but she's a girl...

Blank minds

I’ve just picked up on this discussion on Textism concerning what you think about when you’re not thinking of anything else. There are some great answers: my favourite was, “What would happen if I started a Slinky going down the up esclator?”, and the scariest was, “Sex and viral vector purification via HPLC”.

On the bus coming home yesterday, my thinking about nothing ran thusly. “Why has that guy got dark hair and a grey moustache? Does he dye his hair? I don’t see any grey roots, and why wouldn’t he dye his ‘tache too? Is it possible for just your facial hair to go grey? That’s weird. Surely your facial hair is younger than your head hair. Idiot—they both get replaced every few days. Maybe he leaves it so that women will stare at him and wonder why his hair is dark and his ‘tache is grey. Must stop staring at him.”

Dubious design

A couple of links to things that I ought to think are cool but somehow I just don’t.

• Segway^TM Human Transporter: I applaud anything that might get more people out of their cars, if they can’t use a bicycle for the journey for some reason, but there are two problems. First, it makes you look like Davros from Dr. Who. If I rode one, I would have an irrepressible urge to shout, “You will be exterminated! Resistance is useless!” Second, I have a sneaking suspicion that instead of being used for commuting, it will just replace any situation in which the owner might have actually used their legs. Having visited the States and seen how many opportunities there are to avoid walking (drive in fast food joints, pharmacies and ATMs, for crying out loud), this can only be a bad thing.
• The Combimouse. When I first saw this, I thought, “Hmm, that looks cool”. But I just can’t get my head around how the heck you would actually use it. It seems to me that it would be like trying to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. And wielding the right-hand bit around as a mouse just seems plain clumsy. Perhaps it works well in practice—I’d like to give it a go anyway.

[via Gizmodo]

Snow makes UK grind to a halt

The recent snow chaos, with motorists stuck in their cars for 20 hours, might have been tailor-made to showcase the Great British Stereotype. Namely:

• British infrastructure, creaky at the best of times, inevitably buckles under the strain of totally unexpected events—such as a snow storm that was clearly indicated on all of the TV and Radio weather forecasts.
• Despite the fact most conversations between British people are principally to do with the weather in some way, we have a fundamental inability to cope with any meteorological conditions more extreme than a light drizzle.
• ‘Plucky’ Brits stuck for 20 hours in their freezing cars on the M11 will always display a ‘Blitz spirit’, making jokes and cups of tea for one another and singing “Roll Out The Barrel”. Or so we are told. My arse.

Big and comprehensive, or small and sleek?

At the weekend, I was thinking about applications and whether I prefer a big application that does everything, or a number of small ones that do things collectively. I mulled over writing a post about it, and then lo and behold, I find that Dave Hyatt has been thinking about similar things in relation to Safari. Curses—I’m puffing along a couple of miles behind the bandwagon once again, waving my arms and yelling, “Wait for me!”.

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Eccentricity

Regular readers will know of my fondness for Scrapheap Challenge. Now that the series has finished, my craving for watching people toiling over oily things is being sated by Salvage Squad. The tasks are less endearingly pointless (the antique fireboat they did up last week might come actually come in handy if the Green Goddesses can’t cope during a fire strike), but there’s enough cursing of awkward flanges and engineering ingenuity to keep me happy. You get the misty-eyed tearfulness of the grateful antique-owner at the end when they see their pride and joy restored to its former glory, and there’s Claire: my role model, mistress of steam, and the one who keeps her head when Axel and Jerry are throwing sledgehammers around.

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More nice pictures

I know that this is the second link I’ve posted recently to a photography site, but I came upon this one via Zeldman, and I just had to share it because the images are so extraordinary: Lost America Night Photography. The pictures are all taken around the full moon on a really long exposure. The colours make the abandoned diners and gas stations look totally other-worldly. I’m really excited waiting the next full moon now, as I’m going to dash out with a camera, a tripod and a lot of patience, and give it a go.

John Peel - Fabriclive 07

We got this album (compiled by John Peel) last weekend in the fabulous Fopp in Bristol. Peel has hugely varied taste in music, that the label “eclectic” doesn’t adequately cover, so we knew when we bought it that we would probably hate a third of the tracks with a passion. But it only cost us £10, so we thought it a reasonable gamble. We were right: we hate 9 of the 24 tracks, but the others are so gloriously brilliant and unexpected that £10 seems like a bargain.

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Bristol pictures

I've just put up some pictures from my trip last week to Bristol on Wings Open Wide. I've even made a new gallery category for them, which will encourage me to go back soon and take some more. Feel free to go and take a look.

Saturday linkage

A couple of things which caught my eye:

Asia Grace by Kevin Kelly – some really stunning photographs taken all over Asia. I only wish I could take photos like this. [via BoingBoing]

Ladies Against Feminism. It looks like a total wind up, but apparently it isn’t, which makes me laugh and despair at the same time. Evidently, I am not a “lady”. At about the age of 5, I found out that girls were allowed to wear trousers. Applying the logic of a child, I had assumed that if boys weren’t allowed to wear skirts (remember, this was the 70's, and I’d never heard of transvestites), girls obviously weren’t allowed to wear trousers. Angels appeared, singing the Halleluiah Chorus, and from that moment on, I had to be surgically removed from my jeans (I nearly spelt that “genes”, which would have been a bit of a Darwinian slip). You just can’t climb trees in a skirt. On very rare occasions, I do wear a skirt or dress, whereupon some wag always says, “So, you do have legs!”. I go “hahaha” and think, “Yeah, you see them every day in my trousers—what’s the difference?” [via greenfairy.com]

“The Internet Has Broken”

And I thought it was just my ISP. Of course, because I couldn't get online, I didn't find out that it was a giant DoS until after it was all fixed. As usual, it's all Microsoft's fault.

Friday accomplishments

Sometimes to-do lists have a function. It’s true that most of the time they just mock you silently for falling behind with their endless tyrannical demands, but sometimes—just sometimes—they are a source of satisfaction. This morning, I had 15 items on my to-do list (anything over 10 makes me hyperventilate), and they were all reasonably non-trivial and urgent things. This evening, I have 7½. The bonus is that it happened on a Friday, so that I can go into the weekend with a profound feeling of Zen calm with my productive day behind me.

Ticking check-box on the list is pretty satisfying by itself, but what I’d really like is some kind of automatic reinforcement system. My computer could dispense a yummy square of dark chocolate for each completed item, or better still, I could get my lateral hypothalamus (the ‘pleasure center’ zapped wirelessly to give me a little bolt of happiness. The result would be a operantly-conditioned response to completing tasks—ideal! Alternatively, I would just cheat and tick the box anyway to get the hit, which—let’s face it—is the much more likely scenario.

Eewww

This is amazing and horrifying at the same time: a young lad has had his partially-severed head sewn back on. Successfully. [via ext|circ]

Pointless invention of the day award goes to…

Just what the world needs: a new eating utensil for people who can’t coordinate their bowl-mouth popcorn action. Actually if you can’t get popcorn in your mouth without a utensil, you probably shouldn’t be trusted with pointy plastic objects—you’ll have our eye out.

From the publicity blurb:

Hi, I’m Don Sothman. Now you, too, can say good-bye to greasy fingers and paper napkins.  With new finger foods coming to market almost daily, the least I can do is help clean up this delicious mess!

Replace ‘Don Sothman’ with ‘Troy McClure‘, and the Popcorn Fork might be up there with Styro-Glow: “the incredibly simple seventeen-step solution that makes your styrofoam look brand new”. [Link via BoingBoing]

Doh!

You know how some women who get beaten-up by their partners claim that they have walked into a door? Well I actually do walk into doors. I managed to clout my arm on the door handle in our living room yesterday morning. It was early, I only had a few neurons firing, and they evidently hadn’t got their act together yet. My brain failed to center my body on the door opening, with the inevitable result of a painful impact between arm and metal door handle.

Woohoo!

I did my first presentation with Keynote today! I hurriedly converted my old lectures to Keynote format once it had eventually arrived (note: does anyone know why we shouldn’t be able to download paid-for Apple software immediately, then receive the boxed version at a later point?) To be honest, I was a bit nervous about it after I noticed on MacUser that some people have had kernel panics (of all things) in the middle of Keynote presentations. Gulp. There would be utter derision from the Mac-hating students in the audience: “Call that a stable UNIX core!”. However, I haven’t personally had any problems with stability, so I thought I’d risk it (though I must admit that I exported to Powerpoint—just in case, you understand). I crossed my fingers and got there very early to test it out with the data projector. I’m glad to say that it all went swimmingly. This may be because I was somewhat conservative (note small “c”) with the fancy-pants 3D transitions, and our data projector is set to run at 800×600, so it wasn’t exactly taxing my 32MB of VRAM.

I must say that I’m pretty impressed with Keynote so far. Granted, there are a few things missing at the moment, but I didn’t miss them much. You can add lovely LaTeX typeset equations with Equation Service, and OmniGraffle does a great job of producing lovely diagrams and so on. I found that the PowerPoint import and export worked very nicely. The main thing is that the main tools you need are easily accessible, unlike with PowerPoint, where they tend to be buried under a ton of menus. Plus it makes me one step closer to a Microsoft-free nirvana. I did, though, have to physically restrain myself from adding a “One more thing…” slide at the end.