Last night was the MacUser Awards ceremony, which both I and my lady wife – as a contributor to the magazine – attended. Many and frequent high jinx ensued. Some documentary evidence of the event to be found here and here.

No sign of a replacement hard disk for my MacBook yet. Gah.

My MacBook's hard disk died recently; I'm kind of between computers, living something of a nomad life as I wait for Seagate to exchange my defective drive for a working one, so apologies for the dearth of posts here, and for delays in replies to email.

While we wait for normal service to be resumed...

My influence increases – a review I wrote for sister title PC Pro was licensed to an Australian PC magazine, and has appeared in print and on its website. I wasn't even aware of this till I had an email from the developers of the software reviewed noting the review.

Creative advertising: some lovely examples here [thanks, Nik], here and here.

Amusing* story: I phoned A Major Internet Service Provider the other day, and was told that it would be pointless to send them an email as their email system was down.

Finally, who doesn't love kitties doing cute things? [thanks, Nik]




* For a given value of 'amusing'.

Yup, Summer is over. Pitch black mornings, dark on the commute home, torrential downpours of rain, and that chilly feeling on slipping into bed. Gah. And still months till Christmas – the good cheer may be forced and phoney, but it's still some good cheer, people.

In other news, check out these quite beautiful composite pictures of Sydneysiders, this really quite disturbing video footage from a service in a Pentecostal church, and this fantastic blog post from my erstwhile colleague, Chris Brennan, entitled The Seven Stages of Mac Fandom.

This morning, for example, I learned that ghetto boys can suck there mumz. Inspiration can strike from anywhere, you know.

Thanks for the helpful dialogue box, Illustrator...

Things are a little manic at present, what with one thing and another. We declined our upstairs neighbours' invitation to their New Cross Crisp Festival last night; would have been a laugh, I suspect, but we were just too whacked, and judging by the sounds of copious vomiting that attended my morning bath – their bathroom is directly above ours – it was a wise decision.



In other news, I've been doing some rearranging of our media centre setup, and have had the Macs going full tilt encoding, reencoding and moving various media files. Above you see the MacBook ripping a DVD, converting some DivX to H.264 (pulling the originals off one networked drive, and saving them to another) while the Mac mini (with the blue desktop) was engaged in DivX to H.264 encoding as well, plus copying gigabytes of data from a network to a local, and between two local drives. Phew. All this was happening simultaneously, and nothing fucked up – result!

It's a life of such little triumphs and minor catastrophes at the moment. Got caught in the rain today, which was so heavy that at times I was sloshing literally ankle-deep in water in some places. Utterly drenched. I was taking our washing to the launderette – I could have just sprinkled in a little Ariel around the case and pulled it over some cobbles and achieved the desired effect, I think.

In typically male fashion, I wish there was something I could do to help my wife. Her work is stressful and not particularly rewarding, and she is what psychiatrists call Not A Happy Bunny. I think she's caught in a live to work cycle that leaves no space for her to enjoy the good things in life. I guess we're both at a what's it all for, really, when you get right down to it place that makes self-motivation a bitch. Even having fun seems to require so much damn effort. Gah, sorry, you didn't come here to read twenty-something angst*. Do not adjust your sets...


* Like teenage angst, but with more household commitments and fewer spots.