet Earth series has really let me down so far.

I've watched the first three episodes and it seems to be a series of random "watch the predator eat its pitiful prey" and "here's some majestic footage of mountains and Big Impressive Things with an orchestra to remind you how moving it all is." I can go along with a few shots like that, but the whole program was a series of these, one straight after the other, with no connective tissue, no discussion of evolution/history/ecology to tie it all together. Perhaps they'll talk more about it later, but it really got obvious after a while that they were more concerned with showing off their flashy helicopter-based aerial shots, their expensive orchestra with overworked French Horns, and how well they can write ominous sounding music for the numerous scenes where the Bad Ol' Predator sneaks up on its doe-eyed Bambi-like lunch. Carnivores have to eat too, dammit, and film-makers should have more creativity than playing "Jaws" sound-alikes over every scene where something eats something else.

A missed opportunity, to my mind, in a world where evolution still needs all the good explanations it can get, to help people understand why the world is the way it is. Nature is not just a series of photo ops and "cool" spectacles, there's a lot to learn about life in there, if they'd care to discuss it.

As for the appliances, well, it's just the usual modern litany of a day when everything went wrong. As of last night I was combatting problems with my laptop, my computer, the garbage disposal, one of our cars, Bellsouth and their misleading sales reps, insurance agents (two of them) and landscaping contractors.

Just another day on Earth, as Brian Eno says.

2006-07-07T20:53:00.000-04:00

Back From Baton Rouge
I spent most of this week in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for a business trip. As I do for most of these I didn't get out much, except down the road for dinner at Applebee's and two very nice lunches with the people I was there to see. Some people I know make it point to go out and see the city at night whereever they are, but I prefer to stay in, watch a little TV and get to sleep early.

I hate being bored so when I travel I always have my MP3 player and Nintendo DS with me so that I'll always have something to keep me busy or distracted, and of course I make sure I have a book for the twenty minutes or so during which you can't use electronics on a plane. The book of the moment is Garrison Keilor's Lake Wobegon Days, which you'll be pleased to hear has not a single spaceship in it. The favoured game is Advance Wars DS, a military strategy game in which I always win because I'm using a character that I've built up so strongly that I can't lose...and I like it that way :)

During the flight on the way home I was on a plane that had a screen built into the back of every seat, and besides having television shows there were several games you could play. I went straight for the trivia game, which you play against other passengers. It was great :) I played 5 games of 20 questions each. I won two of them and came second in the other three. I've always been a "general knowledge" buff - some facts just seem to stick to my memory. When I was a boy I loved getting books with titles like "Big Book of Facts", and in later life I'd sit with box of Trivial Pursuit cards and just read them for fun.

So it'll be no surprise that I got onto a couple of quiz shows when I lived in Australia: Crossfire and Sale of the Century. I won Crossfire, taking home about ten thousand dollars of stuff, and won one night of Sale of the Century, only to lose right away on the following night. I hope my memory keeps working this way - it just feels good to have a raftload of useless facts at my disposal...I think it'd feel weird not to know that the WW II surrender was signed aboard the U.S battleship Missouri. That little factoid was worth five thousand bucks :)

2006-07-01T10:22:00.000-04:00

There's a 40% chance of the Space Shuttle being launched today so I'm going to drive up there and take a look-see. I found directions to Spaceview Park in Titusville and if my luck holds out I'll see a shuttle launch! I've always been a spaceflight fanboy, though the plan announced by President Bush to return to the moon and then proceed to Mars left me strangely cold. This man shows no interest in science during most of his waking hours and this really looked like a stunt. Plus NASA has had to cancel a lot of science missions to the outer planets. Still, I've been in Florida for nearly four years and still haven't even visited Cape Caneveral; very remiss of me! I'll come back with pictures if there's a launch.

Update: It launched three days later, on July 4th, while I was in Lousiana, but while trolling around the net I found these amazing pictures of a shuttle photographed from a U-2 spy plane flying high overhead.

2006-05-28T14:35:00.000-04:00

I was fortunate enough to have a very nice article written about me in our newspaper! You can read the whole thing here if you'd like. Update A couple of weeks later a local frame shop (The Great Frame Up) that had framed a lot of art for me wrote me a note and said they'd like to frame this article for me, for free! What a nice surprise!

2006-05-20T16:37:00.000-04:00

For the past month or so I've been taking pictures at our local dog park, then cleaning them up with the excellent (and free!) Picasa program, then printing the best pictures and giving them to the dog's owners. It's been a great way to meet new people at the park and everyone has been very happy with the pictures, which in turn makes me feel talented, so everybody wins :)

If you've got a good digital camera and some skills and time on your hands I'd urge you to do this for your friends at the park. You can see more of my pictures at my flickr photo stream.

2006-05-14T10:09:00.000-04:00

I took these pictures during rehearsal last night, partly because I wanted to test out a new lens I'd bought. It's a Canon fixed 50mm, f1.8 and I'm very glad I bought it. I was able to take these shots at 1/50th to 1/90th of a second in available light, and when I tried switching back to my 28-105mm zoom lens I got readings of between 1/5th and 1/20th of second, which is unsuitable for handheld shooting. The only trouble came when I needed to take flash pictures of a group larger than three or four people; I had to stand so far back with the fixed 50mm view that the flash didn't reach them properly and the shot was quite dark. But for available light, the "nifty fifty" is a winner. And it's only around $70-$80.

2006-05-14T09:55:00.000-04:00

And I'm back! It's been a hectic few months when I didn't really feel like writing much, but I've had so many interesting experiences lately that I couldn't stay away.

I'll start with the snappy picture on the right. You can see I'm playing the trumpet again; I joined a community band in the area called the Symphonic Band of the Palm Beaches, a very nice and talented group of musicians. I'm standing next to Maestro Loras Schissel, a guest conductor who visited us for our Memorial Day concert, and in just two rehearsals really fine-tuned our playing.

He told me that because he has such a short time to rehearse a band he'll try and keep the band playing, while calling out his instructions over the top of the sound, like a record producer making adjustments in a studio. He's a world-renowned expert on the music of John Phillip Sousa, the"March King", and corrected a lot of common mistakes we made with the music.

The best part, though, was the two concerts we played, where all the pieces were preceded with a story about the music, or the composer, or getting the audience to sing along, or getting audience members who had served in the armed forces to stand up and be recgonized when the tune of their branch was played during our "Armed Forces Salute". I don't think there was a dull moment in the whole program, and we got 3 standing ovations before we'd even reached the finale and encores! It was a very rousing and emotional night, so thank you Loras, George and Jim for putting together such a fine program.

2005-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00

My Favourite Podcasts

By now you probably have an portable MP3 player of your own, and if not then you at least can listen to them on the computer you're using to read this. In addition to the great convenience of having acres of music at your fingertips, there's something else you can do with it: listen to podcasts. Podcasts are like short radio shows that are downloaded to your computer at regular intervals. I've tried a few and wanted to recommend a couple.

The best one so far is NPR's "Story of the Day" (http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/), which is on that page near the bottom under the "People and Places" group. It has the best story broadcast that day on National Public Radio in the USA and is always interesting. There are lots of other programs listed there that you might want to try too, but Story of the Day is the best, I think. Deanne and I actually lay down on the couch together and listened to about ten of them in a row. A story from Nov 29, 2005 about a band called "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah" is what inspired this blog posting, actually. It's an excellent story about how Internet exposure took an indie band from nowhere to "choose your record label" in a matter of weeks.

Quirks and Quarks is a science program broadcast on Canadian radio - they take the extra step of dividing each weeks podcast into seperate mp3 files, so you can listen to them one at a time, instead of having to fast-forward through the file each time you have a chance to listen to it. Kudos to them for thinking of that - so far they're the only one I've seen that does that. Look for the "XML Podcast" logo on the right side of the main screen.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporations' "Radio National" offer a lot of their programs as podcasts too; I used to enjoy the Science Show when I was able to catch it, and now I never miss it :)

You can download iPodder, a software program that will help you manage your podcast subscriptions, automatically downloading the programs and deleting the files when you're done with them. Don't be tempted to keep everything you've downloaded; well, I suppose you could burn it to a CD if you really wanted to, but I think its best to treat it like radio: listen to it, then delete it.

It's nice to be able to pop the headphones on, or hook up the mp3 player to the car stereo and hear the best programs from all around the world, in perfect clarity, whenever I'm ready to do so -give it a try :)

2005-11-08T01:29:00.000-05:00

A George Carlin Moment
I just finished watching George Carlin's latest show (?) "Life is worth living", and jeez, it's terrific. His barrage of ideas and framing of our lives seemed to spark a thought in my head, so here goes.

Two major genres of TV shows are filled with content that is opposite to their description. Reality-TV is full of completely artificial situations. In real life nobody is going to be trapped on a desert island with 11 committee-selected individuals with attitude problems, nobody has to eat worms and roaches and nobody has a team of talented homosexuals descend upon their houses to pick out new clothes for them. Reality TV is entirely fictional.

Most of the popular fictional drama shows, however are based on (and this came as quite a shock when I thought about it) REAL FACTS! The murderer is caught by using DNA evidence, the suspect tried by our real courts using real laws. The medical show has more real medical terminology in one hour than I'd hope to encounter in a year, and every week I learn about three new conditions I might have.

If I was actually George Carlin I could think of a witty retort with which to end this little observation, but I'm not and I can't.

2005-11-07T23:21:00.000-05:00

I took a lot of pictures with our new camera, a Digital Rebel XT, over the weekend and the techniques I used got me thinking about the way the very definition of photography has changed...at least for me.

I've always been fascinated by cameras - a Canon EOS 100 was my first major purchase after I started working as a programmer. When I was 14 or 15 I used to get all the free brochures from our camera shop when we lived in Saudi Arabia and read them over and over again, comparing the features on each model. I also read a lot of photography books and I knew all the basics of apertures, film speed and shutter speed before I owned a camera.

The one thing I rarely did was actually take pictures. Film was expensive, developing even more so and there wasn't much scope for experimentation with weird pictures on a budget. So I just kept reading about it, about how to get the image you wanted directly onto the film with the right camera, lens, composition, settings and filters. There was some information about darkroom techniques: basic cropping and composition...changing the image after you'd taken it, but that seemed unlikely to be something I'd get into. Like most keen amateurs I'd be working hard to get good pictures straight onto the film and not worry about modification after the fact.

But the digital camera revolution changed things for me. I can remember the first time I used one. I was at a birthday party (Hi Anestis!) and a friend of his brought a small digital camera along. I was asked to take a couple of pictures, and I got such a rush when I snapped a picture, looked at the little screen...and there it was! No guessing, no hoping the light was right...it took the guesswork out of it, and best of all, every picture was FREE! You could take as many as you wanted, weird ones, stupid ones, or whatever and not feel $0.20 leave your pocket with every click.

I was very happy with this whole arrangement for many years, happily using fully automatic cameras that seemed to do the job of taking basic pictures of people, places and things. And all the pictures were well lit, cropped nicely, thanks to free software like Picasa (which I'm even using now to write this post!) As the mega-pixels increased I found that I didn't need to zoom in as far - I could just crop a generously wide image down to the interesting bit and still have enough detail to make it look good. The software made it easy to take a competently taken picture and make it look terrific. Final images that would have taken a lot of training and darkroom skills were a mouse-click away.

It seemed a shame all that stuff I'd learned about manual control of photography wasn't being used...but this weekend I found a good use for it! The Rebel XT has several manual modes and, while you can use it in "point 'n' shoot" mode you'd better stay in good light and not try anything too fancy. If you want to take pictures under a range of conditions though, you'll need to understand how a camera works, because the rules are the same as they were a hundred years ago. The XT will tell you if areas of the pictures are overexposed - they've gone "flat white", containing no information, and if you try to darken the image or process it in some way, that area of the picture will immediately reveal it was a bad source image. You need to make sure the source image is just right if you want to have the software produce a beautiful final image. I think that's a lovely synthesis of the skills I learned as a kid with his camera brochures and "How To Take Pictures" library book, and the adult I've become who loves what software (and some money!) lets us do.

2005-11-05T20:50:00.000-05:00

I had a really nice day today, waking up late after the lovely night out with Rob, Harper, his brother Daniel and sister Lisa. We went out for drinks, air hockey, music and pool. I found a South Park pinball table with a game ready to go, something I used to REALLY hope I'd found when I was a youngster with only one 10p piece to spend, and this machine was very good to me: I got a multiball and a replay on the very first ball. Second ball disappeared in mere seconds, and the third was so-so. I gave the replay to Lisa, to make up for playing air-hockey like a maniac :)

I had a little drive around Wilmington this afternoon, then drove down to the beach to take some pictures. You can see them at my Flickr account. I'd passed a restaurant called the Portland Grill earlier, on my way to the beach, that looked good so I returned there for an incredibly good meal: a "Shepherd's Pie of Duck", which used mashed vegetables instead of mashed potatoes, and duck instead of ground beef. I followed that with, rather unusual, roast antelope (it came from here) with veggies, sausage and sliced pear on a pumpkin compote. Sounds weird, I know, but it was unbelievably tasty. Some ice cream to finish and I was done. I'm flying back home tomorrow; it'll be good to be home, but I've really enjoyed my trip up here, especially glad to have met Robert and his family.

2005-11-03T13:02:00.000-05:00

Wilmington, North Carolina
I'm visiting my friend Robert Lurie for the first time, on the occasion of the first public reading from his biography of Steve Kilbey, the lead singer of The Church. I've run Shadow Cabinet, a fan site for the band, since 1995 and been a fan for many more years. During all that time there hasn't been a single book about the band or its members, so fans who wanted to know the band better (whether the band wanted it or not!) had to rely on collections of interviews, such as the hundreds I collected for the Shadow Cabinet website.

But many of those interviews cover the same ground over and over again and leave one hoping for a more in-depth work. Then Robert Lurie comes along and just does it! The project was done for his Masters degree, and will also be sold to the public, with the possibility of more books to come. He interviewed Steve many, many times and let me be among the first to thank Steve for participating in a project that will make a lot of people very happy.

So I flew in to Wilmington last night and will spend this afternoon typing up some relevant items for Robert to look at. I love hotels with free wireless Internet access!

Spring Water

2005-10-30T10:49:00.000-05:00

Spring Water
Originally uploaded by sirenbrian.

I took this photo in Saratoga at one of the many natural springs there. This one actually tasted OK, but another one we tried was really awful :) !

2005-10-30T10:40:00.000-05:00

I've switched my picture hosting from Buzznet to Flickr, simply because flickr seems to have won the battle. Buzznet was nice, but flickr has so much more traffic; using bloglines.com I've set up RSS feeds which get new pictures of "great dane", "melbourne" and "malta" every day from buzznet and from flickr. The buzznet stream hardly ever has pictures, while flickr can have a couple of hundred!

I've imported all my old pictures and posted some new ones, mostly taken during the recent hurricane. Look on the right side of this page and click on the link to see what other photos I've taken.

Work finally has their power back so we'll be back in the office on Monday.

2005-10-25T10:23:00.000-04:00

The house is in good condition and our power is back on! The back gate got blown off its hinges, a few roof tiles slid off and some of our trees are looking a bit sorry for themselves, but otherwise we're unscathed.

Actually this storm gave us a soft landing, because the temperature after the hurricane passed was a very pleasant 70 degrees fahrenheit, which is the coldest its been since last winter! While the power was off we read, listened to music on Deanne's iPod and battery-powered travel speakers, I played games on my Nintendo DS in a room lit by about 30 candles. Around 10pm Deanne called me outside to see the sky; it was a spectacularly clear and starry night, so we went for a little walk with Patch and looked for satellites. During the night the power came back on and things are very close to what passes for normal :)

Pictures later on, after we've cleared out the fridge and freezer.

2005-10-24T09:47:00.000-04:00

Hurricane Part Two
It's about 9:30am and the wind has really whipped up. We were woken up about an hour ago by the peaks in the wind; you know how you can ignore wind up to a certain speed and pitch, but something in your brain says "worry" when the speed peaks. I kept opening one eye to see if the bedroom fan was still spinning, indicating our power was still on. So far its flickered once or twice, but it's still here. The TV is out but the good ol' Internet is hanging on!

No damage or leaks in the house yet, which is great news. We'll have some breakfast and keep an eye on things. I read the *real* hurricane will pass over West Palm Beach from 10am till about 2pm, so things may crank up a little more, and I may yet get to see a hurricane eye.

2005-10-23T16:45:00.000-04:00

Hurricane Diary Part One
If any of my family and friends are reading this to see how we cope with the storm, I suppose I'd better write something or they'll think I've been washed out to sea! Deanne and I are urgently ('pass the wine') attending to the important business of securing ('and the cheetos') our house. A trip to Home Depot and ('how about a foot rub?') the supermarket for sensible, solid supplies ('Where's my copy of "20 More Things to do in an Inflatable Raft"?') mean that we're ready for the storm.

Seriously though, it's a tiddler compared with the Category 3 storms that hit us last year. It'll probably come ashore as a Cat 2 and weaken as it crosses the state. I don't know anyone that is evacuating the area, and we get two days off work, so we're going to catch up on paperwork, footrubs etc.

In other news, we hired a public insurance adjuster to represent us when dealing with our insurance company. We're still waiting for a decision on LAST year's storm damage, and it seems that being patient and believing their representatives when they say "We'll take care of it this week" over and over again...well, it gets you nowhere. I hate being a noisy, angry customer, especially when I don't think it actually accomplishes anything...shouldn't being a nice person get you better treatment? Apparently not. So our guy is a Paperwork Judo afficionado and says things will move along smoothly from now on, which is a great relief.

There's a good breeze outside, but the main event is about 24 hours away. I'll keep posting as long as the power stays on.

2005-09-17T21:44:00.000-04:00

My stack of home video tapes are up to almost eleven years old, so I figured I should try and digitize them before they become unusable, and that precious footage of times past is gone forever. Of course I'd forgotten that I was in a Mad Beard phase when I started filming this and that, so there's some cringe-worthy moments to be seen. This stuff hasn't really been watched for a very long time, so it's a real pleasure, unfortunate facial hair aside, to see it again. This is me in October 1994 on Rye Beach, near Melbourne, where my parents, myself and girlfriend Kate went for an afternoon picnic. It's also the place where I filmed the end of my mum's nose moving when she talks, just to prove to her that it does, in fact, do so. The word "seven" got the biggest proboscal deflection :)

The other picture is of Simon Borda and myself - he used to be married to my cousin Marthese. Its nice to see I trimmed the beard for the party :) I had a beard for many years, though I can see why my wife very insistently says NO when I suggest growing it back again - firstly it doesn't grow evenly enough, and secondly I'd be terrible at maintaining it and soon look like a hermit again.

The process of getting these tapes saved is, as usual, a friggin' nightmare of incompatible cables, dodgy hardware and dying appliances. The video capture card was unseated in its PCI slot and thus refused to even show up as being installed in the PC. Opening up the PC to fix this led to a half-day crusade of wire untangling, USB hub replacing (three stops to find what I wanted, a seven port one), a VCR with a dodgy loading mechanism that now refuses to eject the tape. My 8mm tapes will play in my camcorder, but since I can't connect it directly to the PC I need to go via the VCR's line in, but it is so paralyzed with fear about the stuck tape, I can't even get it to change channels.

So the VCR will be taken to the repair shop on Monday, I'll buy an adapter so I can handle the 8mm tapes, then I'm buying a bloody digital video camera! Goodbye analog!

2005-09-09T17:36:00.000-04:00

My friend Daniel, in a successful attempt to get me back on the web, challenged me to do the "Five Favourite Tracks" thing; so here's my choices:

Kings - The Church: This one is from the Priest=Aura album, from 1992. Its got a combination of what I love most about the Church: poetic lyrics ("And kings will come/and years will pass/stars burn cold/beneath the glass/and days will glow in distant time/in distorted haze/the zebras graze"), a measured heaviness in the rhythm section, and their trademark jangly guitars.

Othertime - Steve Kilbey: From his Unearthed album (1987), this is my favourite of Steve's "little songs", a short, descriptive, melodic and very singable song.

The Sun and the Rain - Madness: They were my favourite band until I found The Church, but I still love hearing their music: it's very English, a culture I was immersed in for a while as a child. It's an uplifting song that I finding myself quietly singing whenever I get caught in the rain.

2nd half of Before and After Science - Brian Eno: I can't choose just one song from these masterpieces of restraint. "Julie With", "By This River" and "Spider and I" have not one wasted syllable, and Eno's mastery of ambience doesn't need repeating.

Amarok - Mike Oldfield: OK, it's 60 minutes long, but it's still only one track! It's a pain in the ass to fast forward through, but why would you want to? It's a rhythmic, insanely melodic collection of tunes and guitar choppery. Oldfield's best, IMHO.

By the way, Daniel has become a great spokesman for public transport users in Melbourne - I'm proud of you, mate! As many of you know, the USA is not known as a country that values public transport: I hope Melbourne keeps investing in their system, which is (was?) a big part in making Melbourne one of the worlds most liveable cities.

2005-09-09T17:23:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure why I stopped blogging so suddenly, but I think it's time to get back on board. We've just come out of a stressful few months, which sees us still waiting for settlement from the insurance company on damage to our house from last year's hurricanes. Also Deanne's car was in an accident and sat for about 6 weeks at the body shop before they even started work on it. After some yelling they agreed to rent a car for us, and it should be finished "any day now." We'll probably sell it right away, I think.

On a more positive note I've taken up archery as a hobby. It's a lot of fun and has put a bit of muscle on me! When I got started I had trouble pulling the bow back after just a few shots, but I can now get through a set of 50 arrows fairly easily. We meet at an indoor range called "Gators 'n Guns" every Monday night and shoot over a twenty yard range. I'm the only one there who doesn't also hunt for real; I'm just there for the exercise and trying to improve my aim. I'll take some pictures and post them here.

Work is going well - we just installed a new version of our Release of Information software at three hospitals, the highlight of which was spending a weekend in Las Vegas before the L.A install. I did something I'd always wanted to do: play craps in a Vegas casino! I gave myself a budget, which I stuck to, and though I ended up losing it all, I had a couple of streaks where I doubled my stake in short order. It's a good game to play once or twice, but, like all casino games, the odds are against you. I'll stick with playing it on my Nintendo DS from now on.

2005-05-12T22:17:00.000-04:00

Hey there! Long time no see - I've been quiet for a while, but its been an eventful couple of months. We sold our house back in Australia, we're still talking with the insurance company here in Florida about the damage to our house from the hurricanes in September and my main computer just refused to boot up - I think its because of all the dust inside. So it's time to buy a new case and transfer the guts into a nice new dust-free and SEALED home.

For some reason I felt like buying some original art. We have some posters on the wall, but its not the same as having something unique, something original, so I got onto eBay and took a look at drawings and paintings. It's been great so far! My favourites are ink drawings by a guy called Kenneth Eccles, who makes exquisite line drawings. I've bought lots (more than a dozen!) of small ones and two large ones, and I was so pleased with them that I rushed out and got four of them framed. I really like seeing art that is clear (as in "I can see every line he's drawn) but still produces a nice image with different textures and "feels". It's hard to describe why you like something, isn't it?

I got a call from Keith, my brother, and we chatted about Tivo, Bittorrent, Java, Azureus, Firefox...jeez, what a couple of geeks :) Hopefully Deanne and I will be going up to Jersey for a visit some upcoming weekend.

2005-03-08T23:11:00.000-05:00

Patch bounced around the park on Saturday afternoon. Keith got the dog's website working again and all is generally happy and good with the world. Deanne and I have decided to sell our house in Australia and after just a few days I think we have a sale! The paperwork wasn't quite ready for a buyer to arrive yet, but we've got a verbal agreement so it's pretty much a done deal. For the first time in 5 years we'll be without a financial tie to Australia.

In other, slightly geekier, news, I've been working on a mashup of Church songs. I've mixed together samples from 15 songs by The Church and I think the result is pretty cool. The band's singer, Steve Kilbey, just auctioned the original notebook in which he worked on the lyrics for their last album, Forget Yourself, and I joined a small group of Church fans who bid on it. We won! Steve gave permission for the book's contents to be scanned and made available on the Shadow Cabinet image gallery, where fans will be able to see the book freely, and perhaps be inspired to work on their own music.

Today I found a very interesting blog that has nothing to do with the usual topics of pet pictures, politics, science fiction or technology. EnglishCut is the blog of one of the famous tailors of London's Saville Row, where some of the world's finest men's suits are made. He talks about the culture of high-end tailors and the work that goes into the suits he makes. Very interesting reading!

2005-02-27T09:08:00.001-05:00

Time for an actual blog entry, I think, rather than picture of our ever-so-cute pets. That said, however, I posted 6 new pictures to my buzznet account...of pets! I took Garibaldi to the vet yesterday - he's developed fuzzy spots on his eyes that had us worried. It turned out they're called "Florida Spots", or "Florida Keratopathy" and luckily for us they are not a threat to his sight or health. The cause is still unknown but is suspected to be a virus and results in small "opacities" or "fuzzy spots" in one or both eyes. They reach a certain size (usually quite small) and just stop; I'm guessing they stop when the cats immune system kicks into gear. The vet told me the only case he saw where the spots continued to spread was in a cat with feline AIDS; he had a weakened immune system and couldn't protect his eyes from the spread of this virus. So if your cat has this condition, make sure its not some other condition, and if not then don't worry about it.

In Babylon 5 news, JMS has just revealed that the planned B5 movie "The Memory of Shadows" is not going into production. Sad, but seemingly inevitable for this brilliant show that just can't catch a break. Crusade was born on the wrong network and got shut down before the first episode aired, Legend of the Rangers' ratings were killed by a football game, the collectible card game got cancelled and the video game got screwed by Sierra-Online. It's weird - there's any number of Star Trek and Star Wars games, B5 makes a huge profit for WB and still it's beaten like a red-headed stepchild.

I've been recording more music over the last few days and learning how to use the software and hardware I bought. I wrote a song called "Civilized", which started out as a merry little ditty called "Tropical", but mutated. I still have more work to do on it, but it sounds quite nice at the moment, IMHO. The lyrics are a sort of paen to the future, urging people to think for themselves and not waste their lives being bound to the superstitions and beliefs of the past. I got a bit upset after watching a documentary on celibacy in the Catholic Church which talked about how in 1139 the church decided that all clergy, not just monks and nuns, had to be celibate? Why? Putting the theological "married to the Church" excuse aside, it was so that thousands upon thousands of clergy would have no heirs and so would pass all their money and land back to the Church when they died. Follow the money and there's your answer, all dressed up in sanctimonious mumbo-jumbo.

I got up earlier than usual for a Sunday morning, so I think it's going to be a very productive day :)

2005-02-13T10:44:00.000-05:00

Wonderdog gallumphs across the sands of Jupiter Beach.

2005-02-13T10:43:00.000-05:00

Patch bounding around

2005-02-13T10:42:00.000-05:00

I like this one - looks like a courtly ritual of some kind. Actually it was just the little one inviting Patch to chase her.

2005-02-13T10:41:00.000-05:00

When Patch gets in close, it can be a bit scary for a little dog to see!

2005-02-13T10:40:00.000-05:00

Patch played with this six month old Labrador puppy for a few minutes.

2005-01-22T15:42:00.000-05:00

Mum and Dad are fostering Harley for a year. She is being specially trained to work for the Australian Customs service, sniffing out drugs in the airport. They have a list of behaviour to encourage, like being comfortable around people, being able to go down slides because she'll be working on luggage ramps a lot and not being taught to sit on command, because she'll be trained later to sit when she smells food in a piece of luggage.

I had a busy, busy morning today, because Deanne is coming back home tonight and I've left most of the errands till the last day again :) I returned some clothes to a store, took our car in for an oil change, got a refund from the Post Office for getting our Xmas presents delivered late, vacuumed the whole house and put laundry away. Then I had some breakfast :) I also have to write an email to the good folks who run The Church's website because they want to make it better but they're not sure how. I'm going to tell them to make the front page be more functional and less "stylish" - a big brown splat is not the way to welcome fans and new listeners to your band's web page, IMHO.

My own Church site, Shadow Cabinet, is coming along nicely. I finally found out how to put a piece of content *before* the news items on the front page, so I can permanently lead with thumbnails of the most recent three (perhaps four ?) albums. I'm also scanning a lot of collectables from my collection into the Image Gallery - my old scanner died an I bought a new one. Just $50 shipped from Amazon and it's doing very nicely so far.

I signed up for photo printing service Shutterfly this morning after realizing that the Kodak camera dock and printer we bought is, you guessed it, extremely expensive to refill. The colour catridge costs $20 for a 40 photo "roll", and you can't "stretch" the use of the cartridge - it actually advances a spool with each print you make, and stops when it reaches 40 prints. That's fifty cents per photo - I can have prints made online for half that cost, so I'm going to try that out.

Lastly I've had a fairly steady nosebleed situation for the last couple of days. I'm not sure what brought it on but I'd better see a doctor about it. It clots fairly quickly, but when the clot comes out the bleeding starts right up again.

2005-01-13T09:15:00.000-05:00

Lots of interesting things have been happening lately, but for some reason I kept putting off blogging about them. I wonder why that is ? I don't have a good answer, but I think it's because my boss at ScriptRX used this blog to make sure I was in Australia when I said I was. This put me off writing or even thinking about blogging for a few weeks. Pretty nasty, I think. Anyway things didn't work out over there and I'm back at DSS.

There's lots of good stuff happening though ! I'm recording more music for the guy at Frightmares, who is planning to put out a DVD of his work ! So my music will, hopefully, be on a DVD for the second time. The second time ? Yes, Curt Stewart is sending crew copies of the DVD of "The Wedge", which also used one of my pieces called "A Good Beginning". You can find it in the "Brian's Music" link on the right side of this page. And as a result of being included on The Wedge, I'm now in the IMDB !

I bought a Zen Touch 40GB which I really like, except for the touch sensitive "slider" on the front, which is too sensitive even at the lowest settings. Shame really, because the price is good (about $310), sound quality is excellent and the battery lasts 24 hours. Deanne got an iPod and some nice travel speakers and she really loves it too. I'm a consciencous objector to joining the iPod Cult who think $250 for a 5GB mp3 player is a good buy. "Ooh, but its got colours ! And white headphone cords !". Sorry, not for me. But the wheely slider on the iPod is easier to use than the vertical slider on the Touch.

And the iTunes software, though a little braindead in some areas, at least does a proper two-way synch with your player. The Creative Labs program is "additive" only, meaning it won't delete anything from your player. So if you, for example, change a filename, or update your ID3 tags, you'll send down a fresh copy of the song to your player, but it won't delete the old one ! I ended up finding an open source program called NomadSync which does the job properly.

I downloaded a pile of free music from Epitonic (especially enjoying The Clientele (Rose, you might really like these guys)) and LegalTorrents. I bought a Clientele CD too, so there's +1 for the value of giving away unencumbered MP3 files for promotional use.

Deanne is in Cleveland, Chicago and Tucson for the next two weeks, so I'm in charge of house maintainance and all that. I already ran a bunch of errands and will be contacting roofers (to fix hurricane damage), taking cars for their 3000 mile services etc. I still have very little patience for these things; I know, I know, they're important, they have to be done, but at least now I can be accompanied by my favourite music everywhere I go.

And watch for the pictures from Titan tomorrow ! If all goes well you can thank Boris Smeds, a man who single-handedly discovered a fault in the communication system between the Titan probe "Huygens" and the Cassini orbiter. If not for him, we'd have nothing from the Titan landing. Engineers rule !

Siesta, by Hellblazer

2004-12-29T11:26:00.000-05:00

Siesta
Originally uploaded by Hellblazer.

I'm going to try using flickr's blog posting service to put someone else's picture in my blog. This is a beautifully Maltese picture; it reminds me of the short time I was able to spend with my grandfather, Arthur Smith, before he passed away when I was four years old. We sat on the steps of his house in Balzan and played, I suppose :) My thanks to Hellblazer for taking and posting this picture.

I've been working hard on the Shadow Cabinet site (http://www.shadowcabinet.net) and I'm quite pleased with it now - it's a fan site for my favourite band and I've learned a lot about content management and also how to use the free software called GIMP for image editing. My fractal explorations are still going strong; there's four new images in the "Brian's Fractals" link on the right side of the page, and I have some more coming.

2004-12-18T10:16:00.000-05:00

Me in front of the Melbourne skyline by the Yarra River.

2004-12-18T10:15:00.000-05:00

The family sings happy birthday to Benjamin - the poor little guy was asleep by the time the cake came out :)

2004-12-18T10:14:00.001-05:00

Mum looks at the *huge* Christmas display my Uncle Percy built in the window of his new house.

2004-12-18T10:14:00.000-05:00

A sparrow eats leftover food

2004-12-18T10:13:00.000-05:00

Mum and I watching Dad do his singing at the Yarraville Pokies Club.

2004-12-18T10:12:00.000-05:00

Me and my dad - he's dressed up to go and do a show.

2004-12-18T10:09:00.000-05:00

Me on the balcony of my parents home.

2004-11-27T18:31:00.000-05:00

I'm In Australia !
Deanne and I decided to surprise my Mum and Dad by sending me on a two week to Australia ! It's just me, though, because Deanne has so much responsibility at work with her promotion to Product Line Manager. I haven't been back home since we emigrated in July 2000, so there will be a lot of catching up to do with friends and family...and lots of baby names to learn !

The trip itself went smoothly, starting with a 5.25AM flight out of Florida, then to LA, then Tokyo, then Melbourne. I had to go via Tokyo because that's all that was available. It wasn't too hard to pass time on the flights - I had two seats to myself on both of the long flights (about 12 hours each) and I had a good book and good movies to watch.

When the taxi dropped me at Mum and Dad's house around 10 AM I left my bags by the front door, knocked, and stepped around the corner. He answered and I waited a few seconds, then slowly stepped out to see his stunned face, mouth wide open. Big hugs and a few tears and laughs later we settled down and had a little drink and waited for Mum to come home from her weekly bridge game. She sometimes goes to lunch afterwards, but thanks to Dad's cousin Rose (who knew I was coming) inviting herself over for lunch she had made sure Mum would be here to see me nice and early.

When she got home and beeped the car horn so Dad would open the garage for her, Dad, Rose and her husband Ray all went outside to say hello. Instead of lifting the door though, Dad just hit it and said "Open Sesame !" She looked at him like he was crazier than usual, but when he hit it again, the door slowly lifted to reveal a set of skinny hairy legs...then khaki shorts...then a blue and white baseball shirt...and then me ! The car lurched forward as she was so shocked that she'd tapped the accelerator instead of the brake !! "Whoah !" says Dad and Mum just stopped the car, got out and gave me a big, big hug. It was really nice to be able to surprise them both - thanks Rose and Ray !

Australia hasn't changed much since I left, of course, but it was interesting to see what I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten. The soft curve of the blue taps in our bathrooms, the earthy, salty smell of the creek behind our house, and how closely packed all the houses are in our suburb. Everything looked a little smaller than I remember too, but it seemed cosy and comfortable to be home again. I'm very happy to be back for a while.

I went back to Westgate Concert Band, a community band that I was involved with for more than ten years. I turned up un-announced, as it gets a good reaction and there were a lot of wide eyes when I walked in. But it got better ! They were just about to rehearse a vocal duet from Phantom of the Opera, "That's All I Ask of You", but the male singer hadn't shown up. No sooner had I sat down to listen to the band rehearse than conductor Roy Hamilton put the music in my hand and said "Can you sing that ?" Wow...two minutes after walking in after four years away, I've got a microphone in hand and warming up to sing a duet ! It went really well, with harmonies and everything - what a great way to walk back into band ! Roy said afterwards he'd just been wishing I was there because it was the kind of song that would suit my voice...and then I walked in :) ! I said hello to everyone afterwards, of course, and played trumpet in the second half of the rehearsal. It's a great feeling to be part of a group again, musically speaking, and I was surprised at how quickly everything came back to me. I'm going again next week and hopefully some of my old friends who weren't there this time will be there.

In the afternoon I helped Dad get set up for his show at the golf club, and met all his friends there - very nice people indeed. He's got a nice setup for doing a show; karaoke machine, speakers, amplifier etc, but Mum and I were feeling too tired to make it to the actual show. But he's doing another one today in Yarraville, so Mum and I will be there for that one. We also stopped by to see my Uncle Percy and Aunt Carmen in their beautiful new house. He's doing a really nice display of Christmas decoration, so watch out for when you drive by !

Lastly I want to thank my wife, Deanne, for her support in getting me to Australia for this visit. She's got a lot to take care of while I'm away and I really appreciate what she's doing for me, Mum and Dad.

I'll start calling some friends today and organizing lunches, dinners and large amounts of drinking (in at least one case) to catch up.

2004-11-10T21:14:00.000-05:00

In front of the Statue of Liberty on a lovely Sunday afternoon. Sadly we couldn't get inside but it was a cool place to be anyway.

As you can see, we spent the weekend in New York. That sounds mighty jet-setting of us, but it actually the first vacation we've had for a couple of years. Deanne needed to be in the city for a day of training this week, so we decided to make some time and went up early to take in the sights and sounds of New York. There are more pictures on my buzznet account (see the "Pictures" area on the right side of the page) if you'd like to see.

It's a great city; you can really feel the energy of the city as you walk around; every shop seemed to be open all the time, and there was a theatre, or skating rink, or outrageously hip and colourful shop around every corner. It's definitely well-suited to using the public transportation system and just plain walking - there's not much parking space available, so you're better off not trying :) The weather was cool enough to let us wear nice jackets, something we can't enjoy in Florida, but not so cold that you wanted to be inside.

We saw a musical called Dracula on Saturday night, visited the Statue of Liberty on Sunday afternoon, dinner in Little Italy, and the Rockettes at Radio City Musical Hall that night. The first show was not really my thing, but the staging was exciting and the guy playing Dracula was excellent. The Rockettes were perfect - a great show for anyone who remembers Christmas as a child sees it.

Personal highlight for me though was seeing Eric Idle of Monty Python ! Yes, he was walking down 6th avenue and I recognized him right away, said "Mr Idle, it's a pleasure to meet you and thank you for everything you've done, I've enjoyed it all." or something like that. He nodded and smiled at me, but didn't stop - he looked like he was hurrying to get somewhere. He's the main force behind the new Holy Grail musical is opening in a couple of months; perhaps he was organizing some aspect of that ?

So there it is, my weekend in New York City - an immense and exciting city.

2004-11-10T21:13:00.000-05:00

Breakdancers in Battery Park. These guys were still going when we got back from our visit to the Statue of Liberty - a long days dancing.

2004-11-10T21:12:00.000-05:00

Times Square advertising

2004-11-04T21:02:00.000-05:00

Election and Horror Music
It's been a heck of a couple of weeks at Casa ClarkSmith. Deanne voted in the election, of course, and waited in line for 7 hours to do it ! She was going to be out of town on the day, Tuesday November 2nd, and Sunday was the only day she could do it. I dropped her off at noon and went to the library; "wait about 90 minutes then come and get me" was the plan. When I returned she had barely moved, so I went home with the promise to return with food at 5 pm when the doors were locked so she could eat something. I came back as promised, got locked in and we didn't leave till 7 pm. The people in line were very nice though and I think they were mostly Kerry supporters. We talked about life, the universe and everything and I spent a lot of time with a lady who is the editor of one of the sections of the Palm Beach Post. She said she'd never met anyone who thought quite like I did :) She's an artist too, so I talked about copyright law, the Creative Commons, Larry Lessig and Janis Ian and I promised to send her an email with more information and links that I find interesting.

Sadly, President Bush was re-elected in a total bloody surprise to me. I have a lot of faith in democracy and for a couple of days it was pretty shaken by the idea that so many people actually believed what this man told them. But after some reflecting I came to the conclusion that he appealed to that part of their minds where facts didn't apply and nebulous things like faith and morality were more important. Oh, and of course its not a secular morality as in "how can we make life better for more of our fellow citizens via healthcare and better wages", but instead the religious morality that is more concerned with "protecting marriage" by making sure gay people don't have the chance to set up a normal life for themselves. And lets ban abortion as soon as we can load the Supreme Court with conservative judges who'll reverse Roe v. Wade."

The silver lining, if there is one, is that President Bush will have to clean up his own mess and can make no excuses for the misery that is to come. It'll be him that history blames; it's just a shame that the massive deficit he's racking up for future generations can't be avoided, just so he can make evangelicals feel good about themselves.

Musically I'm finally getting down to business ! I downloaded the free version of Acid Express to record my keyboard playing and make loops so I didn't need to actually play correctly for more than 30 seconds :) I used Audacity to generate a click track, and sent my client the music he'd asked for; a reworking of "Ghost" without the drum track.

DSS contacted me and asked if I was ready to begin the next phase of the ROI software, which I suspect will be eating up a lot of my evenings and weekends for a while. I said yes, of course, and mentally noted how many projects I'd better finish (like the music above) before I get stuck into it again.

It's dinner time, then I'll go and see if DSS has sent the specifications for the software.

2004-10-30T16:54:00.000-04:00

Hearing The Music Again
It's been a good few days for my music. The nice chaps at frightmarestheseries.com, who are using my piece "Ghost" as their intro and credit music asked if I had any more like it - he said "I recently received an email from someone who really enjoyed the show, and the "sweet-ass sounding theme"!. Sadly I don't, but among my projects-for-the-near-future was the task of getting my recording sessions going again. This seemed like a good opportunity to get started, so I went out and bought a keyboard, microphone and little pre-amp doodad for talking to the computer with and will be doing some recording this week. I hope I like what I produce !

I've also made great progress in getting Shadow Cabinet into its new skin. The Mambo CMS I'm using can be hard to set up; they just changed versions and a lot of the old components don't work any more, but with a few nights work I managed to get it all going. It's nice to be able to load up the content and know that I can change the appearance later on without much work at all. I loaded a lot of the old tour photos in this morning and might be able to publish something in a couple of weeks. I feel like I'm into the fine-tuning part now, though I still can't figure out how the menu system works.

Deanne had a long week in Miami and Boston and is catching up on some sleep right now. I'm going to hook up the 200 GB external drive I bought from newegg.com and start doing regular backups of my whole hard disk - I've put too much time into what's on there to think about starting again !

2004-10-30T16:50:00.000-04:00

I've posted my first diary entry over at geekrant.org entitled "Becoming a Shareware King". I'm going to document the trail of woes as I try and get someone to buy Mercury MailRoom, my lovely, excellent and supremely useful email utility. Why am I (and Shannon !) the only one who thinks so ?

2004-10-26T10:45:00.000-04:00

Segway for only $2488 ! Hmmm.....might have to reach for credit card....

2004-10-26T01:01:00.000-04:00

I've begun work on the rebuild of Shadow Cabinet, my site about The Church. I'm using Mambo, Apache, PHP and MySQL. It took a couple of attempts to get things configured right, but all the bits are talking to each other and I'm converting all the content into a sleek, modern web site. It'll be nice to have everything in a flexible "skinnable" kind of form, where if I don't like how something looks I can just alter the style template behind the scenes without needing to modify hundreds of pages myself; that's probably why the old site got so glacial - it was just too hard to change anything. I'm going to pop over to geekrant.org and start writing this up.

Buzznet has put in a "buzzwords" feature which will shortly allow you to subscribe to a daily dose of pictures by keyword: I've set up my bloglines.com account to search flickr.com (another photoblog site) in the same way, looking for pics of Malta, Great Danes and Melbourne.

Y'know, for someone who still thinks of himself as introverted, I'm bloody not.

2004-10-21T01:22:00.000-04:00

My favourite picture of Marty Willson-Piper, taken at a concert in Melbourne...thinking Churchy thoughts again :)

2004-10-20T23:53:00.000-04:00

Lots to think about doing
Deanne's going to be away for most of the next three weeks, so I'll have plenty of time to make a start on some of those projects I mentioned last time. Thanks to Daniel and Sean for the suggestions about content management systems - I might make a start on a refurb of Shadow Cabinet, my Church web site. Did you know the background on the front page has been there since the first day ? That was in June/July 1995 ! It used to be the only major site with info about the band, but there are many excellent sites out there now, including the band's own official site. But I've still got a good collection of interviews and a lot of photos. I think I'll winnow the site down to just that, and make an "archive" section for the other stuff that was all hand-built that it'd be a shame to lose. I always wanted to make a lyrics page with explanatory notes and discussions about references in the lyrics. A wiki might be just the ticket for that, 'cos I won't have to do any of the work - just make a site available.

I have a box full of Church clippings from Brett Leigh Dicks, who used to be (still is ?) a freelance journalist and gave me his whole collection of Church newspaper clippings. Back when there was literally almost nothing to read about the Church and I was a ravenous fan, this was such a treasure trove. I read most of them, but got lazy and didn't actually type any of them out. A big hello to Brett if he sees this :)

Things are going great at work - I'm almost 100% comfortable with all the stuff I'm in charge of, Patch enjoys going in to the office with me, and I stream the DroneZone all day, which puts him to sleep and me in a working mood ! I've ripped almost all my CDs to this hard disk now, to the extent that it's takes quite a bit of peering at the CD rack to find one I haven't already done. Winamp tells me I have 7201 tracks; about 27 GB of music. It's great to have it all at my fingertips, but it's hard to remember what I wanted to listen to next...I may have to get moodlogic to build some playlists for me.

Oh, and thanks to everyone for the alphagrams (which, it turns, was a bad choice of name for them) - there are several in the comments on the previous postings. I think CAD's is my favourite (Chris, was that you ?), followed by the lawyer one. I'll have to try and write a coherent one myself too !

2004-10-16T11:51:00.000-04:00

I thought this picture of the huskies was really nice - they look almost attentive and obedient, don't they ;) !

I've been using emusic.com a lot this week; they have a lot of ambient/electronic music that I'm interested in and they're even carrying Margot Smith's two albums, which is a good thing. She worked with three members of my favourite band The Church on her "Taste" album but sadly she hasn't put out any more albums since then. They also have several Ashra Tempel albums, who Marty Willson-Piper said are really good. We'll see :) I'm also enjoying Daniel Lanois's "Shine" and Basque's "Falling Forward".

I downloaded the Google desktop, which is such a no-brainer I can't see why Microsoft have not done it. Their file find command in Explorer is *so* slow and inaccurate and there are already so many shareware products that index the content of your hard-drive that it seems very strange for MS not to come out and write their own. Oh well, you snooze you loose.

My friend Daniel Bowen has asked me to start writing a regular diary about my efforts to sell my utterly cool and wonderful program Mercury MailRoom, which so far have yielded zero sales. Doesn't seem like there'd be much to write about, but I have plans...why do all geeks have plans ? My List of Plans is currently as follows:

Try and promote MMR to small businesses that get too much email
Promote MMR to overworked tech support bods in small firms
Following my friend Paul Qualls's advice, promote customized versions of MMR to firms that want it to do something special with their database or whatever. Big bucks
Resurrect my Reptile screensaver and do "something" with it in OpenGL.
Get my home studio working again. Erm...step one should be get a home studio. Need a microphone and good sound card, so I can record more little tunelets.
Learn how to set up a web site that gets its content out of a database. Using all Open Source tools, of course.
Learn how the hell CSS style sheets work.
Learn to use Blender, the free 3d animation and rendering package.
Scan all my old photos into digital loveliness.
Record all my good videos into DVD format. I'll do this when some software comes along that makes it easy to add chapter points on a DVD.
Print out some of the 10 000 digital pictures I have and put them in frames - I love my family, why don't I have more pictures of them ?
Learn to draw - my doodling started to look almost interesting a while ago.
Various home maintenance things too boring to think about :)

So that's all my cunning plans. Not quite Rimmer's "Daily Goal List" (Number 37...learn Portugese) but a nice group of interesting projects.

Hey, here's a new blog meme I'm declaring: write a paragraph where each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Lets call it an alphagraph for easy googling/memetracking later.Here's my alphagraph:

And begin counting down, even following grey housewives into junk-kindled lines made noisy, or perhaps quit. Raise security though under violence we x-ray your zipper.

Tell your friends :)

2004-10-16T11:49:00.000-04:00

The "album cover" pose by Jacob, Brandi and Patch. This was Patch's first trip to the park with other dogs since his spine problem seems to have come under control, and he had a great time :) He's down to one Prednisone pill every three days.

2004-10-14T16:47:00.000-04:00

Venice Window Light

photo by: sirenbrian

I found this while trawling through my photo collection. I took it in 1999 and its in the cathedral in Saint Marco's square in Venice. I remember the floor being really uneven and sort of damaged - it's amazing how much history is left exposed to the elements, but I guess in Venice they don't have much choice.

2004-10-11T01:26:00.000-04:00

I'm a Jingle Writer
Another one of my little tunes is going to be used in someone else's work :) I'm proud to pass on the news that Frightmares will be using my short piece "Ghost" as their intro music and on their credits. I'm very pleased that two people have now found a use for my music, which I was always a bit embarassed at never having fleshed out into longer pieces or perhaps into songs. But maybe I'm good at writing short, punchy pieces :)

You can listen to some of my music by following the "Brian's Music" link on the right.

2004-10-10T11:36:00.000-04:00

Team America
I managed to get tickets to this much-anticipated movie's preview showing last night. It was hilarious ! "I'm Ronery", the musical lament by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il was a classic, as was the dicks, pussies and assholes speech. Its structured exactly like a Hollywood blockbuster with the reluctant hero stepping into a role that holds great fear for him, bonding with the team, facing a setback and reaching eventual triumph etc. It strips bare the formula and shows that most of those films would be comedies if they didn't take themselves so seriously.

It was interesting to see this interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone in which they said they edited the film while they were filming it, which enabled them to alter the script as they went. This makes a lot of sense to me and leads me to wonder why more films aren't made this way. It'd be like me, a programmer, trying to write a whole program without compiling it in small increments as I went. I'd almost certainly miss the mark like Michael Bay did when he made Pearl Harbor :)

So go see this film; you'll laugh, I promise.

2004-10-07T21:44:00.000-04:00

A multi-storey boat shed in Stuart got opened up by the wind.

2004-10-07T21:43:00.000-04:00

This is very close to where Hurricane Jeanne came ashore, and lots of power poles were blown over like this one.

2004-10-07T21:42:00.000-04:00

Patch is feeling much better ! This is an older picture of him, but he could certainly do this if he wanted to :) His pinched nerve in his spine seems to be under control thanks to the Prednisone that he's taking. His dosage is down to one pill every two days and he hasn't had an attack since the one I last wrote about a couple of weeks ago. We're hopeful that the condition won't deteriorate any further and that he'll live many more years without that sort of pain again, though as all big dog owners know, the poor things are just not bred to live a long life.

Life outside of Patch-watching continues unabated. We bought another carpet for the other big room in the house and it really feels warmer and more homely in there. If only the big tv in that room worked, I might actually have something to do in that room ! I called a TV repair place and they said to call back tomorrow to talk to someone who might be able to work on a German television with no repair manual. I also contacted the hurricane insurance people and they'll be sending someone out next week to take a look at the kitchen cabinets, which are smelling a bit moldy now. Hopefully we'll get a new kitchen out of this, which we'd been planning to do anyway. We met a fellow who had put in a new kitchen before the hurricane hit and now had to rip it all out and start again, what terrible luck for him.

I've been reading a few political blogs lately, with the election just around the corner, and find Andrew Sullivan a very interesting read, and the most interesting conspiracy theory I've seen so far is at IsBushWired which asks if President Bush wore an earpiece in some speeches he's given (not such a big deal) and also during the first debate with John Kerry, which would be absolutely shocking if it were true.

2004-09-26T18:30:00.000-04:00

About 8:30 pm, wind around 70-80 mph and things are just getting started.

We survived our second hurricane in three weeks and this time we sat home through it. It made landfall just north of us again, and Jupiter (our town) was right on the southern edge of the eyewall...meaning we didn't get any of the calm of the hurricane eye. At one point I think we caught some gusts over 120 mph from a micro-burst tornado, which form near the eyewall in hurricanes.

It was awesome to hear the power of the wind and see how it shoved the trees around. I took some video and pictures and will share those later on, but I don't know if they captured everything we saw. The sliding doors actually bowed inwards as the wind peaked, like cheeks being puffed up. The huge fronds on our biggest trees being pulled hard in one direction and a split-second later being thrashed hard in the other direction. The smaller palm tree outside our bedroom catching the light in such a way that it looked like a mad scarecrow dancer prancing, yes prancing, and waiting for the window to blow out so it could come in and poop in my shoes.

And poor Patch kept asking to go to the toilet, but of course I wasn't going to let him out in the backyard. I took him to the front door where there was a small area fairly shielded from the wind. I pointed to the spot and told him "come here. go potty" and he stand there, sniff at it, and just look at me. "Go potty", I'd repeat, and the brave guy would start wandering out into the street, which is where he usually goes ! "No ! Patch, come here !" would get him back and I'd try again to get him to use the shielded spot. He just looked at me, then walked behind me and stood against the door. I think he didn't want to use that spot because it was too close to the house. Anyway, we tried this three seperate times and eventually I just waited for a lull and let him into the backyard. I shone the spotlight on a grassy spot near the back door, which he totally ignored and ran around the house to his usual spot. It wasn't much of a lull - the wind was still pretty damned strong and I was worried about him being blown over and hurting his back, but a minute later he came back, tail wagging and his body totally soaked. We dried him off and he flopped back onto his bed and slept well.

We slept around 3 am, got up again around 10 am, and the power came back at 4:40 pm, which is not bad at all; just 22 hours without power.

We had some water drip into the house in about six places, but strategically placed buckets and plastic dishes took care of that. Of course we'll need to get a professional roofer to inspect it and see what kind of damage is under there. Worst case is that the whole roof will need replacing. Another questions is whether this will be covered by the windstorm insurance that we have; they might just say it was a problem with the roof that wasn't actually caused by the hurricane.

So that's our second hurricane experience in a month - I'm glad we stayed home, especially for the pets' sake, but I'm glad its the end of the season :) Thanks to everyone for the kind emails - see you all later !

2004-09-25T01:41:00.000-04:00

doom 3 is way scarier than this hurricane
We've decided to stay home and sit through this hurricane, unless it does something to change our minds in the next 24 hours. It's the same strength as the last one, and seems to be heading even further north (viz. away from us) than Frances did, and since the house came through with no damage at all, we think this is the easiest place to be. Not necessarily the safest - that'd be a couple of hundred miles away, but moving Patch and the cats at such short notice would be tough.

No sales yet on Mercury MailRoom, but I've submitted it to lots of shareware sites and signed up six affiliates, who will take 30% of whatever sales they generate for me. It's an interesting world, this shareware business, with forums full of arguments between vendors (that's me) and affiliates (that's the guys who built sites designed to sell vendor's software) arguing over affiliates "stealing" sales from vendors by offering discounts, or falsely claiming that the vendor's price is higher than it actually is. My program is pretty expensive for a shareware program ($99) and I'm not banking on making a lot of sales to the general public. I'm actually looking for working tech support staff to find it and buy it. When I get into the next phase of promotion I'll be trying to get it in front of such people in a more targetted way; in the meantime I'm just putting it out there and seeing if anything interesting happens.

I just downloaded the Doom 3 demo and fairly shat my pants when the zombies started lurching at me while the lights went out. I tried turning up the brightness level in the game, but it did no good :) They want it dark and shadowy ! Even on my low end video card (FX 5200) it does a very good job of terrifying you. I'm a total wimp when it comes to things like horror movies...why did I think I could handle Doom 3 ? I think I'd better play it during the day (non-hurricane conditions) with the lights on and happy sunshine daisy sunflower bright cheerful posters on the wall. And happy music playing too :)

Speaking of music, I signed up at emusic.com intending to try it and dump it quickly, but I'm very impressed. It's the first online music service that doesn't assume you're a thief who needs to be punished before you've done anything wrong. For $9.99 a month you get to download 40 high quality (192K) mp3 files. That's it. No DRM, no "limited number of burns to CD", no "only plays on an iPod". They're unencumbered mp3s, they're yours forever, even if you cancel the service. There's not a lot of mainstream music on there, but luckily I was looking to beef up my Steeleye Span collection, so this is a good thing for me. They have a wide range of music, editorials etc, so if you're interested in music at all I can recommend it.

I'll be taking video and stuff during the storm, so come back for some choice cuts of real life hardcore weather.

2004-09-23T16:33:00.000-04:00

None for a hundred years, then three come along at the same time !
Hurricane Jeanne looks like it's going to hit us, which is a real drag. If it's less than a category three I think we'll stay home - the house stood up to Frances with no damage at all, and if it's weak enough and moving fast enough we might be better off sitting through this one. But that's not set in stone, of course; we'll see how the storm shapes up.

I've set up a streaming music server on the box at home, so anyone who reads this can take a look through my music and listen to it. Point your music player to http://68.215.39.248:9000/stream.mp3 and you'll hear whatever music the server has been told to play. You can change the music by directing your web browser to http://68.215.39.248:9000/ and using the menus to build a new playlist. I don't know what happens if more than one person tries to change the music at the same time.

Best of all, this is a free program ! Download the server from http://www.slimdevices.com, makers of the Squeezebox, which is a piece of hardware that will hook into this same music stream and plug into your stereo system, and some other stuff too. Look at the bottom right of their screen for the "Slim Server 5" software.

Regnow have done what they need to do in order for me to start selling Mercury Mailroom, so here we go :)

2004-09-22T21:57:00.000-04:00

Working for the men....
Deanne is in Houston this week, and I'm sitting in our quiet living room listening to The Church on my old DSS laptop as I work my second job. We bought a new carpet for this room and it really makes it warm and inviting - we're still looking for a carpet for the other room.

Patch had another attack today, a full-blown fall to the floor howler. He'd been doing really well with no pain for three or four days, but today I walked into my office with my boss, Victor, and though I told Patch to stay on his bed three times, he still got up, walked around Victor's legs a few times and then got hit with the pain. I stroked his ear and petted him while the pain subsided, cleaned the floor where he'd peed a little and put a pillow under his head, but he didn't move from the corner for another three hours when it was time to go home. After this kind of pain if I ask him to stand, he trembles visibly and hangs his head as if he's upset that he's too scared to do what I ask. I always tell him it's OK and he can stay where he is, of course. He's taking 1.5 pills of Prednisone each night, which I stick inside some peanut butter between two small pieces of chocolate - a guaranteed pill delivery system for a Great Dane with sweet tooth :) This medication is supposed to be gradually tapered off though, but he's behind schedule by quite a way. We tried going down to 1 pill per day but his pain was more frequent, and to have an attack even after 1.5 pills is very worrying. I so hope that the inflammation recedes further.

I drive Patch to and from work in our PT Cruiser, which has lots of room in the back. He has seven dog beds now...one in the bedroom, one in the office at home, one downstairs, one in the Saturn, two in the Cruiser and one in the office downtown ! We just got too tired carrying his big beds from place to place, so whenever we found a new place he needed to be, we picked up another bed for him :)

OK, that's it for tonight. Hope you're all doing well !

2004-09-17T23:47:00.000-04:00

Patch is in some trouble
We've had bad news about Patch's condition. The best we can hope for is to make him comfortable and hope the inflammation in his vertebrae can be held at bay. His daily attacks (see Hurricane Part 3 from Sept 3rd, 2004 below) are continuing, though they seem less intense now. A vet x-rayed him and saw damage around his C6 vertebrae, where his body has developed inflammation that is pinching his spinal cord. He's on steroidal anti-inflammatories which have some mild side effects, but aren't working as well as the vet would have liked. He's been coming to work with me so I can keep him company and also let him out every few hours to go to the bathroom - the pills make him drink a lot and pee a lot.

The new job is going very well: it's good to have Patch with me, of course, but I'm also starting to make changes to the software and hopefully the previous developers will be able to do some more training soon so I really understand all the subtleties of what they built. I've also begun a contract with DSS, who I just left two weeks ago, to continue working on one of the products I worked on while I was there. I'll be working nights and weekends. Plus I got the merchant account sorted out for Mercury Mailroom and will be, hopefully, getting that into shape this weekend. I can take credit card payments now !

We went out to R.J Gator's for drinks and dinner with some DSS buddies, then met another DSS guy, Kip, for drinks at Quarterdeck, watched a little baseball, then came home.

Life is good, but I hope Patch feels better soon. He's a brave little guy and I can see how nervous he is when I ask him to stand up - he knows it might hurt him, but he's tries his best to do what I ask of him. Good boy :)

2004-09-17T23:45:00.000-04:00

The first load of palm fronds and chopped up trunks. It still hasn't been picked up, so it's actually getting hard to get out of the driveway, the pile is *so* big ! That's Patch's sofa in the background there - it wasn't damaged but we decided to get rid of it. It took up too much room and his back pain seems to be worse when dealing with overly-spongy beds that are high off the ground.

2004-09-17T23:43:00.000-04:00

This is the remains of one of four fans outside a cafe on Clematis street, where I work in downtown west palm beach. They were all damaged, but at least the awning stayed up. Not much good to anyone now :)

2004-09-17T23:41:00.001-04:00

"You're right...no human being would ever stack furniture this way."

2004-09-17T23:41:00.000-04:00

Patch on the sofa bed in the the Hampton Inn. Five days later we were still there and the carpet was soggy from water being blown *in* through the air conditioner. But we were glad they let us bring the pets with us !