TalkRhubarb

It’s election day tomorrow and Ian says it’s too close to call.

I feel I must vote. Despite the combination of low turnouts and living in a constituency with a Labour majority so large that any other vote may only be useful in helping some other poor candidate get enough votes to get their deposit back. Despite the lack of credible candidates I can actually believe in. Despite a choice of where to place my vote that is as bewilderingly wide as it is infinitesimally shallow. I must because many don’t have that privilege. But mostly I must because it validates my haranguing of my elected representatives for the rest of their term.

Investment in health and education is laudable, but who’s paying for all those schools and hospitals? They’re all built with money from a PFI mortgage our children and grandchildren will have to repay. And of course Gordon Brown’s made sure they don’t know the size of their debt because PFI doesn’t appear as public borrowing. That makes the country’s finances look better than they really are.

Where is the candidate with the courage of their convictions? Where is the candidate willing to say that to deal with poverty and health and education and housing and asylum is going to cost you, and here’s how much?

And if there was such a candidate, would I vote for them?

Maybe there aren’t those candidates because they know I’m as hypocritical in the ballot box as they know I think they are in their council office.

But maybe that can change. I live in hope.

. Nomes has some great pics of the Nedbank (click picture for link). Neds are getting more and more sophisticated all the time. Now they’ve moved into financial services whatever’s next? An airline? Answers on a postcard please.

I love my Thursdays off. particularly when this (from BBC) is what I’m missing. The guys in the car pool didn’t make it to work. They left at 7am and at lunchtime they gave up and went home.

We’ve moved and our new house is totally boxtastic. I’m hoping all the boxes everywhere will provide an extra layer of insulation.
I’m asking myself several questions:
1) Where did we keep all this stuff in the flat?
2) Why did we bring so much of it with us?
3) Why didn’t I get the removers to put more of it in the garage?

I’ve spent the last 10 days painting, laying carpets, plumbing in washing machine and dishwasher and getting stitched up at the local casualty department. The latter being the result of stabbing myself with a screwdriver. So we’re settling in nicely.

Should really be GmailRhubarb but there we go. I was trying to get Google Apps for your domain up and running for merriweather.org.uk, but it’s very difficult because of the lack of options UKReg (who I registered the domain with) provide. No matter how hard I tried Google wouldn’t verify that I was the owner of the domain. Last night I gave up and decided I’d try with talkrhubarb.com (hosted with powweb.com). The result is that I have 50 talkrhubarb.com 2Gb gmail accounts setup so I’ve added a link to the login page at the top of the page. Powweb’s setup made it soooo much easier.

I downloaded this game last night and have found it strangely compelling.  It’s taken me back 20 years to when I doodled similar sketches in 2nd year physics at high school - only sketchfighter brings those doodles to life.  It gives it a weird mix of nostalgia and novelty I really like. What does that say about me?

There’s multiplayer competitive or co-op options too, both of which have you tethered to another player.  Unfortunately my firewall stopped me finding internet players, but even sharing a keyboard works quite well.

You can get Sketchfighter here

Some Swiss developers have used the flickr API to allow you to create mosaics of your own, or people’s flickr photos, providing they’ve used a creative commons license. It’s a nice little app, but unfortunately it’s just too slow for me to use without frustration. Hopefully you mileage varies. I mention it because it seems a photo I took of dolphons at Parc Asterix last summer is used as one of the sample mosaics. Check it out:
Mosaickr sample

Ok that’s stretching it a bit. But this article on BBC News immediately brought to my mind the Babelfish from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have created a device that translates mouthed words into one of a number of languages. With a very limited vocabulary of less than three hundred words, and only an 80% success rate, it’s clearly not a product that’s going to be available anytime soon. And that’s a shame, because I was looking forward to special promotions at Amazon along the lines of “Free Babelfish with every Hitchhikers Guide DVD”. It would be a great way to get rid of excess stock of the dire movie adaptation.

Some people have incredible ingenuity which flies in the face of much more obvious and simple solutions. Here’s someone explaining how they use a torch and their iSight webcam to switch on and off iTunes on their mac.
MacOSXhints.com article

As the editor of the site above says - it’s a lot easier to go and buy a remote control! And did I mention that all new macs (with the exception of the high end mac pro’s) come bunded with a remote control? Alternatively with bluetooth on the computer you can use your phone as a remote, with the salling clicker software. This is also available for Windows users too.

The BBC has an article on taking pictures from the Higher Art examround the country in a bus.
You can see the 10 of the pictures here.
We’ve known Josh Wilkie’s family (his is the bright and cheerful still life - picture 5) since Faith was very small. Josh is studying chemistry rather than taking his art further academically, which you might think is a shame. Personally, I feel that some things are more fun when they’re your hobby rather than your job. Why is it that professionalism sucks so much of the of the life out of things? “Amateur” has as it’s root “for the love of”, and I find the passion and inclusivity of an amateur often much more inspiring than the stand-offish exclusivity of many a professional.