Charlie Brooker wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, but the best example he gave was from the Telegraph where journalists wrote: "Young women - such as Britney Spears - are buying more shoes than ever"
In an attempt to steal some tiny fraction of the hallowed Mr. Booker's inevitably tiny traffic, I 'borrowed' his least-searched-for keywords for my own blog-thing.
And managed to get myself blocked from my own blog on an airport lounge's complimentary interweb PC - complete with a big giant 'THIS PERVERT IS LOOKING AT FILTH!!!1' message on the screen. Oops.
So, with the aim of dissipating yet more long-tail traffic from Mr. Brooker's articles, and hopefully blocking a few people from reading Slashdot in the process, here we go:
When Mr Security says "I'll take your camera" you say "just fucking try" and if they don't go off to get their superior then you call your lawyer.
Or, don't. Many of these photographer-versus-security-guard altercations appear to involve photographers immediately acting up with shrill "I KNOW MY RIGHTS!!!!1" tirades against said guards. Okay, you may well be correct, but you're only going to escalate the situation.
I've found that apologising, immediately moving to put the camera away and politely providing a brief explanation of what I was doing can work wonders - the other week, I ended up being given a potted history and miniature tour of some old industrial architecture by the people working there, and was provided with recommendations of where else to look at.
Actually engaging with your subject (or inhabitants thereof) and not acting like a total nob is great. And even if the person telling you continues to be unpleasant, defusing the situation, going somewhere else and getting the camera out again works okay...
(Mr. Hawk is a complete pansy, anyway - was he shouted at by Polish military personnel for taking photos of their security arrangements? Okay, it was their ridiculously fluffy, damp and grumpy-looking guard dog I'd taken a photo of, and taking pictures of such stuff in Poland is now legal anyway, but the politely-apologise, put-camera-into-bag-and-walk-away route worked just fine...)
Bits blasted off Mars in some titanic collision aeons in the past, which have drifted through space before falling to Earth as meteorites. Bit of a roundabout route, but it works!
Actually, though, one of my favorite things about Lightroom is that it automatically makes backups of your database.
One of my least favorite things about it is that I've had to use these backups on several occasions, because the 'working' database became corrupted. Aperture apparently isn't much better in this regard.
Oh, that's what it's for!
I'd assumed it wanted to backup absolutely everything to an external disk - which was already happening with Time Machine. So after being annoyed by Lightroom's prompting, I switched that feature off, not realising all it wanted to verify and copy (to a subdirectory of the catalogue stuff) was simply the catalogue data itself.
I've re-enabled that feature so it'll run every week - and the 'local' backup will get copied to my external disk automatically through Time Machine.
Can someone explain to me what Aperture is, what a "raw photo editor" is, and how a "photo manager" differs from a "file manager"? Thanks.
Screenshots might help - basically it's a file manager with additional sorting, filtering and whatnot designed for organising photos. Here's Lightroom's library view as an example - I've filtered to show only photos I've given three stars or more, and selected one so you can see all the keywords and other metadata assigned to that photo. All searchable, sortable, filterable and so on!
With regard to editing, here's a screenshot from the develop view. All the edits are non-destructive - you can see a history on the left. 'RAW' refers to the image from the camera being in an unprocessed, raw-data-from-image-sensor format, which gives you a bit more latitude in tweaking white balance, contrast, exposure and the like.
(I don't normally shoot 'RAW', but my once-in-a-lifetime shipyard visit coincided with some utterly horrendous weather - getting just the right exposure in unlit, semi-derelict Eastern European industrial buildings at 7am on a cold, dark, wintry morning proved a little tricky at times...;-] )
Since then, she's switched to a WinPC and Lightroom, and Lightroom is both stable for her, and reliable and does more and she will never touch a Mac again. The moral of the story is that Adobe Lightroom is the real target, not Aperature... even the feature sets of Lightroom have her not missing her Mac...
Why did she get a new computer?
There's a MacOS X version of Lightroom, and it seems to work just fine - I specifically chose it over Aperture after evaluating the trial versions of both last year...
As an honest question, what useful things has Aricebo produced? Yes it is wonderful for tracking NEOs and providing quality information to astronomers, but what has the return been for ME on MY tax dollar?
Ensuring that there's no imminent repeat of this on a more populated area?
Other than certain addresses frequently used in phishing scams, I've never been able to identify a single real e-mail address that has received any of the responses. I watched pretty carefully for the first couple of months.
Well, you're lucky then.
My own email addresses have frequently been adopted by spammers as their 'From' addresses - the first I know about it is when I receive a bunch of mailing list server errors, spam bounced messages and out-of-office replies from people I don't know, with '3NL4RGE Y0UR 4PP3ND4GE'-style subject lines.
It's not backscatter spam, as nothing of the original message (beyond the subject) has survived - and as such, it usually gets past all my spam filters.
It's terribly annoying. Please don't contribute to it.
(Bloody shitty Wikipedia table - the version I looked at didn't sort properly, and a quick read suggested that Energia was the king of the hill. It wasn't. Although one unflown variant of Energia, the Vulkan Hercules, apparently could have launched 175 tonnes into LEO...)
Of course, the Soviet Energia beats all of them, hands down.
A hundred metric tonnes to low Earth orbit!
Two launches, in 1987 and 1988, both successful (Polypus' problems weren't the launcher's fault) - and then the project was closed down.
Oh well...
Of course, it cost an absolute fortune - so much so that it and its sister project Buran (the 'Russian Space Shuttle') arguably contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union.
I love bad reviews, especially those dripping with badly-spelled verbal venom. Here are some choice quotations from random forum postings about my own MINERVA mod for Half-Life 2:
lighting was fucking shit, its just like these other fucking mappers making maps extremely fucking dark
Despite the website that oozes more angst and self-hatred than an emo concert at an emo convention, this is worth downloading.
Was anybody else annoyed by those frequent messages? That pompous, cliche tone gave the sense that a smarmy Brit with two dictionaries, three encylopedias and a latin textbook shoved up his ******* was faxing you orders.
i made a box map with a giant penis that has better lighting that this shit
Besides, the content of the website is overly presumptuous, overloaded with vague metaphors, random big words and allusions to irrelevant Greek myths, as if they were talking about anything but a second-rate Half-Life 2 mod.
Other people claimed to like it, but I derive great fun from tracing Referers to the website, and reading what the Truly Informed Forum Users inhabiting this 'ere internet think of it...
Strangely, nobody's yet told me it's rubbish in an email. I must try harder.
I enjoy being a beer snob without spending much money.
In my cupboard I have bottle of Rochefort 10 - claimed by overly-enthusiastic Americans as being one of the best beers in the world. Except it only cost me a Euro down at my local supermarket. One of the advantages of living in Belgium.:-)
(And it's more of a beer to drink slowly on a cold winter's night, sat in an armchair in front of an open fire - if you want something colder and more refreshing, there are loads of other beers to choose from. Excluding Miller Lite, obviously!)
I had the same (my dad found it in a cupboard at his work at some point in the mid-nineties, and nobody either knew what it was or wanted it) - except the bloody thing died a few years ago. All it would do was display crap on the screen. I'm wondering if using a different, possibly-wrong-spec mains charger may have killed it.
It was great fun to mess round with when it did work, of course - I wrote various games (enhanced with the extended-character-set editor program) and generally had good fun with it. This was despite having access to way more powerful computers at the time...
The aim was to use it to construct some sort of robot, but I never got round to that. Using some sort of microcontroller effort could be a bit more sensible!
Even now, I see the despare that is in the 20-35 y.o. WRT human space flights. Yet, if we really want to explore AND to preserve mankind, then we MUST go along. The reason is that at this time, we are the best tool. High maintence, but still the only flexable tool.
I'm 28. On my shelves are books like Full Moon, a NASA atlas of the solar system, a biography of Sergei Korolev... I'm a bit of a space nut in my spare time (and did the astrophysics degree to prove it).
Human spaceflight is fascinating, but right now it's utterly useless for exploring our own solar system, let alone further afield. There's just way too much sodding plumbing you have to take along too. A radiation-hardened processor controlling a space probe is one thing, but the necessary life support mechanisms, living area, exercise machines, lavatory facilities, windows to look out of, paper underpants, DVD players, Tang, freeze-dried noodles and the machinery necessary to reprocess piss and shit into something more palatable... Humans just aren't designed for spaceflight.
If most of the non-fuel mass of your spacecraft is solely there to stop the human passengers from coughing their guts into hard vacuum, you may be doing something wrong. A far smaller craft which doesn't care less about the one-way nature of its mission, laden with scientific instrumentation designed solely to learn about its destination - that's more like it. And, compared with the human alternative, they're both cheap and disposable - so if something does go wrong, launch another one...
I'd love for humans to walk on the surface of Mars within my lifetime. But I also accept that it would just be another, magnificent white elephant along the lines of the original Apollo missions to the moon - no chance of living off the land when you're so utterly dependent on the exact hardware that took you there. We're more likely to progress long-term by investing in genuinely novel solutions to problems, even if they remain unmanned for the foreseeable future - and the wealth of knowledge about our solar system that we'll have gained from such robotic space probes will be invaluable when we do finally get round to those real attempts at colonisation...
Yes, it's funny, but would you suggest that Shrek would have been even close to the success it was had Pixar used cheap voice acting instead of these stars?
Forgetting for a moment the fact that the Shrek series isn't made by Pixar, the real Pixar will often use voices from unexpected sources.
Edna Mode, the pint-sized super-fashionista from the Incredibles? That's, erm... the director, Brad Bird. Who isn't even a lady, let alone a voice actress. Supposedly a temporary voice which they grew to love too much...
Linguini, the utterly useless human chef from Ratatouille? A certain Lou Romano, who is apparently normally found doing production design type stuff.
Voice acting is terribly important, but I think it works best if it uses the right voices rather than necessarily expensive voices.
I think his point was more that if he were to figure out how much it all cost, it definitely wouldn't be 'good value' on purely monetary terms - but the fact that he's "worrying about every batch like it's [his] child" suggests that maybe, just maybe, he's enjoying it immensely already?
Get yerself some Rochefort - especially the 10. Yes, it's stupidly strong, but you're definitely not supposed to gulp it down like cheap lager. It's gorgeous on a cold winter's night, around Christmas...
I'd go on to recommend other Belgian Trappist beers of note, but the answer is basically 'all of them'. I've still to find any Westvleteren, but I think that'll involve a special trip to the brewery...
(Note: I live in Belgium, so I can get weird beers that Americans lust after down at my local supermarket, really cheaply. And I get money back on returning the bottles. Brilliant!)
Incidentally, if you like that dish you could probably get it on the cheap as Jordrell Bank might be closing soon due to incredibly stupid short sighted funding cuts. Down with STFC, the lying UK Government and Keith Mason!!
I was at Manchester University from 1998-2001, and one of the undergraduate experiments I did involved going to Jodrell Bank every week, to fart around with the 13m telescope. If they close that place down, I'd be incredibly angry...
The Lovell Telescope is just beautiful. My only regret is that I hadn't yet bought a digital camera when I was there - so didn't spend hours taking photos of the thing. Which was possibly a good thing for my marks, but still...
Slashdot Mirror
In an attempt to steal some tiny fraction of the hallowed Mr. Booker's inevitably tiny traffic, I 'borrowed' his least-searched-for keywords for my own blog-thing.
And managed to get myself blocked from my own blog on an airport lounge's complimentary interweb PC - complete with a big giant 'THIS PERVERT IS LOOKING AT FILTH!!!1' message on the screen. Oops.
So, with the aim of dissipating yet more long-tail traffic from Mr. Brooker's articles, and hopefully blocking a few people from reading Slashdot in the process, here we go:
JOHN SELWYN GUMMER . . . PATRICK KIELTY NUDE . . . UNDERWHELMING KNITTING PATTERNS . . . FULLY CLOTHED BABES.
There. That's done it!
Why not buy both in one lens?
(Surprisingly, I want one!)
Yes, but how will they collect any photons? And what about pesky diffraction effects?
Or, don't. Many of these photographer-versus-security-guard altercations appear to involve photographers immediately acting up with shrill "I KNOW MY RIGHTS!!!!1" tirades against said guards. Okay, you may well be correct, but you're only going to escalate the situation.
I've found that apologising, immediately moving to put the camera away and politely providing a brief explanation of what I was doing can work wonders - the other week, I ended up being given a potted history and miniature tour of some old industrial architecture by the people working there, and was provided with recommendations of where else to look at.
Actually engaging with your subject (or inhabitants thereof) and not acting like a total nob is great. And even if the person telling you continues to be unpleasant, defusing the situation, going somewhere else and getting the camera out again works okay...
(Mr. Hawk is a complete pansy, anyway - was he shouted at by Polish military personnel for taking photos of their security arrangements? Okay, it was their ridiculously fluffy, damp and grumpy-looking guard dog I'd taken a photo of, and taking pictures of such stuff in Poland is now legal anyway, but the politely-apologise, put-camera-into-bag-and-walk-away route worked just fine...)
Just watched it in Belgium with a Belgian IP address, so I assume it's working.
All I can say is - poor Doctor Horrible! I sympathise with him. :-(
No idea about the Smithsonian, but I've already seen Mars rock - at the Natural History Museum in London.
Bits blasted off Mars in some titanic collision aeons in the past, which have drifted through space before falling to Earth as meteorites. Bit of a roundabout route, but it works!
Oh, that's what it's for!
I'd assumed it wanted to backup absolutely everything to an external disk - which was already happening with Time Machine. So after being annoyed by Lightroom's prompting, I switched that feature off, not realising all it wanted to verify and copy (to a subdirectory of the catalogue stuff) was simply the catalogue data itself.
I've re-enabled that feature so it'll run every week - and the 'local' backup will get copied to my external disk automatically through Time Machine.
Thanks!
Screenshots might help - basically it's a file manager with additional sorting, filtering and whatnot designed for organising photos. Here's Lightroom's library view as an example - I've filtered to show only photos I've given three stars or more, and selected one so you can see all the keywords and other metadata assigned to that photo. All searchable, sortable, filterable and so on!
With regard to editing, here's a screenshot from the develop view. All the edits are non-destructive - you can see a history on the left. 'RAW' refers to the image from the camera being in an unprocessed, raw-data-from-image-sensor format, which gives you a bit more latitude in tweaking white balance, contrast, exposure and the like.
(I don't normally shoot 'RAW', but my once-in-a-lifetime shipyard visit coincided with some utterly horrendous weather - getting just the right exposure in unlit, semi-derelict Eastern European industrial buildings at 7am on a cold, dark, wintry morning proved a little tricky at times... ;-] )
Why did she get a new computer?
There's a MacOS X version of Lightroom, and it seems to work just fine - I specifically chose it over Aperture after evaluating the trial versions of both last year...
Ensuring that there's no imminent repeat of this on a more populated area?
Well, you're lucky then.
My own email addresses have frequently been adopted by spammers as their 'From' addresses - the first I know about it is when I receive a bunch of mailing list server errors, spam bounced messages and out-of-office replies from people I don't know, with '3NL4RGE Y0UR 4PP3ND4GE'-style subject lines.
It's not backscatter spam, as nothing of the original message (beyond the subject) has survived - and as such, it usually gets past all my spam filters.
It's terribly annoying. Please don't contribute to it.
Thanks for that - my Slashdot posts are usually much better researched, honest. :-)
(Bloody shitty Wikipedia table - the version I looked at didn't sort properly, and a quick read suggested that Energia was the king of the hill. It wasn't. Although one unflown variant of Energia, the Vulkan Hercules, apparently could have launched 175 tonnes into LEO...)
Of course, the Soviet Energia beats all of them, hands down.
A hundred metric tonnes to low Earth orbit!
Two launches, in 1987 and 1988, both successful (Polypus' problems weren't the launcher's fault) - and then the project was closed down.
Oh well...
Of course, it cost an absolute fortune - so much so that it and its sister project Buran (the 'Russian Space Shuttle') arguably contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union.
I love bad reviews, especially those dripping with badly-spelled verbal venom. Here are some choice quotations from random forum postings about my own MINERVA mod for Half-Life 2:
Other people claimed to like it, but I derive great fun from tracing Referers to the website, and reading what the Truly Informed Forum Users inhabiting this 'ere internet think of it...
Strangely, nobody's yet told me it's rubbish in an email. I must try harder.
Obviously, God wasn't listening to this new-fangled technology.
I enjoy being a beer snob without spending much money.
:-)
In my cupboard I have bottle of Rochefort 10 - claimed by overly-enthusiastic Americans as being one of the best beers in the world. Except it only cost me a Euro down at my local supermarket. One of the advantages of living in Belgium.
(And it's more of a beer to drink slowly on a cold winter's night, sat in an armchair in front of an open fire - if you want something colder and more refreshing, there are loads of other beers to choose from. Excluding Miller Lite, obviously!)
I had the same (my dad found it in a cupboard at his work at some point in the mid-nineties, and nobody either knew what it was or wanted it) - except the bloody thing died a few years ago. All it would do was display crap on the screen. I'm wondering if using a different, possibly-wrong-spec mains charger may have killed it.
It was great fun to mess round with when it did work, of course - I wrote various games (enhanced with the extended-character-set editor program) and generally had good fun with it. This was despite having access to way more powerful computers at the time...
The aim was to use it to construct some sort of robot, but I never got round to that. Using some sort of microcontroller effort could be a bit more sensible!
Quite difficult, but it is being planned...
I'm 28. On my shelves are books like Full Moon, a NASA atlas of the solar system, a biography of Sergei Korolev... I'm a bit of a space nut in my spare time (and did the astrophysics degree to prove it).
Human spaceflight is fascinating, but right now it's utterly useless for exploring our own solar system, let alone further afield. There's just way too much sodding plumbing you have to take along too. A radiation-hardened processor controlling a space probe is one thing, but the necessary life support mechanisms, living area, exercise machines, lavatory facilities, windows to look out of, paper underpants, DVD players, Tang, freeze-dried noodles and the machinery necessary to reprocess piss and shit into something more palatable... Humans just aren't designed for spaceflight.
If most of the non-fuel mass of your spacecraft is solely there to stop the human passengers from coughing their guts into hard vacuum, you may be doing something wrong. A far smaller craft which doesn't care less about the one-way nature of its mission, laden with scientific instrumentation designed solely to learn about its destination - that's more like it. And, compared with the human alternative, they're both cheap and disposable - so if something does go wrong, launch another one...
I'd love for humans to walk on the surface of Mars within my lifetime. But I also accept that it would just be another, magnificent white elephant along the lines of the original Apollo missions to the moon - no chance of living off the land when you're so utterly dependent on the exact hardware that took you there. We're more likely to progress long-term by investing in genuinely novel solutions to problems, even if they remain unmanned for the foreseeable future - and the wealth of knowledge about our solar system that we'll have gained from such robotic space probes will be invaluable when we do finally get round to those real attempts at colonisation...
Forgetting for a moment the fact that the Shrek series isn't made by Pixar, the real Pixar will often use voices from unexpected sources.
Edna Mode, the pint-sized super-fashionista from the Incredibles? That's, erm... the director, Brad Bird. Who isn't even a lady, let alone a voice actress. Supposedly a temporary voice which they grew to love too much...
Linguini, the utterly useless human chef from Ratatouille? A certain Lou Romano, who is apparently normally found doing production design type stuff.
Voice acting is terribly important, but I think it works best if it uses the right voices rather than necessarily expensive voices.
Oi! Stop making me feel hungry!
(Speaking of cheese, I actually do have a chunk of Orval cheese in my fridge right now. Hooray!)
I think his point was more that if he were to figure out how much it all cost, it definitely wouldn't be 'good value' on purely monetary terms - but the fact that he's "worrying about every batch like it's [his] child" suggests that maybe, just maybe, he's enjoying it immensely already?
Get yerself some Rochefort - especially the 10. Yes, it's stupidly strong, but you're definitely not supposed to gulp it down like cheap lager. It's gorgeous on a cold winter's night, around Christmas...
I'd go on to recommend other Belgian Trappist beers of note, but the answer is basically 'all of them'. I've still to find any Westvleteren, but I think that'll involve a special trip to the brewery...
(Note: I live in Belgium, so I can get weird beers that Americans lust after down at my local supermarket, really cheaply. And I get money back on returning the bottles. Brilliant!)
I was at Manchester University from 1998-2001, and one of the undergraduate experiments I did involved going to Jodrell Bank every week, to fart around with the 13m telescope. If they close that place down, I'd be incredibly angry...
The Lovell Telescope is just beautiful. My only regret is that I hadn't yet bought a digital camera when I was there - so didn't spend hours taking photos of the thing. Which was possibly a good thing for my marks, but still...