The Starrenburg’s Website

I just love these things… but I hear Bill Gates hates them - surprise, surprise! There were three new ads added to the Apple website ‘Get a Mac’ page today : ‘Choose a Vista’, ‘Genius’ and ‘Party is Over’.

‘Choose a Vista’ highlights the fiasco facing people trying to choose which version of Vista to upgrade to. Many people are making the best decision and saying “none of them!”

One of the ads I love the most however is an earlier one ‘Computer Cart’. This one is so painfully true, yet funny, that I had to stop watching it before I did myself an injury. Look for the “fatal error” part. Click on the thumbnails to watch the ads in HD in a new window.

Enjoy!

Along with the move to the Mac I decided to update the WordPress theme for my site. I did some browsing and found this very bold and clean theme called “Dark Theme“.

The original design is from Bartleme Design in Austria, with CSS and coding for WordPress done by iLEMONed in China - thanks guys!

Coincidently, Wolfgang is a Mac user. I knew there had to be a reason why the theme particularly looks good on the Mac.

I’ve done a small number of changes to the layout of the design, most particularly to make the right sidebar one column instead of two to give more room to the body of the post. Also I made another template which removes the sidebar and the bottom (but not the footer) to make a straight page design which can be used as a ‘non blog’ web page.

Anyone who knows anything about America knows that one of the foundational aspects of the country is advertising - in other words selling. I mean… this is the country that invented SPAM after all. Advertising in America is almost more sacrosanct than the free press!

So it is not surprising that the US media (the usual suspects like CNN et. al.) leapt onto the yet latest sad incident of an American ‘exercising his rights’ via his US constitutional amendment of choice resulting in the Virginia Tech tragedy. Shame about the dead people’s rights, but let’s not get too distracted about that inconvenient piece of truth.

Of course it’s not just the ‘usual suspects’ who licked their lips watching their ratings (sales) go through the roof, every ‘respectable businessman’ out to earn a buck no doubt fell over themselves trying to ‘hitch their wagon’ to this rising star. I mean, c’mon, what a golden opportunity, you have an incident on everyone’s lips, what fantastic advertising!

While CNN decked out their special report on Virginia Tech in a ‘respectful’ black colour (while, no doubt, watching their website hit counter tick over nicely thank you), other less salubrious sellers went for the soft underbelly of the American consumer and dreamt up various SPAMs and scams exploiting to the full the notoriety surrounding Virginia Tech. All in the name of ‘respectable’ business (increased sales) - naturally.

And, also naturally, no story about the situation about guns in America is complete without a comment about that shining beacon of American freedoms, yes… the NRA (National Rifle Association). Not content in their holy quest to put a submachine gun into every home in America (hey I have to protect myself against you don’t I), shortly after the obscenity of Virginia Tech they made the public statement that they want to ensure that every terrorist in America can “exercise their god given second amendment rights - goddammit!” (UPDATE: CNN pulled this page, basically it was a news article which reported that the NRA said that no-one in America should be denied their right to buy guns (killing machines) including potential terrorists. Love that word “potential”, it’s like saying someone is only a “little bit pregnant”).

However I have to leave my final observation as this - for all the hand-wringing in America about this latest tragic incident nothing has changed. They’re all just waiting for the next advertising opportunity…

After many years using Microsoft Windows, I came to the conclusion that I had looked through too many ‘windows’ when I saw the latest ‘vista’ on offer from Microsoft.

It was… a vista too far.

I finally decided to go with the the best graphical user interface, on top of the best operating system (Unix/Linux) = Mac OS X, and buy a Mac!

I have now moved the whole family over to Macintoshes - and we haven’t looked back!

p.s. apologies to Cornelius Ryan (look at the title of the post), I’m sure he didn’t use Windows either.

Well it’s here! My site’s all new, fully designed for WordPress 1.5, theme - “The Low Sky”.

I had wanted for a while to update my blog to a native WordPress 1.5 theme, and had looked at all of the themes submitted to the recent theme competition on Alex King’s blog. But, to be honest, none of them had really caught my attention. Too many similar variations on a “theme”, and too little real estate for displaying content.

I looked at my then current theme (a converted 1.2 template) which actually had only been in use for a short time (from when I had started using WordPress) and thought - well I basically liked the main layout of the theme but wanted to have it as a native 1.5 theme. What to do - in the end I decided if there was none available which I could customise, then I would get a blog designer to develop one with me.

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If you live in Europe and drive a car eventually, unless you have a) a photographic memory and/or b) two heads so you can look at two things at once (a map and the road ahead), you are going to have that awful experience of saying “where the heck are we”. And for those of you old enough to remember the old sitcom comedy F-Troop you’ll wish, like the fictional “we’re the Hekawi” Indians in the show, that you had a GPS navigation system. Well… they didn’t wish they had one… GPS hadn’t even been invented in 1967 let alone 1867, but they sure as heck could have used one.

Well fast forward to 2005, and I have a GPS navigation system in my car, and I love it - it’s the best marriage saver since… well anything. Better than having your own private, on-tap, marriage counsellor sitting in the car with you!

Now while the technology of GPS would have been new to the (native American) Indians, the “forked tongue” double-talk I am experiencing coming out of the supplier of the GPS map navigation software needed for the system would, I believe, be very familiar to them. I am getting the impression that the supplier’s customer service belongs back in the 1860’s.

Here’s the problem. A GPS system obviously needs updated GPS map navigation software - roads are changing all the time and you don’t want to do something like following directions from a GPS system which is using old maps, and drive off the end of an unfinished flyover, or into the sea. So you need to obtain (at some regular interval) updated CDs of navigation maps for your GPS system. Uh oh… enter stage left - TeleAtlas one of the world’s major GPS map navigation suppliers.

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