#67 Stress savers

These three sites are to help you use life without stress. Dial A Human site helps you get around those phone trees. It gives you what option you can press at many national service providers to talk to a person. Unfortunately this is American, doesn't help with Telstra , Centrelink etc. Custom Guide provides free computer training tipsheets on a variety of programs. If you need some quick help with various Mac, Windows, and Adobe programs for quick assistance. This isn't a proper training/tutorial (you need to access our Comupter School online program for that) but it is a basic step by step of some aspects, it's a bit like Microsoft's help text. Where is your Username Registered? is a site which will check multiple sites to see if your preferred username is available at a bunch of readwriteweb sites (again like the Faves site icon recognition goes a long way). My problem is I have soooo many usernames and passwords that I don't really have a 'preferred' username and am I going to sign up to half these sites - probably not.

Where were you?

Yes, I remember where I was when 'man landed on the moon' - crushed in about 5 to a desk so the whole school could assemble in the classroom to watch on the school's single TV set. The TV was the old cabinet style with 2 doors, set up on spidery legs. Being in a junior grade I got to sit near the front.

#66 Web 2.0 directories

Had to check out 2 sites All My Faves and 43 Marks, search for my favourite sites and see how they are categorised, go to 2 sites I've never visited and see if I agree with the categorisation. And finally sign up for 43 Marks and create my own personal start page and write about the process.
With All my Faves I found it heavily reliant on your recognition of the company's logo, which I guess is anyone's aim when you design a logo. The categorisation seemed to agree with what I thought.
I made up a 43 Marks page, removing a couple of groups, re-arranging them in alpha order (a librarian thing), changing colours, didn't really get the hang of the RSS Feeds section.

As tall as Everest

Late last night I finished reading the Scott Fischer biography "Mountain Madness", so coming across this item today is a little serendipitous. We all know that Mount Everest, at 29,035 feet (8,850m)above sea level, is the highest spot on our planet, unless we think about the word "highest" in a different way.
Think instead of the point on the planet closest to the moon and the stars. According to Issac Newton, the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin will result in a slight flattening at the poles and bulging at the equator, which would make the planet an "oblate spheroid," which means that anyone on the equator is already standing "higher," or closer to outer space, than people who aren't on the bulge.
Therefore the highest point of Earth is Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador - a 20,577 foot (6,272m) peak sitting on top of the bulge, 1.5 miles higher than Everest. Mount Everest is lower down on that same bulge.
But remember that the tectonic plates are pushing Everest higher all the time.
And Scott's biography, it hasn't changed my opinions or perception of what happened, just confirmed that I'm not climbing Everest any time soon.

Wistful wishing

The Kelly Myth

I enjoyed the ABC's "Ned Kelly uncovered" on TV last night. Presented by Tony Robinson (the best narrator of the Discworld books), it was in a similar vein to the "Time Team" serial with an archaeological dig, at the site of Ned's last stand at Glenrowan.

In this program though they dealt as much with the Kelly Gang story - Ned's upbringing, the Stringybark Incident and the revoluntionary bent of Ned's ideals.

Part of the program was filmed in the State Library with SLV's Shane Carmody allowing Tony to pick up the real helmet.

There was even a "Mythbusters" session when they shot up a replica inn and fired it to establish similar conditions to the seige.

Ballarat & culture

The local TV news has Ballarat as a bit of a culture centre at present. They hosted a visit by author Tim Winton earlier this week and now the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery is about to display a major retrospective by one of Australia's greatest landscape artists -Hans Heysen. The exhibition marks the 40th anniversary of his death and celebrates the 80th anniversary of the first exhibition of his paintings of the Flinders Ranges.
Included in the display is this painting -> Three Gums, which is taller than I am, and which I photographed while in their storage department.
So I must make time to visit the gallery again, was there a couple of months ago to view the "John Lennon Imagine" photographic exhibition.

Session 9 & Danvers

I managed to hire a copy of the "Session 9" DVD from the local video store, after being unsuccessful sourcing a new one via my usual supplier, Amazon or Ebay!

It is more a suspenseful thriller, than a splatter horror, and the hospital was the real star with both interior and external shots - from the wide-open spaces of the rooms and passages to the dark, dank recesses of the basement tunnels and cellars. It doesn't resort to the usual practise of filming everything in the dark to create atomsphere, there's atomsphere aplenty in the sheer existence of the hospital!
Definitely concerned about the workers OH&S though and the number of breaks they appear to have, when supposedly working for a quick-finish-bonus.

The gothic style Kirkbride building, is part of the psychiatric facility in Danvers, Massachusetts that closed in the 1990s. This was the original structure built when the hospital was founded in the 1870s.



More than two-thirds of the building (and almost 100% of every other buildings at the former hospital) have been demolished. This irreplaceable example of 19th-century craftsmanship is now reduced to a shell of the central admin section and one wing section on either side. Condos are being built up around the site.

Bubble web

I'm still amazed at the photos on Pixdaus, especially some of the macro and stop-motion shots, including this one of a bursting bubble.