kimbofo

Farewell to the 'tractor', hello to the MacBook

Well, I finally succumbed and figured we'd spent so much money this month* that it wouldn't hurt to splurge a bit more. So this afternoon I ventured into the Apple Store on Regent Street, fighting my way through all the tourists walking seven-abreast, and bought myself a MacBook -- the one with a 13-inch screen, 160GB hard drive and 2GB of memory. I also bought an external 500GB hard drive to back up all my photographs. 

This means farewell to my trusty old Dell Inspiron laptop -- affectionately dubbed the "tractor"  -- which has served me well over the past four or so years. But, to be honest, I'll be glad to see the back of the damn thing, with it's clunky keyboard, dodgy DVD drive and completely uninspired design. 

I'm now looking forward to a long and fruitful relationship with my new laptop, so expect more blog posts on a more regular basis from now on! 

* We're getting our bedroom and bathroom renovated, which is basically half of our flat -- but that's another post for another time.

Old school journalism

There are too many choice quotes in this little gem of a film from the 1940s for me to quote here. Although I do like the idea that journalism was a young man's game and women were better suited to writing about cookery and fashion .... not!

(Via Mediations)

New look for BBC News website

Take Google and Amazon out of the equation, and the website I frequent most is BBC News. Imagine my shock this morning to find it had been redesigned! Initially I wondered if I was looking at the low-res version by mistake. But when I realised it was simply a new look and the panic was over!

The site now features a new banner, more white space, bigger pictures and a different font. I quite like it, although I'm not convinced by the typeface. You can find out more about the redesign on The Editor's blog.

'Prime Suspect' calling

So, as you will remember from last week's post about Prime Suspect, I was keen to watch the next instalment -- Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness -- to see how mobile phone technology had changed since the last one.

Prime Suspect 6 -- the best one so far, I have to say, excellent plot and super-high production values -- was made in 2003. Now pretty much all the characters have access to a mobile phone, and these are small, compact devices, half the size of the ones spotted in the previous instalment, Prime Suspect 5, which was made in 1996.

Interestingly, Tennison is now so contactable by mobile that she sometimes deliberately switches it off, whereas in previous episodes she's struggled to get it to work -- either because of short battery life or poor signals.

Text messaging also plays a vital role in police work. In one scene, Tennison's deputy receives important information about a suspect via SMS and simply holds up the phone's screen to show her what it says.

Other technological changes include the use of video when interviewing suspects (as opposed to simple audio tape) and the prevalence of email (Tennison's computer continually "pings" with messages arriving in her in-box).

I wonder if the next episode, made in 2006, will include references to Google, blogs or the Home Office's DNA database?!

They don't know how good they've got it

From a story in today's The Age:

Mobile phones are charged. The internet site will be jammed. Telephones will ring. Today is all about four numbers for more than 45,000 VCE students, who receive their tertiary entrance, or ENTER, score. [...] The scores begin arriving on mobiles from 7am, with the message containing the overall result and individual scores for each subject.

My how times have changed. I got my VCE score (or HSC/VCE score as it was known then) in the post... three months after I had sat all the exams! It made for a rather unbearably long summer.

A concert in your pocket

The wonders of technology never cease to amaze me.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I went through an (expensive) phase of tracking down and buying bootleg cassettes. It was a labour of love trying to source particular concerts I'd been to -- mainly U2 and occasionally Crowded House or Midnight Oil -- just so that I could add them to the collection knowing I had been in the audience on that particular night. The quality was always slightly dubious. More often than not the actual live music would be drowned out by the voices of the audience members singing out of tune or talking to each other -- and everything always sounded muddy or fuzzy, as if the event had been recorded on a hand-held tape recorder shoved under someone's jacket to thwart security. Oh, that's right, that's exactly how they'd been recorded!

Fast forward almost 20 years and now some bands sell CDs of their concerts -- recorded at the mixing desk so that everything is crystal clear and minus all the annoying audience chatter -- within minutes of them finishing their final encore. I kid you not.

Last night a trio of us was fortunate enough to see the newly reformed Crowded House play Wembley Arena. It was a superb gig with an incredible song list and a genuinely fun and friendly vibe. It was so good even the band didn't want to leave. Their encore was almost longer than the actual set!  And after  some 2 hours and 15 minutes on stage we were sorry when it all ended...

...but the best bit was that after we'd filed out of the venue and queued up with about six trillion other people in the freezing winter air, we were able to buy a CD of the actual gig we'd just attended! There was a CD-pressing plant on the forecourt of the venue churning out a limited 1,500 souvenirs for die-hard fans. I think this is fantastic. The idea that you can go home with a concert in your pocket just astounds me. How I wish this had been commonplace every time I saw Crowded House throughout my teens and twenties, what a collection I'd have now!