Sunny Breaks

This might make you feel uncomfortable – e-thrombosis; that’s right, too much potatoing in front of the monitor and bammo. iThrombosis sound better, but they’d probably have to clear it with apple. It says get up from the datamachine at least once an hour. Hmmph. I’m lucky if I can sit here for 15 minutes straight – and that ‘s non-homework season even.

That last episode of the x-files was average. Too much bombast. In hindsight, they really should’ve killed it when duchovny left.

Had some luck at the library this arvo – found the soundtrack to ‘The Hard Word’ – Dave Thrussell; one of my all time fave musicians. The soundtrack shows him well as more of a composer than a fiddler of electronic knobs. Will take a couple more listens of it to get a proper feel. I read an interview in RRR’s subscriber magazine, The Trip by the guy who hosts that show ‘Incoming’ – he was talking to Thrussell mainly about the making of the soundtrack. If I actually had the mag. I’d scan it in, but alas, it wasn’t mine. It was good because he keeps a pretty low profile and he hardly talks at all on his own radio show on PBS.

Am a tad scattered today. Graham virulent memes linked me back which is fantastic. But a few weeks ago I was fiddling around under the MovableType dashboard attempting to eliminate visits via wacky search strings — these generally only come because the full monthly archives are taken as one document. So I told the robots not to visit the monthly slabs. But the daily and monthly pages work off the same template. Google just stuck up its Feb. index and now I’m not getting any google-traffic at all. I suppose it’s not such a big deal, but it was weeks ago when I did that – and for some unknown reason it only occurred to me last night just as I was about to crash out for the evening — out of nowhere the thought comes that ‘oh, maybe nothing will be indexed’.

I’m off to ‘The Ranch’ for a day or two tomorrow.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.34.197.32
date: 2003-01-30-23-57
yeah x-files.. i liked the “good old” x-files when there were lots of freaks of nature.. the worm man, the fire man, the inbred family… they were cool.. not all this alien conspiracy crap
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name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-01-31-10-18
Yes. I was meaning to put some more things down about the show. By the time i got to writing all the things i was thinking had dried up.
It’s not that when duchovny left the show got boring because of that. i actually liked dogget. But the scripts got thinner and thinner.
Sure there’s a million bizarre and conspiracy related story ideas out there, but the truth is that not many people care for all of them.
That’s the other thing. A few years ago – or maybe 5 years ago, when the uttered that phrase “the truth” it meant something, or i, the veiwer, was acutually interested in finding out what they meant by ‘the truth’.
That last ep. – and all this last season, the truth meant nothing at all, and was bandied around way too much.
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name: Monkey
email:
url: iamthemonkey.com/blog/
ip: 203.31.48.3
date: 2003-01-31-15-15
I didn’t want to watch the last episode, I thought they’d tie everything up in a neat little parcel, and that’s what they did. That’s not what the X-files I know and love was about. Of course, I’m one of those ones that stopped watching after the 5th season or so. It got crap.

(Am redesigning just for you. Because I love you. mwah. You’re a well-kept secret, you know. One day you’ll triumph. One day… )
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name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.123.64.149
date: 2003-01-31-23-39
Flattery will get you everywhere.

Just clarifying – if yesterday you didn’t go check out the excitement machine website, then go straight through this link and grab those two 30second .mp3s down the bottom. Damn it’s catchy. And it might drive me mad, so by encouraging you to also listen to these jingles I am hoping I will have some company.

Also it was a bit dumbish of me to refer to jean as ‘her’. I’d hate for that to be misconstrued as bitterness. I’m not bitter, was just having a moment of sadness — that album reminded me most of travelling around south australia just over a year ago. And then today i watched this doco about the history of mining in australia, and Burra was shown, and this also reminded me of the holiday. And i think ‘well that was a nice time, why can’t there be nice time now?’ but it’s not even a question, it’s just just a moan from a little part of my mind that doesn’t get how Things Change, and, Time Moves On.
But gollly Burra was a nice place. I remember as a kid getting dragged around this and that ‘historical village re-creation’ – and I didn’t appreciate it much at all — all those places smelt funny and the clothes that people wore back then seemed ridiculous and sucky. We lived only an hour’s drive from Flagstaff Hill (a ‘living’ maratime museum). And Sovereign Hill was always just a stinking-hot Sunday afternoon’s drive away. Wherever we lived it was always the same distance away. True story.
It’s probably because those places were just recreations that let me down. Seeing the real thing in Burra was different. The walls on the cottages were a foot and a half thick. So I start to take on an appreciation of buildings and the building style from that era.
There were other towns in the doco that exploded (population wise) in a similar fashion, like Broken Hill. I ain’t never been there.

KDE 3.1 final is out. I’m waiting for preconfigured mandrake packages before I start grabbing. The kde link is down there on the right…
A shame to see that Opera probably aren’t going to produce a browser for Mac anymore. Apple is worse off for it.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-01-30-13-09
While in general i see change as a good thing.. it’s funny how i resist it so much sometimes. Dwelling on “the good old days” is such a common past time.
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name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-01-30-16-30
Aye, but one has to live through them for them to become good, old. Same applies to today.

This is interesting; this fellow got the plum of all jobs, working for google. He says Spencer Kimball works there too, I wonder if he still does stuff for the GIMP?

After looking at der fotoblogs yesterday i decided to go for a walk today. This foto came out okay. It looks like a mouse in a wheelchair ie. a wheely-mouse.

Flippin’ around last night i came across the Excitement Machine blog. There’s lots of neat stuff there, including a whole bunch of funky 70s black-person’s magazine ads and links to cheesy ween song downloads. If you’re feeling hollow inside, these things won’t fix that up, but they will distract for a moment or two.
I listened to the Gotan Project album this morning and got the blues about the relationship break-up a couple of months back. It was her CD, I ripped it before I left. (I knew that’d backfire.) The blues on a bright sunny day … life’s like that.

I’ve added a few more people to the right hand column. Have been cuttin’ by Emmajane.net for a while now, via tripledoubleyou. She talks about linux sometimes, and can be an inneresting read.
Yin yang; which yoshi (aka phony ) is a part of, is going again after some kind of holiday from the internet. Congrats to yoshi for getting into what must be a fairly sought after spot in software development studies.
Also, Graham of virulent memes, who I’ve been reading off and on for a fair while. He’s in Albury and most always has something to say about everything. Ya gotta admire that kind of opinionation. ;^)
Actually, via v.memes today i had a look at this: a linux switch ad. A bit of a larf. Because of the Flash situation I’ve had – I haven’t seen any of the switch ads — I may have to dig back sometime.

I’ve just been having a trawl of the eatonweb port hole to see what I could see in the way of french weblogs written in english, but there’s not much there. I suppose I had to expect that, what – with french being the main language there and all. However i did come across two examples of the phenomenon known as the ‘foto-blog’.
There’s a fella called Alan in strasbourg who has a fotoblog, and the pictures are pretty good, what’s more he has unselfishly placed them all in the public domain. At present i can’t really think how such fotos could be re-used but I’m sure something will pop into mind.
There’s also the 9:9am log where the central idea is that a foto is taken by the author each morning at nine past nine in the morning (kind of like the movie ‘Smoke’).

I watched the superbowl today. It was pretty crappy. i want my 4.5 hours back. Have been in a rather sedimentary phase of late. Sometimes this can be okay when i can be okay with it, but I’m not. i feel like there’s things to be done, so this week i shall get my arse into gear.

name: SirFlakey
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2003-01-29-18-12
Yoshi has my #1 all time favorite handles .. “Phony Bolognese” ..It just opens up the mind to sooo many pictures =).
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name: JM
email:
url: www.blog.9online.fr
ip: 212.30.114.214
date: 2003-01-29-22-03
Hi Spouting,
Nice to put a link to my blog.
Hope koala are ok, here in Paris there is not that much!
Ciao
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name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-01-29-23-11
Yes, it’s a cryptic one alright. I hope he tells a bit about what it’s like studying software dev. via yin/yang.

Hi JM. :^) Last time i saw a koala, it looked like it was doing fine. Thanks for making the effort to write your blog entries in english as well as french.
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name: Alan Cowderoy
email:
url: www.cowderoy.com/cgi-bin/alan/blo…
ip: 195.132.0.227
date: 2003-01-30-07-53
Hi, its the Alan from strasbourg. I’m not sure how/why anybody would want to use the photos either but I suppose that’s part of the point.

If you don’t say anything about copyright that automaticaly means that people have no right to use the pictures. Not what I wanted. The creative commons licences all seem to me either like legal overkill or just being half hearted and not just sticking it in the public domain.

When it comes down to it I just don’t much agree with copyright.

Glad you liked the pictures, best of luck with your web log.

Regards
Alan Cowderoy
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name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-01-30-09-12
Hi Alan, thanks for popping back through. t’is refreshing to find you put some thought into the licensing of your work. I like the Creative Commons licenses if only for the fact that if McDonalds or Coca Cola or Stephen King wanted to schnaffle something of mine — then they should pay for it, because they’ve got the money to do so.

I think my apathy toward institutionalised patriotism reached a new level today. Earlier I was watching the news they were saying something about australia day celebrations being a good distraction out in the bush. I thought it odd that places were celebrating aus. day today – instead of tomorrow. Isn’t the 27th the right day? I thought – afterall that’s when the public holdiay is. And then I just had a look on the calendar and it says that I was wrong – it actually was today. Anti-patriotism is waking up and gnashing your teeth first thing in the morning — apathy is getting to 7:21 in the evening and going “huh?”. [or maybe it’s thickness.]

But really I’m very grateful to have been born here. There’s a lot of space, it’s not too crowded, has all kinds of climates – and then the really fortunate bits – it’s in the 1st world and australia still has a pretty damn decent social welfare net. That kind of thing matters to professional slackers like me. In comparrison, the US seems shocking and insane, the UK is rotting from the inside. Some parts of Europe believe in social welfare, but (as far as I can tell) you’d have a hard time finding a tree to take a slash behind without someone seeing you. Also – it’s pretty cold over there.
The only thing I can say is that I seem to be able to buy significantly less since the intro of the GST. Just normal stuff like food, utility bills cost more.
Plus we have one seriously fucken deluded leader at the moment, but that’s temporary.

While I’m rattling on about bigger issues, i’d like to say that germany and france rock bigtime for saying that they won’t participate in the Iraq invasion at all. It’d be wishful thinking to think that their motivation was purely altruistic but I think it’s more like that they could’ve got a better trade deal on oil from Saddam than the corporate petro-puppet that they US wants.
Either way – it’s a big turning point – them saying that regardless of what the UN verdict is, they won’t be in the boat. Also with them being the EU movers n’ shakers, it might get other EU countries thinking too.
Also, this anouncement by Saddam that if Iraq’s invaded they’ll torch their own oil wells — makes me giggle darkly at the ingeniousness. It reminds me of a scene out of the Simpsons where, at the dinner table, Bart and Homer are fighting over the last pickle. Bart licks it to claim it as his own and render it inedible to Homer. Homer dumps it in a nearby glass of milk, saying “Checkmate”. Bart in admiration: “Always thinking two moves ahead”.
******
I think summer jumped the shark with that 42 yesterday. It’s all downhill from here.

For the first time ever i got the Nvidia graphics driver worked out for Linux today! I’d tried several times over the last year or two. So I also got to play Tux racer properly too, and it’s neat downhill racing on your belly fun.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.34.226.33
date: 2003-01-26-23-12
I was just having a discussion about our “leader” with a friend of mine over a pint of Guiness. My friend and I don’t agree very often on anything that is important, I am sometimes astounded at the views of people who I would otherwise consider intelligent (but i guess that’s just egocentrism at work)… anyway i was saying how I thought John Howard is a complete twit for (amongst other things) his views on the middle east and lap dog support of the US. Pre-emptive strikes??!!!! Insanity!!

Anyway, my friend did argue that our economy is doing well (especially in comparison to much of the rest of the world) and that JH did seem to care about the plight of Australians. This I couldn’t argue with.

I should be wary of rattling off without having thought things completely through (who’s blog is this anyway??) but I do find your view on patriotism interesting. I’m also very grateful for having been born in Australia. It’s a great place for very many reasons (there’s a lot that I don’t like – but lets not get into that). I often wonder about my rights when it comes to living here though.. does birth in a place really give me some ownership of it? Or is it the fact that I pay taxes – contribute economically? Or is it just a question of contributing to the society in whatever manner? Why do I have the right to be here more than someone else?

… I have obviously lost the plot here :) Better have a think about it.

Again, your words have provoked thought. This is good thing.
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name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-01-26-23-49
Yeah – I’ve been think a fair bit about howard and his reasons for participating in this invasion lately too. The only thing I can think of is that it’s a traditional thing for Liberal governments to be staunch supporters of US foreign policy — and this is why.
As fertile as my imagination is, i can’t quite imagine there being someone from the US directly saying to someone from here that if australia participates then there’ll be kickbacks for australian companies (or at least aust. branches of global companies, like Mobil).

As 19th Century as his values are, Howard has always had this look of sincereity – which I think is genuine too. It’s entirely subjective, but that look he has – you contrast it to Bush – Bush knows exactly why they need to invade Iraq, he knows what kind of human cost there will be but is dead-set determined to do it. Also it’s no secret that the Bush family have a lot of fingers in oil pies.

I think being born here just means you won’t be kicked out, unless you do something really bad.. :^)
This reminds me that people in gaol don’t get to vote.
I think ‘they’ don’t even really care if you contribute to society, as long as you don’t rock the boat too much. But almost all people do want to contribute, and that’s one of those things about humans that goes beyond national borders.
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name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.34.226.33
date: 2003-01-27-00-37
..ahh but it’s the idea that we should care about or own, contribute for our own good – before we care for those outside our borders that gets me sometimes… it’s a natural thing i guess.. but we have it soooooo much better than others.. and there seems to be a lot of “No this is ours – get your dirty mits off!” going around
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 63.34.226.33 / Block IP range 63.34.226.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-01-27-23-22
yes. I suppose my original para was stemming from the thought of, ‘gee, i’m glad i wasn’t born as a little hungry black kid in africa’. Rather than spin off into the metaphysics and possibles of how souls are born into bodies…
I’d never thought that if i was that little african kid, then I’d probably want to go to australia 9or which erver country) because they have eskimo pies there (among other foods).

I really don’t know wht the answer is to these problems caused by globalisation and sovereignty and unfair trade deals. Maybe abolish all national borders and we’ll all just have free-for-all.

to the Eighth plane of Hell. My name’s Mephistopheles, I’ll be your waiter this morning. Now, can I offer you a nice hot bowl of HOT!? HA HA HA HA HHA HA HA HA!”

That’s pretty much the scene here in southern victoria today. The weather dingleberries said it was going to be 42degrees Celcius, and for once I think they’ll get it right. Talking to Ma on the telling-bone last night – she was going into work today to do overtime because they have an air conditioner – a wise move.
I battened down the hatches at 6 this morning but even then the air outside was warmer than it was in. It’s days like this i wish there was some kind of land bridge to tasmania.

I watched that movie Sliver on telly last night. Nice idea, poorly executed. It’s amazing how much of a yardstick computer hardware is. Everything else in a movie can look very much present day, then I see a PC in the background of a shot and — ooh — how 1993. But that’s an aside.
The movie was based on a book, and I imagine that this book was the first to raise the issue of present day voyeurism, how society has been changed by what we know as ‘surveillance’ and maybe even where the term ‘reality tv’ was coined.
But I hope that the characters and parts of the plot weren’t as dodgey in the book as the were in the movie. The ‘twists’ didn’t work at all, and surely the lead woman character would’ve been a bit more disgusted to learn that the entire building was completely wired. Maybe the issue of privacy has become more important now that we realise the invasivness of all this surveillance. But it still made me think that this, supposedly 35 year old character, was more like 18.

I better get back to that bowl of Hot; it’s getting cold.

PS. you can tell how hot it is here just from my sheer lack of ability to proofread this bugger.

name: SirFlakey
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 203.110.131.78
date: 2003-01-25-15-05
Ditto here – I have retreated into the confines of work – for it’s net connection speed AND ice cold air conditioning =).
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name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.60.239.120
date: 2003-01-26-16-42
just ducked in from pool side myself.. though it’s starting to cool a bit now.. certainly never reached 42!

Was watching this doco about archimedes the other day and was thinking about how information can be lost and refound. I sure hope to goodness that someone is archiving the whole of what’s on the internet. Sure it’s not being done in public, but maybe there’s some secret para-govt. organisation somewhere with giant archives of it all – the hoarder in me really wants this to be so. If they can monitor as much as they can with Echelon, then surely they could do this. And even if it’s not available to everyone now, it will be when the structures of civilisation change. It’ll happen one day – just look at Imperial Rome.
I don’t know exactly what the deal is with hard disks. I know that phorensics people can retrieve stuff from disks even after they’ve been erased several times, but what about when things are continually overlayed. Could they take mine and see the ghost of red hat 7.2, or whatever it was I first put on it, 15 months ago. The problem is that there’s so many hard disks scattered across the planet, even if future ‘archeologists’ – or what equates to them – could read everything that’d been on the disks.

The thing is, the makers of the parchment that Archi wrote on probably never consciously thought, ‘this stuff’s gotta hold up for 2 millenia plus’. And if you’d said to the folks from 3 or 5 hundred years ago, ‘Here’s Archimedes’ book, what do ya reckon?’ – they would’ve said it was pretty buggered, but people today can get legible stuff out of it.
I was just thinking that with little 10, 20 or 40 gig hardrives scattered everywhere, there could be a modern-day archimedes out there right now, maybe messing around with a computerised version of Spirograph, but it’d be a fluke if anyone found their research.
But what’s this – as I write – I read this at Core about a whole city moving to a centralised system of data storage. (Okay well, maybe not the whole city.) That’s an interesting development. It’d make it a hell of a lot easier for future peoples to study us.

It’s funny what can barrel up onto the virtual doorstep. Via a search string (geelong [swearword] – I jumped back through to google to see what else fitted this two word combo. I clicked through a page but didn’t have time to read it so saved it and read it off line. If you’ve got a minute or two check this out, but don’t click on any of their links…

Why would I ask this? Because I want to try and communicate the sense of Wha?? that I had on Saturday. Very much a double-you-tee-efff-??? situation.
Perhaps more so for me because all the street names etc. are in this general area.
I couldn’t figure out what it was about. Stoners? Hoons? RPGers – It sounded like Shadowrun maybe.
But no, later on I found out all about these things called Hash house harriers clubs. They describe themselves as, “a drinking club with a running problem”. In a nutshell, what they do is loosely based on old English hunts from the 1800s where a rabbit or something would be let loose the hunters on horses with dogs would chase it down.

This more modern version doesn’t use animals – one of the club members volunteers to be chased. In place of leaving a scent trail they use scraps of paper (at one time at least. This is where the phrase, “paper chase” came from.) or something else now – I couldn’t figure out what.
“Hash House” harriers are a slightly different form of this – they don’t take it quite so seriously and do it more for the social aspect. The word hash refers to an eatery in Malaysia, where the first of these paper-chase style runs started in 1938. The Full history is here. I liked this picture the best. They have mens, womens and mixed groups. They do it every week.

These groups are everywhere – this is just the victorian list. It’s a worldwide thing. if you’d like to see dozens and dozens and dozens of fotos of working class whiteys holding tinnies you need look no further than this

You maybe thinking that drinking copious amounts of beer and running long distances don’t go well together – and you’d be right. Some guy dropped dead of a heart attack here in geelong while on a hash run last year.

Human beings are strange and amazing things. Just when I think everything is war and fire, something like this shows up.
So next time you hear one of those plastic trumpets (more commonly seen at larger sporting events) sound somewhere in your neighbourhood, go stand in the front yard – a gaggle of staggery sweaty middle-aged proles might just lumber past.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.34.228.49
date: 2003-01-22-00-11
I have seen a big bunch of diverse looking people running around where I live too. Except they weren’t drinking and seemed to blowing whistles everynow again. It was weird when you heard a return whistle call from what seemed a couple of streets away and everyone turned and ran in that direction. I never did get to the bottom of that.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 63.34.228.49 / Block IP range 63.34.228.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-01-22-22-17
That’s amazing that you’ve actually seen them. This was one of those things that I wasn’t sure if it was just me who hadn’t heard of them, or if it was genuinely obscure.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.4 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.60.233.203
date: 2003-01-22-22-41
Well I am not sure that it was the same thing, but it was quite a spectacle.
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name: SirFlakey
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2003-01-22-22-57
Puts things in perspective doesn’t it .. which is to say now everything is skew wiff =) ..

When I was at the peace thingo on saturday I got vox popped by a lad from the local rag, the geelong advertiser, which is owned by some New Zealand concern, which is in turn owned by the evil News Corp. It was on australia’s involvement with the iraq thing. I said ‘I don’t agree with it, it’s more about greed than justice’ – and click-click they took a couple of fotos. I didn’t get much time to think about it. Although that’s pretty much what i think, I just wish I’d added the word ‘corporate’ in there, corporate greed — that sounds so much more hardcore.
I think the journalist boy must have been a work experience student, he seemed really chuffed that I’d actually talk to him. I was surprised that I got in there today. I thought they’d do 20 or something then pick the 5 or 6 they liked best. I was surprised that pretty much all the responses were against any action in Iraq, except for on that kind of sounded neutral. What? No, “Killl ‘em all an’ let god sort ‘em out” ? This is, after all, geelong.
Anyway I was all excited about scrap-booking it onto here – but the moire’s a killer. I just found this page on how to deal with it, so maybe I’ll give those suggestions a go tomorrow.

I went and saw the career counsellor today. Frankly, I’m still not a hell of a lot clearer on future direction, but I have some leads to follow up. This would’ve been so much simpler if i’d wanted to be a fireman or a milkman.
They were putting some new hardware into the acer hole — that is the main science computer laboratory. I don’t see how they can call it a laboratory when it’s just a big hole in the ground with datamachines in it where people write essays and instant message eachother from across the room – I mean hole.

I see Open Office dot Org have released 1.0.2. I’ll have to grabby-grab it tomorrow.
Was muckin’ around a little more with Lycoris yesterday. It’s a mystery – I can’t figure out why the dial-up connection cuts out after (just under) 2 hours. It’s pretty consistant. I thought updates might fix it, or fiddling with the KPPP set up, but no.
Am a bit disconcerted about how un-intuitive all of the CD burning programs are in Linux. All of them. i did a back up of the /home directory, but had to cart it through to Windows to do it, which just ain’t good enough.

There’s a little poll over at Mowabi at the moment about star trek crews which got me thinking about this article I’d read a while back, entitled The Sword and the Starship by Amy H Sturgis which goes into a detailed comparrison of all the star trek series’ (except Enterprise, because it was written before then) and what it calls ‘arthuriana’ – which is the legends of King Aurthur, and things surrounding that like the holy grail.
It was printed in the fiirst (and only) issue of Winedark Sea — which was mainly fiction – and most of it excellent, but a couple of non-fiction pieces too – one being this. A very interesting read.
One category I’ll eventually get going is “other people’s stuff” and I wouldn’t mind attempting to contact this person to see if I could re-tap this essay out so that everyone could read it. As far as I know, this obscure little journal is the only place it’s printed. It’s a shame Winedark’s not released anything more. Their webstie’s been sitting like a duck for two years now.

My thoughts go out to the folks in Canberra right now. What i saw on the news last night was the most extreme looking fire situation I’ve seen in a while.

name: SirFlakey
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 203.110.131.78
date: 2003-01-20-09-27
I read the paper this morning .. 380 Homes .. I remember the fires in ’96(?), I had a view of them coming in from the north. It’s amazing how certain type of fire can be so devastatig while other (larger) fires can be fought effectively.

I’ve kind of started categories. I think the two there will probably be all. I thought of maybe a music, or more broadly – kulcha one, but thing get stuck into pidgeon holes too much already.
Just read an interview with scott mcnealy. Either I’m very tired or he’s on something – he makes more wacky parallelisms than me after too much coffee.
None of the efforts to download freebsd or any other OS to mess with have worked. Bit of a shame. I don’t have the patience to keep trying.

Went to a ‘peace picnic’ organised by the greens today. It was pretty small – they’d only decided to do it a week earlier. Bumped into an old commie friend who’s burrowed himself into a nice academic position these days. He was saying that i could do a job teaching English in Japan with just the bachelor o’ arts degree. Another, mutual, commie friend is over there doing that at the moment. The whole idea made my ears prick up — the elusive white collar — and good money too, apparently. Something unpredictable like that is just what could happen to me. Japan; home of Bashõ, zen master Takuan, and the 5, 6, 7, 8’s.
I saw them play at melb. uni O week in ’93 or ’94. Man can they scream, and rock, and scream. I could post entries to here via a mobile PDA from the top of mountain Fuji while reciting Gary Snyder and drinking green tea.
I do this y’know – I get an idea in my head and play around with it for a week and daydream — then drop it.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.34.224.162
date: 2003-01-19-12-30
Funnily enough, I have been looking into teaching overseas myself.. i have considered Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong. I hear that HK kicked all the expats out in 2000 (or whenever that going back to china thing happened) and now they are keen to get teachers back again – so you can get a pretty good deal. Though I am thinking the shoe box lifestyle in HK might be a bit much to bear

Junk mail really shouldn’t get proscriptive on ‘yo ass’. But occasionally it does, like this, from The Warehouse, where everyone gets a bargain. It’s backtoschool time – just in time to carry on the momentum from the rabid post-christmas sale frenzy. There’s little-uns out there about to meet the great unknown quantity that is systematised state education.
“Hot Tip 1.
Speak positively to your child about how much he or she is going to enjoy school. – Don’t communicate your own stress or anxiety. (Mum had a panic-attack outside the front of the school and they had to call the ambulance.) – Ask the teacher how long you should stay. (Dad sat at the back of the classroom the whole day.)
Hot Tip 3
Reassure your child that he or she is prepared for the big day. – Have you got your bag? (Help. I don’t know where I am.) – Have you got your lunch? (Liquified white bread and tomato. (Throw the cheese in the bushes.)) – Have we taken a photo? (”Have we taken a photo? Have we taken a photo? It’s three to 9am. Have we taken a photo?“) – What news have you got for news time? This just in; a gum nut with a face glued on. More news at eleven.) – Now where will I be when I come to get you? (45 minutes away from wherever you promised.)
Hot Tip 4
The Night before… – Buy them a big bag or backpack. Then they can fit everything in it. (Help, I still don’t know where I am. The cat’s here with me.) – Label everything with colour or fun labels so that they can recognise their own gear. (Give the grade one bullies something to zero in on.)”

name: Quanta
email: quanta_87@myway.com
url: aspyre.net/quanta/
ip: 203.220.145.236
date: 2003-01-18-00-18
writes these down

Thanks, these will help come the 26th.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.220.145.236 / Block IP range 203.220.145.*

name: crisp
email:
url: www.crispyhead.org
ip: 202.7.209.122
date: 2003-01-18-11-51
he he evil laughter poor innocent children, they look at us old people and think, “i will never turn out like them…” but they dont know our mothers too had taken many pictures of us in kindie with our ridiculous name tags that say “Hi, I’m [Insert Name Here]” that would oneday look eerily similar to the one we would wear as an employee of a popular fast food chain years later…they train us young….its my McDonalds World Domination conspiracy.
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name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.12.1.17
date: 2003-01-18-12-29
Help. I don’t know where I am.

These tips were on some junk mail???

You’ve leapt a little too far for me this time.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 63.12.1.17 / Block IP range 63.12.1.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-01-18-17-10
One of those credit-card style ‘priceless’ things I picked up in the hospitality industry was an imitation brass name badge – it has no corporate logo – so it’s completely re-usable. I could wear it down the street it I wanted.

Jay, slotted in amongst the pictures and prices of things like textas – there really was ‘Hot Tips’ in the junkmail. But the italicised bits above are made up. Welcome to the jammin’ category – which for lack of a better word, is fiction. my ma didn’t have a panic attack. But I at the age of 4.5, without help, did have a crazy first day of school – at the end of the day i got on bus no. 17 instead of 16, and so went to woop-woop and back. Ah… fond memories. ;^P
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name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.34.228.153
date: 2003-01-18-19-41
Oh ic.

You’re good.. i can’t for the life of me remember my first day at school.. must have been uneventful

Have been making a few attempts at downloading a FreeBSD mini ISO through the week – and may have got it properly today. Opera’s the only thing I’ve found that’lll resume a transfer but it doesn’t like me flippiin’ around while it’s busy attempting to grab a 220mb file. i’ve never tried free-bsd.
This also means firing up the cd burner – which i haven’t bothered with since the last huge debacle a few months back – him bad big hurt.

I can recognise a nutter quicker than i can click my fingers. There was one in the fish n’ chip shop this evening. It’s probably the way they eyeball without reservation. Or perhaps it’s like crooks. One crook will always pick out another in a crowd. I definitely have an affinity with them. That was one of the ‘in hindsight’ thoughts about anglesea – it was just too small for me to feel comfortable. A town has to be big enough to have a population diverse enough to include one or two nutters — for me to fit in as well.
But who really are the insane – is it them because they start talkiing straight up – like that – to people they don’t know. Or offering their food to strangers. It’s funny how these things qualify as ‘no-nos’. Western society’s a bit rooted like that.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 63.34.224.27
date: 2003-01-17-18-29
Ever had someone sit next to you on a bus or train .. or near you when the rest of the bus/train was empty? …we westerners certainly have a different sense of personal space
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 63.34.224.27 / Block IP range 63.34.224.*

name: crisp
email:
url: www.crispyhead.org
ip: 202.7.209.127
date: 2003-01-17-18-43
have you ever had a guy sit next to you that talked to his thumb the whole train ride? this guy was telling his thumb off for something it had done and when he saw my aunt looking at him he put his thumb behind his other hand and started whispering his frustration behind his hand to the thumb….very funny and it made my day that much less mundane.

Well, food at least. I’ve pretty much been a margarine man since, oh, as long as I can remember – but now i have found butter. It all started last week when i made a promite sandwich at an irregular time (9:30pm). I et it, thought it pretty damn tasty without knowing why, so made another. I think that happened 4 times. At that point, like any other normal person, I started thinking that perhaps the baker had accidentally dumped a shitload of opium into the dough. This would also account for why it was being sold at the “Not Quite Right” supermarket.
But no — it was the butter. That is, it was tasty (and untainted). Of course, it’s a hell of a lot easier to spread butter in this weather – but this winter i’m sticking it out with the butter. Someone should market a brand of butter called, ‘I can’t believe you’re still eating frikking margarine! — and it would display its statement to you as you reached for the tub of marg. in the slightly refrigerated section of your supermarket.
It even feels like its better for me. I listen hard and the internals can tell me the difference between good and bad oil things – coconuts is good, avocados is good, two dollars fitty of chips: not so good.. (no don’t take away the chips!). Last year I heard how – in the margarine factory when they make it – it’s GREY – they just add in the yellow colour later but at the time it still didn’t make any difference to me. Maybe i had some traumatic experience with butter as a child – so horrible that it was blocked from conscious memory and I somehow just got over it last week.

Music.
I haven’t rabbited on about music for a while because sometimes i feel like it so broad and atomised that I could mention four things that I was listening to and most people won’t of heard of any of it, let alone actually heard the stuff. But it’s not as if my tastes are that obscure, particularly of late.
I can’t stress how wrong it feels to be getting so much enjoyment/benefit out of council library property. Where are they getting the budget to be buying new CDs every week?
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Orange -absolutely rocks. That guy’s got a voice like he’s the demented lovechild of Elvis and Fog Horn Leghorn. I borrowed another or theirs, but it didn’t rock as much, so i recommend the ‘orange’ one – which i think isn’t officially titled Orange — but it’s kinda like the beatles’ white album. It’s got a song called ‘orange’ on it and the actual cover’s silver.
I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get into them. I was going through old scheduling notebooks from 95, 96 (golly i was busy back then) and noticed the word “Bellbottoms” scrawled several times in bubbled letters, so must’ve been aware of the Explosion to some level.
Also listening to little bits of older stuff of James Brown, The Dirty Three – Horse Stories (not bad, gotta be in the right mood) and a newy of Tom Waites’ – album titled ‘Alice’. his stuff will always go into the “it’s growing on me” category. I’ll probably come to appreciate it in 6 months time. As a bonus – it was completely new – which means no scratches – which means i ripped it. Oh dear! ;^)
Graham briefly mentioned the doco that was on last saturday night on The Pixies. Hearing/Seeing little bits of them performing live sent little shivers up my spine. They have a big part in my musical memory. I bought Bossa Nova when i was 16 or 15, then doolittle — and they invoke good memories of that period – they’re more upbeat than Sonic Youth. I’m gonna try pinging graham to see if this trackback actually works.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-01-16-11-20
I have always thought that butter tastes better (i think that is a line in an add by Peter Russell Clark)… but must admit that the health thing alwyas played on my mind.

I have however been recently doing some research into Colloidal Silver and how a heap of people call it a miracle cure and an alternative antibiotic. On the flip side, there are those who claim that it causes argyria – a disease (or condition) that causes the skin to go grey (See stories about Rosemary Jacobs). Anyway, after a pile of reading, I am left none the wiser – it’s very difficult to know what is truly bad/good for you and what is just popular belief. Sadly, marketing and advertising often hold too much sway with the masses.
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name: Graham
email:
url: grudnuk.com/
ip: 198.142.148.3
date: 2003-01-16-18-59
Hi! Got the ping. The weird thing was that I was listening to Orange on Tuesday; a damned rocking record if there was one. A bit over the top for some, but hey.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 198.142.148.3 / Block IP range 198.142.148.*

name: SirFlakey
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 203.110.131.78
date: 2003-01-16-19-30
My feeling – everything will turn out to be good for you in quantities that are “moderate” – ie butter up a loaf of bread and you might here the cholerterol alarm bells ringing, have a few slices of toast with butter and you’re going strong.

.. ok maybe everything but cigarettes. I can’t see how they would improve your health…
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.110.131.78 / Block IP range 203.110.131.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-01-16-23-32
Moderation is good, but damn hard to achieve. :^P
I’d never heard about that stuff Jay – that was a pretty freaky story about that woman.
generally I use Nexus mag. as my crapfilter of what to have a closer look at/think about as far as what’s healthy and what’s not. I find it gets a bit heavy thinking about it all at once – but one little thing at a time (like ditching flouride toothpaste) is easier.

Hi graham – i’m glad the trackback is working (and that there are at least a few people in australia who have it enabled).
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name: Quanta
email: quanta_87@myway.com
url: aspyre.net/quanta/
ip: 203.220.145.236
date: 2003-01-18-00-23
No, you have got it wrong, its grey till they add the sunshine.

;-)

It’s funny how things dovetail in together at certain times. Like – eventhough I have that link to kuro5hin there on the right – it’s rare that I go take a look at what’s happening – but last night i did – and the same guy who submitted a short bit – just after christmas (on ‘rare-earth’ theory, among other things) has posted a whole 60, 000 word story called the metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. I’ve read a couple of chapters and it’s blowing me away. It’s all the same subject matter that I was dealing with in that assignment I stuck on here the other day. The whole book’s a download of a zip there at the link.

name: tony
email:
url: www.tamesapien.com/weblog/
ip: 211.28.96.68
date: 2003-01-15-18-28
Whoah there mumma!

Thanks for that link. Now I have something really interesting to read before uni starts again in March.

What’s better is that I don’t have to pay $19.95 @ ‘Collins Bookstores’ for the pleasure.

We here finally got a little little taste of what new south walesians have been getting loads of the last two summers — in the form of mutey smoked-glass sunlight. This morning the light was orange like the inside of an oven – or barbecue samboy chips. Bits of gippsland were on fire yesterday, apparently.

I haven’t given up on this ‘give me a job’ thing. But for the first time in my life i’m gonna try and get a job that I actually like (and what pays money too). I was telling t1e the other day – that i have this terrible block in my head that says that if people have to pay me to do a job then ther must be something wrong with it. I went out to deakin today and got me an appointment with the career counsellor to find out what type of people would be interested in someone with these skills what I’m studying. I still really have no idea. The gumment? Telstra?(ug.)
The limitation is that I’m going back to full time study in a month and a half.

SF at Core did a little post about photoshop tennis. Apart from some of the use of text (which mostly looked wanky and meaningless) in the pieces – some of them looked nice – and I just want to grab the and chop them up. I tell ya – it’s only a matter of time before there’s some form of resampling bits of web to create new bits of web – either cut-ups of text – Burroughs style – or of graphics. I’m sure I read something somewhere about there already being examples of electronic fotomontage.

Of late I’m being really taken aback by the graphic side of the web – via the funnel of the google image search – it throws up the most unlikely little gems and nuggets. Even the little size I like. I’m going to make a page and catalogue all the little pictures I stick on the side. The thing is – a quarter of the time when I follow the link to take a look at where they came from – and the page is gone — so in a couple of months even these little pictures will drop off the google catalogue, which is a bit of a tradge. The littleness cuts out detail and leaves room for the imagination — like songs with no lyrics. What McLuhan would’ve called ‘cool’ media. Instead of wading through oodles of text (like this ;^)) loaded with angle and spin – the picture is just there.
The bringing of the scanner and digital camera to the masses sure has been a revolutionising thing to the net – and I wonder if in a while – fatter bandwidth, digitial film cameras, and mega-sized hard disks will be the next thing.

name: Quanta
email: quanta_87@myway.com
url: aspyre.net/quanta/
ip: 203.220.145.159
date: 2003-01-14-01-38
Ah, the dready fires are smitting ye to.

B.B.Q Samboy chips, waxing lyrically aren’t you?

:-)
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name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-01-14-13-05
I always find it ironic that fire and the pollution it creates can cause such interesting, surreal and often beautiful effects in the sky

I’m running out of titles. Sometimes having one just doesn’t fit. I heard that ‘oversized gourmet kitchens’ on an ad. for those house + land packages. Instead of oversized i reckon they should’ve gone with humungus.
Speaking of house and land packages my buddy, t1e, who got me the horror-sleepwalking job showed up this morning. He had a bunch of scratchies with him. He can’t scratch them at home because his wife doesn’t approve. Most things appear bizarre to me before I’ve had my morning coffee – and this did. I’m susceptible to most everything else but gambling’s never floated my boat.

I’ve been in a real tv mood the last while. I watched ‘airport ‘75’ last night and i have no idea why. All Charlton Heston does is yell! Charlton Heston!? Good Grief. And then yesterday uh the tv uh turned itself on – it wanted me to watch the cricket. “No, I’m playing on computer” i say, but it stayed on knowing that sooner or later it’d get me.
Cricket is, in any other circumstance, not my cup of tea — but there was this Sri Lankan dude, the captain; Sanath Jaya-something batting — and he was smashing balls around and in general just really rockin’ it. Then when it got to bowling he did that really well too – got a bunch of people out. And i was happy for him because he’s a bonehead like me. Jan 9 2003, boneheads of the world: score- 1.

I think I’ve just had a bad run as far as choosing books to read – the last few weeks have been reading Marco Polo – the travels – another one that falls into the ‘okay but not gripping’ category.

Lately everytime i do something watering related in the backyard i get completely soaked. This is another of those things i can’t figure out. Even turning on a sprinkler system – invariably i have to walk into it to fix something and end up completely wet.

It was awful nice for The Flood story to get a plug at Core but – I just html-ised something that’s way more up core-ites’ alley – the last technocultures assignment grandly titled, ‘Is science ready to create its own god?‘ — looking at A.I and its future.

name: Jon
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2003-01-10-20-49
Ahh consider it posted =)
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 144.132.163.213 / Block IP range 144.132.163.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-01-12-11-06
Thanks Jon. :^)

I’m glad I gave this a couple of days. The completely subjective and inexpert verdict is: close but no doughnut. The pppd was wonky, and there’s nothing more frustrating than having the internet connection die on me regularly.

The extremely drawn out review is as follows…

Amethyst Update 3 (Download edition) BETA

Welcome to the first entry of the Chump’s n’ Cheapskate’s Computering Compendium aka the 4C formerly
known as the bottom-feeder’s guide to computering.

Lycoris is one of the newer Linux distributions. It’s based on Caldera Linux. It targets the mark of windows users looking to try Linux and folk who use their machine for desktoppish stuff; writing the odd letter or
other document, muckin’ around on the net (browsing, chatting, emailing and maybe uploading the odd happy-snap to your ISP webspace). It’s also ready to go with hooking up your camera or scanner, play a few little games, burn a CD or watch a DVD.

Installation:
Perhaps it’s just a sign that my hardware is getting older and therefore more easily recognised by all distributions of Linux — whatever the case – this install was the smoothest I’ve ever sat through. Everything was correctly identified.
At the time I was horribly disconcerted by the fact that there was no ‘choose your packages’ section, but later realised that it’s because there’s really only a handful of packages included compared to most distroes.
Similarly, the only choice given with Grub – the bootloader – was to install it into the Main Boot Record – or not install it at all. This reminded me that the target audience is folk who’ve got a version windows on their hard disk and nothing else, not situations that involve a /boot partition, 2 other linux distroes and then windows. That’s fair
enough, after all there’s a lot of people out there with just windows.
I didn’t install Lycoris’ grub and was later able to get Red Hat’s Grub to point to the right partition and boot Lycoris that way. maybe it was because of this approach, but this was the first time I’d seen linux get to the end of an install and not want to do it’s single reboot to get running.
Also this was the first install I’d seen use sound.

Using it:
This is where I realised why it was so quick to install — compared to the 5gigs and multiple CDs or SuSE and Red Hat — Lycoris only needs 700megs of space. There’s no choice of desktop environment: it’s KDE and that’s it. Initially a surprise – I found it easy to get used to. It’s probably because of all the stuff which isn’t added in like
a local web server, mail server and all those other daemons but KDE here ran a lot quicker than on Mandrake and especially Red Hat.
The more I think about it – the decision to go with one DTE is a great idea. I’m sure there are many windows users left looking ponderous at the Linux login screen thinking, ‘desk … top .. environment?’ Maybe I’d be grumbling if it was Gnome they’d gone with instead of KDE. Really, Red Hat 8 should’ve bit the bullet this way too – and just gone with Gnome rather than get two-thirds of the way there with their mongrelised ‘Blue Curve’.
Compared with a default KDE set up, everything’s preconfigured in Lycoris. There’s no ‘welcome wizard’ that puts you through a dozen decisions on how you’re desktop should look (which for the new-newbie) happens even before you’ve seen it at all. This is a good idea. All the options to change the look are still there, and sooner or later the new user will find then if they want.
The layout of the main menu bar beats both Red Hat’s (which was absolute chaos) and Mandrake’s (which was closer to the default, but still had this “what to do” section, which I’ve read that others like, but I thought was doofussy).
I suppose it comes back to the clutter thing. It’s evidence of the McDonaldisation of society, where more=better … if red hat gives me 5 gigs of software, then I’m going to install 5 gigs of software. This means I end up with 12 text editors which makes thing feel cluttered. It also means that there’s a million doo-dads to check out, and
being curious – I do. In the past that meant I actually got little done with the computer – I was too busy mucking around.
Lycoris has one program where others have six or ten variations.
It uses Mozilla as a web browser, Moz-mail for email, KOffice as an office suite, and mostly Kde apps for other things — there are some exceptions – it uses Gftp as the ftp client, GIMP for image stuff and XMMS is included for .mp3s.
Some third party plug-ins like real player and shockwave flash are included,, which is different, and probably a good idea.

When it comes to maintenence updates, unfortunately there’s only one server available to users of this download edition – no mirrors. It doesn’t seem to affect download speed – but while stuff is coming through, everything else (browsing or whatever) goes completely on the skids. I don’t know what’s missing that causes
this – neither RH or mandrake suffer from it.

++ Probably the biggest hassle with this distro for me so far is that the internet dial-up application, PPPD, has been pretty damn dodgey – it dies on me a lot. I can’t tell if this is just something that I over-tweaked or what.++

I can see why the mega-corporate US department store chain Walmart are installing this one their super-cheap PCs. Admittedly, i don’t know what windows XP offers in the way of an incorporated imaging program or games (maybe it’s still just mine sweeper and patience) but Desktop/LX does well in these areas — plus it has linux’s
trusty built-in firewall, and then there’s a whole heap of stuff that can be added via sourceforge and other places. The bought version of Lycoris has a thing called Iris which lets you into a selection of other linux programs that’ve been specifically packaged for its set-up.

The Verdict:
The usual cautionary note given to the complete Linux noob before they try a distribution is, ‘it can be a steep learning curve but once you get the hang of it you’ll see why Linux is heaps better than windows’ – this doesn’t really apply to Lycoris. There’s no curve at all. But the other side of the coin is that the multi-verse of choice (of desktop environment, applications etc.) isn’t present in Lycoris either, so the user may be left with the impression that Linux isn’t much more configurable than Windows.

It’s up to you – give it a go or not. It’s a good intro to Linux. I grabbed it off of the cover CD of PC User magazine – colllector’s edition which should be on your noozestand (in australia) right now. It has some minor problems – but then, there’s no such thing as the perfect operating system.

name: Jon
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2003-01-10-21-05
Ahhhh – yes Lycoris .. I did a review a little while back on core – with much the same results – I suppose I had some bad luck too – the ethernet and screen probes went wrong on two differnet machines (a Compaq Armada m300 and a Compaq Evo D500) On the M300 notebook the ethernet probe (it has a mini pci based intel card afaik) cause the laptop to power down!

Once I had it up and running it looked good and certainly was easy to use .. BUT bluecurve on redhat seems to me to be equally user friendly – (but has the drawback of being too bloated)

I shelved Lycoris.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 144.132.163.213 / Block IP range 144.132.163.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-01-10-22-36
Laptop installs always ask a bit more of distroes. But yeah – Lycoris wasn’t enough to entice me away from fluxbox on Mdk.