Sunny Breaks

What have I been doing this weekend? Studying for a Research Methods mini-exam … battling Tukey and his totally honest mate significant difference F-test?
Well, kinda. But also slapped together a new site design and switched to a full fresh copy of Pivot and changed where it resides. Lately I hadn’t relished the thought of major messing with CSS, but actually it wasn’t too much of a hassle. But then (as is becoming the unhealthy norm.) I haven’t had a look at it on Internet Explorer, or mac.

I haven’t puked in 6 years, but a couple of things that’ve popped up recently are giving the boat a shake:
1) Movies with Freddie Prinze Jr. in.
2) This picture. Ay carumba! Imagine using that for your website’s wall paper.

comments:
Quanta
url: please don’t eat me!
date: 2003-08-31-19-57
Oh wow, it’s so bright.

I like it though, the pictures at the top really cinch the deal.

Nice to see you didn’t let those web designers and their so called conventions of good taste guide you!

;)

yak sox
date: 2003-08-31-20-10
Hehe, thanks I think. ;)
But you’re right though – ‘organic’ I call it – ie. thinking up the colours myself,a dn not worrying too much about symmetry or “style”.

A while back i said I wanted to have a go of LiveJournal to see what it’s like. I did, but not much. So this isn’t very comprehensive: I did it here.

The interface that i type into, called Drivel, is pretty simple. Compared to things like Pivot here and MT – it feels like it’d be a lot less self-conscious way to go about recording thought into an online depository. One could use the drivel everyday and not ever actually look at their site. Of course that could be done with other mechanisms too, but it seems much more of an obvious possibility with LJ.
I can take or leave the little ‘iMood’ things, but I do like the ‘what song i am listening to right now’ bit. Because the Linux version of Drivel is Gnome-grouped, it picked up what XMMS (X MultiMedia System) was playing no probs.
It’d be neat if that could be added to Pivot.

I did have a look at how to go about modifying the look of the page, but I kept getting error pages when attempting to load that page, which isn’t very good.

Song I’m listening to right now: The Breeders – Iris [live]

A couple of tribesmen from my old northcote tribal days came to visit today. It was good. I was kind of thinking I’d have little in common with them now, but not so. Went trawling some of the 2nd hand bookshops geelong has to offer. There’s one that I just wouldn’t normally go into (nad hadn’t in ages) because it’s almost impossible to come out not holding a book. Uni has taken much of the joy out of reading. I don’t think I’ve read anything longer than a medium sized magazine article in one go, off my own bat, since January. But maybe I’m not trying hard enough. But then, I do a lot of reading online – that I don’t give myself credit for. Whatever.
I bought a collection of 3 Woody Allen books rolled into one, one of which I’ve read – Without feathers – which was a lotta fun eg. “Should I marry W.? Not if she won’t tell me the other letters in her name. And what about her career? How can I ask a woman of her beauty to give up the Roller Derby? Decisions…”.

- Say what you want about them Nigerian scamsters, but when they start a letter, “I crave your indulgence…”, at least you know they’re trying to keep their material fresh.

- The best explanation I can come up with as to why they call that bar on men’s bikes the ‘sissy bar’ is that it can turn a man into sissy if he has an accident on it badly enough. And this isn’t a very good explanation. It took significant time pondering why a men’s bike would have it and not women’s when, on a relative scale, such a thing would sure be more injurious to a man. Then I rememberd the whloe clothing thing.
But surely metalurgy has come far enough that NO bike need a bar there anymore. I ride the so called ‘woman’s bike’ and am damn proud of it. Damn. Plus the seat is way more comfy.

- The best way I can describe the living situation I’m at here is with a ‘Magnum P.I.’ analogy. TiJ owns the property and lives in the main house — she is like Higgins. I live in a smaller dwelling on the property and rent it off Higgins. I am Magnum, except that instead of it being a guesthouse, it’s a bungalow, and instead of driving a Ferrari GTO I ride a pushbike and have no moustache:
<%image(20040110-KRUZOR!.jpg|300|225|henry the pony the bike)%>

TiJ has RSI and so has a cleaner clean her joint. In the 9 months I’ve been living back here, she’s gone through at least 6 cleaners. I can’t explain it because it’s not like she’s a dragon… it’s more like her house is a Bermuda Triangle, except for cleaners. I always end up meeting them briefly. Sometimes TiJ introduces me to them so they don’t freak out when they see someone walking around the backyard (i.e. me).

I always say hello and how’ d’ do, and yesterday I met the newest, and for the first time, when i looked at them I thought, there’s not much point being nice because you won’t be around long. Not because you seem like a particularly hopeless cleaner, but because the odds are stacking up against you, bigtime.
Probably like meeting people in war.

-They must have pirates working at channel 7 because they’re doing a great job at hiding and burying the good stuff. King of the Hill: 11:30pm one night, same for Futurama on the next — with The Lone Gunmen after that at midnight. Lone Gunmen’s okay I suppose… at least it has a freaking plot.

- Who I want to be this week: Leaping Larry L — He gets to write a collumn for the Age once a week making fun of commercials. I do that anyway. I didn’t, but I was going to mention those Brand Power commercials here, before he wrote about them. except I was just going to say that I want Brand Power Woman’s job. Walking around the supermarket, picking up stuff and talking about it — I can do that.

comments:
Quanta
url: please don’t eat me!
date: 2003-08-28-17-49
Notice that the brand power women doesn’t walk, she glides. I suspect she is on a skateboard.

Jon
url: the spork
date: 2003-08-28-21-41
“Say what you want about them Nigerian scamsters, but when they start a letter, ”I crave your indulgence…“, at least you know they’re trying to keep their material fresh.”

That line so cracked me up =)

A heads up, thumbs up and what’s up? and then eventually a peace out to the Mary Kostakidis fan site that links back to here.

Continuing the music from the invisible – The Go! Team – Ladyflash, at short fuse. I’m diggin’ that Archie Bell n’ the Drells sample.

Bob has stuck up a couple of Morcheeba acoustic+live tracks here. I’ve never really listened to morcheeba, but that song ‘the sea’ is very recognisable. Recorded somewhere in western europe and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s difficult to get here.

Meanwhile, I’ve Gone to Find Myself. If I Get Back Before I’ve Found Me, Please Keep Me Here.

This is in part a test if the backpack trings feature of Pivot. But I also have to say about a little of this post of jon’s at the Spork — the movie The Italian Job – I haven’t seen it, and wondered about how much to it there could be if they use footage from the same car chase scene twice in the one 15-20 second tv commercial. :)

I haven’t bothered to look it up, but this must be another remake a la Ocean’s Eleven. I remember at some point in kidhood seeing this Brit movie about a bank job or heist or something, and the criminals/heroes getting away in a trio of mini minors, red white, blue. A big chase scene – through giant stormwater tunnels, just like the ad. for this current movie.

The thing about that bit of old footage is that it’s the only example of ‘sampling’ in tv/film I’ve seen. That whole car chase was reused in an episode of McGuyver. I’m sure the ideas and technical set ups for action scenes are borrowed all the time but this was completely lifted.

comments:
Jon
email:
url: the spork
date: 2003-08-27-23-16
Didn’t seem to backtrack but oh well =). The italian job feels like it could be a remake of Oceans Eleven – only that the inherent Calm/Coolness of George Clooney isn’t there. It says at imdb that Ed norton did this movie “under duress” .. it sure looks like that.

yak sox
date: 2003-08-28-00-01
Yeh – I meant Ocean’s eleven was a remake of a 60s movie, same as this probably was.
I’d heard it said that Ed Norton was one of the few lucky actors have not been in a dud movie to date — but maybe this was his first.

Will have to notify the coders of the t/b glitch.

Recently seen number plates and one-word opinions on them:

URMYHO … classy

TAXDOJ …forthright.

Had a nice weekend- little contact with computers. I could get huffy and prideful about how being a Linux user exempts from all this email virus hoo-haar but it makes zip difference if the ISP’s machine is grinding along, which it has been.
Lot of rain which is great, but I was couped/cooped up inside because of it. I seriously think it rains more down there.
The last two times I’ve headed down — hitching — has ended up being with ‘furriners’, as they say, – a polish guy, and then a timorese or indonesian couple. And both times on the eastern approach to Colac they’ve looked to the right, seen the Colac lake and said ‘wow that’s some big damn’. I don’t know if it’s significant but it’s funny. Funny odd, not funny ha-ha.

This sign is a hark-back to the days when the Romans over-ran the Western District. Hey where the hell else did ya think Highway 1 came from?

Speaking of ancient Rome, I think we’re taking this whole bulgy architecture a bit far. I’m talking about that thing they figured out with one of the temples, the optical illusion thing where if they made the columns bulge just a little in the middle, then from a distance they would appear to be perfectly straight.
That’s fine in the case of the first temple it was used on because it’s managed to be distinct enough not to have other buildings spring up around it, thus ensuring that it can actually be seen from a distance.
Such techniques weren’t meant to be used on buildings that are positioned on modern cramped streets — as is the case with the Geelong Hall of Justice (or whatever it’s called …. where the councillors hang out) – it just looks dippy. Maybe they got the bulge proportion wrong – too bulgy.

I even saw it on the front of a house the other week, which is kookoo.

comments:
Quanta
date: 2003-08-25-18-45
There is nothing like going to sleep when its raining. I wish I had one of those little rain noise maker machines. Better then Valium.

yak sox
date: 2003-08-25-22-10
Very true. I wonder why is that.

I had a thought while walking around this funny little backwater called Colac today – ‘they’ should make a digital camera that has all its drivers built into a small portion of its storage capacity. Most of the storage is in the flash cards these days, but I don’t see why there couldn’t be a little of the internal memory housing drivers for the major releases of windows like 98, 2000 whatever. You slot your trusty usb cable into whatever machine you come accross when you’re on the road, the camera swings into action by setting up a way for it to talk to the computer, so that you could d/load the images to the machine which could be then sent to wherever — storage space, emails.

This’d help a lot with windows machine that currently need a cd rom to get the two things co-operating, while OS X and Linux are more conveniant in that they have the drivers built in, OS X moreso because they employ people to write the drivers that hardware companies should but aren’t.

I think that in hell, the devil tortures some of the people by giving them computers with dodgey mice that work some of the time – just enough to not throw them through the window.

I’m down here hangin’ out with my mum for a day or two. My brother’s computer is disgustingly grubby, and I’m getting some kind of karma payback — he’s a closet ciggarette smoker and now that I’m not smoking I can tell that everything reeks… there’s probably a lot of people out there in the past that I put this on too. The bugger’s on gurnsey island and he’s still getting me riled.

Oh boy there’s something getting in the roof again. Sounds bigger than a rat, bigger than a cat. I think it’s a mountain lion.
A hectic kind of day.
A bit here on CORE about how ‘they’ are adding WiFi technology to the australian V8 racing cars. For some reason the whole wireless bit about computers eludes me [hehe – which bit doesn’t?!] — It’s like philosophy. Maybe if I saw it in action.

Anyway – I don’t see the difference between that and the normal way cameras are set up in racing cars now.
I was actually thinking about how with things that are broadcast live, that have no plot (like – all sporting events, and (shudder) big brother) could really throw open the way they broadcast – so the viewer could chose how actively they wanted to view. Example: from as it is now – through to choosing which camera view you wanted to watch. You’d have a smaller auxillary screen with all the camera shots in a grid (like on pay tv, with that ‘what channel do you wanna watch now?’ thing) – press one of them to see it on the bigger screen.

This way, you choose who the “star/hero” is. Watch what’s happening at the head of the field/centre of play … or wherever else.
And even better than that – if the tv channels would throw open the commentary thing so that anybody with a little bit of hardware at home could offer their own commentary to the event, and the viewer could tune into that instead of the tv station schmoes if they wanted. Sure, there’d be a lot of dips out there getting into it, but you don’t have to listen to crappy radio just because it’s on the air.
There could well also be some really intelligent experts out there (you know what sport’s fanatics are like – so much brain used for so little) who aren’t as ego driven as people like ur.. well, like eddy mcguire for one.

Of course the tv stations would never go for it because they’d lose their revenue stream, but there’s probably some happy medium.

comments:

Jon
url: Core
date: 2003-08-22-15-23
You know – wireless is actually quitre nice – because once you have it setup – you can forget about it. Literally no need for cables. Imagine if you like how you’d feel about truely wireless headphones.

yak sox
date: 2003-08-22-21-05
Funny you should mention that — I was looking at a pair of them in a junkmail catalogue yesterday. They’re definitely something that the benefits of wirless become obvious quickly

ipod in my mind.
How very true.

I bought the new b(if)tek album today. I wasn’t really planning to, but it caught me by surprise in the music store, the visiting of which was also unplanned.
It’s called Frequencies Will Move Together – a CD and an extra CD of 12 remixes by other folk, including Architecture in Helsinki, monolake and telemetry orchestra.
Get this – from the sleeve: “This album was partly funded by a grant from the Australia Council to research the effects of low hertz frequencies in music. Frequencies Will Move Together contains deep bass frequencies from a series of our field recordings of both natural and mechanical sources. The field recordings include: cats purring, electricity sub-station, thunder, helicopters, trains and aeroplanes. They have been digitally manipulated, and in some cases, emulated by a collection of analogue synthesisers. We hope these sounds will entrain you.”

comments:

Jon
url: core
date: 2003-08-20-17-26
BT makes some comments about the subsonic sound thingie in a DVD I am watching atm (better living thought electronic circuitry)

yak sox
date: 2003-08-21-19-35
I take it you mean b(if)tek and not British telecom? :^)
Yeah – for musicians, they’re outspoken. I remember them appearing in an The Age magazine article about sampling and its legalities/ramifications too.

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Captain’s log, Stardate: whatever day today is. We have been caught in some mysterious fourteen-hour time lag. Mr.Spock is being his usual stand-offish self and is no help at all. We’ve scheduled a brainstorming session to touch base, incentivise the crew and leverage a holistic actionable gameplan out of them.

And by that, what i mean is that these entries are being dated as if i was in Merryland where the server is instead of here in the future. There is a plugin to adjust this but I can’t get it working yet.

I have been watching a bunch of old star trek videos. It’s interesting how certain aspects reflect norms of the era (late 60s) such as bureaucracy – the characters are continually signing clipboards. They were all sipping coffee out of what looked like stryofoam cups painted blue and then sitting them down on the contol panel/dashboard. If that’s the future then you’d hope they would’ve learnt from our era that coffee and keyboards don’t mix.

Go for it Margaret Pomeranz – all that scene was missing was the cop saying “gissit” and her saying “Nuh, ya not getting it” and holding the DVD outstretched backward behind her. I chose <— that article about it because I like the wacky collage of still-shot from the movie and film censorship man. That’s the kind of thing I’d expect from me, not the SMH.
This might be useful to you if you’ve a habit of bullshitifying your bidness writing. Bullfighter hooks into either your Win2000 or XP copy of MS Word (but nothing else) and does a phrasing check for crap. There’s a 30 day trial version there.
Personally, I’d like to see an app. that turns plain English into jargon like that. It’d be good fun. Apparently the levels of jargonised meaningless could be clearly charted as ‘Five feet high and rising’ when looking at the communications eminating from the (then) soon to be sunk Enron.

I subscribed to RRR this morning. I’d been lapsed the last year or two, for various reasons. The only time I listen regularly is to the Breakfasters, and it’s been that way for since adolecence onward, with the exception of a period a while back when I lived with a 3LO radio-fascista.

I was 15 of 16 when I won De La Soul’s …Is Dead off the Breakfasters, and hiked on up from Irrewarra to Fitzroy to collect it where I met that surly bastard Chris Hatzis, and the much more approachable Tim Thorpe (but hatzis was great — a rock — I was very sad when he split for N.Y.).
A year or so later I won a radio/walkman in a letter write in competition, which is now part of a pile of three busted walkmans i have.

A year or maybe two later I was working in the Melb. CBD and RRR was doing an OB from some arcade on Collins st. I was listening on the then functioning walkman and it was a ‘first person to run in and answer this question’ thing and I won a pair of chunky ladies leopard skin print sunglasses (cool in a Sonic Youth kind of way) of that surly bastard Stephen ‘Ghost’ Walker and then had a chat with the much more approachable Tim Thorpe. I lost the sunglasses to a girl in some nasty little romantic tryst in Sydney.
I’m hoping I can win the 30gig iPod in this year’s radiothon so that I might eventually add it to the collection.

Pivot has bumped on and up with a slightly updated, slightly debuggified version, and now has Moblogging incorporated. Now all I need is a Mo. But seriously, I’m a paitient lad, so how long is gonna be before I start seeing mutations and ugly things growing on the sides of people’s heads??, thus vindicating my non-partaking of the mo. ahh… I couldn’t afford one even if I wanted one … and no one rings me anyway.

Also, after my suggesting it, (he says, raising his eyebrows a few times, triumphantly) a script and entry field was included so that Pivot can ping other people’s trackback addresses … and it can be done without bowing to that artist’s license. We’re calling it ‘backpack tring’. That’s right, ‘we’. I’m part of the team now — I’m gonna proofread the documetation, and maybe write some if i get time — or more accurately — make time.

donna summer on the radio
donna summer on the radio
donna summer on the radio
donna summer on the radio
donna summer on the radio
donnna summer on the radio
donnna summer on the refrigerator

Seriously hepnotic and good. This is what Underworld are doing now, 15-18 years later: reptition of words until they become meaning-free sound shapes.

I’ve been watching some feelgood movies lately. I’m watching one right now. They seem to produce a mild electrical current through the front of my brain. I think the word enervating should be requisitioned for this. It’s a hurts so good kind of thing.

The study guide for my cultural studies subject is full of typos — as if it wasn’t proofread. But I actually think it’s the lecturer’s way of stickin’ it to The Man. I’m calling his bluff and am including the phrases, The Man, The Kids, old-skool and in-your-face in the essay.

comments:
Sam Weller
url: www.rudnick.com
date: 2003-08-23-06-45
Who in the Hell is “The Man”? How very ’70s:)