I think it’s Monday. I’m not sure. Possibly. Yes. I’m sure today is Monday.
See, this is the problem with bank holidays. They throw you right off. As far as ‘things to do’ go, it feels like a Sunday. Only, it isn’t! I’m not knocking bank holidays though. Free days off are ALWAYS gratefully received. Unless of course, bank holidays come out of your holiday allowance. But mine don’t, so yay bank holidays!
Even if it doesn’t feel like Monday.
I suggest you go listen to this right now: MP3 Link.
It just randomly popped up in a random shuffle on iTunes. I got it as part of the 2007 South by Southwest festival music pack thingy. I might have to go look up some more of their stuff!
I’ve noticed myself doing it more and more lately, and I’m going to try and stop. They say the first step to stop and addiction is to admit it. So here goes.
I’m addicted to using exclamation marks and ellipsis where I shouldn’t.
Phew! That feels SO much better! Aw damn, I’m already doing it again. I was pondering over why I keep abusing these two simple punctuation marks, and I think it’s quite simple: often it’s to do with timing, and finding a simple way to convey an emotion in something written.
When I talk to somebody, I can pause for effect, and emote with my voice, but it’s so much harder to do that in text. It’s all too easy for a reader to skip over something and see the punchline to a joke before you want them to. The end result is that they don’t laugh or feel the same emotion that you were trying to originally express to them.
So as a result, I’ve taken to peppering my forum posts, emails, blog posts, and anything else I write – apart from the formal stuff, obviously – with exclamation marks and ellipsis. I over-use the parenthesis sometimes too. I’d written an email recently, which when I read it over I realised I’d pretty much overlapped entire sentences by using parenthesis.
Maybe it would be a good idea for me to re-read Eats, shoots & leaves?
I use Retrospect Backup to… backup (oddly enough). Anyway, it used to run quite well on XP, but on Vista, it hasn’t been as good. It hides in the background, and you can’t interact with it in any way; if you run the main app during a backup, it tells you it’s running a backup, and you can’t do anything with it. I had a dig around and never found much info, so I just had a fiddle around myself.
Basically, Retrospect runs as the Local System account. That’s all well and good, but I can’t see it from my account. To get around that, I need the Retrospect Helper service to run as me. There won’t be any problems with file rights, as I own all the files anyway.
So what you can do is this:
C:\Program Files\Retrospect\Retrospect 7.5\retrorun.exe -u
C:\Program Files\Retrospect\Retrospect 7.5\retrorun.exe -a
And there you go, you now have Retrospect running in the user space, and able to be monitored.
So now I have that going, I can find out what the hell Retrospect is up to that means my backups take over 12 hours to complete!
I’ve seen this ‘Simpsonize me‘ site recently. The idea is simple – you upload a photo of yourself, and it produces a Simpson-style rendering of your visage.
Only, it doesn’t.
I tried it, and the resulting picture looked NOTHING like me. Not even remotely! It allows you to tweak the image, which I did, but I still couldn’t get anywhere near. It didn’t take long for me to just lose interest and forget about it. Since, I’ve seen a few people produce their own pictures, and they all look the same! So basically, it’s hopeless.
The only way you’ll get a Simpsons-like picture of yourself is to bribe one of the animators to draw you, find a decent artist to do the same, or become super-famous and be invited onto the show.
I think for now, I’ll pass on it. The WeeMee generator of old managed to produce a pretty close approximation of me, and the South Park character generator produced similarly good results. I don’t know who coded the Simpsonizer, but Burger King and Fox should be demanding their money back.
This is really simple – anybody can do it, and it’s pretty reliable.
You’ll find most spyware (and to a less extent, viruses) people end up with on their computers, come from porn sites. The ‘average user’ doesn’t tend to go browsing download sites and downloading massive amounts of files, such as shareware utilities and the like, so the common ‘attack vector’ (to use a security term) is through the web browser. I don’t think you could even blame any particular browsers, as these installers are usually executables that have to be downloaded and run.
So how can you spot them? Well, you’ll often find sites advertising free porn, or in some cases, porn you can pay for via your phoneline. To get to the porn, they’ll make you download a small program (a dialler) to run. This will usually install itself and allow access to something, but at the same time go and download a load of other junk and install it in the background. Before long, the PC is riddled with rubbish, and you’re barely able to use it.
So there you go! Simple stuff really!
