Relatively Ignorant Blog

This is my ‘me too’ blog post with a photo of tonight’s total lunar eclipse.

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Who is Silvia? What is she,
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.

Actually she is a coffee machine. About a month ago I bought a near-new Rancilio Silvia to replace my five-year-old Gaggia Carezza. Amongst coffee snobs the Silvia is considered the best quality domestic machine.

My Silvia has a secret. She is modded with an electronic temperature control that keeps the water temperature for brewing within 1°F of the set temperature. The normal thermostat in these machines typically only controls temperature to within 5–10°F. Some details are here.

I had a free coffee-making lesson with her at Di Bella Coffee and that has really improved my skills as a barista. Is it the new machine or my new technique that has resulted in my making better coffee now?

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I watched some of the Australia vs. Paraguay match on TV last night. In every international soccer match I can remember watching (including the World Cup) the name of the host city is displayed in large letters in the centre of the ground-level advertising opposite the main TV camera. That way you can quickly tell where the match was played: a useful convention.

But not in Brisbane. The words on the gap in the advertising were too small be read in the usual TV long shot. Only when the players were in front of it, a close-up enabled the text to be read: Get Active in Queensland.

What the?

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Sometimes you get surprised by good service. We were last week when we discovered our fridge was warming up (the ice cream was more cream than ice).

Louise rang Fisher & Paykel on Monday and a serviceman came on Tuesday. He told us that the fridge was losing gas and that it need to go back to the service centre to have the leak fixed. Oh dear.

Then the good news. This fridge is still within its five-year warranty period (by three months) and will be fixed by F&P without charge to us. Also, they will lend us a fridge while ours is being fixed. On Wednesday a replacement (same model) was wheeled in and ours taken away to be fixed.

Wow. That is good service.

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Finally I have done a very small amount to relieve the boring, out-of-the-box look of this blog by replacing the default WordPress theme with a different one.

I am tweaking it a bit: I have changed to feed link from RSS (old hat!) to Atom (new, fancy and valid) and removed a repeated date field.

Some day I might actually have something original…

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I decided to get an influenza vaccination for the first time this year. I haven’t bothered in the past but decided it was probably time to reduce the risk of nasty illness.

I last had influenza in 1999 and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I don’t mean ‘the flu’ as in a bad cold – I mean being unable to get out of bed for a week or three. The pneumonia I contracted immediately after was an experience I don’t want to repeat.

My doctor told me at the time that it is common for people to be badly affected by flu about every seven years. So, seven years later, I figure it is time to improve my chances, and on Monday I got a shot of Fluvax®. It contains dead viruses from recent strains (three I think) so it offers some protection, although not against any new strains.

There is usually some kind of reaction. On Tuesday my right arm started aching (it was the left arm that took the needle). And my left knee, and … typical flu symptoms. A day later I felt better, so it looks like my reaction to the vaccine was minor.

There’s no guarantee, but I hope to escape the seven-year bitch.

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It used to be that primary selection criteria for on-air jobs in broadcasting were beauty of voice and quality of vocal production. That has not been so for quite some time and it’s getting worse.

There are some beautiful voices on air in Australia. John Laws is probably the most famous (and whatever you think of his opinions, the voice is magnificent). But there are some really bad ones that I have heard, especially on TV.

These TV ‘personalities’ are probably chosen on their looks, such as Sandra Sully. Her voice is quite devoid of beauty, although its huskiness might be considered sexy by some people. But her technique is horrible: she seems to be trying to speak at a low pitch to sound more serious (she is a newsreader) and her intonation is a poorly modulated monotone. Johanna Griggs’s intonation is just as unmusical.

Some people sound like they are damaging their voices. Every time I watch Spicks and Specks I wince at the sound of Myf Warhurst lacerating her larynx whenever she speaks. At least she doesn’t get asked to sing! Monica Trapaga sounds similar, and she did sing a lot on Playschool (and you could hear her start to lose her voice, not surprisingly).

Some voices are just plain ugly. Rob Palmer, who works on Better Homes and Gardens TV show, makes a hideous, rasping noise when he speaks (perhaps in imitation of some of his carpentry tools).

Doesn’t anyone else hear how bad these people sound?

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Reading Jakob Nielsen’s top ten mistakes by webloggers, it’s clear I am a failure as a blogger, on most counts.

• I’m too lazy to write a biographical page (mistake #1). My readers (both of them!) know me already.
• Nor have I a photo (#2). Ditto.
• I try to invent slightly curious titles, with a whiff of pun about them (#3).
• My blog motions are quite irregular (#7).
• And I spread them thinly (#8).
• Doh! How could I keep forgetting that I’m writing for my future boss(es) (#9).

I do OK on the other points, so I get 4 out of 10.

What is my blog about? I have some whimsical notion of it as a multi-faceted portrait of myself that reveals itself (and thus me) piece by piece.

Sorry to disappoint you, Jakob.

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The Piratopedia (formerly, and still commonly known as, Uncyclopedia) is a good laugh with its Onionian style of deliberate misinformation.

I hope they can keep up the quality and wonder if they will be able to sustain adequate quality control at least half as well as Wikipedia does. I fear that the temptation to hijack pages will to be too great for some people and that decent, witty folk will not be able to keep up (for example, see the entry on George W. Bush).

(The site is currently slow because it has been Slashdotted. That’s how I found it.)

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I have just discovered YouTube, that hosts people’s videos as Flickr hosts still photos.

I suspect that many people will post personal but boring videos. However, some may use YouTube as a medium to show off clever stuff, like Balancing Point.

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