Tangled Mind

1. Last night I discovered a previously unsuspected superpower: when beckyc's bike locks froze post-cinema, I saved the day!

2. This morning I am gagging at teh stupid. Yahoo are shutting down del.icio.us. BASTARDS. Luckily there seem to be plenty of alternatives, but still: GRRR.

[sent home from jury service til afternoon session, so am availing myself of the lovely bugshaw's laptop, on which she has set me up.]

Okay: dead laptop, dead PDA, slow and grudgeful EEE ...

1. I am going to uninstall Windoze on the EEE, and (re)install Linux. I have external drives aplenty but no CD drive. Can anyone point me at an easy how-to (especially, at what stage do I remove Windoze and how?) BEER for any Cambridge person who's prepared to do this for me, ideally in the next few days!

2. If anyone has a Palm T3/T5/TX that they would like to sell me for £30 or less, speak now!

3. Am about to phone Dell and see if there is an alternative to on-site service -- otherwise I'll have to pend laptop until after jury service.

Thanks in advance!

... not me (well, not much) but the interwebs. I mean, so slow that even Gmail takes ages to load: forget watching streamed videos.

Apparently this is a known issue with Firefox 3.6. Phew!

*downloads Chrome beta.*

Incidentally ... I want to run two separate browsers with two separate sets of cookies (so I can stay logged into Google on one and not the other. Any suggestions for winning combinations? I've used Firefox and Flock up to now.

Vanity, the latest iPhone app that's going to change how you evaluate people—or more specifically rate the hotness of the redhead eyeing you from across the bar

My translation:
- Men! unable to tell whether or not you find a woman attractive? Insult her and humiliate yourself by using an iPhone app to score her appearance from 1 to 10. For added *ICK* points, "you can save the results and share them on Facebook".

Dear friends-with-iPhones, please to be making sure your phone is insured against 'accidental' damage before pointing that thing at me.

(via feministing)

I've tested my EEE -- which has a battery life of < 1hr -- with bugshaw's EEE-battery and discovered that it can run for longer on a battery. (1.5 hours so far and 30% battery left.) Not only is the standard Asus-supplied battery not great, I have an inferior example. Have ordered fab shiny new extended BIGGER battery via Amazon.

In other EEE news, I note that it allegedly uses power even when not running! (cite). Lucky the battery's so easy to remove ...

In other non-EEE news, insomnia: the gift that keeps on giving. Apparently I still have a fragile sleep cycle: have been getting very tired of late (post-infections) and found myself sleeping 11 hours the night before last, waking at 11am. So of course last night I couldn't get to sleep at all until nearly cat o'clock (arbitrary point in time, generally between 6am and 8:30am, defined as 'OWWWW okay, I get it, breakfast-time, now take your claw out of my eyelid'). Am functioning on about 3 hours' sleep and ooooh my bed looks lovely. But I must keep wakeful til 10pm at least, to reset.

1. It's autumn, all right. I do actually like early autumn a great deal -- something about the light -- but I prefer to have summer immediately prior.

2. It's getting chilly, especially after ridiculously early nightfall. I put the heating on last night. (Shiva very happy.)

3. Via woolymonkey, what the Romans may have done for us -- messed up potential HIV resistance in the Roman Empire. Possibly using cats.

4. Chrome v. flashy and pretty fast (I'm not noticing slowness, anyway) but there are some oddities. Like scrolling-and-selecting, which doesn't behave as I'd expect (i.e. usefully) and has a nasty tendency to select random stuff from elsewhere on the page.

5. In other browser news, there is a new version of Flock. This one logs me out, randomly, from LJ several times a day. STOPPIT.

6. Skool hols are over in the borough! My lunchtime swim was oddly peaceful, and it took me a while to work out why.

7. I am trying to have a very productive week (and succeeding in several areas) but prolonged typing still makes my left thumb-joint hurt. A lot.

8. Off to Kew this evening to celebrate my friend M's birthday and bitch about her sister.

9. Have been flicking through online reviews of Stephenie* Meyer's The Host. Am dismayed to see so many Amazon (and other) reviewers hailing the brilliant prose, originality of concept, depth of characterisation: also, phrases like "the first love triangle involving only two bodies" (manifest bollocks) and "SF is downplayed in favor of more thought-provoking issues like the resiliency of humanity, overcoming cultural barriers, interspecies prejudice, and so forth". [FX: toothgrinding]. I did enjoy the book, but not for the aforementioned virtues.

10. Post-conversation with major_clanger t'other day, does anyone have useful resources about communes / communities set up in the late 1940s by ex-servicemen? I was intrigued to note that Othona, at Bradwell (next to St Cedd's chapel, built ~650AD from the bricks of the Roman fort), was set up in 1946 by an ex-RAF chaplain.

I have been spelling it wrong all this time: there is no 'a'

Compare selection count and whole document (*only* document) count...


EDIT TO ADD: about those weird comments ... this is how they show up on the laptop.

Words haven't been working for me this week. Tiredness (still trying to fix b0rked sleep cycle) doesn't help.

I have just typed the words 'faint phrase'. It is like a message from the universe: go to bed! or possibly to bad.

on the other hand, have just pre-ordered EEE. eeeeee! (Mauve ones have the most RAM disk space.)

Have broken my no-shopping-in-February pledge to buy a printer:
1. I don't have one and feel I need one to send packing notes with Amazon Marketplace sales
2. Spending >£50 in Tesco gets me a money-off-petrol voucher.
3. It was stupidly cheap (£18)

However there is one thing I forgot. Not the USB cable (can has many USB cables). Not the print cartridge (included in price, e.g. actual printer costs about £6).

I don't have any paper.

(Test page printed successfully on receipt from last vet trip.)

I want one of these!

And I was about to make a post inviting help with all the tech stuff, until I read the sentence "If your solar bag is not exposed to the sun for about 70% of the time, I would recommend not connecting the iPod or other USB powered devices."

Unfortunately nothing in the UK in autumn is exposed to the sun for anything like that percentage of time. (Actually, hang on, wouldn't that imply that it only really works at the poles? What with that 'night' thing?)

Still, it gets my award for Creative Technology, and I still want one.