This is an advertisement for anyone who lives in my area and would like one; break into my building, and then break through my door and the little iPod shuffle is yours. I know it’s good to show off our material wealth to the world so that they can assess how worth burgling we are. Of course, it’d be a shame to break into my place because I’ll either be there and in the room, or I won’t be there and the dear Shuffle won’t be either since it’s so darn small and easy to take everywhere with you. It never leaves my side, or more accurately, my coate pocket. Most of the time I can’t find it, but it actually is there, simply hidden away.
I’m liking it so far - it’s a bit of a nifty little thing. The one thing that you have to get used to is navigating through the songs on the your (single) playlist. It took me a while to work out how the iTunes software had organised the songs, and it appears it’s done by how you had them organised when you were playing them, the last time you were using the iTunes software.
Anyway, it’s fun, and playful and that’s all that’s expected of it really; it does its job, perfectly.
I’m amusing myself into the night by a virtual duel that’s going on with my most esteemed web host, Ms P. I mention to her that I’m having problems with the Users on the server, and then a few minutes I check back into the admin function and see that she’s created new users to test it out and figue out this system. It’s an odd one, but then I don’t have an overly huge collection of experience with web-based-server-mangaged-blog-publishing-architecture; I think it shows.
But it’s funny all the same.
Following retirement, following her instincts, Susan Hesse began to experiment with her digital camera and started taking photos of fruit and vegetables from her local market. What makes her photos unique is that she’s placed partial facial features of her own and her husband’s face on the objects she photographs to create the image. In doing this she humanises the produce and gives it a new angle. The New York Times contributed to this report.
link to NYTimes article
link to gallery of work
Spaghetti
Shaving Cream
Ice
I woke up two hours early today, long before my appointed hour, for a class that has now been cancelled for not apparent reason; perhaps the lecturer simply couldn’t face it this morning. The worst thing about it, having to sit next to the wet drips who are the Biology students in this place - it’s like talking to a defrosting fridge - slow, morose, cold and unaware.
In a tragic turn of events, a party of worshippers set fire to shops surrounding a Hindu temple 150 miles south of Bombay yesterday, after they heard news that relatives and loved ones had been earlier trampled to death.
The incident occurred after an earlier festival event went awry when participants slipped and fell on spilt coconut juice, a part of the ceremony, then were trampled to death by some of the 300,000 strong crowds pushing forwards to make their own religious offerings. When their relatives heard that the events had been fatal they set fire to nearby structures, resulting in a further stamped and the loss of over 250 lives.
“The fires were set along a packed, narrow walkway lined with tea stalls and shops leading up a hill to the temple. They set off what witnesses said was a stampede of screaming crowds fleeing in horror.
Though his leg was injured in the stampede, Yerunkar, a 45 year old pilgrim from Bombay, said he helped pull 15 people alive from a mound of bodies. “But I couldn’t find my wife Nirmala. I kept shouting for her,” he said, weeping uncontrollably.
His wife of 22 years was among the dead. Yerunkar fainted when he identified her body at the Wai hospital.”
-The Malaysia Star
link
It was a courtesy call; I knocked on the door of a friend of mine, down the corridor in my dorm. It’s just after 10 o’clock in the morning so I assumed it was safe to think that she’d either be awake and working or gone into University already.
Much to my surprise, a wail comes from behind the door, a plea for peace that astounded me with it breadth,
“Can you give me like… thirty minutes?”
It’s being reported today that the forthcoming film adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code will star Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou.
Reuters is reporting that the director of A Beautiful Mind, Ron Howard will also direct this movie. Whilst Howard is an interesting choice, bound to create the necessary tapestry of storylines that weave the tale to a conclusion, the heavy style of Tom Hanks and his recent over use in Hollywood productions, will offset the tone of the film.
Tautou’s delicate style is the one redeeming feature - she’s a wildcard in the mix that may save the production from being a standard laborious thriller. Her skill in leading the camera is perfect for a mystery of this nature and hopefully her abilities will make the film, but Tom Hanks still rankles. Though he may be an adept director, as shown in Band of Brothers, he should take a break from pressuring the public with high profile, low intelligence movies.
Just as Chrisafer was yesterday asking the US Democrats to have some sort of backbone, today the UK press is asking the ‘New Labour’ government to hold firm on their immigration stance. The Conservative party, in a desperate attempt to swing right-wing voters back towards their fold, have been calling for caps on the numbers of asylum seekers allowed into the country each year, and swift (”but fair”) return to their home country, the country they’d been fleeing.
“It’s not racist, as some people claim, to talk about controlling immigration - far from it. It is plain common sense - a vastly underrated quality in British politics today.”
My question is this; why is it that I really don’t care that the British are being their usual racist selves, why does it all seem so insignificant. When politics swings into action on a European scale, on a US scale - when decisions really affect thousands of people, I begin to care. Now, it’s just so small. If I’m reading news from across the globe, the xenophobia of a guy who only won 15 million votes doesn’t matter to me; my interest isn’t raised. Should I care?
Howard calls for strict immigration cap
Migrant madness
This is yet another design. Forgive me the lack of style - I hand coded it and therefore, it’s a bit raw. I’ll do the graphics and prettiness over the next few days. I can’t stand it looking quite so bare as it does at the moment. It all takes time. Time which I’ve spent today, but time which only produces limited results despite the hour. Not being a natural webdesigner, coding by hand (since Dreamweaver etc really doesn’t work all that well with Blogger), takes me an extraordinarily long time.
By the end of the week, it’ll look good.
In reading through goodle’s zeitgeist today, I came across a page in which the company details how the google websearch improves people’s efficiency through correcting our spelling. The example they gave was that of Britney Spears, the ever present pop-princess. She was Google’s number one search query for 2004 and apparently, some people still don’t know how to spell her name, for there are thousands of people who had to have their searches corrected by the Google bot. Of course some of this is simply mistyping the new madonna’s name, but some people evidently had never seen her name written down, or on a screen or whilst watching tv. There were 332 combinations of errors in spelling her name - and these are just the spellings that occurred when more than one person typed in the query.
1096 britiney spears
991 britaney spears
991 britnay spears
811 brithney spears
811 brtiney spears
664 birtney spears
664 brintney spears
664 briteney spears
601 bitney spears
how to spell brytni spears
