Category Archives: Jeffrey the Barak

2010 Columbus Day Rant

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By Jeffrey the Barak

I hope that our post office and banking employees have a very nice day off today, for Columbus Day, but let’s not forget, he did not discover America, He did not come to America,  and he was by today’s standards an all round horrible guy.

We can thank him for murdering natives, enslaving random peoples he encountered, delivering disease, and all manner of other great achievements, but to celebrate him with a holiday or to enshrine him as a discoverer is not appropriate.

There is still much discussion about exactly how and exactly when the Native Americans arrived and spread over the continent, and then of course there is further discussion regarding possibly more recent Polynesian and Chinese naval visitations that are pre-Columbian, and we have solid evidence of Leif Ericsson’s pre-Columbian settlement on the East coast. (Yes I know his name can be spelled several ways).

But the failure of Columbus to discover the American continent was the nicest thing he ever did. And yet in the United States we honor him with a holiday, we call a region, the District of Columbia and we have named many cities and towns Columbus. In South America, an entire country is named Columbia, and then there is CBS, and there are hundreds of other other businesses flaunting his dirty name. Perhaps one day we’ll do something about it, but for now, lets start by telling the kids the truth about this scoundrel.

There are many articles and books describing the real Columbus. Rather than go further here, I will offer a web link to a page by  Roy Cook, published on AmericanIndianSource.com: http://www.americanindiansource.com/columbusday.html

This splendid introduction to the dark truth of the history of Columbus is a good starting point for further reading and contains external references.

Just Pay Separate S+H

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By Jeffrey the Barak

How to make twenty-four dollars sound like ten.

It seems like a bargain, only ten bucks, and then they’ll throw in a second one for free, “just pay separate shipping and handling”. But that’s the catch. Shipping and handling may be $6.99. So let’s add it up.

First item: $10

Second item: $ free

Shipping and Handling 1: $6.99

Shipping and Handling 2: $6.99

Grand total: $23.98

Well that seems fair enough, or does it? Lets say this example is a pair of sunglasses, and I’m not picking on 3D Vision here, and I have no reason to assume they are not excellent $10 sunglasses, but I use them here to illustrate the example. You may not need two pairs, but to say no to a free pair is difficult. So you pay $13.98 for shipping and handling. Is this UPS Second Day Air? No of course not, it is regular mail, and the handling is unspecified, and it may be while before they arrive. Perhaps the postage only costs the seller a dollar or two, well that’s how they make their money, and you could have bought the glasses locally for $10 anyway.

So it may be fair to assume that any time you hear “just pay separate shipping and handling” it is your cue to not buy anything.

The Nice Manifesto

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By Jeffrey the Barak

In the story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, adults are persuaded to accept a false reality, which is eventually shattered by one little boy, who voices  a true observation that instantly makes the adults realize they were following a false path.

I too have my little boy, the eternally young Lamb Borghini, who although tiny and innocent, has a great skill  for pointing out the obvious when I am being silly, or when I am wrong. His often repeated mottos include “world peace”, “civil liberties” and “stop global warming”.

His words of course come straight from my wife, a person of great wisdom, and someone who is simply unable to chose to not do the right thing, or not be nice.

But regardless of the true source, Lamb’s philosophy is simple, true and correct, and it can be applied to very much more complicated behavior in world politics. In world politics, leaders are all too often driven by greed, Sadism, spite, hatred, ignorance, fear, aggression and other ugly aspects of human behavior, and the result is, in a word, unfairness.

It is unfair to exploit a person or entity for the gain of another, and it is certainly unfair to hurt or kill others. I mean this is just plain logical common sense. It cannot be justified by observing non-human animals in the competition to survive. Because we humans can conceptualize good and bad, we are then responsible to choose to be good.

Being bad can be mildly harmful, as in the case of the school bully, or very harmful as in the case of the national leader who practices genocide, or anything in-between.

So when looking at the behavior that gives us the most trouble today, I wonder why Lamb’s simple philosophy cannot be applied.

Why would someone use, for example, a religion, to come up with a plan to misinform gullible children and adults about the true reality, and end up making them think that conducting a suicide bombing, can be good, as opposed to bad?

In Africa, generations of normal kids are transformed into fighters who go on rampages, dismembering, raping and murdering other people just like them. Why does any one of them think that this could be anything other than completely wrong?  Who is responsible for making this their reality?

It’s too easy to blame religion for everything, although on a broad scale it is hard to find a common violent or dishonest act that is not tied into a certain brand of a particular religion or political movement. But religion is one of the easiest ways to make normal people into evil ones. You see, in order to have religion, you have to have faith, which is essentially a suspension of disbelief. If you can be taught to believe that the approximately three centuries old idea of a magic man who made everything is real, you can apparently also be taught to believe that you should run out and murder all redheads called Joe, because your structure of belief has strayed too far from the path of logic and reality.

And so even leaders of very small groups of people, for example the infamous Charles Manson, can lead hereto normal people into evil acts and cause terrible outcomes.

And yet even people who understand that religion is just a new idea that started a micro-billionth of a moment back in the history of time, can still be murderers, if they do not follow the path of good, which is independent of any movement such as religion etc.

If Lamb’s principals were followed by everyone, there would not be war, murder, gangster violence, racial hatred, repression of female people, or any of the other ugliness that we see around us.

Even if we focus, not on murder and war, but on social and economic issues of everyday government, we see blatantly dishonest people getting their way. A good party with all good intentions cannot make progress in government because an opposition party blocks all their ideas in order to try to get themselves back into power, and this is driven by greed. And this is at government level.

The same philosophy extends down to the mundane. It extends to households, relationships and to a sole individual’s own choices that barely affect anyone else.

If everyone knew Lamb, or if everyone could learn ethics from the purely good kids in the kindergartens, all our evil would pass into history. We would all be….  nice.

Nano Downgrade

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By Jeffrey the Barak

The new September 1st 2010 iPod Nano, 6th Generation.

Yesterday, Apple unveiled the 6th Generation iPod Nano. Following the keynote announcement, I went to Apple.com and bought the 5th Generation Nano at a third off.

Two days ago, this was the new one, but now it is not. So why did I do this? Did I really need to save $50? Well no, but there is a background to this.

I recently looked at my phone bills, and I was on my second iPhone, and I realized that although I make between zero and three calls a day, and never send text messages, and cannot see Internet on a phone sized device, I was paying a lot each month for a telephone, albeit a nicely designed one.

And then Google put Voice Over Internet Protocol, VOIP, into Gmail, which is where I live for most of the day anyway.

So I sold my iPhone and reactivated my old Motorola Razr non-smart mobile telephone, and I couldn’t be happier.

But the only things I miss about the iPhone, besides some music-to-go, are the portable viewable copies of my iCal calendar and my Address Book. Contacts and a date book are things I’ve had in my pocket since the Palm Pilot days of the Nineties seduced me away from Leather Filofaxes and Date Runners.

And so realizing that the iPod Nano 5th Generation Nano had this info synced to it via iTunes, the Nano 5th Gen puts this data back in my pocket, just in case I need it and I’m away from a computer.

2009's Apple iPod Nano, 5th Generation

The new 6th generation Nano, does not seem to have contacts and calendar, and the interface is approximately 35% obscured by any finger that one uses to interface with it, so even the well-presented unveiling at the keynote did not make it look like much of an upgrade to me. Besides, this 5th generation Nano will be my first device with an Apple Clickwheel, and I wanted to experience that interface before it is superseded forever by touchscreen alternatives. I am assuming that after a few minutes of familiarization with the Clickwheeel, which most of you have been using for years, I will be able to control the 5G without looking at it, or inside my pocket. Try that with a 6G!

I think that I have picked up a $99 bargain!

Jeffrey the Barak is an Apple fan, who besides having had two iPhones, has never had an iPod, until now.

Netbook or smartphone?

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By Jeffrey the Barak

I spend most of my waking hours in front of a 27″ iMac. Not that I’m complaining. When I’m not working, I play here too. But sometimes I have to actually leave my desk and be in other places, and then I sometimes need to be connected and do things that involve Internet.

The background to this dilemma:

I was a latecomer to cellular phones, but once I got one I needed it. For mobile organization, I stayed with various versions of Palm Pilots, from III to TX, for years until one day a few years ago I decided that they were all too small for my poor eyesight and large fingers and said, no more.

The plan was to stay with my simple phone, which at the time was a Motorola Razr, and just be patient for communication. I bought a Macbook so I could work away from home, but it was and is, too heavy to have along all of the time.

My plans were sidetracked when my wife bought me the original iPhone for a gift. I considered returning it for an iPod, but being a Mac-Head, I kept it and got used to it. I even began to use texting sparingly, something I could never do with a numeric telephone keypad. And then mainly because of the headphone socket, I upgrade to a white 16GB iPhone in early 2009.

But now the iPhone is not making me happy. It again seems like a too-small, too hard to use device. Yes it synchs well with Mobile Me and is a portable package containing all my stuff, but I rarely use it unless it’s ringing or I’m too far from a computer. It seems really slow too, not the commonly maligned AT&T connection, which always works for me, but the device itself. It can take ten seconds for it to stop messing around and show me today on the calendar.

I was looking at whether to switch to an Android phone like the nice new larger Droid X, because while I may be a Mac-Head, I’m just as much of a Google-Head, using Google Docs and Gmail as heavily as anyone in the universe. I think Android is very cool, especially for a Gmail, Google Docs kind of guy.

But then I remembered what I almost did before the iPhone appeared in some gift wrap, and I am now thinking the way to go will be to wait for the Google Chrome OS netbbooks to come out, get one with a 3G or 4G data plan, or to avoid a data bill, just wi-fi and exercise some patience between hotspots, and replace the iPhone with a simple telephone-only no-data-plan cellphone designed for old farts.

My iphone contract runs until March 2011, so by then there should be a few Chromebooks around (I’m guessing that may be what we call the Chrome Netbooks that will soon dominate world computing), and some 4G choices.

The iPad is no good for me. I think it’s fantastic, but I never watch movies or play games, and it is awful for Google Spreadsheets and heavy email, so no thanks.

And so I’ll hold off on the switch to Android, or the upgrade to iPhone 4, and think hard about a lightweight Chromebook in a hip bag and a simple phone. I have eight months to flip flop in my head, but I think my mind may be made up. I hope there will be a Chromebook with good screen resolution, solid state storage and enough power for the browser’s demands.

Replace:
Macbook + iPhone

With:
Chromebook + simple mobile telephone.

Next year I’ll look at today’s post and see if I was right.

Jeffrey the Barak shared this idea on 25th July 2010


Update August 18th.

 

Well here I am, no action taken, but still waiting for Google Chrome. I have been shopping and played with 10.1 inch netbooks. I can see them! I like them! But why oh why do they have that crazy Windows operating system? It’s just so wrong for a netbook, so wrong.

 

Anyway, a curveball. All of a sudden Google Spreadsheets are easily editable on an iPad, which brings that back into consideration. It may not have a keyboard but with practice it works well, and it’s a no risk purchase because you can resell them on eBay with little or no loss. It has no tabbed browser, but it has the similar feature that lets you switch between browser pages.
And why not the iPad 3G? Because 3G is too slow and unpleasant to work with except in a dire emergency, and the device costs much more, and you get a data bill for every month during which you want to utilize it.
So maybe a $500 16GB wi-fi iPad and a dumb-phone could be the solution. I don’t know, but I’ll update this post when something happens.

Update August 20th.

Thanks for the emails but I wish you would go public and post your comments guys! Well here I am, no action taken, but still waiting for Google Chrome. I have been shopping and played with 10.1 inch netbooks. I can see them! I like them! But why oh why do they have that crazy Windows operating system? It’s just so wrong for a netbook, so wrong.Anyway, a curveball. All of a sudden Google Spreadsheets are easily editable on an iPad, which brings that back into consideration. It may not have a keyboard but with practice it works well, and it’s a no risk purchase because you can resell them on eBay with little or no loss. It has no tabbed browser, but it has the similar feature that lets you switch between browser pages.And why not the iPad 3G? Because 3G is too slow and unpleasant to work with except in a dire emergency, and the device costs much more, and you get a data bill for every month during which you want to utilize it.So maybe a $500 16GB wi-fi iPad and a dumb-phone could be the solution. I don’t know, but I’ll update this post when something happens.

Update August 25th.

Today I took out my old Razr and reactivated my phone number on it, effectively turning the iPhone 3G into an iPod Touch. No more data bill! I will be texting (rarely) using Google Voice from now on and the Razr is, well, a non-smart telephone. Nothing more. I’m selling my 3G as we speak and will wait for the Chromebooks to replace it, although I could buy an iPad or a Jolicloud Netbook to play on and resell that later.

Update July 6th 2011.

So a year has passed. I have not had a telephone data bill for 11 months. I’ve had an iPad and sold it again because it really was too heavy to hold and too uncomfortable to use. (Sorry millions of users). I’ve had a netbook running Joilcloud. And I’ve looked at the Chromebooks which finally came out recently. Chrome OS has not been received warmly, but I like it and could use it, except….the Chromebooks are far too heavy.  So I will be getting a Macbook Air, after the Lion and processor update and subsequent re-release, and spending most of my time on it in the Chrome browser, connected via wifi.


The Saddleback Briefcase Odyssey

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By Jeffrey the Barak

I am a man-bag flipper. I like my personal luggage, be it a briefcase, messenger, pouch or satchel. I was never one for going around with no stuff, or stuffing my pockets, so a bag just makes sense for me. I always regret leaving the house without one, and I’ve carried some form of day luggage around for four or five decades.

So I buy them, enjoy them, get bored, and sell them again as used bags.

I recently used the same bag for three years, a large tricolored messenger bag from Timbuk2. But it was too big, and sometimes a bag that is too big makes it difficult to find anything. A properly packed smaller bag will usually be a more efficient mode of carriage and retrieval.

After such a long stint with vinyl lined ballistic nylon, I had a hankering for leather, which I had been avoiding for some years. Convinced I might occasionally have to stuff dance shoes in my daily bag, I stayed with the messenger format and bought a nice soft high-end messenger in leather, by Osgoode Marley. It’s a nice bag that holds my Macbook and plenty more, and it’s not heavy, but it has internal features that do not please me. For a start it is lined in satin and has lots of zippers and compartments. This makes finding anything a constant fumble and some effort has to be taken to memorize where an item was stowed.

Aside from having to have a large section for the computer, I like to have an array of open, top-loading pouches for easy visual and manual access. Too many little things designed for pens and obsolete cellphones and business cards etc are just visual clutter to me.

My Saddleback medium briefcase in dark coffee brown

While I was researching this bag I also stumbled across the Saddleback Leather Company via Amazon, and then found their own website Saddlebackleather.com. This little firm based in Texas thinks outside the box and makes stunning leather items out of full grain leather, that’s right, full-grain, the thick stuff you see in tool belts and work boots. Because of this, and their refusal to include magnets, snaps, fabric lining, zippers etc., it means they can guarantee their bags for one hundred years.

Saddleback have earned a hardcore fan base and there are thousands of admirers, collectors and enthusiasts stocking up on various sized items that Saddleback sews together down in the land of the cowboys, (Texas and Mexico). The company founder and owner, Dave Munson, appears in a few demonstration videos and has acquired the fan status of an iconoclastic leader. He’s a really nice fellow too who genuinely appreciates his customers and aspiring customers.

I too was instantly an enthusiast of Saddleback Leather, and despite the fact I had recently purchased the aforementioned leather messenger, I plunged into a commitment and  acquired a medium briefcase. It took me a while, because I was scared of the advertised weight. I mean, did I really want a briefcase that weighed 6.5 pounds empty?

I bit the bullet and bought my medium sized dark coffee brown briefcase. What a work of art! For it’s size it does not hold as much as one crossing over from the nylon universe might expect, without very intelligent planning and packing, which is I suppose because it’s so thick and rigid, but beauty overrode practicality and I became inseparable from my bag. I would haul it around with nothing but a few items that could have fit into a two ounce nylon bag with ease.

I even went against my better judgement and took it as my airline carry on bag on a three day trip to Hawaii for a funeral. The Macbook and various other items were placed into the Saddleback and off I flew. (I did also check a large suitcase, because life is not a movie and little bags are not as big as houses on the inside).

And even in Honolulu, where hauling stuff around is never a pleasure, I carried it with me as I went about my business, and I still enjoyed having it around as a constant companion. That is until I went a walking! I walked for about two hours, around Ala Moana Shopping Mall, with no computer, just a water bottle, wallet, keys, hat, three pairs of glasses (various tints and focal lengths) and a tiny camera. I could have fit the same array into a really small nylon bag and weighed in under three pounds including the water, but here they were cruising in style in the medium Saddleback briefcase.

It was a hot, but breezy day, and of course it was cold inside the stores. But by the end of the walk, I had definitely begun to fall out of love with my bag. It was just too heavy for a two-hour hike in flip-flops. A leather bag that weighed five pounds less could have held the same stuff. Imagine putting a five pound dumbbell weight into your shoulder bag? Well if you could, you would remove that dumbbell right away, and therein lies the problem. A Saddleback Leather Briefcase may be a beautiful piece of art, but you can do without all the weight on a hike.

image (c) Saddleback Leather Company. Small Satchel.

So my Saddleback briefcase is now back at home beside me, leather cleaned and fed, and waiting for me to go out to a place not too far from my parking spot so it can be my best buddy again. Yes I came within a hair’s breadth of adding a small SaddleBack Leather Company Satchel into the mix, but I held back due to the 3 lbs weight, and the rigid format etc., and went for a less beautiful artifact crafted from nylon, that will hold more and yet weigh less than almost any single thing that I put inside it. In fact for a good visualization of what I am rambling about here, the Kipling bag that I bought weighs less than the two shoulder pads on the strap of the Saddleback Briefcase.

The Internet is a great research resource, but to really know a bag, even a local baggage store cannot eliminate all potential less-than-ideal decisions. You almost have to buy one and live with it to really know how it will work out in practice. Only after spending a few hundred dollars over time, and recouping some of it by flipping, can you truly know what size, format and material will work out to be your ideal bag. Of course at the aforementioned Ala Moana Shopping Center, I hauled my Saddleback into all the designer Italian bag stores and looked at man-bags costing up to three thousand dollars. But luckily for me, none were my style.

I know from expensive experience that too few and conversely too many compartments can be a liability, that satin or silk linings don’t work, that the weight of the empty bag is an important consideration, that too much depth and a dark interior, and even insufficient rigidity will make it hard to put your hand around what you are looking for, and that zippers can be undesirable if in the wrong spot and unworkable using only one hand.

We all carry fairly similar man-stuff but we each find what works best for us. It may be a vertical or horizontal messenger, it may be fat or thin, huge or compact and it may open in a variety of ways. Personally, I find the format of the cross body shoulder bag is the best for me, better than a two strap backpack, better than a hand bag, but the addition of a handle is good. However, what I like in terms of aesthetics (Saddleback) and what I like in actual use (Kipling) are two opposite beasts. One is very cool, and the other is extremely lightweight.

Ideally we may each need a small assortment of bags from which we select what to load up each day, and I do recommend that any bag be unloaded and reloaded often so you know what you have, what you need to have and what you need to leave at home. But as a minimalist I still pine for one perfect bag that replaces all others and becomes the ideal companion. If it were not for the inevitable weight of full grain leather, then my bag of choice would definitely be a Saddleback bag.

Jeffrey the Barak carries a lot of stupid stuff around and yet still insists he’s a minimalist.

The Presbyopic Pirate

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Douglas Fairbanks as The Black Pirate (1926)

By Jeffrey the Barak

Novels and movies have glamorized the image of the pirate. We can imagine ourselves dressed in puffy shirts, with swords at our side, swinging on ropes between various high points of ship’s rigging, sailing to exotic lands full of treasure and beautiful women.

Of course deep down we know that pirates have always been cruel, dirty, smelly, dangerous, murderous filth bringing misery and death to their victims, only to have their short lives end in early death.

But even as images of the scum of Somalia pervade the news media, we still imagine Johnny Depp, Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, in some sunnier version of the Disneyland ride whenever we hear the word pirate.

There are societies of people who dress like a pirate, talk like a pirate and swagger like a pirate. But again this is the fictitious pirate image, not the Somalian in the open boat who would shoot off your hand to steal your Seiko.

With this seductive enchanting vision in mind, I decided to attend a local Pirates Class. The colorful flyer was stapled to a telegraph pole, and the first class was free. To save time, I donned my raggedy calf-length pants tied at the waist with am eight-inch wide leather belt, tied my white ruffles shirt with the billowing sleeves into a knot at the waist, knotted on my bandana and place my tri-cornered felt hat atop it. I grabbed my rubber sword and practiced some pseudo Cornwellian aaaarghs on the way down.

The same flyer for the Pirates Class was on the door and in I strutted, only to find all sorts of alien and diabolical ropes and pulleys atop even more diabolical beds of torture. Alas, my landlubber friends, I was once again a victim of my failing eyesight. You see, the flyer did not say Pirates Class at all. It said Pilates Class.

I would have stayed, but I was asked to leave.

Jeffrey the Barak drinks rum while laughing atop the mainmast.

Why I won’t be buying an iPad

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By Jeffrey the Barak

I may be the thousandth person to publish a why I will be buying or won’t be buying an iPad rant, but here goes.

I am an Apple enthusiast, with a 27″ iMac, a white Macbook and an iPhone 3G, and I like all of them, despite the Macbook and the iPhone running slower than my needs sometimes demand, but I was determined to play with the iPad before automatically buying one.

The first few times I dropped by an Apple store, the crowds around the iPad table were three deep, but yesterday I had the area all to myself.

The interface and the display on the iPad were so beautiful and sharp, I felt like buying it on the spot, but I decided to stand there and try and perform some tasks over wi-fi first.

There are two things that make this something I should not  buy. Firstly, it may be one of the lightest computers in use today, but since it is handheld, and not sitting on the desk, the meager weight of it eventually becomes a pain, and a warm one at that. This is no great surprise to me because I went through a tablet computing experimental phase in 2005 with an Acer tablet that had an awful display and an even worse operating system (Windows Tablet).

But the clincher for me was the iPad’s version of the Safari browser. It, perhaps deliberately, does not work well with Google. Yes Google, whom I love as much as I love Apple.

In my iGoogle home page, there were white bits representing modules that would not display, and in Google Docs, something my entire business resides in, the spreadsheets were kind of unusable in their “mobile” format. The iPad loads them as if it were a smartphone, and if you’ve ever tried to work in a big spreadsheet on a phone, you will understand torture.

So I will pass on the iPad, and probably also pass on any Google Android tablet that appears, for the same reason, but I will eagerly await the chance to get a Google Chromium netbook. I think that Chromium will be the key, and phone-based stripped-down operating systems like the iPad OS and the Android OS will only be useful for entertainment, as in photo viewing, book reading, video watching etc.

But to be fair, that is what the iPad is intended for, No-one said it should be used for real work first and fun second.

So a Google Netbook with a real keyboard is an exciting prospect to cut down on the weight of hauling a Macbook around, and I’ll gladly pay extra for a beautiful screen resolution to rival the iPad’s beauty of a display.

Such a thing should hit the streets later in 2010.

Jeffrey the Barak is an AppleGoogleTrout

UPDATE November 17th 2010

Well, I bought one, on September 30th and gave it six week of my time. Now it’s for sale on eBay because I cannot work on it. All I really do is work in email for eight hours a day, in Gmail to be specific, but Gmail on iOS is not so elegant as in OSX. Worst of all, my essential huge database, is a Google Spreadsheet, and even with the November Mobile Gdocs update, it’s a pig in iOS.So it will be a Macbook Air for me, unless the fabled Chrome Speedbook suddenly arrives and passes the rest. But I am not trying to be too negative about  the iPad, it’s a superb device and worth it’s price. My personal needs cannot be served by the iOS, but I’m not the average guy.

No one knows how to stop it

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By Jeffrey the Barak

Photo credit: NASA

Anyone who lives in Valdez knows what is still under every rock on the beach. As of now, Louisiana will be the same. And no-one is able to prevent it. The only thing proven to remove crude from seawater, human or animal hair inside nylon stockings, was not deployed sufficiently to prevent landfall, and now it’s too late. What a sad day.

Where is your stuff?

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By Jeffrey the Barak

Stuff? That could mean anything but more often than not these days it means your information, not so much your pictures and music, but your contacts, and your calendar.

Back in the paper and leather era, we could lose our Filofax and lose all, but with today’s synching and backing up, only an exceptionally careless person would lose his or her vital information. The choices today are more focused on local versus cloud storage of this valuable data. If you have a PC (trying not to laugh) then it is likely you keep your calendar and contacts in Microsoft Outlook, part of Microsoft Office for Microsoft Windows, a big old Buick of a program responsible for devastating data loss each time the single “pst” file is corrupted.

Or if you have a Mac, you probably use the Address Book and the iCal calendar and you may keep them in synch with your iPhone via iTunes or Mobile Me. Of course if you also use Google, and I wonder why anyone would not be using Google as much as possible, you can, with a little research and study, find a way to import and synchronize your contacts into Gmail contacts, your calendars into Google Calendar, and your most important documents and spreadsheets into Google Docs, so even if you lose every piece of equipment when a mountain flattens your town, you still retain all in the cloud. All you have to know is your gmail email address and one password and there it all is.

There are of course many choices when it comes to hardware, operating systems and software, cloudware etc., but as these options develop and multiply, there are still people who lose their phone and lose their stuff in the process. It’s akin to keeping all your money in your pocket. Sooner or later you’ll lose it.

Currently I use Apple’s iCal and Address Book and I have Mobile Me to keep my iMac, Macbook and iPhone in sync, and I also export to Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar. Plus I have a folder in my address book called notes, which uses the contacts program to record lists such as to-do, waiting-for, sizes, etc.

We have feedback and comments here at the-vu, so If you have any different ways of keeping it all, let us know!

Holding the Tablet

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By Jeffrey the Barak

The most polarizing computing device ever sold is spreading across the United States.

Long-time professional hardware reviewers have all published their opinions for and against  the wisdom of buying one, now, later or never. Some say it’s a giant iPod Touch, (as if that were a bad thing), others say it’s the most important breakthrough in personal computing for the masses.

The importance of this device is great, or small, depending on your personal point of view. A tablet computer is not new, the interface of the iPad is not completely new, and the concept of the device is not new, but it is here, it is enjoyable to use, and it is very useful.

Looking beyond this device, it is clear that in general there is a huge demand for a device that has the following qualities:

  • Affordable
  • Connected
  • Easy to use
  • Useful
  • Enjoyable

Forgetting current issues such as Flash versus HTML, Apple versus Google (I love them both), Google Docs versus Microsoft Office, computer operating systems versus mobile device operating systems etc.,  The demand of the consumers will win out, as it always does, and the inventors and manufacturers will fill the niches.

One of the more promising roads to computers for all is the Google Chrome operating system, designed to fulfill the needs of the average person, offered at zero cost, and designed to run on low cost “Netbooks”. Plenty of money will be spent on high-speed Internet access, the Netbooks and their accessories, and on goods and services advertised on Google, to make it all worthwhile for Google to give us this system at no cost.

Clearly, the usual standard traditional option will remain for anyone with the money to get a full computer, PC, Mac, whatever, and run heavier applications to make music, movies etc., and to manage business. But once millions of adults and kids begin to use Netbooks, with Google Chrome or another OS, or iPads, the technical world will change as much as it did when everyone got a mobile telephone.

The Apple iPad is a hurdle and a challenge to Google’s plan for global domination via Chrome, because the iPad has such a beautiful design ethic as compared to any Netbook that exists today. Sure we may prefer to type on a keyboard and have the illusion of multitasking, but who really prefers plastic and fuzzy graphics to the chrome and special magic glass touch screen that is on the iPad? People may choose less functionality and go with iPad simply because of it’s beauty.

I think that Netbooks would have become much more widespread if they did not run Windows. Even the simplified version of Windows 7 that ships with most Netbooks today is pretty horrible and slow and well down a dark road of bad design. In this pre-Chrome era, the only alternative to Windows is a flavor package of Linux, but regular folks who are not computer enthusiasts tend to have no end of little problems with Linux, because it’s never really completely finished and tested. For success, a normal idiot needs to be able to get anything done, and that’s why the iPad is so brilliant.

Personally, to do any considerable amount of work, in comfort, I need a desk, and a large monitor with sharp graphics. I am very comfortable with my 27” iMac, but less so with my 13” Macbook.

For many years I was a Palm computing enthusiast, even before they became telephones. I upgraded and flipped my way though Palm (or Handspring) devices right up to the TX, then my eyesight became inadequate to really enjoy the size. Had my wife not bought me an iPhone, I might still be eschewing small devices, but with a good pair of glasses I can enjoy the excellent design of the iconic iPhone.

Today’s iPad has all the appeal of those Palm Pilots, plus the appeal of a paper based personal organizer, plus the power of an Apple computer plus more that we never dreamed of ten years ago.

Of course, a connection is required, but we can count on that becoming normal everywhere in the future. The point is, no matter what pros and cons the iPad and the Netbooks give us, it’s inevitable that millions of people around the world will have something that is greater than a smartphone, and not as great as a laptop. You can bet on it.

Every student in every school will have some device, just as they all have calculators today. Nothing will stop it.

Going back in time fifteen years to before the Palm era, our paper based systems were as heavy as, and much thicker than iPads. But they would not give us movies, games and other forms of entertainment. The entertainment factor is very important and many an iPad buyer will never do an ounce of real work on his or her iPad, but the entertainment is a distraction from the real importance of the format. Anything that makes computing an extension of our fingertips is world changing tool.

Like it or hate it, this is the iPad era, and soon it will also be the Chrome era. And as the Internet and Wi-Fi spread, more people in the world will be joining our world.

Jeffrey the Barak is not carrying a penguin

How to get new eyeballs for a couple of Grand

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Hello, it’s me, your publisher, writing the usual rubbish, but this time seeing it as if with new eyes. I have just treated myself to my latest tech upgrade. Out with my 2007 24″ white iMac and in with a shiny new 27″ iMac. Words cannot describe how sharp and clear the tiniest text on any webpage now appears to me. It’s like having new eyeballs. I have already downloaded many 2560 X 1440 photos for wallpaper and screensavers, and I just sit here staring as if I had just been  released from a month inside a cave.

My plastic waste killed your great grandson

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By Jeffrey the Barak

Yesterday at lunchtime, I had a salad. After the salad was transferred from the mixing bowl to the plate I looked at what lay before me, and it was a lot of plastic. In fact it half filled my kitchen trash can.

The salad itself was a precut, pre-washed salad. But I washed it anyway, in the basket from the salad spinner, I washed it and span it three times until the water was not brown. Next to these packaged salads, on the same shelf are similar salads with added plastic cutlery, dressing in plastic pouches and croutons in plastic pouches. These are for convenient lunches, but these generally go straight from the market to the table, and don’t get washed three times. Mud for lunch.

The package was rigid, clear PET plastic, with a sealing ring of plastic around the top edge and with a third piece of plastic in the form of a full color label. I used salad dressing, from a plastic bottle. I added chopped up sliced pre-cooked turkey, from another hard PET plastic container, and finally some non-cheese slices, individually wrapped in plastic sheets, and wrapped as a stack in more plastic. It took a few scoops with both hands to get all this plastic into the trash can. Today the trashcan will be emptied as I pull the plastic drawstrings on the plastic bin-liner and take the trash down to the dumpster under my apartment building. And from there on, it’s out of sight and out of my life. Or is it? Will it be buried, burned, deconstructed or dissolved? Where will the packaging from my lunch be next week, next year, after I’m long dead?

So I begin to wonder, what food can I eat that will not make such a lingering mess? Can I get food, distributed within a short distance from my home in urban Los Angeles, and keep it fresh long enough to have it for lunch a day or two later? Can I do this without using any plastic? I Googled Earth-friendly diet and eco-friendly diet and it seems I’m late to the party. People are already doing it with farmers markets and cloth shopping bags and bicycles. A little less plastic is being made and disposed of. But with a growing population is this movement keeping pace with us?

I see mountains of electronic and plastic waste in the suburbs of cites in China. The ocean contains tons of slowly degrading plastic, being ingested by fish and mammals. And every day there is more and more. Can I really make a difference by doing one small thing, forgoing plastic containers, or being very careful to wash them out with chemical detergent and get them into the recycling bin? Can I be sure that it is really being recycled by the trash company even though my neighbors put the incorrect objects and substances into the recycling bin every day? Someone will have to sort it very carefully to separate my washed out salad box from a cardboard carton containing the last uneaten slice of pizza, and  a broken electric space heater. I’m not convinced it’s really being done.

So I can start gradually with a little bit of locally grown produce. I can buy less processed meat because the cattle ranches are ruining the planet, I can cut out some processed and refined foods because they cause a larger environmental impact with their manufacturing operation, and I can make sure I don’t eat the wrong kind of fish, the kind that is from declining or endangered species. Does this help the world when two hundred people an hour go through a drive-through lane to get a burger and a Coke? And what would happen if everyone did it? Would we even be able to produce the food for today’s huge population?

Yes I know this is an article of questions with no answers, but I’m not. the professor. I’m just a silly old jazz drummer who noticed a heap of plastic towering beside a lunch plate.

A 70′s dinosaur falls into eDrums.

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By Jeffrey the Barak

Before I ever had electronic drums, I spent a couple of decades carrying around large, heavy drum sets and cymbals, which could only ever be played in rented rehearsal rooms, because they naturally made very loud sounds that would never be appropriate in a normal domestic setting.

As loud as real drums are, they invariably require amplification in a loud setting, so not only are there many huge shells and large cymbals with a great deal of heavy, metal hardware to support them, there is a second set of hardware to support the microphones.

But once a decision has been made to replace the drums and microphones with electronic drums, a new option appears. This is the option of a compact format. With real drums, as they have evolved, the standard drum set includes a bass or kick drum, which is on it’s side, on the floor and a hi-hat, which has it’s pedal directly below the pair of cymbals, and is usually therefore placed before your left foot. Typically the snare drum is between the legs with the kick and hat to either side, and then an array of toms and cymbals surround the aforementioned triangle.

But of course, with a remote pedal for the hi hat, an electronic hi hat does not have to be in the usual position. For example, a right-handed drummer does not have to cross arms to get to the hi hat on his left with his right stick. It can be at 2 o’clock of the snare, and still be opened and closed with the left foot. And since we don’t need to have large toms and large cymbals to produce the sounds of large toms and large cymbals, then it starts to make sense to abandon the format and layout of acoustic drums in favor of a small compact array, permanently connected and easily amplified with one or two cables.

In some situations, a drummer will have to mimic the layout of an acoustic kit, either because he switches back and forth from one to the other and wants to avoid adapting back and forth, or because the standard image of a conventional set is assumed to be desired by his band, or his audience.

But for me, if I can have a large ride cymbal sound or a large floor tom sound without having to have those large objects present, then I will happily have a compact layout before me and also take advantage of the ability to play quietly and precisely, and yet still produce all the sound I want. So my electronic setups have started and remained compact throughout and I have little interest in the so called normal electronic kits with their racks and spread apart format.

A legacy of Flipping: How I bought, sold, returned and flipped my way through many eDrum setups.

Towards the end of my acoustic era, I had already eliminated tom-tom shells and had an array of Roto-Toms over two bass drums and a snare. If I could have found a decent double-kick pedal back then, I would not have had two bass drums either.

Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing altogether, but at one point I went to a toy store and got a Yamaha DD-50 with it’s two little foot switches and noisy, hollow pads. That little toy was a lot of fun for a while and I even McGuyvered together a base for the kick trigger that I could strike with a bass drum pedal.

But that was not real. It took eighteen years of being a non-drummer to prepare me for a return to serious playing, and when that time came I began an odyssey of buying, trying and either returning or re-selling various devices

First was an Alesis Performance Pad. Ironically, as you will see, I almost went full circle back to this, but my Performance Pad was returned to the store due to a crackly potentiometer (volume knob). I did not love the sounds that the included drum machine provided and I found the rubber hard and tiring to play on.

Then came a Roland SPD-20, complete with throne, Roland FD8 hat pedal and KD7 kick trigger with pedal. Then came a year of swimming against the current. I got rid of the pedals and sticks and adapted to hand and finger drumming using a Roland Handsonic 10.

I developed a technique whereby I could play bare handed and have the Handsonic sound like a real drum set. I even recorded an album of self-penned compositions using my Handsonic,  and at the same time, having been impressed by the YouTube videos of David Fingers Haynes, finger drumming on a $60 Korg NanoPAD, I got pretty good at doing that also.

But I felt that I was wasting my ability to control a pair of sticks. I wanted buzz rolls and all that comes with stick drumming. So I got a Yamaha DTX Multi 12 and it took me all of a day to realize that I could never get what I wanted from it, and so that led me to the DrumKAT dk10.

The DrumKAT has been around for a couple of decades, and yet unlike a slick mass-produced product from Roland or Yamaha, it remains a specialty product, encased in tough steel, finished with a hammered enamel paint, looking tough and roadworthy, and yet with an air of laboratory roughness. To use car euphemisms, while the Roland and Yamaha all in one drum pads have a refined quality, like a new Toyota Camry, the KAT products, from a little American firm have more the feel of a hand-built British Morgan sports car, or a military vehicle.

I found the DrumKAT to be one of the most playable surfaces I’ve ever taken a stick to. As per my comments on format, unlike a conventional electronic drum set, the DrumKAT puts everything on a tea-tray, right under your sticks. It is a format conducive to flying around the drum  kit, without having to move much above your elbows, perfect for quiet, fast, precise strokes and press rolls with lightweight 7A drumsticks, which with electronic drums, can sound as big and loud as a crazy hard swing on a rock kit with the butt end of a 2B drumming bat. So I bought a full playing setup from Alternate Mode, makers of the DrumKAT. The DrumKAT dk10, with a new Yamaha Kick trigger and a Pintech Hyperhat pedal.

During my DrumKAT period, I had a succession of little problems and issues that eventually led me to finding another way to play. These included an incompatibility with Garageband,which forced me to buy EZdrummer and a Jazz EFX pack, adding to the already high price tag. Then my first dk10 had a faulty pad and it’s replacement arrived with a loose mystery object inside, and then I was okay for a while, but due a faulty pedal issue that was not discovered until later, Alternate Mode assumed that their own product, the dk10, did not provide continuous CC data for the hat, and I wanted the proper hihat control for all that money, not just open and closed, so I invested even more money to upgrade the perfectly good dk10 to the DrumKAT 3.8.  Even though I am attracted to the small format of a pad controller, I have to point out that with the 3.8 instead of the dk10, this setup was now more expensive than most big electronic drum sets from Alesis, Yamaha, and even Roland! And that includes all the pads, cymbals, cables, racks and triggers, and the sound module! But then, that’s what I don’t like about the standard e-kits. Too much stuff, too big, and not logical.

But my problems only grew from here. The control interface of the 3.8 is too difficult for a humble jazz-drummer like me. Even the very comprehensive video help desk movies on Alternate Mode’s website are way beyond any engineering course I would ever sign up for. It transpired that I could not even set up the DrumKAT with Alternate Mode’s Mario on the phone, because my hat pedal was faulty. But then after many hours of attempting to familiarize myself with the interface operation procedures required for using the DrumKAT 3.8, I gave up, and decided to return all to Alternate Mode and make a fresh start. And then a week later, Mario from Alternate Mode called to explain that the dk10 did indeed have a fully controllable hi hat, not just open and closed, and it was only the Pintech Hyperhat pedal that triggered this entire mess.

And the imagined failure of the DrumKAT brought me almost full-circle to the Alesis Control Pad. Yes it is harder and louder like my original Performance Pad of two years prior, and it sure does not feel a quarter as nice as the KAT, and for some reason I cannot yet play a super closed buzz press roll on it, but I could buy a pile of Control Pads for the price of one KAT, so I will somehow adapt to it and make the best of it as the compact playing surface of choice… for now!

I would ideally have the simple interface of the Control Pad with the playability of the DrumKAT. Perhaps a new surface material will…surface.

Jeffrey the Barak is the publisher of the-vu and back in the Nineteen-Seventies, he used to be Jeffrey the Barak.

Living in the cloud

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By Jeffrey the Barak

Slowly but surely, more and more of my computer time is moving off my computer and into the cloud. I have a fast business cable connection at home and work, so my cloud applications are usually as fast as my native apps, but today I passed a landmark so now is a good time to rant about it.

Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, I stopped using Microsoft Excel. Excel was the last and only Microsoft product that was in my daily life. I left the Windows world a few years ago to live on Planet Apple, a much more efficient place in my opinion, but hung onto Excel because it was the only product good enough to handle my databases and spreadsheets.

I tried several alternatives such as Numbers, Open Office Calc, Bento, and others, and I tried Google Spreadsheets, many times. As recently as November, Google Spreadsheets, part of Google Docs, failed to handle my requirements, but with the approaching launch of Google’s Chrome Operating System, the G Boys have been hard at it, and now I find it is up to pace with my needs.

So my email, my accounting, my complicated databases and my shopping cart system are all now in the cloud, as are the control panels for my various WordPress sites, including this one, and my shipping modules too. I can find the same daily working environment in any browser on any computer, anywhere there is a connection. With a wide screen and plenty of tabs, it’s all there on my desktop, wherever that might be. It’s quite a strange feeling actually, after two decades of Spreadsheet juggling, but hey, welcome to the future.

Oceans of Placka

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By Jeffrey the Barak

We all know that over long periods of time, land continents move, collide and separate, and oceans take on different shapes. Due to the rotation of the Earth, the positions and sizes and shapes of the continents have a significant effect on ocean currents.

In today’s world, the positions of the continents contribute to today’s ocean currents. There are five major rotational ocean currents on the globe today, known as gyres.

There have always been gyres, but only in today’s human dominated world, have the gyres also become garbage patches. Vast areas accumulating man-made marine flotsam.

The pollution in these areas consists mainly of floating chemical sludge, suspended plastic and other debris. Much of it can be seen from ocean-crossing boats, but for what we can see there is many times more of it that we cannot see. Some floats at the surface, and most floats below the surface at various depths.

There could be more than a hundred million tons of garbage in the North Pacific gyre alone. It does not all fall off ships. In fact, most cities in the world are situated on river systems, so a morsel of plastic thrown in the street in the Western USA or West of the Andes, or in Japan or Eastern Russia, can be carried by rain and streams and rivers and eventually take it’s place in the gyre in about five years.

Larger pieces are eaten by birds and fish and mammals. We find them in the stomachs of the dead. But as the plastic breaks down into smaller pieces, it works it’s way down the food chain. Even plankton, at the very base of the food chain, can ingest objects from the garbage patch.

So that plastic fork that we threw away in 1987 can show up as a trace amount of plastic inside a sausage on the end of today’s plastic fork.

If the plastic disintegrates entirely, it still exists in the form of toxic chemicals like PCBs and polystyrene. The seawater is no longer just water with dissolved minerals, it’s a suspension of man-made objects.

As we find more and more fish and birds with plastic in their stomachs, we also find that non-native species have invaded far and wide after being carried around the world attached to tiny plastic cruise liners.

Eventually we will need to find a way to take the pollution back out of the ocean and bury it deep on land, or we’ll all be poisoned and starving. But all that will take much longer than it took to add this stuff to the water in the first place, and it may even remain impossible forever.

What’s missing from the BYD?

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In order to save weight on next year’s most controversial new car, the Chinese manufacturer has not included any of the following:

  • an engine
  • a fuel tank
  • an exhaust system
  • a fuel system
  • an anvil

However they did add a couple of things, such as some batteries made by the world’s top battery maker, an array of computer-controlled electric motors, and a plug.

Also missing will be emissions, a need to buy fuel, and a lot of guilt. Today in Los Angeles, BYD is looking for a partnership to manufacture it’s long-range zero-emissions cars in California, and the State of California is eager to go up against Detroit with it’s Chinese venture partner. Perhaps by year’s end we’ll hear almost nothing as Californians silently zip around town in cars without engines.

That’ll Come In Handy

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Jeffrey the Barak

That’ll Come In Handy.

An album by Jeffrey the Barak

Recorded in 2009 using bare hands on a Roland Handsonic 10 as the drum set.

 

Panama Dip Fright

Panama Dip Fright, recorded on 7th October 2009. Drums are played in one live take on a Handsonic 10. Upright Bass is input into Garageband using Korg Nano Pad, and the squeaky drum is generated from the Handsonic’s sound bank in a third take.

 

The Way Out

Recorded in the summer of 2009 using a Roland Handsonic and bare hands for all percussion, and Korg NanoPad plus the Apple keyboard for all of the other instruments. This was a tune that found its way into my head and required the making of an album to get it out.

 

Monkseaton Drive

Sometimes a drummer has to sit in the back and behave, and sometimes a song has to be in C Major and have a tune that won’t kill your goldfish. This one is almost normal, so for all you folks who were afraid of how the other tracks made you feel, have a cup of tea, sit down and listen to this one.  Tools used: Garageband, Korg NonoKey and a Roland Handsonic.

 

Not a Boat

A live take of the drums, played on a Roland Handsonic 10, with midi bass, guitar and trumpets over the top. Completed August 20th 2009.

 

Blues Whale 

Blues Whale begins with our friend the whale performing a blues, and then transitions into a brief dialogue between whale and drums. All instruments played by Jeffrey the Barak. Drums performed on a Roland Handsonic 10 and everything else via midi and GarageBand.

 

Xootr Over Pavement

Drums played on a Roland Hansonic 10. Other instruments: bass, piano and organ are midi-generated via Garageband. Completed September 11th 2009.

 

Lambience

Orchestral snare, bass and tympani from the Handsonic merged with midi upright bass and a thunderstorm. Synth texture for ambience, or in this case, Lambience.

 

 

A Humane Goldfish Bowl

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By Jeffrey the Barak

You can spend five-thousand dollars setting up and stocking a huge tropical reef aquarium, and the bastards won’t even look at you. But put a one dollar goldfish in a five dollar bowl, and that little fish will await your return twenty times a day, eager to play follow the finger and he or she will gaze at you and love you like a puppy dog.
Ethics.
If you ever play the game, or perform the exercise of, Word Association, then the the most common response to “Goldfish”, is “Bowl”.
The typical picture of a goldfish, in photographs, cartoons and on film, is a picture of a goldfish in a bowl. But if you let people know that you have a goldfish in a bowl, they will consider you cruel, and they will tell you that a goldfish needs to live in a long tank with an elaborate filter system, and then move to a pond when it matures.
There is probably one pond around per million goldfish. Most live, and die, in aquariums or in bowls.
So the question arises, how can a goldfish be humanely kept in a bowl? Is it automatically cruel, reprehensible and impossible, or is the noble rescue of a commercially bred goldfish from the pet store, and the keeping of such an animal in a bowl justifiable.
It’s all about the water.
Actually, it is humane to keep a goldfish in a bowl, as long as the water is good, and as long as the fish can be relocated to a pond or large habitat when it becomes mature, as in too big the live in the bowl. It is not automatically cruel to keep one in a bowl.
But a goldfish aquarium has features that are missing from a simple empty glass bowl full of water. There are many elements that remove or convert toxic chemicals from the water, and also elements that support living bacteria that help keep the water healthy for your fish.
These elements include gravel, biological media, cotton filters, carbon filters, air stones, bubble wands and more. Each has a duty as part of a system to remove harmful wastes from the water and to keep it clean, oxygenated and nourishing to the skin and gills of the fish. Even if you have a nice large aquarium with elaborate filters, gravel and air systems, it is quite easy to mismanage the systems and end up with cloudy, uncomfortable water that will make the fish sick or even cause them to die.
So then, if an aquarium system costing hundreds of dollars can be that bad, how could a bowl be better? The answer is simple, the bottom line is the state of the water. The fish only depends on the quality of the water and it does not matter if this perfect water is introduced as-is or if it relies on a system to make it so. In fact it is less cruel for a goldfish to be in a bowl of perfect water than it is to be in a less-than-perfect larger aquarium.
The way to have water in a fish bowl that is as good as or even better than the water in an aquarium system is to have a second vessel. Water can be obtained by buying bottled water, which is often called mountain spring water, or it can come from a tap water filter, as long as it is not the reverse-osmosis kind. It cannot be distilled water, de-ionized water, or water containing municipal chlorine or other chemicals designed to protect human consumers from food poisoning.
But this is easy. If you have drinking water at home for the human occupants, it can usually sit in a bucket for a day and become safe for a goldfish to live in. But to be extra sure, you can add a drop or two of aquarium water conditioner and a granule or two of aquarium salt before it sits, so that by the time your fish is living in it the next day, it will be nourishing and comfortable.
So one simple way to have a goldfish living in perfect water is to have two bowls. Each day the fish can be moved to the other bowl, while the first bowl can be emptied, wiped clean and refilled with water that will be ready for the fish to live in the next day. As long as your home never gets freezing cold inside and you do not feed the fish more than it can eat in a minute, or more than two to six times a week, the fish should remain in healthy condition and be quite content with it’s environment.
Better yet, to have a similar system that does not involve removing the animal with a net, and potentially causing stress from the move, you could empty most of the water, leaving the goldfish in the remaining water, and then introduce the clean water from the second vessel. Using this method, you can even have a small, lightweight rectangular tank, such as an affordable plastic “Lee’s Kritter Keeper” and a cheap plastic bucket as the second vessel. If you have a water filter on your kitchen faucet (not reverse-osmosis) then you can refill the bucket from that and use it the next day. For this system you don’t even need a net. Just one bowl/lightweight tank, and a second bucket.
As long as the goldfish has not reached a size where the bowl is too small for it to swim freely in one direction for a couple of seconds, and you are able to offer it some visual stimulation from outside the bowl a few times a day, then you will have a happy healthy fish in clean water at all times. Just be ready to bid farewell to your beloved friend when it’s time for it to move to a big pond for the rest of it’s, hopefully long, life. If there is no sign of such a pond within a hundred miles of your house, then most aquarium stores will be willing to take in a donated healthy-looking large goldfish in exchange for another one-dollar feeder to rescue from a certain date with death. Hopefully they’ll sell it to someone with a big pond or aquarium.
So we have to remember a few things to justify a goldfish bowl. Goldfish are not natural. They were bred by man to become attractive golden fish and were originally hardy river carp, scavengers that could survive in ponds, streams and rivers, eating anything and everything, and since they don’t have a stomach, but rather just a long intestine, they would excrete the waste quickly and make the water dirty. An expensive and complicated aquarium system intended to condition the water may fail to do so for many reasons, and it is very easy, or even highly likely, to have a goldfish in such an aquarium, suffering distress from a less than optimal water quality. A bowl can contain clean, healthy, comfortable water if you have the two bowl system, or a bowl and bucket system. The water in this bowl can be, at all times, better than the water in most people’s aquaria. And lastly, even if your goldfish dies after a few months, as they may do through no fault of the owner, it can be a few months of a good life that it would not have had as food for an aquarium carnivore.
Aside from the well-being of the fish, the advantages of a goldfish bowl over an aquarium are many. They don’t cost much, they don’t weigh as much as your sister riding a bike, they don’t require electricity or reinforced furniture, and you can move them from room to room in order to spend more time interacting with your pet.
While it is always nice to see healthy goldfish in a clean, healthy large aquarium, it is also not so good to see them suffering in a cloudy, dirty tank and exhibiting spots, sores and nervous behavior.  Your happy healthy bowl fish will be better off than most goldfish alive today.
What does the fish need in it’s bowl?
Goldfish are bred from carp, which are scavengers. This is why goldfish can be seen constantly sucking pieces of gravel into their mouths and spitting it out. You may assume they are playing or trying to keep busy or wishing they had something to eat, or extracting some nutrients from the bacteria on the gravel, but they just can’t help this natural behavior. In an aquarium system the gravel can be a medium for the growth and support of healthy bacteria, but it is also a hiding place for fish waste that breaks down and introduces harmful elements into the water. So if you can stand the inevitable sight of a few strands of fish poop in your bowl, don’t bother with the gravel, because let’s remember, it’s all about the water quality, not the objects.
And speaking of objects, goldfish are more intelligent than most people assume and they love to follow your finger and look at you and play with you, but they have no need for decorations or toys. In fact such objects can cause injury because part of the natural behavior of a fish is to be occasionally startled and move several inches at a remarkably high speed. Better if there is no castle or treasure chest to collide with.
The minimalism of a clear empty bowl and a healthy fish in clean water is ideal. If you want to landscape the habitat, then set up a large aquarium system.
So if you would like a little golden friend to interact with while you sit at your desk all day, don’t be put off by people telling you a goldfish bowl is a cruel habitat. Remember it’s all about the water, and if the water is always good and there is enough of it to permit a little swimming, your fish will be content.

bowlsYou can spend five-thousand dollars setting up and stocking a huge tropical reef aquarium, and the bastards won’t even look at you. But put a one dollar goldfish in a five dollar bowl, and that little fish will await your return twenty times a day, eager to play follow the finger and he or she will gaze at you and love you like a puppy dog.

Ethics.

If you ever play the game, or perform the exercise of, Word Association, then the the most common response to “Goldfish”, is “Bowl”.

The typical picture of a goldfish, in photographs, cartoons and on film, is a picture of a goldfish in a bowl. But if you let people know that you have a goldfish in a bowl, they will consider you cruel, and they will tell you that a goldfish needs to live in a long tank with an elaborate filter system, and then move to a pond when it matures.

The majority of goldfishes live out their lives without ever becoming mature pond dwellers. Most live, and die, in aquariums or in bowls.

So the question arises, how can a goldfish be humanely kept in a bowl? Is it automatically cruel, reprehensible and impossible, or is the noble rescue of a commercially bred goldfish from the pet store, and the keeping of such an animal in a bowl justifiable.

It’s all about the water.

Actually, it is humane to keep a goldfish in a bowl, as long as the water is good, and as long as the fish can be relocated to a pond or large habitat when it becomes mature, as in too big the live in the bowl. It is not automatically cruel to keep one in a bowl.

But a goldfish aquarium has features that are missing from a simple empty glass bowl full of water. There are many elements that remove or convert toxic chemicals from the water, and also elements that support living bacteria that help keep the water healthy for your fish.

These elements include gravel, biological media, cotton filters, carbon filters, air stones, bubble wands and more. Each has a duty as part of a system to remove harmful wastes from the water and to keep it clean, oxygenated and nourishing to the skin and gills of the fish. Even if you have a nice large aquarium with elaborate filters, gravel and air systems, it is quite easy to mismanage the systems and end up with cloudy, uncomfortable water that will make the fish sick or even cause them to die.

So then, if an aquarium system costing hundreds of dollars can be that bad, how could a bowl be better? The answer is simple, the bottom line is the state of the water. The fish only depends on the quality of the water and it does not matter if this perfect water is introduced as-is or if it relies on a system to make it so. In fact it is less cruel for a goldfish to be in a bowl of perfect water than it is to be in a less-than-perfect larger aquarium.

The way to have water in a fish bowl that is as good as or even better than the water in an aquarium system is to have a second vessel. Water can be obtained by buying bottled water, which is often called mountain spring water, or it can come from a tap water filter, as long as it is not the reverse-osmosis kind. It cannot be distilled water, de-ionized water, or water containing municipal chlorine or other chemicals designed to protect human consumers from food poisoning.

But this is easy. If you have drinking water at home for the human occupants, it can usually sit in a bucket for a day and become safe for a goldfish to live in. But to be extra sure, you can add a drop or two of aquarium water conditioner and a granule or two of aquarium salt before it sits, so that by the time your fish is living in it the next day, it will be nourishing and comfortable.

So one simple way to have a goldfish living in perfect water is to have two bowls. Each day the fish can be moved to the other bowl, while the first bowl can be emptied, wiped clean and refilled with water that will be ready for the fish to live in the next day. As long as your home never gets freezing cold inside and you do not feed the fish more than it can eat in a minute, or more than two to six times a week, the fish should remain in healthy condition and be quite content with it’s environment.

Better yet, to have a similar system that does not involve removing the animal with a net, and potentially causing stress from the move, you could empty most of the water, leaving the goldfish in the remaining water, and then introduce the clean water from the second vessel. Using this method, you can even have a small, lightweight rectangular tank, such as an affordable plastic “Lee’s Kritter Keeper” and a cheap plastic bucket as the second vessel. If you have a water filter on your kitchen faucet (not reverse-osmosis) then you can refill the bucket from that and use it the next day. For this system you don’t even need a net. Just one bowl/lightweight tank, and a second bucket.

As long as the goldfish has not reached a size where the bowl is too small for it to swim freely in one direction for a couple of seconds, and you are able to offer it some visual stimulation from outside the bowl a few times a day, then you will have a happy healthy fish in clean water at all times. Just be ready to bid farewell to your beloved friend when it’s time for it to move to a big pond for the rest of it’s, hopefully long, life. If there is no sign of such a pond within a hundred miles of your house, then most aquarium stores will be willing to take in a donated healthy-looking large goldfish in exchange for another one-dollar feeder to rescue from a certain date with death. Hopefully they’ll sell it to someone with a big pond or aquarium.

So we have to remember a few things to justify a goldfish bowl. Goldfish are not natural. They were bred by man to become attractive golden fish and were originally hardy river carp, scavengers that could survive in ponds, streams and rivers, eating anything and everything, and since they don’t have a stomach, but rather just a long intestine, they would excrete the waste quickly and make the water dirty. An expensive and complicated aquarium system intended to condition the water may fail to do so for many reasons, and it is very easy, or even highly likely, to have a goldfish in such an aquarium, suffering distress from a less than optimal water quality. A bowl can contain clean, healthy, comfortable water if you have the two bowl system, or a bowl and bucket system. The water in this bowl can be, at all times, better than the water in most people’s aquaria. And lastly, even if your goldfish dies after a few months, as they may do through no fault of the owner, it can be a few months of a good life that it would not have had as food for an aquarium carnivore.

Aside from the well-being of the fish, the advantages of a goldfish bowl over an aquarium are many. They don’t cost much, they don’t weigh as much as your sister riding a bike, they don’t require electricity or reinforced furniture, and you can move them from room to room in order to spend more time interacting with your pet.

While it is always nice to see healthy goldfish in a clean, healthy large aquarium, it is also not so good to see them suffering in a cloudy, dirty tank and exhibiting spots, sores and nervous behavior.  Your happy healthy bowl fish will be better off than most goldfish alive today.

What does the fish need in it’s bowl?

Goldfish are bred from carp, which are scavengers. This is why goldfish can be seen constantly sucking pieces of gravel into their mouths and spitting it out. You may assume they are playing or trying to keep busy or wishing they had something to eat, or extracting some nutrients from the bacteria on the gravel, but they just can’t help this natural behavior. In an aquarium system the gravel can be a medium for the growth and support of healthy bacteria, but it is also a hiding place for fish waste that breaks down and introduces harmful elements into the water. So if you can stand the inevitable sight of a few strands of fish poop in your bowl, don’t bother with the gravel, because let’s remember, it’s all about the water quality, not the objects.

And speaking of objects, goldfish are more intelligent than most people assume and they love to follow your finger and look at you and play with you, but they have no need for decorations or toys. In fact such objects can cause injury because part of the natural behavior of a fish is to be occasionally startled and move several inches at a remarkably high speed. Better if there is no castle or treasure chest to collide with.

The minimalism of a clear empty bowl and a healthy fish in clean water is ideal. If you want to landscape the habitat, then set up a large aquarium system.

So if you would like a little golden friend to interact with while you sit at your desk all day, don’t be put off by people telling you a goldfish bowl is a cruel habitat. Remember it’s all about the water, and if the water is always good and there is enough of it to permit a little swimming, your fish will be content.

End of the Uh-Oh’s

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I wonder if we will call this coming year twenty-ten or the more cumbersome two thousand and ten. I think we should have called 2001 twenty-o-one, just like they did in nineteen-o-one and eighteen-o-one. Personally I will from this day make that change, and no longer refer to twenty-o-four, as two-thousand and four.
And what do we call the decade? Is it to be the double-oh’s, the twenty-hundreds, or the uh-oh’s. Well not the twenty-hundreds as that would mean the century, just as the nineteen hundreds refers to a whole century.
It will be The Media that set the course, as they did in 2000 when they started saying two-thousand and one, when they should really have said twenty-o-one. And why did this happen? Probably because no-one ever said twenty hundred. There is no such number as twenty hundred, so we all said two-thousand, which is good. The mistake was a year later when we missed the opportunity to spend the future saying twenty-o-one, twenty-o-two etc.

By Jeffrey the Barak,

(written towards the end of 2009.)

2010I wonder if we will call this coming year twenty-ten or the more cumbersome two thousand and ten. I think we should have called 2001 twenty-o-one, just like they did in nineteen-o-one and eighteen-o-one. Personally I will from this day make that change, and no longer refer to twenty-o-four, as two-thousand and four.

And what do we call the decade? Is it to be the double-oh’s, the twenty-hundreds, or the uh-oh’s. Well not the twenty-hundreds as that would mean the century, just as the nineteen hundreds refers to a whole century.

It will be The Media that set the course, as they did in 2000 when they started saying two-thousand and one, when they should really have said twenty-o-one. And why did this happen? Probably because no-one ever said twenty hundred. There is no such number as twenty hundred, so we all said two-thousand, which is good. The mistake was a year later when we missed the opportunity to spend the future saying twenty-o-one, twenty-o-two etc.

By next month, we will know.

Where are the nice cars?

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Where are the nice cars?
A walk through the 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show
There are certain cars that just look and feel right. Their design suggests quality and precision. The metal looks solid and the doors close with a solid thunk, and no tinny ring. But other cars look as fragile as tin-foil, with seams that are too wide or too tight. They may have hard plastic where you would expect upholstery, or molded polyurethane where you like to see a softer surface. And then some designs are embellished so much beyond their function that they scream ugliness.
It may be personal preference, and differences in the tastes of middle-America versus those of, for example, the Japanese or the French, but in general, some cars are rolling art, and others are rolling messes. And then there is Steam-Punk, a cartoonish design idea that has now found it’s way onto the showroom floors.
What follows is my personal opinion, and my personal impression, but I at least, agree with myself!
For good clean design that seems functional, well-executed, and just has a quality, precise, expensive feel, look no further than Audi and Volkswagen. Alright, perhaps outside of the USA, their larger SUV’s are a bit bigger than anyone would ever need a car to be, but in general, their designs are elegant and just right. The world loves the Golf, and for good reason. It’s sporty, practical, holds a lot of stuff and takes up little space. The GTI version is as enjoyable on the racetrack as many a six-figure sports car, and speaking of which, the Audi R8 looks so much cooler than today’s Italian supercars.
Also from Germany, the interior of the BMW Mini-E, an electric car, is a beautiful design, with it’s colored swirls and oversized central display. For some reason the fit and finish on the Mini seems to be a step above that of the larger 3, 5 and 7 series, which despite their clever angles are bland, and have orange peel paint, rather like cheaper Chevys.
The new Lexus LFA supercar, has a terrible paint finish that combines a high gloss above the beltline with a visually sticky-looking texture in the same color, and a front-end design that is comparable in style with a Corolla, only with a big gap at the tip of the hood/bonnet. If you search for photos for the front you’ll see it shot from up high, or lit from the side to create shadows, but in real life, it’s a front from Wal-Mart, and yet this supercar costs $375,000. Something does not add up here.
Representing Steam-Punk, the new Morgan Aero SuperSports  was almost a hot car, but is a hot mess. A mishmash of curves and embellishments that should not be shared on one chassis. Steam-Punk can be described as historical future fantasy such as in the visions of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. This ever so ugly Morgan has it down, right down to it’s misguided interpetive brown leather seats.
To understand what is wrong with General Motors, you have to imagine that you are not in Los Angeles, but instead on a street in Rome, Frankfurt or London. You look up and see the grille of a GM SUV coming at you. A big ugly unnecessary jukebox of a grill, stuck onto the front of a primitive oversized hunk of beige metal. To my eye, these vehicles look ridiculous and I would rather have witnessed their extinction than been a part of their bailout with my income tax. Car manufacturing is a competition, and these guys lost that competition. They should not still be here.
Ford got by without a bailout, but what are those big things stuck on the front ends of Mercurys and Fords and Lincolns? Who on Earth likes these grilles?
Design in modern cars treads a narrow ridge path with steep fall-offs on either side into ravines of bad taste. In these ravines, you will see Rolls Royces, Dodges, Fords, and countless other Marques. The traffic on the top will be quite light, even in rush hour.

By Jeffrey the Barak

319A walk through the 2009 Los Angeles Auto Show

There are certain cars that just look and feel right. Their design suggests quality and precision. The metal looks solid and the doors close with a solid thunk, and no tinny ring. But other cars look as fragile as tin-foil, with seams that are too wide or too tight. They may have hard plastic where you would expect upholstery, or molded polyurethane where you like to see a softer surface. And then some designs are embellished so much beyond their function that they scream ugliness.

It may be personal preference, and differences in the tastes of middle-America versus those of, for example, the Japanese or the French, but in general, some cars are rolling art, and others are rolling messes. And then there is Steam-Punk, a cartoonish design idea that has now found it’s way onto the showroom floors.

What follows is my personal opinion, and my personal impression, but I at least, agree with myself!

audir82For good clean design that seems functional, well-executed, and just has a quality, precise, expensive feel, look no further than Audi and Volkswagen. Alright, perhaps outside of the USA, their larger SUV’s are a bit bigger than anyone would ever need a car to be, but in general, their designs are elegant and just right. The world loves the Golf, and for good reason. It’s sporty, practical, holds a lot of stuff and takes up little space. The GTI version is as enjoyable on the racetrack as many a six-figure sports car, and speaking of which, the Audi R8 looks so much cooler than today’s Italian supercars.

minieintAlso from Germany, the interior of the BMW Mini-E, an electric car, is a beautiful design, with it’s colored swirls and oversized central display. For some reason the fit and finish on the Mini seems to be a step above that of the larger 3, 5 and 7 series, which despite their clever angles are bland, and have orange peel paint, rather like cheaper Chevys.

lexuslfa375kThe new Lexus LFA supercar, has a terrible paint finish that combines a high gloss above the beltline with a visually sticky-looking texture in the same color, and a front-end design that is comparable in style with a Corolla, only with a big gap at the tip of the hood/bonnet. If you search for photos for the front you’ll see it shot from up high, or lit from the side to create shadows, but in real life, it’s a front from Wal-Mart, and yet this supercar costs $375,000. Something does not add up here.

morganfmorganrRepresenting Steam-Punk, the new Morgan Aero SuperSports  was almost a hot car, but is a hot mess. A mishmash of curves and embellishments that should not be shared on one chassis. Steam-Punk can be described as historical future fantasy such as in the visions of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. This ever so ugly Morgan has it down, right down to it’s misguided interpetive brown leather seats.

enclavegrillTo understand what is wrong with General Motors, you have to imagine that you are not in Los Angeles, but instead on a street in Rome, Frankfurt or London. You look up and see the grille of a GM SUV coming at you. A big ugly unnecessary jukebox of a grille, stuck onto the front of a primitive oversized hunk of beige metal. To my eye, these vehicles look ridiculous and I would rather have witnessed their extinction than been a part of their bailout with my income tax. Car manufacturing is a competition, and these guys lost that competition. They should not still be here.

lincolnfrontFord got by without a bailout, but what are those big things stuck on the front ends of Mercurys and Fords and Lincolns? Who on Earth likes these grilles?

Design in modern cars treads a narrow ridge path with steep fall-offs on either side into ravines of bad taste. In these ravines, you will see Rolls Royces, Dodges, Fords, and countless other Marques. The traffic on the top will be quite light, even in rush hour.

The Good Quiz

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The Good Quiz: How good are you?

Answer the following questions with absolute honesty and tally your number of yes answers and no answers to see how good you are.

Question MarkDo you think that female humans are in any way inferior to male humans? Yes or No
Do you think that people who do not share your identical and exact religious views are inferior to you? Yes or No
Do you think that people of a certain ethnicity are in any way inferior to you and your own exact blend of ethnic backgrounds? Yes or No
Do you think that people who do not believe in God are in any way inferior to you or less good than you? Yes or No
Do you think that people who are attracted to their own gender are imperfect? Yes or No
Do you think that homosexual people are a potential dangerous threat to the safety and well-being of children? Yes or No
Do you think that female humans should be treated differently to male humans with regards to rights and freedoms?  Yes or No
Do you think that physically less able people are less important or of less value than the able? Yes or No
Do you think that “mentally unwell” people are less important than the “normal”? Yes or No
Do you think that people who have different moral standards with regards to sex and promiscuity are not as good as yourself? Yes or No
Do you think that gay people are not naturally so inclined? Yes or No
Do you think that governments and religions should prevent two people of the same gender from marrying each other? Yes or No
Do you think it is alright to put someone to death or imprison them for adultery or flirting? Yes or No
Do you think that the poor and/or homeless should be completely responsible for their current circumstances? Yes or No
Do you think that elderly people are less important or valuable than the young? Yes or No

    Answers:

    • If you answered with 15 NO answers, you are good.
    • If you answered with 14 or less NO answers, you are not good, and you should seriously consider being less horrible.

    Note, some contentious  issues, such as abortion, and euthanasia etc., have been deliberately omitted from the quiz, because everyone seems to think one camp is right and the other wrong, and few people ever change their mind. Among the truly objective, there may never be a general yes or no answer on such issues, but the truly objective are a rare minority.

    Turmeric kills cancer in Ireland

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    800px-false-startBy Jeffrey the Barak

    There is a racing flag that is green with a yellow chevron or V. It means false start. But green and yellow are very important colors when it comes to food. They are the colors of life.

    The color of death is not black, it is brown. Brown as in brown colored food that is not really very good for you. A healthy plate needs to have green and yellow on it.

    Most of us have heard about the advantages of eating food that looks green. Kale, broccoli, soy beans, spinach, all good for our health.

    But besides yellow peppers and a few squashes, what is the yellow we need to be consuming? Strictly speaking, the magic yellow is not a raw natural food, it is a processed spice, and it is called turmeric. It is used in yellow curries.

    turmericNutritionally we can all do just fine without ever encountering turmeric, and even a cancer victim does not need to eat turmeric. However, scientists have found that a chemical extracted from turmeric, called curcumin, kills cancer cells and then digests itself, vanishing without any side effects.

    Specifically, a team at the Cork Cancer Research Center in Ireland, led by Dr. Sharon McKenna have been able to positively show that oesophageal cancer cells (a.k.a. gullet cancer cells) are clearly destroyed by curcumin.

    It is not clear if frequently eating plenty of yellow curry laced with turmeric can cure oesophageal cancer on it’s own, but any excuse to eat this delicious yellow food as a preventative measure is welcome.

    Global warming is 51% cow farts

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    credit: unknown

    credit: unknown

    It’s not  your local coal power station, or your soot-spewing school bus. It’s not even the production of your mountain of plastic waste. No, global warming has been pushed over the edge of the point of no return by cow farts.

    Follow this link to Simply Sustainable’s excellent report on this realization. Time to invent a synthetic soy filet mignon!

    A new way to travel in a plane.

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    Photo credit: Wired.com

    Photo credit: Wired.com

    An idea that should have materialized decades ago.

    Wired Magazine’s Jason Paur added an article to the Wired Autopia Blog that highlights a design technology that is long overdue.

    How many of us have sat upright in a coach seat for twelve hours and dreamed of lying down to take the pressure off our backs? It turns out that not only could we all have a bed, but we could also check fewer bags. All it takes is a new way of thinking regarding passenger cabin design.

    The original article, complete with photos can be found at this link

    As you know, we do not normally link to outside articles here at the-vu, but this is important. The plane builders and airlines need to open their minds and get way from the rows of seats idea.

    How Art Almost Killed An Entire People

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    By Jeffrey the Barak

    At times, we wander the galleries and see pieces of art that look as if they could hurt someone, or kill someone, but in a way this has actually happened.

    moI refer to a place commonly known as Easter Island. This is it’s modern name, given to the place by Christian explorers from Holland in 1722 when they happened to come across this land on their Easter Sunday.

    For most of history, This place had no name, and no inhabitants, but at sometime between 400 and 600 C.E. a human civilisation, the Polynesians, found it, and it became known as Rapa Nui.

    We know from the surviving Polynesian people here and across Oceana that for at least two thousand years, their relatively advanced society was capable of trans-oceanic explorations by canoe that no modern sailor in their right mind would dare attempt. By contrast, the people of the nations that would later become the world’s explorers, the Britons, the French, The Spanish, The Portuguese, The Dutch were by comparison, quite behind in terms of long-distance seafaring.

    Even the Mediterranean traders of the day would have been amazed at the voyages back and forth that the ancient Polynesians embarked upon.

    So art came to Rapa Nui with its first people. It is generally accepted that they came from either the Marquesas Islands or Mangareva, which like everywhere else, are very far indeed from Rapa Nui.

    The oral history tells us they brought plants, food animals and tools and their mission was colonization. The climate on Rapa Nui was certainly not the tropical paradise they were used to so they had a lot of adaptation to do in order to survive and thrive.

    Rapa Nui was covered in trees, palms and other types, and drinking water was naturally gathered in volcanic craters, despite the island’s absence of rivers or streams. The island also had obsidian, great for making cutting tools and weapons, and it had lot of special rock which we call lapilli tuff.

    Some say the islanders employed slash and burn techniques to clear land for farming, and others say, they used up all the wood in order to make and transport the huge stone statues that Rapa Nui is now famous for.

    With the forest cover gone, the rain and weather eroded the topsoil and famine ensued. But let’s take a step back and focus on the art.

    The art of Rapa Nui is divided between two periods. The Moai period and the Birdman period. On other islands in Polynesia, there were statues, (Moai), atop shrines, (Ahu). which were representations of chiefs (living and dead) and the gods in which they believed.

    Dead chiefs were sacred, and after their life passed, their representative Moa remained. Rapa Nui has around 900 such moai, either standing, toppled or partially completed, still in the quarry or partway to their final site. There are about 360 ahu. The moai did not look out to sea, as commonly assumed, but they faced away from the sea, towards the villages. Some completed and erected statues had white coral eyes and wore stone hats or top knots called pukao, carved from a rock that was more red (scoria).

    There is much debate as to exactly how the heavy statues were moved, assembled, erected etc. They are so heavy, that engineering on a grand scale was definitely needed, but the methods used have passed from memory.

    It seems clear that at some point, the statues were worshiped as gods, and were a means of control for the ruling society, called the “Long Ears”. Everyone else, lived as subjects of the ruling Long Ears. However they were not slaves, but simply lowly subjects of the rulers, who would eventually rebel aginst the Long Ears and topple the very statues that generations suffered to construct.

    It is said that so much wood was expended on the statue making that the islanders could no longer build canoes, so they became unable to travel to and from other parts of Polynesia. However, it is possible that the forests were burned to clear land, without any understanding of the long term environmental consequences. Without canoes, there was little opportunity to fish offshore, and without the lush vegetation, farming was all that was left.

    So in isolation, with the natural resources of the island being eroded, burned and used for making statues, the people sealed their fate. Numbering as high as seven thousand in it’s heyday, the society on Rapa Nui became unsustainable with the resources at hand, and they were unable to leave or go for help.

    Eventually, out of this declining situation, a powerful warrior class emerged, called Matato’a. And a change of power and leadership ensued. This also heralded the second art movement. All of the statues were toppled, some face up, some face down, and a new, even sillier religion began to dominate.

    This was the birdman cult, (Tangatamenu). Once a year on a small island off the coast of Rapa Nui, migrating birds laid eggs. It was a bountiful annual harvest. The young warriors would hold a swimming race across the rough, shark-infested straits between the main island and bird island. The first man back holding an intact egg became absolute ruler for exactly one year, until this was repeated.

    In the time after the upright moai, the art consisted of carvings and drawings on rock, depicting a bird-man character. Again the sheer quantity of this art in the virtual absence of all other, shows us that life at the time was all about the birdman. And a new monotheism emerged, coincidentally featuring a single, creator god, not the Jewish-Christian-Moslem one, but one with the name Makemake.

    If the Western sailing ships had never found Easter Island, the natives may or may not have survived to this day, but considering what the sailors did to them, it is amazing that any have survived. The so-called advanced civilizations from Europe murdered, enslaved, kidnapped and infected the people with diseases such as smallpox and syphilis, and those few who survived these horrors were later subjected to forced Christianization.

    As a result of the missionary subjugation, at this point there was no more art for a long time. The island was culturally dead until relatively recently when inhabitants of Polynesian decent began to nurture their cultural heritage, which amazingly still has much in common with other far way parts of Polynesia. And so through dance, costume, cuisine and the tatoo, the art of the island survives, but this time it won’t kill them, it may save them, from us.

    The path to our news

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    By Jeffrey the Barak

    newsAs more and more newspapers disappear from the marketplace, more of us turn to the Internet to read our news.

    But although there are many sources to choose between, only a few actually gather the news, and these news organizations have to give it away and foot the bill.

    No longer can they rely on the business of printing, selling and distributing paper that sells for a quarter or a dollar, and no longer can they sell page after page of print ads to cover the rent, salaries and countless other expenses of news gathering.

    To illustrate this, let me use one of my own daily routines. I have in my Google home page, a ‘gadget” or columnar panel that highlights Current News. This is tier one.

    If I click on the header it takes me to current.com. This is tier two. Once here, I can select a news article or click on “more news” and then select an article. Let’s assume I do the latter and pick an article that is not in the top three. This is tier three.

    In “more news”, I select an interesting headline, click on it and arrive at tier four, an excerpt of the article, that includes a link to the original article which in this case resides on bbc.co.uk

    So I click through to here and arrive at the page on BBC, tier five, and see a television interview video and read the article, which was gathered in the UK by BBC staffers. None of my money went to the BBC, and I was five tiers away from the article.

    Along the way, I saw advertisements. There were none on Google, which is one of the many reasons why it is better than the mouse-over pop-up ridden and animated Yahoo!, There were none on Current, except for links to Current features, but then on the “more news” page I saw a small ad for Mini (the car). At the article level of current I saw one ad for AT&T, and then at the final BBC tier, there were no ads, except for BBC features links.

    So assuming I did not shop for AT&T service or BMW minis, I got my story for nothing.

    This is great for me, and I am not complaining, especially since my eyesight is not really up to reading a traditional newspaper anymore. But somewhere, someone has paid a lot of money to bring me the story, and eventually, we may end up with a news shortage, because no-one is paying the bill.

    Louis the Scooterer’s last ride

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    By Jeffrey the Barak

    lou5d

    Louis the Scooterer 1935-2009

    Since 2004, Louis the Scooterer, Louis Scop, has contributed to the-vu, and his readers number in the thousands. Sadly, I have just learned from his daughter that Lou passed away on July 26th 2009, and was buried in the Netanya cemetery, Israel, on 31st July.

    Lou’s last input was a comment on June 15th, and his last email to me was on June 26th, in which he mentioned he had not been feeling good for several weeks, but would soon be writing another chapter. Some followers of Lou will no doubt learn of his passing with these words. I will be reading his writings again in order to celebrate his life, but of course he did more than he wrote about, and for a lot longer.

    My Summer 2009 Tech-Rant

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    rolhpd10

    By Jeffrey the Barak

    Time for a tech-rant. It’s been a while, but believe it or not people still ask me for my opinion, as if it really mattered.

    I have decided to base this rant on the technology that I personally own, which is a naturally narrow band of goods, since I am not rich, and I am also a bit of a minimalist at heart.

    As always, please note the date of this article, as tech articles do not stay fresh for very long, so it will soon stink even more than it does today, and believe me, it already stinks. It is 2009, July 20th.

    I have three computers in my arsenal these days, all of them are Apples. (No, I said arsenal, wise guy). First is my 24 inch Apple iMac. It is two and a half years old and still operates on Tiger. It will stay on Tiger until Snow Leopard comes out in a couple of months time.

    This was the big white beast that liberated me from the Windows experience. I had been wrestling with, maintaining, cleaning and generally nursing Windows since 3.0, so switching to Apple OSX in 2007 was a move that freed me from working for my computer. Now my computer works for me.

    I also have a white Macbook, also purchased in 2007, which rarely gets switched on, unless I go away from home. The main reason for this, is I am spoiled by the 24 inch screen environment, and I unfortunately do not have very good eyesight.

    Therefore my third Apple, a little white 16GB iPhone, is much more capable than it needs to be since trying to read a web page on it is torture for me, and unless it’s an emergency I don’t even try to do email on it.

    So as I sit with my three white Apples, I often consider the state of personal computing today. I think that folks with good eyesight who never edit a batch of 200 photos or edit a movie or, like me, work with a fifteen thousand row, twenty column spreadsheet all day, would be fine having a netbook instead of a home computer system, but, and it’s a big but (I prefer little butts), they would need to have readily available fast wireless Internet to make it bearable, and it could definitely not be a netbook that ran Windows. Using Windows to run a netbook is like towing a motorcycle with a water buffalo. Some of the Linux flavors are apparently very good on netbooks, but Windows itself needs more power than a netbook possesses simply to play politely with human beings. And I can definitely say from experience, no-one likes any computing device that seems to work slowly. That is worth repeating, no-one likes any computing device that seems to work slowly.

    Moving to the living room, we are still happy with our old 42 inch, room-heating, plasma TV that is on the wall with all the ugly wires hidden inside that wall and coming out of a socket lower down to fan out into a bunch of black room heaters.

    But what is really needed is some modern take on the consolidation of all the mess. The aforementioned room heaters are the sound amplifier, the DVR from the cable company, and two different DVD players, neither of which is currently connected because the cable company’s DVR does not like the HDMI cable so it had to borrow the composite cables. Honestly, the amount of vinyl-clad copper spaghetti and the basket of remote controls is a complete mess. Someone has to invent a simple connection and control system for home entertainment. I sometimes feel like I’m shoveling coal and filling a boiler on a steam engine just to watch TV. I have to manually change the aspect ratio from channel to channel and go through a multiple button sequence on more than one device to do anything more complicated than change the volume. No wonder so many people watch narrow pictures squashed into wide screens so everyone looks short and wide, it’s too much hassle to adjust anything.

    One piece of technology that is dear to my heart is my Keurig K-Cup coffee system. Anything else is so messy and uncivilized that I rank this device as one of the greatest technological feats since the rocket engine. Look elsewhere on the-vu for more about this charming lump of counter-top tech.

    And lastly a piece of technology that made something extremely huge into something tiny. My Roland Handsonic 10. This has replaced a van full of drums, cymbals, cases, microphones, stands, racks, and more, and it’s not much larger than a laptop computer. Oh yes, this too is white, exactly like my three Apples.

    Jeffrey the Barak is the publisher of the-vu

    Discovering Single-Serve Coffee, Keurig versus Tassimo

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    By Jeffrey the Barak

    sscompLet me start this tale with the bottom line, I prefer the Keurig. Okay, now that’s out of the way, I’ll take it from the top.

    I feel like I’m on vacation, making good coffee with a single push of a button, and letting the hard work of earlier times fade into memory.

    Until a month ago I was at the tail end of an obsession lasting for decades, the obsession of making espresso based drinks at home. Normally, I would be the only one drinking these concoctions, and yet, at the end I had an array of equipment worth $1,400 and still, I could produce a lousy drink if I wasn’t careful.

    So one day, while out of town, I drank a cup of regular joe, and it wasn’t half bad. In fact I liked it. Upon returning home and getting some fresh milk for my latte and going through the usual grinding, wiping, cleaning, tamping, more wiping, warming, wiping, pulling, wiping, steaming, wiping etc etc. a seed in my mind began to grow. Do I really need to spend all this time every day as a full time cleaner, just to drink a few cups of coffee?

    As I was cleaning the coffee ground stains out of my grout lines with bleach one day, I considered getting a coffee pot, or a French press, or a glass cone or some kind of system that would quickly and easily make a good cup of coffee, but I wanted more. I wanted to remove stale grounds and mess and even the challenge keeping milk fresh from the equation. Enter the concept of single serve coffee.

    Now years ago, during my espresso equipment escalation, I had a super automatic espresso machine, which in theory would make a drink with one button push. But behind that push was a lot of hidden cleaning work and I have to say the drinks were pretty awful. So it was with some skepticism that I first turned my attention to the Bosch Tassimo and the Keurig systems.

    Since the Tassimo offered the option of pseudo cappuccinos, lattes and espressos, I began with that system. I found it to be a brilliantly clever system, but the only drink varieties that were not pretty darned awful, were the brewed coffee varieties from venture partners Starbucks and Seattle’s Best. And even these were nothing to get excited about, despite their very high cost per cup. The milk drinks, lattes, macchiatos, cappuccinos etc., were practically undrinkable to me, mainly due to to the Ultra-Heat-Treated milk, as were the Gevalia brand T-Discs, which were almost as bad as instant coffee.

    Enter the Keurig B60. It had me at cup one. Paired with the Tully’s French and other bold blends, it was heaven in a mug right from the start. Similar as the systems may be in concept, the drink quality is very different. To put it simply, one system makes generally poor coffee and the other makes great coffee.

    Also, over the course of the experiment, I trained myself to enjoy dry-powder fat-free Coffee Mate creamer in place of milk, because milk is only fresh for a short while, and with the long shelf life of the T-Discs and K-Cups, the Coffee-Mate made a lot of sense. If I was to take a trip, not only would I miss my Keurig, I’d also be able to return home and immediately be able to have a fresh cup, without shopping for milk.

    As I said at the beginning, I chose the Keurig over the Tassimo. But nothing is perfect, so here are my four small criticisms of the Keurig B60.

    1. It is too tall to fit under my upper cabinets and be able to be opened to drop in a K-Cup. For this, I blame my kitchen design, not the Keurig.
    2. Compared to the Tassimo, it takes a couple of minutes to warm up and makes a sound like an electric tea kettle as it does so. The Tassimo was immediately ready as soon as the switch was flipped. However, I can program the Keurig to switch on shortly before I stumble downstairs in the morning, so I have a workaround for the slower morning start.
    3. The Keurig is also a bit noisier than the Tassimo, but still quieter than lots of things, including a grinder, a vibration pump espresso machine, a working steam wand etc . I would not call it a loud device by any standard.
    4. The water reservoir of the Keurig is a little tricky to hold onto with one hand when filling at the faucet, but then there is always a jug.

    Keurig is owned by Green Mountain Coffee, and the more I look at the way they do business, the more impressed I am. The only thing I am a little uncomfortable with, is the fact that they successfully sued Kraft, the maker of the Tassimo, for seventeen million dollars, for copyright infringement with regard to the similarity of the Tassimo T-Disc system to the Keurig K-Cup system. Apparently, the court thought Keurig were right about it, but then what came before both systems? The pod. Now what if Illy sues Keurig, saying the plastic K-Cup is similar to a paper pod? Having had a Tassimo and a Keurig, I think they are very different in how they do things and I am surprised that the law suit was successful. But I wasn’t in that courtroom so maybe there was evidence of direct infringement.

    Anyway, who cares about law when there’s good coffee around. And with the Keurig system, there is a lot of good coffee. Every K-Cup I have tried, is far better than even the best of the best T-Discs. And that is the bottom line. I think the Tassimo may even be a better machine than a Keurig in many ways, but if the drink is not fantastic, what’s the point? As long as you don’t use the silly travel mug button and bitterly over extract the dose of coffee in a K-Cup that was designed to make a smaller cup of coffee, you cannot go wrong with a Keurig.