My pants are exploding
If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
When I think about the changes that happen in language with new technologies, I think about how we “google” things now, or you can “skype” someone, or “mapquest” something. But sometimes there are other types of phrases that slip in unnoticed.
How funny is it, seriously, that cell phones have finally given us a legitimate excuse to say: “Hang on a sec, my pants are exploding.”
Materializing CDs
When I went to put a CD in my player this morning, I found a disc I’d never seen before. This thing is my alarm clock, and it sits next to my bed in my room.
I have no idea who would have put this CD in here, or when or why. It’s a burned CD, so I don’t even know what it is. It just has a bunch of girly writing all over it, saying things that could theoretically be track titles since they don’t make any complete sentences.
How long has thing thing been there? I don’t think I’ve tried to play a CD in like five or six months. Weird.
So busy i’m not doing things
It’s always a bad sign when you get to the point where you have so many things to do that you spend an hour or so sitting around not doing any of them.
This happens to me more often than I’d like. I think I need to copy TheFerrett and start really using my phone as a PDA, make sure I check-off the things I need to do on any given day.
Oddly enough, I already makes lists like the ones he’s talking about most days, but I tend to put them up on the white board in my room, where it’s easy for me to do things like scribble in the margins. But carrying it around with me might help me organize myself a little.
Apparently HBO is not on-demand at DishNetwork
Guy, I just bought two months of HBO thinking that I was going to get the on-demand ability to catch up on the shows that are the whole reason you buy HBO in the first place, but it turns out that
a) HBO on-demand is a separate package and
b) my receiver doesn’t support on-demand anyway
Lame. I guess I’ll ride out the last two months of DishTV down here, cancel the package, and make sure I get a good set top box whenever I order TV again.
Up to 15 posts on the page
I’ve always stuck with the Wordpress default of 10 posts displayed on the front page because it seemed like a good solid number, and, after all, there are archive pages.
But now that my posts are getting shorter and shorter, partially because I’m trying to really chunk my ideas down and partially because I’m rapidly discovering that I have no free time whatsoever thanks to this crazy-ass half-hour documentary I have to edit (and probably shoot more for) by April 12th, anyways, now that these posts are getting shorter, I decided to run the number up to 15 so that it will hopefully extend past my sidebar junk.
I changed it in the feed, too. As long as the number doesn’t turn out to be overwhelming, I’m thinking this is where it’s gonna stay.
All along the watchtower meets BSG?
As sweet as Bob Dylan is, and as sweet as the final Battlestar Galactica episode of this season is, WTF is with using All Along the Watchtower?
The mouse and keyboard
Computer can do bazillions of things that were really only dreams even just thirty or forty years ago. I’m listening to music on Rhapsody right now, which, when you think about it, is a bit ridiculous. I can hear pretty much any song anytime I want almost instantaneously? Amazing.
The thing that hasn’t changed in a long time, and needs to, is the mouse and keyboard. The way we interact with these machines is basically the same as it was fifteen or twenty years ago. It’s also not the most natural way for a human to interact with things.
I’m excited for when we can work with computers in our language instead of theirs. When the computer understands spoken language and can “see” hand gestures. That’s going to be cool.
My poor eyes
Over the past few days, spring in LA has decided to let loose a storm of pollen or something that has made my eyes itch almost constantly for the past two days. It’s gotten worse, too.
I managed to get to sleep last night by putting a fan on my face and taking nyquil, but today I think it’s time to go to Target for some serious allergy medicine.
My lazy computing habits
I used to ctrl-click to open new tabs in Firefox whenever I was reading something with a link in it. That would open the new tab in the background so i could just move on to it by closing the current tab when I was done. Way convenient.
Recently I noticed that I’ve started using the mouse (right click -> open in new tab) instead of the keybaord shortcut. The change confused me until I realized that I’ve started hiding things using the menu instead of hitting CMD-H: I just use whatever my hand is closest too.
Really, am I that lazy?
Microblogging suits my microthinking
I’m all about microchunking things. At least thoughts. I think buying cell phone ringtones for $3 when you can get the whole song for $0.99 is silly.
But I tend to think in three or four sentence chunks. I’m curious to see how that goes over in blogging, seeing as how everyone seems to be nuts about Twitter right now.
Originality is overrated
You don’t have to be original to be successful. You just have to be faster than 90% of the people out there, and you have to have good execution.
I’m pretty sure this is not an original thought.
My latest in the Oxy Weekly
For the first time ever, Occidental’s weekly newspaper is putting its articles online. Which means that this week I can actually link to the article I wrote about skiing.
Let’s Go Ski: How-to From a Know-Nothing
Whenever I think about skiing, a quote comes to mind from the 1985 John Cusack flick Better off Dead: “Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.”
I recently took a vacation to go skiing, and spent three days hurtling downhill at speeds meant for a racetrack. Only after several hours in a hot tub did the feeling returned to my bruised legs.
The general idea behind this sport, as I understand it, is to point your skis downward, and then hang on for dear life. Speed limits do not apply to ski slopes, and I suggest you acknowledge this accordingly.
Even before you get on the snow, there’s a fair amount of equipment you’ll need. The skis are a must, of course, but so are the boots, which have been designed to cut off blood to your feet. You carry poles so that when you fall down it looks funnier…
Flipsyde
Yesterday I found an e-mail that I sent to myself about a month ago, which said simply “new band: flypside.”
So, trusting my own taste in music, I went and picked up the album on iTunes, and it turns out that its pretty good. Here’s one of my favorite tracks on the album.
Themed Google homepage? Interesting…
I’ve always liked the simplicity of Google’s pages. Way back in the day the Google home page couldn’t get much simpler - logo and a search box.
Then they gave us customizeable home pages, which turned out to be very cool. Then tabs. Now? Themes.
Not sure what I really think about it yet, but it *does* change dynamically with the time of day, which is cool.
Two random thoughts for a monday afternoon
1) It’s been a long time since I listened to Counting Crows, and they’re really good.
2) There’s something about the taste of a good english muffin, toasted, with butter on it, that makes me think of my grandmother’s house.
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