Josh (the blog)

I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.


@joahua

“What colors should I use in my bedroom to help me relax and sleep?”

The question is stolen from this Ask Yahoo! post, which gives a phenomenally long (and moronic) post.

My recipe for sleep: What colours should you use in your bedroom to help you relax and sleep? None, duh. Lights off, dark, eyes shut. Yahoo! are way off.

Of course, the best way to get an answer would be to go ask an expert. Everyone knows Yahoo!’s Ask team are insomniac geeks ;-)

Exam went something like this

Well… not really. I think I did okay even… I just wanted an excuse to post that video ;-)

Sorry to jump on the date-propaganda bandwagon

But I thought I’d mention my first end-of-semester exam just happens to fall on 6/6/06. At 16:00. Co-incidence? I think not! Heh. Let The Omen try and monopolise dates all it wants… even university faculties have a strange sense of symbolic appropriateness in scheduling events. (Just for the record I don’t place much importance on the date. Just another day. It seems especially bizarre once you expand the date fully… 6/6/2006… what’s the “2000″ got to do with anything?)

Whilst criticizing the movie, it’s worth remarking that the only trailer I’ve seen for it was the most phenomenally underwhelming film trailer I’ve ever seen. Like, I actually had no response to it. Normally at least I’d go “wow that looks like a crap movie” to a bad trailer… this didn’t even evoke that much emotion. The impact of the trailer on me was literally zero. Having said that, being a fan of the genre for whatever reason (trashy, suspensful, potentially cool special effects, whatever) and watching too many films anyway (except for the, err, allegedly formative/canonical works of a medium that certain people have been trying to make me watch forever), I may well end up seeing it. The possibility is significantly lower than if the trailer hadn’t been utter crap. Even if my response is “wow that looks like a crap movie”, I might feel like watching a crap/trashy movie and actively choose to see it once in a cinema-context. That’s happened plenty in the past, with varying consequences in terms of enjoyment of film.

Then again, maybe the film is actually just that boring. A shot of some kid on a swing was the best they’ve got. It wasn’t even an understated trailer, because the clichéd VO guy was out in full force if I recall correctly. Nope, must just be a crap movie.

Jim Ramsay on the “Emerging Church”

“People are going back to the sensual, using incense and candles. [But] we live by faith, not by sight. There is a great danger in emphasising those aids. They are flawed tools and not the engine that drives us.”

From Madeleine Collins’ article, True Confessions of the Emerging Church at SydneyAnglicans.net.

I think I need to get stickers with Romans 1:16-17 on them to put on video + other AV equipment.

For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

As if the gospel needs to be any more impressive than it is. Praying for balance and upright motives always, but especially where content-creation/support material creation is concerned.

It’s tea weather

Only it’s tea weather so much that “tea” has suddenly become “te”, as my burnt tongue struggles with the motion of “eay” (te-eay). Would you like some te?

Tea and soup weather, that is. Not coffee because of awful instant and its amazingly bland contextual associations (has anyone ever drunk instant coffee anywhere interesting?), and the fact that real coffee is too far away/too expensive/with too many side effects I really don’t need, being awake and up/down plenty already. Anyway, tea is warmer. Coffee you spend your time waiting for it to cool because burning your tongue with coffee is infinitely worse, as the taste imprints itself and won’t go away until you burn your tongue with something else, and then, assuming you didn’t burn your mouth, end up drinking it luke-warm (yuck) as quickly as possible because most hot drinks don’t taste any good luke-warm, least of all one that (when badly made from instant) probably didn’t taste that great to start with. Sigh. So many people over-rate coffee (that sentence is meant to be like that, because coffee can be good but mostly isn’t and this fact is ignored by the masses, etc.).