Well, that's one item off the to-do list. Yay!

Comments and opinions very welcome :)

In the interest of maybe kicking my own butt into action instead of just sitting and doing nothing... things I want to do this week:

I was recently introduced to the concept of podSites - in short, using the iPod's Notes to display useful content - call it a mini-site, if you want. Unfortunately, the current selection is rather limited.

With the 4k limit on each file, I'm aware, there isn't much that can be turned into something readable on an iPod without lots of fiddling. There is, though, something I very much wish would exist - a HTML guide to go with the CSS guide that started it all.

I'd do it myself, but while I know HTML, I'm not quite at the level of knowledge one would need to compile such a guide. Help, LazyWeb?

As people might now, I have an iPod, and I love it to bits. It goes everywhere with me, it carries all my music, etcetera.

Of course, since I don't want it to get scratched all to hell, I also got a case for it. Plain black belt clip case, you know the type. It's plain but functional (even though it's a bit of a pain to have to drag my iPod out of it every time I want to see what's playing or get at the controls), and I like it.

While I've been looking around the internet at different iPod cases and going "oo, pretty!" "oo, nice!", and sometimes considered getting one (hello, iSkin), my reaction's never been "damn that's gorgeous, I waaaaaaant". Until now that is.

Maybe it is because I'm fond of Japan and of kimono patterns, I don't know. But the kimono case (ipodlounge review)? Damn that's gorgeous.

If I end up getting an alternate case for my iPod, it's probably still going to be the iSkin, if only because of the price... but still. Damn. I waaaaant.

"What do you recall from school", indeed. :P

(In case they change the image, or you don't see the problem, I have saved a copy here.)

Darling Fairyfux Firefox:

I'm only using you in the first place because the website I want to download stuff from has, in its infinite idiocy, decided to stop me browsing it in Opera and I won't touch IE unless I have no other choice.

So, please stop taking decisions for me without asking me. I told you to download the damned file, as opposed to opening it - whatever made you think that I wanted to open it, without even being asked, after it was done downloading? I didn't ask you to do that, and I do not like programs who presume to know what I want. For fuck's sake, even IE knows better than that.

No love,

Me

I guess I'll have to change the sidebar, now.

Hidden in an extended entry for your convenience, as I'm aware not everybody wishes to hear me ramble about music :P

I got a CD I'd ordered in the mail today... the soundtrack to "La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano" ("The Legend of 1900"). Beautiful, beautiful movie, and beautiful music. The American version of the soundtrack is on Amazon.com, but you really have to get the Italian version (which is what I did). The American version is missing bits (no clue why).

And so listening to the soundtrack took me back. To the movie and the book ("Novecento" by Alessandro Baricco... I don't think it's ever been translated in English). And damn, even just reading the book again makes me cry a bit.

Now I want to watch the movie again, but I'll probably end up bawling my eyes out... can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing, still.

No point to this entry, no... just feeling a bit introspective. Ignore if you're allergic to introspection. ;)

It's snowing :D

I was grumbling earlier that we hadn't seen real snow yet this winter, and I wanted it to snow because it was all coldickgreybleh outside... and I went to take a nap and now I've woken up and it's snowing :D Really large flakes, too, and it's all white outside. Yay!

Ok, ok, I admit it, I was asking for it. Going to look - on the pit of voles of all places - for good "Phantom of the Opera" fanfiction, especially since all I know of it comes chiefly from the Leroux book (I've seen the movie that just came out, thanks to BitTorrent *cough*, but that's about it for non-Leroux Phantom), was a bad idea right from the start.

But I wasn't exactly prepared for... well. eh.

Here's a few examples of what I found...

- A rewriting of the story, set in 2000 for the sole purpose of having Christine fall madly in love with Erik, con Raoul into paying for plastic surgery for Erik, and live with beautiful!Erik happily ever after and have lots of beautiful children.
- A frillion "original" characters that Erik ends up falling in love with and forgetting Christine for. I put "original" in quotes because it's almost always either a blind girl or a mute girl. Sigh.
- A frillion badly-done rewritings in which Christine ends up with Erik instead of Raoul. (I can understand liking Christine/Erik - hell, that's my pairing of preference too, Raoul is dull - but for fuck's sake, try and make the rewriting make sense. Don't just have her up and decide, after leaving with Raoul, that oopsie, she loved Erik better after all, and run back to him to live with him in the dungeons happily ever after.)
- A squillion stories claiming to be based on Leroux's book, which break canon in a million ways. (Hello? Erik dies in the end of the book. Rewrite it and stop it from happening if you want, but don't call it canon and based on the book. And don't, for the love of God, call in a gypsy witch to resurrect Erik after he dies because Christine is in twue wuw with him.
And for that matter, book!Erik looks like a corpse, okay? Don't have Christine or your original character state blithely that they find him beautiful, and that his fucked up face makes him all the more fascinating.)
- Entirely too many stories featuring Erik falling in love with the daughter of Raoul and Christine. (Or, worse yet, the son of Raoul and Christine, but don't let me get started on that, please.)
- Slash. Ugh. Raoul/Erik, Christine/Carlotta, Christine/Meg, you name it, it's been written.
- Utterly impossible pairings. I mean - Erik/Carlotta? HELLO?
- Poor, misunderstood Erik. He's messed up in the head and has and will murder anyone who gets in his way, okay? No, Buquet wasn't just an accident (how do you hang somebody by accident?), and no, Piangi didn't die of a heart attack because Erik surprised him. Gah.

I could go on, but it'd only make me grumpy all over again. Heh.

I know this is a long shot, but does anybody know of any well-written Erik/Christine stories? *puppy eyes*

Ok, ok, I know, I'm gutterminded.

Still, I find Google having google.co.ck absurdly amusing. XD

Upstairs and downstairs, and in thy nightly chambers...

Still haven't finished Thief 3, but getting close now, judging from what just happened in the plot. I'm right after Robbing the Cradle, after having gone back to the Keepers and found out that [insert appropriate spoiler here - if you've played you know, if you haven't I'm not about to spoil it for you].

Even if I haven't finished the game, I replayed RtC last night, just to see if the utter scariness and creepiness of that mission held even with me knowing all that happened, how to neutralize the enemies, where everything was, etc. And well, it did. Fuck that place is creepy. *shudders* Definitely worthy of being shelved with the other RtC (Return to the Cathedral, in Thief 1). The game is worth its price even just for this mission alone.

Now to go visit [Mrs. Spoiler]'s lair... sheesh, Keepers. All high-and-mighty but when they're in trouble they always have to rely on the lowly thief to help them out. :P

So I get woken up this morning by my mother, around 9am. Not being a morning person, my reaction to her words is, at first, "mrf?"

So she repeats herself. "There's a problem with the computer."

"Mrf?" (We have five computers. And I was still, at that point, more asleep than awake.)

"You know, the computer that connects to the internet and shares it."

Ah. The old and ailing Frankencomputer. "Mrfphghlwrong with it?"

"Oh, your father went to turn it on this morning and it was making a lot of noise and it wouldn't find the operating system, so he opened it up and saw the noise was coming from the hard drive, so he took that one out and put another one in and now the computer is doing fine, but it won't connect to the internet or see the network or anything. Can you come downstairs and fix it?"

Still more asleep than awake, but now a sense of impending doom and of "I'll most likely have to spend the day sorting this out, so much for getting other things done today" is starting to get at me. "Mkay, let me sleep another little bit so I'm more awake and then I'll go downstairs and see what I can do."

Now, at this point, from the description of the problem my mother had given, what would you think had happened? I was guessing at:
- Main HD go boom (that particular computer has two) - got replaced and the OS reinstalled, but all settings etc are gone
- Perhaps some other damaged internal bits, especially because of the not connecting to the internet or to the network part

So I roll over and doze another hour or so, then crawl downstairs to see what's up. What I find is the Frankencomputer in perfect working order, with all settings etc. still there, the desktop looking exactly like it did when I turned it off last night, the only thing "wrong" with it being that the cover is still off.

o_O Okay... I sit down at it, and my father offers, "let me tell you what I've done so far."

"Sure..."

"When I turned it on this morning it was making a grinding sound and it wouldn't find the OS. So I opened it, and determined the grinding sound was coming from the second HD" - insert mental facepalm from me at this point - "so I turned off the computer, and replaced that with a spare HD, and now it works perfectly fine. It connects to the internet fine" - mental facepalm x2 - "but it won't see any other computer on the network, and the other computers can't see it either, so no other computer can get on the internet."

Ok, that sounds like an actual problem I can try and solve. "Can the other computers see each other on the network?"

"No."

Mental facepalm x3. Get up, go to where the network switch is, fiddle with the cables a bit - one had somehow gotten loose - unplug and replug some cables - hey, look, the network works again. Odd that.

If only all problems were this easy to solve...