Author: Purple Wyrm

Wow, so much to write about, so little time. Well, plenty of time really, it’s the weekend. More like so little energy. I’ve been feeling incredibly run down for about the last month. I feel exhausted all day, go to bed dead tired, then wake up still dead tired. I went off to the doctor’s on Tuesday and had some blood tests done, although he seems to think it may be sleep apnoea (I was suspecting the same thing actually). To confirm it I’d need to have a sleep study done. This of course is prohibitively expensive, so I’ll just have to try and lose weight. As if I’m not trying to do that anyway 🙁

There are a number of things I’d actually like to write about – assorted birthday stuff for instance – but I simply don’t have the energy right now. So I’m going to try and write a small amount each night and see if that clears the backlog. Hmmm, we’ll see how long that lasts.

OK, so to start, Serenity. Serenity as all would know is the movie that continues on from Joss Whedon’s axed TV sci-fi western Firefly. I have never actually seen Firefly – mostly because the networks down here treated it with the utter contempt that they treat all sci-fi with and put it on at about 2:00am every second Tuesday – but have been hearing extremely good things about it for the last year or so, so put the DVD set on my Amazon wishlist. Naturally I then neglected to actually tell anyone about said Amazon wishlist, so was extremely and pleasantly surprised when my cousin Greg and his wife Antionetta turned up to my birthday get together with a copy of Serenity.

I didn’t watch it right away. In addition to my general malaise it had been a really hot week so I was fairly wiped out. I decided to wait until I could get some semi-decent sleep and actually appreciate it, a circumstance that came around last weekend.

So, what did I think? I was pretty impressed. The setting is really clever (one planet-dense, highly terraformed solar system so you don’t have to worry about fudging the physics for FTL*Apparently this was never actually stated in the series, they only explicitly confirmed it in the movie, but it’s still damn cool), the effects are pretty good for the budget (the reaver land-speeder thingie is a little dodgy at times but apart from that I didn’t see any problems), it’s well acted with a really sharp script and (probably most importantly) it’s funny as hell. Nathan Fillion in particular has a great comic turn and the script gives him some great lines to work with. And the plot is pretty good – as someone who’s never seen the series I was able to jump right in and know what was going on.

And as if all of that’s not enough the DVD has some great extras. Like the out takes. I said Nathan Fillion is funny – the out takes prove it because most of them involve him goofing off in some highly entertaining fashion. The very best has to be the – shall we say – “variation” on the “modify the ship” scene, which almost had me in hysterics. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but the phrase “takin’ a dirt nap with the baby Jesus” may well be entering my vocabulary (assuming I could ever find circumstances to use it in that is 🙂

So, my final opinion? Well in the last week I’ve watched the film three times (once with the commentary, twice without), ordered the complete series from Amazon (I looked at JB’s in the city but couldn’t find it) and found myself with a strong desire to swear in Mandarin and call things “shiny”, so I’d have to say that Serenity is fantastic. Too bad they axed the show, cynical, ratings obsessed liou coe shway duh biao-tze huh hoe-tze duh bun ur-tze.

Oh, and I suppose now I’d better do that personality test linked from Ali’s blog hadn’t I?

Well there you go, exactly the same result (hmmmm, as for the natural mechanic thing does the fact that I just spent 20 minutes rewriting the HTML to make that result nice, clean and standards compliant count? Natural engineer then maybe 🙂

Best. Computer. Game. Ever.

(Just a shame it’s not actually real)

On another subject there’s one of those SMS idiot-baiting add campaigns on at the moment (the ones where they try and make you pay good money to message the answer to a fairly inane question for the miniscule chance of wining a prize) that’s really annoying me. Well, more so than they usually do anyway. It’s offering the prize of a motor scooter and the rather inane question you have to answer to go into the draw is “What does a scooter run on?”. The options are “A: Fuel” or “B: Gas”. Frankly, neither of them is particularly well thought out.

First of all anything a machine runs on (including gas) is fuel by definition. If you built a scooter that ran on fluffy little kittens (as one guy in Germany seems to have done recently I seem to recall) then it’d still run on fuel wouldn’t it? It’s just that the fuel would be fluffy little kittens. So you’d think that would be the obvious answer.

But – the word ‘fuel’ is a blanket term for any substance that can be converted to energy, which by definition would include gas. So, if you answer “Fuel” you’re also answering “Gas”, since gas is a kind of fuel. You can’t actually separate the two. Making matters worse there’s the American meaning of ‘gas’. Now, OK this isn’t America, but it’s still a recognised usage. So, if we assume that you’re using American English, then yes – scooters run on gas.

So, do scooters run on fuel, or gas? Yes. Scooters run on fuel (an energy source) – by definition. They also run on fuel (petrol). But they don’t run on gas (gas), which is a fuel (energy source), so they don’t run on a specific fuel (gas) (unless they’ve undergone an LPG conversion in which case they do run on gas (gas) which is of course a fuel (energy source)). However they do also run on gas (petrol) which is both a fuel (energy source) and fuel (petrol). It’s a semantic nightmare of epic proportions.

I wish advertising people would actually think now and then. But I suppose that’s asking too much. After all if they were able to think they wouldn’t be in advertising…

I phoned up the-soon-to-be-non-existent Western Power to make a late credit card payment today. To get to the credit card payment section the phone system rapidly routes you through about five different departments, each playing their own Mozart CD as hold music. It’s like listening to the Mozart Mega Mix.

Sleep deprivation and work stress levels approaching critical. I’ll explain later, assuming I don’t die first.

(Oh, and I have to work tomorrow – Serenity now! Serenity now!)

This may well be simultaneously the stupidest and funniest thing I’ve ever seen on TV 🙂

And this may well be the greatest computer game ever made 🙂

It’s now officially autumn, so naturally summer has arrived with a vengence. Since Saturday daytime temperatures have hovered in the high 30’s and night-time ones in the low 20’s. As such I have had about 6 hours sleep over the last 72 hours and am having to intraveneously inject Red Bull just to remain upright.

It doesn’t help that yesterday was the Labour Day public holiday either. So rather than slaving away in a nice air conditioned office I sweated away in my apartment, unable to do any of the rather inportant things I was hoping to get done with my day off. Like cleaning for instance, or emailing Helen and Ali who I both seriously owe emails to – Helen in particular who I’ve been inadvertently ignoring all year 🙁

Hopefully though I shall soon have things back under control. The weather should break by the weekend (or at least that’s what Nerelda Jacobs on channel 10 keeps saying, and why should she lie?) and I’ve decided to stop taking Saint John’s Wort which – while it seems to have been making me feel less depressed and anxious – seems to have been doing so by making me feel all vague, spaced out and non-motivated to do anything, a conclusion I unfortunately reached just after spending $15.00 on another bottle of the stuff. I’m also going to see about taking some time off work, like every second Monday for instance. Dale may not be exactly happy about that, but I may have to put my foot down – I am really not happy with my quality of life at the moment and an extra day to take care of non-work stuff every two weeks would work wonders towards improving it. He’ll probably make some points about doing some extra hours on other days so my salary doesn’t drop – but that’s missing the point entirely. A weekday where I can do what I want to do is of far more value to me than $150. Shocking though it may seem there are some things more important than money.

Well, how about that? I intended this as a quick note about why I haven’t done numerous things I should have done and it’s turned into some kind of manifesto. Well I suppose that’s a sort of good thing, it gives me a plan. Hmmm, I’d better do some work now…

Well, there we go, I’m now 30 and officially old. I guess I have to be all mature now and buy life insurance or write a novel or travel the world in search of Googlewhacks or something. I should probably also develop a heavy load of existential angst over my now lost youth, but frankly I suffer from so much existential angst on a daily basis that any more would just be lost as background noise. At least I’ve started carrying a wallet*Rebecca has been at me for years about how I walk around with all my cards and large quantities of twenty and fifty dollar bills stuffed into my pockets and then pull them all out and look at them whenever I have to pay for anything. She seems to think it makes me more likely to be mugged. So I’ve knocked together an RFID blocking Duct Tape Wallet to hold all my uncommonly used cards and heavy cash reserves, and now just walk around with a few twenties in my pockets instead..

I suppose I really should have spent yesterday (the last day of my 20’s) racing around in fast cars, getting riotously drunk and cavorting with beautiful and exotic women. But I had to work. So I’ll have to put that off until my mid-life crisis. I did get to eat some cake though, and should get to eat some more today, so things aren’t all that bleak – apart from from a weight loss perspective.

And when you think about it, 30 only seems like a significant number because we count in base ten. If we counted in binary (or hexidecimal for that matter) 32 would probably be the big birthday and I’d have another two years of youthful irresponsibility to look forwards to. Maybe that’s what I’ll do, maintain that I’m counting in hexidecimal for the next few years (then when I hit 32 switch to vigesimal or something). That’s the secret to never getting old – keep changing the measuring stick 🙂

In other news white supremacist Jack van Tongaran (I’m possibly spelling his name wrong, but can’t be bothered trying to find out what the correct version is) is missing and the police are concerned for his safety. One is tempted to say good riddance. If someone who (allegedly) firebombs chinese restaurants wants to top themselves I’m rather inclined to let them go ahead and do it. Mind you, one of his other associates is missing as well, so it’s entirely likely they’ve just decided to break bail (allegedly) and gone on the run (allegedly). No doubt they’ll turn up sooner or later, probably with arms full of “Asians Out or Racial War!” posters (allegedly). Idiots.

Better do some work now.

PS: Did I mention the other day that Wonderfalls has a theme song written and performed by Andy Partridge of the Partridge Family? Well, it does – which only makes the show even more surreal 🙂

You know, there really is some pestilential television on at the moment. Take for instance Channel Nine’s new offering for Sunday evenings – a show named Clever. It isn’t. Its general format seems to be getting two teams of C-List celebrities together, presenting them with ‘zany’ science experiments – the majority of which have already been done on Mythbusters and Braniac – and then getting them to answer a multiple choice question on the outcome. The first episode (which I watched most of last week before getting fed up and changing to David Attenborough over on the ABC) featured walking on a pool full of custard, putting light globes in a microwave oven, melting styrofoam with acetone (cutting edge science there guys!) and blowing up a caravan to see if mobile phones can cause fires at petrol stations. I mean blowing up a caravan! That’s Braniac‘s signature “experiment”! Now I’m no great fan of Braniac (give me Mythbusters – a show that doesn’t treat its audience like hyperactive 8 year olds – any day) but I’d rather watch 20 Braniac episodes in a row than even ten more minutes of Clever.

Nine has also thrown together a similarly monsterous travesty for Tuesday nights called Magda’s Funny Bits. My best guess at the concept for this show is that they had a whole load of left over content purchased from the States for Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show*Maybe you think Australia actually produces an hour’s worth of “funny” home videos each and every week – maybe you’re a fool. and episodes three to twelve of the The World’s Funniest Adds and couldn’t think of any way to use them. So someone suggested stringing them together into a clip show and getting some minor celebrity (Magda Szubanski as it turns out) to do “funny stuff” in between. Well, I suppose it’s cheaper than spending money on anything good.

That said I suppose there has been some pretty good stuff on the last few months, so maybe I’ve just been spoiled. Smallville for instance, which is becoming more and more incoherent with each episode. We got ten or so episodes of Gilmore Girls and the second (and sadly final, because it got axed dagnabit!) season of Carnivale. The ABC finally finished its complete run of Doctor Who with the incomparable Sylvester McCoy – leaving me with nothing to do at 6:00pm for the first time since (I think) 2003. And I discovered a very weird but rather endearing series called Wonderfalls which Nine were using (along with Celebrity Golf Challenge) as filler on Saturday afternoons.

Wonderfalls (which only lasted one season thanks to unfair comparisons with Joan of Arcadia) is about an extremely cynical Generation Y-er by the name of Jaye who despite (or possibly because of) coming from a highly sucessful family and getting an excellent education prefers to live in a trailer park and work (badly I might add*Quick! What movie?!) in a gift shop at Niagra Falls. Which all seems to be working out fairly well for her until previously inanimate objects start coming to life (when no-one’s looking of course) and spouting instructions at her. Like a wax lion telling her not to give a dissatisfied customer their money back, or pink lawn flamingos telling her to “get off your ass”. Naturally she tries to ignore them at first, but by a few episodes in is following their prompts almost without thinking because things usually seem to work out for the best that way – eventually at least.

It’s a very odd show. It seems to have had problems deciding exactly where it was going or what audience it was trying to appeal to, but the writing is pretty sharp and Caroline Dhavernas’s acting as Jaye kinda makes the whole thing work (she has the same talent for expressions of incredulous horror as Linda Cardellini in Freaks and Geeks). So it’s a shame it wasn’t picked up for a second season. It’s also a shame Nine seem to have given up on it after about five episodes – no sign of it for the last two weeks – so I may have to resort to finding it on DVD at some point. In the meantime I’ll just disconcert passers by by muttering “What ARE you!? The COW of PAIN?!?” under my breath and cackling.

Here’s two completely unrelated interesting facts I stumbled across recently. The music of the choral piece Oh Fortuna*Probably better known to many in this illiterate age as Excaliber was composed in 1937 (in Nazi Germany of all places), but the words are from a collection of bards’ songs dating from the 13th century. Now is that majorly cool or what? Six hundred odd years between the music and the lyrics! And what lyrics! Translate them from the Latin and they’re all about how fate is cruel and fickle and cuts people down like puppets – I had no idea there were Goths in the 13th Century!*Well obviously there were Goths, I mean Goths, not Goths. All clear?

The second interesting fact is that Rock, Paper, Scissors was invented in ancient China and there is no record of it existing in Europe until the early 19th century (when it was presumably brought back by sailors and merchants). Can you imagine living in a world without Rock, Paper, Scissors? It’s unthinkable! How could people ever decide on anything?

In other news I turn 30 this week. Oh good lord. I should be doing something highly important and significant with the last week of my 20’s, but I can’t think of anything – apart from doing the dishes that is. So I suppose I’d better go do that now…

Well here I am in at work early again. I gave up trying to sleep at about 4:30am and decided I might as well come in and set up that custom 404 error page I’ve been working on for a while. Try it out, it’s a riot!

(Note: My sleep deprived state is probably making me think it’s far funnier than it actually is)

(Another Note: Just in case you were wondering a 404 error page is what comes up when you try and access a page that isn’t there. So type something creative onto the end of the URL and watch the results.)

My continuing sleep deprivation is down to the fact that last night was horribly hot and humid – even sticking my fan right next to the bed didn’t do anything except move the hot air around. On top of that there was an alarm of some sort that kept going off somewhere close by at unpredictable intervals, and my left big toe kept getting this weird itchy pain all night. It’s still doing it now as a matter of fact, although since I’m not trying to sleep at the moment it’s a minor irritartion at most. It’s probably gout from all that high living.

I could write something here about the AWB scandal couldn’t I? Without getting too far into the details Australia’s monopoly wheat exporter (The Australian Wheat Board) has spent the last decade or so paying bribes to Saddam Hussein under the aegis of the UN Oil for Food program. This (understandably) has pissed off quite a few people, and there’s now an enquiry going on. Exactly how much good it’s going to do is debatable, as the Government (for no conceivable reason except to cover it’s own lying arse) has just banned civil servants from testifying before it. Wooo democracy!

The big problem from the Government’s perspective is that up until 1999 the AWB was Government run (before being spun off into a private company). On top of this the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is supposed to keep an eye on what said private company is doing. So the department iss either complacent in the bribery, or completely incompetant. With the track record of the Howard Government, either option is entirely likely.

I’d like to imagine that this might finally take down the Government. Unfortunately the next election is a few years away, and when it finally arrives all they have to do is yell “Interest Rates!” or “Terrorists!” or “Illegal Immigrants Defiling the Our Sacred National Borders and Throwing Children into the Sea!” and the average sheep-like Australian voter will forget all about it and vote how they’re told. *sigh* Democracy is a fine idea, apart from the bit about letting just any idiot vote.

And so, once again the turn of the seasons brings us to the dreaded 14th, and it’s time for me to prove just how much I do actually care by making my yearly “I don’t care” entry. Amazing how time flies isn’t it?

I’ve come in early to work for three reasons. One – to avoid the heat. Two – To catch up on some work I didn’t get to do yesterday because I took the day off with a cold *A cold on a day when it was 36 degrees Celcius. Lots of fun believe me.. Three – to avoid as much of the Valentines hoo-haa as possible. Not that it’s likely to make my day particularly worse – I feel like death already from lack of sleep and lingering cold effects, so hearts and roses everywhere aren’t going to have much of an effect.

(This isn’t particularly riviting is it? Like I said, I feel like death)

Part of the reason for my feelings of imminent mortality is that I haven’t been sleeping terribly well of late. My friendly local pharmacist – concerned by my massive consumption of pseudoephidrine based antihistimines – has convinced me to go onto non-pseudoephidrine based antihistimines by process of removing all the the pseudoephidrine based antihistimines from the shelves while making up some story about packaging changes (yeah, right). The new 24 hour ones I’m trying seem to work OK (although they start failing in the evenings with the result that I start coughing like I have consumption about 8:00pm), but I just can’t seem to get to sleep anymore. My theory is that I’ve been using pseudoephidrine (may cause drowsiness) for so long that my body relies on the stuff to put me to sleep at night. With these new non-drowsy ones I have to fall asleep naturally and my body has no idea how to do it. Oh well, I figure it’ll learn eventually – either that or I’ll start hallucinating spiders crawling under my skin and die. Whichever happens first.

Went out to dinner at the Red Orchid with Dom and Rebecca on Sunday night, which was fun. It was warm enough to eat outside, thus avoiding the usual cacophany – although everyone else seemed to have the same idea, so there wasn’t very much cacophany to avoid. The food was excellent as usual, although they did their usual trick of disguising chunks of chilli to look like chunks of capsicum, which I really have to remember to watch out for next time – almost choking to death can really spoil an evening. We headed up to the Regal afterwards for ice cream, and invented a new form of breakfast food (patent pending so I’d better not publish the details) so all in all a pretty good night.

Hmmm I saw a latin motto on a schoolbag the other day. It read Dominae Dirigis Nos. I like to think this means “The Lord is not an Airship” – even though I know full well it doesn’t. This got me thinking about dodgy Latin translations a bit, and led me to come up with “The Parrots are everwhere!” for In Omnia Paratus, “I drank, I filmed, I collaborated” for Vini, Vidi, Vici and “U2 are good” for Pro Bono. *Sigh* – it’s sad what I find amusing sometimes :).

I’d better do some work now I guess.