the siren islands

personal faves (to rant or to read)

open minds and gates

margins of my mind

friends for good

(bi)monthly brain food (frogtalk)

podcast pages

music & .mp3 blogs

finding the words
(pop-ups occasionally are pests)


general references

blogroll me?


even bloggers play in bands
britblogs

MacMusic FR/EN

last.fm

clubbing
my technorati cosmos

downwards, ever downwards


 

 

jeudi 8 mai 2003
 

Having vowed to say no more about my insides, I shan't. There's been enough recently about toilets of whatever kind. However, if the blogging incentive is back and natural calls have become sufficiently infrequent to rule out a browser in the bathroom, I'm fit for work tomorrow. There will be further medical intervention, but I'm not making any appointments on a jour férié.
May means feast-days. The French particularly like this this year's since all three of them fall on a Thursday, so the childless "font le pont" (the weekend "bridge") - while those with offspring have to decide whether to whip them out of school for a day. VE Day (on which you can even listen to Ed Morrow should you care to) and Ascension don't, however, close all shops and offices like May Day does.
Apple and other developers have been equally busy with internal plumbing. Any computer energy I found yesterday went into upgrades: eight of the things. They included one to iPhoto Library Manager (released in mid-April), significant improvements to iView Media Pro, which I use far more than iPhoto anyway but does cost $90/?79 first time round, and Jaguar Cache Cleaner 1.8 (a couple of days old).
Almost each time I look, the indefatigable Thorsten Lemke has added something new to his invaluable Graphic Converter, while Gordon Byrnes this week squashed a few more tummy bugs in Safari Enhancer.

What started the spate of downloads was the Mac OS X software update panel offer of iTunes 4, not for that wretched music store business (which I'm now told you can use outside the United States once you know how), and the QuickTime 6.2 you need with it to investigate the AAC (advanced audio codec) Apple's raving about:

"AAC encoding compresses much more efficiently than older formats like MP3 (which iTunes still supports, by the way), while delivering quality rivaling that of uncompressed CD audio. In fact, expert listeners have judged AAC audio files compressed at 128 kbps (stereo) to be virtually indistinguishable from the original uncompressed audio source."
Discovering that Mac OS 10.2.6 was also sitting there waiting was pure accident. Like an idiot, given past experience, I installed it without a second thought; the package was but a mere 6.4 MB as compared to the ridiculous 41.2 MB of 10.2.4, let alone the 81.9 MB for the 10.2.5 "combo" (saved for safety's sake). Even after the customary maintenance routines much beloved of TSers, once 10.2.6 was in, my scanner promptly ceased to be "recognised" and function. "Great," I thought, "par for some of Apple's recent course!" but the insult was unfair since it turned out to be a minor glitch elsewhere.

zzz

I wish all game developers were as assiduous in ensuring things work properly as most others do, again particularly for we non-North Americans. Now that Apple is determined to sell Macs as gamers' machines as part of the switch campaign, game producers can be slow. At Aspyr, they did react fast when I realised that Marianne was not alone in having trouble with 'The Sims Vacation' and they whipped up a quick support note here for the French almost as soon as I mailed them.

swipeWe shall probably never find out what happens at the very end of 'Atlantis III' because of a CD-reading error I can't fix (but it's not the CD), while in 'Morpheus', we can't get into one room though we know the door code perfectly well.

As for 'Ring', I shall likely finish it in my dotage. If ever... But Marianne and I are not gamers. If they keep us occupied from time to time, then with even the beautiful 'Myst III: Exile', it's because the first place we go, not the last, is the Universal Hint System. "No spoilers. Just the hints you need," they say. Give us the spoilers any day.

I was looking for a moan spotted once, which drew considerable comment, about an only too common problem, on the lines of "Buy the game, then find the friggin' patch, but why does it have to be like that?" Couldn't turn it up. In trying, I did stumble on this:

"As a woman who plays video games, I've had to think about gender [successes and failures] in videogames, because it's so obvious that I'm playing in a boys' world.
The late Dr. Anita Borg taught that technology isn't neutral; tools are shaped by the values and desires of the creators. Often the creators tend to be clueless to the values encoded in their tools, because to them, the tools are transparent - they reflect pure utilitarianism. But to those who are excluded, the tools are highly charged.
That's an interesting blog-space, game girl advance. I'll return for a thorough look.


11:57:21 PM  link   your views? []

sanctityHere we have André Baudier, whom I first introduced in this log on March 9. Indeed, it was at "the canteen" (Pizzeria Pernety), when M. Baudier was in a positively exuberant mood, his latest work all but wrapped up, that I asked Sam to lend me his copy of 'L'Odeur des Casernes' (The Stench of the Barracks).
My spinach was well spiced up in Oriental fashion that day, Sam had spoilt his other regulars too, and he not only remembered to leave me Baudier's novel, but unexpected signed copies of two more works by the "lion". I think I'll not ask André (if so I may presume), what the picture I can only baptise Salomé "means". Let's just say that 'Le père Noël ATTAQUE et je suis sans défense' (Somogy/Editions d'Art, 1999) is a singularly, on the whole, dark collection of 165 deceptively childlike paintings. Not a word in the book. And that's how it should be.
On the back of 'La Cinquintaine Omnibus' (Somogy, 2000), the thinker and sometime mathematician is described by 'Person Magazine' thus: "At 66, an age he wears well, though he would rather live 20 or 30 fewer years badly, (Baudier) has the despair of a great moralist who has survived the temptation of suicide."

Nitche?Cher monsieur, I may write about 'L'Odeur des Casernes' (Séguier, 1989, then Somogy, 2001) if ever I get my head around it! It's neither the French (tricky) nor the forest of wordplay (trickier), while I dimly sense that the three false starts are neither false nor departures. But for the moment, I prefer to dip in, here and there, and would perhaps do better still by beginning at the end. As a structure, it has a perverse fascination.
The 'Omnibus', dedicated to "La Belle et la Bête," is more accessible to a reader in search of a story, in this instance that of three sisters (or princesses?) in their 50s, the Paris-Trouville omnibus, and a miracle (the prince?). Text on each left-hand page - wry, inventive and not always dry - with illustrations on the right (as here), it's perhaps the best place to make an odd aquaintance. I should imagine they're all in stock at the Fnac.


5:32:51 PM  link   your views? []


nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit
Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website. NetNewsWire: more news, less junk. faster valid css ... usually creative commons licence
under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.


bodily contacts
the orchard:
a blog behind the log
('secret heart, what are you made of?
what are you so afraid of?
could it be three simple words?'
- Feist)


voices of women
RSS music

the orchard
RSS orchard

stories of a sort
(some less wise than others)

wishful thinking
(for my own benefit)

e-mail me? postbox

who is this guy?


May 2003
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
        1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Apr   Jun


'be like water'? be music
march 2007
[feb 2007]
jan 2007
[dec 2006]
nov 2006
oct 2006
[sept 2006]
aug 2006
july 2006
june 2006
may 2006
april 2006
march 2006
feb 2006
jan 2006
dec 2005
nov 2005
oct 2005
sept 2005
aug 2005
july 2005
june 2005
may 2005


(for a year's worth of logging, a query takes you straight to the relevant entry; if answers date from the first years, this search engine will furnish them on monthly pages;
links to "previous lives" -- february 2003-april 2005 -- are omitted here but provided on all the log's monthly pages.)

shopping with friends



Safari Bookshelf