Journal Entries
Critical Mass
Posted Dec 24, 2002
Christmas eve - I went to church for the old sit stand sit stand sit stand sit stand kneel stand shake kneel walk kneel sit stand slow-impact aerobics routine. It occurred to me that for all the hundreds of years some of them have been around, Christmas carols are not very polished. The rhythm is all off - some unstressed syllables are ludicrously elongated while others are omitted. Even seasoned churchgoers hesitate at some lines, wondering just how to fit the words into the tune. As some words are replaced by more modern versions the rhythm is screwed up even more, and the difficulty is made worse by the fact that different churches offer slightly different modernisations to fit into the same tune. And for more linguistic gymnastics, some songs which had perfectly good tunes of their own are squished into tunes from other songs. Madness!
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Latest reply: Dec 24, 2002
iPod
Posted Nov 15, 2002
It's a 20GB firewire hard disk, it's an mp3 player, it's an address book and calendar, and most importantly, it's a portable Breakout game. It's a brand new Apple iPod, and it's mine, all mine!
Now I will be able to listen to the Hitch-hiker radio series (or any of my 2.5GB or so of British comedy radio shows) wherever I am. And I have three times as much disk space as I used to have!
Even the box that the iPod came in is really neat. Wow. This is the most expensive thing I've ever bought (about a month of Windows programming to accumulate that much spare money... ugh!) but it is so worth it!
I'm not sure what to name it. White Noise, White Label, Whitebeat and hardrockdrive came to mind before I got it... now I've seen just how shiny the back of it is I'm calling it Silverbeat for now. Silverbeet is more palatable than whitebait, but then, the reason I don't like whitebait is all those eyes, and it is an i [eye] Pod after all...
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Latest reply: Nov 15, 2002
Deadlines
Posted Aug 30, 2002
I forgot to mention how very amused I am by the fact that, while dead, Douglas Adams managed to finish a book much more quickly than he could while alive. I guess it must be the lack of distractions.
I think there was something else I forgot to mention, but I can't remember what it was.
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Latest reply: Aug 30, 2002
Goo, Goons and GUI
Posted Aug 30, 2002
It's about time I added to this journal. It's sad to see that h2g2 doesn't seem to be very active since it went offline for a while... but perhaps it's just that I haven't been visiting so often. Alabaster is not appealing at all, but perhaps if I can get the cookie going again I'll always be greeted by the whimsical Classic Goo which will encourage me to stay. I wonder what happened to the mauve gam room.
Last night I was walking past a bookstore, and glanced inside... immediately I saw something halfway to the back of the store which looked very familiar. A book I'd never seen before, but even from that distance I immediately recognised it as The Salmon Of Doubt. Since I was so surprised at having spotted it in a brief glimpse from afar (considering I often poke around in bookshops looking for it) I strode in and bought it, just like that. It was quite expensive for an impulse buy, but worth it. Already people are lining up to borrow it once I've finished. I'm not sure what to do though, because it happens that I was halfway through reading Mostly Harmless on my second Newton (which I got a few months ago) so I can't decide whether to finish that first. It's too late now though, I've already started on The Salmon of Doubt. It'd been ages since I last read Mostly Harmless though, and I'd only read it once, so it's quite unfamiliar to me. It's like I suddenly have two new DNA books to read. What a choice!
I've also been reading A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. I'm a bit bored with it at the moment but I'll get back into it once I've read the DNA books and caught up with New Scientist. I 'discovered' New Scientist magazine a few months ago, it's addictive! The only problem is almost all of the articles are worth reading so I just barely have time to read one a week. I even registered [Broken link removed by Moderator]as a spoof, and I know I don't have time to do much with that. Hopefully other people will submit articles.
I also bought [Broken link removed by Moderator]and [Broken link removed by Moderator]. It's been over a year since my last post here so you won't know that I've really got into Cocoa development now. It's awesome that I'm able to do this stuff now, thanks Woz! I also got a job. A job as a windoze developer, unfortunately, but nevertheless a job which gives me enough money to buy books and domain names and more Newtons on impulse. A job which would allow me to buy PowerBooks and overseas trips on impulse would be better, but this isn't too bad. Windows and Visual C++ still frustrate me often though. It's astounding how bad Windows is at actually drawing windows... I'd expect from the name that it'd be good at it. Instead, we can watch the almighty 1.6GHz P4 draw windows rectangle by rectangle, line by line, and leave window trails behind when the window is dragged around the screen. I can see now that mouse trails are not a feature, but an optimisation. How people put up with that I don't know... and then there's the issue of three to seven different styles of each widget - even within the same app you can see several different styles of scrollbars, menubars, buttons etc which are functionally the same. And don't get me started on progress bars. I don't care how ugly the Windows GUI is or isn't, I just want it to be consistent! And that's just the GUI... I won't mention functionality because I have books to read. And you have better things to do I'm sure... like learning Objective-C perhaps. Go on.
(I did not just call you a goon, whatever it looked like.)
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Latest reply: Aug 30, 2002
My best birthday yet
Posted Jun 4, 2001
I just had my 21st birthday party, and there were so many people, including friends and relatives I hadn't seen for ages, and so many great presents, and so much food... It was insanely great. The most obvious present to me at the moment, as I type this in Omniweb, whose spell checker is telling me that Omniweb is not a word, is Mac OS X! This is amazing, I was expecting to be using Mac OS 8.1 for another year or so, and suddenly here I am in June 2001 with an iBook running Mac OS X. I love it! Other Apple-related gifts included a bag of Mackintosh's toffees and a custom-made Apple logo necklace. I also have a larger selection of warm clothes (great since it's been hovering around 12 degrees Celsius lately) a mirror, another necklace, and loads of other nice surprises. I won't list them all or you'll get jealous... although you're probably already jealous because I have Mac OS X. The only problem is I'm meant to be doing assignments but I keep playing with things instead. And on that note, I'll put my lovely iBook to sleep so it doesn't distract me, and read about post-Renaissance mathematics.
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Latest reply: Jun 4, 2001
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