Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The iPhone – myth or Motorola?

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

Today’s The Joy of Tech – a nice tease for the Mac devotees out there and who’s to say they’re not right? Surfing to www.iphone.org, a domain registered to Apple in Cupertino, takes you to Apple’s main web page.

iphone
There again, they would do that, wouldn’t they?

A little housekeeping

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

Please bear with me while I freshen the blog up a little.

Robert Altman

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006
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Strange to relate, last night we watched Gosford Park and today we learn of Robert Altman’s death. From the impact of M*A*S*H‘s mirror on the Vietnam conflict and the knowing movie industry inside jokes of The Player to this year’s film interpretation of the US public radio series A Prairie Home Companion (the wonderful work of one of my favourite broadcasters and authors Garrison Keillor), Altman was never a Hollywood favourite but he was hard to ignore.

Ron Mueck at The Brooklyn Museum

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006
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Even viewed on the web, the installations of Ron Mueck are startling and hard to process; so they must be stunning in the flesh.

Like Bloglines but simpler

Monday, July 10th, 2006

I am terrible. I have no restraint. No sooner have I got settled to using Vienna as my RSS reader than a glance at a post in a Google group nudges me to look at Newshutch. Lean, clean and does the job very nicely indeed; importing my OPML file took seconds and all feeds updated and worked fine. Of course, there’s no real conflict issue as I’ll use Vienna on my iBook and Newshutch elsewhere but I am a shameless seeker of the proverbial silver bullet app, whatever the need.

A year on, a world away

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

It is not often I am unable to finish my breakfast but this morning I have no stomach for it.  Browsing through my news subscriptions in my feed reader, I am confronted by the events of a year ago and realise just how far away, physically and emotionally, I am from those events and the places in which they happened.  Without the slow build-up I am sure there has been in the UK media, the events I blogged feel raw and fresh and I am struck by the void that must now exist in the lives of fifty two families and the continuing trauma of those who survived.  In the same breath, I am thankful that we had the courage and self-belief to pack up and move to a different environment where we could build a different life.  As I go through my day, preparing to move to a new family home in the community we have chosen to live in, my thoughts are with those who were on the train just two minutes behind the one I was on this time last year.

Hello again

Sunday, June 25th, 2006

I haven’t posted for a long while. Since I last posted, the All Blacks have won their first three games of the season, the World Cup has begun in Germany and winter storms have ravaged many parts of new Zealand. As for the absence, to cut a long story short, I messed up the migration from Blogger to WordPress a few weeks back, threw my toys out of the pram and gave up trying to fix it. Yesterday, a few kind words of advice and encouragement from my long-suffering friend and host, Chuck, prompted me to sort the mess out. Given my tendancy to let my blogging lapse, I doubt that anyone out there still reads my posts; if you have kept my feed intact, I salute and thank you.

No.8 Wire for wifi routers

Sunday, May 7th, 2006

Effective though my DLink wifi router is, it isn’t quite powerful enough for me to get a decent signal in my bedroom. This is a shame as I’d love to prop myself up in bed on lazy winter mornings and enjoy the pastoral view from the windows whilst reading email and feeds. As someone who lives in a country that prides itself on ingenious pocket money solutions, I think I have found the answer to my wifi woes.

Parallel bookmarking

Monday, April 24th, 2006

Late last night, I made one of those ‘why didn’t I look for this months ago?’ finds on the web. I have flip-flopped between del.icio.us and Furl for ages, liking both del.icio.us’ simplicity and Furl’s ability to cache a page. As a merge of these two tools is unlikely, I have found that Alan’s Marklet Maker site submission multi tool provides me with the next best thing: one toolbar button for the creation of two parallel submissions – I just add tags and save. The tools offers the user the choice to combine up to 20 popular social bookmarking/tagging tools in one bookmarklet, though I’d imagine generating more than three or four entry forms would be a little unwieldly and self-defeating.

It was only a matter of time

Thursday, April 13th, 2006

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