Live Blog: I’m Studying!

So in a spontaneous decision to reset my sleep-wake-cycle I decided to go to the library at 7 in the morning, the time I’ve been going to bed in the last week or so. The lack of sleep means my brain is working randomly, so I thought I’d do a live-blog.

I arrived at 6:55-ish, and the place was deserted! Woo. Or something.

07:40 Pretty hot blondie just arrived and is sitting 2 places away from me. Hmm she smells good. I wonder if I should ask her what perfumé she’s wearing. And then what. She unpacks an elaborate array of decoys to occupy the seat between us.

Maybe as a joke I should get Autopilot from the movie Airplane! (here’s a picture) and inflate him to take up space in the library. Where does one buy one of those anyway?

08:07 So she unpacked her things, and left. That was 20 minutes ago. That’s a bit cheeky, but hey, better than not having any place to study. Now she’s returned, with a coffee. Still fragrant. Still blonde. The library is not as full as it was on 8 AM two weeks ago, there are still about 5 seats available in this wing.

08:23 Wow, 15 minutes ago I felt fine, now I’m drowsy.

08:56 Two girls on my table of 6 have Starbucks coffee mugs, the ones that you re-use. Oh one of them’s the blondie from before, and the other one has a shiny MacBook Pro, 13″. But Starbucks, heh what’s the psychological term for that feeling of satisfaction of drinking crap that you get only because the crap has a brand?

Here’s a starting point for that thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

09:52 Ooo fuck, my laptop blue-screened, a VMWare workstation error popped up when I mistakenly clicked a Windows Explorer window of a disconnected network drive (which always hangs Windows Explorer, fuck you Windows), and then it BSOD’ed. I wonder what VMWare had to do with it, since I’m not running it. Maybe my Windows environment is inside a Matrix-like virtual machine, which apparently some malware are capable of creating.

10:44 So 3 hours later blondie’s boyfriend shows up, the one he’s been reserving the place for. He looks douchey. This is petty, but hey, I set out to document my environment for a day, so it’s all in the name of… documentation!

10:50 And 5 minutes later they go for coffee.

11:19 Aaand blondie and douchey are back. 1 minute under the 30-minute break limit too. Not bad.

11:57 And I think I’m going home. Sleepy. I wonder if I should sleep, or keep going since my brain is still able to understand concepts…

The .nomedia Dilemma

This should be part of a larger critique/review of the Android operating system, but since I lack time, here’s one annoyance I’ve found on it.

The plus side is, you can plug the phone over USB and it will act as a USB storage device to the computer, not requiring resource-hogging iTunes to copy files into it. This also works for the music files. Another plus side is, the music player apps can semi-sanely deduce that a JPEG file inside a directory of MP3s is probably the cover image of the album. This is better than having the image embedded in each MP3 file. Or at least to me, preferable.

A cover image, what is that, you ask. Well, you see kids, music used to be delivered on circular 12cm shiny platters inside boxes…

But annoyingly, the music and gallery programs look in the entire SD-card for music (or image) files. So the gallery program shows folders with single files, which are the cover images to each album on my phone.

The internet says, if you don’t want a directory to appear in the music/gallery program, you can add a blank file called “.nomedia” into the directory.

Do you see the problem yet? If I want the cover images to disappear from my gallery app, I can put that file in the directory of music. But guess what else that does? Exactly, it will make the music invisible to the music player.

I wish the programs can be made to only look in certain directories. Not having to search the entire filesystem would also make them more efficient.

Short Enough for Twitter…

I wonder if The Simpsons will ever die, or if it will live a zombie-like existence to satisfy the needs of the long-tail* consumers…

* I keep using this term, I’m not sure it means what I think it means.

Too Long For Twitter

Oh man, my brain’s really fried. I just opened a fridge and saw a tube of powdered garlic, (which doesn’t need to be refrigerated) sitting there in the middle of an otherwise empty shelf. I had put it there when I was unloading my groceries.

Pre-emptive Technical Support

Watching a demo of the HTC Desire Z (nifty phone!), I’m suddenly reminded of a conversation I witnessed between a nerd, and a non-nerd, who happened to be a girl. That she’s a she is relevant to the story not because I’m saying she doesn’t understand technology, but because probably the nerd was trying to impress her by being helpful. Which he failed to do. Amusingly.

The girl had just gotten herself a new SIM-card, so the nerd asked her, and I quote imprecisely, because he wasn’t that articulate, “Do you know if your phone stores the phone numbers on your SIM card or on your phone?”

“What?”

“You see, we may have to transfer the phone numbers from your old SIM card to the new one.”

“What? I don’t get it.”

“You see, there are 2 ways to store…”

At that point I got embarrassed at the nerd making tech people look bad, so I interrupted him and said, “Come on, most phones these days store their numbers internally and not on the SIM. Even so, why are you confusing her? Just wait and see what happens when she puts the SIM card in, if all her numbers are gone then we can help her.”

OK, maybe the story isn’t that amusing. It was to me!

Blog Reboot?

So I thought I’d blog again. But there are no stories to tell really. I mostly slept today.

I thought I’d go to bed early last night, and wake up early today and get a thousand things accomplished.

That didn’t happen. I did sleep for 30 minute segments last night, played Split/Second, and woke up at 3PM.

One exciting thing did happen, I dreamt (dreamed? The browser is complaining “dreamt” is not a correctly spelled word) I was watching a plane land. It was a big one, with a wide flat bottom, which was filled with floodlights for some reason. Actually it looked like a Hercules C-130, with rows of 3 big round flat-bottomed lights at the bottom. It was trying to land, and I thought, “Wow, is that an Airbus A380? Cool!”. Then I looked at the writing on its side, and it said A-340. “Oh, ok then.”. It was still diving, far in the horizon, between 2 mountains and a village in the middle, and I wondered when it was going to pull its nose up. Suddenly it wobbled, went behind one of the mountains, and boom! Huge fireball!

At this point I thought, “Holy shit! I better get a camera to document this! I can’t believe I’m seeing this! This will be all over the news!”

And then I woke up.

Facebook is Watching (?)*

* the title is an obvious homage to 1984, with a “(?)” for lawsuit-proofing.

So Facebook Connect has arrived, the ability to FB-Like! a page anywhere on the internet as long as the owner of that page has enabled that feature. Another feature is you go to e.g. http://www.docs.com, and if you are logged into Facebook at the same time, it scarily says “Hello [Your Name Here]!”.

Through the magic of the internet, it doesn’t mean that the site has access to your Facebook account details, BUT, it does mean Facebook theoretically knows what sites you are visiting which are part of its Connect network, AND they can also store this information. Imagine someone having the list of all the sites you’ve visited the last couple of days.. weeks.. months?

Even if you’ve logged out of Facebook, they still store cookies on your computer that can be sent to them when an external websites load that “Like!” button from Facebook’s server, and even if you’re logged out, they can theoretically store information in those cookies that links your web-browser with an account that was logged into Facebook on that browser.

If you don’t mind that someone knows which websites you’ve been visiting, then you don’t have a problem with this. If you do mind, then… potentially there’s a problem.

According to the guide, FB Connect works when the website has code that loads information from: http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php*

From what I can see while opening http://www.docs.com, it loads 3 external links from Facebook, that begin with:
http://www.facebook.com/extern/*
api.facebook.com/restserver.php*
static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect/xd_proxy*

I’ve added these addresses to my ad-blocker (I use Proxomitron, Firefox users can use Ad-Block Plus). That way if my web-browser asks to download some data from these addresses, that request will be refused.

I don’t know if Facebook is spying on its users or not, maybe not, but what if they are? I’d rather be not spied upon.