Glad

It’s a beautiful spring day. Lex10 has won a small victory over Blogger and the Glyphblog is back with another great bit of moving image + music. I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad.

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Lex10’s Youtube channel is here, his workup of the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn is here. I reiterate: I’m so glad.

N810 Followup

I’ve been pretty pleased with my little Nokia N810 so far. It’s fit in well as a secondary/companion device – web access (almost) anywhere, navigation and media playback. Tnere’ve been a couple nagging gaps, though…

– Podcasts. I’ve yet to figure out if it’s possible to subscribe to podcasts in an iTunesish way. It looks like you can kludge your way through with RSS, but not easily or conveniently.

– Weather. There’s a nice looking weather app (omWeather) available, but I can’t get it to install. I’ve made the N810 take the red pill (Nokia-speak for loosening some of the controls) without success.

– Twitter. There’s (again,as far as I can tell) no stand-alone Twitter client for the N810. Reading tweets on my cell phone is no big deal, but I just haven’t acquired the numeric keyboard texting skills that I guess I need. I could always go to the Twitter web site, but I’d really like something more like the Twitter widget in Netvibes.

Eureka! I’d been thinking about putting a Nokia-optimized Netvibes page together, and yesterday I finally got motivated to do it.

Weather? Check. Twitter? Check.

Podcasts? Sorta-check. The small toolbar at the top of the netvibes page is the built in player. I can listen to The Onion Radio News so long as I have a net connection. It’ll do…

Now, if I can just get this self-charging hack to work, I’ll be sitting pretty.

Note – N810 + Wordpy + cell phone camera + texting-photos-to-Flickr = completely moblogged post.

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Turning Wicked

In a recent email exchange, Steve turned me on to a great little phrase. I’d been going on about one of my favorite moments with pointing dogs – it happens once per dog and is that instant when instinct/breeding kicks in.

Me:

I love the moment the light bulb goes on. One minute the puppy is busting birds, blundering around, then you can see her get a nose full of scent, the switch gets flipped and bang! she locks up.

It is a fraught moment – an instant of ‘fit’ when the element that is the pup finds her way into the hunting partnership with a nearly audible click.

Steve:

“Moment the light bulb goes on”: called “turning wicked” by Brit longdoggers.

Now I know what to call it – repurposing the phrase isn’t too big a sin. As a bit of penance, a picture of a British gazehound from a Flickr contact. If you look at Ameerah’s face, you’ll see intense focus – she’s waiting – knows her business.

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Saluqihounds says, “Our dog point all the time whether its to tell us there are in a particular rabbit warren or something is in a bush etc. Some, Ameerah in particular will point in a fashion whilst stalking game in open ground.”

Purple hair and other attributes

Continuing with our Drake theme- this time, emphasizing UFO hair – color, if not length: Charlie Stross (who’s heard of J. G. Ballard) writes a post explaining how much control an author has over the way their book is published (especially, in this case, influence over cover art).

Unless we’re talking about the small press or self-publishing, the answer is “zip”. The author is responsible for writing and delivering the contents of the book and, optionally, additional material such as a dedication and acknowledgements. But the way their manuscript — a typescript, typically prepared in accordance with the ancient and established Rules — is turned into a book is entirely up to the publisher.

Why would he feel that it was important to say this? Behold the US cover for his latest – due for a July release:

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As an aside – what better place for the immobile enhanced breast meme than in a CGI portrait…

Connectedness, part eleventy-trillion

I’ve been getting a lot of hits on searches for Gabrielle Drake – something I find myself taking a perverse pleasure in. I thought I’d use the google and see what was coming up; before I got anywhere near DoaMNH, I encountered this essay, Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon, on the Ballardian. Yes, Ms. Drake appeared in a 1971 short titled Crash!, opposite some guy named J.G. Ballard. Click through and read the essay – meanwhile, I’ll just continue to shake my head in amazement.

Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.

Mild warning – the film is titled Crash! after all…

Flame on?

My guess is that the Olympic torch relay will continue to be newsworthy today when it hits San Fransisco (now that’s going out on a limb). As we watch things unfold, allow me to recommend a couple good posts on the torch and the Olympic movement, such as it is nowadays.

James Wimberly:

In contrast, the wider political message of the modern Olympics is vapid. The torch in particular, lit at Olympia by pretty girls dressed vaguely as priestesses in skimpy chitons, is a pseudo-religious fraud. The torch relay was actually invented by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics; its tainted origin lies in the racist propaganda immortalized by the twisted genius of Leni Riefenstahl. No black, Jewish, or disabled athletes needed to apply then. Paradoxically, the public legitimacy of the protests depends on a measure of acceptance of the fraud as a symbol of a real value which the Chinese and the IOC are betraying; rather in the way the Church of England grew from its origin in cynical politics into a genuine religious tradition.

Henry Farrell:

The current debacle though seems to mark an important change in the politics of the Olympics. As best I understand it (I am open to corrections if wrong), in the past, Olympics politics have involved inter-state rivalry, and have been driven by decisions on the part of traditional political elites. The US boycott of the Soviet games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 resulted from a decision by Jimmy Carter, and the tit-for-tat boycott by the Soviets and their allies of the LA games in 1984 resulted from a top level decision too. The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders.

The post’s title refers to this guy.

A good evening

A bit of dog training on a lovely spring evening. No pictures of Dinah – too busy working her. We took the older dogs out for a quick lap after finishing up with two of the pups and Janey pinned a woodcock. KD and Briar backed nicely.

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One of Dinah’s littermates, getting ready to do his thing:

More Nokia fun (elsewhere)

Some people (me) post GPS data from lame little trips on Rte. 128. Others – see here – post data on bar-hopping. In this case, the bars are floating on the igarapé do Tarumã Açu (a tributary of the Rio Negro), just west of Manaus. I’ve got radio towers and he has peacock bass – don’t know about you, but I’d rather be there.

I’m working on converting Mr. Lawrence’s track data to something that’ll show a path in Google Earth – so far, I’ve gotten waypoints and that may be where it ends – we’ll see.