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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
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| Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 | | 16:18 |
Ready for prime time
For reasons I'm not yet going to go in to, my new laptop is a Macbook Pro. Holy crap. We'll see what it's like to live with, but the preliminary impression? Snow Leopard is ready for prime time. I mean, it's not as seamless as I'd like, but it leaves Windows 7 and Ubuntu in the dirt. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you'd (ahem) pay money for. And it doesn't seem to assume anymore that I am my granny. The new zero-button mouse is in fact an infinity button mouse, and everything seems to understand it.... Of course, Apple are famous for out-of-box. Sigh - memories of Newton. We'll see how long the honeymoon lasts this time. | | Monday, November 16th, 2009 | | 10:37 |
Salutations
Am I the only person who is irritated by email that starts [[Hi Jim,]] as if 'Hi' were syntactically similar to 'Dear' or 'O'? Surely one should write, as ones says, [[Hi, Jim.]]? | | Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | | 21:13 |
Interesting trip
Spent most of today on planes, going to a conference. The first, three hour leg went by - like that. I shared a row with a bishop (Anglican, Ugandan) and a priest (Roman Catholic, female[!], married[!!], to a Presbyterian minister[!!!], who is also female[!!!!]). Talked theology the whole time, from hardcore applied (ministering to the dying) to the severely meta (cross-religion incarnation theory) to the application of the notion of the selfish meme to analysis of social trends in religions. Oh what fun. | | Monday, November 2nd, 2009 | | 08:40 |
Is it just me, or does this protest sound a little offbeat? "Reformist leaders have urged their supporters to take part in peaceful rallies on 4 November, including losing presidency hopeful Mir-Hossein Mousavi."(From the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8337779.stm) | | Sunday, November 1st, 2009 | | 21:23 |
Irreality TV
Been thinking about my new TV show concept. It's called "Waltzing with Dinosaurs." That should be worth a laugh. | | Sunday, October 4th, 2009 | | 11:37 |
Guides
Something I meant to write about earlier.
We went on a tour of a (now inactive) gold mine. The thing that was special (other than being dropped a thousand feet down a hole on the end of a rope squeezed in like sardines) was the guide. He was an ex-miner himself, and he clearly had a special relationship with the tools and techniques he was explaining.
"This is a JF-253X. It completely revolutionised the process of making the horizontal holes that allow large rocks to fall on your head. We call it Mr. Ouchie, because if you hold it like this, rotate it thus, and then take your left hand off to scratch your ass, the secondary handle slides forward, your nads get sucked into the air intake, the hydraulic ram flips over to the back and sends the whole machine rocketing to the ceiling dragging you by your scrotum, and then the spike at the end here goes right through your spleen. Lots of guys get that in their first few weeks at work. The company then charges you to replace the gaskets, that isn't good either. If you will stand back, I will gladly demonstrate." <mind-blisteringly loud noise ensues>
I'm sure I exaggerate slightly. But less than you might think. | | Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | | 22:20 |
| | 22:18 |
Pork with Special Vegetable
An important man passed by the vegetable seller and was surprised by what he saw. "Vegetable seller," he asked, "what is that vegetable?". "Ah, fine sir," replied the merchant, "That is known as 'the vegetable that wise men cannot identify.'" "Good, good," said the gentleman, pleased with the response. "And this other vegetable, here, what is this?" "Oh, this 'the vegetable that no one can identify.' I think." | | Saturday, August 8th, 2009 | | 23:50 |
Nomenclature
I feel like I want to start one of those companies that appears far down in the credits of animated films. Specialise in distant scenery so I can call it the "Farfield Bakery." | | Friday, August 7th, 2009 | | 00:14 |
Personal archaeology again
Goodness, but I used to be pompous.
And my maths notes? Make no sense whatsoever.
So probably I was smarter then, too.
Bedtime now, I think, even though there are still papers all over the floor, quite contrary to the plan. | | Saturday, July 25th, 2009 | | 10:38 |
Squid Lore
“If I had butt fins, then when I sneezed, I could fly .”
No, really. | | Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | | 19:33 |
Scribblenauts (DS)
I think I want this game. Saw the E3 demo. The level wasn't hard to solve. Summon a lumberjack to chop down the tree. D'uh. Did they go to the next level? Noooo. They screwed around a bit with the time machine, then summoned Cthulhu and God, gave God a shotgun, and let them fight it out. Evidently, it's a game all about WTF. The game mechanic is, well, like the Freengrottle. Summon what you like. Let the dude figure it out. Hah! | | Sunday, July 19th, 2009 | | 22:12 |
Micro-review: Cheri
Yes! The review sites hate it. It just makes me sad how much of the population is empathy-impaired. It's brilliant, if you are not blind and deaf. Ah, it's based on a story by Colette. So nobody blows up any aeroplanes, you understand. Maybe that's the trouble people see. | | Monday, July 13th, 2009 | | 08:18 |
The exact thing.
[BBC article on Tennessee gun law: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8145541.stm]
An interviewee says, "I hear people say all the time, guns are made specifically to kill," she tells me.
"My answer to that is: 'yes a gun can kill, but in the correct hands, it can be used to save innocent lives'. I don't care so much about a bad guy's life. I'm sorry, I don't. They make the choice to be evil, that's their choice. If they choose that, and I am armed I know what I'm doing, I will try to stop them."
So, ok, Nikki, who made you the judge? And even if you are better than everyone else, how do you know when someone is 'evil'? Maybe it's because they have a gun and are acting threatening? But, then, what was your plan? I call hypocrite. You want guns because you want revenge. Perhaps preemptive revenge. You are, or have become, part of the 'evil' you speak of.
Logically speaking, you can have no right to the absolute imposition of your will. And game theoretically? To attempt it is to force others to play their all-or-nothing strategy. You don't want that. | | Friday, July 10th, 2009 | | 19:33 |
Personal Archaeology
Been going through old boxes of stuff (the principal thing of which my life is made). Along with various documentary evidence of the total roller-coaster that was the mid 80s (and some maths notes that are WAY beyond incomprehensible), I found design notes on database query languages for gangsters (the Criminal Query Language): GIMME DA SHIT ON suppliers WHA DON WANNA live NO MORE . And a short note entitled "The Demise of the Commonwealth Ideal Traced through the Names of Critical Institutions" which goes like this: His Majesty's Loyal and Enthusiastic General Waste Disposal Service [UK] -> British Rubbish -> BR [Jamaica] -> Jamaica Refuse Removal Corps (or JRRC) [Canada] -> Garbage Canada -> TrashCan | | Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | | 15:39 |
| | Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | | 17:42 |
Ubuntu incomprehensibilia
Something has made middle-mouse-on-maximise change from maximise-vertically to send-window-to-back. WTF? Not to mention, who could ever want that? Anyone have any idea how I can make it stop? | | 15:12 |
...
...And now it has to be breakfast time! | | 14:57 |
Ubuntu not ready for prime time...
So, the Windows 7 beta having expired, I sat down to install Ubuntu. (Thanks, Microsoft, for letting me try it. It turns out that the situation is like Vista: it still doesn't play older Windows games, and since there's no other reason for running Windows, why would I keep doing this to myself?) Beautiful experience. It installed and came up, elapsed time about 15 minutes. I logged in, and it said, dude! Funky hardware! Want to install the nvidia proprietary drivers? So I said, yeah. Will, it didn't exactly brick it, but it did put me in a state with no GUI. And no documentation. And no recovery plan. Why, oh why, doesn't text mode start up with a little prompt telling you the name of the text mode config program (maybe there isn't one enymore. I never found it). Of course, it turns out to be simple! All you have to do is type "sudo apt-get remove 'nvidia-180-kernel-source'; sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" and your GUI comes back. How come I never thought of that? After a little googling I figured out how to selectively disable the hardware driver thinker, downloaded the newest from nvidia, screwed around until monitor 3 came up and everything got rotated (monitors 2 & 3 are both on card 2, I think the autoconfig understands two monitors er card and two cards, but not the combination), and, ta-dah!, Xinerama-y goodness. I don't think my mum would have got this far, though. So: I understand that proprietary drivers wreck the model. But it has to be possible to back out of changes that f*** with your GUI. It just has to. Even Microsoft understands that one. | | Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | | 15:53 |
Emacs says....
"<Triple-mouse-7> is undefined." Stephen says, "no shit, Sherlock." But where the hell did that event come from? |
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