Ramblin' Rosen

Today Tony and I went to the World Parrot Day main event at Trafalgar Square. World Parrot Day was held for two reasons: to gain support for banning importation of wild-caught parrots into the EU and to help people understand more clearly the responsibilities of owning a parrot. Along with allowing people to meet various parrots, mainly macaws, signatures for a petition to ban parrot importing were collected, and the petition was delivered to 10 Downing Street. We didn’t get to go in 10 Downing Street ourselves, but we watched as Quentin Blake, a man dressed as Superparrot, a real parrot and a few other people went in.

We took photos of the event—click Superparrot below if you want to see them.

Also, we bought Pollyvision, a DVD of parrots in the wild for parrots in our homes. Fred and Vic, our two cockatiels, seemed to really enjoy it. I’ll post a full review of it later after we’ve shown it to the boys a few more times.

Apparently we were on ITV London News, but we missed it the times it was on, and their website seems to be down at the moment, so I can’t link to it. If anyone saw anything about World Parrot Day on TV or on any websites, please tell me about it and give a link if there is one.

I’m back from my holiday to the Isle of Wight that I mentioned in my last post. If you haven’t been to the IoW, I highly recommend it, especially for those of you located in or near Britain. I really loved most of the trip, and I plan to post in more details about a few of the places I visited and things I did after I reinstall a graphics program on this computer and can edit some of the photos I took. (I recently upgraded to XP Pro and still haven’t reinstalled everything.)

Here’s a short list of recommendations and things to avoid, some of which I’ll go into more detail in later posts:

Recommendations

• Shanklin Chine — A beautiful gorge that also has some lovely aviaries.
• Michelangelo Restaurant in Ryde — A wonderful Italian restaurant.

Things to avoid

• The Isle of Wight Zoo – Small, with too small enclosures for many of the animals. The conservation work they are involved in may be commendable, but the zoo itself isn’t.
• The Crab Inn in Shanklin — This used to be a traditional thatched roof pub; the outside is still traditional, but it has been bought by new owners who have turned the inside into a typical characterless chain pub on the inside.

If anyone else has been to the IoW, please post your comments with recommendations and things to avoid, as we plan on going back.

I’m off for a week’s holiday to the Isle of Wight. While I’m there, I probably won’t be able to post, as I don’t know if I’ll be able to find Internet access or not. If I find a cybercafe that isn’t too expensive, I’ll try to post something while I’m away. If not, I’ll write again when I return.

Please feel free to post any comments while I’m gone, but keep in mind I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to approve them until I get back. See you again in a week!

I just found out today that Anthony Ainley died last week. For those who do not know his name, he was the second actor to play the Master on a regular basis in Doctor Who. For me, he was the first face I associated with the Master (other than the decayed version of the character who appeared in the Deadly Assassin), and I am very sad to hear about his death. Although he was often directed to play the role a bit too much over the top, he was overall very convincing as the Master, and when I was younger and had yet to see the Jon Pertwee era, he was the Master to me.

Outpost Gallifrey has more information about his death, along with a very good tribute to him.

For those of us who love Doctor Who, he will not soon be forgotten.

I just received three emails all from the same person with the subject ‘Crowley’. Even though Spamnix had tagged them as spam, I had to doublecheck in case they were legit. Needless to say they were spam, spam for viagra and other such drugs, which is kind of fitting for Crowley spam.

The best bit was the typical spam nonsense phrase at the bottom:

‘textual,a moment later,wrangle,knew perfectly well,easygoing,the poets attempts,crete,through the ventpane.’

Is this a fragment of a lost poem by Uncle Al? Or is it too good and does it make too much sense to be him? You decide.

Last Sunday, I went to the British Museum to see the Queen of the Night relief (a.k.a. the Burney relief) in person. As I mentioned in my last post, it’s on display in the Reading Room temporarily. As can be expected, it is much more impressive in person, and, to be honest, I don’t think photos really do the relief justice. It’s still impressive in pictures, but anyone who has a chance to see it in real life should definitely go and see it. See my post on a virtual reconstruction of it for links to more information on the tour it is taking around England.

I tried photographing it, so I could post a picture of it here, but none of them turned out well, since the Reading Room has rather low lighting, and the relief was in a glass case. So when I tried with a flash, the flash reflected from the glass, and when I tried without a flash, it ended up out of focus. If I go back to the British Museum and it is still in the Reading Room, I will try again, as I’d like my own photos of it, but it will probably be easier to take a good picture when it is on permament display in a regular exhibition area.

One thing I noticed is that the British Museum has yet to exploit the commercial potential of the Queen of the Night yet–the only thing in any of the gift shops that I saw related to it was part of a picture of it on a new book. Not even a postcard yet, but I’m sure these things will come, and I’m sure I’ll buy at least one of the products, especially as the BM is a great institution to support just in general. I did see a Louis Wain paperweight that I plan to go back and get some time, but I didn’t want to buy it that day as I wasn’t going directly home afterwards and did not want to carry it.

If anyone else has had the chance to see the Queen of the Night in person, please post and give us your impressions.

The Burney Relief is an ancient Babylonian relief that some consider to be an image of Lilitu, the Mesopotamian predecessor of Lilith, though it could also be an aspect of Ishtar or her sister and rival Ereshkigal. It is most commonly associated with Lilith to the general public, which is why I have a picture of it on the front page of my Lilith Shrine, even though it’s more likely to be someone other than her.

Recently, the British Museum acquired the Burney Relief, renaming it to the ‘Queen of the Night’ Relief. It is currently on tour throughout Britain and is on display in the Reading Room while not on tour until the end of August. I have tentative plans to see it this weekend and will write about it here if I do.

Along with having the original on display in the museum, they also have a virtual exhibit that includes images done in Photoshop showing how the relief would have looked originally.

Many people do not realise that reliefs such as the Queen of the Night would originally have been painted and seeing them ‘in colour’ can be a shock at first, and often modern people prefer the ‘bare’ images, but I find the colour version fascinating and can’t decide which version I prefer.

Here’s a small picture of the reproduction with colour. Please visit the virtual exhibit to see a bigger version and to see a comparison between it and the actual relief.

Recently, I upgraded our computer to XP Pro. Previously we were running ME, so I don’t think I need to explain why we upgraded. Anyway, most things I’ve reinstalled have worked fine, at least after I tweaked settings a bit. Not so the Treo 600. I installed it according to the instructions in the installation wizard, but it only worked on my login, not my husband’s, and trying to Hotsync it, while logged in as Tony, managed to wipe out all his contacts and other data from the phone. Needless to say, Tony wasn’t happy and had a good rant until we found his old data in a harddrive backup done a few days ago.

All this trouble could have been avoided if the installation wizard had given adequate instructions as to how to install it in XP, including information on installing it for multiple users, a fairly common task on XP. In any installation of a Palm OS device on XP, after the first attempt at Hotsync, a dialog box pops up telling you that Windows has detected your new device and needs to install the drivers for it. Unfortunately, the wizard doesn’t warn the user about this, so when I ran into this screen, I wasn’t sure whether to say “cancel” and let the wizard install the driver or let XP do it. (You’re supposed to let XP install the drivers, and then if your first Hotsync times out while doing this, you just do it again after the drivers are installed. Not that the installation program tells you any of this, of course.)

That’s just a general XP Palm installation issue–the worst you can do probably is do it wrong the first time, and then try it again doing it the right way. The problems that can happen while trying to install it for multiple users, however, can cause much worse results, such as losing all your data as happened with my husband’s Treo.

The two most important things about installing it for multiple users are:

1) You have to be logged in as the user you want to install it for. Also, you have to make sure you aren’t logged into any other user accounts at the same time.

2) You have to install each user’s Palm Desktop in separate directories.

Can you guess how much of this information the installation program informed me of? That’s right, none. Not only that, but on the screen that lets you pick the installation path of the software, it even says that it’s best not to change it. So much for helping the user know what s/he needs to do at this point.

PalmOne are aware of these issues as can be seen from the section on XP faqs in their support site, so why wasn’t the there any information given in the installation wizard to tell users about how to install under XP? It’s not like XP is particularly new—by the time the Treo 600 came out, it had been out about two years, more than enough time to make changes to the installation instructions, even if the software itself wasn’t changeable.

I’ve always championed Palm OS devices over PocketPC, partially because I find their user interface easier to learn and use, but this is a major UI mistake and causes unneccessary problems for users trying to do the basic task of installing a connection between their handhelds and their PC. Let’s hope that the next version of Palm Desktop either fixes the problems with multiple users on XP or at least fixes the installation wizard to let users know the workarounds.

Today my husband and I watched the DVD Microcosmos, a nature documentary film on insects. I’d originally found the DVD in a bargain bin at Virgin for a fiver, so I wasn’t expecting much, but the packaging made it sound interesting, as it is filmed with Macrovision and is from the bug’s point of view.

Unlike most documentaries, this one only had short voice-overs at the beginning and the end, and the rest just consisted of the sounds of the bugs and music. The results were extroardinary—it really made me feel a part of the insects’ world and I became involved in all aspects of their lives, including birth (technically, hatching), sex and death.

I do not want to go into too many details about specific scenes, as most of the joy in watching it is discovering it for yourself, but I highly recommend it for anyone who loves nature or wonderful cinematography. Unfortunately it appears to be out of print in some countries, but it’s available in the UK for under �6 from the usual online stores. Also, I noticed a lovely two-disc collector’s edition is coming out soon in France with loads of extras, unfortunately all in French, but if you know French, it looks like it could be well worth it.

Hello, and welcome to Ramblin’ Rosen. I decided to start this blog for a couple of reasons. I have run a website for years (lilitu.com), and I often have felt the urge to post comments related the subjects of my site—Lilith, Jewish Paganism, Louis Wain—without having to go to all the troubles of writing a long article and publishing it on the site. I’ve wanted a more immediate way to comment on any of these subjects, so I thought a blog would be perfect for that. Any posts I write that I feel have lasting interest on any of these subjects, I will link to from the main site.

The other reason I started this blog is that I’ve wanted to start writing more in general, so I will also be using this blog to force myself to write regularly—my goal is three times a week at least. I will write about various things of interest to me, not just subjects that are “official” lilitu.com subjects, including books I’ve read, anime and other things I’ve watched, parrots, cats and technology, such as the Treo 600 that I bought end of last year. I’ll be adding categories as I write my first post about that subject, so expect the list of categories to increase quickly.

Please feel free to comment on anything I post, and I will reply when I have something to say. At the moment, I have the blog set that I have to approve all comments, so as to avoid spammers, but I’d like to set it so that only registered people can post, as soon as I figure out how to do that in WordPress. In the meanwhile, sorry for any inconvenience, and I will go through and approve posts at least once a day, so that you won’t have to wait too long to see your comments. If anyone knows about WordPress and knows how to change it to registered posting only, please post and let me know. Thanks, and I look forward to people’s comments on my ramblings.