The Unreasonable Man

Summer seems to have arrived in Ontario: it is sunny, blue skies, 20C, very nice. A binary transition from last weekend’s weather:

Click on the image to see the miserable weather. All forgotten now.

So what does everyone else use for planning appointments?

I used to use my Treo, but for the joint reasons that it is way too heavy to carry in a pocket and that the carriers in Canada charge an arm and a leg (think up to $1,200 a month if I actually use it to check email abroad), I have stopped using it.

And my life is better for it, apart from one thing. Calendar. What do I use to track appointments?

I now use Windows Calendar but that is dumb. I need a device that I can both carry with me and access on the PC. Carrying in the briefcase is OK, but the old Treo is just a tad too heavy and bulky.

So should I buy another Palm? A cheap, thin, no-frills one?

Or perhaps -shudder- a paper agenda?

This story is fascinating: Yannis Kontos, a photojournalist, spent time illegally shooting in North Korea, while posing as a tourist. His pictures are here. And they show the expected Stalinist disctatorship. But they also show how life goes on. No, they’re not all wearing identical green suits. Fascinating reportage.

I am taking a short three-day vacation down south, starting Thursday. Regrettably alone, without family; but since I had a free flight coming I though I might as well take a few days off to lie on the beach. You need a rest sometimes, and that certainly applies to me, right now.

It will be beach, sleep, and photos.

I can finally play media, like a DVD or an .AVI file, in Vista. Not using Windows Media Player (that moans about the need to buy a decoder when I want to play a DVD!), but using vlc. Even vlc did not work at first, but that just needs a setting and it works. A bit of googling found the solution here [link].

While Ubuntu makes it easier and easier to play media types, Windows makes it increasingly difficult. Maybe that is what the “media center” is all about (I had wondered) - just a few codecs. Vista business does not have the Media Centre. You have to upgrade to Ultimate.

So by going against the trend, is MS shooting itself in the foot? I am not so sure. Predictions here that Vista will be MS’s undoing seem premature, what with a 65% rise in profit due to Vista.

I have been watching the Afghan prisoner scandal with increasing puzzlement. The conservatives really are handling this very badly.

For those of you who have not been following this: In Kandahar, the Canadian army routinely hands over prisoners to the Afghan authorities. These prisoners, it turns out, are then kept in Medieaval circumstances and there are strong suspicions they are sometimes tortured. if true, this is wrong: Canada, of course, should not be handing people to torturers. Canadians feel very strongly about this.

The government has been going back and forth. It announced that the Red Cross and other organisations had access to the prisoners and regularly check their well-being. One by one, all such organisations have denied this. They either don’t check, or have not been given access.

The government then released reports on the human rights situation that it had received - but they were censored versions of these reports. The newspapers duly found out what the censored text was - and it turns out all positive things were kept, while all negative things had been deleted.

The message is clear: the government wants to stay in Afghanistan and will do everything to get rid of these pesky people who ask questions about things like human rights.

I think most Canadians sympathise with the army: their task is hard. But they should not be there in the first place. And while there, their behaviour and their human rights record must be exemplary.

I am home, back from wonderful NYC and wonderful Newark.

OK, from rainy Newark. Which it costs $70 to get to from Manhattan. I strongly suspect I was ripped off, but what can you do? And the taxi did not take me to my airport hotel: “New Jersey outside the airport means I have to double the bill”. Right. So the taxi dropped me at terminal A, but “due to security rules ” the hotel shuttle can only pick passengers up from Parking 4, which is 20 minutes by train from terminal A. And the bus was full, “wait for the next one”. One of those days. Why do people want to come here, remind me again?

..to ban churches. They use a lot more energy than incandescent light bulbs, which I read this morning the federal Canadian Tories now also want to ban.

In fact churches even use light bulbs. Lots of them. But unlike my incandescent light bulbs (spot lights, dimmed lights, and halogen lights), churches do not actually serve a useful purpose: they exist to praise non-existent Gods. Surely that is very environmentally wasteful and if we are to take the scientists’ advice on this, then surely all pursuits that have no provable use must be stopped.

The Globe and Mail had an article last week (link here) about a movie about a typeface. Yes, a movie about a typeface, or font. My kind of movie, and I do hope I get a chance to see it eventually. This movie discusses Helvetica, the clean typeface we all use for sans serif letters (except if we use Windows where we all use Arial).

For those of you who appreciate beautiful typefaces, do not stick with MS choices and try some new (or classic) ones. Try Frutiger, Oranda, Galliard (Italic bold is beautiful), Gill Sans, Iowan Oldstyle, Melior, Optima, Eurostile, or Goudy Old Style, and bring some life into your documents. Do an experiment: write a letter and print it (on paper, yes) in each of the above typefaces. And see how different it looks. Like a Pakistani, a Japanese, a Frenchman and an Icelander are all people, yet all look different.

Tomorrow, I am off to New York. Rooms are now over $500 for a two star hotrel (dump). New York has a serious hotel problem.

Today’s image is a situational portrait of an army cadet with effect lighting:

For the technically minded: bright sunny day; camera on manual set to “sunny sixteen minus two stops”, i.e. at 100 ISO that means f/22 at 1/200th sec). Fill strobe on the camera driving two key strobes off camera, a:b set to 1:4; one key strobe in my left hand, one on a light stand aimed straight at the subject’s face.