August 2010 – Page 2

Astonishing

Pushing work off to other people is really useful

Things are looking up. For the first time in months I was able to look at my work list this morning without a sense of impending doom.

I should probably enjoy it while I can ;D

Castling

Another damn series for me to obsess over…

I admit it. Despite the excellent reviews and general buzz I’ve been avoiding watching Castle. My reasons for doing so are threefold…

1) I watch far too much TV as is
2) They always put it on stupidly late
3) Watching Nathan Fillion playing anyone apart from Mal feels like some kind of betrayal (not to mention the fact that it’s a reminder that there’s no more Firefly – *sob*)

Despite this, last night I stumbled into the first 10 minutes of an episode – the first time I’ve seen any of the show at all.

Which episode you ask? The Halloween one which opens with Nathan dressing up in a “space cowboy” costume suspiciously identical to Mal’s 😀

What I saw of the rest of the episode was pretty damn good too – I suspect I’ll have to get the series on DVD now…

Victory!

Huzzah!

Good news on the electoral system front!

GetUp! wins High Court challenge to electoral roll cut-off

The quick summary. It used to be that when an election was called you had seven days to get yourself on the electoral roll. Back in 2006 the Howard government changed the law so that you only had until 8:00pm of the day the election was called to get on the roll – a move many (including myself) saw as a way of disenfranchising voters who’d turned 18 since the last election and not got around to enrolling (young people being well known for voting against conservatives like Howard).

Now a High Court challenge has overturned the change and restored the seven day rule. Huzzah!

Also, the opposition has come out and announced they will not support the government’s mandatory internet filter. This pretty much kills it dead, regardless of who wins the upcoming election. Again, Huzzah!

Good times…

Denys can’t code

Denys can’t sing, Denys can’t sing, Denys cannot sing…

Denys can’t code,
Denys can’t code,
Denys cannot code,
He only reads books and he cannot code,
even when he’s reading a how to code book…

Just spent the better part of ninety minutes trying to figure out why a counter wasn’t incrementing only to discover I was initialising it inside the loop.

Boy is my face red.

Psychology Today

Roll out the barrel…

You know, it can be very interesting to take a step back now and then and cast an impartial eye over the workings of your own brain.

The phenomena of Stress Goggles for instance. Often, one of the first things that alerts me to the fact that I’m feeling particularly stressed is that the attractiveness of every woman I see jumps up by several notches. The train on the way to work for instance is suddenly full of girls who could pursue quite successful careers in modelling, and every woman on TV appears to have undergone a makeover.

(On this note Claire Hooper on Good News Week has actually changed her hair style recently. I’m unable to tell if this actually makes her look fantastic, or if it’s just the stress talking.)

(Oh did I mention that a mate of mine went to primary school with Claire Hooper? This is my latest pathetic attempt to claim some vague reflection of celebrity.)

Conversely I can usually tell that my stress levels have dropped down to a more reasonable level when random women start looking normal again.

The reason I mention this is because I’m under a lot of pressure at the office at the moment, and the phenomena is in full swing. I suppose it does offer some kind of compensation but given the choice between a world full of beautiful women and a job where I can sleep at night, I think I’d take the sleep.