active_apathy

I have other posts to make today, too: there'll be a poll, and there'll be a meme of Science!, and there'll be... um, this one. A miscellany of textfulness.

I'm going to start by mentioning that my ISP is discovering new heights of sucky at the moment; I could very nearly get a better Internet connection using a rubber band, a toothpick and a four-slice toaster. I may, at some point in this post, go text!shouty at my Internet breaking.

And... some of my earlier notes are past their use-by date. Iemma campaign launch, very old. Howard scared-of-election education funding promise, equally old. And- oh, that works.

I had a note scribbled on the bald Britney thing, but I'm certain that was done to death while I was looking the other way. Well, that, and the thing I heard on the radio about her being seen wearing a wig. What that said to me was that it wasn't some grand show of identity; I think that instead, it's entirely possible that she had an accident trying to wash that man right out of her hair - there probably isn't enough rinse and repeat in all the world to properly deal with K-Fed.

And from there to... hee! Public transport. Where, on a nice, long trip on my morning bus yesterday, I decided to do a little more on the story that I still haven't finished for shaysdays. So there I am, cheerfully writing freefall sapphic porn in cute purple ink, as the seats slowly fill around me.

As usual, the space next to me is the last left empty, and then this woman clambers aboard, plods over to where I am, and unceremoniously plonks herself on the seat. She looks - well, miffed, I suppose, at the whole entire world, and almost exactly like the kind of person who should wear a sign on their neck saying "ZOMGWTFBBQleftwinggayterroristagenda I R TEH CONSRV".

So, there's me, merrily scribbling away without the slightest care for how this could - just maybe - end unhappily. Until, that is, she glanced at the page. Cute purple ink, pretty writing, fantastically legible... and apt to make the small-minded explode in a plume of righteous intolerance. At this point, I doubt she'd read a word of it; I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, and decided to just finish the paragraph - during which time, she decided to have a bit of a go at reading it.

Yay.

Three more words, then two, then the end of the sentence and - finally - a fullstop, then - with a kind of fast yet delicate smootheness - I closed the book, capped the pen, and put both away, in favour of doing something a little less likely to make her arrange my booking in hell. So, DS in hand, I decided to just play whatever was in there.

Which, of course, happened to be Trauma Center; a fact that clicked somewhere between the ventricular fibrillation and the myocardial incision.

So, hee. I've never seen someone so capable of fuming about nothing for thirty-two minutes.

Oooh... shiny. Midnight just went by; it's cute the way that email from the previous day suddenly ticks over from times to the date in my Gmail inbox. Hee! But, seriously: it took my soul long ago. It doesn't need to bother with cute.

And now, notes. Oooh... these ones are better.

maggiebloome has made a new comm called dethdethdeth. No, I'm not telling you about it because she asked me to whyever would I do such a thing you must have me confused with someone else HEY LOOK A MEME!

(Go, join, and ask for leetle deth flags)

Lastly, it seems that Michael Hutchence's brother has decided to make some money for himself by selling bits of the estate on eBay. Why, yes: where once family of dead famous people made a mint by way of 'grief' and 'misery' and the 'true life story', now they can flog stuff on the Internet! It's almost enough to make me wonder if the Egyptian writing system they've not yet deciphered is really just saying things like "AUTHENTIC! Pharaonic grave goods! BID on these items, or BUY NOW for..."

And... that's about it for the miscellaneous texty stuff. Hooray! Next, some user research.

The episode was Objects in Space, which has some of my favourite lines. Just like every other episode. I'll be making a shiny new icon from it soon-ish, just to amuse myself.

I think I may have figured out what's wrong with comment notifications in Gmail. All mine are turning up just fine, but at semi-random times. I think some piece of shiny in the Google servers is aiming to misbehave. This is based on two of my mailing lists being a bit funny in their message delivery, and I find one problem at Google much easier to believe than one in LJ and another in Y! Groups.

Today, I bought myself a notepad a6 spiral-bound acid-free cartridge-paper sketchbook, which is my version of a notepad. I like the feel of the pages and the lack of lines, but I'm odd like that. This notebook is partly to keep the stuff I consider putting in LJ posts from slipping right out of my mind when I finally get near Deepest Sender.

I did more bookshopping today, but could find neither Wicked nor Arrows of the Queen. I shall have the bookshop order them in, in a few weeks' time. My purchases have been expanded, though, with The Princess Bride, Mort and Sourcery. My buying list is massively behind still, but I plan to work on it. Also! They forced convinced me to sign up for a free loyalty programme, which essentially works out to 5% store credit for every purchase, earnable and spendable anywhere in their chain and worth double-points until the end of August. So, I'll be ordering books and trying to pay for them in advance in about a month. I'm sneaky like that.

Lastly, people on buses are odd. I know some people have a slightly harsh or aggressive tone, like they're trying to force words out instead of just speaking, but this one woman on the bus had a manner of speaking that made it sound like she wanted to bludgeon each and every word with a cricket bat until it was no longer recognisable as the speech of a personable level-headed human. What was more surprising was this, said loudly enough that you could've taken notes in the middle of a busy street in Tokyo with a loud, rusty typewriter: "I never have a lot of luck with flatmates. They always seem to move out. (beat) [Name] is moving out now, too. Just when I got to know her. (Beat) She was always saying she never gets any space or privacy. It's my house, I can do what I want."

And that's how it is for 2:25am. I'll be back shortly with an icon, I think.

I think I'm going to start archiving things more than two months old, so that I don't wind up spending another whole hour shuffling emails about my account - as you do when you notice there's a thousand threads hanging about in your inbox. Thus commenced much searching, labelling and archiving, and a little bit of deleting for things that I really didn't want anymore.

This is what alerted me to the strangest feature of Gmail - you never notice just how much mail there actually is. "You are currently using 43 MB (2%) of your 2401 MB" is just a cunning cover for "You have 1857 threads in your email account, some of which are well over 100 individual emails". There's something truly scary about numbers like that, probably because the last time I really cared about how many emails there were I had a hotmail account with a generous limit of 5MB.

One thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven threads, easily twenty to twenty-five thousand individual emails, and I'd consider the volume of email that passes through my account to be fairly light. This may also be because, if I wake up and have fifty messages waiting, they've been folded into ten or eleven compact, easy-to-read threads.

In other news, my Marvin has been slightly tweaked. I'm tempted to adjust him based on other events - xmas Marvin, GoF movie Marvin, NYE Marvin, the Easter Android, and so forth. [[Edit: The following isn't intentionally Marvin-esque. The note about the icon is here, because I wanted the pretend Gmail thing to be at the end of the post. Still, it did sound that way, didn't it. Oh well. Google won't like it.]]



You are currently using 43 MB (2%) of your 2401 MB.

Honestly, we don't know why you bothered looking at this bit. You'd have to be extraordinarily popular to need to worry about it, oh ye of millions of emails - and by that stage, we're actually kinda happy that you're not using dead-tree letters for all of this. Still, we're reprogramming your Gmail notifier to just tell you that everyone in the entire world has emailed you.

Twice.