christopher's ramblings

Battlestar Rhapsody

2010-01-05T06:20:03Z

from @hexsteph, BSG as told by paraphrasing Bohemian Rhapsody:

(spoilers for the entire series :)

The Quantum Thief

2010-01-03T10:40:16Z

Wow - one to watch out for.
The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi.

Not available yet, but it's a post-human hard SF heist novel by a Finnish physicist who's been hanging out with other writers in Edinburgh the last few years - and I love Scottish hard SF.

My thanks to @JonathanStrahan for the heads up :)

New Year's lyrics

2010-01-03T02:23:04Z

(Birthday, New Year - wevs..)

"Roll out of bed, look in the mirror
And wonder who you are
Another year has come and gone

Today is your birthday
But it might be
The last day of your life
What will you do if tomorrow it’s all gone?
...
So look at your life, who do you want to be before you die?
Look at your life, what do you want to do?
Look at your life, who do you want to be before you die?
Look at your life, you haven't got forever
...
But maybe you touch one life
And the world becomes a better place to be
Maybe you give their dreams
Another day, another chance to be free"

Avatar

2010-01-02T11:37:15Z

There was a spare ticket going this afternoon to go see it with the Nichols clan (thanks secrets_n_lies!), so I overcame my distaste at the rumoured Papyrus subtitles (ow, my eyes! Far more strain from that than from the 3d glasses), and went to see it.

While we were organising our munchies in the foyer beforehand a stranger wandered up to say to Jess and I "My daughter's staring at your hair - she thinks you're both avatars!" Ahh, the joys of long hair :)

The film was very pretty, the plot very clichéd, and the script not quite as bad I was expecting. They even managed to foreshadow something just the right amount (ie, I kicked myself later for not seeing something coming). Just try not to think about the physics or the politics with a remotely critical eye. Sigourney Weaver rocked, of course.

There was general agreement amongst the clan after the film that with a little body paint, some contact lenses and some prosthetic tails that Jess and I would do quite well at an appropriately themed costume party, though as Jess pointed out we are neither of us quite freakishly thin enough.

(Oh, and welcome to the long version, those of you who get this twice. Apparently stalkbook has a 420 character limit on status updates).

pedantry.

2010-01-01T08:13:00Z

Yes, there was no year zero. And I'm quite happy to accept that there are strong arguments for saying the end of the 20th century was 31/12/2000

But the 1990s were the years whose name in English starts with the prefix "nineteen ninety," namely those whose decimal representation matches 199x

Pedant that I am, for me at least the Noughties are over.

(Oh, and as angriest points out, no one was using our current calendar until some time in the 6th century anyway. We were messing up leap years until 1752, too - if that year only had 354 days, I don't see why the first century has to have 100 years in it).

Puzzles are where you find them.

2009-12-28T13:34:00Z

On Saturday a friend happened to sit under a veranda ornament that spins in the wind, and it had a fair bash at giving her an impromptu dreadlock before anyone noticed. I think I was the second person to attempt untangling, but we got there in the end. (I used to spend hours detangling balls of fishing line I found on the beach..)

This evening rabbit1080 accidentally dropped a piece of doweling into her sewing machine (she was trying it for size as a replacement thread holder). Between the two of us we managed to find enough screws to undo to pry open a 20mm gap in the underside of the case (she started it!), after which it took some impromptu use of a pair of scissors as tweezers to manipulate the rod around various bits of machinery to get it into a position where it could be withdrawn. That was fun :-)

What kind of artist are you?

2009-12-28T02:06:56Z

Spotted in the pixelling forum at CSDB:

The author's clearly not familiar with graphic novels, and I'm not sure where he'd place people who have Illustrator but not Indesign (a common case I would have thought?), but I'm still amused :)

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.

2009-12-24T06:17:42Z

Season's greetings all :)

For all the caffeine addicts in my life

2009-12-21T16:11:51Z

snaffled from Blake over on stalkbook.

Song: Stress
Artist: Jim's Big Ego
Anime: Cowboy Bebop

more info here, if I'm not mistaken.

Anniversary

2009-12-21T10:50:15Z

It was our wedding anniversary on Friday, but rabbit1080 was somewhat under the weather, so we deferred celebrations until Saturday night.

I did some shopping for salad ingredients at Herdies, we did some teamwork at Kailis Bros., and rabbit1080's parents had kindly provided some bubbly earlier in the week. I did a little kitchen-handing in the evening, but it was pretty much my beloved wife who prepared for us a fabulous lobster fondue, with prawns, scallops, bread and asparagus for dipping, and an artichoke salad as a side.

We had a floor-picnic in front of Ferris Bueller's Day Out - a movie we've not watched together since we gave up on our VHS tape collection.

It was a lovely evening :)

then we could be heroes

2009-12-18T07:42:13Z

Last night I dreamt I was part of a crowd watching someone reach the final level of an arcade game, and then suddenly I was the protagonist - possibly some kind of cross between Spider-Man and Iron Man - standing on top of a volcano, accepting my enemies invitation to pick up an incredibly dense object the size of a table-tennis ball, and consequently sinking through the lava stream experiencing the pressure of the depths hyper-oxygenating my brain(!?), expanding my mind to a new level of consciousness..

(how unrealistic is that? As if Tony Stark or Peter Parker have any kind of "not getting killed by lava" powers :P)

Twitter taken down by Iranian government sympathisers?

2009-12-18T06:57:13Z

I can't get through to twitter.com (or even status.twitter.com) at the moment¹..
but when a friend tried accessing it from her phone she got

" U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But They Don't. We Control and Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Simulation Iranian Peoples To................... NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA? WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST ;) Take Care"

Presumably Twitter was targeted due to its use as a communication tool by Iranian protesters after the 2009 "election," but it's still more than a little bizarre..

eta: more here, though it seems to be back now.

¹I'm not getting anything at all from tweetree.com or Echofon (an iPhone app) either.
ps - in before slashdot :-P

"Progress"

2009-12-08T15:39:29Z

Hrm. Apparently my 18 month old 2.4GHz core-2 duo Intel laptop is slightly faster at running my renderer than a 5yo liquid cooled quad core 2.5 GHz G5 desktop. (And yes, I am using all the cores of both machines).

Good news for my laptop, but I'm feeling a bit sheepish given that when I bought one of the latter second hand earlier this year it was primarily as a renderbox. It should still be a decent beasty for playing my old PPC games, and at least when I use it over my lappy for rendering the whining fans are in the office and my laptop's getting less thermal stress..

I may even be able to get the desktop to run a little faster than the laptop if I fine tune the code a bit, but it's unlikely to ever be vastly faster.

me, to desktop: "You were supposed to be this colossus!"

small office all-in-one printer etc

2009-11-30T07:48:21Z

Dear Lazyweb.

Someone I know is after something to replace their dying combined printer/scanner/fax machine. Were it not for the fax requirement I'd just suggest they get a cheap scanner and something like the hp LaserJet 1010 that's been serving us quite happily for the last four years; they only print the odd five to ten page document.

FWIW it's for a wireless network of Macintoshes; the existing beasty is connected to their Time Capsule for printing, though I gather scanning requires a direct cable connection to one of the machines.

Decent colour printing for the occasional photo would be a bonus, but I've already suggested it might be cheaper and saner just to get a bureau to do those.

Any thoughts?

5000km

2009-11-27T08:18:10Z

The odometer I installed on my bike in 2005 (sometime around May??) reached 5000km last week.

It's slowed down a lot since I quit the job I had out near Curtin; I was doing 70-80km a week then. Now it's more like five or ten (one or two trips into the CBD, or occasionally heading in to Northbridge).

(this post is mostly for my own reference)

White ribbon day

2009-11-25T04:19:56Z

As a few have linked already, it's White Ribbon Day today.

Around seventy Australians a year are murdered by their current or ex partner, and three quarters of the victims are women¹. Most domestic homicide victims had experienced violence at the hands of their partner in the previous year.

This opinion piece by Andrew O'Keefe about what we can do is worth reading. (link courtesy of darkstardeity)

¹(cf various National homicide monitoring program annual reports - the trend is good, but the current stats are still appalling)

Home!

2009-11-24T08:23:53Z

We got back from our travels on Friday - a two month working holiday, catching up with geographically distant friends on three continents while trying to be productive on our laptops during many of the days.

Sort of been on Perth time since getting to Hong Kong on Tuesday last week, but the midnight horror flight on Thursday night's thrown my body clock again. Just about recovered now, though I did have another one of those odd dreams this morning where my dream-self's vision was borked thanks to my real-self having his eyes open while asleep. At least dream-self has stopped being freaked out by this occurrence; he just hasn't worked out that it means he's dreaming.

Trip reports to come, but I'm also really looking forward to catching up with all the Perth friends I've been missing :)

Thanks heaps to our house sitter of win, to everyone who put us up overseas, and to rabbit1080 for being such an excellent travel companion. Sorry to those of you in the UK or over east I didn't catch up with this time round - will try again next time :)

Seven Quirks

2009-10-27T20:14:14Z

Seven Quirks meme

tagged by lori_lee69.

A. List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.
B. Tag seven people to do the same.
C. Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you tag "whoever wants to do it".

1. If I accidentally kick a kerb or something I balance that by doing the same with the other foot.

2. I stop to stretch my calves (dropping my heels down with my toes on a step) pretty much whenever I go for a walk - have done since I was around ten.

3. I have trouble sleeping without either showering first or just sleeping in my clothes - preferably the former.

4. I sometimes calculate square roots of small integers in my head when I'm bored, to as many decimal places as I can manage.

5. I've only got around half a dozen fine hairs growing on each of my toes, but I still want to get them lasered.

6. I was mostly very bad at sport, but I did hold the distance record for frisbee throwing one year in high school.

7. I want to grow a hedge maze one day. Closest I've come so far was planting a dozen Tiny Trevs for an ornamental border too close to the start of summer - all but two of them died.

I tag originalnilson, angriest, capnoblivious, catundra, sithmagician, skwerlie and callistra.

Desktop picture meme

2009-09-24T19:10:51Z

After stephbg.

My current laptop wallpaper is Howard Sayles' "Faded Glory."

Because it's pretty without being too attention grabbing, and I wouldn't mind having a study decorated in that style.

I'm looking for a book.

2009-09-16T12:43:38Z

Way back in the mists of time, sometime around 1984, my Dad would drive me to school. We'd usually listen to 6WF (now 720 ABC Perth), where between 8am and 8:30 they'd read the next instalment of a Book. I quite enjoyed sharing that experience with Dad.

That was my introduction to Orwell's 1984.

There was another book they read that year (or possibly in 1985, but I think I was cycling to school by then). It involved a group of people negotiating an unpopulated building or citadel full of lethal traps, while they hunted down a criminal who had some kind of mental stench. I've no idea what it was called, or who it was by.

Does anyone have any ideas?

District 9

2009-09-04T14:37:46Z

Very very good.
Also, very very the-opposite-of-uplifting. I'd say the least uplifting thing I've seen since Maria Full of Grace.

Oh, and I hated Wikus more than any protagonist since.. well, Lord Foul wasn't the protagonist of the Covenant books. Nor was wotsisface from the Time Master trilogy. Ok, since ever.

Sorry, he was just never redeemed for me. Even his self interest was frequently misdirected and counter to his own survival. The second time he was surrounded by Evil Nigerians I was just barracking for them to get on with the amputation.

I spent the bicycle ride back to work from the cinema wilfully enjoying the sunshine, and thinking about butterflies and kittens. Go see it if you haven't, but hide the knives first.

ps - the shakey cam is A Current Affair bad, rather than Blair Witch bad..

Robot hands are getting better..

2009-09-03T01:45:23Z

Originally got this from letsburn00 a few days ago, though it was sithmagician's post this morning that reminded me I was going to pass it on.

I'm impressed :)

Knew that degree would come in handy some day.

2009-09-01T08:48:36Z

Back in around second or third year uni, I skipped most of the lectures for a unit on Linear Programming. Most of it seemed to be teaching you how to do by hand something that I thought if I ever needed to do I'd just download some software for, though the first few weeks were good for laying out the basics.

I crammed for a couple of days before the exam and got a B.

Nearly two decades later, and one of my more pointless hobbies this year has been attempting to get into the global high score table table for a massively multiplayer browser game, namely Nightfall - Bloodlines. There are a number of different categories of Legend, but the most promising appeared to be Most Wealthy - I was going well at hoarding blood. After a few months I discovered the amount you could bank was limited by your level, so having exhausted the limited storyline mode, I tracked down the mission that gave you the most XP per energy expended and settled into a thrice daily level grind, piling most of my skill points into improving my max energy and hence increasing my rate of advancement. (As well as a trickle over time that stops when you're full, you also get a full energy refill each level bump).

A few weeks ago I reached the point of being about to stick my head over the parapet, and belatedly started looking into building up my defences against any attacks my expected fame as 25th most wealthy might bring. A few defeats and crash course in fight mechanics later, and I switched my skill point income over to building up my primary defence stat.

All that remained was to determine the optimal spread of "powers" to acquire in order to maximise my total defence bonus. (Oh, and at some point I realised the significance of increasing clan size up to 500, but that recruitment drive was a few months ago now, and a whole 'nother story - it's also why I had 937 FB "friends" at the start of July, but that's back down to something more sensible now).

So. I had an income of 1.4million blood per hour, and 504 clan members and zombies to equip with a power each from the Sensory, Physical and Mystical categories, and only a few hundred million blood with which to buy them. Each power costs between $400 and $1.6m, grants a defence bonus between zero and +16, and has an hourly upkeep of up to $3600. It wasn't obvious how best to divide my ill gotten gains, so I did what any obsessive compulsive game playing programmer and ex-engineer would do, and downloaded a Linear Programming solver.

port install lp_solve

One python script later to parse the Powers list from the fan-run game wiki and spit out some equations to pipe through to the solver, and I had not only my ideal mix of defences, but a tool with which I could easily play what-ifs for seeing how the blend would change if I saved up for another few days, or kept aside some income for capital growth. Some of the inclusions were quite surprising, but the result is substantially better than I'd managed by hand.

My defences are holding, and I'm looking forward to sharing this post with a dear friend once he's well enough to read it.

Tuesday, In One Act

2009-08-26T15:32:12Z

rabbit1080 and I went to see a play this evening.

It was the saddest day of both their lives... Andrew the Astronaut and Richard the Cowboy happen upon each other in a storybook park.

It was like sitting in a giant diorama :) Cardboard buildings and paper bread crumbs, shadow puppetry on the face of the moon. More than a tad nihilistic, but highly recommended. And as J just reminded me, the lighting was stunning.

Runs until the end of next week.

Tuesday - In One Act by Demelza Rogers. Directed by Alexa Taylor.
Featuring Jeremy Mitchell and Kit Sparrow, with lighting and sound by Joe Lui.

20 August – 4 September. Meet the Artists Wednesday 26 August
8:30pm Tuesday – Saturday @ The Blue Room Studio, 53 James St Northbridge
Tickets: $22 / $15 concession. Blue Room members $18 / $12 conc. 
Bookings: 9227 7005 / www.blueroom.org.au

Medical abortions forced interstate

2009-08-21T06:47:20Z

From The Australian:
QUEENSLAND women facing the trauma of a medical abortion will have to cross the border for the procedure because the state's biggest hospital has scrapped its service, forcing the state government to review its controversial laws on abortion.

I'm somewhat lost for words :(

(thanks baby_elvis for the heads up. Oh, and just in case it's not obvious, I'm strongly pro-choice).