What I Learnt Today

31 year old pom Derek Paravicini is profoundly abled.

Sure, he can’t do up buttons on his shirt, doesn’t know how old he is, and has been blind since birth.

But he can play the piano beautifully – and he can play any song he has ever heard, in any key, in any style.

Derek took up the piano aged 3, and has been performing internationally since he was very young.

CBS 60 minutes had this story on his immense musicality.

Hat tip to Dave for the link.

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Apparently there has been some weather in Sydney this week.

The BBC were impressed by this waterfall flowing uphill.

Reminds me of Will’s favourite poem.

Losing

By Robert Pottle

Sure is windy out today.

There goes my hat. It blew away.

At least I’ve got my glasses on.

Oh no! Where are they? Darn they’re gone.

And now I’m getting quite a scare,

atop my head there is no hair!

This fate is worse than all my fears.

The wind just blew off both my ears!

Oh no, I must… I must… ACHOO.

My nose is gone ’cause off it flew!

Excuse me now, I have to cough.

Goodness me my wips fwew off!

Wifout my wips it’s hahd to tawk.

Escuse me as I take a wawk.

 

THUNK

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Our Latin teacher, Fr Fraser, had a ‘canon’ of ten books which all educated people should have read.

He was never invited to submit his list to The Book Show on Radio National, but should have been.

However, finance writer Trevor Sykes was a recent guest. His list (below) had one book in common with Fr Fraser’s canon – can you guess which?

I found it interesting that all of Sykes’ choices are available ‘in the public domain’, and therefore can be downloaded free of charge (or nearly so) for Kindle or iBooks from either projectgutenberg.org or iTunes. It is a particularly erudite selection for someone Fr Fraser would have dismissed for studying ‘ecos’.

Project Gutenberg offers 36,000 ebooks for free download. These have all been digitised by volunteers – a massive undertaking. Each book is ‘out of copyright’ .

In Australia, copyright exists on a book for the life of the author plus 50 years.

In the USA, copyrights exists until 95 years after publication, and in the EU it is life plus 70 years.

As Orwell died in 1950, the Australia Project Gutenberg page is allowed to display ‘Animal Farm’ (published in 1945), but the main Project Gutenberg sticks to the USA law and does not yet allow it to be downloaded (not until 2040, in fact!).

Trevor Skyes is a Wodehouse buff. PJ Wodehouse is also one of my favourite authors. The tiny Seaforth Library had all 35 short stories and 11 novels featuring Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. (published between 1915 and 1974!)

As Wodehouse started publishing while still young, and lived till 1975 (the ripe old age of 94), even his 1915 ‘Right Ho Jeeves’ is still copyright in Australia (till 2025). It is however public domain in the USA. (Although the 95 year expiration is not yet up, all works published before 1923 are exempted and considered copyright free.)

The copyright laws are completely ridiculous!

Fr Fraser’s canon can be the subject of a future WILT.

Today, its Trevor Sykes’ turn.

 

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Max OSX 10.7 “Lion” was released from captivity this morning.

If you are currently running “Snow Leopard”, you can download it from the Mac App Store The Mac App Store is also available from the Apple Menu.

If you are on Leopard, or an even earlier ‘cat’, you will need to wait till the DVD version is released next month.

The cost is $32 and the download is 3.5 Gb – huge!

Note: If you want to install Lion on another of your Macs and want to avoid another huge download, after downloading you can find the app ‘Install Apple Lion’ in your Applications folder and transfer it to the other Mac (across you’re lcoal network, or via a USB drive) You will need to do this before you install Lion, as it is automatically deleted after installation. If it is ‘too late’, you can find Lion in the purchased section of the Mac App Store and download it on the mac (usng the same AppleID) without additional charge.

After downloading, installing is easy. During my install, it seemed to be stuck a number of times (28 mnutes to go for 28 minutes!)- it paid to be patient as eventually all went well.

Lion is not compatible with some old Mac software (that written for PowerPC), so do not upgrade if there are some old programs that you depend upon. (this is our situation at work)

Some of the new features:

• New ‘Gestures’ on MacBooks – drag two fingers up or down the trackpad to scroll – drag two fingers left or right to go forward or back a page. Drag four finger up to open “Mission Control”. Pinch to zoom in, or tap with two fingers. Note that the scrolling works like the iPad and may be the opposite of what you expect. You can change this setting in System Preferences.
• New LaunchPad, available from the Dock,  which shows all your apps.
• New Mission Control, which shows all your open windows, also available from the Dock. You can have multiple virtual desktops that have different applications within them, and scroll from one to the other with a three finger swipe. See http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_use_spaces_mac_os_x_lion
• A newly designed Mail app, which is much better, particualry for searching.
• ‘Full Screen Mode’ for most apps, available with Ctl-Cmd-F (I had to change the gloabl search setting in Evernote which also had this shortcut to allow it to work). Press ESC to return to normal view.
• Auto-save in iWork apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), which keeps multiple versions of the document youa re working on. A Time Machine like utility allows you to go back to a point in time before you actually wiped out chapters 4- 30 of the book you have spent the last year working on.
• AirDrop is an easy way to share documents across a local network.

I’ll continue playing with Lion and report back on anything else of interest.

For the record, the Apple OSX Big Cat Series is :

• 10.0: “Cheetah”
• 10.1: “Puma”
• 10.2: “Jaguar”
• 10.3: “Panther”
• 10.4: “Tiger”
• 10.5: “Leopard”
• 10.6: “Snow Leopard”
• 10.7: “Lion”

My predictions

• 10.8:  “Lynx”
• 10.9:  “Cougar”

You read it here first.

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