ATTENTION:
SORRY, I SHAN’T UPDATE THIS BLOG ANY MORE.
IT REALLY IS A PITY, CONSIDERING ALL THE HARD WORK I’VE PUT INTO IT.
AGAIN, SORRY, MY CONSIDERATE READERS!
THANKS FOR READING MY [SOMEWHAT BORING] BLOG.
PS: I’VE A NEW BLOG, TO TAKE THE PLACE OF THIS ONE. IT’S HERE:
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
One thing I did all this year without forgetting was writing 2010 instead of just 10. (I know, it sounds silly)
This year I shall finish that darn novel of mine. I’m on the fourth draft, for goodness’ sake!
I wonder why time flies so?
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
— Mark Twain
Hello again. I haven’t posted for a while because I had visited Gir forest (y’know, the only home of the Asiatic lion). There I hadn’t internet access. Here are the lions we photo’d at the first chance we got.
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Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Does anyone know what this color’s called?
I think it’s brown and orange together.
Eddie, my dog, was hilarious today. From above, a bed with a tail:
In front, a bed with a nose:
And, underneath it all:
The pink-nosed + brainless + lazy + handsome dog.
Image by kevindooley via Flickr
An odd-looking beam of light shone down on the balcony, forming a perfect circle with a ring around it. It was a very strange hue, something like this. It was rather large, though not as large as the balcony. I took no special notice of it at that time. But towards the end of the day my cousin’s eyes became rather round and that was when it all began.
Image via Wikipedia
Hello again. I’ve been too busy to post these days. First, there was sports practice; second, projects; third, homework; fourth, this annoying book of mine clamoring to be written; and so on and so forth. Anyway, let’s get down to business:
I have discovered I Write Like. I did this while browsing MakeUseOf. It says on the website that it will:
Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
I am not sure about its accuracy, for on my first try, it said:
On my third:
I am convinced my second try was the most accurate, for then I pasted my entire story into the box:
It’s really strange when the sky’s all blue enveloping a gold-
bronze-copper-orange-yellow ball sinking beneath the trees and rooftops with a enigmatic faraway feel. It was the loveliest one I beheld this year. Photoshop Mobile aided me in cropping and the vignette border.
Jvac isn’t really a word, but it does suit this font I’ve crafted. It’s a Latin font, yes, but it sure is better than FIYH.
I won’t bore you with a description, ’cause a picture is worth more than a thousand words:
How annoying.
SCREECH. I look up from my book, carefully bookmarking my page first, and wonder where that came from. I realize it isn’t my imagination, it’s my computer. Stupid thing.
A thought suddenly pops into my head, wondering if it’s a joke. Shaking it away, I tiptoe into the Hall, where the computer was the last time I saw it. There sit my computer’s two other, more ignorant users, squabbling about who downloaded the thing that screeched. I’m noticed as I stand there, glaring at the two.
“What happened?” I manage to spit out, with badly concealed air of curiosity mingled with wrath.
“This idiot downloaded something. A virus, I reckon.” comes the reply.
“I figured that much out. What’re you doing to fix it?” I demand.
“‘Kaspersky’ something.”
“Kaspersky what?”
“I think you’d better help.”
I shuffle over to the sofa, collapse on it, hit my head on the wall in the process, swear and peer at the screen. “What did you do to my laptop?”
As though in answer to my question, it screeches again.
This is what happened the night before yesterday. I was simply furious. And this is a book lover’s bliss compared to a lesson in Literature: “The Killing.” It’s an excerpt from Hemingway’s “The old man and the sea,” though what is so good about it that the guy got a Nobel Prize for it? I fell asleep trying to listen to the teacher. Maybe I’ll get a Mac now, thanks to the virus!
Or I may not get a new computer at all. 
.
I was browsing Rinkworks today and found these: (have a laugh or two 
)
Someone told me his hard disk was full. His nephew had installed something that would make it larger and had muttered something confusing about slaves and jumpers. But the hard disk, it seemed, was “still full.”
My first thought was that his nephew had installed an additional hard disk, and the guy got confused about drive letters. But it was worse. He had an 80 GB hard disk with 6 GB used, plus an extra 250 GB hard disk, which was completely empty.
I asked him why he thought his hard disk was full. He said, “But can’t you see? There’s no free space!” And, really, there was no free space — not a single inch of free space — on his desktop.
I gave him a higher screen resolution and put a handful of folders on his desktop. I told him I installed some “drawers” so he had more space. Now he’s happy.
I worked on my manager’s computer a while back. While waiting for an operation to complete, I was idly spinning the cursor around the screen, as many do. My manager asked why techs often seem to do that.
“Oh,” I said, “sometimes you have to spin the mouse around in a clockwise direction to wind it up. You don’t have to do it very often, but we usually do it while we’re working on other things to save time.”
The manager swallowed the story, and my co-workers and I had a good chuckle about it later.
A few days later, another of our guys was working on the same machine. The manager caught him moving the cursor around while he was waiting on the computer to finish something.
“Why are you spinning the cursor counterclockwise?” the manager asked.
Without missing a beat, he replied, “Every so often, they get wound up too tight, and you have to unwind them.”
I taught web design one summer to a group of underprivileged teenagers. At the end of the informal course, the “course assessor” (a senior academic who was formally in charge of the course but knew nothing about computers) came to see the students’ webpages. Upon looking at the first student’s monitor screen, she exclaimed, “Oh, that’s beautiful!”
The student looked perplexed. I walked around to look at the student’s screen, and saw… the Windows 95 desktop. The student hadn’t yet displayed her webpage. The academic was praising the beauty of the desktop.
About a year ago, a customer from Roswell, NM, called in to place an order. To break the ice, I jokingly asked if he or any of his neighbors had seen any aliens lately. The guy laughed and proceeded to tell me all about the crazies (his word, not mine) that not only live in Roswell but who come on vacation there in hopes of seeing a UFO themselves. As he talked, I processed the order, and the last bit of information I needed to complete it was the guy’s email address for marketing purposes.
Customer: “Email! I won’t have anything to do with that Internet or modems of any sort! You should be careful about those. Don’t you know that once you install a modem, the government can look into your computer and watch everything you do? That’s why every night before I go to bed, I turn the monitor to the wall.”
I know a woman that believes there is a hacker attacking her computer. Every time there is a problem, or she gets an error message she is convinced it is “the hacker” messing with her. Almost every day she tells me “The hacker made me lose my document” or “The hacker made my email return with a wrong address message” or “The hacker made Explorer freeze today” or “The hacker made Napster lose its connection today” or “The hacker made a floppy unreadable” or “The hacker made the printer jam.”
She has even assumed her imaginary enemy has superhuman powers. When I tell her some of the things she says are impossible to do, she says, “He knows how to do it. He is a genius.”
She is sure this guy exists, and he devotes enormous resources and several hours a day, seven days a week to the sole purpose of bothering her.
I was an editor for my high school’s newspaper for a couple years. The newspaper and the yearbook staffs shared a computer lab, because it was too costly to keep separate ones. The yearbook advisor (a little off her rocker) was convinced that we newspaper students were sneaking into the journalism room at night, removing all the memory from the computers, and selling on the black market for a higher price. The reason she believed this is that we always got type 11 errors (Mac), and she thought that since they had to do with memory and the computers were fairly new, one of us had to be physically doing something to the memory. She finally went and told the principal. He, not being much smarter than she, proceeded to tell our newspaper advisor about our “illegal activities,” and she laughed him out of the room. The only thing that really happened is that the yearbook lady finally had a police officer come in and lecture us about the harm of stealing school property.
In 1989 I worked as a repair tech for a company that made Amiga and Atari modems and hard drives. On one of the Atari computers I used for testing, I added a screen saver that just made a blank screen. One of the female line leads used this particular computer for auditing floppy disks and was unaware that I had added the screen saver. One day when she came over to test a few disks, she asked if I would turn the computer on for her. I told her that it was already on and jokingly told her that there was a loose connection somewhere in the computer, but if you bang on the table by the computer it should fix it long enough for her test (when in reality, it was just bumping the mouse and turning off the screen saver). I even banged on the table to show her. She accepted this and continued to bang on the table whenever she tested some disks, and each time I had to hold in the laugher. I decided to see how long I could get her to believe this. A couple of weeks later she was training someone new to her crew and included the table banging to “activate the loose connection” as part of the training. This went on for a month before I finally decided to tell her what was going on when one day she banged on the table a good ten times trying to activate a computer that was turned off.
I was once using the generic telnet program on the library computers to check my mail on UTM (the local university) with Pine. The computer-inept librarian walked up behind me.
- Her: (shrieking) “WHAT ARE YOU DOING???”
- Me: ”I’m checking my email–”
- Her: ”It looks like you’re breaking into the computer!!”
- Me: ”No really — I’m checking my mail.”
- Her: ”But that’s not HOTMAIL!!”
- Me: ”I don’t use hotmail. I use–”
- Her: ”But EVERYONE uses HOTMAIL!!”
- Me: ”No, my account goes through UTM. My email account ends with–”
- Her: ”But that’s not what MYYY UTM looks like!!” (apparently referring to the UTM web page)
- Me: ”Yes, I’m telnetting. It’s another way of accessing–”
- Her: ”I think you better shut that off. You’re breaking into the computer.”
- Me: ”But I–”
- Her: ”Turn it off. I don’t believe that ‘checking mail’ story.”
Have you seen anything quite like this? Hilarious.
Yeah, you guessed. Another font.
As for the name, this helped. Quite handy, isn’t it? The font’s rather dotty. Dotty — it’s both crazy and full of dots. I considered naming it Railae, but decided against it. And it’s true both P and p look like tanks 
It’s a symbol font. Handy for ciphers, codes and such like. I’m best at symbol fonts, after all. You saw what an absolute fail Feather in your hat was.
I feel like writing a long, long post. But no inspiration, except for my good-for-nothing dog snoring at my feet.
Anyone using Adobe Ideas out there? I made this with Ideas:
It’s quite good. What about a few quotes?
I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
— Oscar Wilde
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
— Marston Bates
The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary.
— Dave Kellett
Meet Feather in your hat, successor to Osilis and my second typeface, let alone my first Latin one.
It’s rather curvy, a bit like a hat, you could say. And each hat has a feather in it! Almost. I’ve been working on Feather in your hat for a week or so. (I haven’t counted.) I began work on the 26th of September, so you can decide for yourself. I think I messed up the accents a bit, though . And I left out the ® symbol. Anyway, the alphabets have their feathers on the left side and pointing the same way, while the numerals and punctuation have them the opposite way. What a way of distinguishing them, isn’t it? Have a look:
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
— Oscar Wilde
A conference is a gathering of important people who can singly do nothing, but can together decide that nothing can be done.
— Fred Allen
I’ve been collecting quotes lately, and this is one of the funniest I’ve got. If you’ve heard of PocketMod, you’ve probably read a lot of quotes like this.
My newspaper has a small section dedicated to quotes, which I love reading — there was once something about a proffessor talking in someone else’s dreams, which had me ROTFL.
The average person thinks he isn’t.
Father Larry Lorenzoni
How true. I don’t think I’m average ’cause the average person doesn’t write a book, does he?
Via drurydrama of Flickr
