Author: admin-blog

Hey! Boing Boing accepted my submission about Cosmic Painter. Let’s hope they appreciate some free publicity and don’t stumble under the load.

Oh, it’s a cool little program that runs under OS X, is GPL open source, and lets you “paint” on a spinning canvas. Like a spirograph, except that the canvas spins instead of the pen, and you can draw whatever you like, change the spinning speed, direction, frame rate, colour, colourspeed changing… not so much like a spirograph really. But a great idea, and hopefully when back in Australia I’ll get a chance to VJ some of this live.

Oh, and if I haven’t blogged our recent trip to Norway by this weekend, someone let me know, yeah? Email is blog [at] funwithstuff.com. Many, many photos to sift through, so I’ll post the best few.

OK. Here’s a way for anyone interested to contact me. I don’t really need another email service, but since they offered, I’ve now signed up as a tester for Google’s Gmail. (Blogging has perks – who knew?) There are privacy concerns so I’ll watch for any news and keep you posted. In the meantime, email me at funwithstuff [squigglysymbol] gmail.com if you don’t know me yet but have something, anything to say to me. (The usual addresses stand if you know them.)

Actually, drop me a line at the Gmail address even if you do know me. It’d be nice to know I’m not just typing this for my own benefit. If you want to send lots of pictures, 1GB of email space is the ideal spot for it. And it’ll probably be good while travelling.

Google may not be perfect, but it’s a long, long way from Microsoft. Let’s hope the IPO doesn’t screw it up.

We’re leaving London soon, after three years spent here with the old buildings, the drizzle, the tube, the beer, and Londoners. Everyone’s experience of a place is different, coloured by their individual experiences. For us, though, it has been enough.

London, and other big cities, are great at delivering the exceptional time; the wonderful theatre experience (Jumpers) or the amazing restaurant (Roussillon) and the best chocolate shop in the world. (And we had a good day today looking at old buildings and gardens in Mayfair.) The metropolis is also great at connecting people in unusual ways. But big cities are lousy at the everyday.

Daily life in a city where everyone wants to be is crowded, dirty and overpriced. The tube is a living hell in rushhour, traffic a slow negotiation between crawling psychopaths. A ray of sunshine is such a rarity that everyone drops their top and takes their towel to the local park to sunbathe.

We’ll be reversing this little equation by moving to a mountain community outside Brisbane, Australia, using rain as our water supply, eating happy organic vegies and enjoying daily warmth. The exceptional experiences may be fewer, and further between. Daily life will be far more fun. (We hope.)

Five weeks left here, a few weeks around the UK, two months around the US, then back home.

Lovely weekend with the family. Sister, Father, Uncle and I went a-walking and a-drinking in Southern England, along the Test Way. Most enjoyable, though more beer than I’m used to.

(So, if I spent a long weekend rambling through the countryside, drinking plenty of real ale, wearing a beard, what does that make me? Don’t answer that.)

Anyway, one of the things we got to was Chilbolton, and its Radio Telescope. Now if you do a Google search on that, a few odd things pop up about crop circles. Some really amazing designs appear each summer in English fields, especially in Hampshire and Wiltshire, and most sensible people would agree that they are man made, mostly by the group that takes responsibility, Circlemakers.

Many, many sites persist, however, in maintaining that humans couldn’t have done it. The circles are either too complex, or there are weird effects around the area, or dowsing rods show a change… all stuff which can be easily debunked. The Circlemakers are actually pretty clever, practised, quick moving guys (here’s an answer to some criticism) who are more than ready to encourage the “researchers” by, say, adding iron filings to a circle they’ve just created. These iron filings are hailed by crop circle researchers as evidence of meteoric dust, impossible for “hoaxers” to obtain. Dowsing I’ll leave to James Randi.

There is no hoax. There really are a bunch of humans who enjoy making art with fields, and it looks great.

(Lastly, if you want a laugh, you may enjoy this analysis of the Chilbolton “Arecibo reply” formation. Wow.)

How can the USA hold people for two years without access to lawyers, loved ones or human rights, and the UK government set them all free within 48 hours? And what drives anyone to do what they did in Madrid?

I’ll be happy when we leave the UK. Flying to the USA, but not on British Airways, United or American Airlines; staying in the US, but not in the major cities; flying to Australia, but not on QANTAS; living just outside a smaller Australian city, with our own water supply and a long way from any terrorist targets.

Sure, I’m worried, somewhere underneath the day-to-day. The UK, and probably the Tube, is widely expected to be hit. All the Madrid trains went through the same outdoor station; one person could have planted all the bombs with pre-calculated timings, and the same could happen here. It’s (apparently) easy to kill, though I can’t fathom why anyone who understands the value of life would want to.

London, in a country whose government supported the last war, has so many people that an attack seems inevitable. (The IRA managed it many times.) But terrorism is unpredictable. Any small crackpot group can claim to “have links to Al-Qaida”, and all a bombing near you takes is a few determined local nutbags. As we live in a global village these days, that means that nutbags anywhere can cause trouble.

If we all live in fear of a global terrorist organisation (like KAOS from Get Smart) then “they” are winning. If “they” are a coherent force at all.

What’s the best two lines of song lyrics you can think of that will fit engraved on an iPod?

None of this “Happy Birthday” crap. It’s got to fit in the 27 character limit, be two contiguous song lines, and no swearing, cause they won’t let you. But a good pair of lines, as you’ll have to live with them for the life of the beast.

An easy one: “it’s oh so quiet/it’s oh so still”. Or maybe “rameses! colossus!/rameses! colossus!”. Along the same lines: “there is joy in repetition/there is joy in repetition”. Or… “i palindrome i/man o nam”? Enjoy. And if you signed up for one click purchasing, it’s your own damn fault.

Having trouble writing? Try a short story in which the characters share names with the last five “people” who spammed you. For me, right now, that means Joe Whitaker, Jean Hood, Lien Keira, Cornelius Hawkins, and Marco Means.

Maybe I should go to bed now.

Wonder Boys is one of those films that makes you want to be a writer, to create something. Sometimes after I’ve seen or read something like this, I wonder if I’m truly a creative, an artist, or just a person who creates things because the techniques are interesting.

Then I wonder, is the distinction too fine to extract a judgement? How many authors or filmmakers today started out because they could construct a sentence or frame a shot? Is web design a coding chore or a creative act? And I figure it doesn’t matter. Everything’s a sliding scale, what you make it. If you claim you’re an artist, you’re an artist. Anything you create, by virtue of the process, is better than numbing yourself in front of a TV, drifting towards death.

(Offtopic query: Where should I submit the word-free airport animation I finished recently? A contest? Just on this site? Suggestions welcome.)