Categories
Blather

Friday Morning

This morning, I met a girl in a dream.

I was in a car-park, waiting or searching for someone else, but she was there, and we started talking (or maybe the dialogue was just taken as read) and it hurtled past friendly as wakefulness rushed upon me.

I knew before I woke up that I wouldn’t remember her face, if she even had one. But she was nice, and in that slice of dream in which she existed, she liked me.

Sleeping late on Friday morning. Recently, it’s becoming a new social highlight of my week.

Categories
Comics short

Grant Morrison Video

Grant Morrison on Google Video, talking about magic and the rest; like the interviews, only with Scottish accent and beer.

Categories
Oddities

Your dad’s maiden name?

Israel sent me another web blooper, this time from the Bezeq site. This one is much better than the last one, which was just a typo. This one actually requires someone to have applied stupidity:
bezeq equality
When registering a user, the site asks you to choose a secret question to identify yourself (in case you forget your password), such as “in what country were you born?”, “what was the name of your high-school?”, and what was your father’s family name before he married?

I’ve never seen this, so I assume it’s part of a new user registration system implemented by Bezeq. I’m pretty fed up with how annoying things like mybills and the electric company’s site have become, so I’ve moved to paying all my utility bills by phone.

Categories
Comics Science Fiction and Fantasy

Animated Film, Comic Interview

An interview in comic form with Richard Linklater, the director of A Scanner, darkly, a rotoscope “animated” film based on the Philip K. Dick novel.

I’ve recently been sticking my uncommented links in my antisocial bookmarking tool (it’s a social bookmarking tool, but with just one user!), but, well, no one reads that.

Categories
Blather

Nerdvana

Nerdvana When I moved into my own apartment, I’d had some vague plan to set-up my computer as the center of a sort of home entertainment thing, essentially imitating Israel.

Once there’d been enough of an unpacking to have a living room, I got the computer hooked up to the TV and the stereo, and since then I’ve been consuming media purely through my Internet connection (I haven’t had TV reception since cancelling my cable subscription a couple of months before moving out of Hod HaSharon).

But surely, I thought, there must be more to this then just running over to the computer, setting up the show you want to watch in the media player, changing screen resolution, dragging the window to the TV part of the desktop, hitting full screen and rushing back (I remember a lot of rushing when I started out with this; also a great deal of having to get up to the computer to pause).

So when I got a new desktop computer, I got a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, again imitating Israel. I think I had some notion of being able to use them in the living room without getting up to the computer, but the crappy resolution of the TV screen made that impractical.

Recently the level of discomfort from sitting in the bad chair by the desk, and of using the mouse, has been getting to me. I can’t concentrate enough to write, I said to myself (somewhat hypocritically: I do sit there uncomfortably for many hours reading the Internet or fiddling about, but that requires less concentration, I guess). So yesterday, while trying to write a session recap, I decided to give this a try: take the text editor I’m using (Kate) and put it in full screen mode, get rid of all the toolbars and sidebars (the default interface is much to cluttered to my taste), switch to a really big font, change to a low resolution (the one I use to watch TV), and settle comfortably on the sofa, with the wireless keyboard. Turns out that this works out not bad at all. I need to find the best posture, but I can actually work like this, it seems.

Of course, instead of writing the recap, I got so excited I decided to take a photograph, and post it to my blog, and write an entry (which has taken me over 24 hours…). Procrastination is a constant.