New Who: The Hungry Earth

( Spoilers wear their sunglasses at night. )

Random assorted things

1. Not to take away from the genuine hilarity of the OP ("I was reminding myself this morning that it's a sign of weak character to take long showers. Anyone who does this is a soft sister -- a person looking to hide inside the warm amniotic fluid of his mother's womb, which is what a nice hot shower feels like. This realization goes back to when I was in my early 20s. If I happened to notice that a roommate or some guy or girl who was staying over was taking ten- or twelve-minute showers (or worse), I would instantly write them off."), but for me, the lolarious part of this wank is the multitude of comments saying, "But I could never get clean in less than ten minutes!" or, "For the purposes of saving water, I keep my showers down to six minutes."

To which I say, I SURVIVED BRISBANE'S LEVEL 4 WATER RESTRICTIONS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS INCREDIBLY EFFICIENT SHOWERING ROUTINE. Which reminds me, we need a new four-minute shower timer. I used to have, like, five lying around, but I think most of them vanished in the interstate move. And Melbourne is a city of water-using weaklings who think level 3 restrictions are a crime against humanity, so I'm not sure if the councils here give them out like candy. Investigations shall take place.

2. In preparation for the House o'Squid's upcoming move, I have filled an entire granny bag with clothes that no longer fit. GO ME! Of course, now I actually have to get it out of the house and down to the Salvation Army, but, you know, one step at a time.

3. MESH.

4. Nail polish that cracks within an hour of application: unimpressive.

5. Borders Australia has brought out Kobo, the Kindle killer. You guys know I ♥ ♥ ♥ ebooks, right? Sometimes I read them on my EeePC (which is better than nothing, but not as portable and quick-loading as you'd want for an ebook) and sometimes I read them on my iPhone (the backlit screen is tiring for the eyes, and the tiny screen means frequent page-turns). I've been keeping an eye on the eReader market for a couple of years, but devices have been slow to come to Australia, and prohibitively expensive. (I think the Kindle starts at $375? Which is a bit OTT for something that can only read Kindle-formatted files; for that kind of money, it could at least be a bit versatile. Not to mention Amazon's increasing tendency towards evil.)

Anyway, Kobo is $199, light, small (approximately the size of a comic book), uses e-ink technology, and reads PDFs and ePub formats. (Which are widely available, and it's easy to convert an ebook from, say, .lit to another format using Calibre or similar.)

Along with Kobo, Borders has launched the ebook store, and an iPhone app carrying same. Oddly, the iPhone version of the store is much more user-friendly and better-organised than the web version, but I'm hoping that will change soon. As it is, a bit of digging turned up, for example, a book I've been meaning to buy from Amazon for a couple of years. And I'm sure any decade now, the libraries will implement an actual ebook-loan system, instead of just linking to online databases and calling them ebooks.

Frankly, it's almost enough to make me wish I still worked at Borders. Rumour has it -- because I still have a lot of industry blogs on my feed -- that Borders America was all, "Oh look, Borders Australia's putting out it's own version of the Kindle. Isn't that cute? Let's all point and laugh." Which sums up why the American company lurches ever closer to bankruptcy, while the AU parent company just posted a record profit for the quarter. Apparently Kobo is selling out all over the place. And, since between the impending move and being (as usual) stone broke, I'll be living on instant miso soup for the foreseeable future, I shall have to wait before I get one. #firstworldproblems

6. I slept until ten this morning. But a nap would be might nice right around now. Hmm...