Life is grand

Bought a 32 inch Sony HDTV (Bravia 32v2500) today, a bit of an upgrade over our current no-name brand 20 inch telly. First impressions are a mixture of stunned happiness and understandable disappointment. Disappointment not directed at the new telly but through realising just how poor the quality of most broadcast TV is. Right now BBC 1, RTE, Channel 4 etc. are coming through a standard terrestrial aerial feed and all the problems of it one doesn’t notice on standard TVs is made painfully obvious. It will improve a bit when I get the Sky feed coming in but I can see why so many people get HDTVs and then shortly after do exactly what they said they wouldn’t do; get Sky HD or find other broadcast HD channels.

Highlights so far have been March of the Penguins and The West Wing both from standard DVDs. The Sony DVD player I bought with the telly does upscaling and it does a reasonable job of it. You can see it isn’t HD but it is still a good step up from DVD on a standard telly.

Actually the real highlight has been using a DVI to HDMI connector from my Mac Book Pro. The Mappedup.com app looks fantastic on the big screen and I must have spent 30 minutes going through the Mac OS X screensavers again. Flurry looks particularly amazing. The only problem with the connector is sound stays on the laptop and is not transferred to the TV. Not sure if I need to change a setting or if DVI isn’t meant for sound in which case it won’t get passed onto HDMI.

Apart from the great resolution what really blows my mind is the colour. This Sony has a “live colour engine” or some such malarky. Or I thought it was marketing BS until I saw it at home. It really does an amazing job of revving up normal content. March of the Penguins, photographs I’ve taken in the past and even normal broadcast telly is given a lovely colour boost that is not overdone.

I still have a lot to try with the new telly, including a proper HD source like an Xbox 360 or PS3. So far I am more than happy though and most importantly the girlfriend is too.

A widely acclaimed computer game, and much sought after Christmas present for children, featuring gun toting, chain smoking, oft swearing space marines hell bent on the extermination of an alien race is being pulled from shelves for being released with a hidden scene featuring the shocking footage of a pair of naked buttocks. That Microsoft can let such content slip through their quality control and into the hands of my future children is horrific.

I hope the censorship board get their priorities straight again and focus on violence as they used to. When I buy a violent video game like Halo 2 I want my children killing things, not looking at naked buttocks!

Going through a bunch of CVs/resumes today and I thought I’d write down a few thoughts in general. Consider this some advice for when you submit your CV.

1. Put your name in the filename of your CV. Don’t attach it as “CV.doc” as we get hundreds of CVs and have to rename them.
2. If you are 20 years old, just out of college and haven’t had a job yet don’t write down that you are “very experienced” in anything except possibly drinking and carousing. Doing projects at home, even public open source ones, is a different experience to working in an office.
3. Make your CV relevant to the job you are applying for. Show me you made some effort and that you aren’t spamming fifty positions with the same CV. You should want to work where you apply, not just be hoping for something to hit.
4. I like a bit of humour but not everyone is going to appreciate it so be careful. And don’t slag off anybody, especially not your past clients.
5. Don’t waste the first page of your CV with just a heading and your name, we don’t like carrying around and flipping through extra paper.
6. Your address, date of birth, gender, nationality and physical characteristics are of the least importance, put them at the end of the CV if at all.
7. Unless the position is sales or deliveries I really don’t need to know you have a full driving license.
8. I prefer CVs in PDF but, sadly, you are probably safer going for Word documents.
9. I got a one page CV for a multimedia position today in PDF laid out with great typography and just the relevant information. Best CV I have seen in ages.
10. If you say you are into web-standards, clean design etc. then make sure your personal site reflects this. If I see Dreamweaver code in there I am going to assume you haven’t got much of a clue.
11. Please get acronyms and abbreviations right. It is XHTML, not Xhtml and it is .NET not .Net. Getting these right shows an attention to detail.
12. Spell check, grammar check. Get someone else to read your CV.

Reading articles like this about domain exploiters makes me sick. It is especially sad how the journalist has woven in a story of Ham’s faith. The section on Cameroon (.cm) is worrying too. That business men from 1st world countries are still exploiting the wealth of 3rd world countries. The same sins revisited in digital form.

With Google buying FeedBurner more than a few people are having cadenzas over Google’s growing understanding of your digital life.

Fair enough, you have a right to worry yourself sick (I just hope my taxes aren’t paying for your ulcer treatments.)

All I can say is that if you worry about this, produce a feed and want FeedBurner features then just redirect. It is dead easy if you run a WordPress powered blog as you can use the FeedBurner plugin FeedSmith.

If you don’t use WordPress then use a 301 redirect. Create a FeedBurner feed, link it to a non-published feed off of your site. Then using your web-server redirect hits on your site’s published feed to the FeedBurner feed.

e.g. I have a FeedBurner feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/paulmwatson/journal, that siphons a hidden feed on my domain. You on the other hand subscribe to http://paulmwatson.com/journal/feed. Not to the FeedBurner URL. Technically FeedBurner is sending you the data for http://paulmwatson.com/journal/feed but I maintain control of the subscription URL.

Using this you can at any point stop using FeedBurner but your subscribers won’t have to change a thing. They probably won’t even notice.

So when Google turn evil you won’t have to worry much and you can swap to using their replacement, whomever that may be.

Second movie I’ve seen in the last week were a collection of rare books was paraded about. I must admit that as much as I love reading I have very little desire to own rare, fragile and expensive books. Much better to be able to bend a book on its spine to find just that perfect reading angle. Much better to not worry about a splash of tea on a page or take a book to a beach. Floor to ceiling shelves are fantastic when filled not by a wall of brown and red leather but by a splash of varying heights, colours, thicknesses and conditions. From Penguin to Harper Collins to Nebula, all those different, lovely spines.

In my head the value of rare books is in maintaining original text. For translations, for staying true what the author first wrote down or illustrated. Being a techno geek though I think digitizing the lot is a better way. If a rare book turns to dust, is lost or damaged then having a digital copy, millions of digital copies, is far better.

After all it is the words not the ink and paper that is of value.

Nerd alert.

I thought I’d give Millifeed a run in the Firefox 3 build that has native Mac OS X control support. Mostly it rendered fine but the native control bit went a bit haywire as you can see below with the file control:

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

(And please don’t mention the 660 HTML warnings. Believe me, I know. That is what you get for allowing RSS content into your HTML.)

As previously mentioned Google Anayltics refreshed and they’ve now rolled out the new look to everyone.

As you can see from the above, my blog is wildly popular. Heh.

So far I am liking the changes. The statistics are far easier and clearer to read and understand. One particularly nice change is the following shot:

It shows the stream of visitors to a specific page over a course of time.

And so, in conclusion, the P5000 is a product that - like so many we look at - has an achilles heel that we feel is important enough to reduce its rating, because it has a serious effect on the overall usability of an otherwise excellent camera.

- DPReview of the Nikon Coolpix P5000.

The Nikon Coolpix P5000 sounds like exactly what I have been looking for. I have a Canon EOS 20D which is fantastic but hardly portable. For a long while now I’ve been wanting a pocketable camera that produces good results, has manual controls and is fast to use. The P5000 ticks every one of those boxes except the fast to use one.

Apparently it can take up to two seconds to focus.

I don’t sit still that long, never mind my future kids.

I cannot justify it. Every situation that involves the words “pocketable”, “chance”, “unplanned” etc. require a reasonable focus speed. Party photos, kid photos, out-the-window-of-a-car photos, birthday and Christmas photos, Sunday walk photos. You don’t want to be yelling to your girlfriend “Don’t move for 2 seconds hun, it’s focusing!” You pay models good money to stand still for photographs, you don’t get your kids or wife to stand still.

DPReview does their best to justify it and say it is usable when doing landscape photography. But folks, you’d have your DSLR when you are doing your landscape photos. Not a pocket camera.

Argh! I am frustrated. Nikon, P5001 please with fast focus. Leave everything else alone.

Professional journalists have another weapon in their armory of arguments against blogs with Engadget’s rash blogging of an email from Apple stating that Leopard (next version of Mac OS X) and the iPhone would be delayed. It turned out to be fake but damage was done to Apple’s stock ($4billion wiped out at the depths, recovering to a $1billion loss by the end of trading.)

I don’t particularly like the culture of “Post it now, ask forgiveness later” of some blog sites. I’d want Engadget to take stock of its mistake and work on preventing it in the future but I wouldn’t want this to be the start of a legal clamping down on what are private websites on the internet.

What should happen is Engadget suffers their mistake through reduced readership as their readers loose some faith in them and go elsewhere. I don’t see that happening yet but a few more mistakes like this could cripple a blog like Engadget.

Funny how the same rules that apply to professionals is coming around to apply to us “amateurs” as our popularity increases. Accountability, responsibility, thoughtfulness, these are as important to blogs as they are to mainstream media. It is partly why I don’t subscribe to Engadget, I cannot count on it for the really important things. I listen to respected work colleagues, a few professional journalists and individual bloggers for that.