Cutethulhu. Heeheeheehee. Poor Lovecraft. XD

[Note, I dunno when you'll see this. My server's currently down. Hopefully it'll go back up soon. Eh.]

20 questions, against a computer. A clever bastard of a computer.

Little things that make life beautiful...

Cats being really affectionate with you (by the way, that cat was back again today, still affectionate as ever... he is now unofficially named "Struscio", from the Italian verb "strusciarsi" which means "to rub oneself against something"... guess why ;). Singing along to a song you love, at the top of your lungs, even if it's midnight and you risk waking up neighbours. Chocolate. Finding friends in the oddest places. Having a hard time singing at choir rehearsal because you're laughing too damn hard, because there's masked people being silly because it's carnival week, and everybody's laughing and you just feel happy. Being greeted with a smile and a hug and a "where have you been? We missed you" after skipping choir rehearsal once. Knowing that, despite what it may look and sound and feel like, things really do turn out to be okay most of the time.

Feelings suck.

Yes, that's all.

Caring for your introvert. And an introvert's lexicon, and social skills for introverts. Anybody know how to make my parents get the point that yes, sometimes I really do want to be alone, no, nothing's wrong but I'd really rather be alone and can you please just shut up already?

Because I'm easily amused: boob scarves, boob pillow, "transparent" skirts (yes, I'm aware these are probably photoshopped, but they're amusing anyway), computer toaster.

The cat was back yesterday. Apparently he has no intention of settling down - but he was as affectionate as the last time. Maybe I should call him the Tabby Wanderer or something. Hehe.

Slept a lot yesterday and today. Maybe to make up for me sleeping maybe an hour or so two nights ago, dunno why, I just kept waking up... yesterday afternoon I slept right through volleyball (I never sleep in the afternoon), then skipped choir rehearsal, went to sleep around midnight and slept until 11am or so (getting woken by mom at about 7:45am because she was leaving for work and wanted to say bye). Haven't slept this well in a while.

What else... oh yeah, if you use Trillian and still haven't downloaded the latest patch, do so. It came out on the 11th, but the program was slow in autodetecting the need for a patch so I only found out about it yesterday... ¬¬ I was wondering why my ICQ was suddenly fucked up.
Though I did discover, thanks to Trillian fucking up, that ICQ to go (I refuse to use the dumb spelling) is actually pretty decent. I'll have to readd some of the people I've started talking to after I started using Trillian, since Trillian doesn't save the ICQ contact list to the ICQ servers, but that's a minor annoyance. ICQing from university, here I come. *grin* And yesterday I also found a computer where the "sysadmin" had forgotten to uninstall mIRC, sooo... hehehe. It's almost always free, too, since it's a bit slow. Mwahaha.

"Courage". Damn, I wish I could write like this.

More on the Google/Blogger thing, because I'm the kind of person who finds this stuff interesting: 1, 2, 3.

Non ho idea di come il carissimo don Ulisse Frascali (Fondazione Nuovo Villaggio del Fanciullo, via 56 Martiri 79, 48100 Ravenna RA, tel. 0544/601111, fax: 0544/61379) abbia ottenuto il mio indirizzo email - io certamente non gliel'ho dato. Non ho nemmeno idea di cosa fa pensare al caro sacerdote, che certo non brilla per intelligenza se pensa di poter promuovere efficacemente le proprie attività con lo spam, di poter mandare email con attachment di 1MB a persone che neanche conosce. Sono davvero tentata di fare ricorso al garante per la privacy, tanto più che questo tizio mi ha pure intasato la casella email... voi che ne dite?

Grrr. Must manage to get in touch with the sysadmin for the computer room at uni to convince him to install Opera on these computers, as an alternate browser. I had almost forgotten exactly how much of a pain in the ass to use IE is. >< No, stupid browser, I don't want you to display a silly "loading bar" which tells me absolutely nothing about what you're loading right now and how much is still left to load. I don't want you to reload a page when I press the back button unless I tell you to do so. I don't want you to load again the page I was on when I open a new browser window unless I tell you to do so. I don't want your stupid stock error page which tells me absolutely nothing about why I am not able to get to a certain site. I don't want your clumsy interface to get in the way of my browsing. I want to be able to rightclick in a frame and maximize that frame to get out of an annoying frameset to link to the page I want. I want to be able to zoom in and out of a page. I want mouse gestures and useful keyboard shorcuts and a customizable search bar (without having to install it as an addon) and tabbed browsing and one-key toggle of images display and one-key-one-click setting of major preferences and all the other things Opera has spoiled me with.
Yes, maybe I'm spoiled, but for fuck's sake, I want a real browser, not the abortion that IE is, which most people use just because it came with their computer.
And by the way, to all "webdesigners" who design pages that work in IE only, for whatever reason: you're dumb. If you do it because "Opera and all the other browsers don't support proper HTML and proper CSS" or other such bullshit, you are doubly dumb. If your page doesn't display decently in Opera7, there's something wrong with your code - it's not the browser's fault. And if you deliberately write bad code that shows fine in IE but not in Opera and other browsers, or deliberately write a browser-sniffing script that deliberately feeds bad code to non-IE browsers (hi there, MSN), fuck you and rot in hell.

(Why yes, I'm cranky today. Nice of you to notice. :p)

Google bought Blogger. Meh. Could be good, could be bad, let's see what happens...

Went to see Catch me if you can yesterday afternoon with my brother. That was an entertaining movie. The first sequence - the animated one with all the names - was a little gem, and the movie itself was fun and amusing.
The only bad point were the two dumbfucks sitting behind me and my brother who talked fairly loudly throughout the movie - even if I turned and asked them to please be quiet a few times. Gah. Some people have no respect. They weren't youngsters, either... probably my parents' age, most likely even older. Sheesh.

Why Despair Inc. 0wns, one of many reasons: Bittersweets and the Pessimist's Mug. I can only wish they offered the possibility to make a wishlist.

Bork, bork, bork - take that, MSN!

So. Yesterday was lousy - the heating in our house broke a few minutes after noon, it was cold as hell, as if that wasn't enough I was all cramped up (stupid ovaries), my cousins came visit so I was stuck in the house all afternoon (because I couldn't leave them home alone) and had to get off the computer abnormally early (since they were sleeping in the same room the computer's in).
Today the heating's still broken, I'm still cramped up, I had to wake up abnormally early because I'm the only one in the house on Saturday mornings and a tech was supposed to come in the early morning to fix the heating, and the tech is still not here and I wanted to go out of the house this morning, go get new manga at the comic store, go take some photos (it's a beautiful day outside, even if cold), but nooo. I'm still stuck inside. Grrr.

Heeheehee. I so love Sinfest. Especially the cat/dog strips. Especially the current ones. :D

Some birds eat worms. Some birds eat breadcrumbs. Some birds eat berries. And some birds eat cat food. The blackbird who lives in our garden, for instance.
He's quite clever, too. He only goes to eat from the cats' food bowl when all three of our cats are inside the house. (And watching him from the glass door, and loudly begging to be let outside so they can go kill the insolent bird - which of course we won't let them do.) It's great.

(I wonder if he'll ever get caught and eaten by a cat? And if yes, will the cat wonder why the bird tastes just like cat food?)

Valentine's Day is approaching, and whether you're in a relationship or not I think you'll find these amusing. ("Uprooted plantlife and sugar-saturated caffeinated fat blocks? You shouldn't have." Hee.)

Erm. What the fuck?

Japanese pencil carving. Check out the gallery, this is great. Makes me wish I had the patience to do that kind of stuff.

This afternoon I saw a dying dog.
Well - I don't know if he was dying. I hope he'll survive. But he'd been ran over by a car, and he was badly hurt and couldn't move and had thrown up and defecated from the shock. A nice man had moved him from the middle of the road to under a wall, and he was just curled up there. I saw him coming out from my singing teacher's house, and we thought it odd that a dog would just be curled up there and not move - especially that particular dog, which she said was always very hyperactive - so we went to see what was up. He was curled up and crying and it just broke my heart. His owners had gone somewhere else for the afternoon, according to a neighbor - and had left the gate of their garden open, so the dog had run out. They'd left the gate open, so the dog had run out, onto a street that's widely known for being dangerous - since it's long and straight and cars go fast on it.
If I could've gotten my hands on the owners of the poor dog I would've punched the shit out of them. How can you be that irresponsible and take that little care of a pet? You don't leave a gate open for your dogs to leave your garden when there's a very dangerous road nearby. It's a bad habit almost all dog owners around there have, according to my singing teacher... sigh. How can people be that thoughtless?
When I left, the dog was still crying, and my singing teacher had gone to phone a veterinarian. I hope the dog survives...

Sigh. TTLG down again.

Mmh. Not blogged in a while. Let's fix that now.
Just haven't felt like blogging. My life's been pretty uneventful and boring, and whenever I thought of something I wanted to say, it sounded silly when I tried to put it down in words.
So. Finally got started on a course at uni, with a nice professor who said that it was no problem that I'd started late, I could catch up fine. Classes are very pleasant too, interesting and entertaining. No final exam, rather, but two essays instead... since the course is "Research methods for social sciences", it figures, and it's right, IMHO. Rather than having to memorize stuff for an exam, we get to apply what we learned in comparing two already done researches (essay 1) and doing a research ourselves (essay 2). And the professor clearly doesn't take herself or her subject too seriously, which is nice. See for instance these quotes from the "What is research?" section of the material I've been given to study:

First year student: a drag.
Second year student: searching the web the night before my paper's due.
Masters: A great journey of investigation, full of surprises, loaded with fun - and a way to procrastinate on writing my dissertation.

AdAware 6 is out, finally. In the words of a friend, "DIE SPYWARE, DIE!!!!" \o/

[EDIT:] It looks/feels better than AdAware5.x did, in terms of user interface, clarity, download of updates, etc. And it's blue! Bonus points for that ;)

You.

You clever bastard, you can always find the right words. You can make me laugh or cry or smile with just the right word at the right moment. You do, and I don't know how... but you do, you care, and in the end that's all that matters.

You've been with me, far but near, for enough time that it feels like forever. We don't talk much anymore, but you're here, always ready to help when I need somebody, and I wouldn't be what I am without you. I owe more than I will ever be able to repay, and you say that knowing me is enough.

You were so often silent these days, and I missed you. Now there's a big question mark between us but that's fine with me... I can accept, and wait, and whatever happens it's going to be fine.

You should take better care of yourself, you know. I worry.

You no longer talk to me. The reasons are your own, and even if I don't like them, I accept and respect them. I sincerely hope you're happy, and I know I'll see you again someday.

You know I hate the silence. Yet it's always there, looming over every conversation we have. Will we ever talk again like we used to? I miss that.

You disappeared, without a word, without a goodbye. Where are you? Come back. I miss you.

You are somebody I have always admired, for many reasons. And so, sometimes I don't know what to say, and I don't say anything, because I am afraid of disappointing, both you and myself. Bear with me, I'm trying my best.

You are somebody I'd love to get to know better and be friends with, but sometimes it's hard to find common ground and something to speak about. Help me out a bit?

You partly shaped how I am. We don't talk often, we never did, but you are part of me, and for that I thank you.

I trust you. You can trust me. Won't you give me your hand? We can walk together, and be safe.

Columbia Space Shuttle lost during landing. (Landing journal, with detailed timeline)