I noticed a blind spot in my eye on Friday after a particularly violent coughing fit (viral infection following my trip to Hobart), and got in to see the optometrist yesterday at 12. It's a little bit of blood - similar to what I got about 8-9 years ago after falling off a stool while painting (don't ask, was stupid!) - but the proximity to my central vision and the freshness of the injury made him want to get it looked at ASAP. (Looking at an icon on a windows desktop at the usual distance, with my other eye covered, I can't see most of the icon underneath it.)

( ongoing tale (contains no medical treatment) (at all) (sigh) )

I'm unreasonably excited about Trove (aka the National Library's 'Single Business Discovery Service') - this is the cross-search platform which allows you to do a keyword search and get results from Picture Australia, historic  newspapers, People Australia (bios and identities - under development), Libraries Australia (books held throughout Australia), Australian research repositories and archives and other sources.

They're also going to have the Australian Women's Weekly digitised (next year?) up to about 1982, so that'll be a nice inclusion.

The particularly exciting bits are:
* user tagging - add tags so you can find the data again. If you set them as 'public' they are included in the keyword search index, which helps other researchers
* FRBRised displays - basically this library jargon means that results are nested so that the different editions or reprints of the one book (for eg) will call come up in a single record rather than filling up your results screen. After you click into that you can select the French edition, the audio book, etc and see where that's held in Australia.
* crowdsourcing - they're already letting people fix badly OCRed articles in the digitised newspapers, and they're also letting people loose on combining works together (for the FRBRising)
* set your home libraries - when signed in, it'll flag the results in your preferred libraries. By default it shows which results are available online

Still to come
* article search links through to the full text at your home library - this is under discussion, but could potentially save libraries a fortune if they get it implemented.
* user trails and lists - create a 'story' within the data

(Can you tell I've just been to a conference?)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/01/google-youtube-monetise-content

Google is apparently trying to get people/organisations to sign up for advertising revenue via Youtube vids. They've got a gizmo to recognise and tag copyright material, which the owners can then decide whether to embrace or demand to have removed. So, if you used someone's copyright music recording in the popular home video of your cat and the music creator isn't a psycho, they could sign up to monetise the opportunity.

If anyone's interested, my group Brindabella Chorus is running their famous Women's A Cappella Christmas Chorus for six weeks, starting Weds 4th November (next week). For $40 you're taught how to since 8-10 songs in four-part harmony - no music-reading required as learning tracks are supplied - and then the big group will be the warmup act at the War Memorial carols (but you don't have to!).

More info:
http://www.brindabellachorus.org.au/christmaschorus.htm

I've just been playing with an augmented reality app on the dread iphone - Wikitude. It drops geotagged Wikipedia links and user-generated points of interest over your camera view. I've been trying to add POIs in the Wikitude.me website, but it's rather slow at the moment (combo of our dodgy wifi router and a fair bit of site activity, I think). The actual process is pretty simple, and you can use your existing Google/Yahoo signon to get in. One problem is that the radius of "things of interest" is a bit big - the default view picks up things more than 100 km away (bit mad, much as I enjoyed seeing my home town come up!) - and the smallest radius is 1.27 km.

Cyclopedia is a sexier-looking app which just does Wikipedia, but I don't feel like giving the itunes store any more cash this week.

As discovered over here.

curufea managed to get the tele to pick up all the free to air channels on the weekend (we'd previously only been able to get the 2 ABC and SBSes as digital channels, not that it was really a bad thing). So this morning I was wildly channel surfing and came across Today doing one of their traditional no-research stories, this time something I'd read about on Snopes** a while ago - how 'shag bands' (gel bracelets) are 'sexualising our kids.' What really makes me think they didn't do any pre-research between hearing about the terrible trend and screaming "get an interview!" is that even Wikipedia lists it as an urban legend!

I sent them the URLs, just in case there's anyone over there who can read.

** (I've been subscribed to the Snopes RSS feed for a while.)

I'm determined to have a more useful kitchen garden this year (esp. compared to last year, when I just couldn't be bothered with it and let everything go!). So far, we're prepared two no-dig patches and planted taties in one and silverbeet at the back of the other (the front will be tomatoes when I'm sure it's warm enough), also stuck in a couple of rhubarb crowns and a punnet of zucchini seedlings next to the fence.

Last week we dug over the sad strawberry patch to clear out all the evil runner grass that took over. and replanted the remaining strawberries (plus some new friends) in the front of it. The rest is now full of digger's club 'magic bean' mix (five types of dryable beans - might be a little early but they seem OK so far) and rocket around the edges.

Still to plant (today's impulse buying): nasturtiums throughout the garden (I like to nibble on them), peas, sweet corn, punnet each of of basil and oakleaf lettuce.

I put in two ballerina apples about a year ago - one is flowering madly, but the other hasn't quite gotten there yet (could be a problem as they want cross-pollination). The little cherry tree is covered in swelling leaf buds but we're yet to see if it'll manage any fruit this year.

I've just discovered this website: http://www.yourmovies.com.au/  It's produced by NineMSN and has the usual amount of annoying information and non-news, but what you can do is set up which cinemas you're willing to go to, and then see an overview of what times are available across all or any of them for a particular film.  I was particularly impressed that they included the National Library and the Film and Sound Archive as venues - don't know if they're actually getting info from them though.

Leaving aside issues of equality, religion, semantics, etc, I'd like to propose that the global economy could be fixed by legalising same sex marriage. Why? Just think about it.

When people marry, they usually take out loans from the bank or dip into their savings.* This money is channeled into businesses throughout the economy:
jewellers, restaurants, bridal attire and suits, celebrants or houses of religion, car hire, photography, and other services. They take expensive holidays and circulate the money further afield.

The majority of people attending will buy new clothes for the day and spend up big at retail outlets on appliances, wrapping paper, hairdos... Interstate visitors will book hotel rooms and visit local attractions.

There must be thousands of gay couples in Australia keen to marry ASAP to express their feelings and their equality -> spending -> sudden big economic stimulation ... Suddenly, everyone is better off!


* We didn't spend that much on ours, but then everyone knows we're a bit abnormal.

At last, another (sorta) scifi musical! Apparently there's an album coming out at some stage, and this is just a tiny teaser bit.

I've recently hooked up with a distant relative of my father's, who's sent me death certificates for a bunch of people.

The most exciting of which was for my great great great grandfather James Gay, who died in November 1864 of "Inflammation of the stomach from drinking a quantity of cold water while in a heated state of body."  Admittedly he was gold mining somewhere around Sofala at the time, but it isn't the most butch way to perish.

My chorus was filmed singing for Stateline a few weeks ago and they apparently showed it last Friday, evidently having a slow news week. Quite a lot of filming for such a short slot, too! I'm briefly visible early on, looking somewhat stiff and disturbed.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/07/19/2629881.htm

http://www.wordnik.com/

(Yet another) new online collaborative thingy - in this case an encyclopedia of words. It shows usage from Project Gutenberg texts, blogs and twitter, related Flickr images, definitions from a couple of American dictionaries and Wordnik users, and wildly inaccurate and unsourced statistics on use (apparently this is being worked on). Also links to related words.

Think that swine flu is getting passé? Want to put something more interesting on your next sick leave application? My cubicle buddy at work discovered this interesting site which lists "archaic medical terms, diseases and causes of death." 

http://www.antiquusmorbus.com/Index.htm

We're cleaning out the junk room, which has hardly been touched since I moved in (except for more stuff being shovelled in there and lost forever). Very nearly done with that, after which we'll be peeling velcro dots off the walls, filling the holes they create in the plasterboard (except for the ones that came off cleanly last time we tried and left only impenetrable tacky glue on the wall), repainting and pulling up the last of the horrible carpet in there.

After all that, the room will be repopulated with things like the old wooden card catalogues I pilfered from work (they will be filled with craft supplies and lead miniatures) and the bookshelves that were previously in there piled with books instead of junk. We might even get the curtain rod put up, assuming all the bits are still somewhere.

I'm hoping this will be the key to reorganising the depressingly cluttered up house. Currently feel like I've dipped my hands into a bucket of invisible grime.

I've just been embracing another family tree building website, Geni.com. Ancestry.com gives you access to a lot of research material in return for big $$. This one is more of a social networking site, which lets you contact other people, merge yourself into their tree and it then shows you their relationship to you. For instance, I'm now "collaborating" with someone who is my "husband's third great aunt's husband's second great niece's husband's second great niece."

Curufea was making us a slacker dinner of tinned soup this evening, when he suddenly got accosted by all three cats, wailing desperately. This was awfully puzzling until we realised it was because they'd heard the tin opening and assumed they were going to get some more smelly fishy catfood (they mostly get biscuits but recently I got a couple of old tins from Mum - leftover from when they were trapping a vicious stray that was hanging around). There was a bit left in fridge, so they all got a post-dinner snack.

So we were slackly sitting up in bed, watching Time Team over a bowl of soup, when it became apparent that Ellie was sitting nicely on Curufea's lap and completely ignoring poor Thomas sitting next to her - this is practically paranormal because she's constantly hissing and slapping at the dumb boy. Then it came to me - Ellie believes her sense of smell more than her eyes (she slaps Ollie if he's been to the vet), and Thomas now smells pleasantly of fish guts rather than 'that weird cat who lives with us now.' 

[spoke too soon - he jumped down cautiously, probably as freaked out as we were, and got hissed at again when he returned. Of course, he was too far away to smell.]

We've heading to Hobart tomorrow morning - my chorus is competing, and curufea will be one of our official supporters (he's allowed to skive off to the shops or hide in the hotel room watching Foxtel for most of the convention, though). At least we'll be acclimatised to the weather!

I just got a semi-automated response from Velocity (the Virgin Blue frequent flier program). As well as including a slightly passive-aggressive comment about how I should have given my Velocity number to Virgin Atlantic when I booked in order to get my points in a timely manner (which I actually had done, though I didn't spell that out to them in my initial email), I also received the foulest spelling of my name ever: Kathileen.

I'm semi-used to being called Katherine by people who should know better (mainly workmates who couldn't cope with calling me Kath and then stopping - the main point of going by the shortened form is to stop the freaks who hear my name as "Kath with another random syllable" and to allow myself to choose my own abbreviation), and only slightly offended by people who like spelling things with a C, but I'll never deal with Kathy because that's what my step family called me growing up, and it usually involved some sort of inane condescension. (eg. You shouldn't behave like that, Kathy, you're a Libra.) Sticking an "i" in the middle of a perfectly valid name to convert it into a horrible hybrid of itself and Kathy deserves a jolly good thrashing.