Polaroid photos

I love the look of polaroid photos. They hold such wonderful memories from my childhood. That instant gratification was such a novelty - and how cool was it to watch it process before your eyes?

However, Polaroid have stopped producing their film and so slowly the cameras and those funky photos will be on the way out. Sad isn't it?

Luckily, you can simulate a small part of the experience - ie just the look of the product - with rollip. You just upload your photo and select a range of "polaroid' effects for it and voila.

Fun.

Just a hint though: keep the image small when you upload it. I tried to upload a slightly bigger file (900kb) and it was very slow and then didn't work at all...

Generation generalisations

I really hate generation generalisations. I have always thought of them at annoying marketing-speak and never understood why people would willingly adopt a category that is just pigeon-holes them into a category designed to assist corporations to sell them stuff more easily.

I think that this is one of the reasons that I have always been unreasonably pleased that my particular birth year is so inconsistently allocated to any particular generation that it is impossible to reasonably label me Generation X or Y.

Personally I have no desire to be in either category. If this media is to be believed (and, I should note, this is rarely the case) then Generation X doesn't give a toss about the planet; is materialistic, boring, and illogically loyal to companies who regularly sack their work force; while Generation Y are flighty, disloyal, idealistic, lazy, unreliable, and have an unreasonable sense of entitlement. Clearly neither is true of even the majority of people who happen to have been born within a particular time frame.

Anyway, all of this is merely a segue for me to point you to a great article by John Quiggin, in which he takes on the idea of Generations and very effectively tears it apart. It is worth a read.

Journaling

I recently finished reading "Drawing from Life: The Journal as Art" and got all inspired about starting a new journal. I have kept a journal for most of my life, but they have always been the wordy, angsty kind of journal that doesn't serve me very well as a source of inspiration. After reading this book I am very keen to try something completely different.
I had just bought Lily a big spiral bound sketchbook to draw in and so I stole it (yes, I am bad - I'll get her another one though) and made it my own. Then I set out a bunch of lovely coloured pencils, a sharp lead pencil and gave myself permission to paste in stuff and generally collect bits of daily life that might serve to inspire me in the future or remind me of moments in time that I found particularly significant. I am really quite excited about it.

Another inspiring pathway that this book opened up for me was its mention of the 1000 Journals Project. I had never heard of it before, although it has been around since 2000. Essentially Brian Singer (or Someguy, as he calls himself on his website) spent a few years sending 1000 journals out into the world with the following instructions pasted on the inside front page:

"Take this journal and add something to it. Stories, photographs, drawings, opinions. Anything goes."

They are then supposed to be passed on to someone else to continue their journey. People have scanned pages of the journals and posted them on the 1000journals site and the location of each journal is also tracked on this site whenever it is spotted. At least one completed journal has made it back to Brian Singer and two have gone completely missing in action.

A documentary film has been made about the project and there is a touring art show of some of the pages that have been contributed. A book has also been published.


How cool is that?

Naturally I wanted to join in the fun, but it is nigh-on impossible to get a hold of one of the original 1000 journals and so I signed up to the 1001 journals site. I'll let you know if I ever receive one of the journals to contribute to - or if I get up the motivation to send one out into the world myself.

The first page of my new journal is covered in toadstools and birds. I'm not very deep.

How about you - do you keep a journal? Do you consider your blog to be your journal?

Facebook

With the trip to Darwin and The Move (and chaos that has followed) it has been really hard for me to find any time to sit down in front of the computer to post. Because of this I never had the chance to comment on Howard's Emergency intervention in Indigenous affairs or on the appalling intervention on the Minister for Immigration into the Haneef case, and I have hundreds of unread posts on my bloglines accounts (actually thousands may be more accurate). I had big plans to change this last week. I was going to catch up on my favourite blogs, post a little, read the Guardian online - you know: get back in touch - when I was silly enough to answer an invitation to join Facebook.

Time passed.

Blogs went unread. Posts went unwritten. News became stale.

And I collected 'friends', send them flowers for their gardens, got bitten by a vampire, and generally wasted my precious computer time on something that I still don't entirely understand. It's addictive though. I can tell you that.

Now I must go. Lily is trying to get piglet into her mouth and he just won't cooperate.

Hicks charged, sort of

The US Government has finally gotten around to charging David Hicks with something, sort of. And while our Dear Leader insists that it wouldn’t be right for Hicks to be charged under retrospective legislation (i.e. with crimes that weren’t crimes at the time they were "committed") in Australia:

"What the Americans do is up to the Americans … We believe the arrangements for the military commission meet the reasonable requirements of Australian law".

"[W]e do not believe the passage of retrospective criminal law in this country is appropriate".

"[O]nce somebody goes overseas they lose the protection of Australian law".

"I don't equate what the US is doing with the passage of a retrospective criminal law in Australia. I don't accept the analogy".

Well, that’s a whole new level of doublespeak.

The whole thing is a farce, and therefore I’m sending you over to a post by AnonymousLefty that would be funny if the situation wasn’t so sad, disgusting and deranged.

Corporate environmentalism - a contradiction in terms?

I know I have often ranted about corporate abuse of the environment here and occasionally about their seeming shifts towards environmental responsibility. But, in my view, with something this important there's no such thing as overkill.

Too much of one voice, though, can get a little drab, so I'm handing over to an "expert" - temporarily.

George Monbiot, a far more qualified ranter than I, has recently published a piece on the greening of Tesco and Walmart that is really worth reading.

Monbiot argues that while mega-corporations may spout enviro-speak (i.e. talk the talk) and may even walk the walk, this will only go so far.

But there is a bigger contradiction than this, which has been overlooked by both the supermarkets and many of their critics. "The green movement," Terry Leahy tells us, "must become a mass movement in green consumption." But what about consuming less? Less is the one thing the superstores cannot sell us. As further efficiencies become harder to extract, their growth will eventually outstrip all their reductions in the use of energy. This is not Tesco’s problem alone: the green movement's economic alternatives still lack force.

The market cannot replace government regulation of the environment. What incentive do corporations have to make the kinds of changes that are ultimately necessary when (as Joel Bakan has taught us) the corporation is a psychopath interested only in the relentless pursuit of profit and power. Corporations will never willingly cut into their bottom line in order to protect the environment or appease fickle consumers who may care about sustainability this week but will still want their goods as cheap as possible.

We need more government regulation of corporations (particularly where they intersect with the environment and human rights) if we are ever going to make a difference to the future (which is increasingly becoming the present) of our planet.

While corporations like Tesco and Walmart are saying all the right things it remains just that, talk, if they refuse to submit to independent audit of their environmental impact. And, as Monbiot notes, while they are pushing the big picture they are neglecting the small, everyday interventions that do so much more to protect our common future:

In his speech on Thursday, the company’s chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, spoke of the sophisticated new refrigeration techniques Tesco will use, which will allow the chain to reduce its consumption of climate changing gases called hydrofluorocarbons. But at no point did he mention an environmental technology called the door. How can you claim your stores are sustainable if the fridges and freezers don’t have doors?

And there you have it.

New Life for Sale!!

Would you pay $60,300.00 for this?

Each to their own I guess, but really?

Online Opinion Commenters

My post on pregnancy went up on Online Opinion on Monday. Fortunately for me I was in Kangaroo Valley with my brother and so I didn't have the chance to see the comments until Tuesday night...

Wow, I knew that there were plenty of men who were particularly defensive of patriarchy and who get their heckles up at the merest mention of feminism, but I was surprised by how agro they were able to get over the idea that I might have found pregnancy a confronting experience and dared to write about it on my own blog. Actually, more surprising was the fact that they think that I care about their opinion, but that is another story.

Anyway, I was particularly struck by this little gem of insight that just arrived into The Forum (the discussion about the post):

I am sure Cristy's feelings are real whilst she struggles to complete her Ph'd fighting against the patrairchial oppression and sexism and at the same time dealing with the change in her body image.

I recalled the other day a friend who was so desperate to have a baby, that she was prepared not only to put her health on the line, but her life as well.

Against medical advice she choose to continue her pregnancy, she even had a stroke which made her dysphasic and at one point she became so ill that she was admitted to Intensive Care, still she choose to continue the pregnancy.

Both she and the baby survived and she has a healthy boy. Fortunately for most western women they are not faced with such a life and death dilemma's.

And when compared to the third world we do not really have to worry much about the survival rate of our children where in the third world a large percentage do not even see their third birthday. We worry about luxuries such as child care and maternity leave, Ph'ds and careers.

I guess the work of the culture of patriarchial oppressors in this country has had nothing to do with improving the health outcomes and survival rates of our children.
Posted by JamesH, Thursday, 18 January 2007 3:47:16 PM

Of course, this raises many questions about the author. However, the most pressing for me is what on earth he is going on about in the last sentence?

Does he think that societies in the "third world" are not patriarchal? Is he really claiming that patriarchy is the reason that maternal health care has improved in Australia?

Why are sexist men so delusional? Do they have to spin these lies for themselves in order to continue to justify their hatred of women?

Today it's Cameroon, Thursday it's Vanuatu...

8 January 2007 was a bad day for the environment. Not because anything terribly different happened – just the opposite in fact. Monday last week was the day on which the average citizen of the UK had already produced as much C02 as the average person in the world's 50 least-developed countries combined will all year.

8 days!

I hate to think how long it takes the average Australian, particularly as we are (on per capita basis) worse polluters than the UK. And then I think "how long did it take the average American?" and I shudder.

What we are doing to this planet (and the majority of its inhabitants) in the name of 'better' living and 'progress' is absolutely disgusting and I'm sick to death of it.

UK-based World Development Movement has put together a climate calendar marking off the days on which the average citizen of the UK passes the yearly emissions of the average citizen of other countries.

That was a confusing sentence, sorry. Best to just go check out the calendar and get the picture visually. It's scary.

Today the UK passed Cameroon. I'm sure Australia passed them several days ago.

When are we going to learn that we can't keep abusing resources and pumping crap into the atmosphere without major consequences – for us, the rest of the world’s inhabitants, and the planet)? Sometimes I feel like we’re living in the first half of the 20th Century. Remember when smoking was good for you, you couldn’t be healthy without eating red meat and drinking and consuming several glasses of cow’s milk a day, the planet’s resources were infinite, and economics was a zero sum game – a race to the top? Life was just peachy then – except it wasn’t. The world has changed, but we’re not changing fast enough to make the change for the better rather than the worse.

Some days I feel like it’s just not worth bothering and that we’re a lost cause. That tends to last about 5 seconds and then I get pissed off again (at our arrogance and ignorance) and vow anew to keep at it till everybody just gets it.

I’m very stubborn.

Too easy

This quiz was clearly too easy. My grammar is appalling. I just happen to know where to put apostrophes.

Your Language Arts Grade: 100%

Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know "no" from "know." Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).

Are You Gooder at Grammar?
Make a Quiz

Thanks for the diversion Ampersand Duck.

Focus on your world

I've just stumbled across this, and it's made me wonder what I'm doing working in an office when I'd rather be out making amazing pictures of incredible things - and helping others to record the details of their daily lives and communities on film.

Ah, the pleasures of dreaming away a slow office afternoon.

One of these days it'll all come together.

100 million sites and nothing's on...

Today marks a milestone of sorts for the internet, which has reached 100 million individual websites. That's a considerable number, especially when there were less than 20,000 at the end of 1995.

While net nerds celebrated net leaders were discussing the future at the Internet Governance Forum in Athens, which wrapped up today. The four key agendas for the conference were security, diversity, openness and access.

The forum was borne out of the World Summit on the Information Society meetings, the last of which was held in Tunis - that bastion of free expression (where people are regularly imprisoned for speaking their mind on the net - and you wonder why the talks were a resounding failure).

UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, addressed the forum, saying:

With more than one billion users world-wide and still growing dramatically, the Internet has outgrown its origins as a network run by and for computer specialists. Indeed it has become too important, for almost every country’s economy and administration, for Governments not to take an interest. The challenge therefore is to bring two cultures together: the non-governmental Internet community, with its traditions of informal, bottom-up decision-making, and the more formal, structured world of Governments and intergovernmental organizations.

Just how that might happen is still much debated.

Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs held an alternative forum concurrent with the "real" forum, attempting to bring to light the abuse of human rights (particularly freedom of speech) some governments are engaged in and how this can be facilitated by the internet.

Steve Ballinger from Amnesty told BBC reporters:

"The Internet Governance Forum needs to know that the online community is concerned about free expression online and willing to stand up for it" ... "People have been locked up just for expressing their views in an email or a website. Sites and blogs have been shut down and firewalls built to prevent access to information."

So, while the internet is an incredibly useful tool that can facilitate communication and close gaps between peoples, it can also be used as a tool for circulating propaganda and monitoring the movements, thoughts and actions of people who disagree with the state.

One can only imagine that the 100 million sites of today will be a tiny proportion of those in another 15 years, but this leads me to wonder, if only a tiny percentage of today's sites are worthwhile and contain useful information, just how much trash will there be in the ether by 2031?

Google launches book search, publishers sweat

As part of its bid to “organise the world’s information” Google has launched its latest tailored search engine, this one for books. Google Book Search does just that, it searches the entire text of books Google has scanned and stored online. You can download entire books and print to your heart’s content, but, according to a London Times article, you’d be a bit stupid if you did.

It seems Google is being very careful to steer clear of picking a large fight with major publishers by only making out of copyright publications available on the website. They’ve been scouring the shelves of several libraries in the US and UK, scanning the text and sticking them online. They haven’t scanned anything more recent than the mid-19th century to avoid violating any copyright laws, anywhere.

This sounds great, but there is a bit of a hitch. You might think that downloading and printing out, say, the complete works of Shakespeare might be a fun way to spend an evening and a cheap way to get hold the master’s words, but, according to the Times:

At present home download and printer speeds, it could end up being more expensive to get hold of a free copy of a classic work.

An 1825 complete works of Shakespeare, found by the Google book search, runs to 908 pages and takes 56.6 megabytes of data.

Downloading the tome would take up to five minutes on a broadband fast internet link, and could take approaching an hour on a traditional dial-up connection. But the determined reader would have to endure reading the plays on a backlit screen.

Printing out, though, adds to the complexity. Using a cheap home printer working at 12 pages a minute, it would take 75 minutes to produce the entire book for bedtime reading.

The exercise could easily consume an entire ink cartridge, which costs between £35 and £40.

On Amazon it is possible to buy a paperback Complete Works of Shakespeare for £4.79.

Well, that puts a hole smack bang in the middle of that theory...

Even though only crazy people (or those seeking to really abuse work stationery) are going to bother printing out entire books, publishers are up in arms, talking about the death of their field. Not quite yet, I’d venture.

I think it’s great. I could really have done with digital copies of some novels during my undergrad degree. Cutting and pasting quotes into essays rather than re-typing them would really have cut down needless typing in my honours thesis, and having the ability to perform word searches (looking for that half-remembered line) would have cut out tons of flicking and needless re-reading.

Now, if only digital readers would become more readable…

I’m not a technophobe; I just don’t want to cuddle up with my phone, okay

This article in the SMH got me a little concerned. I suppose I should be excited, but I’m not. I’m not even torn.

You see, loads of people, in Japan at least, are now downloading e-books and reading them on their mobile phones. It seems that tons of Japanese youth who just weren’t into reading the classics have started doing so now that they are available in digital format.

"We find that e-books complement the printed publications," said a spokeswoman for the Shinchosha publishing house, Sonoko Fukaya. "As a publisher we of course would like to see our printed publications sell well, but at the same time we find that digital contents are cultivating a new generation of readers who would not have read the contents otherwise."

Maybe I am a luddite after all. I just can’t imagine enjoying a book on my phone. There’s just something so comforting about curling up with a real book, feeling the cover and smelling the pages. And what about browsing in bookshops? I would be one sad little puppy if there were no bookshops to spend hours just wandering in.

Though the environmentalist in me says I should be applauding the fact that people are moving away from paper-based reading as the technology evolves, I just can’t – not on a phone. I’m all for the development of digital newspaper and e-book readers. The ones that are designed specifically for the purpose and are still some ways away from being perfected (though see the effort from Jinkie, above). Bring them on. I’ll happily sacrifice the paper feel and scent for one of those (just so long as I don’t feel like I’m staring at a squidgy computer screen (I get enough of that already – not so much the squidgy though).

And just in case you thought that Japanese youths were the only ones nutty enough to want to read books on their tiny little mobile phone screens, Harper Collins wants you to believe otherwise. They have launched a mobile reader club and I’m not giving you the link. If you’re odd enough to want to read books on your mobile you can find it on your own.

Final Call for Submissions

There is just over a week to go now before the Third Carnival of Empty Cages, which will go up on Tuesday 1 August 2006. So please if you have been planning to write a post of your own or submit someone else’s, now is the time to do so. Our email address is nopod(dot)blog(at)gmail(dot)com

As a reminder of the focus of this Carnival, we are particularly interested in the life cycle of veganism and vegetarianism (veg*nism):
1. The story of when and how people became a veg*n.
2. The evolution of people’s reasons for staying a veg*n.
3. The most frustrating aspects of being a veg*n.
4. The most rewarding aspects of being a veg*n.
5. Whether or not people make much of an effort to “convert” others to veg*nism and what people think of this as a concept.

If you are not a veg*n, but your post is on topic (and in the spirit of the Carnival), we would be happy to hear from you too. We are also really keen to hear from people from all over - so please get in touch with us.

I've got a lot of places still to see

create your own visited countries map

[Idea stolen from adelaide writer]

My older brothers made me this way

Canadian researchers have found that the most consistent biological impact on a guy's sexuality is whether or not he has older brothers.

According to their research, a mother's immune system reacts to male fetuses by creating "maternal anti-male antibodies" that affect the part of the brain that determines sexuality. The more male fetuses carried, the stronger this response will become.

What I would like to know is whether and how this relates to sexual preferences in females.

I've never wanted to travel to a toilet before...

until now.

The toilets in the Singapore airport are quite nice - with their aromatheraphy scents and mood lighting - but these new German loos sound amazing. I hope that everyone who is heading over to see the World Cup puts these toilets on their itineraries.

1. Watch soccoroos
2. Drink in several local pubs
3. See Brandenburg Gate
4. Check out Berlin Film Museum
5. Hang out in very cool new toilets

I wonder if the queues are long?

A century between them

I just wanted to quickly share with you the day's strangest news stories:

First, the very young: Budhia Singh, a 4-year-old slum resident from Orissa, India ran 40 miles to enter India's Limca Book of Records. It took the little guy 7 hours and 2 minutes. To think that I was impressed when I ran the city-to-surf...

Second, the more mature: Wook Kundor, a 104-year-old woman, recently took her 21st husband. Muhammad Noor Che Musa, who is 33, said 'he found a sense of belonging after meeting Wook Kundor'. She is his first wife (and, in case you were wondering, she is poor - so it wasn't about money).

OK, back to work.

NY'ers have lunch (and don't rip each other off)

Just as I was having my lunch (at my desk, which is not the best of habits, I know) I came across this story in The Guardian.

It seems the lunch club is taking off in a big way in the big apple and, surprisingly, I think it’s a great idea (my crippling social phobias aside).

The thing I like best though, is that the club has a “you pay for what you eat rule”. As a vegan/vegetarian/ecotarian I’m constantly ending up in situations where I’m forced to subsidise other’s carnivorous tendencies.

Why is it when I go out to dinner with a group of people and order a vegan dish (which often has to be specially made as most restaurants are still too short-sighted to have even one on their standard menu), which usually costs significantly less than the meat-based equivalent, without fail at the end of the meal someone (usually the person who ordered lobster and drank the best part of 3 bottles of wine) will loudly suggest, “let’s split it ‘x’ ways”.

At this point I have 2 options. I can speak up and look like a cheap bastard, or I can sit quietly and cough up (up to) double the price of my meal.

There is something very much not right about this. Not only are meat eaters contributing to the degradation of the environment and supporting an unsustainable industry, they expect me to help them do it!

Not anymore. I’m done with that lark. Let it be known I will no longer be subsidising meat eaters in restaurants.

I’m yet to work out how to go about this without looking cheap, but I’ll figure it out, or I’ll look cheap.

So, anyone want to have lunch?