Show and tell

Le calme de ma journ�e de cong� est interrompu par un appel:
-Allo?
-Salut Martine, c’est Renaud (mon neveu de 6 ans qui est en premi�re ann�e). Dans 2 semaines � l’�cole, c’est la journ�e de l’�tre cher. Je voudrais te pr�senter � ma classe. Est-ce que tu peux venir?
-La journ�e de l’�tre cher?
-Oui. Viens-tu?
-C’est quoi un �tre cher, Renaud? Quelqu’un qui nous co�te beaucoup d’argent?
-Ben non! C’est quelqu’un qu’on aime beaucoup pis qu’on ne voit pas souvent.
Petit moment de silence pendant lequel j’ai un gros sourire tout en me sentant coupable de ne pas passer plus de temps avec lui.
-Tu vas me pr�senter devant ta classe?
-Ben oui.
-Et qu’est-ce que tu vas dire?
-Ben, j’sais pas.
-Ben s�r que je vais �tre l�, mon loup. Passe-moi ta maman qu’on arrange les d�tails.

Je vous l’annonce officiellement: je suis un �tre cher. �a fait chaud au coeur! J’esp�re juste que les autres enfants ne vont pas pr�senter leur chien ou leur ourson de peluche.

Il neige, il neige, il neige. Je me suis permis une journ�e de cong�, comme quand l’�cole fermait en raison d’une temp�te. J’ai dormi jusqu’� 9h00. Le t�l�phone ne sonne presque pas. Je reste chez moi. Mon appart est d’un calme incroyable. Ce soir je fais un bon souper, un feu dans mon foyer et on regarde Yi Yi, le DVD que je viens de recevoir (pas de frais de poste ces jours-ci chez Amazon.ca). J’ai toute une fin de semaine devant moi pendant laquelle je n’aurai pas besoin de travailler.

J’attendais ce moment depuis un bon bout de temps. Maudit que �a fait du bien.

When technology tries to tell you that you are gay, should you listen?

I’ve briefly talked on this blog about the PVR (personal video recorder) technology which has just arrived in Canada. This technology allows you to take control of your television by letting you pause live programs and by making it easier for you to record hours and hours of television shows on a huge hard drive. There’s also an interactive t.v. guide which will record some shows for you according to your previous choices. Some users of the TiVo technology in the US were surprised recently to find out that their PVR interpreted some of their programming choices in unexpected ways. They ended up tricking their machine by taping a few shows they didn’t really care to watch in order to convince the machine of their sexual orientation. One guy used this as an excuse to tape a lot of shows with naked women, just to convince his machine, which kept taping gay oriented movies for him, that he was straight. Read this funny article from the Wall Street Journal for more details.

Big brother is showing up in a lot more subtle ways than we expected!

Two interesting articles in Salon today:

Home decorating and other lies
All the truth about the way the super popular tv show Trading Spaces is filmed.

Georgy Do-Right
A Canadian journalist explains the whole “moron” incident to american readers.

Dans les petits pots, les meilleurs onguents.

Voici deux petits gadgets adorables auxquels je n’ai pas pu r�sister. Le premier est � moi et le deuxi�me doit malheureusement repartir vers la boutique informatique qui me l’a pr�t� pour une chronique techno:

1) Main gauche: Un concentrateur USB � quatre ports.
J’en avais plein le dos (litt�ralement!) d’avoir � me plier en quatre et � me mettre la t�te sous le bureau pour essayer d’atteindre les deux ports USB stupidement situ�s � l’arri�re de la tour de mon Dell. Je pensais m’acheter une extension de c�ble USB mais j’ai craqu� pour ce petit concentrateur qui fait tr�s bien l’affaire et qui ne m’a co�t� que 20$ chez RadioShack. C’est moins cher que le prix d’un c�ble USB.

2) Main droite: Le Nomad MuVo de Creative.
Ce petit appareil est tout d’abord un disque dur amovible qui se branche directement � un port USB. Pas besoin de c�ble, de pilote ou de logiciel. On le branche � l’ordinateur, une ic�ne appara�t automatiquement et on y transf�re n’importe quel type de fichier en le glissant-d�posant sous l’ic�ne en question. Jusqu’ici rien de tr�s nouveau, sauf que quand on y ajoute la partie bleue, qui contient une pile AAA, le petit bidule se transforme en lecteur MP3. La qualit� sonore est �tonnante et l’appareil fonctionne pendant plus de 10 heures avec une seule pile. Le MuVo co�te environ 145$ pour la version 64 Mo ou 280$ pour la version 128 Mo.

J’adore le fait que cet appareil ne p�se rien (parfait pour les voyageurs charg�s) et qu’il est tr�s simple � faire fonctionner. Le probl�me, c’est qu’avec 64 Mo d’espace, on se lasse vite de notre douzaine de chansons en MP3, surtout si on utilise l’appareil tous les jours. Il faudra donc prendre du temps chaque jour pour transf�rer de nouvelles chansons et cr�er de nouvelles compilations, ce qui peut vite devenir lassant. On rencontre cependant le m�me probl�me avec bien des petits lecteurs MP3 qui n’offrent m�me pas de fonction de stockage amovible pour � peu pr�s le m�me prix que le MuVo. L’appareil offre malheureusement tr�s peu de contr�le � son utilisateur et la musique joue dans l’ordre dans lequel les pi�ces ont �t� transf�r�es. L’id�al serait que le MuVo offre l’option Bluetooth. Plus de fils d’�couteurs qui se coincent dans mon foulard! Je r�ve…

Le probl�me quand on fait une chronique techno et qu’on teste des gadgets, c’est qu’on a souvent peine � les retourner, m�me quand ils ne sont pas parfaits. Sortirai-je ma carte de cr�dit pour pouvoir conserver ce petit MuVo? Je pense que je vais me faire sage cette fois-ci, puisque mes chroniques commencent � me co�ter plus cher qu’elles ne me rapportent! Je garde l’oeil ouvert cependant et si l’appareil s’approche dangereusement de la barre des cent dollars, je craquerai s�rement. Il est si petit et si mignon!

Prochain d�fi: Retourner l’Enregistreur Num�rique Personnel de Vid�otron/Illico que j’aurai entre les mains d�s mardi…

Bill’s american readers are feeling envious of her canadian status today. Maybe they should just switch, like this guy did?
parody of the Apple adds discovered via Emmanuelle

Some people will go through a lot to please their readers. Me? I just went to the bathroom with my digital camera and snapped this shot. (Why the bathroom? I used the mirrors as a guideline, and I have a very cool shower curtain, which you won’t get to see anyway.)

In case you haven’t noticed, this is a photo of a geek girl wearing glasses. I don’t know that I truly qualify as a geek, but my blog sure gets a lot of visits from people who look for “photos of geek girls wearing glasses” on Google and other search engines. The reason why anyone would be fond of this specific type of women is beyond me, but I figured hey, give the readers what they want. Those of you interested in pictures of me biting the head off a live chicken should know that I leave the cooking to my boyfriend, like geek girls often do (with a few amazing exceptions).

Speaking of search queries, while looking at my referrer logs, I came upon this site which gathers the most disturbing search requests leading to different blogs. The stuff you find there is pretty amazing. It does take all kinds of people, doesn’t it?

Lisa, the Kit Kat queen, has one more reason to come and visit from England during the holidays. Her favorite chocolate bar, the Orange Kit Kat, is finally here! I was paying my milk and orange juice at the d�panneur a few minutes ago, and a guy behind me was waiting to buy the new Kit Kat. Too bad the store was closing. I’ll go back tomorrow and give it a try.

Looks like there’s a real cult following for these chocolate bars. There are a lot of Web sites dedicated to the Kit Kat, and this one is even showing an orange PowerBook, I believe, getting friendly with the Orange Kit Kat. Nice match! Now THAT might be enough of a reason to switch.

I also found this info on some odd Nestl� Web site:

The chocolate crisp bar was made and originally launched in London and the South East of England in September 1935, and was called Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp. It only became ‘Kit Kat’ in 1937, two years before the Second World War.

Kit Kat was supposedly named after the Kit Kat club, an 18th Century Whig literary club. As the building had very low ceilings, it could only accommodate paintings which were wide and not very high. In the art world, these paintings were known as ‘kats’. It’s believed that Kit Kat derived its name from paintings, which had to be snapped off to fit into the rooms with the low ceilings.

Culture sometimes comes in very small and sugary packages…

So when are we going to see the Strawberry and yes, the Banana Kit Kat in Canada?

Interruptions

I am counting the days until November 30th, which will mark the end of a mad period of 4 months when I was buried under work, work, work. Starting at the end of the month, I will only have one full time job instead of two (not counting the short side jobs). I know I should not complain - I’m a freelancer, and work is good for freelancers, right? It’s just that some freelancers tend to be of the anxious type, and they sometimes take on too much work because they’re worried that the job offers will slow down. What if the money just stopped coming in?

Things will slow down though (yes, I WILL make it happen) but in the meantime, I’m compensating by buying books like crazy. The holiday period is always a big reading time for me and this year I want to start early! And more reading usually means more writing… which is good, because I have had a few fiction projects on the back burner for quite a few years now. One of my original intentions with this blog was to keep a kind of writer’s journal, but it hasn’t happened yet. Too many life changes in a short period of time. Too much work. Will the excuses ever end? Stay tuned…

Speaking of writer’s journal, last night, before I got to taste Amelio’s famous pizza, I finally found a copy of May Sarton’s “Journal of a solitude“, which I had been trying to find in local bookstores for months.

I love beginning to read a book, and I love book beginnings. The first few sentences are often the most powerful ones in a book. They contain its essence in a clear, elegant fashion. When I finish the last sentences of a book I really enjoyed, I usually go right back to the beginning and read the first paragraph again.

Here’s how “Journal of a solitude” starts:

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.

I dream about owning a house with which I could have old conversations! I have never, in my entire life, lived in a house. Always apartments - too many of them in the last few years. I fear that I will not be able to seriously start a big writing project until I actually settle down in MY place and develop a relationship with it. But I know it’s silly and it could become yet another excuse.

Must start. Must set aside the time to do it. Only two more weeks, and that damn month of November will be over.

Tiens, je viens de tomber, presque par hasard (via Michel Dumais puis le beau et nouveau site de Martine Gingras) sur un nouveau magazine qu�b�cois consacr� aux nouvelles technologies. Bande de cachottiers! C’est moi qui suis dans la lune ou bien est-ce que personne n’avait parl� publiquement de ce projet auparavant? Est-ce compl�tement ind�pendant comme publication, � part l’association promotionnelle avec Branchez-vous? En tout cas je vais aller essayer de trouver une version papier du magazine parce que la version Web est pratiquement impossible � lire.

Ah tiens, bien s�r, La Grande Rousse en parle aujourd’hui. Comme toujours, merci Dolores!