(no subject)

Got to watch the season premiere of 24 today...and found out something very amusing. The keyboard I bought in K.C. to go with my new computer—a Logitech Elite USB keyboard—is almost exactly the same as the one being used by Kim Bauer in CTU. Funny.

This morning, checking the FedEx tracking data for my computer packages, I found that it's arriving sooner than expected. Everything but the case is coming today; that's coming tomorrow. My brother's going to put 'em together as quickly as he can, and it's possible that tomorrow night I might actually get the first taste of what it's like to have a new machine. I can hardly wait.

"It's like you're exploiting a security hole in your own body."

Read an amusing article on Salon (premium account or ad-view required) just now about low-carb dieting and geeks. It's not the fact of the low-carb dieting that's amusing...I've heard that Atkins can actually work pretty well. It's the way that the geeks who are doing it (including some high-profile geeks like BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow) see it in terms of geekly metaphors like "hacking" or "overclocking" your own body.

Doctorow, who lost 75 pounds by cutting out carbohydrates, sees a natural affinity between his brethren and the diet: "Read the alt.support.diet.low-carb FAQ, and you'll find people attacking their bodies like they would attack a logic board," he says. "Substitute 'faster bus speed' for 'metabolism,' and you've got something pretty close to an overclocking FAQ, he adds, referring to a practice popular with hardware hackers in which computer processors are tweaked so that they run faster than their out-of-the-box speeds.

Isn't it funny how people tend to see things in terms of familiar metaphors? And isn't it such an amusing metaphor?