My perceived age seems to be a running theme on my blog as the running-into and meeting several new people thanks to dance classes has my age coming into question time and time again. What about how old I am on the inside then? Well, according to a study that has recently come out about social media amongst young adults (which has been getting referenced a lot this past week from the sites and blogs I follow) I'm likely to be 30 or older.

According to the study, blogging amongst teens and young adults declined since 2007 (went up with the 30+ crowd over the same period) who have exchanged "macro-blogging" for micro-blogging with status updates. It's more likely the status updates are just confined to their online profiles on sites like Facebook, as the study also showed that a majority of young adults have a Facebook profile, but not a Twitter account.

So blogging and Twitter are both uncool and for the old folk. *sigh* Can't catch a break can I? And all of this on the back of a dream I had a few nights ago where I was getting gray hairs O_o

I guess being told you're old on the inside isn't as bad as being mistaken for young on the outside. It carries with it a lot of the better connotations associated with age, like wisdom and responsibility, and it kinda makes me feel good about myself, much like that feeling you get when you did reading tests at primary school and were told by your teacher you had a reading age beyond your years. Pride, I think it is - the sense of achievement kind, not the self-important seven-deadly-sins kind.

Back to the study, it's probably just showing the trends of today: Facebook is an easy way to share certain content with your friends, and status updates are an easy way to do what blogging does but with less characters; say what's on your mind to those who are willing to read/listen.

When I started this website in 2001, I was just following the trends of those days which was to get your own Geocities (or equivalent free-hosting) page and add whatever spastic animated image or annoying follow-your-mouse-cursor JavaScript to the site. The blog was the natural extension of the personal website and so that was added quite soon afterwards, although I didn't start calling it a blog or blogging until late 2005.

Little did we know that maintaining the thing takes actual effort, and so came the decline of the personal website / blog, paving the way for the multitude of social networks, each with their own little way of doing relatively effortless things like uploading photos from that drunken 21st, or telling your friends about what food you're ingesting AT THIS VERY INSTANT.

If the long-term trend though is to replace effort-requiring things with effort-less things, then I wonder what will be superseding the Facebooks and Twitters of today? It's bad enough that today's kids have forgotten what punctuation is for in their goal to say as much as they can with as few characters as possible.

What are we going to forget next? The ability to act appropriately in social situations because everything is done with non-face-to-face communication methods?

Oh wait...

I've said before that books, reading, and the local city library are a few of the things that rate very highly in my list of hobbies. Upon returning from my New Year's holiday, I went to the library and saw that 3 books I wanted to read were available, so I got them all, thinking that I could manage to read all 3 books within the 1 month borrowing period. It'd be like a reading challenge I told myself.

I wouldn't say I'm a slow reader, but the amount of time available to me for reading is the biggest hurdle to completing such a challenge: spare weekend afternoons being the largest chunk of available time, followed by before I go to bed at night, during my lunch break at work, and maybe even a few pages when I turn-on my work computer in the morning. (When I lived in the suburbs, I could add 'the train ride to/from work' to that list, which added about 40 minutes every weekday.)

1 month on, I did manage to read those 3 books, but for as long as I've been having this love-affair with the library, I've had this nasty little habit of borrowing another book whenever I return the one I've just read. It was never a problem before as it kept me with something to read, but now it's keeping me perpetually in 'reading challenge' mode which is starting to weigh on me. So I've still got 3 books to go, none of them the ones I originally borrowed after New Year's, and on top of those I also have the 2 books I was given as Christmas presents from my family (Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim).

I'm trying to break the cycle - I don't want to feel eternally obligated to use my spare time reading books when I should redirect that spare time into other things like planning for Pizza 1.1, or practicing guitar now that I have someone to practice songs with - and with the last book I returned I did manage to leave the library without a replacement. However, something else has taken the place of my library habits, which is doing just as good a job of putting a new book in my hands: curiosity.

Cats aren't the only thing curiosity can kill...
(and 10 points if you saw this image and thought 'Schrodinger's lolcat!')

Ever started at a topic in Wikipedia, and then followed the 'see also' and other links, only to find yourself hours later at a totally unrelated topic? (What, no? Well, XKCD has it documented, so I know it's not just me that does it) Well, that happened to me last week, and while I can't remember what it is I started with, I do remember ending-up on the Wikipedia entry for Moby-Dick.

I've never read Moby-Dick before. With all the cultural references to Captain Ahab and his hunt for the elusive white whale, I thought I knew enough of the essential plot points that I didn't need to read Moby-Dick. As I was reading through the article and the parts about the background, themes, and the effects the book has had on us to this very day, the curiosity in me took hold and I started wanting to read the book to get an understanding on all of this stuff and to join the bandwagon that has been rolling since it was first published over 150 years ago.

With the prospect of a slow weekend ahead, and against my better judgement (knowing that I had 2 more library books on my plate), I went to the library's online catalogue to see if a copy of Moby-Dick was available.

They had 1 left.

The opening line of the book reads:

Call me Ishmael.

Well... that didn't take long. After discovering my website Chrome/Safari (WebKit) woes earlier this week (although only making that blog post last night), I fixed the menu bar rendering issues last night, and then fixed the Twitter script issues just now.

For those technical minded amongst you, the culprit was in the following lines of JavaScript which used script.aculo.us, a JavaScript library for cool effects/animations (like the sliding fade-in effect of the Twitter items on the right-hand side). I use script.aculo.us's Builder class which is handy for inserting HTML elements into a document, like the Twitter feed:

twitterdiv.appendChild(Builder.node('script', {
  src: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/u1traq.json?' +
       'callback=twitter.callback&count=5',
  type: 'text/javascript'
}));

Chrome just didn't like the Builder.node() function in this case (I use it in a bunch of other places without issues), maybe because it was trying to insert a <script/> node, I dunno. But by replacing it with standard DOM functions, it did the trick:

scriptnode = document.createElement('script');
scriptnode.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
scriptnode.setAttribute('src', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/u1traq.json?' +
  'callback=twitter.callback&count=5');
twitterdiv.appendChild(scriptnode);

Now all those browsers are happy, and so am I.

It's a bright sunny day in my little corner of New Zealand. I'm looking out the window on this lovely Saturday morning and up above are blue skies and white fluffy clouds, the Metservice says it's 22.9 degrees Celsius, and my watch is telling me that now is a good time to go fishing (yeah, something to do with setting my longitudinal position and the phases of the moon, don't ask me to go into detail).

The only problem with this picture is that the window I am looking out of is not any of the ones at my apartment, but rather the ones at my work building. Yep, I'm at work today :(

While I'd rather be anywhere but here, I don't hate coming to work on a weekend. On the rare occasion that I do find myself walking to work, it's usually morning when the streets are pretty empty, and when I arrive at the building it's nice and quiet and there's usually nobody else around. I find that the quiet of the weekend and the feeling that this city's population has magically been cut in half help me sort-out my thoughts for a much more productive couple of hours than the busy office environment usually does.

The office may be empty, but today, and for the last couple of days, the streets are anything but.

There are a bunch of big events going on: 2 AC/DC concerts, a Them Crooked Vultures concert, Wellington Cup Day (horse racing, although the focus of such events is never on the horse racing), next week we play host to the Rugby Sevens, and to top it all off, docked at the harbour are some very VERY large cruise ships with LOTS of tourists.

So the streets are packed, it's hella busy outside, and when I walked around during my lunch break the other day my ears honed-in on several foreign accents, mainly American. Accents weren't the only odd thing that day; a massive line coming-out of the Wellington Cable Car was the other:

I don't think anybody in this line is from around here...

Long lines aren't a very common sight around here. When they do appear, they're usually leading towards an upper-middle-class retail/department store with some sort of epic store-wide sale going on. We don't often get 60 metre lines streaming-out from what is effectively a 7-minute tram ride between the CBD and this city's gardens.

But maybe I'm just being too cynical. Tourists aren't a bad thing - I even enjoyed being one the last time, despite being mistaken for a local and asked which way to the immigration offices - and my lack of enthusiasm towards The Cable Car is probably because for years I used it as one of my methods of transport to/from university, thus relegating one of this city's best attractions to the background of public transport vehicles that help this city function.

Maybe I've just lived here too long.

Earlier this week I finally got to see what my site looks like in Google Chrome. I was just showing someone (the same inquisitive someone who asked me what my mum is like), during our first guitar session/get-together, some of the older space pics I've done (well, they're all old ones since I haven't created anything new on that front since mid-2008) and noticed that something wasn't rendering correctly!

*gasp*

I had a mate of mine check it with Safari on his Mac (since Chrome and Safari both use something called WebKit to render web pages) and got the same result:

This makes me cry

That wasn't the only problem: the Twitter feed on the right-hand sidebar seems to be stuck on 'Loading...' in Chrome/Safari, but otherwise fine in Firefox and IE7/8.

So I downloaded and installed Chrome, attempted to fix these little issues, and only got so far as to fix the layout of the menu. As for the Twitter feed, I've taken it down in the interim.

Continuing the computer-ish theme for the week, earlier tonight I was asked to install Skype by a friend from overseas (the one I called the neck-licker in this old BEDA '09 post, who has unfortunately been sent back to their home country because they couldn't stay in New Zealand). I thought it a bit funny that, before this week, I had never touched Skype - not even with the electronic equivalent of a barge pole - but for the first time this Monday I was involved in a Skype call from inquisitive guitar girl's end, had my friend the hug nazi mention it because her netbook has a built-in webcam, and am now being asked to install it.

As I was downloading the program, at around the 50% mark a realization hit me: I don't have a webcam... or a microphone. I told the overseas neck-licker as much, and they replied in kind:

what kind of ASIAN COMPUTERSPECIALIST are you?

Good question.

As one of the IT guys in my group of friends, I don't even have some of what is now basic hardware that is so run-of-the-mill that many computers and devices come with these things attached or built-in. I have a million cables lying spare, more computer screws than you can shake a stick at, and even more twist ties from all those wires that I could create some sort of contemporary art piece and break a Guinness World Record in the process! But, a webcam and microphone are nowhere to be found.

At least I'm still more feature-complete than the iPad.