And an unexpected anniversary present is a bunch of new traffic via a comment I made on Rory’s recent post about XP vs OS X, which later was linked to by [inexplicably popular] . The target is a post I wrote a few months back on what annoyed me about OS X, and looking back I still feel pretty much the same way about it. If Apple really wants people to "switch" they should pay a little more attention to how 90% of the computer users in the world already do things, because [believe it or not] not every single thing about Windows is bad. I run both operating systems all the time, and it would be a delight if not for these basic keyboard/UI grievances that make it so damn hard to jump from one to the other. If only the real Steve Jobs were listening…

I guess this isn’t much of an anniversary post (I must dig up my graphics tablet and draw some pictures again), but then the actual anniversary was two days ago. My first post is dated August 28 2002, and interestingly makes reference to the HTML Editor in which I compose my blog entries to this very day!

Having just watched the first episode of The IT Crowd’s second season, I am reminded that Graham Linehan is the greatest television comedy writer alive today.

Seen here is the full-scale version of Coco’s The Thing, with Coco included for scale. He is mostly made of styrofoam, plaster and PVA glue.

Right now he lives at NIDA, but his future is uncertain— this world wasn’t made for one so large. Perhaps he will live out his days a lonely drifter, wandering from one town to the next helping ordinary folk with their problems, but never staying long enough to accept their gratitude; Until tomorrow he will just keep moving on…

Yikes, it’s been a while since my last update, and this is partly due to that internet vortex known as Facebook, which makes it so easy to waste a lot of time browsing friends’ photos and mucking about with music quizzes and stuff (and responding to pointless notifications which I finally realized I could switch off). I added a profile a little while back but lately have actually been using it a bit.

What I like about Facebook is that profiles are not publicly visible by default, so people seem to feel comfortable providing real information about themselves, and when people are less anonymous they are also less likely to behave like wankers (a corollary of the Zeroeth Law of the Internet ). The fact that Facebook is infinitely extensible with a neverending supply of mostly pointless "apps" means it might feasibly become another MySpace, but at this point it seems vastly different, with none of that anonymous friends bollocks ("Hi stranger, thanks for the add! DUHHHHHHH!") and no way to customize a profile with yellow text on a hot pink background (did I mention that I really hate MySpace?).

I might not buy one of the new aluminium iMacs, because I don’t actually need one. But even the 20" is bigger than my current TV, and would make one nice little media center… And an actual glass screen, that doesn’t squidge when you tap it with your fingernail? I want one!

I also might not buy a second hand Toyota Prius, because I went and sat in one today and man, do they have the stupidest interior design I’ve ever seen in a car.

Perhaps it’s something to do with cutting costs for producing both left and right hand drives, but all the display and non mechanical controls are placed in the center of the dashboard— I would probably get a crick in my neck from leaning over to see the display all the time (right up until I crash into a bus while craning to admire my rad fuel economy).

Also note the bizarre transmisson lever that just sticks out like they glued it on as an afterthought (obscuring the driver’s view of that fabulous multi-function touch screen).

Somehow the Vodafone site knows that I’m a pasty white guy with weird looking feet and a MacBook!