Urbane Tiger

Mandala Clocks and Myanmar Corpses

Mon, 12 May 2008 09:03:21 GMT

Surely those that are running Myanmar have to be bought before the ICC to face charges of crimes against humanity. The pictures of bloated corpses of children in pools of water, alongside video clips of young women urging people to vote for the new "constitution" is obscene.

Here is something against which every man and woman must rage, irrespective of race, colour, religion or creed, I cannot believe that it does not offend and diminish each and every one of us.

Armenia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, El Salvador, Cambodia, Dafur, Rwanda, Burma, how many more of the innocent must die before the world leaders understand that enough is enough. The guilt of those who choose to stand idly by -- again, and again, and again -- must surely soon overwhelm. Who will have the courage to face down China and India, to act decisively and with purpose to bring these bastards to justice.

India and China could collectively to snuff out the Myanmar leadership tomorrow if they so chose. The people of world would hail their respective leaders as men of courage and compassion, but their fellow leaders would howl with indignation and tremble in fear. Tibet would disappear from Peking's nightmares at least until the games were done. India could justify its claim to being one of the worlds great democracies.

I too stand guilty, my father may well have taken up arms if he had seen such atrocities ...

Mandala Clocks, tales for another day perhaps

Review : Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:46:24 GMT

Author : Margarete Buber-Neumann

Autobiographical account by a German woman who was a prisoner in a Soviet labour camp and in a Nazi concentration camp..

First published in 1949, a new edition has recently been published by Pimlico.

I'd seen references to this book over the years but never got around to finding a copy to read. When I spotted in a bookshop window a couple of weeks ago, I said to myself "Ah I've been wanting to read that", so I bought it.

This it a remarkable story, told by a remarkable woman.

The author was born in Potsdam the capital of Prussia. She married the son of Martin Buber the Jewish philosopher by whom she had two daughters, they divorced and she became the partner of Heinz Neumann a prominent member of the German Communist Party. Margarete & Heinz fled to Russia when the Nazi's came to power in 1933. They became victims of one of Stalin's purges, Heinz was executed and Margarete was sent to a labour camp in Kazakhstan. Under the pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany Margarete was extradited back to Germany, soon after her arrival she was imprisoned in the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women until shortly before it was liberated by the Soviet Army.

I find it astonishing that Buber-Neumann was able to write this book so soon after her ordeal ended, and it is perhaps because she was able to do so that makes her book so compelling. It is a book whose every page bought tears to my eyes, they are there now.

The book was written in German, and translated into English soon after it was published in Germany. One of things I noticed was that there were "errors" in the translation. I got the impression that the translator did an initial scan translating pretty much word for word, then another to correct the grammar and get the right tense etc. Occasionally it seems that he missed this second scan and the text was published as per the first scan - are translated works edited, after they've been translated.

The differences in the manner in which the two totalitarian states treated there prisoners is stark. Nazi concentration camps were segregated in every which way - classes of prisoner (Jews, Deviants, Political, Jehovah's Witnesses etc) as well as sex and age. In the Soviet gulags everyone was thrown together in an environment of bizarre freedom. One is left with the feeling that the Nazi system was based on a perverse morality, whereas the Soviet system was based on a equally perverse immorality.

In conclusion if you're prepared to have your emotions stirred and conscience pricked this is a must read.

Travel Bags and Keyboards

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:33:12 GMT

Episode 1 - @,s are off, luv- we've run out, can't get no more for love nor money.

There are just two things in my live with which I have never been really satisfied - keyboards and travel bags

Returning from a recent visit with some friends 35K inland the from the mid north coast, I was looking forward to playing with my new ADSL/2+ link. I'd been disappointed that I'd not been able to start using it before I went north. Before going away I'd configured the router and made the necessary changes to my PC's configuration and whilst away I'd received notification that the link was in service.

So, when I arrived home I powered up the PC and the router and started to unpack my bag, on turning around there was a Windows dialogue box on the screen ----- wanting to know what it should do with the update it had just downloaded - yes it worked first time, and hasn't stopped since. And it's seriously quick (IMO) - peaking in excess of 20Mbps.

However my glee soon turned to gloom. I composed an email to someone, when I hit Send, Live Mail told me the mail address was invalid, I'd left out the @; moved the caret and pressed shift/2 -- nothing, fired up Notepad pressed shift key and held down the 2 -- nothing, tried it in a DOS box -- nothing, Damn my much loved Microsoft Office keyboard's had run out of @'s.

Realising that living without @'s would be difficult, I grabbed an old Packard Bell (PB) keyboard that I found on the street, and plugged it into the PS2 keyboard socket, but I didn't disconnect my @less keyboard. Windoze can support two keyboards, so I slipped the PB keyboard into a shelf where I could get at shift/2 and carried on using the Microsoft keyboard, occasionally reaching down to get an @.

After a while I discovered that not only had the @ gone AWOL, but so too had the %, ), [ and ", soon after the A and the K disappeared too!! OK I give up, I disconnected the Microsoft keyboard and started using the the old PB job exclusively.

Next day I took the keyboard apart and gave it a thorough wash & brush up, took a long time getting the keys off and putting them back again. Alas even though it shone like the sun, the @ bucket and the % bucket and all the other buckets remained empty. I searched the Web to discover that you can't replenish the stock of letters, numbers etc in your keyboard, once you've used them all, that's it - time to get a new keyboard.

Imagine if GM or MB made cars that way, so that when they ran out of petrol you'd have to buy a new one, the greenies would go off their trees. Keyboard manufacturer's are in a different league, they can get away with blue murder - I wonder how much they contributed to the Labor party last year.

Now, as I said my Microsoft Office keyboard is much loved, primarily because of the metal buttons it has to the left of the QWERTY section of the keyboard. These buttons provide cut, copy and paste plus back and forward plus a rocker button for task switching plus a chunky rubberised scroll wheel. I knew that the keyboard was not a current model and I anticipated difficulty in finding a suitable replacement. I once made the mistake of buying a clone of the MS Office keyboard, it lasted less than 6 months, but it only cost me $16. I made that mistake before I found the real MS Office keyboard, the one that just exhausted its cache of @'s.

Stay tuned for episode 2 of the urbane.tiger's quest for the perfect keyboard

What you can expect to find here

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:23:23 GMT

Don't expect to see pictures or videos in this blog, the owner is a paid up, card carrying, iconoclast.

Don't expect to see any commentary pertaining to television shows - the blog owner doesn't have a TV receiver.

Don't expect to see any commentary regarding celebrities, except as would apply to the "celebrity class" as a whole.

Do expect to see politcal comment within the local, state, national and international arena's and bearpits.

Do expect to see the odd 'critique' of books read, movies watched, played seen etc.

Do expect to see the owners thoughts on current issues - climate change, credit crunches and liquidity squeezes

Do expect to see some techie stuff re computers, programming and the like.

Custom List: Useful Places

Sun, 11 May 2008 01:34:27 GMT

Useful Places

PartnersInRhyme
Free Sound Effects Download thousands of free sound effects from PartnersInRhyme.com

Custom List: Words of Wisdom

Sun, 04 May 2008 08:00:40 GMT

Words of Wisdom

Urbane Tiger - 1993
Reward excellent mistakes, punish mediocre successes
Ancient Indian Proverb
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our descendants.
Winston Churchill
From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.
Urbane.Tiger 2008
One can stay in the present providing one heeds the lessons of history and values the benefits of foresight

Custom List: Software Favorites

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 06:54:36 GMT

Software Favorites

Pstart
System Tray tool to start applications. Designed to run portable applications. You can start executables from USB key devices or removable disks. I also run it on my desktop, gives me a subset of Start->All Programs
Firefox - Web Browser
Not much I can say that hasn't be said elsewhere
The Sage
The Sage integrates an English language dictionary and a relational thesaurus into a single reference system Super program for anyone with an interest in words, much loved by crossword addicts.

Book List: Book List

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 06:47:35 GMT

Salman Rushdie: The Enchantess of Florence
To B read. Should be good contrast to Prisoner Under Two Dictators. An amalgam of history and fantasy, not unfamiliar territory for Rushdie. Reviews : SMH - April 11, 2008, The Spectator - April 8 2008
Margarete Buber-Neumann: Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler
An account by a survivor of both the Soviet Gulags and Nazi concentration camps. This book explores the behaviour of the guards, supervisors, police and secret police and compares and contrasts Stalin and Hitler's methods of dictatorship and terror.