Nir on Windows Vista (rant in Hebrew):
If the twin towers had been designed by the Vista development team, they would have been built underground, at the center of a maze, and no one would be allowed in, and those who got in by mistake would not be allowed out. The latter people whould be scanned periodically to ensure that their identity had not changed, and woe upon the poor soul whose weight had gone up a trifle because he’d just eaten a tuna sandwich, or who had lost a hair from his nose.
So, I was having this late-morning dream, the kind I linger in because they’re the one place I get to meet chicks, although this was about a congruency of people (brother, uncle, Roger Moore) fighting each other as they struggled down a slope.
“Everyone has an Imaginary sibling”, my subconscious mind was moved to say, “and their relationship with this imaginary brother or sister affects their relationship with their family.”
My subconscious likes to offer such two-cent psychological insights when I wake, a consolation for getting me all emotional about people that don’t exist. Its observations do tend towards the blindingly obvious, although this one came at me from an angle.
My younger brother once did a comic about a kid who fantasized about having a cool and tough older brother to protect him, someone very much like the rock star my brother was re-imagining himself as. As his real-life older brother, that comic made me uneasy, confronting me with feelings of my own inadequacies. But today I asked myself, who was my brother’s actual imaginary sibling, the rock star protector or the kid who yearned for a hero?
And what’s my imaginary brother/sister like?
I should like totally have my 40th Birthday party in my parents’ basement.
Boojie has complained, justifiably, that the more current images I’ve started to use as my user pic in livejournal (instead of the old one) are a bit scary.
Sadly, I think the problem stems more from my haggard old face of recent years than from my poor arm-distance photography.
To get a cuddly-looking image, I had to go back a bit, and because the material demanded it, I made a Frank Miller tribute:
Ian Hickson’s new blog post demonstrates why he’s a geeks’ geek:
One day I looked at my bank statement and it was something like:
POS Trans ZIBIBBO PALO ALTO CAUS $76.00 POS Trans CHEESECAKE PALO ALTO CAUS $40.00 POS Trans OUTBACK #0514 CUPERTINO CAUS $210.00 POS Trans BROOKFIELD’S REST #2 SACRAMENTO CAUS $34.00 Look at all those zero cents… there are data bits there, lying unused! It struck me that with every single restaurant transaction I could set the cents field to some number under my control, thus allowing me to communicate with myself at a later date!
So he develops a system of annotations about each meal which he tries to insert into the cents value of his credit card charges, by adjusting the tip he writes in. Turns out that no restaurant actually charged him what he wrote…
