Category: Old and Uncategorised

The complete text (or more accurately subject line, since the client in question is yet to realise that you can type in the “big text area” as well as the “little text area”) of a support email I received from a client today…

Hi pls look at background at to – it has a BLOCK AFFECT IN THE IMAGE!!!

I was tempted to email back something along the lines of “I’m sorry, it’s company policy to only accept emails written in English”, or even “What the hell are you talking about!?” but I bit my tongue and sent a polite request for clarification.

I honestly think some of our clients are using random text generators to compose their emails to us. How else can you explain the fact that they can be perfectly articulate on the phone while their emails resemble second rate beat poetry?

Rather tired and depressed at the moment, which is why there haven’t been many updates lately. Basically just a combination of work stress, health issues (nothing serious it turns out, but very worrying there for a while) and the need to get my tax done ASAP. I’ll pull through it in a few weeks. Probably.

*sigh*

I’m doing a CPAP trial at the moment for my sleep apnea. It’s not going very well, which is why I’ve been fairly silent recently. The theory is you wear a mask while you sleep that blows pressurised air into your throat, holding it open so you can breath. That’s the theory. In my case it seems to involve wearing a mask so uncomfortable that I can’t sleep, which blows pressurised air into my throat so I can’t breath out. As a result I’m not getting much sleep, and not up to doing much except the basics (work, eating, trying to sleep etc).

I think I may have to bite the bullet and lose weight. I was working along the lines of ‘get set up with CPAP, get some decent sleep, use the extra energy to exercise’, but it looks like I’ll just have to summon up the energy to exercise without the sleep. I’ve finally got a replacement inner tube for my bike, so I can start cycling again which should help, but it’s still not a pleasant prospect *sigh*.

Current mood – Well and truly fed up.

You know, the Internet may be the greatest information resource ever constructed by the human species, but it could sure use some organisation. I spent a good two hours yesterday trying to find out how far an average person could travel in a day on foot and on horseback (why? you’re not cleared for that! 😉

I found plenty of information about how villages in northern England are spaced based on how far a person could walk in a day, and how traffic in central London today is apparently slower than horses and carts in Victorian times, but precious little on the actual distances and speeds involved. I was at the point of tearing my hair out when Wikipedia (the font of all human knowledge 😉 came to my partial rescue with articles on the various gaits of horses, and the Pony Express. Some more poking around on the subject of “walk” finally allowed me to come up with some semi-reliable figures which I shall present here to make life easier for anyone else seeking the same information

An average, healthy, human adult can walk or march at about 5km per hour, or 3.1 miles per hour. Running speed is around 13km per hour, or 8 miles per hour. A horse can comfortably trot at the same speed (13kmph/8mph) more or less indefinitely. A horse can gallop at about 40-50km per hour (25-30 miles per hour) but can only keep it up for about 15 minutes before having to stop and rest.

So if we assume that a day’s travel is seven hours, a person on foot can travel about 35km (22 miles) a day. On horseback they could travel about 90km (56 miles).

I suppose I should now prove my calculations by getting a map of northern England and checking if the villages are 22 miles apart. If they’re closer I’ll just have to blame lazy peasants. If they’re further I’ll pin it on long summer evenings 😀

(Oh, and for the record if you wanted to do it Pony Express style you could conceivably cover about 350km or 220 miles in a day – but you’d need 30 or so horses lined up across the landscape waiting for you and a very tough backside 🙂

I am very very tired – I’ve got a number of things I keep meaning to write about, but I just can’t seem to summon the energy. I suppose I’ll make some effort though.

Jericho. It wasn’t bad. It seems a lot like a post-nuclear version of Lost – which is kind of an odd thing for me to say because I’ve never watched even a single episode of Lost. Nonetheless it somehow seems to have a certain Lost-like quality 🙂

Of course it helps that it’s post-nuclear. I’m in favour of anything post-nuclear (short of actual post-nucleism naturally). I ascribe this to both finding a copy of Henry’s Quest in the school library and watching Quest Beyond Time way too many times as a kid. I’ve been obsessed with the ruin of civilisation ever since. Funny how things turn out 😀

Hmmm, what else was I going to say. Oh yeah, how nerdy is this? A few months back my old boots wore out and I upgraded to Doc Martens – ten eyehole yellow stitch ones. These chewed up my feet pretty bad for a while, but are now nicely worn in (or have sufficiently reshaped my feet). In any case I badly scratched one of them the other day, taking some of the nicely tanned surface off and leaving the underlying rough leather exposed. Clearly this wasn’t going to fly so I bought some black boot polish (I already had dubbin naturally, but that’s not black) and got into some vigorous polishing.

It worked a treat. Unfortunately however I slipped with the brush a few times and smeared polish over some of the trademark yellow stitching. I did my best to clean it off, but no dice – the stitches were reduced to a dull brown. What to do?!

Simple. I grabbed a Citadel fine detail brush and a pot of bubonic brown and painted them back on!!

With some careful, painstaking work I highlighted the dulled stitches with a thin line of paint. And you know what? It worked perfectly! A day later and you can’t even tell which were touched up. Conforming-in-a-non-conforming-way-street-cred restored! 🙂

(I said it was nerdy 🙂

Anyway I’m probably going to watch the second episode of Jericho and go to bed. If I can stay awake that long.

Wait, hang on, so Here Comes Your Man isn’t about the bombing of Nagasaki? Now I’m just confused!

Spent a quite enjoyable day at work designing and starting the coding work on a new product. It’s nothing too amazing – in fact it’s fairly boring – but there’s just something really… I don’t know, it’s like a sense of freedom, when you start out with such a huge, blank canvas on which you can write your words (or code) large. Like you’re cruising down the coast on a summer’s day with the wind in your hair and five months of paid holiday in front of you. Or something like that. I’m probably quite mad 🙂

Hmmm, there was no Triple J when I woke up this morning. Or at least there was, but only in the form of song after song after song with the occasional “We’re experiencing technical difficulties, but we’ll be back real soon!” recording in between. I wouldn’t have minded so much, except that there were no time-calls, no news bulletins and no weather forecasts. I had to go across to (shudder!) Mix 94.5 to find out whether to take my umbrella with me.

Turns out there’s massive industrial action going on at the ABC. Thousands walking off the job and such. It’s only a 24 hour strike apparently so things’ll be back to normal tomorrow. Supposedly.

Hmmm, what else has been going on in my oh so glamourous life? I finally got a package of stuff from Amazon I ordered like a month ago (their shipping times to Australia are ridiculous, I honestly think they ship across the Pacific via sea otter) and as a result have been listening almost non-stop to the soundtrack from Serenity. Particularly track number 3, which is the main reason I ordered it. It’s the music from when you first see the ship and she starts re-entry into the atmosphere. If for some reason you wanted to pinpoint the very moment I became a Firefly fan, you could make a good case for it being that scene, and a good part of it was because of that amazing music. I mean, banjos combined with a symphony orchestra? What madman could conceive of such a thing!? And what even greater madman could make it sound so damn good!?! (David Newman actually). The only thing wrong with it is it only goes for 50 seconds – I hereby demand Mr Newman works it up into a full 40 minute symphony! Now!!! ;D

Oh, here’s an interesting link that was on Slashdot today. An interview with the guy who made the Columbine computer game that’s been implicated in that shooting in Montreal. It’s actually really, really interesting – if you want to make any kind of commentary on the Montreal incident you need to read this interview. I could sum up the gist of it here, but I won’t. Suffice to say that if you think the idea of making a computer game about Columbine is sick, and anyone who would do such a thing is some kind of pervert, you’re in for a real surprise. Go on, read it!

OK, I’ll shut up now. Jericho premieres in a few minutes, and I thought I’d give it a chance. In all likelyhood it’ll be awful, but you never know.

PS: Hey! The opening music is by the Killers – that’s a good sign…

Does the fact that I find myself really looking forwards to the re-done Star Trek make me an enormous geek?

 

 

Yes.

I’m reading Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys at the moment. It’s pretty good (although that’s a given really) but today I noticed something a bit odd…

As part of the flow of the story Neil drops in the occasional Anansi story, and one of has a bit that goes a little like this…

You get that? Weeny-weedy-weaky?

Now at this point you’re probably wondering what the heck I’m on about. Well, while preparing for Justin’s birthday party (which I wasn’t able to go to in the end) I did a fair bit of brushing up on my Latin. One of the interesting things about Latin is that there’s two ways of pronouncing it. The one that most people are familiar with is the Eclesiastical pronunciation, which is the pronunciation developed by the Roman Catholic church over the last 1000 years or so. The second one is the Classical pronunciation, which is our best guess at how the Romans actually spoke it. There’s some diferences in the vowels here and there, but about the biggest divergence is probably ‘v’ and ‘c’. In Eclesiatical these are usually pronunced ‘v’ and ‘ch’ respectively. In Classical however they’re ‘w’ and ‘k’.

So what has this go to do with Anansi Boys? Well consider Caesar’s famous declaration Veni Vedi Vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”, for those whose classical education is lacking). In Eclesiastical this is something like “veenee veedee vichee”. In Classical on the other hand it’s (drum roll….) “weeny weedy weaky”!

SEE!?!?

(I don’t know what’s sadder, that I know all this at all, or that I know all this well enough to immediately notice it in a book 🙂

PS: Ha! David Tench is being moved to 9:30. It’s the begining of the end!! *vbg*

So, the body formerly known as Xena is now officially Eris!

This is great news for any fan of the Illuminatis! trilogy – so much so that I actually yelped with joy when I read it on Wikipedia (thankfully I’d come in early and was the only one in the office). It’s a name almost as good as Persephone, given the amount of discord the planet (sorry! dwarf planet) has caused in the astronomical community.

And it also means they’ve been able to name the moon after Eris’s daughter Dysnomia or Lawlessness. Get it? Lawlessness? As in Lucy Lawless? Clever no? 🙂

Now all we’ve got to do is get them to reverse that stupid “Dwarf Planet” ruling and get Pluto, Charon, Ceres and Eris back onto the list where they rightfully belong. Fnord!

Late night up at Fabian’s place last night. Plenty of vodka, bourbon and sitting in the spa in the rain – none of which I partook of, not being a fan of any of them (I don’t drink, and strongly suspect I may have been a lobster in a former life ;). I just drank coke and sat on the edge dodging the rain as best I could. Still, not a bad night all up and probably better than sitting at home all alone (although I could have stood to get to bed earlier than 1:00am, not having slept terribly well on Friday).

Here’s something vaguely interesting (or not). While poking around on Wikipedia (like you do) I discovered Durendal – the legendary sword of Roland (probably better known in English as Orlando). If you swap the first two syllables around you get ‘Endural’… Sound familiar? Well, probably not, because you’re not an obsessive Tolkien nut, but it’s quite obviously the same word as ‘Anduril’ – the reforged sword-that-was-broken (you know, the big flashy one Vigo Mortenson was waving around in the third movie?).

Tolkien was pretty expert in European mythology and legend – there is no way he would have been unaware of Durendal. So I reckon we can mark this one down as deliberate in-joke, or at least reference. Oh sure, Anduril means ‘Flame of the West’ in Quenya (well probably Quenya anyway) but I can state from personal experience that when you’re making a language the temptation to throw in a few little gags here and there is very strong (Zurv

I said everyone’s dying! Now Peter Brock has joined in. What is going on?!

There was an extremely annoying woman on the bus to Subiaco the other day. She sat right behind the driver and for the entire duration of the trip talked at him non-stop in an incredibly loud voice about… well anything that popped into her head seemingly. I was seated halfway up the bus and could clearly hear every single word she uttered about football, the healthcare system, mobile phones, and a dozen other subjects. I was dearly tempted to stand up and berate her, sweeping my coat around dramatically perhaps and declaiming (in my best Shakespearean tones) “Hold thy tongue thou garrulous crone! Mine very ears do bleed from thy intemperate prattle!!”, but I didn’t of course – I’m too polite :). It was certainly a relief to reach Subi though.

While I’m on the subject of annoying things there’s a very annoying song around at the moment. It’s called The Devil was in My Yard and it’s by Perth’s own Sleepy Jackson. It’s annoying in two specific ways – the music, and the singing (which frankly doesn’t leave much does it?). The music is a horrible smushed up mass of instruments, smeared together into not so much a wall of sound as a kind of upright, linear, auditory bog. It’s like white noise but more annoying. And the singing, well… I am reliably informed that the lyrics of the first verse go,

Unfortunately the singer doesn’t feel constrained by the lyric sheet, or indeed the English language, and – well sings isn’t the verb, bawls would be closer to the mark – bawls the following in a nasal voice,

It’s absolutely awful! And naturally doing quite well in the charts (funnily enough however the video clip ain’t bad.)

On the subject of video clips (see how hard I’m working on my segues today?) I’m watching JTV Saturday at the moment which is Triple J’s fairly new foray into television. Basically it’s a clip show – but they count down the 20 most requested songs from Super Request from the previous week – so there’s actually the possibility of something worthwhile getting in at number one.

In any case the host of JTV Saturday is the host of Super Request, Rosie Beaton. And while I have absolutely nothing against her, I’m finding her irritating almost beyond belief.

Why you ask? Well, after much thought I’ve reached the conclusion it’s because she’s used to radio rather than TV. You see, on radio all you have is your voice. You can’t communicate with your face, or with body language, so you need to put everything into your voice. You need to ramp up the emotion, ramp up the expression and basically say with your voice everything you’d normally say with your face. Rosie does this very well, and listening to her on the radio is quite enjoyable.

The problem is she speaks exactly the same way on camera – and it just doesn’t work.

She talks so loudly, and with so much forcefulness that she comes across as some kind of crazy person – the kind who comes up to you on the train and starts babbling out their life story, or why they like Steve Earl, or how the aliens took their knees. Or alternatively like she’s trying to sell you a used car. Now, if you look away from the screen and just listen, she’s fine – it’s just that normal people don’t talk like that face to face, and it’s damn disconcerting.

So Rosie – in the unlikely event that you’re reading this – you’re great on the radio, but chill a bit on the TV, OK?

Apart from Rosie Beaton freaking the life out of me JTV Saturday is pretty good. And educational! For instance this week we learned…

• The video clip for Here it Goes Again by OK Go features the best treadmill dancing ever!
• Kick Push by Lupe Fiasco is almost as annoying as the Sleepy Jackson.
• Muse should do an album of Coldplay covers on a container ship.
• For all her freaky-speaking, when Rosie Beaton straightens her hair she bears a notable resemblance to Lauren Graham.

So, if you have some time to kill on Saturday mornings, tune in.

Abandoning clever segues for the moment, my new tooth is performing quite well. It hasn’t fallen apart and I’m getting used to the fact that it’s not quite as pointy as the old one was. Presumably there’s also slightly less mercury seeping into my system now, which is probably a good thing. I intended to mention this last week with all the other tooth related stuff, but the dentist was very impressed with my teeth. She said they were in absolutely excellent condition, which is nice to know (in light of this information I like to think that in 1000 years a distant descendent of Dr Alice Roberts will dig them up and completely underestimate my age at death).

Teeth of course used for eating, and on the subject of eating (now that one was just forced wasn’t it?) I went out to dinner with Rebecca and Dom last night after work. We hit up Wagamama in Subiaco where we had quite a good time despite the appalling noise levels, rampaging children, problems with the loyalty card system and a server apparently named “Trial” who forgot to bring the wine (not that I minded too much about that :). We decided to splash out and be daring and tried a side of the steamed soya-beans, which were actually much nicer than you might think. Afterwards we walked up to the Gelare place at the Regal, and mocked the Nova FM DJ visible through the window on the other side of the street. So a good night had by all really (apart from maybe “Trial”).

Anyway, I have things to do today (probably) so I’d better go and do them (or not).