friend has just sent me the following mock-up image. He occasionally has a play with graphical software and other people’s photos are used in the process.

So apparently I am responsible for one terrible disaster. I had never realised it until he told me.

Never post to your blog while drunk because you will regret it the following day. Being inebriated at the moment, I can barely even remember how to use the spellchecker, let alone add the image above. Fingers go astray on the keyboard. I will not say anything more.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

HE staged demise of commercial software can be attributed to a variety of factors. The major factor: Large-scale Open Source software with great involvement from talented volunteers. This brought about many wonderful products like Firefox, which managed to surpass, in terms of the quality, their commercial equivalent/s. This provided a well-founded precedence to those wishing to explore non-commercial projects.

Although the basis of these open projects was about freedom to change and extend, these were often free too. The only issue to have remains in the air is budgets and liability, particularly among wealthy organisations.

UE to an important paper deadline I stayed awake for 30 hours straight yesterday. Ultimately, and oddly enough, 3 hours of sleep were enough after that. They compensated for the long procrastination of bedtime and rejuvenated the body fully. This cannot be healthy, can it?

The many issues that pertain to sleep and rest have always intrigued me. I even participated in sleep disorder newsgroup where I could engage in conversations with experts in the field. I am usually able to catch up with sleep entirely while travelling. I could never quite identify a pattern which would indicate how much sleep is truly necessary on a given day. ‘Luxury sleep’ or excessive sleep is also worth investigating. It seems as though many individuals tend to oversleep and still remain tired. One’s daytime occupation definitely plays a role too.

I once wrote about my own personal way of falling asleep immediately. This seems to have become a fairly popular Web page. It is amazing how little we think about an occupation that makes up about one third of our lives.

N interesting collection of observations: People like to mock others and identify their weaknesses. Children have no restraints, so they can be cruel at times. Adults will never truly like a person, a rival especially, as much as at the time of death. The exception are those who fail in life and lead to a feeling of self-worth to those who surround them. Regarding that last venturous statement, it is a proverb I have recently heard. The context is typically the fact that rarely do we hear a bad word about a deceased person. It still is a taboo.

THINK how much simpler shopping would have been if it were not for that opaque ’99 cent’ (or pence, or whatever) system. Aggregation of numbers should have not become an arduous task involving the combination of many small chunks of money (typically negligible coinage) like 49 and 99 cents. It can become mentally confusing and exhausting as a matter of fact.

Riddance of this deceiving system has great potential if conducted and enforced by a court of law. This simplifies banking and accounting too. Yet again, businesses might argue that it drives away customers elsewhere, so eradication of the system must be mutual and global, through lawmaking. Meanwhile, we are all bound to fall victims to the illusion that we save money. We only lose our minds.

CCASIONALLY I get reminded why productivity and Windows remain an oxymoron. Take authoring in research, for example.

Colleague: juggling processes, restoring and minimising active windows, yet unable to cope with the complexity and clutter in the desktop

Over here: 8 virtual desktops

Colleague: needs to convert many images from encapsulated PostScript to PNG. Approach: start bloatware and wait for a little while; Load all images, assuming physical memory permits it; Wait for a long time for images to be rendered; Save images one by one and change file extension by hand.

Over here: a simple 3-line script does all of the above in just seconds. It uses ImageMagick.

Colleague: uses Wordpad for composition and paint.exe for simple graphics

Over here: a decent choice of professional tools

Colleague: figure placement handled by hand, hyphenation not possible. LaTeX is not reliable under Windows as it is not ‘native’

More issues: occasional viruses, FS maintenance, regular reboots (thus restoration of workspace is needed)

I estimate that we save several hours per day by opting for Linux. I am left baffled wondering: how can anyone who uses a computer for work possibly choose Windows? Has the world turned upside down?

I will soon be writing about the transition of a close friend to Linux. He recently discovered a world of power computing and left Windows on the curb. Linux stereotypes are often the main peril.