The Blue Danube on an icy morning in Boston…

I am listening to J. Strauss today… No you don’t understand: the valses! Granted I am bored since I’ve been working on computer for two days (after yesterday’s debacle, hopeful she’ll not crash and eat all my analyzed data, or play dead… Am I spending too much time chained to my laptop? I wonder).
Well, some people would consider J. Strauss downright corny; I say he inspires some sort of enthusiasm, and after all he reminds me of Tom and Jerry – you remember the episode when Jerry freezes the kitchen floor for ice-skating, and he plays “Voices of Spring” (as far as I recall). I think Jerry was really a man of the world; Tom was different, more earthbound, and crud, all he cared about is to eat his friend - I hope I’ll never get friends like this.
I don’t know, maybe I’ll do a poll on the people in the lab, and see how many think J. Strauss’ music is beneath their intellect. I’ll let you know how that goes.

On another note, I want to tell you why PowerBooks are females like I promised to do:
Well, when I got my first apple computer (may she rest in peace), I discovered the option of “speakable items and applications”. In brief, instead of opening applications (and I believe you call these “programs” in the PC world) you could speak to your computer and tell her to open and close stuff. So I activated this option, and one day I was working on a paper, and you know how sometimes you get writers’ block for a couple of centuries in the middle of a sentence, and you start tackling existentialist problems like the meaning of life, or “maybe if I focus long enough, I could have an out of body experience” (and this is by the way how I start to astral project)… Anyway, so computers usually think you’re dead or something, so she feels compelled to wake me from my reverie by a joke, so suddenly she says “knock knock”, after picking up my heart from the floor and catching my breath from the start, well I said “who’s there?” (of course entertaining the idea that my computer came to life like in Sci-Fi movies, or like Pinocchio). Then she answered “Thea!”, and you could imagine the rest on your own (let me not sound so corny in one day)… Now, since then I decided that my computer is a female (well of course she is, since she speaks in a woman’s voice, very lilting by the way and not robotic at all), named Thea (since this is how she identified herself)…
And after she died and I got a new PowerBook, the persuasion remained…

Now, I have to go back to my data analysis and of course Johann (Danube blue – god! That’s sappy…) – and if the poll was a success, I’ll let you know how it went.

Ghassan
Boston, March 06 2006