I can’t add much to this, except to suggest that check out the entire Flickr collection on-line. Read the WFMU Blog entry, then imagine what would happen if CBC Radio One launched a similar initiative.

Visitors to WFMU are often amazed and amused by Station Manager Ken’s collection of velvet paintings adorning the hallways of our Jersey City home. The whole collection is now available for your viewing pleasure here as a set on our flickr site.

Ken started collecting the paintings about 6 years ago, after the chaplain at Upsala College (who was based next door to WFMU on the Upsala campus) donated 5 paintings he had. These first seeds in the collection include the “Vampire Lady” and the “Fantasy” paintings (one of which later became the subject of a ‘FMU t-shirt). Ken became interested in the medium and began collecting them, finding many on Ebay. In particular he was impressed by the ones sold by Bill Robison, a velvet painting collector and dealer who traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, to commission most of the works seen here, including the “Velvet Republicans”.

I figured it was time to run down the ongoing happenings with the Powerbook.

First up, I hate to disappoint the disciples of the Church of Mac, but the truth is that the software programs included with the Mac really are very limited.

I have had many people tell me with absolute certainty that iPhoto is a wonderful thing that surely will handle all image management tasks. In fact it’s clunky and lacking in some essential functions. In particular it just doesn’t hold a candle to Picasa, the superb Windows program.

One surprise disappointment is the dearth of good freeware and open source software for the Mac. It seems that nearly everyone who writes programs for the platform insists on at least $20 or $30 for their little utility.

Honestly this quite surprised me, since the sense that I have always had was that PC users were somehow in it for the buck while Mac users were of a higher plane, more interested in Art and The Good of all mankind.

Even though the Mac refuses to sync with my Motorola phone via Bluetooth, I still tried to get by with iCal and Address Book (i-less for some unknown reason). Their considerable limitations were more than I was prepared to accept, so I have moved back to the Palm Pilot.

I always thought that the Palm Desktop was kind of limited, but it’s head and shoulders above the Mac provided apps. It is though thoroughly different from the PC software. And yes, the Palm syncs via USB, not Blue tooth, but that’s life. At least it works.

One of the disappointments was NeoOffice J, the OSX port of the generally quite agreeable OpenOffice project. Certainly it is one of the slowest launching programs that I’ve known, literally taking a minute or more to start up. It also seemed to have trouble with file associations. Sometimes a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet would open with NeoOffice, sometimes with the MS Office trial included on the Mac hard drive, sometimes with Pages, the mini word processor included as part of iWorks.

Finally I coughed up $200 at Amazon.ca for the educational edition of Microsoft Office for the Mac. I really didn’t want to support Microsoft, but in this case I needed both Word and Excel, or a close equivalent, in a stable and responsive form.

Office for Mac had a couple of surprises. I already knew that it lacked MS Access, Microsoft’s database, so I guess that I’ll need to start learning the mySQL package that’s installed on the Mac. And of course, it included Entourage, not Outlook.

Most surprising though was the software licence. Apparently the educational version of Office needs no proof that you are in fact a student. they simply take you at your word, and provide three registration keys for three installs.

I was dismayed by the packaging for Office. Certainly I’m used to buying large cardboard boxes that hold only a CD, but Microsoft has taken overpackaging to new heights.

The Office CD actually came in a standard black plastic DVD case.

Inside a plastic box.

Inside another fancy ass plastic box with a paper insert with the Mac only hieroglyphics.

Truly one of the most wasteful packaging exercizes that I’ve ever seen.

The next big jump in the Mac journey will be a RAM upgrade. At the best of times the stock 512 megs of RAM is somewhat sluggish. On a machine that never actually closes programs, and which leaves an increasing number open at the same time, things quickly slow to a crawl.

So I have ordered a gig of RAM.

Here’s a price check, and I welcome the Apple fanboys to explain this bit of price gouging.

I’m buying from a US outfit called Memorysuppliers.com for $155 US plus shipping for Kingston RAM. That came out as $188.73 CDN.

Crucial, another excellent memory manufacturer, wanted $212.99 US, or $244.10 CDN.

And how much would Apple Canada want for the exact same item? Which I will guarantee comes from either of Kingston or Crucial.

THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY DOLLARS!!!

Although the shipping is free…..

1) Thanks to OpLes for the great plug today. It’s appreciated and more than a little flattering.

2) Anyone know why suddenly on the Mac I seem to have lost half of the images on the home page, plus the button bar that should be overtop the text editing window?

Surely my decision yesterday to install MS Office couldn’t have anything to do with it?

Followup: Hmmm, I have no idea how this happened, but in Firefox it appears that somehow a setting was changed to block images from my own domain. Too strange.

I just don’t understand it. Companies spend hundreds of thousand or millions of dollars to design a product. They choose the colour, the texture, the shape, all of the things that make a product pleasureable and easy to use.

Then they spend a similar amount to design the manufacturing dies and presses that make the product a reality, and the packaging and marketing that will help me to decide to buy it.

Then when I have been seduced, and have bought it, I make the horrible discovery.

There’s a big ugly stupid sticker on the product and no way to remove it!

Check out the Motorola phone on the right. Did the designer who created it’s form and shape do so with an eye towards having an ugly orange sticker slapped on it? Would he or she be happy to see what had been done to the thing that she or he had created?

And do you think that I was pleased to find the sticker on on the phone? Much less that it is more or less not possible to remove it?

And the brand new Thermos bottle on the left. A giant sticker covers one whole side of the plastic thermos. I spent twenty minutes with that thing, first gently, then with fingernails, then soaking it in hot soapy water.

The paper sticker finally was gouged off, but the glue underneath it appears to be there for life. Unless I want to scar up the soft plastic by attacking it with a knife.

A year ago I bought a Brother fax machine that also was covered with particularly garish stickers extolling the many glorious features of the unit. Nothing that I could do could budge these things.

I wrote and faxed Brother. I explained how there was no way I wanted an item with those ugly stickers in my office. I explained that they were cheap and garish and would detract from my image as a professional.

They actually mailed me a new telephone handset and paper tray to replace the ones that came with the fax.

Is that an intelligent way to conduct business?

Honestly I prefer good Kentucky moonshine, but this still disturbes me on about three levels.

As reported on India’s newKerala.com website, “A strawberry-flavored whiskey developed with women in mind has gotten rave reviews from whiskey experts.”

Strawberry whiskey…

For those of us old enough to remember such transitional wines as Lonesome Charlie and Baby Duck this is a disturbing concept.

For decades these awful fruity drinks were what you began with. Once you had acquired the taste for liquor you moved on to “real” booze like gin and scotch.

“We decided we wanted something aimed at the younger, female drinker –we thought there was a real gap in the market,” said Norman Brown. “We chose a 14-year-old Speyside single malt whiskey after trying a lot of different ones and then worked at adding ingredients to make it into a liqueur.”

Then again, in an age when Wal-Mart is selling a house brand of “wine”, I guess anything is possible…

The ever charming Mark Morford, columnist for the SFGate web site run by the San Francisco Chronicle, has launched a project which I heartily endorse.

You may know that the American Department of Justice has demanded that Google.com hand over all search records dating over several years so that the DOJ can go on a fishing expedition for … well there’s some debate on that, but the common assumption is that porn is what they claim that they’re hunting.

What Mark is proposing is actually really simple. He wants each and every one of us to fire a couple of specific search phrases into Google to skew the results and mess with the great minds over at the DOJ.

You can read about it in his column, or just click the searches below and admire the results.

hot bunny terrorist fluffer banana

Osama butt pancake lube explosives yay

homemade nuke porn lollipop kiddie nipple bomb!!!

By the way, if you read his column, and aren’t a long time Slashdot reader, I’ll strongly advice that you DO NOT follow the link for “goatse”. Trust me, once is enough for that guy.

If you’ve ever installed software, you’ve seen the page that allows you to read the End User Licence Agreement, otherwise known as the EULA.

In fact, no-one reads these things, and people just click on “Accept” and move on. You’ve bought the software, you know that the retailer won’t accept a return on it, so what can you do?

Today I signed up for cable TV again. It’s been a while since I’ve had it, and it seemed like fun. What surprised me was that after forcing me through several invasive and irritating extractions of personal information, I was told that the final step of the process was to listen to a recording of the User Agreement with which I would be forced to agree.

Much to my surprise it actually worked well. I put it on speakerphone, and was able to listen to the Cogeco demands while working on something that actually mattered. This was likely the first time in years that I really knew what was in one of these licence agreements, and somehow it felt good to have that knowledge.

Now, I am the first to say that the actual terms and conditions were among the most evil, slimey, and draconian that I have ever encountered. If I were to summarize what I heard it would go like this:

If our top ten senior executives arrive at your door, break it down at 2AM, slaughter your children with a machete, and then machine gun your other family members, and then consequently burn down your house using a radio-active variant of napalm, Cogeco and anyone remotely legally connected to Cogeco will not be liable for any damages, and what’s more the police will not lay charges, and what’s more you will still be liable for the remaining term of your contract with us. Even if you’re dead.

Slimey, but at least accessible and slimey.

Really, via Peter Hirshberg’s blog.

Everyone’s favorite ex-Nazi religious leader is a little ticked at all those people who try to Spread the Word. From the TimesOnline:

A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.

… For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

The edict covers Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which is to be issued this week amid huge international interest. The edict is retroactive, covering not only the writings of the present pontiff — as Pope and as cardinal — but also those of his predecessors over the past 50 years. It therefore includes anything written by John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII.

It gets better…

A Vatican spokesman said that the Holy See had to defend itself against “pirated editions”. The move is also aimed at “premature publication”.

Don’t you just love that picture that I..um…ah…found on the Internet? Yeah, that’s where it came from…

As well, check out some of the commentary out there in the blog Universe.

KnowProSE.com… “Try as hard as you want, I don’t see God telling the Vatican to start charging for copyright. I don’t expect that God is hard up for money, but I don’t wear a cool hat – so I expect that I don’t know. I’ve been hanging back on this story because it’s just too strange to be anything but true, especially the bit about being retroactive for 50 years.”

Sacred Femmes… “The head of the world’s largest male-dominated church has decided his words are made of gold. The Burning Taper blog reports that the Vatican recently announced that everything the Pope writes will fall under copyright law, including encyclicals like the one expected later this week. Not only does this apply to all future writings, but they claim it’s retroactive for the last 50 years! Everything written by those Beatle-named Popes (John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII) of the last half-century are included. O-bla-dee O-bla-da!”

Well, the results are in, and it looks like Canada has elected their very own neo-conservative Government. Yes, we can now model ourselves even more on the Reagan/Bush era US.

Some good thoughts on this outcome can be found over at Heading to Central Blissville, Victoria’s blog.

I too worked as a Deputy Returning Officer at the polls here in Hamilton. As bad as things look nationally, at least we routed the Liberals.

In particular former cabinet minister Tony Valeri was ousted by labour leader Wayne Marsten. This is particularly satisfying when one recalls that, with Paul Martin Jr’s backing, he more or less stole the Liberal nomination from former MP Shiela Copps in a campaign that was nasty even by Liberal party standards.

The future for Canada looks bleak. Harper and his ilk will certainly work to reduce or eliminate social programs and medicare. The poor will get poorer while the rich, or at least nouveau riche, get richer. Certainly cultural spending and the CBC are on the chopping block.

The biggest concern that I heard yesterday though was from parents who were frightened that Canada will now be dragged into the American war on Iraq and that Canadian kids will now start returning home in body bags.
At least in a working class town like Hamilton there is a genuine concern that in his rush to obey his American masters Stephen Harper will send us headlong into their Middle East mess.

The only ray of hope is that the Tories have only a minority governemnt, and will need a third party to support them. Either of the NDP or the Bloc Quebecois will hopefully offer some sanity and moderate the right wing extremes that are found within Harper’s caucus.

Or, as Victoria put it:

Okay, so waking up to Stephen Harper’s smiling face isn’t exactly my idea of a great way to start the day.

But hey, I can live with it and hope that the next couple of years gives Canada a really good look at what Reform/Conservatism/ Republicanism could do for this country (as in DESTROY it). Sure, there’s always the possibility that Mr. Grumpypants is going to become Mr. Happyface until he gets his majority and then the moral majority will settle in forever. But we do have to hang to every shred of hope we can find in the political landscape, at least for the time being.

Well, I suppose that it was inevitable. Anyone who has read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” will hardly be surprised to know that Wal-Mart employees aren’t likely to go out of their way to make your shopping experience easy or memorable.

I don’t blame them.

After last week’s fun and games at Futureshop (and after trying to order from the Futureshop web site, except they were incapable of actually charging my Visa card.) (Something that Amazon.com has never had a problem doing.), I decided to try Wal-Mart, who had the same phone for ten bucks more. I suppose that they would price match, but I’d already wasted far more than ten dollars of my time on this stupid quest.

I walked in intending to buy three things: a pair of pants, a phone, and a set of bookshelves. The latter item was heavy, and located right beside the rear check out counters.

I found, tried on, and selected the pants, swung around to the Electronics department, and grabbed the phone off the shelf. I was walking back into the aisle, on my way to the bookshelves and checkout, when a voice rang out.

“Excuse me SIR!”

Wal-Mart, like many stores, goes to great lengths to convince themselves that they are preventing shoplifting. In fact they probably do nothing except irritate and inconvenience their honest customers.

Now you should realize that one of the best ways to lose my business is to accuse me of being a thief. I have never shoplifted, and never will, and take it as a personal insult when you accuse me of that sort of behaviour.

In this case I had run into the sometime Wal-Mart decree that electronics department items can only be paid for in the electronics department. In practice this is generally ignored by Wal-mart employees because it’s a pretty stupid rule.

“You’ll have to pay for that here, SIR.”

I explained that I still had to pick up one more item and would pay for everything on the way out.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave that here, and then come back and pay for it when you finish your shopping.”

She obviously didn’t know that a year ago I left a collection of $200+ dollars worth of potential Christmas presents sitting on the floor in a Wal-Mart Electronics Department rather than stand behind eighteen other people waiting to pay.

I surely wasn’t going to trip back and forth across a store, checking out twice, just to get a lousy $79 phone. I tossed it on the counter in front of her and walked away.

I eventually bought a much nicer phone, for ten bucks more, at a local Radio Shack The Source: by Circuit City.

1) Lost sale to Future Shop: $139.98
2) Lost Sale to Wal-Mart: $79.95

Total to date: $219.93

The first in a new series that tells about the times when I walk out of a store, costing them a sure fire sale that they squandered through indifference or hostility.

Yesterday, in response to an ad in the latest Future Shop flyer, I went shopping for a phone. A Panasonic 2.4GHz Cordless Phone (KXTG2421F) to be exact, which has Caller ID and a speakerphone built in.

In fact I was ready to buy two of these phones, one for me and one for a friend. The price was good, and it had just what I needed.

Future Shop of course is notorious for using bait and switch tactics, where you arrive and find that the sale priced item is out of stock, but they will happily sell you the more expensive version that they just happen to have lots of.

Sure enough, after working my way through two different commission sales drones I find out that they have only one of the phones in stock, but that they have lots of the black version of the same thing, at only $10 more.

I suggest that they sell me the “frost” coloured one that is on sale, plus a black one at the same price.

Oh no, they can’t do that.

So I walked out.

Lost sale to Future Shop: $139.98

I’ll open this installment with a rather amusing error message that the Powerbook coughed up yesterday. Amusing in that it’s almost as confusing as the now classic MS-Dos “Abort, retry, Fail?” message of the 1980s.

Check it out at the right.

What I wanted to do was eliminate any jobs left in the queue, and print the new one, but Mr Jobs has decreed that I shant do that. Oh well.

Some highlights of the Holiday season.

I began with a bizarre font problem in Firefox, which caused text in some case to do some very strange things. Characters would get jammed together, and linked phrases would backspace themselves overtop of the preceding word.

Tracking this one down took several days, and not a bit of blind luck to find the one place that had a solution. In a nutshell, even though OS X allowed me to install a number of fonts from my Windows machine, and even validated them as working correctly, they were in fact mucking things up. I have uninstalled all user fonts on the Mac and am reinstalling them one by one.

The whole story can be found here. It seems that the user friendly Mac can only be relied on so far to keep bad things from happening.

Now, I’m going to get a little testy here. The reason for spending the premium to buya Mac was to hopefully get away from obscure problems like this. Over and over I had heard Mac fans say that things were so easy, and that things just worked with no problems. As this font issue demonstrates, that is not always true.

In particular if Fontbook, the Mac font manager, says that a font has been validated and works, then it should do that.

The next bizarre problem revolves around Indesign, the Adobe replacement for Pagemaker. Although the program itself seems to work fine, it refuses to print multiple copies of a document. I ask for ten copies of a notice, it prints one. I ask for five copies, it prints one. Bizarre.

I continue to search for a graphics management program that is as divinely easy to use as Google’s Picassa. Many Mac people have sang the praises of iPhoto but honestly it just irritates me and it seems that things that are very easy in Picassa are far too complex in iPhoto. I’ve also been trying out iView MediaPro 3 and a couple of other programs, including Adobe Bridge.

We’ll see. I really miss Picassa.

After a couple of weeks of trying to work with iCal and the Mac Address book apps (and what exactly defines the apps that get an “i” suffix, and those which don’t?) I have reverted back to the Palm Pilot and software. I need something that will track my addresses and calendar, and which will sync it to a portable device.

As noted before, despite claims on the Apple website the Address Book will not sync with my Motorola phone, and honestly both iCal and Address book are pretty limited compared to the Palm desktop application. Interestly the Mac version of the software is quite different from the Windows version, and still has some wierd limitations.