The weather in Durham has been pretty good recently. I took the above photo last week on a short break from revision (one of many!). Whilst it’s a fairly stereotypical shot of the Cathedral I quite like the composition with the tree leaves silhouetted in the foreground. I’ve desaturated the shot from the colour original and used a ’softglow’ filter to make the whole thing stand out more - you can see this better on the higher-res version.
At 11am tomorrow the exam nightmare will be over and I’ll be free forever from formal education (in theory at least!) so a small moment to mark in the history books! Expect more soon, very soon…
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Looks like the FBI are having a crack down on the operators of the high-profile BitTorrent sharing sites at the moment. In the last few months many of them have been shut down and polite notices (like the one above) posted in stead of their usual content (quite what the U.S. Immigration authority have to do with it I don’t know!). My favorite line on one of the take-down notices from the MPAA was “You can click but you can’t hide” - really catchy that one! (lol)
What makes me laugh about all this is that ever since these sites came into existence cinema and DVD sales have been climbing year on year - whilst any link between the two would be tentative it’s not outside the realms of possibility that people consciously operate on a try-before-you-buy basis when it comes to music and film - i.e. I’m not going to buy a film I don’t like etc.
The real way to reduce internet piracy is to make more content available digitally at a reasonable price and without DMR restrictions which just annoy. Apple are doing a fairly good job of this with iTunes but it’s still to expensive and limited to make the impact it could.
Out of interest the creator of the BitTorrent protocol has just launched a Google-like torrent searching site. It’s supposed to only track legal torrents but my first search brought up illegal content so I doubt it will last long either. Looks cool all the same.
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Apparently if you thought the debacle over the designs for the new World Trade Center were over you’d be wrong. Donald Trump, a notorious American real-estate executive, has been openly critical of the Libeskind ‘Freedom Tower’ design (photo left) and has put forward his own design (right) which is basically an exact copy of the original but one story taller, dubbed the ‘Twin Towers II‘. Seems like good intentions have become wrapped up in politics and money which I guess was inevitable. Everyone involved was bound to have differing opinions of what a fitting memorial/replacement was but isn’t it about time, 4 years later, that they get on with it and actually built something instead of leaving the site as an open tomb?
To see what the current WTC site looks like see Google Maps.
For more (better) commentary see [A Daily Dose of Architecture].
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So busy… No time to post… Must not get distracted by Star Wars…
Must. Revise.
Actually my next exam is nearly two weeks away but thats no reason to be complacent especially when it comes to the intricacies of the 3D graphics pipeline and distributed computation algorithms! Probably best not to mention the first exam - half good, half awful :-S
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I wasn’t so keen on del.icio.us, the social bookmarks manager, to begin with but after browsing through it last night properly for the first time I’ve found it to be a mine of cool links and other miscellanea organised by tags and descriptions. The more people who link to a certain page the more ‘popular’ it becomes. The only downside to this being that it can seriously eat your time so possibly not a good thing to be looking at right now for me!
Even the BBC are interested in the idea and have a prototype site which allow del.icio.us tags to be added to any article thus allowing your to find stories based on these. This can give a good overview of whats popular and what related. It’s good to see the BBC allowing people use their back-end content to innovate, I hope they keep up the good work.
(See here for a cool example of how your del.icio.us bookmarks can be visualised)
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For those revising for exams right now: 50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work. I might find this useful if I actually get round to reading it!!
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