june 2004
More dead animals
Boy, am I tired today. I was about to go to bed last night when there was the most terrible commotion. Evidently, the cat
had caught and dissected a rat in the back yard, which is bad enough in itself, but then, to make matters far worse, the dog
found the corpse, and tried to eat it. When he started choking on a particularly unchewable morsel, he ran into the house - his front legs, chest, and face covered with blood - and proceeded to hack up a huge chunk of bloody flesh and bone onto the floor. It was so disgusting, I couldn’t even take a photo of it.
Obviously, we couldn’t let him wander around the house dripping with blood, so into the bathtub he went. It was just like that scene in Psycho where Marion Crane’s blood (although Hitchcock actually used chocolate syrup, fact fans!) swirls down the drain after she is stabbed to death in the shower. It was horrible. Then the dog had to be dried, which, given how much fur he has, was a gargantuan task involving heaps of towels and a hair dryer, the sound of which always terrifies him.
So, I didn’t get to bed until about two o’clock, and woke up this morning to find that both animals, apparently sickened by the rat meat, had crapped all over the house.
Oh happy day!
27 june 2004 ~ 17:26 
Hit and run
25 june 2004 ~ 18:48
Miscellaneous linkery
I used to sit next to this guy in Physics class in high school. Now he’s a “writer, analyst and consultant on technology and society,” and is apparently quite well-known in his field in the UK. Well I never.
This one’s been around a while, but it’s still a laugh: the Infinite Cat Project.
Two interesting new products. Basecamp is a “web-based project management and client extranet tool for creative services firms,” though it looks like its usefulness could extend further. FeedBurner is a free, pre-alpha RSS/Atom feed converter and publisher, and also provides feed traffic statistics.
I was reading a very interesting article on user experience design (which Robin alerted me to), and followed a link to Q LTD, a design firm that the author is connected with. Browsing their site, I saw that this guy is their Creative Director. He looked very familiar - did I know him? Had I met him somewhere? Then I realized that I’ve never actually met him, but have ... erm ... admired him for quite some time. Oh, yes indeed. Hmmm, now I want to work there. I should ask him if he has an opening available. Maybe he needs someone on his staff? (Etc.)
24 june 2004 ~ 20:32
Gee ... mail!
I finally got a Gmail account (thanks, Robin!). To avoid getting put on spam lists, I shan’t provide the address here, though you can probably figure it out in about two seconds. I have no idea what I’ll use the account for, but I’m sure I’ll think of something. The gigabyte of storage space gives me all kinds of ideas related to managing the plethora of large files I tend to carry around with me all the time ...
Funnily enough, I had been on the verge of switching from Yahoo! Mail to something (anything) else - it has been painfully slow lately - when Yahoo! bumped their account size up from 5MB to a whopping 100MB. I maintain several Yahoo! accounts for various purposes (school, listservs, etc.), and it would be a pain to change addresses now, so, somewhat reluctantly, I’m keeping those accounts. I also recently found a great utility YPOPS!, which miraculously lets you POP your (usually unpoppable, at least with free accounts) Yahoo! mail to a client such as Eudora or Thunderbird. Very handy. I no longer have to keep checking these accounts; instead, I can just let Thunderbird check them all every few minutes, and alert me to new mail. Très nifty.
A similar utility, Pop Goes the Gmail, is available for Gmail, but I haven’t tried it yet. There’s also the Mbox & Maildir to Gmail Loader (which lets you import messages from a standalone mail client into Gmail), and GCount (which displays the number of unread messages in your Gmail inbox on the OSX menubar).
So many free utilities, so little time!
23 june 2004 ~ 13:25
The good, the bad
Five things that rule about living in San Diego:
- You can wear shorts to work every day of the year. (Well, almost every day. It occasionally gets below sixty degrees.)
- Need a lemon? Walk outside and pick one from a tree in your garden!
- The excitement of non-fatal earthquakes.
- Amazing Mexican food is available everywhere, cheap.
- Palm trees and cacti all over the place. (Having grown up in England, I still find palm trees incredibly exotic.)
One thing that sucks about living in San Diego:
- After you live here, anywhere else will seem awful by comparison.
20 june 2004 ~ 16:07
Classic movie quotes #1
Pecker (John Waters, 1998)
Background: Pecker (Edward Furlong) and his family have just arrived home in Baltimore after a trip to New York, only to discover that their house has been broken into and ransacked. Pecker’s father (Mark Joy) instantly blames the local strip bar, the Pelt Room, for attracting a criminal element to the neighbourhood.
Pecker’s father, to police officer: “It’s no wonder we were robbed, with that Pelt Room down the street. Pubic hair causes crime!”
16 june 2004 ~ 20:50
Did the earth move for you too?
Ah, that was nice. Two blogless weeks. I’ve had my fingers in quite a few pies lately - in fact, some of them were so big, they required more than one finger. I’ve been messing about with wikis, working on CSS with my friend and co-worker Karl (we had a coding party! how geeky), trying to fix my home wireless network (turns out it’s just the Windows wireless network manager that totally sucks, so I disabled it), and having a housewarming party (I made some killer sangria, which got a few people significantly trollied).
Since classes ended, I’ve also, miraculously, been reading things that are not textbooks or academic articles. It’s fantastic. I just finished a book on cryptography (written for the layman, i.e. me, but still sufficiently complex in parts to be really interesting), and have just started a book recommended to me by one of my brothers (about a year ago - took me a while to get to it): The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. I always forget how very much I enjoy reading fiction until I sink into an armchair for a few hours, lost in a gripping novel. I really should do that more often.
Other than that, things have been rather uneventful, except for an earthquake today. I was sitting at work, when I felt a strange rumbling and shaking coming up through my chair. I assumed there was a truck nearby, or people were moving heavy furniture around downstairs. Then, a few seconds later, there was a huge jolt, much like when there is heavy turbulence on a plane, and everything drops suddenly with a crashing noise. Turns out it was a 5.2 on the Richter scale, which isn’t that high (although the total energy release is roughly equivalent to that of a 20 kiloton atom bomb). It passed almost without comment from the people in the room at the time. We’re all waiting for the big one, and this wasn’t it.
Interestingly, when I asked people afterwards, no one had felt the rumblings right before the jolt, like I did. I must have a really sensitive ass!
15 june 2004 ~ 19:43
Work photo #3: Plant and blinds
The colour came out rather interesting on this one, I think. The green and yellow certainly aren’t that vivid in real life. Also, the plant is absolutely covered in dust, which shows as a kind of aura on some of the leaves (particularly the one top right).
1 june 2004 ~ 21:28
Gym neighbours
To relieve the tedium of cardiovascular exercise, I often survey my neighbours at the gymnasium (as I noted a few days ago). It’s unlikely that any of these people read this blog, but just in case, here are some words of advice:
StairMaster® Lady: By supporting your entire body weight with your arms, locked at the elbows and shoulders, you are defeating the whole point of using the StairMaster®, which is to work your legs and get your heart rate up by hauling your body weight up steps. If you can’t manage this, you need to either set the machine to a lower level, or try walking on a treadmill instead.
Shouting Middle-Aged Man: Your yells of “Woo!” and “Yeah!” each time you clock in one more minute of jogging are rather distracting to the rest of us.
Non-Machine-Wiping Sweaty Fellow: Please remove the rivers of sweat you deposit on the handrails of the machines with a towel when you are finished. Thank you.
Scary Fundamentalist Man: When six people on the machines behind you are already watching the television, please ask them before switching the station to the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Not all of us enjoy being told we’re evil (with subtitles!) as we work out.
I think that’s it. Check back for more self-righteous complaining soon!
1 june 2004 ~ 13:59