Keys Corner

We greatly enjoyed our two-week break in Salamanca – despite getting taught at least three forms of past tense (including a good number of irregular verbs in each tense), two forms of the imperative and piles of new words in that time. Which says a lot for the staff and the other students, since 4 – 5 hours tuition a day certainly isn’t guaranteed to make the time enjoyable! I’m not sure how much we have retained, as our brains felt pretty scrambled by the end of the “holiday”.

The highlight for us was probably the event on the Saturday of the weekend in the middle of our fortnight. The city of Salamanca has been celebrating the 250th anniversary of the completion of the Plaza Major (the main square), and the final celebration was on the 22nd October. There was a spectacular show of light and water in the late evening, which completely filled the square, with girls doing acrobatics suspended under balloons (in the air) and dancing inside even bigger balloons (on the ground). There was also a large surprise for many of the spectators at one end of the square when two large jets of water sprayed up, to form a curtain of water used to project images onto – a lot of umbrellas went up in a hurry, as the water sprayed everywhere! (Unfortunately not too many of my photos came out sharp, as I was shooting at 1/8 second without a tripod, we’re hoping Ruth’s camera, loaded with 800 ASA film will have produced better results than the digital comara managed.)

Just to say that posting will be slow or non-existent over the next two weeks – we are off to Salamanca again for a second dose of Spanish.

The corner of Ruth’s latest work in progress
Ruth has taken up patchwork and quilting this year, having played with one or two ideas over the last 25 years or more. Click on the thumbnail above to take you to a page with more information.

If you are interested in learning more about this sort of thing, take a look at Quilt University – they offer very reasonable courses for around $20 – $35 per course. Ruth has taken 3 or 4 courses there and has enjoyed them all, so far.

If you enjoy playing with colours, take a look at Jim Bumgardner’s KrazyDad Color Picker, which will pick similarly coloured photos on one of several different themes which you can select (under the colour-wheel) from Flickr. Great fun!

I used to use Xara X under Windows quite a bit, so I am pleased to see that they have decided to make it Open Source – also for the Mac:

Xara is pleased to announce that it intends to make its flagship graphics product, Xara X (in its latest and greatest incarnation, Xara Xtreme), Open Source. Xara is also working to bring it to the Linux and Mac platforms…

...Ironically, given the dominance of the Mac in graphic design circles, there is no mass-market, high performance, easy-to-use graphic-design tools available for the Mac. For more than 10 years, we’ve had a continuous stream of Mac users asking, begging, that we port Xara X to their platform. By Open Sourcing the product we believe this is now a practical, realistic prospect.

With the likely elimination of Macromedia Freehand by the Adobe acquisition, Expression being acquired by Microsoft (who are unlikely to create any new Mac versions), this leaves the Mac platform with just a single serious player in this space – Adobe Illustrator. This near monopoly is not good for the Mac platform. We hope that Xara Xtreme on the Mac will change the graphics landscape for Mac users.

Gradually we are getting quite a comprehensive set of heavy-duty Open Source applications for the Mac – NeoOffice (based on OpenOffice.org) and the GIMP, to name two of the better-known ones. As well as reasonably priced alternatives from Apple. There are still gaps, however. A good, professional web editor along the lines of Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, for example.

A proposal to introduce flat-rate income tax in Germany may have contributed to the completely unexpected failure of the CDU/CSU to win a workable majority in the recent elections. The proposal was fought tooth and nail by Gerhard Schröder, arguing that it would mean that an industry boss would be paying the same rate as a worker, which might have been correct, but which came over as if Schröder meant the number of Euro would be the same, rather than the percentage, and in any case wasn’t correct as the proposed flat rate would have included a tax-free sum for the first 8000 Euro, meaning that lower earners would have also paid a lower percentage than the managers.

However, I came across an argument in the Independent, referring to the UK tax system, which I don’t recall seeing in the German election campaign. It highlights a major problem of introducing a flat tax if you already have progressive tax bands and lots of deductible personal allowances (which is the situation in Germany today):

10 per cent of UK taxpayers contribute about 50 per cent of the personal tax take, and the average contribution by households is just 18.2 per cent of their income. To get the same revenue, you’d need to charge a flat rate of 23 per cent if you kept current allowances. This would leave 90 per cent of taxpayers – or 27 million people – worse off. Even if you scrapped all but the most basic personal allowances, 22 million taxpayers would be worse off. And if you try to consolidate national insurance into your flat tax, pensioners would be worse off.

The authors of that analysis claimed it took ten minutes to do the sums, and half of that was doing research on the internet to gather the necessary figures. Anyone fancy doing the sums for Germany?

I enjoy good photographs, and discovered recently that one of my colleagues at work is a talented photographer. The photo above will take you to his portfolio, if you click on it.

I don’t do .INI, .BAT, or .SYS files.
I don’t assign apps to files.
I don’t configure peripherals or networks before using them.
I have a computer to do all that.
I have a Macintosh, not a hobby.

(Fritz Anderson)

Noticed in the right-hand screen-bar of Mac Essentials