Artists
Shigeno Suwada and Junko Masumoto are joined by the new Japanese Consul
General Kazuo Shibata at the opening of the exhibition.
By Shana Kongmun
The Lanna Japan Festival takes place in Chiang Mai every
year and features unique and contemporary Japanese art and pop culture. This
year, cosplayers even took part in the Japanese float during the Grand
Parade for Loy Krathong.
Additionally, unique attractions can be found around the
city, from the calligraphy on display at CMU to the contemporary Japanese
handicrafts exhibition at CMU Art Centre. The Art and Culture Museum behind
the Three Kings Monument was also host to such an event, featuring modern
dance performances by a Thai-Japanese duo and the artworks of Shigeno Sawada
and Junko Masumoto entitled “A message from Paper & Iron” that runs until
December 5.
Featuring enormous paper fish swimming through waves made
from saa like paper, and plume like paper on stalks of iron this modern
display takes up a very large space on the second floor of the building. Be
sure to check out all the exhibits on display.
Some of
the giant paper fish on display.
One of
the unique ceramic works of art on display at Chiang Mai University’s Art
Center as part of the Lanna Japan Festival, the show on Japanese
contemporary handicrafts runs through December.
Visitors to the upstairs gallery at CMU’s Art Center were intrigued by the
unique and beautiful ceramic and wood handicrafts on display, noting that
Japanese culture has managed to meld the ancient and the modern and yet
still remain uniquely Japanese.
By Jai-Pee
Gallery 116 has yet another interesting and attractive
exhibition open to the public, this time devoted to portraits including many
of members of the Royal Family, self-portraits and of other people. The
Gallery, situated at 116 Charoen Muang Road just a short meander from the
Nawarat Bridge, will be keeping this exhibition open until February 15th
– and it is the third exhibition this year in this innovative gallery,
founded and run by local entrepreneur Mrs Wanthip Nimmanhaeminda.
Most of the portraits – there are about 40 of them – are
traditional in conception with one notable rather abstract exception, and
painted mainly with oil or acrylic. They form a great contrast to the last
but one exhibition here – this time we have largely somber colours (there
are a three stunning exceptions!) which contrast sharply to the exhibition
of May this year where we were greeted by a blaze of radiant colours. The
first notable exception is an attention-grabbing portrait of His Majesty the
King, done in a blue wash and measuring a huge 150cms by 130cms. Artist
Rungsak explained that the blue is taken from the centre of the Thai flag –
the blue stripe in the flag representing the King. It is a great tribute to
His Majesty entitled Love the King 2. A further portrait shows the Royal
Princess MahaChakri Sirindhorn outlined against a white background. The
artist has captured so eloquently the beloved Princess’s warm and attractive
smile and it beams radiantly down at visitors as they enter the gallery. One
other wonderful exhibit is a large-scale and reverential painting of the
well-known monk Luang Tabua, painted by local artist Vichit Chaiwong, whose
former Gongdee Studio was a great local attraction before moving to San
Kampaeng. This large painting and many others are for sale, the proceeds
going to local or Royal charities.
Fourteen artists, some local, others from further afield
including Bangkok, have contributed to this delightful display of talent and
enterprise. Most of the portraits are of a reasonable size for living-room
walls, measuring in the region of 50cms by 40cms. Interested visitors,
having seen the style of the many artists whose work is on display, may
commission a portrait of themselves or of their family and friends. It is
well worth a visit to enjoy a browse in this interesting and eye-catching
exhibition or you may wish to visit the website at: www. 116artgallery.com .What
a great way to celebrate the New Year - commission a portrait to enhance
your home!
By the Computer Quack
Despite all the warnings out there, one of the biggest
mistakes I see from PC owners is the unpatched computer. So this week, why
you need to apply patches and how you do it.
Security patches are not unique to Microsoft. Although
the software giant gets the most press, virtually every other piece of
software may contain security holes that need to be “patched”. A quick
glance at current vulnerabilities contains most of the heavyweights: IBM, HP,
Symantec, Linux, Trend Micro, Google, Mozilla, Adobe; the list is endless.
So what is a patch? Since most software is written by
humans, it is inevitable that it will contain errors. These errors vary from
code that can be exploited to crash a system to ones that allow an attacker
to take over complete control of a computer. There are two sets of people
looking for these errors, or security holes: Those with white hats, who want
to help secure software, and will generally advise the software’s authors of
the problem in secret, to allow them to fix it; and those with black hats,
who want to exploit the hole for nefarious purposes.
Keeping Antivirus software up to date is not a completely
effective solution. Not only does it often take days for a virus to be
identified and blocked, but in some cases it doesn’t even require a virus to
attack your computer. Code Red, a fairly destructive worm from 2001, was
able to spread from computer to computer by sending a simple web request to
servers with a security flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Information Server. And,
as I mentioned last time, other infection vectors are used such as USB
drives.
So if you want your computer properly patched, here’s how
you do it. I’ll focus here on Microsoft Windows, but at the end I’ll give
you a couple of links where you can go and check what’s going on in the Mac,
Linux and application worlds.
Please note that if you haven’t been patching your
computer regularly, this is going to take some time! So crack open a cold
one and do the following:
In your start menu is a “Windows Update” option. Just run
it, and it will load Microsoft’s Update web site. You’ll see two options,
Express and Custom. If you want to do this in two parts, go to Express. This
will focus on what Microsoft call Critical Updates. However, I’d recommend
you do the “Custom” update, because this will install all patches, including
certain hardware drivers if they are there.
Windows will now check its update catalogue to see what
you have installed, and after a while, , it will list all of the updates
outstanding. It will classify them as “Critical” and “Important”. You select
“Review and Install Updates”, and then press the button to download and
install everything outstanding.
You’ll see how many updates there are, and the amount to
be downloaded, before you do this, so you’ll have an idea of how long it may
take.
A word of warning here: If you start this, don’t
necessarily expect it to run to completion without you doing anything else;
certain updates may ask you to confirm a license agreement before it starts,
so chug down that coldie while you watch for a while.
Once all of the updates are downloaded, they will then
start installing. There may be other “OK”’s to hit, so be prepared. But it’s
a straightforward process. In my experience, most updates require a reboot
on completion, which is where the next part comes in. Windows has looked at
your current setup and updated the holes it sees, but this is an iterative
process. If you are far behind on updates, you need to run the process again,
and it will probably find more updates. You may have to do this two or more
times if you haven’t applied updates for a long time.
Finally, you can automate this procedure. Depending on
your version of Windows, search the help for “Automatic Updates” and it will
tell you where you can configure this behaviour. You can select the updates
to be downloaded and installed when available, or just to download and wait
for you to install them.
Once you’ve got your PC up to date, updates normally come
once a month from Microsoft, on what is called “Patch Tuesday”. On an
average month there are around 10-15 of them. If you see a recommendation to
upgrade to “Microsoft Update” by the way, take it. This will also download
updates for your other Microsoft products like Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
If you’re interested, you can find out more about
vulnerabilities from the HNS website at http://www.net-security.org/vulnerabilities.php?d=20
or http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/.
Feel free to email thecomputerquack@gmail.com with your
computer related questions.
