I have found myself, at least on a few occasions, talking to a person whose relationship to the Internets is much thinner than my own, trying to explain the nature of certain Internet memes. I find this a pretty tough task to pull off as I tend to make memes sound really infantile (and perhaps that is just what they are). To explain this world to the uninitiated, I either: 1) very quickly give up and move onto some other less obscure 2) go into semi-professorial lecture mode and give a mini-low down on memes, some of the early examples, a small theory of self-referential irony, 4chan, rickrolls, encyclopedia dramatic etc etc and then show a bunch of memes as really you can t do it justice without the audio visul component. Now, I can just point people to the Meme Factory to three youngish guys from Brooklyn who put together a **fantastic show**** a few weeks ago on, yes, Internet Memes. It was a dazzling ride into the (sometimes very obnoxious) territory that is memeology, addressing and displaying both the happy-cheery-cute side of memes as well as its darker side. The video they have on their site documents their presentation and the word is out that they will soon craft something more like a stand-alone video-essay about Internet memes. As we wait for this next step in their project, this video is an amusing watch (though the interesting stuff starts about 3 minutes in).

Wow, don't even remotely remember anymore when I was last blogging about going to the cinema. Granted, I wasn't that often in recent times, but I haven't mentioned some movies... Whatever. Yesteday I have been to cinema again, and we watched "The Dark Knight". To be honest, I regret to have gone. The movie is as dark in its setting as the title says, even darker than what was common in previous Batman movies. They turned Batman into James Bond style, turning Morgan Freeman into Q, and using cheap Eminem quotes. I feel sorry for Heath that this was his last movie to star in. Even his great performance wasn't able to save the movie, and it's sad that this should be the movie people will remember him with... You deserve better, buddy.

Last month, the dutch-languaged C'T featured an article about retouching pictures with The Gimp, amongst others. Great timing, of course, since everyone goes on holiday during summer, right? Right. It's amazing what you can do with The Gimp and a bit of basic knowledge. Take this picture, for example, which I took at this year's FOSDEM: I kindof like it, but the colors are a bit blend. Too much of a red tint over everything. So, what we need to do, is change the curve: Pardon my, eh, Dutch. The trick is to remember that there are only so many colors which can be represented in a (JPEG) photo. The histogram on the background represents that; and by modifying the curve that is above the picture, you can effectively change the colorspace that is available for any peaks. If there's a lot of the darker blue in the picture, but less so in the lighter regions of the blue (as in this case), you just give the picture more space in the blue regions so that the blue that actually exists in the picture can be better represented. We do this by lowering the curve right before the peak, and by raising it afterwards, as the above screenshot shows. After doing so for red, green, and blue, this is the result: Looks much better, right? Way more contrast, and the colors look much more natural. And that only took me like 10 seconds to do. Do watch out, though -- it's easy to overshoot, resulting in an ugly picture; and you wouldn't necessarily want that. Also, if your camera has a RAW mode, you're going to be able to do a lot more of this kind of retouching with that than you would be using JPEG files. Then again, my camera has RAW too, but I don't use it most of the time...

A day or two ago, I got the feeling that winter has set in. Maybe you know the feeling.

I looked outside the bedroom window. The trees had a bit of white all over. The tall grass in the distance had a sheen of gray on it. The sky was a uniform gray. Small ice pellets hit at our window. As far as the eye could see, not a sign of anything that wasn't frozen.

As I stood in our warm 68-degree house, I was reminded of how little separates us from the frozen outdoors. A few inches of wood and insulation is all. How easy it is to fret about the rapidly rising cost of propane these days, the cost of heating a house. But still, how easy we have it compared to the people that came before in this house.

They had to keep a fire going for warmth, keep a ready supply of firewood for the winter, figure a way to get the warmth throughout the house. All with insulation that wasn't as good as we have, windows that didn't shut as tight as ours, doors that were draftier. As is typical today, our furnace has safety systems designed to detect problems and shut itself down if something weird happens. Back then, indoor heat was a dangerous thing. There's been at least one chimney fire in this house, an event which often claimed the entire house and sometimes the lives of its inhabitants. Ten feet from my desk, there's a rounded out black spot on the floor where, perhaps 70 years ago, someone opened the door to a wood stove, only to be surprised by a burning log falling out to the wood floor.

Today, we can't use wood heat due to Terah's asthma. We had the chimney removed to boost the energy efficiency of the house with modern heat. Out back in the trees north of the house, there is a pile of bricks, saved from our chimney for future use. Each brick has a scorched side, darkened from the chimney fire and decades of use.

As we experienced firsthand in the ice storm of 2005 (see also more stories and pictures), it doesn't take much to be thrown back a hundred years from a convenient modern heat to our non-automated, non-mechized, past. All it takes is a tree to snap too close to the right power line anywhere between our house and the generating station -- which I think is 80 miles away -- to make our house mighty cold. Even though I still have a stack of firewood, it wouldn't do us much good these days.

With that in mind, today I was listening to the radio while driving in to work. How lovely to hear this quote:

"The National Weather Service will issue a Winter Storm Warning effective at noon today, lasting through 6AM tomorrow." We are to expect rain, freezing rain, ice pellets, and ice. A "wintry mix" is the technical term for it, I believe.

Temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than expected this afternoon, so we got mainly rain. What we will get tonight is an open question yet. I'm sure that schoolchildren all over the state are hoping for ice and lots of it. Personally, I feel that it's only been three years since I spent a week carrying a saw in my trunk in order to be able to clear my driveway every time I left home or got back home. I think I'm owed another year or two off. I also wouldn't mind avoiding the giant branch sitting on the ground right in front of the front door, or the 40-degree indoor temperatures, or the lack of running water due to lack of electricity.

But these crisp, cold winter days are a rare thing to enjoy these days. We get a month or two of stifling heat each summer, but only a week or two to enjoy this really cold part of winter. I miss the snowdrifts when we don't get them.

So, mother nature, bring it on. I'll be waiting with my camera and a glass of hot chocolate. Because even without electricity, I can still light a burner on our oven with a match.

For a while now, Iceweasel/Firefox comes with built-in phishing protection, which is undoubtedly a good thing given the number of idiots using the Web these days. But the implementation is crap. If you surf to a phishing site, such as this test site, the page loads as you would expect and then the first strange things happen:

• the mouse movement becomes sluggish as the browser increases its virtual memory needs from 466Mb to a measely 912Mb, while the RSS jumps from 134Mb to 423Mb. The entire computer hangs for 2-3 seconds whenever I drag the mouse pointer off the window. I am not saying that my window manager (fluxbox) or Xorg or anything else on this machine is flawless, but this problem only ever appears with Iceweasel/Firefox. Anyway, it's impossible to follow any links on the page, the mouse pointer does not even change.
• suddenly, an icon and a little triangle appear at the right side of the URL bar.
• about 7 seconds later, the rest of the balloon appears, alerting me to the dangers of phishing attacks. Did people think those things are so extraordinarily beautiful that they had to be copied from Windows (or Apple, or whatever)?
• another 5 seconds later, the webpage darkens.
• with an entirely unresponsive browser, I have no other choice but to try to leave the page, which is easier said than done: Hitting Ctrl-W to close the tab does not have any effect for almost 25 seconds; then the page was finally gone and the system restored itself to normal.

I get similar performance problems on the StaTravel website, and on map.search.ch, it almost always crashes. Thank you, Firefox developers, for bringing the joys of the Windows world to Linux! NP: Dream Theater: Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes from a Memory Update: several people have responded that they cannot reproduce the problem. I thus created a new profile, uninstalled all system-wide extensions, removed all plugins such that about:plugins was empty and tried again. The problems persist, although I think the lags are not quite as long as before and the memory consumption is obviously down. Maybe this is amd64-related? Update: It's not amd64-related, as several users have pointed out. Update: still no luck, but James Andrewart pointed me to this bug report, which might improve things a bit:

"The new protocol specifies a single lookup algorithm for all tables, rather than having per-table logic. This lookup logic was moved in to the db service from the javascript. URL canonicalization was moved completely into C++ too. The DB service can now handle a query from a raw URI, which will be needed for malware blocking."

For those who have asked youself sometimes, when watching any of the Spanish sucess in any kind of sports (but football), why when Spanish athem is sounding no one signs anything, or why, when sound system breaks, people sings "ti-to-ti-to-ta-ri-ro-ri-ro-rit-to-ti..." you have to learn that Spanish Athem has no lyrics. Of course, it had, but was removed when democracy imposed over other darker options 30 years ago. Today, I have seen that, from a mistake, the old lyrics were used by a Romanian ship in a competition at Barcelona. You can see (and listen to it) below.

I cannot understand why this can be considered fascist by reading the lyrics. But listening to it I have felt again that we need lyrics. We cannot go out at the world mumbling our athem, as we cannot sign it. Recently, Spanish Olimpic Comitee requested lyrics to be written. I strongly think that they will be some king of "flower power" lyrics, to avoid hurting anyone (which is impossible)

For those who have asked youself sometimes, when watching any of the Spanish sucess in any kind of sports (but football), why when Spanish athem is sounding no one signs anything, or why, when sound system breaks, people sings "ti-to-ti-to-ta-ri-ro-ri-ro-rit-to-ti..." you have to learn that Spanish Athem has no lyrics. Of course, it had, but was removed when democracy imposed over other darker options 30 years ago. Today, I have seen that, from a mistake, the old lyrics were used by a Romanian ship in a competition at Barcelona. You can see (and listen to it) below.

I cannot understand why this can be considered fascist by reading the lyrics. But listening to it I have felt again that we need lyrics. We cannot go out at the world mumbling our athem, as we cannot sign it. Recently, Spanish Olimpic Comitee requested lyrics to be written. I strongly think that they will be some king of "flower power" lyrics, to avoid hurting anyone (which is impossible)

This afternoon I had another visual migraine. It was a little different from the previous ones in that it had more significant visual affects and in that it affected the right side of my vision. My central vision was OK, the left side was quite good, but the right side was mostly occluded by bright flashes. Closing my right eye seemed to make it a little better - apparently my right eye was more affected than my left. Previous visual migraines had only affected my central vision.

It happened shortly after going outside and it was a sunny afternoon, so maybe the bright light helped trigger it. The Australian optometrist chain OPSM advertise transitions - lenses that darken when exposes to UV light so they act as sun-glasses when outdoors, this sounds interesting (I don't want to have prescription sun-glasses as well as regular glasses). However there is one concerning item in the advert - "protect your eyes from dazzling sunlight, harsh artificial lighting and the glare from computer screens", I don't want my glasses to go dark when I'm looking at a computer screen (a large portion of my waking hours)!

To whom it may concern... Daniel and Rob are holding a party in June to celebrate their Civil Partnership. Yay! And I'm invited. Double-yay! Unfortunately, it's the same weekend that Debconf 7 finishes. And it's in in deepest, darkest Wales, almost at the opposite end of the UK from Edinburgh. Less yay...! As Daniel is a DD, I'm guessing (and he has confirmed) that quite a few of the party guests will be at Debconf. That means there will be quite a number of people will be needing to get from one end of the country to the other on Saturday 23rd June. As I'm a mug for this kind of thing, I'm looking into organising travel for a group. If you're looking at making this trip, mail me if you're interested in travelling together. Options at the moment include hiring a minibus and driving the whole distance, or maybe flying from Edinburgh to somewhere much closer (Bristol or Cardiff) and sharing a vehicle from there. Let me know...

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

Via mariuss’ weblog (discovered accidentally, provides an unusually high signal-to-noise ratio for a random blog), this Canadian article entitled Coping with Climate Dread. Read it. Then read Elizabeth Kolbert’s article, “The Darkening Sea: Carbon Emissions and the Ocean” in last week’s New Yorker Magazine. (Sadly, the content does not appear to be online — if the New Yorker put only one article online, it should have been that one. As a consolation, there’s a short excerpt here, and a related article is available from last year.) It’s become a lot harder to think about this problem since I had a kid.

Today I'm travelling to Belgium to take my part in the orgy of elitist conspiracy that is O'Reilly's European Foo Camp and open source convention. I've elected to undertake the journey by train.It is difficult to overemphasize how magnificent a thing the Eurostar service is. Were it left to our drab and utilitarian government alone, such a thing would never exist.Instead, in two and a half hours of clean, comfortable carriages and more than tolerable coffee I will be in Brussels, just a short tram ride away from my hotel. With the increasing difficulty and odiousness of air travel, things could hardly be more of a contrast.The price seems to me insanely cheap. My journey to Brussels and back costs under £60, less than my journey down to London from York in the first place.It almost makes you wish for the heady days of the Major government's flirtation with Europe. Life seemed simpler then. (We even had a prime minister who understood cricket, but that's another story.)EuroFOOFoo Camp is an event where O'Reilly Media invite a bunch of people to create an ad-hoc conference. For O'Reilly, it's a great way to take the pulse of earlier-than-thou early adopters and mad inventors, which in turn feeds their business. For the invitees, it's a great way to meet others, put your ideas out there, and get your mind expanded. For those outside the fold, exclusion has taken on an importance far out of proportion to its actual significance, which appears sadly inevitable.Although I was present at the US Foo a few weeks ago, illness meant I missed the bulk of it while recovering in a darkened room. So, I'm looking forward this time to playing a bigger part.One of the themes I'm seeing developing, and for which we intend to focus on at XTech 2007, is that of the increasing connectivity and blurring of distinction between the web and the world. Things to watch include Second Life, Thinglink, mobile, geotagging, ubiquitous computing.I'm also looking forward to hearing the low-down on Railsconf Europe from those who went. Sadly pressure of time meant I couldn't go, but the write-ups I've been seeing make it sound like an excellent event, and a great progression from the Chicago one.

Half a year ago yesterday, I stepped off a plane in the United States. It's been an eventful 6 months, as can be seen from reviewing my blog, and I thought I'd summarise the top 10 things I like and dislike about living in this country as opposed to Australia. Ten things I like about living in California:

1. Plenty of sunshine Love the sunshine. It was a bit wet in winter and early spring, but I'm told that it should be pretty much rain (and cloud) free for the rest of the year. Daylight saving also helps make enjoying the copious amounts of sunshine easier, it doesn't get dark until well after 8pm.
2. The public transport options, particularly in San Francisco are vast Particularly in San Francisco, your options for getting around the city are huge. You've got the BART, the Muni (which covers about three distinct forms of public transport in itself), and the VTA overhead electric and petrol powered buses. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, you've got the Caltrain, and VTA light rail and buses.
3. Petrol pumps You need never darken the door of a petrol station. Everywhere has pay at the pump (with plastic of course), and the pumps all have the automatic latch, so you don't even need to stand at the side of the car holding the handle while it fills up.
4. Free parking This was a big change, coming from Canberra, which has a love affair with pay and display parking. Even the multi-storey and underground carparks in the downtown areas are free.
5. Pedestrian crossings that countdown No excuse to get skittled because you thought you could make it in time. You known exactly how long you've got before you'll get mowed down before you step off the side of the road.
6. The postal system Saturday delivery. Every mailbox is an outgoing mailbox (just put the little flag up).
7. Right turns on red This is a real time saver. I can't see why Australia couldn't adopt this for left turns. The only downside is you can spend so much time looking to your left for a break in the traffic to dart out in, that you miss your green arrow (but that's what the guy behind you and his horn is for).
8. Corporately run rental apartment complexes Instead of having an apartment complex where individual landlords own each apartment, the entire complex (and they tend to be larger) is owned by a mega-corporation that employs half a dozen people to maintain it and run it as a business. The upside is they tend to have better facilities, an onsite office (great for receipting packages delivered during the week), onsite maintenance (some places even have a service-level agreement). This offers some economies of scale that you wouldn't otherwise have.
9. At least the perception of a low cost of living I haven't done the sums, and it's probably partially because the bills come monthly instead of quarterly, but all the utility bills seem fairly low and reasonable. Dollar for dollar, petrol is also cheaper, even though it's jumped a dollar a gallon in the time we've been here.

Of course, one must take a balanced look at these things... Ten things I don't like about living in the United States:

1. The currency Not a big fan of the notes. I miss the one and two dollar coins, and the distinctiveness between each denomination. I figure that vending machines over here must be so much more expensive because they have to have a note reader, and even then, the treasury decides to produce some new oddball note that half of the readers don't recognise... I blame tipping. If there were no tipping, the utility of one dollar bills would diminish enormously.
2. The government bureaucracy As my blog records, I haven't exactly had a smooth run with the system over here...
3. The banking system The banking system in general is woeful by comparison. The cheque (or check) still reigns supreme, whereas it's nearly obsolete in Australia. There's no such animal as BPay (and oh how I miss it). In fact, the equivalent system here often involves the bank cutting a cheque on your behalf and mailing it to the biller. How ridiculously antediluvian is that? Oh, and I miss vaguely decently authenticated electronic payments. I've been at cafes were I've paid by credit card, and haven't even had to provide a signature. Given that the credit card is actually a debit card, it's pretty disturbing how easily someone can clean out your bank account.
4. Ex-tax pricing I'm so glad that when they introduced the GST in Australia, they required by law that all prices include it. Most prices here don't, but the occasional food outlet does (like Subway for example), so it's sufficiently confusing that you can't budget for how much you're going to actually fork out.
5. ATM fees The ATM fees are more in your face. Instead of the bank charging you a fee at the end of the month for every transaction conducted at an ATM that isn't theirs, the ATM itself tacks on an extra amount to the withdrawal and effectively skims the money. I've seen fees as high as $5 a transaction, but $2 is fairly common. It's kind of weird seeing an ATM withdrawal of $42 on your bank statement... So having a bank account that doesn't charge you feeds for non-bank ATM withdrawals is all well and good, but it doesn't stop the ATM from charging you.
6. Inaudible pedestrian crossings Oh, the number of times I haven't been paying attention and missed the walk light at a pedestrian crossing... In some places, they do make noises like birds, or talk to you when you can walk, but they're definitely not the norm.
7. The road surface For the highways, they seem to have gone for quantity and not quality, or they're too busy to take offline to resurface. Either way, the road surface quality is pretty poor.
8. Sugar Everything is loaded with sugar. Absolutely everything.
9. Alcohol labelling Light beer is low calorie, not low alcohol. I miss Australia's concept of "standard drinks". Makes it very hard to drink and drive responsibly.

Dear readers, I am looking for a new terminal emulator. I use aterm since several years, but it lacks of UTF-8 support, and I would like to switch away from ISO-8859-1. But *the* feature of aterm I can't live without is fading: aterm becomes darker when it loses focus, and I really love that. So I am looking for a terminal emulator like aterm with UTF-8 support. Any recommandation welcome. Update: rxvt-unicode supports fading and UTF-8. Thanks to ptitlouis for the advice!

I redecorated my (physical) desktop today. I still need some more posters, too much empty wall. But it's nice to lean back and have some colorful stuff to look at. But do you know what's best? My laptop is back from repair. I have backlight again! Though I think they used a too short light tube, it feels somewhat darker on the left and right. But the laptop is old anyway. And the old tubes used to have a reddish tint there... I love having my 15" 1600x1200 screen back. ;-)

It has happened. Today I had the impression that my display was a bit darker than it used to be; and later it started by slight changes in brightness, then real flickering - and then only darkness remained... I can still somewhat read the display, since I've started using black-on-white two years ago when I noticed the increased readability in pure sunlight. Now I've hooked up a TFT, but it's not yet running optimal, since my laptop had a 1600x1200 TFT, while the 17" display I've attached has a physical resolution of 1280x1024 I guess. I loved my IBM ThinkPad, especially because of it's display. Compared with much more recent displays, it had an excellent viewing angle, next to no reflections on it, and stunning sharpness with it's 135 dpi. I'll miss it. And I'll definitely miss the page-left and page-right keys next to the arrow keys I've gotten addicted to for desktop switching... The laptop is now 3.5 years old, so out of warranty. More stuff had started breaking; just before end of the warranty the harddisk died and I got it replaced, the main battery doesn't charge any more and my secondary battery holds for half an hour. Bluetooth never worked for me, and doesn't show up on USB like in all the Howtos. Heck, even of one of the two USB1 ports (no USB2) falls apart - the plastic part to keep the pins from touching is broken off... So it definitely doesn't pay off to have the display fixed. They would need to fix just about anything there. What sucks most is that I had intended to buy myself a new laptop in 10 months. I'd like to get one with a Core CPU then, but I don't trust the early models... and I'll have to decide which brand to buy. I loved my A31p display, but 15" and 3.5 kg is too large and heavy for my current taste. I'd go for an IBM ThinkPad X* (and I'd love the X50 I guess) if they weren't a bit expensive... maybe I'll get a Samsung now, but I definitely would want to test the display first... can't stand some of the displays I've recently seen on Dell (don't even think of watching a DVD on them unless you are at most 2 people, and they reflect like shit.) Does anyone know if there is a sponsorship program for Linux developers to get new laptops cheaper? ;-) Or at least without having to buy a useless Windows licence? Of course I'd help writing drivers and document the installation process...

I've been so busy, I haven't had time to blog. Rather than putting it off any longer, I'll just dump what I can remember. Last Wednesday, Sarah arrived after her holiday in Singapore, and from all accounts, had a great time. Photos as well. Sticking with the whirlwind theme, the next day, we had a "building warming" party at work for the new building we'd moved into the week before Michael and I started. The next night we had the work Christmas party, which blew the socks off any work Christmas party I'd ever been to before, and then on Saturday night we went to a party in San Francisco that we'd been invited to. On a life in general front, I'm still waiting for a Social Security number. The lack of one makes life a bit difficult for a lot of things. It also turns out that Sarah's work permit will take about 90 days to approve, so she's going to be a lady of leisure for the next few months. I've finally been issued with a work mobile phone (or "cell phone" as they call them), and so can stop roaming and paying through the nose for the privilege. We've found somewhere to live. We take possession of a 2 bedroom townhouse (split-level) in a complex in Mountain View that is 3 miles from work on the 18th. The rent is $1725 a month, which is a bit better than we were expecting. The complex we're renting in does have shared laundries, which we'd not too keen on before getting over here, but they're quite modern and secure, and there's a laundry block close to our townhouse, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The whole place had been renovated about 5 years ago, so it's all in good condition. We could have rented a 3 bedroom apartment (single level) in the same complex for about $125 a month more, but we're trying to actually make some money while we're over here... Driving on the other side of the road becomes fairly "normal" after about a week of doing it regularly. Sarah's adapted fine. Lane placement is the hardest thing, because your body's used to being in a certain spot on the road, and it's all different sitting on the other side of the car. We've managed to open a rudimentary bank account, even with my lack of Social Security number. Unfortunately I can't get paid until I have an SSN. Upside of that is that if it doesn't happen until next year, I presumably won't have to worry about income tax for this US financial year. Downside is kind of obvious... By far one of the stranger things of everyday life here is the lighting situation in the average residence. Lamps are all the rage, to the point that light switches don't exist in some rooms (notably bedrooms). Take where we're currently living for example. There's a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, there's one at the top. There's a bank of four in the living room, two of which control lights in the kitchen, and one the hallway. The last one controls a lamp in the corner of the living room, which is connected to a power socket (or power point as we'd call it). The bedroom with the attached bathroom (en suite) has two bedside lamps, and that is the sole source of light. The bathroom attached has light switches, and the walk-in robe has a light switch. It's so weird. So walking into a darkened bedroom involves walking all the way in, and fumbling around with a lamp. It's often easier to turn on the light in the wardrobe so you can see what you're doing first. I can't think of any reason for it, except tradition. It's not like they're avoiding wiring the walls or the ceiling, because it's done partially already. The bedroom has a ceiling fan, but where in Australia, there'd be a knob on the wall near the light switch to control it, it has a little chain you yank on. To add to the strangeness, there are two switches on the wall, one of which seems to allow you to turn off the ceiling fan if it's already been switched on by pulling the chain. The townhouse we're renting has a similar lamp dependency, so we're going to be making a trip to Ikea for some lamps it would seem. That's about everything I can recollect right now... Oh, I should point out that I'm really loving it over here.