It's a Saturday afternoon. I've been awake for just two hours. It's the first warm, sunny and generally beautiful day we've had in months. It's the harbinger of another gorgeous summer. The Coldplay (Parachutes) CD that I have waited for, for almost two weeks now, has just arrived in the mail along with a Valentine's Day card from my parents. I've just had two blueberry waffles and a glass of cold apple juice for breakfast.

Nothing has annoyed me yet. Nothing will be able to for while now. I'm feeling too good for that.

Life is good.

Everyone's got a gimmick and it's about time I got one too, hence:

Things that annoyed me today:
1. Brain dead line wrapping behavior in Thunderbird 0.5. Lines seem to be neatly wrapped at 72 characters. Then you send what seems to be a neatly formatted email, and lines aren't wrapped at all at the receiver. The situation is worse if you're composing from a template. The template itself seems to have line wraps. Unfortunately, any edit you make that involves deleting a newline (basically pressing backspace at column 0, and going to column 72 on the previous line) makes it seem that that particular line is wrapped when it's not. So the receiver gets an email, which has some sentences wrapped at column 72, others not wrapped at all. Receiver then doubts your IQ.

There is a rewrap function in the edit menu, but we need an option to automatically rewrap all outgoing emails.

Better yet, we need Thunderbird developer's to look at the jEdit project, and take inspiration from their concepts of soft and hard line-wrapping.

2. On again, off again, on again, off again-right-in-the-middle-of-a-transaction-with-the-bank wireless internet connections.

3. Self censorship again.

Its 2am and I'm waiting for Windows XP SP2.

This post was actually going to be about a fairly controversial topic, but then I realized that this blog is publicly viewable, and I'm not really ready to wear my opinions on my sleeve. Yet.

Another interesting phenomenon of the liberating weblog subculture. Self censorship.

Or maybe it's just me and my paranoia acting up again.

It's hard to write. And mostly when it's hard to write I simply rant, which while being simpler, is never as interesting, nor can be used to maintain a torrent of words and ideas. After all, how much can one person complain?

So it comes to this then, an unsteady ramble, almost forced, with no clear direction. No story to tell or idea to dissect.

After a quick trip to the library, I returned with large stack of graphic novels, including Alan Moore's classic Watchmen, and his recently-converted-into-a-movie-which-got-mixed-reviews From Hell. I've read Watchmen before, but it's a compelling read. (For those who don't know much about Alan Moore, he's a British writer who's recently announced his retirement from comic books, and who's written stuff like Swamp Thing, a compelling horror comic about a man who's killed in a swamp, only to wake up as a muck-encrusted monstrosity, and after finally coming to terms with his loss of humanity, finds out that he's not the man who died, but rather just a bunch of plants who have evolved into him, and gained his memories. Mr. Moore's other famous works include, the aforementioned Watchmen, probably the first and certainly one of the most disturbing studies in super-hero deconstructionism, examining how a world would be, if it really had men who could fly and masked vigilantes meting out rough justice, and the recently-also-converted-into-a-movie-but-the-movie-sucked The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) I skimmed through Watchmen, and couldn't find the patience to read From Hell. I suppose something must be wrong if I'm getting impatient with mere comic books.

Here I shall segue to what seems to be the problem with my mind lately. I seem to be on a short fuse of sorts. Not in terms of temper but rather in terms of attention. I seem to be suffering from a sudden bout of attention deficit disorder, wherein I can't stick to a train of thought long enough to follow it to its logical conclusion. Rather, I simply wander all over. And I suppose having easy access to the internet simply aggravates this problem.

Most of my time these days seems to be spent at sites like Slashdot, or Ananova, reading about the next nerdy (or quirky) news item. I should probably just bite the bullet, and install a RDF aggregator. Then again, that's probably courting further loss in productivity. I can't believe I'm saying this so early in my career, but I seem to be suffering from work addiction, and these are just the withdrawal symptoms.

I shall end with more recommendations from off my reading list (most from my former reading list):

1. Supreme Power: Another superhero deconstructionist tale, only this one is still going on, and new issues come out every month. It's by J. Michael Straczynski, for whom comics are a second job, his first one being a writer/producer of television and film. A preview of Supreme power #1: http://www.wizarduniverse.com/magazines/wizard/WZ20030815-sp_1.cfm

2. Preacher: A weird, violent, and iconoclastic tale about a Texas preacher who loses his faith and gets to play host to an entity as powerful as God, his ex-girlfriend who's now a hitman, and his new best friend, an Irish vampire. After he finds out that the Devil is dead, and God has abandoned Heaven, the preacher goes out to find and confront God and make Him pay for His actions.

3. Ghost World: This has nothing to do with ghosts. It's an immensely funny story about a pair of teenage girls, who decide to wreak havoc with the lives of people around them by playing practical jokes. This became an excellent movie starring Thora Birch.

Nothing more to say. It's bloody 3am and I need the sleep.

So. Each and every knob in the world which controls temperature has only two settings - `Too hot' and `Too cold'. Choosing between them is an art that one learns to master only after spending multiple nights either like a leg of lamb in the freezer or a chicken carcass left to bake in a clay oven. Why are essentially all temperature controls created so that you are either charred to a crisp or quick frozen to a state of suspended animation? Why can't I find a single bathroom fixture, which does not consider me its bitch, and decide to alternatively boil me or flash freeze me? All the time when it knows that the soap is going to come to life and leap out of my fingers again and make another desperate attempt to secure its freedom by escaping down the nearest drain. I probably shouldn't get started on soap reanimation and save talk about it for some other time though. Right about now, I wish I could come up with a catchy slogan for those oppressed by temperature control devices, but my brain's overheated so they'll have to wait.

On a side note:
Why are rants always such interesting reading? Is it because we as rantees commisserate with the ranter, or are we simply enjoying the spectacle of someone else breaking down in frustration (or anger or envy or whatever emotion the ranter is channelling at that time) ?

On a side side note: (If such a thing exists)
Rantee: I'm fairly certain no such word exists in the English language, but it means `wild' in Marathi!

Another late night, another sleepy day. Don't you just hate people who are early to bed and early to rise? Morons and maxims strike again.