23 May 2005
One of the strangest sensations I’ve experienced recently is reading something I’ve written as little as a day or two later and wondering if I really wrote it. It happened to me just then, and it was absolutely bizarre.
Not the content so much as the style – this was completely foreign, as though it had been written by someone else. That I was reading it having just tabbed from a slightly-more-conversational chat session into it probably exacerbated its apparent distance, but even without this, I think it would have felt as though written by another person.
Stranger still, it doesn’t even reflect the style of anything else I’ve recently read, so this difference can’t simply be attributed to an ‘inherited’ or acquired voice… at least, not explicitly. Either way, it’s a bizarre feeling reading something you know you wrote and finding it completely unknown!
23 May 2005
“There’s nothing wrong with being an addict!”
–Tori
22 May 2005
These things apparently cost $0.06 and get through customs without any hassle, although one has to wonder why. They’re wooden scarab beetles, and have no apparent purpose, but are supposedly sold on streets everywhere (probably just to tourists).
Uh huh!
22 May 2005
Totem is great, but adding plugins via its brilliant drag-and-drop-couldn’t-be-easier “Add Proprietary Plugins” interface does absolutely nothing if you’re using the totem-gstreamer version (the default that ships with Ubuntu). Switching to totem-xine makes the playback with these plugins possible, but potentially introduces problems of its own.
The inbuilt configuration of Totem is pretty poor, but thankfully there’s a way around it. The actual configuration exists in a hidden folder in your home directory – for me, this is /home/josh/.gnome2/ – the file you’re looking for is totem_config
For me, it was simply a case of uncommenting audio.driver and setting it to “esd” (audio.driver:esd) – but depending on what distribution and sound server you’re using, YMMV.
Anyway, Totem now works great, and I have cooler visualisations than gstreamer’s!
21 May 2005
The Sydney Morning Herald has had a series of rather unfortunate snippets published of late. I found them immensely amusing (perhaps I’m just childish), and thought I’d share two.
From the article Six stranded on Luna Park ride, the closing paragraph reads thus:
“That accident was believed to have been caused by a cap which blew off a passenger’s head and caught in the Mad Mouse’s car wheels.”
Just for the record, no-one was injured in this incident – It’s just a crap sentence.
And then there was this headline (probably by now ubiquitous due to syndicated news services – this one was from AP) — “Probe ordered into Saddam underwear photos.” I’ll leave the misreading of this to the reader… again, maybe I’m just childish!
UPDATE: The Saddam headline didn’t make it to the next edition’s print, but no such qualms were had about printing the last paragraph of the Luna Park article… ahhh, journalists.