No rest for the obsessed

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 56: At Rockabaret last night, they were showing various cartoons on a screen over the stage. Some were old cartoons, such as Felix the cat and a Betty Boop cartoon entitled "Betty in Blunderland".

LikeTelevision Embed Movies and TV Shows

I knew it the moment I picked it up

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 53: Page 196 of "The Portable Door" by Tom Holt features the lines "Sophie raised her head and stared at him. She still looked as though she'd followed a large white rabbit with a pocket watch down a hole in the ground, but some colour was starting to return to her cheeks."

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 54: Danielle Horvat (the actress who plays Taylah Jordan in Neighbours) has a picture on her MySpace of her in an Alice costume. It appears to be the same costume as worn by Pyretta Blaze.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 55: The Screaming Trees album, "Buzz Factory", contains a song entitled "The looking glass cracked". While the lyrics don't refer to Alice specifically, they revolve around themes of altered reality and "going beyond". In looking them up, I also found that there's a Babyshambles song called "Through the looking glass". No doubt it's horrible.

Here's a causal link for you

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 52: In episode 12 of the first series of The Big Bang Theory, after Raj, the third person he's tried to help with their research, tells him to go away, Sheldon mutters "curiouser and curiouser" as he's walking away from Raj's office.

Milestone reached and passed...

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 50: I picked up a copy of issue 6 of "Wonderland" by Tommy Kovac and Sonny Liew. It apparently follows the adventures of the various Wonderland inhabitants after Alice has gone back through the looking-glass. I'm not completely sure what's going on though, as this is the last in the series. I shall have to pick up the collection sometime.

Alice in popular culture sighting no. 51: In a "flash-forward" in the most recent episode of Lost, Jack is reading Alice in Wonderland to a child. He's reading the section where Alice contemplates her identity. I'll leave it at that, so as not to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't seen it yet...

Adventures with Google docs

Last week I had a presentation to do on my proposal for my major project. My initial plan was to use the facilities in the IOCT to create a simple presentation. Due to using Linux, I don't have PowerPoint and I didn't want the hassle of making something using OpenOffice or KPresenter and either having it not work in PowerPoint, or having to bring my laptop to the IOCT. Unfortunately, the IOCT was busy for the whole day, so I made for the library. On the way there, I came up with the idea that of trying out Google Docs, as this would solve any future problems I might have along these lines.

I created a simple presentation and while it doesn't have any kind of fancy animations or effects, it does everything I want. You can find it on my major project development blog.

After this good experience, I decided to use Google docs once more. This time I used it for my research essay on moderation systems in online communities. I worked on it at home and then I was able to simply go into the IOCT and download my document. I then cleaned it up a bit in Word (double-line spacing, page numbers, etc) and printed it off.

The final problem that Google docs has allowed me to solve is that I wanted to put my essay I did for my Digital Cultures module on here. I didn't want to simply post it as a blog post, as that would be obscenely long. I also couldn't attach it as a file as Blogger doesn't offer that service. That left me with only the option of having it hosted somewhere else. Thanks to Google docs, I'm able to simply publish it to the web and provide a link.

While I don't plan to use Google docs for everything I do in the future, it's still a very useful tool and will hopefully only get better.