Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk (the author of Fight Club), is strangely uplifting. The writing style is pure Palahniuk. Disjointed, minimalist, every word packing a punch.

I finished Fight Club a couple of months back. I didn’t realise how much of an effect it had on me till I was doing some writing of my own. The subject matter had as little to do with Fight Club as possible, but it fast became obvious whose style I was subconsciously, at least at first, emulating. The repetition of certain lines in the narrative, what Palahniuk refers to as ‘choruses’, are probably one of my favourite aspects of his writing style.

Choke is one of those books where to say anything about the plot would be to take away from the reading experience. So read it!

…

Just randomly: I rather enjoy the strange tidbits of medical information. It certainly sent me a-wikiying.

I’ve just had a look at the wiki and apparently Choke was adapted into a movie that was released in September 2008. Rotten Tomatoes rated it at 55% though. I had a quick look at the trailer on youtube and…ugh. It looks like a cheap comedy. Ugh.

What should I read next? Maybe American Psycho. I’m looking forward to reading how the business card scene played out in the book.

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Have cleaned up house a bit. Cleared the email inbox, Windows desktop, uninstalled a bunch of programs, compacted down Programs in the Start Menu (only one column, and it extends to only half the height of my monitor!), filed away files, changed my theme to the very awesome areao4.2 by heylove (search for it on deviantart), updated calibre and my ebook library and updated the files on my bebook. It’s the little things in life that make me feel fulfilled (‘__’)

A few hours on and the things are starting to pile up again though. There’s always tomorrow.

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I’ve started using Dropbox, a service that syncs up the designated folder and the files contained therein on
your computer, to Dropbox’s servers. You can sync up multiple computers to the same account, and you can mark if files are public too. It’s a great way to automatically backup files. I’ve been wanting to shove a bunch of stuff into ‘the cloud’ for some time but Google Docs, which I had in mind, only allows the upload of one file at a time, and that’s through a form on the web. If only gDocs did something like this!

Dropbox gives free accounts a box of 2 gig, which is plenty, in my opinion, for just documents. There is the option of increasing this though – if you sign up to Dropbox with this link, I get an additional 250mb, and you will too! This works up to a max of 3 gigs. I signed up with a referral link so I’ve already got 2.25 gigs. I just need 3 more referrals to hit my max

Ah well, it doesn’t really matter because I’ve uploaded everything I can think of uploading, in terms of documents, and I’ve only used up 20% of my quota.

I’m really quite pleased with the way it works. It’s simple and very intuitive. Works as advertised.

-stamp of approval-

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Have finally found a solution for shoe storage. I’ve almost certainly settled on the full height Billy bookshelf in white with additional glass doors from Ikea. Or perhaps in black-brown if the white looks too cheap. And because the Billy series is such an Ikea staple, I can easily purchase actual shelves to increase the capacity if needed!

The other options are Smadal, with additional glass doors, and Bergsbo.

Smadal was actually my first choice. I’ve seen it in person and the quality is good. It will certainly match with my Hemnes drawers – the knob of the drawer is actually exactly the same as on my drawers, except smaller. I’m also pretty sure the pieces are by the same designer as many of the Hemnes pieces. The only problem is – there isn’t going to be enough shelf space for all my shoes!

I do like the glas shelves in Bergsbo. I think it will display my shoes better. It is a leeeeetle too large though. And by that I mean it is huge.

Billy isn’t my first choice by far but it is what I have to settle on. Doesn’t matter, I can’t wait to get my hands on anything so I can finally get those shoe boxes off my bedroom floor and free up some space!

Maybe I should go on a shoe cull, see if I really can’t get everything squeezed in to Smadal. It will totally kill if a few months from now Ikea introduces a full height version in the Smadal line. In fact, I think it is highly likely as Smadal is a new line which was only introduced a few months ago (in Australia anyway) and already new stuff has come out. Should I wait? Argh.

And I do realise it is probably nothing short of sacrilegious to mention Fight Club and Ikea in the same post.

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Have created a custom Ikea Australia search for my browser. Feeling guiltily self-indulgent.

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Have almost a full jar of cream in the fridge that will be going off in a few days. Barring unforseen circumstances I think I shall go to Vic Markets tomorrow to pick up some supplies to make a pavlova to use up all that cream! I’ll be using a recipe in Cook with Jamie, a Jamie Oliver cookbook, which I’ve road tested before. Aaah. Good times.