Just say something

Something.

    Just getting the damn thing over with

Well shit. I'm sick. I'm sore all over (or, rather, I have distinct points of pain throughout my body that move around over time) and I have a nasty, raw and thick throat. And my left ear is beginning to clog up.

I did not get quite the full night of sleep I would have liked, so I've despatched ecogrrl to the pharmacy for some remedies that should do the trick tonight.

So far, my day has consisted of wandering around in my tattered housecoat grumbling to myself, eating oranges and toast, and playing Animal Crossing on the Wii. Now I'm seeing how much the internet can keep me amused until I feel tired enough to nap.

So, I demand the internet amuse me, dammit. Dance, internet, dance!

    Dear Diary

Too bad I can't stack these extra entries up and bank them for future days when I can't be arsed to blog.

I'm currently drinking a hot-lemon-and-ginger (spiked with brandy) in order to ward off some nasty virus that is threatening to impinge upon my little vacation. *cough*

I insisted upon the brandy even though ecogrrl is convinced that a nice double shot before bed will be certain to weaken my already embattled immune system. I remain unconvinced of this, mostly because I like to get nicely toasted before bed when I have a cold. I hate waking up in the middle of the night when I'm sick. Whether I select an over-the-counter or over-the-bar remedies, I like to be properly nestled in the arms of morpheus when I'm unwell.

Today, e. and I took my visiting mother on the shorter tour of Uptown Sleepy College Town, including a pilgrimage to the local Russian cafe for food of our people. Our people sure have good food. Then, on to the scintillating New Mall for sundry window shopping and gawkery. Visiting Mom purchased a digital camera and other digital camera accoutrement and is happily snapping pictures of family members in compromising positions.

A. and Dr Nutshell dropped by for self-assembled burritos and light conversation, but I was clearly too weak to hold up my end of that bargain, and we called it a night.

Wii have a Wii Fit! I managed to scare one up just before Xmas, but it was not delivered until today. E. appears to be happy with it, and I admit it is far less gimmicky than I was expecting. I'm still pleased I managed to find one at a reasonable price.

So, Dear Diary, that is what I did today. We have nothing planned for tomorrow, though I'm looking forward to some down-time catching up on my reading. I suppose I shall have to write about some of the Very Important Things based on Very Serious Subjects I've been reading about, but that day is not today. Nor will it be tomorrow, I expect.

I hope I am not too sick tomorrow; any excuse for another brandy, I suppose.

    Generic blog entry form #1-X12/B

See, the thing about blogging is that opening up the old browser and actually creating coherent sentences has such a sufficiently high cognitive load that, unless I have something really interesting (to me) to blog about, I'm not that inclined to go through with it.

Day two, and I'm already wondering what the hell to talk about.

    Day 1: the journey starts with a single step.

In no particular order:

• Vacations are good.
• New Year's/40^th bash appears to have been a success. Shout-outs to all who helped us ring in the change.
• I really, really like le cidre de glace. Call me crazy, but I think I prefer this to champagne for celebratory beverages.
• Manhattans are a popular cocktail, and real maraschino cherries seem to make the drink work. Those weird candied cherries soaking in a colour not found in nature never made sense to me.
• I think a cosmopolitan should be made with 100% pure cranberry juice, instead of the usual cranberry cocktail most of us use. I think this might make the recipe I have make more sense.
• My new year's resolution is to blog at least once a day, every day, for one full year. That is, I will try my best to at least update here once a day, barring some unforeseen disaster. Some days this might be a snarky one-liner, and others it might be a full-on essay or rant. But I will be blogging at least once a day. Lucky you!
• Bullet-point blog entries are such a cheat, but since we are going for letter-of-the-law interpretation of the blog once a day thing I can cheat all I want.
• Happy New Year, and all that. Let's all try to not be shitty to each-other and the world this year, and fucking learn how to make this new thing called civilization work for us for a change. Wouldn't that be nice?
• This is the last bullet point.

That is all.

    Scarlett Johansson naked

It's that time again.

Time to honour the latest Clever Monkey Light-Heavy Industries pin-up tractor girl.

Using the latest in Google-y technology, we ask the panting, sweaty internets which starlet would you like to see naked? Then, we assemble a crack team of photogs to run web searches to find the most fetching image of said starlet and post it here for your panting, sweaty viewing enjoyment.

This time around our lucky winner is Scarlett Johansson. Congratulations Scarlett!

To be fair, referring to Ms Johansson as a starlet is probably all wrong. She is obviously a very smart young lady with oodles of acting talent. Unfortunately, This Modern World can be terribly unfair to women (famous and mundane alike). The internets, they hunger. And they especially hunger for nude pictures of Scarlett Johansson, or pictures of Scarlett Johansson in lingerie. They must feed, or we all suffer.

In the interests of full disclosure, the internets really wanted to see more of internet phenom Katherine Lee. In the spirit of fair play I decided to opt for the big Hollywood star rather than subject Ms Lee to any further (possibly unwanted) attention. And then wrecked that completely by tagging her here.

This internet thing is so hard.

Check below the fold for stunning, never-before-seen images of Scarlett Johansson naked, nude and in lingerie.

[Read the rest...]

    Apple Mail, Gmail and Notes

It is still totally beta, but I actually use the To Do and Notes feature of Apple Mail quite a bit. I like how it hooks up with iCal and centralizes my stuff in one interface that I always have enabled.

What I don't like is how flaky and buggy these features are, especially when you have references to IMAP mailbox accounts. For some reason Mail wants to update Gmail with changes to Notes before they are saved and even when you are making the Note on a local IMAP account.

The results are Notes that can't save, or disappear, and 10s or 100s of failed Notes that hang around forever and cannot be deleted. And I mean cannot, ever, ever be deleted, no matter what you do.

But I ran across a hint that suggested I revisit the Gmail account settings. Specifically, Gmail IMAP supports the IDLE state for remote accounts. This is, essentially, a way for IMAP servers to push updates to authenticated clients.

This means your client spends less time actually going to the server to ask for mail. It will sit patiently knowing that Gmail (or whoever) will let it know when there is new mail.

A side-effect of this change is that Notes and To Dos are much more friendly, and the confusing cycle-of-updates that was causing them to endlessly loop while you were creating them seems to have solved itself.

So, if you use Apple Mail, and subscribe to one or more Gmail accounts, make sure you use IMAP. Furthermore, for each one of those IMAP accounts in Apple Mail that support IDLE (your provider, like Google, will say if they do) go into the Advanced settings and clear the Include when automatically checking for new mail option.

You will still get your mail regularly as ever, but your client will spend less time hitting the server for no reason. As a bonus, To Dos and Notes will work better.

Hopefully posting this here will help lost internauts find a solution to this problem that I struggled with for months.

    ONE TWO THREE FOUR!

I'm not an aging punk, but I play one on the internet.

On a tip from Boing Boing I checked out this pretty awesome archive of photos from the classique Age of Punk.

Johnny, Savoy, San Francisco, August 20, 1976

The photographer, Jenny Lens, is releasing photos from her extensive archives as a series of DIY ebooks. This photo is from the first release in the series, Ramones First West Coast Tour, 1976. (Photograph used by permssion. I think. The stated terms of use are a little confusing, but I'm assuming that the non-commercial clause is in effect here. I urge the photog to consider a non-commercial CC license for her work!)

These are not fine art prints, on low-acid paper, framed in powder-coated steel and meant to be viewed in a gallery (though I see no reason why they couldn't be displayed in this manner). Some of the negatives are thin or blown-out, with so much contrast that most detail is just missing. Sometimes the focus is wonky or very soft. The images are raw, grainy and immediate.

And it just works.

I've already dropped the photographer an email asking for The Clash to be featured in a future volume.

I was a little too young in '76 to be into The Ramones (I attended that particular Rock and Roll High School much later) but in the early-to-mid 80s I discovered The Clash. This probably changed my young self forever (and proves I come by my fuck-you attitude honestly). So I'm curious to see these moments from my youth (however distant) captured on grainy black & white emulsion.

    Re: my scheduled political rant

As per M. Nutshell, Ph.D., the rant I was working up to regarding current events in Canadian politics has been suspended. Instead, like the good doctor, I give you Yarn Harlot. Absolutely spot-on.

Seriously, the way some folks are going on about this, you'd think they weren't familiar with the basic machinery of their own governments. It's enough to give one an aneurism.

Burst blood vessels, averted.

Oh, and by the way, Governor General Michaëlle Jean is totally hot. I'm just not afraid to admit it.

    What does that Queen song really mean, anyway?

My recent spectacular spill notwithstanding, I've been safely using my bicycle as my main source of low-impact transportation for years, and well before it was considered eco-chic. I've been commuting by bike regularly nearly the entire time I've lived in this province. And when I lived in Manitoba I used to bike to work in the middle of the winter. (Yes, I was really that hard-core. I'm softer-core now. More of a medium-low-core.)

So, I know exactly what I want from an urban commuter bike.

After nearly two decades and thousands of kilometers, you can imagine that my aging Raleigh hybrid has seen better days. The bog-standard chromalloy frame is starting to show more than a little rust and both axles need a complete rebuild. Actually, the front axle has been eating bearings for so many months that I'm afraid to open it up and take a look.

But I keep putting it off until the next season, mostly because I'm a little obsessed with using my current ride up completely. I mean, the wheels are true (I'm a big fan of aluminium rims) and it is still a fundamentally sound bicycle. At some point I'm going to have to cut the long tail short of course, so I've been shopping for the ideal commuter bike with my eyes (if not my wallet) for a few years.

My wishlist has all the usual suspects: disc brakes, large front crank, street-tuned gearing, aluminium frame. I wouldn't mind front shocks even though they steal a little of the pedalling energy, but this is not required. One thing that has really bothered me is that we still use chains as the primary drive. Dirty, slippy, nasty chains. We hates them!

So, when I saw a reference on the Make blog to the growing number of production bikes with belt-drives I took notice. Using the same technology as motorcycles and snowmobiles, these guys employ a clean and quiet carbon composite belt for the primary drive.

My new bike-crush: the Trek Soho urban commuter in light grey, with belt-drive.

I'm seriously thinking of getting one of these for next year. I just need to go to my local shop and give one a test-drive.