New Freebooters

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It’s been a while since I checked what the Google Adsense folks have been up to. I created the previous post because I found an item that interested me in what they call referrals (most of us call them affiliate schemes). Now I’ve been checking out an outcome of Google’s YouTube venture. I’m not sure that I’ve done my selecting correctly - if I haven’t, I may be about to inflict upon you some really terrible videos. There are plenty around that make my 24 second feeding pigs clip look like a masterpiece…

Well. I previewed 2 videos. The first was an amateur-quality production of amateur-quality piano playing. The second had the germ of a concept - spoofing video game movies - but gratuitous scattering of foul language spoiled it.

I’ll leave this post live for a day or so, and encourage you to give honest opinions of whatever you get fed in the way of videos. Then maybe I’ll see if I can find a way of passing your opinions back to the creators…

More than memory training

In my youth, there was Pelmanism. Since then, there have been many memory-training schemes and many books about them. However, not only has knowledge of how the brain works advanced since then, but we have access to immense computing power, either locally or on servers we can reach on the Web.

I was browsing around when I came across Lumosity, reputedly the most popular web-based ‘brain training’ program.

This online service exercises users’ brains with a series of games that improve your cognitive skills. Co-Founder Michael Scanlon, a neuroscientist who graduated from Stanford, claims that these exercises build learning ability by improving processing speed, cognitive control and attention. Playing these simple, entertaining games for as little as 30 minutes a day (have you ever seen a computer game player get bored after half an hour?) can make you think quicker, improve your memory, increase alertness, improve concentration and even give your mood a lift.

Read the rest of this entry »

It happens all the time. Technology takes a leap forwad, and the users leap in a different direction from the one the designers predicted. The commonest mistake forecasters make is to underrate entertainment as a driver of applications. When dedicated graphics workstations that could do fancy rendering and 3D modelling cost more than I earned in a year, it wasn’t manufacturing industry CAD/CAE divisions that bought them without turning a hair - it was the film industry. First big movie companies like Lucas Film, then very soon afterwards the folks who made TV ads - for them, time was money in a big way.

It’s been a while since people started talking about the impending death of local PC apps like word processors - we’d soon be using our broadband links to access such function from servers owned by the likes of Google. It’s happening, but not in a cataclysmic way yet. Instead, the businesses that provide storage for data and images, such as flickr and YouTube, started providing tools for users to present their images in a more sophisticated way. I’m sure this is just the beginning of a trend that will eventually provide some serious editing and production tools that run on servers rather than locally on your PC or Mac. Read the rest of this entry »

“Yahoo overplayed its hand,” said a source. This is typical of many reactions to the collapse of Microsoft’s attempt to strike a deal with Yahoo in order to strengthen its position in the world of search engines and associated advertising revenue.

I’m among the many who find that the Adsense world isn’t what it used to be. I don’t blame Google, though - I reckon it’s just a sign of the concept of context-sensitive classified ads maturing. Google will have done their best to ensure that their cut of the revenue keeps increasing, to keep shareholders happy, but advertisers, publishers and ad-clickers have all grown up and established their positions. Read the rest of this entry »

This little gem is by George East, a friend and mentor of many years’ standing, whom I keep failing to meet in the flesh whenever I try to do so. He’s the one sitting down eating, here and I am assured by another pal, Keith Kellett, that the photo is a good likeness

I’ve been messing around in France for nigh on twenty years. In that time I’ve bought, restored and sold several properties (invariably to my cost, but that’s another story). I’ve learned to adapt and adopt, to go with the flow and eventually managed -most of the time- to avoid making grown men and women cry with my mangling of their language. I have even learned to put up with the Gallic version of baked beans.

But there is one aspect of everyday French activity into which I had failed to integrate until recently. Read the rest of this entry »

My first job was ‘employment for the otherwise unemployable’ - as a punched card tabulator programmer for a company that was a memebr of the De La Rue Group. One year, we all received a Christmas present of an unusual pack of De La Rue playing cards. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the French artist responsible for the design, but it sowed the seed of an interest that I’ve just taken up again. That pack was a standard deck of 52 cards plus two Jokers, but my current interest is the tarot cards.

With four court cards per ordinary suit plus another 22 illustrated cards forming the trumps and the Excuse or Fool card, you can see why artists have been drawn to them as a theme for a series of illustrations. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I used the name Freebooters for this site and its predecessor, I owe you at least one French pirate story. Here it is.

If you check the website for the Biscay resort town of Les Sables d’Olonne, you will learn that the port is the starting and finishing point for the Vendée Globe – a single-handed, non-stop, no-outside-assistance round the world sailing race.

You will also learn about its history as a port: its creation in 1218 as a replacement for the irretrievably silted-up Talmont, its promotion to France’s main seaport around the time of Columbus, its heady days as a whaling and cod-fishing port, its decline during the Napoleonic wars, and its reincarnation as a resort full of bathing machines in the 19th century. Read the rest of this entry »

Vivienne Mackie takes notebook and camera round homes buried in a hill.

Imagine caves without a single stalactite or stalagmite. Picture caves formed, not by water action, but by human hands. And now imagine those caves along the banks of a river meandering through a bucolic and fertile land. The troglodyte caves along the Loire River’s central area are just such caves. Even more unusual than their appearance and formation are the many varied uses of these caves over the centuries.

Some 90 million years ago the sea, which covered part of France, gradually receded, and tufa ( a type of limestone) formed from marine sediment. In your mind’s eye, fast forward to see the activity in the Middle Ages. Busy artisans and quarrymen dig into the tufa with simple tools, making underground caverns, shelters, escape routes, chapels, and houses. They build beautiful monumental churches, castles and houses above ground with the creamy limestone blocks. By hand, they dig about two thousand kilometers of tunnels in the Saumur region alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we didn’t win any seats, but we got 35% of the votes. Now I understand why established minorities like the British Liberal Party keep rabbiting on about proportional representation. We also created a free ’spectacle’ for the members of the Meuzac commune. Since there was competition for the first time in 13 years, nearly 200 people turned up on a day when it was cold and pouring with rain, to watch the votes being counted.

The fun thing about elections in small communes (around 700 voters in our case) is that the procedure is a little more informal. In big communes, there is one big list with all the candidates’ names on it, and you tick boxes to vote. In our case, each of the two groups provided a list of 15 candidates for the 15 places. Each voter picked up one copy of each list, then disappeared into a voting booth. Once hidden away, he/she could do any one of the following:

- put one list in the envelope and throw the other away (vote for an entire team)

- put both lists in the envelope (vote for both teams in their entirety - first past the post wins, so exces votes do no harm)

- draw a line through the name of anyone they did not wish to vote for (leaving any number of undeleted names)

- any of the ablove, AND add names of their own choosing

The last option has occasionally resulted in the selection of a candidate who did not stand. Opinions differed as to whether the reluctant winner had the option of refusing to accept the honour…

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Well, the election is over. We’ve had fun. I’ve not only found 14 new friends, but made myself known to a whole bunch of vilagers, 170 of whom even voted for me. Can’t complain.

We got on so well together that we plan to gather from time to time, and perhaps to find other ways of making our mark…

A month ago, an unknown car came down our untarred country lane and pulled up outside our house (it couldn’t have gone much further - the lane peters out into a bridle path a hundred metres further on).

I went up to the car and asked the driver and passenger who they were looking for. “You”, they said. I invited them in.

It turned out that they were looking for two more people to complete their team of 15 candidates for the upcoming council elections for our ‘commune’. There had been no opposition to the current mayor and his team of councillors for 13 years, and these folks felt that it was time for a change. They had assembled a non-party team of candidates with a view to shaking things up.

I joined, and spent several happy evenings plotting our campaign, taking photos, adrressing and filling envelopes, and all those things political candidates do. I also tasted some excellent food and wine - this is France, after all.