Insomniac Somnambulist

Long day, and for the first time in awhile I actually don't have anything much to say. I did manage to finish my colleague's copy of Zhang Yimou's Hero, though, and for the life of me I can't figure out how he managed to screw House of Flying Daggers up so badly. Perhaps it's true, that too much of a good thing ain't really a good thing.

So what's a semi-insomniac-aspiring academic-mediapath-gamer-geek to do at a quarter past one in the morning? Ursula K Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven is next to my pillow, and I suppose I could spend some time reading, but it's such a thin book, and I need something to sleep with, so it'll have to do.

In the meantime, my travails about the net have unearthed some interesting results:

The CORDZ Multi Connection Survival Tool looks to be one of the must-have accessories of the year for any travelling geek. Housing 7 feet of Cat. 5 cable in a compact hard body, it features a ratchet mechanism so you can be sure no accidental "retractions" occur, plus in addition to a standard RJ 45 connector on each end you get four different adapters to turn it into a crossover cable or a regular RJ 11 phone cable, among other things. I dunno about you guys, but I'd like one (if I ever get a laptop, that is).

On a related note to my previous rants on DRM, here's a funny little anecdote. Seems that printer manufacturer Lexmark sued a company called Static Controls for making compatible printer cartridges. The gist of their suit was that a printer cartridge is a copyrighted work, and by refilling it you were committing piracy. Sound unbelievable? Click here, for the full story (via BoingBoing).

I think by this time everyone and their pet turtle will have heard of the new photo-friendly Ipod, so there's not much sense in talking about it, except to put up the obligatory link here (via Gizmodo). The sudden change in temperature you're probably feeling is the millions of geeks in the world letting go a humongous, needy, sigh. So before I bugger off, in case you haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 and are too poor to shell out the RM 13 for the disc, head over to this site where you can download it for free. Oh, and it helps if you have bittorrent. Finally, if that doesn't give you a buzz, maybe you'd enjoy a blast from the past here. There's Jason Bateman and (gasp!) Alyssa Milano!*

That's it for tonight, I'm outta here. Have a good one, folks.

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* It's a 15 MB file, so you have been warned