Month March 2010

Cartoonish stereotypes lurk just below the surface

Well here is the thing. Real, live Germans are not heartless ants, and the Greeks are not broke because they are giddy crickets who sing their summers away. Greece is a grown-up country with grown-up problems: rough, tough politics, and a lot of recent history, not all of it very nice. And it is precisely that recent history, and rough politics, that are at the core of Greece's fiscal woes today. Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those civil servants with jobs for life, and unusually generous retirement packages. The existence of those jobs for life is not a cultural quirk, in which Greek officials simply like coffee and backgammon too much to do any work. It is the end result of a brutal, multi-decade power struggle between the left and the right: a struggle that got people killed within living memory.
Spot on.

That Parade of Clichés that we call Cinema

Excellent, albeit over-the-top. But so are most Hollywood productions anyway. I mean over-the-top, not excellent. =)

Guitar Rig 4

Two years after Guitar Rig 3 was released in autumn 2007, the fourth iteration of the software modelling application for guitarists was released by Native Instruments. This time around a combination of an ever increasing workload, little free time and the fact that Guitar Rig 3 was ‘good enough’ for my needs meant it took […]

Microsoft Courier.

If its anything like the demo video Microsoft’s Courier is the closest device I’ve seen to Apple’s — now classic — demonstration entitled the Knowledge Navigator. See the resemblance? From the few images and videos around, the device seems beautiful, but that’s not the point; as the Mac and then the iPhone have demonstrated, it’s […]