Life and Associated Annoyances – Page 23

Don’t Filter Me Bro!

Ah! Activist chicks!

OK, it’s again been a long time since an entry. I’ve been oscillating between not feeling like writing, or feeling like writing but being plain too tired to do so. End result? Decals for turning lego men into the Freakangels, and no blog entries.

But I’m pulling myself together today and actually getting some writing done (it’s 35 degrees outside, so it’s not like I’m doing anything apart from cowering under my air conditioner).

So anyway, yesterday there was a nationwide protest over the Government’s plans to force a mandatory net filter onto everyone. This is an absolutely terrible idea on any number of fronts both technical and social, so I figured I’d go along and make my voice heard. Ryan was also sufficiently motivated to go along, so we met up at Stirling Gardens for the rally at midday.

It wasn’t huge with about 300 protesters turning up, but that’s reasonably successful turnout for a city the size of (and apathetic as) Perth. There were a number of speakers, most of whom were pretty good once they abandoned the farcical PA system they’d bought along and switched to a megaphone (the one exception was a 911 conspiracy theorist who wouldn’t give his name and tried to tell us that the net filter is the work of the Bildenburg group, as are laws forcing children to wear bicycle helmets and restricting when you can water your lawn). I even got interviewed by a journalist and quoted in today’s paper, which is pretty gratifying on a personal level 🙂

(There were also a number of rather cute activist girls around the place, one of whom kept glancing at me. I’m not sure if she was glancing at me because I noticed her glancing at me once and kept glancing at her to see if she was glancing at me again which prompted her to keep glancing at me to see if I was glancing at her, or if she was actually glancing at me. She left before I had the chance to go over and say hi, which is convenient, as it meant I didn’t have to walk around cursing myself for being too timid to go over and say hi ;))

We also ran into Sam who I used to work with (actually I’m surprised there weren’t more people there I recognised). She and I had a quick chat while Ryan distracted one of the 911 Conspiracists who was trying to force pamphlets on us. Then we all cleared off before the riot cops arrived.

(That’s a joke by the way, we’re not quite a police state yet although this proposed filter is a good first step)

Apart from that I haven’t done much else lately. That should change as Christmas draws near, I’ve still got plenty of gift shopping to do at least. Watch this space for Astounding Tales of Holiday Commerce!

That’s about it for today. Expect more entries soon! (I know, I always say that… 🙂

I’m surrounded by f******* goblins!

With a shout out to the Potter Puppet Pals…

Apologies for the lack of updates but it’s been a rough few weeks.

There was a State Election resulting in a hung parliament which was resolved when the evil National Party decided to ally with the evil Liberal Party, bringing the state under the control of an evil pseudo-Coalition. Now I’m the last person to say the Labor party were great, but at least they weren’t going to start wholesale uranium mining, which seems to be about number one on the new government’s wish list. To quote Kent Brockman “Democracy doesn’t work!”

On a more personal note my parents had to have their dachshund Jacques put down last week (he had stomach cancer and couldn’t eat). They actually got him when I was still living at home, so he was sort of my dog too. It was all rather sudden, so on top of having to have him put down, I didn’t get a chance to see him first to say goodbye. I guess that sounds fairly wussy, but he was a great dog, and I miss him.

I’ve also been under a fair amount of stress at work. Thankfully that seems to be coming under control. One major job is out of the way, and I’ve got a clear list on what to do on the other major one, so things are looking up.

Expect more updates soon!

Making Lives More Surreal Since 1976

Attack of the mysteriously materialising lemons

Went around to Rebecca and Dom’s on Saturday night to try out the pizza maker I bought them for their joint 30th birthdays. The night (and the pizzas) were a great success, but they wouldn’t let me leave until I agreed to take with me a bag of lemons from their manically overflowing lemon tree.

On arrival back at my place around 10:30, I – having no use for large quantities of lemons – got rid of some of them by sneaking around and putting one in each of the alcoves outside the doors of everyone on my floor.

(I would have done the entire building but there were still people about and I didn’t want to get reported to the terrorism hotline or anything).

Mysteriously materialising lemons! 🙂

Things I Hate (The Ongoing Series)

We have a language people, use it!

People who say “change tact” when they mean “change tack”. Example: So I said we had to change tact…
People who can’t tell the difference between “cliché” and “clichéd”. Example: The plot was so cliché!
People who can’t tell the difference between “to” and “too”. Example: Can I come to?

Train Follies

Air and buttocks.

There’s an old wives’ tale, sometimes bandied about in “did you know?” type lists, that every breath you take contains an air molecule once breathed by every single other person who’s ever lived.

I do not believe this for a second.

It seems possible to me that the number of molecules in a single breath of air is greater than the total number of humans that have ever lived, but I find it unlikely that the air breathed out by every person in history has been so perfectly distributed that every breath one takes contains a molecule breathed by (to pick some names at random) Caesar, Hiawatha and Yul Brynner. I just don’t see how the necessary air-distribution infrastructure could exist.

I suspect the story came about based on the (provisional) fact mentioned above – that a single breath of air contains enough molecules to give one to every person in history and have a good number left over. It’s a short leap from that to the idea we’re discussing – a variation on the fallacy that since many cats are black, anything black must be a cat (I’m sure there’s a better way to put that, something about Cretans being liars, but I can’t think of it at this time of night). It’s probably a fairly easy mistake to make – until you start thinking logically about it anyway.

(If any mathematicians or meteorologists want to correct me and prove that I am breathing the same air as Hitler, please feel free).

As unlikely as everyone in history sharing their air may be, I think it’s fair to say that a bunch of people crowded into a railway carriage do, in fact, breath the same air. And this brings me to the main thrust of this article, which is an extremely attractive girl on the train tonight.

She was fairly gothy (which I have to admit is a look I like) with long red (dyed) hair, and was standing more or less right in front of my seat on the journey out from the city. She was accompanied by another gothy chick and from what I could make out of their body language I think they may have been together (which is fine). She was really remarkably beautiful and quite captured my attention for the whole journey to my station.

I spent said journey entertaining the kind of melancholic thoughts that plague the lonely nerd – how I would more than likely never see her again, how I’d almost certainly never get to speak to her, and similar jolly imaginings. Then, when we were getting close to my station, I stood up to fight my way to the door, and she sat down in my seat!

So that’s my story. I didn’t speak to her, I’ll probably never see her again, but we breathed the same air, and she sat in a seat warmed by my buttocks. And in a strange, silly and probably slightly disturbing way that made me feel a little better about the whole thing.

(Of course some people are now going to suggest that I should have offered her my seat – providing a perfect opportunity to speak to her, and creating a good impression all in one. Yes, well, a stuttering, sweaty nerd offering an attractive woman a train seat always goes over so well doesn’t it?)

Kolfinnia Kokokoho?

Finland! Finland! On the Baltic Sea! Finland! Finland! Also known as Suomi!

Ah, busy week, busy week.

Not only have I been co-ordinating our efforts to go to the Supanova convention tomorrow (I have four tickets in my hot little hands right now which mean we’ll be able to go straight in rather than queuing) but we’ve got a new employee at work. His name is Lasse and there are a number of interesting things to note about him…

He’s from Finland
His birthday is February 29th, making him only 6 years old
Ummm…

Well he’s only been with us for a week so there are no doubt plenty of other interesting things that shall be revealed in time.

(Oh, and I know he’s not really 6 years old, but it’s such a common joke about people born on the 29th that it shouldn’t really require any explanation).

We asked him about the Estonian message from last week. It turns out that as similar as Estonian and Finnish may appear to us Indo-Europeans they’re actually mutually incomprehensible – although there are a few well known similarities such as the Estonian for “milk” meaning “sour milk” in Finnish, and the Estonian for “Wedding Day” meaning “Trouble Day”. This is no doubt a great source of amusement among Finns, probably of much the same calibre as the Australian/Kiwi “Fush and Chups” 🙂

I was tempted to ask him about the famous “Kokoo kokoon koko kokko” but figured it’s probably as annoying to Finns as “You chop a tree down then you chop it up!” is to English speakers, so I let it be.

I also caught up with Katie over dinner on Thursday night. We wandered around Subiaco looking for somewhere to eat, but everywhere was either stupidly expensive, closing or Indian (I have nothing against India, but I just can’t abide Indian food). We ended up at Cafe Ecco where we had a potato and rosemary pizza – which is a lot more delicious than it sounds. We then adjourned to Gelare for ice cream. A good night overall.

Today I headed over to the Galleria for groceries and a haircut. I figured I could do with a haircut before tomorrow as while the odds of Jewel Staite spotting me in the audience, falling madly in love with me and us living happily ever after in a flying castle are ’round about fifty billion to one, they’re bound to be slightly better (say forty billion nine hundred and ninety nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine to one) if I’ve got a decent haircut. Or at least any kind of haircut at all as opposed to the rather unorganised mess that was sitting on top of my head. So I got one. Any kind of haircut that is. I don’t know if it makes me look any less geeky, but at least it looks a bit neater.

Continuing with preparations for tomorrow I’ve spent the last hour or so fashioning a Pringles can into an insulated Red Bull can holder. You know, if I feel the need for a quick caffeine hit. The only problem (apart from my apartment now being littered with styrofoam scraps) is that it looks a bit like a pipe bomb, so I’ll need to be careful with it. Hope there won’t be any bag searches 🙂

Finally a FreakAngels Google Earth update. After the interlude last week the story is back in full swing, with Jack seemingly about to get into serious trouble. The GE file has been fully updated – including the exact location of “Camping Etc.”, which I managed to track down by dint of a lot of zooming around studying intersections (I could tell you where it is, but you’ll just have to download the file and see).

That’s it, early night before tomorrow’s festivities 🙂

No TV makes Denys something something…

I’ll need a plastic bucket…

Go crazy? Don’t mind if I do!!

Well OK, it’s not quite that bad. But it’s still having an effect. Last night for instance I had the most appalling trouble falling asleep. I didn’t drift off until the early hours when I took the measure of snuggling up to some spare pillows and making believe that they were Alison Mack (Awwww, how sweet! And vaguely disturbing). I think I’m beginning to see why any extended period of TV deprivation should be preceded by a (Twitch City style) Pon Farr.

But seriously, the issues I’m having have less to do with TV deprivation and more to so with autism. We autistics have a natural tendency to organise our lives into rigid routines, and when those routines are suddenly forced to change it tends to mess us up badly. Having no TV in the evenings is a major change to my daily routine, and I’m suffering the consequences (mainly ill focused general anxiety). But sooner or later I’ll adapt – probably just in time to get my TV back, and start all over again 🙂

Ain’t life grand?

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!