Who is that on my computer screen? Wait, what?! This morning I turned on the computer (still without the proper vista or any of my files and I’m pretty furious about that) and went into the kitchen for my first cup of coffee. By the time I came back the computer had gone to the Acer screen saver, showing pictures of vibrantly coloured frogs and so forth in succession. As I leaned back on the sofa, coffee mug in hand, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of something on the screen that caused me to do a double take. Then there I was, staring at myself staring at myself in full colour. Thinking to myself, ‘damn you seriously need to go back to braiding your hair when you sleep because your morning hair looks like a tangled up (American) mop’ I tentatively waved at the image and saw it wave back before a brightly coloured picture of another frog replaced it. I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t had enough coffee to process things. I wondered briefly if I were suffering some sort of hallucination. Because I mean, how the heck was I live in real time on the screen saver of my computer?! I sipped and stared as the screen saver went through its little routine and then, yes, there I was again. Hi me!
It took a bit of investigating until I discovered that this model comes with a built-in video camera right on the screen frame, cleverly blending in with the frame. I mean, there are the words ‘crystal eye’ on the frame but I thought that referred to the brand of the screen. Clearly the screen saver turns on the video for a brief moment as part of its routine!
Sorry by the way for all the downtime. Gnblog is under concerted dns attacks by fans of Ahmadinejad and since this blog shares the server…unfortunately even when the blog is not down I am often unable to get in to update because the repeated accesses cause posting and logging in and so forth to time out. In light of that, keeping it short and sweet while I’ve got a window.

(Photo by Dani Machlis)

