Feeling a bit tired and run down this fine Sunday morning?
This should help wake you up.
Enjoy!
Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
The best of the Portsmouth Sinfonia
Feeling a bit tired and run down this fine Sunday morning?
This should help wake you up.
Enjoy!
I’m not who you think I am.
You know, I’m not as smart as people think I am.
I mean, yeah, I’m smart. I can say without too much unjustified arrogance that I’m a lot smarter than the average Joe on the street. But the thing is I come off as being far smarter than I actually am, because I have a vast amount of readily available data to draw on.
I’m knowledgeable. I’m really knowledgeable. This is one of the advantages that having a differently structured brain gives you. Sure, an autistic brain is retarded (I use the phrase in it’s literal sense of ‘held back’, so don’t be getting all up in my grill ‘kay?) socially, but it’s fantastic at storing and quickly retrieving ridiculous amounts of information. I absorb information like a sponge, and can usually pull it up for processing with a moment’s notice. Combine this with a merely higher than average IQ and it comes out looking positively phenomenal.
Trust me, I’m not really as smart as you think. Look at maths for instance. I can’t do maths in my head at all, I just don’t have the working memory for it. Give me a pen and pad to act as an external buffer and I can crunch numbers until the cows come home, but ask me to add two three digit numbers in my head (what’s 528 plus 234?), and I really struggle – I just can’t hold all the number combinations in my brain at the same time.
And time. I have very little sense of time. I caught up with Fabes over the weekend and he pointed out that it’s been six months since we last spoke. I would guessed it was one and a half, maybe two months tops. That’s just stupid π
So yeah, don’t overestimate my intelligence folks. I don’t have a terribly fast processor, and very limited RAM – my fast System Bus and massive hard drive just make it seem like I do π
Burgers and hot dogs? Lord take me now!
Well, looks like my old school chum Sebastien is finally getting that gourmet burger bar of his up and running. That gourmet burger bar that’s pretty much right next door to my work.
I can’t decide is this is awesome (for my mouth) or awful (for my waistline).
I’ll go with awesome π
(oh, and it’s December 1st and it’s not yet open. What gives?)
My brother used to think it was…
I know the guy who wrote this, and heartily endorse his viewpoint
Take that Bill!
So, they’re using the Pixies’ Where is My Mind to advertise the Kinect.
Hmmm, given that it’s a Microsoft product I would have thought Trompe le Mond was more appropriate…
Anyone recognise the formula?
I just spent 20 minutes converting the formula…
d = M-((M/2)+7)
…into…
M = 2(d+7)
I still got it baby!
(Even if it would have taken me about a 10th of the time back in high school :))
The steps are…
d = M-((M/2)+7)
M = d+((M/2)+7)
M = d+7+(M*0.5)
M-(M*0.5) = d+7 (This one took me ages)
0.5*M = d+7
M = 2(d+7)
Now, does anyone recognise the base formula?
Yeah, like I’d actually call her…
Caught a couple of episodes of Warehouse 13 last night for the first time.
I’ve been meaning to check the series out for a while, it’s been getting a fair amount of good press online and hence has been sitting in the back of my head as something to watch out for. So when Channel Seven announced (with a slight amount of fanfare) last week that they were putting it on at 8:30 Sunday nights I jumped at the opportunity (sorry Spielberg, Terra Nova is quite good, but not quite enough for me to obsessively reserve its timeslot).
So, having watched two episodes last night, I have a number of questions…
What’s with starting with episodes 8 and 9 rather than 1 and 2?
The most likely explanation of course is that they’ve quietly played the previous 7 episodes in some graveyard slot and all they’ve done now is promote the show up to the top rank by moving it to Sundays, but it’s a bit disconcerting to have all these ads promoting this great new series only to drop new viewers right in the middle of the first season without warning.
Why was the pre-credits teaser cut from Episode 9?
It would have been a lot easier to understand the episode if we’d seen the intro. Was it a typically pathetic attempt to run the two episodes together into a continuous “Movie Length Episode”, or just general incompetence?
Why did the Studio 54 Mirror Ball play generic disco music rather than I Will Survive?
Yeah, I know, probably a syndication licensing thing…
What – if any – is the connection with Steve Jackson Games and their GURPs Warehouse 23 from back in the 90s?
It’s exactly the same idea with a different number.
Why are the Communicators called ‘Farnsworths’ rather than ‘Logie-Bairds’?
Zing! π
Where can I get Allison Scagliotti’s phone number?
π
All that aside, I found the show quite entertaining – even if the science was abominable – and will keep tuning in for as long as Seven deign to air it at a reasonable hour – which will probably be for about two weeks at which point it won’t have beaten Terra Nova in the ratings so they’ll swap it out for So You Think You Can Juggle Chainsaws America or whatever their next guaranteed ratings winner is.
Aaaaaand after a weekend of my computer working (or at least working as well as it ever does) it decided to crap out on me this morning. Again.
I’ll run the startup repair process again tonight and see if that fixes it. It only took three hours last time…
Dunwich is ridiculously old…
Rejoice and be glad all ye people of the Interwebs! For my computer is healed!
Well, not exactly healed, but useable for the time being, which is the main thing. Once I pick up that additional 1 terabyte external drive and back up my music collection I’ll be sending it off to the shop for a complete overhaul – perhaps a complete reinstallation of Windows – which should see it right. I hope.
Anyway, while luxuriating in the ability to view Wikipedia on a decent sized screen this afternoon I discovered something rather, well, I don’t know that there’s a better adjective for it than “cool”.
Many years ago, when I was about 14,Β I discovered that our local library had a book on tape of two stories by H.P.Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror and The Rats in the Walls. I was quite getting into Lovecraft at the time and leapt on the opportunity to hear two tales I hadn’t yet managed to find a copy of – the only ones I’d tracked down at that point being Beyond the Wall of Sleep in a collection of Weird Tales reprints that also featured Tennessee Williams’ account of the revenge of Nitocris, and an August Derleth “collaboration” named Wizard’s Hollow.
The recordings were a bit cut down in order to fit them on a cassette tape each, but the actor reading them – someone I’d never heard of – did a remarkable job. His rich, but understated reading of the opening paragraphs of the Horror – the eerie description of the hills around Dunwich – has stayed with me ever since. In my mind it’s the definitive version of the story and I can still hear it in my head to this day – as can I his reading of the last line of The Rats.
The rats… The rats… in the walls…
(This is of course partially because a few years later the Library was selling off a bunch of old books and I was able to purchase the tapes, which are still in my personal collection)
So, today I was clicking my way around Wikipedia and ended up on the page for The Rats in the Walls. Much to my surprise the book on tape was mentioned along with the actor who’d read it. Out of curiosity I clicked through and discovered that… it’s Ducky!
That’s just… cool. Try to tell me it isn’t.
I’ve been meaning to convert the tapes to MP3 (just for my own personal enjoyment) for years. Now I’ll have to do it. As soon as I can find them of course… π
I am happy to report that I’ve been able to get my PC to boot into Ubuntu via a live CD and am in the process of backing up all my important data to an external drive. This means that – hopefully this weekend – I’ll be able to drop the box into a repair shop for a complete overhaul without worrying about some clueless keyboard monkey accidentally formatting the hard drive.
(Cue the comments asking my why I don’t just install Ubuntu and be done with it. Hey, do I tell you how to run your life?)
(Oh, I do. Fair enough)