Category: other lesser codologies

Trying a little experiment on the movalog site to see if I can generate a style appropriate for this blog. They’re here.

In an attempt to make this little blog more visible, I’ve reacquainted myself with technorati, and to that end, here is my Technorati Profile

Is this working???

Cambrian explosion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I first heard about this huge eruption of complex lifeforms in the book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by the celebrated author Bill Bryson. It seems that almost overnight (or about 12 million years in geological time), complex lifeforms just sprang into existance. Some of them are your ancestors, but some of them were a bit weird. For instance Hallucigenia, a creature so weird it looks alien. Maybe it was.

The head end contained no mouth or sensory organs, where you’d expect them. It was suggested that the tentacles had tubes in them which directly fed the entity with whatever food it ate. It was also suggested that Hallucigenia was part of another animal.

Nice.

Lt Palmer, 27, from Ware in Hertfordshire, died of his injuries on Saturday after the vehicle he was commanding was caught in an explosion near Dayr, north-west of Basra, the Ministry of Defence said.

I switched on the TV at some time over the Easter weekend and watched an interview with this unfortunate soldier’s parents. His father was a military man and delivered his piece with a quintessentially British stiff upper lip – he showed no emotion when talking about his recently deceased son.

It was a strange media moment, all the more because the death was so recent and the delivery so uncoloured. Maybe this is what Sandhurst produces – people with bizarre eyebrows and no emotion. His mother said nothing during the interview, but since she was wearing sunglasses we can assume she was as moved as any mother would be, at the same time trying not to betray her loss.

Yesterday his father, Brigadier John Palmer, said in a statement that his son had been proud to be a soldier. “He was very well aware of the dangers that he and others faced in Iraq, but he believed that the work they were doing was gradually making life better for the Iraqi people.

“Richard was a very talented and popular young man who achieved a lot in his life. We are immensely proud of him, whilst nothing can make his loss any easier, we are just thankful that the other members of his troop, of whom he thought so much, were not seriously injured.”

Due to circumstances I hadn’t anticipated, I came into possession of a new black 60 GB iPod (5G) on 3/1/06. This makes me very happy because now I can watch video on it in addition to looking at photos and listening to music. I’m in the unusual position that my iPod now has more capacity than my laptops (40 GB and 20 GB). But that isn’t the point of this entry.

The point of this entry is that the new iPod (despite the fact that it has lost firewire capability and is USB only) STILL works with the Altec Lansing inMotion speakers. I attached one end of the iPod USB cable to my laptop (old stylee USB 1) and the other to the port on the Altec Lansing, it immediately fired up iTunes automatically and synced through the dock, and I can also listen to it through the dock, not having to connect the audio out of the iPod to the aux in of the speakers. That made me happy. The port on the inMotion speakers is obviously a 1:1 thing, and they haven’t fooled round with the wiring. Nice of them. Both products are superb, although it’s difficult to buy content for the iPod in Europe. I have to make my own which is a bit slow.

Here is a contribution by Peter Ceresole on the uk.comp.sys.mac group on Usenet. Peter is commenting on the use of Podcasts and the quality of content available to the internet public. His opinion can easily be extended to the blogosphere too.

Newsgroups: uk.comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: What podcasts do we listen to (if any)…?
From: Peter Ceresole Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2005 09:52:51 +0100
User-Agent: MacSOUP/2.6 (Mac OS X version 10.3.9)

Chris Ridd wrote:

> It was, but it wasn’t too far off the mark. Most podcasts then were a couple
> of people talking bollocks for half an hour or so, which seems not
> dissimilar to WW.
>
> The state of the podcasting art hasn’t moved on that much since 🙁

The trouble with the democratisation of stuff is that doing it well is
*difficult*, and that has nothing to do with the technology, but with
the content. While the technology limited access to the airwaves or
whatever, broadcasters tended to be large operations staffed with
professionals. That didn’t mean they were terrific and they produced a
fair bit of boring crap but there was a fair bit of good stuff too.
However, even extending broadcasting hours quickly revealed that there
was only barely enough talent out there (if that) to go round. Opening
it up by reducing the cost and increasing the availability of the
process reveals, all over again, that the great majority of people are
talentless morons. No surprise- any collection of art gathered from any
period of time proves that this has always been so. Of course you also
get genuises and diversity is enabling for those that can hack it, but
it’s pretty stressful for the rest of us who have to sort our way
through the shit to find the occasional pearl.

So instead of the filtering process being done by regulators and
marketroids with a financial stake in success, now it’s catch as catch
can. The filtering happens at the receiving end.

Remember; we’re all alpha testers now.
—
Peter

For those of you who don’t avail of usenet, it’s a brilliant resource for comment, opinion, information and disinformation on all things. There are countless groups with topics as varied as politics, computers, local and showbusiness.

If you’ve never heard of Usenet, you can access and search it through Google, under the “Groups” panel. But to do it justice, you really need to get a Usenet client like MacSoup (for Mac) or Forte Agent for Windows.