New BBC News Site
After launching the new version of their main website roughly a month ago, the Beeb have now also done it to their news site. Until now, I hadn’t much noticed the new designs, as I normally only access the news feeds of the Beeb, and don’t go to their homepage.
Now, I can no longer escape the new look. It’s quite nice, but I tried customising my homepage the other day similar to my iGoogle (i.e. just moving the various different bits around), but it didn’t work.
NB: LOL @ reading back my post and seeing the word ‘Beeb’. For those who don’t know: ‘Beeb’ refers to the BBC, and is a nickname apparently coined by Kenny Everett. Over here, the Beeb is often personified. Sometimes also called ‘Auntie Beeb’.
My Friends’ House
Source: WikipediaI went to see my friends at their new house today. It’s in a wee village or rather a large group of houses. It’s amazing how quickly you are deep in the countryside when driving out of Edinburgh. In London, just getting out to nowhere simply isn’t possible, as there are always houses, neverending.
On that note, I saw The Other Boleyn Girl in the cinema on Friday. It was kinda shit (as expected), but my friend J. and I wanted to see it as we’ve both read the book.
The one interesting bit was when they were riding into London. It literally was a walled city and the countryside, i.e. green grass, went all the way to the city walls! Difficult to explain. I wonder where they filmed it [edit - apparently, it was filmed in Knole].
So, it looks like London too used to be a medieval city once, walled in, and not sprawling out like it does these days.
Mad Men Season on BBC 4
I got into this a bit late, though I knew it was on (it doesn’t help that on the BBC website this supposed ‘Mad Men’ season isn’t actually promoted on their website in a separate section, which is annoying if you want to find out more).
From what I gather, this ‘Mad Men’ – season consists of the series Madmen (about advertising in New York in the 60s) and is framed by various documentaries and programmes to do with Advertising. For instance, yesterday I watched a documentary about David Ogilvy, and there’s a tie-in series called The Hard Sell, of which I’ve missed most episodes but which explores Advertising in Britain.
I should have been a bit more on the ball and watched whatever I missed on the BBC iPlayer; alas, I’ve been either too busy or not bothered enough to do so. The other thing is that I currently only use my laptop as my desktop PC is not on the internet just now, and I try avoiding any multimedia stuff on my lappy.
I’m using this blog post BTW to try out Zemanta, which anaj blogged about the other day. So far, so good – the only couple of points of criticism right now are that:
- You can’t seem to be able to choose which words the suggested links are applied to (the Wikipedia ‘Mad Men’ article was suggested; however, it automatically attached it to the words ‘Mad Men’ as in ‘Mad Men season’, rather than the TV show – one word ‘Madmen’). That is, when links are suggested, users should be able to highlight which word in the text they want to apply it to. Not sure if that’s already possible by configuring the settings, but I intenionally tried it out as a dumb user, i.e. without any background reading, so I get the most authentic ‘first user’ experience
- No YouTube – clips are suggested thus far. Now that would really help, especially, as embedding YouTube into wordpress is still a bit of a pain in the arse; also, in the case of TV shows etc. you’d often want to embed a trailer and so forth, so this would indeed save a lot of time. Again, this may be possible, but as I said I’m just trying the default settings just now as a first-time user. Any configuration I can do later. As it is, this blog post will stay without a clip
And that’s it!
The Battle Is Won
My stubborn insistence and asking, asking, asking has finally paid off: I’ve now got my colleague’s computer, with, notably, 1024MB of RAM instead of 256. I had been on the case from the very first day I started, considering it absolutely unacceptable to be working with a 5-year-old shitty LAPTOP.
I had to push the matter till the last minute though – even while reluctantly agreeing to swap the computers (my colleague, who had been using the fast computer, had left on Monday), IT said to me:
Well…now that you have this computer, you won’t get a new one once they get upgraded next year [!!].
We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, IT!
Lesson learnt:
Ask, Ask, Ask for it, otherwise you won’t get it. Yes, you may make yourself unpopular, but life isn’t about wishy-washy and accepting what other people tell you to do. I felt so strongly about this point that I had considered quitting my job if they hadn’t given me a decent machine (true! I don’t know if I would really have done it, but it’s like cutting my arm off and expecting me to play the guitar. They don’t get it at all though, which is quite worrying).
werbung gegen realität
Some Germans have been taking pictures of food product packaging, then taking the food out and photographing what it really looks like
I quite like it – it’s very simple – though a lot of the ready-made meals used are very German and as such unrecognisable for us here. Imagine doing it for Spam or something! Though Hamburgers etc. should be universally discrepant.
100 produkte im vergleich zu ihren werbefotos. alle produkte wurden eingekauft, die verpackungen fotografiert, die produktfotos vergrößert, die produkte nach verpackungsvorgabe zubereitet und zum vergleich fotografiert. alle produkte befanden sich innerhalb des haltbarkeitsdatums. alle produkte wurden aufgegessen. alle fotografien sind jederzeit wiederholbar.
Isn’t German beautiful?
dict.cc needs English Speakers to Pronounce Stuff
dict.cc, which I’ve used just this week when checking some translations, emailed me today to ask for my help pronouncing English words. I’ve blogged about them previously – really like their idea of a dictionary-wiki, where users contribute vocabulary and translations. The audio is currently in beta, and the email I got read:
The reason I’m contacting you is that I recently finished a voice
recording feature for dict.cc to overwrite the existing computer generated
voice files. This should eliminate some of the problems the computer voice
creates and make dict.cc feel a bit more personal.My current problem is that there are lots of German native speakers trying
to record English words, leading to recordings of questionable quality.
Unfortunately there aren’t too many English native speakers around.That’s why I’d ask you to help me get this going. If you have a microphone
or headset at hand, or maybe your computer features a built-in microphone,
I would be very grateful if you could go to
http://www1.dict.cc/contribute/?action=audio-rec and record a few entries.
Hehe. While I don’t have a decent microphone yet (I tried just now recording an entry), I’ve started rating others’ contributions. They need 10 ‘diggs’ to be verified, and 10 deletes to be deleted (I think – though it should probably take less than 10 tbh).
The only problem with the rating system (yes, I know it’s still Beta ) is that it doesn’t tell you whether you’ve already voted or not. I.e. on digg etc., you won’t be able to vote more than once. Also, it would be great if the number of diggs could actually be displayed, rather than having to hover over an entry to see the ‘voting history’.
It’s great fun though – similar to FreeRice, this too is an interaction that’s actually productive, stimulating and fun. Much better than the navel-gazing of Facebook et al. Might even give dict.cc a banner on here
edit: he probably doesn’t realise that I’m not a native English speaker. I’ll still try once I’ve got a decent mic; after all, German speakers always think I’m native. The other thing to note is that they don’t seem to differentiate between BE and AE. It would be great if, while recording, you could select between BE and AE. Though that probably makes things even more complicated! Also he’s based in Vienna – anaj might be interested.
Having Lunch At Home
I’m not one for having lunch with my colleagues. Firstly, food at the canteen is quite heavily geared towards meat-eaters. OK, there are vegetarian options, but there is quite a strong meaty smell and look about the place. Non-vegetarians may not understand this – but it’s seriously off-putting.
Secondly, I tend to go on lunch later than most people. I normally like getting things done first and get done more, before going on lunch and returning for the remainder of the working day. If I take it too early, I come back and have more wrk time ahead of me 
Thirdly, I enjoy my own company. My colleagues are all nice, but I’m not a big fan of watercooler conversation. I’ll do a bit of it here and then, but I don’t go to work to socialise, and I like to keep the personal and the professional strictly separate.
On Monday, we all had lunch in a restaurant though – it was the last day of a colleague, who has now left. The pizza was delicious and I wouldn’t mind doing that again soon 
German Language & Literature
I’m currently getting back in touch with my German-ness, through language and now also literature. I love the written German language – It’s much more beautiful, formal, and structured than English could ever be (no offence).
My favourite German authors (German in language, that is – not nationality) are Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, and I was influenced greatly by Doeblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
I’ve got very few German books here, but last night I dug out Max Frisch’s Andorra, and Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain). I started Andorra and probably already halfway through. It’s very pleasurable and a nice change from the historical novels (Philippa Gregory et al.) I’ve been going through of late (they are good and well-written, but much more easily digestible).
What strikes me about Andorra is how relatively fixed and black-and-white everything is laid out. It’s very good and perfectly mastered; however, it would be impossible for an author to write like that nowadays. Everything seems much more blurred, and racism lives side by side with non-racism, in the same person. Someone can, for instance, be racist towards Poles or Korean people, but non-racist towards Black people – e.g. considering them ‘English’, or nearly English, even marrying them and having a mixed-race child. Or, someone might prefer a white Albanian neighbour to a Black English neighbour, because the Albanian one, while an immigrant, has the ‘right’ skin colour.
In Andorra, however, anti-Semitism is so far pretty straightforward. The people hate Jews, and they know exactly why, and they discursively reiterate that same hatred, the same prejudice. It makes it easier to pinpoint – though no less easier to fight.
Back to EDI and back at Wrk Tomorrow
I’m on the train right now – we’ve just passed Darlington, and I should be back home within two hours. Annoyingly, the sockets on the train that read Laptops and mobile phones only please don’t seem to have any juice in them – so I’m limping around on my battery, with 48% left.
I completed the book I’d been reading half an hour after we left London, and now have nothing much left to do – other than playing on my PSP, though that too will be out of juice soon, with no means of recharging it. I’ll probably just idle away my time ‘on the web’ for a bit, doing some research into flights, holidays etc., until my battery is too low to continue. I’m phoning my mum tomorrow to see if we can go to Italy together in May (unlikely, as I think her holidays are mid-May, and I want to go end of May/beginning of June, with my neighbour V., and my BF to come along a few days later).
Unlike most people, I’m back at wrk tomorrow – Easter Monday – as this is *not* a bank holiday in Scotland, unlike in England and, I guess, most of Continental Europe. I don’t mind really. I had a pretty relaxing, holiday-like time in London, and I’m ready and eager
I just hope my car still starts when I get home – I’ll try it out the minute I get in. At least then I know, and I can prepare by getting up a bit earlier and getting the bus to work, instead of my rotten car!
My N95 Mobile is Now Unlocked
My gorgeous N95 is now unlocked. Cost me £10 from a phone shop on Mare Street. Fuck you iPhone, with your shiny huge billboard ads EVERYWHERE, your penetration of every magazine, newspaper, and TV, casting yourself as absolutely desirable, most beautiful necessity.
Unlike the iPhone, the N95 has a 5 Megapixel-camera, and 3G (the iPhone’s camera is only 2 Megapixel!). It’s great as I no longer need to take my small digital camera separately, when going out (‘taking the camera’ is normally a conscious decision, whereas now I’ll always have decent camera on me).
The only thing I need now is a 2GB Micro SD memory card
Below is a Cnet ‘fight’ of N95 v. iPhone – note that the iPhone ‘wins’. I disagree, but it’s an interesting comparison anyway, and you learn a bit about the N95
My overall opinion is that the iPhone is more ’stylish’ and aesthetically progressive, while the N95 actually has better features and a higher tech spec.
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