You Know You've Been Using the Computer Too Much When...

...you read a page of a book and then search for a link to get to the next one.

...you write a sentence with a word you're not sure you spelt correctly, but that's okay because Autocorrect can take care of it.

...you glance down at the corner of the paper to check the time.

...the sun is shining in your face so you fumble around for the brightness/contrast controls.

...you wonder in passing why your photo-albums don't have thumbnails on the cover.

...you don't feel like writing out your full name and address on every single one of your application forms, so you attempt to select and copy it instead.

...you hesitate to buy a new item for your room because you're not sure if you have the disk-space.

...there's a word in blue text in your lecture notes and you don't know what it means, so you attempt to click on it.

...while reading the newspaper, you attempt to close the advertisements interposed between the news articles.

...you're in an obstacle course and you decide to save your progress right before that difficult rope-swing there.

...you have the urge to pull stunts while driving, as this will gain you more points.

...some of your things are missing, and you wonder if you should scan for a virus.

...you attempt to right-click on the trash bin in order to empty it.

...you're stuck in a long queue at the bank, so you decide to play Minesweeper to pass the time.

...the introduction to your essay is terrible, so you try to close the foolscap without saving.

...your textbook states something that is clearly wrong, so you search for the Edit button.

...you form compulsive computer-related habits which carry over into real life.

And then you realise where you are, feel like an idiot and hopefully vow to spend more time out of the house.

We Waited Seven Years For This

A member on BZP got hold of the first official images of Mata Nui. As a Great Spirit that is, as opposed to a stone statue.

Check it out here or in the news article here.

I feel honoured and privileged to finally set eyes on the most important being in my favourite fictitious universe. Even if he is, you know, fictious. I feel that all the time I spent patiently waiting, watching new Toa arrive and new enemies stop them, every year slowly inching towards that great revelation, has finally paid off.

As for those who keep saying that he looks like a Transformer - if Hasbro came up with a Transformer which looked like that, their fans would complain about its resemblance to "a Bionicle." So pipe down and let me gaze upon his greatness in peace.

Update XX: Cool, Useful or Plain Funny

So, one of my friends recently picked up a 1 terabyte hard drive for about $200. That's 20 cents per gigabyte, people. And to think that a few years ago, a 1GB hard drive would have cost $100. Meanwhile, Seagate promises over thirty thousand times that capacity in a mere two years.
Computers are moving altogether too fast these days.

I've been trying to figure out for some time what makes things funny...It's sometimes incomprehensible, how some things make us go "ha-ha" while others get nothing more than a bored stare...
Anyway, today's xkcd was undeniably funny, though if it was because of the entirely everyday manner in which the character failed to escape, or because of the subversion of what I expected would happen, I cannot say.

Something which does seem to be almost universally funny are mistakes. Other people's mistakes. CakeWrecks is dedicated to the professionally-made cakes which follow instructions too closely, are incredibly creepy, do not look remotely edible, or are simply... beyond words.
I spent a few days browsing the archives. I don't think I've laughed so many times in my life.

This amused me. Not the vehicles themselves - they are clearly M3G mobile bridges - but rather the various suggestions concerning Decepticons (that one navy gunboat was getting lonely, apparently), Allied Troop Carriers, Universal Soldiers, aliens...

It's been a while since I found a nice time-waster... Cursor10 is a neat little game. You have 650... well, they're clearly not seconds, so I'll call them "units of time." You have 650 time-units to reach the sixteenth floor, and ten cursors to help you accomplish this. If you run out of time, you control the next cursor out of your ten while the previous one simultaneously copies every single action you made it do when you had control of it. In essence, you have to "programme" the ten cursors to reach the end. A very original idea for a game, and fun to play too.

Trapped 5 is a vastly superior puzzle game to its predecessors, and well-crafted. The best part is that it is not possible to get a Game Over, which removes a lot of potential frustration. Other puzzle-game creators, take note.

And finally, something useful. If you've never checked that your desktop clock was synchronising correctly with an Internet time server, it may not actually have been doing so... Recently, I checked mine and found, to my utter horror, that it was four minutes slow. To think I had considered it accurate.
Anyway, I was unable to fix the synchronisation by changing the server or opening a port through my firewall, so I got hold of this nifty piece of software. It's a very small program, and can be set to automatically synchronise the desktop clock with any Internet time server. Worth the minuscule bandwidth cost required to download it.

And now, have a pretty picture. Ta and later.

(Edited on 21 October 2008 for a broken link.)

The Forgiveness Interval

Or, the duration of time between someone violating your personal rights and you deciding not to get angry. One of the great advantages of the internet is that you can always wait out this period before choosing to respond to an annoyance, and so never appear to lose your temper. In real life, this is less of an option for obvious reasons.

Two of my housemates have the habit of taking various items out of the house and/or consuming them, without asking the permission of their owners or so much as leaving a note of explanation. My immediate reaction upon discovering the infractions is fury, which usually fades away to a more objective indignation by the time I corner them. Thus I've so far been able to deal with them without breaking anything or raising my voice.

However they've never learnt, not after repeated confrontations. And one of these days, I'll catch them before the forgiveness interval has passed.

It will be ugly.

Happy Birthday to...

Google!



Amazingly, I actually remember that old logo. Man, that was ages ago...

See, that's a funny thing. Computers, the internet... they've come so far, and yet most of the important milestones occured in the span of my twenty years of life.

Anyway, thank you for the ten years of service, Google. Have a happy birthday!

Cool Things II

SCHOOL HOLIDAYS!

Well, just a week. And then one more week of lectures n' labs, and then exams. Which begs the question of why this is called a "mid-sem break." But who are we to question the eccentricities of university policy? Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die. And, er, get distinctions.

So anyways, while I was under the hammer in the past few weeks, I still took the time to wander the internet, and kept bookmarks of the more worthy things. Worthy things which I now display here.

Crime scene investigators solve crimes (or at least investigate them). But what happens when a CSI falls victim to sandwich theft? The CSI: CSI team is on the case!
"I have a sandwich at home in my fridge. You don't know what it's like!"

Fortunately for those of us who aren't CSIs, there is now a way to protect your sandwiches...

The Wikipedia FAQK. Written a couple of years ago, still relevant.

Knitted Ferrari. It's a Ferrari. Made of yarn. Er...yeah.

In the computer game Half Life, one of the key characteristics of its protagonist, Gordon Freeman, was that he was completely mute. Then again, maybe it's better that way... (Note: Some strong language.)
There are currently four episodes. I can't wait to see how he reacts to the G-man...

More later.

Pavilion

"...And so when you divide the pressure by h, that gives the wall stress per unit length," I say, sketching out a representative diagram on my notebook as I speak. We're in the Pavilion, a small building which is common property for the residents, and I'm explaining a Physics problem to my companion. "Got it?"

He throws down his pen. "That was easy!" he blurts.

Easy? I frown, wondering if he truly understood it all. While the concept was a simple one, it was difficult to teach him anything, ever. He was too accustomed to editing out what he didn't comprehend, relying on a flimsy structure of partial truths.

"I understood it perfectly," he continues, and I am reassured, a little. "Why couldn't the lecturer explain it like you? You draw a few diagrams and I understand, perfectly." The tone is not complementary, but as if stating some fact. You explain things better than the lecturer.

"Well, everyone learns differently," I downplay, reaching for my cup. I swallow the ginger beer, now tepid from standing too long.

"I guess I do better with diagrams sometimes," he accepts, picking up his empty cup and takes it away to the dustbin. I notice that the bottle still has some ginger beer left, so I pour it all into my cup and chug it down, one long draught. Meanwhile he arranges the books along the far shelf, books which are there for common use, with an attentive hand. I understand the affection. We cleaned this place up. I survey the chairs, the pool table, the long bar-counter with the sink at one end, the sofas, the numerous stools. They are all in their proper places, now.

A bare three hours earlier, it had not been the case. I had come in through the glass-fronted door with my dog-tag, which opened any common property on the residence, and found him fiddling with the noticeboard. I barely noticed at the time, my attention was caught by the chaos in the room. Chairs were in random order, occasionally overturned. The tables were arranged as if someone had been trying to make a maze out of them. One dustbin, usually at the opposite end of the bar-counter, had ended up at the far end of the room. The bar-counter itself was littered with playing cards and empty beer bottles, along with a generous flood of what was probably Coca-Cola. Papers and more bottles were scattered across the room. I observed a pair of cubic objects on the pool table and picked one up unthinkingly. The blue chalk slid onto my finger, smooth and oily.

It was a disaster zone. Whoever was responsible for cleaning this all up would have quite a job.

"What happened in here?" He hadn't answered, still occupied with the noticeboard. "Were they all drunk?"

"Probably." He opened the refrigerator, reached for the orange juice bottle, balked at the layer of precipitate at the bottom of it and took out the apple juice instead. I gathered together the cards on the counter half-heartedly as he poured the juice into a plastic cup. He lifted it and then realised his error. "Oh, s…stuff." The cup had a small puncture in its base, and was now dripping apple juice over the counter and the floor.
I went behind the counter and winced at the sight of more playing cards, this time all over the floor. I bent to pick them up and immediately withdrew. "Oh, yuck. They're sticky!"

"Uh, yeah. I dripped apple juice all over them."

Mentally cursing I picked an easier target, the crushed balls of paper decorating the floor. I had no intention of cleaning the common room, of course. Just to clear it up a little, then go on to the study group which was the real reason I was here.

But as I dropped the last beer bottle into the recycling bin and washed my hands at the tap, I thought – I can clean my hands anytime.

I still felt disgust at the sticky cards, but picked them up anyway. Once they were stacked properly on the counter, I took a rag and cleaned away the fluid. The rag felt oily in my hands, but there was no soap to be seen.

On a thought, I raced into the toilet and pushed at the soap dispenser, the door banging behind me. It was empty.

Defeated, I decided that water had to do. I crawled all over the floor, clearing bottle caps, paper balls, paper aeroplanes and… orange seeds? Goodness knows where those had been. I shuddered, but picked them up anyway. Meanwhile he dragged the chairs back in order, pushed the stools into a single line against the wall, arranged the tables into a straight line.

"Come and look at this," he said. I crouched to join him, beside the table-tennis table. Something seemed off about it, perhaps the wooden beam slanting crookedly to the floor. Experimentally I lifted it; one leg of the table twisted to the side in response.

"Better leave it." I let go, aware that the table was not in the correct place, but not wanting to risk moving it.

A few more wipe-downs, a few more items thrown away, and suddenly the room seemed habitable again. I had looked around then, realising how little work it had been to return everything back to normal. And then I had an epiphany.

The Pavilion had surely been dirty before. But every time, someone – not a professional cleaner, but one of us – had put everything back in order.

Because it was ours.

I stand up to wind down the louvers. They are high up, so there is a pulley system for closing them. The crank handle moves with surprising fluidity. Meanwhile he hits a button on the wall. The automated shades, flapping like yellow sails outside the porch, wind up slowly.

I toss away the empty ginger beer bottle, gather up my things, cast a look around before I go. "Heh. It’s all nice and clean. Thanks to us."

"Mm," he says noncommittally, putting his hand on a door-handle. It is at that point that I realise there is a door there. In fact, there are four, spread out across two sides of the building. I hadn’t noticed.

He opens it partway, then lets it fall back. "Better not," he says, showing an odd – respect? – for tradition as he takes hold of the front door and lets us out. I glance back as I leave. "The fans are off."

"I turned them off earlier, remember? It was getting too cold."
Outside on the porch, the wind slams into me. "Who needs fans?" I stand in the wind, the air circling me and tossing my hair, while he walks around to check that all the doors are closed from outside. All four doors.

And then, as I stand on that porch, looking at the transparent walls, the four doors which could surely be all thrown open at once although they never are, standing with the wind around me - the building feels alive. Like a machine, thrumming with life and eagerness and those automated shades and those pulley louvers all waiting to come online, a pulse running through the stained metal pillars, those knowing glass windows watching, and understanding.

All of a sudden I don't want to leave.

Instead I stare out, at the lake right beside the small building, the trees all cast in evening sunshine, the grassy hillock in front. An army of ducklings are climbing the hillock, bills scanning the grass.

"They've moulted."

"What?"

"The ducklings. They've moulted."

"How do you know?"

"Look at them. They have feathers now."

He pauses, considering. "They don't look as fat as they used to," he concedes.

Naturally.

He walks off in the direction of his apartment. The wind gusts at my back, pushing me off the porch and towards home.

I obey, the chill buffeting my legs as I walk.