Author: Purple Wyrm

Good News: The Howard Government is still trailing miserably in the opinion polls – meaning we might finally be able to shift them in this year’s election. This will give us the exciting opportunity of being screwed over by a new bunch of people in new and exciting ways!

Bad News: The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics (one of the most Godawful depressing songs of all time) has been stuck in my head for the last three days straight. I may need to apply liberal doses of Limbonic Art to get rid of it.

Indifferent News: The recharge port on my mobile phone has busted, rendering it useless. On the upside this means I’m not contactable for support after hours. On the downside people I actually want to talk to may be trying to call me, and getting annoyed because they think I’ve got it turned off.

Weird News: I just got a spam email from ‘Bernard Black’. When fictional British TV characters start spamming you, then it’s time for drastic action of some sort 🙂

An exchange witnessed on the train to work this morning…

It’s time’s like that that you realise women really do get the short end of the stick sometimes. I mean she was perfectly safe physically (there were a whole bunch of people listening to the conversation who would have stepped in if things started heading in that kind of direction) but it must be horrible to not be able to ride the train without being harrased by weirdos pestering you for dates, no matter how rarely it might occur.

Jericho is back on tonight, although they’ve put in on at 9:30. It’s just as well Spooks ended last week, or I’d be torn. Truly torn! Oh, and it looks like Channel 10 has got Torchwood (they’ve started a teaser campaign about “Captain Jack Harkness – the man who cannot die!”), which is odd because I would have expected the ABC to pair it up with Doctor Who. Oh well, as long as they don’t put it on opposite Doctor Who I’m happy.

Although on the subject of Spooks I do have to complain about whoever does the subtitling (it’s nit-picking rant time, so please feel free to skip this paragraph :). In one of the episodes earlier this season one of the team (it takes me ages to learn characters’ names in shows I’m afraid) is infiltrating a people smuggling operation while masquerading as a Circassian Arab. He’s in the back of a truck with a bunch of other refugees and manages to establish a bit of trust with them by giving an old man some of his water. One of the others then asks him (I think this is what they ask, it was a few weeks ago) where he’s from – in Arabic. The problem? It’s subtitled as “Were are you from?”. Were are you from? Were? I mean honestly!! When the BBC (is Spooks BBC? I’ll assume it is) can’t manage to subtitle in the Queen’s English then what is the world coming to?! Hrumph!!

OK, rant over 🙂

Well my lunch break is now also over, so back to work. Ho hum.

OK I’ve decided I’m going to try and write a bit each day this week, to get back into the blogging thing. So tonight I though why not point people towards Dresden Codak? This is a rather fine webcomic that has only recently settled down into having a storyline – rather than displaying a bunch of brilliantly illustrated and thought provoking non-sequiturs, often to do with philosophy and such.

You’ve got to love a comic that can come up with a phrase as brilliantly anti-romantical-cynical as “my heart is nothing more than an engine forged from the remnants of a dead star” 🙂

Not to mention the entire concept of Dungeons and Discourse 🙂

Read them all!

OK, going to watch TV now.

Just hopping on quickly to say that Jamie T’s song Sheila is truly excellent. Not only does it get the young people listening to Betjeman (The Cockney Amorist to be precise), but the video clip has monkeys! Monkeys!!

(And before anyone decides to complain and say they’re apes, I’d like to point out that macaques are actually monkeys – even though they don’t have tails. So there!)

Hmmm, while we’re at it the video for Muses’ Invicible is also fairly awesome. As is the song. Indulgent – we are talking Muse after all – but awesome. I really must pick up a copy of their latest album.

Well I honestly intended to get a decent entry written this weekend, but what with everything that’s going on – illness, Doctor’s appointments, my brother’s 30th birthday, etc – I didn’t find the time. This is somewhat of a problem as it means more and more news is backing up that I want to write about, meaning that when I do get the chance to write it’s going to eat up a big chunk of time, and be a massive entry.

I suppose I could make some kind of resolution to write a little bit a day, but c’mon, there’s no way I’d keep it. So I guess I’ll just have to put an entire day or so aside for updates, probably next weekend. Probably.

This is turning into a rather awful entry really. Just moaning and excuses about why there aren’t any real entries. I should try and find something to talk about to try and make it worth reading. Which is difficult because I’m typing this out during my lunchbreak at work, with a sandwich in one hand and my co-workers peering over my shoulder with their beady little eyes (well, potentially peering over my shoulder with their perfectly normal eyes to be honest). Maybe I can find something interesting on Wikipedia to link to…

There we go, Ubykh, the (sadly) now extinct Caucasian language with 84 consonants, 2 vowels, and special linguistic classes for things to do with horses, and putting things in and out of fires (don’t even try to talk about putting horses into fires :). The last speaker died in 1992, and one has to wonder if he was playing some kind of obscure Caucasian joke on the field linguists.

Stranger things have happened! (and yes, I know nothing about Caucasian languages, so don’t email to say that “rtthgufgfbog” is clearly Finno-Ugric or something :).

Better get back to work.

This is just a quick update to make some brief explanation as to why there have been no updates lately. Work has been a real nightmare for the last four weeks or so, and I’ve been incredibly stressed out – so stressed out in fact that I ended up spending a night in hospital with a suspected heart attack (it wasn’t a heart attack I hasten to point out – apparently despite being an overweight slob who hardly ever gets any exercise I have the heart of an ox). With that kind of stuff going on I just haven’t had the time or energy to write anything even halfway decent (although I was tempted to knock together a lolcat of “In yor hosiptal eetin yor hosiptal foodz” 🙂

Things should be back to normal soon. Hopefully.

From a spam email recently received at the office…

Arm the charities! Give rifles to UNICEF! Get grenades for Greenpeace! Send your spare pistols to the WWF, and if you have a pocket battleship going spare I’m sure Amnesty International can use it!

*sigh*

No updates for a while since I had to work Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Monday. And I’m having to work again today. Dale is away you see and totally out of contact, so I’ve had to manage things at the office – and managing things is not really my strong suit. Add to this a number of deadlines he gave clients and failed to give us before his departure, and the workload is a bit on the high side.

I will probably survive. I’ll try and get a week or so off once Dale’s back to make up for my non-Easter break.

Well, back to it. The sites aren’t going to build themselves.

It’s OK! No need to panic! Wyrmworld is fine!

For those of you (the majority I suspect) who didn’t visit the site between midnight and midday today (Perth time), I decided to engage in a bit of juvenile April 1st trickery, and redirected the site to an extremely pink chihuahua accessory dog page (don’t you just love the sound effect?). I actually got all my domain problems sorted out a week ago, but decided to maintain the suspense as a lead up to my amazing joke. Not bad eh? 🙂

The reason I switched things back at midday is that I was brought up according to a quaint and esoteric tradition brought over from the old country (ie: the UK) by my mother, which says that anyone who plays an April Fool joke after midday is in fact the Fool. According to what Wikipedia has to say on the subject this is accepted fact both in the UK and Australia, but I am yet to find anyone else who has even heard of it, let alone follows it. Well I follow it, I was brought up right dagnabit! And as for anyone out there hoaxing after midday – you’re a fool! 😀

Speaking of the old country, my mother’s heading back there on Tuesday for a few months, which will be nice for her. I’m taking her and Dad out to dinner tonight, since I won’t have a chance to see her before she goes otherwise. Then tomorrow I’m meant to be catching up with Ryan, Fabes and Matt, which should be good. Then it’s back to work for three days before the Easter long weekend – which would be good except for two factors. Firstly it’s going to be ridiculously hot (it’s meant to be Autumn for crying out loud!) and secondly I’ve agreed to go in and do some work at the office to make up for not going in tomorrow (since it’s not my scheduled Monday off). But I suppose the two will kind of cancel out because the office has air-con. Hmmm I’m tempted to spend the entire weekend there.

At least I might get some sleep that way I suppose. I didn’t get much last night because for the second Saturday running my new downstairs neighbours sat up all night, loudly talking in their yard – ie: directly below my bedroom. And when I say all night, I mean all night – they start up around 6:00pm and keep going through to 6:00am without any kind of break. So yes, it seems that the bogans who’ve tormented me for the last two years have been replaced with vampires. I may have to stock up on garlic and holy water, and plan a bombing campaign from my bedroom window.

Anyway, better go and try to get some cleaning done.