Sunday, 9th December, 2007

My Two Girls

thaumata random

I would take a photograph, but I very much doubt that Thau would be too impressed. I just wanted to mention that she's lying in bed, fast asleep, with Biscuit curled up at her head ... and it's the cutest thing in the world.

It's not surprising she's still asleep (it's past midday). I mean, I know she has this weird body-clock thing where she's out of sync with the entire world anyway, but we were up until about 5.30am this morning, first of all dancing at the Meatspace Lounge (which I bet she has a SLurl to) for Kyle Beltran's rezday bash, then pissing ourselves giggling at the sheer gloriousness of a set of 'barber shop quintet' animated thingumies, which we've decided to take on tour across the grid.

Sleeping patterns are odd things, really. I'm (apparently) a "morning person" — although I can't quite see it myself. I suppose it's fair to describe me as awake in the mornings — if not alive.

I find it impossible to sleep in, to be honest — regardless of what time I go to bed. I think it has something to do with the amount of light around — in that my brain just refuses to let go if there's even a chink of daylight in the near vicinity.

There was a well link-to piece of text on the interwebs a while back, explaining how to force yourself into the type of person that could get regular amounts of sleep each night. It went something like:

1. Go to bed whenever you feel tired, regardless of when that is.

2. Always wake up at the same time.

Apparently, after a while, you'd fall into a regular sleeping pattern. I was intrigued by this, being someone who suffers a lot from insomnia. Or at least, what I call "insomnia" — which is probably better described as "OMG I haven't drunk a whole bottle of wine and I'm too sober to sleep".

I didn't actually set out to give it a go, but I've found that recently, I'm always up pretty early in the morning — even mornings like this, after Fuck All Sleep™. What kinda happens is that I wake up around 7-8ish, and despite my body screaming to go back to sleep, my brain kicks in and starts mulling over all the little worries and frets that I generally have, and even though the lure of the duvet is staggeringly great, I just have to get up and make a coffee.

This morning, for example, the following things are in my brain:

1. I need to renew my passport.

   It runs out in June, I think — based on vague memories of having to get the train at an ungodly hour (even for me) to Liverpool to stand in line with a hideous picture of myself and a few forms, two days before a trip to Paris — because I am crap enough not to remember those kinds of things.

   It seems weird to me that you have to have at least six months still left on your passport to visit the States (and other places?) — but I guess it's something to do with them getting all paranoid that you'll overstay your welcome, and not have the right documents to get home.

   My plan is (you see) to head over to Chicago on the 28th, and stay for a few weeks. As long as (a) I can get the time off work (which I'm pretty sure that I can, having not ever actually taken any leave before), and (b) I don't somehow manage to piss Amiee's entire family off somehow, and get booted out the door.

2. I need to invoice people

   I picked up a rather lucritive bit of Second Life building the other day, and I've a nice fat invoice to send off. I am, however, stunningly crap at things like that, and it's taken me a whole week just to send off an email asking where I should send the invoice to.

   But hey, apparently they pay very quickly, so fingers crossed I should have plenty to flash around in my wallet over the new year — especially seeing as the exchange rate is something like ten bazillion dollars to the pound right now.

3. I'm doing a lecture on Tuesday

   "Um Siobhan? Isn't that what your job is? Don't you do things like that all the time?"

   Hrmm. Yes, I suppose so. Although actually my job is more to do with one-on-one tutorial sessions, and general "Here, let me help you with that tricky bit of PhotoShop".

   I'm wanting to do (natch) a talk about Virtual Spaces — but not (surprisingly) all about the things I do in Second Life. A few days ago, someone asked me if I was ever going to submit some of my work for /seconds, and it made me realise that I don't actually make work much these days.

   I mean, I know I made another one of my stripe pictures about a week ago, but I haven't really seen that as my work for quite some time.

   These days, it more 'undefined' really — it's a confusing mix of 'online performance' (as Kisa and Siobhan), some kind of 'art-meets-technology' thingumy, and the odd attempt at redefining my photographic work.

   Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that I'm not really sure what I'm doing as "an artist" at the moment, but I'm hoping that I can maybe cobble something together over the course of the next two days that will go someway towards explaining it to a group of 18-19 year olds.

4. I need to tell my mother something

   And when I've told her, I can tell yous as well.

Some Links

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I've been struggling along with Newsgator recently, trying to keep up with feeds and whatnot. I know that everyone else in the sane world uses Google Reader (or Bloglines I guess), but I got a free Newgator account when I bought NetNewsWire a while back — and seeing as I only really used it to sync my feeds between Macs, it was all fine and dandy.

The thing is though, my 'working environment' is still not quite how I want it to be. That's actually a rather large geek-type 'bore everyone to tears' post for the future, but basically: Newsgator's interface sucks; I like reading feeds in an App rather than in a browser; I downloaded NetNewsWire an hour ago onto my temporary machine, and found several thousand unread posts.

Anyways, some links that I found interesting:

Fontshop — Unzipped — The making of FF Meta Serif

"Last week it was finally confirmed in the FontShop News e-mailing: FF Meta Serif is available in all its OpenType goodness."

Did you know that FF Meta is the font used through the Second Life interface? Did you also know that if you poke around in the SL client's package contents, there's a copy of it buried in a folder?

...not that I'm encouraging the unlicensed use of a distributed font

Crooked Spin » Blog Archive » E-junkie

...which is basically an online shopping cart that you can add easily to your site, and one that links with PayPal. I'm linking to it mainly for future reference — if, that is, I ever manage to sort out what the hell I'm doing work-wise online.

Which, knowing me, I probably never will.

SixApart Sells LiveJournal To A Russian Group — GigaOM

"Less than three years after it acquired LiveJournal, San Francisco-based blogging software company, SixApart has decided to sell the business to a Russian group, SUP."

Understanding Sub-Pixel Anti-Aliased Font Rendering

Oh look, I'm a geek. I'm fascinated by this stuff — ever since (in fact) I was about ten years old and a friend of mine was explaining to me how new computers could make smooth shapes by blurring edges a little bit.

(That's 25 years ago, for the curious)

Thing is though, I'm still going to mention the thing that I seem to be the only one to have noticed — that when you have "Medium — best for Flat Panel" selected in the Appearance preference pane, white text on dark backgrounds looks too bold to me.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Year 1999 A.D.

"What the wife selects on her console, will be paid for by the husband on his counterpart console"

I really love looking at old predictions of what life will be like In The Future™. What's most interesting about the more successful ones, is that they often predict things that are actually quite common now — but using technologies that are just extensions of what existed at the time.

They get what we do right, just not how we do it.

The thing is, a lot of the time we look back at these and scorn the naiveity of them, without really grasping that a lot of the predictions that we make these days will probably be looked back on and laughed at with equal derision.

But yes, it is rather funny to see them totally miss the idea that In The Future™ maybe women would be independent.

And finally...

YouTube — Brooker's: 10 Biggest Cocks in Advertising

"Charlie Brooker runs through the ten worst blokes in current UK TV advertising." — and says "FUCK" a lot

God, I love that man...