Wyrmlog

I was hoping to have today off to make up for working Saturday. No such luck, put in another 10 hours. I was also hoping to have tomorrow off – since I arranged to have every second Friday off – but I’m going to have to go in. Probably another nine hours. I’m so tired I can barely think.

So naturally (the universe having it in for me and all) who should I run into on the train? Lyndah of course. Haven’t seen her in months and we run into each other when I’m exhausted, disheveled, suffering from severe sleep deprivation and all my clothes are crumpled up because I haven’t had the time to iron properly. Isn’t it fantastic the way circumstances conspire to screw me over in the most remarkable way possible? *sigh* 🙂

Well at least she said hello. That was nice. She could have walked on past without saying a word – I was strenuously pretending not to have noticed her and was doing a pretty professional job of it (I’m good at looking vague ;-). Things are easier that way – people are way too complicated.

Hmmmm I’m sure there was some other stuff I was going to write about, but I can’t think of it. So I’ll write about something else I was going to write about but couldn’t think of a while ago but can think of now.

So, how’s this for a plot? A scientist working for the Government is messing around with some alien technology. It activates unexpectedly and he finds himself stranded in a parallel universe where a major project taking place in his own universe is far more advanced, to the detriment of all. He’s treated with extreme suspicion by people he regards as his friends but who’ve never actually met him, and one of his closest friends (with radically altered facial hair) turns out to be a dangerous enemy. As disaster approaches he manages to convince the powers that be to give him the resources he needs to return home and save his own world from disaster.

Fans of Stargate-SG1 will of course recognise it as the plot of the episode There but for the Grace of God, recorded in 1998. Fans of Doctor Who on the other hand may recognise it as the plot of Inferno recorded in 1970.

Hmmm, coincidence? 🙂

Alec Eiffel by the Pixies is the sound of the inside of my head. It’s the sound that my brain makes. If you really want to know what it’s like to be me then get hold of a copy, put in on a stereo with a really good subwoofer, turn the volume up loud enough to severely anger the neighbours, hit ‘play’, close your eyes and listen. Really listen. Listen to the individual threads of sound, listen to them in combination, study the beats and patterns. Repeat. Turn down the lights and repeat. Do this enough and you might get some idea of how I think 😀

That twirling round song by Kenobi on the other hand is the complete antithesis of how my brain works. As soon as it comes on the radio my brain goes into total spasm. Axons firing randomly, neurons slamming shut (or is it open? I need to brush up on my neurology) and entire sections of my cortexes (corti?) disconnecting and dancing round and round in a ring much like the animals in the song. If it ever comes on while I’m using scissors there’s every chance I’ll die a horrible bloody death.

Another nine hour day. It probably shows.

Well there’s been another long break between entries (or maybe it just seems long). This is (of course) down to work, which seems deterined to kill me at the moment. I worked nine hours today, ten hours yesterday, and six hours on Saturday (yes, I went in to the office on Saturday) and I’m still behind. Stupid server upgrade!

Anyway I’m just really making an entry to say that I’m not dead. Oh, and that I’m reading a really good book at the moment. A Little Piece of England by Andrew Gurr – the former Chief Executive of the Falkland Islands. Not only is the subject matter fascinating (well, at least I think it is), but his writing style is hilarious. There are sentences in there (even the odd passage) that could have been penned by Douglas Adams. It’s great!

Oh yeah, I also received a mothers’ day catalogue from the ABC yesterday. A mothers’ day catalogue titled Thing’s (sic) You’ll Love. There is no way I can let that pass!

So… <Frasier Crane>What is the world coming to when that bastion of learning and culture the A-B-C sends out a brochure emblazoned with a glaring grammatical error!!</Frasier>

C’mon, put on your best Boston accent and shout it out loud! You know you want to 🙂

PS: Nikki Webster has a new album?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Internet Explorer 5.2 for the Mac is a big steaming pile of horse puckey!!!

Gah!!!!!

(Bad day at work yesterday 🙂

Well, so much for a long and detailed entry this week.

Work is hellish at the moment. Still big problems with the new server, and now our email has gone completely apewire. We can get email, but we can’t send it – so everyone who runs into problems with the new server sends us emails about it and we can’t reply, so they think we’re being rude, which is never good for a business.

Add in the fact that I’ve got about five websites to finish in the next 48 hours, and have no way of actually doing so without engaging in some kind of warping of the space time continuum and I’m sure you can see why I have no energy for writing when I get home in the evenings. I’ve barely got the energy to eat – which at least might help me lose some weight.

So there it is. Work is hell and my life sucks. So what’s new?

Well, finally the Wyrmlog is back in some kind of reasonable form. I’ve still got to add in the rest of the sections (books, music, links, all that other self indulgent crud 🙂 but the entries are back up and formatted. So I’m happy with it for now. Expect more corrections over the next two weeks until we’re back to normal operations or a resonable facsimile of such.

This week, with the server change over, has been hell. I’m not going to write about it because I’m still recovering. Thank Mr Winkle it’s a long weekend!

Google.com.au has an ANZAC Day logo. That’s nice of them.

So yeah that’s what happening. I’m too exhausted to write any more now, but expect a longer update over the next few days. Probably 🙂

OK, it turns out that I was forgetting one of my most basic scientific facts. Hydrogen is weird.

Hydrogen as it turns out is not a metal – even when solid. However if you put it under enough pressure it becomes a metal, which is exactly the sort of perverse behaviour you’d expect from an element made up of only one proton and one electron (yeah yeah, isotopes I know, but I’m keeping this simple).

So – I was wrong. But I was also right, albeit only under certain conditions 🙂

The question I guess is is metallic hydrogen lighter than lithium? I have no idea – but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was.

Hmmmmm, it’s 5:20pm and I’m still at work. All alone. We’re switching our new server on tonight which means all sorts of chaos and disruption. I got stuck with the job of backing up our JSPs, which essentially consists of sitting here watching them download. This is the kind of thing one would usually leave running as an automatic process, except that the connection keeps dropping out and requires a manual restart. So I have to sit here and restart it. I wouldn’t mind so much except that it means I’m going to miss part two of Doctor Who:Inferno which is one of my favourites from the Pertwee era. Not that I’ve seen it, I just really enjoyed the novelisation as a kid. And now I’m stuck here watching files download instead, which is about as interesting as… (I’m trying to think of an alternative to ‘watching paint dry’, but frankly it’s the perfect simile, so here goes) …watching paint dry. *sigh*.

Maybe I’ll sing to pass the time… # I gave my love a chicken, it had no bone, #. Hmmmm, maybe not 🙂

Well, once again a decent update is long overdue, so I’d better get on with it I guess.

The weekend. Yes, the weekend. I spent most of it working on Abandoned in Perth. On Saturday I went in to the State Library to do some research on the various sites I’ve photographed. In particular I wanted to check out the Maylands Brickwork since the website of a certain politician suggests that they…

1. Are/were in danger of demolition due to road widening
2. Have/had round kilns, like over at the Belmont Tileworks

Since I know of no round kilns anywhere on the peninsula I was worried that they’d actually been demolished during all the residential development that’s gone on down there over the past few years.

As it turned out the politician (like most of his breed) has no idea what he’s talking about. The photos on his site are the Belmont Tileworks – he’s got the two sites confused. The Maylands Brickworks (what’s left of them anyway) are perfectly safe – well, apart from the brickwork falling off the chimney (although that’s probably more of a danger to visitors to the place than the actual site itself 😉

(The Belmont Tileworks are in danger though, which really sucks)

Anyway I also found a brilliant map of the East Perth Power Station. It covers everything on the entire site, the interior of the main building and even the basement. My floor is now covered with photocopies 🙂

I also turned up a bunch of interesting (or at least interesting to me anyway 🙂 factoids about the station. For instance…

• The small blocky building to the north of the main station is a frequency switching facility built in 1951 at great expense to compensate for the fact that the Government skimped on the original station in 1914 and built it at 40 cycles instead of the more standard 50.
• In 1947 the No. 1 Turbo Alternator spontaneously disintegrated throwing high speed debris all through the station and leaving the metro area at 25% of minimum power requirements.
• There’s supposed to be an alternator in the river by the station – it ‘jumped’ when an out of phase circuit breaker was forced closed (which apparently causes ‘bad things’ to happen :).
• Rolf Harris’s father worked there as a turbine operator.

How about that then?

I also managed to dig up a scant few details on the Albany Bell Hatchery. The property was bought in 1910 by Peter Albany Bell, a tea-room magnate (I am not making this up!) who wanted to build a large “country style” house on it. He built the house in 1912 on the northern side of the property (where the Hatchery now stands) and in 1914 built the ‘castle’ (a confectionery factory and bakery for his tea-rooms) on the south side. In 1928 the company got out of the tea-room business and started renting out the castle for various other purposes.

Ten years later in 1938 Peter’s son Albany Maston Bell started a hatchery in a vacant section of the castle and in 1942 built a new facility on the current site (presumably the house was demolished at this point). The hatchery was still running in the 50’s (by which time the art-deco building on the front of the site was in existence) but from there the trail goes cold.

I suspect the house on the back of the site was a replacement for the 1912 house, but I don’t know for sure. There are some audio interviews with Albany Maston Bell in the State Archives, I might have a listen to them and see if I can dig up any more info. The whole thing has got me intrigued 🙂

Anyway that was Saturday. Yesterday I walked down to the Brickworks to have another look round and take some more photos. I also wanted a look at the old areodrome before it gets demolished for a housing development. I ended up walking all the way round the peninsula to Tranby House. The level of development down there was so depressing (the family used to know the caretakers, we’d visit them each Christmas) that I turned around and walked home. Three hours round trip all up, not bad.

So yeah, that was the weekend.

I’m sure there was something else I was going to write about, but I can’t for the life of me think what. So I’ll shut up now 🙂

P.S. Who Wants to be a Millionaire? does it again! The lightest metal is Hydrogen not Lithium! The fact that it’s a gas at room temperature doesn’t make any kind of difference!

I think 🙂

I was thinking about an episode of Frasier today at work – and lo and behold it was on TV tonight (the fancy dress one, where Niles dresses up like Martin – you know the one! ;-). This seems to happen to me an awful lot – I think about an episode of a show, and it comes on that night.

Either I have a rare and specialised version of precognition, or I think waaaay too much about TV 🙂

Still no word from those slackers over at innergeek.us (no link for them!). I’ll have to follow them up I suppose if I want any kind of satisfaction out of the whole affair. Hmmm, maybe I’ll just set up a keyword loaded page explaining they’re a bunch of thieves and get it ranking higher on Google then they do – that might be fun 🙂

Anyway I suppose I’d better say what other stuff I’ve been up to over the last few weeks, apart from making the odd entry about the Fiery Furnaces and Jorja Fox.

OK, I had a haircut that’s something. I also got my watch repaired. Its battery ran out the other week and while it was being replaced I thought I might as well get the glass fixed back in (it fell out when I was visiting Rebecca in Kalgoorlie in August 2002 and had been held together by sticky tape ever since). The watch people over at the Galleria did a fantastic job, not only replacing the battery and gluing the glass as requested but also cleaning the face, which had got stained in a few places from stuff leaking in. They also polished the case, and all of this for $30.00. That’s what you call value.

I’ve also been doing some more work on Abandoned in Perth – mainly adding inconsequential side pages and visiting new sites rather than processing all the photos I’ve got. Unfortunately I’m running out of pages to add and so will have to get on to actually processing the mountains of images that are waiting, which is so tedious. Oh well, my fault for setting the site up in the first place 🙂

I’m also doing a fair bit of research on local urban history – the site is starting to look (in my mind at any rate) like more of an urban archeology site than a purely urban exploration one. This is mostly down to the fascinating (ie: mind stupefyingly boring to anyone except a tragic history/geography geek such as myself 🙂 survey on the Swan River Trust website. Pages and pages of information covering the geography, history, landuse and flora of every section of the Swan and Canning rivers, in excruciating detail. It’s bloody fascinating – you could live near the river your entire life (as I have done) and not even hear a tenth of this stuff. I never knew for instance that the fairly staid and boring suburb of Bicton is built on top of an extensive cave complex. Or that there used to be natural hot springs in Nedlands. Or that UWA is built on an Aboriginal battle ground. Great stuff 🙂

I’m also planning to head down to the State Library next weekend and find out how much of the old Maylands Brickworks was destroyed for the peninsula housing development. I have the nasty feeling that the answer is ‘most of it’. Bastards. But I’ll shut up about that until I have some more information. And before I bore anyone too much 😉

Also in the website realm I’ve been looking at redesigning the Wyrmlog. This bloated, non-standards compliant layout is starting to be an embarrassment. I’m also going to be looking at a PHP solution to take some of the load off the GTP Sever – and eliminate the frames, which have always annoyed me. So don’t be surprised if there are some weird changes over the next few weeks as I experiment (cue evil laugh here – Mwahahahaha!!).

I’ll also be adding a search feature – for when you just have to know my opinion of Alisen Down say, or Guy Sebastian.

(Although as an adult, music-loving human being with intelligence greater than that of a retarded ant my opinion of Guy Sebastian should be fairly obvious 🙂

(As – given my last log entry – should be my opinion of Alisen Down 😉

About the only other thing I’ve done lately is head down to Rebecca and Dom’s on Saturday for lunch (they wanted to test out their new barbecue). I got down there a bit early so decided to make more website work for myself by photographing the derelict Elders Woolstore (over lunch I was told that a number of people have been beaten up around there recently – just as well I didn’t know or I wouldn’t have got any photos).

Oddly though my camera battery died halfway through. This only ever seems to happen in Fremantle. No doubt it’s down a localised geomagnetic anomaly – either that or convict ghosts draining the energy 😉

Anyway that’s about all I’ve got to say – boring as usual I’m afraid. I’ll obviously have to do something rash and foolish this week just to spice things up. Or get a life. One or the other 🙂