Spring, and especially summer, are tourist seasons, at least here. And unfortunately, most tourists are bad tourists. It's easy to distinguish who's who: the good tourists, and the residents, are the ones looking embarassed, while the bad tourists are the ones embarassing themselves.

I have here attempted a simple categorization of tourists. It's doubtlessly incomplete, but it's a start.

Homo rassegnatus
The Good Tourist, or the Resident. Either way, somebody who has to bear Bad Tourists.

Homo depressus
Tourist guides, teachers, anybody who loves a place and attempts to explain its history to others, only to have them being distracted... and having to repeat the same exact thing to different masses of bored people every day.

Homo ricordinus
You've seen them. The ones who insist on buying a souvenir (or two, or three...) everywhere they go, so, by the end of the day, they look like a walking souvenir booth. They spend lots of money on souvenirs, and at the end of the holiday they do not even remember what they visited.

Homo doloredipedibus
Usually female, but there are a few males. Members of this subspecies insist on wearing the worst possible choice of shoes for walking around a city. You often hear them loudly proclaming how much their feet hurt, or walking like they're walking on hot coals, with their shoes in hand, or even sitting on the edge of a fountain with their feet in the water.

Homo photographicus
This one's gotta photograph (or film, alternatively) everything. Seeing everything through a viewfinder, always in search of the "perfect photo", risks running headlong into lampposts and road signs. Never really remembers what was visited, only taking lots of good photos.

Homo gregarius
You will never see one of these alone. They always go around in herds, those same tourist herds that tend to stop traffic and unnerve tourist guides. They are always crowding around somebody - a guide, for instance, or even one of them who is reading out loud from a guidebook - or something - a statue, a painting, a fountain, you name it.

Homo solitarius
The opposite of the previous kind. Wouldn't be caught dead with another tourist. Has been known to try to visit museums at night to avoid the crowd and the guides.

Homo inmediusviae
Usually male, this tourist stops traffic. It doesn't matter what he's doing in the middle of that road - he could be taking a photo, he could be one of three dozen homo gregarius crossing the road in single file, he could be tying his shoelaces, he could be consulting a map... he still stops traffic.

Homo perdutus
This tourist gets lost, even with a map. If female, she will be asking for directions to a place or monument standing right in front of it. If male, he will be hopelessly lost and adamantly refuse to ask for directions.

Any additions? :)

Woke up this morning, first thing my father does is shout at me over nothing. Apparently I was being "rude" and "ungrateful". And when mom came downstairs wondering why he was shouting, I explained to her that I had no idea why (calmly), and he kept shouting that I was rude and ungrateful and "DO YOU BELIEVE YOUR HUSBAND??? DO YOU BELIEVE YOUR HUSBAND OR HER????"

Then this afternoon I went to the cinema with my brother, to see "Spirited Away" (again), and made the big mistake of taking my father along. He whined about the price of the tickets, he whined about the price of popcorn, he talked loudly in the cinema before the movie started and acted like a goddamned kid, and embarassed both me and my brother. And now he is bitching again about the price of the tickets and popcorn to my mother, and saying I had insisted and whined about getting more popcorn and he said no, which is not true and he knows it.

Gee, what a wonderful day.

[EDIT] Oh, and let's not forget that he whined at me about the family LAN not working properly, and acted like it was my fault and refused to let me help, and fiddled with the config but achieved no result... and this morning I checked the network cables and guess what it was? A phone extension cord spool sitting on a network cable, interfering with stuff. Heh. No wonder it wasn't working properly. And of course I can't tell him I fixed it or how I fixed it, because that's "being a know-it-all".

Funny how you can get attached to places that don't even exist, virtual congregations of thoughts that throw out hooks and draw you in and cradle you in safety. And they become your refuge, your home, the warm comfortable sofa you go curl up on after a long day's work, the small private room in a bar where you know you will always find your friends.
And then one day you step out, and look back in through the window, and realize it's no longer the home you cherished... it hasn't been for a while.
And you still wish it would be back...

You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds, and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay. Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds. But it's just cold and wet and empty, but when you look out of a plane it's a special world...
(Delirium, from "Sandman" by Neil Gaiman.)

I passed the three remaining tests for the ECDL. I should be soon receiving a bit of paper stating what everybody knows already - I know how to properly use a computer.

Um, yay?

I need to learn not to read Nana on the train anymore, because this is the third time in a row it makes me cry. ;_; And I'm guessing it'll make me cry next time, too. Damn, I love that manga...

Had this weird fucked up dream/nightmare last night... I was in a store with a bunch of other people (one was one of my friends from university who I haven't seen in a year), and we were looking for something (I forget). A prophecy or something told us to look on the ground near one of the shelves, and we found a little bump in the floor. We called an expert, he prodded the bump for a bit and went "right, there's eyes under here, are you sure you want to open this?"

And we said "yes" and got a crowbar and pried off a section of the floor, and sure enough, underneath there were a few eyes... mechanical eyes, on stalks, which looked asleep. And there was a bit of paper in the mechanism, like the bit of paper they put between batteries and contacts in new clocks and the like to avoid the battery running out... before we could stop him, one of the guys pulled onto it and tugged it off, and bzzt, the eyes came to life. We all stayed well away, knowing they were dangerous, but the same guy dropped his scissors in the hole and, not thinking, picked them up, putting his hand in full view of the eyes.

After that, his cellphone rang... it was the eyes phoning him. "Hey. It's you, right? That hand in front of us was yours." The conversation went on for a bit, until the guy exclaimed, "I wish I'd never used my hand". "We can help with that", went the eyes, and the line went dead.

An eye stood up on its stalk and glared at the guy, and next thing you know, the guy had taken the scissors and chopped off his hand at the wrist, and was now screaming, with blood spurting from the stump.

And then I woke up.

o.o

*prods her brain* Quit that. Dreams like that are freaky.

11:00 AM PDT: Your blog is currently being converted to a new-and-improved version of Blogger.
Please bear with us. It should be back later today.

New layouts for wingedspirit.net and kicie.net. As always, opinions are welcome.

Small update on the baby blackbird: it seems very happy in its cage. It chirps in greeting whenever somebody gets close to it, and chirp again when it wants to be fed (it's stopped screaming). Even when it's been fed, it'll latch on your finger (not to bite it) if you get it close to him.
It's so plump and well-fed it doesn't look like it'll take long for it to get to the growth stage where it can fly and we can let it go...

One of the cats brought in a baby blackbird yesterday morning. I was sleeping at the time, but was told the tale by mom, who woke me up shortly after clutching the baby bird in her hands and calling for help.
Apparently, the cat brought the bird in, and it was still very much alive. What's more, it was screaming at the top of its lungs, so loudly that mom at first thought it was a car or house alarm somewhere. Then she noticed it was coming from the stairs, so she went to look. The baby bird was sitting there, screaming, and the cat was staring at it and looking baffled.
So we rescued the bird, of course. Put it in a box, and by the afternoon it was feeling well enough to scream whenever it wanted to be fed (we're feeding it cat food, dissolved in water... the adult blackbirds seem to like it well enough, they're constantly stealing it from the cats' bowl), and to try to run away. It somehow freed itself from the box, and half ran, half flew away... right towards one of the cats. When I managed to get to it and rescue it, it was screaming at the top of its lungs, and the cat was staring at it and looking baffled. Again.
It's obviously feeling fine, or it wouldn't be this active. If there weren't any cats around, we would be freeing it so its mom (we've seen her around) could take care of it. But there's our three cats, plus half a dozen more belonging to various neighbors (I don't know the exact number, I lost count long ago), plus one or two dozen strays. It wouldn't last two hours.
Right now we're keeping it in a large cage that belonged to our canaries (when we still kept canaries and not cats). We're planning on taking care of it until it's grown enough that it can fly, so hopefully the cats won't catch it when it's freed. Anybody have a better idea?

SnakeJump is eating my brain. (12481, my reflexes are shot to hell today, damnit...)

Well. Stayed up until 4am finishing Harry Potter, which was dumb in retrospect but meh.

More coherent commentary when I'm feeling less dumb with sleep and more awake, and my brother's let go of the book so I can have it in front of me when commenting, but for now...

(Here be spoilers.)

Went to Padova. Went to the Feltrinelli bookstores (both Feltrinelli and Feltrinelli International). Came back home with books. Whee.

A list:

- Lythande, Marion Zimmer Bradley (in Italian)
- Aurian, Maggie Furey (in Italian)
- The best of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradley (obviously. in Italian)
- The Narnia Chronicles, C.S. Lewis (all of them, collected in three books. in Italian)
- Coastliners, Joanne Harris (in Italian)
- Shadowsinger, L.E. Modesitt (in English)
- The passion of Artemisia, Susan Vreeland (in English)
- Blackberry wine, Joanne Harris (in English)
- Tales from Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin (in English)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling (in English, of course, and what I went there for in the first place.)

Plus:

- 31 songs, Nick Hornby (in Italian)
- Out, Natsuo Kirino (in Italian)

which I bought yesterday.

Plus mom and my brother bought some more books, which I'm not going to list here but will probably read once I'm done chewing on these.

I am a happy little bookworm today. *big grin*

Ahh, I love the extended entry bit of MoveableType. No more cluttering up the mainpage with quiz results...

It's no secret I'm addicted to paper. The backpack I carry to university and work currently holds:
- three different notepads. Two are ruled, cheap, thin-paper dollar-store ones, have been with me for two years, are very worn and almost fully written (I find it difficult to write the final page of a notepad or notebook, almost as difficult as writing the first page... it has a finality to it, a "ok, you're no longer useful" that I tend to try to avoid); one is a squared, good quality one, which I bought just a month or so ago, starting to show signs of wear from being carried around all the time and half-written (I started rewriting my NaNovel 2002 on it, that's why it's already written that much);
- two diaries / daily planners, a large one and a small one. Both barely used, I've always sucked at using diaries. They just have some exam times on them and little more;
- my Moleskine notebook (a pocket ruled one).

The last one is the only notebook that has been with me everywhere, ever since I got it (which is more than three years ago now, according to the date on the first page). It's about 2/3 written (because I often write in normal notepads, since I tend to write during classes and the Moleskine is noticeable, teachers would quickly realize I'm not taking notes), and has been through a lot. Moleskine notebooks are sturdy little fuckers, and they fit in a pocket, and that's why I love them. Whenever I go to places they're sold at, I have to pry myself away from them and remind myself that no, I don't need to waste money on ones with silk covers which would get too dirty, or large soft-cover ones I would never use (though... using a large ruled one as a diary sounds good... if I kept a diary that is...). Apart from my partially-written ruled one, I also have, ready to be used, another ruled one, a squared one, a sketchbook one (even though I can't draw worth shit), a soft-cover address book (bought today) and three soft-cover squared ones (also bought today, I'll use them for noting down URLs and suchlike when I'm away from home... I'm tired of ending up with three dozen different scraps of paper by when I get home in the evening). It may be pretentious - it touts itself in advertising as "Hemingway's notebook" and similar - but it's small, and sturdy, and comfortable to use, and that's all that matters to me.

Now I just need a miniature pen that'll fit in my pocket, too, and is comfortable to write with... all miniature pens I've seen so far cost too damn much and are very uncomfortable to hold. Hrm...

Hrrm. Heh. Stupid feeling, when you are asked to do something for somebody else, and you have to say no because you're too busy to add another thing to do onto the pile... so somebody else is asked to do the thing instead. And you see them doing a half-assed work of it and you're annoyed by that, and a bit angry at yourself for not doing the thing yourself even if you couldn't possibly have found the time to do it...

Took the first four tests for the ECDL this afternoon. I had 45 minutes to complete each test (three hours total), and I finished them all within 40 minutes. ._. I knew they would be easy, but I wasn't expecting them to be that easy... if I'd known, I'd have scheduled them all for today and now I would be done. And have a piece of paper proclaiming what everybody already knows, that I'm good with computers. Sheesh. I honestly don't see the point... but mom insisted it would be useful, because "some employers might not believe you're good with computers without hard proof". *rolls eyes* Oh well.

55-word stories. Some of them are bloody brilliant. Remind me to try writing some as a writing exercise, I'm often too verbose for my own good. I have problems writing stories in 150 words...

Bored at work (for a change... :p) so guess what I'm doing?

Still need to straighten out a few minor problems, but it's done. \o/ Thanks Conty for the help, thanks everybody else I was talking with for the patience at my long silences while I kicked stuff to make it work. Hee.

"Blessed are those who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused."
With that in mind, and laughing my ass off because it's so true, I present: Europe and Italy, a short film dedicated to those who believe Italians behave the same as all other Europeans.

(Also, from the same author, because it's a link that bears reposting, Yes & No: a diseducational road movie.)

It is, I guess, all my fault that I have been so late in completing the assignment for one of my university courses. To my defense, the assignment is a phone survey, questioning at least two properties on whether they get sponsored by anybody, the amount of sponsorship, etc. And I have always hated to talk to people on the phone, and have never been good at administering surveys, whether on the phone or face to face. The few attempts I made at getting the two responses to the survey which are the minimum to turn in have been met with "the person who deals with sponsorship is away and will only come back in July"s, "no, we have no time to take part in a survey"s, and other such refusals.
So this morning, I went to the professor (who is also the founder and owner of the company I'm having my internship in), and told him I still hadn't managed to get any answer to the survey, and I was fully aware that everything needed to be turned in tomorrow, and did I really have to do it? Could I not do something else instead?
No, he said, the two survey responses are required, but you still have some more time, I haven't even started grading the exam papers, and I'm sure Mauro or Emma will be glad to help you.
Mauro and Emma being two coworkers, of course. They just graduated from university last year, and they were very glad to help me, since I have helped them several times since I started working here.
So I sat together with Mauro this afternoon, and collected phone numbers for several prospective interviewees, and he made phonecalls for me and we have a survey response already and are waiting for it to be 5pm so we can call back the people who said please call back later, when the marketing director will be in. And we laughed together with Emma at a badly worded question in the survey, result of a copypaste gone awry and somebody not paying attention, which Mauro just barely avoided reading over the phone to the interviewee. Hehe.

Note to self: <META HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar" CONTENT="no">

So. It appears I've turned into a l33t computer know-it-all here at work. (Now if only it was real work, and not just an internship, and I got paid. Heh. At least I get university credit out of this, and experience...)

I removed Bugbear.B from their computers, I fixed a Microsoft Word SNAFU, I'm making a website for them (slowly, because they can't seem to make up their mind on what they want on it, but at least the layout is ready - and has been praised to the sky, a simple neat CSS-and-two-frames layout, imagine that), I've fixed another bunch of tiny problems with their computers.

And now I'm typesetting a book for them. With Microsoft Word.

^^;

At least, they trust and respect me, and it shows. That's good. Right?

Reading emails from a ML I'm subscribed to... people who don't quote the message they're replying to properly annoy me. People who type above the quoted message and not below, without even trimming the quote, irk me. People who type in all lowercaps, with no punctuation at all, without even inserting some linebreaks or checking their grammar and spelling, and flood the list with messages because they repeatedly "forgot to add something" (because they can't take a little time to think before sending) irk the fuck out of me. People who do all three things make me murderous. ><

Make a lap. Near the fire.
The assertive voice rang in my mind. I looked down at him and he looked up at me. For an instant, our gazes brushed, then we both looked aside in instinctive courtesy. But he had already seen the ruins of my soul.
He rubbed his cheek against my leg. Hold the cat. You'll feel better.
I don't think so.
He rubbed against my leg insistently. Hold the cat.
I don't want to hold the cat.
He reared up suddenly on his hind legs, and hooked his vicious little front claws into both flesh and leggings. Don't talk back! Pick up the cat.
"Fennel, stop that! Where are your manners?" Jinna exclaimed in dismay. She bent towards the ginger pest, but I stooped swiftly, to unhook his claws from my flesh. I freed myself but before I could straighten up, he leapt to my shoulder. For all his size, Fennel had amazing agility. He landed, not heavily, but as if someone had put a large, friendly hand on my shoulder. Hold the cat. You'll feel better.

Refer 2.0. Upgrade when home. (And maybe I should put a link to my referrers in the sidebar, but meh. Who'd be interested, except me? There haven't even been any amusing search requests lately, if you exclude an AOL search for "link that spins ur screen". Learn to type and be coherent, people, and maybe you will get relevant results. Maybe.)

[EDIT] Ok, so there's a downside to text-transforming the entry titles to uppercase... o.O face doesn't work. Meep. [/EDIT]

o.O New mousepad go squish. *pokes it* Hee. It's nice and soft and supports my wrist and goes squish when I poke it. (It's small though. And I don't have it here at work exp so I can't amuse myself poking it. Oh well.)

Moment of childishness over... :p

Opera has spoiled me, I admit. All that searching directly from the address bar makes me miss all the good Google logos... like today's Escher logo for Escher's birthday. Not that I'm going to give up Opera for that... :p I'll just have to keep track of the logos in the archives, and by opening up the Google mainpage once in a while.

Outside, a storm is brewing.

The trees are sighing, the thunder growls, doors and windows are open wide to catch the breath of the storm. The wind pushing at me felt like an old friend, met again after too long.

I wonder what the rain will bring.

Something tells me I need to stop chewing on books so quickly. True, now that I've made it a habit to read on the train in the morning, and on a bench in the park in the morning, and during lunchtime while I eat, and on the train in the afternoon, and often at night before sleeping too, I get at least three solid hours of reading every day.
But I finished Assassin's Apprentice today, and I'd only started it yesterday afternoon, ffs. True, it's a light read, but still...
Nice book, though, even if it had a bit too many half-bloods with dark pasts / dark secrets / murderous intents. :p And I read it in the Italian translation, and it irked the hell out of me how some names had been translated. True, the names had to be translated, because they were proper words and occasionally important to the story, but still, it irks me. Definitely want to get this in English, and the other two books in the series, too. And the sequel series... I recall seeing Fool's Errand in a bookstore in this city, in English too, must check if it's still there when I pass by it going home today. After all, I finished Assassin's Apprentice and now have nothing to read this afternoon on the train. Except for The Shaping of Middle-Earth, that is, but as much as I love Tolkien, I'm starting to be allergic to stories like Turambar and Niniel, or even Beren and Luthien (even though they are beautiful). Reading seven different versions of the same tale in a short time doesn't make you particularly inclined to like it when you start reading it in the eight version. So I'm taking a bit of a break, to hopefully stop wanting to smack Christopher Tolkien for not leaving his father's notes alone. If I ever become a famous successful writer, I swear, I'll expressly request in my will that my heirs bury all my notes with me, or burn them. Hmpf.

A Japanese company, apparently to cater to the young people who spend their days typing messages on their cellphone and don't know how to use a plain qwerty keyboard properly, has created a keyboard that I can only define as a "thumb keyboard". Yes, really. Here is the spec sheet, if you speak Japanese. Which I don't. From what I can understand, it comes in four pretty colors (black, white, blue and pink), connects to the computer via an USB port, and has a small stub on it that acts as a mouse/trackball (like the stub you find on some laptops, you know? I don't know the technical name, if it even has one). O tempora, o mores.

(Via La Repubblica. Newspaper it may be, and almost always months behind in technology "news", but for once it pointed something out to me that I hadn't yet seen.)

For lack of a better entry title, because this is what it is, after all. :p

I need to:
- Remove or redirect the old blogger-made archives from this directory. Redirect would be better. We shall see how lazy I'm feeling when I open the FTP program. 06/16/2003 - done. Yay for server redirect. Thank you Daxim and Sinar. :)
- Tidy the sidebar another bit. Remove the links I haven't touched in ages, add some of the links I've been meaning to add for ages, possibly sub-categorize the blogs ("linked", "stalked", "other"). And add a "blog directories" category, while I'm at it.
- To help with that, find the way and the tag to include a custom template into the layout, so I don't have to edit three different templates every time I update the sidebar. Found it, done it. I love thorough manuals and simple things. I got rid of the "Recent Entries" category on the sidebar, while I was at it - no point in having it there when all the entries it listed were on the same page anyway. Heh.
- Resize the buttons at the bottom of the sidebar. They need to be all the same size. It looks ugly like that.
- Put a permanent link to the RSS feed in the sidebar somewhere. Not that anybody will ever use it, but it's there, so meh.
- Sift through the photos I took in Barcelona, not to mention the rest of my photo directory, and update my photolog.
- Make that store with prints and posters made from my photos that I've been meaning to make for a while. (Nobody'll ever buy anything, but hey, I can dream can't I?)
- Make a new layout for kicie.net, one for wingedspirit.net, and update the layout archive.
- Migrate my other weblogs to MoveableType, too.
- Set a shorter URL for MoveableType, so I don't have to type the whole long cgi-bin path to get at it. 06/16/2003 - done.
- Import the older archives (Oct 2000 - Aug 2001), and import the comments I had on BlogBack when I was using Blogger. (Note to self: explanation of the import format. Woo. It's gonna take a lot of copypasting, but it's very much doable. Three cheers for thorough manuals.)
- Finish that winamp skin that's been in the making for a while now, and make that other one I've been wanting to make for a while.
- Make a small Opera page, mainly consisting of sidebar panels I've made or edited.
- Burn mIRC and Opera to CD, like I've been meaning to do for a week now.
- Continue on the rewriting of my 2002 NaNovel. And start typing in what I have already rewritten.
- Partially tidy my room, getting everything but the book and manga stacks out of the way, so I can go with mom to buy some more shelves for my room (damn mom's "conditions" on stuff... won't buy more shelves for my room until the only thing that's untidy is books and manga). I need shelves, my room is drowning in books and manga. Ah, the hard life of a bookworm. (The first one who makes a "Read Or Die" reference or joke dies. Yes, I'm looking at you. ¬¬)
- Catch up on GetBackers episodes. There's five at least sitting on my HD that I haven't watched yet, and more being downloaded. I sense a GetBackers marathon in the near future. (Another one.)
- Go buy that new CD I've been wanting to buy for a while.
- Buy that mousepad with wristrest at the game/comic store this afternoon. My right arm and wrist have been aching, and even though it's probably nothing serious or related to computer use (I must've slept on it wrong, I woke up with my wrist wedged under my body in a very uncomfortable position a few days ago) better safe than sorry. It doesn't cost much. The only negative side is that the mousepad itself is a bit... well, small. I guess I'll just use it inverted (with the mousepad facing towards me, and the mouse out of the pad, rather than with it facing away from me and the mouse on the pad) or perform mousepad surgery so it's bigger (we have lots of spare mousepads in the house).
- Stop slacking off at work. *suppresses conscience and goes on her merry way* I do work when it's needed. I just don't have much to do today. :P

Things I've learned from having online friends:
1. The education system is a mess everywhere.
2. Timezones suck.
3. So do oceans. Stupid oceans.
4. Language differences? What language differences?
5. Huggles are universal.
6. Guttermind is contagious.
7. Chocolate should be DCCable.
8. When you can't come up with anything else to add to the list, you can always trust your friends to. *points at the comments section, wink wink nudge nudge hint hint* ;)

The Geek Test says of me: 36.48915% - Major Geek. Hee. I'm very amused by the fact that being female gives me bonus points.

(Link off jer.)

Conducting a layout bughunt. Found and squished one, it appears there aren't any others.

Have I mentioned how much I love external stylesheets yet? It was a royal pain to get this to look how I wanted it to (I started work on this layout this morning at 11), but so worth it. To squish the bug I just had to go change a value in the stylesheet, and I didn't even have to republish or anything. Heh.

Oh yeah, I thought I should mention it... this layout looks better with Opera. IE 5.x fucks pretty much everything up (font sizes are yick, the border is yuck, etc.), and even IE 6 (yes, I upgraded, I wanted to check if the CSS support was any better) can't deal with such simple things as a dotted border without freaking. So go download Opera. ;)

Now. Categories. Do I even need categories? Most of my posts are lengthy and talk about a lot of different stuff at the same time. Opinions?

Feeling a bit better.

Thank God for friends.

Cast your eyes on the ocean
cast your soul to the sea
when the dark night seems endless
please remember me...
(Loreena McKennitt, Dante's Prayer)

Heh. It figures.

Most of the time, I hate it that there's a monitor and miles of cables between me and the friends I talk to online.

But now, at least, I'm glad... I can at least keep up a semblance of normalcy, even if it's just a facade, a wall I'm putting up. At least, there, I'm not crying like the idiot I am, again, because of hurt I thought I'd forgotten and left behind.

Yes, new layout. Yes, I switched to MoveableType. Yes, I even imported old entries. I'm also looking for a way to import the old archives I have just as HTML files. They're going to get imported if I have to copypaste every single one by hand, damnit. And so are the comments I had on Blogback.

In the meantime, I would love opinions on this layout. :)

I also changed the name of this blog, from "Angelica" to "Winged". "Winged" fits and feels better, I think, as compared to "Angelica", which I picked almost three years ago to be witty. I was debating between "Winged" and "Wingless", actually... but "Winged" is better. 'Cause I can fly. (And that will mean something to very few people, no more than five, but meh.)

They're going to air a second TV series of Sailormoon. A live-action version, to be exact. The mere thought makes my brain hurt. x.x

And in other news, it's starting to get Way Too Fucking Hot every day over here. I love summer, but I can't stand the heat. It makes me slow and sleepy. Can't wait until I can go back home and curl up in the nice cool basement...

Note to self: PHP Weather.

The place I'm having my work experience at is right next to my university, I've probably already mentioned it... and right now, at my university, students are graduating. The windows are open, and every half hour or so, there's loud clapping, laughs and cheers.
Next year I'll be among the ones being cheered at... next year by this time I'll be graduating. Odd feeling... I most certainly don't feel finished with this period of my life. It's odd, and a bit scary...

*pokepokepoke* It appears to be working now. But somehow I don't feel very trusting in Blogger anymore. >_> MoveableType, here I come...

...

"Oops, your blog was not quite ready to be published. Please try again."

Uh, Blogger? What the unholy fuck have you smoked today?

Just finished reading this book (Joanne Harris, "Holy fools"). I bought it mainly because I'd liked "Chocolat" by the same author... when I started reading I was a bit dubious. What the hell was I doing reading a book about nuns? Hehe. But it's well written and plotted, and interesting until the end. And I really, really liked the ending. It fit.
And I'll probably say more later. Must make that booklog... or at least a proper book category for this weblog when I migrate it to MoveableType... that should force me to write out fuller reviews. :p

Idle Thought of the day: given that mIRC and Opera don't really go prod in the registry when installed... if I burned them both to a CD from my computer at home, then carried the CD with me, would they run on any other (Windows) computer? Because if so, I wouldn't be limited to a single computer at uni anymore, and I wouldn't have to install anything... hmm. Worth a try I think.

Bah, they took "my computer" away from the computer room at uni. :( This morning it was there, now it's no longer there.
But, on the upside, I've managed to install mIRC and Opera on another computer (one of the WinXP ones). Not that hard when you're installing programs that don't go poke around in the registry. Heh.
Yes, yes, bad me, evil me, and all that... what the hell am I supposed to do on lunchbreak, sit here and stare at websites and be bored rather than socializing? And it's not like they're programs that are harmful to the computer, unlike most of the crap that the average user of these computers tries to install. :P So meh.
I've also had to change the keyboard, heh... this computer has an English keyboard, and it was configured as English, of course... except non-Italian keyboards fuck up my touchtyping majorly (I have to stop and look for punctuation), so I just changed it to the Italian configuration and don't look at the keys while typing. :p

My father reformatted his computer. Runs like a dream now (well, as much as an old ailing laptop can... better than before at any rate...), after some moments of panic due to not having gathered all the needed CDs before formatting... heheh. So I helped him through it, found him the videocard drivers (the very conspicuous Generic ATI Drivers CD that obviously didn't belong to any other computer in the house... good that it was still there or dad would've been stuck in 16color 640x480 hell)... and found him a driver needed to take care of this one unknown peripheral that was showing up on his system (thanks, Sinar)... and now all is well. And it netted me an extra €20, which was unexpected but nice. W00t.

In other news, I'm quickly getting very fed up with blogger... it's been not working all day. Grrr. If it were earlier in the day I'd be switching to MT right now, but I'm tired and can't be bothered. :p Gonna do it this week though, if problems aren't resolved.

I was planning to update my photolog this weekend and get a poster store up (not that it's likely that anybody will ever buy something with a photo taken by me on it, but hey, it's free, and I can dream, can't I?), but I ended up sleeping half the time (recuperating from exam stress :p) and talking with a certain person (*huggle*) most of the rest of the time. Heh. Another time.

Speaking of the exam ("Sales promotion, direct marketing & PR"... yeah, yeah, yuck, I only took it because I needed the credit and there was nothing else I could take), it was on Friday and it went well. Though the teacher told me afterwards that I freaked him out because for the first half hour of the exam I just sat there, arms crossed, staring at the questions... :p Well, why shouldn't I have done that? Three hours, five questions, half an hour per question left me a half hour to think about the questions and the answers rather than starting to write immediately in a frenzy like all my classmates did. Heh. I'm sure I passed it, and that was all I needed.

Random semi-useful link: Flash font browser.
Random amusing link: Girls Teach Teen Cyber Gab to FBI Agents.

My father had caught Bugbear.B. Grumble. And of course I had to devirus the whole family network... typical.
Now he's working on gathering files and driver CDs and suchlike so he can format and reinstall on that cruddy computer of his. I'd never thought I'd say this, but that computer needs a format+reinstall so badly. It needs to be put out of its misery.

My father, the computer genius:
"I got this from a person I know, is it safe to open?"
"No, dad, double extension (.xls.exe) and nonsensical body of the email usually means virus."
"But... I know the person who sent it to me. That means the email is safe, right?"
"Dad, it's a virus, trust me on that. You aren't a living antivirus program, shielding everybody you know from virus infections."
"But..."

Question: what's different between normal Photoshop and Photoshop LE? Yeah, yeah, okay, the price, and yeah, some features are missing, but I want to know which ones. That is, I use Paint Shop Pro, but I have a copy of Photoshop LE that came with my digicam, should I bother installing it? Google isn't being any help, which is why I'm asking here.

o.o Whuh. There was this guy I've taken one single course with on this computer (I'm in the computer room at uni, on "my computer", the one with mIRC and the like), sending an email, and it was taking him ages to find a file he wanted to attach to it on the HD... so I reached over (I was on the computer on the right) and helped him out, and he said "ok, thank you, can you hit the "ok" button when it's done attaching and then "send"? I'm going to get something to eat". I said yes, of course, and I sent the message for him and then closed IE immediately and opened Opera... but, whuh. o.o Either he's really trusting or really dumb. I could've done anything with his open inbox.

...
What the fuck is up with people nowadays? The internet isn't free. People pay for it, to put up websites and IRC networks and the like. Everything you're enjoying for free, somebody is paying for. And there are so many people expecting everything to be free, and it is so shit. Hello? Privately owned website? The owner can do what he or she wants with their website, including stopping offering a certain service if the costs become too much to bear.
In the specific: I've been wandering around the internet a bit (I'm bored, so sue me), and I stumbled on fotolog again (via this metafilter post; first time had been a week or so ago, via a NYT article [reg. req.]). They've since gone from a fully free service to a free service with limitations + a pay service. And of course people are whining (just follow the links in that entry and wander around from there, they're all interlinked via the favorites).
The pay service costs just $5 a month, for fuck's sake. You can't pay for it? Your loss, you keep the free version or go elsewhere. Stop whining and expecting people to pay enormous bandwidth bills so you can keep posting your shitty pictures. You aren't entitled to anything. They could've made it pay-only. And all you're doing is wasting space and bandwidth.
It's the same with, say, IRC networks. It's not your right to sit on the network and flood clients off. It's not your right to sit on the network and use it as a base for serving large warez files. Don't whine if you get kicked out.
The key words here are privately owned website / chat network / whatever. The person who owns the place makes the rules, and you can do nothing at all to change it. You can ask nicely, but ultimately the decision is up to the owner, and protesting loudly and vulgarly won't do any good. Try grow up a bit and put those braincells you should have (if they haven't been killed already due to terminal stupidity) to good use.
(And this site, which I found via the previously mentioned Metafilter post, makes my point far more coherently than I have. So yeah, go read.)

Eh. I'm considering migrating this blog over to MoveableType. Should be straightforward enough, judging from the manual (and I'd do it now if I had FTP access), and I'm getting tired of Blogger's "quirks".
One thing I don't like though is, I'm going to lose the comments I have on BlogBack... :( I'm not bothered about the account, even though it's one of the few unrestricted free accounts and it's old and I have lots of comments on it and... okay, maybe I'm bothered about the account, too. But meh.
Can you see me going through each single entry in my archives, finding out which ones have comments, and copypasting the comments into a new comment for each archived entry? ._. Meep. Okay, maybe I'm actually switching in the weekend, or as soon as I have some time to iron out all the wrinkles and tiny problems I'll most likely get from switching... I could sacrifice comments, but a lot of them I like and want to keep... ._.
Perhaps I'll wait until I get switched to this new version they have... see if it's any better. If it isn't I'll switch.

Was wandering the net, a bit bored, so I decided to go look for sidebar panels for Opera. And among the many I found, there's a snake game one. Watch my productivity drop to negative values... :p
(And randomly, because my mind acts weird when I'm sleepy: if you play that game enough, eventually the thingies you have to pick up with the snake start appearing from the snake's tail. Snake eating its own droppings? Ewww.)
Note to self: kick the computer at uni until java works, and install the ICQ2Go panel found here.

Wow, one hell of a thunderstorm here right now. Power went off and on and off and on and the UPS/external batteries we have for the computers were beeping at me in protest. :p Wandered the Recesses of the Basement with a candle to look for the power switch, but the power was out in the whole neighborhood (which hadn't happened in quite a bit). It seems to have stabilized on "on" for now, though. Yay.
[EDIT] Mom and dad just got home and they said outside it's scary. o.o Fallen trees, half-flooded roads, etc.
And Attila the cat was of course Dumb (or Big Powerful I'm-Not-Scared Alpha Male, if you will) and stayed outside during the thunderstorm. He just came in, dripping wet and looking miserable.

Phone etiquette primer: if you need to talk to me and you call on my cellphone, you wait for me to answer, not immediately hang up after the first ring in hopes I'll call you back. It's rude as all fuck. And I'm not gonna do it, especially if I don't know the number you're calling from. I should waste my money to find out who the rude fuck was who doesn't want to waste their money to talk to me exactly why? If you don't want to spend the money then obviously it's not that important. Send a text message if you really need to talk to me and you're low on money on your cellphone, for fuck's sake.

Via Neil Gaiman, because I'm easily amused: funny driver announcements on the London tube.

"Apparently, this train is no longer terminating at Barking, but is in fact, terminating here. I'm sorry about this but I too was under the impression that this train was going to Barking, but 'they' have other ideas. I mean, why tell me - I'm merely the driver..."

Meh. it appears I'm going to Croatia with my family after all. Backstory, since I don't believe I've posted about it here... was planning to go to London, but my parents decided they wanted to go to the seaside. Cue arguments and complaints on my part because they'd promised... eventually they convinced me, saying I can take lots of stuff on holiday including "a whole suitcase of books if you want, and your laptop and your camera and all the notepads you want and lots of CDs and everything else you want" so I'm not gonna be bored. I'm gonna take them up on that promise, too... damned if I'm going to the seaside, even to a Beautiful Place (like my mom describes it), without stuff to do.
They also said I can go to London or wherever I want to go too, if I want, but only if I find somebody to come with me or I can stay at a friend's place or something, because they don't trust me to go alone... I'm 21 for fuck's sake, not 15. >:| And I just know they'll change their mind... hmpf.

Well. I'd completely forgotten today was a holiday (at least over here in Italy). I'm feeling a bit ashamed now, I used to know all holidays by heart... I woke up, looked at the clock... 9am. "wtf? why didn't my parents wake me up?" so I went downstairs and blinked and stared at my parents, and they went, "...today's a holiday, you'd forgotten?" ^^;
But it's nice to have an extra free day to do stuff, unexpectedly. And there was an email sitting in my inbox waiting for me which made me smile. :) So... good morning.