Category: Uncategorized

…as the kids seem to be calling it these days. [shrug] Beats me. Anyway, yes, there’s some sort of election going on tomorrow, thus far unremarked on this site. Which is odd, since not only do I get to meet some delightful old ladies at the local primary school, I can marvel at the joys of barely-post-war typography too. The machinery of democracy is a marvelous thing, and it’s fueled by obsolete lithography and milky tea. This sort of thing pleases me greatly, hence my surprise at not having mentioned it until now.

Also because tomorrow, I shall get to look the faceless bureaucracy straight in the eye. For not only do I get to grasp the stubby pencil and mark a box on a scrap of flimsy paper, but I’ll get to see lots of other marks on paper too. I’m going to the count in Glasgow.

Old chum Martin is, as it turns out, the Scottish Green Party‘s candidate for Glasgow North. It’s all official and in the Guardian and everything. He’s roped me into helping out at the count, which so far as I can tell involves wandering around with a clipboard whilst nodding sagely and muttering ‘Ah yes, a pile of paper’ rather a lot. Or something like that. I’m not quite sure how that gets spun out until two in the morning, but doubtless I’ll find out.

My excitement is tempered only by the realisation that both the constituency Martin’s contesting, and the one in which I vote, are absurdly safe Labour seats. Heigh-ho. Still, here’s hoping it turns out better than the last time I was called to exercise my democratic right, which was frankly something of a farce.

Aside from wishing they’d come up with a better name than ‘H264’, first impressions of the new video codec introduced with Tiger are extremely positive. This page has excellent samples of clips compressed with Sorenson 3, the old MPEG4, and H264, with full information about the compression settings. Looks good to me.

Of course, compressing this stuff will bring my Macs to their knees. Darn.

Beta, of course, but still – it’s out. Link. Ooh, look at the shiny drop-shadow prettiness… now I just need to hook it up to Tiger’s address book and Dashboard widgits…

Speaking of Tiger – forget all the whizzy new stuff, just revel in the whizzy performance. Today’s been my first day of really using it in anger, and it feels like I’ve bought a complete new PowerBook. Sure, Spotlight is brilliant, but the quicker text drawing is what’s really making me grin. Even Word 2004 scrolls smoothly now.

Since there’s a General Election at some point this week (most likely Thursday – I never could get the hang of Thursdays), and because they asked me to, this seems an opportune moment to mention They Work For You.com. Marvelous site. Find out what your MP has been up to, so you can work out whether to vote them back in again or not. Go on, you know you want to.

Note, incidentally, that boundary changes may mean your previous MP is not your current candidate. This is the case for my bit of Glasgow.

Cassette recorder drive racing. No, really. Popular Science article, and the original site. Meanwhile, I just watched a rough cut of the second programme recorded for Mechannibals. It rocks. Seriously, it’s great. Well-judged pacing, funny, impressive, and even the ending makes sense. What a relief.

No, I’m not serious enough about board games to buy the Settlers of Catan Tenth Anniversary 3D Edition. Martin and Lucy, perhaps?

Catching up on Doctor Who, I found myself entirely underwhelmed by the Slitheen and the last couple of episodes (I mean, how many shots of somebody unzipping their forehead are really necessary?). But Dalek… oh, boy. Finally, after all these years, we know why they were so scary. I guess we’d all assumed, as nine year-olds, that they could do pretty much anything. But it all happened off-camera. Now, finally, we’ve seen a Dalek kicking serious arse. And it rocks.

Nice bit of symmetry with the Doctor and the back-story of the Time War; unexpected twist; Christopher Eccleston saying ‘Fantastic!’ a little less than his usual quota. Corker of an episode, I thought. And there are more Daleks later in the series. Cooool.

Incidentally, one of the chaps I’m working with owns a Dalek. A real one. Not one of the first four (Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo – no, really), but I believe the fifth made, out of something like six. Plus, presumably, the Emperor Dalek for the movies, that bizarre Special Weapons Dalek from whatever the heck that episode was way back in the mists of time, and of course the new ones. Anyway, Ian’s Dalek lurks beneath the stairs, looking a little worn but still with an air of ‘ready to take over the world’ about it.

Ho ho ho, what a witty post subject line. Ahem. However, there is cause for some excitement, in that a photograph of mine is, apparently, displayed in the house of some friends. Which is rather exciting, really. The picture in question is of one of those glorious chrome binocular telescopes, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. The original is in my gallery here, but the version hanging at the friends’ house is in black and white, and hence looks more like the one alongside this post. I was tempted to add a little grain, actually – silky smooth greyscale isn’t always to my taste. When I’ve shot in black and white, I’ve usually gone for insanely fast film, liking the surprise of seeing the contrast the camera saw, rather than what was coming down the lens.

I’m a hung artist. Gosh, I feel so grown-up.

Those with a nervous or easily-bored disposition may choose to skip this post, but for the rest of you:

Tiger

Tiger pretty much rocks. It’s a little rough around the edges, something we’ve rather come not to expect from Apple of late, and one suspects there’ll be a 10.4.1 update relatively soon. But mostly, it rocks. Big time.

There’s the obvious stuff that’s been marketed – Spotlight, which is very nearly as good as I’d hoped and believe me, I first saw this demonstrated 11 years ago; Dashboard, which is a neater and less buggy implementation than the almost-fantastic-but-actually-not-quite-right-in-a-way-that’s-hard-to-put-your-finger-on Konfabulator.

There’s the less obvious stuff that’s also delightful – being able to call up dictionary definitions pretty much anywhere, and that they’re really nicely typeset (no, I’m not joking); waaay faster window drawing, which makes application switching really fast; a QuickTime Player that finally feels like it belongs in X, rather than being a hold-over from the Mac OS 9 days.

Then there’s the under-the-hood stuff that normal users won’t notice – CoreData; Quartz2D Extreme; CoreImage; ContentEditable in WebKit; see John Siracusa’s excellent review for way more detail than you really want.

Finally there’s the really weird stuff, like the button bar in Mail (what were they thinking?!), the weirdly unfathomable behaviour of Spotlight searches in the Finder, and my finally realising just how slow laptop hard drives are compared to decent desktop units.

But all in, it feels like a solid upgrade that’s preparing the ground for things to come. Which is slightly unexpected, since Spotlight is such a big deal and Dashboard so whizzy I was half-expecting to see it as a ‘feature’ release. It is, and it’s worth getting for the new stuff alone. Heck, it’s worth getting for the performance improvements. But it’s really worth jumping on the bandwagon for all the stuff you won’t initially notice. There’s some unfeasibly cool stuff going on in Tiger, just beneath the surface.

I’m just hoping people work out what to do with it all.

Car

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. So, the whole point of taking it in was to dry it out, replace the water-damaged bits, fit new seals, and make sure it didn’t happen again. Imagine, dear reader, how dismayed I was to pick it up with the engine compartment full of water – again – and the cover soaked through and mouldy – still.

I’m now waiting for the right staff to come back in on Tuesday, then we shall see what they have to say for themselves. But it’s clearly a bit of a farce right now. Ugh.

Tiger just arrived. Could be a long weekend… But first, lunch, licensing the car, picking it up from the garage, buying a new mobile phone, stocking up on critical supplies (ie. tea, milk), putting the washing on, installing big new hard drives, and backing up everything. Twice.

Ah, it’s good to be home.