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.

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?

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 :)

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.

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 :) 

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.

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! 

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. 

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.




 

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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

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 :) !

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.

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.

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.

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.