Festival season (part two.)

Twas a very hot day and I scored a sunburn despite the posh Nivea sunscreen lol
While looking for a coffee, I discovered a stall selling ‘non colonialist’ coffee and chocolate.

www.mayancoffee.com.au

Great coffee (I went back for a second later in the afternoon)
All the staff looked like they were volunteers, and I bought a bag of chocolate coated coffee beans with a hint of cinnamon and chilli.
They were canvassing for volunteers to travel to Guatemala to teach English and suchlike.
Boy the French must be pissed that English and Spanish became the international languages.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

I like these community festivals cause all sorts of folks can be found
wandering between the stalls. Lots of dogs and kids about too. This video is of a dog show, which seems to be traditional at these events.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

There’s the party animals too, and they tend to gravitate towards the
dance party style sound systems. such as at the end of this ‘stream of
consciousness’ type video.


Lots of music, people, and a brutal slaying of a stuffed toy.

Dead Persons storage facility.

Dead Persons storage facility.

Graffiti

Graffiti

Happy Daylight Savings!

It will be nice to enjoy the light at a more useful time of the day.
No more leaving work as the sun sets and arriving home in the dark. I can go for a walk down to the beach, or a jog in the park.

I reckon that this is the best season of the year. It’s much better then ‘Tax Return submitting Season’ (which you either love or hate,) or ‘holiday Season’ (where all transport and accommodation is a lot more expensive.) I’m not going to bore people with how much ‘Flu Season’ sucks.

Other lesser known yearly divisions are the ‘red wine season’ which tends to be the cooler months of the year and is counter-pointed by ‘G&T season’ which marks the warming of the air.

So I’d like to wish everyone a very merry Daylight Savings and a happy G&T on the rocks.

I’ve inserted some pic’s I took in Chippendale of some graffiti.
There was an exhibition of Stencil art being held, and after I checked out the art I lurked around the back streets to see if I could find some uncaged examples.

The first two are part of a collaborative project that was in the process of being created. I think the result was going to me auctioned off.

Next thing I want from Nokia.

Let's get that useless little cam on the front doing something.
Is anyone actually using it for video calls?
(Probably Snoyt knowing my luck.)

How bout using that pixel tracking tech to allow us to scroll around the screen by tilting the phone? Move the phone and the direction and speed of the pixels can be read by the cam. Currently I’ve only seen this tech ‘wasted’ on games.

The little cam probably has enough rez to read the texture on the pad of ones thumb so our thumb moving in front of the cam could be used as a trackball input.
Possibly throw in a bit of gesture recognition so that ‘circling the thumb,’ or ‘rapid back and forth’ movements could be assigned functions?

I'm now wondering about using both cameras. The Main cam on the back, for left right up down, and the forward facing cam used as a thumb trackball?

How bout using facial recognition so that when the user is looking at the screen, a nod is read as the green key, and a shake is the red key?

• A wink could trigger the SMS function?
• The user opens their mouth to send the SMS.
• Tilt the head to move through your mail.
• Passing you hand over your face shuts the app down.

What about using the voice command system?
Problems with noisy environments?
The phone could recognise the thumb over the forward facing cam, as the trigger for incoming voice commands so that the phone only listens when the user wants it to.

The interesting thing with facial recognition, is that we could get a cheap iPhone type experience by triggering the screen to change aspect as the phone is rotated from portrait to landscape.
When you rotate the phone, the front cam would see that the angle of your face (I'm assuming you’re looking at the screen when you rotate the phone) would change relative to the cam, and this would trigger the phone to change the aspect of the screen.

Entry for October 04, 2007: Crap it was warm today.

And we’re having a bit of a moth plague at the mo.
Happens every couple of years or so.

Lots of grey, furry little bodies, erratically buzzing around the city.

I don’t mind them personally. There are also a lot of flies buzzing around in the warm air right now and those piss me off more.
People at work seem to have been a bit distracted by a few of these little invaders that were able to get inside to office yesterday.
One woman seemed to have a major psychosis going on, cause she spent most of the day gyrating between the cubicles, gazing up at the roof, as she desperately tried to avoid contact with one of the many moths that were knocking themselves senseless against the fluro’s.

At the end of the day, I told her that she should check that the interior of her car was clear, in case one flew out from under a seat when she was driving and caused her to have an accident.
I was kind of joking but she looked at me weirdly and nodded.
She took a leaf of A4 copy paper with her in case a fuzzy body was on the door handle

Bush fire season has started too. A road was closed off to peak hour traffic as a fire blackened the country side. The papers reckon the fires are deliberately lit.
Whole lot of stuff going to go up in flames this year.

Crap it was warm today.

And we’re having a bit of a moth plague at the mo.
Happens every couple of years or so.

Lots of grey, furry little bodies, erratically buzzing around the city.

I don’t mind them personally. There are also a lot of flies buzzing around in the warm air right now and those piss me off more.
People at work seem to have been a bit distracted by a few of these little invaders that were able to get inside to office yesterday.
One woman seemed to have a major psychosis going on, cause she spent most of the day gyrating between the cubicles, gazing up at the roof, as she desperately tried to avoid contact with one of the many moths that were knocking themselves senseless against the fluro’s.

At the end of the day, I told her that she should check that the interior of her car was clear, in case one flew out from under a seat when she was driving and caused her to have an accident.
I was kind of joking but she looked at me weirdly and nodded.
She took a leaf of A4 copy paper with her in case a fuzzy body was on the door handle

Bush fire season has started too. A road was closed off to peak hour traffic as a fire blackened the country side. The papers reckon the fires are deliberately lit.
Whole lot of stuff going to go up in flames this year.

An opinion piece on the New N95 8gig

This is a link to an article about the improvements made to the N96

Higher capacity battery.
What a surprise. Gee I didn't see that one coming! ;-)

Better build quality
Gee, that one was a surprise too.
I'm taking the piss. Click here to see an earlier article I wrote.
It's a shame that Nokia did away with the plum colour of the case. I quite liked that.

The increase in memory is an interesting point.
This article seems to think that it's a good idea to expand the internal memory at the expense of the SD card slot. Why the hell did Nokia remove the card slot?
Was it the room the carriage took inside the phone?
Was the card slot using memory address space that Nokia needed to release for the extra memory?
Is it an operating system failing?

The thing I like about the SD card is that it's removable. Not it's capacity.
I have two cards that hang from a key ring, and I swap them around my various devices.
I don't keep pictures or video, or word docs in the device cause the data is the important thing. Not the device.
Strangely enough, the device is much more likely to be stolen, or lost, or left somewhere.
I'd much rather have two four gig removable SD cards, then one big slab of memory in the device.

Bigger screen
Nice! But I'm sure as heck not plonking down another grand in cash for a phone that still has a way to go before it's where it should have been at the first release.

And for the stuff that still concerns me…
I wonder if the redesigned dpad has a better ‘feel?’

Does anyone know if the new version can be charged from a USB connection? Not the tiny little easily damaged micro plug!