11 Oct 2006
Cut down the trees and build more houses whilst shooting dissident journalists in democratic states and ignoring the event as bombs explode in mountains with Tibetans praying to a man as they fall in gunfire (also ignored, this time in the name of commerce). Closer to home (and the Internet), media ownership becomes homogenous, citizen media comes in above citizen justice, flag-theft is confused with flag-immolation in every major media outlet (some make the decision buried beneath sensationalist headlines) and second chances are met with splattered egg yolk, and irrational rampages leave streets of broken glass without message.
On the plus side, I got a free lunch today.
11 Oct 2006
I’m installing it now, this is so completely painless. And, it even offers an Esperanto dictionary via aspell!! I suppose open-source gurus are prone to obscurity, hey ;-)
It’s downloading ImageMagick and GhostScript (hopefully AFPL… no, wait, they’ve now caught up the GPL version! Yay!)… at a meagre speed because it’s a net-based installer. But this is free. And open-source. And they have net-based installers. And it found my already-installed MiKTeX! Instant cool factor. Maybe this Windows gig isn’t so bad afterall. (On second thoughts, I haven’t tried to get it to run yet, this is just the installer… It’ll probably be all fun and games til I try and change the dictionary from Afrikaans to English… or Esperanto… not that I speak it, but whatever).
Meanwhile, I just discovered I somehow have random papercut-esque things all over one of my fingers. Bizarre. Almost as bizarre as my benefitting from the work of open source on Windows as much as I do. Quite odd, indeed.
10 Oct 2006
…but (just quietly), I made this evening the ludicrous comment of which I am most proud thus far over at Erin’s LiveJournal (that sentence intentionally turgid). It is clearly the work of one equipped with a good dictionary… for that I make no apologies. I only challenge you to discover the meaning of “pampining” using anything but the OED. Yes, the comment does make a tangential sort of sense once you decipher the words. No, the meaning isn’t anything particularly deep. This is why I love the ridiculousness of the English language!
10 Oct 2006
A very useful programme for when you just can’t be stuffed reaching across to the phone sitting a few centimeters away from you on the desk ;-) Or, for those of us who manage to not notice a phone going off less than a meter away from their head, but will be instantly bugged beyond belief by a popup alert on their screen into responding. My SMS response rate has got nearly as bad as my email followups this last couple of weeks, so it’s probably helpful.
Oh, and it’s also useful for ‘backing up’ (yeah yeah, onsite = bad, etc.) /copying/pasting URLs, etc. in SMS. Jeyo doesn’t do MMS/PXT at all which is a bit of a bummer but it’s quite cool apart from that. I’m still deciding if it’s worth twenty bucks (Australian).
It operates through ActiveSync so you’ve got to have that going as well… which you probably would anyway if you own a PDA in any way associated with a desktop PC (weird *nix/mac types excepted – but as if Mac users would use anything other than a Palm! Well, maybe Blackberry have a foot in there, but it’s probably too corporate for them hippies – tongue firmly in cheek). It kinda bugs me that this functionality isn’t available for free from someone, actually, but whatever.
I can now send SMS for ~15¢ Australian through Skype, for ~5½¢ (real cost) using my mobile through Outlook 2002, or wait til people are on MSN and then send them whatever for free. Clearly, we pay for convenience. And don’t really value sub-gold-coin amounts of money.
08 Oct 2006
Glowy goodness. You know you’re a massive geek when you have UV lights but not of the crappy little CCFL persuasion.