and then they found out it was the baby… *cough*

No, actually I’ve been watching a DVD box set, season one of Twin Peaks. I had never seen it before, and actually, my only exposure to it had been through the Simpsons. One episode Homer was reportedly watching it, and it showed a man dancing with a Unicorn under a tree with a traffic light under it… hmm, okaaay. And then there was the who shot Mr. Burns episode with Lisa and the backwards dream with the flaming cards (um, I’ll drive) which I knew from the commentary was a reference (or rather, blatant ripoff) of a scene in Twin Peaks… so my interest was somewhat, ah, peaked, as the show involved David Lynch, so I figured there would be some strangeness.

It is actually sort of a comedy that’s too good to be funny, heh. Well, it’s like a soap opera, where some of the plot elements are so nuts that it’s like a parody of soap operas, to the point that the characters in the show follow a soap opera in the show itself called Invitation to Love.

The whole show centers around an FBI agent trying to solve murder of Laura Palmer, who is as much of a saint as she is a devil. Homecoming queen, and druggie, english-tutor and whore. And of course, in the show there is the Very Obvious Person who you think did it, sort of like when we thought Snape from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the evil factor in the story, since he was basically painted as such. Also, there seem to be any number of reasons for everyone else in the town to have killed anyone else (and they threaten each other daily) but not many motives in her death.

Unfortunately, the experience with the box set wasn’t great, for two reasons. There was no pilot episode included! There was a pilot, and it aired, and had the whole first part of the story, but there was some rights issue, so the first box set was released without it, what the hell? So the “first” episode has a “last time on Twin Peaks”, all the episodes do… I thought for the first one having that was an interesting narrative device, but no, there was a pilot, just not in the box set, alas.

Secondly, the second, and last season, doesn’t seem likely to ever make it to DVD. They apparently solved the murder (which in the first concept of the show, was going to be made unsolved forever) halfway through the season, and then no one watched anymore, so the show wrapped up in two seasons.

Fortunately, a movie was also made, called Fire Walk With Me, that is a prequel showing the last week or Laura Palmer’s life, and then her murder, revealing the killer. Since David Lynch was heavily involved with it, it is very very odd indeed, the series itself was less so. The movie also had frequent references to the dream seen in the second episode of the first season and which is the one the simpsons referenced. No burning cards, but most of the rest of it was there.

In fact, there’s a weird bit in that dream with Wiggam and Lisa where a shadow passes over the drapes. I always wondered what that was supposed to be.. a glitch, a reference?, something about Burns’ shooter? Turns out it was taken as seen from the dream sequence in Twin Peaks itself, of course, what it means there is even more baffling. The best I was able to come up with is that it’s sort of bird shaped, and a bird, oddly, does play an important role in the murder of Laura Palmer.

The show itself is pretty good, strange but not overly so (movie is another matter), has really nifty lounge music that reminded me of 7th Guest, and also, unfortunately, has a Dragon Ball approach to rising action, where it could take a season for one of the characters to build up the energy to release their attack

Anyway, so that’s another show that is in the public collective consciousness that I now have caught up on.

I’ve been reading a few blogs/journals on various kinds of usability. The alert box focuses on web usability, but a lot can be extracted an applied to computer in general. flow|state is seldom updated, but is pretty humourous, as is The Daily WTF which has a couple nuggets, usually in the form of amusing error popups that people have submitted.

All of which have made me pay attention a little bit more to usability in terms of computing, and now I have my own WTF moment to complain about. Here at work, we use a bug tracking system, I won’t name names, but it’s got some good points, and a whole lot of bad points. It has both a client agent, and a web based agent, but I never use the web based one since one would tend to time out all the damn time, so I stick with the client one.

I also have a mouse (quelle surprise) but it’s an optical mouse, which has the nasty habit of just sort of flinging the cursor where ever the hell it feels like putting it, luckily bounded by the screen itself. Of the four corners of the screen, I wonder which is the most dangerous, also think of a maximized application. Say, like bug tracking software, where I had a bug report all typed up, but I couldn’t submit it. I was waiting on a build, and waiting, and waiting, but I have to use the thing for other purposes, and as it’s a sort of crappy MDI app, I can manage it. So then my mouse picks a time when I’m just clicking to fling the mouse off to the top right of the screen, where my click was interpreted as a click on the close button. Gasp, if this had been the web version of the app, it would have just closed the window and I would have lost everything in my unsubmitted bug report.

But ho, I was saved by the application asking me if I wanted to Save the Bug, Discard the Bug, or Cancel. I clicked cancel, which has saved me from similar problems in Word, EditPad and virtually every other program I can think of. I guess the program interpreted my cancel as being “Cancel the closure of the child window”, but then it went ahead and closed the whole program anyway, so much for the child. There, thank you, no better than web based, glad it takes space on my hard drive.

If it would just start timing me out too, now that would be shiny.

No, the story itself isn’t worth 50 dollars, the story itself involves 50 dollars.

I’ve thought about this story recently, and I see that I don’t appear to have a record of it online already, which is odd. But anyway, here’s the best that I can remember the story right now. It is always a painful ordeal trying to reconcile conflicting memories of the past with friends, so I’ll say mine is definitive in all ways except in the ways that it isn’t.

Anyway, this occured many years ago, when I was in 1A in University, or actually, it was probably in my work term at Schneiders in between 1A and 1B. I was with 5 other friends, not all of whom I can recall, so I won’t bother giving a list. But I beleive there were six of us total, and also, I know most definitely we were at Mel’s, a diner in Waterloo.

We were there, in a booth, 3 on each side, eating an late (or very early morning) breakfast I beleive. I don’t know about anyone else, but I do recall seeing a strange man in a booth further back, but I didn’t pay him much mind, until he approached us. Given the noise, my position in the booth, and my general inability to pick a voice out of anything but silence, I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. Then he put down six 50 dollar bills, one for each of us. And after some discussion afterwards, everyone putting together what they had heard (apparently I wasn’t the only one who had trouble understanding him) he had told us to find some person to give the money to, and gave a name (which actually had two derivations that I recall between us, and we later could find neither in phone books or the university directory). If we should fail to find the person, he said, we were to keep the money, as he said he knew we were poor university students. But, he also said, if we found this person, we should tell them the numbers 6, 3, 1, and that they would understand (my mind was disconnecting from this point). Finally, one of the things that came out of our notes on the encounter, was that he said that he didn’t like men for one reason or another, okay, jolly good.

He then left the restaurant, sort of shoo’ed away by a waiter. Who then told us to just take the money and not make a fuss about it. That last bit struck me as odd, it’s like he was trying to avoid a scene or something, when a scene in a half empty diner late at night is hardly devestating for them, hell, I’ve had friends vomit over their tables. The waiter then told us that he was in earlier, gave a waitress some really large tip (in the hundreds) and just not to worry about it and to stay calm, etc, etc.

Anyway, out of the six people, I am the last, as far as I know, to still have the fifty. One person I beleive gave theirs to charity some time later, another beleives they accidentally spent it thinking it was one of their own fifty’s. Mine is still in my wallet, like decoration, like the condom. I don’t know if I will ever get rid of it before it disintegrates, it’s a fixture.

As is this story.

I bought a USB Harddrive a while ago, during a boxing week sale from Futureshop’s online store. Got it last week but I haven’t really put it through its paces. I tried a couple dummy big files to check the speed, and it’s pretty swift, but I’m just not sure if I trust it. James had one that, if I recall, gave him some difficulty (stuff vanished if I recall correctly). My brother has one that had the dire warnings that if you turn it off or otherwise unplug it before telling windows of your strong desire to do so (strong because you may try to stop the device, and windows will think better of it and decide that, no, now is not the best time, so go away) then you risk losing all your data, the drive itself, windows (oddly) and half your worldly possessions. So what about power outtages, my computer has lived through those… does it affect external drives more or something, are the manufacturers just covering their… assets?

Which reminds me, have to find room on the UPS for the plug, crazyness. Had to pull out the lamp (which was just on a surge protected plug).

Anyway, the point of this litle entry was just something I noticed in the included quick-start guide (which is listed in the box as included, as is a driver CD… what I’m sure they meant to say was that the quick-start guide was a PDF on the CD which still and confusingly just says “Driver” on it. I know, easy to get those confused, anyway, in the area dealing with the simple backup utility provided:

For important data, every month at least ‘data check’ some files after Backup Task
completed.
If possible, it’s recommended to backup your important data to other media or device
as back up copy incase of failure or accident.

I see, the very device some people would have bought to back up their internal drives to is now recommending that people backup their backup. And also, it’s recommended to backup.. as back up. incase. of failure or accident. Well, I’m sold. And I’m sure when I buy my DLT units and carts that the manual will suggest that I should back up my data on stone blocks for safe keeping, but to keep them out of that acid rain. The stone block people will then suggest getting someone with a really good memory. Not that any ’serious’ corporate or small business users should back up onto USB drives as such, but I found it funny enough to ignore that opinion.

Anyway, not sure if I should trust the thing, but I figure it might hold some of my episodes before burning them off on DVD I do download lots of… things…. things to make us go…. we look for things. (Somewhere in Hong Kong, Curtis is feeling summoned by that reference) But I should probably break it in for some general backup purposes or some such, it’s a 160GB, and my two internal 120GB ones give me 400GB of what-the-hell-am-I-hoarding capacity. The fact is, I’m not sure. I mean, I have lots of episodes of things, but every time I check the size of some of the higher folders, I dunno, it’s like all the socks I lost over my lifetime have found their way onto my platters and are filling them up. I think I might need a good format soon enough, clear away the cruft.

I remember on my P2 when I had to reformat and install XP fresh after every reboot because of… something I never quite nailed down, man, that really teaches you what you need and what you don’t. I guess I hang onto stuff just because I haven’t suffered a recent catastrophic loss of data that makes me start fresh.

Fates: That is not a proposal.

This is a picture by azuzephre who I’m guessing is the same as this guy.

Anyway, I don’t know why I find this picture so fascinating, and also incredibly sad at the same time. Sort of reminds me of some situations of my own…, not that I’ve ever eaten someone’s intended gift, but it strikes a chord with me for some reason. Also, vaguely the sense of having tried, made an effort, for something, and also ruining it all by yourself. I dunno, a simple little picture, but for some reason I associate something with it.

I made you some tea…