Sunny Breaks

Tuesday. Next Tuesday, between 4 and 7pm AEST Tough Culture’s Jonathan Alley will be interviewing Barry Adamson on RRR. They also stream live for the folk outside the reaches of 102.7FM.

I got back `Shiny Metal Rods!’ the other day. Got 75% for it, which is pretty good considering. It’s only supposed to be a fragment of a story – so you’d imagine kinda hard to put all the bits together, but i still feel like I did too much telling, not enough show. But mr.TB – the lecturer says in the comments that he didn’t get it ‘til he read the action replay + commentary at the end. i didn’t think it was that hard to unnerstand. There was only two people in that class on Wednesday; this is what happens when there is no exam, and teach doesn’t give us a break in the middle of a double session. Slackers. A shame, because i think it’s a really interesting subject – teKnoKulcha, that is. Have been reading the little book that mr.TB wrote himself which is titled, Technoscience Worlds, which is okay – I might do a proper write up when i’ve read the whole thing. From 1991, and unfortunately (as are the perils of being published by academia, and therefore the state) towards the back there’s a full page ad for Union Carbide – the company that screwed up bigtime in Bhopal, India during the 80s, killing at least 6000 people because of a toxic gas leak. A find it terrible-ironic that this should be the ad in a book that, in part, talks about the possible catastropy of science getting out of control, and who is accountable for what science gets up to.(see above)
But the same as when people mess up, Union Carbide was able to move, and change it’s name to Dow. Actually, a person would be put in gaol for that kind of thing. We should start executing corporations when they do stuff like this.

I chopped up the ancient archives into smaller portions for easier searching, and made the 404 a little friendlier.

Watched a video last night – saw `Amelie’ – very nice movie. So refreshing to see a movie that didn’t have product-placement thrown around everywhere. i really admire the French for not bending over to English-speaking cultural imperialism. The story structure was very different to what hollyweird would produce too. It made everything Hollyweird (including the comedies seem grim and gun-filled.) I’m sure that in Europe that movie wouldn’t have been considered arthouse – and so, niche-holed to short runs and specialised cinemas as it pretty-much was here.
It was filmed just around the corner from where our `french connection’ lives, (well okay jean’s travel-buddy girlfriend) And I kind of wonder would France really look that nice, or is just because this was a move and the colours and lighting were done nice. Do they have big Coca-cola billboards, but they just weren’t shot in the movie, or other things i’ve seen?
I thought it was kind of odd how they didn’t start the (special effects) magic realism type stuff ‘til half way through.

Re this post’s title: We have (Oh i don’t know) a 38cm tv – it’s a fairly reasonable size, but because of the way the movie was reproduced to video – by whatever company 9 Roadshow or whoever the hell they are — it was probably made for wide-screen tv or something — but we ended up watching a 6inch band of film in the middle of the telly, and then with subtitles over a quarter of that. The thing really was using just over a third of the screen space.
Hey TV/Video Peoople?!!? What about us Normals who can’t afford a freakin’ $8000 TV Just Yet??? It’s all a bit messes up – mediums like tv being split into so many levels; normal, wide-screen, digital, high-definition. Where are the regulating bodies in charge of this?
It strikes me that it’s the same with motherboards too. There’s so many specifics – this chip won’t work with that board, and there’s so many types of RAM now. It’s one thing to move ahead — but should things have to get this atomised to make that move?

name: SirFlakey
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2002-09-12-18-12
I think in europe the 14:9 format is pretty popular – I have seen plenty a TVShop that 10 years ago that carried these models. That might be why =). I did see Amelie as well. It’s cute – nice way they integrated the effects to be part of the story – not the other way around =)
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name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.7
date: 2002-09-12-21-47
About the effects – yeah – I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Feelin’ kinda pleased with myself this evening. Have been under the impression that I was, in fact, a coffee pot.

What i mean is with doing homework, i could never get motivated until the pressure (and steam) had built to a certain level, usually a couple of days before the bit of homework in question was due.
This week i have two things due on the same day, so needed to get one out of the way quickly. From an external position this sounds easy. But I had to trick myself into thinking one of them was due the next day. Anyway – I got one bit out of the way – now this psychology thing by Monday. Good-O.

Did a little op-shopping today. Feel like I’ve been wearing the same clothes for the last ten years, which in some cases is true. Got a couple of shirts, got a brown theme happening. The other thing is that I used to live in the op-shop capital of australia- west geelong. I don’t tend to get time to wonder around there anymore, and occasionally in the last couple of years, this little part of me has surfaced which finds the whole op-shopping thing vile. I don’t know what that is.
Another thing is that regardless of what kind of luck one is having, one can still come out of it looking like every other badly dressed (trendy? or not?) schmuck on the street.
I’m very much over clothes. i wear this shocking fuzzy synthetic top thing around the house all winter – it’s comfortable and it’s warm, and I wonder why I don’t wear it out of the house.

It’s been a big day for me. I also went to the food-chain thing titled “Subway” for the first time. i marvelled over the fact that how often is it that i get to experience the process of getting food from a new multi-mega (and getting bigger) fast-food chain.
I admit to eating red-rooster or KFC chips once in a blue moon but I haven’t stepped into a McDonalds or Hungry Jacks in years – even just to use the toilet.
I was just a little child the first time I stepped into a Maccas – or any of them – and all those kind of experiences were knocked over very quickly. I digress.
Am very much reminded of that brief monologue from that wonderful movie [HahaHA! ;^P ] `You’ve got mail’ where tom hanks goes on about how the key to starbucks was throwing an avalanche of choices at the consumer, so as to make them feel like they’re an individual, and not just a pig lining up at the same trough as every other pig.
Subway does that. And so, (this is what got me) ordering a salad roll became a baffling ordeal – this bread – that bread, what salad ingredients, what sauce, what size, eat in or take-away, cheese or no cheese, etc. Sure this happens in the local deli – but you expect that – that’s what they’re about. The fast-food chain is better suited to the “Gulp n’ Blow” method.
And despite all this, there wasn’t much of a choice for the vegetarian (But as jean says, I gave up half of my choices when I became vegetarian … ya gotta love that logic.) All up, I found the experience to be, in a word, shitty. The roll (sorry sub seemed old, and the choice of salad bits kind of bland. There was something weird about the serving guy too. He wasn’t on drugs. Maybe he was crazy, and got his rocks off by confusing people with endless empty choice.

PS. Hey Wow – Okay – I know everyone is getting in on this `is my site bad-arse enough to be censored by china, but Spouting is reported as inaccessable in China. It’s probably the Daniel Ortega story…

Ah .. i just couldn’t stay silent, even with the insane pressurous homeworx. moo-able type for those who haven’t heard yet, will be jumping up to a new version in the near future – improvements include a native search function, (fine n’ dandy, but I just got one thanks), they’re translating into german (Wunderbah!), and the one little bit that makes sense to me – is that it’ll only ping servers like weblogs.com the first time you click through on the Save. i know, often i’ll say, this entry is finished, then look at it on the site qand add a little bit — or change something — and feel like a right bastard for pinging an extra time, like I need the extra publicity or something.
Sri Chimoy might be bloglist spammers, but I’m not.

All yesterday I was preparing a scathing review in my mind of Groove Armada’s ‘goodbye country (hello nightclub)’ album, thinking that we hadn’t progressed beyond the fifties in regards to crediting black people for their musical endevours ….. but anyway – I can’t really go off on that spout because all the vocalists on the album are well creditied – I just hadn’t looked.
It’s a pretty catchy album. My fave track at the moment is ‘Superstylin’’. More clubby sounding than ‘Vertigo’, which I’m ambivelent about, but also much more upbeat – which is good. There’s there’s some tracks on Vertigo which frankly sound depressing – English melancholly. I think it’s about a year old now. I borrowed it from the library. Probably one of the better quality CDs there I’ve found. I’m starting to realise why ambient music has such a reputation for crapness = because 95% of it is.

Looking at my wonderful field-spotter’s guide to australian birds (which Gran gave to me) last night cleared a few things up, but also destroyed a bit of magic. It seems the little (superb) blue wrens weren’t sitting on my window ledge because they wanted to talk to me, they just wanted to rumble with their reflections in the window.
And there’s these little olive-green and red kids who hang around out there sometimes, known as the Red Browed Firetail (i like that word, “firetail”) and the book says they’re not natives. They’re aviary escapees from WA. How ‘bout that.

This is partly in response to SF’s string of news bits on Core about experimenting with wireless networking technology; here, here, and also here

The most recent green guide had an article that explained a bit about it. I learnt that “AP” stands for Access Point. i might look around for some other stuff in the coming week.

I realise my posting of late has been a bit golemish – mutterings and aggravated grunts in the dark (and here’s some more!). It’s just that time of year – even when I’m not doing homework, I’m doing other non-productive things, saving up the productive frame of mind energy for when I’ve really got to use it.

This redesign really wasn’t thought out. It’s like last semester when i decided i was going to give up smoking right before a bunch of assignments were due – there was no way I was going to pull it off successfully in one go and still get done what needed to be done.
I don’t think there’s enough contrast between the lettering and the background. i’‘ve been racking my brain trying to think of a good colour combination to use – that I haven’t already seen being used by another blog. That’s seems to be the main prob. – since when I did the robots one til now I’ve looked at countless other blogs and see that there isn’t much room left for something different.
I’ve been thinking of racing cars, coporate entities, national flags, medeval flags and now tartans trying to get some inspiration for a combo of colours that works. And what’s the deal with red and blue – it freaks colour-blind people out – or something? And red and green is too nauseating … and even though I’ve seen quite a few sites using blue and green together, it just doesn’t seem right.
What ever you see now is temporary.

As for some good news, I really am getting to like the Fluxbox window manager.

(Later That Day)... – Erm, let’s pretend the last couple of days never happened eh? I got a little stressed … i did some things I probably should nae done… :^P — Thank goodness I backed up the originals.

Anyone would think I subscibe to the reactionary theory of life that goes that `we’re all just billiard balls bouncing off each other’, reacting – cause and effect cause and affect (But I don’t).
Nevertherless, not being able to figure a way to get little IE to co-operate with my rectangles, i went on a redesign jag last night. Some may say that the colour scheme is highly derivative of metafilter’s, but really it’s just the main two shades of blue and yellow I was using previously – reversed.
The main thing I’ve been wanting to do is go from the stratafied to the sqeeze-box accordion style layout. Monitor resolution size and shape is getting more and more spread out. One can’t assume that people are always going to be viewing with their browser opened up to the Max. anymore. I know that if I had one of those sexy new 17” iMac flat panel setups, then I’d have two browsers open side by side.
Having said all that I haven’t actually checked how it looks in IE. S’pose i should … maybe in a couple of weeks. And there’s all the comments type stuff that hasn’t been changed. Will get around to that too, at least the colours are complimentary.
later…: Okay – so things are still a little messed up. Standby.

name: jean
email:
url: http://
ip: 210.84.253.254
date: 2002-09-06-16-26
hi, you wanna know how it looks in ie? well, not tto good I’m afraid. Can you move the left marjin so it’s not right against the edge of my puter?
thanks yako
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name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.5
date: 2002-09-06-17-11
If you’d not phoned as well I wouldn’t believe it was you given the spelling etc.

The thing is – both the oversized heading and text being hard-up against the left are artistic. I was doing those things on purpose. However i will re-evaluate the look.

The sidebar disappearing to the bottom so easily is another matter. I’m working on it.

shoe laces are untied, peice of toilet paper stuck to shoe, shirt hem caught in fly, tag sticking up at back of shirt, tie crooked, food stuck between teeth, crumb of food at corner of mouth,
booger stuck to and drying on outside of nostril, hair doing wacky things…

Ah, For I don’t know how long, the side bar has been out of wack according to Internet Explorer (that bastard spoilt child of a browswer, why don’t you behave like the other kids??). I only find out yesterday when I come down here to the main computer hole at uni. Honestly I try to presnt a nice looking web page. The idea is that it’s meant to look like one unified rectangle.
Yesterday was feeling kind of headachey so couldn’t be fagged trying to fix it. I get back here this morning — and it isn’t immediately obvious as to what’s wrong. All last night was feeling tetchy — you know—like it wouldn’t take much pushing to get me to strangle something…. and today ain’t kicking off wonderfully yet either.

I usually avoid the mainstream news, but got a dose last night and this morng. It’s no fun living in the country that’s the beligerant little brother of the neighbourhood bully — the greenhouse gas thing. And for once I think this is one of those things that’s specific to the current “leadership”. I think if the personalities were different then the situation would be different.

ame: Adrian Bedford
email:
url: modemnoise.blogspot.com
ip: 144.139.121.11
date: 2002-09-05-13-58
Hi Yak Sox—
First, I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for taking the time to stop by my blog, particularly with your help on my aspartame problem. Much appreciated!

Second, I couldn’t agree more about our current government’s fondness for US government policy. Makes me ill, and embarrassed to be Australian.

Third, Love that photo of Nick Cage!

Thanks again!
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name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.9
date: 2002-09-05-14-27
No problem Adrian, and please excuse the poor spelling of my above post, i was writing from the electric bull-pit and not paying much attention because I felt like I was being watched.

This Rockin’ out with: is such a rare little treasure that i couldn’t let it only be thumbnail size.

This was part of a piece created by Gareth Sansom entitled Electrical Experiments (2002), for an exhibition currently showing at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery to do with Nick Cave.
Apparently, the foto was taken during Cave’s first year at art school (at Caulfield Tech) where (even then) the young Rock Star to be roamed around the halls with a very healthy attitude about himself and his abilities.
The exhibition finishes on the 15th so hurry on down.
I didn’t get to go – was stuck here, but jean did and said it was worth the dollar-something to get in.

“Do snails move faster on cement or wood?”

This is the type of question that the world asks the internet, and it refers them to me. I’m sitting here shrugging my shoulders, I have no answer.
I know i promised I’d never mention the stats page, but I can’t help it. i realised yesterday that i hadn’t added the detection code to a bunch of pages, and people were visiting them looking for things (like snail speed) and weren’t being counted. I don’t want to be one of those people contributing to the prolish generalisation, “Ah ya can’t never find nuthin’ on the innernet”, so will add big sign posts back to the search function.
Have been thinking a lot about redesign lately. A lot. You could almost say I’m obsessed by it. But nothing will happen until the end of the semester, which really isn’t that far. Would be nice to have a new feel happening by the first of December.

There was more talk of, `is this a table?’ in class today, but it was the teacher leading it, so it’s not as if i could’ve lashed out violently and got away with it.

The first time i came across metafilter was when that supposed alternate EU flag, that looked like a bar code was doing the rounds. Can’t remember exactly when that was, bet feels like a fair while back. I visited mefi for ages before it struck me that maybe I wanted to register. Then I found out that they were only taking 20 people a day, starting at 12noon, US West coast time. So I never got to be a member. Then I read “woe for us” type posts from people saying it’s being swamped by people who aren’t thinking before the post. I’ve seen this happen before at other communal sites. But right now it strikes me that part of the rise of blogging as a phenomenon may be due to this natural life cycle of discussion forums. The blog is controlled by the individual, who can control whether or not they choose to affiliate their space with anyone elses, and how close they want to affiliate.
They also have the power to IP ban other individuals from posting at the blog (that is if the blog lets people comment at all).
Like I said, the idea only just came to me—might think it over a bit more.

Anyway, I d/loaded a Blackbox .rpm, but also grabbed fluxbox in .src.rpm form. I really didn’t have much hope in it compiling successfully, but it did. And I’m using it right now. Sweet!
When I logged into it, Irealised that a change in desktop environment feel was way overdue. Things are much faster in the fluxbox. I decided to go the flux instead of the black because I read that flux had the same theme as blackbox (which is what I wanted to see again) anyway.
As sometimes happens with a juggling around of menu styles and window managers, there’s a whole bunch of little apps showing up which I didn’t know were on here. And I think `Garnome’ – the run-seperately version 2.0 of Gnome initialised properly because lots of things look way more smooth – anti-aliasing all over the joint. i think that’s what happened. Either that or a whole bunch of the .TTFs weren’t being recognised. I had verdana on the system but none of the browsers were using it. now they are, things are lookin’ different.
Okay, here’s that grid i was talking about if you’re curious. It’s a pop-up so duck your head.

Re: that bit last night about OS X for the “PC” architecture – I meant x86, not “i86”, my head was wrecked from hammering the metaphorical anvil all day long.
And actually I wonder if it’d be as simple as if apple said they’re changing to the x86 architecture … would that mean that people could get a copy of the OS and wack it on their clone-box … or is their something in the apple hardare – the motherboard, BIOS (or what?) and that’s why the systems won’t mix?

It’d be the ultimate test to have a copy of OS X that I could load here onto Jugger to see what the story really was concerning the efficiency of its coding. Is it just because Blooey the iMac only has 128meg of ram — is that why it feels slow to me? I’d also like to experience the operating system without the stoopid apple mouse, and at a decent screen resolution (800×600 just doesn’t cut it with this lad). Would it lose any of its shine by not being in a nice looking box?

What the hell’s happened to the Black Box window manager? It’s homepage has vanished. I seem to remember that it was only maintained by one person, and it’s been at a stand-still for a while, (and has basically been forked by fluxbox) but it’d be nice if blackbox still had a homepage.
See, last night I was working on this story, and I need to look at the old blackbox background (you know that grid) for inspiration. Ah well, it’s still out there at rpmfind but it’s a bit late now. I had to go on memory.

Will be tackin’ the story up soon. Funny, innit, It takes me months to g e t a r o u n d t o i t. And then i endure a weekend of chaos doing it, then keenly get to HTMLising it the night after. I suppose it’s not as demanding.

(The BottomFeeder’s Guide to Computering)

Have really only had a little while to get to know this camera, but then again, there’s not that much to get to know.
The techy-speckies.
In a nut-shell, you can get 54 shots at 800×600 resolution, (which is good enough for me) or many less at the max. res. of 1152×864.

To get a bit more subjective:
the photosmart c120 strikes me more as the type of digital camera used to get and put fotos on your computer. Eventhough it’s a bit of a mini-moke in the megapixel department, it does fine for storing pics digitally.
I haven’t tried printing any out. But lets face it – a reproduction is a reproduction, no matter how expensive your camera is.
Looking back at really old fotos of rellies – you know the little square ones, the shades of sepia, the irregular shapes — I like those. i don’t think that kind of thing detracts from the memory.
Print outs of a reasonable quality with this kamera would be smaller than your average 35mm kodak moments, but the ability to shape them how you want is a fair trade off.

It really is basic though – compared to the last little road test (the benq dc1300) the HP fotokamera has no wrist strap (but why would I need one?!) and no soft pouchy-thing – this is more serious. I’m wondering how to keep the lens from getting scratched without paying out the extra dough to HP to get the pouch.

“The buttons and on-screen interface are straightfoward and intuitive”.
Intuitive interface? What is that?
I honestly can’t tell the difference between intuitive and unintuitive when it comes to stuff like this. (This is probably why I’ve put up with Linux for so long, Hahaha!)
The instruction booklet was basic but easy enough to understand, and grammatically correct. there’s a big section on trouble shooting in there, but I haven’t had to use it.
It uses four AA bateries, which seems like a lot, and makes it that bit heavier, which doesn’t matter, but also makes it large. But my guess is that HP wanted it to be the size and shape of a normal analogue camera anyway. As yet i don’t know how long these batteries will last. On the upside – it will use rechargable batteries, whereas the benq wouldn’t.

One small thing i like about it is that the inner packaging that the thing sits in when you get it is made of egg-carton-ish type stuff instead of plastic. That one little bit of plastic multiplied by however many thousands of units they ship can add up to a lot of crap. **For the discerning Linux user, I’m halfway there to getting it recognised so that fotos can be extracted straight to this OS. KDE recognises that there is an HP product hooked into the USB port, it just doesn’t have the details. as I mentioned a few days back – there’s a couple of retellings of getting other HP models going — on the Linux Hardware Database website.

name:
email:
url: http://
ip: 211.28.150.172
date: 2002-11-26-19-59
GOOD REVIEW

This is procrastination to the X-treme … I should be in bed…
But how’s this article, which says that apple have been keeping a copy of OS X – (all the way up to date, too Jag) that works on the i86 architecture. Of course this is only for internal use and for the purposes of pushing a bug up the butt of those lazy motorola slackers, but man, a smuggled copy of that OS would be super-fun.