Oh Bollocks

(alex clark)

"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world."

I'm just tired of it. Can't get my damn computer to convert .mts files to something usable without the sound going screwy.

Then the hi-rez films end up looking like crap on GoogleTube or the Internets anyhow. What's the point?

I wish I had somebody to blame for me buying this stupid expensive camera. I'm just itching for it to tell me "PC Load Letter" so I can finish the job.



(from the film classic "Office Space."

Toblet:
What have you, my good friends, deserv'd at the hands of
Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

Guildenstern:
Prison, my lord?

Toblet:
Technology's a prison.

Rosencrantz:
Then is the world one.

Toblet:
A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and
dungeons, Technology being one o' th' worst.

Rosencrantz:
We think not so, my lord.

Toblet:
Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
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The Alzheimer Express

(photos: Geert jan van Rooi)

This is the kind of use of technology I really love.

For people at an elderly home who suffer from Alzheimers or dementia, the designers converted an ordinary lobby space into a replica of a (roomy) train, and the "windows" are video screens that desplay a Dutch countryside slowly rolling past, with cows, windmills, clouds and trees.

They even have people in costume come by to collect tickets and serve coffee.

I guess some people might not like this idea because it could be seen as too fake or demeaning to the people because they're being tricked.

But they love it! And for people who are not physically or mentally in shape to do much outside the walls of the home, what a nice option.

One row of seats side by side for people who feel like chatting, one row of single seats for people who just want to gaze out the window or read a newspaper.

Kudos to the artists behind it, Lino Hellings and Yvonne Dröge Wendel. It's installed at nursing home "De Bieslandhof" in Delft.





There's more information in English on the project on the website of "SKOR", Dutch acronym meaning for the Institute for Culture in Public Spaces."

Awesome that such an institute exists. Unfortunately, the website is a little cluttered.

The artists' own website details the ENTIRE process, from conception to completion, at www.bies.nu (but that's in Dutch).

"We discover an old steam train between Hoorn and Medemblik. The windows are perfect, as is the speed. We use old socks filled with coffee beans to stabilize the camera..."

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Amsterdam Police Use "Drone" Craft Against Squatters

(Photos: Karen Eliot)

Amsterdam cops used an unmanned "drone" aircraft while evicting squatters from a building yesterday. It's equipped with a little camera that feeds live images back to a laptop on the ground.




They say it was the first time they've done this. Usually they would use a helicopter, but that was impossible because of low-hanging clouds.

(Right, like that's never happened in Holland before!)

Unfortunately none of the Dutch stories say exactly what they were using the thing for! I would presume for the police to check out what awaits them in the upper floors of the building.



Squatters sometimes resist evictions with some violence; and there was a big controversy after police accused squatters of "booby trapping" a roof to collapse during an eviction several months ago.

(Executive summary: the squatters denied it, and photo evidence to me appeared to back them up).

According to some of the websites writing about this, they tried to introduce these things in the U.S. but were blocked by the FAA. Anybody know more? In England apparently they've put them into use in the town of "Merseyside," but they have to follow rules laid down for toy planes, keeping the grounded person piloting them within a certain distance of the craft.


I just keep thinking of that scene at the start of The Empire Strikes Back, on "Ice Planet Hoth" when the little drone scoots along doing reconnaissance.




The company that makes these things, "Microdrones" of Germany.

Here's a BBC item on the product, which costs around $2,000. You could probably build it yourself for less, but you need a little know-how...

And if anyone was wondering, the squatters at Steven Biko square left peacefully; in fact they 'booby trapped' the door of the building with a heap of balloons as a joke.
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Farewell, but not goodbye

I'm off to London-town on family business for a few days, which means brief posts, or none, or few.

If you're in Amsterdam this weekend and looking for something to do, I highly recommend "Robodock."

http://www.robodock.org/2007/

(flickr:silvertje)

Tip tip, cheerio and all that rot. MORE

MabelGate Redux, Thanks to WikiScanner

UPDATE: The IHT has the official story. I wudn't have posted this blog entry if I thought AP wanted it...

xxxxx

Original post:

Ah, it warms my heart to see 1,000 scandals bloom. The new Wikiscanner, created by some young genius at CalTech, can be used to trace the IP address of any computer that makes changes to Wikipedia, revealing bad-acting editors around the world.

It has already shamed WalMart, the CIA, the BBC, the Australian government, and now Mabel Wisse Smit, known to the Dutch media primarily for "Mabelgate."

Mabel was set to marry Prince Friso, which would have put the couple and their spawn second in line to the Dutch throne after Friso's big brother Willem Alexander and his brood.

But after a television program by crime reporter Peter Paul "Tintin" De Vries unearthed details of her college relationship with a known drugs baron (Klaas Bruinsma, who stopped smoking in 1991), the prime minister said he couldn't sign off on the marriage because the pair had given him "incomplete and incorrect information."

They ended up getting married in 2004 anyway, but had to relinquish any claim to the throne.

The Wikipedia entry on "Mabelgate" reported what they gave the prime minister Balkenende as "incomplete and false information," but the entry was changed twice to remove the word "false" by a computer whose IP address can now be traced to a Dutch palace. Whoops.

The couple quickly 'fessed up. Not much point in denying changing your Wikipedia entry when you've already confessed to misleading the prime minister...


I think there's much, much more dirt where this came from. Better dirt too, though of course falsifying a Wikipedia entry is not a crime.

What Dutch corporations and or institutions are likely to have changed their entries? I can think of about a dozen...

What about, say, Trafigura? Not purely a hypothetical idea. I'm open to suggestions...
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