Posts by Thomas Gray 104 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2010
My school sends out a weekly newsletter to parents which is written in a Google doc and then wxported as a PDF. Can anyone suggest an alternative? It needs to be editable by all staff (i.e. as easy as a word processor), read-only by the recipients, allow for interactive response (to avoid the “print this page, sign and return” issue), be not too expensive, and not look like arse.
"One of the incidental uses of Morse code - apart from the belated Beethoven's 5th Symphony attribution - was in the theme to the TV detective series about Inspector Morse"
Also the theme to Some Mother's Do 'Ave 'Em, in which the piccolo part sounds out the name of the show in Morse.
Computing Science (which existed as a GCSE for years before this "initiative" - heck, it was originally an O-Level) isn't for everyone. ICT is the gateway drug for most people, teaching as it did problem solving skills through 4th Gen tools. It should never have been dropped in the name of "progress" from (ironically) the Conservative party
If the narrative of the album/story is being interrupted by cut scenes of Roger gadding around Europe, I'll pass on this. The impact of The Wall is in the immersion: the only bit of the album I don't like is the middle stanza of "Hey You", when the fourth wall is broken by Roger singing "But it was only a fantasy/the wall was too high, as you can see/No matter how he tried he could not break free/And the worms ate into his brain". The story loses its immediacy and impact because suddenly the narrative voice has shifted to a third person, and I fear that telling "the story of The Wall" will take away from the the story of The Wall.
Perhaps it would have been better to have the documentary part as an opening film, before the main event?
That's kind of the point. The central character ("Pink") gets so wrapped up in his own delusion, and the isolation he creates for himself by building his wall, that he begins to see himself as the dictator of his own personal reality. Being obsessed with the war that took his father, he naturally leans towards Nazi symbolism to express this. What Waters is trying to convey is the danger of this kind of thing, both to the individual and the wider world.
Except you'd pretty much have to stop using any sort of power for anything other than making renewable energy generating plant. Which means there wouldn't be any money for building that plant, nor any food to feed the people building that plant, nor and heat for them in the winter or light in the dark.
Reducing energy use is a real goal, particularly as nearly all raw energy eventually ends up as heat. But it is a separate issue to where the energy comes from.
The author dismisses dSLRs as being too cheap, but then asks how can someone learn to move from a point 'n' shoot (or phone camera) to a "proper" camera. The answer is obvious: through the cheap dSLR. Yes, they all have full Auto mode and more Scene presets than you probably need, but they also all have the 'classic' PASM (Programme, Aperture priority, Shutter priority and Manual) modes, user-controllable ISO, off body flash - in fact, everything that we old farts were desperate to automate back in the day. The only reason most dSLR users don't get better photographs is because they don't learn to use the tool they have. And there are plenty of upgrade paths available from the "bargain basement" plastic dSLRs available in Currys.
He claims to be a fan, and yet he does not seem to have watched any of the episodes, otherwise he wouldn't contradict the canon (and himself) so much. He also seems to think that the show is *about* the Doctor, rather than simply utilising the vehicle of the character to tell stories. Watch the classic series: the only time we have any exposition about the character of the Doctor and his past is during the "X Doctors" specials, perhaps at regeneration time, and when it was absolutely necessary for the story. Now it seems that every damn episode is about whether the Doctor is a good man or not. That isn't what the show is about.
At least Russel T. knew that much.
Cloud cover reduced following the eruption of efefeofeoifjoeifjoeifoeifoeifjoeifoeifjoeifjoeifj (or something like that...) with an attendant drop in air temperatures of about 3°C, IIRC.
Keep the aeroplanes out of the sky for as long as possible. In fact, ban any air travel between two points that can physically be reached by train, which should simultaneously improve the climate, and remove such carbuncles as Easyjet and Ryanair.
"spell the end of the ICE". Err, right. Not everyone lives in cities, you know. And some people even live near to power stations, which is simply where your pollution (in fact, a great deal more - given the inherently wasteful nature of electric generation and motive power) gets pushed.
I've an idea: re-build Battersea Power Station for the exclusive use of electric vehicles. Then London would see EXACTLY the consequences of all this "free, clean" electricity.
"Why would you want to shout at your watch?"
Because apparently people can't interact with a screen smaller than an A5 sheet of paper....
More seriously, the screen of any iTimeKeeper would be very small, and supporting the touch interface with voice commands could be very useful. It might even remove the need for a touchscreen at all, making the iTK more robust and cheaper.
@AbelSoul
Yamaha 01x? That's what I have :)
If you are interested, there is an active Facebook (I know, I know) group supporting the 01x and associated hardware, and we are currently talking to a developer about the possibility of getting an updated mLAN driver written for OSX and Windows.
... he is _presenting_ himself as one in the Torygraph article, and because he is associated with a programme that contains facts, non-technical readers will assume that he is correct. To my mind, the article here is justified because (a) Fry has got simple facts wrong, and he really should (and the Telegraph also should) do some basic checking before he publishes anything that claims to be remotely factual, and (b) Fry uses the word "cracked" to describe a man whom he has probably never met, clearly knows nothing concrete about, and who is dead and therefore cannot defend himself. Fry's use of the word "cracked" is itself a mystery, since there is nothing in the context of the article to explain what he even means by the word (although I concede that some sloppy editing by the 'graph may be to blame for that).
The fact that Fry has previously shown himself to be ignorant on technical matters does not help. As an aside, when he was "explaining" GPS on QI, he was clearly off-script - he spent the entire time during that speech looking at the panellists, rather than consulting his cards or reading the Autocue. It's interesting to watch the programme and spot the difference between the scripted and the unscripted stuff.
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