Sunny Breaks

Here’s one for the space nerds. Via the fix - a really comprehensive scale gridding of spaceships [it's a long-loader, over 2megs] from star trek and other sci-fi. My faves have always been the orange Ferengi ship (nice shape, nice lines) and the old school Romulan bird of prey (with the picture of the bird underneath). There’s also a few normal things there like the Eiffel tower and uh Godzilla. I have a couple MicroMachines versions sitting around here that I grab a play with when the net jams up between sites.
Oh wow! - You can also move them around. Super cool.

name: Jon
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2003-05-01-12-30
Hmm..the B5 Shadow Scout was always one of my more sinister fave’s (mind you not the profile pictured but when they swooped in ..)
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 144.132.163.213 / Block IP range 144.132.163.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-05-01-16-41
I never watched Babs5. Must make an attempt one day.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.3 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-05-02-12-56
I bumped into that site a few wekes ago, but couldn’t manage to make the page appear.. I think it was really busy.

.. now I am at work (dialed up) and don’t want to do the down load.. sounds cool though. Is it worth the effort?
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.58.6.10
date: 2003-05-02-13-38
Yeah - it’s pretty neat! For a second I thought you could line the ships up right next to eachother, but they seem to be stuck in boxes. And there’s a couple of boxes of much smaller ships like the Millenium Falcon which are supposed to pop-up to a bigger size - but I couldn’t get it to go - maybe that’s just Opera…

Good from a home machine maybe. I saved it and might make a picture of Godzilla with a spaceship in his mouth.

I’m tempted to start up a movie review category– for cheapsters. Videos to be more exact - nothing over $1.10. Last weekend i watched the first spaghetti western, Sergio Leone’s _A Fist Full of Dollars,_ (1964) which was also Clint Eastwood’s first movie performance.

Maaan, he was pretty damn sharp– and clearly the place where this archetype image of the gunslinger originated. There was a few close-ups at specific points where you’ve got the brim of his hat, steely-cold squinty eyes, 4-day unshaved weather-warn naturally tanned complexion and a cigerello clenched between straight teeth. O the symmetry!
As a side note, I suppose it’s just the nature of the machine the way Holyweird keeps chewing actors like this til there’s no flavour left. Jack Nicholson could probably go in that boat too. Sure, it’s not liked anyone put a gun to their head to make them do the same kinds of roles over and over for thirty years, but lately - the spectacle of seeing Clint Eastwood shoot a whole bunch of people dead has lost any meaning it may have once had.
There’s also the backwards affect I had to contend with of having - as an 8 or 9 year old having seen _First Blood_ and then the whole roll on from there. On the back of the FF of dollars box it said that in its day the movie was distinctive in its gritty, brutal realism (ie. a lot of people got shot) but from this point in the timeline that apsect was a bit “meh”.
This was also one of Ennio Moreconne’s first gigs in film scoring, it sounded kind of normal and not as hammed up as i was imagining.
Things i liked - the way Clint said hello; “HuhLoo(?)”
- the gender politics were kind of interesting (for 1964) at least. Part of the plot was that there was two warring families in one town. One of the familes was headed by a woman…. who eventually got shot, but hey, who didn’t? ;^)
- near the start a mexican civilian gets rail-roaded out of town just as our anti-hero is coming in. Pinned on the back of his shirt is a bit of paper saying, “Adios Amigos”, which remained unexplained for quite a while.
- the pace of it. Part of the reason why i like the vid. format is that I can pause it whenever the hell I like and go take a slash/make a cup of tea or whatever. Other things I’ve watched lately seemed jerky compared to _A Fist Full of Dollars_ in that there only felt like one natural break in the storyline about 2/3s of the way through. “No time for a cuppatea, something’s about to happen!’
- the poncho clint was wearing. I want it.
So while it was filmed in Spain, the fact that Leone is Italian probably went most of the way toward the term ‘Spaghetti Western’ being coined - since it was him that kicked it all off. Apparently the P.C. term is something like ‘all Italia cinema’.

Sometimes I get a bit conscious of how much i complain on here, but by golly those deakin IT people sure don’t know how to run an IT. First, take into account that I’ve never had two computers to hook together so in practice I don’t know what’s involved in maintaining a network. Second, I can appreciate the logic that the larger a network gets the more complicated it would probably get.
But I was out there on Monday and the whole thing was virtually useless. I waited ten minutes in the otherwise empty bookshop while the cashier’s machine slowly grinded through finding the price for the book i needed. From two places i tried to get on the net (just to check here, but hey - it’s important!) and it wasn’t working at all. Right now I’m trying to access their website and, as Han Solo said to Luke Skywalker, ”It ain’t there kid, the whole thing’s been blown away” (damn i wish I could remember the exact wording). I need to check the online library catalogue for a book i need and am already ‘down by law’ with them.
Over the summer they upgraded all the PCs to windoowsXP — goodness knows how much that cost (and you just know I’m gonna say).. they _should’ve_ switched to…. anything that’s more stable and doesn’t cost that much. Like BSD. There’s a long but interesting interview with four BSD honchos at OSNews.

I spent half a day playing with Slackware yesterday and things were going very nicely but then i messed up the permissions, but will give it another go. Permissions is something I really should get a handle on. I’m sure there’s a section on it in one of the little books I have. There’s good reasons for having them so strict that none of the administrator stuff can be run from the user account, I’m just not used to it after mandrake and RH setting them so bendy that anything can be run from there.

No Linux whatsoever at the nerdfair yesterday. I guess it�s one of those �you can�t always get what you want�� situations. i got my Hacker Sticker today. Now i�ve got to decide what�s permenent enough to make it worth while being stuck on.

Easter seems to have got me hooked on chocolate again. I was hammering all day yesterday and eventually got my psychology assignment done. I can see the point of laboratory reports for psy but it just don�t work to say, �hey you, now write an assignment and keep it scientific! I don�t want to see any subjectivity in there.� But anyway � in the special style guide at the end it says �now you�ve finished you�re assignment, well done! go buy yourself some chocolate. Get dark, coz that�s the best�. No, but it does say to reward yourself. That�s a suggestion i don�t have a problem following.

Product purchase of the week: New Organics �Cheese-Os��MMMmm, Yummmo!
Well, okay maybe it was a bit like tinned spag., but everything in it is organic which is pretty amazing and I think it tasted better for it. Plus Richard Scary is in on it. I saw this can (it was the last one) in NQR and i looked at the worm and said, �I know you. Your name is Lowly�. I had a Scary book when I was small and I hadn�t thought about it � Lowly, that cat (I don�t remember his name) and that apple car that Lowly drives � for decades. The story was about a bread stick thief i think. It�s French, but, y�know�the words were english.

It�s been almost a week since I had a go at Telstra so here�s another one. There would appear to be (ya like that? that�s how they talk in psychology essays � �There would appear to be..� a correlation between the slickness of models/actors used in advertising campaigns and the extent to which you, dear consumer, are being screwed. All a bit too professional, attractive, straight and unreal�and expensive. The DSS is the same � none of those people in their pamphlets look unemployed.
Now, compare the telstra tv ad. campaign to Dodo�s. They use a computer graphic bird with a funny voice � and the real kicker � a little fat kid. You gotta applaud Dodo just for getting little fat kids back in the public eye. If you�ve not seen the commercial, there�s a situation where the kid�s sitting in front of a computer looking forlorn. Dodo flies in and delivers cheap broadband. Large cream pies are used to symbolise unlimited downloads. The kid holds five piled on top of each other. Then with a facial expression that could only be described as �ferocious enthusiam�, the kid bites into one, while looking straight at dodo and almost moving a bit toward him�. kinda scary. All this over a boofin� kiddy-techno jingle.
I really like that ad.

Mum borrowed me her TV because they are using my brother’s now. My younger brother, ssschew dropped by today to drop it off and he even carried it in here - he’s taller n’ me, got musclier gunz than me, and now I hear he’s got a girlfriend heh heh - at long last. That means that now all my sibs are ‘gettin’ some’ except me. blarg.
It’s a big tv. Mine has been slowly dying - fading to black, literally. The other week i watched _Blue Velvet_, and I tell ya, I couldn’t see much at all. A lot of the scenes were shot at night or in dimly lit rooms, so i was sitting here in the dark. What’s the deal with David Lynch always getting Kyle MacLachlan to be in his stuff? - ‘Twin Peaks’, _Dune_, and _Blue Velvet_. i don’t see what’s so cult-status about it.
Anyway i had to move stuff around because of the big tv - this place is small. I don’t know that it’s such a good thing - it might give me 4eyes. And i don’t know if tv _should_ be that big - sure there’s a few good things on there but there’s a lot of shudderous things to like Neighbours ads with big-shots of Frog-toad winking - yeech.

I need a new operating system. I’m going to the nerd fair tomorrow to see if they have anything - mandrake 9.1 would do, even if it’s obsolete in 6 months. I stuck Slackware on here again the other day but haven’t had the time to get it properly tweaked, and it seriously is time I don’t have right now. But there was this guide/opinion bit that got me inspired to have a persevere with it again at some point. At least mandrake is good out of the box. Now there’s an expression that’s being flogged a lot.

I have this rodent living in the walls and ceiling - I hear it occasionally. The bajalow itself is rodent-entry proofed but not the bit in between inside and outside. It was scratching around at 7am this morn - I banged on the wall a bit, it quieted and I went back to sleep– and dreamt that I dealt with the problem via legal channels.
I sent the rodent a Cease and Desist letter, but I had to deliver it in person. I caught up with it outside, there was a huge garbage pile where the vegge garden usually is. It was moving slowly around the top. I had this bendy metal rod in one hand that looked a bit like a bit out of my kite. I thought if i can whip it to hit the spot right in front of the rodent, it’ll stop and I’ll give it the letter.
But now, in hindsight it would’ve been more direct to just smack the rodent on the head with the rod.

Before that, at 5am I woke up and brain says to me, you’ve had six hours sleep - you want to get up now and I’ll guide you ’round for the day half-zombied like I usually do?. I said, no my dear brain - you see I have an assignment to write today and I need you at full operating capacity. Whatever, it replies, I’m going to do some thinking for a half-hour beore I can chill enough to sleep again. Whatever, I reply - needing to get the last word in.

We will replace cars with hot-air balloons. People who drive cars to work now will instead travel in hot air balloon. This will be good because it will mean people will need to get up a couple of hours earlier to prep the balloon, and they will see the sunrise more often, which is good for the soul. Hot air balloons are heaps quieter. There will still be traffic jams sometimes - gridlock will be called bubble-lock, road-rage = air-rage. People will climb up the ropes over the ballon and jump into to other people’s baskets and have punch-ons.
People will live downwind of where they work. If there is an odd wind, then the people will work for the day wherever the balloon takes them. If there’s no wind at all, a) don’t go to work or b) catch a centipede.
Busses will be replaced by genetically embiggened centipedes. Not ridiculously big, just so they are about 4 foot high. Saddles will be attached to the centipede - 30 being the maximum and there will be a sticker saying “This centipede licensed to carry 30 passengers”. There will be a centipede driver at the front and the passengers will pay thier dollar to them, then go get on. Once they are on they tap the shoulder of the person in front saying, “I’m on” and that person will tap the shoulder of the person in front of them saying, “they’re on”, until it reaches the driver. Same goes for when someone wants to get off, except they say “next stop please, driver”. This will be good because it will serve as an ice breaker and more strangers will talk to each other.
(Still not sure about commerce - the man in the little white van - solution needed).
Electric trains are fine and will remain. Some other way to make electricity will easily be invented. Diesel trains can easily be switched to run on fish n’ chip vat oil. This is an actual fact. The only other thing that is needed is a bit of vodka in there too to stop the fat from solidifying in the cold. People will need to eat a lot more fish n’ chips to supply the trains. That’s fine by me.

name: Jon
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2003-04-25-15-05
Let me be the first to say DAAAAAMN .. that’s some mighty fine hypothetical - including with a serious dash of humour. Oh and put me down for a serve of fish and chips =).
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 144.132.163.213 / Block IP range 144.132.163.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-04-26-08-30
Heh, tah. dang crazy brain.. :^)
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.3 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: crisp
email:
url: http://
ip: 203.213.61.1
date: 2003-04-26-16-26
the centipedes should be genetically modified to talk and have an attitude aswelll so when people catch a centipede the centipede would say things like, “hello there, thank you for choosing me to get to work, the weather looks buggered but who the hell cares” so when we go to work we have something funny to talk to our workmates with and we can swap stories on what the centipede we rode on said to us that day. he eheh I know that’s lame but it made me laugh thinking about it.

that was fantastic yakky, it had all the stuff :)
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.213.61.1 / Block IP range 203.213.61.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-04-26-23-00
Yes they COULD talk, you’re right! And maybe spit sometimes too.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.3 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: Quanta
email: quanta@dodo.com.au
url: quanta.aspyre.net
ip: 203.220.145.120
date: 2003-04-30-16-40
And tap dance!

But I know how this end, you see all goes fine for 10 years, but one day the centipedes rebel! They have had enough of working for us, and slowly beging there diabolic plan to enslave us all!

So 100 years from all we all work at a shoe factory (’cept for the reallllly unlikey ones who work at a sock factory) producing the required shoes for our masters!

But I bet you didn’t think o’ that did you Yak!

*mutters and starts to twitch*

I’ve been listening to a CD of spaghetti western tracks all done by the grand-daddy of the spag. western score, Ennio Morricone. A couple of them are sung by a, well, a gringo like me - and others have lyrics I can’t understand - which I like. It’s all very weird in an upbeat kooky kind of way. One track on there sounds a lot like some classic classical piece which got me tangenting off to get out the red vinyl ‘Disco Saturday Nacht’ - feverish sounds of 1830 - Eine Kleine Disco Band, Featuring disco concerto ‘(Love in) a Turkish Bath’. “You have in your hands the most exciting _different_ Disco record ever made! That’s a big statement … but this is a big album. What we have here is a triumph of communication– from the 18th century to tomorrow.”
The scary thing is - that’s by no means the trashiest record I have.

The other CD borrowed from the library this week is the _Taxi Driver_ soundtrack. It has some of the spoken word bits - _but they cut the swearing_ . Strange thing for a soundtrack album to do.

Ah man, I’m having one of those days where i can’t find anything and the things i can find aren’t working right.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-22-21-58
I always like dthe theme to “the Magnificent Seven” though I’m not sure that it counts as a spaghetti western. Come to think of it, what makes a western - spaghetti??

Anyway, Yul Brynner is cool.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-04-23-13-54
I think it’s westerns that were made to look american but weren’t made in america. They were more low budget, and only started after the initial wave of original westerns had died off, but ended up breathing life back into the original western format.
At least - that’s what it says in the liner notes of this CD. :^)

I haven’t been watching the news lately, but did last night. I can’t decide if Hollyweird’s invaded Washington or if it’s the other way around. i think it’s the other way around. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t halucinating.
I.M.C.C. (International Mind Control Corporation) robot no. 549X, or, better known as that black dude in the camo-gear who’s usually seen in front of a map with a pointy thing in his hand

– I seemed to have lost the rest of this entry [YS, 30/11/04]

name: Myrr
email: me@myrrhine.net
url: www.myrrhine.net
ip: 61.9.128.171
date: 2003-04-25-01-12
Hmmm smooth spot on the spacebar you say … marks you as a keyboard person. I have a smooth and slightly dirty patch on the left hand side of the mouse, right where my thumb rests, clearly I am a mouse person!
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 61.9.128.171 / Block IP range 61.9.128.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.3
date: 2003-04-25-10-34
I have to go easy on the mouse or it’ll fall to bits.

Hey that ‘recent referrers’ thing is turning out pretty fun. I could add the code to all the pages but then the list’d just be a barrage of ‘lament for the death of a bullfighter lorca’ and surprise chef.
I’ve added more people to the link list since the colour change: Myrrhine of Myrr Purrs who’s into site design, can repair laptops with nothing but masking tap and is relatively local. Also, The Excitement Machine, which has some good links sometimes. And media in motion which I find raava interesting in a ‘the internet as a bunch of communications mediums’ way - it’d be way more cool than studying tv like I am at the moment. Then there’s le fotoblog, 9:9am log - written in french and english by JM (which I’ve mentioned here before). The gang there also recently added a Flash-based ‘jog around Paris’ extravaganza. And last - shauna - what’s new pussycat which is a pretty popular australian weblog, and damn funny too.
All very good indeed. I think I’m on the lookout next for a leet webloggen nerdlinger or two to balance things out.

I’m giving yoper Linux another go and liking it a bit more. There were quirks that I couldn’t handle last time– it’s very strict with permissions, I can’t hardly do anything from the user account. But kde 3.1 is very nice and more stable than I thought. The Yoper people also opened a forum on their site too, which helps a lot for some of those odd little things which don’t make sense at first glance.
What happened was that my existing partitions got renumbered, and by the time I realised I could probably retrace my steps it was too late and I couldn’t boot back to mandrake. Thankfully nothing was lost. I did try red hat again yesterday and this morning but their ‘up2date’ service seems to be totally stuffed, and it was never very enticing to begin with. Plus the things that belong in the “What _were_ they thinking?” basket - like not including an MP3 plugin.
I’m very impressed with this Opera 7.0.1 B1– it’s not really beta at all as far as I’m concerned. The inbuilt M2 mail client is good enough for me to give up evolution, and during each of these jilted installs I’ve been able to set it up no problems and bung the all-important bookmarks folder straght into it. I haven’t fully explored it, but I think bookmarks can even be saved as an html file, and there’s spam filters for M2 too.

I forgot to say happy easter. Happy easter. I almost forgot how it works - like x-buns on friday, chocolate on sunday. I was hoping to pick up some cheap, slightly out of season x-buns today in town but the prices ain’t dropped. It’s another of these things that comes out topsy-turvy while living in the southern hemisphere while following a n.hemisphere timetable. “New Life” is the non-religious specific theme, but the only way I can make sense of that is changing it from new biological life to new mental/intellectual life.
Maybe it’s just the way the external sturctures postition things, but now til mid-Nov. is the “getting down to business” part of the year here. Summer is when brains happily turn to fudge, or mine does anyway - not completely - it’s subtle. This cool morning air is good for thinking. Darkness is good for inspiration.

This is probably as good a time as any to make a general announcement to folks who have those web-based visit-tracking systems, like “eXTreMe Tracking” and whatever the other ones are called — that when you click back through to the originating web site it can expose your password. Of course, I’m assuming that people’s intentions are to keep their password and visit statistics private. Maybe they don’t mind other people having a geezer. If you are innerested in keeping such things private, the best thing to do is copy the curiosity-inducing link, paste into yer browser and go have a look that way. I mention this because of the little “Top 10 last visitors” thinga-ma-jig I stuck down there bottom right.

Anyway, I really should jump back off– I accidentally severely fucked up my hard disk partition system and can’t get back into my normal mandrake set-up. I thought I’d grown out of these self-induced catastrophies… :^)
Maybe I’ll have another go of Red Hat 8.

Here’s a foto from inside the hot house at the Bot. Gardens - I reckon just a tad of blue tint and it’d look like it was under water. Was walking around there today and it was gorgeous. Haven’t been there in yonks.

Just a quick-un to say the site was down for the last 5 hours or so - I don’t know that anyone else noticed, but I did. Yet, amazingly - it wasn’t my fault. It was the people who I paid to host this site, but I’ll leave the dishing out on them to another day.
I’d already done some preliminary scouting for a new web host and right now I’m craning around to ask the spouting chief financial officer (he’s the one in the tin foil headgear) how soon we can make the move. By May 11 he says. Excellent I say.
After a brief discussion with signor newbie I decided that digitalbiz is the go. For the same price as what I got this 12 months with incompetents inc. - digitalbiz give twice the amount of space, a mysql database, and from what I’ve seen of jeremy’s site (his is with them) they seem to be able to accomplish the miraculous feat of keeping web servers running.

Anyway, slacking off time is over. It’s another week of hammer n’ anvil before uni goes back next Monday. More later.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-21-22-42
Hey yes! I noticed it was down.. but assumed that it was the crap proxy server that I have to use at work. It’s like I keep trying to tell so many of my clients, “internet is not an exact science”. It inherently has random (or hard to control) factors built in.. like the path that a piece of data travels from one side of the world to another
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-21-23-48
Heh, yeah. Funnily enough I was much more aware of things like Kraken biting through under-sea cables when I was on Bigpond. That was always happening to them - kraken, loch ness monster, mynoks.

Y’know I’m not crazy about the idea of cybernetic implants, but if I _had_ to get one I’d have an electric eye which could take photos. I’m always seeing people or things or whatever out on the street where unholstering a camera would be way too conspicuous or clumsy or slow– like this old guy near the supermarket in a ridgey-didge sea captain’s hat and skivy - absolute classic. I’m not making fun of them - I applaude their oddness and out-of-placeness. I’m always seeing bumper stickers too - bumper stickers are a great form of cultural communication. Like “I wish I had an Oakley sticker like all the other wankers”, and another that was easily the biggest sticker I’ve ever seen (it took took up half of the back windscreen), “I’d like to see how well you drive after i stick that mobile phone up your ass”.

Damn! How expensive are easter eggs these days?! I saw a rather smallish average-lookin’ bilby for $4.49 today. Even the politically incorrect bunnies were dear. I think I’m going to have to try making them myself next year.

Speaking of sweet stuff (and supermarkets) - out at NQR yesterday — I mentioned a while back all the whacky marketing ideas that gather on the shelves there - and these apple pies shaped like Tasmania. Yesterday I was thinking ‘ah c’mon I’ll give ‘em a go’, and went in for a closer look … to find that it’s a _salmon_ pie - yeech! No wonder they’re not selling… fish pie … ug.
There was an article in Nexus mag a couple of months ago about this product called Xylitol - it’s a sweetener. It’s not new; it was invented by Finns during WW2 because they were having sugar shortages. It’s extracted from birch bark - so not artificial. And it leaves refined sugar and artificial sweeteners for dead. Let’s face it, refined sugar technically is a toxin - it takes more energy/nutrients to process it than it gives– it gives nothing really, just a nasty little high that’s followed by a twice-as-long low.
Xlyitol is almost the complete opposite, it’s more like the natural sugars found in fruit - and it’s even good for your teeth!
In the article they were saying something like ‘it’s good to have something with a little bit of it in it just before bed’ which spun me out, because in the last couple of years I’ve kind of self-conditioned me to be wary of anything that was obviously sugared up, knowing that it’s no good for me. My gums are succeptible to the stuff.
Xylitol is now being sold in australia by these people. Unfortunately it’s expensive, compared to normal sugar. I’d still like to give it a go sometime to see what the difference physically feels like.

Telstra is a vampire and I am Romanian village peasants. The charge for a normal line connection is going up _again_ next month and they’re ditching the ‘neighbourhood’ call charge, which was advantageous to me because my local TPG POP connection was close enough to fit into that category. Every price-hike means more GST too. It sucks. Me dry. I want to look into if Optus are any better.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-17-22-54
Telstra pisses me off too!

Phone line rental is like $25 a month.. I thought about not having a land line and using that $25 to go towards a broad band connection.. but of course, there is no cable in my area, so I would need to pay for a phone so that I could get ADSL!
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: Quanta
email: quanta@dodo.com.au
url: quanta.aspyre.net
ip: 203.220.144.149
date: 2003-04-18-22-24
We all know how evil telsta is - that what they told is a Optus camp.

Optus - Join us!
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.220.144.149 / Block IP range 203.220.144.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-19-09-04
Unfortunately I don’t think Optus can offer much more when all I’m wanting from them is the home phone.

It really doesn’t take much to buy me. A $3 sticker will get you a link on this page. This is why I keep urging the vendors to send me hardware to review– I’d guarantee them a positive slant, and they wouldn’t even have to let me keep the stuff.
I refer, of course, to Hacker Stickers (over on the right) which was posted about on Core. Go here - you stick a link on your site and they send you _Your Choice_ of one of several stickers. I like the phone phreaker one - it’d look good on a skateboard, one of those skinny plastic banana-yellow 80s ones.
But I couldn’t go past the ‘hacker’ written in japanese letters one. It’s so leet (did i spell that right?). The only place where this leetness wouldn’t work is in japan, where it’d

kind of be like walking down the street here wearing a t-shirt that with ‘nudy boy’ written on it.

Also, Opera 7.10(beta) for Linux has been invented. Not a moment too soon either. I was having some trouble with it not remembering its size when I’d fire-it-up - apparently this is just a fluxbox problem - and after using Oppy in enlightenment this arvo, its working okay now.

The other thing I forgot to mention yesterday is that after 8 or 9 months of serving up small and occasionally puzzling pictures, ‘Rockin’ out with:’ has gone on holidays for a while and will be back at some other time.

This is kind of like a big bowl of artifical colouring enhanced chocolate icecream with lurid poiple topping and a slice of banana - it’s a winter thing.
I’ve caved into the alphabetisation thing with the list-of-weblogs-thing-on-the-side, and also incorporated Core and Mowabi into it because they’re like group-effort weblogs in a way. Also redid the about page.
Ideally I’d like it if there was no line of brown between the purple and yellow, but I just can’t figure the thing out. When i set them to add up to 100% they overlap, and as is - 93% leaves that gap, but only when browsers are at a certain phatness or beyond. Generally, I only open browsers up to 800px or so, but i obviously can’t assume that everyone else does.
If it’s all looking particularly wrong in your browser, leave a comment. I didn’t get much of a chance to check it in internet explorer yesterday at uni — and not at all on the Mac version.
I still can’t find versions of Andale Mono bold or italic on the net. I’m not even sure if they made the typeface that way. IE bends any plain typeface to look either of those two ways by itself, but Mozilla and Opera don’t. Sourceforge has the single normal variant here.

name: Jon
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2003-04-15-21-20
Safari v73 - border above a certain hsize
Camino - ditto
IE5 for Mac - ditto

Re core integration =) Might as well =).
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 144.132.163.213 / Block IP range 144.132.163.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-15-23-23
How do you mean border? Is it between the main content and the link list — or on the extreme right.
Either way -tah! I haven’t even seen safari yet, let alone have somewhere to get access to it. The G3s at school are ancient and still running OS 9.2.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.4 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: Charles
email:
url: http://
ip: 64.6.91.76
date: 2003-04-17-05-05
Yes, it’s wrong, so very wrong. It renders right, but it’s all wrong. I presume you were TRYING to create the ugliest possible design? It is generally a bad idea to assault readers with monospace fonts and complementary colors.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 64.6.91.76 / Block IP range 64.6.91.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-17-09-18
Hah hah - I appreciate your forthrightness. Very late last night I was thinking that the monospace typeface wasn’t working…. but the colour scheme stays.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.4 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-17-21-51
Yikes!

How long have I been away? For some reason I am thinking Cadbury’s and neopolitan ice cream.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-17-22-20
Not long. I must admit it was a bit Wonka inspired.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.4 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: Quanta
email: quanta@dodo.com.au
url: quanta.aspyre.net
ip: 203.220.144.149
date: 2003-04-18-22-26
/me changes his blog name to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111AAAAAAAAAPlease Don’t Eat Me.

:D

that’s right on time It’s Tricky!

I taped a bit of this english radio documentary that I mentioned back here. This is a small quote from it:

bq. “In the prelude to the Gulf War it was easy to think that Iraq had only just been invented. That there was nothing much to say about it as a country. That there was nothing much there to bomb. In fact, the history being arranged for us, was played out where all history began. For while Europe was populated with stone-age tribes, the people of Mesopotamia were living in towns and those towns had libraries. The city of Babylon flourished for 2000 years, changing hands as rival empires fought over trade routes, riches, land. It was here a legal code was written - that the strong might not oppress the weak. Twenty centuries before the birth of christ these laws had distinguished justice from revenge.
Centuries later another great city was built, capital of the arab empire and its new religion, Islam. Rhymed poetry, geometry, our number system - all come from Bagdad. Here, in europe’s dark age, arab scholars calulated the circumference of the earth, six centuries later the [christian] church conceded it was not flat.”

It’s pretty sad to see the city being trashed, and its people humiliated.
To take a big step back from it all, and get a bit flippant too– there’s been some aspects of the invasion that remind me a lot games of Civilisation or freeCiv. Civil disorder alway happens when you take over a city - what I’d do was pump some cash straight into it to get the temple/cathedral rebuilt immediately, which would restore order. That doesn’t seem to be happening in real life.

I finished off a long assignment earlier than expected yesterday and then had a (too long) nap. Later on, there was bugger all on telly and i didn’t have the beans to concentrate on doing anything productive on here, so I had a meditate for an hour — all of which contributed to very little sleep being had last night, and accordingly, me feeling zombified all day today.
Another side-effect of all this swotting is these ridiculously long and precarious sentences showing up. Sorry.

Jon found a really neat colour chooser.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-15-00-12
A friend and I were discussing Civilization in comparison to the war recently too.. on reflection, I think it’s a little insulting to the Iraqi people to trivialise it so much.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: yak sox
email:
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-15-09-41
For sure, I’ve thought about mentioning the comparrison here several times before, but didn’t because it’s just too easy for me to - here in comfortable, non-catastrophic southern-australia. I don’t know what it’s like to sit through a night of listening to/feeling my town being bombed.

Well if shampooing your hair can be orgasmic, then printing out a completed assignment via a cross-platform application (like Open/Star Office) should be positively fucking beatific!
for the first time ever I’m having trouble printing in Linux. I know this is one of the things I hear people somtimes wail and bemoan, “Woe, woe, I can’t get the printer to work!”, but the second thing I bought after the Lil’ Lugger laptop 186– way back when… was the printer. So it was old enough for the Linux movement to have it sorted.
While putting everything together again after this last move, I got this zany idea that the printer could be connected via the parallel-port scanner, eventhough there’s never been (and never will be) any real P-port scanner support in Linux.
Long story short — I couldn’t get it going the night before I needed it. I writ the assignment in openoffice so could shunt it across to windows and use staroffice. Sweet.

This morning i had a really intense day-dream about being really moneyed but not having done anything to get get it. Falling arse-backwads into it. i was thinking of all the things I would get and what I’d do. it was lots of fun, too much fun maybe.

Everytime I’m forced to write essays and what not I get this overwhelming urge to write fiction. I wanna have a go at a detective story, eventhough I’ve never read any and had trouble even following the plots of ‘Murder She Wrote’. Geelong’s looking very hard-boiled tonight. One of the pubs has a couple of those giant search-lights tracking the sky and there’s lightning way off in the distance.

floating my boat this week:
Amon Tobin - remix of The Irresistable Force’s Nepalese Bliss
- Sordid … (Both of these sound like adventures in far off and obscure places - like Tin-Tin gone cyberpunk noir. There’s a voice sample from some movie in Nepalese Bliss and I’m desperate to find out what it is… )

Disicko (sp. ?) - Get your Freak On (Have heard this on the radio a couple of times. “Getchya freak on UH, Getchya freak on UH”. Excellent for sticking in your boombox and doing aerobics on top of Ian Curtis’ grave to.

Spelling ‘fat’, “Phat”. “Hey guy them’s some PHAT treads on you treadly. Stylin!” Word.

name: Jon
email:
url: www.core.org.au
ip: 144.132.163.213
date: 2003-04-12-08-56
Can’t get over the Chris Tucker version “Girl your PHAT!” (Pretty Hot And Tempting) =)
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 144.132.163.213 / Block IP range 144.132.163.*

name: Graham
email:
url: grudnuk.com/
ip: 203.164.8.223
date: 2003-04-12-12-08
Heh. Dsico’s stuff is at
http://4trak.net/dsico/download.html
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.164.8.223 / Block IP range 203.164.8.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-12-15-20
I’ll have to have a fish around the networks for that one Jon.

Thanks Graham - I heard the name on the radio, so wasn’t sure of the spelling.

a) Try not to grin so much. That would be a good start.

b) Uh, double check that you actually have those typefaces installed…

c) No.

d) Thanks. :-)

Hope this helps, god

At 12:59 PM 09/04/2003 +1100, you wrote:

TV has been a central theme here of late - mainly because it’s what I’m studying at the moment. I spent most of the day watching and rewatching and pulling apart one 50 second sequence of a Simpsons episode from about three weeks ago = “Welcome to another episode of PADZ! Where we go inside the mega-mansions of today’s hot young celebrities.” 500 words down, 2500 to go.

I can sort of see how the buddhist idea of The Middle Way applies to peanut butter. Of course no one would agree that Smooth is the best. (I honestly don’t know why it’s still made - maybe just for its use as an ingredient in other larger ensembles.) And More Is Better, right? So that’d make *supercrunch* tops in the peanut butter heirarchy… but no, maybe not. It’s pretty hard to spread whith those uncrushed chunks of peanut in there. So, even though I currently have *supercrunch* next time I think I’ll go the Crunchy.

Hehe. Sorry - I’ve got this ‘got to increase word count’ thing happening. I could’ve said that in one sentence.

How do you walk? When I really get going - after 2 mins - I _Barrel_. Like the runaway train that Charles Bronson met his fate standing on top of. I barrel through the plaza and when it looks like I’m going to have a head-on with someone, a side-track clicks open just in time and I roll onto that. Occasionally I gambol, but it’s rare.

name: Quanta
email: quanta@dodo.com.au
url: quanta.aspyre.net
ip: 203.220.144.16
date: 2003-04-09-09-36
Peanut butter in all froms is wrong…

Ewwwww. :S

Unless of course used with jam on sandwich…

Sweet sweet peanuts.

:D
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name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-09-10-39
Yes actually I like to do one piece peanut better toast, one piece jam - and eat them in alternating bites. Figjam at the moment - it’s pretty good (Just Ask Me).

But butter-ising peanuts is a good idea, but they have a hard time in the general mix, keeping up with the likes of macamadamia, walnut and even monkey-nut.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.4 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: Myrr
email:
url: www.myrrhine.net
ip: 61.9.128.171
date: 2003-04-09-13-08
I walk fast too … I learnt in Germany after being buffeted off the footpath six or seven times that it’s ok to walk into people as well, they should know enough to get out of your way quick.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 61.9.128.171 / Block IP range 61.9.128.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-09-22-00
Well there ya go. I never woould’ve guessed they got shovey in The Land of Chocolate.

Ooohhh… okay. It took a little while to click as to how the Geourl thing works. Everytime I looked at the page that leads off from the link (to the right and below) I thought I hadn’t done it properly and it was defaulting me to the centre of Melbourne - but it means that I’m zero miles from where I’m at (a good thing, that).

Lately I’ve been happening across a lot of people crying. A lot by relative terms - normal being basically none. And it’s not kids and “goodbye at the airport” situations either, it’s normal looking people with no easily explainable circumstances. All a bit disconcerting.

I know that the term ‘friendly fire’ pretty much came into being during the gulf war, but back then I was an apolitical lad– on holidays at gramma’s house, reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and gazing blankly at the bright green tracer fire on tv. I don’t know how many people died of friendly fire then, but this recent invasion of the same region seems to be taking it on as the official B-Story to the whole thing. Talk about insane. The only positive thing I can think is that I hope that the Kurds get their own state out of it.

There was a pretty good doco about Bruce Lee on SBS’s Masterpiece last night. What a capital L Ledge! I didn’t know how much he was into the art of fighting before the movies… and all these terms that came from him like the ‘one inch punch’ and (probably) the art of fighting too.
The first joint I moved into when I went to melbourne was with a Bruce Lee fan, so I probably saw a few of the movies, but there was this little bit from Enter the Dragon on the doco (I’m sure I saw that movie) and it was borrowing from one of my favourite little stories involving zen master Takuan; the ‘No Sword School’, where he tricks an adversary into jumping onto an island then ditches him.
Bruce’s approach to tradition and the practice of doing what he was doing - martial arts - gave me the impression that he is (was) a modern day zen guru, which is pretty cool. Plus he could weave lines like “That wouldn’t be very groovy, Baby” into movies … movies like Game Of Death which is on next saturday night. Worth watching it just for the dialogue.

I got a phantom referral from largehearted boy, which has turned out pretty neat because the boy is a veritable goldmine of leads to downloadable music on the net - if you’re into that kind of thing.

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com/
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-07-22-16
Damn! I keep hearing people talk about that Bruce doco.. I’m sorry I missed it. He is/was definately a groovey cat.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 205.191.171.239 / Block IP range 205.191.171.*

name: yak sox
email: yaksox@spouting.net
url: www.spouting.net
ip: 203.29.131.4
date: 2003-04-07-22-32
Oh yeah. I can’t think of anyone else who could wear a yellow jumpsuit (footage of Game of Death) and still come off as a totally slammin’ mofo.
I’d like to know more about the “Woh! Haar!” sounds he makes when he goes for it. Maybe I’m just a parocial whitey but it cracks me up — it sounds like they’ve dubbed chook noises into it.
Edit Comment / Delete Comment Block IP 203.29.131.4 / Block IP range 203.29.131.*

name: Jay
email:
url: www.mowabi.com
ip: 205.191.171.239
date: 2003-04-08-17-11
I vaguely remember that those noises are meant to be cat like. As in when a alley cat is having a fight