fully functional android

Zeitgeist

2007-12-09T09:07:00.000+11:00

I started this with a massive outpouring of self-indulgent angst and realised I have a whole other thing going on for that crap.

This blog is all about the facts. And so forth.

Starting with Star Wars Tattoos.

I realised when I saw it that I would probably do this myself given half a chance:

Then I realised that would be kind-of mental and I should just focus on the scarification I want to have done. See also: kind-of mental.

All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug; there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells, according to Carolyn Bohach, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho (U.I.), along with other estimates from scientific studies. (Despite their vast numbers, bacteria don’t take up that much space because bacteria are far smaller than human cells.)
Humans Carry More Bacterial Cells than Human Ones: Scientific American

Treefingers is like an anonymous group Twitter. Or something.
"Welcome to the first release of Treefingers, a site that allows you to post, well, anything. The site is an experiment of what people would say in a (mostly) unmoderated environment that does not focus on a central topic."

Fisher/Yates (Knuth) Shuffle: Not a dance, but "an algorithm for generating a random permutation of a finite set — in plain terms, for randomly shuffling the set".

Former ‘No Nukes’ Protester: Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power. Obviously somewhat biased, but interesting:
"A family in four in France, where they reprocess nuclear fuel, would produce only enough waste to fit in a coffee cup over a whole lifetime. A lifetime of getting all your electricity from coal-fired plants would make a single person’s share of solid waste (in the United States) 68 tons, which would require six 12-ton railroad cars to haul away. Your share of CO2 would be 77 tons."

I think I support Nukes. Just so you know. As an interim until we get solar working properly. But we have to stop using coal NOW. We can argue about that another time.

Rails 2.0 has been released. I know you're as excited as I am.

Death Star Cafeteria. Oh the joy.

Human History in less than 100 words

Favourite Programming Quotes 2007.
Just so you know the types of things we're talking about:

To Iterate is Human, to Recurse, Divine. – James O. Coplien
My contribution "You're all so embarassing". I also like "Recursion is Funny". Because it ~IS~ funny.

John 3:16. John 3:16 (chapter 3, verse 16 of the Gospel of John) is one of the most widely quoted verses from the Christian Bible. It has been called the “Bible in a nutshell” because it is considered a summary of some of the most central doctrines of traditional Christianity:
"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life."

The post election afray continues. It's been like some sort of weird multiple orgasm that just keeps going and going and eventually is a little bit painful. They lost, he lost, he quit, they fought over the leadership, everyone now thinks he's been quite bad for the country, and so on.

The End.

Welcome to Planet Earth

2007-12-03T09:12:00.000+11:00

Welcome to Planet Earth - The Sunday Hangover - Warren Ellis

Welcome to planet Earth, where, within a few years, we will all have been entrained to raise robot babies that we have designed to feel pain. Soon, they will reach their toddler years, powered by a vast array of monkeys wired up to the internet. We will send them out into the world, where they too will go on to the internet and show the world their chrome nipples and the sleek pink hatches of their robot vaginas before being shanked to death in motel rooms by vengeful, pregnant sea lions.

Warren Ellis channels the future. He is 42 types of awesome.

Zeitgeist

2007-12-01T10:47:00.000+11:00

This week I have been mostly thinking about Hypothetical Megastructures, as most of my Facebook friends are probably already aware because I've been spamming them mercilessly.

My other obsession is sniggering when I ever I see or hear news about the Liberal party. Sucked in.
Way to implode.

This is like, totally all about the science, I am sorry ... I've been hoarding.

Megastructure
"A megastructure, in science fiction and speculative (or exploratory) engineering, is an enormous self-supporting artificial construct.[citation needed] The definition is often informal and varies from source to source, but generally requires at least one dimension to be in the hundreds of kilometers.[citation needed] Other criteria such as rigidity or contiguousness are sometimes also applied, so large clusters of associated smaller structures may or may not qualify.[citation needed] The products of megascale engineering or astroengineering are megastructures."

Matrioshka Brain
"A matrioshka brain is a hypothetical megastructure, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity. It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems. This structure has clear structural analogies to Russian Matrioshka dolls, from which the concept derives its name."

Matrioshka Brain is also an AWESOME band name.

Dyson Sphere
"A Dyson sphere (or shell as it appeared in the original paper) is a hypothetical megastructure that was originally described by Freeman Dyson as a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to completely encompass a star and capture its entire energy output. Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the long-term survival of technological civilizations, and proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of such structures might lead to the detection of advanced intelligent extraterrestrial life."

Stellar Engine
"Stellar engines are a class of hypothetical megastructures which use a star's radiation to create usable energy. Some variants use this energy to produce thrust, and thus accelerate a star, and anything orbiting it, in a given direction. The creation of such a system would make its builders a Type-II civilization on the Kardashev scale."

Kardashev Scale
"The Kardashev scale is a general method of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is, first proposed in 1964 by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. It had three categories, based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal and increasing logarithmically"

The Decline and Fall of the Animal Kingdom
"The animal kingdom's decline came in the form of a three-page paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its lead author, Carl Woese, had spent the previous few years trying to find a way to figure out the relationship of all living things, including microbes. A taxonomist can classify a giraffe, a bat and a human as mammals simply by looking at them. They have hair, for example, and they nurse. But microbes are harder to make sense of. They might simply look like a rod or a sphere."

E8 Polytope
"The E8 polytope is a semiregular polytope, the highest finite (and nonprismatic) semiregular figure. It was discovered by Thorold Gosset, who described it in his 1900 paper as an 8-ic semi-regular figure, with "semiregular" meaning that all of its facets are regular polytopes: 2,160 7-orthotopes and 17,280 7-simplices."

Nuke to the Future
Discussions about building what is essentially a nuclear battery. Insane.

Anyway, I am off to continue testing my Mongrel cluster for capacity. Two instances can handle about 30 requests a second. Cool.

First Post

2007-11-30T10:31:00.000+11:00

I am starting the Zeitgeist again.

It will be intermittent, rather than on Wednesay. Just so you know.

Last Post

2007-07-15T19:21:00.000+10:00

This is the last post.

See you elsewhere on the internet and in the real world.

The End.

Zeitgeist

2007-07-11T09:16:00.000+10:00

Hello.

Not at WorkWork today, so feeling much better, thanks for asking.

I think I've had too much coffee.

I was wondering the other day, while re-reading "Gun, Germs and Steel" for the millionth time, what would have happened if the giant marsupials had not become extinct when humans settled Australia.

What would happen if the Aboriginal people could have fought the English on Giant Armoured Wombats?

Yep, definitely had too much coffee.

“Jamie Langridge, the 2007 Bud Light USARPS champion, made use of several well-known strategies during his Final Sixteen run, but combined and utilized them in a manner uniquely his own. His style of play can best be described as "complex adaptive," as he switched effortlessly between runs of alternating and repeated throws.” - USA Rock Paper Scissors League > Article

How to beat anyone at Rock Paper Scissors

“ITS ROCK-HARD surface can take a full- on assault from a baseball bat, yet remains flexible enough to allow you to kick, leap and roll with perfect ease. Crafted from cutting-edge science, its unique molecular structure means that while providing armoured protection against crude concrete and even barbed wire, it remains light enough to allow you to run at high speed.” - Holy Batcapes The Age Of The Superhero Suit Is Upon Us

See what I did there with the segue?

“A Millwall or Chelsea brick is an improvised weapon made of a manipulated newspaper.” - Millwall brick - Wikipedia

Oh, a rock made of paper you say?
Did you like what I did there too?

In my mind I increasingly sound like Stewie from the family guy.

Psychology Today: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. Not sure about some of them.

Crazy Icelandic people drive up a hill for fun:

USS Hunchback - Wikipedia. Best name for a ship ever.

“The investigators at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Cost Analysis Improvement Group say its more like $203 billion to $234 billion in inflated dollars. likely to grow, And remember, that's just for a third of the Army. So the final cost could be closer to three-quarters of a trillion dollars.” - Danger Room - Wired Blogs

“Extra-terrestrial life may well be so weird we would not immediately recognise it, space experts said yesterday.” - Aliens exist, not as we know it

This stunning false-color view of Saturn's moon Hyperion reveals crisp details across the strange, tumbling moon's surface. Differences in color could represent differences in the composition of surface materials. The view was obtained during Cassini's close flyby on Sept. 26, 2005. (via Catalog Page for PIA07740)

Aw, cute:

Stacy, Attack of the School-Girl Zombies. OMG:

The End

---

2007-07-09T12:18:00.000+10:00

My father just got a cat. A 12 wk old burmese kitten called Haiku.
He's slightly mental. My father, not the cat. Although the cat may well be soon.

I won first prize in a Blogging competition. Not for this blog, but for my other blog, which is so geeky you can't even have the link (even though you would then learn all about Transactional Full-Text Search in MySQL 5). I won three tech books from Apress.

The End.

Zeitgeist

2007-06-28T11:41:00.000+10:00

Wednesday.

I lack focus, I'm afraid. Working on the TopSecretProject ... a bit bored of it, still waiting for various components to come together. I just want this sucker launched. End of July for a beta is the goal.

In the meantime I am playing with the Facebook API ... it's rather cool.

Other than being code geek, not a lot going on.

This is incredible: Thomas Barnett: The Pentagon's new map for war and peace A new doctrine for waging war and, crucially waging peace and a system for managing politically bankrupt states. The failure in Iraq is because although the US can wage war, it cannot transition a state. The question is: What happens between war and peace?

International security strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett outlines a post-Cold War solution for the foundering US military: Break it in two. He suggests the military re-form into two groups: a Leviathan force, a small group of young and fierce soldiers capable of swift and immediate victories; and an internationally supported network of System Administrators, an older, wiser, more diverse organization that actually has the diplomacy and power it takes to build and maintain peace.

“Hasty pudding, also Indian pudding, is a porridge-like dish of cooked grain.”

- Hasty pudding (Indian pudding) - Wikipedia

Hasty Pudding is a band waiting to happen.

And if you are making a Hasty Pudding or some Porridge, you may need a Spurtle

“An M2M system would enable machines to make intelligent choices, execute self-guided adjustments, and communicate with one another, all without human intervention, in a way that they presently cannot. As envisioned, an M2M intelligence system will work with a broad spectrum of machines, from wireless tools and sensors to robots, spacecraft, and computer grid systems. The goal is nothing short of machine self-dependency.” - Partnership to Develop Machine-to-Machine Intelligence System

“15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up” - 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense: Scientific American

“Flying saucer -- the term -- was coined 60 years ago, when salesman and pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in a "V" formation over Mount Rainier, Washington. Arnold told a reporter on June 24, 1947 that the UFOs flew erratically, fluttering and tipping their wings, like "a saucer if you skip it across water" -- and a worldwide subculture was born.” - Out of This World: 60 Years of Flying Saucers

“Life-sized Gigantor memorial to be erected” - Life-sized Gigantor memorial to be erected

“Archaeologists have revived the debate over whether a spectacular Bronze Age disc from Germany is one of the earliest known calendars.” - BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Calendar question over star disc

Drawing with HTML (via leclercalexis2).

What the hell!?

“Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?” - A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

New Theory on Old Debate: Comet Killed the Mammoth - washingtonpost.com

“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

“Scholars have come to learn that there was more to the culture of Kush than was previously suspected. From deciphered Egyptian documents and modern archaeological research, it is now known that for five centuries in the second millennium B.C., the kingdom of Kush flourished with the political and military prowess to maintain some control over a wide territory in Africa.” - Archaeology - Kingdom of Kush - Egyptian Civilization - New York Times

The River by Bruce Springsteen.

That's some good Blues Harp ... and the Harp Tab if you want it.

Zeitgeist

2007-06-28T11:20:00.000+10:00

Hi.

Not a lot to say. I was going to post this weeks Zeitgeist and then realised that I can't post my usual links of levity. The government has invaded the Northern Territory to complete the dispossession started two centuries ago. It's all pretty f*cked.

We're not sending doctors or counsellors or medicine or food or shelter. Just troops and police.

Oh, and the plan has come under strong attack from the man whose report inspired Howard to act.

Given what we know about the Stolen Generation, and paternal approaches to our indigenous communities in general, this is a shameful period in our history.

And all to get elected one more time.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-06-20T09:50:00.000+10:00

An actually-on-Wednesday Zeitgeist. Good for me.

Nothing to report. WorkWork. TopSecretWork. Usual stuffs.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - Wikipedia : “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs.”

ClientCopia - stories about stupid clients. Stuff gets boring fast, but still a few amusing moments for a lunch hour.

From the Department of the Obvious:
“What happens when you take a 40-year-old CIA memo on losing a war and replace the word “Vietnam” with the word “Iraq”? The result is a set of conclusions that are just as true today.” Foreign Policy: The FP Memo: The Endgame in Iraq

I'M IN YOUR NEWSPAPER WRITING MAH COLUMN:

Tommy and I invented LOLporn last week. Oh yes. Imagine some rude pictures with captions like "YOU HAS A FLAVOUR" and "I AM IN YOUR ****" and ... well, probably something about a "BUKKITS" but I am not touching that one.

Work gets a little boring.

Artifacts from the Future - Fido Fusion:

Jesus holding a dinosaur proves creationism. Or something:

For making your blog much betterer:
Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing

I like this one:
Writing Tool #1: Branch to the Right

CritBuns - Supporting creativity where others can't. It's a chair cushion thingy for sitting on the floor.

I want this:

The Best Thought Experiments: Schrödinger's Cat, Borel's Monkeys

“Suppose that, many years from now, we have constructed a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. In other words, the computer takes Chinese characters as input and, following a set of rules (as all computers can be described as doing), correlates them with other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose that this computer performs this task so convincingly that it easily passes the Turing test. In other words, it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a human Chinese speaker. All the questions the human asks are responded to appropriately, such that the Chinese speaker is convinced that he or she is talking to another Chinese-speaking human. The conclusion that proponents of strong AI would like to draw is that the computer understands Chinese, just as the person does. Now, Searle asks us to suppose that he is sitting inside the computer. In other words, he is in a small room in which he receives Chinese characters, consults a rule book, and returns the Chinese characters that the rules dictate. Searle notes that he doesn't, of course, understand a word of Chinese. Furthermore, he argues that his lack of understanding goes to show that computers don't understand Chinese either, because they are in the same situation as he is. They are mindless manipulators of symbols, just as he is — and they don't understand what they're 'saying', just as he doesn't.” - Chinese room - Wikipedia

Some space thing that I can't remember (Galaxy M81, maybe?):

This article is AWESOME. Read it!
“As Bruce Sterling puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach."” - Charlie's Diary: The High Frontier, Redux

The gist:
Space is basically really really BIG. The amount of energy it would take to get someone and some equipment to the nearest star is REALLY REALLY BIG too. And it gets worse from there.

“Zugzwang (German for "compulsion to move", IPA: [ˈtsuːk.tsvaŋ]) is a term used in combinatorial game theory and in other types of games (particularly in chess). Zugzwang means that one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move — the player would like to pass and make no move. The fact that the player must make a move means that his position will be significantly weaker than the hypothetical one in which it is his opponent's turn to move. In combinatorial game theory, it means that it directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss.” - Zugzwang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joy Division live:

Monday

2007-06-18T10:56:00.000+10:00

Someone felt as average as I did this morning and went on a shooting rampage through the city. Or something. News is garbled. At a train station, which should come as no surprise ... murder in Melbourne is much more likely to occur at a Connex-related venue.

It's not actually funny.

On a lighter note. Terrribly unenthused about WorkWork this morning ... I am desiging some software by saying "make it work like this other software that's really good and open source and anyone can download and use for free". If you look up "Pointlessly Futile" in the dictionary there would be a picture of my sad face and a note to "See also: Tautology".

Thursday Zeitgeist

2007-06-14T10:52:00.000+10:00

Thursday. Normally Thursday is my Friday, but today Thursday is just Thursday. Working tomorrow. Work-work not TopSecretProject-Work.

Right.

My brother and his girl are staying with us at the moment, he's in town touring with
Bobby Flynn ... Idol runner-up from last year. Saw them play live and they are very very good. Bobby is incredibly talented. And my brother is an extraordinary drummer. Check em out.

Not so many links this week, but the whale one is pretty amazing. How old do those things get?

19th-century weapon found in whale

“A Krasnikov Tube is to create a space warp behind the space ship as it travels at near lightspeed to some distant star system, and then use the "tube" thus created for the return trip. This distortion of space has an interesting property for the return trip: it gets you back home shortly after you left, no matter how far you go.” Krasnikov Tube - Wikipedia

“Tay al-Ard (طی الارض or طيّ الارض or طیّ الارض - literally "folding up of the earth") is the name for thaumaturgical teleportation in the Islamic religious and philosophical tradition.” Tay al-Ard - Wikipedia

Astronomers find most massive star ever discovered

Colour schemes of Butterflies

Woman jailed for testicle attack

"Testicle Attack" would be a great metal or punk band name. If you're into such things.

Visualizing Global Web Performance with Akamai

Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It?

Muhammad is No 2 in boy's names in the UK

Thought for Monday

2007-06-12T09:50:00.000+10:00

When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful... and you blink and take a step back.

That's the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.

All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.

From my mate Seth

Keating

2007-06-08T10:47:00.000+10:00

Transcript of interview on lateline last night with Paul Keating

The real question today with the economy growing so rapidly and unemployment so low is why doesn't the tinder box go off? That is, why don't we get the big bang? The big bang in inflation and in wages back into the old dismal cycle? The answer is because of the structural changes. Nothing to do with Mr Costello's economic management ... nothing to do with Peter Costello and everything to do with Labor's structural changes from the '80s.

The great lie of the Howard Government in respect of workplace changes, they are simply a set of arrangements to keep unions out of workplaces. They've got nothing to do with productivity and the quicker we move away from that kind of discriminatory structure to a truly trust based co operative sharing of work and workloads, then we get back to reasonable levels of productivity and again, reasonable rates of growth in real wages.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-06-07T09:20:00.000+10:00

Day late, because the script I use to parse the RSS of my Tumblr link blog and generate the HTML for the Zeitgeist is not on my laptop and I couldn't be bothered writing another script. Sorry about that.

And yes, I am that guy ... parsing RSS to generate HTML for your edification. I am sure you're jealous of my elite hacking skills, because we all know that chicks dig skills.

Nothing much else to report. Working on stuff, hanging out. Usual.

Oh dear. First rule of boxing - don't just stand there. Need to fast-forward to the 30 second mark. And ignore the bad music. It's a weird thing that people do to these fight videos.

That's Don Frye, who looks suspciously like my father-in-law. He is awesome, over 40 and still fighting. Like some sort of MMA Rocky ... brawler with a magic chin. He's also mental. There's a fight we're the ref stops it before he taps out in an arm-bar because it looks like he WON'T tap out. Am arm bar is basically where you get someone's arm between your legs and bend it the wrong way with your bodyweight. If you don't submit your elbow snaps. The guy must be nuts.

My occasional addiction to MMA (now through the unified UFC and Pride) continues unabated. I must be nuts.

Category:Ship Types

The Profit Calculator

Splash, Splash, You're Dead: The Military's Next-Gen Water Gun: The SPP-1 flying-nail pistol came into service in 1971. It is more compact than the Underwater Defense Gun and half the weight, and even now is standard issue for Russian combat divers, including a section of the Presidential Security Service that patrols the flooded sewers connecting the Kremlin to the Moskva River.

“Number of stars in the visible universe = 30 billion trillion (3x10²²)” - The Universe within 14 billion Light Years - The Visible Universe

Or our nearest neighbours: The Universe within 12.5 Light Years - The Nearest stars

The Traveler's Dilemma. Game Theory

Schneier on Security: Cyberwar

Steam Trek: The Moving Picture (Star Trek Parody)

HowTo: Make your own M41-A Pulse Rifle, the rifle from Aliens

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

“Russia has repeatedly claimed that the majority of these manufacturers produce AK-47 without a proper license from IZH.[17][18] The Izhevsk Machine Tool Factory acquired a patent in 1999, illegalising manufacture of the Kalashnikov rifle system by anyone other than themselves.[19]”: AK-47 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nessie caught on tape (via goochcamper)

Further investigation has reveleaed that Nessie was caught on tape by a guy who thinks Aliens talk to him. May not be reliable, is all I'm saying

Q&A: Seth Godin Says 'Know When To Bail'

“Speedy solar storms carrying a billion tons of charged gas through space let out a thunderous scream before they unleash satellite-stopping radiation storms that slam into Earth's magnetic field.”- Radio ‘Screams’ Forecast Dangerous Solar Storms

Startup Search. Directory of web technology startups. I am not in there. Yet.

The LOLs never stop: LOL BOTS

Desktop Tower of Money: 3 tips to profit from casual games

Glyphius Copywriting Software Review

The Office and Others

2007-06-06T14:33:00.000+10:00

Spending so much time at MagNation that I've started to refer to it as "the office" ... as in "heading to the office, now".
When this project is launched, it will be thanks to this place as much as anything else. At least the free coffees have stopped, I was starting to get insomnia.

The project is coming along quite nicely. Learning many new things about Ruby On Rails, and generally enjoying myself.

Out of contlol

2007-05-31T11:22:00.000+10:00

Someone has made a programming language from LOLCatese: lolcode


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
     UP VAR!!1
      VISIBLE VAR
      IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

I cannot tell you how amusing I AM IN YR LOOP is to me (Not to mention AWSUM THX and OH NOES as Try/Catch blocks).

There is a promise by a game developer that if the language becomes Turing Complete he'll develop a game using it.

KTHXBYE

Startup

2007-05-30T14:03:00.000+10:00

I love being a Startup.

In MagNation in the city, free coffee, cutting code, working on Empire.

Magazines if I get bored.

Delightful

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-05-29T12:58:00.000+10:00

I humbly present to you the biggest Zeitgeist ever. Somewhat of a backlog of links. Some of these might be duplicates, I guess. My links are a bit all over the place.

I continue to work on my Hare-Brained Scheme(tm), it's coming along nicely thanks for asking ... and it's not that hare-brained either, I am very excited about it all. Other than that ... Mrs Android is busy as a bee on her thesis, which is not very much fun at all.

I am slightly addicted to World of Warcraft. So much fun. I've been playing with some people from work, hanging out and grinding away, killing the wildlife and collecting items.

Gunpowder Scarification

Weta Originals Rayguns - GOLIATHON 83Infinity Beam Projector - I want one so bad. but $1000 ...

$1000!?

IFRAME remoting made easy

AJAX file uploads in Rails using attachment_fu and responds_to_parent

Sax Solos

NASA - Crescent Rhea Occults Crescent Saturn

Web 2.0 free buttons maker!

Blaine Cook on Scaling Twitter (via Google Video)

VASSAL is a game engine for building and playing online adaptations of board games and card games.

Strange alien world made of 'hot ice'

Sacrelicious!
Bible Fight

Waterboarding

Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1 (via shadon1nja)

Hacknot - The Three Ages of The Developer

Kardashev scale
Kardashev scale

The Kardashev scale is a general method of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is, first proposed in 1964 by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev.

Things I learned setting up my new server
Using J and K for navigation in Google Reader comes straight out of VI (and probably other pointy-headed *nix apps).

Zombie Last Supper via www.myconfinedspace.com

'Cheese': The New Cheap, Deadly Street Drug

May 14, 1939: A 5-Year-Old Becomes Youngest Mother on Record
May 14, 1939: A 5-Year-Old Becomes Youngest Mother on Record

High Power Job

Google Operating System: How to Add Search to Google Reader

gears of war (mad world) (via gears0fwar)

The Underbelly of a Web App

Chris Anderson: Technology's Long Tail (video)

Infinite Loop:

Gmail Manager - manage multiple Gmail accounts from Firefox

Cool business card designs

“A new study suggests that culture may shape the way our brains process visual information.”

- Can culture dictate the way we see? - being-human - 04 May 2007 - New Scientist

Growth of Twitter vs. Blogger

Octopus-Dumpling soda via news.3yen.com

Nanoweb - The PHP Web Server

Because sometimes evil wins.

It's Pikachu!

LOLTrek

The Incredible Edible Belgian Chocolate Anus

Web 2.0 Map. There be dragons ...

Universe - Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife.

Army Tests Fighting Robot

"Designed to fly on a Black Hawk, the [MULE] will carry two 7.62mm machine guns and two Javelin anti-tank missiles and feed camera data from its on-board sensors."

“Notifications, the way you want them”

- brightkite.com

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality

Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups

Code Guardian Part 1 (via CeeGeeProductions)

Open the Future: The Early Signs of the Long Tomorrow - "IBM researchers James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S. Modha assembled a simulated mouse cortical hemisphere (that is, a functional half of a mouse brain) on one of the smaller BlueGene/L supercomputers. They then ran the simulation -- at ten seconds of computer processing equal to one second of brain function."

EarthNow! Landsat Image Viewer

Baseline Rhythm Calculator

...

2007-05-22T10:25:00.000+10:00

Some days are just like this I guess.

Only trouble is that so many of my days have become like this.

Worst Movies Ever!

2007-05-15T13:38:00.000+10:00

In lieu of a real Zeitgeist, I give you this:

The horse stunt is incredible.

I saw Shark Attack 3 at Blockbuster ages ago. I knew it would be awesome.

Shame

2007-05-07T12:05:00.000+10:00

I don't know if you see the news about the "Honour Killing" videos put on the web. Don't watch it.

Just know that the world can be a pretty fucked-up place.

What can we do about it?

90 9F 11 20 9D 63 D4 5B C7 42 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

2007-05-02T12:16:00.000+10:00

You might see a Hexadecimal number somewhat similar to this:

90 9F 11 20 9D 63 D4 5B C7 42 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

popping up on the internet.

It's the encryption key for HD-DVD players.

"90 9F 11 20 9D 63 D4 5B C7 42 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" ... isn't actually the key, because sites are being taken down for publishing it, despite the fact that there is no way of protecting a number or string. But anyway, I don't want Google to block my blog.

The whole exercise demonstrates the futility of trying to block access to media. If you can access the hardware (and we all have to in order to play the stupid video or music), you can break ANY encryption. That's just the way it is.

It's all just maths!!

Zeitgeist

2007-05-02T10:10:00.000+10:00

Greetings. Wednesday is the new Friday. Or at least it is if you are me and only work 3 days a week. Rest of my week is work on Top Secret Project. Hopefully ready to launch pretty soon. How excitement.

Otherwise, nothing to report.

A sexual arms race waged with twisted genitals has been discovered in waterfowl.

Jazz Mutant - some weird-ass music console mixing effects pad thingy. Bjork has one.

I want a Kaoss Pad. Just so you know.

For your perusal and edification: Dragon Precinct. Fantasy Crime Fiction. I kid you not.

Eta Carinae - the most massive star that can be studied in detail

The Homunculus Nebula surrounds Eta Carinae. The Homunculus was created in an eruption of Eta Car whose light reached Earth in 1843.

Homunculus.

I just love that word.

I read "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" and all I learned was this word:

Revanchist
1. The act of retaliating; revenge.2. A usually political policy, as of a nation or an ethnic group, intended to regain lost territory or standing.

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality: "physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it"

On that note ...

The End.

Reflections on one's last day of full-time work

2007-04-27T14:14:00.000+10:00

Change one line
Run compile task
Run jar task
Run run task
Test
****
Still doesn't work
Change one line
Goto 0

------------------
The End.

Zeitgeist

2007-04-26T09:39:00.000+10:00

Yesterday started as a Zeitgeist and ended up something else. So I'll try again.

Flurb - A Webzine of Astonishing Tales. Rudy Rucker is involved. He is a terribly interesting sci-fi writer and mathematician. His *ware Tetralogy features sentient plastic. Nice.

I don't believe in God and all I got was this lousy Atom thingy:

I'd like to see something more aggressive, perhaps. "My God invented the Bomb and proved your God didn't exist and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"

From: Available Emblems of Belief for Placement on Government Headstones and Markers. Our dear friends the scientologists don't want you to know what their emblem looks like for copyright reasons. You can see it here though. I didn't want Tom coming to my house with a Cease and Desist.

Important things to remember #89364589345:

Laura Bush has reassured us all about Iraq: Laura told Anne Curry on the Today Show, that the American people need to know that "no one suffers more than their President and I do."

I want a t-shirt that says: "What would Bartlett do?"

Things I am thinking about:
Information Software and the Graphical Interface.

Ah. So much fun. Godzilla vs The Mushroom Kingdom!

Lame Technology Mascots. This is why Software people should steer clear of design:

Clippy "It looks like you're writing a fax":

Duke the Java Blob Thingy:

17th Anniversary of the Hubble Telescope:

Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered Outside Our Solar System

"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it and because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extra-terrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X"

The End.

Lest we forget

2007-04-25T10:22:00.000+10:00

Short and sweet.

Anzac Day today.

Crush went to the Dawn Service with some of her students. I think I may have grunted at her as she left at 4am or some such ridiculous time.

During the week I learned about the Armenian Genocide. While we commemorate Anzac day on the 25th, the 24th marks the beginning of the Armenian tragedy . Arguably, the invasion at Gallipoli was one of the catlysts of the Genocide, and it was to be a harbinger of the terror that followed through the 20th century.

I'd never heard of it. We learn about Anzac day, but nothing about the other tragedy that was unfolding. Maybe we just don't have the space to care about all the bad things that happen?

Anyway.

On a lighter note:

I need this. Kerry-Anne was selling it. She wouldn't lie, would she?

It's an inflatable couch thingy for crunching your abs - you rock backwards and forwards getting 3 EXCERCISES IN ONE.

The buff model using it was trying not to laugh.

I also saw a inflatable thingy you put under your mattress to turn your bed into a automatically recllining one. All the footage was in fast forward, with models trying not to move. The claim that it "inflates in seconds" doesn't mention that about 120 of the seconds are need.

I love those hare-brained products.

Now I am off to drink many more coffee.

For your consideration

2007-04-24T13:33:00.000+10:00

I present Desktop Tower Defense. Not since Swords and Sandals has a game been so addictive.

I got 5000 points on medium, looking for 5000 on hard.

Here are some hints. Just in case.

Games not your thing?

Maybe you like Gilbert and Sullivan:

Gig at the Brunswick Hotel

2007-04-18T16:32:00.000+10:00

Forgot to mention, have a gig at the Brunswick Hotel on Sydney Rd tonight, from about 9.

An Actually Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-04-18T09:29:00.000+10:00

Ah, America the land of the free. The usual suspects have come out saying "no honest, it's the video games" and not LAX GUN CONTROL. In Virginia, you can buy a gun. No questions asked. But that's obviously not the fucking problem. It's the kids pretending to shoot pretend aliens in simulated environments that's at the heart of it. You know, there is no single credible research that has managed to ever link media violence with real world violence. You can find a bunch of biased unscientific ones though.

And I know it sounds like I am defending the game industry - the industry that bought you both Tomb Raider (a game predicated on eyeing a magically proportioned woman in hot-pants) and the prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto that regenerate your Life.

/end rant

More Guns Will Deter Shootings:
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has a simple solution to future shooting massacres such as the one that ripped apart Virginia Tech university Monday: more guns. "People are a little more cautious if somebody might have a gun there".

In related news: Chimps More Evolved Than Humans. Hard to argue with that.

Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold

Neural Macrosensing: Macrosensing, a concept created by scientist and nanotechnology expert Robert A. Freitas Jr., relates to medical in vivo nanorobotics for the detection of somatic states as well as extrasomatic states, such as sensory data originating outside the body.

Fast Food Ads vs Reality

Um, this is KFC's “Famous Bowl” - reportedly a mixture of mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, cheese, and chicken.

Ad:

Reality:

And I love the review: "there was so much sodium and fat my heart is still cutting in and out – and it’s the arrhythmia of love."

Mystery phrase of the day: saline infusion.
You don't actually want to know.

Thou Shalt Always Kill

How to build a cardboard castle

The End.

The Boss

2007-04-14T13:03:00.000+10:00

Random Zeitgeist

2007-04-05T12:10:00.001+10:00

Yet another ~~Random~~ Zeitgeist. Working hard on my Top Secret Project. Keep staying awake with a head full of plans and schemes. Means I spend my days surly and grumpy. So no substantive change there.

I thought I had more stuff. Anyway, lunch time ... slow foods with Mskp today.

God vs Satan

T. Rex Protein Analysis Supports Dinosaur-Bird Link

Nine Inch Nails Full Album Preview. Um, it's really good.

That crazy Japanese television:

From a show called Ninja Warrior.

I am currently looking at virtualisation and grid services for the Top Secret Project. This is cool: Joyent Accelerator. Twitter runs on it => upwatrds of 11,000 requests a second.
Or there's the MediaTemple Grid.

300

2007-04-05T11:40:00.000+10:00

Saw 300 last night and was pretty disappointed. It's a computer game, not a film. Not just a conversion or cross-overI actually think they tried to make a computer game in film.

A computer game lacking interactivity.

A computer game that would be pretty lame even if you could control the battles.

Wave of monsters, power-ups, special moves, boss monster, cut scene. Repeat for several levels.

But it IS pretty. The aesthetics are lovely.

And I think this is what the Iranians and the Gay Lobby are talking about:

Things

2007-04-04T16:29:00.000+10:00

In no particular order:

Work (old, now new-again work) moved today.

Yes, I signed back on as contractor, working 3 days ... 2 days a week dedicated to my own stuff ... focus on much secret project that I am VERY excited about. I've had many hare-brained schemes, but this one is different and going to bear fruit. Watch this space.

Midnight screening of 300 tonight. Oh yeah.

Can't wait.

Found the complete Transmetropolitan. Seriously the best thing ever. Warren Ellis is a f*cking genius.

This week's game is Gamma Bros
Old-school 8-bit retro gaming action. I love it.

Wednesday Monday Zeitgeist

2007-04-02T12:13:00.000+10:00

About 10 years behind on lame link spam, so thought I start the week on the right foot.

My apologies to all concerned for Boomshine. Quite addictive, apparently.

I am obsessed with 300. We're going to go see it at Imax on Wednesday night. I think it will be hell-of-cool.

I gave a lecture on Thursday at Swinburne, which was pretty fun. I scrapped the offical talk (which was about XML) and riffed for 60 minutes about things I think are cool.

And we have a gig in a couple of weeks. First practice yesterday. I haven't played the drums since November. Bit clumsy, but other than that was all good.

Speaking of games: Kongregate. It's like YouTube for games. Genius. Made me cry because I never thought of it.

CricInfo - for when you need Cricket rendered into near-realtime 3d.

Zelda Theme Music. ReOrchestrated.

Twitter Vision. Mesmerising.

And, get this: I am Jodee Rich's friend on Twitter. As in One.Tel. How funny is that?

Albono Peacock:

Secret confession: I am addicted to UFC and Pride.

Quitting Time

2007-03-30T15:15:00.000+10:00

I resigned.

Feels very good.

Possibility of a contract, which would free up some time for some other plans.

Addictive Game of the Week

2007-03-23T12:12:00.000+11:00

BoomTime is simple and mesmerising. The music and effects are delightful. Highly recommended for a Friday lunch time play.

Wednesday Half-Assed Zeitgeist

2007-03-20T10:23:00.000+11:00

Bah.

This week is too long.

Nothing to report.

Eating many parma tonight. That should cheer me up.

Lego. Lego versions of Halo vehicles, to be precise

Greek God Family Tree

Geeks replicating Mario Cart on tricycles

Pulp Sci-Fi Book Covers

I really like The Genial Dinosaur:

The End.

Robot Arena III

2007-03-15T13:14:00.000+11:00

For those of you who have maxed out Swords and Sandals, I present: Robot Arena III, with apologies.

Play it.

You know you want to.

It's Just Maths

2007-03-13T09:55:00.000+11:00

Forget 42, here are The Ten Coolest Numbers.

Suprisingly, I am not very good at Maths, despite the fact I ended up in IT, so I don't understand much of what that page talks about.

But I did think that the Monster Group was cool.

I fucking hate this week

2007-03-08T11:27:00.000+11:00

Want it to be over very very badly.

Trouble is, that will just start another week ... probably a lot like this one.

Baudrillard is Dead

2007-03-08T10:29:00.000+11:00

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies.

Or does he?

On Monday

2007-03-05T10:50:00.000+11:00

On Monday I woke up indignant.

So did John: Howard 'very angry' over Hicks delay.

No shit.

We're seeing a very gradual ramp in the rhetoric around David Hicks. None of which is because of concern for David, but because of the increasing political liability the issue is having. The whole thing disgusts me.

And don't even get me started about the whole "pawn sacrifice" with the resigned minister over the Burke "scandal". I mean, could the manoeuvre be any more obvious?

This from a government of ministers who have presided over some of the most nefarious deeds perpetrated while in office (Tampa, AWB, refugees, Illegal Invasion, Sex with Donkeys).

And I want to get Ruddock out. I want him to resign and take a plum diplomatic position somewhere in Europe. Don't laugh, it's the most severe punishment you can get in the Liberal Party.

How do I do this?

A petition?

A site that generated emails automatically that people can sign? I think I could even fax his office ...

NerdCamp

2007-03-02T11:54:00.000+11:00

This weekend I am mostly going to NerdCamp!

It's called BarCamp.

A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. Learn more or organize your own Barcamp!. If you write code at BarCamp, consider licensing it under the BarCampLicense. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp.

I am presenting on Amazon S3. Which I love.

Biggest. Nerd. Ever.

A Risk by any other name

2007-03-01T11:00:00.000+11:00

This week I offer for your gaming edification: Ancient Empire's Lux. It's basically Risk played on maps of Ancient civilisations including Egypt, Sumer and Greece. The maps are welll thought out, with nice choke points, and add lots of variety for the Risk aficionado. Apart from that it's just Risk.

And for no extra charge I give you: Orbit. I really like this one, it's quite mesmerising with some great music. There are no instructions, but I think I worked out what to do ...

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-02-28T11:31:00.000+11:00

Ah Wednesday, everyone's favourite day of the week. Better than working, that's for sure.

We're all doomed: Scientists have estimated the asteroid (named Apophis after the Egyptian god of destruction) has a one-in-45,000 chance of striking Earth on 13 April, 2036. You'll never believe the plan they've concocted.

Have to love Giant Squid:

Intellidrugs:

Forgetting to take medicine may be a thing of the past as researchers close in on creating an artificial tooth which automatically releases medicine. The Intellidrug device is small enough to fit inside two artificial molars in the jaw, the Engineer journal said

Dates are really really hard to program: Lockheed's F-22 Raptor Gets Zapped by International Date Line

Albino Peacock:

Mother coached children to fake retardation

Speaking of retardation: New world record burger - 123 Pounds, $379 USD

First launch from Cape Canaveral(Using a "V-2 missile base" ... ?) :

Io: The Prometheus Plume:

And while we're dealing with space:
Scientists assess DNA Hair sample from Human being apparently not from Earth

What the FUCK!!!!!?. Arguably NSFW.

Release the Freaks: the premier destination for character art presenting an unparalleled collection of designer toys.

Speaking of freaks:

Why can't programmers program?

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

AutoTwit

2007-02-26T13:46:00.000+11:00

I made this: AutoTwit.

It let's you update Twitter automatically.

Write a Twitter post, and then schedule when you want to update Twitter ... hourly, daily, weekly.

Twitter == Pointless
AutoTwit == Automatically Pointless

DOH. Link was broken.

Programming with speech recognition

2007-02-23T10:47:00.000+11:00

This amuses me greatly:

As Microsoft says: The Wow Starts Now!

Game Thursday

2007-02-22T12:56:00.000+11:00

Hot on the heels of last week's Sword and Sandals which proved far too addictive for some, I present you with a game that is not addictive because it is next to impossible to actually play.

JetSpeed is the fastest game ever*. I can't get past the second truck thingy. Try it.

* Well, possibly not, but it is f*cking fast.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-02-21T21:03:00.000+11:00

Well, it's offical. I've had enough and I'm looking for a job. I think it was the patronisation by the CEO this morning that finally tipped me over, not to mention the lack of direction, mismanagement and promise of reward that has been 12 months in the making and still not happened. So if anyone needs a Senior Dev, with stacks of experience with Java and PHP and an obsession with Ruby on Rails and the user experience, drop me a line.

Zeitgeist is small this week, I am afraid. Been working on some stuffs. A computer game. Computational History. A lame twitter joke thing. Usual schemes.

Fixed Earth: these guys think the Bible is correct and that science is some sort of zionist conspiracy. I don't even understand much of it. They appear to think that evidence that stars move in the night sky is proof that stars move around the Earth, as opposed to evidence that the Earth itself revolves.

Hubble image of Death Throes of a Star:
The Hubble telescope is obviously an integral part of the Zionist Conspiracy.

While we're on Science:
Yep. Tesla coil car theft prevention. Now that's fucking science.

Science and Faith as flow charts:

The "Real" Iraq. Jeebus. Very violent, about the sanitisationa nd control of the media.

Ah, Nine Inch Nails has a new album coming and an incredible ad campaign / game ... apparently it started when someone decoded a secret message on a T-Shirt planted at a NIN concert:
Another Version of the Truth.

Random facts about sex.

Lonely Robot:

And finally, a Duck (for Elaine):

A mutant duck.

Good eating on a mutant duck though ...

Mmmmmmmmmmm .... duck.

Just another Manic EXTREMELY URGENT Monday

2007-02-19T10:30:00.000+11:00

Ah, Mondays. Aren't they splendid. Rode to work on my new mountain bike - the finest cheapest bike money can buy. Was most excellent ... haven't ridden to work since my old bike was stolen last year ... riding Wanda the motocycle instead and getting fatter and fatter without the enforced excercise.

Mondays at my work are always exciting because we are assigned some new randonly generated and completely facile project that is EXTREMELY URGENT, despite the fact that last week's project was also EXTREMELY URGENT and also despite the fact that our current list of EXTREMELY URGENT things is due for completion some time in mid-2008.

Last week was an EXTREMELY URGENT localisation of some software for the Chinese market. This week is an EXTREMELY URGENT proposal involving some type of MySpace clone. Or something.

Lovely weather we've been having though.

Maps of War

2007-02-16T09:37:00.000+11:00

I found this last night: Maps of War. The site presents several animated maps and timelines of history ... most of them are not actually directly about war, funnily enough.

Imperial History of the Middle East - everyone's had a crack. Bunch of empires I only know vague things about it, and some of that from playing computer games.

History of Religion - clash of civilisation anyone?

American Leadership & War - this one is rather dubious, I think, but I am not necessarily up on my American History. It seems disingenous to blame the Dems for deaths in World War II. Then again, I am a dirty lefty. Well, sort-of.

Anyway, educational. Filed under computational history.

Thursday Game

2007-02-15T17:00:00.000+11:00

This week I have been mostly playing Swords and Sandals: gladitorial combat made real ... if by real you mean amusingly drawn and with some most hilarious sound effects and even more hilariouser music. The song is basically the programmer singing "Glad-iatooor".

You can create a character and jump into the arena ... win battles, earn gold, increase your skills, buy stuff, win more battles.

You get the idea.

Reminds me of Carnage Blender ...

It's just maths

2007-02-14T20:10:00.000+11:00

For various reasons, I have found myself faced with some rather complex problems of a mathematical nature. Namely, what are all the unique combinations of an array of elements [a,b,c,d] => ab, bc, acd & etc etc. You get the idea.

I can compute the answer, but I am using recursion and it breaks my computer quite fast. 8 elements takes 30 seconds and 9 elements ... well, I gave up waiting after 5 minutes.

Some research for a better algorihtm led me to complexity theory and specifically a set of problems known as NP-complete or Non-deterministic Polynomial time.

From our friends at Wikipedia:

In computational complexity theory, NP ("Non-deterministic Polynomial time") is the set of decision problems solvable in polynomial time on a non-deterministic Turing machine. Equivalently, it is the set of problems whose solutions can be "verified" by a deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time.

My knowledge finds it's limit at Wikipedia ... going through some of the theories to try and find some sort apporimation alogirthm is doing my head in. If any of the mathematically inclined what to take a stab at it I will buy you many beers.

Did you know there is such a thing as recreational mathematics?

Madness.

Update: now I am looking at Diophantine linear equations. Don't ask.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-02-14T17:02:00.000+11:00

Merry Valentine's Day. My wife and I will be enjoying tonight with a secret rendevous.

This week is l-o-n-g ... work has finally and truly jumped the shark. Very much over it and lacking inspiration for something else right now. Need a benefactor or patron to fund computational history. Any takers?

On with the show:

Rather Literal Love song:

Robots on Mars:

A ship for carrying other ships (a meta-ship, if you will):

And it can sink itself to get under ships and then lift them up:

The largest lego set ever sold. Over 5000 pieces:

Corporate jet traffic after the superbowl:

A pulse of light can be stopped, transported, and restarted again using a cloud of super-cold atoms.

Stephen Colbert rocks my world:

The evolution of life and intelligence on Earth has finally reached the point where it is now deemed possible to engender something almost out of nothing.

The Periodic Spiral envisions a remedy to the flaws in conventional periodic tables by illustrating hydrogen's ambiguous relationship to the noble gases and halogens while recognizing its relationship to the alkali metals; it also fully integrates the lanthanons and actinons into the design.

...

2007-02-12T13:54:00.000+11:00

I started writing an entry about George Lucas and Star Wars and how he's a dick and Empire Strikes Back is the best film because he didn't write most of it and it suddenly started turning into a massive rant about the philosophy of Star Wars and then I realised I would be one of those weird computer guys who ranted about Star Wars and also there's no need to continue the theme of "X Sucks" even though in the case of My Chemical Romance and possibly, George Lucas, it is quite justified.

Just so you know.

Update: Of course, now I am the guy who writes about what he would have written about. I may as welll have signed up to fucking Twitter.

Monday Morning

2007-02-12T09:40:00.000+11:00

Slept in and up late. Half the office was later than I was, so didn't matter particularly. Usual frantic Monday "everything is urgent" work meeting. Massive new task, major changes to the project that was almost done. Or current plan says we'll be done mid 2008, but I think we just added a few more months of work.

So very amusing. When you have 18 months of work, it all essentially becomes meaningless. I just say yes now.

Rode on the citylink this morning, which was much longer but much more pleasant than my usual traffic snarl to work.

Nothing much else to report. Played some nerdy computer games (based on Warhammer Fantasy, no less), continued coding ~my~ lame (and nerdy) computer game.

Oh, I gave up drinking. Occasional glass of red, the odd pint of fine ale.

Your Chemical Romance

2007-02-10T10:36:00.000+11:00

My Chemical Romance sucks really bad.

Kids these days, eh?

When I was a boy, emo was called Goth and we listened to bands like The Cure. We didn't have to pretend to be sad because we were sad because life was much harder. The internet hadn't been invented yet, neither had mobile phones so there was no texting, Australian Idol was called Young Talent Time and even if you had been given a vote, you would have had to write a letter (on paper with a pen) and wait weeks for it to be delivered.

Oh, and there was a thing called the Cold War that promised to evaporate the entire world in an instant.

And you call yourselves sad.

BAH!

Once was superhero

2007-02-09T10:38:00.000+11:00

I used to dress in tights and tell the kids this:

This is why I do what I do.

In my wild flights of fancy, the internet is creating something truly new and extraordinary. If a human becomes out of trillions of cells interacting ... what becomes when the products of our culture are connected and interact?

Will we know?

(Which reminds me to not mention my memetic theory of cultural consciousness and how civilisation itself can become self-aware).

Have I had too much coffee or barely enough?

Thursday Game

2007-02-08T14:13:00.000+11:00

This week's games is one for the kids: Fizzball by Grubby Games.

Fizzball is a "breakout" game ... you bounce a ball around the screen to collect a bunch of animals and power-ups to clear the level. If you remember Breakout from Atari, you have the idea .... It's cute and heaps of fun.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-02-08T10:26:00.000+11:00

Small zeitgeist today because I am a very important corporate executive who shall be in meetings for the next 2 days.

Kill me now. Please.

Universe Map

Crazy-ass computer animation:

Iran leader announces AIDS cure

NASA says Low Earth Orbit is crowded full of junk.

I want one of these so very badly. Hare-brained scheme for this year is to build one myelf. My wife misunderestimates my capacities in this regard.

And if I had one I would certainly play this:

Yes. Watergate Caper. You apparenlty have to break in and steal the secret democratic files. What a jape! I am going to make a game called "AWB Adventure".

Ah, Microsoft.

You are terribly embarrasing:
(via the BlandCanyon via Audrey

ReadyMech: free, flatpack toys for you to print and build.

I LOVE them. LOVE.

Off to my meeting. Damn it.

G.O.B.

2007-02-06T14:59:00.000+11:00

This morning the sales guy was playing the Final Countdown in a non-ironic manner.

I just thought you should know the kind of people I work with.

Creative Commons Licensed Books

2007-02-06T14:19:00.000+11:00

I present for your edumacation several Creative Commons Licensed Books. Most are slightly geeky. The Creative Commons is the most coolest thing ever.

Anyway.

Gamer Theory sounds very interesting:

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

Wha Happen?

2007-02-02T14:13:00.000+11:00

Wha Happen?

This is pretty amusing:
US answer to global warming: smoke and giant space mirrors

Or it would be if we weren't all going to DIE.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-01-31T11:07:00.000+11:00

The Ghetto of Hate was magically transformed into the Ghetto of Love for much dancing and ... to be honest, not sure what hapened after about 10. Dancing. Carousing. Our neighbour had a shower and kicked a rock for some time while swearing manically. Um, sure.

Nothing much else to report. Business as usual.

This week I have been mostly thinking about: Operation Barbarossa. Or in multimedia. Oooh...

Tokyo at night using HDR (High Dynamic Range):

China has 900 missiles aimed at Taiwan.

Star Wars using hands:

BlackWater. If I was really really rich I would have m own private army too.

Scariest Ideas in Science

Amazing photo of a terrible F1 accident:

Oh yeah.

Genealogy of Influence ... relationships of various great thinkers & etc.

State of the Union Tag Cloud

Las Vegas Police Website. In the style of Sin City. And I thought it was just like CSI.

Guitarist from Anthrax can't play own song in Guitar Hero: "Dude you are totally going to have to write easier songs 20 years ago".

Ricahrd Hammond's crash on Top Gear. Madness. Rated higher than the UK Big Brother eviction.

AssRaelis. Kosher, yiddish erotica. NSFW.

Which Sci-Fi Author are you?. I am Frank Herbert, apparently.

Interactive map of Middle East groups and their relationships. Nodes have repelling force - move Israel around and see what happens.

Mirin Dajo, a fakir. He actually has steel rods pushed through his body.

Wow ... no smiles at ALL:

Ah, Microsoft. You should totally like, buy a Mac.

Further to Fermi ...

2007-01-25T12:35:00.000+11:00

Is it just me ...

He lied through logic to hide his real indentity!
The worst kind of lie!

Thursday Game(s)

2007-01-25T10:59:00.000+11:00

This week I have been mostly playing strange space-arcade-strategy games. Galcon and Pax Galaxia. The game play o both of these is pretty much unlike anything I've seen before. Pax Galaxia is wacky, but strangely compelling, you create links from planet to planet and control ebs and flows across the map. It's quite pretty, but in my brief play I couldnt' quite work out what was happening.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-01-24T11:15:00.000+11:00

Half-way through the week. Not that I count the working days or nothing, just preparing for the Very Big Party on Friday. It will be wicked.

This week I mostly saw Pan's Labyrinth and highly recommend it.

Big news today is that Dear John has reshuffled the cabinet, an all new line-up of head kickers, assholes and pigs. Good on you, John. With any luck, by the end of the year this will be your legacy:

And in honour of Vandstone, unceremoniously dumped to a plum diplomatic role, preferebly in some hot country filled with the relatives of the poor bastards whose detention she presided over, I present a Two-Faced Pig:

Did you like what I did there?

Whenever I get sad I think about this:

Fuck that would be a FORCEful band.

While I am thinking Star Wars:
Interior Map of the Millenium Falcon

And this guy has thought about Star Wars WAAAAAY too much: A New Sith, Revenge of the Hope

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

And for good measure:

I would love to pimp my bike to look like that. wonder how hard it would be?

The Douce Card, for handing to people. This would be wickedly useful at Trivia for those moments when certain teams attempt to trash talk us.

Ricky Gervais on Spinal Tap and The Office

Incredible images of the world in 2100

US Navy develops railgun. Force compared to hitting a target with a Ford Taurus at 380 mph ... with a 200 to 250 nautical-mile range.

Alan Smitheee Presents...

Fermi: Why Aliens haven't found us yet .

Only 50 years of fish left

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers.

Dawkin's The God Delusion:
Part I
Part II

Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a single photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.

Animated Soviet Propaganda. Ironically, this movie appears to be American propanganda about Soviet propaganda. This may, of course, not actuall be irony. I get so confused.

Tetris Vandalism:

The other big news, of course is that Ruby on Rails 1.2 has been released.

Good news! Someone has developed InfiDisk for EC2 ... allows you to mount your S3 account as a filesystem, caches the data in the local instance memory and storage and streams data to S3. Now I just need to work out what to use it for and I am rocking.

Oh, I am still seeking a quorum for the first Nomic Adventure. We'll do it on Game On, Gnolls. We need at least 3 people.

And for good measure, Google Maps hacking:

Keep Left

2007-01-22T17:40:00.000+11:00

Keep Left. Ah... LOVE! To think that only a little while ago I would barely have known what that meant.

We got our wedding photos, they're very cool, thanks to the photographic genius of young Ruby.

Changing the game

2007-01-22T16:39:00.000+11:00

At the moment I am obsessed with games ... driven by computational history (you didn't think that had died, did you?) and a large dose of escapism from my daily grind.

Currently I am fascinated by Nomic: A Game of Self-Amendment.

Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.

The way the rules are put forward, you can play with points and win that way or attempt to win by Paradox:

213. If the rules are changed so that further play is impossible, or if the legality of a move cannot be determined with finality, or if by the Judge's best reasoning, not overruled, a move appears equally legal and illegal, then the first player unable to complete a turn is the winner.
This rule takes precedence over every other rule determining the winner.

Does anyone want to sent up a game with me? We only need 3 players ... and we can probably do it with a blog.

War, what is it good for?

2007-01-22T12:05:00.001+11:00

Bad Plan for the Middle East

Iran announced new tests of short-range missiles Sunday.

U.S. contingency planning for military action against Iran’s nuclear program goes beyond limited strikes and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former U.S. intelligence analyst said on Friday.

Power Point

2007-01-19T10:07:00.000+11:00

This creation is from two design students studying at the Linz Kunstuniversität, Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit (narration by Andre Tschinder). Here's what Clemens says about the visual presentation called Le Grand Content:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent PowerPoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

If only all the lame presentations I had to sit through were like this ...

Thursday Game

2007-01-18T15:18:00.000+11:00

Now that I am (almost) over my Grow addiction, I need something else to while away the work hours between builds of software that slowly drive me mental.

So this week I have been mostly playing: Valo.

Very simple, very mesmerising, very frenetic.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-01-17T10:12:00.001+11:00

Hot. So very hot. So hot that I had to ask Mrs Android this question to complete the Zeitgeist:

hey, what's the name of that game where it's a mechanical table with silver balls? and flippers ...

The answer is of course PinBall ...

Now I have to attempt to be all brainy and stuff and code up some ... stuff.

TechStars - start-up incubator. Now if only there was a local one. I proposed moving to Boulder, Colorado for 3 months, but not really convenient this year.

Weasel Words of War. Why use torture when an "extreme rendition" would do the job?

The MacGuffin

How a hanging is supposed to work ... apparently, not that fun.

Daniel Libeskind’s design for Gazprom City, the future St. Petersburg headquarters for Russian energy giant Gazprom:

“Zimbabwe, the land of dying children” by RW Johnson in the Sunday Times.

World Health Organisation figures show that life expectancy in Zimbabwe, which was 62 in 1990, had by 2004 plummeted to 37 for men and 34 for women. These are by far the worst such figures in the world.

Battle of Helms Deep. In Candy

Giant Rabbits to feed the poor

The Nazi Raccoons that Ate Germany. Not even a joke. Nazi. Raccoons.

Buy Sealand! Donate and get citizenship. I think I might pitch in some cash ...

The Heff. Sad, sad old man.

Greatest Martial Arts Moments. I like the one with the Pinball sound effects and the raining bodies.

The future ... it ... lives

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. . . This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking." - Isaac Asimov

Sentient Developments: Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual: Redux. Particularly like: "Information Theoretic Death" and "Bayesian Rationality".

Loops of highly charged particles burst from the sun's surface:

Fermi Paradox
"The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence of contact with such civilizations."

Bizarre New Form of Life Found in Arctic Ocean, Scientists Announce

200

2007-01-15T10:07:00.000+11:00

Some time last week I passed 200 posts. In celebration, I changed the site template and added a widget that links to My Favourite items from my Google Reader. Have about 70 feeds that I surf everyday, and the good stuff gets published.

On games

2007-01-12T11:38:00.000+11:00

Here's an interesting interview with the creator of Super Columbine Masacre.

I played the game ... it definitely doesn't pull any punches. You wander around hacking and slashing kids in the school. The game itself is built with a tool called RPG Maker which basically lets you make RPG game in the style of Zelda. That's how the game looks and plays, it's all fairly primitive. The content is everything in this game. I remain in two minds about it, really.

While we're there, this game is pretty confronting: Darfur is Dying

When you're young you get sad

2007-01-12T10:23:00.000+11:00

... then you get high

Apparently.

You know it's love when you're quoting Ryan bloody Adams lyrics on your blog.

Oh one day when you're looking back
You were young and man you were sad
When you're young you get sad
When you're young you get sad then you get high

Woke early and weirdly sad for a bit this morning. Just ... nostalgia? ... 12 months ago to the day I was working frentically on a business project with someone who's not quite a friend anymore ... we took time off work, cloistered with our computers and coded away ... and then ... it just stopped, really. Idea was to gain escape velocity from our jobs and get control. Still my dream, but ... things change so much.

For the better, as it turns out. ~~Girl~~Wife, house, small dog. These things are such joy.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-01-10T17:20:00.000+11:00

So very tired. Dinner with The Lady, afetr which I was very rude and slept on the couch for a bit. Then home to argue with ~~Crush~~ Mrs Android (OMG!) about genocide,, WWII and computational history. It's going to be a long day.

So it's the usual short and sweet Zeitgeist today.

The answer to the middle east situation?
Redraw the Map! The article is subtitled 'How a bette middle east would look'. I want to do a satirical map with McDonald's and bikini babes. But I couldn't be bothered.

Before/Bad:

After/Good:

Humans were possibly in America 50,000 years ago

The Slamdance festival banned a game called Super Columbine Massacre. Other game makers have withdrawn in protest over the censorship. The game actually sounds reasonably thought out. It definitely raises some interesting issues ... I've long maintained that games are the medium of the 21C, but games and gamers get discounted as childish and/or trivial. Which is not hard to understand given the preponderance of rubbish car, shooting and sport games. Then again, it's not like film, tv, or literature isn't swamped by similar amounts of rubbish. For every West Wing, there's an Everybody Loves Raymond and a No Pants Island.

Speaking of Raymond. I'd rather do this than watch it:

From Modblog

I mean, really.

But it does piss me off that everyone gets to have an ill-informed opinion about games even though they never play them and have NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT.

I'll stop yelling now.

Trapped!

Teach Yourself the Harmonica!

Apple has (finally) released the iPhone.
If anyone can pull that off, it's Apple.

At work we've been talking about flow a lot. How do we design software (I am thinking about games, as well) that moves beyond usability and into flow? Wondering,
what comes after usability?

That's enough. Lunch time.

Update:
You can download Super Columbine Massacre.
Windows only, I'm afraid. But you're all using Bootcamp, right?

Note to self

2007-01-10T13:31:00.000+11:00

Just spent an our wondering why all my strings turned into integers ... because I used "+" instead of "." to concatenate them. The latter joins two strings, the first turns the strings into integers and adds them, returning 0. Because, obviously a string is not really a number so it must be 0.

I f*cking hate PHP.

I wanna be in country band

2007-01-09T15:43:00.000+11:00

I've started playing the Harmonica again. Back in the day, we (our band was called The Mythical Vims) used to busk the mean, dirty streets of Toowoomba. As I was the drummer, I started playing the blues harp so I would have something to do. Our biggest claim to to fame was being invited to play at High Street Plaza during the Carnival of Flowers.

So anyway, I am back playing the harp quite badly.

Anyway, perhaps because Mrs Android is all about Ryan Adams, I find myself wanting to be in a country band ... playing the harp. That would be nice.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2007-01-03T11:38:00.000+11:00

Today's theme is, of course, love.

Ah ... love.

It's like, TOTALLY AWESOME.

One thing we don't love is Primus Telecom ... we've been billed for our new phone connection despite the fact the phone doesn't actually work. Highly unrecommended service.
And my wife (OMG!) just cracked it about Qantas. So we don't love them at the moment either.
And we also don't love Mr Abbott, do we.

- Man vs Beast. Weirdly disturbing television. I kind-of love it.
- Three things you didn't know about AIDS in Africa.
- Buy land on the moon.
- Learn a language. You never know when Esperanto will come in handy.
- This year I would love to build an arcade machine. I probably won't, but it would be bloody cool to have one.
- Non-lethal viruses to neutralise cities. I love the Cold War, don't you? Infect everyone with a virus that swells their brain!
- 18 Secret Armies of the CIA. I like the Khamba Horsemen the best.
- Taxonomy of Apocalyptic Scenarios. Ranges from Class 0 - Regional Catastrophe through to Class X - Planetary Elimination.
- BTW, Saddam is on Youtube. But you can't have the link.
- Dear John said it was heroic for the Iraqi people to uphold the rule of law despite the fact Saddam was really REALLY bad and they are not having a civil war and stuff. Funny that a tyrannical dictator can get a fair trial , but some ~~illegal combatant~~ poor bastard caught in Afganhistan in a civil conflict by an invading occupational force can't get one. Surely this is unheroic and possibly un-Australian? I'm looking at you, Howard. You fucker.

That's it. Work, if I can remember how to program through all this sunshine and love.

Happy New Year. PS: We got married.

2007-01-02T15:01:00.000+11:00

~~Crush~~ My wife and I would like to wish everyone a happy new year, and etc. In our extended absence from the blogoverse, we may have tied the knot in a top-secret ceremony.

What was the house warming can now be revealed as the wedding party.

2007 is the best year ever.

I am happy happy happy and everything is incredible.

So much more to say ...

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2006-12-20T12:47:00.000+11:00

I am the victim of the Worst Haircut Ever. Just in time for Xmas and New Years. Delightful. And it's really too short to fix. One of my colleagues said yesterday I look like a Lego Man. I hate it enough that I am wearing a hat.
Stupid hair.
I switched to the new Blogger Beta, which is a little annoying. I already have a Google Account, but I didn't want to share it with my blog, so now I have to switch accounts depending on what I am doing.
Perth Today!
Take that you stupid Inteligent Designers: Superlions.
What coke does to you.
7-legged deer.
How mediums work.
Top Ten Sex Patents. I like the Dildo Excercise System. The Cunnilingus Assistant sounds like something an English Lord would have: "Jeeves, be so kind as to go down on my wife."
Scooter meets Truck:
T-Shirt of the Week:
Why are Zombies so cool?
Horror Archetypes
OK, more work to do. Have a meeting at 12 with our new boss who wants to know why everything here sucks. The rest of us have known for ages but the ~~nuffies~~ suits are only just catching on.

KP update

2006-12-18T14:31:00.000+11:00

Talked to KP just before and she asked me to update for those 5 of you who read our blogs. She's been out of the phone range traveling the wilds north of Perth, and is generally completely without the internets. She has promised an update as soon as she gets back. Lot's of photos apparently.

Only 2 more sleeps and I head West!

Things to contemplate while slightly hungover

2006-12-15T12:19:00.000+11:00

Newcomb's Paradox:

A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there's a catch.
The being claims that he is able to predict what any human being will decide to do. If he predicted you would take only the closed box, then he placed a million dollars in it. But if he predicted you would take both boxes, he left the closed box empty. Furthermore, he has run this experiment with 999 people before, and has been right every time.
What do you do?

It sounds a bit like Deal or No Deal. With interstellar beings.

Shabby

2006-12-15T12:04:00.000+11:00

Work Xmas party last night and today feel particularly average. Shabby, even.

Some of my esteemed colleagues showed up to work at 10 this morning having not gone home. Very amusing. One of the few fringe benefits of working here is you can get away with stuff like that.

I think I need a nap.

Too much free time

2006-12-13T14:57:00.000+11:00

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2006-12-13T10:13:00.000+11:00

Home Alone. Stuff everywhere, but I am slowly moving through it all ... the front room is still nearly completely full of boxes, bags and furniture. Want to have it all purty before I leave so it will be nice for Crush when we get back from our Very Western Xmas.
Thinking of surgery? Why not outsource your medical procedure to India. Just like the big corporations!
Yay for health insurance, I say! Sorry, KP.
Che-Bacca:
I still like Cliché Guevara, myself.
Soy makes you gay. Um, yeah.
All that soy I ate while being vegetarian has made me hot for Jon Stewart. He does such good work.
And also, the Christians have come out against that stupid Left Behind game. The one about life after the Apocalypse. I tried to play it and it's just about the worst game this year ... content aside, it has obviously been made by people who have spent too much time praying for the Revelation and not enough time learning to make interfaces that work. Fucking rubbish. On every level.
I should get back to work.

Going with the Flow

2006-12-12T13:56:00.000+11:00

Yesterday sucked.

KP lost her lovely new (and expensive) holiday hat at the airport while waiting 4 hours for her delayed flight to Perth. 4 hours that could have been much better spend saying farewell.

I came home from dropping her off and destroyed the television. Plugging it in and it fell straight out of the cabinet. Cracked it wide open and spread noxious vapours throughout the house. And I really wanted to watch South Park.

I found this though. Wisdom to live by:

Home Sweet Home

2006-12-11T09:44:00.000+11:00

We (Crush and I) finally have a home. It's lovely.

Moving, however, was not. A million degrees over the weekend, two houses of stuffs to move and unite. We delivered the last load of furniture at 11 last night ... after all that heat and exertion, today I feel like I am hungover.

But the house is lovely. Did I mention that?

Crush leaves this evening for the city of Glamour that is Perth and I am heading over to hang with her and various others in a week.

So house to myself, boxes, bags, furniture to assemble.

Oh, and word is that a very large housewarming will be late Jan, just so's you all know.

I wish those birds would shut up

2006-11-30T09:04:00.000+11:00

I am not sure where I am ... vaguely in the direction of Kennilworth, which makes rather good yoghurt, if I recall correctly. It's pretty idyllic, all trees and nature and dial-up internet.

Drinking my coffee this morning (at 7am, would you believe?) a frog jumped on me. Nearly dropped my beverage. We looked it up in the "Big Book of Nature" ... it's just that sort of place.

It has been really really hot. Nearly 40 yesterday, I don't function well in the heat and have been pining for Melbourne or an air conditioner.

Other than that ... well, that's about it, actually. Not a lot happens when you live in a forest.

Heading to the 'Vegas to pick up Crush this afternoon. Staying with her friends tonight, then dragging her north for the TOBYtoby family experience ... meeting my Mum for the first time and as an added bonus(!) a 60th birthday celebration for my manic Father, with extended family reunion.

Good times.

'Vegas and Liquid Bovine Tracheal Cartilage

2006-11-27T09:35:00.000+11:00

Brisbane is hot and sticky, it makes me sneeze, my eyes hurt and I miss Crush like nothing else.

Apart from that, it's all good*. Heading up with Mum to the "Farm" tomorrow. She calls it the "Sanctuary", because she is a dirty hippy ... 75 acres of virgin bush about 45 minutes from the Sunshine Coast in the Obi Obi valley. She bought it a few years ago as a hare-brained scheme. At first, I was a bit skeptical ... it seemed a bit silly for a 50-something woman to buy a property like that ... but eventually I realised that it was awesome ... my Mum is the sort of person to grab onto a vision and make it real.

Anyway ...

The house here is filled with all sorts of delightful hippy claptrap, including things like "~~Stereotype~~Archetype Cards" which are cards with pictures of "Archetypes" on them (Damsel, Martyr, Femme Fatale, Knight) that you use to gain insight and/or wisdom.

Um, sure.

I don't know why I beleive in things like the I-Ching and Intention Manifestation and then baulk at crystals and astrology. Maybe it's because I haven't completely abrogated my rationality?

Mum is taking about 500 different supplements with cool names like "Phytoplex". One of them is called "Cartrin" and is Liquid Bovine Tracheal Cartilage.

Yes.

Liquid Bovine Tracheal Cartilage.

It smells like rancid beefstock mixed with cod liver oil.

Delightful.

* Please picture pretending to shoot some "hand" guns as I say that.

Dodgey

2006-11-23T13:34:00.000+11:00

These games are hard at the best of times:

Domino Effect

2006-11-20T11:44:00.000+11:00

For your enjoyment: A new world record for largest domino chain.

The count: 4,079,381

I particularly like how excited everyone is. Especially the couple toward the end.

Oh, and the September 11-esque toppling buildings. Poignant.

Oh, and "Eighties pop star Kim Wilde pushed the first domino that started the chain reaction."

I had one of those domino kits when I was a kid ... came with a little bridge and everything. Used to get matchbox cars to go down a ramp and trigger the dominoes. Minutes of fun.

The secret of my success strangeness

2006-11-17T11:15:00.000+11:00

I often get aksed: "Toby, how does I get to be so ~~weird~~ smart as you is?"

My secret is the Brainwave Generator.

This software uses something called binaural beats to stimulate particular Brainwave frequencies. You can use it to help in meditation or in maintaining focus (as I often do, ADD child that I ... ooh look: a room that looks like a cartoon).

The different frequencies of the brain are:

Frequency range	Name	Usually associated with:
> 40 Hz	Gamma waves
13–40 Hz	Beta waves	Attention
7–13 Hz	Alpha waves	Relaxation (while staying awake)
4–7 Hz	Theta waves	Dreams, deep meditation
<>	Delta waves	Deep dreamless sleep

It definitely works, you can feel you mind shifting. I like to get some pink noise or water sounds underneath the tones ... takes the edge off.

I also recommend caution when using this tool. In 2000 I abused the "Creative" setting for hours at a time for several months and went ... a bit weird.

Imagine that ...

Oh

2006-11-16T12:00:00.000+11:00

Mum had surgery yesterday. At about 11 we did a big conference call and said some prayers and gave her a blessing. A crystal may have been involved.

Last I heard from my brother last night was she was in ICU for 24 hours, but that everything went smoothly, no complications or anything, tumour is out, was a "well-defined mass", which is again, awesome - means little risk that in bringing it out it may have dropped some cells that could cause complications . It will be analysed and then we'll know whether she needs chemo or radiotherapy.

So we wait. Again.

Whenever Zeitgeist

2006-11-16T11:30:00.000+11:00

Yay for rain. Yay for closed-off city streets thanks to the G20. Yay for the million years it took me to get to work.

But not so good the most awesome post I just lost because Firefox just froze.

Damn.

Cool Death Metal Band Logos. My favourite names include:
Nunwhore Commando 666
Vomitory
Cock and Ball Torture
Foetopsy
I love metal. But not to listen to. It's rubbish.
Like the Nazis. Cool logos. Bad content.
Apparently the web isn't filled with porn: Only about 1% of pages have pornography.
The Amazon S3 Adventures continue: SmugMug saving $$. It's incredible. I'm using it on my current project.
Which reminds me:Jeff Bezos is one of my guys. A very grand vision.
My Mac is so pretty. I just like looking at it.
Although I have needed to learn all about command line *nix to get my stuff settted up.
Can someone please explain this: OJ Simpson to reveael how he would have killed his wife. You know, if he actually, like, killed her, and ... you know ... stuff.
And how did duckhunt decide if you shot the duck?
Animator vs Animation. The Revenge.

The Dresden Droll

2006-11-14T11:05:00.000+11:00

Friday Micro-Zeitgeist

2006-11-10T11:42:00.000+11:00

Very slack. But you all know this.

In no particular order:

Mum's PET scan came back clear, meaning the cancer hasn't spread beyond her lungs. Which means surgery has been scheduled for next Wednesday. Which is all totally the best case scenario.
Every morning I wake up and think: be happy and grateful - the world is boundless and everything is possible. I don't need reminding, gorgeous girl, great work, a bike, amazing friends, sunshine, chicken avocado bacon burgers, best case cancer.
I bought a MacBook Pro and "switched". Bit of an impulse, but fuck it's sexy. Although the packaging is arguably sexier. Even the foam padding in the box is designed.
This stuff damaged my mind: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). How good is that name - Elastic Compute Cloud? If you are of a geeky persuasion, check it out, it's like science fiction.
Forget hover-cars, it's about commoditised utility computing services.
Borat on Letterman.
John Coltrane.
Crush loves The Other America. Me too. The world is changing.
Obama was on Oprah yesterday. I have $100 that says he is the next US President.

Good on you.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

2006-11-01T09:33:00.000+11:00

A long time between posts.

The last week has been ... intense ... uplifting ... and .... I don't know, amazing? My Mum was diagnosed with lung cancer last week. She smoked about a million years ago, before my brothers and I were born. Although she told me that she may have had some cigarettes while pregnant with me at her Dad's funeral. Explains my stunted development. On the way home from the specialist she was trying to spread the word about the dangers of smoking to my extended family. Despite the fact the Doctor said it pretty much had nothing to do with it. I've tried very hard to not pick on Crush about her smoking, but part of me wants to yell at her.

So in Brisbane being the eldest son for the last week ... hospitals, specialists, and just being there, holding Mum's hand as she freaked out completely. We find out today the results of her Bronchoscopy. Surgery, probably some radiotherapy. And then some hare-brained hippy claptrap like an all-juice diet and meditation. She's going to be fine, and I am really not particularly worried.

In any case, not many links to share.

If you are buying a juicer, make sure you get a cold-press one, rather than centrifugal. It doesn't bruise the vitamins or something.
You can spend $3000 on a two-stage hydraulic press juicer. Which is a bit mental.
Oh, I was healed by a Shaman. I had my Chakras aligned and then some crystals placed on my body and some other stuff. I had my eyes closed for most of it so I have no idea what was happening, but I could here all sorts of sounds and things ... including something that sounded particularly like a Dreamcatcher being waved over me ... I honestly don't know.
I watched The Secret. And it made sense. I joked with Crush that I had become a Shaman (is it contagious?) but secretly, I don't think I was entirely joking.
I sent her a bird to show my love.
All she received was a big black crow on a car. But it was outside a house that has the name "Serendipity". Which is apt for all sorts of reasons.
She's still a skeptic.
But I saw three Ibiseses.
The Soviets (Crush's mates) didn't create Star Trek because they lived in a science fiction fantasy land (and gulags):

The Ministry of Transportation. Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

From We Make Money Not Art.

I just liked that picture.