alex.mullr.net/blog

Just got back from seeing the new horror film 1408 – it was fine (quite immersive, but nothing amazing). It did make me jump, but that’s nothing special – everything slightly scary makes me jump.

I even smiled in a couple of places, the first being when Mike Enslin’s Dell (product placement anybody?) laptop showed a blue screen of death after getting a little damp from the fire sprinklers. But it’s all OK, because the computer decided to switch itself back later on in the film so that he could have a video chat with his wife. The second smile moment was just weird: some of his daughter’s clothes came out the hotel fax machine…

Today was a fantastic day – I got my first piece of actual junk mail in the post, which meant I could do something I first read about from Maddox (while I’m talking about him, just finished his book – The Alphabet of Manliness – and it’s the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time).

The idea is simple: you take a prepaid envelope that a company sends you, fill it full of other rubbish (Maddox uses coupons) and post it back to them. The end result is that they pay for the postage going back to them, eventually dissuading them from sending this stuff out. I know I have too much time at the moment, but I’m going to keep doing this in the hope that one day they might stop.

To name names, as I’m feeling a little bitter – Haymarket Media Group sold my address from a magazine subscription, and I received advertising from Bose and Hiscox home insurance.

Spending a week with people who aren’t completely insane over technology has been refreshing. They don’t mind giving me their laptop to use, whereas I’m crazy to the point that I can hardly leave people alone with my lovely shiny new machine.

The family computer here is a Dell Inspiron which is at least four or five years old, reinforcing (to me at least) something that Leo Laporte mentions on his US radio show, The Tech Guy, relatively often: you don’t need a new machine, you want a new machine because the old one looks clunky. This Inspiron still runs XP (albeit slowly) and Office, and can surf the web fine. To be honest, I’m surprised that some part of it hasn’t given out yet, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time.

And I have to look on the bright side – it means my MacBook looks even prettier than normal.

Photo by robertrazrblog on Flickr (creative commons license)

So today (14th August) is my birthday and my first front page story on digg

Does it get any better?

I think not.