waider

tongodeon

• 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.

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...

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.