The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Excuse me, shouldn't Keanu Reeves be playing Gort?

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Get a domain name

Have I talked about this before?



You want a domain name. Yes, you do. You really do.

It's one of those question and answer things that goes like this...

"What's your name?"
"My name is X"
"Did you answer? I didn't hear your answer, but whatever you said, you want a domain name. You do."

I guess it's possible that you might disagree with me. It's happened before. I've been wrong, too. But not about this.

Why do you want a domain name? Mostly for peace of mind, but there are plenty of other reasons.

I've had a lot of people complain to me just lately about their email. The service they get from their ISP, the problems they have with access to their own stuff, the troubles with moving stuff from one place to another.

The solution is to get a domain name. Mostly, people around here would get a .nz domain, but you can do whatever you like. .com, .co.uk. Hell, got for .com.au if you must. :-) Give it some thought. Say it out loud. Look at it written down. Say, for instance, that you chose jimtoldmeto.com



Once you've made your decision, find a geeky person, and ask them to help you set it up. It's no real drama.

Once the domain is set up, the options are limitless. A really common scenario now is to have your email hosted by Google, but with your domain address. Mary@jimtoldmeto.com, for instance. Google can host some web pages for the domain as well. A blog. Documents. Whatever. But it's the email that's really important.

The thing here is that you own the rights to your domain. That is, anything that happens in the jimtoldme.com domain is up to you. You don't need to use Google, either. If you decide they're not keeping their end of the bargain, pick the whole thing up, and take it elsewhere. You're in control. It is hard to beat the price where Google are concerned.

You really, really, really want a domain. At least one.

One thing to remember though... you have to keep paying your (normally annual) fees. They can vary, but I recall picking up a domain for $2 a year recently. Shop around.

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For the geek in us both!

I LOVE stats.

Not the subject. Not the study of them. I just like to be able to look and see what people have been doing... And I'm not alone. Not nearly.




Where they came from, what they were looking for. What they found. When. How...

And now, flickr makes it possible. So I go to the sign-up page, and I tell them to go for it. The page loads... and tells me it might take a while, and that I should check back tomorrow, and see if it's all been done yet. :-(

The geek in me - the same geek who was so excited about the stats - has attention deficit problems, memory issues, and an overload of things to look at... so I lose interest again.

I think it's going to be good, and it could be really great, but I can't tell... until tomorrow.



Never mind. In the meantime, my friend Brenda has been nice enough to upload an example. Nice photo too, Brenda. I have no idea what she's doing using it on a Mac... :-)

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If anything...

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people.”

James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University.

What is it with people today? James Katz was talking about the rampant increase in what many would consider inappropriate use of cellphones on buses and trains, but I’m seeing something much wider.

It seems to me that a large number of people have forgotten that anyone else exists, much less has rights, and needs. Opinions too. Opinions that might well be different from yours, but are not necessarily wrong, evil, or demented.

Our societies are approaching the point where non-physical communication is the norm. Where people never meet, but nonetheless build relationships. With this capability comes great power and freedom. As usual, there is also huge capacity for abuse.

I’ve been commuting via bus for years, intermittently, but in the last few months I have also been wearing an iPod. I don’t carry this thing to block out the world. I carry it to give me more opportunity to listen to music. Nonetheless, it functions as a barrier. People generally sit down next to me now without a nod, a smile, a hello. Yes, this happened before, but not to anything like this degree. I’m no longer in the bus with the other commuters. I’m just taking up space.

I saw two people fighting over a car park the other day. One person turned into the angle park when she saw the chance, depriving a man who was turning from the other side of the road the same opportunity. He swore. She gesticulated. He parked his car in the middle of the road, got out, and harangued the woman. She insisted that he was both wrong and of doubtful parentage. He suggested she should undertake a physically impossible feat. If it wasn’t for the other irate motorists making such a noise, he might have slugged her one rather than returning to his large vehicle and screeching off in anger, his hand out the window in an unmistakable digital gesture to the rest of the world.

Was this a normal large city scene? No. It wasn’t even in a large country. Was it in the central business district, where parks are hard to come by even in a smaller city? No. It was in a beach community, well out of the city. There were other parks within a block of the location in which the discussion took place. Neither of the combatants had any obvious issues with mobility.

I swim in the mornings. Slowly. I’m frequently passed, even in the slow lane, by younger, fitter, or more determined swimmers. Generally, it’s just like a road. You wait until an opportunity presents itself, and there is sufficient room for the manoeuvre, then you make your move. Depending on the difference between your speed and mine (hopefully not too much) you might need a fair amount of free space in order to not cut off someone swimming back the other way. If there isn’t sufficient room, or your speed difference is not great enough, you wait, swimming more slowly, until you have a suitable opportunity. Right?

Wrong. You barge past as best you can, cutting off the slow swimmer (me), and the opposing swimmer as well. If you’re really good, you wait a few laps, and do it all over again.

What, I repeat, is it with people today?

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Saving The Planet One Game At A Time...

Saving The Planet One Game At A Time...
Originally uploaded by Mac Girl.

"Of course it's all luck." ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

As I write this post my photo (above) has had a total of 747 views, appears in the rotation for the main Flickr Explore page, and 91 people have marked it as a favorite.

I'm stunned.

It's not that I don't like the photo - I do! - it's just that I never planned it.

It started with Terry, as it so often does. He mentioned a book called "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson and said that he'd heard that once you read this book you shoot in Manual mode for the rest of your life. Strong words. I had to read it.

So I did. Well, I read Chapter 1 and a little of Chapter 2 and decided to play a bit, do the exercises, see if it was possible to re-train my mind to do things a different way. To do things in what I thought was a more difficult way.

I'd just unearthed my old Scrabble kit and though that the tiles would make a good subject to tinker with. I had planned the word FRIENDS in an attempt to cheer a friend who was blue yesterday. The problem is that FRIENDS is a long word and it's not so easy to stack the tiles in a way that makes a 7-letter work look like a random spill. Not from the side anyway. So after several attempts I changed to LOVE instead.

I did a bit more tinkering (you'd never know it but those tiles are slippery little suckers!) and finally got the letters where I wanted them and in an attitude that minimized glare from the window (my primary light source) and still faced the camera. I added a little fill flash - stopped down 3 full steps if I remember correctly - and pulled out a shot that I was reasonably pleased with.

Until I put it on the computer.

Brown tiles, bright colored bag, and a bright festive blue table cloth had me grabbing for the saturation slider. A pull here and a tug there and I had one shot that I was happy with out of many, many test shots.

I uploaded it, added it to a few groups, and walked away. I'd re-learned a bit about exposure, tried something new with my flash, and come up with a reasonably decent photo.

And now it's on Explore.

I never planned this. I never looked for it. How did it happen? I've had more Flickr emails saying that people have added me as a contact in the last 24 hours than I've had in the last year or so.

I'm stunned. And grateful. And wondering how in the hell I'm going to top this...

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