Goldtouch Go! Ergonomic Travel Keyboad

I've been using this keyboard for the past year and abit. It is the only keyboad out there tha is ergqonomic AND portable.

As you can see, it just craped itself.

I used t he exat same keyboad a work, and of course since it sa far more use, it did this ealier. GQot it replaed on waraty no problem. I don't hae the luxury this time aound. It wa, incidentally, the exactly same problem. Somethingq in the wiringq gqoes nuts, and suddenly the keys don't line up.

I've looked, but been unale to find ayone else reportingq on this.

Feelingq, ater tha lat post, ater statingq my only gqoal for the da wa to sit ad write my diay, thwated.

I've left my job, my home, my family, friends, loves and country. Scuttled my life to try build a new one, better suited to me now.

What more must I sacrifice?

Little wins. Let me have some little wins.

iDie

Hal III is dead. Long live Hal III.

There is no middle ground with memory and iPods at the moment, the jump goes from 60GB (which is too little) to 160GB (which is waaaaaay too much). As such I hit the nearest Apple Store and made an appointment with the Genius Bar with hopes of resuscitating Hal, because I am traveling and in transit and I bloody need all my music with me at all times.

They had some massive global infinite database which, when Hal's serial number was entered into, produced his date of purchase; 24 December 2006.

Five years old, okay, yeah, I guess we've had a good run.

He really was dead though, and I wasn't interested in spending heaps of money on a new shiny thing, so I then visited a second-hand dealer, and found a 120GB classic for significantly cheaper. Still money I wasn't intending on spending, but not a frivolous purchase I think.

Hal IV is all set up. Before syncing, 'Owner's iPod' indicated it had two songs stored upon it.

BEST. STARTING LETTERS. EVER.

When something like that hits at 10:50am on a Friday morning there's no point in pretending that any further productivity will be forthcoming. Hot porn heralded the beginning of the weekend.

It doesn't recognise 'eh'. DOOMED.

hello, my freaky darlings.

for Christmas, my family put in together and bought me Dragon Dictate for Mac. It was at my request. A year is long enough to sit on an idea, and where it down, until, it is no more threatening than my age painted this. I was actually a little bit excited to receive it, as while I will not be using it for fiction it will enable me to properly e-mail all you far-flung distant beautiful friends. I have missed you.

Unfortunately, many in technology, well, we have “issues". When I installed Dragon Dictate it politely informed me that it refused to run on the current version of Eddie's operating system. Fussy little sheet. That shouldn't have been a problem, and I was quite happy to even pay for a legitimate upgrade (because Macs are just too weird and funky to our stuff on) and went to do that right away. However, Apple beings so forwardthinking shooter orientated, and all that, there was no option to simply download the upgrade. Noel. They insisted on shipping me the physical disk. Which... Was not what I wanted this year on the first day of the four-day long weekend.

Beach ripe Martin.

I cultivated some patients (meaning I stole some from our little old lady on a Zimmer frame outside the supermarket) and ordered the damp upgrade will stop. It was not delivered on Wednesday. It was delivered on Thursday. And of course Apple use a courier service so they weren't going to just shove it in the letterbox. I had to sign for it. So I missed that first delivery, and low! The next delivery would not be until Tuesday due to new years public holiday will stop. Fine stop. That's just fine. Fortunately they agreed to deliver to my workplace which happened on Tuesday quite early, and it was just a CD case. It's not even like it was a big cardboard box of new slots packaging will stop they could have quite easily have shoved in the letterbox. It was only $40. The.

After doing a quick backup of all my necessary files, of which I'm sure I forgot many, I upgraded Eddie's operating system. Which was surprisingly painless.

Then I ran Dragon Dictate.

Then, I pulled out the fancy Swedish headset that my family had also given me for an extra $100 and went to plug it in. The fancied swish headset has a USB plug that is the some reason ridiculously why stop.

Eddie has only two USB ports.

I could not plug the headset in and have my ergonomic keyboard plugged in at the same time.

Can't.

I can tell you right now I did not just say “can't" Asian stop.

So I had to unplug my ergonomic keyboard, which meant that Eddie could not sit in he's nice ergonomic laptop stand, as it covers his own keyboard. This seems to be, I don't know, ergonomic forces at wall? I know. Factions of occupational health and safety revolution coming into conflict and you're getting distracted so that they not actually fighting the problem which is RSI and instead bed is fighting each other and... It is a little bit frustrating. I'm going to have to buy a USB hub. The better Eddie gets for my hands, the first portable he becomes.

So. There we are a will stop. As you can see, I have a little bit of trouble ending sentences. I haven't corrected anything in this post. For ease of reading I will go back and insert paragraph breaks.

And then, I am going to teach this program how to swear will stop.

Expletive. Blasphemy. Expletive.

You're Too Old For Toys, Woman. (It's a good thing they're action figures then.)

Happy little family of intergalactic soldiers, aren't they?

Herbie the HS10 shot this. I was sitting on the floor in the far corner of the lounge room. The blinds were down, and the only light one incandescent globe. Herbie was only resting on my knees. That is at full zoom.

The colours are crud, but that's partly the light. I'm surprised at the lack of shake, considering. The noise levels are acceptable. Not bad, considering.

He had far more trouble when I just turned the light out and we were pretty much sitting in the dark with light bleeding in only from a door way that didn't actually illuminate the happy little family.



Noise is bad enough to almost be artistic, and who knows what the colours are doing. Regardless, this is bloody impressive given that through the view finder I could only just make out the vague shape of the stormtrooper to lock onto, and didn't think it'd focus at all, let alone have such minimal shake.



Second shelf from the top, to the right. There's the happy family. That's without any zoom at all, just to give some perspective.

Don't look at the clothes horse.

I had a faff around shooting movies on Herbie too. Herbie isn't really designed to use macro in movie mode. This is an issue when you're experimenting with finger puppets in low lighting.

Sid & Herbie: My All-Seeing Eyes

This is the FujiFilm Finepix S9500. My computers have names, my phone and iPod have names, but my camera does not, which is unusual given it's the oldest piece of technological fun I have. I suspect this is because it plays a different role to the rest. The others are servants, they carry things around and do things for me, not unlike familiars. The camera however acts merely as an extension of myself.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm calling him Sid.

Sid is four years old. I bought him just before I went to the USA in 2006, and we got to know each other very well as I went hiking through the Rockies. He's been to Japan and Patagonia, down the Great Ocean Road, to the zoo, and chances are if a photo on this blog is not a dodgy webcam shot, it's one of Sid's.

Sid and I have a very happy relationship.

That said, Sid is four years old, which in the digital world is quite a few rings around the trunk. I was content with him until in Patagonia, where everyone else on the truck had newer, more powerful cameras, and I got some serious camera envy going on. When there were others to compare him to, I felt Sid's limitations.

I wasn't really planning on buying a new camera, but, uh, these things happen.

Sorry, Sid.



This is the FujiFilm Finepix HS10. For the sake of simplicity, I'm calling him Herbert.

As you can tell from the photo, Herbie and I are currently in that awkward getting-to-know you stage of the relationship, in which there are more faux pas than anything else.

When it came time to fork over the money, the choice lay between Canon and Fuji for hybrids, purely because they were the only ones that offered AA battery as a power source (very important if you intend to traipse about the mountains and not see a power point for days on end).

I decided to stick with Fuji less out of brand loyalty (although, seriously, Sid is the best camera ever) and more because it was only a few weeks before I leave for China. The last thing I wanted to do was learn a new camera and menu system while out on the road. If I took that risk, I knew I'd end up with a series of photos that get progressively better as they go on, meaning all the early shots (which will be of BEI-FUCKING-JING) will be considerably less than awesome. I'm not okay with that.

And okay, a little out of brand loyalty, because seriously, Sid is just that awesome.

On paper, Herbie appeared to be perfect. He was presented as the current equivalent of what Sid was, the biggest difference being zoom. Sid can do x10 optical. Herbie can do x30 optical.

Which...holy carp and swordfish.

Of course, even staying within the brand, there was going to be a teething period. Yesterday, that came to a head.

I took Herbie for a walk in the Yarra Bend. Well. I say 'walk', but the way I hike with camera is really an 'series of stops with intermittent ambling'.

Herbie shat me to no end.

I had him set to record photos as RAW+JPEG. I don't work with RAW, but as someone pointed out, just because I don't now doesn't mean I won't later. If I save as both, I can put the RAW away on a disc somewhere and forget about them, and should 'later' ever come about, then they're there for me to tweak to my heart's content.

It takes Herbie TEN FUCKING SECONDS to write RAW to the memory card.

This would be okay if I was, say, taking a photo of a rock that was being a rock and not moving. And my light source was consistent. And I wasn't in a rush or anything. And didn't mind TEN SECONDS OF MY LIFE being eaten by an overworked processor. Might as well go make a cup of tea while waiting to be able to take another photo.

That isn't how I take photos though. That is way, way, way, way, WAY too long.

He also appeared to be having issues focusing, and that I wasn't pleased with either.

I played with the Panorama function. This initially had me very excited in a capslock sort of way. Are you thinking panorama of the Himalayas? I am.

Panorama is a temperamental function. It won't have a bar of any zoom whatsoever, and seems to make up its own mind about when a sweep is complete, regardless of what you're doing.

I did get to play with the zoom though, and that was...holy carp and swordfish. I sniped a starling so close it gave me a fright.

Not entirely satisfied with the field test, I took Herbie home to give the results a good going over. Hooked him up to Eddie (my MacBook), at which point they entirely failed to talk.

When I plug Sid into Eddie, they get along wonderfully. Eddie recognises Sid as a big ol' harddrive and I pull pictures off without needing any finicky photo storing program interfering. I APPROVE.

Herbie refused to reveal himself to Eddie at all.

This, I am not cool with, as Eddie is my photo computer.

Disgruntled, I poked around online looking for USB drivers or the like, only to find that as Herbie is so new, only a couple of months on the market, he has no support.

Well, surely they wouldn't have shipped him without drivers. Further disgruntled, I installed the Finepix Viewing Software, and unsurprisingly this made exactly no difference.

Fine. Whatever.

Fortunately Herbie did talk to the Decepticon (my desktop PC), and I was able to finally get the photos off the camera.

To discover that saving as RAW+JPEG does not actually save two file types, one being JPEG. It saves two RAW files. With marginally different file names, but definitely two RAW files. Being as all my photo software is on Eddie, the Decepticon had no idea what to do with RAWs, so even further disgruntled I installed the bloody Fuji shyte program on him too.

For the record, the Finepix Viewing Application is ugly and useless on both platforms.

So! Finally managed to view the bloody RAW files, and they looked like shyte. Noisy and horrible and full of dull colours. This is no doubt because I'm used to working in JPEG, and am not used to uncompressed noise.

Regardless, this isn't something you want to see your brand new camera do.

Figured the only thing to do was get the photos onto Eddie where I could view them in the same software as my other photos, to make a comparison. Dragged the files across the network.

Discovered Fuji does not save as RAW at all. RAW is supposed to be universal and unowned. But no, Fuji save as Fuji RAW.

My program looked at it, looked at me, and said, "WTF is RAF?"

To which I replied, "RAF is fucking inconvenient, that's what RAF is."

Queue more installing and grumbling and discovering yes they're still noisy as fuck and the panoramas look like rubbish. The panorama function is limited to no taller than 720 pixels, which is nothing, it's blocky horrible chunky crap, and the stitching generally not very good. The colours were poor in everything.

At this point I went and did something else and didn't look at them again for the rest of the night.

Today, I took both Sid and Herbie to the Royal Botanical Gardens. I was pretty much set on taking Herbie back, but had to be sure. Comparison shots were required. I took Herbie off RAW entirely, and when shooting purely JPEG his write speed is fine. As much as was possible between the two, I had them on the same settings.

First comes Sid, then comes Herbie;

In the 'Silver Garden'.





I really should pay attention to the names of the plants I'm shooting. This plant was decorated with leave balls.





CATERPILLAR ATTACK!





I shot this plant just to freak them out, but both cameras handled the colour bombardment pretty well.





Aside from shrinking them to a sensible size, none of these photos have been adjusted.

Not much difference to speak of. When I had all the photos together to have a good comparison, I was pretty happy.

When viewed at 100% zoom, Sid still beats Herbie in image quality. Sid's photos are smoother. There's a speckledness in Herbie's photos, and I'm told this is in part to compensate for his ridiculous zoom. It's minimal, to say the least.

Panorama still utter shyte.

The zoom blew me away. Especially on macro. I died. This is an area Sid simply cannot compete in.

Herbie still won't talk to Eddie, but that's something I'm sure software/firmware will fix in due time. I'm still pissed about the RAW thing. It feels very much like I've paid for something I haven't received. RAW taking so long to write and then being Fuji tilted is useless.

Tomorrow I'll take them for another walk, probably up Ruckers Hill to get some landscape scenery type shots (I get far too carried away with macro on the gardens). At this point, however, much less inclined to return Herbie. I suspect the HS10 is one of those cameras that, in another couple of years or so, will be unbelievable, but right now has some growing pains.

Aaaaand, here are a few other shots that I just adore;

LOOK AT THIS.
WHAT THE HELL IS THAT.
IT IS AN INSANE PHOTO.
I DIDN'T TAKE IT, THE CAMERA DID. I JUST PRESSED THE BUTTON.

(Regardless of how Herbie compares to Sid, he's still quite an amazing camera.)







The heron has spied a tasty snack. By tasty snack I do of course mean crunchy dragon fly. The heron is all about tasty snacks. It does not care if the tasty snack goes straight to its hips. It's a heron on a mission.



And the heron has its tasty snack!

I'm particularly taken with this photo as also caught in the photo is a second dragonfly buzzing by the heron's beak, probably screaming, "You ate my girlfriend! NoooooOOOOOooooOOOOOOooooo...!"

The Ghost of Harddrive Past Does Not Walk

Took Eddie's old brain to a data retrieval centre. A quick diagnosis indicated that the reading arm was busted, a mechanical fault that would cost over $2,000 to fix and take up to four weeks. That was a punch in the guts, but I told myself I was buying my future self a present, and there was a finance scheme of sorts, but-

But that particular model of harddrive was built with a coating on the disk which comes off, clogs the head and erases the data.

He said they could give it a go, but the chances of retrieving anything were infinitesimal.

Sayonara, Hokkaido.

The Ghost of Harddrive Past

Eddie's first brain is dead. Long live Eddie. New brain has been installed. They don't make small 80GB brains anymore, so his brain is much bigger now.

Backups of all important work exists and is current.

Unfortunately, backups of files that are no longer active (not being worked on) were not so good. Or at least, if a backup of said files exists, I've put it in a Safe Place, which is pretty much the same as it not existing. One such casualty, in fact the only casualty I care about, is my Japan trip journal.

Most of it is online here, but there's still some two weeks of the trip I had yet to load up, and they're the best two weeks, Hokkaido, oh, Hokkaido, and uuuuurgh.

I didn't sleep well last night. It's hard to sleep when you're kicking yourself in the head repeatedly.

Data recovery is not cheap.

But trip journals stay with you for life. Travel writing is armchair travel, even more vivid when it's not poking your imagination, but nudging your memory. I'm buying my sixty-seven year old self a present (that's how I'm justifying it, at any rate).

And if any of you know where I put my legitimate paid-money-for copy of MS Office for Mac, I'd really appreciate a tip.

Oh Sweet Deities of Our Technological Advancement, I think Eddie just committed suicide.

ETA: Confirmed. Hard drive is malignant.

ETA: The people at the Apple service centre said, "The service centre is open Monday to Friday."

I am leaving the internet. I've a last day in fabulous San Francisco before jumping on a metal bird and returning to the future, 'cause this is the future, and we totally have the technology.

I will be reattaching myself to people I haven't seen in a couple of weeks, so to avoid any social malfunctions in recognition, here is a current, taken right this second, photo of me:



You peeps I just spent ridiculously hilarious weekend with, I loff you. I bequeath you the northern hemisphere, with which to do as you please. Hopefully, 'as you please' means you will turn it into a giant ball pit.

See you on the otherside of the date line.

plaguerising my blog

"OH, MY ACHING HYPERLINKS..."

Time Warp

After five years, my mobile phone wanted to have some 'time apart'. It did this by committing suicide every few days, and I would be forced to resurrect it by ripping the battery out.

We've had a good run. I barely used it, and it was fine with that. But, I can't stay with a phone that wants to die. For starters, I have no other contact number. Kinda a big deal, that.

So I upgraded. Grudgingly. Resentfully.

I've put off getting a new phone for some time. I knew the end was coming, but I was happy with what I had; a phone. Calls and text messages. That's all. All new phones that people pulled out and showed off in front of me, they came packed with so many features and heaps of connectivity. I don't want features. I really don't want to be connected. I want a phone.

But, oh well. If I must make this step, then I'll do it properly. Screaming. Shrieking. I have to admit, after some mild teething problems, the iPhone is pretty neat. I have science fiction in my pocket. I HAVE SCIENCE FICTION IN MY POCKET. It knows where I am! (Alarming.) It's learns my spelling, it learns! (Alarming.) Because it contains a keystroke logger! (Alarming.) IT CONNECTS ME TO THE INTERNET AT ALL TIMES. ALARM. ALARM. ALARM.

Because I love walking away from all my connectivity. I love being unreachable. I love being away from the feeling that I should be checking my accounts, to see if someone has sent me something. I love not being in a position to respond to anything said to me. I love not being able to receive anything sent to me. I love being away from you all, even as I love you.

I love being off the radar, off the edge of the map.

I love being off.

I haven't set up email on the phone, because I don't want access to it 24/7. So far I haven't fallen into the trap of checking through web interfaces. So far, I've just been treating it as I treated the old one; like a phone. There to be forgotten and ignored.

I wonder if people will expect me to check my mail, now that I can, and respond promptly. Is that expected of everyone? Are we unwittingly rising to an apex of perfect impatience in our demands for acknowledgment? Smack me if I nag. Sometimes, I'm not replying because I haven't checked my mail. And sometimes, I'm not replying because I don't feel like it. There is no one who needs my attention immediately. None of us are obliged to drop everything on receipt of a message.

(One thing the old phone definitely had up on the iPhone (henceforth referred to as Spartacus)is that it always displayed the time and an icon to show if there were any messages or missed calls. I could check it without touching it. I resent having to wake up the Spartacus every. single. time.)

Where to from here? More connectivity? How connected can we get? Should we be so perpetually connected? I know I don't want to be, but I think I'm being dragged along and into this tangle of connections anyway. For better or worse, we all are. I dread to think what, in five years time, the next phone will be. Something that reads my mind and sends prompts to my friends when I need attention? Coddle me, my piece of pocket science fiction, validate my existence. I dare you.

But as long as I can keep my MONKEEEEEEEEEY! ringtone, I will not fight the onset of the future too hard.

What's in a name?

Optus is still fucking with my email. Not everything is getting to me, not everything is getting out from me. Trying to work around that.

I was attempting to set up sirtessa as a gmail account, but due to having that username and blogger being bought by google, I ended up with wonky accounts, and in an effort to set everything up in the one google account, deleted sirtessa as a gmail address.

After which I read the bit about the username never being available again.

Fuckberries.

I've bitten the bullet and just gone with my name. If you know it, you know it, if you don't, it isn't hard to find. I avoid using my surname because a) I'm the only person with my name in the world, b) I'm not sure if, on the path to being a Rockstar Superhero Mad Ninja God Author, it's a surname I'll be retaining, and c) it makes this blog pop up on porn searches in google. For Serious.

I've set up all three addresses to reply from the gmail one, so if you're too lazy to update your address books, don't sweat it.

(Actually, I'm not sure if the aunix one is set up properly either...I've sent, but has anyone received?)

In the process of sorting out that gmail account, I discovered I'd already registered it, and had mail in it from 2004. Ummm, sorry about that, you know who you are.

Tangent!

This post triggered a chewy discussion on "the mechanics of forgiveness", to steal the phrase from Kirsten Bishop.

I particularly like the last comment left by Deborah Biancotti;

'I forgive you', for me, does not translate into 'what you did was OK' or even 'we are OK' -- it is 'I am OK'.

And maybe it's 'you are freed from my previous need for you to address the hurt you caused me'. To be complicated about it.

Which I think is the purest ideal of forgiveness, and something worth cultivating in yourself.

That said, I will not, at the present, be using that definition of forgiveness on myself. If applied to me it reveals that I've never forgiven anyone in my life. BECAUSE I'M A MEAN BITTER SHRIVELED UP LITTLE HAGFISH. AND I EAT DESSICATED BABIES FOR BREAKFAST.

If anyone else has any thoughts to add, I'd love to hear them. I think I've said all I have to say, but given forgiveness is an intensely personal process, I'm sure there are approach vectors we've missed.

Actually, fuck forgiveness. If anyone has any tales of RAW AND STEAMING VENGEANCE, goddamn, share them.

"I'm not foreign; I'm exotic."

The wonderful awesome amazing spectacular Jaime pointed this at me, and you must on love on her for it. This video concerns racism in Australia, and is hilarious and true. Especially about the tooth pick thing (except we keep ours in the kitchen drawer). I've watched it four times and counting, think I'm about to make it five.

Also, optus has been playing up in terms of email delivery; most messages get through, albeit hours late, and some are bouncing. If you require me to save the world, please use the bat tessa signal.

ETA: filched from deep sea news--



GIANT FLYING 100 YEAR OLD LOBSTER! Further details and move here.

filched from boingboing--



96 tentacled octopus! Which is...whoa. Every hentai-lover's dream come true. But imagine trying to do anything when you have 96 tentacles? "Still...cannot...grip...tweezers...!"

Ninja Says

Ninja Says

My MacBook here just died. No warning, no errors, it just turned itself off. Like it fainted. Which for a moment I assumed meant the battery was flat, but it's at 42%. Que? Eddie, please don't be getting crotchety on me! I love you, my facsist white laptop!