Month: July 2003

a load of drivel

Literally and otherwise.

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I’ve been putting off mentioning drivel until I actually got a chance to try it out, but it hasn’t happened and it’s taking very little to get me spinning out about what kind of pace I’m going to have to sustain with studying this semester. A no-breaks 4 month dash for the finish.

Anyway — it’d be fun to be the dian fossey of webloggen by working my way into the strange and mysterious realm of livejournal — getting them to accept me, acting like them until they started to forget I was there et cetra. For those not in the know, it’s a free, hosted service similar to Blogger’s blogspot setup, except (and I didn’t know this bit) that to join up to LJ, you have to have an existing member ‘recommend’ you. (There’s also an option to pay to join.) I haven’t had the time to gain the trust of one of these inhabitants. Just wanted to see what the interface was like.
And that’s where Drivel comes in – it would be like the ‘word-processing’ window bit (or front-end) to the livejournal account. There’s versions for windows and Linux on the souceforge page pointed to above. The first time I saw it was as part of Dropline Gnome and I was wondering how many Slackware + Gnome nerdy hacking types would be into using LiveJournal since most users seem to be on about breakfast and boyfriends (like so) — but the Livejournal software is open source, so there ya go.

Comments:

pixelkitty
url: http://pixelkitty.net
date: 2003-08-01-07-27
I have an LJ account, so I guess I could recommend you to get you in, if you like? havent used it in a long long time though.

yak sox
url: www.spouting.net
date: 2003-08-01-07-42
Why that’d be neat, thanks.

Now I wanna be your…

A fortnight ago I was at a meeting. Somebody brought this little dog – white furry thing. I don’t know if it was a specific brand. But it went around sniffing out everybody there and got to me and starting humping my leg. It was pretty fuckin’ funny. I think it was a day or few before that I’d missed a Rodney Dangerfield movie, but who cares when you can be a participant in your very own Dangerfieldian scenes? This kind of dog is the sort that generally when I see them I assume that it must be a girl-dog because they’re just so, well, girlish. But no – instead: fiesty.
Anyway it was there again tonight and again mine was the only leg worth a hump-attempt. I don’t get it.

Floating my boat musically this week is Gene Krupa – Drum Boogie. Swingin’ and swell. He was known as a big band drummer, and I’d heard him kickin’ it on a couple of tracks before — and sure it’s not as wild as the amon tobin drum crash-bam-boom-bash rolls, but there’s 60 years between them.
I’m liking that mid-1940s ‘gettin’ the dinner ready in wiinter and everything’s gonna be aawwlllll-right’ feel. Up until a couple of months ago I’d found the 40s kind of repulsive but am now curious. I wish I had a Tardis.

surprise chef revisited

There’s a tv show starting tonight that has prompted me to finally write this entry. It’s a hammed-up cooking show, something I heartily endorse.

I’m de-indexing the surprise chef piece. Perhaps it was a bit harsh. It’s made its point. I happened to catch 10 minutes of a show a few months back, and noticed that they’d taken on some of my suggestions of hamming it up a bit. Aristos did the same joke 4 times in the same episode, which is great because I like the number 4. Anyway, i harbour no ill will towards the surprise chef. There was a more broader point to it, effected by the fact that countless people clicked through to the page. Let this be a lesson, TV networks – you and your shows can be got at. All it takes is one lone nut with a web page and a well targeted < title >.

He just wanted us to call him captain da

Somedays I have these moments where it feels like the best thing to do is pack it all up and head back to mars. My social interaction muscle is severely atrophied and getting back to a more healthy state produces some weird results, particularly when i been staying up too late watching men on bycycles.
I came across that quote about the internet again recently – something like “the internet is a tool whereby individuals who have lives are able to benefit from those who haven’t”. The coin seemed to drop this time, and damn yes — it’s true — those bastards!
Of course now I feel obligated to populate as much virtual space as possible with misleading info, half-truths and infinite Kaos.. Ah-ha-uh-ha-ha-ha-HAHAHAHAHAaaaa!

20040109_MYSTERIOUSO
President Arroyo and Chairman Kaga: the same person???

the truth about icecream

I mentioned Amon Tobin a week and a bit back. He’s on the NinjaTune record label, and at their site there’s a couple of Tobin tracks for download (on a different site here – on the discography page, down near the bottom: ‘Verbal’ featuring MC Decimal R and a remix of ‘people like Frank (except they spelled it franck) by some French dude) plus a whole bunch of other neat stuff like wallpapers, .mpegs, videos and screensavers — of other artists on the label too.

I found out which is the nation of Boom-Cha! – it’s Italy. They play it at the Formula One when the driver is driving a Ferrari because of the Italian connection.

Sad to see Jan Ullrich have a stack earlier this evening on the tour de france highlights. I was thinking, very few people can relate to smashing up a racing car (or perhaps a few more – smashing up their own car at speed) but nearly everyone can relate to coming a cropper on a pushbike.

Jon Harsem
url: http://www.core.org.au
date: 2003-07-27-18-37
I am from the relaive region were the Tour De France should make me wanna watch it but somehow it doesn’t appeal to me. I dunno why .. it’s curious in fact. You’re probably right about stacking it on the bike… except of course there aren’t usually 20 people running over your you afterwards ..

yak sox
url: www.spouting.net
date: 2003-07-27-19-07
True. I haven’t had a bingle at 60km/h either, which isn’t rare for them.
Those pile ups looked nasty. Motor-bikes move a lot faster, but they have leather too..

LEGISLATOR – L1

Alright. I was going to do a bit of schtick titled ‘Night of the Living Hussein Boys’ but eating dinner always diminishes mania. I still think it’s worth saying that it’s really disappointing how much of the media and so called leaders are saying, ‘golly it’s a damn good thing those two are dead’, and how few people are saying, ‘it’s a shame that killing them was the best solution we could come up with’. Regardless of how much bad stuff they did at the end of the day they were still people.
Gee, it’s been a while since I got political.
When The Man whispered in california’s ear, “Just remember, it’s all just a circus sideshow y’know” regarding parliamentary politics — california took it literally and decided that Schwarzenegger was the perfect ring-leader since John Wayne was no longer available.
I’m waiting for the movie where he is angered by the (by then) federal democrat (D) congress, shows up glazed muscles and a touch of blood. “OVER-REGULATE THIS, ASSHOLES!” pow-pow-pow-pow-peeeoWW!

These shoes got me wondering why the idea of making shoes with springs attached to the bottom hasn’t progessed at all. Of course there’d only be certain situations where they’d be useful but they’d get you there in half the time with half the effort.

blogathon

Is on – here. It snuck up on me. I was intending to participate with the theme of :“Get more Buddhist Monks Surfing” because the one in geelong does and I thoroughly endorse it. But anyway, maybe I’ll just click around and poke fun at the participants like I did last year.

dreadnought

Had the first lecture of developmental psychology aka kiddie-psych. It’s gonna be the holiday I hoped for compared to the other two brain-mashers. In fact it includes lectures on fondue cookery, making wall hangings out of tiny plastic beads and proper grooming – I get to wear a blouse, skirt and bobby-socks on that day. ooo-la-la.
The library at uni went sik on O’Reilly books. They must’ve had 40 newies there — PHP cookbook, Python cookbook, java and XSLT, maintaining mailing lists and even a Linux book. All of it was web app. related and all but one really small reference book for windows was open source in subject matter. Not that I really have any time to look at or borrow any. Ah well.

I’m a bit disturbed by how different this page appears in internet explorer compared to everything else. May have to backstep to the carbon-vanilla layout that it came with. Go Jan Ullrich in the tour de france, go. I’m sure lance armstrong is a nice person but he’s had his turn and wherever possible I’ll always barrack for a non-yankee over a yankee. I can relate to Ullrich disappearing into the wilderness for a couple of years too. Actually, lance armstrong can speak french. And so can that big-footed australian swimmer guy – thorpe. It seems everyone can but me — gotta do something about that.

I bought a pair of shoes from the op shop. They were two dollars each. At first I thought the were corrective in nature, but it’s just that they had really thick soles and I’m not used to that. Thick soles make for a pretty sweet ride — it’s like suspension. It’s strange how foot-memory is so short. They can put on a pair of shoes that immediately feel shocken but after a day or two they get used to it and forget that they ever had anything better.

Comments:
name: Jay

url: mowabi
date: 2003-07-25-00-42
Hey Devlopmental Psych!? I did that.. no doubt you will look at the likes of Piaget and Skinner.. and the nature vs nuture thing.

yak sox
date: 2003-07-25-00-55
Yes indeed – there was a little of it last year and both of them came up, as did Noam ‘Chompers’ chomsky.
Long time no see, Jay! :^)
I was almost going to email you to see how you were going. Mowabi-land has been very quiet.

Jay
url: www.mowabi.com
date: 2003-07-25-01-50
Yeah Noam is an interesting one.. among other things (quite controversial things), doesn’t he have some ideas about language development?

As for the quietness, I have been moving house… an activity which I detest! It’s been keeping me busy

yak sox
date: 2003-07-25-06-21
yep, linguistics was his thing before politics.

Ben
email:
url: please don’t eat me!
date: 2003-07-25-06-58
Kiddie Pysch. Hehe, that sounds cute. Do you get to sit in a circle and eat your glue?
I thought so.

yak sox
date: 2003-07-25-07-05
Hehe. nah but it’s okay to go have a nap in the corner if it all gets to be too much, which it undoubtedly will.
Nice to see you back in the land of the virtually-living too, Ben. :^)