Lines and Symmetry: The Death of Jean-Louis Trintingnant

This week, well known French actor Jean-Louis Trintingnant passed away at 91 years of age. He was the topic of our French conversation group so I had to quickly look into his work only to realise that he was in classics such as 1950 And God Created Woman and of course (doh!), 1969 film by Costa Gavra, Z. As I searched for his movies to watch online, I came across The Conformist (1970) of which the full movie can be found on YouTube but what struck me the most of this movie as the symmetry.

That’s when I found out it was made by Bernardo Bertolucci, a well known man so I did a bit of hunting and came across this video. I love cinematography that has symmetry. There’s something about it that makes you take in the entire frame because it’s actually telling the story….without words.

Check out this brilliance too by Wes Anderson in his latest film that I loved, The French Dispatch.

I LOVE movies with this cinematography. I go crazy for it. I have conniptions whenever I see any stuff from Wes Anderson. Whenever I see movies or photos that play with these symmetrical elements, it’s like catnip to cat for me. I’m fascinated.

I have no idea why. I just do. Meanwhile the rest of my life and surrounds is a dog’s breakfast.

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Passwords or Pass Phrases?

One of the conversations I’ve been having with some security boffins at work – and my dad (who’s not a security boffin) – is about this idea of using pass phrases instead of passwords. We’ve been taught over the years to come up with a strong password that has a mix of letters, symbols and numerals but it turns out that there’s a body of evidence that if we use PASS PHRASES instead – a mix of words in a random order – that the password is a lot harder to crack.

I was being my own suspicious dubious self in those work conversations and wondered if there was any evidence-based research about it because frankly, keeping our data secure is critical now more than ever. As more accounts are being hacked, you want to do the best thing to keep your data safe.

I’m no expert in this and I STILL haven’t read enough about it because really, i have no idea who to believe and trust anymore. A colleague sent the links below and it struck me as to how old they are. They’re from 2005! If some people were sharing this stuff 16 years ago, why weren’t their voices amplified?

Why did I have to go through hours of the most boring security awareness training ever?

Why did I have to design and develop said security awareness training and have the fear of god put into me by the IT team for not putting my lame password on bloody a post-it note to stick under my chair?

It made me start to wonder that maybe – just maybe – the few voices who were drowned out in the early years by the majority, really knew their stuff and we just chose to ignore them and now our chickens are coming home to roost with heaps of data breaches.

Maybe there’s a lesson in all this which is to trust the original naysayers that the pack is ganging up on.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/passphrase-evangelism/

https://blog.codinghorror.com/passwords-vs-pass-phrases/

https://blog.codinghorror.com/rainbow-hash-cracking/

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Dewey as Epstein?

Coming out of the Oakleigh Library recently, I asked my father why he hadn’t borrowed anything.

“I couldn’t find what I wanted with that numbering system! Who came up with that crazy system?”

He was talking about the Dewey Decimal system of course and I started to explain it initially and then realised I didn’t know enough about it myself. I left it aside in the corner of my mind.

A week later, I’m reading The Book Seller’s Tale by Martin Latham and there’s a chapter on the Dewey Decimal system that’s enough to send warning signals.

Turns out that Melvil Dui (yes, that’s his name as he wanted to cut some letters out to reform spelling! *Alarm Bells*) Dewey was a bit of a letch – but not just any letch, he was anti-semitic, racist, misogynistic and by all accounts a pretty horrible person with OCD – which is reflected in his decimal system (which by all accounts, not his original idea as it was taken from somewhere else – *Alarm Bells*) and also the system reflects his biases.

He even ran a camp at Lake Placid which openly excluded poor people, non-whites, non-Christians and the uneducated! Oh women, he hated women too that’s why he took every chance to harass them. In one case, he abducted one in his car to sexually assault for the weekend. ?

Bloody hell what a moron. For someone whose system is being used in my most revered place (to me a library is akin to a church for me), we are continuing to use his decimal system from this vile man. If people are going batshit over Captain Cook statues (and he was a nicer man for his time), why on earth aren’t they replacing the Dewey Decimal System?! ?

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Hitting the Twitter Nerve

Big thanks to Luis Suarez who posted to my post on I Permanently Deleted Twitter. He shared a couple of his own posts that explain the changes and why it doesn’t sit well with him either. I encourage you to check them out because they resonated strongly with me.

Things I Terribly Miss in Twitter

Twitter is Where My Conversations Went to Die

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Parisian Vibe

I fell in love with this couple’s apartment. Look how clean and beautiful it is. Would be something I’d quite comfortably live in. Although to be fair, I’d be able to live in a shoe box (as long as it wasn’t cold, drafty or mouldy). This is a channel I’ve wasted hours of my time.

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Learning How to Crochet & Learning Spanish at the Same Time

Thanks to my friend Renee who lives in Spain and speaks fluent French, during our weekly chats, she let me know of this YouTuber, Yolanda Figuera. She creates these fabulous crochet tops that aren’t “mumsy” so naturally I had to make one.

This will be a separate blog post because I’m actually creating this below by following Yolanda (who DOESNT SPEAK ENGLISH) and learning crochet at the same time. My husband thinks I’ve gone mad especially as I now count my stitches in Spanish, uno, dos, tres…

Some Photos From The Week