Varrqnuht.net

Time for one of those infectious and virulent¹ net memes! Found this one on Chris Samuel’s Blog.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
6. Tag five other people to do the same.

Here’s mine:

Five in the evening and she can barely keep her eyes open. Lifts her cup of black unsweetened coffee. Mouse-clicks.

That’s from Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. I counted the partial sentence which carried over on to page 23 as the first sentence, but I agonised about it first.

The laptop is on the loungeroom table at the moment, so I had a pretty wide selection to choose from - we’re not always very good at putting books away properly. Still, without getting out a tape measure I’m pretty sure that one was the most accessible of the closest books.

The other most likely candidate was How to Improve Your Chess, which I fetched out with the intention of studying, but haven’t got back to yet. I’ve been playing regularly on Gameknot.com, which I’m really impressed with as it has a great interface, and large community, and seems to be quite actively maintained. I’ll get around to buying a paid account one day.

[1] Is this redundant? I don’t think so, as it seems that “infectious” merely indicates potential while “virulent” implies a particularly high degree of infectiousness. Hmm, on second thoughts I guess that does make infectious redundant in this context. This reminds me of something I was wondering about yesteday, namely²:

[2] What is the etymology of “equivocal”? I was guessing something literally along the lines of “between voices” or “middle effort”. The dictionary included in Mac OSX (which is actually really nice, by the way) says:

ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from late Latin aequivocus, from Latin aequus ‘equally’ + vocare ‘to call.’

Technorati Tags: books, pattern recognition, william gibson, meme, chess, etymology, equivocal, virulent, infectious

I’ve been taking a few photos lately, but I’m way behind on processing them and uploading my favourites to Flickr.

Here’s one I took over Easter while wandering around the waterfront in Hobart.

I’m using that as a desktop background at the moment. The seagull was sitting on a railing when I went to take the shot, but launched into the air just as I was pressing down on the shutter. I cropped the railing out of the end result.

Lots more to tell and photos to show, as soon as I find/make the time!

Technorati Tags: seagull, desktop, desktop background, close-up, telephoto, DOF

Here’s another perspective on Web 2.0, following on from my recent post - I found it quite entertaining.  Found via Librarything’s Thingology blog.