Author: Purple Wyrm

Poisonous Fumes

Revenge of the Roaches

My good friend Ryan is (I hope he won’t mind me saying) an environmentalist much more towards the hippie end of the spectrum than myself. Living as he does on the fringes of the rural enclave of the Swan Valley he is often moved, when visiting my home in the inner suburbs, to comment on the difference in air quality by darkly muttering things like “the very air you breath is a poisonous fume” under his breath.

I, an urban lad born and raised and hence having lungs adapted to a heady mix of carbon monoxide, ozone and soot, barely even notice the difference.

But not this morning. This morning the air in Bayswater tastes like someone’s been burning tyres for fun and profit. It is indeed a poisonous fume worthy of Mordor and my head is already aching from it. Heading in to work will be a relief – if I survive the walk to the train station that is.

I suppose it’s kind of appropriate. I fumigated my apartment yesterday to deal with a persistent cockroach problem. Obviously the roaches had some powerful karma to call on and are getting their revenge by gassing me from beyond the grave. Tricky little bastards.

Going to go look for an oxygen mask now…

May Day

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

Well I’m not dead. I’ve just been busy. I took the last week off work to really get to grips with all the cleaning that my apartment needs. Or rather needed as I’ve actually managed to get most of it done. The place is now cleaner that it’s been in probably years, and there’s room to walk around freely without having to skip hop and jump around various piles of useful things. How long it’ll remain like that I don’t know.

I’ve also finished Fallout 3, which was a bit dissapointing as I didn’t realise that the last quest I took on was actually the last quest – I had a whole lot of other stuff I wanted to do! I also discovered that I hadn’t actually installed the add ons, and then had massive problems trying to get them to install over the top. So, in the end I uninstalled the whole thing and then reinstalled it fresh (with the add ons). Sadly this meant the loss of my character, along with my highly customised home (I had my collection of garden gnomes, chinese swords and deathclaw hands arranged just the way I wanted them!).

On the plus side I get to play it all through again, which I’m currently doing 😀

Last Sunday was of course Anzac Day. As is my wont I headed down to the local dawn service, although it wasn’t as good as last year’s. Actually it was all a bit shambolic. One of the cadets guarding the memorial threw up halfway through (I have to say that the rest of the unit perfomed admirably, the CO leading him off and another cadet stepping forward to take his place immediately) and the speaker from the RSL’s lecture on all the wars and peace keeping actions Australia has been involved in since World War One conspicuously ignored Vietnam (I like to think this was an oversight rather than an example of the RSL’s historically rocky relationship with Vietnem veterans). A further surprise was in store however, as he finished off his talk by telling us all to spy on immigrants lest they bring down our democracy or something, which was really quite disconcerting.

I’ve also been getting stuff across to my new computer, which is now pretty much set up and ready to be used on a daily basis (apart from just as a platform for Fallout 3, which to be fair it has been used for on a daily basis). I managed this trick by buying a terrabyte external hard drive, which has made transfering stuff so much easier. Hooray for affordable USB storage!

Anyway I’d better go. I’ve uploaded a bunch of new photos to Flickr and they need descriptions and tags.

Lifehacker FTW

Was a fail, now fixed!

Lifehacker is a pretty cool site – one of the ones I check on a daily basis during my lunch break. That said, it would be nice if when they decide to illustrate an article with one of my photos they actually attributed it to me. Particularly since the Creative Commons licence I use on my photos requires it.

I’ve added a comment to the article – we’ll see what happens.

Also on the subject of my Flickr stream, the operator of Save the Cliffe has been nice enough to upload my photos (with full permission and CC attribution) to his site. I can only hope it helps.

Later: Aha! Lifehacker have fixed the attribution. Thanks guys!

Derp

Derp Derp Derp

I hope everyone enjoyed this year’s April Fools prank. For those who missed it, it can be viewed in all its glory here…

I’m at the office, working away my Good Friday. Not that I’m working particularly hard mind you – just catching up on a bunch of minor jobs that have been waiting in the eaves for the last few months. It’s actually not a bad way to spend a day – working at your own pace with no other people around to distract or annoy you. A much more restful atmosphere than the usual office environment.

Anyway, before I go, here’s some twisted genius to enjoy ;D

How are those hot little potatoes?

Can’t sleep. Feral Ghouls will eat me.

Picked up my new computer on Saturday and rather than do anything useful like start migrating data across I spent most of the weekend playing Fallout 3. I think I’ve overdone it a bit – I’m developing a morbid fear of train tunnels and when I saw a dead cockroach at Subiaco station this morning I almost tried looting it for meat.

I think I’d better go cold turkey for a few days 🙂

Obama is true Hitler

Godwin?

We get a lot of spam at work – it kind of goes with the territory. Most of it’s the usual ads for male enhancement products, pleas for help from dying/persecuted millionaires and catalogues of Chinese crapware. But every now and then (for some reason) we get bombarded with poorly written missives protesting about something to do with the University of Aalborg, one Peter Axel Nielson and the hosting of student websites.

It’s hard to figure out exactly what the writer is upset about because his (her?) emails are liberally peppered with barely coherent rants concerning President Obama, Hilary Clinton, Hitler and Jesus (or as the writer prefers, “Jesu”). From what I’ve been able to establish over the months we’ve been been getting this stuff, Peter Alex Nielson (maybe) moved the hosting of a student’s website from the sever in his department (I think) and then called in Obama and Hilary (perhaps) to persecute said student in the United States (possibly). It’s all very confusing.

In any case I’ve been meaning to post one of these insane screeds for months. One came in today, so enjoy!

who does believe that hitler can change his essence?
it is impossible that obama may change his essence of hitler.
many people paraded in my city. I was very angry too.
I do not work at Aalborg university now. I left the criminal university. I never go to Aalborg university again.
Jesu forgives the criminal souls. They schemed the machination together.
in fact, After peter axel nielsen lost the head position, Obama and policemen helped him persecuting the student in USA. We heard all based on the software.
thereby, you may understand why obama came to Europe before presidential campain.
you may understand what the Aalborg university did.
you may understand why there was the financial crisis in the world. you may understand who operated american stock market.
you may understand why Anders Fogh Rasmussen became the secretary-general of NETO.
you may understand why the Aalborg university removed the student’s webpages on each department.
you may understand what obama did. you may understand what obama can do.
you may understand what obama will do
Using obama

Ice, Gale and Storm

It’s natural disaster time!

Well, yesterday afternoon Perth was hit with the biggest storm in, well certainly over a decade, and according to some people since records began. While it didn’t affect my part of Bayswater much, some parts of the city were absolutely pummeled with howling gales, pounding rain and hailstones the size of golf balls (yes that’s a cliche, but seriously, they were actually as big as golf balls). There was flash flooding, lightning strikes and even a landslide on Mount Eliza which blocked Mounts Bay road and buried a bunch of apartments chest deep in mud.

It happened to be my day off yesterday so I missed the excitement at the office when the roof of the light well shattered under the onslaught and the storm poured in, smashing windows and flooding the ground floor. Happily my colleagues took plenty of photos which they’ve given me leave to put up on my Flickr stream (which I shall do in due course).

Nedlands was absolutely pummeled. The trees have been almost completely stripped of foliage, and in some cases bark. At UWA the 80 year old stained glass windows of Winthrop Hall have been almost completely destroyed and a retaining wall at the new semi-sunken library building collapsed – filling the place with at least a foot of mud. In Subiaco the pavements along Rokeby road were solid green with leaves ripped from the plane trees and both my morning and afternoon buses had to divert around roads with downed power lines. The total estimated damage is over 100 million dollars and the city has been declared an official natural disaster zone.

Fun.

Oh, and on the way back through Subiaco I saw a man chase a rat out of his store with a broom. I don’t know if this was connected to the storm, but it is worthy of note. Apparently (according to the bus driver) when they demolished the old TAFE College a few months ago they didn’t bother to poison all the rats first, with the result that the cheery little fellows dispersed through the surrounding area. This particular rodent took cover in the next shop along (a high class clothing boutique) and the shopkeeper seemed content with this situation, leaving it to its own devices.

Some of my storm photos are up on Flickr, the rest will be up soon. Ish.

Ebony’s name is ENOBY

Tom Bombodil and the Goffs

Call me easily amused, but the TV Tropes page on the mind-bendingly awful Harry Potter fanfic My Immortal sent my into hysterics today.

Literally, hysterics. The misspelling of “Reader Discretion” in particular had me slumped in my chair, screaming with laughter for about five minutes. My neighbours probably thought I’d gone insane and (once I recovered enough to breath) I discovered I’d given myself a nasty case of the hiccoughs.

I have no intention of reading the source material – the text parser in my head would break under the assault – but the summary is pure, radioactive comedy dynamite.

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