Category: Life and Associated Annoyances

My Dark Mistress

That sweet, syrupy taste.

Good Lord! This is the Wyrmlog’s 1000th post!
Cecil! Get the champagne!

It came to my attention over the weekend that I appear to have addicted myself to Coke Zero.

Yes, laugh if you must. Make comments about how I’m completely exaggerating my situation and how what I actually mean is that I just like the stuff, and I’m being dramatic. But no. I’m dead serious. I think I’ve become an addict.

You see, the thing that you’re probably forgetting is that Coke Zero contains caffeine, and caffeine is a dependency forming stimulant. If I wanted to be more scientifically accurate I should probably say that I’ve become a caffeine addict, but the thing about caffeine addiction is that the addict develops a psychological association between the high from the caffeine and the delivery method. The addict doesn’t actually crave caffeine, they crave whatever it is that contains the caffeine.

In my case, Coke Zero.

I’ve never consumed that much caffeine. When I get to work in the morning I grab a caffeine containing drink to give me a boost and help me face the horrors of eight hours of PHP coding and fielding phone calls from idiots who wouldn’t know an SMTP server if it bit them in the rear. Historically I’ve consumed sugar-free Red Bull, but the supply of it at the eccentric supermarket over the road has been erratic for the last year or so, so I’ve been substituting Coke Zero instead. And I’ve developed quite a taste for it.

But there’s a difference between having a taste for something, and being addicted. So what was the moment I knew I had a problem? On Saturday afternoon I was sitting at my computer and feeling thirsty. “Hmmm” I thought, “A Coke Zero would be really nice about now” so I got up, went out, walked over to the shops and bought a two litre bottle, carried it home and had a drink. Then I felt like another drink… Half an hour later the bottle was empty, and I still felt like a Coke Zero. Derp.

Following on from this revelation I’ve been looking back over the last few months and realised that I’ve been preferentially selecting Coke Zero when other, healthier drinks are available. I’ve also been drinking it in the evenings when I know I should avoid caffeine in order to have a decent night’s sleep. Whoops.

So, what am I going to do about this? Not a great deal. Caffeine is a pretty harmless drug, I mean it’s not like I’m hooked on heroin or something. I’m going to source a decent supply of sugar-free Red Bull to break the cycle, not drink caffeine on the weekends unless I’m doing something really active, and not drink it at all after 4:00pm. That should see me straight.

Probably 🙂

Gaint and Wired

Blagh.

Been feeling totally dull, blah and pointless of late. In an attempt to do something approaching worthwhile I spent much of yesterday uploading the photos from my 2009 trip to the UK for Ali and Mat’s wedding to my Flickr account – which I’ve been meaning to do since the day I got back over two years ago.

The vast majority have no titles, descriptions or geotags – but I’ll work on it over the next few weeks. There’s also one day’s worth of wandering around Leicester left to go up, including my exciting and action packed investigation of the Medieval Packhorse Bridge!*

(*Not guaranteed to be exciting or action packed)

Those should go up this afternoon. In any case if you have an abiding interest in amateur photographs of unidentified English buildings, fields and street signs, please consider my photostream!

Back to work…

Monster – Part 2

Casting Wild Aspersions

I called up the electricians about my invisible smoke alarm. They were nice, reasonable and apologetic about it, and are sending out a revised invoice.

Damn. I’d worked myself up to do my best Victor Meldrew impersonation…

…Well there isn’t a smoke alarm! No smoke alarm has been installed! Unless it’s cunningly concealed inside the pile of discarded wires and brick dust your workmen so thoughtfully left in my kitchen…

…No! I don’t care what ‘Barry’ says! The words ‘smoke alarm’ at no point issued forth from his lips during the entire procedure! A large number of other quite unprofessional ones did, but ‘smoke alarm’ was not amongst  them!…

…Well if ‘Barry’ or one of your other trained neandertals can be bothered to come down here and show me the smoke alarm he claims to have installed, I’ll happily pay your account. But until then you’re not getting a cent out of me!

(For the record the electricians – one of whom may or may not have been named Barry – were entire professional, and didn’t leave any mess to speak of. You’ve just got to exaggerate wildly and cast random aspersions if you want to channel old Victor).

Monster

Deeper and Down

REM have decided to break up, my dinner last night was tube pasta seasoned with the dust from the bottom of a parmesan cheese container, and I’ve been sent a bill for hundreds of dollars worth of electrical work that I’m fairly sure doesn’t exist (unless someone broke in and installed a smoke alarm where I can’t see it).

This is probably not going to be a good day…

Austerity

The new normal

Dinner last night – Gherkin Dip and Sliced Ham sandwiches.

Breakfast this morning – Gherkin Dip and Sliced Ham sandwiches.

Lunch today – Gherkin Dip and Sliced Ham sandwiches, brought from home.

Money spent so far today – $5.20 on a muffin and Red Bull, all in 50c pieces culled from my strategic silver change reserve.

Further Austerity Measures under Consideration
– Is it feasible to bake bread with a mixture of normal flour, self raising flour, milk powder and bread crumbs?
– Is raw vegetable stock a viable source of nutrients?
– Do I really need to buy deodorant?

Good Thing They’re Free…

Put the cloves and Tom Collins mix in a bowl…

I’ve been teaching myself to use a couple of open source programs lately. Hugin for image stitching, and Scribus for desktop publishing.

Scribus is a pain. This is not because it’s a bad program, it’s because Desktop Publishing is a pain. You’ve got to worry about margins and gutters and fonts and all kinds of crazy stuff that gets automatically handled in a word processor. This is the price you pay for being able to do much cooler things layout and publishing-wise.

It’s a steep learning curve, but Scribus is proving to be really flexible. Once I get the hang of it I should be able to pump out professional looking PDFs from here to the wazoo, and actually launch that games publishing empire I’ve been planning for years…

(Yeah, let’s see if that happens… :))

Hugin is a lot of fun. Take a bunch of photos, load them into Hugin, and it stitches them all together. It can do a lot more than that of course, but I’m still just learning. You can check out some resulting gigantic panoramas of the semi-demolished Entertainment Centre in my Flickr stream.

On another subject it’s good that these programs are open source – and hence free – as after a triple hit from Council Rates, Strata Fees and Water Bills my bank balance is looking really ill. I’m having to go on a crash austerity drive for the next few weeks, which will no doubt result in more meals of bread crusts, pearled barley and soy sauce. But hey, it could be worse, at least I’m not eating pie crusts, cloves and Tom Collins Mix 🙂

I Has a Monitor!

48 hours without the net. How did I manage it?

My new 24 inch LED monitor has been courier delivered to the office. Assuming that nothing goes wrong between now and when I get home, I am back in the 21st century! Hooray!

I also picked up some new speakers to replace the rather old and decrepit ones that have served my last three computers. Nothing special, but they do have a rather frightening looking sub-woofer. Not sure where I’ll put it.

Ah! Technological bliss!

On that subject I’m thinking of formatting my Asus Eee and installing Linux on it before I head off on my cruise in the new year.  It’s not powerful enough to handle Windows 7 in any useful way, and I don’t like the idea of wandering around parts foreign running XP. I’ll only be using it to write, to store photos and to access the net when nothing with a bigger screen is available, so Linux should serve all my needs admirably. I’ll need to do some research…

Forciable Detox

My monitor has forsaken me!

Well, my home computer’s monitor has finally crapped out on me.

It’s been dying for a while. The power button hasn’t worked for about six months, and for the last few months it’s been refusing to wake up once it goes into sleep mode. I’ve been dealing with both problems by rigging up a monitor extension lead so I can directly cut and restore power without getting out of my chair, which has been serving to wake it up again. But yesterday morning nothing I did could get an image to appear. Dang.

Apparently the thing that most often goes bye-bye on Viewsonic monitors is the capacitors. These can be replaced, but unless you’re willing to do the work yourself the cost for parts and labour is generally about that of an entirely new monitor. So I guess I have some shopping to do.

On the plus side, this enforced break from using my home computer (I don’t have a spare monitor, so I can’t do squat) will serve as a nice detox from Fallout: New Vegas, which I’ve recently got back into and have been playing way too much. I’m getting seriously tetris-affected – I saw an agave plant in a garden over the weekend and had a sudden urge to harvest it. Not good. Not good at all 🙂

(As long as I don’t start seeing people’s body parts highlighted I should be OK though :))

Over and out.

Da Guv’na

They see him rollin’, they hatin’

Was crossing the road outside the office today when a most curious vehicle went past. It had a miniature West Australian flag flying from the bonnet, and the number plates were polished silver (well, probably aluminium) with big, chunky, 3D silver crowns in the middle.

A small amount of research later it appears that it was the car of His Excellency Mr Malcolm McCusker AO QC, 33rd Governor of Western Australia.

I don’t think he was actually in said vehicle as I only saw a driver and no passengers and I don’t imagine the Governor drives himself. I suppose he could have been ducking down in the back, but it does seem unlikely.

So that’s my excitement for the week!

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