Aplace

Alien Ferd

Aaaaah ! I am in love with my new computer. Just like the old computer. But the best part is photo booth, which lets you take these types of fun photos of yourself. I am loving it. Aren't I cute as an alien?

TMI

Is there really such a thing as too much information? I'm not sure. I think that the easier it is to obtain information the more critical it becomes to you.

Does that make sense? 

See, for example, the age-old question of song lyrics. When we were kids we might go to a store and hear a song and think, hey cool. Then we might ask around about it : "Hey, X, do you know a song that goes...?". And that was it, that was the only way you could figure out what the song actually was.  Or else if you saw  archival footage of the president of Brazil from 15 years ago and wondered if his first wife was on that tele-novela you used to watch, you would have to actually hoof it to a university library, break out the micro-fiche and go searching for info on his first wife. Now you just sit on the couch and everything you wanted to know, lyrics, ex-wives of Latin American dictators, it's right there so easy, too easy. But weren't we perfectly content before? Is it actually beneficial to have access to all this information?

I mean technology is good: electricity = labour-saving, cars = ambulances to bring people to the hospital quickly, air travel means many more people can see the world than Marco Polo could have ever expected. Is there something unhealthy about having your curiosity satisfied instantaneously? About everything?  In life, it seems, things that are easy to obtain are somehow not worth having. Who needs to actually *know* anything? What you really need to know is how to look it up! No more premium on knowledge but is that bad? I don't know. I'm just thinking. At least there's still value in that, right?

 

Facebook = The Devil

When is a friend not a friend? When they're a facebook friend. Ugh, I have about 100 friends on facebook and maybe 10 friends in real life, which means I have 90 empty acquaintances whose lives I track electronically. Whose lives I enjoy tracking electronically. Why do I care that a girl I went to elementary school with got engaged? It makes absolutely no sense. And yet... and yet... Part of me wants to quit facebook and focus on real life friendships. But, on the other hand, electronic communication has allowed me to maintain serious, vibrant, friendships with people who live far away. I'm torn.

Meme

I had technically sworn off memes but since aplace was looking so forlorn, I present to you meme courtesy of bexy23.livejournal.com

A) Four jobs I have had in my life:
1. articling student
2. filing clerk
3. library clerk
4. receptionist

B) Four movies you would watch over and over:
1. Princess Bride
2. Dave
3. Pretty Woman
4. Bridget Jones' Diary

C) Four places you have lived:
1. Ottawa
2. Kingston
3. Montreal
4. That's it.

D) Four TV shows you love to watch
(note: currently don't watch tv, so these are retro shows)
1. Grey's Anatomy
2. The Oprah Winfrey Show
3. scrubs
4. The West Wing

E) Places I have been on vacation:
1. Tampa, Florida
2. Cuba
3. Los Angeles and San Francisco, Cali
4. Belgium

F) Websites you visit daily:
1. Gawker.com
2. Becky's blog
3. Mel's blog
4. Wren's blog

G) Four of my favorite foods:
1 Sushi
2 Quesadillas
3 Samosas
4 Baguette

H) Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Europe
2. Belize
3. A friend's house
4. Several months into the future

Meme

Cool new meme from Karen: put your birthday in Wikipedia's search field (without the year), then write down three events, two births, and one death that happened on your birthday. So here goes

Events

1907 - UPS is founded by James E. Casey in Seattle, Washington.

1963 During a 200,000-person civil rights rally in at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his famous I have a dream speech.

1996 - Britain's Charles, Prince of Wales, and Diana, Princess of Wales, are divorced.

Births

1913 - Robertson Davies, Canadian writer (d. 1995)

1969 - Jason Priestley, Canadian actor

Death

430 - Augustine of Hippo, North African saint and theologian (b. 354)

Cute Blog Alert!

Please welcome my high school classmate, Caroline, to the blogosphere. Caroline recently moved to Hong Kong from Canada to begin a career as a TV news producer (she's got her sights set on the anchor chair, which I've no doubt she'll reach in record time!) Byline Caroline documents her weird and wonderful experiences as an ex-pat journalist a long way from home. You can click over to her blog using the link on the right hand side of the screen.

Book Meme

Yayayayayayay!

I have finally been tagged by the book meme fairy. Woot! Thanks Zainab

Last book I bought:
Six Queens
David Starkey

Last book I read:
Recently finished A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. Currently, I am reading Six Queens by David Starkey

Five books that mean a lot to me:

White Teeth
by Zadie Smith

Cat's Eye
by Margaret Atwood

About a Boy
by Nick Hornby

Family of Strangers
by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides

And I, in turn, tag:

Dilani

Hasini

Farhad

The K-dog (if she ever resurrects her blog) and

Wren

Promised my first dance to Winter

I have a new way to satisfy my inherent nosiness.  Flickr.com, the superamazing picture sharing website recently acquired by Yahoo allows you to assign particular headings to your photos which other people can also use. Then all these photos are aggregated according to their headings. My current favourite heading is "What's in your bag" which just has pages and pages of photos people have taken of the contents of their bags. Very cool. You can look at people's iPods and laptops and wallets and gum and whatever else they chose to stow in there. Perfect for nosy Nellies such as yours truly. In fact this Flickr tag has led to my current obsession with the Timbuk2 messenger bag which all the hip people seem to own. So pretty and practical! Tomorrow, the ridiculous dance routine. Yay!

PC dwellers need not apply

I'm so sorry but this post will only be of interest to MAC enthusiasts and those who love them (Sorry!)

Is it me or is the ridiculous arduousness of opening applications in MAC OS X getting on your nerves? Mine too, my friend. Which is why we should all hail 43 folders, this amazing productivity website (sounds dorky, but check it out, k?) It has introduced me to Quicksilver! Before to open a piece of software that was not in my dock, I had to click on the applications icon in the dock, then scroll down the list to find whatever piece of software I was looking for then click on that and wait for it to load. Now all I have to do is Cmd-space bar to call up quicksilver then type the first few letters of the app I'm looking for and voila ! it's icon appears. I can also do the same with my bookmarks. Instead of opening Firefox then clicking on the bookmarks tab in the menu then selecting my bookmark, I just cmd-space quicksilver open and type in the first few letters in the name of the page and voila, there I am at my typepad login page or wherever. This will save me countless hours people. I can now unequivocally say I'll never go back to Windows (except for work, obviously but otherwise, never again!)

I was asked...

last week about bittorrents, which is ridiculous because I know next to nothing about them or how they work. However, on the new super/wicked/awesome weblog from Gawker Media, LifeHacker, they give an excellent listing of all the best bittorrent sites. LifeHacker is actually pretty awesome with all sorts of little computer tips and tricks to make your life better at the keyboard and away from it. They also have this new website called Gridskipper (not worthy of its own href tag !) which is about travel but it's kind of random.