Lotusblog

I am in Tokyo at the moment (again) and staying a dive in Shinjuku. With the most amazing hotel service I have ever experienced. Anyway, thought I would upload some of the pictures that were in my ‘phone, the trusty Nokia 6630.

As a communications device, this ‘phone is pretty good. Not remarkable, not bad, just OK. But as a camera, this ‘phone rocks. It rocks because of its limitations. Because of what it can’t do. Take a look at these pictures. All taken at night. At the Louis Vuitton Tokyo 2006 party. No flash. No editing with software. Just straight from the ‘phone’s memory to you.
I think some of them are pretty cool.

It was with enormous relief that I read this post on BoingBoing which showed that I am not the only person in the world who loathes professional sport. Especially the ones with jackasses running after balls.

The post itself, however, was not specifically about the tediousness of (watching) professional sport. No, rather the post was about a hilarious “pre-emptive cease-and-desist letter”.

Absolutely hilarious to think that some lackey in the Baker & McKenzie LLP office thought that BoingBoing might actually want to stream videos of games, and therefore would have to give them a stern warning to watch their step.

On my “Top Ten List of Wastes of Bandwidth”, webcasts of soccer matches are certainly up there. Slightly ahead of YouTube, and just under spam.

Probably not quite as wasteful as blogging, though.

Over the last couple of months I have been the unlucky recipient of a lot of spam. I was fortunate in that up until very recently I seldom received any at all. But my number is up.
Speaking of numbers, there was an interesting article on Boing Boing talking about mysterious spam blog comments that consisted of a strange comment and then a 5 digit number. (You can read about it here )

Today, I broke the number one rule and actually opened one of the spam messages and was intrigued to find that this is what it said:

Discretion is the better part of valour Give Neither Counsel Nor Salt till You Are Asked For It Many are called but few are chosen A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones. The bigger the better.
The pot calls the kettle black. Barking dogs seldom bite

After a storm comes a calm. You can’t teach a new mouse old clicks. Better bend than break Wise men think alike. Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain and most fools do
Where there’s a will, there’s a relative. Football is a game of two halves The country is in ruins, and there are still mountains and rivers – japanese proverb It is easier to get forgiveness than permission. A bad penny always turns up.

What does it mean?

The great thing about having to stay at home and convalesce is that you get time to do the things you’ve been meaning to do for ages. Namely, reinstall your system software, and do lots of geeky things to your computers. Thanks to this, my iBook is feeling much more responsive too, which can’t be a bad thing. As I have complained many times, OS X 10.4 seemed to be a de-evolutionary step, but it seems that a good spring cleaning brings performance back to a 10.3 level.

Anyway, I can now clench my left fist, hold a glass, typing doesn’t kill me anymore, and I am well on my way to recovery. Thank goodness. Anyway, I had better get going because Disk Warrior is rebuilding directory data on my desktop computer, and I think it needs my attention.

Everything is going wrong at the moment. There’s a glitch in the matrix. This was confirmed by my crash last night. Cruising along, slowing down for a corner, turning the corner and WOAH! I under-steered like a ‘60’s Mini , my front tire lost the bitumen and I came down hard. Typing hurts, my left wrist is in a bit of a swollen state. Scabs on my knees and elbows. Skin stripped from finger tips. (but thank goodness I was at least wearing half-finger gloves).

But I am OK.

My post (almost exactly one year ago) in which I raved about my slicks seems so funny now. Ah, 2005. An innocent time. Wide-eyed and naive.

Sorry but I can’t type any more.

Good-bye.

Interesting that I just wrote about the Sydney Morning Herald in my previous post. Today, I awake to find that Boing Boing quotes from another SMH source the interesting news that it will now become illegal to watch a personally recorded copy of a TV show more than once.

I’ll say that again, after you have recorded a TV show, you can watch it once (and only once) and then you have to delete it. You can read more about it here.

Personally, I think that once is still too many times, but I guess if you really have to watch TV then it’s better than nothing. Surely.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a secret page. I can’t find a link to it anywhere on their site, but it does it exist, as I look at it several times a week. The link is here . If you clicked on this link, then you’ll see that it is quite unremarkable- just a list of all the stories in today’s newspaper. And here’s the important bit- with no ads! No banners. No Flash. No flash. No fluff.

[Err, in 2009 it does have ads. Not sure when the change was made]

I first came across this page when I used to subscribe to the SMH “channel” on my PDA. I was delighted to find that it could also be accessed from a normal computer. At the time, RSS didn’t really exist in the mainstream, so this link of “text articles” was my only option to get a stripped down version of the news (the whole news, and nothing but the news).

Since I have been television-free for about 5 or 6 years now, I really depend on the internet to tell me what’s going on in the world. Also, and I think this is an important point, since I am television-free, and since I rely on 5 different text-based news sources, and because I am essentially the news presenter, presenting the news to myself, “my” news becomes stripped of emotion. The SMH link I give you above is about as close as you can get to impartial news. Not completely, however. After all, it is written by a private company which like all businesses, has to make money and certainly has vested interests. And it writes for its readership, which is also a pretty compelling point. But if you understand that, and keep that in mind, then you can probably agree with me that it’s a fairly “clean” source of news.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make: A story of two men trapped in a mine, is just that. When they are freed they are just two men who survived a particularly grueling ordeal. Heck, one of their colleagues died, so they certainly weren’t on a picnic. And while it’s fantastic that they survived, that’s the key point: they are survivors. Not heroes. Not national icons. Not puppets to be manipulated by the Prime Minister as example of “Australian courage and mateship”, they are just survivors of a terrible accident. They were rescued, they didn’t escape. It’s easy to get caught up in the euphoria of survival, but it’s important to stay balanced.

I leave you with a few lines from a story on the SMH which talked about the same story, and even offered this example of an hysterical, biased media. How many people knew about this story?

Besides, it’s all so arbitrary. Webb and Russell were trapped down a mineshaft for 14 days while, at the other extremity of the country, three men were trapped much longer – 22 days, more than enough time to starve to death – in a five-metre boat out of fuel in stormy, sharky seas in the Torres Strait.

Compelling story. But three remote blackfellas with no union powerbase just don’t rate.

Anyone else think Tiger (OS X 10.4) is really slow and annoying? I have thought this ever since I installed it. But I can’t deal with it any more. It’s doing my head in. Is this a ploy by the maker of the hardware I use to upgrade to a newer machine?

I spend half my computer life looking at a spinning beachball. This is absurd.

Every decade, society witnesses some sort of massive, unprecedented development; economic, technical, natural or even chemical, which defines the moment and forever changes the direction of social evolution.

Since this decade is really only half-finished (or half-begun) I don’t want to be premature in judging what it may be. For the 90’s though, I think you’d all agree it was the democratisation of the internet, and introduction, acceptance and use of the web and email.

For the 80’s I think it was the introduction of the Walkman. Music wants to be free. The introduction not only of the mechanical device itself, but the concept of the portability of music has had a massive effect on the way society (at least in developed countries) has developed. Not to mention the economic and cultural effects. The thing that triggered this early morning mental meandering was Cliff Richard’s “Wired for Sound” which I listened to after a particularly invigorating shower and remember fondly as a 10 year old, and for those who grew up on music videos, will certainly remember that “Wired for Sound” was the Walkman song.
But the other thing that grabbed me was the realisation that “Wired for Sound” was perhaps the first ever rap song. Three minutes of catching rhythms. A story being told. Boasting of prowess. Sure enough, Cliff Richard isn’t the sort of guy to say something as obvious or explicit as “I got a sawn-off, squeeze the trigger and bodies are hollowed out” or “My AK-47 is a tool, don’t make me act the motherfuckin’ fool” but nonetheless, there is definite macho posturing in there.

Go listen.

I was deleting all the stuff that has built up in my phone, and found these pictures that I had forgotten all about:

This is Coronita giving an Okinawan fisherman-dude a ride.

A view from my balcony, and the aquarium near my house.

The Honorable Lord Flounder

The Hon. Lord Flounder.

Lunch at Kua Aina (the Hawaiian hamburger chain) at Namba Parks with Graeme and Justine.

It’s been a pretty action-packed week or so. Wasn’t feeling too crash hot last week (probably Juneitis, a common Japanese medical condition that occurs in June) so I didn’t ride or swim at all. It meant that today, while the ride was as exhilarating as always, I couldn’t quite maintain my usual average speed, and my swim was pathetic.

There’s always tomorrow.