I received this today:
Hello,
It’s been more than 30 days since your initial photo submission to Shutterstock. If you would like, we invite you to submit your recent photo work for another review.
Regards,
Shutterstock Support
I have not decided if I want to try again.
I loved this small informal French restaurant when I lived in Singapore. It’s in a most unlikely place on the Serangoon Road in Little India. I still receive their newsletter by email – one of the few I bother with.
This screenshot is from their web site: http://www.thefrenchstall.com.sg/. Somebody does some whimsical Flash authoring in Singapore.
I don’t know any reasonably priced, non-pretentious French restaurants in Bangkok. The only one I knew, La Boulange on Soi Convent, closed and now it’s a 24-hour Italian place.
The owners of The French Stall have also recently opened an Italian restaurant. What is it about Italian food that makes it so popular and thus a good business?
What Should Colleges Teach? – Stanley Fish Blog – NYTimes.com.
A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?
I love to write and I wish I could make money on it.
I often cringe at the state of the Thai education system where still great stress is placed on rote memorization and not on critical thinking, creativity and especially not English writing.
It’s sad that the same is true about writing in the USA, and for what appears to be ideological rather than practical reasons.
I was fortunate that I was educated in the days when writing was considered an important skill. It served me well when I worked for HP – I invariably took the notes from meetings. “He who wields the pen has the power.”
This is pretty lame:
Another disk operation is in progress. Please wait until the previous disk operation ends and retry.
This is the 21st Century Adobe! Companies mastered concurrent disk access decades ago. Why can’t you?
Note this only comes up some of the time. In this case I wanted to move a picture to another directory while Lightroom was importing a batch from a CF card. Of course Lightroom does multiple disk operations all the time. I don’t know why this is an exception.
I bet if I asked they’ll blame Windows and say it doesn’t happen on a Mac!
Disappointing Bangkok Sunset
Originally uploaded by Ian Fuller
Yesterday we had a wonderful sunset. Today, despite the weather looking superficially the same to my untrained eye, it was a non-event.
i set my camera up to take photos at 5 minute intervals but it was not photogenic. See how quickly the sun goes down in the tropics.
Does anyone know what makes a great sunset?
Neither!
I actually bought a magazine today. The old sort – on paper. I enjoyed reading it over lunch. It’s the Asia-Pacific Edition of Fortune Magazine: 220 Baht in 7-11.
It was quite a novelty to read something on paper: very different from all the reading on screen I normally do. I should do it more often.
The cover story caught my eye: the competition between the Blackberry and the iPhone. I am happy to see that RIM is working hard to attract applications to the Blackberry. I think that’ll be the secret that enables them to be successful.
But I hope we are in the “pre-PC” era of smartphones. Every one of them has a proprietary design and software environment. I hope that an open source platform like Google Android will do for the market what IBM and Microsoft did for what was then called the micro-computer. But without the Microsoft-Intel lock in. Of course Apple will never go that way, but the rest of the industry might given time.
The article included a mock “quiz” called “Are you Blackberry or iPhone?”.
I read it and to my dismay, I’m neither! I think Fortune assumes for their business audience that readers are familiar with them. But I have never used either. They are both available in Thailand. I saw someone using a Blackberry on the train a couple of days ago – typing for all she was worth with her thumbs. And the iPhone is available exclusively through True Move.
I am sure it is a business opportunity to become a developer for one or both. You can develop applications anywhere in the world and submit them to the manufacturer’s app store. I think many apps are developed by individuals and small companies.
Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People – NYTimes.com.
Wikipedia Logo
This is a tough one. If everybody had good intentions then it would not be necessary. Unfortunately in the real world that is not true. Malicious or careless editing can do immense harm.
But isn’t it the thin end of a wedge? What about recently dead people like Michael Jackson? Don’t malicious edits of his entry cause great pain to his family and friends? I can see how it was a hard decision to reach and reasonable people can differ on the right answer. I would not like to be in the position of deciding a policy like this.
I have been a passive consumer of Wikipedia content for years but I have never contributed. I have looked at it but it seems very complex. It would take a major investment of time to do it well and I don’t know if I have any special expertise.
But I did make myself a Wikipedia account last night. I am “bkkphotographer”. My user page is here and my user talk page is here.
Lightroom 32% CPU Usage
I was not doing anything with Lightroom but I noted it was using around 30% of the CPU for a long period. Does it have some maintenance functions it likes to do with it is loaded but not in use? It stopped when I captured this screenshot of Windows Task Manager and imported it.
I mistrust software that seems to have a life of its own.I understand if I invoke an operation that it wil get busy. But when it is sitting in the background and suddenly gets all busy I get curious.
It could put up a message in the area at the top-left of the display where is shows background tasks like imports: “Database maintenance” or whatever.
I don’t want it to keep on showing me dialog boxes but I’d like a way to find out what it is up to and why it is to my benefit.
Space Invader on Silom Road, Bangkok
Originally uploaded by Ian Fuller
Most of the time I do not look up and see my Bangkok surroundings above eye level. My excuse is that the pavement / sidewalk is so uneven that safety is my number one priority.
But here I glimpsed a tiled image of a space invader on an old building in Silom. I had no idea what it was but a Flickr friend pointed me at http://www.space-invaders.com/.
It looks like the artist visited Bangkok in 2005. This may be one of the few of his works that remain. He posted seven pictures on his site but it implied that he created 50 little tiled images. This one is not amongst them.
Have you seen more Space Invaders in Bangkok?
I am amused that many of the top searches on this blog as reported by WordPress are about problems with ACDSee. Three of the top five searches that ended up on this blog are about the software:
I think that shows there are a lot of users out there with problems. As I said before, I truly wanted to love ACDSee – but it was too unreliable. They lost me as a customer and I fear they’re losing many more. Sad.
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