My retirement/crazy old man project is going to be to create a fully functional Bat Cape (akin to the one I saw a few evenings ago in The Dark Knight).
That means fully foldable/retractable, very very light, very very strong, and it’s got to work. No, really.
Sounds like I’m gonna need a bigger shed.
And a few repeat slots with a hip replacement programme.
…the morning after a very big meal with my parents, CP and my sis, who is over from Oz for a while.
And I’m awake, perky and fine.
My secret? A Sleeptracker Pro watch, which I’ve been using for about three months now. It’s startlingly effective, and works by waking me at the best time – the moments where my sleep cycle is at its shallowest within a given window before my target wake-up time. It also lets me monitor my sleep patterns, with a view to working out how to get a better night’s sleep.
The result? Waking up no longer feels like being yanked back on a bungee cord from the land of the dead through a hedge made of extra-thick treacle. For me, it’s been worth every penny.
From Wired mag’s blog today
“A survey by General Motors that found nearly nine in 10 women would rather talk to a guy in a Prius than a Porsche. Dumping the SUV in favor of an econobox would make you more popular at parties, too. Eighty percent of respondents said they find people who drive fuel efficient cars more interesting than those that don’t… [and] 45 percent of respondents consider gas guzzlers a fashion faux-pas.“
Now that’s a sign of a shift for the better, I reckon, and an indicator of greener moves finally being seen as ’sexier’ in one of the toughest consumer arenas there is.
For the last year or so, I’ve been organising my life through a combination of a lovely black Moleskine diary (try one, you won’t go back), the To Do list on my BlackBerry, and some handy pseudorandom ‘nags’ from HassleMe.co.uk.
I found HassleMe a great way to remind myself to do certain time-insensitive tasks, but it isn’t that useful for specifics - you can’t set reminders for particular times, for instance. However, the other day I stumbled across (via Daring Fireball) www.iwantsandy.com - a virtual personal assistant that you control via email (or Twitter, or IM via Twitter).
So far, it’s proving remarkably good - especially for someone who uses a BlackBerry, as you can email ‘Sandy’ with a simple message like ‘Remind me to call Bob at 3:35 on Tuesday’ and ’she’ works out the rest, then emails me 15 minutes before the appointment. Even better is being able to snooze a reminder with a simple ‘Remind me in an hour’ reply, as well as the ability to tag appointments via a simple @ tag, such as @meeting or @guitarhero. Fantastic.
There’s plenty more to Sandy, and it’s definitely worth checking out — IWantSandy leaves me with more headspace to think about that, my code, my projects, and all the good things in my life.
“One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day is that so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find no opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents, but have to hire themselves out to rich corporations directed by Philistines, who insist upon their producing what they themselves regard as pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists in either England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper for which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling himself to the doing of it, a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer derive whole-hearted satisfaction from anything whatever. I cannot condemn men who undertake work of this sort, since starvation is too serious an alternative, but I think that where it is possible to do work that is satisfactory to man’s constructive impulses without entirely starving, he will be well advised from the point of view of his own happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more highly paid but not seeming to him worth doing on its own account. Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.” — Bertrand Russell
This is my first ever bonsai tree, bought for me this weekend by CP’s parents as an early birthday present, and installed today upon the mantlepiece in our study.
It’s Japanese Pepper Tree, apparently (Zanthoxylum piperitum). I hope it has enough light. Despite how it looks in the picture, the study’s rather gloomy as it faces north. I’m told that if it’s unhappy it will lose drop leaves, so I’ll keep a close eye on it and move it around if needed.
I use the Twitter app in Facebook to share my tweets via my Facebook status.
Thing is, the things I mention via Twitter aren’t necessarily the things I want in my status (often web dev references, urls, etc), so I’ll have to disable it.
Indeed, I think it’s just a small example of how, just as in real life, we expose ourselves in different ways to different people — there is no thing as the single online representation of oneself. I don’t think there really can be. Who would want it?
Imagine a two-foot-wide glass pedestal, seven feet high - high enough so everyone has to look up at it. Its construction is completely clear, so that whatever is on it can be seen with ease from below.
On the pedestal is a a golden award - elegant, chunky, sophisticated. At its top is an elaborate crystal orb. It has a name plaque towards the bottom, but the winner’s name is not discernable.
The award lies knocked on its side. The crystal ball is chipped, with shards lying beside it.
Glued under the base of the award, a stark black-on-white advisory message is now visible:
“Surgeon General’s Warning: excessive exposure to fame can damage your health”
Or words to that effect, anyway.
I’ve literally just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
It’s amazing. So beautiful and so sad and yet so compelling and deeply moving. I’m looking at the whole world - even the bits I usually grumble about - with such… awe? reverence? concern? All of those things, really.
I’ll post my thoughts about it over the weekend, I hope. But if you see it in a bookshop, pick it up and buy it and read it.
It’s not like I exactly have plenty of spare time on my hands right now*, but I really am feeling the urge to spend some time writing fiction again. It’s been too long without it.
(* expanding my experience of three programming languages, plus formulating/designing at least four distinct applications of varying scale, plus domestic life and wanting to have fun with CP and our friends…)