Kirlian photograph.

[reddragdiva]

• If you buy a Kindle, you're a complete sucker.

• Mind you, you already knew if you bought a Zune you were a sucker. iTunes might use DRM, but it doesn't take your paid-for songs away! (Original Facebook page.)

• "Hey, you there! Stop having fun!"

• An interesting chat between me and a Microsoft rep (in the comments) about the Feynman Lectures Silverlight fail. They really don't get this "sell the customer what they want, not what you want them to want" thing.

• NotN: Pain essential to childbirth, says male midwife.

I AM GOING TO GO OUT AND DRINK AND PARTY ON SATURDAY NIGHT. I am not quite sure where. Who is going somewhere? I understand there are several things on.

Good Lord, what a wringer of a week. Freda was diagnosed with flu on Tuesday; they haven't tested for swine flu per se, but they're treating all flu as swine flu, so she got Tamiflu. Which she was allergic to, leading to a nasty rash, a cranky day and a visit to A&E on Wednesday night. Though she's mostly over it now, thankfully. Meanwhile, arkady has been adjusting to a new medication and wrangling a sick baby while being a perpetually tired zombie.

I had a phone job interview today which has led to a second interview Monday. \o/ (I went to iron interview shirts. I found two still ironed from my last job hunt, three years ago ...)

Trying Arora, a Qt-Webkit browser with Firefox clone interface. Very fast and good rendering. I like it. JavaScript not so fast (GMail was a slug) and it did crash on me three times in a day ...

The National Portrait Gallery thing has been Story of the Week, with several posts (1, 2, 3) on my blog and an official one from the Wikimedia Foundation. Thankfully, the WMF and NPG are now in negotiations, which beats a legal battle every time.

(One of the biggest problems is funding — governments often expressly demand their galleries be self-sustaining, which means squeezing their public-domain works until the pips rattle. This was barely tenable last century and is increasingly unworkable this one. Never mind we've ALREADY PAID for the digitisations through TAX MONEY. So to really solve the problem, we need to change governments' attitudes to arts funding. Rotsa ruck.)

Comments

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

On the 'flu side, I think the last time they actually tested, something like 95% of cases in this country were swine 'flu. So there's little point in spending the money (and delaying treatment) on the tests, when it's almost certainly H1N1 anyway.

That's because it's much more infectious than the normal 'flue, which pretty well die out at this season.

The good news is that it's a pretty mild variety, and doesn't last too long.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah. She felt crappy for a week, ran a fever, vomited, got the shits, is better now. It's normal flu, it's just so infectious. Mind you, none of us have caught it. Cross fingers.

[paula-angela.livejournal.com]

"pain of childbirth is essential to proper bonding with the child and a “rite of passage” experience"

In some ways I don't mind this. Having had one birth with an epidural and one without, I would suggest that the less medicated birth is required if you are seeking to have a peak life experience.

Yes, it's something he will never experience, and it seems a bit rich to be telling others to suffer. But on the other hand, he probably listened to a lot of women to come up with this statement. A woman who has had one child, and takes that to represent all birth experience is more frightening. Each woman/child/pregnancy/birth is so different that you need to step back from the single case study in order to find the truth.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Also iTunes no longer use DRM.

[reddragdiva]

No DRMed files at all? All just straight AAC? Win!

[sbp.livejournal.com]

A few months ago, iTunes got everybody to redeliver their content as unencumbered 256k AAC+ and got rid of the DRM stuff. I'm presuming their video content went the same way, but I don't know about that end of it.