Charloween

Sometimes, I read academic work on a series I'm familiar with, and I wonder "Are they watching the same show I did?"

But sometimes, there'll be something like this:

...and, yeah, the author was definitely watching the same show I did.  (Apollo spends a lot of the series stunned.)

(From Patrick B. Sharp, "Starbuck as 'American Amazon': Captivity narrative and the colonial imagination in Battlestar Galactica." In Science Fiction Film and Television, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2010, pp. 57-78.)

Also, vaguely related to this; I've finally started using my Kindle for academic stuff. Turns out syncing a pile of pdfs to the Kindle is a snap, and as I've got the keyboard version (boo touch screen) it's quite easy to make notes after highlighting bits.  I don't know how it would work with full textbooks, but for shorter works (~<30 pages) it's functional and simple.  It means I can sit on a bus and flick through a stack of recent papers on a topic area, mark a few bits to come back to, save trees, and spend less time scrolling up and down on a pdf reader app.*

*it lags a bit, bless it, but I'm willing to accept that ...for now

The thing I was told the Kindle could do, but I never tried to make it do, actually turns out to be a time-saving thing to do, and not difficult at all.  

And it maintains the pagination of the original document.  Magnifique.

I joined 750words.com last week, and I'm enjoying it.

It's like a giant Twitter text box that keeps a running word count but doesn't share your words anywhere and also keeps some neat stats* and gives you badges for stuff. So, not at all like Twitter. But found it via qui_oui's Twitter feed, so I can be forgiven? (Plus, the site has a combo birds-and-bowling scoring-and-badges thing that I'm enjoying, so tweets maybe aren't that far off? Yeah. /overthinking) Anyway - I like that there's a running word count displayed for me so I don't use checking the word count as a distraction.

*Time-to-completion, wpm, how many times you were distracted, etc.

I've got 6 days in a row now of making it to 750 words, and while not all of it is brilliant, it's 6 x 750 words typed out that I probably wouldn't have typed. I used it to bash out some thoughts and plans in prep for yesterday's So-What-Are-Your-Research-Questions? meeting with my interim supervisor. I used it to go through some possible responses to questions in my rapidly-approaching job interview (in ~2.5 hours? - for an hourly-paid and supervisory job at the place where I've been volunteering). I haven't used it to write an entry for here, but I suppose that's not far off.

(Yesterday I mused about a Mythbusters versus Top Gear crossover, but decided that would be a Very Bad Idea since one show is people being perky about science and the other is people being grumpy about cars.)

Since the site keeps stats, I could see that over the last five days I've had the window open for hours in the background while I'm noodling off somewhere else. Today I decided that I'd try tossing words in all at once - and was able to get up to my limit (while muddling through some theoretical stuff for my thesis) in 18 minutes.

18 minutes to type 750 coherent words? Put that way, it hardly seems a chore at all. Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Gmail ads are funny. I guess what they want is for me to be emailing someone about how I want new shoes, an online PhD or Harry Potter fic, and then gleefully present me with sidebar ads that exactly match whatever I was talking about.

In practice, as I'm sure you all know, it's more fun to look at the sidebar ads and discover what Google thinks you want.  Who does Google think I am?  What does Google think I want?  What impression does Google get of my innermost hopes and dreams, after thinking through every email I've written in the last five years?

Well.

If I take all the opportunities offered by my super-duper personalized sidebar ads, I will:

• rent property in Canary Wharf, courtesy of the area's "leading estate agent",
• "come back to" Stratford, Ontario (a city I've visited at least twice a year for the last few years),
• spend a relaxing two weeks in Tuscany,
• enjoy accommodations at the Holiday Inn, Royal Leamington Spa,
• purchase vacation property in either Florida (foreclosures!) or Australia (!?), and
• become a helicopter pilot.

I get lots of use of this tag.  This should worry me.

2010: The mobile phone is a tiny, slender box that'll do almost anything - including letting you use your voice to talk to other people who aren't in the same room.

1979: The mobile phone has a rotary dial.

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I'm saving up for an HTC phone running Android. The Legend and the Desire are both wonderfully pretty, but I think I'll probably go with the Tattoo because it's going to be far less expensive (in comparison).

Has anyone made an app that'll let you dial your touch screen like it's a rotary phone?

I did it! After weeks of whining about it, I went and bought a netbook. I got the Asus 1000HE (*flips computer over* yeah, that one) and it's pretty damn cute. But it has an okay keyboard, a matte screen, a 6-cell battery and is shiny and all-black.

I'm typing on this right now, and I've gotta say - yes, the keyboard is cramped, and no, I'm not sure why XP thinks there are two (two!) possible LAN connections when there is only one port, but all in all, it's not as bad as I was fearing. And this "chicklet" keyboard is pretty awesome because every key is separated by a few millimeters so you can tell where the edges of the keys are. Neat!

The sad part is I'm sitting on my bedroom floor, surrounded by 1) my replacement desktop that I built and that nevalent helped me make run, 2) my laptop which has capital-I issues but, I'm sure, a heart of gold, 3) the old HP desktop that I used and absued for 6+ years before it died, and 4) the Mac G3 which was a tide-me-over while both the old desktop and the laptop were off on some mystical adventure leaving me computer-less. And then there's 5), my new teeny tiny shiny. *pats the shiny* (Proof, a photo which was taken by my phone and then transferred to my teeny tiny shiny via Bluetooth, hee!)

Note to self: in June, DO NOT BUY A COMPUTER.

Many thanks to nevalent and his zipcar.ca membership, infinite patience and good humour, and willingness to visit the P-Mall on a Saturday. Thanks too to all you flisters who've been listening to me go on about effing netbooks. (I has a shiny!) :D

The funny thing about a) being paid at the end of the month and b) having your rent cheque due at the end of the month is that:

When you lust after a pricey electronic toy all month, thinking, "but I get paid at the end of the month", writing out a cheque for that same amount of money plus another hundred dollars to give to your landlord... well, the fire of lust does dampen a bit.


Though I carried my Acer Aspire 5570 laptop to school and back two days in a row and I think my body would like me to get a smaller, lighter computer. (My kid-brain just wants any excuse for one of those floppy keyboards...)

Did you know the Beatles recorded Christmas greetings? I did not, until The Onion told me so. Scattered throughout this recording (from 1963) are some of the best verses of "Good King Wenceslaus" that you've never heard.

See? I can take pictures on my phone! There's even a little button on the side that's like a shortcut to the picture-taking menu! I'm sure the novelty will fade in a week or so, but until then I'm having lots of fun.