So have you ever felt like a total muppet stood up in front of an audience giving a presentation? Maybe so, but it seems that we should be taking inspiration from the Muppets – or at least from Sesame Street – when giving a presentation. Check out this post from the continually excellent Coding Horror blog.
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Another Geocaching Convert?
You know those moments when someone thinks they’re telling you about some really great secret, but you, and a load of other people already know? Various of us at St James had that experience this morning listening to Rev Richard’s sermon.
On his day off, he and Penny his wife had headed off to the Bramshill Plantation, a large area of Forestry Commission land just over the border into Hampshire on the other side of Eversley. They went walking off into the forest, Rev Richard armed with a map and compass, and managed to get them thoroughly lost.
Luckily for them, they met someone else walking through the forest, and asked him if he knew where they were, he pulled out a handheld GPS unit – something Rev Richard hadn’t seen – and read off the co-ordinates. They then got talking about precisely why this man was wandering around the forest, and he said he was a Geocacher, and that he’d just done one of the caches that are hidden in the plantation.
At this point in telling the story, Rev Richard asked whether anybody knew about Geocaching, and I guess was slightly surprised at the people who knew. The reason of course that a lot of people around the Church know becomes clear when you watch our Geocaching video in which our segment is filmed around St James. Various people know about the game having seen us on the programme when it was originally shown, and various others, generally those involved with grounds maintenance know about the game having inadvertently found the cache – indeed the cache has moved twice following occasions when the regular maintenance rendered the previous location unsuitable. The interesting thing is that despite having been here several years, nobody had actually told Rev Richard about the cache. Not surprising really as it’s not usually the kind of thing that comes up in conversation…
Anyway, Rev Richard carried on, telling how the Geocacher had taken him back to the cache he had just found, and the story was used as an analogy – searching for treasure with the Christian search for ‘treasure’.
After the service I told Richard quite how close he’s been to a geocache (our Queens Oak cache mentioned in the film) for the past few years, indeed the fact he’s walked past it every day. I also mentioned myself and Beth’s involvement, including us being one of the seven founder teams behind the Geocaching Association of Great Britain, and have since sent him the link to the video. I’ve also taken the opportunity to upload some of the older Geocaching snapshots I have on iPhoto – these ones are from back in 2003, including some shots of the preserved planes a Lasham Aerodrome which figure as clues in a cache, and another church with a cache close by, the almost totally unaltered St Swithun’s Nately Scures, which gives you an idea of what St James must once have looked like before the subsequent generations started knocking through bigger windows and adding bits.
So I guess the question is, has Rev Richard now got the Geocaching bug?
Microsoft Word Fast Saves
This morning I had a plea for help with the computer in our Church Office. Our Parish Administrator had tried four times to send a Microsoft Word document to my fellow Churchwarden, and every time it had come back with a weird failure message. Taking a look I tried resending the message, and after about five minutes of disk thrashing and network traffic it again produced the error message, saying that the upstream mail server had broken the connection.
What was slightly more weird was that other messages were being sent and received without problem, so I took a look at what was actually being sent. On the surface it seemed relatively innocuous – a little bit of an accompanying message, along with a four page word document. The document included a couple of pictures and some clip art, but nothing out of the ordinary. Then I looked at the size of the file – 16MB!
A quick dig around the options on the install of Microsoft Word found the problem – ‘Allow Fast Saves’ was turned on.
A bit of explanation, Fast Saves is a feature in Word that does exactly what it says on the tin – makes saving your document faster. The way it does this is pretty simple, rather than recreating your entire document file from scratch, it instead attaches a new block to the end of the file detailing the changes you have made since the last save. If you’ve got a very big document, and only make small changes it’s quite a neat little trick, however conversely if you have a relatively small document that changes a lot, the file can get significantly bigger, and here’s the rub – our Parish Administrator was trying to send a document that goes out monthly, and the way she does it is by taking the document from last month, and changing it – and this month she’d done quite a lot of inserting and removing graphics, all of which were embedded in the document. As a result, when I turned off the ‘Allow Fast Saves’ option the file size plummeted from 16MB to a paltry 73k – over a 99% reduction in the size of the file!
So, if you’re not writing vast multi-page documents in Microsoft Word – and really most people don’t – it’s worth going into your Options panel, looking under the Save options, and if ‘Allow Fast Saves’ is checked, turning it off.
One other thing to consider about what Fast Saves does too, especially if you’re dealing in company confidential data, nothing you delete from a document is every really deleted if it is turned on, it’s all still sitting there in the old data that sits around in the document, and can quite easily be retrieved…
F50fd Low Light Picture – Attempt Two
Okay, after the somewhat disappointing results with the Natural Light mode, Sophie was in almost the same spot with similar conditions today, so I tried taking another couple of pictures in the basic automatic mode, but locking the flash off and limiting the maximum ISO to 400 – something you can’t do in the natural light mode.
First off – Sophie isn’t in quite the same spot as before. She is demonstrating the universal truth, in this house at least, which is that if you leave some item of clothing – especially if it is black – lying around, it will almost inevitably get slept on…
Anyway, first thing to note is that there is a lot less noise – there is still some, but it’s not nearly as noticeable as in the previous shot. Having said that, the two pictures from today, especially the second one are significantly darker – although I’d say that the pictures more accurately reflect the light levels than the shot yesterday which I thought was too light. These two get the light and dark more effectively. Still not much clarity when you zoom right in, but definitely better pictures than yesterday.
Children of Men
One of the movies that has been on my ‘must watch’ list for a while, and that we finally got around to watching tonight, has been Children of Men, the critically acclaimed film released in late 2006, set in a dystopian Britain in 2027, in a world where a child has not been born in over two decades, and society is on the verge of collapse.
The film is loosely based on the similarly named 1992 novel The Children of Men by P.D.James. Although the basic premise, of a dystopian Britain is retained, and the reason for the collapse – mass infertility leading to a loss of hope – are retained, along with some of the characters, there are significant differences in terms of plot and some of the details.
Perhaps the most major difference, and also an indication of the way in which science fiction is often used to comment on contemporary issues, is in the whole illegal immigrant sub-plot. In the book, young immigrants are lured into the country and exploited, in the film however immigrants are rounded up, kept in cages and then taken to ‘refugee’ camps. The treatment of the immigrants, and the scenes in the refugee camps have very clear references to the Holocaust, and also more contemporary issues such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo – the use of the the name Homeland Security for the government department responsible also makes this very clear. The change in the plot by having one of the illegal immigrants be the saviour, the mother of the first baby to be born, and trying to leave the xenophobic Britain behind, compared to the book where the baby is brought to the leaders of the country, is stark in it’s message also.
To some extent some knowledge of the book is useful for understanding parts of the film, as director Alfonso Cuarón dislikes back-story and exposition in movies – as a result there is almost a throwaway reference to his cousin before we see Theo, the main character of the story in the back of a limousine heading towards the luxurious other world in which his cousin resides.
Unlike some modern films, the movie also retains many of the Christian undertones of the book – P.D.James describes the book as a Christian fable, indeed the title is taken from a verse in Psalm 90, which in the King James reads “Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.â€? In the movie there are religious groups attributing the mass infertility to the damnation of God on the world and the terrorist group fighting for the rights of the immigrants are called the Fishes. Indeed the whole story was described as a modern day Nativity Story by some critics. The Christian elements even extend to the soundtrack, with John Tavener being commissioned to provide some of the music for the movie.
In terms of look, this was very much a near future vision, with the majority of the world being much like our own, but after twenty years of decay. The only exception is the brief glimpse of the other world that Theo’s cousin inhabits, behind the security gates. Although there are elements of technological advance, this is the only obvious point.
The style of the images is also very raw, with an almost documentary look at times. This comes in part through the lengthy single-shot sequences where the camera is moving around within the action, ducking and weaving along with the characters. A grainy and dark look permeates the whole film, with it clearly being Britain in the winter, with bare trees and grey leaden skies.
There is a good selection of acting talent in the movie too, with Clive Owen the lynchpin of the whole film in the main role of Theo. Also appearing is Julianne Moore as Theo’s former wife, and Michael Caine looking very much like an old John Lennon as Theo’s friend.
The movie appeared in many top ten lists of the films for 2006, and also was nominated for, and received a number of awards, especially for the writing, all well deserved. Certainly as movies depicting a dystopian future go, and those depicting believable one at that, this is certainly up there with the best.