Frisky Stolen Moments

Overdue shoutouts:

• Stolen Moments: My younger brother is working on a inline skating movie showcasing the best Denmark has to offer. He got a short preview up as a taste of what the final film is going to offer. It'll be available on DVD and VHS in late spring, and will feature some very smooth editing and very smooth skating. Do check it out!

• Frisky: The work-o-folio of my good friend and talented digital pixel-pusher Daniel. Besides the work samples, he has a large collection of beautiful backdrop images to spice up your desktop. I'm hooked on Australian Infront. He's also available for freelance work, if you need some sparkling pixels moved around in an alluring way.

Avoiding the singles trap

The singles trap almost had me. But I side-stepped it. I'm talking about the new Staind album. "It's Been A While" and "Outside" have been touring MTV much to my enjoyment. I love their mix of a dry voice, some-what original lyrics, interposed by a wee bit of electric guitar-slingering.

But beware, people of same thinking. It's a sheep in wolves clothing! I was right about ready to press buy when I glansed at my collection of dusty CDs bought of singles impressions. So I embarked on a quest to find a friend with a rip (life is too short to scour file-sharing services for full albums in decent quality).

Got the full album down in no time. Got majorly disappointet in no time. Most of the tracks takes Heavy Metal to a whole new scary place. The rest mixes the great sound of the two singles with the awful sound of the scary stuff.

Avoid!

Rewriting brain

When I was six, the two front steps to our house changed texture. I don't remember why. I doubt I even knew. Or thought about finding out. It wasn't the new texture or its origin, though, that has me regularly recalling these steps every few years. It was how quickly I forgot the look and feel of the old.

They simple faded from recollection within a week. Looking up "front door steps" brought back only a picture of the new. The old was gone. Forever lost.

The rewriting of the steps in my memory puzzled me greatly back then. I could spend minutes trying to remember what once was. Passing my hand over the new flat surface in astonishment.

Human memory still puzzles me.

Amnesia coming early

How is it possible to forget a dinner appointment made only 30 minutes in advance? Amazing. Luckily my mother isn't the type of women who gets angry. I would have :)

Customer service horror story #9456434

Disbelief personified (me): "So you're saying there's a good chance I'll have to pay €200 and live without my Vaio for 14 days only to get the same defective machine back? That is, if the engineer at your repair center in France has another opinion on what constitutes a loud/broken harddrive."

Wall of Sony (customer service): "I see your problem, but that is correct."

I am baffled. That was the fourth customer service person acknowledging—in gebrochen English—the insanity of their policy, yet offering little in pity and less in solutions.

Current status: Waiting another 48 hours to have their CIO examine the insanity. Having to call in (paying international rates every time) to get the answer. Sony Europe doesn't do email support.

In a stylesheeted flash

Stylesheets are great, of course. They remove much of the annoyance in making HTML look pretty. But why oh why must the entirely CSS'ed page designs render a non-styled version of the page half a second before showing the real deal? I understand CSS is supposed to be optional and displaying a HTML page before all the elements have loaded (such as the stylesheet) is great and all, but still. There must be a better way that includes not flashing a non-styled page. Or at least there ought to be one. Update: Opera 6.0 has no such problem

Turning on the Radio at 8.0

UserLand is getting ready to launch a new version of Radio, and I for one am eagerly awaiting it. I have the 7th version installed, and loved the RSS subscription features, but the outliner left me wanting more (and I found it in NoteMap). Now with 13 months of development from Winer and Co. put into Radio 8, I'm most certainly going to give it another go. Scooble is taunting already with the multiple blogs thing, sweet.

The gleeful backlog

BloomingThoughts.cnm, my NoteMap outline for in-writing thoughts, needs pruning. It's become overgrown with reminders of my inability to take a thought to its finished state before abandoning it. Half-finished thoughts perish usually fades out of interest in a day, sometimes even hours. That's why the notes next to the bed hasn't resulted in a lot of published thoughts. I commit an interesting story in form of an headline, and sometimes a few additional words, but don't return to it before at least 16 hours later (sleep, work, and study makes sure of that). The chances of survival gets slimmer by the hour. The gleeful backlog welcomes another member.

I must not stop writing from the conception of the thought until it's finish and online. It seems to be the only way to get anything done.

I'm in love with an Apple

It wasn't a webtablet or a PDA, it was so much more. The new iMac has me excited unlike any computer ever had. It's so beautiful, so clean, so right. I watched the unveiling from MacWorld live off Apple's site. Then I sat through the entire 1.5 hour show one more time. Apple is amazing. Now where can I find some poor smock who still haven't seen the iMac and make him buy my two tangled desktop PC's? They seem so utter obsolete.

Oh, and OS X rocks. iTools, iMovies, iDVD, and iPhotos rocks. I have untill March to scratch enough dough together to get the iMac when it launches in Denmark. And make it I will.

Beep... Beep... Beep...

Fourteen days of hibernation from Loud Thinking is believed to have ended. My single resolution for the new year is to write on a regular basis. The recent absence hasn't been for lack of subjects to ponder loudly about, though. Next to my bed is a piece of paper and a pen that has already captured eight potential headlines. I promise I'll convert at least one of said headlines into a full-fledged bubble of somethingness tonight. (How clever of me to use public commitments to force writing! Update three days later: It obviously didn't work)

Reasonable people bend the rules

My love for lists and outliners lead me to NoteMap a little over a month ago. With an asking price of $100, I knew it was more than I'd feel comfortable paying - being a student and all. Never the less, I spend the entire 30 day grace period falling completely in love with NoteMap. Especially for taking notes in classes, I got that "no way I'm going back" feeling great software gives you.

I ran out of grace last Tuesday. For a couple of days, I postponed the problem of having 42 files locked in the NoteMap trunk. Since I jumped on the XP wagon, I have only rebooted my laptop less than a dozen times over the past two months. Doing hibernation and stand-byes keeps shareware from checking up on the grace period as they're never shutdown. All is good when you don't have to worry about crashes.

When you almost don't have to worry about crashes, that is. Three days ago WebDrive (shareware program that maps a FTP site to a drive letter) exposed XP's lack of improvement on network time-out recovery over previous versions of Windows. The 20-something days of no-shutdown glory has been brought to an end and the system to its knees. WebDrive was indeed the culprit, but it was the inability of the task manager to recover from the mess that forced the reboot.

Having to reboot meant having to close NoteMap. And since I was all out of grace, NoteMap wouldn't let me back in after Windows rebounded. 42 files in the trunk. A dire situation requiring swift action, in this case referring to playing the "young and poor" song to CaseSoft (makers of NoteMap) sales lady Christine Cox. I appealed to reason and compassion, and it worked!

I got off paying $25 -- a quarter of the sticker price. A very reasonable price for a great piece of software. Such a noble deed should not go unapplauded, hence this story. Do check out NoteMap, if you're running Windows (no Mac or Linux version). If you're a student, I bet they're even willing to extend the 75% discount they gave me to include you.