Category: Old and Uncategorised

Had a really good debate/discusion (with Ryan and Fabian) on MSN last night on the subject of the Scientific Method versus Intuition (I’d say mysticism except Ryan would get upset ;-), caves, AD&D phase systems and the relative cuteness/hotness of Jorja Fox. It may be an evil product of Micro$oft, but MSN rocks! 😀

Still haven’t got enough time/sleep to make a proper entry, but I just have to say that Tropical Iceland by the Fiery Furnances is the best song I’ve heard since The Electric Version came out.

Go listen to it. You won’t regret it.

OK people, he wrote some decent songs but Kurt Cobain was not that great. Certainly he wasn’t great enough to justify the wholesale grief and hooha surrounding the tenth anniversery of his suicide today. Hell, he wasn’t even great enough to justify the wholesale grief and hooha surrounding his suicide in the first place. Teen Spirit is a good song – but it ain’t the anthem of my generation damnit!

This whole issue has been completely resolved, and I encourage everyone to go to www.innergeek.us and take Yvette’s test, and to go to my previous blog entry and read my full apology for some stupid things typed in the heat of the moment – August 24th 2004.

To: The Owner/Administrator of www.innergeek.us.

I recently had the fortune to stumble over the Geek Test on innergeek.us. In the process of filling it out I couldn’t help but notice that several of the questions were uncannily similar to those on my own Geek Test (URL). This similarity was only reinforced when I submitted the test and received not just a percentage rating, but a label based on that rating – in exactly the same fashion as my test.

On viewing the source of the page I discovered that the original javascript I wrote for the evaluation of my test is being used (with some modifications) to calculate the score. In addition to this the HTML of the rest of the page is also clearly copied from my test, including the 100%/80% nested tables, erroneous margin tags in the outer table, nonfunctional ‘title’ class and 80% HR tags around the title.

While I don’t mean to accuse anyone of plagiarism or theft, it is quite clear that your Geek Test is an edited copy of my Geek Test. As such I feel justified in pointing out that the source of my test contains a copyright statement, which – while it may not stand up under the Rio Protocol for instance – certainly asserts my right to be acknowledged as the author of the work.

I should make it clear here that I’m NOT going to ask you to take down or modify your test. I like your test, I like what you’ve done with it and I like it that something that I created has gone on to greater things. However I do feel somewhat cheated that no acknowledgment of my original work (or that of my friends who provided many of the questions copied to your test) is provided.

Instead I would politely request that a simple acknowledgment of the origins of the test be added to the test page (in small letters down the bottom is fine) with a link back to either my Geek Test (URL), the Tales of the Geek Underclass (URL), or my website (URL). Something along the lines of “Based on the original Geek Test by D.P.Wyrm” for instance.

I feel that this is a reasonable request under the circumstances. After all, how would you feel if someone copied your version of the test (or some other content) from your website to their own and posted it without any acknowledgment of its origin or the work you put in to create it?

In return I will happily place a link to your test and website from my test.

Please let me know your response.

Regards

Denys the Purple Wyrm

Please Note: This entry was made in the heat of the moment and contains a number of statements and assumptions that are just plain wrong. The “Guy” (who as it turns out is not a guy at all – there’s an assumption right there 🙂 is actually a perfectly nice person who has addressed all the issues I raised despite the excessive raving and ranting below, and I would encourage everyone to visit her site www.innergeek.us and take her test. I’m leaving the entry as written for historical purposes, but would like to sincerely apologise to Yvette for any ill-feeling or upset caused by my tendancy to type out whatever comes into my head without actually thinking first. – August 24th 2004.

THEY’VE STOLEN MY TEST!!!!!!!!

And the code for my test as well. I mean it’s just Javascript so it’s not like it took any great skill to write, but it’s still mine. And I might also point out that every ‘purity test’ style online test I’d ever seen up to the point when I wrote mine used overcomplicated CGI scripting to calculate the score – not Javascript, so in that respect my code is (or was) somewhat pioneering.

And on top of all that it’s just plain rude. This guy finds my test, thinks it’s neat, grabs the code (and a bunch of questions) and puts it up on his website as if he thought of the whole thing – without any acknowledgement or link to the original author. It’s (and I’m mad enough to swear here so those with delicate eyes look away) plain f***ing rude!

The ironic thing about this is if he asked permission, I would have given it to him, so long as he preserved a link to my test (like this for instance). And if his test ended up being bigger than mine (which it is) or better than mine (matter of opinion) I’d be happy, because something I created had gone on to greater things. But he’s just ripping off my work and pretending it’s his, which is plain not on.

He’s even got the nerve to stick a copyright statement on his site – “

I just walked home for the first day in several weeks and I had a busy weekend, so this is going to be a pretty short entry. But my busy weekend did result in an extension to Wyrmworld, so that’s got to be good. Well, hasn’t it…..?

Anyway I had Friday off work and went into town (I would have prefered to stay home and… well I dunno, slept, but I had to pay my rent). Once I’d handed over my hard earned cash *g* I decided to hike down to the Terrace to get some exercise and take pictures of a boarded up derelict office block I’d found down there (I felt like indulging my gothic side obviously). So I did.

That done I decided to catch a bus home rather than take the train, and since I was heading that way decided to take another look at the urban swamp across from the bus station. I’d noticed what appeared to be some kind of pedestrian walkway on the far side and wanted to check it out. So I took a stab at where the entrance should be and continued up the Terrace until I found it (right where I expected to by the way 😉

So, I took a whole bunch of pictures there too, and caught a bus home.

On the way though I got thinking. I now had a whole bunch of pictures of two derelict sites in the CBD. And I had a bunch more of the derelict site next door. And the old East Perth power station is just down the road. Started to sound like a website to me…

So, here we go. Yet another gloomy website full of pictures of derelict building sites. SO what the world needs! 🙂

I’ll probably get the Albany Bell Hatchery (Chicks of Real Quality!) up at some point over the next few weeks, and I’ll definately visit the power station this weekend. After that there’s the old Fremantle power station, the Leighton Railyards (if I can get there before they level them) and (if I can be bothered scanning a bunch of old photos) the railyards that were dug up for the east end of the Northbridge Tunnel. Wow, this is actually starting to sound like a decent website – how about that? 🙂

So yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. Oh, and meeting some long lost relatives from the UK but no one wants to hear about that 🙂

Hmmm, another week gone by and I haven’t written anything. I suppose I’d better do something about that.

OK, so last Saturday was my birthday. The dinner at the Red Orchid was good, although Justin and Marika were a no-show (anyone really surprised?). Everyone seems to have had a good time, and the food was excellent. Even the service was passable for once which makes a change.

Things did take a slightly surreal turn when everyone decided to sing me happy birthday though. I hadn’t arranged a cake because – well it seems kind of weird to me to organise one’s own birthday cake (that’s probably symptomatic of living at home for so long or something :), and I always find the whole singing and blowing out candles thing an embarrassment anyway, so I was sort of hoping that with no cake to sing around everyone would just skip it. No such luck – they sang. Also since there were no candles to blow out I had to blow out an imaginary one stuck in the top of an empty champagne bottle. As if that wasn’t weird enough I then had to fake blowing out the imaginary candle since Andrew had failed to get a photograph the first time round. What the..?! 🙂

Anyway afterwards Rebecca and Dom and I went and got gelatos and talked about Survivor Allstars before they dropped me home (they also gave me a lift there in the first place, which was nice of them :).

So, all in all a good night.

I had dinner with the parents and aunts the next night, which was good except it had got close to 40 earlier in the day and Mum insisted on us eating around the table in the (uninsulated) dining room rather than buffet style in the much cooler loungeroom. I had to keep getting up and fleeing into the relative cool of the lounge throughout the meal just to cope. Next year I think I might specify a buffet 🙂

Anyway I suppose I’d better post a list of what loot I managed to score 🙂

• From Aunty Mary in England – Some Tupperware
• From Rebecca and Dom – A large non-stick frying pan
• From Katie – Some chocolates and a Lord of the Rings bookmark
• From Ryan – A Games Workshop Sauron figurine
• From Andrew and Travis – The first season of Futurama on DVD
• From Mum and Dad – A Short History of Almost Everything by Bill Bryson
• From Aunts Faye and Bev – A new vegetable steamer and non-stick pasta saucepan
• From the Cousins – Some candy in a 50’s era Coke machine styled tin box

I think that’s about it – not bad considering 🙂

Since then I’ve pretty much been taking it easy. Well, apart from being extremely nice to a woman in Sydney who needed last minute tickets to see Infected Mushroom on the Gold Coast for her son, and needed them like yesterday (managing the online sales for Earthcore is getting to be more trouble that it’s worth 🙂

Well, I was taking it easy until yesterday when I went out and bought myself a number of things.

Firstly I got a new pair of boots as my old ones had developed a large split along the sole -which meant that I either had to but new ones or a whole load of black socks. This presented a slight problem as for years I’ve been buying my boots from the Discount Shoe Sale place in the city, down the back of King Kong Sales (yes, yes, that’s a very uncool place to buy anything from but you could usually find a good pair of boots there that would last two or three years and cost thirty dollars so nyaaaah!! :). Now – because of the Mandurah Railway project – that entire city block is going to be demolished, so everything (including King Kong and the Discount Shoe Sale) has been closed down (although there are a few die-hards living siege style in their stores until the Government pays them decent compensation – cool no?).

So I had to find somewhere else to buy shoes.

I also wanted to move into the 20th century (some years late, but what the heck) and buy a microwave – because I’m sick of surviving on sandwiches and pot-noodles when the mercury climbs above 36. I was looking at ones on sale at Myer because I had $25 of gift vouchers left over from Christmas (from the aforementioned Aunty Mary) – but then Rebecca pointed out that K-Mart were selling some at only $99 each. She also mentioned that they were pretty good for shoes, so I decided to head over to the Galleria and kill two birds with one stone. Oh – three actually because they have a Myer there and I decided to buy a CD.

I was tossing up between the Mountain Goats’ We shall all be Healed and the Darkness’ Permission to Land. I eventually decided on the latter since I really really want the former and am hence much more likely to spend my own money on it at some point (if I bought it with the vouchers then I probably wouldn’t get around to buying Permission to Land because while I wanted it I didn’t really want it enough to use $30 of my own hard earned cash to buy it – all clear? No? Good! 🙂

(As it happened it was priced at $24.99, so that worked out well 🙂

So, I am now the proud owner of a pair of ex-display boots (they’re exactly my size and only cost $30 – woot!), a 800 watt 20 litre microwave oven and a copy of Permission to Land. Each of which I shall deal with separately below.

The Boots: Um… well there’s not a lot to say about these. They’re leather, brown and have all sorts of funky looking metal studs and hooks and things all over them. I haven’t worn them yet – I’ll do that tomorrow – and I fully expect they’ll give me appalling blisters.

This isn’t anything to do with the shoes themselves, it’s to do with some very shoddy coding in my genome. Apparently whoever was responsible for writing my DNA skimped a bit on the feet, leaving me with foot ligaments too big for my foot bones. This means that whenever I try and use my feet – for instance to stand or maybe walk – rather than form into the classic arch shape, they splay out flat. This in turn means that the width to length ratio of my feet is much lower than normal and hence a shoe that fits me widthwise is way too big lengthwise, resulting in large amounts of forward-back shifting during walking and hence blistering.

Although it does mean people can stand on the toes of my shoes without me noticing 🙂

(By the way don’t get me started on the DNA for my ears. Or my fat metabolism. Actually on any part of my genome. In fact when I consider all the problems with this body I strongly suspect that my DNA was compiled as an end of year project by an un-gifted first year who spent most of the semester drinking and going to frat parties rather than hitting the books. I’d give him a C-, but that’s purely because I haven’t died yet)

The Microwave: The microwave is cool. So far I’ve cooked two things in it. A microwaveable pasta dinner that I brought specifically to christen it with, and a toasted cheese sandwich. The pasta was great. The cheese sandwich on the other end had some problems – specifically that the only microwave safe container I had to put it in was a bowl, and I overcooked it somewhat. This resulted in the cheese bubbling up like crazy in all directions then setting in a kind of porous matrix in the shape of the bowl. It was completely edible and in fact quite tasty – it just happened to look like a component from the engine room of a Klingon Bird of Prey, that’s all 🙂

Permission to Land by the Darkness: I wanted a copy of this because of the songs Black Shuck (which I carried on about in an earlier entry) and Growing on Me which – well has been growing on me frankly. So I bought it, and have listened to it twice. My opinion?

The Darkness are a truly horrible horrible band who perform absolutely appalling songs.

I should probably clarify that 🙂

Yes, they’re a horrible band who sing truly awful songs – but the point is that they know this. And so they don’t bother to pretend that they’re anything else. They just dress up in spandex and fake leopard skin and camp it on stage like complete and utter glam-rock dorks – and have a fantastic time doing it. This attitude is captured perfectly in their songs – so although they’re really terrible (c’mon, when was the last time you heard anyone not just yell ‘Guitar!!’ but yell ‘Guitar!!’ and follow it up with a thirty second guitar solo? 🙂 they’re having so much fun that it’s infectious. When Justin Hawkins hits the high notes you can’t help but break into a spontaneous grin at the sheer stupidity of it all, and before long you’re trying to join in, and having a great time (even though you’re failing miserably 🙂

Or maybe that’s just me? 😉

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned the Darkness Rock!!

Hmmm, I’ve got other stuff to write about – but I think I’ll leave it for later. Like next Sunday for instance 🙂

Oh, but before I go as may have been noticed by some I’ve dropped the whole Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week thing because I’m bored with it – and some weeks it’s a pain to have to find someone to nominate *g*. That said however I happened to catch the video clip for Stella One Eleven’s new single last week and the lead singer (Cindy Ryan is it?) looks so insanely cute that I just have to – well, say that she looks insanely cute in that particular video clip 😉

Mind you at least some of the members of Stella One Eleven are gay. I don’t actually know which members but with my luck Cindy is one of them. Which is no doubt great for her, but somewhat depressing for me *g*. I don’t really know why that should actually be depressing – I mean assuming for a minute that she’s straight then my odds of actually a) meeting her and b) us hitting it off are virtually nil anyway – her theoretically not being straight really doesn’t affect them at all. But for some reason it’s still rather disheartening. Hmmm, probably some messed up male ego thing. Well how about that, I’m as screwed around as every other guy after all! ;-D

GUITAR!!

That was fun. I just spent over half an hour trying to solve algebraic equations for some programming I’m doing. It was to do with scaling right angled triangles up and down -keeping the same angles but making the sides longer or shorter. Essentially I had the length of all the sides of the larger triangle and the length of hypotenuse for the smaller triangle and needed to find the length of the rest of the smaller triangle’s sides. So I started messing around with Pythagoras’s theorem to see if I could come up with a nice simple formula to do it.

After covering several sheets of scrap paper with frenzied scribbling I managed to come up with the following, where x and y are the non-hypotenuse sides of the large triangle, and a and b the corresponding sides of the small triangle…

x = ((((b*b)-1)/a)/b)*y

(That may not even be correct 🙂

After struggling for quite some time trying to get this into slightly more manageable format (hey, it’s been over a decade since I did any hard-core algebra 🙂 I realised that I was basically trying to single handedly derive sine and cosine – no wonder my head was exploding!

So as soon as I go online and look up how to use sine and cosine (it’s also been a decade since I did any geometry or trig OK?) my problem will be solved.

Anyway today is my birthday. Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! (call me when you’re finished). So, what did I get? A coldsore. Well OK, I didn’t get that specifically because it was my birthday – not unless my own body really is out to get me – but one did pop into existence mid Thursday, just in time to look all ghastly and embarrassing at the Red Orchid tonight. I’ve been treating it with Zovirax at about twice the recommended dosage, but it’s still hanging around dagnabit.

Actually the mini pump pack of Zovirax I was using ran out last night, just before I went to bed. I didn’t want to go to bed without putting some more on, so I decided to cut the pack open with a craft knife and scrape out what little was left. Unfortunately this didn’t work, so anyone breaking in last night at about 10:30 would have been greeted by the bizarre sight of me standing in the loungeroom in my pyjamas attacking the thing with a hacksaw 🙂

I eventually managed to cut it open – and frankly I was shocked. A pump pack of Zovirax is a cylinder five centimetres or so long with a diameter of about one centimetre. On cutting it open however you discover that most of that space is solid plastic, and you’re paying $13.95 for a tiny vial suspended in the middle that can’t possibly contain more than about 1.5 cubic centimetres of the stuff. Rip off!!

This vial was completely empty, however the change in air pressure caused by my cutting into the internal cavity allowed the last few dregs caught up in the pump mechanism to escape – meaning I could put some on before I went to bed and then again when I got up this morning. Then I walked into Maylands and bought some generic Zovirax for $10.00 which I’ve been applying all day. The coldsore’s still there though – I’ll just have to hold a menu up over my face all night or something 🙂

Anyway, in addition to turning 28 and trying to re-invent trigonometry I’ve also burned a music CD today and covered it in mouldy tomato juice. No, I haven’t gone insane (or at least if I have it didn’t start just today) I’m trying to replicate the research of this guy. Well, when I say “replicate the research” I actually mean just create some weird and freaky sounds. I can’t remember exactly what I put on the CD, but I know the following tracks were featured…

• Alec Eiffel – The Pixies
• Debaser – The Pixies
• All for Swinging You Around – The New Pornographers
• 99 Luft Balloons (German Version) – Nena
• Reseda Casino – Shivaree
• The Cheesecake Song – King Missile
• Brandenburg Concerto Number 2 Allegro – J.S.Bach
• The Triple J Breakfast Pigeon Song

So, the results should be interesting. For the mould primer I’ve used using a mixture of sugar water, the juice of a mouldy tomato I found in the fridge and some dregs from the bottom of an old vegemite jar (for those extra b-group vitamins). The CD is currently resting on top of the fridge, and if I get a good growth of mould – and if it’s actually playable at the end of the process – I’ll probably post some sound files.

Shanen Noll is at number one? ARRRRRGHGHGGHG!!!!! Worst – Birthday – Ever!!!!!! 😉

Recipe for a hit R’n’B song

1. Hit the pedal of a base drum once, and record it. Loop this at a rate of 30bpm.
2. Select a hit song of the last forty years. Fast forward to a section with either horns or piano. Select a two or three note sequence at random and loop this incessantly over the base drum.
3. Hire some guy who couldn’t make it in the hip-hop scene to mumble lyrics about sex and money over the top, punctuated (seemingly at random) by strange grunting noises.
4. If it’s still missing something, hire a female backup singer to make high pitched warbling sounds and orgasmic moans at appropriate intervals.

Congratulations! You’ve just recorded your first top 20 R’n’B hit!

Observations prompted by watching Doctor Who – The Mind Robber.

1) Those soldiers are worse than Serpent Guards.

2) Back in 1968 (and when she wasn’t screaming hysterically at everything that even twitched) Wendy Padbury was a bit of a babe 🙂