Chocolate Box

Pondering: the purposeless of headaches
Marvelling At: the unbelievably precise timing of said headaches

i took to the road at the weekend and high-tailed it into the nearest city with my Acer. the original mandate was to seek out the wi-fi spots in town and get drunk at the same time.

perhaps before i bundled up my beloved netbook into its car seat and put on spongebob squarepants to keep it quiet during the journey, i should have considered the following:

1) i have pretty bad luck with plans of the best-laid variety
2) i haven't had a drink for two weeks, so i got distracted from my task almost instantly
3) cate blanchett feels it in her water

when i awoke many hours later in a state of mild dehydration, i checked my bleary-eyed emails - clearly for sheer novelty factor as there were three other computers in the room with me - and it must have been at this point that i got distracted by colourful things and left the netbook on with no power-saver in place and eventually the battery went into a deep, peaceful sleep.

the rest of the day was plagued with bars offering free wi-fi. the bastards.

Lessons Learnt: netbook is light enough to fit in bag. users brain also light enough to fit in bag. attention span small enough to fit in wallet
Shiny Things Happened To Be: infuriatingly colourful anime of the baffling variety

The Fellowship Of The Ring(s)

Watching: the world pass by as i Blog On The Move!

just a quick sign in. i'm now officially an on-the-move blogger.

...
..
.

this was going to be more exciting in my head.

Wondering If: that girl i like is really only a few hundred feet away from me right now - and here i am, sitting drunk watching a lord of the rings a thon
Wondering If: i'm too geeky to really care about the above

Flagstaff's Abstract

Overtime: ridiculous amounts
Made Possible By: sacrificing what little is left of my social life

i'm awash with technology.

surrounded by my gizmos, i have so much gadgetry that my room/office/nest is starting to look like Joe Pantoliano's code haven in future-gone-wrong, google-has-taken-over-the-world distopian epic The Matrix. you may have heard of it.

in truth, it's more like Jamie Bell's desert cubby-den in Jumper (yes, i did like that movie, thank you, and i make no apologies), only there's no sand/london buses/Darth Vader The Early Years and i'm a girl, not a dancer. but i digress.

i'm beginning to feel akin to someone who was mildly starved in their childhood and is suddenly thrust into a world where all-you-can-eat chinese buffet is the norm. that is to say, everything on offer is such a novelty that i instinctively want it, but i can't work up the energy to care because i'm already stuffed. with chips. silicon chips. because of food being a metaphor for technology. remember?

so... following my own dogged, if haphazard, train of thought: the new fuji desktop in april was my main course, the lumix in the summer was a fondue pudding thing, and this netbook is like cheese and nuts. my pda was snacking between meals, and my iPod nano was a wartime banana.

i sometimes wonder if i lack structure.

Listening To: the trundle of a happy dishwasher (or maybe it's plotting my distopian demise, who knows?)
Resisting: M&S Sponge Cake

Easy Muffin

Enjoying: the first cup of tea of the day. which is the best, as we all know
Listening To: my noisy fan kicking in at 70 degrees

i'm beginning to see the world from a linux point of view.

two weeks ago, i chose a linux-powered netbook because i thought to myself "beth, old girl", because i've been reading a lot of Wodehouse recently, "i think it's time we took the plunge and became the UberGeek."

first impressions were marred by the toybox linpus that acer have stuck on here for the doofuses of the world, but a quick tinker later and the thing was looking especially purdy and sleek. everything seems quicker in linux. the bootup is 30s. and there's something about all this free software that i love love love. there's other good points, but i'll save them for a rainy journal day as i'm in danger of losing my (potential, but not proven) audience.

in conclusion, i may be on the brink of letting slip the slang "windoze" into my day-to-day vocabulary; i'm positively bustling with indignation over which major developers do and do not support linux distros; i'm using linux words like "distros" without shame.

all of this does not equate to the fact that i feel any affection for that fat penguin thing linux uses as a subliminal underdog message. i'm not a "mascot" girl, i'm not a "hey kawaii bandwagon for meeee" geekgirl following her socially retarded boyfriend from comic shop to comic shop with a vacant smile, and i prefer helvetica to comic sans.

but if i was all of the above, it would take a lot more than a fat penguin representing an operating system to tickle these bios.

Loving: the pale glimmer of light through my dusty blinds
Hating: being too lazy to dust my blinds

Martian Economics

Thinking About: Jeff Brown

That is all.

Ug.

Listening To: the dog squeaking a bone, which sounds eerily like someone fingertipping a balloon

i wonder where the word for balloon came from. ball. oon. it's a floaty ball. therefore: oon.

mice are silly. they've apparently been eating their way into the dog's kibble. this is bizarre, and unecessary, as there's a gaping hole in the bag where i get into the dog's kibble. this to me suggests answers to the following:

1) why mice get caught in traps
2) why mice and humans (and dog humans) can't co-exist in the same household

Learning: new ways to expand my already wide train of thought
Not Learning: to take my plates downstairs when i've finished with them

Rumble Rumble Rumble

Baited-Breathing-It: with the season 2 finale of Weeds
Listening To: strange, unidentifiable rumblings
I Could Be Listening To But I'm Saving It For Later: Aphex Twin's selected ambient works (vol II?)

i can go outside right now (should the perverse urge take me) and look at £45 worth of coal. as far as the fuel-damage of the planet goes versus the cost per load in these times of constant regional economic depression, which the latest money crisis has little or no impact on credit crunch, it doesn't look much.

carbon footprint? you can keep it.

speaking of Dickensian landlords and estate agents finally getting their comeuppance after skimming the financial cream off've the top of relatively honest citizens not wishing to live 16 to a house the housing market slump, i may finally be able to afford a nest of my own in the not-too-distant future. saying the not-too-distant-future sounds a little bit Phillip K. Dick-esque, but in the real world that means sometime in the new year. which is decidedly more Winterson than Bradbury.

Fretting About: where the internet is going, and how will it change in the future / too many literature references per pixel inch
Pretending Not To Fret About: autumn. bastard red leaves. they can bugger off.
Not Fretting About: who wins the gimp parade American election.

No iPod, No Music

Listening To: the early bird catching the worm

mmm. bagelicious early start today - the dog does not seem too happy about it. he's undecided between Course Of Action A) sitting outside dad's door looking miserable and Course Of Action B) sitting between my legs looking at my bagel.

i set the live trap for the mice downstairs last night. we of this household are very pacifist when it comes to animals, but we can't have the kitchen offered up to the Rodentia. so we set normal traps. which the mice can't get enough of (after a few false starts, playing out like a poorly re-dubbed tom and jerry where the lady isn't quite so black anymore. don't think we didn't notice) and we have to haul their sad little carcasses out every morning. well, i'm making it seem like it's the Sommes of the mouse world, but there's only ever one at a time.

anyway. the point i'm making is that the mice never go in my (more expensive and re-usable) humane trap. which is laden with kitkats (they supposedly love chocolate) and raisins (i don't know who does the experiments to see which food mice like, but from my own lab-testing, i'd say they prefer any food where death may be an exciting option) - which, frankly, if i could fit into the trap, i'd be after those nommie treats like a humourously topical subject after a sardonic twist.

Pining After: my own bagels, which have grown cold in the dog seige

Wondering: about mice/work/bagels/egypt

Secret Societies [day one in retrospect]

Listening To: noisy AA1 fan
Watching: dispiritedly as my dog begins a pre-emptive strike involving the duvet
Biggest Catastrophe Of The Day: 12 hour working day for not much ROI
New Sound Track Of The Day: Xen Cuts
Working Hard Made Bearable By: Xen Cuts

long day. long night ahead. all things in balance. cosmic harmony restored. garbled brain functions. night night.

$beth = sleep_mode(true);

Pasta N' Sauce

Making: tea
Boiling: kettle / pasta goodness
Listening To: the kettle boil

i'm blogging while eating dinner. this, i feel, is important to the tone of the following posts. it reminds me, for example, that a lot of the time, my life is boring, ordinary, and is characteris(z)ed by an astonishing lack of events.

i wonder if i'll go to diet hell for adding more cheese to my pasta n' sauce. i wonder where my comma went when i typed it, just there... i wonder if there's such a thing as potential punctuation. what a fantastic concept! maybe we could do away with the need for actual punctuation in sentences, and bring in the power of virtual language instead.

my god this pasta is taking a long time for conveniance food.

idea for essay: the power of the innocent exclamation mark in contemporary fiction and its uses in defusing postmodern situations.

Ponderment of the dinner hour: would you know if a mouse crawled up your dishwasher hose until it was too late?

Diet Karma Resolved By: extra cheese proving too hot to eat and causing more calorie-crunching typing.

working (on a theory)

.. this is hopefully the first and last time i'll mention this thinking, as i do believe a good blog should never be self-aware: i can't remember the purpose that i assigned to this space. it was very clear in my head when i chose "Create A Blog" on friday. and it had something to do with my netbook. but now i can't articulate it.

what a netculture faux-pas.

*taps chin with biro in thoughtful pose*

i think... something about... blogging (a lot more than i do usually), using my netbook or maybe any other mobile device? sort of at-the-scene impressions of this existence? it probably had existence in, i'm quite keen on that word.

i think it was maybe devised out of a crossover between The Diet Diaries and my hidden blog (which is an abstract mussy-fussy thing which i share rarely and even then, only when drunk).

...there may be a part two on this, before i give up and start flipping through a magazine.

All Things In Reality

For those who have stumbled upon me:

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