I have given my Internet home page—Cycroft.com—a complete facelift. Links have been updated and a News & Views section has been added. The site serves as a Web portal for my expanding presence in cyberspace and ties together my interests, which include technology, politics, photography, birding, family research, creative writing and sports—along with commentary on politics and social issues, covered in my blog at Blogspot.com, and my photography, covered in my photo blog, The Way I See It.
At the same time, I’ve published one of the Web’s most comprehensive directories of Web resources, providing links to some of the Internet’s most interesting and informative places and spaces. While this directory will be of interest to most users of the Web, bloggers, journalist, students and others who research and write for profit or fun will find it an invaluable resource.
You can see the directory by visiting Cycroft.com and following the link to “Web Resources (links).”
I’m reading the latest James Bond novel, Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks.
Devil May Care is set in the late sixties and is more than vaguely similar to the Ian Fleming originals. It was published to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. This new instalment in the adventures of the world’s most iconic spy has been written by one of Britain’s most admired novelists, Sebastian Faulks.
Faulks, who—like Ian Fleming—was a journalist before becoming a full-time novelist, is the author of about a dozen books, including the best-selling Birdsong (1993). He also wrote and presented the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 Television series, Churchill’s Secret Army, screened in 1999. He is a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature.
This book is pure “Bond, James Bond” right down to the hand-made cigarettes, expensive tastes and the arch-villain who likes to cheat at sports. And as Times on Line notes:
M here is still male, curmudgeonly and pipe-puffing; Bond is the battle-scarred, reluctantly ageing veteran of a tragically curtailed marriage, brainwashing and a resultant spell as an amnesiac Japanese fisherman.
In Faulks’s own words:
My novel is meant to stand in the line of Fleming’s own books, where the story is everything. In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.
Does Faulks pull it off? I think so: it’s a cracking good yarn and a must-read for those who miss the “real” 007. Try it for yourself.
IBM Corporation has announced its Lotus Symphony 1.0 office productivity suite: word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications.
Back in the mid-1980s, I used Lotus Corporation’s (pre-IBM takeover) Lotus Symphony software suite which was and upgrade to Lotus 123 with word processing capability added to the iconic spreadsheet product. That Symphony was not very successful.
IBM’s latest attempt to launch an office suite is built on the OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and uses Open Document Format (ODF) as its default file format. It will also read/write in Microsoft Office formats so you don’t lose compatibility. Although it is not likely to support every Microsoft Office feature, it’s compatible enough for me, and I think I’m representative of most office software users. Lotus Symphony also saves files in Adobe’s PDF format, which is a major plus for me.
Along with nearly one million others, I downloaded the beta version of Lotus Symphony and used it for about six months. I liked the software and had no problems other than that I found it slow. The speed issue seems to have been resolved in the live release, and I’m very pleased with it.
And have I mentioned the price? It’s free! That’s right, you can legally download it and use it for free. Corporations have to pay for support, but individuals can use the online support for free.
The way I see it, IBM must be doing something right with Lotus Symphony 1, because it’s already made its mark while in beta release. Back in February, Datamation picked Lotus Symphony as 2008 Product of the Year winner in the Office Productivity Software category. Given Microsoft Office’s status and enormous installed base, it’s a major eyebrow raiser that this category was won by a relative newcomer. The fact that the software is free and is backed by one of the giants of the software industry probably didn’t hurt.
I have been using the beta version of Windows Live Writer for some weeks now to post to this (WordPress-based) blog, and I have been very pleased with it. Live Writer is easy to use and quite comprehensive in its feature set. I’m not much of a Microsoft booster these days, but it certainly seems to have gotten its Live services right.
There is a lot of information availably on the Internet about intellectual property rights (IPR), including copyright of photographs. Unfortunately for us Canadians, most of what we see on TV and on the Internet describes IPR under the laws of the United States of America. And although U.S.A. laws are similar to ours, there are significant differences.
Because of mass media originating south of the border, general knowledge of many U.S.A. laws and legal practices is so pervasive in Canada that many of us mistakenly assume they are Canadian laws. In the case of IPR, this could turn out to be a costly assumption for some unlucky photographer.
Not being a lawyer, I wont offer any specific advice other than to suggest that photographers living in Canada, who want to protect their intellectual property, would be wise to do Canadian-based research into the subject, and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) Web site is probably the the best place to start that research. For those particularly interested in Canadian copyright, here is a link to the CIPO’s A Guide to Copyrights.
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