it's amazing how times have changed. and haven't changed.

during my "oh yes i had a blog" excitement from a month or so ago, i ambled my way through past posts and came upon one from march 2004.*

here's a snippet.

"i have THE coolest brother and sister in the world. no, seriously. SERIOUSLY. note the capitals. and note that i never use capitals. that must mean something.

here i am on one side of the world, sitting at my computer in utter despair on saturday morning (belgium time) as i cannot figure out how excel works and how to get little graphs to graph stuff that needs to be graphed.

and there is my wonderful brother on the other side of the world, sitting at his computer on saturday night (nz time), about to save my life.

i send him my little excel file. he opens it. there we both are. opposite sides of the earth. in front of two computers. looking at the same data.

then he proceeds, via msn (a simply marvelous lifesaving contraption), to tell me step by step how to make graphs. he says things like 'okay, now highlight these columns, and then press this button'. i follow his instructions. when i get it wrong, i.e. what i end up having on my screen is nothing like what he has on his screen, he figures out what i did. and how to fix it. then he proceeds to say things like 'hang on, let me see, i think this might look even better' and takes me through a different range of instructions that gets me a different graph.

...

and then there's my sister. also very cool. who just saved me about 20 hours of work. literally.

i have these numbers in a table that was created in this programme i use. the numbers have decimal points. with a '.' point like is used in new zealand. however belgium have this weird system where they use the comma instead of the point in excel. i needed the data in excel to make graphs. so i thought i had to go through and change every decimal point into a comma so that excel recognised it as a decimal. this probably makes no sense. oh well. the point is (ha ha ha, the point. get it? obviously you can tell i'm tired and have spent far too long on this computer when i start making jokes like that!) that i have 35 tables, each with 50 rows of numbers and i was going through one table at a time, converting each decimal point to a comma, on every single row. this takes a long time (hence the bad jokes).

rachel came online. i sent her one of the tables and she said she would see what she could do. two minutes later (yep, only two, actually probably not even that to be honest) and she had the solution. man. now it takes me one second, one button, and suddenly all my points are commas..."


there are two key things about this post. one of these things highlights how times have changed. one highlights how things haven't changed.

thing that has changed: technology.
1: msn chat? i don't think i have opened msn in at least 5 years. i'm not saying it doesn't exist. some people use it all the time, but not me. i now use google chat and facebook chat.
2: sending, downloading, opening and editing files whilst explaining what you are doing? how about google docs! oh how that would have helped back then!

thing that hasn't changed: coolness of brother and sister.
1: sister: my sister recently posted about blog comments and the idea that facebook commenting is so much easier than blogger commenting.** she then set her blog up with facebook commenting. i marveled at this fact and decided to copy her. i tried. i really did. but after getting stuck on the first bullet point in the instructions i turned to my brother (this time via google chat).
2: brother: my brother then proceeded to have a play and explain a few bits and pieces and presto! now you can comment just like on facebook. it'll even appear in your newsfeed. give it a go. i dare you.

oh yes, one other thing that hasn't changed? my lack of capital letter usage.

*original post
**rachel's post

this post shall be entitled: an ode to cats.

i'm a big fan of cats. they've been a part of my life since i was two years old. so let's have a chat about them.

simon - a rather wise tabby cat who, when faced with a tall thin glass containing milk, understood enough physics to dip his paw in, swish it around, bring it out, lick, and repeat. also known as sugarhead because one day i was making myself a nice cold milo and i accidentally dropped a spoon of wet sugary milo mix onto his head, where it hardened and remained for a number of days.

fluffy - the king of the block with a fluffed up tail and fluffed up body and fluffed up head (i named him after these affectionate features) who would climb trees with me as a kid. often said by another family member to not be as intelligent as simon - until said family member had a dream of fluffy at night walking on his back paws saying "you don't know what i get up to at night".

tigger - a kitten who thought she was a dog. suppose this is understandable as we brought her home at the same time as our puppy macgyver.

picasso - elegantly able to chase her tail and foot around in circles to this day. named due to unique colouring and a brushstroke like mark on her nose. would bring me a bird a day for about a week every time i got home from an overseas trip. i understood her heart was in the right place. but i still got dad to clean up the mess.

phoenix - adequately described by my father in a text message whilst cat-sitting "dad slept like a lamb. mum was attacked all night by a marauding lioness." phoenix loves to chase ping pong balls up and down the hall, tries to follow us on every walk we go on, and is terribly addicted to jellymeat. her favourite flavours are jellified yuck, stinklicious lamb, gross beef (correctly labelled as: duck, lamb and roast beef.

phoenix has another skill. she likes to fly in her spare time.


thanks meg for the pic.

for those of you who noticed, i've rediscovered my blog. and in doing so, had a bit of a virtual walk down memory lane. mostly it caused me to laugh out loud. which made me ponder writing more regularly. so that i can have more walks and laughs down the virtual memory lane in the future.

this reminds me about what my sister called a "mindtrap" back in the 80s. a mindtrap quite simply is when you think about doing something and then realise you are thinking about doing something, knowing that when you actually do that something, then you will remember back to thinking about doing it and thinking about thinking about doing it. and this causes a mindtrap. pretty ingenious. i think the matrix copied our idea later.

anyway, so me thinking about writing my blog purely for the purpose of being able to read it in the future and think back to this moment of thinking about writing it is a mindtrap. but a good one, because now when i re-read this blog in ten years i will laugh and remember, possibly quite vividly, writing this anecdote.

phew. new paragraph required to delete mindtrap traps.

i pondered starting up a new one. a new blog i mean. not mindtrap. you know. mentioning eric. and caleb. and phoenix the cat. in the title. but then i decided they could just join me on my one. especially because i'm writing it anyway. as a slight aside - do i use full stops too much? maybe i should start thinking about alternative methods of punctuation. not sure. i like the full stop.

so. i started this in 2003 when i was a mere 22 year old heading to europe to start my masters. i guess it was a travel blog back then. to keep folk back home updated on my life. remember this was a time long before facebook. and now? well i don't know what it will become. time will tell. things i do know:

(a) i will be writing it
(b) i will be reading it
(c) other people might read it

let's see what happens eh?