Miriam Parkinson

Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with Flock. Quoting from their website:

“Flock is an amazing web browser built on fast and secure Mozilla technologies. View and share photos with an innovative new photo bar in the browser. Subscribe to your favorite websites to get the freshest content automatically, in summaries that are easy to save and blog.Search more quickly, more effectively, and more richly with the innovative Flock Search Toolbar“

So that’s the sales pitch. I’ve had a bit of a play around with most of these features so I’ll give you a quick rundown.

Photo Bar: This is actually a handy little feature. In essence you can click a little button up next to the ‘Home’ button and a bar appears across the top of the webpage with your photostream from flickr or photobucket (whichever you elect).

You can upload photo’s using the inbuilt inbuilt photo-uploader which brings up a new window with a drag and drop interface from your computer and simple crop and rotate tools. From here you can title, describe and tag your photo’s, set public/private and also select which album the photo’s go in.

The photo bar also allows you to add friends flickr streams so that you can view their photo’s on the bar instead of your own. There is a simple drop-down interface to swap between accounts.

My favorite feature of the Photo bar, however; is the ability to drag a photo from your Photo Bar to the blogging tool. Like, for example, this photo I took last year at Bright.

RSS Reader: The RSS Reader in Flock is based on the Sage reader in Firefox. I’ve actually used Sage before and to be honest it’s not really to my taste, so I haven’t really played with this much.

Blogging Tool: I’m undecided on the blogging tool in flock. It has some very useful features. I am able to open a new blog post with a simple keyboard shortcut and I can comment on a webpage, image or piece of selected text by right-clicking and then clicking ‘Blog this’ from the drop-down menu. There is also a ‘Web Snippets’ tool which allows you to drag text or images from a website to a clipboard for future use and, of course, the drag and drop interaction with the Photo Bar.

However there are also several missing features which bug me. The tagging feature only enters Technorati tag html at the bottom of the post rather than the inbuilt labels in blogger which I prefer and text formatting is a little harder with no alignment options, text colour options or ‘quote’ buttons which I have become accustomed to.

On the other hand the spell-check is very well implemented and you can save drafts to your hard drive.

I think opinions on the Blogging Tool are likely to be mixed and its rather a matter of individual taste and usage. I’m not sure whether I will use it regularly, but its certainly useful for when you want to write a quick blog comment on something.

Search Tool: The search tool is, well, just a search tool really. I’ve heard some good things about its features but I haven’t really noticed a significant difference.

Overall I’m quite impressed with Flock. Anything you can do in Firefox will work with Flock and it has a couple of extra features which are kinda fun.

technorati tags:Flock, Blogging, Blog, Flickr, Photo, Photobucket, Blogger, Labels, Tags, Browser, Firefox, Mozilla, Review, Technorati

Blogged with Flock

Check out the cute pic of me my mother emailed me the other day. That was the year that my grandparents gave me a Baby Alive doll. Its actually pretty weird to see the transformation of the Baby Alive doll. Looking back at some ads it appears it started with a lever on its back to make it look like it was eating. Mine did it automagically! And more importantly she pooped!

Edit: J. Godsey kindly fixed up the borked colour in my baby photo caused by fading over time. Thankyou so much!

Tags: Doll, Photography, Christmas, Baby+Alive

A recent episode of G’day World (G’DAY WORLD 190 - Evan Maloney: Paid Blogger, Screenwriter, Tough Guy) got me thinking about coffee. This Christmas my sister Naomi, knowing about my caffeine addiction, bought me a coffee machine. So far I’ve been making fairly average cappuccinos with very little care or consistency. Just your typical garden variety someone-bought-me-a-coffee-machine-for-Christmas-style coffee.

But now that’s not enough. See in this particular episode of G’day World Cam mentions that on that particular morning he’d made his first perfect cafe latte. He seemed to be pleased as punch. Which made me think, why am I settling for an average coffee when I could with some practice make a really good coffee?

So I’ve decided to start learning and practicing. I’ve been reading various articles on coffee making (I’ve bookmarked The espresso guide and How to present a latte) I’m going to pick up some proper espresso cups and a milk jug, and I’m going to make a lot of coffee.

I’m thinking it might be fun to photograph my progress and keep an ongoing log so that anyone who knows good coffee can feel appropriately smug about how poor my early efforts are.

On a completely different note I just tried out Podscope for the first time. In their words:

Podscope lets you search the spoken word for audio and video that interests you.

I used it because I couldn’t remember precisely which episode of G’day World Cam mentioned his perfect latte in. So I used Podscope to find it It certainly still has some kinks to iron out. For example ‘espresso’ wouldn’t come up with his podcast nor would ‘latte’ however ‘coffee’ worked perfectly and I eventually found what I was after. Overall I was very impressed! It will even play a short clip containing the search term in context so you can figure out whether you have the right podcast. I definitely think it’s something worth playing with and I’m sure they’ll tidy up the speech recognition over time.

Tags: Christmas, Cameron+Reilly, Podcast, Coffee, Podscope, Espresso

When Colin got up the other night to go to the loo he was somewhat amused to find me sleeping like this:

That explains alot!

Tags: Dream, Humour, Funny, Sleeping, Photo

On the basis that you can learn a lot about someone from their bookshelf I thought to myself: why not put together a couple of annotated photo’s of my bookshelf to share with anyone who cares to look?

So from the top shelf…

1. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and the Places that Scare You both gifts from my mother, both books that I’ve been meaning to read but never got around to it.
2. The Path to Enlightenment by Geshe Loden. Given to me by Geshe Loden. It and the previous two Buddhist texts are kept on the top shelf out of respect.
3. The sheet music I’ve gotten around to bringing down from sydney: Half cello, half guitar. My piano music and complete works of The Beatles are still in sydney because I don’t have a piano (which is, incidentally, driving me crazy).
4. A whole bunch of diet books because I’m great at reading diet books and useless at following them.
5. The Coming Plague a really cool book which chronicles the worst diseases in recent human history and how they came about.
6. Biological Psychology. A very cool textbook which talks about the neurological side of psychology.
   
7. Clinical Medicine. A medical textbook I devoured a couple of years ago when I wanted to study medicine.
8. My Harry Potter books in French. I’ve only read the first one the whole way through. I need to brush up on my french a little bit and get back to reading them. Its a good mental exercise.
9. Suicide Girls. Birthday present from Colin.
10. My uni textbooks

Obviously there are other books on the shelf but if you want to stickybeak further you’ll just have to look at the larger photo and figure out what they are

Tags: Books, Reading, Bookshelf, Interests

My sister Naomi is with me in Melbourne for 10 days to work on her Design and Technology major work. Its all very exciting (even if she is a pain in the arse) and I’ll keep you posted if anything interesting happens.

Colin in his loveliness has gone against all his principles and bought me an iPod! It should be arriving any day now

Tags: Apple, iPod, Gift

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had a bunch of dreams moving from bizarre to disturbing.

Cam had a starring role in the first one. It was about a strange form of TPN Christmas party clearly held in the northern hemisphere as evidenced by all the snow and during the gift-giving part of the evening a serving plate (gift for Cam) turned into a gravy boat whilst I simultaneously discovered that I was naked. I then procured some clothing and we got chatting about moleskines and productivity… as you do!

The second was somewhat less strange and more disturbing. Basically there were two guys tasing me. I can’t remember much more than fear and pain.

The third had me waking in a cold sweat shaking. To explain why it was so disturbing for me I’ll have to give you a little history but I’ll get to that later. The dream was simple and I don’t remember any details but someone was standing over me with a sharp blade making long, shallow cuts in my skin.

Now for the history.
I used to cut. I don’t remember when self-harm started, I’d been doing it since I was a child but the first time I actually used a blade and made a long, shallow cut down my arm was a turning point for me. It was when I was around 13 and thats when it became an irresistible urge. Cutting is an addiction like any other. Like many alcoholics drowning their sorrows with whatever spirit is on hand I did it so I didn’t have to feel. When life got too painful to bear I would lock myself in my room and drag a blade across my skin until the blood carried my pain away.

I’ve stopped that now. When Colin met me he told me never to do that again. I stopped for a while, a good few months. Then one argument with a teacher at school pushed me over and I cut deeper than I ever had on my upper thigh. I probably should have had stitches there was no way I was going into hospital. Colin did what he could to treat the wounds and to calm me down and I finally felt safe and realised that I didn’t need to cut any more and I haven’t since. Thats not to say that I haven’t wanted to, but I’ve resisted it.

So to dream about someone cutting me is like a recovering heroin junkie dreaming about someone forcing them to take a hit. Shook me up a little.

Anyways enough of my self-indulgent rambling.

You may be curious as to why I group these three dreams together. They’re the only dreams I’ve had in the past month. So its strange that they should all be about vulnerability.

Tags: Cutting, Self+Harm, Nightmare, Dream, Taser, Self+Mutilation, Depression

I’ve been offline for just under a week now. Painful stuff! The closest I got to the internet was refusing to pay $40 for the privilege of internet access at my hotel for a day. So that explains the silence.
The reason for my absence was a friends wedding. Yes at just under 20 years old (in less than a month) I already have friends getting married. What a strange world we live in.
For all you gen xs around here this might seem somewhat confusing. Aren’t modern sophisticated women supposed to shun early marriage in favor of careers and education? Well here’s the thing. There are a hell of a lot of miserable 40-something women about who decided that they were going to have a career ahead of children and then by the time they got around to the children bit they discovered they’d dried up. So gen y are making the choice. Sure, we can be doctors, engineers, writers, academics, accountants whatever floats your boat, but we can also be mothers and wifes if we want to be.
My friend Anna has chosen to be a housewife. A housewife with a degree in communications (creative writing) but a housewife nonetheless. All Anna has ever wanted to be is a housewife, and maybe a children’s book writer if she ever gets around to it. So good luck to her.

Tags: Feminism, Housewife, Wedding, Generation+Y, Generation+X, Career