question:
in geekdom, if a gal regularly backs up her computer, does it make her more attractive?
Archive for October, 2006
catching news
I track a news feed in my bloglines and everyday there are around 100 new headlines from around the world. My bloglines is set to only show the headlines, not the article text. I scroll down the list and an average of 5 headlines per day will really catch my eyes and I will go read the article. Regularly, I try to keep up with the “big stories” but during busy times – like now – I only use impulse when making my selection.
Today my impulse selections were:
Model Campbell released on bail
Brazil ’serial killer’ convicted
Bee fossil, DNA generate a buzz
I almost selected Blaze at refinery ‘under control’ but at first I had read “Blaze at refinery ‘outta control’” and during the moment between my impulse being fired and my finger clicking on the mouse, I reprocessed the title and thought “oh no wait, it’s ‘under control’ now, I don’t need to read that”.
So…what do these impulses say about my subconsciousness. I cannot say that consciously I am that interested in Naomi Campbell and serial killers. The bee thing is kinda cool. Are the impulses based on the (possible) topic of the article…or on single words that stand out. Like…chocolate.
I want to do an eye tracking test to get more information on how I scan headlines. Just for some understanding of how I generally absorb information. What do I tune out and what catch me?
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click the day away
Today has been a day of looking for answers to various work-related problems. Browsing through forums, tutorials, articles, wikis, and so on and now my right index finger feels numb everywhere but under my nail where it aches a little. Interesting aren’t I?
The other night I dreamt that I had plans with various people and at each engagement I was boring as all hell if you can imagine hell as a boring place. Or I guess a boring place would be hell. So in my dreams it was hell for people to hang out with me. I think the dream was influenced by lack-of-plans weekend and guilt over having no plans although there was reason to my decision. Either way, today I was wondering if I am entertaining or not, and if I want to be entertaining. You don’t need to respond to that ponderage.
And if I were to go anywhere in the world, is there a product that would always be there waiting for me and would that product be:
nutella?
Oooo great link from there: wiki_nutella references a product called Plumpy’nut developed for famine relief. That is too gleeful for me.
feeling a little bit better this friday shut down
I have a lot to do at work. A lot. Sometimes my brain hurts but I think it is from learning. So, when I feel discouraged, I just remember that day after day I gain experience bit by bit. I am overcoming the “this is too hard” freeze-up which feels really good.
Today I realized that it was time face character encoding hell. Making an application for Japanese mobile phones so it has to handle Japanese characters of course. This is not always so easy. It feels like it should almost be easy, but it is not completely. Many attempts result in screens showing mojibake. If you don’t know, mojibake is a term borrowed from Japanese to refer to garbled appearance of characters that your computer cannot support (or is not configured to support). Moji = character, bake = appear in disguise. I like it – mostly because before reading that bake is “to appear in disguise” roughly, I thought of bake as in baked, broken, toast, kaput.
After a day of surfing the Japanese Java forum, using rikaichan for rough translations, trying, testing and seeing a lot of mojibake and question marks, I finally added something to my database that phpMyAdmin showed as being really, truly, Japanese script. Yay! There is still the other half to deal with – assuring that I can retrieve text from the database and present it non-mojibaked but I don’t think that will be too hard.
Not much else going on but work. Yesterday was another intern’s birthday and a number of us went for supper in Yokohama followed by delicious delicious ice cream. This weekend I have work to do, and likely next weekend too, but sometime in November I will travel somewhere. Where, I don’t know yet.
Oh, and I think I might like earthquakes too much. Last weekend early Saturday morning we had one a bit bigger than the normal little ones. I woke up, felt it, had some half-asleep thoughts of my apartment building tumbling over, smiled, went back to sleep. Forgot about it until someone mentioned it later that day. I know earthquakes are scary, kill, cause damage, etc….but it just feels so incredible when something that seems so sure and constant (the earth below you) shakes. I might become an earthquake chaser. Like that movie…with the cyclones…but not them…
outta here!
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short
I’ve been staring at the same powerpoint textbox for 15 minutes and I wonder where my time goes.
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