I installed Panther. With Panther you can press F9 and all your windows shrink and fly around so that they all fit on screen at the same time. And then you can press F9 and they all fly back. It’s very handy indeed. And because Apple just knew people would be pressing F9 over and over to see it work, they added an extra feature. If you hold down the shift key, it does the same thing, but in slow motion.

Naked in the cold sun, breathing life like fire.
4th Of July, Soundgarden

In partisan democratic systems there usually seem to end up being two major political parties – a moderately conservative one and a moderately progressive one. And it has always seemed obvious to me that if you’re one of those parties, you want to control the centre ground. The left and the right are slim pickings for minor parties, because most voters are somewhere in the middle. To stay in power, you try to engineer things so that you look like the moderate one, and the other side looks dangerously extreme.

It surprises me when I find that politicians don’t seem to share this perception. For example, at the moment the National Party, traditionally moderate conservatives, are polling poorly compared with the Labour government. The natural response ought to be to build an image of the government as dangerously radical, and themselves as stable middle-of-the-road dependable types. They had a good leader for this job, a young Southland farmer named Bill English, whom the public seem to see as a decent, amiable sort of person who isn’t likely to make any sudden movements.

But instead they’ve unceremoniously dumped Bill and replaced him with a first-term MP named Don Brash. The general public know Don as the guy whose signature is on our money, because he used to be the governor of the Reserve Bank. He’s associated strongly with the harsh policies of the previous National government. The one that the public voted out in favour of Labour a couple of elections back. Instead of controlling the centre ground, they look to be heading off to the right. Which as far as I can see doesn’t help them a bit. I think they’re on the proverbial hiding for nothing.

Long white cloud in the dead skies. Time will come when it happens to you. We won’t see it in our town. Small events don’t get on the news.
Letter From L. A., Chris Knox

There’s this guy called Brian, who used to be my PE teacher in fifth form, and was a colleague of Nicki’s.

A few Decembers ago, when Nicki and I were driving to Hagley Park to get married, Brian was also out driving and happened to see us going past. Somehow he figured that something was up, and ended up briefly gatecrashing our wedding, which otherwise consisted of immediate family and a marriage celebrant.

A couple of years after that, Brian gave one of the eulogies at Nicki’s funeral.

Yesterday I met Brian at a barbecue, and with him was Kate. Kate and Brian are getting married in December. And the first time Kate ever saw Brian was when he was giving the eulogy at Nicki’s funeral.

If she’d looked in a window she might not have seen him. If he’d lost his car keys he’d never have lost his heart.
Queen Street, The Front Lawn

Eight hours for work.
Eight hours for sleep.
Eight hours for recreation.

On Labour Day we remember Samuel Duncan Parnell and his vision of a balanced life.

My. It has been a while since I posted anything. Everyone OK?

That might require some explanation, because if you’re reading this at isaac.freeman.org.nz/blog you’ll be wondering who “everyone” is. See, most people are reading the LiveJournal page of the RSS feed of the blog of the life of me, and that’s where they’re posting comments. Personally, I like having the comments on my own website better, but that’s an unnecessary extra hassle for most people, and it’s my own silly fault for starting my own non-LiveJournal website. But if anyone out there knows a way to share comments between Movable Type and LiveJournal, I’d like to hear about it.

You’ll all now be growing impatient with all this shilly-shallying. “Do not,” you will be demanding, “shally so much as a single further shilly. Get to the point.” And you will be justified in so demanding, if that is indeed what you are doing. For there is a point, and it is to catch up on a number of loose ends.

Firstly, my school was visited by ERO recently. That’s the Education Review Office – they don’t in any way resemble Eros, the Greek god of love and sexual desire. Basically, they’re inspectors, and their job is to audit the school according to whatever categories they are auditing on this time, and then produce a report. This always involves ridiculous amounts of paperwork for Heads of Departments, and classroom visits for everybody else.
The final report hasn’t been produced, but one of our Principals asked to borrow the preliminary notes, and had made copies for all the stuff before the officer from whom he borrowed them decided it wasn’t a good idea to lend them out. The upshot seems to be that they couldn’t think of many things to complain about. But they’d look silly going back to Wellington without making any recommendations, so they pointed out that our reports for junior classes were formatted inconsistently between subjects, and that there’s a television set in X Block that’s not bolted down properly, and if there was an earthquake it could fall bonk! right on Bill’s head.
I’m just glad I didn’t get the school in trouble for not recognising the name of a punk band that one of the officers used to be in when he lived in Christchurch in the 1980s. Because he did seem disappointed that I hadn’t heard of it.

As was always fairly likely from the beginning, I got a letter from the Ministry advising that my services will not be required as an E-Learning Fellow. Never mind. I didn’t want to be a dumb old E-Learning Fellow anyhow.

What else, then? Oh yes… I went to see Conscience and so should you. It’s an excellent play about conscientious objectors in World War One, based on real events but with characters that are composites of multiple real historical figures. The acting is excellent, but it’s been getting shamefully small audiences.

I don’t like: springless Russian wagons.
Superhero Breakfast Cereal, Wendyhouse

I think if I ever get another cat I will call her “Meow”. Because what difference does it make, really?

Join hands to hands children start to dance, we’re independent!
Forward March, Derrick Morgan

Apple released a version of iTunes for Windows today.

If you have Windows 2000 or XP, you can download it here. If you haven’t got it already, you should.

Now I can play Ari’s music on my computer and Ari can play my music on his computer, all over the network without having to muck around with shared directories and other such nonsense.

It’s back from the printer and ready to show to publishers.

I’ve got beyond the point where I can tell whether it’s good anymore – I can’t look at it without seeing everything I could have done better. But I’ve shown it to a few people who hadn’t seen it before, and they seemed suitably impressed.

Old purple frog danced with dinosaurs.
Old purple frog danced with dinosaurs.
Old purple frog danced with dinosaurs.

In Tibetan Buddhism, chanting the mantra Om Mani padme Hum is believed to attract the blessings of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. The more often you recite it, the greater the blessings you bring to yourself and the creatures around you.

Now, somewhere back in history someone determined that if you write the mantra on a flag and let it wave in the wind, that’s the same as if you said the mantra for every time the flag flaps in the wind. Or if you write it on a wheel, it’s like saying the mantra for every time the wheel is turned. I’ve never been too sure about that one, but I can see how making the flags and wheels would be a meritorious act. Although it does seem a bit rough on the poor Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, who works hard to help us poor slobs at the best of times.

However, my knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism is inadequate to fully comprehend the latest development in automated mantra technology. It seems that the Dalai Lama has determined that having the mantra in digital form on your hard drive is equivalent to a 5400 RPM prayer wheel. I shall have to ask my Tibetan Buddhist friends about this one. It seems to me unfair that a rich person like myself could have so many mantras recited on my behalf without having to raise a finger, whereas a good but penniless Tibetan peasant might be unable to afford even a traditional hand-operated prayer wheel.

In any case, if this message is in your browser cache, you are currently operating a high-speed prayer wheel. There are a variety of other digital prayer wheels here.