When instant messaging technology goes too far

I’m hoping the MSN product team’s intent for this feature wasn’t really industrial design. Maybe we just found an explanation for the crudity of Xbox controllers? ;-)

The fog comes rolling in

I wish my camera were better/bigger and stabler. This looked so much better IRL. Late-ish at Coogee beach earlier this week. Imagine really sharp vectors as the light shines through the branches onto the beach, as the fog gets progressively thicker and thicker.

Shattered tree

Everything in the mirror is so much brighter, possesses so much more light and vitality, than the tree on which it rests. Then again, the tree is buried in rubbish and rocks, so we mustn’t expect too much in such circumstances…

Why does true North keep shifting?

It’s the same sort of pissed-off as when fiction makes you cry. It’s the pissed-off that says Why should I deal with this, it exists in a realm outside of me. Map change time. Then, of a sudden, it comes sharply into focus and hits you square between the eyes, in a way only depth perception can provide. Its scope is suddenly crystallised and defined sharply (not in any way to make ‘relief’ implicit) and it becomes, most definitely, one’s own problem. One as in son-of-man is not. How’s that for convoluted? The problem lands squarely back on this side of the court, and the frustration of it always coming back slowly subsides. Maybe it’s time to play ball-boy. Not in a temper-tantrum-look-at-me-I-stole-all-the-balls-and-now-try-playing-with-scrunched-up-newspaper-instead-I-dare-you kind of way, either. Definitely without that element of party-pooper (or extreme hyphenation). It’s time to use short, clear sentences, speak clearly, avoiding the weirdness of expectations of weirdness [sic. - not a late night typo] and acting not as cudgeller but leaving the usual implements firmly tied to the ground. By the way, this is not bloody leisure. Don’t delude yourselves into believing this a faisandé – though it is that, in parts, perhaps – it goes beyond artifice. Art and pretense extend beyond what is known and make mansos of about half of us (though perhaps to say ‘make’ is an incomplete rendering of the problem). But then the artists ‘do a mizzle’ (look it up, this is slang from 1910-30′s, not a product of all ma homies) and with them their art, and suddenly… suddenly what? Suddenly, we’re (plural first person) back to not having a clue what the way forward should be. Leave your painting as a compass. Oh, but it is a sculpture. Installation art. Post-modern crap. Why does true North keep shifting?

Watching the mercury

I just realised it was hot outside by monitoring the temperature of hard drives in a computer at home. It’s comfortably cool where I am now (in a web-monkey bunker deep in the heart of Sydney’s CBD) but apparently not at home… whisper’s poor hard drives just hit 60 degrees! *sniff*

Yeah yeah, I know, such a geek…