The skills involved in public speaking are often underestimated. It is an important social tool, especially when you are involved in a deeply social activity such as giving presentations. People who sit down in a room quite unaware of things are (surprise surprise!) often willing to receive information. Small things such as voice projection, ( Read more... )

The world can be a beautiful place when you let go. Light falls in perfect places, skipping across the surface of things, and shines with a degree of shyness. People hide behind their glasses of water, flasks of whiskey, cans of beer, cameras, cigarettes, music, conversation but their souls emerge as if rising out of some darkness into the clear, ( Read more... )

Having a mouse, I've realized, means I can scroll rapidly through any webpage. This is a fantastic rediscovery!
And! I bought a book today (happiness) and resolved a big problem.

But it's no fun crying over sad Chinese love songs. That really breaks my heart.

I bought a new laptop. It's an Asus machine of the F8 series, a tad heavy (but I bought a nice backpack to deal with that), super fast, super lot of disk space, super wonderful graphics card and a pretty super memory card. It was pricey but there had to be a trade-off if I was going to plunge into the competitive PC world. Macintosh was a haven of ( Read more... )

Wednesday was a lovely day out with my camera!


( Read more... )

I could have gotten firsthand books for very very cheap but I had to go miss the Expo book fair because I've been too involved with my new boyfriend, Canon. I'll do the next best thing: mourn for my loss.

Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the best movie I've seen in cinemas this year. It's one of those movies that could have easily exploited a longer, more complex plot only to get away with it yet it fantastically managed to say everything it had to say in short, sharp scenes. While the graphics are mind-blowing ( I couldn't stop ( Read more... )

"The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd ( Read more... )

I alternate between being "cool with stuff" and very very pissed off. For example: this morning I woke up feeling all right and quite suddenly I was not.

I can't believe it took me this long to watch the Coen brothers' Hudsucker Proxy. Wonderful set, 1950's New York captured in a Christmas fantasy, emotionally detached script, emotionally detached characters, a clockwork man, blackmail, treachery and corporate take-overs - with a hoola-hoop! .. and no, I'm not being sarcastic at all ( Read more... )