2005.10.28
Life sucks and you'd better get used to it. Sounds negative, but nothing could be further from the truth. The sooner you understand that politicians are liars, thieves, and worse, the sooner you stop waiting around for a leader to make everything better. Stop putting your faith in Gods, friends, family--hell, you may not be such a hot prospect yourself. Truth is hard and absolutely essential.He goes on to explain how it was his abstract expectations for the world that literally brought him to the brink of jumping off the top of a building, but the truth "It'll HURT" that brought him back.
Article of the Moment
It's a fun morning that starts out with Intelligent Design vs Monty Python.
Product of the Moment
Ksenia is the envy of her classmates after I gave her the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse...it's pretty slick. A bit smaller than a regular mouse but not too small, and the clever bit is that the USB plug/receiver snaps into the base of the mouse which makes it very portable and non-fiddly, as well as tells the mouse it can shut off to save battery life. Plus the basic model doesn't seem to suffer from the "featuritis" of many mice that stick on too many buttons. (As far as I can tell the site is misleading about the feature set...and I had to use Google to find that they had a feature comparison tool--and even that is a bit arcane. What's a "Smart Receiver"? and I'm vaugely amused by "Sophisticated Finish" and "Cutting Edge Design" and "Ergonomic Design" as seperate features.)
So thumbs up for that. In general I think Microsoft does very decent hardware work...I think they were the first to start pushing scrollwheels in a major way, and the split keyboards that I prefer (and that drive coworkers sitting at my PC nuts...) Though I'm a little unhappy with the number of multimedia buttons they've been adding to the keyboards, making an already biggish keyboard even more unwieldy.
Lately I've been recognizing how I have some neurons that "compact design" rubs in just the right way...I get a little happy buzz when I see something just the right compact size (so long as it doesn't seem fragile.) This applies to the car I drive, cellphones I admire...sometimes I wonder if it might even tie-in with body types I find appealing. There's just something so karmically right about avoiding excess when it comes to design.