graculus

Over the weekend I'd wandered past the website of a local camera shop (well, the local branch of a more widespread one, at least) and they had a secondhand one of the camera I was looking to buy for £100 less than it would cost me new. And it was even the colour I wanted (i.e. not black, but red). I saw this as A Sign and went into town today to get it, only to find that they'd either knocked another £30 off or the price on the website was wrong! \o/

It's the Panasonic Lumix G3, for those people who care about that sort of thing, and I'm sure we'll be very happy together! The only downside is needing to wait till the weekend to start to play with it properly.;)

I know I'm a nitpicky old bugger but... ( Spoilers for Blood Ties 2x05 )

Mission accomplished: the computer is back upstairs and the lovely wireless router picked up the signal first time, no problem. Yay for Netgear again! :)

I'm waiting for my mother to phone me to tell me what she's doing for this graduation thing. The first version was that she would get the train, and that because she doesn't sleep very well (not to mention the minor fact I only have one bed at the moment, which I hadn't told her), she'd rather stay in a hotel than disturb me in the middle of the night. The more recent version became that she's organised for someone to bring her and that she thought she was going to stay with me. Then we had a long and complicated conversation about where someone driving her might drop her off, since I explained that where I live has the ring road from hell and even though I've lived here more than 6 years, I still get lost. *headdesk*

Oh, and apparently she's planning to come up on the Tuesday, the graduation is Wednesday and then she's going home on the Thursday. Considering that it's more than a three hour drive each way from where she lives, I don't think that's a good idea - hell, I wouldn't want to do it and she's twice my age, literally - but she's made her mind up, it seems. I come by it honestly. ;)

Back to the grindstone, a.k.a. 'getting the house and garden in a fit state for a maternal visit next month'...

I know a number of people reading this are working on that reading-50-books-in-a-year thing that's going round - well, I haven't officially joined up but, in case anyone is interested, I decided a couple of months ago to use my Vox account to keep track of what I have been up to. I doubt I would have a great deal of difficulty with it, and if you read through to the end of this post you'll see why. ;)

I snagged the username over on Vox before anyone else did, but there are things about Vox I'm not overly impressed by, while it does at least let you post links to the book in question, including a picture of the cover. Vox does have the option of letting you post an excerpt of your post there to somewhere else, like here, but that's just not going to happen...

So, if anyone is interested in the 24 books I've read since October, then you can find them here.

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people receiving email have only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any message correctly. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

So, it's finally happened - I've overhauled my recs pages, ditching a couple of fandoms and pulling in a couple of new ones that have caught my attention. Still more Harry Potter than anything else, I have to say, but that's probably because there's just so much good slash fic in that fandom. It's probably quite a good thing that there are a couple of prolific slash pairings I won't read and I haven't worked my way around the gen stuff too much.

Having boggled my brain with the stuff xochiquetzl recommended I look at when I was complaining on this subject a while back, I think I'll be sticking with html for the foreseeable future. ;)

What I really need for writing fic is something like the device in Dr Who where the data stream goes in and out of the person's brain, so the porn goes straight into the computer without the actual effort of having to write the damn story.

Because I have way too many ideas to ever get done and while some might say that's a good thing, the mountain of would-be fic and half-written stories can get a bit much at times.

In other news, my recs pages continue to grow. Personally, I view these as something of an extended bookmark collection for myself, but I know that they get visited by other people as well and have begun to wonder if they're starting to become unwieldy. I split them into four a while back, because the recs for certain fandoms were starting to take over, then had to re-jig again when Harry Potter became the fandom that ate my brain. Now the HP & original fics page alone is 40kb.

I'm not sure how to better organise them, though, if they continue to grow at the current rate. Any suggestions gratefully received.

At last I have found an S2 layout that I like, after some tinkering with the colour scheme (liked the blue, prefer the green versions of the same shades). Am geekily happy now. :)