Life and Associated Annoyances – Page 23

And a Thousand Goths Cry Out

No hotlinking! Or TV!

I finally got around to doing something I’ve been intending to do for ages this week, which is to block image hotlinking from Wyrmworld. This is largely to protect the images (insomuch as one can protect any images on the net) involved with a new project that I aim to launch within the next few weeks, but it’s also to finally deal with all the goths and emos leaching my bandwidth.

No, I haven’t turned into some kind of paranoid old man who blames the “young people” in their “strange clothes” for everything wrong with my life. And neither am I “hating” (as the young people say) on goths and emos. I’m referring to that hoary old chestnut the Camarilla Test which has been attracting people of a vampiric bent to Wyrmworld for almost as long as the site’s been online.

It’s been a nice little traffic generator for me, and I’m still quite happy with it and have no intention of removing it. But what has been a bit annoying is the number of people who get their result, then copy the HTML wholesale to stick on their blog/facebook/myspace page, without taking a local copy of the appropriate clan image. So every time someone looks at their site, the image is grabbed from Wyrmworld, driving up my bandwidth usage.

(And OK, I don’t pay anything for bandwidth, but it’s the principle of the thing.)

So I finally put code in place to stop it.

Now there are two ways you can do this. The first is to deny external image requests entirely, so anyone linking to your images just gets a broken one. This is well and good, but not particularly creative. The second option is to serve up an alternate image – traditionally either a simple “Hotlinking Not Permitted” notice, or something incredibly obscene. Naturally this is the option I went with.

Now I could have been boring and gone with the “Hotlinking Not Permitted” – but boring just plain ain’t me. Or I could have located some detestable blasphemy (thanks Lovecraft Engine!), but I don’t really want to punish the people who’ve enjoyed my work enough to post it on their sites. So I went with the third option and set up an image that – while completely inoffensive – is just plain, freaking insane.

(No, I’m not going to post it here – that would be no fun. You’ll have to figure out how to see it on your own. Think of it as an exercise for the reader.)

In any case on Thursday morning goths and emos all over the world would have woken up to discover an extremely strange and definitely non-gothic image adorning their carefully constructed virtual shrines of darkness. Hopefully they’ll learn a valuable lesson about image leeching 🙂

(apart from the Malkavians, who’ll probably like the new image)

At the same time I’ve also done something that Ryan’s been bugging me to do for ages, and set up a favicon for the site. It’s working in Firefox, I’ll need to check it out in Explorer at work on Tuesday. So update your bookmarks!

(On the subject of favicons, what’s with Google’s new new one? It looks appalling)

In other news a great tragedy has befallen me. My TV is broken. I have no idea how this happened, it was working fine when I turned it off on Friday night, but when I went to switch it on yesterday afternoon it was as dead as a doenail (a new portmanteau word I came up with, being a combination of “dodo” and “doornail” – use it people!).

I really cannot fathom this. When TVs break they should do it mid-program with clouds of smoke and showers of sparks, not quietly in the middle of the night. It didn’t even have any power to it, as a good environmentalist I keep most of my appliances switched off at the wall (or at least powerboard) when I’m not using them. So how it could spontaneously die is completely beyond me.

The best explanation I can think of it that it was something to do with yesterday’s thunderstorms. We had some major ones go over and lightning struck only about a block away (titanic boom, car alarms going off all over the place, no power for an hour). This would seem to be a feasible theory, except that the VCR and DVD player hooked up to the same power board as the TV seem to be working fine (insomuch as one can tell without a functional TV). I didn’t even blow any fuses, which one would expect to be the first symptom of a power surge.

I think the only logical conclusion is that the lightning strike generated a extremely compact and directional electromagnetic pulse that happened to hit my TV dead on while avoiding every other electronic appliance in the apartment. The exact physics behind this phenomena I leave up to the experts – I’ll be too busy trying to find a TV repair place and lugging the thing over to them.

Hmmmm, or maybe it’s time to upgrade to a digital…

In any case, I can look forwards to a week (or maybe more) of having to make my own entertainment like some kind of 19th century peasant. There should be a law! Hrumph! Well at least it might give me time to write up that Eurovision review I promised.

Well better go. The turnips won’t harvest themselves (19th century peasant, remember?).

Good news Everyone!

#We’ll steal the show, Jolly Rogers go! We are the wolves of the sea!#

Phoenix has successfully landed on Mars, and Sir Ian McKellen is signed up to the Hobbit movies. It’s a great time to be alive!

No updates over the weekend – I was busy working on other projects and watching Eurovision. You can expect a detailed summary later but it can be best summed up as Russia’s fairly dull effort winning through political voting, the best acts (involving pirates and old men yelling at the audience while scratching gramophone records) getting nowhere, and the UK coming equal last despite having a pretty good song. Next year in Moscow!

I was also supposed to catch up with Rebecca and Dom for lunch, but Rebecca got sick so we had to call it off. Hope you feel better soon Rebecca!

Better go. I have work to do.

That was the week that was

A weekly round up

A number of dull anecdotes from my first week back at work…

Anecdote 1: From the bus to work on Thursday morning I saw a 28. Not the number, the bird. The reason this is worthy of blogging is that – despite the fact that they were all over the place when I was a kid – I hardly ever see them these days.

(When I say they were all over the place I mean it. Once one flew into the church on a Sunday morning when I was about 10, and sat flapping its wings and screeching on top of the crucifix all through mass. The priest was moved to comment that if it got too close to him it’d be a 14 – which I thought terribly unchristian of him :))

I blame the rainbow lorikeets.

These gaudy and raucous birds escaped from UWA in the 1960s (why there were any there to begin with I have no idea) and have been spreading ever since, cutting into the territory of the 28s. If I had my way they’d be wiped out with extreme prejudice, but (apparently because they’re colourful) people seem to like having them around, rather than the “dull” 28. So I suppose I’ll have to get used to them. But I’ll still keep a look out for the occasional brave 28 holding out against the rainbow aggressor!

Anecdote 2: Only a little bit further down Nicolson Road the bus got stuck behind an ambulance. Well not behind the ambulance – at right angles to the ambulance which was parked just off the roundabout with Derby road, in such a fashion that it made it impossible for the bus to turn left (which it needed to do). The Ambos were seeing to a cyclist who’d apparently been knocked off his bike and either broken or dislocated his shoulder, and seemed oddly inclined to leave him for a few seconds to move their vehicle 20 metres further down the street.

The result was that the bus was stuck at the roundabout – completely blocking the street – for a good twenty minutes. Cars started banking up behind us, and about ten minutes in frustrated motorists started driving down the wrong side of the street just to get past. This led to a quite amusing incident where one came face to face with another bus coming around the right way and had drive up onto the pavement to let it through.

Personally I don’t know why our bus driver didn’t carry on straight, if only far enough to clear the roundabout. But he apparently preferred to sit tight and cause chaos. Perhaps independent thinking had been drummed out of him by harsh Transperth discipline? In any case the cyclist was eventually loaded into the ambulance and driven away, and we carried on, twenty minutes late.

Anecdote 3: On the train home that same day I ran into Lyndah. Or rather I saw her. She either didn’t see me, or decided to ignore me – which is fine. She and my brother seem to have had some kind of falling out, and my mad crush on her pretty much faded away once I went public about it on this very blog. She’s still very pretty (although she did look rather tired), but I no longer turn into a babbling fool in her presence 🙂

Anecdote 4: On the train home today there was a girl who bore an astounding resemblance to my ex-collegue Sam. Her hair was brown instead of scarlet, her face was more rounded and she had fewer ear piercings, but apart from that they could have been twins. Very strange – I wondered momentarily if I’d fallen into some kind of alternate universe.

So that was my week. Amazing!

Dip the Apple in the Brew…

Let the sleeping death seep through

So I get up this morning and (after showering, shaving and getting dressed – eating breakfast in one’s bedclothes is so uncivilised 😉 head into the kitchen to get breakfast. I open the fridge and immediately notice a number of things…

1) The three litre plastic bottle of apple juice in the fridge door seems to have imploded, and is around two thirds its normal size.

2) The bottom of said fridge is full of a liquid that looks suspiciously like apple juice.

3) The floor around the fridge is covered in the same liquid.

Forensic examination of the scene quickly revealed that at some point during the night the bottle developed a pinhole leak, drip-siphoning juice all over the bottom of the fridge, which then leaked it all over the floor. Great.

So, I get down on my hands and knees with a big wad of paper towels and start to mop it all up. It’s at this point that I notice the apple juice has pooled around the big chunk of rat poison down the side of the fridge – the one whose instructions strictly forbid touching it with bare flesh or even breathing deeply within a fifteen foot radius. So not only is my kitchen floor covered with apple juice, it’s covered with poison apple juice!

I eventually got it all cleaned up, hopefully without poisoning myself. *sigh*

News from the Briney Deep

A mystery solved.

Well it looks like they found the Sydney, and only a day after the Kormoran. Nice work!

Really that’s about all I’ve got to say. Didn’t do much over the weekend, just did some cleaning and watched five straight episodes of Stargate Atlantis so I could return the DVD box set I borrowed from Daniel at work. I also managed to hurt my shoulder somehow – it’s quite painful, I may need to get it looked at.

Oh, and Sam didn’t make it in on Friday (sick apparently, although she may have just been sick of us 🙂 so she’ll finish up some time this week. Don’t know if we’ll do the lunch thing or not.

That is all (ain’t my life just fascinating?).

We Gotta Move These Colour TVs

Foam related antics and reckless endangerment of compact cars.

OK, well I haven’t made an entry in ages, so I figured I’d better jump on and make some attempt at doing so, lest the Wyrmlog turn into one of those abandoned relics from the golden age of Blogging that litter the web like the tumbled ruins of an ancient civilisation (there, that’s a good start).

So it’s the Labour Day public holiday, and I’m celebrating by labouring – that is going into the office and catching up on some work. But that’s OK – I’ll get paid for both the holiday and the time I’m giving up, and with no one else in the office I can fire up some internet radio and listen to cheesy 80’s music with no complaints.

The more observant of readers may have noticed that it was my 32nd birthday last week. How very depressing, I’m practically ancient now. To celebrate, the family went out to Savinni’s in Mount Lawley on Saturday night. The food was excellent (as it usually is) although the service was a little bit dodgy – but then they were extremely busy, so I can forgive them. Katie (who isn’t technically family, but might as well be *Lest anyone get over-excited by this statement I would like to point out that she’s practically family because we’ve known each other for decades – we’re just friends people!) wanted to go dancing/clubbing afterwards, but even in the unlikely event that dancing/clubbing was something I’d actually enjoy (as opposed to regarding with unreserved horror :)) I was far too tired after helping Fabian move all day.

Now that was a fun way to spend the day. Matt, Ryan and Myself turned up to Fabian’s place mid-morning and spent about the next two hours hauling trash down his precipitous driveway in the blazing sun, while he was out and about dealing with some kind of “IKEA emergency”. Well, actually I jest, he turned up not long after we started and joined in. We then spent the better part of a half hour debating on what we wanted for lunch (we ended up settling for kebabs as none of the local fish and chip places seemed to be open), and then drove around in a two car/one trailer convoy picking up new furniture from various places, one of which kept us waiting for about 45 minutes before informing us they didn’t actually have what we’d arranged to pick up from them. (This journey was made all the more exciting by my salvaging some extremely large sheets of foam insulation that someone was throwing out and having no other place to put them than in the passenger cabin of the ute I was sharing with Ryan)

We then hauled said furniture over to Fabian’s new mansion. I say mansion because it has about five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a gigantic kitchen and dining area, and a home theatre room with built in projector. Oh, and a small chandelier in the hallway. That counts as a mansion in my book. Ryan and I had great fun testing out the acoustics by bawling bits of opera at the top of our lungs, while Matt and Fabes cringed (as Fabian observed, Ryan’s version of Oh Sol Le Mio would be a great introduction to his new neighbours, many of whom are probably Italian and could therefore fully understand the rather obscene version of the lyrics he was using).

It was then back to Fabian’s place to load as much furniture, boxes and other junk into the ute-with-trailer as we could for one last run over to the mansion. Unfortunately I needed to get home to prepare for dinner, so Matt and I had to leave before the improvised “bed sheets and three bits of rope” baggage containment system we devised to hold everything in was put to the test (I hope it worked, otherwise the roads would have been littered with Fabianallia for miles).

The trip home was once again complicated by foam, as we passed the same house that was throwing out sheets of the stuff, and Matt decided to grab the quite substantial pile of it that I’d left behind. Unfortunately he was driving a rather small and beaten up Hyundai rather than his usual beast, and the only place the stuff would fit was rammed through the back, filling the rear of the vehicle from floor to ceiling with the hatchback wide open – the general dearth of rope once again coming back to haunt us. He successfully managed to make it all the way down the freeway to my place though without crashing or getting pulled over for reckless endangerment of a compact car – so that’s all right then.

So, a good day was had by all (except possibly Fabian’s new neighbours) and Fabes should be more or less moved in by now (there was still moving planned for today apparently).

Well my self determined lunch break is now over, and I’d better get back to it. People waiting on emails, expect them soon!

Happy New FEAR

Work all year and what do you get, another year older and deeper in debt…

Two weeks into the new year and not an entry to be seen. Shocking I know. I’ve got an entry summing up the best music of the last year almost ready to go but it’s taking a long while to get finished and out the door. So I figured I’d better write something, lest everyone think I’ve died or something.

So yeah, it’s a brave new year. Yippee-kiy-o. I’m not that fussed to be honest. I’m kind of glad to see the back of 2007 – it wasn’t the most enjoyable year of my life – but I’m not terribly convinced that 2008 is going to be wildly better. Hmmm.

But at least I’ve been doing plenty of stuff. Yesterday I caught up with Rebecca, Dom and Jakob in Mount Lawley. On Thursday night I met up with Katie in Subiaco and we had dinner at Wagamama. We also almost got free tickets to the opening night of “Keating the Musical” – although I really wasn’t up to it and we had to turn them down. I’ve also caught up with Fabes and Ryan a bit – we’ve been working on a project that I can’t really say much about :). And of course I’ve been working on a few projects of my own…

I’m also back at work, which after two weeks of getting up at 9:00am is a bit of a blow.

Hmmm, that’ll do for now. I’m too tired to try and be interesting. But check out this rather amusing webcomic.

A Return to Form

General ramblings

Well, it’s been a while hasn’t it? I just haven’t really been in the mood for writing lately – too much on at work, figuring out what to get people for Christmas, that kind of thing. I have been doing stuff, I just haven’t been very motivated to write about it.

Let’s see if I can throw together some edited highlights. Had a Thanksgiving dinner with the parents’ next door neighbours (they’re Americans, they didn’t just decide to celebrate Thanksgiving for the hell of it :). It was most enjoyable – much to my surprise pumpkin pie is actually fairly delicious – although I was slightly disappointed that we didn’t go around the table saying what we were thankful for. Television has lied to me once again!

I’ve been up to Fabian’s place a few times and done some workouts on the $8000 or so home gym he’s invested in. Let me tell you, he’s a pretty hard taskmaster when he gets into personal trainer mode. His mantra is “failure is success”, meaning that you keep working until your muscles completely fail and you have to curl up in a sobbing ball in the corner for a few hours. I’m thinking of making up a 1984 style poster for his wall FABIAN’S GYM: “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength; Failure is Success.” 😀

I was actually up there again last weekend for another session of the Wild Southwest game I’m running (it’s only been, oh, three years or so since the last one). It didn’t go as well as I planned because I’m so horribly out of practice at GM-ing, but everyone seemed to have a good time, which is the main thing. I’m hoping to run the next session in the new year – that one should go a bit smoother now I’m back in the saddle.

We actually played until about 11:00 at night, which takes me back to the AD&D games we played in high school. We’d play until 2:00am, collapse wherever seemed convenient, get up at 8:00 and keep playing. I’m obviously getting old, because this time around I was a complete wreck the next day 🙂

The new Government is yet to do anything really annoying, and has actually some some things I really approve of (signing Kyoto for instance). This puts me in a kind of weird place – for the last 11 years being angry with the Government has been part and parcel of my daily existence. I mean, they’re sending the Navy out to chase the Japanese whaling fleet for crying out loud! How can I possibly get all mad and righteous about that!? Sooner or later they’d better stuff up, or I’ll have to find another hobby.

I’ve caught up with Rebecca and Dom a few times, young Jakob seems to be doing well and is actually sleeping now, so they’re getting some decent rest (well, decent for new parents anyway). I’ll be going over to their place for breakfast on Christmas day, I’ll have to check the exact time they want me to show up I suppose.

In health news I managed to contract food poisoning from an extremely dodgy chicken wrap I bought from the supermarket over the road from work. I’ve been buying food there for almost seven years now with no problems so I decided not to dob them in to the authorities over just one case of almost killing me. I’m not eating their chicken again though.

Well, that’s probably enough to be going on with for now. Hopefully forcing myself to write this will get me back into the blogging habit. Hopefully 🙂

The Power of the Internets

What you can achieve when you have the internet and nothing sensible to do with your time.

I woke up this morning with a song in my head which I haven’t heard in years. I thought to myself “You know, I think I’ve got that in iTunes somewhere”, so I hopped on to the computer and dug it up. After listening to it (and quite enjoying it) I thought “I wonder how all the lyrics go?”. So I jumped onto Google and tracked them down. After reading them through I realised that the song – which I’d always presumed was about a girl who’d been dumped but never got over it – could actually be about a girl who’s guy went off to fight in World War II and never came back. A moment’s musing suggested that the video clip might settle it one way or the other. So I went over to YouTube and found the video. Sure enough, the clip confirmed my theory (although on a less positive note it also made me realise that my idea of what’s attractive in womens’ fashion is firmly grounded in the early 90’s).

I achieved all this in under fifteen minutes, and before breakfast. What an age we live in! 🙂

(Extra points to anyone who can figure out what song I’m talking about from the clues above ;))

So as planned I went out to dinner with Rebecca and Dom last night. We dined at Sen5es restaurant at the Novotel, which as it happened was hosting a high school formal. This was good because it meant we had free entertainment, watching all the fancy cars pull up and disgorge gussied-up and over-excited teenagers. We were able to make a number of observations…

If you decide to have a ‘Masquerade’ theme for your school formal, make sure the student body understand that this involves masks – otherwise only the staff and nerdier students will turn up with them.
It is apparently ‘cool’ nowdays to bring your younger siblings to the school formal – as long as they bear an uncanny resemblence to you, Mini-Me style.
Anyone wearing a top hat to the school formal is an Emo, whereas anyone wearing a top hat and carrying a cane is a Goth.

So we had entertainment while we eat. We also had miniature teacups full of leek and potato soup that we didn’t actually order – they didn’t seem to bill us for them though, so that’s OK.

So how was the food (apart from the soup, which was quite nice)? Well, that depends. Rebecca and I had the penne pasta with mushrooms, tomatoes and spinach, which was extremely tasty and so filling neither of us could finish. Dom on the other hand had the special chicken dish of the day, which in his own words consisted of “gristly chicken, overcooked potatoes and completely inedible mushrooms”.

Now, Dom is hardly the kind of person to sit in a restaurant curling his lip and sneering that the pâté foie gras should be at room temperature and the wine list is no better than you’d expect – so for him to come out against a meal so harshly it must have been pretty awful. As such Sen5es is now off our list of places to dine at – even when it’s running a $25 special.

After dinner we took the secret Catholic shortcut down to McIver railway station and got the train back to our respective domiciles. Much to my disgust my place was still like a furnace – although it did cool down by the early hours of the morning, so I was able to get some sleep eventually.

OK, that’s it. Entertain yourselves now! 🙂

Love’s Labours Lost at Lamonts

Marron and embarrasing recollections at Claisebrook Cove

You know, I seem to be suffering from awful amotivational syndrome at the moment. Now that’s usually a term used to describe the effects of pot consumption, which certainly isn’t the case here, but it’s a fairly accurate description of how I’m feeling. Mentally dull, detached and completely unmotivated to do anything at all.

Which is a problem because I’ve got to go to work tomorrow. I mean I’ll go, but I don’t know how well I’ll be able to concentrate. Guess I’ll just have to suck down the caffeine and manage as best I can.

I have had a reasonably busy weekend. Went around to Rebecca and Dom’s new place in East Perth then we went out to lunch at Lamonts at Claisebrook Cove. I had the marron which was nice, but involved a fair bit of work because (Lamonts being such a classy joint) they serve them in their shells and you have to dissect them before you can eat them. This to my mind is the kind of thing they should handle in the kitchen, but then what do I know about the lifestyles of the rich and famous?

Anyway it was a good day out, although one odd note was that one of the waitresses seemed awfully familiar. She kept glaring at me too, although I don’t know if this was because she recognised me, or if she objected to my continual glancing at her to try and figure out who she was. I strongly suspect she was a girl I went to high school with, a girl that I shall refer to as Sam.

Sam wasn’t at St Francis’s for very long, I think she was there for about a year, year 9 or 10 perhaps. She was actually the cousin of and shared a surname with one of the more dominant Rebels, which (to my somewhat deranged mind) gave her a certain edge – a frisson of danger if you will – although hardly knowing anything about her I can’t say whether this impression was in the least bit accurate.

Of course as with most of the girls at my high school that weren’t actually physically deformed I thought Sam was pretty cute and had a bit of a crush on her. However any vague hope I had of getting to know her was ruined by a totally ridiculous – and in hindsight fairly funny – incident that took place one day after school while waiting for the train at Central Terminal.

There were a bunch of us who used to hang together on the train. Justin Simes, Carl Taylor and a few others, occasionally including the unpredictable semi-bully Megsy. We’d sit up one end of the carriages (these were the old diesel belching monsters that ruled the rails before electrification) in what was almost an old fashioned compartment between the passenger doors and the inter-carriage door. You could comfortably seat eight people in there who would be pretty much hidden from the rest of the carriage. We got up to all kinds of chaos on those trips home – the most memorable being Mike Harris’s mooning the cars at the Farnborough level crossing – although I was usually more of an uneasy bystander than a real participant.

On this particular day most of the gang were absent. It was just me and Justin waiting for the train. And surprisingly – to me at any rate – Sam. I don’t know if she and Justin were friends, or if she was just bored, but she wandered up and started a conversation – a conversation including the both of us.

I did my best to be cool, although on the inside I was doing the usual geek “oh my god oh my god she’s talking to me oh wow oh wow don’t blow this man just be cool man just be cool” thing. The three of us chatted for a minute or two, and then she suggested we moved further down the platform where there were some seats free. We assented, and I bent down to pick up my bag.

Now you need to know some things about the equipment I used to carry to and from school. My bag for instance. It was one of the standard, shapeless, green, zip-up bags with two straps and the school crest on the side that we all had to use (in my last two years they expanded the rules to include green backpacks with the school logo, but I never had one of those). In any case mine was fairly old and beaten up, and the zipper was so temperamental that I often left it unzipped.

And you need to know about the files we used. Everyone was required to have a large lever-arch file to store their school work in. I could never be bothered to actually clip anything into it, I’d just shove it in, resulting in it acting merely as a cover for a huge pile of loose leaf papers (my year nine social studies teacher used to take great joy in grabbing it off my desk, taking it up to the front of the room, shaking it out in front of everyone then making me pick it all up – but then he was a sadist who called people ‘gecko-head’).

Anyway on this particular day on the railway platform with Sam and Justin I grabbed my unzipped bag – containing my file – and swung it in a carefully calculated cool and nonchalant motion up to my shoulder…

Unfortunately I only happened to grab one of the straps. Also my file was sticking out the top, paper side uppermost. The bag swung around in a graceful arc, and right at the top of its ascent launched my entire term’s work out in a high velocity wad that quickly separated and landed gently all over the railway tracks.

I stood there in shock, with an expression on my face not unlike that of a stunned mullet. Sam burst into immediate hysterical laughter, as did numerous standers by. Much to his credit Justin immediately jumped down onto the tracks and started gathering everything up (this being quite safe as the station was the end of the line and you could see trains coming for a good kilometre away). I chased down the papers on the platform and before long everything was back under control. But any small chance I might have had of not looking like a complete dork in front of Sam was totally shot, and I never spoke to her again. She left the school not long afterwards.

So that’s one of many incidents of humiliation from my high school years, brought back to mind by possibly running into the girl involved. At least I can actually laugh about it now 🙂