Aaron Irving – Nightshadow

Despite it’s nicknames such as the itampon – it poses an interesting idea.

So we all know by now it is basically an iphone on roids.. – so what’s the deal. The deal is apple. They are a marketing power not to be taken lightly. They do a damn good job of convincing you that you need to buy a shiny version of relatively normal hardware. So…

Software: Basically if you have used an iphone you will know how to use the ipad. Why they didn’t choose a lighter version of OS X – who knows. My gripes – single program usage. In today’s world, people are use to multi-tasking. They have multiple programs at once. Like the iphone the ipad only lets you have a single piece of software running at once. There is no minimise, its open or close. This is a smart idea as it minimise the need for large amounts of RAM (of which apple doesn’t say how much in the Tech Specs.  It’s also annoying as all software must be loaded via itunes – no plug and play. At least until you hack it and therefore void your warranty. Of course this forces you to use apple software, have an apple account – list your credit card details in the apple store and yeah – be one with apple. I am surprised that the US government hasn’t deemed this some sort of anti-trust, c’est la vie. The 3g model is the only one I would consider – this also gives you a choice of GPS software – if you feel so inclined. Several features such as ibooks aren’t available in australia (and won’t be for at least a year, if ever). This is due to licensing agreements with the authors publishers.

Hardware: Now this is nothing new. It’s all been around before. Apple claims they have this special A4 processor that is all theres. It’s based upon the typical ARM-based processors found in your GPS or smartphone and made typically by centrality or samsung etc. They are good processors and power windows CE, windows mobile, android, win 95 (on a nokia) or even linux (tomtom etc). APple has modified – and supposedly produce it themselves (which is a first in a while). This version runs a 1ghz chip – which is pretty damn fast for a little device that only runs one program at a time. I have a more powerful than average GPS unit running a dual-core 600mhz ARM chip and it is damn impressive what it can run (my GPS plays divx’s, has a DVB-T tuner in it, opens word files, opens pdfs, has corel draw, reads out ebooks using text-to-speech etc). These ipads come with various size flash disks (!6, 32 or 64gb) which is nice. Of course they are tablet-only (multi-touchscreen) which is getting more and more common – and the way of the future. All will be that way soon enough. It is a 9.7” screen (diagonally, non-widescreen). Why the hell aren’t they widescreen apple – they would be perfect for playing movies. They also only run 1024×768, so despite having a good quality, shiny, pretty screen, isn’t even true High-Definition.

I guess apple is the first to put it all together with a 10” version – but the 13” netbooks are getting damn common nowadays (and make a lot more sense for travelling than a laptop). a 10” tablet will be available by other manufacturers soon enough (one would imagine). The other features like 3g, N(108mbps) Wifi, A-GPS, acceleromator, light sensor, etc are all found in current ARM-based GPS devices with touchscreen (though not many on the Australian market – I can get all of those features on a 5”/7” iphone clone GPS device for about $200/$280AU incl. duties). The apple software does multi-touch better than most though and they are the first to do it in 10”. It is interesting to see how well it goes. It looks damn hot and the apple marketing will tell you need it (especially to go with your iphone or apple mac laptop). For me the ability to only run one piece of software at a time and forced to use itunes is a deal-breaker. It’s a big NO from me…. though it looks sexy and I don’t have one.

As most of you know – Melbourne has some damn good coffee. It has some crap coffee and a lot of average coffee, but yes, some damn good coffee. The problem is – you find a good place and then some toss* like Matt Preston writes a review and voila – busy as hell. Two of my favourite places have slowly declined in quality that much that I don’t even want to go there anymore.

Liar Liar in hawthorn, just hasn’t been the same since the owner sold it and moved on. The new staff just can’t cut it and I have actually had bad coffees from there. The vibe is just all wrong aswell.

Chimmy’s in Richmond – again just can’t cut it with the crowds lately. Cold meals, massive waits and then the coffee is more often average than not lately. Very disappointing based on how good it has been in the past. They have all their fresh-baked goodness though.

A lot of places are just dishing out mediocre coffees as they can’t handle the amount of people anymore… I blame the write-ups for all the extra people. It certainly can’t be the global financial crisis.

Anyway there is hope. The dancing Goat in the city. St Ali in sth Melbourne. Artichoke and Whitebait @ Monash. Jones @ Chadstone. Ilios at Richmond. The new merlo place in degraves. Di Bella in nth melbourne or at the vic markets. The green room @ Brunwsick. BBB also in the city and lat but not least, BBB’s sister – Seven Seeds at Carlton. There are plenty of other Gems around but Seven seeds takes the cake.

Definitely my pick of the cafes in melbourne at the moment.

One day soon I will do up a list of all the good cafes/coffee places to visit.

I am kind of fond of long random titles for blog posts.

Just got back from seeing Avatar in 3D with a good mate who is visiting from Tasmania (Seth). James cameron did a good job in re-creating a fantasy world, as did Weta Digital. I quite liked the storyline and character development – despite the bad reviews. Was a visually stunning movie, though I felt a little dizzy/headachy by the end. This was likely due to the heat though and my dehydration. 36 degrees is not that hot (when not humid) – but the warm wind makes it pretty uncomfortable.

More warm weather to come – yay. Christmas in Brissy though so the weather will be nice then. A whirlwind 4 day trip, but c’est la vie.

Work has been busy. Yay. As per the monash guidelines we have from the 23rd to 4th jan off. I was in today though to do a maxi – got a cool new construct in that I want to use asap. Writing up my paper (actually several’) – hopefully a decent impact factor first author though. Got news today the Molecular Therapy paper with Michael got accepted (I’m an author anyway, even if not first). Papers are always good. Finally on top of things and starting to feel comfortable. Eventually I will get motivation back and maybe even be inspired to go out photographing. meh, maybe.

Enjoy the break peeps – happy festivus (As daz would say), merry christmas (remember it’s about jesus and not gifts/food) and happy new Year!

So. another rant. I kind of remind myself of Foamy sometimes – http://www.illwillpress.com/vault.html 

Anyway, I felt some serious road rage today. If it wasn’t an overloaded ute seriously driving 30km/hr down the freeway it was a bag of clothes falling off a truck onto my windscreen or a cab cutting me off by driving up a traffic island and almost toppling over (the cabbie even looked scared and grabbed his window).

Ahh melbourne – some crazy roads. The weather here is great though – a bit of heat and very little humidity (so far anyway) unlike what I have heard brissy is like.

Seriously almost snapped and killed a crazy driver today – well not really.

6 1/2 hrs of continuous confocal (FRAP) – yay what a good day.

so anyway…. Neville Parish will soon make a debut at http://www.cityonahill.com.au

Awesome.

The piece, by Peter Greenaway, is pretty impressive. A unique mix of artwork, lighting, music and pojector/cinematography. Short (20mins) but sweet. I found the use of lighting/projector on top of a fixed painted image to be a pretty decent blend of skills. If you are in Melbourne – it is going on for another 2 weeks. http://www.melbournefestival.com.au/program/production?id=3505 Check it out.

A few visual sights I have found disturbing recently:

- A 5yo girl wearing a miniskirt so short I saw her g string when she bent over.

- A pink toilet bowl on the side of the street that someone had taken the initiative to use (hard rubbish collection, where people dump furniture etc on the side of the road).

- Someone had stuck a photo of a guy on the cow up a tree – http://blog.panedia.com/2007/04/27/docklands-cow-up-a-tree/

-clayton

-One of the regulars at my local pub spill bill on himself because he was trying to drink while pissing at the urinal.

- An indian cabby getting changed in the back of his cab (fully changed).

-The amount of blood that can be mixed with snot when you have a seriously blocked nose.

-The fungus growing on one of my supposedly ‘bacterial’ plates.

- The ants pouring out of the mini-CBD buildings in the docklands and running to get to the train station (by ants I mean people in suits).

South America is celebrating as Rio De Janeiro wins it’s bid for the 2016 olympic games. This bid would normally be worth celebrating – however they only win over the unsuccessful bid of Tingalpa. Tingalpa, a small suburb in Brisbane, has now failed for 3 olympic bids in a row. More information about TINCOG’s bid can be found here http://tincog.splunge.net.au/

So – science is geeky. We all know it and embrace it. Sometimes you can use geeky scientific knowledge to make cool objects.

The bloodlamp by Dutch designer Mike Thompson is a glass ball filled with Luminol. It reacts upon binding blood to fluoresce – hence giving off light.

Pic c/o the NS pic of the day – http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn15018-pick-of-the-pictures

It was designed to make the person think about how precious energy is and how much they really need light.

anyway – how’s that for a random post of the day.

Why must one walk up a rampfrom the footpath to get to “lower ground” in my complex?

Why was there one supra, one mitsu Evo X, one GTI, one skyline GTR, 2 HSV coupes a WRX STi, a civc type R (rally prepped) and 2 highly modified nissan patrols in my apartment carpark at midday? Why spend lots of money on a car then leave it parked in the garage all week long.

Why does the name “Craven Cottage” sound so cool?

Why did the butcher let me down? (Worst lamb shanks ever for diner tonight, I swear the sheep must have been 20 yr old reject stock).

Merlo or Di Bella?

Why does the microscope work fine when your cells don’t express the protein properly, but screws up when you get good clean expression?

Enough questions for now anyway…..

On another note, I’m going to cross post my ResearchGate Blog posts from their to hear aswell. Starting with this one on Gene therapy to restore color blindness.

A recent Nature letters paper by Mancuso et al details the use of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) in gene delivery to restore the function of photo-pigments in squirrel monkeys. The male monkeys, red-green color-blind from birth, obtained the ability to process red-green color information via the delivery of the L-opsin gene into the retina. 

While this research opens the door for further hope of gene therapy involved in human eye conditions, including blindness, it also raises some interesting questions. It was previously thought that the brain of adult monkeys would be too "hard-wired" to gain a beneficial effect from the restoration of deficient pathways. The recent paper proves that gene therapy can be utilized in "middle aged" monkeys, and is not solely an avenue to be pursued during early development. This adds a lot of significance to work already begun in human patients, to restore an enzyme involved in a type of hereditary blindness.

Original Article:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08401.html

Gene therapy for red–green colour blindness in adult primates

Katherine Mancuso¹, William W. Hauswirth², Qiuhong Li², Thomas B. Connor³, James A. Kuchenbecker¹, Matthew C. Mauck³, Jay Neitz¹ & Maureen Neitz¹

Well, if our teams last efforts in indoor soccer are anything to go buy – I suck. But I like to watch. Premier league and A-league have started again and this year is looking interesting. As ashamed as I am to admit it – I have traditionally been a Man Utd fan. (maainly from visiting man when my bro lived there). This year they are looking crap and it is good to see Man City starting off so well. Arsenal are also looking hot this year, and even the wolves have potential. Liverpool need a bit of help and we’ll see how chelsea end up doing (off to a good start). Even newly promoted burnley beat Man Utd. So yeah – I am going for man city this year I think… but hope arsenal or chelsea take out the crown – Man Utd has just won too much.

In the A League – I am a melbourne victory supporter. This year, however, they look shit. Need some serious help. I am curious to see how well the new gold coast ends up doing.

For those looking for a new internet provider use iinet (use me for a referral). 4 live premier league matches (in HD) a round and 5 pre-recorded (via fox sports online). Free and quota free.

If you have a digital tv you can see serie-A and bundesliga LIVE in HD on that new sports channel ONE HD (ch 10 sports). They also show UFC wired, which is a crack up.

anyway, off to work.