Katze mit Wut

After all those years of trying to make my synthesizers sound like a guitar, I ended up making my guitar sound like a synthesizer. :-D

(Strat knockoff played through Fender amp with overdrive, then souped up in audacity, totally love its speaker sim. Sounds like Carter USM or Armageddon Dildos, I reckon. That said, anything music is still a major pain on Linux; for instance, that's not quite how the riff goes, but play-through doesn't work right so I couldn't hear myself while playing. (For the non-musicians among my readers, playing without a monitor is like painting in the dark.) Also, don't read too much into it, this is just something that happened while jamming, I doubt it's going to be my new sound. But I'm busy explaining a joke, ain't I? Anyway, I'm half-tempted to go out and buy a Mac, as an appliance only, put Cubase or Logic on it (which I keep calling Live for some reason), and have at it.)

It started out pretty simple. And with a real world case, too. I'm debating a new keyboard, as this one starts to act up — I'm sick of wireless, I'm sick of batteries, I'm sick of PS/2-to-USB adapters, and it seems the hardware starts failing me, too. That said, I was very happy with the ergonomic ("split keyboard") Logi — it was good to my wrists, it held up for ten years, and it certainly is one gorgeous keyboard —, and if the SafeType doesn't do the trick for me, I'll be looking to get a variant of the Logi that's not wireless. Anyway, the SafeType is also a split keyboard, but they mean it. It's like hacking a typewriter in two in the middle, and then putting both halves of the keyboard upright so they keyboards aren't horizontal, they're vertical. When you type, your hand are not parallel to your desk, but orthogonal to it. It did wonders for me when I tried the "upright mouse", so I think the keyboard may be beneficial, too. The rub is, you don't have cursor keys that way. So I needed to find a way to put the cursor keys on the main keyboard.

So, I'm in the middle of something. DSL goes down for no apparent reason. I don't see any WLAN I could share (and in fact NetworkManager has been behaving very weird since the update; if I don't kill -STOP it, it eats all my CPU — just plain killing it also tears down the net; this problem can be googled — a solution, not so much). So, UMTS. On this, pppd fails, giving unrecognized option '/dev/ttyUSB0'. This is the most obscure way they could find to say, You upgraded the kernel and haven't rebooted yet, so I can't find my shit. So, I reboot. Or, I try to. The upgrade from 2.6.25.3 to 2.6.25.4 plain broke my system (broke as in, EDD check, then BUG: INT14 CR2, dead before I get even the most basic boot messages). It is at this time that I notice that I haven't got a boot-manager installed that won't let me pass kernel options without excessive pain.

Way back, I got the Motorola RAZR v3, a very sexy phone. It had a stunning design, a nice display, and pretty good sound — and not much else. I've been hoping to upgrade for a while, but the next generation RAZRs took long to arrive, and did not entice me right away — the RAZR's design was so perfect that any change from it seemed to be for worse, while keeping it seemed more of the same. A rock, and a hard place. At the same time, the technology seemed OK, but not all that impressive, and the fact that the interesting features seemed spread out over a confusing trinity of next-generation rather products rather than being united in a single unit didn't help.

One contender was the LG Shine. I ultimately decided against it because its killer feature, its look and metal body, was offset by every review mentioning how it's "all fingerprints" after half an hour (give or take some complaints about the user-interface). I still think this might possibly be a great phone to have, especially if you wish to spend a little less.

Another contender from LG was the Prada-phone which in some ways anticipated the iPhone; with more up-to-date technology (or even just more memory), it might have likewise have been a serious contender. By now, it's sold on shop channel, so any exclusive air it may have possessed is gone.

Speaking of the iPhone itself, I'm pretty sure I'll want one. iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3.0, something like that. This one? Not so much — no 3G, no voice dial, no MMS, crap camera, no flash, no Java, no Bluetooth stereo, no video-recording, the list goes on. Add to that that it comes with a plan and I'm not sure I want one (I'm not even sure when mine expires), and that you can't change the battery yourself, and I'm put out.

Then came the Samsung Soul.

The Good

Well, for one thing, the SGH-U900 (video) is very chic, obviously. This is one seriously beautiful phone — the shell, the (brushed metal) theme, even the touchpad if configured right. The menus are more straight-forward than the RAZR's, the display's resolution is higher of course, and so is the camera's. It has more memory, and can be expanded further. Like the v3, it has the downer of some token plastic in that "full metal shell." And at first, it feels awkward to hold while making a call. But is it the "new RAZR"?

Below the fold: The Bad

Being a woman, I tend to find a half-dozen friend-requests in skype each morning. Aside from those who like my picture, I presume some are looking for free English lessons. Some also tell me about their private parts — goddammit, this is skype, not the bloody bananaphone, is that so difficult? —, and maybe some actually liked my profile. Yeah, a girl can dream. One thing though: guys, what are you thinking (well, are you?) sending me friend-requests when you don't have a picture, don't have a profile, don't even send a hallo to go with the request. Or in short, "Friend me." You've given me no reason to be interested in you. Or shorter still, "Friend me; I won't tell you who I am." What is it with those people?

I don't flag Skype me!
I don't flag Online.
I'm normally set away of busy.
That doesn't mean anything.

I never really thought much of it, they make an offer, I'm not interested, no harm done, can't blame them for trying. Right? Well, in fact I find it a little rude when the person's not flagged Skype me!, for one thing. But with at least one of a filled-in profile and a little something about you in the hallo-message (that should be both literate and not about your sexual prowess), I might relent. "Unsolicited" seems less bad when it's polite otherwise. And when it's not commercial.
article originally written on 2007/04/29

2007. I'm still not Gia Carangi, and I'm still not Nikki Craft. I'm just a year older, one that I likely won't admit to. Is this success? Is it something Buddha would have done? I've done taken down a picture of Angelina Jolie from offa me wall, and put up nudes of self. So maybe that's success. Maybe not. But it's something Jesus would do. What else? I got a new pet/toy, and maybe, the blurring of the line will upset some people (a fundamental difference remains for the time being; this one feels no pain). Does Azundris dream of electric cats? Yeah, seems so. Aside from the amusing recursion, Yume Neko Smile (vid) is fun exactly for that blurring of the line. It's as strokeable as any cuddly toy, and when it sits a few yards away meowing over the music, the effect can be eerie in one way, while when it sits in your lap and you hear the servos work, it can be spooky in an entirely different way. But then, I'd likely also have gotten it had it just been an animated steel skeleton, for extra Edge of Human value. (Much stronger book than Replicant Night, which was disappointing for more reasons than killing my favourite character.) Sure, they can't mechanise the song and dance brigade, and they certainly can't mechanise the miracle of the cat, but maybe, it's one of those transformative things, and maybe, it's just keeping your hands occupied while you read, kinda like knitting where you can't stick the needles in someone's eyes. But hey, the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible, right? Time to get the razor-blades out of the house.

My new work machine arrived last week, a Dell Latitude D820. Let's take a look at the adventures of setting it up for work (Windows, Linux, Windows running on linux (thanks to Xen), and assorted other fu).

It's the Chinese Year of the Mouse. First my beloved logitech mouse died. All I could get on short notice at the time was an IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 (see there for installation) though I'd have preferred another logi, the size and shape of which suit me better. Now I mucked up my lower arms and wrists — no, not typing those 200 line poses on MUSH: I was stupidly carrying home my groceries when I should have sent a man. Let's face it, at BMI 18 you don't have the muscle, and you shouldn't and needn't be without a strong guy to serve and to protect, anyway. : )

So much for being ecologically minded. Next time I'll take the beamer. Or something. Anyway, my arms hurt, a little when typing, and a lot when using the mouse. Untwisting them into the vertical (handshake position) immediately relieved the pain, so I went looking for a mouse that would work in that position.

My beloved logitech mouse died. For reasons that have no bearing here, I ended up with the titular IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 (though I'd have preferred another logi, the size and shape suit me better). If for some reason you too gave Microsoft money (well, don't! It's bad enough I did it!), here's how you use it with linux.

Liebe auf den ersten Blick. Wenn man einen Festplattenvideorekorder hat, wähnt man sich immun gegen Werbung. Man überspringt sie einfach, sieht vielleicht mal einen halben spot beim Springen, oder wenn man den Fernseher einschaltet.
Ein halber Spot war genug für Motorolas RAZR v3. Wow, Telefone können sexy sein! Hellooooooooooooo, Moto!

Philips has an interesting project featuring (immobile) robotic cats that can display a wide array of facial expressions to be used as social cues in human-robot interactions. True, the cat may be sausage-lipped, tell bad jokes, and move in a slightly jerky fashion, but it's definitely a step in a very interesting direction, and I for one applaud them for taking it. (See the site for more info, images and movies to reach your own conclusions.)

To the left: a mou— cat pad I was given (thanks Steffi! thanks Ofu! : ) as a birthday gizzie. Click on the image to see what it looks like when you plug it in! Meow!