My life

Thanks to Fanpop for the image.

Having recently finished Arthur C Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, I was contemplating how much memory might be required to store the entirety of a person's existence ready for re-activation at a future date - a la Rimmer out of Red Dwarf.

I recently purchased a very reasonably priced portable hard drive from PC World (£34.95 - 320GB) so that I could back up and take with me my Mac settings and all of my music and pictures. I was amazed (and slightly disappointed) that all of this chaff together took up just over 80GB of space.

Of course, that 80GB total does not contain the totality of me. Without mentioning the music I have  owned in vinyl, magnetic tape or CD form which I have not yet digitised, nor even just heard somewhere (ah, the demise of Limewire... What are we to do?) it doesn't capture the stored verbatim Monty Python sketches, the memorable (and less so) scenes from the many movies I've seen, or the - admittedly few - moments of glory from Manchester City matches (anything from yesterday's match would of course be over-written very quickly). Neither does it hold recordings of the millions of bits of human interaction that have taken place in my life. I think AC Clarke posited about 2 TeraBytes as an estimate of a person's existence, but maybe he was basing that figure on vastly superior data compression technologies than any we currently have access to.

Housewerk

I have been vacillating about this one, because somewhere in my mind (nothing new under the sun and all that...) has been a nagging suspicion that it's all been done before. But, buoyed by your (thank you, dear reader) unstinting support, I have decided to press on.



Deep breath... Wouldn't it be amusing if the band members of Kraftwerk shared an apartment - in Dusseldorf if you like - and argued endlessly (a la The Upper Hand) about whose turn it was to do the washing up? Something has been in the back of my mind that there was a skit along these lines some 20+ years ag0, hosted by the great Paul Hogan. Or something.



In any case, I'm sure you can just imagine the (admittedly fleeting) hilarity as the boys fret about their plastique hair and John Smedley polo necks whilst running a hoover round. There would be a cat. And possibly a wacky neighbour, though I'm not sure if this would be a Kramer-esque creation, or altogether more Rosemary's Baby type freaky old lady. I may prepare a treatment.

Stat attack

Some time ago, I posted a piece about my online presence. I think it's time to update the numbers, in light of the fact that the blog anniversary, is in a little over 3 weeks. So, up to this moment, I:

Have posted 141 times to this blog. Last count, there were 4125 hits recorded, which is pretty pathetic, so I would like to send out a request to all my friends to see if I can reach the 5000 mark for the 25th of June.

Have updated on Twitter 263 times

Have 1680 songs in my iTunes library

Am storing 1451 pictures on my external hard drive

Have put 346 pics on Flickr and 252 on Zooomr

Have contributed 3 posts, 32 comments to MeFi, 1 posts and 3 comments to MetaTalk, 4 questions and 8 answers to Ask MeFi and have been favourited 12 times
Have posted 35 comments to CiF
Have posted 23 videos to YouTube
Have edited 4 sections of Wikipedia

Curses

I am a diletante. Not afraid to say it. I quite like video games, but (with the exception of some seriously old school stuff like Space Invaders or Asteroids and to an extent Defender, and even then - back in the day - I wasn't anywhere near the top performer, despite spending god knows how many lunch hours and 10p pieces from my mum in the leisure centre cafe, but I did reach a kind of unconscious competence in the end) I was never particularly good at them.

I have recently been loaned a copy of Grand Theft Auto - Vice City Stories by one of the guys at work to try out on my daughter's newly purchased PSP. First impressions were generally good. I found the game much richer than any I'd tried previously. There were a few cheap laughs with a strong whiff of racism hidden beneath the veil of irony, and the odd cliche. The animation leaves a bit to be desired, but the music is good, and I like the ability to switch radio channels.

My main beef, though, and this is the same with Prince of Persia, Warrior Within also (though god knows this game has enough other faults, which is probably a discussion for another day) is that it's too easy to get stuck in a rut. You carry out some difficult task, which has to be followed up by some other stuff, making your 'stamina' ebb away, and if you're unsuccessful you're forced to return to the beginning of the level to repeat the difficult task. I find myself losing interest (and patience) rather rapidly and then trying to enter houses or randomly punch people in the street. Good fun for a while, though it soon becomes tiresome. My other problem is that, through the countless efforts I've made at beating Shaydee in PoP WW I have caused the R1 button (which functions as a 'block' command) on my rumble pad to occasionally stick, because I have been holding it in so hard. At crucial moments I end up lying on the floor refusing to respond to my commands and getting stabbed repeatedly till I die.

L'hamster est mort, vive le rat

Poor old Alexander the Great passed away recently. He has featured on here before. His was a brief candle, though it burned only at one end (the end where you're trying to watch a movie and he's making a god-awful incessant racket on his plastic wheel) and he will be sadly missed. I feel a little culpable, in that he may have starved to death. It's hard to be sure really, as he would (as is normal, I hear) hoard his food in his nest amongst his own shit and piss, so his food bowl was frequently empty. He was not easy to tame and would bite the bejesus out of your fingers at every opportunity, so that my kids took to wearing Marigolds while playing with him.

Anyway, I endeavoured to bury him yesterday, but after about 2 weeks of constant sun, the ground had hardened to iron. I only had a stick - and a slender one at that. It didn't seem appropriate to use one of the kids' beach spades while they were watching, and this also negated my first plan which was to tip him along with the stinking contents of his cage (somehow a large blowfly had managed to get in there) into the palladins outside the flat. I therefore reverted to my druidic heritage and made a stone cairn, decorated with a silver screw from someone's bike I think. I also painstakingly etched his name into a piece of slate, but it pissed down overnight and my efforts were erased. Though the cairn still stood! My fears of foxes, cats, feral wolf kidults from Islington, etc. went unrealised.

So farewell Alexander. Never again.

I also bought myself a new MFD, which certainly gave what The Sun used to call VFM, though no doubt I will be grabbed by the consumables in the end. A couple of years ago, I bought an Epson Photo Deluxe Ultra-Shit 2.3 or something and it cost me somewhere in the region of £80. The one I bought today is an HP Photosmart 4280 and includes scanner, copier and printer. Not only that, but it has 11 (count 'em!) different memory card slots.

Cost? £44.99! Toner cartridges are approx. £40 the pair. Problem: the better the printer, the more you print. The damned cartridges are the same size and design as a referee's whistle, though I couldn't find a pea in there. I assume therefore that they won't last very long. Not even as long as Alexander.

Irritations

Update - 2/10/07. Google have responded to my phish report. The account was a spoof Gmail account in addition to being a phish. I hope they track 'em down and cut their balls off. That will make things better for people.

This week, I will write of passwords.

Like a lot of folks round here, I divide my UGC activities between home and (ahem) work. As I am a Mac user at home, and a Windows sufferer in the office, this means I am also cross-platform, though this is increasingly less of an issue.

One example is my Gmail account, which is probably the one I access most often. At home on the Mac, the little box next to 'Remember Me On This Computer' (BTW, I haven't checked the box on that last link. It may not be wise, but if you do so, please tell me what happened) is checked, but I recently changed all of my passwords and the Mac remembers the old one, so if I am not watchful, I have the (admittedly small) inconvenience of going to the password verification page once the first attempt fails. I have tried removing the check, thinking to enter the new password the next time and then to re-check the box, but still, the old password keeps auto-filling.

At work, auto-fill is not an option on almost all website logins (cookies and security or something - I do know that this can be a problem, especially in a shared workstation environment) BUT my Gmail login page remembers the new password anyway.

On the subject of Gmail, spam seems to be on the increase. Not a problem for a long while, but I've had 2 spasms recently, and 1 rather lame attempt at phishing (the email purported to be from The Bank Of America and, as a valued customer - snort - they were seeking to verify my account details. It came from another Gmail account - not even bankofamerica@gmail.com, but some cruddy name and number combination - and the copyright symbol at the bottom was actually a @)

Now, on to Twitter. On the Mac, Twitter autofills my user name and password as soon as I enter the first letter of the former - 3 keystrokes and I'm in. Lovely. At work, I have to tap away manually.

Metafilter - at home, I appear to have (missus) an automatic login - as soon as I hit Login hard enough, I'm straight in, which doesn't seem right as anyone could get in there far too easily. Know what I mean? MeFi doesn't even have a 'Remember Me On This Computer' option. Go figure. At work, manual entry is again required. On a daily basis.

Flickr is OK despite what some people I know have said about entering a lost password hell of Kafkaesque proportions. I log into 2 accounts, and at home, it simply remembers the last name I logged in under, with an option to change user name if necessary. At work, manual completion again. It's all very odd - no doubt due to IP addresses, firewall verifications, etc. etc.