moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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(and my Wish List)

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Refreshment  
Last sennight or so, times have been troublous, myself tim'rous, difficult, despondent. Then friends dragged me out, we had tea & sandwiches with the pigeons at Pyrmont, spent several hours at Sydney Aquarium [long descriptive enthusing redacted], hot congee in Dixon St, walked home, watched a Monty Python episode (with more tea). Now well-fed, content, refreshed & quite tired out.

Labels: personal

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 2:43 am

 
Interactive themes for Gmail  
For giggles and prettiness, I put a theme, Tea House, on my Gmail account with a landscape and sky background. Later I found it reflects the time in your account's time zone setting, showing dawn, day, dusk and night in the scene. Nice. Too nice! I enjoyed it so much I had to change it because it was distracting me from getting quickly in and out of mail, so tried a plainer one, Tree. Recently we had bad weather and it showed clouds, rain and tossing trees! Good fun.

Much better than the pretty season/day-night shareware icon on my Windows 3.11 screen that couldn't be adjusted for southern hemisphere seasons.

Now I'm intrigued to find others which may have such quirky little features.
*checks effect of changing themes in Gmail account*
OK: Tree; Beach; Mountains; Summer Ocean; Phantasea; Graffiti; Planets; Bus Stop; Ninja; and Tea House ask for localization information, whatever use of it they may make. But I can imagine themes doing stuff that doesn't depend on place, too.

In The Good Old Days, I'd have thrown myself into making a local version, Bush Shed (aka Time Sink). From dawn choristers in the mist, to cockies above a tin roof in 'the purple noon's transparent might', to the mass migration of flying foxes across a rainbow sky at dusk, to possums lolloping and tawny frogmouths lowering in the dark under glowing stars. Wattle, banksia, eucalypt, distant mountain ranges and a macropod should preferably be present. *wistfully contemplates huge list of essential, urgent and important tasks*

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Labels: computers, personal

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 12:54 pm

 
Crumple Zone  
Protecting my limited time and mental energy, to help retain some fingernail-edge grasp on whatever shreds of sanity I try to gather 'round me, I've had to develop, inter alia, Pedantry Crumple Zones.
I still feel shame and guilt when, seeing an error and a chance to teach and spread truth, I pass by the other side of the road. But there are so many other things to feel shame, guilt and anger about that the pedanticism is well down the priority list :)

Labels: language, personal

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 12:42 pm