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Following the 2007 election, the always-eloquent and not-particularly-neutral journo Mungo MacCallum wrote Poll Dancing, an eloquent and not-particularly-neutral account of the political acrobatics the major parties performed in their attempts to win our last conclusive election. His last passage, I think, beautifully captures the sense of relief we felt after the Liberals finally left — the feeling that, at long last, Australians would be allowed to feel good about ourselves again, that the ugliness we had been encouraged to let loose within ourselves could finally be tucked back in shame once more.
After three years of moderately competent — but supremely uninspiring and, at times, baffling — Labor rule, it's worth revisiting that passage again, especially as we face the grim possibility of a return to power of some of Mr Howard's policy masterminds. At least we know the worst excesses of either party will be curbed by minority government.
Kevin Rudd ... demonstrated that one of his first jobs should be to hire a new speechwriter. After ten minutes it was still not entirely clear where we were going. But we knew all too well where we had been. For more than eleven years, John Howard led us on a voyage driven by greed and fear, and parochialism and paranoia, selfishness and racism, bigotry and corruption, and other dark places in the Australian psyche where we never should have gone. It was a mean and ugly trip, and it will take us all a long time to recover. As he left the Wentworth Hotel surrounded by his weeping and cheering entourage of orcs, my main feeling was not of exultation or even euphoria, but of relief — the same sort of reaction as I had to Cathy Freeman's win at the Sydney Olympics, or at the moment, seventeen years ago, when I stubbed out my last cigarette. The result was long anticipated and a fine achievement, but how dreadful I and many others would have felt if it had not happened.
And on that note, spare a thought for Labor's patriarch, Gough Whitlam, who against most expectations has survived to see another Labor government in Canberra. The final word should be his: a great quotation which he used in another context altogether, but which is utterly appropriate for 24 November 2007: E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
It is the last line of Dante's Inferno, describing the poet's return from Hell, and it means: And thence we emerged, to see the stars again.
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I like to think I'm pretty hot stuff in the kitchen (let's not ask about the other rooms). I'm not very adventurous, however. When I'm cooking for just myself, I tend to stick with my signature dish: whatever I have lying around, plus rice or pasta. Whenever I do something a bit more creative, it's worth recording so I don't forget. So, well, why not here?
As boring as my nightly routine is, it represents great strides over my constant nemesis, Past Mark. Past Mark could just about boil an egg, grill tasty cheese on toast, or burn a pop-tart. About four years ago a mate and I realised that we were pretty useless chaps, and that it was time to do something about at least one symptom of that uselessness — inability to cook — before our twenties pounced too aggressively. So we started researching recipes and meeting monthly to host a dinner party and poison our friends. It worked marvellously, forcing us to learn to cook and quickly, and kicking off a tradition that continues to this day. We don't meet quite so often now that I have a stressful job and a stressful lack of access to mum's dishwasher, but the benefits are still there — now, of course, we don't need to learn the basics of cooking; but we do feel pressure to always come up with something new each time we partay it up, dinner-style.
For this week's sesh I obtained a recipe from a lovely co-worker, who says she got it from her mum: lamb chops roasted in fruit chutney. Well, why not? Forequarter chops, sprinkled with honey, vinegar, and minced chilli, bathed in mango chutney, and roasted in tinfoil for 90 minutes then uncovered and cooked for a further 45. This was served on top of mashed potato, with a side of mushrooms, cucumber, broccoli, asparagus, and snow peas. We served herb bread (garlic, oregano, and parsely) as an entrée, and raspberry jelly with low-fat wildberry ice cream as a dessert.
Did it work? Hell yeah, it worked. The only downsides are that it's expensive (if nothing else, you need one $5 jar of mango chutney for every 2-3 diners), and sufficiently involved that you'd want to be cooking for a fair few people before going to the effort. Still, this one's definitely going into rotation.
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Thinking back ...
We're a few games away from the playoffs and we're not playing well. That is, my team is not playing well, and I'm not playing well. Meanwhile the rest of the league have found their form. We're kind of struggling to hang on. I step into the box and go through my usual routine of tapping the plate, digging in, and warning the pitcher to watch out for that gap his fielders have made in deep left because I'm a quality slugger. Then I shape to bunt.
The first pitch is somewhere up near my head and I dive out of the way. The second pitch is a gutser and I pull it foul on one of the lousiest bunts you'll ever see. The third pitch drops down towards the plate and I struggle not to chase it, in the end executing a clumsy half-push-half-stumble towards the ball before skipping away, ball two. "Hey," shouts the catcher, "he went at that one!" "Pull the other one," retorts the umpire, the manager of another ballclub we pulled in because we're short on blues.
I get back into the box and start thinking. I think about whether or not I feel like I pulled out of the bunt in time. I think about all the times, as an umpire, I might have missed a close call and had the benefiting team falsely agree with me. I think about my relationship, as a social ballplayer, to the other clubs in the league. And, for a shameful minute, I think about the league table, our struggle for the playoffs, and the fact that going 1-2 down would put me seriously in the hole. Then I turn to the umpire and say, "No, mate, they're right. I went at that one, it was a strike."
"Pull the other one," he retorts. "Ball two."
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I'm often asked — no, really — how to tell the difference is between Softball and Baseball. This does not present a problem — I simply smile a broad, confident smile, and explain simply, "It's easy. Softball is better."
Of course, there's more to it than that. Softball was invented as a variant of baseball that could be played indoors over winter, but it was popularised amongst girls — who are clearly not good enough to play a real sport — who wanted something to do in the summertime. The ball is larger, the field is significantly smaller, the games are faster, and the pitcher is required to throw underarm. Most of the differences lead softball — when played well, and it usually is, by both men and women — to be a much quicker, more exciting game. Softball is Twenty/20 to baseball's One-Day game.
I occasionally wander down to my local ballpark to watch Canberra's A-grade baseball league games. The standard is much lower than the equivalent men's softball league, but the games are still quite engaging. One of the things I found most striking, after watching a couple of games, was the easy masculinity of the players. Baseball — at least, the games I have watched — seems to be very much a man's game. The players are men the way your father is a man — that simple, confident masculinity that says "Sure, I'm male; I have broad shoulders, I can do stuff with power tools, and I keep losing my keys. So what?" The women — when there were any — were there to help their sons or brothers or boyfriends. As a bloke, I find this fascinating, and somewhat thrilling — in a don't-tell-the-feminists-I'm-not-so-enlightened kind of way.
By contrast, male softball is aggressively macho. The players grunt and groan and scream like That Guy down the gym. When some misfortune befalls them they react like their very manhood is at stake: "That fucktard umpire called me out, so I'm going to spend the rest of the game swaggering around, talking in a deep voice, and loudly announcing my intention to pee standing up next time I need to go potty." Elite softball men act as if they're forever in fear of being called on for playing a girl's game, and so they do everything in their power — short of actually dropping trou — to remind you that they do, in fact, have a penis.
It must be said, this sort of behaviour does not occur at the level I play. Perhaps it's because for my colleagues, softball is a game for the older gentleman, many of whom literally are your father (well, maybe not your father, although there have been rumours ...) — and can therefore be expected to bring your father's easy, responsibility-accepting masculinity to everything they do. Or perhaps — and I prefer this explanation — it's because we suck. If you're an elite player, you will be forgiven for throwing all sorts of tantrums because, it seems, once you have a certain level of talent, you've earned the right to act like a spoiled brat with control issues and some nervousness about his sexuality. If a D-grade player, on the other hand, apes the behaviour of his more elite brethren, the most common response from his team-mates is likely to be, "Who the heck do you think you are? Why don't you shut that foul mouth, zip up your pants, and go back to dropping easy catches like the rest of us?"
And now I'm rather taken with the idea that male softballers who arc up are worried about threats to their manhood. I wonder how successfully I could soothe the savage breast if, next time I'm confronted with a raging ballplayer, I were to remind him that, yes, I'm sure his equipment is still "all there" and he has nothing to prove?
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So I read somewhere that you shouldn't make new year's resolutions. This is easy for me to pull off, as I never make new year's resolutions ... except when being facetious, I suppose, but that never ends well. The alternative to making new year's resolutions is to give each year a theme. I decided to do that for my recent life, and then inflict a navel-gazing 'blog entry on y'all about it.
2007 could be described as The Year Of Growing Up. I took a good, long, hard look at myself, and made some hard decisions about where I wanted my life to go, and what sort of person I wanted to be. I left my job and joined the company, on track to become a project manager. I finally knuckled down and finished my university degree. I started looking in earnest for a new place to live.
And — most significantly — I joined a gym and started my diet. For years I had been telling myself that, because I was extremely active in sports, I didn't need to exercise any more, and my diet was just fine. It wasn't. I dieted for three months before I even got up the courage to weigh myself or set foot in a gym; when I finally did step on the scales, I weighed 136kg. Human beings have no business weighing 136 kilos, and human beings who are only 170cm tall ought to be ashamed of themselves. I finally admitted I was ashamed, and started to do something about it. I don't know how big I got — I estimate at least 140 kilos — but I was still growing in early 2007, and I finally did something about it. I've probably lost about 40 kilograms since then. I guess you could say I looked at the scales, and they fell from my eyes. (boom, tish)
2008 was The Year Of Results. The groundwork I'd laid in 2007 started to bear fruit: I got more responsibility and more interesting tasks at work; I was promoted to National level as an umpire; my weight continued to fall sharply; I found myself a lovely apartment not far from City; I took up hiking and found it a deeply enjoyable — in fact spiritual — experience; I started, finally, to feel happy with who I was.
2009 was, uh, not quite so nice. Actually, it was a shit of a year. When it was over I seriously considered grabbing every calendar I could get my grubby little hands on and burning them in a giant funeral pyre while dancing around them naked and yelling for joy. It's true that I brought it on myself: on Near Year's Eve 2008 I managed to get plastered, and spent much of the evening post-midnight baring my soul to a mate, explaining why 2008 was so awesome, and that I expected 2009 to be better. That's right. I said I expected 2009 to be better. I also may have mentioned something about letting myself fall in love. I'm calling 2009 The Year I Went Off The Rails, but probably a better name would be The Year I Should Have Seen Coming.
So, yeah, 2009 really kicked off a couple weeks later, when my girlfriend dumped me. I was still reeling from this — being a big baby with no sense of proportion — when work dumped the Project From Hell in my lap. This and a couple of other extremely difficult projects saw me spending most of 2009 in the office. I stopped going to the gym. I stopped cooking for myself. I only barely managed to eat healthy by extending the definition of "healthy" to include anything reasonably low-calorie, so that at least I did not put on weight. But I've been pretty well stable for most of the last year, even despite some early-year hiking. I know exactly what I need to do to start losing those kilos again, to get into double figures — maybe even reach my goal weight this year. I just haven't been doing it.
But this isn't 2007, 2008, or 2009. It's 2010, baby. What is this year going to be? I'd like to proffer: The Year I Took Back What Was Mine. Or at least, The Year I Got Back On Track. I've already been promoted, and moved to a different location. Ironically, the work I'm getting now is more appropriate to my new position: so I have less work to do, because in my old job I was being given projects so far above my job description I'd get nose bleeds just reading my to-do list. I'm getting home from work around six, six-thirty each day, and have plenty of time to cook myself something healthy. I need to get back to the gym soon. I need to start going to bed earlier and getting up earlier. These are all small, achievable things, and they will all do wonders for my life. I've already started: I can't wait to go further.
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So I've more-or-less wasted my last day of leave before Nationals. Hey, it's what I do. Luckily there's the Internet (okay, Twitter and TV Tropes mostly) to distract me from the self-loathing. I hope you'll find some of this stuff a pleasant distraction, too.
- What if the new Doctor Who series used the Orbital mix as its theme? I really think this could have worked, and — as awesome as the real theme undeniably is — it would've meant we continued the tradition of the Doctor Who theme being electronic.
- Comparing Rowling's Snape with the one the fans have invented — where a repulsive villain is turned into a sex bomb by inattentive readers because Evil Is Sexy (TV Tropers call this phenomenon Draco in Leather Pants).
- Ralph Lauren caught photoshopping model to make her thinner — drop-dead gorgeous model Filippa Hamilton is considered "too fat" by Ralph Lauren management, who insist that her photos be altered to make her look thinner ... so thin, in fact, that her head is larger than her pelvis. She is later fired for being too attractive. I Am Not Making This Up.
- Speaking of being thought "too fat", here's an illustrated guide to the Body Mass Index. Some of the women pictured are skinny, some are ... not; but you'd have a hard time working out what the BMI scale would have to say about each woman just by looking at her. Also, unless I'm very much mistaken, one of the beautiful ladies pictured is none other than Shauny, whose 'blog I assume you're reading, because you're too smart not to.
- The geekiest tattoo ever seen. 'Tis awesome. (via that drew).
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So early on the morning of New Year's Eve I went for a long-ish bike ride around South Canberra. This time around I brought my camera, a severe lack of sleep, and a bad attitude. The sleeplessness and bad attitude didn't seem to help me much at all, but the camera gave me an excuse to stop and rest regularly, and — of course — to practise with my new toy. I am not now and have never been a photographer, but I do harbour secret dreams of one day being somewhat competent behind the lense.
My first stop was at the Royal Australian Mint in Deakin; more to play around on the oval there than anything else, if only because the Mint itself is being refurbished and not looking its best at the moment.
I started by taking a photo of my tormentor.
I spent a lot of time taking photos of signs (some of the ones not attached today might make their way into a "form one lane"-themed site design). I like signs.
I do agree with the view put forth by the likes of Tom Vanderbilt and Hans Monderman, that most road signs are unnecessary, at worst a distraction and at best a crutch for poor drivers. However, I find there's something oddly charming about the combination of officiousness and helpfulness in so many of our signs. This is not to say that every sign holds that same charm.
The Mint oval is in very good condition and has some nice toys, such as a fake-turf cricket pitch (most Government playing fields use concrete), some very well-maintained practise nets, and lush, verdant grass. I got some quite attractive photos of these two argumentative peewees enjoying the grass, but I repeatedly failed to catch them in action as they head-butted each other. I don't think they were friends.
I walked a little further on. You can always tell you're in Australia because if you take a stroll around the edges of a popular sporting oval you will find at least one discarded beer bottle.
I found two.
I had intended to continue on through North Deakin, but chickened out and took the easier ride on Cotter Road along the outskirts of Yarralumla. That's where the Governor-General lives. I don't know why they advertise it; actually approaching Government House along this route is frowned on by the AFP, although the rich are permitted to play golf nearby.
This part of Cotter Road provides a good view of the Woden skyline, and by "Woden skyline" I mean Lovett Tower and Scarborough House. Lovett Tower is the big white building in the centre of shot. Were I a little closer, it would appear as 26 storeys of ugly (though from a distance, I admit it's quite lovely). Lovett Tower is the tallest building in Canberra by some margin, and nearly twice the height of any other commercial building. It's visible from as far away as Belconnen, and local lore has it that the reason it's so large in the face of strict Canberra planning rules is that, on the day in 1972 (or whenever) it was approved, the height restrictions had expired — and although the Government rushed to fix this oversight, it was too, too late. I've always loved this story, but I was unable to find any evidence for it with my trusty friend Google.
I became fascinated with some of the shots my camera was able to achieve with my stronger zoom lens attached. Even roadside dirt, weeds and flowers arrested my attention.
If the Americans ever decide to do a fake landing on Mars, the Australian landscape would be quite a suitable source for any photographic evidence required.
Shamed by my laziness in Deakin, I decided to take a detour across to Scrivener Dam. The bike paths from Cotter Road past Scrivener Dam into North Canberra are supposed to be the most well-maintained in the Territory, and provide the most enjoyable ride. I wouldn't know: this day's ride was the furthest I've ever travelled along them. It was rather nice, though. I was more interested in the bubbler that had thoughtfully been provided for thirsty riders at the Dam itself. I'd have fallen to my knees and given thanks, if I'd had the slightest trust in my ability to stand again afterwards.
Don't get me wrong, the Dam itself was quite nice, too.
They don't like you getting too close, though, and there are many signs and stickers — not all of them in good repair — advising that we're being watched. Out of deference to the poor men manning the cameras, and despite the heat, I decided to leave my shirt on.
Something tells me, however, that I needn't have worried about the cameras.
The water-side of the Dam is very pretty indeed, and is at the highest level I've seen it in years. I was struck by how little graffiti and damage had been done; maybe it's because the only nearby residential area is hoity-toity Yarralumla, or maybe the region's youths are taking the camera threats seriously.
There is a viewing platform on the (less picturesque) river-side of the Dam, from which one can see the National Zoo and Acquarium and the growth of the new Arboretum. (Why is it called the Canberra International Arboretum?).
On the way to (and, well, from) Scrivener Dam is a lookout, from which one can see Government House without attracting police attention.
They still don't like you to get too close, however. I like that the "no-tresspassing" sign nearest the Lookout also advises that the House grounds use water drawn from Scrivener Dam; it invites the visitor to assume that one is the result of the other. "Don't jump the fence!", it warns, "You may come into contact with lake water!"
There is a display ring around the lookout with some interesting information. About a third of the display is dedicated to the dispossession of the Ngunnawal tribe, and invites the white visitor to try to imagine the humiliation the local Aborigines must have felt, being forced to rely on rich whites for their livelihood — even as the theft of their old way of life remained in living memory. A few signs and display boards are very poor compensation, but it's surprisingly classy, just the same. My photos, naturally, came out poorly. The boards also mentioned that the cedar tree in front of Government House was planted in 1840.
The Government House Lookout also provided a nice view of the bikepath, as six identically-clad riders passed by. They seemed to be enjoying themselves more than I had been.
Government House was built opposite the Molonglo River, which is still quite pretty, despite the presence of Scrivener. I'm trying to work in the phrase "damming with faint praise" but it's not working out well.
The Molonglo is surrounded by introduced Willow trees, which look pretty enough but are actually quite a pest, an ecological annoyance on the scale of blackberries or foxes or Conservatives.
Most of the area around the Molonglo has been claimed by an equestrian club, and I have too many friends who love horse-riding to make any comment there. Somewhere in the middle of the big field where horses gad about gaily is the Yarralumla Woolshed, which is famous for being built in 1904. Now, don't get me wrong, I like woolsheds as much as the next fellow, and have spent many a diverting hour (well, maybe two or three at most) exploring old farm buildings out west. However, it must be said that if there were a monument to Canberrans' inability to properly understand the scale of a timeline, this is it.
I rode back up through Curtin and stopped at the servo there for an ice cream and a cold softie. It turns out that Paddle Pops are only 84 calories; I doubt I could be trusted to use this information for good and not evil. I sat behind the servo (great view of the dumpster, aircon unit and toilets) and enjoyed my Paddle Pop until I noticed the lot behind me. It's an old carpark that is occasionally used by a local detailing company as a workshop and scrap-heap; I thought the bright midday sun and deep shadows would present an interesting challenge (it didn't; my camera is too good) and snapped away.
It's probably the ugliest part of Curtin, and I'm including the govvie flats in my estimate. After I'd taken a few shots a burly fellow introduced himself as the manager of the servo and asked me to piss off. Politely. Seems the company doesn't take kindly to people taking photos on Shell land. My argument that I wasn't actually taking photos of Shell land didn't hold much weight with him; I gather that he didn't consider it his job to care what sort of arguments anyone made against company regulations, and fair enough too: it isn't. So I finished my drink and scampered on home, where I collapsed, exhausted, sore, and sunburned to all buggery.
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When I first wrote the CMS I never bothered to include RSS support, I guess becuase I never use the thing myself (I either remember to keep up with someone's weblog, or I don't). Laurie asked me where it'd got to, and I kind of decided it was time to finally bow before the needs of Web 2.0. After a little research, I can now say that the Form One Lane weblog is the proud owner of its own RSS feed. It seems to work; the first real test will be if it continues to work after I've published this entry. Or, uh, I guess the real first real test will be if someone's able to subscribe to the feed and follow it long-term. But if not, then I guess we at least have RSS theatre; that's kind of cool, right?
There is a bug with it: if I've used any special characters in a main entry (e.g. e acute) some aggregators will throw a tanty. That hasn't happened in the last ten posts, but may at some point in the future. I supposed I could solve the problem with regex, but you know what they say about regex. Isn't that some kind of Happier Living tip — always leave yourself something to do?
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So yeah, there's a photo of me on my website. That's kind of new, not something I usually do (Facebook is an exception; the peeps there are already unlucky enough to know what I look like). The somewhat loopy nature of some of these posts is now explained, at least: I 'blog while hanging upside-down, like a bat with a bad back.
It's hard to recognise myself in the photo, partly because I'm not wearing glasses (or pants), and partly because I look a lot thinner than I'm used to. I've now lost 40kg since I started my diet and exercise programme two years ago; the last 10, however, is proving stubbornly, frustratingly difficult to shift. A part of my plan for kick-starting the weight loss again and shedding the last of my TSA image is to start riding my childhood mountain bike around the place.
This arvo I rode down to my gym (3km away, mostly downhill) then veered off through South Canberra for an extended detour (mostly gentle uphill). So in all I rode about 10 kilometres, mostly uphill. Which, y'know, nearly killed me. Hiking caused me to re-evaluate my idea of what a "steep uphill slope" meant; cycling, however, is causing me to backslide. I gather 10 kilometres isn't very far by cycling standards, so I guess I've a ways to go on the whole "fitness" thing. Oh, well, no doubt it'll be worth it.
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So Santa brought me a new camera for Chrissy, which is so many different kinds of awesome I don't think I could ever catalogue them all. I took some photos of the family, and later some self-portraits, largely as an excuse to play around with depth of field and white-balance and various other photography things I haven't the first clue about. Yes, my life really is just that exciting.
I'm playing around with one of the photos a little later and decide it would probably look pretty cool as part of a website design. Back In The Day I used to re-design websites at the drop of a nerd's beanie, but I'd barely touched this site since I first wrote the design — and the CMS — over two years ago. So while I was re-doing the design, I took the opportunity to re-write the backend as well: back in '07 I was sort of learning as I went with the CMS, so the code was in serious need of re-factoring. And because I become obsessed easily, that's pretty much all I've been doing (apart from visiting dad and breaking my own spirit on my mountain bike, of course) since Christmas.
So the site's been re-designed, and the post-and-archive delivery thing's had a complete overhaul. The code's almost pretty in places (operative word: almost). I'm very pleased with how the design turned out: clean and simple, and looking like it took hardly any work (ha!). The only downside is I can't really test it: I have Windows running IE8, Google Chrome, and FireFox 3.5.5. Safari is choosing not to run for reasons of its own. I'm particularly curious about IE6.
If anyone reads this, mind giving us a little hint about how it looks on your system?
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So there's no particular theme this time, it's just stuff I thought was cool:
- A Pictorial Guide to Avoiding Camera Loss, which outlines a great technique for getting your camera back after you've mislaid it. It's ... it's very funny. Trust me.
- Doom II on a Doom 3 engine, which demonstrates some classic maps for DooM II as they would look if they were written for Doom 3 — and, therefore, what DooM II would look like if made today, and by extension, just how much more exciting DooM II was compared to its sequel. Made Of Win. Speaking of which, here's some rendered top-down DooM II maps, which are surprisingly engrossing.
- And finally, speaking of "Made Of Win", we have Average Cats, which seeks to re-introduce sanity and intelligence to the LOLcat phenomenon. Because, you know, it can.
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So the attempt to return to regular 'blogging was fairly successful, but short-lived. It may be because I am amazingly boring.
I mentioned back in May that I was just one repaired inner tube away from finding out if I could still ride a bicycle with the same gay abandon I did as a little tacker (incidentally, I love that post; I'll likely never make it as a writer, but I can at least make myself chuckle). The variables are actually quite well-controlled here, since the bike is the same one I rode as an 11-year-old.
It was only on Tuesday that I finally got around to repairing the bike, and I discovered that in the meantime I had managed to lose my bike lock, which fact may not prevent me from going anywhere, but which certainly keeps me from staying there once I arrive. I rode down to Phillip to get myself a new bike lock, figuring that I could just carry the bike around with me inside the bike shop. Phillip's a little over 2km away. Should be easy.
Well, I thought it would be easy. Turns out I'm less fit than I thought. I rolled into the shop on legs that weren't entirely sure what dimension they ought to occupy, but which were sure they were still meant to be peddling. This was pretty much the point the nice young men (and nice and hot young lady) pointed out that my bike seat hadn't been adjusted in, like, ever, and that this probably explained why my knees met my ears with every revolution. I had been pondering that very problem.
The ride home was much easier — easier like whoa, as the young'uns do say. Nonetheless, my legs were on fire, and remained on fire until about five minutes ago. One thing that really struck me is that, unlike other punishing activities like hiking and jogging, I don't actually enjoy cycling that much. Maybe my opinion will change as I get better at it. Maybe I need to try riding a real road bicycle instead of a kid's mountain bike.
My time hiking (which, I believe, I've never 'blogged about) introduced me to the concept that, with enough patience and preparation I can go anywhere. This is an incredibly empowering and liberating thought, and something I'll probably expand on later if I ever regain any semblance of my former self-discipline. But it does require patience, and since any round trip over 10km will take more time than I usually have to spare, I need to find some way to get around faster — some way that still affords me a spot of exercise. I think cycling regularly is the single most effective thing I could do to push me down to my weight-loss goal ... so I'd better bloody get to it.
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So every month I have about a hundred bucks to spend on discretionary crap. If I try to save it I find I fritter it away on tiny little things I won't remember (like an extra cup of coffee here, a sneaky chocolate bar there), so I've fallen into a pattern of "buy something big at the start of the month, regret it at the end". Basically I have enough money in my monthly budget to drink alcohol or buy books / CDs / other crap. When I try to do both in the same month (or one as the result of the other), my month-end is spent eating rice and trying not to move around very much.
So, yeah. I think they're pretty sweet t-shirts, and they have one virtue over my usual ill-advised Internet purchases: they're size "L". I don't think I've ever worn a large-sized t-shirt; right around puberty I went from being a tiny skinny kid who swam in "XS" to someone who needed his own pew in Mass.
I once thought that the end result of all my weight-loss labours would be a big label marked "L"; I warned myself that, being stocky and broad-shouldered, I could never expect to be skinny, and would have to make do with the lot of stocky and broad-shouldered men everywhere. However, I'm wearing one of those Large shirts now, and while it's a little too tight to be risked in public as yet, it does promise a future where one day even it will be too big for me. So this evening's trip to the post office has granted me two goals: fit into a Large t-shirt by my twenty-fifth birthday; and one day wear, with a little pride and a lot of self-satisfied smirking, a Medium Threadless tee. I'd better get back to ye olde gym.
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I just did a clean-up of my bookmarks and got rid of a bunch of reminders that, it turns out, failed to remind me of the thing I needed reminding of in time for me to stand reminded when I needed to be. This is the usual result whenever I clean out my bookmarks. However, I also came across several interesting-looking websites and articles which, having enjoyed, I now feel beholden to share with the world. You're welcome.
- Baby's named a bad, bad thing — a compendium of bad ("unique") baby names, each derided with an attached attempt at failed humour in the trademarked Internet House Snark. Bored though I am (and I dare say you are) by Internet House Snark, the website is fascinating simply because of the sheer breadth of bad baby names out there, and the increasingly hysterical explanations proffered by clueless parents. (I also got a kick out of one line,
The child was later mistaken for an amnesiac when, asked by a police officer what her name was she said, crying, "I don't know."
) - Speaking of Internet House Snark, Overheard in New York is a great list of the funny and fascinating things people overhear out of context. Its presence helps, in some small way, to help fill the massive gap left by the beautiful inpassing.org.
- A Great slideshow of "no girls allowed" signs.
- An hilarious story from the New Yorker: Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers, by Yoni Brenner.
- What Hath Captcha Wrought?
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So as you may have guessed from the post title, I'm not dying of swine 'flu. It's also payday tomorrow, so I won't be dying of scurvy, either (sure, I could go get myself a credit card ... but they scare me, like I scare myself).
The end-of-month financial situation was made a lot easier by the onset of influenza last week. It was amazingly rapid: I showed up at the office at 1530 (as is my wont) for a client meeting at 1600. Everything felt fine — indeed, peachy — until I got back to my desk around five, at which point my back began to scream at me. I blamed it on the meeting room chairs and tried to continue working, so the rest of my body decided to pitch in: my face burned, my neck creaked, my sinuses clogged, my brain wandered off on errands of its own, my arms and legs shook, and my lungs took to amusing themselves with impressive and disgusting feats of expectoration. I'm not used to feeling so good as I did that day, so it was a particular shock to find myself falling so quickly from "I feel like a million dollars!" to "even a million dollars couldn't cheer me up!"
Monday was particularly unpleasant: I didn't sleep, my joints shrieked in protest at the mere thought moving (or, indeed, staying still); I burned uncomfortably and shivered uncontrollably; I was thirsty as all get-out; on those rare occasions when I ventured from my bed to get a re-fill of water, I would tend to walk into the walls of my apartment, and with some violence. All these things were shocking and worrying to me.
When Tuesday night rolled around and I still hadn't got any sleep (and had started to leave dents), I rugged up and cajoled my sister into carrying me to the doctor's. My tale of woe didn't impress the doc. "Yeah, sounds like normal 'flu. What's your point?" It's true: what most people refer to as ''the 'flu'' is, in fact, some variant of the common cold. You could quite comfortably argue that I've never experienced real 'flu before. I wonder how many people, the ones who boast so confidently about shrugging off colds right and left, are in the same boat?
One of the side-effects of the 'flu is loss of appetite. I've barely eaten anything since Monday night ... rarely more than one meal a day, and that meal rarely weighed in at more than a few hundred calories. I've lost five kilos in the past week. I wonder how much of this should be worrying me? And I wonder how much weight loss I'll be allowed to keep once I recover fully?
I'm already feeling a lot better, and already working again (but with frequent breaks). I'm working from home this week, because my boss is a little paranoid — arguably he lost several people (including Yours Truly) when a colleague was silly enough to turn up to work a couple weeks ago with an uncontrollable cough, and he doesn't want to see a repeat. But I feel like I could return to the office now (I do wonder how I'd manage the breaks?).
Tomorrow is sis's birthday, and apparently she Really Wants me to attend a lunch in her honour on the other side of town. I don't feel contagious. I even popped down the shops today (they're 50 metres away, no sweat ... now) and indulged in some Berocca and fresh fruit. So? Feeling better, and scurvy crisis averted. Yay!
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Things I've run out of and won't be able to purchase until payday, nearly two weeks away, in order of personal importance:
- Beer
- Fresh vegetables
- Fresh fruit
- Diet coke
- Pepper
- Cheese
- Sweet chilli sauce
- Baked beans
- Eggs
- Salt
- Moisturiser
- Dignity
Two years on and I still haven't got the hang of monthly pay. The upside is I won't be getting many calories for the next two weeks, which means I'll lose weight faster; the downside is that I will die of scurvy.
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Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. — Jamie Zawinski.
So Linux is going darn well for me. Two of the entries on my wishlist are unavailable: lirc isn't working for me at all — it turns out to use it, I'd need to re-compile my kernel, which action forms a sort of terrifying last frontier for me. And as for the Linux tools that are supposed to replace iTunes, well, Amarok is certainly niftier than iTunes, but it's also slower, more crash-prone, and breaks my iPod every time I try to use it (I need to hop onto a Windows computer with iTunes and reformat the memory card). The alternatives I've tried, Banshee and Rhythmbox, are even more dire — Banshee refuses to recognise my 4th Gen iPod, and Rhythmbox crashes so frequently I've not yet been able to work out if it'll do the trick.
On the other hand, I can listen to music (by dint of some effort), and have even been discovering things that were lurking in the remnants of my library that I'd forgotten about, because iTunes refused to play them (mostly Ogg files), which is quite cool. I can listen to music, I can play DVDs, and — because I'm a nerd and I really missed it — I can even program with vi. Yay.
In fact, I spent much of yesterday (when I should have been working, or at the very list gyming) updating this very CMS. Text entry is a lot easier — I've replaced a spot of HTML tags with something resembling wikitext. This involved learning regex, which isn't the silliest thing I've ever attempted, but isn't necessarily recommended, either. But it's kinda cool nonetheless.
So while I was wrestling with regex, I got a call from a bored mate inviting me over for beer and movies. Sounds great! We watched Galaxy Quest and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I loved. Then I staggered home and got back to programming. Like a nerd. But I think I've got this pesky regex thing licked (if this post doesn't explode, it'll be proof), and it was a good night. In all of this, though, I've not done any work. It's after two on a Sunday and I was supposed to get a lot of work done this weekend. Ulp.
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A couple of weeks ago I dropped by the Capital Football office to buy some equipment, find out what my FFA number is, and ask them if they've worked out whether or not I owed them money for my annual fees yet. Lately I've been doing so fairly regularly, with the following (fairly predictable) results:
- Damn you've lost weight;
- Your FFA number is some ghastly long thing you'll never remember, so try not to lose this business card AGAIN; and
- We still haven't figured it out, but rest assured you'll be the first to know.
While I was there I decided to get my hands on a whistle that wasn't a Fox 40. I've now learnt how to blow, and quite effectively, your average, common or garden-variety Fox 40 whistle, but it was touch-and-go for a while there, and I've developed a kind of baffling dislike of the breed. Also, every referee in Canberra uses the brand, sheep-like, which often causes problems on multi-pitch parks. But it turns out Capital Football only sell Fox 40s. Go figure. If you're lucky you can *sometimes* get one of those awful Fox40 Pearls, which have a different tone but sound woeful.
However, I did find out that there was a nice bloke (a referee over at the ANU) who was planning a massive online order for a bunch of Acme whistles. I remember Acme whistles! When I first signed up, back in my salad days (when I was green and went well with balsamic), all new referees were given a free "starter whistle", but my refereeing father disliked them, and bought me a deeper, louder, nicer Thunderer. I loved that whistle, and kept it for ten years ... before it fell through a hole in my kit-bag one black day, and I was forced to learn how to use these new-fangled pea-less things.
So, I got in touch with this nice referee whistle bloke and asked him for a Thunderer and a super-loud T2000. We met today and he provided me with both, allowing me to wax nostalgic and boring for a short while. He then revealed that he'd gone a bit crazy while ordering online (I'm the same with stationery), and had bought far more than we'd all ordered ... so he was giving some away for free.
Long story long, I walked away with an additional (day-glo green!) T2000 and this weird pipe thing that's apparently quite popular in South America. It's a bit harder to blow, but it is ever LOUD! And it's day-glo yellow. A colleague and I wandered to a secluded part of the CBD this arvo and practised with them until shame and self-conciousness forced us back to the office.
So I now have a bunch of whistles, some of them fluoro. I can't see the multi-pitch scenario threatening me again, because in my arsenal I now boast:
- T2000, which I think will become my primary whistle now
- Tornado, which would make a good secondary whistle — it fits well into a pocket, not too bulky
- Thunderer, for when I want extra control, or just feel nostalgic
- Fox40, if I otherwise want a loud whistle
- Metal Rugby Thunderer, if I've dropped all the others in the mud
- Metal holy-crap-it's-old Thunderer that belonged to my Opa (also a ref, and apparently a semi-pro footballer back in the Old Country)
The new guys are all arrayed on my desk beside me, and I can't wait to use them when football resumes. Yes, we refs can get that excited about whistles. Sad but beautiful, no? Okay, maybe just sad.
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So I've been having real trouble with the kitchen tap lately. It's old and dodgy, but I can usually "stop the drop" if I turn the "cold" handle hard enough (this used to drive my ex crazy, since it turned into a habit — and her taps didn't need such treatment).
So this morning I'm turning and turning, and the tap is dripping and dripping. I keep turning, and the handle starts to emit a squeaking moan, the restrained cry of tortured metal that's too old and too dignified to scream. Still the tap drips, and still I turn. I turn and turn, and the squeak becomes quite alarming. Somewhere below, in the dense, unfathomable heart of the ancient plumbing, a knocking noise begins. At this, my room-mate[0] rushes into the kitchen. "Careful!" he shouts, "don't faucet!"
Boom-tish.
[] Note: I haven't a room-mate. I live alone, and every night I cry lonely tears of joy in celebration of my freedom.
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So it's after eleven on a Saturday night and I'm dealing with computer problems. I guess after all this time as a project manager I needed to restore my geek cred. Plus we got drunk last night, so I can't afford another Night Out On The Town until next payday, which is nearly a month away.
I don't have a home computer, as such. What I have is an ancient laptop that I use for watching DVDs, set up atop an entertainment unit with a large flatscreen monitor (this makes up for another lack, that of television). I could theoretically use it for 'net surfing (like I am now), but it's a bit of a pain, what with it being attached to an entertainment unit and all.
Basically, my laptop developed a major problem, in that whenever you attempted to access a file, Windows would wipe the file's directory. One of the uses to which I put this laptop is to play music I've bought from iTunes, so you can imagine how pleased I was to see my library culled. I tried to fix the problem, and somehow managed to make my hard disk non-bootable. So I installed a second instance of Windows XP and backed up as much as I could, then abandoned the poor thing for a couple of weeks.
Yesterday a mate gave me a copy of Linux System Rescue CD (while we were drinking; I did well not to lose it!), which I used to wipe my hard disk and start again from scratch with a clean install of Windows. Naturally, my "clean install" (I have lost my original installation discs, but another mate gave me an "enhanced" copy which includes a bunch of useful tools and tweaks) is a little buggy — it includes some setting on the display adaptor which makes any (legally purchased) copy-protected DVDs I try to play think I'm stealing; to watch them, I have to (illegally) decrypt and rip the buggers, which gives me a good little chuckle but is also a right pain in the arse. Less annoyingly (since I don't use it that often), it also does not include any drivers for my laptop's NIC.
So, I hopped back into Linux System Rescue to try to find out some more about my NIC and download some drivers. I've been on it for a while now and, I must say, I miss Linux. I ran it as my main OS for several years on a previous computer, more out of elitism than any real need (though it was nifty for programming projects), but (apart from some UNIX projects at uni, and tooling around on friends' Macs) I've not used anything other than Windows since 2002, and I quite miss running Linux. I'm not enough of a geek to take full advantage of the thing, but it must be said, Linux is fun. It's fun to use the command line. It's fun to play around with Vi. It's fun to test out various Linux equivalents of familiar applications and work out what they do better and worse and what possibilities never even occurred to you while running Windows. I've really missed it. So while I'm downloading RealTek network card drivers, I figured I'd download Linux as well.
Of course, before embarking on a dual-boot Linux project, one must first ask: what should I use? I started my Linux life with Mandrake, back in the day, and hated it with an unholy passion. I found RedHat quite serviceable, but its package handling drove me crazy, and besides, I just wanted to try something new. Ubuntu doesn't appeal, and I've no explanation as to why. After some industrious but aimless clicking, I stumbled across this Linux distro quiz, which recommended openSUSE, Fedora (né RedHat), and Linux Mint. SUSE may have changed in the last ten years, but Back In The Day it had a bit of a scary reputation for a non-techy like Yours Truly, so I'll pass on that one; I'm rejecting Fedora out of hand because I want to try something I've never used before, so: Linux Mint it is. I've also placed my grubby paws on straight Debian, so I've something to fall back on if Linux Mint doesn't work out.
So when that finishes downloading, I can hop back into Windows, try to get network connectivity going, and burn a Linux Mint CD. Because I'm an incorrigible (if incompetent) geek, I'll probably then stay up all night trying to get Linux to work on an ancient laptop. I'll be super-mega-happy excited if I can get wireless networking and my remote control working, too — the latter looks promising. And I'll be one of the happiest men around if I can find some way to get games working (I play MVP Baseball 2005 with a wireless controller from my couch, and pretend I own an Xbox. My final issue is the ability to run iTunes on Linux, but apparently I needn't worry. Cool.
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So, I'm still at the office. There exists no good reason for me to be here still: I simply couldn't get enthused about my work an hour ago, and I can't get enthused now. I've very little work left to do, and if I'd just get it done I could leave very very soon — could have left before seven. These things are easier to bear when you've someone else to blame, but there's some interesting stuff on the Internets these days.
- How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, a speech by one of my favourite authors of all time, Philip K. Dick, gives us some interesting insights into the way the great man thinks.
- Jay Heinrichs' How to Teach a Child to Argue arguably gives us some interesting insights into the way Mr Heinrichs thinks, too, but that's a topic I'm not so interested in. The article also provides, however, a jolly good read and an intriguing argument (ahem) for the benefits of raising children as rhetoriticians. The article, and the now-defunct weblog, are interesting enough to make me want to buy his book.
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So here is the film supporting Australia's bid to host the World Cup. Although I enjoyed the cameo from Mr Rudd, the whole thing just seemed a bit ... well ... boring. "Come play" is seriously the best we can do? If you visit the website, it talks about Australia being the world's greatest playground. Well, that's not a bad pitch, but it doesn't seem to come through in the vid at all.
And there's something about the film that just seems to suggest its creators weren't that confident they could rely on the enthusiasm of the average Aussie. I think it's the exaggerated stunts; football, the film seems to argue, cannot possibly be interesting unless you can pull off a triple-backflip-and-half-pike before punting the ball over the shoulder of a quivering model in a bikini. While there's some effort to show off some spectacular Australian locales (particularly those that lie nowhere near any potential match venues), on the whole the film just doesn't manage to get me interested in the game itself, let alone excited about the prospect of Australia hosting it. I don't know the process FIFA use to determine a winning bid, but hopefully it doesn't rely too much on our lacklustre advertisers.
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I mentioned some cool-looking 'blogs last entry; it seems only right to point out that the awesome Zoe is back in action. Also:
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So it's time to clean out the hyperlink bucket again. Here's some stuff that caught my eye recently, and classified as Awesome:
- Tube Bar prank calls
- A series of recorded prank phone calls that were the inspiration for Bart Simpson's famous jokes.
- Comfort Food: My Life With Lasagna
- An entertaining and touching short story from Double X magazine, written by Amy Bloom. I'll have to keep an eye out for her books.
- Burned by the Angry Mob
- A 'blogger's tale about ... well, a whole lot of stuff, really. But it's very funny, so go read.
- Crush Test Dummy
- Very funny post about (among other things) the dangers of going without sex, from someone who looks like a very entertaining 'blogger. Someone to keep an eye on ...
In addition, I've come across an interesting-looking 'blog: Back in Skinny Jeans, and its sister Noshtopia, which I suppose are the sort of 'blogs the always-amazing Shauny was talking and thinking about while writing her secret 'blog (and later amazing book) Dietgirl. I wish I'd started reading things like this a long time ago.
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So we didn't work nearly as effectively as I'd planned today. However, the plan to bash through the week's workload today at least gave me a reason to get out of bed and open up the ol' laptop on a public holiday. So once the workday failed to pan out, I used this magical extra time to do some programming instead. Some of what I've changed affect only the CMS, which means the extra functionality will be of interest only to me unless I decide to clean this baby up and make her into a genuine light-weight alternative weblogging product that anyone can use. Which will probably never happen. All the updates:
- Fixed annoying bug I'd not noticed before that was preventing all but the latest ten posts from showing.
- Installed captchas on every entry to guard against spambots. These are special captchas, a project of Carnegie Mellon University, and are a great idea.
- New CMS functionality — can delete individual comments straight from the web interface, without having to access the database directly.
- New CMS functionality — can now delete all comments associated with one post, in case of "take off and nuke from orbit" spam situations (I used this repeatedly today).
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So, inspired by last night's tomfoolery, and a frustrating day of slow testing (yes, I know it's a public holiday, the project team reminded me), I've started working on my CMS for the first time in, oh, two years. Most exciting development: I've finally added the ability to delete spam comments from the web interface. Most annoying development: it turns out that I'm getting hit by dozens of spam comments every day.
It's time to start learning how recaptchas work.
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So I've been working incredibly long hours lately, and thus not getting much sleep. Weekends would normally provide a chance for a little bit of relief in this area, but I spent Saturday refereeing football — then went out with bro and some mates to see Terminator Salvation, which was entertaining but didn't impress me much (never trust a director who invents a stupid nickname for himself), followed by an evening of fireworks and pool at the Uni Pub, which impressed me a great deal. There were two outcomes from my Saturday: firstly, I slept all day Sunday and consequently Sunday night at this very laptop, and secondly, we created something beautiful.
In fact, beer and pub pool impressed us so much that, inspired by an unconscionably awesome tweet from the great biorhythmist, we started riffing on bad Goldfinger puns. The results, set lovingly in a handcrafted website possible only thanks to a certain 'blogger's sleeplessness, will be forever recorded at The Goldfinger Pun Treasury.
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So, via the always-admirable Andrea, here's the trailer for the new Sherlock Holmes film. I need to pay more attention to the outside world. This looks awesome!
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Last Sunday the agéd father and I hiked our way up to the top of Mount Ainslie, which was awesome. I've always enjoyed the Mount Ainslie walking trails, and I found that I enjoyed the experience of climbing to the top even more when I could combine it with my father's company and, let's face it, a rare moment of sobriety. Oh, yes, I've been up that hillock before, but I may have had a few. Dozen. It was Dad's first time up and, given that he is essentially half-robot (Doctors: "We can rebuild him, we have the technology; ... but we are on a budget"), our purposeful charge in many ways resembled a slow saunter. We were passed by fitness junkies getting their jog on; middle-aged spinsters in cardies walking their dogs; young couples carrying their kids; gorgeous European backpackers disgusted at the sight of us fat old men; and, sad to say, the elderly and infirm. But, though we gazed longingly, we resisted the urge to visit the Fat Guy's Reward Ice Cream Van at the top, and there's no better way to work up a sweat. We're planning to make it a regular thing; I'm already looking forward to seeing a different pair of disgusted gorgeous European backpackers this weekend.
The many benefits of a regular waltz up the disabled ramp at Mount Ainslie notwithstanding, it wasn't exactly the sort of workout that's going to blast the lard off my arse. (Actually, years of softball, hiking, and walking up the stairs to my 10th-floor office have left me with arse and thighs you could moor a battleship to, if that's your idea of a good time, but my upper half is still regularly mistaken for the Hindenburg). I bid my beloved relative adieu, and wandered off to the gym, where I was next to useless. I need to go more often. Like, at least once a week would be nice.
So I was quite excited to get my bike home the other week. I did fix up the rear wheel problem, but when I tried to ride it again, found that the valve on the front wheel's inner tube was damaged, and I needed to replace that. But that was some weeks ago. What have I done since then? Well, I've taken the front wheel off. The bike looks kinda cool sitting in my lounge room upside-down. I should probably do something about it, so that maybe I can enjoy riding it. But I don't seem able to get any of that sort of stuff right at the moment.
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I'm not going to say much about Days With My Father, it's better you just see it for yourself. The writing is beautiful, and passionate, and the gorgeous and personal photographs resonated with me quite deeply. I hope they do the same for you.
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So the company gives us a Christmas Bonus in April. They hate it when we call it the "Christmas Bonus", because, after all, it's not paid around Christmastime, and in any case, "Christmas Bonus" implies they won't take it away from us even if we, say, parade around in public wearing nothing but a loincloth with the company logo on it (not that I've, er, considered such a thing). So I guess we call it the Christmas Bonus because, if nothing else, it annoys the bean-counters. I like annoying bean-counters.
For many months I'd been planning to by a bike with my bonus. Something I could ride to work with. Yeah! That'd kick-start my fitness programme all over again! But sometime between when I received my April paycheque and when I attempted to spend it foolishly, my brother reminded me that I still owned a bike. It was stored in the deepest, darkest, most spider-haunted recesses of my parents' deep, dark, and spider-haunted back shed, but it was a bike and it was mine, and it would cost me nothing but a little time, a little labour, and a lot of spider bites.
So I braved the Parent Trap on Saturday night, after football (football! Don't get me started!), rescued my bike, replaced the inner tubes, and listened patiently as my bike enthusiast father showed me how to replace the wheels. This was, after all, my first time in the company of a bike in twelve years (which, as we've established, is half a lifetime), so it was about time I did some sitting and patient listening. When it was done, Dad drove us home and stayed for dinner. That was rather nice.
Sunday was the big day. On Sunday I would ride down the nearest large shopping centre, 2km away, get some groceries and grog, and ride home again. Should be a doddle; I walk it every week. Turned out ... it wasn't so easy. It was, I must admit, just like riding a bike; I hadn't forgotten. However, I was having control problems, and finding it much more tiring than it should have been. I struggled the two k's down the shops, locked her up, did a decent shop (adding ten kilos or so to my return journey, of course), hopped back on the bike, got half-way home, and realised why the bike was becoming increasingly hard to control: the wheels were off-centre! Yes, really. We'd somehow managed to stuff up putting wheels on a bicycle. Is there an easier job out there that I could stuff up instead? If there is, I'll find it, and stuff it up.
About half a kilometre from home, the tyre jammed hard against the frame, and the rear wheel would no longer turn. I guess carrying heavy shopping and a heavy bicycle for five hundred metres is much better exercise than anything I'd planned for the day, so there's definitely a silver lining there. But I looked a right pillock wearing a helmet and carrying a backpack full of groceries and a bicycle full of suck through Woden. Oh, well. The bike has no lights, of course, so I'll not get a chance to try again until next Sunday. But when I do — watch out! I think I worked out all the kinks before I got my mechanic on when fixing things up Sunday night. And then I'll cut up a swell. Oh, yes. I'm on my way ...
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I'm a couple years late, but if you've not already seen it, please enjoy this New Yorker profile of FBI agent Ali Soufan, lead investigator into the Al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole. Apart from the provocative lead question, "Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from preventing 9/11?" (answer: heck yes), there are also fascinating insights into the way these chaps do their work, and the sort of results they can achieve when they aren't futzing around in politics — as security expert Bruce Schneier (hee) pointed out in his excellent book Beyond Fear, the FBI and CIA achieved great results using existing, pre-9/11 methods, they just didn't try using them properly until given the post-9/11 incentive.
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Many Australians take the opportunity of the Anzac Day holiday as an invitation to get drunk and gamble. Still others attend Dawn Service (or even visit Gallipoli or the Kokoda Track), to remember and pay respects to the thousands of brave Aussies who died in service of country and/or empire. Some do all three, and on at least one, scandalous occasion, a few Aussies tried to do them all at the same time.
My weekend was rather quieter. I used the time to catch up on some reading and some gymming. And, if I'm honest, a teensy bit of drinking. I also found out why I don't normally use the gym two days in a row (however, the gym was --- I thought --- closed on Saturday, and I felt up to another trip on Monday, and didn't really want to waste a long weekend) --- my arms and especially my legs are on fire, even now. Ten years of umpiring has bequeathed me with thighs you could moor a boat to, and a gym regimen that includes recumbant cycling, rowing, and squats ensures that, while I may come away with burning legs, I'll never lose any definition or strength. So, yay. I just wish the rest of my body would behave so well. I need a smaller belly and better-toned arms, and I'm getting a little impatient about it.
I finished three books over the weekend: Wyrd Sisters, As They See 'Em, and Jocko, and started Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. Terry Pratchett books count as a sort of "comfort food" for me, and I'm always re-reading one book any time I'm unhappy (most of the time, these days). I'll review the other three in detail later, but the mere fact I was able to get well into them over the course of a rainy weekend should tell you a lot about how interesting they are (or, alternatively, how boring I am).
I did go out on Friday night, with a few mates after work. We went to the Tongue & Groove, a new, trendy pub I'd never before visited. It seems like a popular haunt for Tax Office public servants, for better or worse. At least it meant that no-one thought I was a prat for wearing shit & tie to a pub. After a while we split into two groups, and my group headed off to dinner at Kingo's, then pool and dancing at Transit Bar. Transit have an "Indie night" on Fridays, and when they say "Indie", they don't mean The Killers or Katy Perry (although they do mean Kings of Leon, so they're not perfect). I love all three, but I, of course, am not indie.
After we lost the pool table, in a dreadful showing full of tears and recriminations, we took to observing the hipster kids on the dance floor, and adopting our best dance moves to the occasion (mine, needless to say, is the Depressed Cure Sway, and it's not very dynamic). Canberra's hipster scene is a little out-of-date; they ride BMXes and wear thick glasses and ACTION blazers. Still, it was fascinating to watch the fragile kiddies rock out ironically to the music of my youth ... at least, until one incautious DJ dared to play Vampire Weekend. Now, I love "Oxford Comma" as much as the next guy, but the combination of self-consciously meaningless music and rich boys in lady jeans and working-class flat-caps started to get to me, and I downed my G+T and fled for the fresh air. My departure precipitated similar flight from others who had also been hanging on as long as they could, and I felt a little better, a little stronger.
You know what would be cool, though? If the hipsters revived old dance moves ironically. I'm particularly looking forward to being able to get away with the Batusi and Mashed Potato. C'mon, guys, stop fooling around with dumb haircuts and start to work on what's important!
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The great Terry Pratchett wrote memorably in his Discworld novels (particularly Sourcery) about "particles of inspiration". In Pratchett's novels, creative thoughts arise when a character is hit with one or more tiny particles, sleeting through the universe, on a mission to provide some deep insight to a properly receptive mind. This isn't just a one-off humorous conceit; Pratchett shows us what happens when these particles miss, hitting the wrong mind and giving uncreative characters strange ideas they aren't prepared to cope with (and leaving creative characters bereft of the one leap they need to pull of something extraordinary). We're also treated to a discussion of how one might attempt to increase the "inspiration receptors" of one's mind, which attempts involve consciousness-altering drugs more often than not.
Seth Godin has a great post about using hard work and intelligence to help those of us who aren't particularly creative or blessed with large inspiration receptors keep up with those who are. (Via LeviFig).
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If you're like me, you'll agree that windmills of all kinds (electricity-generating wind turbines included) are ever so beautiful. Slate magazine are promoting a selection of photos of windmills and wind farms, and they are simply stunning. Make sure you keep clicking long enough to enjoy photos 19 and 20 in particular.
So when do we get more of these babies in Australia?
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What do you call it when a bunch of American right-wingers take the streets in their hundreds to protest against tax cuts? If you said "fluoridation", you'd be wrong: the word is "teabagging", mercilessly mocked by The Daily Show and ('blog link via 'Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony) David Shuster (video ripped by Think Progress).
I don't plan to do much politblogging (I'm a catblogger, always have been), but some things are too damn funny to pass up — especially when we add a plea for snowballing into the mix.
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So I've been feeling my age a lot lately. Not that, of course, twenty-five years on this Earth could be considered old by any rational definition ... but when you feel the Dreaded Quarter-Century lying in wait just a few short months away, rationality can take a running jump.
The catalyst is probably my visits, with mates in a similar state of elderly decay, to Canberra's night-time hot-spots, which select locales could fairly be described as a rock spider's dream. My recent commitment to sobriety, of course, has done nothing to help me conceal to myself the horror inherent in my mates' and I throwing ourselves into the mindshare of little kids with fake ID, fake smiles, fake faces and inappropriate clothing (it's cold outside, children). In a few short years, we'll be old enough (biologically speaking), to father some of those tots.
It doesn't help that our bodies are starting to let us down. A slightly-younger colleague and I recently wasted a morning tea break complaining about the increasingly decrepit state of our bodies. I'm developing wrinkles at an alarming rate (M— says this is because I'm cheerful and always smiling, a characterisation I'd never considered), and my colleague is going bald. Naturally, we received no sympathy from our 40+ co-workers, who refuse to accept the validity of a navel-gazing young adult's fear of turning twenty-five. But for us, it's a case of realising that we're at about the point where one should start behaving like a grown-up, and I for one feel like I've not yet taken the time to enjoy being young. I suppose everyone feels that way, but I've spent most of my youth overweight, poor, and working insane hours at the office. How'm I going to spend the next few months? Well, there aren't any changes a-brewin' over the horizon ...
So it's the tenth anniversary of The Matrix, which, again, has us all looking nervously over our shoulders for the Grim Reaper. Some mates — and my newly be-birthdayed brother — came around for a Matrix Marathon and barbequeue, an event made extra-interesting by two hitherto-unconsidered facts: one, I don't have a barbequeue, and two, no-one could agree on the plural of "Matrix". To use Matrices, the Latin variant, gets you teased as a maths nerd (which is to say, I will tease you as a maths nerd). Matrixen, on the other hand, will get you teased as a geek (which is to say, I was branded impossibly geeky). The last resort, Matrixes, naturally gets you teased for not knowing that Matrixes is not a word. Oh, dear.
So the plan was The Matrix, The Animatrix, The Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions, and then the similarly-themed, underrated and Aussie-er Dark City. We dicked around a bit on YouTube first (as you do) — I learned about Sifl and Olly, others discovered the sublime beauty of les blaireaux — but ultimately had no excuse, other than age, to explain why we conked out well before the finish line. The Matrix was every bit as good as we remembered it; The Animatrix, which I'd never seen, similarly awesome; The Matrix Reloaded not as offensive as we recalled (but we still shouted unanswerable questions at the screen); the others will need to wait until another night. Will Neo escape? I'll have to rely on my memory, unless we can re-join.
M— stayed back a little after the others headed home, and we talked about growing old, inability to withstand Matix marathons, and things we can all do as a group (paintball comes to mind). I ventured to suggest that I missed those days when we'd go out on the town and get our dance on and get blotto (not necessarily in that order, as anyone who has seen me dance will attest). M— pointed out, quite reasonably, that times have changed; we no longer have the free time, nor the enthusiasm as a group, and besides — isn't that a little immature? We're damn near grown-ups now.
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So it's well past time I did something about comment spam. It should be fairly trivial to ring something up (at the very least, I'll need to add something to the GUI that will let me delete comments, possibly en masse for posts infected to the "take off and nuke from orbit" level). It's just a matter of time. Perhaps when my current project ends at work and I take some TOIL (I will be getting TOIL, right, boss?) I can concentrate on a li'l programming. It's been a while.
So, apart from the spam, I went on the Internet, and I found this. There's some interesting 'blogs out there ... Ruhe seems to be showcasing some splendid photos every day, for one, but the 'blogs I've been most interested in lately have been of the self-help variety. Sad but true! The Art of Nonconformity, The Real Delia and The Art of Manliness all shoot from different directions, but clearly aim for the same target: how to be a grown-up. It's a difficult concept for people of my generation to grasp: after all, adult behaviour went AWOL with the Boomers, which gives us precious little to enjoy in the way of good role models. We all need to do some private, individual thinking about which rules and behaviours are appropriate and which we needn't bother with; what it means to let loose and have fun, and what it means to be an adult; and how we can live up to the example set by our grandparents or great-grandparents, and whether we think it's worthwhile.
But while we're grappling with such issues, sit back and enjoy Will Ferrell's terrifying encounter with his landlord, Pearl.
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So it's Holy Thursday. What this day means to you will depend on your views on religion, your culture, and your home. To an Australian, it's the day before the Easter long-long weekend, four days of partying with maybe an attempt to get to church if you're up to it (but no pressure). It means you won't be at work today, or if you are, you'll have a half-day, or if you don't, you'll still have a fairly relaxing time because nobody else is around and hey, if they aren't working hard, why should you?
Like many Aussies, I'm conflicted about my faith. It's a deeply personal (and boring) subject, so suffice it to say I'm taking baby steps back to the flock. It's the tradition around here to give up something of value around Lent, or to attempt to drop a vice (quit smoking, cut back on serial killings, and so on). I view fasting as a way of showing respect for the Lord --- and for yourself. I was going to give up sex, but (as friends were kind enough to point out) that would be too easy at the moment --- and in any case, ironic self-mockery kind of misses the point of the holy month. So I gave up boozing instead.
This quickly became a problem. Never have I attended so many parties, pub crawls, nights out and just general quickies after work, in such a short time, as during Lent this year. When we add to that the constant stream of friends and co-workers expressing their fascination with the concept, "I hear you've not had a drink in weeks. What's with that? How do you even do that?", we find a Mark who is thirsty and frustrated all the time.
What does Easter mean to me? Well, it's a time to reflect on the sacrifice Jesus made for us, and the miracle of His resurrection. It's a time to re-read the Gospels. And it marks the last time in a long while that I'll have to spend a weekend dry ...
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BBC News reports that a referee in England's Manchester Publicity league cautioned a player for farting during the taking of a penalty. Allegedly, the Chorlton Villa player was deliberately trying to distract the penalty-taker, who missed. Chorlton manager Ian "Tready" Treadwell is quoted as saying, "While I won't condone the actions of the players, it is an emotive game and some of the players were sent off for entering into conversation with the referee." According to this unsourced 'blog post, the sent-off player was the 'keeper, who was perhaps understandably upset that his brilliant save was nullified (the penalty was re-taken, and this time made good).
I hate to admit it, but when one comes to discuss bad referee decisions, there are some real humdingers out there, especially at local level. There aren't nearly as many as we find ourselves accused of, and they don't justify poor player behaviour, but they are out there, and sports officials would do well to recognise it and work on limiting this sort of thing. I wonder what the regional assignor had to say about this call?
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So it's been a couple of weeks since the last time I managed more than five hours sleep in a sitting. Going to bed extremely late and getting up early might have something to do with that. Who can say for sure?
I'd like to say the whole "always incredibly tired" thing isn't affecting my work. However, the third page of notes from one of Friday's meeings reads, ominously: "The vole is the only mammal that can expand to three times its size. Coincidence???" Voles weren't even on the agenda! Also, I have a sneaking suspicion I wore my underpants on the outside today; everyone is so polite, how would I even know?
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So I'm sitting here waiting for an American to show up. This happens a lot to us foreigners. Eddie Izzard once posited that Americans suffer a national addiction to old war films, and always see themselves as leading the final cavalry charge --- "I see we've arrived in the nick of time once more. Splendid! How I prayed we should not be too soon!" And why not? It worked well for them the last time we had a couple of World Wars.
We were up late doing some other project stuff anyway. Now that's done, I decided to do my expenses for the first time in three months (um, oops). It turns out the company's online expense claiming piece of Java nonsense has changed a bit since last time I bothered to ask the company for some of my money back, and I need to sit through a massive software upgrade. So much for that idea.
The night wasn't a total "work 'til you drop" mess, though. I even went to the gym for the first time this year! My weight-loss efforts have been relegated to the background over the past ... um ... 12 months, largely because of a regrettable period in my recent history where I all but abandoned such luxuries as gyms and salads in exchange for the arduous task of swanning around Canberra theatres and restaurants with a pretty girl on my arm. Well, that's a mistake I shan't repeat in a hurry, I can tell you! It took me a couple of months, but I've decided to emerge from the mire of the emotional wreckage a New Man, intent on taking over the world if necessary, one treadmill at a time! And while I'm at it, I may as well return to 'blogging.
I'm Mark. You won't remember me, but I've turned over a new leaf, and now I'm back. Er, hi.
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There appears to be a sooty footprint on the ceiling above my desk. I've no idea how it got there, but I'm sure it would make a great story.
Six days remain before my second luniversary (?) at the flat. My agent chose to celebrate the occasion by organising an inspection. Personally I'd have gone with a cake and booze, maybe some paper hats, but perhaps I'm just odd. "Most people I know think that I'm crazy" ...
Saturday was spent washing clothes and watching Firefly. Not a bad way to relax. On Sunday sis dropped by and helped me clean up the place in exchange for dinner. She's a professional cleaner, which is to say she gets paid to clean things (I just get kicked). Which is to say, she's really good at keeping things clean, whereas I'm just good at being kicked.
She's too damned fussy, though. Turned up with presents — "Here's some dishwashing detergent, because I knew you'd be using a brand I didn't like." (I am. I'm using Black & Gold. We can't all afford fancy "Earth" stuff.) "Here's some liquid soap. It looks neater than dowdy old bars, and real estate agents prefer it." "Here's some soap specifically designed for zero-G kitchen use." "No, don't use that stuff to clean the floors. Here, look what else I brought."
I was torn between being grateful, outraged, and amused. The real estate agent's note — "apartment is being kept in excellent condition" — confirms it, though. I'm going to have to practise making that pasta sauce sis really likes.
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Lotes databases are great. I've started referring to them as "free time generators". The periods when Notus is frozen have given me plenty of time to catch up on my thumb-twiddling. Productivity, what's that? I'll work harder, not smarter.
Every Easter for the last several years, Dad and I and two of our junior umpires have headed down to Melbourne for the annual boys' softball tournament at Dandenong. It's always great to go south of the border from time-to-time, witness new ways of doing things (particularly Victorian drivers). After visiting for so many years, our Spanish is starting to get quite good, too.
This year we broke with tradition a little by inviting my sister along. She had been to Melbourne years before to play in the girls' tournament over at Waverley, but had never been as an umpire, nor attended the boys' event. It was an interesting experience for her. The major benefit was probably that she experienced Victorian umpire coaching for the first time (the Mexicans tend to be more brusque, but also more effective, than us in the ACT).
As for me, I had more fun than I think I've had at this tournament in years. I suspect part of it is being a Level 5 umpire now; you aren't treated any differently (the players don't know what level an umpire is, nor should they care), but I think I may have approached the tournament with a different attitude from what I have in the past. Perhaps less worried about screwing up and more worried about enjoying myself.
A highlight (or lowlight) of the tournament: I heard, in my three morning games, the three worst things a catcher can say to an umpire: 1) "I feel sick, and I really don't want to catch today, I told them I didn't want to play catcher, I want to go back to bed"; 2) "I'm so hungover right now, I can barely see the ball" (somehow this excuse never quite cuts it for an umpire, though); 3) "You look pretty tough, that's good, because you'll need to be with this pitcher". Want to see my collection of bruises?
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Today someone asked me if they would need a stairclimber to carry a RAM chip. That is the single most awesome thing to happen this week. Possibly I'm just easily-impressed.
I have a 3 Mobile broadband modem for work now. The Internet access in the project offices is worse than dial-up (no, really, we checked. As a result, the Project Director offered us all free modems. They're to be used whenever we're on a project where Internet access is hard to come by. I think this fits the bill. Whenever we overload the office connection again, we just need to whip out the USB modems and log in to 3. Bliss. The ideal for us all would be some sort of prepaid plan, so we could pay money to use it when we're on a project that needs it, and not pay when we're not. But 3 Mobile don't give you that. They're clearly the best of the lot, though: $50 a month for 4gb a month, and you can cancel and resume at any time with no penalty. Not quite prepaid, but not bad.
I had a bit of trouble signing up. The fifteen-minute activation procedure took about fifty minutes, most of which I spent arguing with the activation guy. Because I'm already a 3 Mobile customer with my personal phone, he couldn't understand why I wouldn't want to direct debit my modem use fees from my personal bank account. But because I'm damn near broke and anyway the company will be paying for this, thank you very much, I couldn't understand why he couldn't understand. When he finally understood it was for work purposes, he then asked me for the company ABN (which I don't know) and hinted that he'd like me to set up an official company account with 3 Mobile. Yes, that's not really an option, either.
But the little modem works beautifully. I have a great connection almost all the time. And why would you go over 4gb in a month for work? That's a lot of email.
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Some of the tools the company prescribe are really useful in increasing one's free time. That is to say, the long freezes they inspire in Notus Lotes lead to plenty of time to do one's own thing. Provided, of course, that "one's own thing" is not defined as "going home, drinking a bottle of vodka, and collapsing in bed", which is about the way I'd like to define it right now. There's a trap there: vodka is not very appropriate today. As a young lad of Irish descent, I should be drinking beer, or at least whisky. I guess I'll just add that to the list of things I'm getting wrong these days.
Eh, it's not so bad here. I mean, I'm gasping for a drink, but I have some lovely jazz blaring out of my computer, a friendly co-worker on company IM, and ... well, there's not much else going for me at the moment, really. Oh, well. There could be killer bees in here with me.
Easter hols coming up soon. It will be interesting to see how work deals with this. It's not looking pretty. With luck, though, by 0630 on Friday I'll be on the highway, heading down for a weekend of delight and debauchery in that most wonderful of cities, Melbourne. Well, to be more accurate, I'll be umpiring softball. Where other people will use Easter to give thanks at Mass, or even just spend time with family, I'm off to a foreign city to cop abuse at the hands of incompetent coaches. It's traditional! I've been at it for 10 years now; soon I'll have spent more Easters at softball than not.
And with that, and one more incredibly-long freeze, I think I might just give up and go home. It can wait until tomorrow. And if it can't, well, there's only so many hours of work they can expect from me. So, "thrrp" ought to sum things up well enough. I'm for bed.
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Surprise! I am still alive, and 'blogging from work. I don't really have any choice, because there is no Internet access at home. That's right, I moved out. I've been in the new flat nearly for one month now. I'm also nearly broke. I don't think it's a coincidence.
I figured I'd still be able to 'blog occasionally, since The Company have a fairly enlightened Internet use policy. They say: so long as you aren't downloading pornography, supporting intolerance, or supporting terrorism with the company dollar, you can use the Internet for whatever you like — this means, of course, that watching a movie of KKK members building a bomb in the nude will result in instant sacking. Other than that, they don't seem to mind what you do, provided you get your work done.
And there's the rub. "Get your work done" tends to involve leaving the office at eight or nine o'clock — even later sometimes, like tonight. By that time I haven't the energy to goof off on company equipment. I have just about the energy to go for my walk and get on home, and very little else. The only reason I'm 'blogging from work now is because one of the tools I'm using to complete today's to-do list takes forever to load and freezes up Notus Lotes while it's loading, so I may as well goof off for the ten minutes I have to wait.
I've now been here long enough to have proof that the "after hours" lights work on a timer (I didn't need proof, but now I have it, so that's kind of nice), and I've listened to two complete sets of Jazztrack. And if I wasn't so high up in this building I could probably look out the window and see people enjoying themselves and drinking. Instead I can look at my reflection and see someone feeling sorry for himself in an incredibly dreary and uninteresting way. Hey, it could be worse. There could be killer bees in here with me.
Updates may be sparse, at least while my current project lasts. I'm sure my only reader is heartbroken by this information. But it could be worse: there could be killer bees in there with him.
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I actually had occasion to use surfactant today, but I held fast to my principles. I'm not certain my replacement, thingamajig — you know, whatsitcalled, was quite le mot juste, however.
I think I can legitimately claim to have finished work at 2305, because that's when I shook hands with the courier and wished him bon voyage. It's not like I worked straight through until eleven, though. At eight we left work and went for a walk to Parliament House and back. We do that a lot anyway, but it was particularly interesting in light of the morning's event. On the way back we lingered for a while at the Tent Embassy, and enjoyed scones at the Rainbow Chai Tent. Strolling around the Parliamentary Zone and eating scones probably doesn't count as the sort of exercise we'd planned, but I'm hoping the scales will overlook that.
This morning, the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia finally said sorry for the Stolen Generations. His speech was not at all bad. He's about thirty years later than he should have been, but fair suck of the sav, an apology has only really been on the agenda since the early Howard days. From my attitude here you might assume that I'm a fan of the "just bloody apologise already" option. That's not an unjustifiable assumption. Midnight Oil: "White men came, took everyone".
There are many reasons not to say sorry, of course. People argue that Australia today is very diverse, and most of the people living here now could not have had anything to do with Aboriginal suffering. This is true. If you looked at my own family history, you might find immigrants and refugees, but you won't find oppressors of Indigenous Australians. Why should I say sorry? The theft of Aboriginal children, if it occurred on the scale commonly believed (if you're a devotee of Keith Windschuttle, you will argue it did not), ended more than thirty years ago. This was well before many of us were old enough (or Australian enough) to influence politics; it was well before many of us were born. This, too, is true. Why should I apologise? Any apology would inevitably be followed by claims for compensation, claims which should not be paid for by modern Australians. Another excellent point! Why should I admit guilt and make reparations?
The answer, of course, is that I should not. I have nothing to apologise for. Neither does Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard or Peter Garrett or Brendan Nelson or Pauline Hanson. Probably John Howard could be excused, too, but if that little rodent can't bring himself to say sorry he could at least start practising some other apologetic lines, perhaps something along the lines of "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned ..."
There are people alive today who were alive during the heyday of the Stolen Generations. Some of them are even to blame: public servants and lobbyists and politicians and right-wing commentators and do-gooders and racists and others of their ilk, who must fiddle in the affairs of others they can't quite see as human. We'd all love to see a few apologies fall from the lips of those people at some point. They're not the only ones, though. I said that Kevin Rudd need not apologise. He needn't; he's done nothing wrong. He's not harmed any Aboriginals. Kevin Rudd should not be apologising; the Prime Minister of Australia, however, must. The 2008 Rudd Government has not harmed Aboriginal interests; the Commonwealth Government, however, has.
The Commonwealth is the Commonwealth is the Commonwealth. The Government is the same government we had at Federation, and with any luck will be the same government we will have long after Rudd and Howard and you and I are crumbled to dust. The Commonwealth Government can change its mind, and apologise in 2008 for wrongs it inflicted in 1968. We might have had a different Prime Minister, a different government-of-the-day, a different population, but the Government of Australia was still the Government of Australia. If we are expected to respect the laws passed by one government-of-the-day even as we elect another, then we can expect each successive government-of-the-day to take responsibility for the actions of its predecessors. Perhaps we can even expect it to pay for past mistakes. Sure, its tax revenues are now our money, not our grandparents'. But if we the people of my generation can get through life and count this as the worst instance of paying for our predecessors' mistakes, we can count ourselves very lucky indeed.
It's a very small thing, and inexpensive when you consider what governments usually do. Three hundred words for healing compared with billions for hurting. The risk of a few compensation lawsuits lost compared with the use of laws to bludgeon those of the wrong colour. Maybe it's a waste of taxpayer funds. If it is, at least this government-of-the-day is wasting them in interesting and exciting new ways. I'd like to see more of it.
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I'm not going to talk about work, because there are some words I'd like not to use on this website. Actually, there's quite a lot of words I'd rather not use on this website, including surfactant, but in the case of this particular word, there may be delicate ears reading. Or something like that.
I'm nearly through consolidating the music libraries my brother and I have amassed over years of annual-income-twenty-pounds-annual-expenditure-nineteen-six. Being good, innocent boys, the main idea was that no matter who turned his speakers on first when we inhabit the same room, the music will be tolerable to the other lad at least half the time, probably more, since our tastes overlap (a co-worker recently described overlapping musical tastes as "significant synergy in acquisition of compositions", and I think it was a joke). As it's taken me so damn long to rip every CD we both own, it looks like I'll be leaving the household the day after we start to realise the full benefits of having all discs in a single digital library. On the other hand, I can now just leave a copy on his hard disk ... and we get all each other's music. Don't tell the RIAA.
One thing that's made the job quite interesting is my brother's habit of putting discs back in any random case he happens to come across. Thank goodness for the inerrability of iTunes' CDDb-pull feature. He asked me to burn "backup" copies of two of his discs this evening, and it was only after he left that I remembered that the discs he'd asked for weren't in their cases. I'm sure they're somewhere in the pile ... I've ripped one of them, so I can just burn from the digital versions, but the other is His Problem to find. Much as I love some of their music, I'm amazed that Creedence are willing to have certain songs (you know which they are) described as their "Greatest Hits".
Two sleeps to go until zero hour (H-minus two sleeps?). Coincidentally, two sleeps to go until payday. Clearly I planned that one quite well; I certainly won't be able to jump the gun on this one, because I'm flat broke. Was it worth it? Ask me in twelve months.
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Diverting things on the Internet ...
Adrian points to The Jennine Wekipaijua, which description is hauntingly familiar.
Magnus Manske, who is not praised enough, has produced an editor activity generator. Essentially it picks up a random Wikipedia article, and tries to suggest ways to improve it. The program is not, of course, foolproof, but it deftly handles more foolishness than you'd expect. In other words, it's a great addition to the toolbox, and one day I may even find the time to use it.
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The course — how to manage projects without becoming a menace — finished late on Friday afternoon. I passed. We went out to celebrate, and separated after a couple of hours. Somehow I got lost and ended up on Pitt Street. It was an accident, I swear. I walked along, haemorrhaging money as I went, and came face-to-face with a Borders. We have one of those here, in the awful new Canberra Centre. For months I had shied away from entering the place, because I feared I would lose my soul ... or at least my credit rating. Finally, at the coaxing of friends, I crossed the threshold of that dreaded emporium. They had promised to hold my hand for the entire experience, and if necessary provide covering fire for an emergency retreat should the allure of commercialism prove too strong for me.
Their ministrations were not necessary, however. The shop sucked. It didn't even pass the Wodehouse Test (the awesomeness of a bookstore can be expressed as A = W, where A is awesomeness and W is the number of works on the shelves under the name of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse). It would not be at all an exaggeration to say I was disappointed. I may even have ventured to tut disapprovingly. But, let's face it, there was also an element of relief in there, for I had managed to enter a bookstore — no, not a bookstore; this was, I had been led to believe, the bookstore, the Ultimate against which all bookstores are measured — and come out empty-handed. This was an invigorating thought, and I took it as certification that, deep within my core, I possessed the strength to fight any bookshop and win.
So it was that, standing before this Bookish Mecca, wearied by aimless walking and emboldened by purposeful celebration, I convinced myself I had no reason to fear. Accordingly, I rushed in, nearly tripping over a couple of trembling angels on the tread.
I think it would be fair to say that the Borders in Canberra is but a pale shadow of its namesake on the Harbour. I may have felt safe and confident as I experienced the Canberran shoebox, but the Sydney store is far more sophisticated. At the door complex infra-red scanners hum into life, immediately divining one's tastes, lifestyle, and socio-economic status. My wallet was taken from me, and I found myself compelled to donate a modest percentage to the Borders Shareholder Retirement Fund. Immediately upon divesting myself of my wallet, I was accosted by two burly, shaved-headed men who each towered like the Colossus of Rhodes, only more bronzed. Although firm, they were not unkind, and appeared concerned that I should adopt only the most befitting books the store had to offer, in recompense for the extortionate amount of money already stolen from my accounts.
Half an hour later, I staggered outside, my clothing disheveled and an expression of imbecilic wonder on my dial, clutching to my breast hard-won copies of several books whose titles I cannot remember right now, and whose contents will consume much of my time for the next several weeks. I tell myself that I have been privileged to experience an unusual delta of pleasure, disturbance, and spiritual awakening, not unlike being pampered with rare perfumes and oils by killer bees as uplifting hymns play in the background.
If you ever come across me in the City of the Coathanger, do not suggest a trip to Borders, for I am subtle and quick to purchase.
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Yesterday had all the makings of a Very Bad Day. It started with remembering that I hadn't confronted the scales in a while. As I fronted up before the daemonic, digital visage, I felt a horrible premonition.
"Premonition" is probably not the right word. It implies that the knowledge just suddenly hit me, a bolt from the blue, a message from above. It wasn't anything of the sort. In fact, the idea that the scales might not be my friend that morning was not so much a vague foreboding as a bloody certainty. The information didn't come from the planets. My ancestors and spirit guides were mute. God didn't whisper in my ear, "My son, you may not want to do this today." No, the reason I was reluctant to approach my measuring master was the sudden realisation that, however many calories I thought the whisky I'd drunk last week contained, I had underestimated. Then there were the pies I scoffed down in lieu of breakfast on Saturday morning. Then there was the pizza from the local greasy that composed dinner on Saturday night. Then there was Mum's delicious chicken kiev, which contains more calories than I would normally eat in three days, served with beans and high-carb white bread on Monday night.
Dad's scales confirmed my fears: my adiposity was undiminished. In fact, I had gained 2.5kg. 2.5 kilos! In one week! That's a month's worth of losses! I spent the rest of the day walking gingerly, in case by lurching suddenly I might unbalance the ground and tip us all off into Outer Space. I tried to ignore the way the ground shook as I walked, or the crowds in Civic using me as a portable wind shelter. During the ten minutes I took for lunch, I actually attracted a Greenpeace patrol boat, packed to the brim with hairy hippies anxious to protect me from the Japanese. Now that's a bad day.
I'm on a course at the moment, which is why I'm sitting in a hotel room in Sydney working (okay, 'blogging, but I'm just taking a quick break). The course had a pre-requisite online thingy, of which I did half on the weekend. I attempted to do the other half at work on Tuesday, but the damn thing wouldn't load. So I just jumped right in and took the final exam. It's quite difficult doing an exam when you've done the online equivalent of wagging every class. It's even more difficult when you're interrupted every couple of minutes by colleagues wanting you to work on something. I think I'll claim the hour I spent on the exam back to my project. After all, it's not like I stopped working to complete it; I just used the time I would normally have spent breathing and blinking to do some supplementary company stuff. Or, to put it another way, I utilised the corporate teaming online collaboration environment to leverage my synergy in a client-oriented context. Still passed first bloody time, too, and you have no idea how difficult it is to sit an exam while leveraging synergy. My head barely fit out the door after that effort, and I had to carry a lead weight to get my feet back on the ground.
I was on my way to the City of the Coathanger when the real estate agent rang (next on FOX: "When Real Estate Agents Attack, Volume II!"). She'd spoken to my references, and was willing to give me not just the key to a flat, but also the key to the city, her heart, and the Royal Mint. I suspect when I return to Canberra I'll run across a couple of rental referees gasping for a pint. And why not? I definitely owe them. I was a bit worried when the agent asked me, "Is it true you used to be Queen of Zamibia?", but I think I dealt with her questions deftly and with my usual aplomb. Royal blood tells, you see.
I wonder how the scales will read when I get home. Probably before facing the merciless machine I should prepare a cocktail of vodka, ice cream, Panadol and chocolate. Then I'll be prepared no matter what it says.
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Now there is a cool watch. Not sure I'd ever wear anything so cheesy, but I can certainly admire from afar.
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I heard a nasty rumour yesterday that the new Bond film will be called Quantum of Solace. It turns out that it really will. Ouch.
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The dedication many Wikipedians show towards Freedom is impressive. Admittedly, most of the Wikipedians who seem to be upholding the idea of Free Knowledge and Copyleft and blah, blah, blah, are in fact just doing it because Da Rulz say they should, and they're too dumb to think otherwise. But there are many editors who passionately believe that Information Wants to be Free, and not bound by patents or insane copyright terms forever.
It goes a bit far sometimes. Angela Beesley pointed out that some user on the Wikimedia Foundation website enthusiastically deleted an award the Foundation had received, because the image wasn't free. And the single most awesome behind-the-scenes thing to be posted to Wikipedia in ages was deleted recently, although in this case I think it was a Da Rulz-inspired breakdown of common sense (Wikipedians will nod sagely and understand when I point out that the culprit is a member of the Counter-Vandalism Unit, which group never met a Clue it didn't lack). I couldn't let it die, so here's the image:
It's a letter from an American student caught damaging Wikipedia entries for a joke (his name has been removed, naturally). It's typewritten; the school revoked his computer privileges and required him to use a typewriter. Now, if you've ever edited Wikipedia much, you will be aware of two things:
- Vandalism doesn't cause much damage; everything that is done can be undone.
- Vandals tend not to be malicious, but merely fail to understand that Wikipedia is not an elaborate game.
The reason the note is exciting is because we see non-Wikipedians seeing vandalism as their problem, too. Vandals don't just create work for volunteer Wikipedians. They're pissing in the community's drinking water, (temporarily) damaging the Sum of Human Knowledge for kicks. Every time a non-Wikipedian gets upset about vandalism, we see another person waking up to the importance of this resource, and realising that vandalism is something we can all fix — not necessarily by history reverting or hitting rollback. You don't have to be an administrator; you certainly don't have to be a member of the Counter-Vandalism Unit. You just have to spread the vibe, the meme that Wikipedia is Important, Damn It.
As The World Wakes Up, this will have several consequences, mostly good. As vandalism is better-known, and less-liked, by non-Wikipedians, it will stop being something you can do for fun and brag about to your mates, and start to become a real faux pas. That's not enough: after all, if being considered rude was a deterrent, we wouldn't have teenagers doing burnouts in the Inner North. Heck, we wouldn't have smokers any more. But if it won't stop the problem, it will at least reduce it.
It's great to see the idea that Wikipedia is a precious resource, not to be messed about by bored teenagers, taking hold. This does bring danger with it, though, and it's something that was inevitable as the overall quality of content improves (naturally, the content I and my mates provided has always been solid gold). We're starting to see three groups emerge. Wikipedia has writers, readers, and vandals: choose which one you are. The better the content becomes, the less likely readers are to think, "Gosh, I could do that," and the more likely they are to say things like, "I wonder who writes this stuff; they're very clever." That's, of course, a Bad Thing. We still need people who aren't out there writing top-drawer articles but could help clean up some of the terrible articles that still exist.
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Two weeks in a row I ruined the "morning after" tradition, this time by waking up at 0700 on a Sunday morning. I must be getting old. Yesterday was nice; this morning was not. Both days were quite different from what I had planned: what was in order was a nice, quiet day, finishing off some work, maybe with a trip out to see the fireworks early in the evening. Glass of warm milk, cookies, et cetera. That didn't happen. I didn't get any work done. In fact, I didn't even spend any time at home. Whoops.
I spent the morning at a nerd convention. We had expected it to be a terrifying, yet deeply spiritual, ordeal. A chance to reconnect with our geek roots, check out what's been happening since we abandoned the world of wargames, and maybe see some fat guys in velour capes. All told, it was slightly disappointing. Most of the attendees were overweight, certainly, but if I wanted to see an unadorned fat guy I'd look in the mirror. Fat guys are entirely uninteresting, except when they wear capes, and there was not a cape in sight. There was a young lady wearing an old-fashioned dress and fairy wings, but given that she'd set up a stall and was flogging drawings of fairies in old-fashioned dresses, this doesn't really count as an expression of Nerd Pride.
Most of the attendees were depressingly normal. Many of them, in fact, were more normal than we were. Some of them even looked and smelled better, and there's nothing more depressing than attending a nerd convention, intending to Sneer, but coming across nerds who are better-adjusted than you are. The stall operators had also expected the attendees to be crazier than they were. There were terrible books, computer games you couldn't give away, overpriced fake weapons, and one sad bloke with a very low opinion of the Aspberger's Crowd, trying to interest people in children's military books. Someone was even trying to shift a Doom 3 board game. Yes, really.
Eventually our resolve wore away, and we blew the dust of our wallets. My companions emerged with a bizarre collection of role-playing games, and I was shocked to discover, as we walked out, that I had somehow lost $40 but somehow gained possession of a game that features heavily in a certain novel. I'm weak.
We headed back for lunch, then spent hours watching music countdowns and, eventually, Firefly. I don't know how I managed to avoid this show for so long. I don't know why.
Moved onto a different group for the evening, and we watched a bit of telly, a bit more Firefly, and the Hannibal Lecter origin story, Hannibal Rising. I think it would be fair to say that Hannibal Lecter doesn't really need an origin story. The film certainly failed to jibe with my own ideas of what Lecter is, how he should have developed, and how he should behave. But who are you going to believe, me or Thomas Harris? The answer isn't as obvious as it seems: after all, Harris liked the idea of a Hannibal film without Anthony Hopkins. Perhaps I should be the one to write the next Hannibal screenplay. I promise it won't be the pornographic orgy of pointless violence we see in this flick. Oh, boy. Tripod – Maryanne: "The smell of dead flesh put the kibosh of romance."
So, this means Australia Day and New Year's Eve were both spent in the nerdiest way I could manage. That bodes ill for the next major holiday. And we didn't see any fireworks. Did anyone go near the City? What was it like?
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Generation Y has been copping a bit of a beating in the press over the past couple of years, particularly from the Packers. We're lazy, inarticulate, selfish, disloyal, easily-bored, self-centred leeches without any self-control. Well, obviously. I don't intend to argue with much of what is said about us: some of it is so blatantly incorrect it doesn't warrant further examination; other bits are simply inarguable. You may enjoy a nice little drawing by Jess Hagy.
The Bulletin has been particularly cruel, as we see in this outstanding piece of journalism from late 2006 (punctuality never was my forté). Some elements of that story that I found striking were: disloyalty to employers, distaste for politics, immunity to advertisements, and particularly interesting in my situation, refusal to leave home.
The article makes a big deal of the way people of my generation view their jobs. We tend to want more money than our forebears, expect to work less, be more ambitious, be less likely to stay in one job for a long time, and have less respect for their employers. Gen Ys expect the workplace to be a fulfilling and educational experience, and they want more to show for their time served than a couple of year's pay. To this, the obvious response is: well, it only goes to show. We're seeing the inevitable result of decades of The Invisible Hand of the Market at work. Big deal. Do I expect to work every day of my life from now on for the same company, day after day after day for forty years until I retire with a small pension and a whip-around from my office mates? Well, something approaching it might be nice. But my company may not let me work for it for that long; most companies wouldn't.
Why should Gen Ys be loyal to their employers? Many of our preceding generations showed exemplary loyalty, and received a right rogering with the rough end of a pineapple at the first sign of economic downturn. We've learned better. We don't expect Mother Company to look after us through thick and thin, but in return, we'll show them the same disloyalty they show us. I like my employer, and think it's one of the better companies worldwide; but I don't pretend to expect to keep my job if an HR hack's Christmas bonus is on the line. In such an environment, why shouldn't I also act in my best interests if another company promises to treat me better?
All our lives, we've been told: you must be adaptable, flexible, ready to face change. The business world wants us to flit from job to job like a frightened gazelle, and is prepared to pay us handsomely in return. We're better-educated than any previous generation, and have less job security. All other things being equal, we're better workers — I'm a better worker than my experience-equivalent from a past generation; I am older, better-educated, more adaptable, more energetic. There are companies that see the value in this and are willing to give me more money and better conditions. If your company isn't one of them, that's your problem, not ours.
My generation's job-periods are short-term, because that's the way most bosses like it. We come together for a short time, and nobody is tied down: you give us lots of money and educational opportunities, we give you some of that Gen Y magic. Then we move to something better. If this was a problem, it's your fault. The casualisation of the workforce was once a tragedy for the workers; now we've evened up the scales a little. Where's the problem?
The political aspect, I think, ties in strongly with the advertising. Advertising has never been as pervasive and invasive as it is today, and we grew up with the foul menace at its worst. It's only to be expected that we should be immune to the worst of its effects; we've developed a resistance. How is a twenty-something like a super bug?
. We're cynical; that's a natural consequence of repeatedly being lied to. Politics, too, reached its nadir during our lifetimes. Never before has politics been so connected with marketing; never before has it been so disconnected from reality. Whether you choose to look at the blatant lies of Little Johnny on our sea-girt shores, or cast your eyes to the East, where the American Far Right tend to froth at the mouth and do very little of use to anyone, it's undeniable that our politicians have never been less trustworthy.
Despite this, many of my contemporaries are still to be found engaged in more politics than is healthy. To use a typical example, you can still find passionate greenies, twirling their armpit hair and toking up, and they're just as virulent as their 70s counterparts. Joking aside, there are political Gen Ys of all types out there, and if they're not as populous as they once were, well, we can only guess at why.
It wouldn't be accurate to say Gen Ys are totally resistant to marketing lies, whether in the service of corporate bastards or politicians. We pat ourselves on the back and talk about how "savvy" we are, while older generations faint in horror at the spectre of such an independent, arrogant demographic. But at the end of the day we'll buy a big lie almost as readily as anyone else. Here we see a young lady not only frothing over the insulting "campaign for real beauty", but doing so with the help of words like "proactive":
"I respond to companies who do the right thing and are proactive about their cause, like Dove with the Real Beauty campaign," says 21-year-old Amy Malpass, assistant publisher at ymi, a magazine for Gen Y.
Yes, you can tell she will never be played for a sucker.
The bit that interested me the most, of course, was the emphasis on Gen-Y-as-leech-on-society. Because these freeloaders refuse to leave home, run to their parents at the first sign of trouble, and expect society ultimately to bail them out. In this piece, we aren't the only targets of vilification: our parents, over-protective Baby Boomers stunting our social growth to feel important, come in for stick as well. I don't understand what the author is getting at here. It's clearly something she feels strongly about. I feel strongly about it, too.
I'm twenty-three. I'm ready to leave home, and will do so as soon as some real estate agent, somewhere in Canberra, thinks I'm worth a set of keys. Until then, I'll be living at home, contributing to the household as best I'm able. Leaving home at the moment is more difficult than ever; housing prices and rent are criminal; the competition for every shoebox in every city makes every application a crapshoot. I wonder what influence the previous generations' love of "investment properties" has had on our troubles?
The Bulletin somehow came across 30 particularly poor examples of our kin, and drew from that to argue that all teenagers and twenty-somethings are leeches. Why, just look at how many live at home! I don't think Gen Ys are much more likely to stay at home longer than our forebears; surely no more likely than is explained by the sheer difficulty of moving out during this era where demand outstrips supply and prices leave common sense far behind.
We've seen a lot of profiles of This Fascinating New Generation, and What's Wrong With It, but we're not so different from our forebears. Certainly the differences we manifest are easily explained, easily predicted. What's the fascination?
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The site was live for three weeks before I noticed an error in the code. It's such a bloody stupid error, really, that it can't justifiably be called a "bug". Basically I'd somehow managed to set the comments-form to always try to post comments to the same weblog entry; even worse, that entry doesn't exist yet. Er, whoops. Anyone trying to post comments here, um, I'm sorry. Bonehead at the wheel. See, kids, that's why we don't do programming or web design while drunk. Right?
I've also made a small change to the design, removing the all-lowercase thing. Because that was just dumb.
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'Blogging from work. Oo-er, naughty! But I figure if you're still working at 1930, you're allowed 5 minutes' break. Plus, company Internet policy says it's okay. This is a very Enlightened company in some ways.
Things I haven't got around to doing yet: book some time with O'Brien to get my window fixed. Apparently they'll also remove all the broken glass for me. That's nice to know. I wonder if they'll catch the bloke who broke into my car, then go back in time and remind me not to forget to remove the bloody Navman from the glove box. Idiot.
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It's after midnight, and I'm still at work. This is unusual, because my job is theoretically a full-time business-hours forty-hour-a-week number. As such, I shouldn't be working after midnight on Monday morning. In practise, of course, we work much more than forty hours, and I have achieved Minority Status by never working on weekends. I work long hours during the week, and colleagues chide me for still being in the office at seven o'clock or later ... but they work weekends, and I don't. Go figure. One way or another, the company gets its money's worth. As for why I'm working on this weekend, well, I have a Deadline. it's self-imposed, but I'm freaky like that. I should have been finished this morning, but I couldn't face starting work until early this evening. And then I got distracted ...
In my defence, I've had plenty to distract me. Some co-workers and I went out to dinner on Friday night, detouring before the main event to inspect a very nice cigarillo case in Watson, a place I yearn to inhabit. Dinner was, I think, lovely. I don't recall. My memory tends to focus on the moment I returned to my car, parked securely in the underground secure carpark underneath the secure National Convention Centre. The only thing that wasn't positively secure about the experience was The Silver Bullet herself, sporting as she did a gaping hole in the rear passenger-side window. Not that I noticed this straight away, of course. No, I strapped on my seatbelt, started the engine, and adjusted the stereo. Then I found myself trying to remember if I'd left my glove-box open, with all its contents strewen across the interior of the cabin. After a quick internal debate, I decided that, no, in fact, I hadn't. And that's when I noticed the window. I had kept my GPS device in the car during Nationals, for the benefit of interstate umpires. I don't know why I hadn't bothered removing it from the car. Fortunately, our friendly neighbourhood thief handled that for me. He didn't bother relieving me of the stereo or the car itself, though. I squealed off to the City cop shop, where the nice constable behind the counter informed me that ACT Policing don't investigate such trifling issues as thefts and burglaries these days, unless it involves a nice juicy murder, drug ring, or illegally-downloaded mp3s. Then I called the insurance company, and found that "comprehensive insurance" isn't, and that, as my boss had joked recently, the excess really is more than The Bullet is worth. Not a good way to end Friday.
I don't remember much of Saturday. I'm pretty sure I spent most of the day moping, and most of the night getting drunk. But we were quite careful, much more so than usual. The threat of work on Sunday morning, and a general lack of good "going out" money in the budget, was all that was required to keep us honest. We're good boys like that. We went to Kremlin, and Phoenix, and Bar 32, and Uni Pub (long after the Dara crowd had left; punctuality is not my strong point). And I danced. I rarely dance, certainly not without at least a dozen standard drinks inside me. One more layer of Fat Guy Insecurity dropping away? I'm fairly sure I wasn't the most welcome sight on the dance floor, but I didn't make anyone sick, either. I mean, there were sick people there, but the hairy guy with a leather coat and no shirt has to take his share of the responsibility there.
And so I awoke Sunday morning. As a matter of policy, I never wake before two o'clock after a Night Out, because the best way to avoid The Morning After is to sleep through it. But there I was, clearly awake, and there the clock was, clearly Ante Meridian. And not at all hung over. See? Good boys. So I was in the perfect mood to ring and find out I will not be living in the cigarillo case this year, and to stay up until two hours past midnight not doing the work I had scheduled for Sunday morning. And in the morning (Monday morning), I'll need to decide the fate of my car window. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just say to the Universe, "I don't want to!" And then the Universe might say, "That's all right, then, Mark. I'll fix it for you."
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A couple of years back I waddled into Best & Less and bought a bunch of very large, plain t-shirts. Black, navy blue, blue, pale green, grey. There was no logo (though I've never been the logo type), no pattern, nothing but a wall of navy blue. They sent a very clear message: "Pay no attention to the man wearing the curtain."
I still wear those t-shirts a lot, around the house or at the gym (I'm wearing the black one now). Once they were reassuring: big and loose, they disguised bits I really didn't want noticed. The shirts also made it much harder to notice me: doubly-effective camouflage! They're not quite so useful now. The sleeves are so big and flappy that, at the gym, I almost get tangled up in them when doing weights or (ahem) skipping songs on my mp3 player. Wearing them out in public, I find that, where once they disguised layer upon layer of disgusting fat, they now billow out strangely and suggest the existence of layers I've long been rid of. I now rarely wear them outside, except on Laundry Emergency days, and because I'm not quite ready to wear smaller clothes to the gym.
I've found that, since I started losing weight, I'm paying a lot more attention to clothes and shopping than I ever thought I would. I can't afford to keep up (though I've spent an embarrassing amount on Threadless), and consequently almost everything I wear is much too big for me. Not as big as The T-shirts of Insecurity, but still quite big. I umpired 7 games under the microscope at this year's National Championships wearing uniforms that didn't even come close to fitting. At times I was more worried about how I looked in my ridiculously-billowing clothes than about whether or not I was passing my practical examinations. I prefer my new clothes to immediately become too small than to fit well for a while, though: it shows I'm still making progress. I expect to be human again in a year or so, but utterly incapable of clothing myself.
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I had a little trouble with sessions in this here CMS. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. I'm still not sure how that quite worked. Perhaps the system fell asleep on occasion and accidentally let me achieve something. If so, it strongly resembles the bureaucracy at work. Boom, tish.
A nice, helpful, and undoubtedly devilishly handsome chap on IRC pointed out that I was trying to start a session mid-way through a script. So? Well, as I damn well know and should have considered, you can't suddenly start sending headers after the browser has finished dealing with headers (e.g. when you're halfway through a script and the browser is already rendering output) ... and session handling uses session cookies, sent in headers. Whoops. Well, at least now I can reliably log in and post.
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The motivational chap at 4 Eva Young has come across an interesting and funny presentation by Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet on new ways of looking at global health and poverty statistics. It's well worth a look.
Popular Mechanics' sponsors want you to learn how to be a real man. I'm not sure what purpose has the appeal to masculinity, but maybe that's why I'm not a sub-editor for a major magazine. A lot of the skills they list make a great deal of sense, and I agree that everyone should know how to perform them. Others are interesting, but only really for the entertainment value. You can decide which entries fall into which category.
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The last game of the u16B National Championships finished at roughly four o'clock last Saturday, but the tournament itself didn't end until the doughty boys from Western Australia had the opportunity to defeat their tormentors in a late-night arm-wrestling contest. Judging from the kids' expressions, slamming the odd New South Welsh hand onto a rickety wooden table was far more satisfying than hitting a home run could ever be. I'm glad they had fun; they worked hard all week against much richer and stronger teams, and they deserved some form of triumph. One just worries what might happen when they're old enough to drink.
My colleagues and I had reasons of our own to celebrate on Saturday. For one thing, the tournament was over, and we would soon be returning home, reminding our loved ones what we look like. More importantly, two umpires had, thanks to tireless preparation and a big leg-up from the other umpires present, achieved promotion to level 5, the first real national level. I was one of those umpires.
I wish I could say I feel any different. However, after 18 months of constant training, of working hard in the gym to become as fit as possible as quickly as possible, of travelling all over the eastern portion of Australia looking for different softball experiences and talking to dozens of senior umpires, I'm just bloody relieved it's all over. Returning to work straight away doesn't help (workmates: if I fall asleep at my desk this week, please don't wake me). I won't be umpiring again in our local club leagues up at Hawker for nearly a month now, either. Perhaps when I do it'll start to sink in. Or perhaps it's just not that big a deal any more.
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I will be away at the the 2008 National Championships for the next week. Luckily no-one reads this, or I'd be missed. In case anyone was wondering, I will be at the u16 boys' championships. This will render me incommunicado for the next week. See? It's an ill wind ...
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So, AOL have announced that they will no longer support Netscape Navigator. Remember Navigator? Yeah, that's the browser that people used last century. Who knew it was still around?
Navigator was released in 1994, and sustained itself as the Browser of Choice™ for half a decade through the power of sheer awesomeness. I didn't come across the Internet until early 1997, by which time Netscape was well and truly dominant. It was only underhanded skulduggery (as distinct from, of course, overhanded skulduggery) that allowed Microsoft's significantly inferior Internet Explorer to claw its way towards relevance during the heady '90s. We're all familiar with Microsoft bundling IE4 with Windows '98. When you can dictate the default browser on the world's most popular operating system, it doesn't matter that that browser is unconscionably bad: if most users are happy with the OS, and not technologically confident enough to seek out alternative applications, they're going to stick with the defaults. We can quibble over whether Microsoft abuse their power; it's hard to argue they don't fully exploit their monopolies. The thing I object to when Microsoft do try to use marketing to force-feed us inferior products is not that Lots Of People Use Microsoft Products, but that Microsoft deliberately breaks those products so that those of us who do know how to use third-party applications find our lives made ever-so-slightly more difficult because of ignorant weenies learning the Microsoft Way. It wasn't just browsers; two examples I can pluck out of thin air right now are audio encoding and .NET. Woo! I'm getting off the track here, but I think we can justifiably indulge in a little bitterness now and then.
Of course, Navigator's demise wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault. After all, by the time Navigator 4 finally dropped to a low enough point (not long after the release of IE6) that we all felt comfortable pretending it didn't exist, we did so with loud sighs of relief. Navigator 4 was better than its predecessors, but not significantly so. The gap between Navigator and Internet Explorer was closing. Part of this was that, with Explorer's building market share, web designers started building sites that broke in Navigator (partly because Microsoft were introducing bells and whistles to spur innovation in much the same way Netscape did, but mostly because Microsoft Way followers just full stop broke things, like they always do). Part of it was that there was growing awareness in the web design community of nifty things like CSS, and Netscape's implementation of such supposedly-standard web features was even worse than Microsoft's (Navigator 4's CSS rendering was based on its JavaScript interpreting code, and so incredibly buggy that advanced web pages made it crash). Further new versions of Navigator 4 added nothing of benefit to end users, but significantly increased the bloat of the application. Every subsequent version of Navigator was larger, more memory-intensive, and less stable. When your application crashes more often than Microsoft products, you've dug yourself a deep, deep hole.
Netscape famously released its Navigator code in 1998, asking for the help of the open source community. This code was rejected wholesale because it was so crap the programmers were better off starting from scratch. Ouch. AOL bought Netscape in 1999, and helped make a goer of this whole "new Navigator" thing. Netscape 6 was released in 2000, and didn't suck as much as Navigator. Fast-forwarding a little (hi, Mozilla Corporation!), Netscape today is little more than a re-badged Mozilla. Those of us who were inspired by Mozilla switched to Firefox years ago. Netscape today is irrelevant, unnecessary, no more than a name worshipped by an insignificant number of nostalgiacs. Evidently AOL agree with me; they don't see the point of supporting Navigator, not when you can cut out the middleman and make everyone happy.
Of course, the Web is not an either-or, "Mozilla-based or Microsoft" dilemma. There are many other fine browsers out there. Safari is quite good, Opera is excellent. Me, I prefer Firefox. But we have a choice. I won't mourn Netscape; wouldn't even if it was logical to mourn a brand (it isn't). The company that made it great died eight years ago. The people who made it great were rewarded. The brand is meaningless now; we have better things with which to concern ourselves. The Web today, and the web design scene, is as vibrant and as exciting as it has ever been. We're looking at unprecedented innovation. There are more people doing more exciting things with StyleSheets and JavaScript and things of that kidney, made possible by the adequacy of Internet Explorer and the excellence of engines like Gecko, Presto, and WebKit. Who could be sad?
The only thing one wonders about is what Microsoft's response will be. I've heard several opinions on this, ranging from "they won't care" to "they won't care", and everything in-between. However, I like the way BBspot think.
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So, the other day I came across a list of New Years' Resolutions for 2005. This is interesting for a number of reasons that I can't really go into right now. I thought it might be worth a butcher's, at least to see how I've stacked up since then.
- Quit smoking (I don’t smoke, but if I want others to quit I guess I have to lead by example).
Successful! It was a struggle, but I managed to quit smoking in January 2005.
- Accidentally win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Alas, the Nobel Prize remains beyond my grasp, although by never getting around to writing those books, I can at least say that any awards would definitely be accidents.
- Trap spammers in their secret caves in Afghanistan, then take ‘em out with laughing gas and lock them in a room somewhere without Internet access… forever.
I suspect I'll be hearing from my lawyer if I spread rumours about alleged illegal activity I've allegedly performed.
- Get a pay raise. [Looks into the distance, hears muffled Russian cursing] You’d better make that two.
Well, I got a new job, which was a payrise, then another new job, which wasn't (but was in a better industry). So we can check that one off, too.
- Resist any temptation to explain the poor joke used above.
What?
- Accidentally lose twenty kilos ("honey, did you check behind the fridge?").
Actually, I did lose twenty kilos. But it wasn't an accident. And I've still a long way to go.
- Finish Gormenghast (I’ve got about thirty pages of Titus Alone left to go), and not let my love for the first book be diminished by the idiocy of the third.
I don't even know where Gormenghast actually is, let alone how it ends. Actually, I'm reading half a dozen books concurrently right now, so Gormenghast evidently featured significantly more highly on my list of priorities than it does now.
- Stop describing everything I dislike as “idiotic". Just most things should do it.
I've gotten pretty good with this, actually. Maybe I've grown up. Maybe I'm just more subtle. Maybe my intellect has lowered.
- Finally send those bloody mix CDs I promised Nick many moons ago.
Oh, heck. Does Nick still live in the same flat? Does anyone else remember him? I have no current contact details.
- Marry Elle McPherson.
Alas, she still remains alluringly beyond reach.
- Single-handedly save the world from alien invasion.
I considered it, but I wasn't in the mood at the time, so Will Smith did it for me.
- And most importantly, buy more socks.
Successful! No-one can accuse me of lacking socks. Well, they'd better not.
So, that's 2004. Obviously I'll have to be more realistic in 2007. How does this sound?
- Needlessly quit smoking again, just to be a prick.
- Write that book. Heck, even manage to write the second chapter. Write more in general.
- Code more. The weblog was a good start.
- Lose another 20 kilos. Steadfastly refuse to check behind the fridge.
- Get a payrise. A good one, so I can buy more stuff. Then don't buy more stuff, so I've actually saved some money.
- Nick's CD. If he still lives there. Maybe throw in some Sinatra in case he's moved out and been replaced by some nice blue-rinser.
- Be less self-absorbed, but also less self-affacing. Try to cultivate exactly the right level of mindless self-preoccupation appropriate to a member of my generation, and no more or less.
- Give up on Elle McPherson. Really. I mean, gosh, kid, she'll be a grandmother first ...
Apart from the payrise, this list actually looks achievable ...
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I'm back. That statement on its own is nigh-on meaningless, but I'm good at that. Who is back?
My name's Mark. I was a 'blogger from 2001–2005. I don't know why. There's a number of very poorly-written weblogs in my wake: MarkWeb, infiniteBabble, do not use lifts, rent-a-lemming. You may have seen some of them. You probably didn't read them.
This is Form One Lane. Hopefully it will be better. It certainly won't drown you in babble, which was the stated aim of at least one of the weblogs I've listed above. There have been many changes since I quit; I got a new job, for one. In fact, I got a new job, then got jack of it, then got an even newer one. I think the current one is pretty good. Hopefully my employer thinks the same of me. I graduated from university, so there won't be any whining about classes any more. Isn't that good news?
I've done no web design (other than a fairly snazzy-looking uni project 15 months ago) since I quit 'blogging, so I'm pretty rusty. Even so, I think this design looks rather nice. It could have been worse. If you cast your eyes to starboard you'll see a list of links to other weblogs. No, I haven't been following the 'blog scene. These are the people I liked who are still around even today (good to see Grandfather Graham is still at it), or sites I ran across during random searching this past week, usually after getting sidetracked while researching some obscure PHP thing.
Anyway, nobody likes to listen to 'bloggers rant about themselves (or so I've heard). How are you doing?
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Content management systems: so easy even an idiot did write one.
Form One Lane is powered by a very basic CMS written for PHP and mySQL by Yours Truly. Features include basic post-handling (duh), dynamic links, tags, and reader comments. However, I haven't gotten around to writing archive handling yet (so the tags are useless for now, although they were fun to write). Another feature it lacks is "smart paragraphs" (that is, interpreting spaces in the text areas as paragraphs), so if you want cute little paragraphs in your comments, you'll have to add the HTML yourself. Sorry.
On the whole, though, I'm quite happy with the effort here. It took me only slightly longer to write my own thing than it would have to wrestle into submission the templates of Movable Type or WordPress or whatever the cool kids are using these days, and it was good to do some programming for the first time in well over a year. Yes, I can feel the geekiness flowing through my veins again. It's been too long ...
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![[This is not a weblog]](/uploads/kottke.png)
