Image Surgery

Ahhh, the beautiful sounds of a soft bossa nova to help lull you quietly to a restful doze, João Gilberto lazily singing and strumming on his guitar. The subtleties of the picking of the strings, the quiet noises the audience makes, all add to make the recording full of life and very relaxing.

The really amazing part, however, is that I’m listening to this on an aeroplane. The volume is at normal levels, and the background noises are subdued enough not to interfere. A few weeks ago, I thought myself crazy for spending what I did on yet another pair of headphones. Today, as I settle into almost 24 hours of air travel, I wonder why I haven’t done this sooner.

So, to anyone who may be in a situation where noise would do better to not be heard, I strongly urge you to consider a pair of quality, noise cancelling headphones. I highly doubt you’ll regret it.

Also, having 3 seats to stretch out across doesn’t hurt either.

Today, my monitor died. Well, one of my many monitors died, but it seems the most significant because it was my main monitor, a lumbering behemoth and part-time bed for my cat.

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As a person who spends (too) much of his day trapped behind a monitor, I tend to want to have the largest amount of real estate available to me. It was with this in mind, and after years of using dual monitors at various workplaces that I decided to take the plunge and get this 21” used beauty. It was cheap, as all good technology hopefully is as well as rarely is. I bought it on eBay and hauled it across provincial borders, and even managed to mark up my desk trying to lift it up.

Now I have a hole on my desk. Given that I’m moving soon, I’m not too sad to see that much space cleared up. Even if I wasn’t moving, at an almost perfect 53cm cubed and a back breaking 32 kg, it’d clear up some major desk space. I’ll probably pay 10 times what I paid for it and get an LCD with a few extra inches in my new home, but part of me will miss the misfiring guns, the plethora of inputs of which only one is useful to me, and the 4 minute waits for it to warm up before the image appeared.

Nostalgia is a weird beast, attaching us to something that has so many drawbacks, making us feel a loss when all signs point to an improvement.

\* sigh *

When I was learning to drive, I went to the government office in my home town a few months before my 16th birthday and picked up a copy of the rules of the road. When I moved to Québec, some years later, I was already a well established driver, had a good idea of the rules of the road, and didn’t need to re-learn the rules in Québec. Which was fine because there didn’t appear to be any anyway. Getting my license exchanged required an appointment (for what exactly, I’ve never been sure), but aside from producing immigration papers from my fifth cousin on my mother’s side to prove my identity, I didn’t have to do anything.

However, I’m now teaching a friend how to drive. I though it might be a good idea for me to have a copy of the guide, so that I could give her correct information and be reminded myself of exactly how this stuff worked (at least on paper). So my first instinct was to head on down to my local website, and download a PDF copy of the guide. It must exist, right?

I have been working hard on a new design for this my site, and I’d like to give you a preview of what I’ve been working on!

The current site is not really my design at all, but simply the nice-but-plain K2 theme for WordPress. It works, gets the job done, but I want to offer a site that is much more personalised, and has some features that aren’t found elsewhere.

To make this all happen, I need to find myself a web designer. If you are one, or know of a good one, keep reading!

This is new to me.

Not blogs, or journals, or the idea of writing. Neither the web, hyperlinks and downloads. I’ve seen it all before, and have spent countless hours over the years practically glued to the screen reading all about anything anyone would write about. No, that part has been done before.