After my last post, where I talked about how busy I’ve been at work and that I drank beer for a week, I’m now sick. Suprising? No. Annoying? Yes. Mostly because the back of my throat currently feels like someone took a cheese grater to it. Saying that, it’s just a cold and I’m sure it’ll pass soon. Meanwhile, sick days! There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a legitimate reason to skip work, and if that means being a snot monster for a few days then I say it’s worth it.
Today I did nothing, or as close to nothing as a person can get. Certainly nothing productive. I just watched TV in my pyjamas all day, with a quick visit to the doctors to get him to give me a note. The whole getting a doctor’s note seems a little ridiculous when all you have is a cold. He didn’t bother prescribing me anything other than to drink a lot of water and rest up, and, while drinking water at the moment feels like chugging a glass of ice cold acid, that’s pretty much what I was planning to do anyway. In fact the argument could be made that driving myself to the doctors and waiting for an hour for a five minute consultation to get a piece of paper that says ‘You’re sick’, actually gets in the way of me resting up. Oh well, you know what they say, if the system’s broke then complain about it on the internet and don’t actually do anything to fix it.
Tomorrow I’m planning to get some writing done as long as my mucus filled head is able to think clearly. I’m looking forward to it. I’m working on a short story that has the working title His name was Henry, as that’s the first line of the piece and I haven’t thought of a proper name yet. Pretty good first line though, right? If all goes to plan tomorrow I should get a nice chunk of it done. As that’s all the writing news I have let me harshly segway to…
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…internet bits, aka, cool things from the internet.
As some of you know I’m a big fan of Warren Ellis. One of the things he does so well with his writing is to imbue it with ideas and knowledge of things that seem likely to exist in the near future. In other words, he’s a futurist, so much so that he’s been asked to give talks and write essays on the topic. Another writer who does the same thing is Ramez Naam. He’s written an award winning series of books called The Nexus Trilogy which are must reading, not only for its in depth futurist themes (and they are very in depth, the guy was a CEO for a nanotechnology company and worked for Microsoft before writing fiction) but also for its interesting characters, and a story that will always keep you guessing.
I found his writing after seeing a post on the internet about an Icelandic tradition where you givie books to each other on Christmas eve and then spending the night reading them. The Lady Holly and I decided to partake in this tradition and so I had to find a book to give her. I went to the website www.whatshouldireadnext.com, which allows you to type in the names of books you’ve enjoyed and then produces a list of books it thinks you’ll like. Nexus kept popping up, I read a synopsis, purchased it, and gave it to Holly. I’m glad I did, as I mentioned it’s excellent reading, and it inspired me to look more into futurism (footnote: the Lady Holly and I both ended up finishing the book while in Iceland which added a nice circular ending to the whole thing).
This interest in futurism caused me to look for pages I could add to my facebook feed on the topic and unsurprisingly I found one called…Futurism (which also has a website here) and it has been entertaining and educating me ever since. It, as you may have guessed, is this post’s cool thing from the internet. Apart from checking out the site yourself I thought I’d share a few of the cool, quick, videos they make about all things futurist.
Like this one about braille tablet for the blind
Or this one that is a brilliant combination of technology and art in the form of 3D projection face mapping
Or finally this one about a smart touch mirror
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Mind blown? Good, because mine was. Although as it’s full of mucus I’m going to go blow my nose instead.
Talk soon.
Damian
Damian Robb 
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