marramgrass

This summer, my mate and best man Peet will be heading to Zambia to do constructiony-type things with Habitat for Humanity NI. This trip for a couple of weeks requires a fair old amount of fundraising, for which he and a few of the boys have put together a rather fetching four track EP of Britpop covers in an alt. country stylee. Really, that’s what the press release says!

You may find information, sample one of the tracks, and find out how to support this worthy cause by ordering your own copy, all over at the Zambian export band mini-website-thing.

Go. Spend money. Enjoy the lap steel.

Last night’s entertainment was a toss up between Be Cool and The Interpreter - I reckon we made the right decision :-)

Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman lead off in one of the more tense movies I’ve seen lately. The plot twists and turns all over the place (unfortunately not always in unexpected directions, but you can’t have everything), zipping around the threatened assassination of the unpopular president of a fictional African country.

Quite powerful in places, edge of the seat stuff, a whole lot of fun, it’s a handy reminder that both the leads are capable of acting up a storm - especially Sean Penn.

A topical take on the UN, also.

Go see.

(Nice trailer for Batman Begins, too.)

WooHoo!

(In my excitement, I negelcted to thank TNH for pointing it out.)

From The Scotsman:

ANTI-G8 protesters have turned down the chance to camp at Meadowbank Stadium this summer - after discovering they would have to share it with police.

…

But that prospect has been dismissed as “laughable” by the protesters, who have warned of “tented cities” springing up across the Capital unless suitable temporary campsites are agreed.

…

Willie Black, spokesman for G8 Alternatives, said: “This needs to be sorted out by the council and the police.

If they are serious about avoiding having people camping around the city then they need to come up with a sensible plan. The idea that we should share Meadowbank with the police is ridiculous. Can you imagine what would happen if things spark off?”

Looks to me more like an opportunity to demonstrate the peaceful intent of the protest. After all, unless you view the police as the ‘enemy’, why should a little bit of common ground be an issue? And anybody who tries to paint the police as the enemy is a fool who’s just trying to stir up trouble.

I’d rather be assured by the various protesters coming to this city that things won’t ’spark off’.

(And while I’m here, what’s with all the protesters demanding that the council sort out somewhere for them to sleep? I’ve read plenty in the papers that sounds like only-slightly-veiled threats. But I wouldn’t want to be a protester camping on the Meadows when Friends of the Meadows come a-calling :-)

I would like to attend the makepovertyhistory rally in July, and would quite like to go along with the secondary intention of photographing it.

But (and here I must question the local youth rep for one of the organisations involved, who rumour has it has been encouraging young people to attend) G8 protests have a significant recent history of going bad. Going really very bad, actually.

And I’m sorry to say that that makes me think twice about going along. Perhaps that demonstrates that I haven’t got the nerve to follow through on what I say. I don’t know.

But I won’t be encouraging the young people I work with to attend - quite the opposite.

I walked out the front door this afternoon, and whatever way the wind was blowing, I could smell the sea.

I’ve walked past this several times a week for what may be multiple years:

(Excuse camera-phone quality.)

Many of you who know me ‘in real life’ will know that I’m a sucker for little boxes full of transistors, the more LEDs the better; I think my heart perhaps pumps electrons around my body in preference to the more usual. I like my toys, I like them a lot.

But sometimes I wonder if there’s a better way (and here I am starting to feel like a geek-type Jerry Maguire)…

I have a drawer beside me that contains multiple PDAs. I went through several before I discovered the LOOX, and I stand by that discovery. That little box of tricks satisfied my every organisational need for longer than any gadget has a right to - I never felt the need to abandon it for a bigger, better, flashier model, and I maintain that, for me at least, it has the perfect mix of features well executed. But it’s still in the drawer.

These days, my diary and my address book are both made of dead trees rather than plastics and wires. Why? I don’t need to keep them charged, or synchronised. They won’t complain when I drop them. I don’t have to adjust my handwriting to use them. Cool. And - get this - I write in them with a real pen that I fill from an ink bottle. Yes, you can still buy such things!

And MS Outlook no longer runs my life. That feels good. And it’s also where this waffle started: since I am no longer bound to Outlook by my need for synchronisation, I decided a while back to try out the Thunderbird email client, and having spent some time with it I felt it was worthy of a quick plug.

It only does email (and Usenet), so if you use more of Outlook’s features then it won’t do the job, but for what it does, I’m very happy. The interface suits me better, and it has some nice features: the email tagging and grouping functions are handy, the preview pain is actually safe to use, email account structuring, grouping and sorting is easier to configure than Outlook’s, the newsreader is great, and I have found it to be much more stable than Outlook.

All is not rosy, however. When I first installed it, I tried to import everything from Outlook, and each time it just hung up on me. Eventually I gave up and started over in Thunderbird. This doesn’t bother me, as Outlook remains on my machine and I can still find old emails and things there. But it is potentially a problem for some. That said, that is the only problem I have had - not bad for 1.0!

Plus, it’s free. Give it a whirl, you might like it.

While I’m on the retro thing, you may be surprised to hear that all the photos from our holiday in Copenhagen were captured on film. Not a digital capture device in sight. Much more fun that way - like my ink pen, an all manual camera has a tactile appeal that my (still much used and enjoyed) flashy digital SLR cannot match. And I can use it without batteries if I need to.