The personal memoirs of Randi Mooney
I think I’ll catch a pigeon
To teach it how to dance
I’ll keep it in the wardrobe
And feed it bread from France
My pigeon will be stubborn
And steadfastly refuse
To switch off Silent Witness
So I can watch the news
My pigeon will make gravy
With string and twigs and dirt.
Our guests will smile indulgently
But leave before dessert.
(with thanks to wetwebwork for the pigeon photo)
Earlier today I was killing time by attempting to shop for rare and obscure camera lenses which I suspected (correctly) would not be in stock at a particular Oxford-street electronics vendor. As I waited for the shop manager to type boring stock-codes into his inventory system a large man adjacent to me asked another shop-worker for directions to Great Portland Street.
English was obviously not the shop-worker’s first language and he was having difficulty giving directions to the customer. His advice consisted of lots of hand-waving and wild gesticulation. I felt compelled to assist, as my knowledge of the streets of London is second to none. I explained that from our position on Oxford street, any of the perpendicular roads nearby would take him to Great Portland Street, and that the station was pretty much unmissable. I fixed him with a beatific smile as one does when one offers helpful directions.
It was that moment that I noticed something familiar about the man: Long shoulder-length slightly greying brown hair. A pointed and arched nose, and two distinctively truncated digits from his right-hand. I may not have been able to acquire the fabled Nikkor 18-200 VR lens, however I had achieved something far greater. My boyhood ambition had been fulfilled: I had actually met Terry Nutkins.
He noticed my stare hat his fingers. He looked at me and said “Yes, I am who you think I am”. I replied with only slight exaggeration “You were a childhood hero”. Thanks he said, and then addressing the whole assembled staff of the shop and myself he said “I’m working on a new project. I’m doing some research at Great Portland St”, and then briskly walked out leaving the enormous Canon video camera he was examining on the shop’s cluttered counter.
My mind was a whirr - this man who was once friend to all marine mammals (except otters) was obviously embarking on a new videographic project. Somehow the location of Great Portland Street is critical to this project, and it was none other than myself who ensured that he got there. I can rest easy tonight knowing that this great man is one step closer to realizing his dreams.
But why was this star of “The Really Wild Show” and “Animal Magic” ignorant of the location of Great Portland Street? As a long-serving BBC type he would have attended countless meetings at Broadcasting house which was but five minutes walk away. Anybody who goes to broadcasting house knows that Great Portland Street is pretty much directly North. He certainly seemed not to have lost his marbles - I can only think that he was so deep in thought about his important animal projects to contemplate mundane London geography.
The latest podcast on Steve Eley’s Escape Pod has to be the best story of the series to date. For the uninitiated, Escape Pod is a weekly sci-fi audio magazine. It features the best in new fiction and spans the fantasy and science-fiction genres.
This week’s story “How Lonesome a Life Without Nerve Gas” was written by James Trimarco and narrated by Resonance FM’s Frank Key. Cory Doctrow of BoingBoing states that “Frank Key, of the Hooting Yard podcast, gives it a dry, sardonic reading that fits perfectly.”, and I am in agreement. BoingBoing also link to Frank’s web-site (but sadly not the podcast feed).
I’ve been trying to get Cory Doctorow to read / listen to Hooting Yard on the Air for some time now (well at least the brief time that I knew him and he lived in London). Could it be that he too is an aficionado of Frank Key’s “Hooting Yard on the Air“?
Our second night in Madeira brought us to this net festooned seafood restaurant in the “downtown” area of Funchal. We had been informed that it was exclusive and “an excellent choice”, far from the main tourist strip.
Instead we found ourselves in the middle of a crowd that might be more typical of Siducp or Skegness than a Portuguese colony off the coast of Africa.
The centrepiece of this restaurant is a giant circular lobster tank. Lethargic looking lobsters skanked around the cloudy aquarium. They languished in a pool of cloudy stagnant looking water, the lobster equivalent of death row.
What is worse than knowing you will die? Surely it is knowing that your innocent death will be for an unworthy cause. Fortunately molluscs cannot philosophise – only humans suffered in O Barqueiro
The lifeless black eyes of Belinda’s prawns stared at us in grim reproach. These invertebrates bore the signs of hideous crimes against food. Their accusing eyes told me that they had been lumped on a skillet and then grilled until chewy. They had not been cleaned or prepared in any way justifying the twenty Euro price-tag.
My “Cod Barqueiro” turned out to be a surprise. I was told to expect locally produced cod fillet, served in a piquant sauce made from shellfish. It was their majestic signature dish, the pinnacle of Portuguese seafood, an unforgettable gastronomic opportunity.
Instead I found an unfilleted lump of thick-skinned bony cod, plonked in a dish with bland-boiled potatoes. This dish was then scattered with a smattering of prawn, tough squid-rings and unidentifiable “fruits de la mere” and then drenched in a kind of stringy molten fondue-cheese which was grilled to a dull yellow-brown.
This were served with a small tray of what appeared to be oven chips. The overall appearance was that of a microwaved macaroni-cheese served in a trucker’s service station.
We picked at our meals, and decided not to bother. I took a photo of Belinda making a sick expression and glowering at her plate of overcooked, under cleaned prawns and then we asked for the bill.
Our plates were removed swiftly, not a word of “did you enjoy your meal”. Clearly the waiters did not expect us to derive pleasure from this cheesy mush. When the bill came we had been charged for a bottle of wine that we never ordered. The basket of garlic bread and fishcakes which we had assumed were complimentary turned out to be extras.
This has to be one of the worst restaurants we have ever attempted to eat at. As one of the island’s well appointed taxis sped us to our mountain hotel, we wondered what process might have lead the chef to drown our fish in cheese. Was this mere culinary incompetence or more likely genuine loathing of the silver-haired foreigners who were our fellow diners.
I found some particularly good comments on the Blairwarch.co.uk blog article about the National ID card scheme:
“This is going to be one of the biggest wastes of public money ever. Still, as an IT contractor, maybe I will be lucky enough to get on the gravy train? I’ve worked on 2 local govt projects in the past 3 years, and each time the project has been cancelled after close on £1 million has been spent.” - Will
“The pressure is likely to be immense, given the timing of the next election and the likelihood of political weight being brought to bear to have it done and dusted before a likely Labour defeat. See rail privatisation for an example of what happens when you rush in order to make life difficult for the next people.”
The ID Card scheme is going to make a lot of IT contractors very well off. It’s an enormous project and it will require a lot of people. The chances of the biggest government IT project ever running according to schedule are minimal, and our prime minister is almost certainly counting on the fact that the fall-out of the National ID Card scheme will be the burden another government.
So ID Cards will be compulsory by 2010, and our government are acting like they have made an enormous and magnanimous concession to the majority of the House of Lords who remain skeptical of this ill-conceived notion.
It is just an act; This is a complete victory for the government.
Work has not yet begun on the ID card system. No infrastructure has been put in place. Nobody has been recruited to build it and the billions that this white-elephant scheme are likely to cost are still safe in HM Treasury. The probability that the UK’s biggest ever public-sector IT project will be complete in less than four years is low.
The ID Card scheme is the technological equivalent of building the channel-tunnel. It’s big and it’s infrastructure will need to span our entire country. It will need to be reliable, secure and foolproof if it is to have any hope of working. What are the chances of a mega project being complete and functional in less than four years time?
Most likely, the 2010 deadline will come and go and the project will be incomplete, massively over-budget and prone to exactly the kind of security leaks that will make this project a thousand times more disastrous than a city full of millennium-domes.
I don’t plan to be in London for the 2012 Olympics, however I am sure I will be reading headlines about how the new and over-budget ID card scheme is screwing up our nation’s security.
Released in 1982, Tron is an animated feature film from the Walt Disney Corporation. This film combines live action with CGI and traditional cell animation. The artistic result is way ahead of it’s time; indeed we can safely argue that Tron is the visual forerunner of the cyberpunk genre. The “computer world” of Tron has inspired the alternative realities of more recent works such as Sega’s “Rez” and “The Matrix”.
![Tron - Widescreen - AC3 [XviD]-1.png](http://blog.stodge.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/Tron%20-%20Widescreen%20-%20AC3%20%5BXviD%5D-1.png)
Tron’s plot is a thinly veiled allegory for the great debate between operating system pioneers Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tannenbaum; spesifically the eternal battle between advocates of monolithic operating system design vs micorkernel. Tron’s producers take a very one-sided view of this argument – the monolithic “Master Control Program” is clearly the bad guy, however in their credit, this was merely the received wisdom of the age. Regardless of the computer-science flaws, the film is visually superb entertainment more than twenty years after it’s original release.
![Tron - Widescreen - AC3 [XviD]-3.png](http://blog.stodge.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/Tron%20-%20Widescreen%20-%20AC3%20%5BXviD%5D-3.png)
That isn’t to say the film has dated; It certainly has – while the animated sections remain compelling, the live action segments set in the real world appear ludicrous and clumsy. They lack the panache of the virtual-reality scenes and only serve to provide a somewhat redundant set-up for the entirely self-contained animated sequences that form the body of the film.
The live-action epilogue is also baffling in it’s redundancy. I suspect the film producers were trying to provide some kind of revenge themed closure, in which our hero replaces the corrupt manager of the company; Once again, this live action sequence detracts from the final sequence of the animated section where we see “Flynn” rise god-like from the spinning wreck of the “master-control program”. We can only assume he has made it, but his absence from the cyberscape after that moment leaves us in doubt.
One of the film’s main strengths is it’s sound-track. The score was composed and performed by Wendy Carlos (an associate of the recently deceased synth-pioneer Bob Moog), with help from the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s evocative, subtle, original and entirely spoilt by a number of unimaginative prog-rock tracks by a band called “Journey”. Fortunately there are only two sections of prog-rock in the film, both of which are somewhat redundant.
Perhaps by now you have twigged, that it’s my intent to correct some of these flaws. In a nutshell, we have an visually superb film spoilt by some unnecessary, badly-filmed live-action sequences. Thanks to affordable digital editing software I can now take my DVD copy of this film and completely strip it of all of it’s flaws, leaving a shorter, more challenging and ambiguous film.
When you remove the “real world” from Tron you get a completely different effect. Without any orientation, we do not nececarily know from the beginning what the nature of these characters who inhabit the virtual world are.
We see Clu apprehended and apparently crushed by a “recogniser” at the start of the film. In the original version Clu is destroyed and replaced by his alter-ego. In my version he is merely thrown into the “game-grid” as a result of his capture. Naturally that also explains his colour change. In Tron, the MCP’s agents are predominantly coloured red, whereas the fugitive programs are pale-blue.
Of courese, if the real-world does not exist then how do we explain Clu/Flynn’s change of manerism and his claims to be a user. Before his apprehension he makes no reference to userdom (the equivalent to divinity in the computer-world). Is Clu delusional or perhaps some kind of computer-world mesiah.
My reduced ending also adds a delicious ambiguity to what in the original version is shown to be a clean escape. Clu/Flynn is propelled upwards in the disintegration of the MCP. He is not shown to have been destroyed, but nor is he shown to be safe, or re-united with the programs that he has saved from assimilation. We are now free to interpret the nature of his escape for ourselves.
![Tron - Widescreen - AC3 [XviD]-2.png](http://blog.stodge.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/Tron%20-%20Widescreen%20-%20AC3%20%5BXviD%5D-2.png)
Sadly, the film Tron and it’s soundtrack are copyrighted works. This means I cannot legally distribute a copy of this movie, however I will release my “Edit Decision List”, the recipe for you to take a copy of the Tron film and re-create my edits. This will be released into the public domain, which means that anybody is free to view this classic work of science fiction is it was meant to be.
This short essay at the “Right to Create” explains the fallacy of IT Patents. We are often told by pro-patent advocates that a harmonious patent system is required for a thriving information economy. For those of us involved in IT, this just does not add up. Lawyers cost money, and patents (both the ones you have and the ones you dont have) end up costing businesses money.
“Many of you, no doubt, are familiar with Bastiat’s Parable of the Broken Window, in which is illustrated the fallacy of economic benefit caused by a small boy who throws a stone through the shopkeeper’s window, causing money to be spent by the keeper to pay a glazier to replace the window, which the glazier then uses to buy bread and shoes, etc.”
Like all of Batistat’s fallacies, begin with a widely held belief (e.g. economic protectionism is good), and then this notion is expanded upon in order to reveal it’s real absurdity. In this case, the easayist shows that arguing for IT patents makes as much sense as paying little boys to throw stones through windows.
And as a reminder to information activists, Cory Doctorow is hosting the final Copyfighter’s drunken brunch, possibly somewhere near the Stanhope Centre, near Hyde Park. Do please check Cory’s blog if you care for that sort of thing.
What on earth were the Bedfordshire police thinking when they detained and interrogated an award winning group of actors? They had just returned from an award ceremony in where their film “The Road to Guantanamo” had won a “Silver Bear” award at the Berlin Film Festival.
Ironically, the film is about young British citizens who were wrongfully arrested and then sent to the American military detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The actors were permitted to go home after some hours of questioning, however the whole incident gives the impression of a clueless and racist counter-terror operation.
Most countries like to honor their award winning citizens. A popular film can bring revenue to the box-office and sustain the British film industry. I’m saddened that Bedfordshire police cannot see the value in popular films that explore controvercial topics. I think that these hard-working actors deserve a public apology from the police!
This exciting Flash game reveals just how hard shooting caged quails on a private game-shooting reserve must be. I’ve never shot a live animal, but once I began to play this game, the adrenelin rush was nothing short of incredible. How could anybody object to this truly noble sport?
The concept of the game is simple as it is beautiful; wait until the bird is released, take aim and then blast your prey out of the sky.
Completing this game will require the dexterity and moral courage of America’s Vice-President… please do nnot blame me if you fail tomeasure up to his standards of strength and moral courage.