Thought for the day

Don’t live every day as though it were your last, because that’s how a hypochondriac lives, and it’s just awful.

Windows [the operating system] really does actually suck bigtime.

I know people have been saying it for years, but up until now I haven’t really agreed with them. There are two main reasons for this change of heart: Mac OSX and WindowsXP Service Pack 2. OSX is beautiful, and with every release looks more and more like computers are supposed to look, whereas SP2 is like the final ugly straw on an ugly camel’s disfigured back.

As Steve Jobs once said: "Microsoft has no taste."

I’m a heavy computer user. I’m a freaking computer programmer for chrissake! And yet, my current installation of WindowsXP is as kludgy and damaged as I have ever experienced. After installing SP2 my DVD/CD writer stopped working properly. My emails come up with broken image icons [this is because images are being blocked for privacy reasons, but there is NO visual distinction on the page between a missing image and a blocked one]. File associations are also getting weird, so that even though I associate *.vnc files with RealVNC, for some bizarre reason Acrobat keeps trying to open them. Not only is XP not beautiful, I am coming to regard it as not functional.

Grrrr!

If you are a long time Windows user, I recommend you wander into a cafe sometime and go stand behind the nearest PowerBook user for a few minutes. Feel the anger building inside you as you begin to understand just how rapidly OSX is leaving Windows for dead in both usability and style. Gnash your teeth at the fact that the iLife apps bundled with every Mac leave for dead all of those shitty shareware/freeware apps you’ve tried in the utterly vain hope of finding a decent piece of software which will let you manage your photos, or burn some digital video to DVD.

[ If you were to tell me that you had just shot some video and burned it to DVD, I would assume you must be using a Mac, because hardly any Windows users I know have machines set up to do it. Windows Movie Maker doesn’t know what a DVD is, you see ]

It’s not that being creative isn’t possible using Windows; just that it’s less likely.

And it’s more than just the software; In case you hadn’t noticed, Mac hardware is clean and well designed [except for overheating batteries], whereas Windows desktops and laptops are almost universally disgusting looking, with stupid recessed bits and sticky out bits and badly placed superbright LEDs etc. They are also much noisier, and they’re not even necessarily cheaper!

It’s hard to be a programmer when you lose faith in your chosen platform. Even though Windows is by far the dominant OS — and is therefore here to stay for the forseeable future — I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just woken up on the wrong bus.

Well well well… if the spooky incident involving the sausage wasn’t bad enough, now my apparel seems to be moving about the place of its own accord!

Oh damn, there I go again, giving away the punchline instead of breathlessly building up to it in a drearily predictable way. Obviously I’m just not cut out for telling these spoooky tales of the paranormal.

Were I any good at it, I would be busily pointing out that this day was perfectly normal AND just like any other, and that absolutely nothing had happened thus far that should indicate that my clothing was planning to adjust itself without my interference. I would also make it clear that although there was no reason for me to be particularly observant at the time, I still remember with photographic clarity just how perfectly ordinary conditions were beforehand, and how completely devoid of unusual or irregular influences the scene was. So maybe I should start again:

There was nothing noteworthy or out-of-the-ordinary about conditions in my room the night before this miraculous event happened.

Already, your tiny neck hairs are prickling, yes? For what builds apprehension better than an assurance of utmost normality? Bwooo-ha-ha-hahaha! … *cough* … *cough* …

So, enough waffle, on with the actual story…

The thing is, I have this really ugly blue shirt on my clothes rack which I never wear, and really it just serves as a kind of bookend for my other shirts, which I wear slightly more often. I always shove it to the left, with this jacket-like garment on the right, which I wear all the time.

Blue Shirt on the left, Jacket Thing on the right, OK?

So anyway, one night I’ve noticed that Jacket Thing is not quite dry after washing it [strange that], so I make a special point of separating it from my other clothes to let it air more, pushing it to the right and Blue Shirt all the way to the left. And then I go to sleep, alone in my bedroom.

Next morning, I wake up, roll over, and can’t help noticing that Blue Shirt is now pressed right up against Jacket Thing, exactly as I wanted it not to be the night before. How very odd, I thinks to myself, it is plain as day that this shirt has moved during the night, but how is that possible?

Now here’s where my story could get extra creepy, when I reveal that the reason the shirt is even hanging on my rack in the first place is because my late fiancé bought it for me just a week before she died, and I had not the heart to throw it away. Lucky for me I have endured no such tragedy; it’s just a cheap shirt that I bought and never wear.

But without a deceased lover to blame, what could the explanation be? The cause certainly wasn’t immediately clear. Here’s my preliminary list of possible explanations:

1. Ghostly intervention [someone else’s deceased lover in the wrong house?]
2. Divine intervention [an incredibly obtuse warning about the dangers of not believing in God?]
3. Sneaky housemates.
4. Me Sleepwalking.
5. Me actually having moved the shirt the night before, and simply forgotten about it.

Were someone else telling me this story — assuming I hadn’t already tuned out — I would probably bet on explanations 5, 4 and 3, in that order. But as it turns out, none of them are true! Just like an annoying mystery writer, I have withheld just enough information to stop you guessing before I am ready to reveal the rather anticlimactic truth, which is:

I generally sleep with an electric fan on, and the slight breeze generated by it caused a tiny rocking motion in the Blue Shirt which allowed it to slowly edge its way along the clothes rack, so slowly that it took an entire night to do so.

Another mystery solved!

Just when you think that the internet has lost its appeal, you find something that gives you faith that true nerdliness will never die. If you haven’t already seen it [it’s been around for a while], I recommend a visit to Totally Sidetalkin’ , a bizarre site paying homage to a particularly stupid design feature of Nokia’s original N-Gage phone. Follow the links at the bottom of the page to about a zillion comical photos contributed by readers with nothing better to do, bless ‘em.

I’m trying to improve my punctuation lately, having decided a little way back that it was time I fell into line with the rest of the English speaking world. I think I’m doing pretty well avoiding the miniscule I, and the next habit I want to break is my excessive use of square brackets, which I have been using to signify just about anything which breaks from the tone of the main text [You know what I’m talking about]. And so I have been experimenting with the Emdash.

In plain text the emdash is commonly represented as two standard hyphens — as seen separating this fragment — and the benefit of this is that the hyphen [also used as minus sign] is part of the standard ASCII character set. A proper emdash on the other hand is an extended character, represented in some but not all ASCII variants.

Similarly, “proper” quotes — as seen here surrounding the word “proper” — also rely on extended ASCII characters. So the question is: Should I use proper punctuation marks when writing, or should I use their inferior but ubiquitous ASCII substitutes? The proper ones certainly look nicer, but when copying and pasting text, or simply processing it through other filters / browsers, there is always the chance that they will get screwed up and replaced with garbage characters.

On one hand I think: "safer is better", but then on the other I think: “Bugger this! If people don’t start using the extra characters then what’s the point of Unicode?”