In the burgeoning tradition of “Fiona Fakes”, the photo I posted of her floating on her own in a swimming pool was actually a photoshopped composite. (Original images: 1 and 2.)
Didn’t I say I was a bad dada?
Reality TV shows and low-cost labour
It struck me the other day that reality TV shows are another example of an industry shedding skilled employees, only to replace them with lower-paid temporary workers. Out go the professional actors and presenters, and in come the shallow attention-seekers and Z-list celebrities eager to flaunt their lack of talent in order to (re)gain their 15 minutes of fame, or whatever dubious prize is on offer.
Left-handed mousing
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had a nagging pain in my right shoulder. Not a blind, stabbing pain, but just a throb and a twinge. It throbs at the end of a long day, and it twinges if I try to reach too far in any direction. Last month, as we were weeding out our book collection (which involved much heavy lifting of boxes up to and down from the attic), I noticed that my right wrist was hurting, too.
Until then, I’d put the pain down to the fact that with two kids around now, I’m doing even more heavy lifting in my day-to-day life than I was before. Fiona is still growing exponentially, it seems, and Alex still likes to be carried around a lot. But with the wrist staring to play up, my thoughts turned more towards some kind of repetitive strain injury. As a programmer, this is a bit of a scary thing to consider, because I earn my living from sitting at a desk and typing all day. My wrists are my livelihood.
So I’ve taken some steps to mitigate the problem. At home, I used to use a regular dining room-style table and chair for computer work. No more. I’ve now got a nice new desk and a proper adjustable chair to go with it. It took me a week or so to get used to the new sitting and typing arrangement, but I’m much happier with it now. Also, the new desk gives me more space to accumulate desk clutter. Excellent.
At work, I’ve switched mouse hands. I tried this a couple of years ago on a tip-off that it would help my drumming by improving the fine motor control in my left hand. I gave up on it quickly back then, but I’ve stuck with it now. I’ve been switched over for a fortnight now, and I can definitely feel the difference at the end of a day. My wrist and shoulder don’t suffer nearly as much.
Another unexpected benefit from using my left hand for mousing is that my right hand is now free for doing other things, like scribbling down notes. This has been terribly useful over the last week or so, when most of my work has consisted of scrolling through vast screeds of standards documentation and summarizing them into project compliance reports. With one hand on the mouse, and one hand on my pencil, I can just feel the productivity blazing through me. Oh yeah. I’m documentation crazy right now. Feel the burn.
I’m a bad dada
On the other hand, now we know for sure that Fiona is a witch.
Bread?
Cinema freebies are getting weirder. This morning we went to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and a couple of slightly bored freebie-away-givers ambushed us on our way out. It seems that Warburtons (a large UK bread bakery) are doing a big ad campaign, and so they were handing out…loaves of bread.
The tagline for the campaign is: “Rise with Warburtons.” (Rise…bread rises; early morning cinema-goers are early risers… Geddit?) Each freebie bag contained a small white loaf, five or six (!) Warburtons-branded ballpoint pens, and three vouchers for 20 pence off our next purchase of “any delicious Warburtons product”. Any “disgusting” Warburtons products that might be on the market are not included in the promotion, I suppose.
Also: “product”? This doesn’t exactly fill me with cozy images of home-baked bready goodness. It makes me think of “juice drinks” which can be made with as much as 5% real fruit juice, or “potato snacks” that are more closely related to extruded plastic mouldings than actual potatoes.
Still, it’s free bread. I wonder what next week’s promotion will be. Milk? Butter?
XBox Live rocks
Boy, does it rock. XBox has been slowly working its way up my “must-have” list, but it crashed through the final barrier when I was round at Richard’s place a couple of weeks ago for a gaming session. We played some Rainbow Six 3 and Project Gotham Racing 2, and had an absolute blast.
So…I had to get one for myself.
The only Live-enabled game I have right now is Rainbox Six 3, but I should be getting back my copy of PGR2 sometime soon. With a toddler and an infant around the house, I don’t know how often I’ll be online, but if you’re on Live, too, look out for me under the Gamertag of Sunpig. (What else?)