Well the Apple iTMS is up and going in Australia. I wonder if the Apple Australia Store login I already have works with it? New Zealanders who want to buy Apple software and licences for things like Quicktime have to create an Apple Australian account with the NZ city as part of New South Wales. (Which I did when I bought the QT MPEG-2 component a while back). For the purposes of both Apple and music companies I think NZ is just treated as part of Australia. Hmmm.

Great headline just made for B-grade movies. Work done by researchers in NZ on spiders intentionally seeking out female mosquitoes that have feed on human blood as their primary food source. I’ve been working on writing a mini-history of artificial intelligence for the thesis and this sort of thing raises some of the ongoing issues as to what exactly intelligence is. The spider identifies its prey (good eyesight, biochemical receptors) and develops a “plan” to hunt and capture it. If we saw that sort of behaviour in a human we’d probably call it “intelligent”.

Anyway see, African Spider Craves Human Blood, Scientists Find.

Update: Remembered I’d heard Mark Wm. Worthing talk on this a while back. Here’s an essay of his related to the topic.

Worthing, Mark Wm. “Human and Animal Intelligence : A Difference in Degree or Kind.” In God, Life, Intelligence and the Universe, eds. Terence J. Kelly and Hilary D. Regan, 85-110. Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum, 2002.

Tripped into the city on Saturday to Armageddon and had an enjoyable half-day there. Avoided the long queue to get in by having prepaid for a ticket and spent a few hours looking around before heading to the panel with Mark Waid (Wikipedia). The bottom couple of levels of the Aotea Centre had things like Pro-wrestling and booths for computer/video gaming (mostly displays by Microsoft, Sony and EA) which wasn’t what I was interested in so I headed upstairs to where the comics and sci-fi stuff was.

Managed to restrict spending to a couple of DC trade paperbacks (including one of the Golden Age Green Lantern – Alan Scott) and a poster. (TVNZ had a spot on Close Up about setting the show up on Friday – Windows Media Player links 56K | 128K)

Anyway, I loved the panel with Mark Waid. There were only about 20-25 of us there so everyone got time to ask their questions and interact with him over the hour. Some really interesting questions asked and I made some notes of his replies to them. (I also got to ask a question about religion/spirituality and comic books that’s related to an article on eschatology and comics that’s rattling around inside my head at the moment.) Anyway here were some of the interesting things:

• Comic book writing is ultimately a collaborative process between the writer(s), artist, letterer and others. At the end of the day the character(s) being portrayed and story being told should take precedence over the egos of the creative team. (Not that that always happens harmoniously).
• Some interesting comments about how do you write comic books in a culture currently shaped by the “War of Terror”. Waid noted that the Superman slogan “Look! Up in the sky…” has taken on an element of fear post-9/11. Who is Superman in this world rather than the more optimistic worlds of the past?
• Waid made time to listen to and answer the questions of the children and teenagers there. He didn’t ignore them or patronise them. There was also some discussion over whether the current superhero comic writing, while in a style for adolescents, could be considered as “appropriate” for children and young adults as it once was.
• Waid argued that he thinks all comic book stories should have a moral voice. They are one of the few places left, he asserted, where you can learn morality (of a sort), consider issues of good and evil, and ethical action given the abdication of that in the wider media. This would fit with my earlier posting here Greenflame: On new morality plays.

Good stuff to think about with potential for religious/spiritual engagement.

BTW – There’s an RealAudio interview with Waid back in 2002 that covers some of this stuff.

In the last few days I received in the mail a couple of things from the Families Commission – Komihana a Whanau. One is a summary of their Focus on Families report which is a “study set out to improve understanding of successful outcomes for families with dependent children and the things that help and hinder family wellbeing, as described by the families themselves.” Both summary and full report are available at the link above and from skimming the summary looks to have some useful information in it (including what sort of things they think are relevant to the discussion). Media release here.

I’ll be interested to see whether the report gets used by Christian groups. The setting up of the Families Commission was claimed as a big win by the United Future party prior to the election and UF was one of the parties conservative Christians were “encouraged” to vote for. Whether those same conservatives bother to use the results of the commission, or see them as “tainted” by the State, will be interesting to see.

Also in the mail was their new newsletter “Family Voice” available here (as a PDF file). Apparently you can subscribe to getting it electronically but the web site isn’t clear on how to do that. I guess send them an email and ask how to do it.

Whether or not you agree with the government and its various bodies I figure its always a good idea to read things like this. Sometimes you see things to support and other times things to disagree with, but you’ll be informed. Also pretty much everyone will send you multiple copies for free and often there are “discussion” documents.

A few years back we got a whole lot of stuff from the then National government on their “Code of Social and Family Responsibility” (1998) which we discussed in house group and then made our own submission. Excellent material for working out some of our perceptions of the gospel and its outworking in the real world (as well as how to maintain unity in the face of internal disagreement).

Ticket purchased to go to Armageddon (no, the other one) tomorrow. Will probably post about it on Sunday post-preaching at church.

For those of you possessing back issues of the excellent (though now defunct) Reality Magazine check out Stephen May’s “Media Watch” column from Issue 34 (Aug/Sept 1999) where he comments upon his pilgrimage to the same event. (Not online unfortunately)

After (possibly) sitting in a Parisian café for a month Jonathan Finley (AKA un californien à paris) returns to stretch us mentally, impressionisticly and linguisticly. Go to un californien à paris: (un)mediated experience and take up the challenge.

Well I tried the live stream this morning and it seems like its all up and going. See SansBlogue : Bible broadcast and podcasts start today.

There’s another advanced screening of Serenity on this Sunday at Village Cinemas on Queen Street (Auckland). Tie in with the Pulp Culture festival also on at the Aotea Centre.

See: Serenity – Special Advanced Screening – 23 Oct.

Also, Serenity interviews here and the River Tam viral marketing campaign for Serenity here.

Well, Radio New Zealand has revamped its internet presence with a relaunched web site. Now there are live audio streams, archives of some programs for seven days and RSS feeds (text only) for news and programming (National & ConcertFM). No podcasting explicitly and it’s still a few steps behind larger media providers like ABC radio in Australia and the BBC in Britain. Still a significant step in the right direction.

Live audio streams are available as Windows Media only (boo hiss!) which means having an extra program running on my iBook, instead of just leaving iTunes running for both radio and local files. But if you click the “Audio” button on the main page the pop-up window has a link to allow you to change the default from Window Media to MP3. Then the programmes come down the wire/wireless as pseudo-streamed MP3s.

Good things about the site – they’ve divided up some of National Radio’s flagship programmes intelligently. So no longer do you only get “Nine to Noon” in 1 hour streamed chunks but now its divide up into segments (say by interview or topic slot). Nice to see the 7 day archive as opposed to the 24 hour one previously. And the site worked well on my Mac and they’re dipping their feet in the RSS waters. Plus recipes and details about books and music talked about are there now.

Not so good – No podcasting (including no RSS feed for audio) – Can’t set my Mac to grab “Morning Report” to listen to at 9am after the kids have gone to school. Many of the programs I like – e.g. At the Movies, The Sampler, Touchstone, Spiritual Outlook, Home Grown aren’t available and possibly won’t be because it often explicitly deals with non-Radio NZ copyrighted material (see their disclaimer “Not all audio is available due to copyright restrictions”). See Enz game by Russell Brown | New Zealand Listener for the farce here. I’d like to get my music and movie reviews and “thinking” programmes etc. with a NZ slant but at the moment my iTunes points offshore for all of that.

So I’d give it about 6/10 (up from the 2/10 it had before). Good progress but still a long way to go.

Even though I’ve been a Mac person since 1986, as well as a UNIX programmer and sysadmin, there’s always something new to learn. Like this tip from the Apple web site. I was wondering how to click on a file on the desktop in OS X and then print it (printing used to be on the Finder’s File menu). Now I know. See Apple – Pro – Tip of the Week – Printing from the Desktop (Without a Desktop Printer).

Also has the tip on setting up a drag-and-drop desktop printer if you need one of those (they can go in the dock too.)