Wyrmlog

So here we are. The dreaded 14th. St-Valentines-Day-Massacre Day. The most romantic day of the year. Excuse me while I try to give a damn.

So how did I spend this blessed date? I went to work, came home, translated the Beachboys’ “Fun Fun Fun” into Surfarian (or tried to), then wrote this. Woo-hoo.

It’s been one of those days. The kind where you spend the better part of an hour trawling through hundreds of lines of code only to discover you’ve done something insanely obvious, like trying to assign a floating point decimal into a character array. The kind of day where clients ring you up with what seem to be a simple problem so you promise to have it fixed in ten minutes, then it turns out to be interminably complicated and you have to put up with disgruntled calls from said client for the rest of the afternoon. Only making matters worse is the fact that Dale is off whooping it up on Rottnest, Bevan is having a week off due to a personal bereavement and Naveen headed off around lunchtime to farewell some relatives going back to KL (all justifiable reasons not to be around, but still) leaving completely unqualified me alone to run the office (Want me to debug some code – No problem. Want me to talk to clients on the phone – What you say?).

I can’t prove that all this is down to the nefarious actions of the Archfiend Cupid, but I have my suspicions. It sounds like his work. Depech Mode may think God has a sick sense of humour, but I’d assign that particular attribute to the little bastard with the bow and arrow. We’ve never got on particularly well, and on this day in particular he always seems to put aside a little time from all the flying around and shooting at people to make things just that little less bearable for me. Call me paranoid, but I just don’t trust the little so-and-so. To quote Chris Stevens, he’s “too much of a kidder“.

Don’t worry about me. I’m just bitter. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow 🙂

Well, regular readers (if any such beasts exist) will have noticed a bit of a change to thegood old Wyrmlog. I’ve finally given in to temptation and gone totally blogger, addingsome self indulgent lists of the books and music I like. I am justifying this by tellingmyself it’s a valid use of the gigantic territories of the whitespace (or indeedgreenspace) that formerly filled the right of the screen when you scrolled down pastthe first page, but am not entirely convinced.

The impetus behind this change is the infamous Stephanie, who has gone and gotherself a Blog. She has kindly linked from this to me, so protocol (not to mention the fact that we’re friends so I’d link to her blog anyway) demands I link backto her. This of course required insertion of a link section, which required a redesign, soI decided to go the whole hog. And here we are. Oink Oink.

So go and check her Blog out. At the moment it mostly seems to be a lot ofcomplaining about the horrors of being an IB student along with occasional referencesto musical theatre, but this is bound to change when she goes off to College. We cansafely assume it will then consist of a lot of complaining about the horrors of being aUT student, but at least (like all her work) it’ll be very well written and entertainingcomplaining 😉

(You’re going to kill me now aren’t you Steph?)

In case anyone was wondering by the way, I don’t actually know Succa, I justenjoy his work. Hence the link. Getting very Canuck oriented this Log. I might as well add a link to Avalon and be done with it.

Talking of Canadians, I’ve recently downloaded a copy of William Shatner’s “Lucy inthe Sky With Diamonds” off his 1968 album “The Revealed Man”. This is possibly themost demented recording ever, easily beating his Star Trek co-star Leonard Nimoy’sbossa-nova “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” (Bilbo! Bilbo Baggins! The bravest littlehobbit of them all!).

The “song” takes in all the excesses of the saccharine, wholesome, reworked, PatBoone rock hits of the 1950s like “Tutti-Fruti”, but somehow manages to remaincompletely un-musical in the process. Fluttering harps, tinkling fairy bells, dementedstring and horn breaks match up with the female voice choir absolutely murdering thechorus to create a sound similar to that of smashing the Lawrence Welk orchestrainto a muzak factory. As if this isn’t enough you then have Shatner’s “unique”interpretation of the lyric smeared over the top like so much rancidbrylcreem.

Now I don’t know what sort of drugs Bill was taking back in the summer of love, butI’m sure he was taking them in the studio, as he variously moans, shouts, whispers,intones, shrieks, whines and grunts the lyric without even once approaching anythingthat could be called singing. The funniest moments of all are at the end of each verse,where the producers decided to slap on a primitive echo effect. Not only does thismean Shatner’s demented vocals go bouncing around the room like he’s recording atthe centre of the earth, but they completely cap out the frequency range of my PCspeakers, adding an entertaining metallic/static effect.

Needless to say I am completely in love with this entire appalling production, and findmyself wandering around idly muttering things like “MARSH-mallow Pies!!” and”TOWering Over your HEAD!!” then cackling inanely. Mind you this isn’t too muchdifferent from my normal behaviour, so no one has really noticed. Or at least no morethan usual.

Oink Oink.

I’m rather pleased with myself.

After almost a year of trying to figure out exactly what the lyrics of Shivaree’s very catchy yet disturbingly violent song Daring Lousy Guy are actually about, I’ve cracked it. The answer? Nothing really.

It should be noted that I cannot actually claim to have reached this stunning conclusion through anything but sheer blind luck, specifically my stumbling over a page on www.rinkworks.com that explains it all. Not that the page is actually about Shivaree, or indeed song lyrics, it’s in their “Things People Said” section, and lists a number of appalingly bad English subtitles from Hong Kong martial art films. On perusing this list it became astoundingly clear to me that most of the song lyric is built from these quotes, strung together to create at least a semblance of a storyline.

For example, the song….

The quotes…

“Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.” — Pedicab Driver

“The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?” — Lethal Panther

“Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?” — Armour of God

Putting aside for a moment the concept of a film called “Pedicab Driver”, it may be noticed that there doesn’t appear to be a quote about ending games or folding. We can probably put this down as improvisation neccessary for the rhyme. In any case I leave a full comparison between the lyrics (tip – it helps to select them with the mouse before reading) and the quotes to those interested enough to check them out for themselves.

So, does this mean Ambrosia and Duke are readers of Rinkworks? Or did Rinkworks and the band both harvest the information from one of those annoying novelty emails that float around the net pointing out the failures of other cultures to deal with our insanely complex language? I dunno. I’m just happy that I can finally sing along without worrying about exactly what kind of hideous massacre I might be advocating.

It is a shame that they couldn’t work Brain Theft’s immortal line “A normal person wouldn’t steal pituitaries” into the lyric though…

Well, the new year is upon us. And has been upon us for a good four days, which shows how organised I am. Happy 2002 to anyone who ever reads this thing.

I celebrated the new year in the truly Geeky fashion by going to bed at 10:00, and getting up early the next day to defrag my hard drive. Go to a party? Bah! I have better things to do! 🙂

These better things by the way do not include making any new year’s resolutions. Year after year of broken resolutions strewn all over the figarative ground behind me (usually within a week of January 1st) convinced me to make a resolution that I could actually keep a few years back. That is, not to make any more new year’s resolutions ever. I have sucessfully kept this one ever since, and am hence rather proud of myself.

These better things on the other hand do seem to include even more updates to The Beginners Guide to Surfarian, including a major change to the orthography. I’m obviously in a linguistic mood at the moment. The review of The Fellowship of the Ring is underway, but seems to have decided to become a gigantic essay, so I don’t know when it’ll be available or indeed finished. And that’s about it.

I’m outa here

Well, it’s been a while between entries hasn’t it? I have a couple of decent excuses though.

The first is that over the weekend of December 15-16 the server decided to eat it’s own hard drive. This is not exactly the kind of thing that you want to happen to a computer that’s handling the shopping cart systems for dozens of e-commerce sites at any time, let alone during the run-up to Christmas. It also (incidently) meant that this weblog wouldn’t work. It took us about a week to get everything going again, so even if I’d had the energy to make entries I couldn’t.

After that of course was Christmas, which has a habit of causing interuptions. Also general sugar-overload induced exhaustion. So I haven’t been up to writing anything.

That should probably change over the next few days. I at least intend to write up a review of The Fellowship of the Ring which I saw with Rebecca and Ryan on Boxing Day. That’s if I don’t get out to Kalgoorlie for a few days. So check back soon.

Oh yeah, I also made a few changes to the Beginner’s Guide to Surfarian, so check that out if you’re so inclined.

Given that it’s been several weeks since my first report on the issue, some readers maybe wondering what happened with that whole dating agency thing. Not a lot really, butI might as well explain it all, since I haven’t really got much else to talk about at themoment.

Much to my surprise I didn’t receive the phone call I was dreading so much.Not right away anyway. In what was obviously a well thought out and tested battleplan, they softened me up with a letter first.

This letter consisted of a gushing, hand signed missive congratulating me for “takingthe first step”, a wad of brochures full of carefully constructed success stories, and fourprofiles of “compatible” women.

Exactly why these women could be considered in the least bit compatible withme remains something of a mystery. The four of them could best be summed upas slim and athletic, slim and adventurous, slim and romantic, and slim and oldfashioned, which sort of sounds like a roll call for next year’s Spice Girl clones. It’squite clear that the agency didn’t even look at my form, and just shovedtogether the standard grab bag of slim women in the right age group (the fact thatthey’d count me as compatible with a bunch of slim women is a deadgive-away 🙂

Of the four the slim and romantic one probably appealed the most, but considering thesection on her ideal partner was a rather good portrayal of the hero from a Mills andBoon novel, I felt rather underqualified. As I’m not Fabio* I figured pursuing itfurther would be a good way of setting myself up for disappointment, and wasting agood amount of money in the process.

So I binned the whole lot.

Unfortunately it was soon after that that the calls began. A representative of the agencythat I shall call (for no particular reason) Lauren, began to phone up, attempting toarrange a time to discuss my “particular needs” (her particular needs being a steadysupply of large denomination cheques).

I avoided these calls by the cunning expedient of being employed (you have to wonder about someone who rings you at home during work hours, unless of course most dating agency clients are unemployed shut-ins – which seems likely). However as the week progressed these calls got more and more numerous, and I realised with horror that unless I took action Lauren would soon figure out that calling me after six might not be such a bad idea.

So, in an act of supreme deviousness, I called back at 8:30 in the morning. This was obviously the optimum time. I’d already established (by way of missing all of Lauren’s previous calls) that I was an extremely busy worker and pretty much uncontactable during the day. So calling at 8:30 was not at all unreasonable. By the same token her previous calls had established that Lauren seemed to have a problem with working outside of office hours, thus she was unlikely to be in, or at least taking calls that early. It also had the advantage that no one else was in the office to overhear me phoning a dating agency.

I do have some sort of reputation to maintain.

As I expected I got an answering machine. I left a short but courteous message for Lauren saying that I wasn’t interested in taking things any further, and have not been bothered by her since.

Which in a way is a shame. I was quite looking forwards to continued pestering calls, because then I’d have an excuse to get really nasty and righteous. When dealing with this kind of thing, my first refusal is always rather short, and passionless (“sorry, not interested”). My second refusal is longer, more detailed, and reasonably polite (“I understand that you have a business to run, and you don’t like losing a prospect, but I’m just not interested, so you might as well stop wasting your time on me and work on some other people”). From that point on I pull out all the chocks. Threats of litigation, government involvement, and growled threats in a low voice descend like paratroopers from above. She’d be sorry she ever harassed me in a shopping centre!!

OK. I’m sane again now.

* Thank God

Well, The Fellowship of the Ring comes out soon, so I figured I might as well launch a little project I’ve been working on for about six months. It’s not actually finished, and there’s a good chance it never will be, but eh.

It’s an interactive map of Middle Earth. Oh yey. I started it to get a bit of hands on experience with DHTML and as a response to the pathetic one on the official movie site which doesn’t seem to actually work, and lists “Wizards” as a race. Pretty damn small race, I mean there are only five of them, and only three involved in the actual plot, the other two unnamed ones headed out east soon after their arrival at the Grey Havens in about T.A. 1000…

Yes, I’m an obsessive Tolkien Fan. Deal with it.

Anyhoo, use the checkboxes to turn map features on and off, and then click on said map features for information about them. I’ve tested it in Netscape 4.7 and 6.2, and Explorer 5.5 and it all seems to work. No guarantee it’ll work for you though (these people with their weirdass browser set ups I don’t know…)

Most of the actual map work is done, apart from clickable links on the “Reunited Kingdom” layer, but a lot of the information pages are still non-existant. So if you click on something and get a blank pop-up window, don’t panic. It just means I’m a lazy bastard.

As if we didn’t already know that.

Enjoy!

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything (as usual) but I have a good excuse. We’ve been moving office. This means that instead of sitting at a desk all day typing and mousing I’ve had to carry heavy equipment up and down stairs, which is not the kind of work IT professionals are designed for. But it’s all done now, and I can come home after work and do things apart from collapse into bed. Or onto the couch. Or the floor.

When I first joined the company in early 2000 we were bailed up in a pokey little room at the back of an ISP. Not long afterwards we got a big chunk of investment to launch a shopping portal, and moved out to spacious second storey offices in fashionable Subiaco. This was great, except we launched the portal (who’s name I shall not repeat, because the hollow shell is still online and it’s just too embarrassing to let anyone see) just as the dot.com bubble burst, and it was a complete and utter failure.

Actually we can’t totally blame the dot.com meltdown. The idea was we combine all our online stores via a clever front end that would make them look like just one big online store. A great idea, except that at that point our online stores sold…

• Power Tools
• Lingerie
• Liquor
• One handed knives for the disabled
• Flowers

So we ended up with possibly the world’s first power tool, liquor, lingerie, flower and knife portal. Needless to say it didn’t sell a thing, and before long crashed and burned, trailing funds and the company’s reputation flailing in it’s wake.

Thankfully we’d been smart enough to set the portal wing of the business up under another name (necessary for a .com.au domain name), so the rest of the company didn’t suffer too much fallout. But we were still stuck leasing expensive Subiaco office space, without the promised money pouring in from the golden goose portal to support it. This of course made moving to smaller premises a priority, and last week we shifted offices from our spacious, airy retreat high above Rokeby Road, to a slightly less (but still very) pokey little room at the back of the same ISP we started from.

Net result? Eighteen months and several thousand dollars to move the company one door down the hallway. But at least we’re still afloat, which is more than can be said for a lot of dot.coms these days.

One disadvantage of moving back to the ISP (apart from the fact that we have to fit the equipment of a 100 square metre office into about 16) is we have to deal with the bathroom issue again.

The ISP shares bathrooms with an investment company on the same floor, there’s a door from our side of the building into the bathroom hallway, and one from their side. This wouldn’t be a problem except that in a fit of paranoia the ISP directors decided that they couldn’t risk the occasional merchant banker wandering through and raiding the fridge. To this end they installed an expensive security card system on our door, meaning you need a magnetic card to get out of the hallway.

Yes, to get out.

In their infinite wisdom (or as some kind of sociological experiment) they decided to let anyone into the bathrooms from our side of the building. It’s the getting back out that presents problems. If you’ve left your card at your desk (as frequently happens when you’re concentrating on an insanely complicated programming issue and suddenly realise that can of cola you drank an hour ago wants out now), you end up helplessly imprisoned in the hallway.

It’s like some kind of fiendish trap.

Until recently the only way to escape was to hammer on the door and yell until someone came along and opened it. The door is at the back of the building, next to the kitchenette and away from the offices, so it usually took a good ten minutes of drumming to get anyone’s attention. Even worse, the Investment Bankers from the other side would often hear the racket and poke their heads in to have a good laugh or offer helpful advice such as “You have to knock really hard! No, harder that that!“.

Recently however, after many complaints from staff with sore throats and fists, the directors have seen fit to install an intercom in the hall. This means that you can now hold down a button and yell. Since the other end of the intercom is just outside the door this isn’t much better than the old system, but is at least a bit easier on the hands.

I feel like I’m living in a Dilbert strip.