waider: (Default)
Oh look! A print of my all-time favourite A Softer World strip. Isn't that neat? (They also have pretty keen t-shirts, too.)

I swear I'm gonna have to try that "kiss" line on someone, if only to see what the reaction is. The only problem I forsee (aside from, possibly, it being the last conversation I have with that person) is that they discover I'm not being wittily original - for extra points, via this exact livejournal entry. Ah well, as [livejournal.com profile] jwz once said, "The universe tends towards maximum irony. Don't push it.". A very sound piece of advice which I have no intention of paying attention to.
waider: (Default)
I have previously mentioned Jorm's excellent (if flawed) discussion on / guide to social interaction. I was impressed enough with this that I thought I would at least try to bear some of the points in mind when in social situations. Three things I have noticed about this (one of which I'd posted as a comment in [livejournal.com profile] tongodeon's journal some time ago):
  • If you are in a group of people, and noone is playing Centre Of Attention, and everyone is sufficiently unfamiliar with everyone else that there's not much - if any - shared humour available, there's a heck of a lot of tumbleweed in the conversation. I tried kickstarting things a few times when I wound up in such a group, but since I was making an effort not to focus the conversation on myself, and noone else was running with the baton, it was pretty stilted.
  • It's all well and good to tell someone they've upset you or made you angry and not realised it, except... if you're upset for selfish reasons, like that they're not paying you enough attention, and the reasons they're not paying you enough attention are of greater significance (e.g. illness, life troubles, etc.) than your petty ego-stroking requirements, then telling them you're upset may not be the smartest approach. I've chosen to err on the side of caution in these situations. After all, otherwise I'm just trying to be the centre of attention...
  • While terse replies do not, in general, foster communication, sometimes people don't take the hint and will continue to talk anyway. I'm not sure if it'd be politer for me to interrupt and say, "Stop talking. Please." or just continue with the terse replies until the "conversation" stops.
waider: (Default)
As previously mentioned, I've been going back through old LiveJournal posts applying the Web two-point-oh tags (and thusly building a votagulary); occasionally I stumble upon myself being sufficiently funny to make me laugh out loud, which fact I even commented on back in November 2004. Anyway, I am reposting an excerpt here from a December 2004 entry relating to a loaner car given to me by the garage repairing my own car, because it still makes me laugh:
The car is... fascinating. It seems to handle by suggestion, such as when I press the brake pedal, the car thinks about slowing down, and when I steer, the car makes suggestive moves towards the general direction I indicated. I pressed one of the preset buttons on the radio and the radio switched off for five minutes, then came on and flashed various backlights at me before eventually returning to normal - I presume something's loose there somewhere. The driver's side wing mirror is held on by several screws, which means that occasionally road vibration (and there's an amount of that) causes the mirror to drift out of the position I set it in, giving me instead a nice view of the skyline behind me. There's some unidentifiable goop on the dashboard on the passenger side, which I only discovered after dropping my GPS toy into it. I think it might be a long-discarded Fox's Glacier Mint. I scared the living daylights out of Eoin, who was half-asleep in the back seat, by turning on the rear wiper without warning him. And the front wipers sort of smear the mud and rain around the screen rather than actually wiping it; to this end, there appears to be a reservoir of mud at the bottom of the windscreen that they can drag across. I guess throwing a bucket of water over it would do no harm. Truly an experience, this car...
waider: (Default)
Fiddling with the tags on my LiveJournal entries just now, I figured I'd use the "rename tag" feature to merge those tagged with quote (3 entries) into those tagged with quotes (57 entries). So I renamed quote to quotes. And was presented with quote: 1 entry, quotes: 57 entries. Er. So I manually edited the one entry that was tagged with quote, retagged it as quotes, and saved it. The Manage Tags page is still claiming there's one post tagged with quote, and if I click on Display Journal Entries I get no posts.

Oops.
waider: (Default)
In the past week or so, it has been independantly noted that I am very bitter and I am cynical beyond repair. Sorry if you were on the receiving end of that. Also, sorry if you encountered Cranky Waider this week, as he was in pretty full effect due to some technical stuff that was going the wrong way down a one-way street, and doing so while honking its horn at people coming the other way trying to point out the error.

Having gotten that out of the way, I will note the following (we'll call it "residual crankiness")
  • My Amazon Wishlist is now titled "Yes, it's up-to-date". Even though there is stuff on it from 2004 that's no longer available from Amazon themselves, and there's other stuff there that Amazon UK simply won't ship to me due to an ongoing issue with recycling laws in Ireland.
  • Twitter comes with a feed. So does your blog. If I'm interested in the latter, you really shouldn't need to tell me about it on the former. Announce your blog, sure. Tell me every time you post? Not so much.
  • Daylight savings time can bite me. Twice. And the alleged US energy-saving legislation from 2005 that made things even more screwy can seriously bite me.
  • Livejournal posts of your twitter posts: same deal as going the other way. If I'm interested, I'll have subscribed to both. If I'm not interested, I'm not frickin' interested, ok?
  • This weather has got to stop. I got snowed on last weekend. I came home yesterday with hands so cold I could barely type. And now it's blazing sunshine, after blowing a storm this morning. Maybe humans were meant to sleep through this.
  • Dear local bar, please clean the taps or something. Three beers giving me a headache? That's not right.


In the immortal words of the TBSC:
Whew, that was fun. Actually, it has nothing to do with any of that. I'm just killing time until this Pat tape runs out.
waider: (Default)
I've just seen the buzz going around about LiveJournal being sold to SUP, the Russian company that was operating LiveJournal Russia since some time in 2006. I have additionally seen far too many "In Soviet Russia..." gags on this topic already, but handwave. I am curious to see how this develops; various people have expressed concern about their data being owned by Russians, and implicitly by the Russian Mafia ("Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our thing as ‘The Sicilian Yakuza’? Huh?"), but as has been pointed out elsewhere, (a) AT&T wiretaps for the NSA and (b) LiveJournal The Company still remains a US corporation bound by the laws yadda yadda. Which isn't to say they can't just backhaul the data to a secret location in the Urals for folding, spindling, and mutilation, but really I have more concrete things to concern me. I'm more interested in their 100-day plan, which seems rather like they are attempting to turn LJ in Facebook. I also note it doesn't have a timeline other than "we plan on doing this in 100 days", so there's no sense of what's being prioritised, whether everything will roll out together at the end of 100 days or whether it'll dribble out over the course of the 100-day period. And yes, I've seen the 5-year plan jokes, too.

Interesting times, as the man says.
waider: (Default)
Those snapshot things appearing on livejournal links wouldn't be so bad if they were click-to-load. The fact that they pop up on mouse-over is pretty much unbearable when my wimpy laptop is any way busy. So, DIE DIE DIE.
waider: (Default)
Every so often some combination of prevailing wind, stock market averages, and, uh, butterflies a-flappin' their wings results in me apparently losing my login credentials cookie at livejournal.com. Typically, I don't notice this until after I've posted an anonymous comment. Of course, because this is an intermittent occurrence, I have yet to determine what causes it, but damn it's annoying.
waider: (Default)
I got tired of the hack I'd added that resulted in "Dublin, IRELAND" in the last few posts. Now it'll only trigger if I'm not actually in Dublin.

And posting with my laptop.

Which is less likely than it seems, since the laptop tends not to leave the house much these days.

Oh well. It's the thought that counts, right?
waider: (Default)
Q. How many comments can a LiveJournal thread have?
A. 5000, apparently.
waider: (Default)
At some point my lj was limited to approximately the people I knew on talk.bizarre. Back in the day, I'd use teedotbee as many things: a sounding board, a place to post random writings, a safety valve, and so on. It's funny that I now consider a friends-only journal less "safe" than a completely open (and not retroactively censored) forum, although perhaps it's merely a change in attitude on my part.
waider: (Default)
I much preferred logjam when it used XML files for the local backup, despite my hatred of XML, because it meant I could quickly find an old post using grep. Now it's using SQLite, which means I need to bang my head against the desk until the post I'm looking for falls out. Gah.
waider: (Default)
posting from Gaim isn't quite as cool in practice as it seemed like when I first realised it would be an obvious integration point.
waider: (Default)
I've just realised I've been using LiveJournal for a little over four years now. I've recently started going back over my friends-locked posts and figuring out if they're still worth keeping locked or not; I've unlocked a few with only one or two edits here and there because they were locked for reasons that no longer apply (in short, I don't work there any more) but I keep forgetting what I'm supposed to do with the "backdated entry" toggle, so sorry if any of them have reappeared in anyone's friends page. I've been kinda haphazardly tagging them too, but really what I need is something like SELECT * FROM livejournal WHERE user = 'waider' AND privacy = 'FRIENDS' and I'm too damned lazy to script anything up.

loose ends

Jan. 30th, 2006 12:20 am
waider: (Default)
  • I ended up nuking all the comments on the post that referred to gentoo, since there's apparently no way of saying, "ok, no more comments here" - you can freeze an individual subthread, but not the main thread. And when I said, "I don't want a distro war on my livejournal", it was apparently read as "let me tell you why I use My Favourite Distro". Thanks, yo. Read the goddamn instructions before posting.
  • More like/dislike for the Motophone: iTap text input is like T9, only much, much better. On the other hand, the phone's clock is in the Dumbest. Place. Evar: when you've the keypad locked, pressing a button to light up the display so you can check the time causes a "helpful" How To Unlock This Phone window to pop up. On top of the clock.
waider: (Default)
http://www.livejournal.com/img/goat-irish.gif

(go to "My LiveJournal", scroll down to the box with Frank (that's the goat) in it, click Edit, and select "Irish")
waider: (Default)
I just added a comment to [livejournal.com profile] merde's journal, and, well, it's about 6am here, and according to the comment, I posted it at about 12am, which is wrong for both our timezones. I wonder where it's getting the time from? (I used the website to post, as opposed to any client that might be doing the time frobbing for me)

Oh, and before you ask, I'm up this early because we had a company night out last night, and in recent years alcohol has a tendency to make me sleep less. WAY less.
waider: (Default)
I rather like this concise justification for cleaning out the friendslist. If such a thing were even needed, which is a whole 'nother thing.
waider: (Default)
my laptop spent most of this evening in Windows land, partly so that I could update the virus scanner that lives there and partly for some other reason that escapes me. While I was there I played with Firefox and Thunderbird for a bit and installed some extensions to the former. Things that I am noticing as a result of this toolery:
  • Thunderbird's RSS reader is pretty damned rough. You can't seem to drag and drop RSS URLs into it or do something like thunderbird <url to rss file>
  • Thunderbird needs at least two more display layouts: folder list + message list, and message list. I don't care if this is a "if you want Outlook/Evolution you know where to get them" statement.
  • Firebird extensions: good. Restarting to activate them: bad. Inconsistently placed configuration screens: very bad.
  • Deepest Sender is nice, but missed the one basic thing I thought was totally the point of browser-embedded web log clients: writing an entry based around the current page. Like, BLOG THIS ALREADY or something.
  • The del.icio.us plugin was okayish but needs to be two-way, i.e. rather than just grabbing my stuff off del.icio.us, it should be possible for me to locally frob the del.icio.us folder and have the results mirrored on the site.
  • WeatherFox (check the firefox extensions site as I couldn't be bothered digging up the URL again) is neat.
And that is all.

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