Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2002/09/Wow, this is really weird. I just upgraded the LiveJournal client I use and this one is really funky looking. It looks like they added a number of features. The spell checker is much more like MS Word (underlines, which you can right-click for suggestions). I wonder how that effects the world–auto spell checking. When I was a kid, you had to go to the dictionary to look up a word, guessing at the phonetics if you really did not know how it was spelled. The act of physically looking up the word helped reinforce the spelling in your brain–partly because it was a pain in the ass to look take the time to look up a word and partly because the act of copying it letter-for-letter from the dictionary into your work helps it mentally stick. Nowadays, you are presented with a menu that you can react to without any thought. “Good evening sir, our special tonight is poached salmon. I did not understand what you were trying to say. Might I suggest the 'Live Journal,' 'Live-Journal,' 'Life-Journal,' 'lovelorn,' or 'lava' this evening?” Like a video game, you mindlessly click on the correct-looking words until you win the game. The game, of course, is not having any red underlines in your document.
Last night was fun, today has not been. Last night was the combined birthday party for vegemitelover and surprise birthday party for Les. I ended up getting them something I have wanted to get for a very long time, but something I have never had a use for myself–I combined their presents and got a giant 3L bottle of beer. We are talking about a beer bottle bigger around and taller than my head full of very strong Dutch beer. Vegemitelover made sushi–vegetarian, fishy, and candy filled. I did not have much to eat or drink, nothing really out of the ordinary: a few bottles of Guinness (normal beer bottle size, not giant ones), a few pieces of sushi, a single piece of the candy-filled sushi, some nice cheese and crackers, and a few cigarillos. None of the above items alone are out of the ordinary for me (well, I do sometimes have candy, but never wrapped in seaweed). I think the synergistic effects of them all ended up kicking my ass today. I feel sick to my stomach. I feel sick to my head. I feel sinus ickyness. I want to roll over, close my eyes, and die, but I keep feeling nauseous and seeing strobe lights when I try to close my eyes.
In other news, I discovered why my web browser (Opera) refuses to display any plugins (Quicktime, Flash, Java, etc). Upgrading to the “unstable” version of Debian gave me some nifty new programs and libraries to play with, but killed some backward compatibility (libfreetype, gnome-print, and Motif's libXm, most notably). I finally fixed the Quicktime problem so I can continue to watch the new Harry Potter trailer over and over again. Maybe I will play with the new Lindows 1.3/2.0 release in a little bit. They supposedly fixed a ton of stuff in it. All I need is SoulSeek (Python or Windows), printing through Word, and Palm hotsync/backup.
