The webcam arrived today! Hurray for Amazon Marketplace! Cas is now one very happy bunny (and the Cute Canadian is rather pleased as well 😉 )

Cas is currently… at life

I’m sitting here typing this post very slowly with lots of mistakes – these two sentences have taken near two minutes. The reason for this is not a new outbreak of RSI, though you would be excused for so thinking. Rather it is a french manicure that is so severely hampering my daily activities.

I was renowned through most of my scholastic career for being a biter. I am ashamed of this, but there you go, it’s about time some of my dirty little secrets got aired on the blog. I didn’t just bite the nails like your normal biter – I had to go one better and chew the skin around the nail as well. Disgusting habit really. I tried over and over again to stop, tried every trick in the book, but in the end what worked was just looking at the ragged stumps of my fingers one day and going “Ick. I’m going to stop doing that”. And I did stop. I have barely bitten or chewed for over a year now.

Sadly, years of such abuse doesn’t leave your nails and fingers in much of a fit state, and it has taken them near a year to heal to something approaching normal. Here’s what they don’t tell you about biting/chewing – do it for long enough and it can actually permanently deform the nail-bed. These last few months though, they have started to look almost decent, so today I figured I would give myself an early Christmas present, and got myself a professional manicure. The reasoning being that it will be easier to keep them looking in a professionally-tended state, than get them to that state in the first place on my own.

Very nice they look too.

Thing is, and they also don’t tell you this, is that freshly manicured nails suddenly become precious and needy, like a spoiled child. Just putting on your nice winter scarf is good for getting bits of green wool stuck to the surface and needing a five minute touch up job. Getting your keys out of your bag is a procedure suddenly fraught with danger. Even making a humble cup of tea makes you stop and go “is this really necessary”.

Put it this way – I’ve been home under an hour and already I’ve chipped two (luckily only minor chips I can repair). I don’t hold out much hope of the polish lasting the 5 to 7 days the slightly dippy brunette (oh, for the humour I so wish she’d been blonde) who did them claimed. I’ll be lucky if they make it to the end of the week. But however long they last, I will know I had them done. I know my nails can look all posh and grown up, so I will have a reason to keep them looking nice.

Well, that’s the theory.

And, with that, I will stop talking about my nails. That post was almost girly enough to warrant me changing the colour scheme to a nice Barbie-pink. An ultra-geeky tech post next, promise, just to reassure you that the strain of designing a new site hasn’t broken me 😉

Well, welcome to the new and (hopefully) better Bright Meadow.

Have a nosy around, go on, I dare you.
Over the next few days I’ll introduce you to the newer features of the site, but for now, just have fun.

Cas is currently… at life

Just a few little things to say today.

1) You don’t notice how much you come to rely on things until you can no longer use it. Case in point – I hadn’t realised how important del.icio.us had become to me until it suffered a little hiccup this morning and wouldn’t let me access it. All is well with the world once more, but it did illustrate one problem with web-served applications – when they go wrong are kinda stuck till someone can go prod the server that is perhaps the other side of the world to you.

2) If you need a laugh, go and view the Wikipedia article on scientology. They have their own cruise ship, upon which they reveal the greatest secrets of their religion. That, and there’s something about a walrus that cracked me up good and proper.

3) I’m in something of a quandary. Do I merge my Yahoo! and my Flickr identities? I know I am going to have to at some point, but I am trying to postpone the inevitable. Yahoo! really really doesn’t like me, and what is more, the feeling is mutual.
Case in point, before you can get POP access for a Yahoo! email account, you have to sign up for Yahoo!Delivers. This is a service I don’t want or need. You can get around it by just not selecting any boxes on the sign up page, but that in and of itself is silly – You have to sign up for this service on this page before you can get POP access for your email account, but you can get around it by not signing up for any part of this service on this page… Slightly idiotic. Oh, and when someone adds you to their “friends” list on Y!IM, it sends you an email. That takes five minutes to arrive. What happened to a nice pop-up a la Messenger saying “Jim Smith has added you to his friends list. Would you like to add him?” and *bam* 15 seconds later you can both be talking.
*grump*
No, Messenger is no better, especially lately when it’s been lagging something awful and secretly booting me off while saying I am still online, but…
*fume*

4) One thing Yahoo! are doing quite nicely at the moment is Yahoo! Answers. A wonderful, wonderful way to wile away the hours. You never know what you are going to see asked and answered next. Why, just the other evening I learnt more than I ever needed, indeed wanted, to know about how to shave your balls… I am sorry to burst your happy bubble, but I am not talking about sports equipment here either.

5) In my ongoing quest for the oddest search that has brought someone to Bright Meadow, I have a new offering: Girl + Noodle.
If the Girl + Noodle searcher is reading this, then welcome. I hope you found what you came looking for, and if you feel like sharing that with the group, well, we’re listening.

That’s it. Toodles 🙂

Cas is currently… at life

I suddenly don’t like using a Mac.

This is a serious thing for me to say, almost heretic, so I will explain.

What with the CC back in Canada till who knows when, I am being initiated in the wonders of Skype. Whilst this is great for voice, on occasion it would be nice to actually see who I am chatting to, which brings us to what I want to talk about: webcams.

The CC dug out his webcam, plugged it in, and after swearing at Yahoo! messenger for ten minutes [I’ll rant about Yahoo! another time], I was able to see him (yay!).

I, on the other hand, don’t have a webcam. I think they are evil and, frankly, they scare me. I am petrified that someone will be able to spy on me without my knowledge (is it still spying if you are aware of them?) a la American Pie. It isn’t rational, I know, but even when the damn thing is unplugged and in a drawer it worries me. For this reason, the fact I don’t like being on camera anyway, and that I don’t really have the need for it, I haven’t even thought of owning a webcam since I bought the Mac nearly two years ago.

But, seeing as how it is hardly fair I get to see my boyfriend but he doesn’t get to see me, I got over my fear and toddled off down to Argos to get me a webcam today.

Alas, and alack, this isn’t a story with a happy ending. I get it home, pull it out of the box, shudder at the evilness of it, and go to install the software when…Yup, you’ve guessed it, Windows only. I go online to have a bit of a nose around, see if I can find a patch or something, and it turns out, webcams for Macs just don’t exist. Correction, affordable webcams for Macs just don’t exist.

Even if I had money to burn, the cheapest Mac-supported webcam I can find is �80. Apple themselves do the very shiny iSight camera, which is a steal at �99. I am loathe to purchase an iSight anyway, because I have come across a few things that suggest it might not work too well with messaging systems other than iChat (which, of course, is Apple only). Something in me does baulk at spending minimum of �80 on something I will use to talk to one person (hell will freeze over before I start regularly using the webcam) and that only for (hopefully) a few months. I did find a site that has software which claims it can make Windows-only webcams work on Macs, but the webcams they support are all either no longer obtainable, or hideously expensive. Also, for most of the cameras there is a rider that says “this only works on around 50% of the cameras in this range due to chip inconsistencies…”

What is it about us Mac users that means we don’t get to video-chat with the rest of the world? Is it that, because we can afford to shell out �2000 for a computer, manufacturers assume we can shell out �100 for a webcam? Or are we just all too ugly?

Cas is all sad now. I’m just wishing I had discovered this problem a week ago before Curly Durly went Christmas shopping – I might have been able to get the Aged P’s to help out toward a shiny iSight. Alas, it’s too late for that as I have it on good authority all the presents for this year have been purchased.

So, dear blog minions, does anyone have any ideas to help Cas cope with 3000-odd miles of the Atlantic Ocean hampering communication?

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