Late March Distractions

Life has run away with me. Which is normally a preamble to me suspending operations on this blog. chaq qaS, ‘a wej qaS. Maybe, but not yet. (That’s for the couple of you that expected more Klingon out of me. It’s all you’re getting this posting.)

Life has run away with me in lots of ways. There was the World Is Much Too Small Way:

NICK: [walks from Melbourne Uni to Fitzroy, having been roped into a focus group]

NICK: *pulls up to the traffic lights before the focus group*

NICK: *notices next to him a vaguely familiar Levantine-looking woman with a short haircut. ignores*

…

NICK: *hang on, her hair didn’t used to be short…*

ZOE: … Nick?!

NICK: … Zoe?!

Hail fellow well met, has it really been two and a half years, woah this is freaky, you’ve got the same email address right, well (looks at watch) gotta go —

ZOE: Yeah. I’ve got to head to this house in Napier St.

NICK: Oh. I’ve got to go to this place in Napier St too.

*blink*

ZOE: … You’re not going to a focus group, are you?

NICK: [grins] F*ck off!

The even funnier thing was when we both walked in to said focus group, and the mutual contact looked at us both, clicked, and mouthed to me, “that’s not… the Zoe?” Like I say, small world.

*waves if you’re reading this btw Zoe*

There was the Failed Sleep Readjustment Way:

SISTER: So why did you invite me over today if you hadn’t had any sleep?

NICK: … Zzzz…

SISTER: Did you want me to make you a cup of tea?

NICK: … Zzzz…

There was the Sudden Work Deadline Way:

… Nah, I’ll skip the illustrative dialogues 🙂 — they make fun of me, as they usually do, but with work it pays to err on the side of caution.

The deadline’s still inconceivable, but I’ve accommodated to circumstances; it tends to take me a day — and some gentle course correction. I convince myself the world is X, and it takes a couple of statements of “since last Thursday, the world is Y” before I realise that the world might in fact no longer be X.

I blame the coming Singularity, because the rate of change isn’t going to ease off.

And finally, there’s the New Toy And Associated Challenges Way, now that I have a power supply for my eeePC. The summary of the challenge is given in a separate Geek Dept posting.

I’m typing this on the eeePC, in fact. The 8.9 inch screen is fine; the keyboard will take some getting used to, and it’s moving me away from touch typing (which I’ve been slowly inching towards over the past 25 years) back to two-or-three finger typing. In fact, in the standing room only train (one more reason I’m not normally a morning person), I was down to one-finger typing. And a lot of grumbling.