March 2004 – Page 2 – Something Odd!

The guy is dumb, really, really dumb

According to the BBC, Bush’s Iraq WMDs joke backfires. This would be slightly funny if it wasn’t in such bad taste. Thanks Colm for the link.

Worms!

Heard on Today FM a few minutes ago, and here for reference purposes.. Ray was asked about composting waste food so he got an expert on the line. My father has a composter which has worked wonders to cut down the amount of waste we throw out. Mel and others have told me about wormeries a few times. These are basically the same, but they have worms in them, and according to the “expert” they’ll consume waste material 10 times faster! With the introduction of weight based billing for rubbish collection at the end of the year I can only imagine that sales of these devices is going to rocket over the next few months!

GIMP 2 in Video

Via the Gimp User mailing list, here’s some good tutorial videos showing off GIMP 2.0. I must really install GIMP 2.0 soon and play with it!

We feel your pain!

Myself and John spent the last 2 days working on GoldMine trying to get it to import users (easy), setup extra fields (bit harder) and automatically importing them into a new track (not done yet). Documentation is terrible, help files are a small help, the program is unwieldy. We visited their website to be confronted with the following…

we feel your pain

Beating the Photography Blues, Trouble on the Streets?

You know those days when you really couldn’t be bothered? Go to work, work the day through, go home, have dinner, veg in front of the tv, go to bed, repeat ad naseum. Everyone goes through troughs in life and Mark’s going through one right now. Here’s his plan for beating the blues!

On a completely different note, this is disturbing. Sensiti was in central London taking photos and looking for insipiration. He started taking photos until 4 minutes later he was approached by a policeman and asked what he was doing. It seems that the CCTV people monitoring the city noticed him walking around with a camera and suspected he was taking photos of children.
What would I have said if I was stopped on St. Patrick’s Day? Besides the parade photos , I took at least 2 dozen photos of the crowd before and during the event! Several of those are of kids looking in wonder and delight at the parade or simply bored and hungry, hanging on to their parents necks.
It’s a sorry, scary, state of affairs. for parents and photographers alike.

What to do? I hardly ever take photos of kids but if I do, I try to make sure people see my approach with a camera. Unfortunately, as Mark points out in the first article, pointing your camera at someone is often one of the hardest things to do as a photographer. so I don’t take many photos of people!
Much later… Here’s another similar story about 2 photographers on the subway in New York! The train was stopped so they could be interrogated by the police!

Gimp Hits 2.0

I took one day off and Microsoft are fined (a not so huge amount in terms of their cash-pile, and there could be further ramifications for the Free Software movement.) the previous day, and GIMP 2.0 is released! I’d link to gimp.org but that site’s down and out. Here’s the usual Slashdot discussion on the matter including links to a Windows Gimp binary release. Apparently it’s much improved on previous versions!
Here’s the list of mirrors in case you want to download the source tarball now. Some mirrors haven’t updated yet, but gd.tuwien.ac.at has!

House things

So I spent the day doing house things – washing machine, beds and wardrobe were delivered. I got a buzz out of setting up the washing machine and connecting the vacuum cleaner. Yes, yes, yes.. cheap thrills, but they’re my washing machine and vacuum! 😛
Had a frozen pizza for dinner, must get a proper oven-lighter thingy, lighting it with a match almost took the hand off me with the roar of flame from it! All going well, I shall probably be living there on Friday night or perhaps Saturday.
House warming parties to be held sometime next month. Ring the doorbell with your elbow and I’ll take the presents from your hands. lol.

Buying a House in Ireland – It's mine!

And I’d be moving in except that the vendors want to varnish the floors in their new house first. My solicitor told me to go over there, get the keys, and change the locks.
I’m more conciliatory and I’ll give them 24 hours. After all the stress of the boundaries and everything.. *grr*
Later… My solicitor got in touch and put on the pressure. They moved out tonight and I’m in! I helped Ger and his father-in-law move stuff out and we finished around 8pm. His wife Liz doesn’t like me I think, but then she made my life hell over 3 broom sticks and a bit of twine.. Here starts another phase in my life!