I know the guy who wrote this, and heartily endorse his viewpoint
Bali is not an Outback Town
My brother used to think it was…
Month: November 2011
Kinecting the Dots
Take that Bill!
So, they’re using the Pixies’ Where is My Mind to advertise the Kinect.
Hmmm, given that it’s a Microsoft product I would have thought Trompe le Mond was more appropriate…
I still got it!
Anyone recognise the formula?
I just spent 20 minutes converting the formula…
d = M-((M/2)+7)
…into…
M = 2(d+7)
I still got it baby!
(Even if it would have taken me about a 10th of the time back in high school :))
The steps are…
d = M-((M/2)+7)
M = d+((M/2)+7)
M = d+7+(M*0.5)
M-(M*0.5) = d+7 (This one took me ages)
0.5*M = d+7
M = 2(d+7)
Now, does anyone recognise the base formula?
Warehouse 23 13
Yeah, like I’d actually call her…
Caught a couple of episodes of Warehouse 13 last night for the first time.
I’ve been meaning to check the series out for a while, it’s been getting a fair amount of good press online and hence has been sitting in the back of my head as something to watch out for. So when Channel Seven announced (with a slight amount of fanfare) last week that they were putting it on at 8:30 Sunday nights I jumped at the opportunity (sorry Spielberg, Terra Nova is quite good, but not quite enough for me to obsessively reserve its timeslot).
So, having watched two episodes last night, I have a number of questions…
What’s with starting with episodes 8 and 9 rather than 1 and 2?
The most likely explanation of course is that they’ve quietly played the previous 7 episodes in some graveyard slot and all they’ve done now is promote the show up to the top rank by moving it to Sundays, but it’s a bit disconcerting to have all these ads promoting this great new series only to drop new viewers right in the middle of the first season without warning.
Why was the pre-credits teaser cut from Episode 9?
It would have been a lot easier to understand the episode if we’d seen the intro. Was it a typically pathetic attempt to run the two episodes together into a continuous “Movie Length Episode”, or just general incompetence?
Why did the Studio 54 Mirror Ball play generic disco music rather than I Will Survive?
Yeah, I know, probably a syndication licensing thing…
What – if any – is the connection with Steve Jackson Games and their GURPs Warehouse 23 from back in the 90s?
It’s exactly the same idea with a different number.
Why are the Communicators called ‘Farnsworths’ rather than ‘Logie-Bairds’?
Zing! 🙂
Where can I get Allison Scagliotti’s phone number?
😉
All that aside, I found the show quite entertaining – even if the science was abominable – and will keep tuning in for as long as Seven deign to air it at a reasonable hour – which will probably be for about two weeks at which point it won’t have beaten Terra Nova in the ratings so they’ll swap it out for So You Think You Can Juggle Chainsaws America or whatever their next guaranteed ratings winner is.
Here we go, here we go again…
Aaaaaand after a weekend of my computer working (or at least working as well as it ever does) it decided to crap out on me this morning. Again.
I’ll run the startup repair process again tonight and see if that fixes it. It only took three hours last time…
NCIS R’lyeh
Dunwich is ridiculously old…
Rejoice and be glad all ye people of the Interwebs! For my computer is healed!
Well, not exactly healed, but useable for the time being, which is the main thing. Once I pick up that additional 1 terabyte external drive and back up my music collection I’ll be sending it off to the shop for a complete overhaul – perhaps a complete reinstallation of Windows – which should see it right. I hope.
Anyway, while luxuriating in the ability to view Wikipedia on a decent sized screen this afternoon I discovered something rather, well, I don’t know that there’s a better adjective for it than “cool”.
Many years ago, when I was about 14, I discovered that our local library had a book on tape of two stories by H.P.Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror and The Rats in the Walls. I was quite getting into Lovecraft at the time and leapt on the opportunity to hear two tales I hadn’t yet managed to find a copy of – the only ones I’d tracked down at that point being Beyond the Wall of Sleep in a collection of Weird Tales reprints that also featured Tennessee Williams’ account of the revenge of Nitocris, and an August Derleth “collaboration” named Wizard’s Hollow.
The recordings were a bit cut down in order to fit them on a cassette tape each, but the actor reading them – someone I’d never heard of – did a remarkable job. His rich, but understated reading of the opening paragraphs of the Horror – the eerie description of the hills around Dunwich – has stayed with me ever since. In my mind it’s the definitive version of the story and I can still hear it in my head to this day – as can I his reading of the last line of The Rats.
The rats… The rats… in the walls…
(This is of course partially because a few years later the Library was selling off a bunch of old books and I was able to purchase the tapes, which are still in my personal collection)
So, today I was clicking my way around Wikipedia and ended up on the page for The Rats in the Walls. Much to my surprise the book on tape was mentioned along with the actor who’d read it. Out of curiosity I clicked through and discovered that… it’s Ducky!
That’s just… cool. Try to tell me it isn’t.
I’ve been meaning to convert the tapes to MP3 (just for my own personal enjoyment) for years. Now I’ll have to do it. As soon as I can find them of course… 🙂
Good News Everyone!
I am happy to report that I’ve been able to get my PC to boot into Ubuntu via a live CD and am in the process of backing up all my important data to an external drive. This means that – hopefully this weekend – I’ll be able to drop the box into a repair shop for a complete overhaul without worrying about some clueless keyboard monkey accidentally formatting the hard drive.
(Cue the comments asking my why I don’t just install Ubuntu and be done with it. Hey, do I tell you how to run your life?)
(Oh, I do. Fair enough)
What does a Middle Eastern Flag look like anyway?
Oh you gotta watch out for those foreign students with their Middle Eastern flags!
At a Victorian high school foreign students raised a Middle East flag on a school flag pole, Australian students took it down. Guess who was expelled… the students who took it down.
The Wyrmlog has been getting quite a few hits for the above phrase recently as a result of my post concerning the email that contains it. As I happen to know a bit about the incident in question I figured I’d do the right thing and share that knowledge with other truth seekers. So here we go…
It never happened.
What do I mean it never happened? Let me explain.
The email that you’ve probably received, the one that starts I am the Government’s/Labor Party’s worst nightmare was not written by an Australian, and was not written about Australia. It’s an American email written by an American about America. Everything that it says was originally about America, and has been clumsily altered to refer to Australia by some Aussie with an axe to grind – a fact that should be pretty obvious when it starts talking about ‘Social Security’.
Even more obvious is the line…
I believe it is time to really clean house, starting with the Lodge, the seat of our biggest problems
…which just sounds odd. When was the last time you heard the Lodge being mentioned in any kind of political debate? However it makes perfect sense when you realise the line originally read…
I believe it is time to really clean house, starting with the White House, the seat of our biggest problems
…see?
So, the alleged incident in some Victorian high school. I said it never happened. This is because it’s a somewhat one-sided account of something that happened in a school in Texas that has had various nouns changed to “Australianise” it…
Texas high school students raised a Mexican flag on a school flag pole, other students took it down. Guess who was expelled…the students who took it down.
There you go. As to what actually happened in Texas, the Mexican flag was being displayed (not flown from a flagpole) within the school as part of a display about Cinquo de Mayo, and a single student ripped it down and shoved it into a trash can. An act for which he was suspended, not expelled.
So there you go. The facts may not be as exciting as certain people with agendas to push might like, but they are the facts.
Peace out.
Channeling Chuck Lorre
Tiger Blood!
In an email to my good friend Rebecca today I said (in relation to my computer woes) that if my hard drive has died I’m thoroughly rotated like a threaded metal fastening pin.
According to Rebecca this is word for word a line from Big Bang Theory, a show that I have watched all of twice, and was not terribly impressed with.
Apparently I’m channeling Chuck Lorre. This cannot be a good thing, no matter how you look at it…
Midnight Lullaby
Robert Smith’s unexpected vocal clone
On the radio this morning there was a discussion about people suffering from musical confusion – you know, when you think a song is by one artist and it turns out to be by another? One of the stories that came up was from someone who went to a party where everyone except him insisted that Come on Eileen was by…. wait for it… The Cure.
THE CURE!!!
This was so gobsmackingly ridiculous that I couldn’t believe it. I mean can you imagine Robert Smith, in dungarees, strutting along singing Eileen! Too-ra-taloo-ri-ay! ? But then they played a bit of it, and blow me down if the lead singer of Dexys Midnight Runners (a certain Kevin Rowland, Wikipedia informs me) doesn’t sound exactly like Robert Smith!
Have a listen for yourself, it’s freaking uncanny!
If your main exposure to the Cure was Friday I’m in Love then it’s probably not such a stretch to attribute Eileen to them as well.
You learn something every day!
