Twitter favourite

Salon for haircut. Lady nxt to me is in love w/ my hair & asked her stylist to give her my color. They're holding my head up to color charts.

- phillygirl, Twitter

Twitter favourites

me: is it plugged in?
lady: yes.
me: is it plugged into the right thing?
lady: oh...no.

- jaredvenezia, Twitter

- - -

zach: the comp. doesnt work
me: did u turn it on
zach: yea ass
me: even the switch on back
zach: (sound of switch) shut the hell up

- slinetty, Twitter

- - -

guy: can you come fix my pc?
me: fine. (walks over)
guy: uh...it's working now that you're here.
me: go in peace. your faith has healed you.

- jaredvenezia, Twitter

Brown Cuckoo-Dove

Brown Cuckoo-Dove (Macropygia amboinensis)
(And I do so hope "macropygia" is pronounced macro-pig-ia.)

The book** says these birds live along most of Australia's east coast and are generally quite common, but I've never seen any before. There were three of them here, but I think these photos probably show just the same one in each shot.

I feel like I should apologise for the above-average crappiness of the photos, but no, let's not.

** Jim Flegg & N. Longmore, Birds of Australia, Surry Hills: Reader's Digest, 1994, ISBN 0864384262, p. 168.

Twitter favourite

"Officially 100 days until Election Day. If you're not already outraged about something please contact the campaign for your assignment."

- jdickerson (John Dickerson), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Some days, the web feels like 5 people trying to make something; 5k people turning it into a list; and 500MM people saying, 'FAIL.'"

- hotdogsladies (Merlin Mann), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Food-shopping for our 2-day car trip. How many packets of cashews to get me across the Balkans?"

- sgazzetti, Twitter

A blogging project: x365

An interesting idea:

"Dan Waber turned 40 on January 12th, 2006, and wanted to mark the occasion in some positive fashion. So he got this crazy idea (not an unusual event) to write 40 words (no more, no less) every day for a year, and each day he'd write about a different person (in no particular order) who touched his life. But not just anyone, it has to be someone he's actually met in person, someone whose name he still remembers."

- How x365 got started

I'm kinda sorta maybe interested in trying it myself, except that right now even trying to write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite the introductions to these quotes is proving to be SOMEWHAT LESS THAN ENJOYABLE.

Here's some nice work from Nathan at Okay City: x365, who - being 27 at the time - had only 27 words per post to work with:

- - -

18 August 2007
300 - B.

"She came bounding up the first day of summer, dressed head to toe in lime-green, exclaiming brightly, 'Wake up! It's Monday!' My dislike was misplaced, but deep."

- - -

26 September 2007
339 - H.

"A fabulous Texas woman, with a heart as big as her purse, and hair as big as her heart, both as big as that huge Texas sky."

- - -

18 October 2007
361 - Dr. H.

"My college advisor was a great Old Testament scholar and biblical archaeologist with a sunny disposition and bright blue eyes that never, ever blinked. Like, never ever."

- - -

UPDATE
I've read a bit more of some x365 work and think it would be better if participants didn't name the people they're talking about. Some of the stuff I've seen is so breathtakingly mean, it's hard to believe the writer would put his/her own name to it, let alone name the person they're trashing.

Twitter favourite

"I don't like food-scented bubble baths. I feel like I'm being marinated. It's unsettling."

- shoesonwrong (Annie), Twitter

Twitter favourite

Mom: "You were telling inappropriate stories?"
Kid: [too quiet]
Mom: "Well, isn't that what inappropriate means?"
Kid: "But it was FUNNY!"

- fedge (Jeff Barszcz), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"I am so sore. My new media coach has me working my douche area. Sent out 500 unsolicited invites and friended 400 people I don't know."

- Moltz (John Moltz), Twitter

(In American Twitter-speak, douche = idiot.)

Twitter favourite

"Doctor, after finding out Grandpa's age: 'Wow, you look really great for 94!'
Grandpa: 'You're not so bad yourself.'"

- ginatrapani (Gina Trapani), Twitter

quote

"'What are you jabbering about, shipmate?' said I."

- Ishmael to a stranger, Moby Dick, instalment 43 of 260 from DailyLit.

Shipmate. I just like it.

Twitter favourite

"Man, I couldn't go a block on my bike ride home without running over some old lady in a sun hat. It was like a biblical plague."

- matthewbaldwin (Matthew Baldwin), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Interesting cause-effect: When you offer the plumber a cookie he then feels comfortable enough to sing while he works."

- phillygirl, Twitter

e-book

Interesting (and I thought funny) Google ad on the page I was just reading - next to an article called The introvert's personality traits: introversion as a personality type - shy, quiet, and tentative?

Introvert = Loser
Being Yourself is Not the Solution It's the Problem. Learn to Change.
www.PopularPrick.com

For $29.95 (presumably USD) you can download an e-book which will teach you how to use manipulative psychology to Make People Like, Respect, and Follow You. And if you're a "sad, irrelevant person" like myself, in a "lonely, wasted existence", even past the point where you "look into the mirror and realize you're old and your dreams have passed you by" - well, gee, reader! Popular Prick might appeal to you.

quote

"People who possess loads of information in a particular field have historically been in hot demand and able to charge high fees for access to their stuffed, fact-filled brains. This was so because the facts used to be difficult to access. Not any more. In an era where information about seemingly anything is only a mouse click away, just possessing information alone is hardly the differentiator it used to be. What is more important today than ever before is the ability to synthesize the facts and give them context and perspective. Picasso once said that “computers are useless for they can only give answers.” Computers and Google can indeed give us the routine information and facts that we need. What we want from people who stand before us and give a talk is to give us that which data and information alone cannot: meaning."

- Garr Reynolds, "Make presentations that people will remember", from page 2 of 5, Peachpit

(He's talking about the benefits of telling a story in business talks specifically, but the idea is applicable to other areas of communication too.)

Twitter favourite

"Everytime I go to the restroom I'm scared a horde of women will bust into their reclaimed territory #blogher08"

- paullyoung (Paull Young), Twitter

(He's braving the corridors of the BlogHer annual conference, San Francisco 18-20 July 2008.)

quote

"And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one.

- Captain Peleg speaking to Ishmael about the moody good Captain Ahab, Moby Dick, instalment 37 of 260 from DailyLit

Twitter favourite

"All of my fellow bus riders this morning were sent from the future to spy on me. I could tell by their nonchalance."

- apelad (Adam Koford), Twitter

Titles

I haven't found a way to avoid writing titles here in Blogger. And I really hate writing titles. Yes, yes, obviously: "What's the big deal? Just call it something, fool!" But there's something about having to sum up a post in a title that turns it into something other than I want it to be. Sometimes I just want to write a long Twitter - not "A Post About Something", but just me saying whatever-not-much.

But Blogger uses a title as the page address, so if you don't provide a title yourself, it snags the first words from your post and uses them instead - which looks stupid in the archives. And my former method of using date and number (eg. 15Jul08-1) now looks stupid in Swurl.

So that's it, you see? Whatever I do it's going to look stupid.

It's nice to have that going for me, yes.

Quote

"Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance."

- Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, instalment 34 of 260 from DailyLit

(I put the whole paragraph in for context but really all I wanted to show you was the last sentence. And while I'm here, said last sentence appears in both large AND bold text because I don't know how Swurl will deal with either; it doesn't reproduce quotation blocks, which is why I now use quotation marks too... making it look pretty stupid, yes.) UPDATE: Swurl does indeed reproduce both bold text and changes in font size.

(And by the way, the problem with testing things in Swurl is that - currently, anyway - you can't delete updates. But apart from that, I really like it. Swurl Is Good.)

Coincidence

I signed into Flickr to post this photo of vapour trails (contrails) in the shape of a cross...


- 13Jul08 by me, Flickr

... and on the homepage in Everybody's Uploads (a constant stream of new additions just posted to Flickr) was this photo of vapour trails (contrails) in the shape of a cross:


(detail snipped from the original photo so I can exaggerate the coincidence)

- DSC_0274 by lcwtw, Flickr

Distributed Proofreaders

I've joined the happy band of volunteer nitpickers at Distributed Proofreaders, which is where most of Project Gutenberg's e-books are prepared.

I thought the proofreading task would involve looking for spelling mistakes and typos, but no! Or not exactly. You don't need to be able to spell, you just need to be able to spot visual differences:

"Mostly your job is to fix mistakes left by the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Compare the text carefully to the scanned image of the page, line by line (or word by word, or letter by letter)."

Here's a screen shot of a page being edited (scanned image at the top, text at the bottom):

(click on the image if you want a slighter larger version)

I signed up this afternoon and since then have checked seven pages. It doesn't take long to get through each page, and there's no commitment in terms of the number of pages finished. You can sign in whenever you want and do as many pages as you like.

It was quite confusing to start off with, and (as I Twittered yesterday) when I did the proofreading quiz I got only one out of five pages proofed correctly, so I guess there'll be a bit to learn.

The beauty of the process is that there are three stages of proofreading and then two of formatting - if beginners in the first stage miss seeing a page's mistakes or make some sort of proofreading mistake of their own, experienced volunteers working at stages 2 to 5 will fix things. It's a team effort. Apparently there are 71,820+ users and 19,395 of them have proofread at least one first-stage page. (I don't know what this means, though; have 50,000+ users signed up but not proofread any pages at all?)

More volunteers = more free Project Gutenberg e-books, so if you're interested, please take a look at the site. As the introductory email says:

"Remember, every page you do helps make these books available to the world, for free, forever, more rapidly. [...] each page we proofread is another small step closer to building the greatest library in history!"

Fri 11th - 1

"Putting sparkle unicorn stickers on my (Nokia) cell phone and (Sansa) mp3 player. Updated, motherfuckers."

- EffingBoring (Rachel), Twitter

(In case you're not aware of it, see Favrd for many many tweets about an iPhone update.)

Spangled Drongo

Spangled Drongo (Dicrurus bracteatus) (probably)
- photo by me

Welcome Swallow

Welcome Swallow (Hirundo neoxena)
- photo by me

Wed 9th - 2

Here's an interesting idea:

New Muxtape project! Songs from every year I've been alive.
- Austin Kleon (who has just landed a HarperCollins book deal for his newspaper blackout poems)

I might try to do my own project somehow, maybe here in blog posts. It's a really timely idea: in the last few days I've been hyper-nostalgic about music after realising I could use YouTube and DownloadHelper + Applian FLV Player to collect old songs for free. This probably seems like a clunky way to find music but I still have a dial-up connection, so can't use sites such as Last.FM or Muxtape. And the sound quality isn't important. I don't have a portable music thingie-whatsit, so only ever listen while at the computer, using the computer's kinda crappy speaker; music sounds about as good coming from a video as it does from an audio track.

Classic old songs-on-video collected so far include The Beatles' "Let it be" and Jackson Browne's "The load out / Stay".

Harvey 1 - 2

This involves talk of death and the means of death and if that will upset you, please don't read further.

Harvey 1 was a little bull - I wrote a post when he died and since then haven't felt the need or desire to say anything else (which is strange - so many big things involved: life, death, what it all means).

But then the vet's bill arrived. I thought the cost would probably be more than I expected, but it's more than I expected to expect.

First, though, thank God there was a vet to call, and he was available, and he had chemicals which allowed an apparently painless death. All of that goes without saying, I hope, but I'll say it anyway in case it's not obvious.

As it turned out, I should have called him earlier. But I didn't know what was wrong with Harvey; he'd been fine the day before. I couldn't decide whether he was sick, or in pain, or stiff in the joints because of the cold night, or what. He was just lying there, not even mooing, just kicking his legs in spasms now and then. I kept hoping he'd sit up. Cattle seem to lose all motivation when they're lying down, but as soon as they sit up again, they often recover very quickly. (By "lying down" I mean being flat on their sides on the ground. It's quite unusual; they generally sleep sitting up.) Harvey just lay there and struggled all day and got increasingly frustrated and tired. The vet said he probably had a virus which is common in "runts" - I hate that word, but that's what he said - and it was unusual that Harvey had lived as long as he had. (I'm still not sure it was right to have saved his life in the first place, so hearing that he'd lived longer than physically forecast was not the good news you might think.)

Anyway, there were a number of options for killing him:
1. Euthanasia by vet.
2. Death by shooting - there is a pet food manufacturer in the district which sends people out to kill and dismember cattle, but I was afraid they wouldn't come out on a weekend, and I was scared Harvey wouldn't be quite dead when they started cutting him up. Also, a gun shot would scare most of the neighbours.
3. Death by shooting - asking one of the unscared neighbours to do it. Dangerous, though, because the bullet might ricochet off the skull and kill the neighbour. Also, it would have been very hard to ask something so awful of said neighbour, who loves animals.
4. I tried to find a means of suffocation on the Web, and couldn't. I was okay about doing this at first, steeled to be practical and focused, but after a while the horror of even the search terms started to sink in and I gave up. People who assist in cases of human euthanasia must be made of really really strong stuff (known as "love", I think).

Option 1 / vet was the right choice. I'm not questioning that now, just whingeing about the price of it:

- euthanasia: $40
- travel: (about 40 kilometres/40 minutes in total) $92
- after hours visit (4pm Saturday afternoon, 2 hours after I rang) $152

Total cost = $284

Wed 9th - 1

"The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for 'fluffy'." - Captain Blackadder

- twitterquote, Twitter

Tue 8th - 3

Attacked by my own computer
- photo by me.

This is a re-enactment of the time I opened my new computer (the first laptop I've ever had) and managed to let go of the spring-hinged lid, which gleefully smashed back down upon my poor unsuspecting thumb.

Oww.

I did the same thing yesterday. You'd think once would be enough, wouldn't you? Yes, you would.

And now that I'm looking at the photo, I can see dust all over the floor (top left-hand corner, between the cupboard and the desk). And the floor mat looks like some sort of freakish animal skin. And my arm looks huge.

Oww.

Tue 8th - 2

"Things that are better than an iPhone:
No.3. Pyjamas.
No.4. Lego.
No.5. Judi Dench"

- munki (Sarah Wedde), Twitter

Tue 8th - 1

"Back from camping on that river, wherever it was. Now my back hurts. I am one thousand years old."

- sgazzetti, Twitter

Mon 7th - 1

Look at the size of this baby's feet!

Elephant caught in snare, Mara Triangle blog.

I expect you wouldn't want to get between a recently-sedated animal and the ground.

The KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service) website has information about elephants - including a press release for the 2008 census of elephant numbers in the Tsavo/Mkomazi conservation area in Kenya/Tanzania.**

Numbers have been increasing since the lows of the 1980s, presumably thanks in large part to the activities of rangers who protect the animals from poachers and snares. An increase in elephant numbers is important, not only for the elephants (who are probably pretty pleased) but also because an elephant is "a large charismatic mammal" which appeals to tourists (see Stimulating Tourism) and probably helps provide support for smaller less charismatic creatures too.

---

** In Tanzania: the Mkomazi Game Reserve. In Kenya: Tsavo East & Tsavo West National Parks, Chyullu Hills National Park, South Kitui National Reserve, plus parts of Taita, Galana, Kulalu, Dokota, and Kwale ranches, plus parts of Kwale district.

That's a pretty long rollcall! 90 people, 10 aircraft, and 40,000 square kilometres.

Straw-necked Ibis

Straw-necked Ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis)(probably)
- photo by me.

Thu 3rd - 3

[Casual Carpool Dispatch] CCD: Bouncing down the highway in a shittkicker truck with sprung seats, cracked dash, and a chatty man in pinstriped pants named "Monty."

- evany, Twitter

Thu 3rd - 2

The Swurl timeline is the coolest thing I have ever seen. I am mesmerized by my own life. http://tim846.swurl.com/timeline

- tim846 (Tim Bailey), Twitter

Thu 3rd - 1

The wildebeest are coming...

- maratriangle (Joseph Kimojino), Twitter

Scarlet Honeyeater

Scarlet Honeyeater (Myzomela sanguinolenta)
- photo by me, and showing an adult male, apparently (so says The Book); immature males and females don't have that lovely scarlet colour.

Wed 2nd - 1

Free idea for Hollywood: Australian gangster movie. American audiences are ready for boomerang massacres.

- apelad (Adam Koford), Twitter

Galah

Galah (Cacatua roseicapilla)
- photo by me. Click image for a slighter larger version (35 KB).

Four galahs. They were sipping water from the trough - quite a hazardous undertaking, really, because the water level was so far below where they were sitting. (See the bird on the left? Imagine it leaning down into the trough from that position to the water about 20 cm below.)

We don't see many galahs here - a rare flock overhead, and sometimes a couple or a small group will feed on the ground. This is the first time I've had the chance to get a photo.

Tue 1st - 1

I miss the days of Web 1.0, when it was okay for a geek to be an introvert.

- kariume (Kari), Twitter

Was it ever "okay" to be an introvert in Western culture? I doubt it. Geeks and artists and writers (creative types) can probably get away with it when they're working, but for the rest of us, introversion means we appear to be antisocial and in this society that is regarded as suspect.

I don't know, though - I keep meaning to look into it further. Probably everybody is a bit of an introvert sometimes - it's probably a sliding scale between extremes of extroversion and introversion. And it's not the same thing as being shy or socially anxious.

From a great article by Jonathan Rauch, Caring for your introvert:

What is introversion?

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

And if you like that article, be sure to see the follow-up conversation between Sage Stossel and Jonathan Rauch, Introverts of the world, unite!