randomosity

Today’s gad­get du jour is the Roy­al­tek RGM-3800 GPS Receiver and Data­log­ger. I have long wanted to exper­i­ment with one of these and today one arrived in the post from the UK. It’s a small ticket item (€50), but after a short test here I am very, very impressed. A GPS data­log­ger is just like your fancy GPS car receiver that pro­jects your track on an LCD screen with the dif­fer­ence being, there’s no screen, and it simply records your pos­i­tion to flash memory at reg­u­lar inter­vals. You can then down­load the data­file to your com­puter and plot the data on a map using google maps or similar.

It arrived this morn­ing and I popped the bat­ter­ies into it. It’s not much of a test as I sit here in the office, but Matt had to go out to run some errands and I asked if he would take it with him. I installed the soft­ware (Win­dows only unfor­tu­nately — Par­al­lels to the res­cue). The install was smooth and the device was recog­nized imme­di­ately. I access it and changed to log­ging inter­val to 15 seconds. The device itself is about half the size of a cur­rent mobile phone. It is powered by two AA bat­ter­ies which sup­posed allow it to fill the memory a few times.

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Last night marked a first visit to the IFI (Irish Film Insti­tute). The IFI, I have gathered and can now con­firm is a won­der­ful

venue for those in the know. They fea­ture a full slate of movies, largely European indie flicks, def­in­itely of eclectic rather than pop­u­lar taste. Last night for example fea­tured: Paris, City of Men, L’Heure d’été and Led­jis.
Last night’s object­ive was to see the rather innoc­u­ously named Paris. Read the movie sum­mary, but went in with little idea about what we were going to see. This 2008 film from Cédric Klapisch earns a very strong must see recom­mend­a­tion! It centres on the flam­boy­ant pro­fes­sional dan­cer Pierre (Romain Duris), who has been dia­gnosed with a ter­minal heart con­di­tion and his sis­ter (Juli­ette Binoche) who sheds work respons­ib­il­it­ies to move in and care for him. Much in the style of his earlier, and superb L’Auberge Espangnole, Klapisch ingeni­ously webs a series of tan­gen­tially inter­lock­ing story lines. He keeps you guess­ing at to when and where the stor­ies will inter­sect, and aside from some rather clumsy fore­shad­ow­ing in one of the tra­gic sequences, he plays his hand well.

Cross-posted to Dub­lin­ica.

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