I was without a computer today. Actually, I'm writing this post on a PDA (with a keyboard, of course). Not having access to the Internet (my iPAQ's Wi-Fi is broken still) gave me some time to actually read books and watch television, things I seldom do these days, it seems. I watched
Hawaii Five-O,
maury,
The Brady Bunch, and even
tyra. Two of those -- I'll tell which in a bit -- were so ridiculous I've sworn never to watch them again.
I also had occasion to read a chapter of my book, "Designing with Web Standards", second edition, by Jeffrey Zeldman. I read about the histories of CSS, browsers, and the DOM, all of which were fascinating. I played a couple games of pinball on a real machine, averaging about 6,000,000 points per game, and then got the idea to blog while (for all intents and purposes) offline.
If I'm making shorter paragraphs than usual, it's probably because I'm using a small screen that makes a few sentences look the length of Hamlet. I'll try to re-edit once I get back to the PC. Or perhaps not; maybe I should just post this as-is and leave this post open to feedback on the abnormal style. This might be easier to read, I don't know.
I'm also much more prone to errors on this keyboard, because the right Shift key is too far to the right, and the keys are cramped. I've hit Return when I've meant to hit the apostrophe about five times so far, and have missed the right Shift at least twice that many times. I keep hitting the up arrow instead, which is in the place I expect Shift to be.
But I'm digressing from my point here. I started this to muse on my disconnection from teh internets (I didn't know my pocket notepad had autocorrect), and so I shall continue musing away.
Anyway, I've been having quite a bit of fun, actually, even while disconnected from Pidgin, Wikipedia, Google Groups, Gmail, Google Reader, and all the rest, and have gotten plenty of reading and absorbing done. It's really amazing, considering the amount of my life that is stored on the Internet. I haven't gotten any homework done, obviously, since all that is in the cloud, but I've been kind of relaxing and entertaining myself, which is OK.
I could see myself taking a sort of iPBloWriMo at some point, once I've gotten more practice with this keyboard. Eventually, I hope to become just as fast on it as I am on the full-size Gateway laptop. Writing all my blog posts on an HP iPAQ could be interesting, and would likely be a good exercise for working on a plane, where my computer is just too big for the tray table. I'd be limited on time, of course, just like with the laptop, but hopefully I can exercise my PDA's battery enough by then that it'll actually last longer than my laptop's. (Though with my slowed typing speed on this keyboard, I'm not sure how much it would extend my productivity. And in case you haven't figured it out by now, iPBloWriMo is my spoof on NaNoWriMo, meaning iPAQ Blog-Writing Month, rather than National Novel-Writing Month.)
So back to the television shows. As I mentioned, I watched
maury,
tyra,
The Brady Bunch, and
Hawaii Five-O. (Why are the talk shows' names all lowercase?) The two I couldn't stand were, of course, those lacking capital letters in their titles. It wasn't because the shows' premises were bad -- they both addressed very real issues -- but the ways they went about their goals were disappointing.
maury especially annoyed me, both because of all the talk about getting help from experts (but only showing such for about five minutes out of an hour program) and the continued repetition of the fact that the show was the "last hope" for the guests there to get help. That statement is definitely arguable. The fact that I heard it about 15 times (due to the number of commercial breaks taken) didn't help.
tyra was a bit better, but the format didn't gel with what I expect from a television program. It was slow-moving for no real reason, and so I quit about halfway through. I also didn't like the lowercase first letter of the title.
Now I'm writing this after having been online for a few hours and catching up on email, RSS feeds, and Wikipedia, with a very liberal sprinkling of instant messaging. Then I'll be off to have a (very late) dinner, and I'll come back for (yay) homework before bed. I hope I can find something more interesting to write about tomorrow...
Wow! This turned out longer than any of
my holiday rants!