Sushi-Inspiration

JB and Co have a shiny new blog, Sushimatic about all things Japanese. Go check it out. You owe it to a fellow minion 😉

I was watching this video about sushi and how to eat it, and a thought struck me: with all the bowing that goes on in Japan, do people ever bang heads?

I know, not the most pc ponder I have ever had, but I genuinely thought that. There’s this bit near the end of the video where the two chaps are thanking the sushi-chef, and all three of them bow into the middle… Seriously, they look about a millimetre from bashing skulls.

And what would be the polite thing to do if you did clonk someone on the forehead?

Sunday Roast: good heavens, people!

I have some potentially bad news for car lovers out there – that manufacturer of beautiful cars, TVR, is in danger again. I’ve long lusted after a TVR, and that they’re British makes them even better, so I would be all 🙁 if they had to shut.

Continuing in the spirit of last week’s 50 51 book-to-movie adaptations you should see, I bring you the 101 102 movies you should have seen. As the author of the list says, these aren’t necessarily great movies, but they are the movies that form part of our cultural narrative. I have, for my sins, seen the majority of these.

Because no Sunday is complete without one: a picture of the penguin from Evangelion. See! Evil!

Ok, I’m worried now, because apparently rambling posts are bad posts. *eek* That’s not true, right? There can be good rambles? Please, I need some reassurance here!

For those languishing still in Internet Explorer 6 hell, I bring you the release of Internet Explorer 7 (in beta 2 format). There’s no way I’m gonna be able to critique this for you, so you’re gonna have to go play yourselves. And let me know how ugly Bright Meadow still looks in IE. If you do try it, welcome to the world of tabbed browsing – glad you could finally join us 😀

John August has a great mini-rant about how air vents are for air. (In a screenwriting context that is. Most of us humble beings are already aware of this simple piece of logic). (Oh, and reminder, no Lost spoilers please. Season Two starts this Tuesday over here, and I will be very unhappy if people tell me what happens before I get to see it).

I never thought the day would come that I would write the word “flatulence” on this blog, but that day has come, , so I guess that just goes to show I don’t know everything. Experts make a flatulence free bean. I can think of nothing that I can say which will add to the inherent humour in this article. I’m sure you’ll prove me wrong in the comments 😉

If Scrivs is to be believed a sign of a great blog is audience participation. This once, I am in total agreement with the chap. I’ve said it before, and no doubt I’ll say it again, but comments are what makes blogs special. They are a good part of what keeps me going with Bright Meadow. If I visit a blog where my comments are ignored, time over time, then I am less likely to comment there again, and I have to seriously reconsider if the place is worth my time (one blog got zapped from the rss reader for just this crime only yesterday). That’s not to say that all blogs with no comments/minimal participation are bad, just they have to be very very good for me to stay. What’s the point of having something in a medium designed to get people involved, and then ignore the very people you are talking to? It’s just plain rude.

Dewayne already pointed this out a few posts back, but in case you missed it – my favourite service, coComment, has released an extension for Firefox. Had this running for a couple of days now, and I haven’t got a single niggle to report. Loving it.

Lastly, we here at Meadow Towers could do with some help – Moose rescued a coriander plant from Morrisons the other day, and now it looks all droopy and half dead. Is coriander meant to be this floppy?
corriander1.jpg
(click to see the picture bigger)

*UPDATE*
Talking, as I was today about comments and CoCo, thank you all so very very much for making Bright Meadow the fourth most commented blog in the last ten days! (Ok, so that’s only the fourth most commented blog as tracked by coComment, and it doesn’t include comments not made by a CoCo-user, but it’s a BIG deal for me, as perhaps you can tell by the prevalence of exclamations points in this paragraph! 😀 )
Pictographic proof on Flickr
Where you can look at the constantly changing rankings yourself

Blog Serendipity

Lord alone knows how I came to be on this chappies link-roll, but I did a quick check of Technorati today and it turns out a new blog is linking to me – Xenoarchaeology.

Now, because I was bored and am, like most bloggers, obsessed with who is linking to me, I went to check it out.

It’s… different. A blog dedicated to xenoarchaeology, which is hardly surprising considering the name of the place. Anyway, I’m intrigued to see how far he get with it. My gut instinct is that there’s only so much that can be written about a subject that doesn’t actually exist, but I would love to be proved wrong.

Spring Clean 2006

I’m in the process of having a bit of a spring clean around Bright Meadow. It’s been a while since I mucked about with things, and consequently things have got a bit bloated and dusty.

In need of a tidy up basically. Consequently, if things get even odder than usual with the blog, please bear with me. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Those of you who read the RSS, I would recommend you poke your nose outside of the reader this once.

We’ve got a new header, I’ve overhauled the sidebar, and the font size has been bumped up slightly. Hopefully it’s a bit more readable now! I hadn’t realised how small it was till I caught myself increasing the font within firefox. Not a good sign when you can’t read your own blog.

What else? Well, the BrightCast is getting its own page, and I’m giving a serious rethink to what’s really required on the other pages. I will also be tackling the display problem experienced in IE with regards the alignment of comments. That and a few other behind the scenes bits that you don’t need to worry your pretty heads about.

If there’s anything else that needs fixing, or that you feel needs changing, let me know, and I promise to at least think about it.

Hack My Mac

Ok, I have a question for y’all and I hoping that somewhere out there I have a reader who knows the answer:

Is there anyway I can set my Mac so that screenshots automatically get saved to a particular folder, not my desktop? If they can be saved to the folder and name themselves in some form of numerical order automatically, that would be even better.

I’m running OS X 10.4.6 on a slightly elderly PowerBook G4.

At the moment I’m taking screenshots, they are being saved to the desktop, then I am having to manually rename and move them to the “screenshots” folder. This bugs me – the extra steps seem unnecessary, and as a Mac user I am spoilt and don’t like unnecessary steps.

Proviso: Whilst I am computer literate, I am not used to crawling round in the code-guts of my computer. If your solution requires me to boot up Terminal, make sure you give me step-by-step instructions. Detailed step-by-step instructions. And are prepared to calm me down via MSN when it all goes wrong.

And yes, Minionhood awaits if you can make me one happy Cas 😀

How old people made me challenge the status quo

Why are we so willing to accept the status quo?

Time for a little background:

At work, we are technically a hot desking office. We have to be – there are ten people and only eight computers, so we rotate tasks between us. Practically, however, there are three of us who always tend to use the same computers. The boss has hers and has to use that computer because certain things she requires on the network are only permitted on that workstation. Others of us have gravitated toward tasks that also require certain workstations, meaning that a good 90% of the time, both the Superhero and myself can be found on particular computers.

I like my computer. It’s in the corner, so I get a view out of two windows and a nice breeze when it’s stuffy. It’s next to the phone, so I have to answer that, but I don’t mind doing that because it serves as a change from the never ending data entry and scanning. I’ve got my little domain all set up how I like it, and have more or less trained everyone to stop nicking my pens. (I have a tendency to nest. I doubt I’m the only one – I challenge you to spend 9 hours a day, 5 days a week in one spot, and not get the teensiest bit territorial).

There was one wasp on the honeypot though – my computer was adamant that my mouse, though in reality brand new mouse with a scroll wheel, only had two buttons. You don’t realise how much you use the scroll wheel till you no longer have one. Anyway, I’d gotten used to not using it. Sure, it took a bit longer to keep lunging for the scroll bars, but you learn to live with these things, right?

Until this morning that is. I don’t know what made me, but finally I snapped, and I called IT. The nice man on the other end of the phone took over my PC, and I watched as he spent a good ten minutes rummaging through obscure settings, before he finally bullied my computer into accepting that yes, I did have a scroll wheel. Restart the computer, and… bliss! Absolute bliss.

Which made me think, why did I wait so bloody long?

With regards the mouse, I’ve been using this computer since late Feb/early March. Every single extra mouse action I have to make moves me one step closer to an RSI flare up. Every single mouse action I can remove from the workflow speeds things up fractionally. The extra 30 milliseconds it takes to move a window up/down using the scroll bar doesn’t sound like much, but multiply it by around 500 events, and you have a significant amount of time that could be sliced from my day. Quicker inputting means we get to our target that little bit quicker, and getting to our target quicker means fewer OAPs baying for my blood on the phone. That, and I’d have a happy boss, and we all know happy bosses are good news.

I was thinking in broader terms however, whilst drinking a cup of tea and staring out at the view over the train station to the docks (I said I had a view, not that it was a good view), about our tendency to just “go with the flow”. Most people will accept a situation, deal with it, and pretty soon forget it was ever a “situation” to being with. Awkward quickly becomes normal, and even if they think “oh, things could be better”, it invariably takes too much effort for them to make that change.

The impetus to change can be some tiny thing – the proverbial pebble rolling down the mountain that causes a landslip that buries a whole town – and frequently when you look back you think “why didn’t I make that change sooner?” That isn’t to say that change isn’t without risk and sacrifice. In my case I had to sacrifice fifteen minutes of my morning, time that could have been spent scanning ten or so images, but I have more than made up for that sacrifice. It was a small thing that Rosa Parks did, staying seated on that bus, and the sacrifice that followed was huge for many people, but at the end of the day we look back and wonder how people lived for so long with segregation. No, I am not equating my getting the middle button on my mouse back with the American civil liberties movement. I am using the two ends of the scale to show it’s not just the little things we get accustomed to.

It certainly takes a special kind of person to see that the way things are is not the way things should be, and to have the personal strength to bust out of convention and tradition. The people who can, why, they are the inventors and the leaders of our world. The movers and shakers.

As I reached the end of my cup of tea, I started to think in narrower terms about what else there is in my life that I am taking for granted. What situations am I just putting up with because it takes too much effort to do something different? Where would I benefit from challenging the status quo?

So thank you, pensioners of Southampton: without you I wouldn’t appreciate the middle mouse button as much as I now do, and without you I wouldn’t be (once again) lying in bed unable to sleep whilst I reassess my life. Well, I did say change is never easy. Hopefully in a few years time I’ll be able to look back as say “yes, it was all worth a few nights of insomnia”.

Oh, the things you think about whilst doing data entry…