ingenting nej ingenting (and i love* you)

*wakeup wanttosleep
want nothing but
thedreamisdead longlivethedream
may be youll see her to day
so getup

bathroom disinfectant like putrid chestnuts
sit and shit and ponder the meaning of life
and forgodssakes keep your eyes closed when brushing your teeth
(thirld wolrld)
out

food minus taste
add mustard or ketchup or mayonnaise
not nonsweet sugar but
sweet sugarfree sweetener
and filteredwater with a distinct taste
the taste of chewinggum overchewed

blur
free hugs sorries and thanks no thanks
freewithafineprint
blur
unblur
her eyes smile
but she dreamsnot what youdream
(first world)
blur

outofphase ambulance wails
twelvestrobes in fivedirections
smilingfaces on the website
of a mental hospital
cheerful noises
onholdonthephone
and a twentyfourseven funeral service

albino squirrels
pin ging stree tlights
walk inwhite stop inred
newspeak in the t station

noise repeat
blur repeat
depth of field decrease
in stay(up)
and pull the shades down

planes taking off at threeinthemorning
surroundsound fire alarms
sweaty feet under nylon sheets
the sound of ventilation is your lullaby

overload not sensory synesthetic
colors of france britain russia and the czech republic
despair brown. cells abcdeeing you
hope not from above from the underground
from the grave of beethoven

stomach rumbling like a badharddisk
to forgetsomeone is as easy as removefromcontactlist
the wood texture on this nonwood desk is p i x e l a t e d
(beculeţeledelamodemclipesc) thereforeIam

Two OpenOffice.org Writer Tricks

Trick #1: Stop AutoText from switching to Times New Roman

I often edit files in fonts other than Times New Roman, just because that font is so ubiquitous. And I sometimes use AutoText to insert frequently used phrases, or Romanian words in an English text (so that I don’t have to switch languages constantly). One thing that has always annoyed me is that after invoking an AutoText completion (F3), the next characters will always be in Times New Roman (even if the AutoText itself is in another font).

As it turns out, this happens because Times New Roman is the font of the Default paragraph style. So hit F11 and modify your style to use the desired font. In fact (and this is a topic for another day), styles should be used in most cases and formatting a selection of text (bold, italic, font, font size, paragraph indentation) should rarely be done by hand. This is very unintuitive to people who have been using text editors before the GUI era.

Trick #2: Insert Formula without switching into formula-edit mode

pv: Progress Bar for md5sum et al.

Tools that know they will take a long time often come with a built-in progress indicator, but there are other utilities on Linux that often leave the user frustratedly tapping their fingers, wondering how much longer they will have to wait.

Luckily, there is a nifty little tool called pv that will donate a progress bar to any program that can read from standard input or a pipe. pv probably stands for pipe viewer.

1. Simple example: figure out how long an md5sum will take:

pv eternal.avi |md5sum

will display something like

96.5MB 0:00:05 [25.3MB/s] [=======>                                    ]  9% ETA 0:00:48