spud says hi

Intriguing!

http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/index.html

4.52 on my first go.

These are... intriguing

These photos, that is.

They're a collaboration between an artist/illustrator and a photographer, and I like the way the infuse Moscow and post-Soviet landscapes with whimsy.  Or with magic.  Or something.  The moon series is called "personal" or "private moon."  And the stars are "A visit to the star."

On the other hand, I quite dislike the fact that two of the comments on the page express anger/annoyance with the fact that the stars are six pointed.  One even says "I'm not an anti-Semite, of course."  And yet still takes issue with the form of the stars

Run, don't walk

to your computers...

Wait.

You're already at your computers, aren't you?

Well, if you're a fan of a) Joss Whedon, creator extrordinaire of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other pop culture items; b) Neil Patrick Harris, former child star; or c) musicals, particularly those of Stephen Sondheim; click on over to drhorrible.com to watch what's being touted as a new model for web content.

All three parts are up as of now, and will be until Sunday night, at which time they're scheduled to disappear.  Or spend a few bucks and buy it from iTunes.

I must admit, I found part III a little bit less strong than parts I and II, and there's a very definite Jossian emotional arc (and, incidentally, for those with kids, it starts out pretty kid friendly, but Captain Hammer's definitely not one to leave a double entendre unexplained, and then there's the whole Jossian emotional arc thing), but overall, well done, folks.

In other news, late Tuesday I got back from a quick trip to Colorado, with a less than a day stopover in Chicago on my way back.  It was a wonderful chance to catch up with people, both friends from my former workplace and family, but also a little wistful making.  And I think I got too much sun!  I actually felt really pretty awful on Tuesday into Wednesday, either because of a super quickly passing bug, or because of too much sun and heat and not enough water.

Anyway, more updates and pictures soon.  But for now, seriously.  DOCTOR HORRIBLE for the win.

Holy smoke!

Towards the end of my drive back to Toronto from Chicago this summer, my iPod crapped out.  It started randomly skipping ahead to the next song, and then just... stopped.

It'd been a bit problematic for a while; the hard drive seemed to get caught now and again, and for quite a while I'd had to be careful when updating it.  Up- or downloading (and no, you're not supposed to be able to download from iPods, but of course you can, thanks to the wonder that is google and various people who've solved the problem) had to be limited to 100 or so songs at a time, or else everything would freeze up.  And after the car trip, it just wouldn't let me reload it with songs (oh, yeah, it also erased everything in the process of totally freezing up).

So, today, I was browsing the internet, a I do of a morning, and came across this article.  And followed the link through.  And started trying to take my old iPod apart.  And got frustrated with that, and so read more of the comments.  And then read that a possible solution to a problem hard drive is totally counterintuitive:  whacking.  And so I whacked the iPod. 

And now, it's in the middle of updating, and has made it through more than 2000 songs without problem.

I'm... shocked.  In a good way!

Meanwhile, Happy Diwali, to anyone who celebrates it.  And in honor (is honor the right word?) of it, here's a little ditty ostensibly about it.

Also, farewell, little white iBook

I'm thinking that a solution might be to buy a cheap PC notebook here.  Is that crazy? 

The other options are:  buy a Mac here, which is really expensive and not ideal because of the weird keyboard issue.

Order a Mac at home and have my parents ship it here, which is probably also really expensive in the end, plus worry-prone and time consuming.

Order a Mac at home and... hope someone comes to visit me.  That seems unlikely.  (I missed the window of having someone I know bring it while waiting for the repair people to tell me that my old computer was dead.  This pisses me off.  Several things about the repair experience here piss me off, actually.)

Buy a cheap PC.  Not ideal because I don't love them, and thus haven't spent that much time with them, and it'll thus take more time for me to get it set up (not that there's all that much I need on it).  And I'll have to find a copy of Office, too.  (Not that that should be too difficult.)  But, on the other hand, I'll admit that there have been moments when having a PC would have made my life easier.  And that's likely to keep happening; apparently the on-line form for a big Canadian grant is almost impossible to fill out on a Mac, for example, and there's always the need to bring extra adaptors with when linking a Mac to a projector, for example.  So it would be a functional computer I don't love, but then also wouldn't care about that much when traveling, which a new Mac would be, that will also have its uses when I get back.  I pretty much work on a desktop when I'm at home, so it's not like I'm replacing my main computer with this purchase.

So, are my rationales right?  Or are there other things I'm not thinking through?

And, seriously, guys, this isn't just a rhetorical question.  I know that friends and family and others read this, because I get the occasional email about it, even if there are rarely comments.  (And I also know that I am not always a good citizen of the web when it comes to leaving comments anywhere, or even always of answering emails.)  But this time, I could actually really use some advice.  I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing something here, or if this is indeed a reasonable solution (I've made up my mind to do so many things with this, and perpetually had it changed by either new information or unexpected roadblocks.)  So if you've ever thought about leaving a comment, this would be the time.

In return, here's another picture... not exactly a pretty one, but an interesting one, in a way.  Really.

It's the view of the Moscow river from one of the bridges I sometimes cross.  Novodevichi monastery would be off to the right.  You can see (if you zoom in... this is a picture I'd recommend looking at the pop-up for) two Stalin gothic towers, on right in the middle, one lurking way in the background to the left.  And the giant smokestacks on the river bank are from one of the central heating and electricity centers around Moscow.  Oh, have I mentioned this?  Hot water and heat are centrally supplied here.  From one big factory to the whole region of the city.  There are thus giant pipes sometimes underground, sometimes above ground, that shuttle hot water--boiling hot water--throughout the city.  And it also means that for a few weeks every summer, the hot water gets turned off while they clean out the pipes.  Which, I mean, good, but...

Oh, frick

Here's what you should never do.  Spill a cup of milky coffee all over your laptop.

I knew things were bad when, after mopping up what I could, and letting it dry for a day, I plugged it in--that's it!  I didn't even try turning it on--and heard a whistle.  And then a pop, as a tiny spark flew out the front.

I have for some unknown reason actually been really good about backing up data this trip.  So I may have only lost a week or so of photographs (including ones from my landlady's seder, which is a shame), and a bunch of episodes of the Office (but not the newest one I haven't seen).

Wish me luck in my Russian computer shopping escapades!  Actually, I don't think it should be too bad.  Just expensive.

Oh, hey, and Happy Easter!

Huh.

So, there's this site on which you can transform any webpage into a graph of its html tags.

This is this blog's graph.

Pretty, no?

Actually, the fun bit is seeing it uncurl... try it!

Wacky crap on the web

I don't remember how I again happened upon this, or what made me think of it, but this cartoon about Trogdor the Burninator is deeply bizarre and funny.

Even though it's done very differently, in terms of sheer wacky fun, Trogdor reminds me of the angry kittens.  Who are also bizarre, and a little scary.  But they also make me laugh rather reliably.

There used to be a totally cool, and very creepy, website about, I kid you not, Russian prison tattoos.  It had a clickable body showing the iconography of tattoos commonly found in Russian prison camps, with lots of freaky photos.

I also like that websites exist for no other reason than to show off an individual's collection of, say, beer labels.  Because, yes, they're often kind of cool.

Reasons for crankiness

So one of the reasons I've been cranky and annoyed with work and service is that I've been having to deal with a very annoying piece of technology.

If it can be called that.

It's a university web-based database on improvement and assessment and planning and stuff like that.  Now, you wouldn't necessarily think that those things were entirely complicated.  But then you see the PowerPoint presentation that someone at the university put together to show how good their system is.

Yes, this is supposed to show how easy life with this system is.

I mean, seriously, the hell?  Not only that, but I've just been working with it and discovered that it's not happy to just sit there being complicated.  It actually demands reassurance and praise.

There's a section that specifically asks for how the planning process has helped us figure stuff out.  My desired response is, it's needlessly complicated an already annoying process.  Somehow I don't think that's what they're looking for.

Grrr.

This is so cool!

Well, this is so cool.  It's a link to a webcam trained on a watering hole in Botswana.  I'm sitting here watching dawn in Botswana.  And seeing gazelley things.  And birds.  Lots of birds.  And earlier, when it was still dark there, I think I saw a hyena.

Bummer that the coolest stuff probably happens in the middle of the night here.  Damn you, mornings that come too early, and make me have to go to sleep and not watch for elephants!