Be still my beating heart. Macworld has an article Apple plans Glasgow retail store. Will be be able to buy Macs in the land of the Mac? Hope it’s true.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Store, Glasgow
Time to come clean, I suffer from OCSPD. Obsessive Compulsive Sony Purchasing Disorder. I can’t believe it, I’ve just ordered another minidisc recorder. That will make five at the last count. I can’t help myself. I know it’s a rapidly aging technology but I have a fondness for the minidiscs. The quality is still fantastic and sliding a physical button to start recording rather than all the faffing you normally have to do to set modes, choose menus and start recording on MP3 recorders, I still like the minidiscs but post-production has been less than thrilling. Another impulse buy. This one (RH1) is supposed to at long, long, long, long, long, looooonnnnngggg, last have the capability that minidisc owners have been crying out for “Let me transfer my own recordings to my computer digitally!” but for legacy SP/LP microphone recordings. At last! I feel kind of sad for Sony they’re having a rough time of it recently, slipping on PS shipping dates and battery recalls. The software with the minidiscs is usually abysmal but they still make cracking hardware and although the initial purchase is usually more expensive than other options, the products are robust. I have a MZ-N710 that’s still shiny brushed silver and iPods be dammed packs a lot of functionality into a beautiful square device - I have Sony gizmos over a decade old and they’re still going strong, for whatever reason their designs don’t seem to have cheap cases that get scraped, thin connectors that snap or get worn out. I think they’re well worth the money.
To me it seems like there’s a bit of a gap in the market for the medium quality recording devices, players aplenty but recorders? There’s the high-end Marantz and any number of cheap ‘voice recorders’ but not a great deal of choice in between. I can’t figure out why iRiver dropped the ball after the great wee iFP800 series of flash recorders. They went all Windows and DRM on us dropped Macs and offered fewer models with decent recording rates. If they’d enhanced iFP800 they could have cleaned up in the low-end portable podcasting market. Folk still recommend them on the podcasting mailing lists but you have to go to ebay to find them these days.
Technorati Tags: Sony, MiniDisc, MP3, recording
…to spot a really simple web problem. 3 and about 2 hours. Had a case where I was given some new styles to add to a stylesheet, added them and an image that should have been appearing on a hyperlink wasn’t showing up on my machine. Try the usual suspects, relative paths, does the image exist, check, proxy caching, check, delete cache, check, restart browser, check, restart machine check. Apple guy can see the images, another Windows user can see the images, just not me. Install new browser (Opera) check - hooray images appear…but why weren’t they showing up on IE/Firefox? Well after what seems like an eternity I clicked on the link in Opera…and watched the image disappear from view right before my eyes. Help mammy the image monster is eating my icons. Aha! The link was missing a visited state. Me being the only person to have clicked on the link was the only person seeing the effect. It was so bizarre having the same thing happen in Firefox and MSIE and not be able to understand what was wrong. Doh, doh and thrice doh! Another one to add to the collection.
The famed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was murdered recently - many suspect this was retribution for her outspoken views, visited the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2005. By way of rememberance and “because the Book Festival will always uphold freedom of expression and thought, we are making her talk (translated from Russian) available for all to listen to.”. Hear her talk on the Edinburgh International Book Festival Readings page.
Technorati Tags: Freedom, Anna Politkovskaya, Edinburgh International Book Festival, women, journalism, Chechnya
(more…)Weekend telly went from the ridiculous to the sublime from trashy X Factor to Jane Tennison bowing out from our screens after 7 series of Prime Suspect. Where to begin? Venice I think. It all began with Bond, James Bond.
More than a few things this weekend made me reflect on the way women are portrayed on screen. Flicking through the channels between the X Factor I caught the opening few minutes of From Russia with Love with Shir Sean Connery. I would love to hear a Camile Paglia analysis of this film, it’s a riot. East meets West. Now this was one of the earliest Bonds but all the trademark title sequence is a blast. You know the drill. Some scantily clad women gyrate in various “arty” shapes in the background while the title credits are superimposed. This one’s maybe more entertaining than most because the said gyrator happens to be a belly dancer. I couldn’t help laughing. But I had to think, what was it that was making me laugh? Maybe the first thought was “this is the kind of thing that radical feminists protest against, women potrayed as sex objects”. Literally pieces of a women displayed, portion at a time, bit o belly here, bit of thigh there - like joints of meat at the butchers. But there’s something about luminous neon lettering hovering over the belly button of a belly dancer in motion that is nothing short of a joy to behold. No one would know who was being credited in the film your attention is entirely behind what’s on front of the screen, quite mesmerising. Who’s got the power?
Again later in the film we are introduced to the deliciously villaneous and wacky Rosa Klebb played by Lotte Lenye - she’s the one that goes on to attempt the hilarious spikey shoes assassination. The women in the film are either toys or they’re organisers. Klebb clearly has a great deal of power allocating agents to different tasks. It’s difficult to remember that this was the early sixties, women by and large didn’t have jobs telling other people what to do. This would be a function of the Russian connection with the communist gender equality placing Rosa where there’d normally be a man in a Western scenario. She tells her spy in no uncertain terms to use her feminine charms to seduce Bond. Back at Bond HQ, what about poor Miss Moneypenny, played by the delightful Lois Maxwell? All that flirting and what’s she got to show for it? Bond can jet set anywhere in the world but he canny go anywhere until Moneypenny sorts out his plane tickets for him. Who’s got the power?
The ‘toy’ women are almost biblical in the way they’re portrayed as the seductive Eve’s luring the hapless males into temptation. The men can never resist them. There are some supporting characters in sultry Turkey. In one scene we’re treated to that staple of film analysis “The Male Gaze” but in an interesting spin by Terrence Young the director it’s a three-way gaze. A woman is sprawled seductively over a bed, fully clothed, the camera and us are looking at her, she in turn is looking longingly towards her partner, her partner is ignoring this vision of loveliness and is in a chair working, if it was a contemporary film he’d probably be tapping away on a laptop, she again the Eve tempts him away from work and into her arms. Then of course a bomb goes off, as it does 
Bond is lounging with yet another lovely in a punt. Bond gets the phone call to leave. Lovely, (can you spot a pattern here), persuades Bond to stay longer for more canoodling, he can’t resist. Who’s got the power? Anyway what about today?
Some cheap, quasi-hokum of a paranormal drama called “afterlife” was on after X-Factor I wasn’t really watching it but midway A young couple tear each others clothes off, no preamble, no seduction. Not to put too fine a point we (The Male Gaze) again are given bare bum and breasts - her only of course, this is only a few minutes past the notional “watershed” for adult content and is scheduled right next to one of the most popular shows with lots of kids watching. Completely gratuitous and unneccessary. Over forty years after Bond film ’sexism’ and this is what we have to show for it? Nubile young actresses are still getting their bits out for the boys on screen, only difference now is it’s explicit. It’s not “suggestive” it’s “in your face”. Is this progress?
Leaving this crass nonsense behind. I have to say that I thought the last episode of Prime Suspect was quite simply one of the best pieces of television I’ve ever seen. Best part of four hours but not a single wasted moment, not one line of script that didn’t speak beyond mere words. Pure Class and a top notch production. AA Gill nailed it in the Sunday Times when he wrote “As a collection, it’s been brilliantly sustained, and this is mostly down to Helen Mirren’s performance. Her heroic decline into the bottle and loneliness is Shakespearian, except that Shakespeare never wrote parts this meatily tragic for women.”. There was an important role too for Scot Katy Murphy (Miss Toner - Tutti Frutti) and screen husband as the distraught parents of a murdered child. Such great support acting all round including the youngsters. I wont spoil the plot for anyone still to watch but the focus is very much back on Jane herself as much as the case she is running. Although the script was great there was so much that wasn’t spoken but conveyed in looks, in panning round empty rooms where in previous series Jane would have been having flings with colleagues, now emptiness all around and her struggles to reach out and sustain any kind of a human relationship with all the bridges she’s burnt over the years as a hard-boiled copper. Has it been worth it? The forfeiting of kids for a career are conveyed tenderly but painfully and oh so very powerfully. This is pure majesterial televisual power.
We should rightly celebrate Helen Mirren who seems to be cornering the market in senior women in power and is starting to usurp the blessed Dame Judy Dench as the nation’s favourite Dame. Now you have to acknowledge the arc of her career. Royal Shakespeare Company but thirty years ago in TV/Film she would just as likely have been the fleshy presence in that ghastly afterlife show. She wasn’t shy of stripping off even the last episode had a shower scene but decency prevailed. The art films of Peter Greenaway, the haunting and tender “Cal” where she has a relationship with her husband’s murderer. The two Elizabeths in quick succession and seven stages of Jane Tennison spread across several years. Tennison is what would be the equivalent of King Lear on the stage for a man. Will we see her likes again? With Prime Suspect we also shouldn’t neglect to acknowledge Linda La Plante, Jane was her creation, the original script writer who helped give the first series such an impact when it hit our screens. Again all those years ago it was a novelty for a woman boss and in the tough, macho world of the police force. Helen gave Tennison life, flesh and blood. In a sense I’m glad Prime Suspect has finished when it is at the pinacle of all that’s best in TV, where there’s so much trash, this was the best of all possible worlds. Don’t miss it.
Technorati Tags: Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect, James Bond, Male gaze, women, feminism, Camille Paglia
Got this message from my web hosts today. Blog must have been down all day, there is a fix but um, yum, whatever, shouldn’t have happened in the first place should it?
“Some customers with a Fedora Core 5 server may have received an automatic update from Fedora that may have caused MySQL on their server to stop working.The fix this issue, SSH to your server as root and issue the following commands:
yum install php-mysql
/etc/init.d/httpd restart”
Technorati Tags: Apache, MySQL, Fedora, yum
I got a request to plug Newburgh Ladies Football Club.
Nae problem. Free Googlejuice here for all sites to do with Scottish Women.
Same crew at RedGerry.com also do the site for Celtic Girls (Tayside) Football Club. Loved the “Celtic Girls Is What Celtic Girls Are”
“…You may as our opposition try and stop us attacking and scoring goals, you may as an opposition attempt to stop us passing and playing the art of football, but you as an opposition will never stop us believing in the art of football because simply put the art of football will always be the Celtic Girls way…”
The “art of football”. Beautiful. Women, Scotland, Footie, great stuff!
Technorati Tags: Newburgh, Celtic, Tayside, Women's Football, Soccer, Scotland
Mildly amusing this blogging scene. I feel a bit like a grandparent stumbling into a teenage party. I’d ‘retired’ from blogging after over 5 years only as it was starting to take off. It’s more than a wee bit strange starting again and seeing how much simpler the systems have become. Jeez things are so easy these days for you kids. So many free gizmos. WYSIWYG, Christ you don’t even have to “Select All” these days these blog tools just add their whizzy JavaScript to do it for you, how lazy can you get.
I been through quite a few self-publishing tools over the years as well as ye olde world hand coding, let’s see Userland Frontier (I paid hundreds of quid for this in the late nineties and now it’s free!) maybe a spot of claybasket, Manilla, Radio Userland, Moveable Type, Blogger and now WordPress. Not sure if I’m staying with WordPress yet, I’m really liking Drupal that I’m using at work and it seems more multi-purpose and developer-oriented and I’m already using it for my Scottish Election site, the taxonomy system is amazingly powerful but Drupal in turn isn’t so strong on the blogging side.
I got a real shock when I totalled up my stats over the years for this domain or at least since I started recording traffic, over 3 million hits recorded since 2001 and it’s been pretty dead the last couple of years, that’s insane, again probably 99% traffic TV blog related, no me.
I’ve duly been faffing and adding my del.ici.ous tags, setting up FeedBurner, Google Analytics and Google Adsense and claiming my Technorati feed and still had time to watch Corrie. No bad. Don’t expect this site to look good visually any time soon though. This stuff used to take an eternity now a few clicks and you’re done. What? It willnae dae the writing fir me? Ach gie it time.
Awright troops here’s ra score. Wur gonny be posting oan ma blog right.
Oops who let Ned Lass aff her ASBO? Ok, Ok, it’s me, I’m back from hiatus, weather’s awfie nice there. Did ye miss me? No, don’t answer that, not that there’s anyone really reading this. So where’ve I been, what’s been going on and why in the name of the wee man is Quine Online still not revamped, ye’ve only had a decade plus to get your act together? If I Quine was my child the wean would have been taken into care by now.
OK in no particular order life events:
Fair to say my mind’s been on other things and somehow I needed to focus my energies rather closer to home.
The “Great Hard Drive Failure” of 2004 was really the start of my blogging break. Tsk, tsk no backup and you a geek? Well no actually. I did have a full backup but my blogging tool was Radio Userland (a desktop tool) and I couldn’t be arsed with all the faffing involved to get all my archives restored. I liked Radio Userland but it gets slower and slower the more content in the object database and very CPU intensive so I was already thinking of switching blog tools, the hard drive failure on my laptop rather took that decision for me. Not to say that I haven’t blogged in the interim, my reality TV shows have been doing really well and I’m still picking up over 3,000 hits a day here for Big Brother for Pete’s sake.
New job! Ya beauty! My new stomping ground is Social Work and online systems for people learning to be Social Workers. I really get a kick from thinking I’m working on things that can really benefit society so I’m happy as a pig in the proverbial.
Cancer. The big ‘C’. This is a really poignant day for me to restart blogging. A Scottish actor called Ross Davidson, nurse Andy in the original series of East Enders died from a brain tumour and sadly the young girl who was given an overdose of radiation in her cancer treatment at the Beatson was reported dead today, Radiation overdose teenager dies [BBC]. Not good news. I’ve had an anxious wait till this evening to find out news about a relative with a reoccurrence of breast cancer who’d had a scan after feeling poorly. The really good news is that the consultants say she is now in remission, all of us are in shock, everyone was bracing themselves for the worst. October is breast cancer awareness month in th UK. Her ‘bad’ symptoms turned out to be unrelated to the cancer and it’s worth noting that she took part in a medical trial at the Beatson and this may be in part to explain for her improvement. Now the Beatson has had some bad publicity in recent times but there are some fantastic things going on research-wise and the Maggie’s Centre at the Western is a godsend, another relative had a tumour removed at the Western and is thankfully doing well. Good news for me and my family and in turn for all of us, this bloody disease, surely the 21st century has to see us crack it.
Techie stuff and the usual guff and faffing with templates to follow but for now Scottish lass is alive.
“Good times and bum times,
I’ve seen them all and, my dear,
I’m still here…” (Steven Sondheim)
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