The Lair

It seems not. I go into the local Aldi when I land and even the shelf configuration is almost exactly as I recall from last year. Never mind that I shopped in a supermarket nearly 300 miles away – within a few minutes, I was on shopping autopilot – throwing things into the cart without even thinking about it too much.

Something I try to do in a new and strange town if I have time – intentionally get lost. Given that my sense of direction is all sorts of weird, this isn’t difficult. What happens next is a walk of a few hours while I try to remember place names and street names and find my way home.

Sometimes this works. Of course, it is cheating to consult strangers or hop into taxis. Given that the town I’m in is smaller than York, navigation wasn’t too difficult. A castle looming in the hillside above the town also helps.

Now, if only the town wasn’t inhabited by chavvish teens after dark…

Possessing fingertips which are impervious to all fingerprint scanners.

Since fingerprints and other personal information is gathered when you need to ask to travel to some countries; I submitted myself to the indignity of being treated a tad like a convicted felon. Only, try as he might – the operator simply could not get my fingerprints to take, as it were.

I cleaned my fingers with some antiseptic smelling solution, washed them thoroughly – the guy even cleaned the surface of the scanner – but to no avail.

And it was just my fingers. He almost accusingly placed his own fingers on the scanner and triumphantly showed me as they scanned cleanly the first time.

And this is hereditary, to boot – my dad apparently has the same problem. If you want to call it that, of course. Now, if we can only figure out how to do this for the iris scanners, we’ll be all set.

Someone has convinced me that my life would complete if I purchased one of those newfangled iPod things. You know, touchscreen. Exactly like my trusty PalmOS device had for the last … uh … decade, but cooler? Yeah, one of those. It apparently allows someone to listen to music too, but I wouldn’t know about that – I’d be too busy holding it up so that all the laydeez can see how hip I am (and simultaneously dodging all the would-be muggers out to wrestle the fancy toy out of my sweaty palms).

This could be the fabled slippery slope, people. The point where I start paying money for software like this instead of using the perfectly serviceable (and free! for my use via the corp) alternative on a much stodgier computer.

But seriously – Omnigraffle seems to be very very cute. If only they had something that worked on Winders or Loonix… Alas. Maybe I need to try Balsamiq instead, since I have been pressganged into that line of work for now.

In other news – Tintin could have been written by a racist after all. We’ve had conversations about Tintin in Congo before, with inconclusive results. Also, I never quite figured out how so many kids in my neck of the woods were exposed to Tintin and Asterix growing up when it allegedly isn’t all that popular in the UK.

And these photos are eerie, since I know the places, but find the streets unrecognizable without a constantly bustling foreground of people and vehicles.