bloggrrr.

I just wrote a nice long post. Blogger choked and it has evaporated. I will attempt to rewrite tomorrow. Grr.

carp and stereotypes

This weekend Navan sang for a Burns Dinner. We have ended up at a few of these over the years and they are one of places where we get a straight dose of one Celtic country as far as the origins of the people who attend. This makes it easy to start stereotyping, but now we can turn to Google to make sure we really know what we're talking about. Enter the prejudice map. (Yes the links really do work the way the author meant them to work - I would have given you a direct link if one existed.) And if you haven't crossed a Burns Dinner before you now have the formula to learn more.

This week has been a week of carping. Well, just Friday mostly when I woke up half an hour late and was running full tilt from 7am until 1:30am when we got back from said Burns Dinner, and all three of my meals for the day went weird (carp, carp). Just last week the Washington Post had to shut down comments on their blog because people were being too nasty and vicious, and David Pogue at the NYTimes sent out his weekly tech newsletter on the topic of internet jerks, largely in response to the nasty emails he receives. (sorry - I think that link won't work after his next column comes out) His best find was this from Benjamin Franklin in 1750 - people haven't changed so much with the coming of the intranet. It's just that we all have easier access to each other.

Interesting in light of all this that carp comes from Old Norse "karpa" meaning to boast. The primary annoying thing about people who carp at/about other people is that they assume they know more and that you are clearly wrong. Seems obvious now, but I'd never connected the two words before.

fast flute bits

Today I came home to find a USPS 2nd delivery attempt slip in our mailbox (did they skip leaving the slip for their first attempt?). I could barely make out the name of the sender but it looked something like "ooter" which I figured might be "Cotter."

Cotter would be Eamonn Cotter who made the wooden flute I bought a few years ago. (If you missed the first part of the story, which would be easy considering it started before my blog did, I opened my flute case in mid-December to find that the barrel had cracked. Good solid nasty crack. Wooden flutes shouldn't live in Wisconsin when they were born in a climate with permanent 66.6% humidity.) The back of the slip said the package would be held at 702 E Wash (all of 5 blocks from the house) and that I could pick it up the day after delivery.

They had a phone number listed with the address that was some version of 1-800-get-usps. Those are never helpful numbers unless you have a tracking number and plenty of time to kill waiting through the menus and hold music. I should also mention that it said the hours at 70 E Wash were from 10am to 5pm. My clock said 4:42. It was also the same day as the attempted delivery. But I'm stubborn like that so I found a local number for them and called.

There were some delivery troubles on the Irish end when I sent the head joint for repair/replacement, and this morning I called FedEx again to see if they'd managed to get it to him finally. I've just finished blasting out my first proper tunes in a month. Nice change in 12 hours :-)

The flute is now living in its case, in plastic box with a damp rag. And I'm planning to acquire one of these:

It's 1 3/4" in diameter, and only costs $6.99. We're so used to seeing all these digital things now, but analog can be cheap and beautiful.

Blogging gets difficult with a cat like Fionn. He's adorable but he likes to sit on my lap, where the laptop is supposedly perched, and he likes to nudge his face into my hands, which disables my typing abilities somewhat. At the moment we have a decent truce worked out - he's laying sideways with his chest, front paws, and head flopped over my right wrist. Probably not so good for carpal tunnel.

PS - I can't believe the Blogger spellchecker doesn't know the words "blog" and "blogging" - official oversight!

Kiss all our Moon-Pies goodbye

Something for linguists and junk food junkies alike:

My good laugh for today.. and it made it perfect that I'm having my little Oreos & tea break here at work while I read it. Good deal to be getting laughs out of New Orleans at the moment - thanks, Noah.

Have We Gone All Tutti-Frutti? - from Chris Rose at the Times Picayune

Fellini and Garrison Keillor

Somewhat different public personae, but maybe today we learn that just a shade behind the public persona Garrison is even more appreciative of Fellini. This morning on Writer's Almanac Garrison noted that Fellini was born today and gave us the quote:

"You can't teach old fleas new dogs."

In this form the quote seems a quaint little switch up of the standard. But Garrison was excerpting from the full quote (down in the "more" section, or search on fleas) And perhaps he couldn't have put the whole deal on NPR (at least not without Audience Services getting an earful).

Apparently staying home from dance class with a cold is good for blogging. Fingers working better than the whole body...

Whale watching in London - go now!

Today finds a whale who has wandered up the river Thames. The BBC article has a link to live (yes, live) video coverage. The camera work seems a bit random without commentary, but yes, the dark blob in the middle of the water now and again really is a Northern Bottle-Nosed whale. I saw it cruise fairly fast up the river at one point. They're hoping it will find its own way out with the retreating tide.

8:40 am update: Not so much live anymore, but there's still a news video. They're leaving a live link in the sidebar which just takes you to a BBC hold screen (live with a clock). This leads me to think they might get back to it if the BBC helicopter doesn't have anything going later on. Of course it'll be dark there before too long as well I suppose.

the end of the world?

Last night we watched The Day After Tomorrow which was totally enjoyable for what it was (a big disaster movie with some impressive effects). I'm convinced that a home projector setup is the only real way to watch movies like this. On a small screen the massive destruction looks too small, and in a theater you can't heckle loudly... well, you can, but I don't. In any case it's the heckling that makes these movies truly enjoyable. And it had Jake Gyllenhaal and Emmy Rossum (who has charmed me entirely ever since Songcatcher).

And then today on BBC news we get this related story. If you happen to be a grad student who feels sorry for your current plight in life now and again, check the 'Volunteers Army' section of the article. I promise you'll feel better!

Coffee break over...

Geeking out

A few of my favorite additions to my Treo 650 (in case you're still monkeying with yours, Woody):

Treo Allegro (v0.2): This is the one that lets you have an LED that's actually good for something. I have mine set to show red when there's new voicemail, and orange when there's a new text message. You can also control a few other things like having the LCD be dimmer during the day to save power, but it's the LED fix that does it for me. And it's FREE

KeyCaps: Allows you to never again touch the shift and option keys - you can set it up with a few options but I have it set so a quick tap gives me lowercase, holding gives me upper case and longer holding swaps all the way through to the option (punctuation, number). Also FREE.

Dragon Character Training: free program to learn chinese characters

EWallet - password protected anything you want

Collins dictionaries - have saved me in multiple languages

And if you have a big data plan and an audiobook addiction-waiting-to-happen:

Audible & AudibleAir

Tags:

• treo

contented words

"The grill-room clock struck eleven with the respectful unobtrusiveness of one whose mission in life is to be ignored."

This week I was introduced to Saki, a writer I had entirely missed up to now. I've only just started making my way through the collection of his stories available through Project Gutenberg, so I'm not sure how his observations will sit in the long run, but I'm quite taken with his way of tucking words together. I'm not much one for ebooks - too much screen reading is no good, but for short stories it's not bad... just munch through one now and again.

While I was sitting here typing away I looked over to the couch and saw Adam and Fionn looking entirely similar - both gently asleep (in that easily woken but totally relaxed sense) with limbs flopped out. Fionn had settled on the back of the couch just above where Adam dozed. From there my mind wandered to the fact that the construction "like A, like B" is only ever used with singular categories... like mother, like daughter. This is a case of "like human, like cat" I suppose, if I stick with the proverbial sense. But what do you do with individuals? It's not a categorical statement that cats are often like their nearby humans. I'm sure someone who studied English instead of maps could fill me in.

Lacking that at the moment I go to my favorite thing about being connected with the University (aside from things like free bus passes and health insurance and all that) - free access to the online OED! If I wanted in on my own it would be a whopping $295/year (in other words, I wouldn't have it). Yay for a big research University! In this case it doesn't help me much except to learn that the construction was first documented in 1598.

Yes, this will be a place of seriously random bits of probably not very useful knowledge.

Tags:

• language

image interpretation

I'm getting all excited about the Olympics (as usual). They're great for all sorts of reasons - impressive athletics, heartbreak that doesn't actually do you any damage, international intrigue that doesn't revolve around war, interesting architecture as each city tries to make itself worthy, technology (torch design for a start, more on that in a minute) and graphic design - my key interest in things today.

Turin 2006 Olympic emblem is this:



Emblems and icons and other minimalist-but-full-of-meaning images are faced with a host of problems before they even get started, especially when you have people from every culture imaginable eyeing your image. They claim that the "emblem portrays the unmistakable silhouette of the Mole Antonelliana. It is transformed into a mountain, among crystals of ice, where the white snow meets the blue sky. The crystals come together to form a web: the web of new technologies and the eternal Olympic spirit of communion among peoples."

Never having been to Turin I wondered what this Mole Antonelliana looks like and discovered this:



Interesting, I thought, because what the emblem most reminds me of (especially growing up in Wisconsin, and having visions of snow running in my head) is this:



Now, I admit the shape isn't right, but you have to imagine this snowfence at the end of the winter when it's been battered back and forth by blizzards and plows and any other manner of things. It looks fairly twisted, and not entirely unlike the Turin 2006 emblem. But orange.

All that said, I like the lines of it and still find it quite pleasing. It just reminds me that I can never take for granted what someone else will see in one of my designs.

Which brings us to the mascots. Meet Neve and Gliz:



What's your first thought? Me, I saw marshmallows. But it turns out that they are an "elegant snowball" and a "lively, playful ice cube." They're cute enough though, and are fairly charming in the video (go there and it's right at the top of the page.). The concept of mascots started in 1968 with Schuss, the skiing man from Grenoble (oy) and has wobbled on. Given that I don't recognize any of them I have to say that designs have been fairly weak all along. Beijing 2008 has also unveiled their plans - altogether more interesting inspirations (Tibetan antelope anyone?)

And torches, because I had no idea what all was involved:

"It cannot be re-lit and it must not go out even in bad weather conditions such as rain, snow and wind.

The flame of each torch, which burns for 15 minutes, must not be higher than 10 centimetres. As for the materials used, the outside shell is made of aluminium; the inside fittings are of steel, copper and techno-polymers, and for the surface finish, a special paint is used that is resistant to high temperatures."

(Again from olympics.org)

Cool.

Tags:

• graphic
• design
• olympics
• turin

yours, mine, definitely not really proprietary I suppose

This is an update to 'Too many cool things at once' - apparently it was too many for me to really sort out what was going on. (Meaning I just googled on concept and found the not so ready to use implementation.) If you liked the sound of mygmap, have a look at YourGmap for one that has some semblance of an interface!

made up languages and audiobooks

Post separation for topic sanity...

I've transformed into an audiobook junkie over the period of the last 5 years or so. It's partly as a result of long drives to gigs with Navan. An audiobook makes 11 hours in an 8x10 moving space much better, and it rips your throat up less than taking turns reading aloud (which we did with Bonfire of the Vanities on the way out the South Dakota years ago, leading to a number of very funny moments with Paul waking extremely shocked and confused from a dead sleep when the one of us reading would launch into one of the many loud swearing fests written into that book). In addition to making long trips better, audiobooks are also great for language upkeep or learning. I got into listening to Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen when I was trying to get my German functional. But it gets a bit sketchier when the language in question is created by the author.

Case in point: If you've noticed my audiobook sidebar, you've seen that I've been listening to Eragon, which has a good dose of created language in it. The problem is that I only know these things by sound and I realized most of the way through the book that I have no idea what these words look like. In a real language that's all well and good. There are plenty of arguments for learning by ear. But with a language that only exists in printed form it's a bit odd to never see the print. Internet to the rescue, as usual.

And just because I'm always happier with maps, there's also this.

too many cool things at once

I just got home from a Weary Mappers evening and heard about all kinds of fascinating new little things. The best for a start is the still very alpha MyGmaps where you can "create, save and host custom data files and display them with Google Maps" which in real language means that you can make custom maps with up to 10 locations each and host them there for other people to find. It's a small concept for now, but with excellent possibilities like GeoPhotoBlogging where you could provide coordinates for all your trip photos in Picasa and upload them to your gmap with comments and a travel route.

Another twist in the geo-information land is Dodgeball.com. I can't decide if this is cool or just slightly too creepy. It's now available in 22 cities including Madison (and New Orleans where it officially qualifies as cool these days - hang with me - you'll understand why shortly). The concept is that you register on the site and your friends register on the site and then if you're out at your favorite bar/club/park/whatever you can send a text message to the website which will then in turn send messages to your friends saying "Elizabeth is at the Brocach. Why not stop by and say hello?" and then it goes a step further and does the whole social network thing. I have friends, and they have friends, so if I send a text from the Brocach to dodgeball.com it notifies my friends and then notifies my friends' friends with a similar message but it has a tag at the end that says "You know Elizabeth through so-and-so." This is where I start thinking creepy. There's also a whole thing with being able to tag crushes, and get notified when a crush is within 10 blocks if you both happen to text the site, so all your evenings can be like high school hallways. (yack)

I've realized I need to sort out a good way to tag my posts... it could actually be handy ages from now to be able to pull all the geography posts or all the dance posts etc.

digital ink

Here you go, Todd - digital ink for the future. I remember news of this coming out as a technical possibility back about 3 or 4 years ago, and then last year they finally came out with this prototype. The main company trying to make a living off of the concept is E*Ink which has some very cool looking things starting to come out. This is one of those concepts that will make all sorts of other things possible eventually even though the initial things being produced aren't particularly revolutionary. Just yesterday the Weather Wizard was blogged on engadget. I suppose they would be more impressive in person where you could flex the material and be impressed by the luminosity (they really like that word). But I'm still hanging in there because when it does come around... just think - full size classroom wall maps that can be edited by the company that produced them, and they just update on the wall!

scientific telling of tales (or at least serifs)

Something to get back to later when I'm not supposed to be doing other things (I'll let you know how it comes out):

handwriting.feedbucket.com

What better combination of art and science could there be? The question is, which of my various bits of handwriting do I use? The one when I'm tired and scribbling, the one when I'm carefully writing a card to someone, or the slanty one I fall ino sometimes?

Now that I take a closer look at the page, I'm supposed to mouse in my signature - I may have to pull out the old pen tablet I got cheap at CEBIT a few years back to try this thing.