Tuesday, April 24, 2007

I'm putting my energies into my main blog, Spirits Dancing, at the moment. Please join me over there. 

Friday, February 23, 2007

Will it never end? 

I'm sick to death of the news saga about the model who died in the US. Will it never end? I don't understand what the interest is, apart from voyeurism. I'm not reading the accounts, but it seems I can't get away from being confronted by each new twist. Its the same with Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, Tom Cruise and Jolie. I wish I could have a filter on my news sources that screens them all out. I know I can filter to a certain extent by choosing just 'world news', for example, but its a very dry, non-graphical way of getting news coverage. But I am thinking more of a filter that you set to exclude all stories using a particular search name or word. I guess there is an economic reason why online newspapers push these stories, so they would probably not care to provide such a filter.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Window to the world  

Amy's post about her first transistor radio set me rummaging to see if I still had mine, and I eventually found it in a box in the shed. I was terribly fond of it, so I thought it unlikely I would have thrown it way, although it stopped working long ago. Mine was an AWA, an Australian brand. I couldn't find any pictures of it on the net, so here are some photos of mine. It is the most amazing dark turquiose and white plastic, and just look at the crud on it!

Like Amy, I was given it for my birthday when I was 10 or 11. (The psycholdelic writing was done a few years later). I distinctly remember the exhilaration of realizing that it gave me a window on the whole world. (I felt the same about the web when I stumbled into my first virtual community). I went through batteries at a great rate, probably because I so often went to sleep listening to it, so much so that my dad soldered those extra connections in so that I could connect it easily to a big battery. I used to think the circuit board looked a minature city.

Monday, February 12, 2007

'A bunch of empty rhetoric' 

Oh my goodness!: Obama's response to Howard is wonderfully accurate. I wonder what will happen next?

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Catching up with Obama 

I've spent a bit of time on Barack Obama's site today, firstly watching him announcing his candidacy for US presidency, and then watching his speech on faith in a pluralistic society. What an impressive person! Before this I had been feeling that Hillary Clinton would be the better choice, because of her experience, but in comparison experience now feels more like a tie to the insincerities politicians often adopt for the sake of winning.

Another point of interest for me was seeing how his website is web savvy. Not only the use of flickr, youtube, blogs and so on, but in having a social network as the basis of his supporter campaign, My.BarackObama.com, and his emphasis on users as integral, in the same way that Time used You.

I was glad to hear him clearly call for troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by March in 2008. Can you believe that our PM immediately called him out on it?? How extraordinary is that!

Oh, and you know the most interesting thing about Obama? He has kind eyes.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

There is a rally outside parliament house today in support of David Hicks. I'm going to go, but I'm not sure whether to take my puppet with me. I'm sure it would attract attention, but I don't want to imply that I think its okay to treat anyone like that; its not. 

Its really hot here, even so early in the morning. I guess it probably didn't dip below 20 celcius last night, and we are expecting in the 30's again today, just like the last I-don't-know-how-many days. Last month we scored 21 days above 30, a record of some sort, I believe. So its another day of holing up and closing the windows and curtains early in the day.

Adelaide, where I grew up, is always hotter than here, and always prone to heatwaves. In the sixties, when I was a kid, we would sometimes head for the beach in the evernings, and on the way home would see people lying out on their front lawns watching TV. Many of the houses in the beach suburbs had street number signs that had a small metal silhouette of a Mexican asleep under a sombrero, and my brother and I used to count them, The drive to the beach was long enough that by the time we got home we were just as hot as when we left! 

Monday, February 05, 2007

I'm glad Dave thinks the people at Flickr won't go through with the merging of accounts with Yahoo. I have an old account that I don't want to merge, too. I signed up when Flickr was launched, my curiosity being piqued by Jason Kottke's enthusiasm for it, and although I didn't initially appreciate the impact of the social networking aspect, and I probably didn't start using my account there regularly until year later, I haven't looked back since. I'm fond and proud of my old account. I probably do have a Yahoo ID, but I hate using the cumbersome thing.