- a note I left for my neighbor who doesn’t appear to be at home

Poor black cat is too young to be a mother, and it looks like she’s decided to nest in my house (I tried to ignore her but she actually managed to knock over a chair and bash on my door so I finally caved). She hid twice in really inconvenient spots (under a pile of unsorted recycling and wedged between desk and suitcase respectively) before I finally coaxed her into a box.

Moral of the story: never ever ever make friends with an un-spayed female cat (I really thought she was a dude).

__________

UPDATE: What a trooper… she birthed 5 kittens within about 2 hours, all kicking and squirming. She also ate up all the muck. Nature is both beautiful and disgusting.

Here’s a video of them being cute and helpless: watch

And here’s one of the second kitten stirring just a few seconds after emerging (not particularly gross): watch

And a final one, kitten pile at one day old: watch

Click for infinitely more…

Something about this scene crystallized what I love about this show. It’s a moment of calm after an uncharacteristically chaotic episode. Don is the alpha male, Joan his female counterpart, and this is the first time in more than two seasons that they have sat down together, facing (and mirroring) each other so directly. Both have just seen their life-plans upended, and yet so much is left simply unspoken. It’s not like anything sexual is going to develop, but the mutual respect is almost palpable (I know that mutual respect is not normally a palpable quality, but somehow in Mad Men it works).

Really sad I missed this day in Sydney, it looks incredible. Click the image for some great photo sets.

(Caused by all the topsoil from inland Australia being blown out to sea– Australia is near the top of the list of countries that will be royally fucked by climate change)

Unbelievable that this angry white mob is so upset ostensibly about the idea of a public health option in the US.

Less shouting in this one, same amount of bigotry and ignorance:

Almost everyone else in the developed world has got this already, and most wouldn’t trade it for anything. Everyone else spends less per-capita on health care largely because it is impossible for insurance companies to get away with reaming us the way they ream you.

Call me Sucka.

I skipped the last iPod nano, so couldn’t resist trying the latest, especially given its weird new features. For those who don’t follow all things Apple, the new features in order of hype are:

• Video camera
• FM radio with “live pause”
• Pedometer (no need for Nike bollocks)
• Voice Over (speaks track and album titles)
• Larger screen

Impressions

The first thing I noticed was that I seemed to be paying too much money for a device that feels so light and cheap as to be disposable. The build quality is really shitty on these things. I feel like if I had fingernails I could pick off the center of the click-wheel, as well as peeling back the aluminium shell from around the screen. The marketing shots make them look like the whole thing is flush with a clear coating, but this is not the case.

The second thing I noticed is the unbelievably poor placement of the camera lens. It’s at the bottom of the device, basically behind the >>| button. Imaging holding an iPod nano as you would normally hold one… and your big fat hand is now covering the lens. You have to pinch the thing awkwardly in order to have access to the button while keeping your fingers out of the picture, and even when you’re trying hard you will probably still end up with skin-colored blobs floating into the edge of the frame from time to time.

The third thing I noticed (while trying to find a comfortable way to hold this thing in order to shoot video) is that the corners are really sharp, like the designers never even bothered playing with it before sending it to China to be manufactured. Maybe Jonathan Ives was too busy giving interviews about how freaking brilliant Apple’s industrial design is. (This from the company that pioneered round rectangles!)

The fourth thing I notice is that when I play back the video there are these nasty clicking sounds throughout, and it turns out these are caused by my shaky hands rattling the “hold” button in its casing. This is the second time I have been staggered by the stupidity of putting a standard mechanical switch into a solid state recording device (I had exactly the same problem with the otherwise excellent Belkin stereo mic accessory I bought a few years ago).

Ok, so those are the shitty aspects… I thought I should get those out of the way. Now for the mostly good bits.

It weighs almost nothing and shoots video that is actually usable! Not great, but usable. Orders of magnitude better than my shitty Nokia phone, not quite as good as you get on an iPhone 3GS, and quite inferior to my Canon Ixus. But then, I don’t have an iPhone and my Ixus spends most of its time in a drawer with a flat battery, so the nano is currently the most likely device on which I might record an unexpected event such as the invasion of my city by an enormous seamonster that shits flying hell spiders from its pores. And this is an important point I think.

The lens captures quite a wide angle and handles close quarters quite well, so things just a few inches away will look soft but not necessarily blurry. You can shoot up to an hour of video, even on the base 8G model (this seems about the limit of the battery, not the memory). The video is stored as nicely compressed mp4 (h.264 encoding) at 640×480@30FPS. A 50 minute recording I made came out at 1 GB in size, which is pretty good really. That’s about 8 times smaller than I get from the Ixus, and in a much more internet friendly format (and may explain the quality difference of course). My only complaint with the video itself is that it is fixed at a 4:3 aspect ratio, even though the screen is more like a 3:2 (wide-ish) just like the Touch and the iPhone. Who the hell wants 4:3 video these days?

The built-in accelerometer helps make up for the shitty ergonomics of the thing, since it will shoot at any orientation and work out which way is up, so you can juggle it awkwardly until you work out which way up works best for your clumsy banana hands. It also has a bunch of realtime video effects a la PhotoBooth for the truly bored or pre-teen, but the only one that I find interesting is kaleidoscope since it lets you use your US$149 iPod to simulate a $2 stocking filler.

The FM radio is an interesting component, although I’m not sure how much I’ll use it since commercial radio generally makes me as angry as jabbing knitting needles in my ears, but maybe there are some decent stations here. It is pretty cool playing with the live pause feature– you can basically pause/rewind/scrub over anything you’re listening to, and although a sophisticated feature the interface takes only a minute or two to work out.

The new Voice Over feature while a neat idea annoys me on principal– it is so brute force in the way it is implemented, with iTunes generating synthetic voice-overs and downloading them to the device. Given this fact I was kind of expecting something in the league of Majel Barret or maybe James Earl Jones reading the titles of my podcasts to me, but no such joy. I’ll probably disable the feature in future to save a bit of sync time/memory.

Overall

The new nano is about 70% the price of the iPod Touch and yet it feels like it would only cost about a tenth as much to manufacture. The inclusion of camera and radio in the former just make them more conspicuously absent in the latter. I like that the nano is small and light but sadly it doesn’t feel as indestructible as previous generations did. It was probably quite wise for Apple to make the camera video only (there is no still image mode), since if you tried to use this thing to take photos you’d probably just be angry with the results.

If I didn’t have an iPod Touch already I would probably like the new nano more, but having the features I want spread across two devices now just kind of annoys me. Maybe I should just fork out for a goddamn iPhone (could that be Apple’s secret plan?).

Samples

I shot a sample in my kitchen, and it will probably be a better indicator of the type of cruddy poorly lit stuff that will generally be shot with this new toy. Both these clips are straight from the respective cameras, with no reprocessing or transcoding, because I know how maddening it is when people post camera samples on YouTube.

• iPod nano sample clip
• Canon IXUS sample clip (for comparison)

And here’s a nice compilation of clips from different devices in which the nano stacks up rather well.

Any predictions for how this was done? Supposedly the trick will be revealed tonight, and I have to assume it’s not just some real-time video editing trick (Real-time image processing has evolved to the point that it would be fairly trivial to pull this off “in-camera”).

Likely red herrings are:

• He claims not to have been allowed to reveal the numbers until after the draw
• He performed from an empty studio for “security reasons”
• He claims that he can’t show more than a few minutes of BBC and so doesn’t switch monitor on until draw is in progress.

My best guess– Once the numbers are read they are etched onto the balls with a laser (perhaps UV, perhaps the balls are coated with photoreactive chemicals). Although this doesn’t really explain why he needed an empty studio; it seems like the sort of thing that could have been done in front of a live audience. It might explain why he doesn’t include the bonus ball– it buys a lot more time between the drawing of the numbers and the reveal, basically 25 seconds to effect the trick.

Is apparently all about faux class warfare, and whining about everything else that’s faux while never acknowledging that bitching about posers (or poseurs) is a really crappy way to assert your own authenticity. By all means bitch about expensive rent, urban sprawl, forced displacement of poor people, but don’t hide behind this when all you’re really worried about is that your suburb is losing the “cred” that it had when it was full of working class people who you could rub up against and feel somehow authentic.

This article (along with the majority of responses) made me want to spit, so full of reverse snobbery, or even reverse-reverse-snobbery… it’s hard to even tell. Surprise surprise rents go up when more people want to live in an area– it’s hardly a conspiracy. And lo, if more people are interested in hanging around and drinking coffee then magically more cafés will appear.

I lived in Marrickville for several years, and never shed a tear for the slow but steady decline in the number of burning cars and broken bottles we saw. The council widened the paths, making them pedestrian and cafe friendly, and yes a whole bunch of upwardly mobile middle class people started moving in to the area. How dare they!

I do feel sorry for people who can’t afford the rent there anymore and have to live further away from the city (in the more “authentic” suburbs) but to blame people for choosing to live there? If they hadn’t moved then the whining shitheads (or real Australians as they probably consider themselves) from that article would probably be laughing about how stupid people are to stay in their sterile rich suburbs when there are so many cheaper places to live.

My response to the article, which fortunately got in before the mad rush of people taking the opportunity to lavish scorn on people for being relatively happy, relaxed and god-forbid maybe a little bit fashionable:

The only thing worse than posers is people who bitch about posers. I can′t believe people still use the “latte-sipping” epithet.

So what, you′re coming back from your day digging coal down the mines and a bunch of university educated ponces have replaced your chip shop? Boo-hoo-hoo, you goddamn fraud. What could be more bourgeois than writing editorials about gentrification?

Better a happy poser than a self-hating one.

It’s one thing to bitch about an artist or an actor for being fake etc, but when you start vilifying entire groups of people for wanting the freedom to choose where and how they live it’s probably time you did something about that massive chip you’re carrying around on your shoulder.

Wankers!