14 Feb 2006
This is one of those “blanket” posts that attempts to cover everything that happened (or didn’t) over the last few days. As you may have picked from the thoroughly disconnected title.
Sunday saw a trip to the day/night cricket semi-final between Australia and Sri Lanka (I say that like I know what’s going on, but I had to ask Dad who was playing that morning. ’twas purely a social thing for me!) with various friends from church.
It was pretty good times, but I managed to get burnt despite putting sunscreen on every hour (it was 4hr SPF30+ cream!). I think I missed part of my arms (the underside!) in the first hour, and by the second hour they’d already been sufficiently damaged to start turning bright red (it was about 2pm… yeah, easy to burn here in Oz). The Sri Lankans (spelling?) lost, but looked like they were having the most fun of anyone in the ground regardless!
So yeah, it’d rock to be Sri Lankan!
Anyway, I ate some horrendously-overpriced-sport-venue food, probably didn’t QUITE drink enough water (probably drank about 3L at the cricket alone, but was sitting in full sun, so…), and hadn’t been sleeping terribly well for the past week (or two). I’d been sticking my hand up for a few too many things some weeks back and it all finally started to come unravelled last week, I guess. Hopefully things will get better from here, we’ll see. So yeah, various factors… I got home and inside okay (albeit with a massive massive headache), went upstairs, and lost nearly everything I’d eaten that day. I got to bed but only for fourty minutes or so before I woke up again… found I apparently had more food left in my stomach! Doh.
I didn’t go to work yesterday, and spent most of the day in bed… reading Harry Potter (because I still hadn’t read book 5 and a whole day is time enough to finish pretty much any book). The headache had mostly subsided and stomach was fine by the end of the day, but I’ve got a cold now… shrug. Tis very odd. I was at work today but felt kind of lethargic + not that productive… but it was better getting some stuff done than spending another day in bed doing nothing (mind you, it would have been back to Great Expectations followed by North and South if I’d stayed home… hmm…). We’ve got a whole bunch of exciting stuff lined up for the Sunrise Family website which is getting rolled out soon, but obviously don’t waste your time looking if you don’t watch the show (I know I wouldn’t! Once various features launch I’ll probably post geeky details here… we’re looking at social media stuff especially (which shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who know Yahoo!’s acquisition patterns, but seeing as 7 is very much MSM it’s pretty exciting), integration with products from Yahoo!’s stable, etc.
So yeah, that’s what’s been happening. Consider blogging un-slipped.
11 Feb 2006
I found the perfect laptop for me. It’s cheap ($700, plus whatever it’d cost me to add wireless and 512MB of memory to it — has 256 at the minute), compact (12.1″), and insanely lightweight (3.53 pounds, which Google reliably informs me is 1.6KG).
But it’s an IBM, so it’s not an option. I didn’t realise this until after I’d got all excited over the specs and it was a shattering moment!
IBM have always epitomised appalling laptop design for me, mostly because of their insistance on a joystick as a mouse (what the HELL is with that?!) but also because of the inanity of their decision to arbitrarily change the layout of the keyboard… particularly omitting a Start key. I don’t care if I use Linux… I’ve mapped my start key in Ubuntu so that it works the same way! It’s a brilliant innovation (unless, of course, you’re a gamer with chunky fingers and dislike being dumped out of games… though that ceased to be a problem post-3dfx/dedicated 3D-accelleration-only cards!), and IBM have to go and ruin it for everyone. Angry angry angry.
It was such a nice laptop…
10 Feb 2006
Or, at least, I think they must think that everyone else thinks that they are. (Read that slowly).
A while back we filmed something and had a preview monitor underneath one of the cameras, which was pretty funny because whenever we were looking at it we appeared to be asleep (because our eyes were pointing down + eyelids followed, relative to the camera). It occurred to me on a bus today (observing someone’s eyes in a mirror overhead) that tall people must think that everyone they’re around must be constantly falling asleep, perhaps attributing it to their presence, as in other images people never look that sleepy!
Then again, maybe it’s just down to people who don’t make eye-contact enough (too-often me, as some have observed in the past!)
Shrug, struck me as being an interesting idea. Probably doesn’t actually work that way, but it’s kinda funny to think that the taller you are the more sleepy the rest of the world seems ;-)
10 Feb 2006
I’m vaguely hunting for a laptop. Well, okay, a little more than vaguely–but as they’re reputedly one of the more-commonly-fraudulent items listed on eBay, use of that service as a purchasing vehicle is less than certain.
Software piracy also features… but, of course, there seems to be little that can be done to actually report this (if eBay have a “Report violation” link, it’s adequately hidden from me). Observe this question from earlier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and MS Office for Mac included:
Me: Does this come with original CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe software?
Seller: No.
(Yeah, that was fulltext of the question + answer!)
And on another listing (I didn’t ask the question on this one!) advertised as including iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:
Q: Are you selling the software disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the software, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be sending the laptop and its power cable. Thanks.
Sigh.
(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not convinced I want a Mac laptop anymore. In fact, I’d probably prefer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)
08 Feb 2006
Stumbled across this picture of more surveillance cameras than that bar should realistically be able to hold on Flickr today whilst building an RSS integration thingy (so, yeah, work related!)
Scary, huh?