Today’s XKCD was relevant to my unique experiences. Spooooky~
I went to a gym today. Indeed, the gym. Helen spotted a 1-day guest membership offer thing, so I tagged along and was shown the ropes.
Only, there were no ropes. Imagine my dismay!
Instead, there was cardio-vascular work, which made my heart explode. There were weight machines that made my arms catch fire. There was a steppping-arm-waving thing that made me look like a big queer.
But then, there was a swimming pool~
I am seriously considering parting with £30 per month just to be able to chill out in a swimming pool and then have a gorgeous high-pressure shower afterwards. I could take all my showers in the gym, trading water pressure and pool proximity for showing other dudes my cock (which rarely happens in my own shower).
Indeed, this is the main incentive to actually use the exercise machines: so that when you’re chilling out in the showers the other guys are all “man, he’s hot, in a totally hetero way”. Also: I could totally use my bathroom for something else if I didn’t need to shower there. A smoking room? A darkroom? A pottery studio? The possibilities are truly endless!
There’s a new JLU commentary podcast up. Man, I’d only just listened to the last one this afternoon.
This one’s for the Episode “Hawk and Dove” from the 1st season (or possibly the third season, depending on how you’re counting), in which a magical weapon of mass destruction is shown to have a really inconvenient weakness.
I don’t want to spoil it or anything, but let’s just say it’s right up there with Captain Planet being allergic to pollution.
Sigmund, the new occupant of the spare bedroom – slightly less hairy than his predecessor.
Roger the lodger moved out this week, giving cause for both celebration and stress. Celebration because I no longer needed her extra rent and really wanted the space back. Stress because she wanted to give 4 days’ notice, skip out a month early, get all her deposit back and still have me smile and say “thank you”. As you can imagine, events did not progress as outlined. There was shouting, names were called and threats were veiled thinly.
Nevertheless, against all odds and with a liberal helping of keeping-the-key, changing-the-lock, and sunflower oil, she’s gone. Last night we celebrated with wine and prawns, staying up to an unreasonable hour, watching television at an unreasonable volume, and doing something quite unreasonable on the sofa.
Unfortunately, in the course of the evening’s revelry we were subjected to a drive-by DVD-returning in the wee hours. Personally I’m still not quite right after this unnerving experience, and I can only imagine how the chinchilla feels. What is the neighbourhood coming to?
So, I did a good thing.
I found that the only place you can score… a thing… is this private, elite, sexy torrent tracker place. It’s pretty well-known in the community, something to do with pigs, they’re not too keen on it being spread about so I’m being vague.
Anyway, I whined about this a bit in a thread on Demonoid (a less secretive and elite torrent tracker), and suggested that if and when I had acquired this thing I would re-seed it there.
So then I did, and I did… only to field a billion people asking for invites to this place. Invites, which I not only don’t have (you gotta seed up 10GB and keep a 1.05 ratio, it’s very exacting). Indeed I outlined this in my post. “Do not ask me,” I said, “for I cannot give that which I cannot have.” I got mine of a dude in an IRC channel, you see.
Shit, I even got some dude asking me to explain to him how to use the IRCs. Did wikipedia and google go down while I wasn’t looking?
In people-who-aren’t-lame-news: someone on the PA boards is doing a podcast-type-thing (commentary on JLU episodes, soooo nerdy~) and needed somewhere to host them. The first one’s up in /podcasts right now, I guess maybe more are to come?
I wonder if this’ll dent my ~2TB monthly bandwidth allowance? Yay for hosting providers over-selling. Dreamhost would so very go out of business if a tenth of their customers actually used that much bandwidth.
Or hibernal cleaning, at any rate.
I noticed the other day that bits of my blog were broken. Random PHP errors were spewing out of the header, the /junk page was MIA and the chess server was acting… funky. Naturally I set about fixing this.
As is always the case, this took far longer than it should have, due to my being terribly stupid. Also due to the geotracking plugin. It was messing up all my PHPs, mang.
Anyway, I killed the chess server (who still plays that anyway?) and the lame plugin, took the shears to the junk script and employed some sexy css.
Next I shall employ the junk page’s script in making a decent replacement for the desktops page.
I still say Ocelot was the only sane choice.
Anyway, I recently scored a copy of Leopard and got to play around with it last night. The verdict? It’s full of nice little touches, here are some of my favourite:
- The firewall can now limit communication on a per-app basis.
- Dictionary entries are included in spotlight results.
- Safari’s javascript doesn’t suck ass any more.
- iChat has a (very odd) tab implementation.
- Mail now does everything in an effort to appeal to Outlook switchers.
- Grid spacing returns as a variable in the Finder, and docked folders are finally spring-loaded.
- The first real upgrade to the text-to-speech engine since 1984 is worth the wait.
- Spotlight is more refined.
- Clicking an open app in the dock takes you to the virtual desktop it’s living on.
There’s no must-have stuff though. At least, nothing that’s going to make me forsake my stable Tiger install now that I’ve tasted it and can’t go back (which I did with Panther for Exposé, and Tiger for Spotlight and Dashboard).
Of course, Steve did mention that they’re holding back some un-announced “secret” features… maybe in an effort to make sure the Redmond boys don’t fire up the copier and slip their crown jewel into Vista before it ships? That ship’s sailed now though, and I’m betting it’s nothing special anyway.
