Author: Purple Wyrm

Oy, what a day. I spent most of my time at the office today coding the parcel postage rates for the entire country into the system. I’d actually done this before, but only ex-Perth, now every single rate from any part of the country to any other part can be accurately calculated. So, if someone wanted to send say, an 11kg parcel from Wagga Wagga to Casey Polar Research Station in the Australian Antarctic Territory, the system can figure out exactly how much it’ll cost them*.

Well, when I say any part of the country, I’m not actually being completely truthful. The system can’t calculate postage on parcels sent from Norfolk Island. For some reason Australia Post leaves that up to the local government, as I eventually figured out after an hour long virtual paper chase through the Australia Post website. A further hour of fruitless surfing established the fact that the Norfolk Island Government has not seen fit to publish their rates online, which is exactly the kind of slack behaviour one would expect from a bunch of inbred, pidgin mouthing descendants of the Bounty mutineers*.

I’ll have to email them I suppose. Unless the postage rates are some kind of closely guarded territorial secret or something.

So, why haven’t I been updating the weblog? Well, sad to say it’s because of my recently purchased budget copy of Caesar III the game of Roman city building. I think I’m dangerously obsessed with it. Hours zip past as I figure out exactly the right place to stick that olive oil workshop or how to raise housing standards in the coliseum district. In the last scenario I managed to bring my city from famine and virtual bankruptcy after an earthquake to flowing with wealth through intensive development of a pottery industry. My warehouses couldn’t hold it all! Ships were queuing up at the dock to take it all away! The really sad thing is I’m actually proud of this 🙂

Nonetheless I’ve decided to take a week’s break from it. Not only because I’ve been horribly neglecting the weblog and people I’m supposed to be emailing, but I’m getting tired of forums, reservoirs and temples dancing around behind my eyelids when I’m trying to sleep 🙂

On Friday I dropped in to Angus & Robertson’s (to buy a $120 Javascript manual with a rhinoceros on the front) and was surprised to note that The Silmarillion is sitting at number 11 on the best seller list. This pleases me immensely. Of course, it’s only because of all the hype surrounding the movies, and (given that The Silmarillion has been compared to both a telephone directory in Elvish and the Old Testament) at least half of the people buying it will read about three pages in and give up in confusion at the lack of hobbits. But at least it’s getting out there. Maybe in five or six years time someone will pick up one of those neglected copies and actually read it. And enjoy it. And find the bit about hobbits in the back.

Or maybe they’ll just all gather dust, like the millions of never opened copies of A Brief History of Time. Hmmmmm.

Anyway, regular visitors may have noticed that I’ve finally added a counter/tracker thing to the log. I have to say I’m overjoyed by the results. People are just flooding in, most as the result of completely inaccurate search results on Google, which I find highly entertaining 🙂 The majority of these are music related, and point rather misleadingly at my “Current Listening” chart over there. A particular favourite of late has been The Bold and the Beautiful by the Drugs, a lot of people seem to be after the lyrics. So, not to disappoint my public (arriving here by accident notwithstanding) I oblige.

(I transcribed these lyrics myself by the way, so I cannot vouch for their absolute accuracy. Also, given that I’d rather perform cataract surgery on myself with a potato peeler than watch a single episode of the show, I have no way of checking the details. Those lyrics that I’m not 100% certain on I’ve underlined, just to make things somewhat clearer.)

Having got that over and done with I’d like to state that I am completely unconnected to both The Bold and the Beautiful, and the Drugs, so if anyone associated with the abovementioned entities objects to my posting of the lyrics (and can back up their association with some kind of actual evidence) I shall of course take them down. I would also like to point out that as an underpaid keyboard monkey I am completely un-sueworthy, so before Ron Moss comes kicking down my door demanding money, he’d be better off practicing his guitar.

So, that’s it for now. I’m all written out. Although I will mention in closing that you know you’ve been reading too much Tolkien when you start pronouncing “celebrate” as “kelebrate” 😉

* $24.76 in case you were wondering.

* I would like to state for the record that Pitcairn is a fascinating and valuable language, any minor problems with inbreeding were solved when the population moved from Pitcairn Island in 1856 and Bligh was an appalling Captain and an even worse Governor.

I am not dead.

I say this to reassure anyone who may be wondering why I haven’t made an entry in just over a week. I am not dead, or ill, or in jail. I’m just very busy.

A lot of this busy-ness comes down to the fact that Rebecca was staying for a while. This necessitated slightly more cooking and cleaning than usual (although stir fries do tend to cut down on the washing up I’m happy to report), but more than that required me to engage in conversation and other social activities to the exclusion of computer time. Not that, I hasten to add, I minded 🙂 But, it does mean I have been neglecting the old weblog a bit.

I’m getting things back on track now. Although I still need to do a massive wash up tonight and clean out the fridge (I intended to do that last night, but got sidetracked by Rove Live). The bottle of sesame oil has been leaking a bit and you do not want rancid sesame oil pooling at the bottom of your fridge, I can tell you. No, not at all.

I’ll see about making a longer entry tonight. If my dishpan hands are up to typing 😉

At the moment at work we’re creating a site for a company that rents out holiday properties. As the lazy so-and-so’s haven’t provided us with any data yet, it’s been handed over to me to knock up some samples to test the system with. This is not a good idea 😉

I started off fairly simply…

Small self contained unit with cooking and cleaning facilities supplied. Hidden from road by dense mulbury bushes. Would suit elderly hermit or insouciant recluse seeking to escape the frustrating modern world for a few days or weeks. No pets.

Seeing that that didn’t provoke any major problems, I decided my next effort would be a little more, well, odd…

Stately hillside manse with extensive views of cow pastures, turves and hillocks. Perfect for the amatuer agricultural enthusiast with too much time on their hands, or military types needing a good view of approaching cavalry.

Happy with that I pulled out a few more stops and went slightly surreal…

Converted rustic cow shed with hay floors and individual stalls for the kiddies. Would suit large families or xenophobic mushroom farmers with something to hide. Pets and survivalists welcome.

Finally I decided that in our post-modern age sense and/or meaning are, strictly speaking, redundant, and came up with the following little gem…

Semi-detached gypsy haywain with hanging buttreses and soaring pinnacles. Excellent multi-range field-state coverage and optional subdivided seraphim and cherubim. Extensive deposits of geological interest.

So far this outburst of creativity has caused no problems around the office. However the clients are yet to examine the site 😉

Thanks to Mark by the way for his plugging of the Tales. I really have to get a new one up soon don’t I? I was planning to take two weeks off mid July to visit Rebecca in Kal, and get a new chapter written, but the Government has seen fit to prevent this by assigning me to Jury Duty. And as “writing” is not on the list of permittable reasons for non-attendance there’s not a lot I can do (apart from maybe joining the Universal Life Church and claiming an exemption as a ‘minister of religion’). So now I’ve pushed back my plans a month, which at least means I’ll be in Kal for Rebecca’s birthday.

That is all 🙂

The ongoing farce that is my life continues unabated 🙂

A week ago, on Sunday night, I happened to call up Andrew (my brother for those coming in late) . I’d been browsing through one of the mysterious discount book sales that spontaneously appear like mushrooms after rain in any CBD storefront left vacant for more than a few hours, and had seen a large “Bold and the Beautiful 10th Anniversary” hardback going out cheap. As his love of the show is legendary I decided it would be a nice thing to do to alert him to it’s presence. It turned out he already had it, but he grabbed hold of the opportunity to inform me that the housewarming party he’d been planning even since I moved into Rebecca’s flat was scheduled for the coming Friday, and he thought he’d better double check that this was OK.

He also informed me that it was a “make your own pizza party”, which is the kind of idea that would never occur to me in a million years. This of course required the procurement of various pizza ingredients, a long list of which was soon forthcoming. The fact that several of the prospective attendees were vegetarians only made this list longer and more complicated, and all in all it was just as well I was getting paid on Monday.

So leaving Andrew to organise the social aspects, my first task was to get the place pick and span. Given that I’d spent most of my weekend playing Caesar III instead of following my usual cleaning regimen, this presented a bit of a problem. The floors certainly needed doing, and the kitchen surfaces, and the bathroom and toilet needed a good scrub. The washing up was starting to pile as well, and if I was to have anything to wear several loads of washing needed to be done, not to mention the need for clean bed sheets lest the party atmosphere lend itself to one getting lucky¹.

If I’d have taken a day off work I could have got it all done in one go, and had plenty of time for my usual cleaning related prevarication, procrastination and general wandering about moodily looking through books in a desperate attempt to avoid having to do any actual work. Unfortunately Bevan, being inconsiderately non-psychic², had decided to take two weeks of leave, meaning that the GTP staff was just down to Dale and myself (much as I like the idea of Dale trying to program CGI and JSP, it wouldn’t be the most sensible thing to do if I expect a job to come back to). So it was clean in the evenings or not clean at all (given that my evenings are pretty much taken up with cooking and watching TV, this was rather inconvenient to say the least).

The week dragged on. My original plan called for me to get the shopping done on Thursday, and spend Friday evening cleaning, however on Wednesday I realised that this wouldn’t leave me much time to watch Daria. So I rescheduled. I’d go in an hour early both days, then leave two hours early on Friday and get my shopping done. This seemed like a very good idea on Wednesday night, as it meant that I could just slump in front of the TV instead of having to do any work, having bought myself a good few hours worth of sweeping time during Stargate and ER. By Thursday night however it wasn’t looking anywhere near such a good idea, especially since it was Dr Greene’s last episode at the hospital, and you can hardly expect to get any decent cleaning done with that sort of thing going on. In the end I stayed up until about 11:00, which given that I had to get up at 5:00 the next morning to get into work nice and early (and fit in a bit of extra cleaning before I left) possibly wasn’t the most sensible thing to do.

Sure enough, Friday morning found my body more than reluctant to get out of bed. A long, hot, shower helped, particularly when the hot water ran out and it turned into a freezing cold shower. But the effects were only temporary, and by the time 3:00pm rolled around, and I should have been bouncing out of my chair to go and get the party shopping done, I was more falling out of chair, and literally struggling to keep my eyes open. So I did the only sensible thing. I went to the deli across the road and bought a Red Bull.

I had never had a Red Bull before, and my observations on the substance are as follows.

Observation One: It tastes awful. Truly truly horrible. It’s like red creaming soda mixed with battery acid. In fact, to judge by the taste it’s called Red Bull because bull urine is a major ingredient³. I once underwent a medical procedure where they then hang you upside down and x-ray your stomach. Red Bull tastes worse than the foaming mix of acids and bases they make you gulp down beforehand.

Observation Two: Red Bull does actually perk you up. Mainly because if you let your attention waver for even a second after drinking a can you’ll hurl.

Observation Three: There’s a warning on Red Bull saying you shouldn’t drink more than five cans a day because it could damage your health. Personally I think this is unnecessary. Anyone who could manage to force down more than five cans a day is obviously some kind of alien, and hence above the petty health requirements of the human species.

To be fair though it did actually, if not exactly “revitalise” my mind and body, wake me up and keep me going until about 10:00pm⁴. Even if the immediate short term effect was to make me all jittery, paranoid and irritable. Something that the other shoppers at Foodland seemed to notice, judging by the way they cleared the aisles as soon as I rounded the corner twitching and grinning maniacally behind my shopping trolley of death.

To complicate matters, Rebecca and Dom were coming down from Kalgoorlie that evening (the main reason for the dating of the party) and needed somewhere to sleep. To wit they were bringing along an IKEA trundle bed, which would have to be assembled that very night, lest they have to sleep on the floor. In addition, I had possession of the only pass keys into the building, meaning that I’d have to be home before they got there. So I was doing some serious clock watching while shopping, a fact that only served to make me even more manic.

I eventually got all the shopping done, and staggered home loaded down with jars of olives and artichoke hearts, just in time to meet Dom and Rebecca in the car park with their gigantic mattress and flat pack boxes full of Finnish pine on a borrowed trailer. The draconian house rules of the complex require that furniture only be moved about on weekdays, between nine and five, and that the caretaker be advised 24 hours in advance, so as it was by now 5:30 on a Friday evening and the caretaker was completely unadvised vis a vis our bed moving plans, this presented a rather major problem. After some debate we decided the best thing to do was to rush the stuff in and up the stairs in a series of commando style raids, doing our best to avoid the security cameras and Resident’s Council members⁵. This plan was entirely successful, several oblivious residents helping us out by opening doors and suchlike, obviously under the impression that to be flaunting the rules so openly we must have special dispensation (it’s amazing what you can get away with under a totalitarian regime just by doing it 🙂

The actual erection of the bed presented another problem, as the spare bedroom was full of cardboard moving boxes and improvised washing lines (there are communal washing lines out back, but I don’t trust the Council Members not to steal my jeans). The problem was solved by quickly shoving all of this junk into the master bedroom, thereby ruining the effect of sophisticated elegance I’d been working on all week (the fact that Andrew had insisted Rebecca bring streamers and these were now draped all over the living room had already killed any such effect stone dead, but still). But, by the time Dom got back from returning the trailer we were all set for a good, old fashioned Amish⁶ bed raising.

It was about now that things started to come unstuck. Soon after we started puzzling our way through the mind boggling Scandinavian jigsaw of the flat packs, Andrew called to say that he was running late. And also that neither Lyndah, Katie or Emma would be coming, as they were all deathly ill with a variety of interesting illnesses. So it was just going to be him and Travis. This was rather annoying since by now I’d got used to the idea of the party and was actually looking forwards to catching up with everyone. Not to mention the fact that I’d blown $80.00 on various foodstuffs that I’d never eat in a million years⁷.

We continued building the bed. It proved to have all the usual IKEA flaws including several bolts being two short, most of the parts looking (but not being) exactly the same unless you examined them from exactly the right angle, and only one allen key included for a job clearly indicated in the manual as requiring two people. However it went pretty well – we only needed to take it apart and start again once and only had to leave out two non-essential bolts⁸.

Just as we were getting the end frames aligned Andrew turned up, bearing the news that Travis had been hit with a traffic fine for running a stop sign and was in such a foul mood that he wasn’t able to be sociable. So, from a planned attendance of eight, we were now down to four.

Dom and I continued with the bed, while Andrew and Rebecca relocated to the kitchen to get to work on the pizza. This went fairly well, until Andrew managed to take a chunk out of his finger with the brand new chopping knife I’d purchased at Foodland⁹ (I presumed that with eight people making pizzas I’d need some extra cutlery). This resulted in large quantities of blood being splashed around, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hasty application of band-aids and aluminium sulfate eventually managed to halt the bleeding¹⁰, although Rebecca took over the main cooking duties to avoid us all getting much more iron in our pizza that strictly necessary.

By now we were putting the guard rails on the bed, and were coming to the rather uncomfortable conclusion that once the mattress was in place, there wasn’t going to be a lot of space between it and the ceiling. There was even some concern that getting the mattress in in the first place might prove a problem. Sure enough, when the time came we had to take the lightbulb out of the ceiling socket to avoid having it snapped off. Even then the mattress still got caught on the fitting and had to be violently prodded free. It finally fell into place, leaving an estimated maximum sleeping clearance of around two feet, not including pillows and blankets.

This was, let’s face it, rather funny. For those of us not having to sleep in the thing that is 🙂

So with that little debacle out of the way, it was time to chow down on the pizza and garlic bread. This part of the evening turned out fairly well, even if the artichoke hearts were not exactly the success some thought they might be. After that we just hung around talking, like you do, until we got fed up and decided to go to bed.

So, not too bad overall.

Plans to reschedule are complicated by the fact that Rebecca (who’s studying at Curtin for the next week or so, and hence staying here) started her course yesterday, and will require the evenings henceforth to be nice and quiet, management books on “synergy” and “coopertition” requiring a fair bit of concentration, lest one collapses into sleep over yet another case study of some fictional American fish market. All in all the best solution is probably to hold the house warming somewhere else, although this does sort of defeat the point 🙂

OK, I’m all written out now. Bye 🙂

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1: This is of course a joke. What, me lucky? 🙂

2: Or highly psychic and even more inconsiderate.

3: They say it’s “taurine”, but that’s almost certainly just an industry code word forcattle urine.

4: When I crashed like the Hindenburg

5: Happily most of the council members have taken advantage of their positions to get lodging on the upper floors, and only descend to plebian ground level when strictly necessary.

6: Not that Amish bed raisings generally include pizza, cask wine and dixie-drumsticks in a biscuit.

7: Artichoke hearts, parsley in a tube, olives, etc.

8: We hope

9: I managed to do exactly the same thing yesterday while washing up. The knife is obviously a menace, and has been locked up in the maximum security cutlery draw under the sink pending further review.

10: And cask wine the wailing and tooth gnashing.

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Well, I was intending to get a long and highly detailed account of the goings on of Friday night’s Make Your Own Pizza/Bed Raising*/House Warming party up here today, however I’ve run out of time. So it’ll have to wait, hopefully only until tomorrow. It’s half written, it just needs finshing off, which I should be able to manage while watching The Secret Life of Us.

On a down note however I’ve discovered that there are no drivers for my scanner under Windows XP, so I’ll need to buy another one. This sucks. OK, scanners are remarkably cheap these days conpared to when I bought the thing several years ago, but it still sucks. Someone should sit down and bloody write a driver! C’mon! There must be….. several people still using the 9630P out there! Hrumph!

Until tomorrow then.

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* Like a barn raising. Only you’re putting together an IKEA trundle bed rather than a large agricultural building.

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Hmmmm. No sooner do I finish my Morlock inspired ravings on Saturday, than I discoverthe unfortunate fact that the PAX TV series Mysterious Ways hasn’t been renewedfor a third season. Now this in itself is no great tragedy, it wasn’t after all the bestshow I’ve ever seen. In fact in parts (often fairly large parts) it was pretty bloody awful,which is only to be expected I suppose in show that’s simultaneously attempting to tap intothe audiences of The X-Files and Touched by an Angel. However it’sdemise does lead to one unfortunate consequence, namely that (short of some theoreticalfuture late night repeats) I will no longer be able to get my recommended weekly dosageof Alisen Down. Or her character, Miranda, who (if she were real*) would in allprobability be my soul mate†. So I’m not in the best possible mood.

On the other hand, I am smelling particularly manly today, which can only be a good thing.For many, many years I have used pump deodorants out of concern for theplanet‡. However for Christmas I received a deodorant/body gel pack from oneof those people who don’t know you well enough to get you any meaningful kind ofpresent, but apparently do know you well enough to buy you intimate hygieneproducts.

So it happened one day that I ran out of pump deodorant, and (because well youneed deodorant) I gave it a try. Much to my surprise it worked far moreeffectively, and didn’t smell like mashed up animal glands§. So, after muchdeliberation, I finally sold out. On Saturday, among many other household purchases, Ibought a fairly well known brand of manly spray on deodorant. Hence my particularlymasculine smell.

In the deranged fastnesses of my mind at least part of my psyche is convinced thatthis change of deodorant will somehow act to turn me into a babe magnet. It seems to beunder the impression that women who have previously refused to give me the time of daywill now fall into my arms saying “I’d never have been interested in a guy like you,but you smell so manly! Take me now!!”. The more rational, realistic part of mypersonality is nowhere near so optimistic 🙂

The fire alarm at the old people’s home next door is going off again. Buncha’ pyros!

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* I’m not that delusional. Yet anyway 🙂

† Brilliant, weird, introverted quantum physics grad student who dresses in blackand investigates the paranormal? Yeah like we wouldn’t hit it off 😉

‡ Yeah, yeah, no one uses CFCs anymore. But the hydrocarbons they replacedthem with are a greenhouse gas. Bet they didn’t tell you that little factoid in schooleh?

§ Perhaps you don’t think that’s what male scents are generally made out of.Now who’s being naive?

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In the novel¹ The Time Machine by H.G.Wells, a late 19th century inventor travels forwards in time to a future Earth, where humanity has evolved into two separate species. On the beautiful, terraformed², landscaped garden of the surface live the gentle, childlike Eloi. The Eloi live simple lives of pleasure and luxury, spending their days dancing, playing games, and feasting in architecturally pleasing halls on the gigantic nourishing fruits that grow freely without any need for farming.

Underground however, in vast, dark warrens linked to the surface via deep wells, live the Morlocks – pale, hairy, and monstrous. They dwell in the tunnels, among great, ancient, still functional machinery, which they maintain and repair. In fact it is this machinery that keeps the surface so pleasant. The Morlocks are crafty and cunning, and there are thousands of them.

Once darkness falls the Eloi hurry inside, sleeping behind sealed doors, for night is when the Morlocks climb up the wells to the surface. Morlocks who enjoy hunting and eating Eloi (not to mention the occasional time traveler). They can be warded off by fire, but in their Edenic paradise the Eloi have lost even this basic technology. An Eloi caught outside after dark rarely sees the sun rise again.

So, who gets off best in this situation?

On the face of it, the Eloi appear to be the ones who have it made. They don’t need to work, they live in peace and harmony, and their environment is completely benign with no poisonous plants, no venomous insects, and no predators. So long as they get indoors before dark, they need not have a care in the world. The Morlocks in contrast are forced to live underground, driven away by the sun, working all day and night to keep the Eloi in luxury, their only pleasure being an occasional trip to the surface to take vengeance on their oppressors.

But when you stop to think about it, things aren’t that clear cut.

The Morlocks are more than strong enough to rise up and destroy the Eloi. In addition to their numeric inferiority, those dunderheaded simpletons are so pampered as to be completely incapable of defending themselves. In one scene a bunch of Morlocks come after some Eloi armed with the Morlock equivalent of tyre irons, and the Eloi just sit there whimpering, too stupid to get up and run³. The Morlocks wouldn’t even have to resort to military measures, they could just turn off the machinery that makes life so easy for the little wimps (you can’t tell me that a race who don’t even know about fire could survive more than a few days without everything handed to them on a platter). With the totally useless Eloi out of the way, the Morlocks would be free to take the surface. Sunlight wouldn’t be a problem, they could just adopt a nocturnal lifestyle, sleeping in converted Eloi feasting halls with all the windows bricked up during the day. So why don’t they? What stops them from rising up and overthrowing their masters?

The only reasonable conclusion is that they like it this way.

Think about it. Underground the Morlocks have complete control of their environment. There’s no sun to hurt their eyes. They can keep whatever hours are convenient, without being tied to a 24 hour cycle. They have machinery to tinker around with. Why would they give all that up for a bit of open sky and greenery? (there are probably entire libraries of Morlock philosophy based on variations of the concept “nature is overrated”). If they feel the occasional need for a bit of open air all they need do is scurry up one of the ladders, and (if they feel so inclined) kill and eat a few Eloi (to be blunt no great loss – culling the ones too stupid to get indoors after dark is probably good for the species on the whole anyway). The Morlocks keep the machinery running because they like the status quo (and if they wiped out the Eloi, there’d be no more tasty snacks).

The Morlocks are smart, efficient, and understand technology. They are obviously the masters. The most you can say for the Eloi is that they’re pretty.

So, what is my purpose in pointing all this out? Well, let’s sum up the Morlocks. They are highly intelligent. They prefer controlled environments, and have an aversion to bright light. They are pale, badly socialised (eating the people upstairs is the height of rudeness) and they have an overwhelming fascination with and aptitude for technology. The conclusion is obvious.

The Morlocks are Geeks.

In Stephen Baxter’s overly long and complicated sequel to The Time Machine (titled The Time Ships) he has the narrator recall an exhibit he saw in the abandoned and decaying “Palace of Green Porcelain”, an ancient museum he explored in the first novel. This was a cross sectional model of a gigantic pyramid city. In the top levels are wealthy, beautiful socialites and millionaires, living lives of pleasure and luxury. Down below, in the subterranean levels, are vast hordes of soot grimed workers, toiling away to maintain the lifestyle of these sybarites. He reflects on how this was the obvious beginning of the split between the Morlocks and Eloi.

I would disagree.

Today, worldwide there are ISPs and software companies packed full of Geeks, locked away behind elaborate security systems, creating and maintaining the digital world for the computer illiterate end-users. We sit in our windowless cells, coding away, not caring that our backs are becoming hunched, our skin pale, or our eyes photosensitive from staring at CRTs for too long, because we love what we’re doing. For the true Geek, overcoming a tricky coding problem is every bit as exhilarating, satisfying and fulfilling as kicking the winning goal, or getting the phone number of the hottest girl/guy at the party. And in our offices and cubicles we’re meeting and socialising (in our own strange way) with others, of both sexes, just like ourselves. And some of us are breeding.

Computers are everywhere. Soon they’ll be in your fridge, your oven, even your shower. And we Geeks are the only ones who can make them work. We are the future. We are the next step in human evolution. We are the ones who will inherit the Earth. We are the Morlocks.

Look out Eloi. We’re coming to eat you 😉

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1 This is the book, not the movie. Hook up Wells’s coffin to a generator and you could probably power a city the size of Dallas after that little bit of Hollywood ‘creative rewriting’.

2 Wells didn’t use the term “terraformed”, he probably passed away before it was even coined, but it’s pretty clear that’s what he was implying.

3 OK, there may not actually be a scene like this in the novel, it’s been some years since I last read it, but it’s exactly the type of behaviour you’d expect from the dull witted idiots.

OK, this is just plain evil. I fail to see how selecting a bunch of colours can result in such a detailed and accurate psychological analysis. It’s obviously just a front for some kind of black-ops mind reading device, no doubt borrowed or stolen from the Illuminati. Stephanie may be prepared to put her results on her blog, but there is no way I’m posting mine. No need for the world at large to know just how messed up I am 🙂

Ah yes, well what have I been up to? I saw both Spiderman and the Italy vs Croatia World Cup game on Saturday. This was because I was seeing Spiderman with Ryan and Fabian, and nothing interrupts Fabian’s World Cup. Now, I don’t know enough about the rules of soccer to say whether the first Italian goal disallowed by the referee was an actual goal or not, but the second disallowal (is that even a word?) was absolutely disgusting. That was a goal damnit! The player kicked the ball, it rolled into the net. That’s a goal!

(On the other hand though, it was amusing to hear the commentator say things like “Kovac has the ball. Kovac kicks to Kovac” because it made it sound like the entire Croatian team was made up of Luca from ER)

Anyway, yes, Spiderman. Pretty good, even if they gave Peter Parker the ability to shoot web from his wrists naturally, rather than have him invent those…. um…. web.. shooting.. wrist.. things. Anyway when I heard about that, I was annoyed, but it worked in the context of the film, so I don’t mind. The most interesting thing about the film was the way it’s been influenced by the events of September 11. There’s a montage of spinning newspapers (OK, maybe not spinning) and “vox pops” about a third of the way through, talking about this new “Spiderman” poking his head up around town, and much to my surprise one of them featured a couple of construction workers at Ground Zero. Also the final sequence of the film, which features Spidey on top of the Empire State Building against a giant US flag. But for my money the most interesting scene is when the Green Goblin is fighting Spidey around a bridge. He’s hovering on his glider, laughing evily at Spiderman’s predicament, when suddenly he comes under a barrage of bottles, bricks and other assorted debris. He spins around to find the entire bridge lined with ordinary New Yorkers yelling at him and hurling stuff. “This is New York!” yells one of them “You mess with one of us you mess with all of us!”. Which was a nice touch I thought.

Finally I’d just like to publically state that Kiss Kiss by Holly Valence is possibly the worst “song” I’ve ever heard. It’s like inferior Shakira (and that’s saying something) on speed. Everyone, please stop buying it, and maybe we can kill off her music career before she releases anything else.