Athlete's fingers

When you consider the number of people in the world who itch between their toes when they have athlete's foot (or tinea) it's surprising there has never been a massive outbreak of athlete's hand. How is it that the fungi that so delights to sit between the toes doesn't transmit to the fingers?

Certainly it would be easier to itch athlete's hand, since the fingers are a lot more accessible to most people than their toes. But it probably wouldn't be anymore socially acceptable...

Big Idea and Opera Critic

The world is awash with websites, as we know, but you'd think I'd have some better idea of what's available in a country as small as NZ, especially in the Arts scene. Yet until today I hadn't heard of either The Opera Critic or The Big Idea, both of which are well-established websites relating to the arts. The first, of course, is focused on Opera, but the second covers arts in the widest sense.

I read about the The Opera Critic in today's Sunday Star Times weekend magazine, Sunday, which I normally don't think much of, but today it had three pieces that were worth looking at. Maybe it's improved since I last checked it out. (I used to buy the SST all the time, because it was full of long opinion pieces and good material, but it went off the boil quite a bit for a while, and certainly wasn't worth the money you had to fork out for it.)

The Big Idea came to me from the Scoop archives, where they had an article about the site celebrating its fifth year. Five years - and I've never heard of it. Website advertising is sure a difficult task...

Technorati and some other techno things

Technorati Profile

I'm now one of the literati listed on Technorati. Ain't that something? One of the billions of literati, I might add.

Came across a very handy tool the other day - while traversing the world of blogs. It's called RoboForm, and it saves you having to put in user names and passwords time and again. Once you've put the info in for the first time, and saved it with RoboForm, it will add the info next time around at the click of a button. Great!

Don't you hate blogs that aren't clear about how to do something? I've just been to Bloggers for Hire which sounds like a promising place to get paid for blogging. I'm blowed if I can figure out how to actually sign up with them...indeed their home page doesn't focus on hiring blogs at all, but is an ordinary everyday blog. There's a link to learning more about their service, but it doesn't seem to go anywhere useful, except to a forum page where it tells you that 'Yes, we're hiring' but doesn't say how to get hired. Or else I'm just tired, and can't find it. But why the heck don't site designers make things easy for people instead of irritating.

Search engine optimization

The phrase, ‘search engine optimization’ is one of the new catch phrases around. The ever-faithful Wikipedia, which is becoming an increasingly useful tool on the Web, tells us that "Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from "natural" (aka "organic" or "algorithmic" search engine) listings. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and ultimately web traffic. This is analogous to foot traffic in retail advertising. The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers", an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients."

I’m not entirely sure that I understand everything there (but what’s new?) but the gist of it is that attracting people to your website by better means is pretty much what you want! A few posts back I talked about USWeb, and that’s a site worth visiting for its expert views on improving SEO (which means something else here in NZ, I think! – something political?). As soon as I get a minute from all the other things I have to do I’m going to sit down and see what it has to say that’s useful to me. A quick glance at it suggests there’s quite a bit!

That’s Incredible - gulp!

And while we’re on old quotes: here’s another nice extract regarding a now-defunct tv show called, "That’s Incredible". Things have become even more incredible since this was written, back in the 12th January 1985 NZ Listener, by Diana Alpers.

"’That’s Incredible’ is wallpaper that doesn’t just move – it rampages all over the living-room. Cathy Lee frogmarched in between two ageing hunks in an appalling vista of knees, teeth and hair, which is all you need to be a star in America. Host John Davidson looks like he’s had all his essential bodily fluids replaced by something less likely to curdle at the lines he has to deliver. I sometimes still watch it – now that’s incredible."

Ouch - plastic surgery!

I’ve just found a quote from an old Reader’s Digest – dating from 1976. It’s both ‘quaint’ (because of the speed with which things have changed) and accurate.

‘In this new, totally electronic age, the enforcement of financial obligations will present few difficulties, since failure to pay up could be disastrous. The culprit might even have to undergo what EFT men call ‘plastic surgery’ – the cutting off of his bank cards. Economically speaking this would make him a non-person."

Well, we haven’t quite got to this 1984 scenario as yet, but the options are certainly open to bankers and other financial

Flowers on the Net

With my mother in hospital, the thought of sending her some flowers immediately comes to mind. Grapes and flowers are the twins of hospital visitors. (Never mind that my wife usually manages to eat at least some of the patient’s grapes whenever she visits anyone – she’s very fond of them!).

I’ve never bought flowers over the Net before, but there are plenty of options to do so. I like the site Dotflowers.com, because the pictures are so good you just want to send for one of each of the displays. (I’m sure they won’t mind me showing you a sample of their wares.) They might be a bit far away for flower delivery to my mother in hospital, though I see they do have some information about international services, but the idea of getting flowers this way is great, and very appealing – and very tempting!

Old music

Yesterday I mentioned the fact that I was playing for two school musicals - one by remote control, as it were. The second one is a musical I've played years ago, though when I first started to go through it again it, it didn't seem familiar at all. However, from the second number in, it all came back.

I was talking with my son this morning, and mentioning the musical in which he played the trumpet as a child. Instantly he began to sing a song from it - 'You never forget those ones!'

Alexander Alekhine

I play chess, but not wonderfully. My father played it wonderfully, though he wasn't a world class champion. The trouble was that it took over his life, and he could never make a real living out it. He was one of those non-entrepreneurial people who have a major talent, but not the means to market it. I know the feeling when it comes to me and writing, and composing and so on. I know I have the talent, but letting others know is another matter altogether. It's rare to see an artist who also has a talent for marketing: Lindsay Crooks was one of the few who did, and did well with it.

Meantime, here's an interesting quote from chapter one of the book: Why You Lose at Chess, by Fred Reinfield, who was a great player of the game, and an excellent writer about it.

Alexander Alekhine was undoubtedly the greatest Chess player in the history of the game, but what he really prided himself on was his....Bridge playing!

People in a position to judge have told me Alekhine was a miserable Bridge player. I can well believe it. Just as we misjudge our strong points, so we misjudge our weaknesses.

A nice bit of silk around the neck....

Some while ago a youngish fellow I worked with used to scout the op shops for ties for his then girlfriend, who was collecting them. I offered to give them some of my oldies, but apparently they weren’t quite the thing. (I have two ties I wear to musical occasions: one with a piano keyboard on it, and another with singers singing, their mouths all very wide open. Love ‘em both.)

When my wife and I were out garage saleing (?) the other day, we found a couple of ties: one is a Santa Claus one, which was supposed to play something Christmassy, but the music’s broke. Never mind, it’s fun anyway.

I was reminded of all this tie stuff when I came across the Belisi.com site, (or rather, the beingbelisi.com site - being is more important than just visiting!) where the Belisi ties and scarves are promoted – amongst other things such as the 19 goals of a certain number of people – the first is, I want to know God more. Yup, so do I, though there are some days when I’m not sure if he wants to know me – just kidding! Apparently the word Belisi comes from Bellissimo – somewhere along the line the double l and s have vanished – and certainly these ties and scarves are classy. But I don’t like to think what they cost: actually I don’t have think, I know what they cost: $76 apiece (and of course that’s US dollars). Quite a bit to throw around the old neck, what?

A day in the life...

What you might call a full-on day: it began with my mother having to be sent off in the ambulance to Accident and Emergency, because she'd been vomiting for around two hours....before we got up. Being an independent spirit, she hadn't called us for help. At first we thought it might have been a virus, or something she'd eaten, but after a scan this afternoon it appears she's had bleeding on the brain, the result of a polyp bursting. I don't know what happens from here, whether she'll recover from this or what.

And then I had to work through some songs with a woman who's doing an audition for a play at the Fortune Theatre - on Friday! I'll have to see her again tomorrow.

And then I spent some hours down at the hospital, with the mother, who, apart from obviously being very tired, seemed reasonably coherent most of the time.

And then it was home to try and catch up with stuff, and then out at 6 pm to start a new part-time job, as a data entry operator. Not a mind-boggling task, and rather hard on the wrist (it's nearly all numeric entry), but at least the people are good, and, after some months of having no work, it's good to be doing something particular.

And then, having played for the local Catholic primary school Christmas musical last night, I'm having to record the music for a different Catholic primary school musical, because the person who was going to play for it says it's too hard for her. As it happens it's a musical I've done before (for the first school) and it isn't that difficult. It's all go!

Christopher Reeve - and being a hero

"A hero should not know he's a hero - otherwise he becomes pretentious and boring. Somebody put it very well when he said, 'You can't play the king; the people around you play to you being king."

Christopher Reeve commenting on his part as Superman, in the book, The Making of Superman the Movie, by D M Petrou. Page 83

Good old Google!

In the last few weeks I’ve been reading a library book on Google and its search engine, and the way it functions. It was quite an eye-opener. (I’ve forgotten the name of the book unfortunately, because I’ve had to take it back to the library! I’ll check it out and include it here later.)

I hadn’t realised the simple fact that Google doesn’t go searching for something on the Net every time you request a search; it has already copied every item it’s spidered onto its own system, and indexed it and ranked it and done a host of other things to it. Your search then just searches Google itself. But Google doesn’t just give you a bunch of results; it takes your request and works out more about it than you can imagine. How it does this in the twinkling of an eye, I have no idea – but then I’ve never been able to work out how a computer saves a heap of information in a micro-second either. I’ve always had this theory that computers don’t actually save anything, they just pretend they do, and hope that they won’t ever get caught out!

Anyway, all that aside, I’ve just been reading an interesting piece on a blog which talks about how Google is dealing the best way to increase link popularity. Being not as technically-minded in the computer department as I’d like to be, I don’t understand it all, but boiled down it’s saying that in order to push you to the top of the search results, Google looks for now are links pointing to your website from many different sources on the internet. He goes on to say: "Page Rank is still a factor in that scenario, but there is a lot to be said about receiving 1000 links from different websites as opposed to receiving 100 links from different websites with a good Page Rank. Nobody can tell you the exact difference in the quality of one over the other but in our experience 1000 links from different websites with low levels of Page Rank work better in increasing your rankings within the organic results of Google."

I’m not sure who the writer of this particular piece, but it’s well worth reading, and comes from a site called US Web. Part of his follow-up to the info about having lots of links to a site, is to make greater use of blogs, and certainly there’s an increasing understanding that blogs can be far more than just your run-of-the-mill info machine, or john doe’s woes and misfortunes online. They’ve always been a place where links were in abundance, but in this new approach, it’s links with a purpose. Go, Link Popularity!

Tim Shadbolt

I guess if you study history, most people seem to want serious political leaders. But I survive through humour. It's how I overcome the cynicism and keep in touch with people. So it's one thing I refuse to compromise on and people have to accept that.

In a world so grim, humour's a powerful political weapon. People open their minds when they laugh. There only needs to be the slightest gap there and you cna drive something in.

I think it's strange that people should think that the minute you laugh, you no longer take yourself seriously.

from an interview in The NZ Listener, 5th November, 1983.

There's a bio of Tim Shadbolt in Wikipedia.

George MacDonald

Every living day, he who would be a live child of the living God has to fight the God-denying look of things.

George MacDonald, quoted in chapter 10 of E M Blaiklock's Letters to Children of Light. No source given.

Professor Edward Musgrave Blaiklock was born in Birmingham in 1903 and emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 6. He studied Classics at Auckland University College, where he became a lecturer, establishing himself as a natural communicator who could build a close rapport with an audience, carrying them along on the current of his own enthusiasm. Professor Blaiklock produced a long series of Bible-reading notes for the Scripture Union together with a number of books on his favourite Biblical theme, the historical background of the New Testament, which gave him an international reputation as a Biblical scholar. He retired from his university chair at the end of 1968 and in 1971 became president of the Baptist Union of New Zealand. In 1974 was awarded an OBE for services to scholarship and the community. Professor Blaiklock died in 1983.

The Time Traveller’s Wife

Yesterday I finished reading The Time Traveller’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. (Not an easily remembered name for an author!) It has a great idea, but it’s way too long: 518 pages. I was skimming increasingly by the last hundred pages, and in fact, had had enough by about 200 pages. Not that she’s ever dull. I just think the story would have been just as good at half the length. A lot of it isn’t plot, but an increasingly long biography of the main character, and his wife. Which is fine, but it’s too long. Did I say it was too long?

There’s an awful lot of sex, some of it described in detail, and okay, the story centres on a very intense relationship, but enough is enough already! It was a bit like my friend Sanchona’s novel, A Family of Strangers: I just couldn’t take any more of the raping and giving of the women’s bodies to men who seemed to have no self-control whatsoever. Only got through about 100 pages of that, and had had more than enough.
The problem with The TTW is that once we’ve accepted the curious idea that Henry has a chrono-displacement disorder, meaning he can suddenly vanish out of the present into either the past or the future (mostly the former), there isn’t much that happens. He can meet up with himself in the past, talk to himself, be himself at different ages and so on. And more curiously he meets up frequently with his wife to be when she’s much younger: she’s eight years younger than him, but sometimes he’s twenty or more years older than her, sometimes he’s a similar age. And along with all this time travelling we have the ongoing story of the present, which is seen through the wife’s eyes. She isn’t a TT of course. The plot is rather minimal beyond that: what really happens one morning when the wife’s family go out hunting? Did they shoot someone? In a sense we’re pretty much aware of what did happen a good way into the book, but it’s only clarified towards the end. And we have to keep checking on the dates in the book (they’re listed at the top of each short section) and see whether we’re ahead, or behind, or in the future, and how old Henry is at any particular time. It’s a nice conceit, but 500 pages of it palls.

I read some of the opinions on Epinions - some of the writers loved it, but some criticise it strongly for its sci-fi inconsistencies. They weren't things I particularly noticed, nor did I feel it was overwhelmingly drear, as one reviewer did, who pointed out all the horrible things that happen to the people in it, especially the women: madness, decapitation, five or six miscarriages to the TT's wife, and the loss of the main character's feet through frostbite. Was that really necessary?

Nevertheless, the writing is very stylish, full of lots of love for things, food, (sex), art, books, music, and relationships, and the characters are mostly well drawn. But if only it had been 300 pages, how much more intense it all would have been!

PS I see on Amazon.com there's an audio version of this book.....unabridged!

MBA here I come!

One of these days I’m going to sign myself up for an online learning course of some sort. Never having been to university, it’s something that’s always interested me, and an online (or distance learning) approach appeals. I wonder whether I’d be able to cope with the course, whether I’d have the nous to do the work, whether I can think as well as I sometimes think I can (or better than my wife sometimes thinks I can!).

I was checking out an MBA online course run by Capella University recently and went through the course demo…almost signed up on the spot. Pity it’s in another country! It’s a very clearly laid out demo, moves efficiently without hitches, and gives you good examples of what it’s talking about. Gee, how much have I got in my cheque book and do I have the time….? (Runs off to check out his bank balance…)

I have too much time on my hands. While looking for some information on Google about possible new inventions that can provide electricity on a micro-level (like a little windmill out in the back garden) I came across a site listing US Patents. The following computer mouse seems a bit of an odd invention: what the heck size would the paper be? And what small thing could you print on it? Or is the inventor envisaging a large mouse....kinda like supermouse?

United States Patent 6650315

Abstract:
A mouse device for use as an input device of a computer is provided that includes a housing in which recording paper is loadable, and a printer unit provided within the housing for printing on the recording paper print information received from the computer. The printer unit includes a paper loading section in which the recording paper is loaded, a platen roller for feeding the recording paper loaded in the loading section, a print head for printing on the recording paper fed by the platen roller, and a discharge port through which the recording paper is discharged after printing by the platen roller out of the housing while taking a substantially vertical attitude.

I'm not sure I even understand what he's talking about.

Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael arguing the thesis that the world is now divided between exploiting white men and exploited coloured people: "What about Castro?" asked one member of his audience, "What about Che Guevera?"

"I don't," retorted Mr Carmichael, "consider them white."

Reported in The Daily Telegraph, 20th July, 1067

Benigno Aquino

It's been some time since I added quotes to the posts on this blog - something I intended to do originally. So here goes again!

There were times when my desperation was so deep that I believed no life is worth a lie, things are either right or wrong and life is worth living only if one acts with some consistency. To submit, to yield, and to surrender to the forces of depression is to give ourselves over to despair: but to act, to resist, no matter how puny the resistance, still preserves for us the hope that we will stand erect.

Benigno Aquino – in a letter quoted by Alistair Cooke. (Found in The New Zealand Listener, 1st Oct, 19383.)