Thanks to my satellite network’s mosaic display, I learn stuff from TV. I had always wondered why the Spanish Civil War (which is only called Guerre d’Espagne, or Spanish War, in French) wasn’t part of the history of France. Or, rather, why it was called the Spanish War — why a war that could lay the grounds for a fascist regime that’d last until 1975 right on France’s doorstep (and I can’t still quite fathom that one, either… a military dictatorship so close to my home, and to my birth date? is the Spanish language bad luck, or what?) could have only involved Spain, why nobody had stepped in. Thanks to a random well-lit interview shot in the middle of the mosaic, I finally figured it out.

What, you expect me to explain? Do you really think this is the kind of blog that discusses history?

Well, okay… (No, actually, I’m writing this down because I’ll have forgotten tomorrow, and by the next winter I’ll remember mentioning it and I’ll search the archive to find this post back.)

A piece of seasonal advice: if you’re going to buy an air conditioner, don’t base your choice on the lack of noise it makes in the store. You just don’t realize how the ambient brouhaha hides the tchiling-tchilings and, more importantly, the big BANG!s every time the compressor starts and stops. Trust the decibels instead — or, better yet, the price. 150€? Yeah, right.

Now all I can do is get used to it. Last night I got woken up a couple of times by the BANG!s mentioned above, with the impression that someone had just slammed my door shut (probably on their way to come and kill me, because who else than an assassin would slam my door in the middle of the night, when it’s locked shut?). Fortunately, unlike the old air conditioner I had borrowed from my parents in order to test the whole concept, this one makes a perfectly regular, smooth noise apart from the starts and stops (at least for now, but no doubt it’ll get old and clunky very soon) so I have no trouble going back to sleep. Or not — I did get awake enough to remember it afterwards.

I forgot a detail: are all Rennes guys particulary metrosexual (which is an actual possibility, considering it’s a students town), or do countryside queers usually go to the DIY/tools stores on Saturday afternoon? I can understand the dyke couple, but guys in tight t-shirts and jeans… I had eye contact with one of those (and a very well built one, but too old), but what about the others?

I feel like I’ve already read a pédéblogueur’s post on the same topic, but I won’t be bothered to look for it. (Or maybe it was on my own blog. I don’t try and remember what I write.)

Did you, too, get the “0% fat” Chupa Chups ad? That’s pathetic and ridiculous, right? Ha!

When I saw the ad for Fruitella Light, I wondered how they could have made that — knowing the regular Fruitella, I couldn’t see how they’d make them dietetic without losing the taste. Even I can get naive sometimes.

Ingredients: sweeteners, cream (4.2%), vegetal oil, …

Of course… the texture doesn’t come from sugar — it’s all in the fat.

So it took a promotion on air conditioners for me to travel all the way to Rennes, the closest real city. One hour on the highway, sixty minutes having nothing else to do but watch the little needle on my speed dial — do they really expect people to believe you’re better drivers when you’re bored and focusing all your attention on your dashboard? Anyway, it was as boring as expected, although just a little quicker. And I didn’t even take advantage of the trip to visit the city… after I spent one hour walking around the store to try and phone my parents who weren’t reachable anyway, then another hour trying hard to collapse the car’s damn backseat, not to mention that I hate driving around in a city with my rearview mirror blocked by a couple of air conditioners, I just wasn’t in the mood (and the smell, and the cleanliness) for a tour of gay Rennes. I did try out the rest area on the way back, but it was deserted (though, considering the poor, lonely truck driver who got his hopes up when I went to piss, I clearly got the place right). Fucking Saturday, fucking countryside. I almost felt like crying as I was visiting the local Centre Leclerc — a real hypermarket! I had forgotten what that was like!

What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here

If I hadn’t waited to gain twenty pounds again before I started exercising, right now I’d be able to sell my body on the escort sites. But if ifs and buts… uh… something something… then I’d have a life.

What do you know! EFREI, my post-graduate school, finally has a real website. Ah, memories… not that they were particularly good, but as I wrote before I give in easily to nostalgia.

It amazes me not to be able to find a single one of my co-students on the web. I know, someone looking for me wouldn’t find me either, but still… I should be an exception! (And I probably am, not in being hidden, but in being on the web at all.)

P.S. Ah… I’m not the only one from my promotion to turn bad!

It’s been quiet in here for the last few days. Okay, I can understand you wouldn’t care about my Mac talk (although should — with the revision 2 of iMac, PBook and soon iBook, and OS X finally coming of age, 2005 is the year for switching), but if nobody comments when I post a young Romain Duris picture there must be something really wrong.

Holy crap, how big the thing is. A huge white block — when I’m in front of it, I feel like I’m not in my room anymore, that I’ve fallen the rabbit hole into an IT showroom. Every time I enter the room I can’t believe there’s thing big, beautiful, clean, smooth, shiny thing on my desk. A modern-day monolith — only much, much cooler than 2001’s.

If I had been to check out iMacs in a store before ordering, I’d probably not have dared buy the 20-incher. Needless to say, I’m terribly glad I didn’t.

*drool*

You could have warned me that my blog’s thumbnails looked horrendous on a decent LCD screen. (And I intended to keep my PC as the main graphics workstation… maybe I’ll have to reconsider my options.)

Oh, and, also… bllllllllllllll gahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Which is the key word? “Onforwarded” or “delivery”?

P.S. Looks like it was “onforwarded”. (Which indeed isn’t a word. Why do we have to suffer so?)

Like I said. I’m gonna be in one hell of a mood for the whole week-end.

— I’m sleepy.

— Already?

— Yeah.
But I don’t wanna go to sleep.
If I go to sleep, next thing I know it’ll be tomorrow 12:00pm and I’ll be in the corridor and I’ll see there’s no Apple box with my name on it.

The way it’s going, I can see my Mac sleeping for the whole week-end less than a hundred kilometers away from my home. I’m gonna scream.

Getting closer. (Meanwhile, the tracking on Apple’s website still shows nothing at all. Really, what’s the point.)

Yes, I know, you (or at least the half dozen that cares) wish I posted something more interesting than my iMac’s journey, but these days when I’m not reloading the TNT page I’m making scripts. For Gayattitude (now with live chat — again, in hopes that it won’t overload again, third time’s the charm, they say, but the French say “never twice without a third”, meaning everything bad happens three times), for this blog, and for other sites. Trying my best to be done with it all by the time my Mac arrives so I get to be fully focused on nesting in it.

Oh, and I also spent two hours reorganizing my feeds in Bloglines, because all Windows aggregators are utterly, amazingly, unbelievably unusable, and because Bloglines had trouble marking items as read on my most populated categories, so I gather you have to make smaller groups. The problem being that every time you move a feed around the whole list has to be reloaded — all 400+ feeds, and 400+ fucking icons, and all the Javascript around (would you believe that all Bloglines pages are entirely made with document.write, which means they don’t only take time to load, they also make Firefox freeze for thirty seconds every time?). Two hours to reorganize.

I know full well I could have exported an OPML list, made the changes in a local aggregator, and import the new OPML back in. But I’m stubborn that way. (And Windows aggregator disgust me.)

Thanks to Vincent for the link.

What’s the point, really, of having package tracking on the web if the page is going to be completely blank?

Vous devriez recevoir votre commande sous 6 - 7 jours.

Veuillez noter toutefois qu’il s’agit là d’un délai estimatif, exprimé en jours ouvrés.

Wahhhh.

Heeee.

Hawww.

*jumpity* *jumpity* *jumpity* *jumpity*

(Do I need to tell you I am really bouncing and giggling in front of my computer right now?)

Voilà, the galleries are now completely functional, and I encourage you to subscribe to its RSS feed if you want to keep seeing my photographs, because that’s where the photolog will now be happening (if you don’t use RSS, you’ll see the latest images on the top right of my home page). Redirections are all set, and the GarooSoft section has been transferred to the wiki as planned. Now, just one last hesitation: do I adapt the layout to use sIFR?

I’d like it better if they said at what time it moved to “Preparing Shipment”, rather than say at what time it still was. Knowing it still is in one stage is less informative than knowing when exactly it entered that stage.

By the power of SQL queries over several tables (I’ve had such a bad time with MySQL, at the time when we were hosted… uh… can’t remember where, that I had always stayed very clear from those sorts of things), here come the garoo.net galleries, in a blog format and with Flickr-like tags, for originality. Though I haven’t had the courage to make the HTML precompilation yet or the RSS feed — I even haven’t made the administration scripts yet. Later. It’s not like I upload stuff there often.

All that’s left now is copying the GarooSoft contents into my wiki, and the site will finally be whole.

P.S. And here’s the RSS feed.

But why did it take two days to reach “Sent to manufacturing” status?

Mmh… is the stand larger than the previous revision’s, or have I only gotten used to the idea of a tiny stand like this supporting all by itself such a big and precious small computer?

P.S. After verification on Google Images, it looks like it’s just me.

Merci pour votre commande passée sur l’Apple Store. Nous sommes heureux de vous adresser cette confirmation de commande. Votre commande sera traitée avant le 09.05.2005 Prévoyez 3 à 7 jours pour la livraison de votre commande à réception de la notification d’expédition.

No turning back now.

Vous avez choisi de régler votre commande par carte de paiement à débit immédiat. Votre banque débitera donc immédiatement votre compte du montant de votre commande. Prévoyez 4 jours pour la constitution de votre commande. Prévoyez 3 - 7 jours ouvrables après départ de l’entrepôt pour sa livraison.

Well, that’s a step in the right direction.

I didn’t originally want to borrow my mother’s credit card because I was a bit ashamed of announcing I was buying a 1,900€ computer, but… I figure that shortening the delay by a whole week makes it quite worth it.

Merci de prendre en compte 2-3 jours ouvrés pour la recéption d’un transfer bancaire et 6 jours ouvrés pour celle d’un cheque. Prévoyez 4 jours pour la constitution de votre commande. Prévoyez 3 - 7 jours ouvrables après départ de l’entrepôt pour sa livraison.

Mfff sgruh gneee.

Est-ce qu’en 2005 on ne devrait pas être capables de concevoir des systèmes qui ne jouent pas à la douche écossaise dès que quelqu’un se lave les mains à l’autre bout de l’appartement ?

It took me a while, oh yeah did it take me a while — about a year and a half rewriting all the scripts. Not because it takes a year and a half, but for lack of motivation and, more importantly, because I couldn’t find anything satisfactory for the new interface — tired of frames, but nothing better at hand. And then Google arrived, and Ajax became the latest fashion (I hated the idea of imposing a cutesy nametag on a technology already known as XMLHttpRequest, but I have to admit that, when it comes to taking notes on paper, “use Ajax for the crossids” is more pleasant to write) and… here comes the future, a revolutionary interface, Javascript pioneers, too classy, I love myself and I love HTML when it works.

Nevertheless, now that I know how Ajax works and what it really does, I can’t help but laugh at how fashionable it has become. For years they’ve been repeating that frames are evil and… now everybody’s enthusiastic about what is nothing more than a Javascript-driven iframe system. Doubly evil. Mwah.

Oh, and while we’re on the fashion subject: I was dead set on making the new site with as few tables as possible (the only layout table was to be on the blogs, for compatibility reasons, because users are accustomed to uploading huge images that layout blocks have to adjust to) and I had to move back and add a bunch of them because Explorer was screwing up completely. I even tried adding a doctype (HTML 4 transitional, though) in case it’d work better.

What a fool you’ve got to be to have satellite TV in Normandy. Oh how odd, it’s raining!

Option 1: hesitate for three days. Option 2: write a 1,900€ check, quickly, before starting to think. Option 3: hesitate for a week. Option 4: buy a Mac mini, quickly, before I’m tempted. Option 5: grab an axe and break everything in my room. Ahhh the pain in my head, make it stop, make it stop!