Brain Damage

June 18, 2007 - 7pm

I think something in my brain has short-circuited.

Over the last few days, I’ve been feeling lightheaded, dizzy, and sort of disconnected from reality. It comes and goes. I’ve also been having strange anomalies in my vision… colors appear brighter than normal.

Easily the strangest thing was around 11:00pm on Thursday night. I was at a client’s office attempting to force a server to reboot. After failing (again) I noticed that one of the other tenants on the floor was moving out, and that the landlord was renovating the office. The office has a magnificent eighth-story view of Madison, so I tried to sneak in to admire it.

I didn’t have a flashlight with me, so I waited until my vision adjusted to the dark, then flipped open my phone. It gave me a dim, but acceptable, view of where I was going. The large main screen was facing away from me, but the smaller outside screen looked directly at me. As I moved the phone around to get my bearings, I was more than a little surprised to see that the small screen was leaving trailers in my vision. These weren’t the usual afterimages we all see when an oncoming car doesn’t dim its headlights–I could swing the phone around, then watch the screen’s streak of light catch up to where I stopped moving it.

I’m sort of confused right now, so I’m not really even sure if this post makes sense.

DS Browser

June 15, 2007 - 1am

I’m typing this (slowly) on my DS. I bought the DS Browser today, and I have to say that it’s not bad.

There are problems; small screen, difficult text entry, slow rendering… all things you’d expect from a device that wasn’t designed with a browser in mind. The wifi transfer speeds seem unusually slow as well.

With image downloads disabled, download and render times dwindle into the acceptable range. With the daily-increasing number of text-only sites designed for wireless devices, this shouldn’t pose a serious problem. However, if you think you’re going to do any serious browsing, forget it. Digg, Engadget, or Fark would take forever to load. And, of course, there’s no tabbed browsing. You get one window and that’s it.

The browser offers two modes. Overview renders the entire page in miniature on the top screen and allows you to scroll around a zoomed-in version using the stylus. SSR (small screen rendering) mode renders the web page in a single column of text and images. I’ve found that reading BBC news and The Onion in SSR mode works quite well.

I’d say the DS Browser was worth the $30. It’s a decent system that allows me to essentially use my DS as a very tiny, very limited laptop. Overall, I’d say it’s a few steps up from trying to browse the web on a cell phone, and a few steps down from a dedicated device like a Blackberry.*

*I’m guessing on the Blackberry statement. I’ve never actually laid hands on one.

Fuck.

June 7, 2007 - 1am

Everything has been conspiring agin’ me to suck these last few days. It’s been so shity, I think it deserves bullet points.

  • I haven’t been able to sleep decently for weeks. I even went to the trouble of getting prescription sleeping pills that don’t work.
  • I spent most of yesterday fighting with Megan. It was her birthday, and I feel like an asshole about it. And we both still believe the other was wrong.
  • Work has been beating me with a spiked iron club. Our data center is currently running at about 110% of its absolute maximum capacity, but the sales department is still selling more space. I expect we’ll be another 10-20% over before we actually get in the new equipment we desperately need to increase capacity–to where it should have been six months ago.
  • We also received a massive denial of service attack to one of our spam-fighting servers today. When I got in to the office, there were 222 missed calls on my phone. I spent the rest of the day attempting to fix everything that was wrong with our shit, plus the tons of other work that the other techs didn’t have time to do during the day.

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© Marc Teale 2009.