Feb

28

Whoo-hoo!

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There is a buzz of excitement today. I can’t tell you why, but feel free to revel vicariously in my enthusiasm and shout a toast of congratulations in my general direction. (towards London from wherever you are)

I’m thrilled thrilled thrilled! Nail biting can subside and a breath of sweet relief is now being let out to join the atmosphere.
My body nearly hums audibly with glee!
Good news is great news on a Monday… and this started out as great news…

(I know I’m not typically this vague, but trust me, in time you’ll know. I promise.)
smooches~
jEN

What I’m listening to right now:
I Think I Lost My Headache from the album “Rated R” by Queens Of The Stone Age

Feb

26

even hard drives get the blues

Filed Under creative stuff, me so g33ky, tout le fromage | 1 Comment

Hey kitties-

I’ve been kind of quiet for a few days, thanks in part to an irritating, yet completely uncrippling issue on my machine. I think it’s isolated to an application that’s just decided to go mental, but to be on the safe side, I’ve been backing things up like mad for a few days and generally trying to ignore the inevitable transition to the new hard disk due here Monday.
A new hard drive is both forcibly liberating and thrilling as well as being the most painful way to spend an afternoon. I have to install loads of genuinely useful software, (like Adobe CS Premium and ecto), as well as wade through the mucky mire of upgrades, updates and filtering out the flotsam I just never used anyway. Argh. All that, and I’m trying to plan a quick trip back to America… These things have to come all at once don’t they?

So, no catastrophic problems, since I’ve got my shit backed up. I slept pretty well over it all. Hard drives go bad. At least I noticed in time…

What the heck did I do with myself whilst in Target Disk Mode all day yesterday? I caught up on the mundane. I’d been fooling myself that my time spent in front of my computer all day was constructive, when in fact, I know all I would’ve done was an hour of genuine work, clean files off for another couple of hours and rot on the internet for the rest of the day, sucking down espresso/french roast blend coffee like it’s water. (Gotta stay alert for the Blogshares.com trading, man…)
I did accomplish things whilst untethered from my diminutive office space. I potted plants. I did dishes. I mopped the bathroom floor and did not one, but two loads of wash. (One lights and one darks, for those scoring at home.) I also grew my brain without the aid of the internet. *gasp* Good old fashioned print reading. We subscribe to New Scientist magazine, so I took the opportunity to learn about everything from volcanos on Mars, to the tech industry in India, to the Minke whale population & Japan, to The Cell processor chip, and much more. My brain loves that magazine. (Looks really impressive when you take it with you to the hair salon too… heh heh. Yes, I’d rather read about physics than Brad Pitt. Undue shock ensues.)

Oh, and I also wrote a poem. I like it, perhaps you will too. Here it is:

August 9

“I miss the sound of crickets,”
she said,
then she laid down her head next
to mine.
In the space of stars she heard
only silence
and the quiet of a heaven without
a soul;
without the cacophony of crickets
on a warm, summer night.
And after a sigh, she drifted to sleep-
dreaming of the sound she
left behind.
Inside, I wished I could’ve
done something,
Something about the silence…
I wanted the weight of the August
night steam
to blanket her in the comfort
of train whistles and the
insects’ song
I could never appreciate.
For the first time in my life
my peace was
too quiet.
So I put my arm around her and
waited for the morning,
Sung to sleep by her soft breath.

© jEN 2005
don’t steal it, lest you feel my wrath… and I assure you, it’s uncomfortable.

smooches~
jEN

Feb

23

Bentonville evil

Filed Under regular, tout le fromage | 1 Comment

Wow. Wal-Mart.
You suck. Hard.
Walmart does it again… if they don’t get their way, they close stores and eliminate employee positions. Evil, thy name is Wal-Mart. You sick, twisted, arrogant, manipulative, monopolising, right-wing, censorship spreading, low-wage paying, store prayer encouraging, competition stomping, small town economy/sense of community destroying, equal pay ignoring scourge from Satan’s left testicle.
Read and become incensed from this article.

I’ve not shopped at a Wal-Mart for years and will pay extra to avoid their plague upon modern economics. I refuse to buy from a chain that “Rolls back” jobs and livelihoods as flippantly as they do the price on Cheerios. Fuck you Wal-Mart.

smooches~
jEN

Feb

23

Old skool goes Flash

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Prepare to waste loads of time here…
Pacman has gone Flash…
Pacman-1
My apologies in advance for wasting lots of your time… ;)
smooches~
jEN

Feb

23

yup- got shafted a bit

Filed Under me so g33ky, regular, tout le fromage | 2 Comments

Ok- I just mentioned the boo-boo on the Apple Store site (see my previous post), and now, just a little while later, I go back and check to see what’s happening…

They’ve reduced the iPod Mini line to just four colours, (removed the gold one), dropped the priced on the model I just bought by 40 quid, and offer a 6GB model for 10 quid less than the one I have. I got mine on Saturday. It gets better-
The 20GB model I spoke of and screen shot in the last post, dropped to just under £178- that’s about 2 quid under my little 4 GB Mini…(correction: that £178 that I griped about is excluding 17.5% VAT… it’s still £209 retail. I do still have the grounds to gripe just a bit about the £40 I just lost on the Mini though… *sigh*)

The one thing that saves my sanity is that there was little to no buzz over a new iPod line until yesterday. I couldn’t have known in advance and if you sit on your thumbs and wait for the next big thing to happen you’ll never have fun. So, the price for having fun is to occasionally get bled by the cost of bleeding edge devices. I’d rather have cool toys and wear a couple of plasters* here and there than to miss out entirely.

smooches~
jEN

*for the Americans in the room- plasters are band-aids…

Feb

23

I found a boo-boo on Apple’s iPod Store…

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Today, the Apple Store team is hard at work modifying the iPod Store section for the product line reorganisation… but they missed something… (I feel like such a mega-dweeb for catching this… :) )
Clearly, the wave of the iPod future is upon us, with podcasting and potential expansions in A/V technology in the works. (See this post on Neil’s blog…)

What seems to be happening to the iPod is the phaseout of the standard, shitload-of-songs-in-your-pocket-model for the shitload-of-songs-AND-PHOTOS-in-your-pocket-model.

What was their boo-boo? They list an attractively priced 20GB / 5000 song model for £209.00, but in the description copy below the Click Wheel photo, they go on to wow you with the now-non-existent 40GB model and it’s 10,000 capacity. There is no 40GB model. Not available from Apple anymore. Not even available as a iPod Photo. (Those are 30GB and 60GB…)
Here’s the window shot of the page..
Applebooboo
So does that mean that the iPod mini I just got last week is about to be replaced/upgraded as rumoured? Did I, once again, buy an Apple product on the cusp? Argh. So it goes. I love my little silver mini… even if it gets upgraded to 6GB soon, I’m still a happy girl.

smooches~
jEN

Feb

22

Shuffle Guts! The horror!

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You just couldn’t leave it alone could you?
ShuffleexposedGo to AppleMatters.com via this link for an 18 page dissection of the tiniest member of the iPod family.
It nearly makes me cringe…

smooches~
jEN

Feb

22

Reading the flood of remembrances

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So, as most of the world knows, Hunter S. Thompson is dead. I found a great quote in the most unusual of sources: an MTV.com article about HST. Written by Kurt Loder, who possibly is the last bastion of intelligent journalism at the bling-centric station*, the article draws attention to some career highlights of the late HST and also offered a quote I really like from a 1974 Playboy Magazine interview with Hunter:

“One day you just don’t appear at the El Adobe bar anymore: You shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were — the writer.”

The MTV.com article can be found here. And the MTV.com initial announcement here. Also, I found an article written some years ago by Hunter’s son, describing the man that was his father. That one is here.

So long- now back to some regular blogging action…

smooches~
jEN

*Perhaps I’m not up-to-date enough to comment, for it’s been a long time since I spent more than 30 seconds on the channel. Thanks for destroying the M in MTV, guys. (That’s why, until I moved from America, I watched Fuse if I wanted to see music videos.)

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