Sam Brown’s Horse

Happened to catch a repeat of the Concert for George on ABC last night. Sam Brown (she of 1988 worldwide hit Stop) did a truly incredible version of Lead a Horse to Water. I was fully prepared to go out today and buy the concert album just to get a copy of it, however it turns out that they decided to leave it off. Oh well, I’m sure I can download it somewhere 😀

Hey, if the record companies will put what I want on CD I’m fully prepared to pay for it. If they won’t, what choice do I have? ;-D

Defective thought for the day

On the bus home today I got thinking about TV and realised that my two favourite shows at the moment are CSI (that is the orginal CSI – I wouldn’t touch CSI:Miami with a ten foot swab) and (embarrasingly) Gilmore Girls. I then got thinking about a way to combine them, like some kind of crossover episode. I then got thinking about a crossover series – CSI:Star’s Hollow. I then decided that this train of thought was way too defective to continue and got back to reading New Scientist 🙂

Heresy!

OK people, he wrote some decent songs but Kurt Cobain was not that great. Certainly he wasn’t great enough to justify the wholesale grief and hooha surrounding the tenth anniversery of his suicide today. Hell, he wasn’t even great enough to justify the wholesale grief and hooha surrounding his suicide in the first place. Teen Spirit is a good song – but it ain’t the anthem of my generation damnit!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

I planned to make a lengthy entry today. In fact I planned to do quite a few things today. Unfortunately I haven’t really been able to do much. This is down to a combination of two things.

1) The play I saw last night (which I shall write about in due course) which meant I didn’t get home until 11:00pm (oooo! so late! 😉

2) The alarm (house? shop? car? I dunno) down the street that went off at 11:30pm and wasn’t turned off until about 6:00am.

The problem with the alarm wasn’t volume, as long as it’s dark I can sleep through almost anything (as living at this place has proved ;-). It was the fact that instead of going “beeeeep beeeeep beeeeep” continuously, it would go “beeeeep beeeeep beeeeep” for about ten seconds, then pause for ten seconds, then start up again. It’s impossible to sleep through that because as soon as it stops you lie there hoping it’s stopped for good but waiting for it to start up again. Which it does.

I think I got about an hour of fitful dozing (featuring some very odd dreams about the Baldwin brothers) in during the entire night. Then, when it finally stopped at about 6:00am I fell into a deep and dreamless slumber that lasted until almost 12:00.

Even then I was still dead tired, but the light and noise outside was too much to sleep through.

So, I’ve had a very truncated day. And not done a lot. And I have to go to work tomorrow. *sigh*

I’ll write more when I’ve had some sleep 🙂

Salvo number 1!

This whole issue has been completely resolved, and I encourage everyone to go to www.innergeek.us and take Yvette’s test, and to go to my previous blog entry and read my full apology for some stupid things typed in the heat of the moment – August 24th 2004.

To: The Owner/Administrator of www.innergeek.us.

I recently had the fortune to stumble over the Geek Test on innergeek.us. In the process of filling it out I couldn’t help but notice that several of the questions were uncannily similar to those on my own Geek Test (URL). This similarity was only reinforced when I submitted the test and received not just a percentage rating, but a label based on that rating – in exactly the same fashion as my test.

On viewing the source of the page I discovered that the original javascript I wrote for the evaluation of my test is being used (with some modifications) to calculate the score. In addition to this the HTML of the rest of the page is also clearly copied from my test, including the 100%/80% nested tables, erroneous margin tags in the outer table, nonfunctional ‘title’ class and 80% HR tags around the title.

While I don’t mean to accuse anyone of plagiarism or theft, it is quite clear that your Geek Test is an edited copy of my Geek Test. As such I feel justified in pointing out that the source of my test contains a copyright statement, which – while it may not stand up under the Rio Protocol for instance – certainly asserts my right to be acknowledged as the author of the work.

I should make it clear here that I’m NOT going to ask you to take down or modify your test. I like your test, I like what you’ve done with it and I like it that something that I created has gone on to greater things. However I do feel somewhat cheated that no acknowledgment of my original work (or that of my friends who provided many of the questions copied to your test) is provided.

Instead I would politely request that a simple acknowledgment of the origins of the test be added to the test page (in small letters down the bottom is fine) with a link back to either my Geek Test (URL), the Tales of the Geek Underclass (URL), or my website (URL). Something along the lines of “Based on the original Geek Test by D.P.Wyrm” for instance.

I feel that this is a reasonable request under the circumstances. After all, how would you feel if someone copied your version of the test (or some other content) from your website to their own and posted it without any acknowledgment of its origin or the work you put in to create it?

In return I will happily place a link to your test and website from my test.

Please let me know your response.

Regards

Denys the Purple Wyrm

THIS MEANS WAR!!!!!

Please Note: This entry was made in the heat of the moment and contains a number of statements and assumptions that are just plain wrong. The “Guy” (who as it turns out is not a guy at all – there’s an assumption right there 🙂 is actually a perfectly nice person who has addressed all the issues I raised despite the excessive raving and ranting below, and I would encourage everyone to visit her site www.innergeek.us and take her test. I’m leaving the entry as written for historical purposes, but would like to sincerely apologise to Yvette for any ill-feeling or upset caused by my tendancy to type out whatever comes into my head without actually thinking first. – August 24th 2004.

THEY’VE STOLEN MY TEST!!!!!!!!

And the code for my test as well. I mean it’s just Javascript so it’s not like it took any great skill to write, but it’s still mine. And I might also point out that every ‘purity test’ style online test I’d ever seen up to the point when I wrote mine used overcomplicated CGI scripting to calculate the score – not Javascript, so in that respect my code is (or was) somewhat pioneering.

And on top of all that it’s just plain rude. This guy finds my test, thinks it’s neat, grabs the code (and a bunch of questions) and puts it up on his website as if he thought of the whole thing – without any acknowledgement or link to the original author. It’s (and I’m mad enough to swear here so those with delicate eyes look away) plain f***ing rude!

The ironic thing about this is if he asked permission, I would have given it to him, so long as he preserved a link to my test (like this for instance). And if his test ended up being bigger than mine (which it is) or better than mine (matter of opinion) I’d be happy, because something I created had gone on to greater things. But he’s just ripping off my work and pretending it’s his, which is plain not on.

He’s even got the nerve to stick a copyright statement on his site – “

The Eyes are the Windows of the Skull

I am so tired. We’re in the middle of another heatwave here in Perth (39 on Saturday, 40 yesterday, 41 today), meaning that I haven’t been doing a lot of sleeping lately. I think I got about four hours in last night, and the last hour or so wasn’t particularly restful consisting mainly of a prolonged nightmare.

What’s interesting is that on the rare occasions I have a nightmare it’s always the same one. Well it’s not exactly the same one, the details are usually completely different. But what remains the same is the overall theme.

Something, often multiple somethings, are attacking the city. Totally trashing it – and not in cheesy 50’s monster movie style either. We’re talking collapsing buildings, fires, massive death and carnage. It hasn’t reached where I am yet, and it might not – it’s all totally random. So what can I do?

I could stay where I am, but with a bunch of gigantic terrors crashing around – any one of which could make a sudden direction change – that would mean being a sitting duck. So it would make sense to flee, but with a bunch of gigantic terrors crashing around going out into the open is tantamount to suicide. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do to be safe.

We (that is myself and whatever semi-anonymous dream people I happen to be with at the time) always decide to make a break for it. We get into a car – or on one occasion a train – and race off, hoping like hell that we’ll be lucky and escape the notice of whatever’s tearing the city apart. What makes this particularly scary is that the “somethings” (whatever they may be in this particular dream) are either truly gigantic or up in the sky, so we can actually see them going about their destruction. And they can see us. Our only chance of escape is if they fail to look in our direction for as long as it takes for us to get away. Which means an eternity – that particular type of eternity only found in nightmares – of sitting in the back of the car (it’s probably significant that I’m never the one driving) staring at the monsters and praying as hard as I can to be invisible – even though I know we won’t be.

Sometimes I wake up before we get away, sometimes I stay asleep until we reach safety. That’s the worst bit because no sooner do we think we’re OK and we’ve made it than one of the “somethings” rises up over the horizon heading our way. Is it after us? Who knows. The point is that we thought we were safe, we though we’d escaped, but we’re suddenly back to square one. There’s nowhere to run. There’s no escape.

To date the “somethings” have included tsunamis, tornadoes, crashing jumbo jets, demonically intelligent ogres, giant burrowing worms and Godzilla (hey, I don’t give you grief about your dreams :). Last night? I revisited the crashing jumbos but with a post September 11 theme of al Qaida terrorism. Dozens of hijacked planes of all sizes plunging out of the night sky without warning, engines screaming in a maelstrom of light, noise and exploding aviation fuel.

Not a lot of fun.

So yeah, I don’t know what that says about my screwed up psyche, but there you go 🙂

It’s not so much the transient fear from the nightmare that I mind. I mean once you’re awake and realise it’s just a dream you get over that pretty quick. It’s the resulting sense of looming dread that follows me around all day every time I have it. The overpowering feeling that somewhere things are very very wrong. A good night’s sleep usually fixes me up, but given that it’s now 8:30pm and the temperature’s only just below 30 I somehow don’t think I’m going to get one 🙁

Oh well, it’s going to be cooler tomorrow. Supposedly.

(PS: Just a note for any amateur Freud Dudes out there – I’ve been having this dream for years, since long before the aforementioned September 11. So there goes that theory eh? 🙂

(PPS: Obviously what with it being 39 degrees I didn’t go and take photos of the old East Perth power station on Saturday. Next weekend. Probably.)

Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami