Author: admin-blog

The musical tastes of teenagers have been driving popular music for so long, I’m very interested to see what will happen in the UK now that downloads will be included in the Top 40. The BBC’s report: How downloads will change the chart is an interesting starting point, though there have been complaints made.

A song is not good because it sells; a movie is not good because it has a big opening weekend. Most pop culture exists to make money, not art. Simply: a product has been packaged and marketed towards those with discretionary incomes but little discretion. Fish in a barrel, fingers in my ears. Go Triple J.

Blasphemy ahead: you have been warned.

So the Pope’s died. Ignoring the living hell that Africa’s becoming because of the edict that condoms are “against god”, my concern is with those who are praying for Pope John Paul II. While I don’t have a copy of the Heaven Entry Rules in front of me, surely he’s home and hosed? Surely if anyone’s getting in, the Pope is… or is there some level of doubt out there?

Here in Brisbane (and I guess in many places) most churches have boards out the front with changing messages in large red and black letters. My favourite up until now has been the distinctly odd “JESUS IS GOD WITH SKIN”. The new winner, though, is one recently seen on an Anglican church that ended in “OUR GOD LIVES”.

Isn’t it nice to know that Christians are all kind and considerate to one another?

Living on Mt Nebo is really, really nice. Sometimes, I get over the drive, but then on the weekend, we can take the comfy chairs out to the back deck, open a bottle of wine, and let the clean wind lift the stress from the world. It’s all in the air.

Meanwhile, I had fun coding over the weekend. (Yes, that’s geeky, but if that’s a problem it’s yours.) Simple-ish, I hacked up some code in JavaScript for Adobe InDesign to transpose a table, including content, fills, colours and fonts. Transpose is when you exchange rows and columns, and it’s something you never want to do by hand. Even in Excel it’s well hidden (Paste Special then hunt for the checkbox) and that would ditch the styles. So yeah, request in the comments if you’re interested. Which is none of you. So I’ll just go and post it to the Adobe site, assuming it hasn’t been written already.

Oh, if you’ve taken the word challenge from last post, put your words in the comments. Post without an account, it’s easier. Cheers!

Quiz time!

Get a pen and a piece of paper. You’ll be making as many words as you can out of these five letters: A, C, D, E, R. To keep it interesting, there’s a three-letter minimum, and you should be able to get at least 20 words. There’s no time limit, so let it keep you up at night, like it did me. This didn’t come from any website or puzzle book, it just bubbled up out of my head after a few too many rounds of Boggle. Enjoy!

And if your inner geek hasn’t had enough of an exercise, check out this logically reformatted version of They Might Be Giants’ classic Istanbul Not Constantinople.

More on Easter, just quickly. If you check out this search page, you’ll see a lot more. Google Search: eostre christian . Even better, there’s the hilarious sponsored link (LetGodBeTrue.com) in the top right, Easter: A Few Problems. That page has this great quote: “Jesus does not look like this effeminate hippie.”

In the course of its literalist biblical preachery, it points out a few problems with Easter. The most obvious is that Jesus was supposed to take three days and three nights to die and be resurrected, but there’s only two between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Is that what Easter Monday’s for?

Also, in the US, Easter Sunday is actually Resurrection Sunday. Freaky. Call it what you want, I’m just happy to have a four-day weekend. And don’t get me started on Christmas.

Wait… shit… it’s too late.

Lots of other stuff around the same time. Yule (Pagan) on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, December 22nd. Gifts exchanged. Wreaths hung. Holly and ivy etc. Also, Victory of the Sun-God (Babylonian); Birthday of the Gods (various ancient pagan civilisations, apparently); Saturnalia (Romans), to celebrate Saturn (harvest god) and Mithras (light god) involving more gift-giving, especially toys to children. Caesar action figures and so on.

Interesting stuff just googled: “When it was first proposed in the fifth century to celebrate “the birth of the Son” on the date of “the birth of the Sun” the eastern churches rebelled. They were upset that a pagan holiday was being expropriated by the church, and resisted the change. The Russian Orthodox Church today still shuns December 25th and celebrates the birth of Christ on January 7th instead.” – from the Institute for Liberal Values. Also, that Christmas was illegal in England from 1647 to 1660 under Oliver Cromwell, and for the Calvinist Puritans in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681. Also see American Christmas Origins.

And of course, let’s not forget Father Christmas, good old Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, Sinter Claes, St Nicholas, etc. Check out the Chronology of Santa Claus. From 1931, Santa’s been wearing Coca Cola’s red and white, and has become the “traditional” view of Santa Claus.

So please, don’t tell me that modern times have taken Christ out of Easter or Christmas. He doesn’t belong there, never did. He was inserted. It’s all about the chocolate, people, and don’t lie to your kids.

What’s a blog for if not for ranting? I’ll just warn the Christian section (vanishingly small) of my readers (again, vanishingly small) to beware.

Every year around this time, you see church leaders and that silly guy in the white hat talking about Christ, how he died for our sins, and how he was resurrected a few days later. Bollocks. It’s all about timing, and how the Christian festival of Easter was plonked headfirst on the pagan festival of Eostre, a spring festival held at the equinox.

Channel 4 – Time Team: “[Eostre] gave her name to the Christian spring festival of Easter, which was originally held on the same day as the festival of Eostre – 21 March, the spring equinox. The modern Easter symbolism of Easter eggs and the Easter bunny arise from pagan custom. The eggs symbolise fertility and rebirth. The rabbit (more properly the hare, which ancient folklore associates with laying eggs) was Eostre’s sacred animal.”

More detail about how this hare lays eggs, from the excitingly named News Letter: “One strangely heartwarming tale about Eostre might even explain why rabbits and eggs have become associated with the Easter festival. The story goes that one winter day, while out walking, Eostre found an injured bird and, in order to save it, turned it into a hare. Unfortunately, the transformation did not go exactly according to plan — the bird achieved the appearance of a hare, but retained the ability to lay eggs. And so it was that this bizarre creature began leaving his eggs — decorated by his own fair paw — as gifts for Eostre!”

So I hope everyone’s celebrating Easter in the contemporary spirit, i.e. enjoying shaped chocolate for breakfast. And then buying more on Tuesday when it’s half price. Chocolate for everyone!

Mt Nebo now has 40/40 required users for ADSL. More would be good, but if everyone says “yes” when someone rings to confirm with them, we’ll have broadband soon. Ish.

And it’s a long, long weekend here; we’re painting. Have more fun than that, everyone.

A long, long time ago (1996) in a town far, far away (Ballarat) I created a tool, CGrUB, to help students learn computer graphics programming in C. It starts at the basics (lines, shapes) and moves through some funky stuff (antialiasing, lighting, splines) to 3D stuff (bouncing balls and random fractals). It’s also free, though it never got the publicity it deserved and remains little known. It was created in Apple Media Tool (unusual in itself) but Director would have been a pain for this project.

Full code is provided for the code examples, along with starter code if you’d like to fill in the blanks as a learning exercise. No idea if you’ll be able to compile the code with any current IDE, but you’ll be able to study the pseudocode in the general learning environment, and see the existing programs in action. Let me know what you think through email to cgrub [at] funwithstuff.com.

If you want to get started you’ll need a Mac and QuickDraw 3D in the classic environment. The PC version is available on request, but I’ll see if anyone’s listening for now. Download CGrUB here.

Nearly there on broadband. After last weekend’s doorknocking, we’ve got 38 interested households, up from the previous 33. (The target of 35, by the way, was raised to 40.) Knocking doors again today and we should have broadband in a few months. For sure, right?

Everything’s pretty busy right now, but it’s looking promising for future work. Some interesting stuff coming soon; I’ll spill more beans after the event. Oh, and I’ve converted airport (link to the left!) to video format and will be submitting it to some festivals. Let’s see if they like it. Oh, one tiny revision to the sound for that version and the web version to the left. Plus it’s now published under a Creative Commons license. Play, enjoy!