Today I happened upon Futura Photography with a lovely picture of a twig with four blossoms. The twig stretches from left to right in a slight bend. One of the reddish blossoms faces the viewer, the other three face away. The background is just a brownish blur that contrasts nicely with the blossoms and the twig.
I like the picture because it is so well balanced and seems to emanate calm and peace.
The owner of the site Futura Photography describes the picture as a “Japanese Blossom Tree” which he saw in Hongkong.
Unfortunately the image is copyrighted. So I can’t show it here. You have to follow the link given above.

It’s only 60 years since World War II ended. 60 years that is nearly a lifetime. Those that witnessed this horrible war which dragged on for nearly six years are leaving the stage. What is to some extend still personal experience is now slowly turning into history.
Stephen E. Ambrose, known for his bestselling Band of Brothers has written some more books on the same subject. In the trail of the Band of Brothers success he got lots of mails from veterans which went into books like the one I’m currently reading: Citizen Soldiers: From the Normandy Beaches to the Surrender of Germany
What the books of Ambrose try to achive is to preserve the personal exprience of the indivdual. History only draws the broad picture, summarizes and gives timetables and statistics. Quotes are usually restricted to official documentation and the press. The individual’s voice is lost and with it the accounts of tragedy, misery and suffering that go with any war. These are not to be lost for only they can show what the real cost of any armed conflict is. It is a cost inflicted upon the individual in form of physical an mental strain. In the past wars were often widely supported by the public. Fighting and dying were mystefied and glorified. Heroism was an ideal to strive for. The true image of war was never shown, neither in pictures nor in texts.
Therefore books like Ambrose’s are of highest value if done well. Citizen Soldiers is a book that succeeds in relying what war is all about at the individual scale. Personal accounts are woven intricately into the broader narrative of the US offensive. Measured in lifes and injuries World War II was extremly costly to the US. This book gives names, faces and biographies to some of those that perished, got wounded or got through somehow to return to a citizen’s life and are now old men or have already passed away. To balance the picture a number of German accounts are given as well. They show that there wasn’t much difference for the indivual private whether American or German when it came to fighting, suffering or dying.

60 years ago Nazi concentration camps were liberated by Allied soldiers. US soldiers took lots of photographs to document what unimaginable horror they found. Today these are the pictures that illustrate history books. Six decades have passed since. Most of those running the camps are dead and the number of the surviving inmates starts to shrink. The more of these witnesses pass away the more all this becomes history, the stuff of books and documentaries.

Somehow I came across Fatelessness written by Imre Kertész the Hungarian Nobel laureate, read some reviews and decided to order and read it. In style it’s autobiographical though it isn’t an autobiography. Fatelessness is the story of a fifteen year old Hungarian Jewish boy who goes through a number of concentration camps and survives to return to his native Budapest. What makes this book so striking is the way the main character George narrates his story. He seems somehow detached from all the things that he experiences. There is no emotion. George is just a boy and he is is quite naive. When he comes to Auschwitz he notices a football ground and looks forward to playing football after work every day. Of course this naivety wears off after some time within the harsh realities of camp life. But this is what makes this book worth reading.

Long the production of movies, music and art was a domain of professionals and huge media companies. Professionals had the know-how to create, media companies the resources and money to produce and distribute.
Times have been changing ever since powerful computers coupled with easy to use software became cheap enough to buy for the average Joes as shown in an interesting article in
USATODAY.com - Tech turns average Joes into mini-Spielbergs.

This combination of accessible tech tools and pervasive Internet usage has touched off a do-it-yourself revolution in movies, music and art. Amateurs of all stripes have become adept at using brawny desktop PCs and rich multimedia production software to generate a panoply of digital content. And they are proving to be dexterous at drumming up fans and patrons over the Internet.

Software like Apple’s iMovie, iDVD or GarageBand combine ease of use with outstanding output. These programs are so clever that even professionals use them.
As a result people without special training are able to create stunning movies, songs or other art.

WordPress in Higher Education « WordPress Support

I am at the Apple Digital Campus conference that is currently being hosted at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The conference itself is using WordPress for their blog. Penn State is also telling all of the participants (about 200 leaders in higher education) about how they use WordPress for courses, portfolios, content mangement and about everything else. Great stuff. Anyone else know of how WordPress is being used for learning in higher education?

writes blueroot

WordPress really is a great application for educational purposes. There are other platforms for blogging that might be easier to setup and use for beginners but once users feel comfortable with WordPress it is great to use. Teachers are in control. They can however delegate certain tasks to students.

Isn’t it strange to note that dying can make good headlines? The Pope at 84 is ill and dying and the world watches. The media delivers details of the slow passing away of the head of the Church of Rome like crumbs to hungry pigeons. They are though in an odd situation for they can’t send any live pictures. There are no cameras to show the agony and suffering. No media allowed! The Pope has the privilege to die in privacy, only attended by a few chosen ones. Official statements about the Pope’s being are relayed to the media which reurgitates them for the waiting masses. The lack of live pictures is comepensated for by reviews of the Pope’s life.
Dying today is usually kept away from us. In hospitals the dying are exiled to the hallways, often left to going the last way alone, no hand to hold, no mouth to speak words of consolation and no ear to listen to last wishes, fears and burdens to unload. We love life and block out death, same as we do not connect our steak to living, breathing and furry cattle. Food is processed and often loses any semblance to the animal or plant it comes from. There is no place for a slimy, slippery beeding fish in our sanitized world of fish fingers. With death it is the same. Death is nature but is not nice, oftentimes. We look away, spare others the sight. Rarely are we witness to the process of a life fading away.
So it was rather astonishing to learn about the Pope’s slow and long way from life to death through the continuous flow of press releases. It made us aware of how long dying might take and which stations it might pass. Perhaps this Pope’s death teaches people something about death and dying in our speedy age of quick fixes to everyting.

The radio station I listen to whenever I’m online is Whole Wheat Radio, Talkeetna - Alaska [www.wholewheatradio.org] run by Jimbob and Ester. They’re nice folks and they play a broad variety of everything independent. Whoever they play I hadn’t known before I heard them on Whole Wheat Radio.

While looking for something completely different I happend upon chomsky.info : The Official Noam Chomsky Website. Mr. Chomsky was a topic in a linguistics course I had to take at university. His theories were quite interesting. Last year I bought one of his books “What Uncle Sam really wants”. Haven’t read it yet, I have to admit. Shame on me.

You encounter them everywhere on the web, rumours about a near release date of Tiger, the newest incarnation of OS X. Often cited is the famous Think Secret site. But only one thing is certain for now, there is yet another Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Build. Perhaps it is one of the last. Mac fans wait and speculate. That’s what they like. It’s part of the fun that goes with beeing a Mac geek.

Last year I set up this homepage with Wordpress. That was in November and I was still new to this platform. Up to that time I had only known Movable Type which is very powerful and convenient to use. I run a large website with it and feel really comfortable using that system.
But I wanted to get on and learn more and came upon Wordpress, then still at version 1.2. Installation was quickly done and I looked around for templates. There were few at that time. I happened upon Kubrick which is now a standard template in Wordpress. All this has changed a lot. With version 1.5 a theme manager was integrated and that makes using themes coniderably easier than before. Of course there is, depending on the theme, still some work to do and one should know some basics but it can be done.
I suppose I have a bad standing with mysql. When I tried to update this website by just overwriting the old files with the new ones everything seemed to work fine - untill I tried to use the theme engine. Error codes were given out at the top of the page and the theme engine refused to work. So I flushed the database and exported the content. Unfortunately I couldn’t reimport the content. Well, so I start from scratch again.
There is still a lot to do. This is the beginning.