Sunny Breaks

Via CORE – the National Toilet Map. What a brilliant idea, what a wise and shrewd use of gumment money (honest! I’m not being sarcastic). In fact it was just the other week when i was walking down the main drag of 1968-72 aka Colac and wishing to myself that I was some kind of super-hero who had x-ray vision for toilets. I’d scan each side of the street and toilet bowls would gleam through walls here and there at the backend of buildings.
Doing tests of Nucleus and just automatic writing stuff without thinking the other day and writ, “expo 2000
A class excursion on a bus — a big red bus along a highwigh in the overcast bright grey mutant day hot and humid just trying to fill in time – a big buzzy fly banging on the window — and I go to touch it with my finger fully expecting not to becuase that the way the ayre – hard to tuoch. But I do and instantly regret it.
Getting sunburnt but not being able to see the sun. Always needing to take a slash but there never being a toilet anywhere. The twenty first century, man nature technology — and never a toilet when you want one.”

Maybe the Federal Bureau of Toilet, the National Closet of Water could give me a job. I could travel the country with a PDA in one hand and a GSM compass in the other (and maybe one of those microphones that you wear on your head so I could talk to central command).
{Y.S. takes slow, quiet steps backward, devices held in hands outstretched in front of him. CUT TO shot of Central Command computer monitor displaying dark blue grid with small white mass pulsing brightly, apparently moving toward the centre of the grid.}
CC guy: Oh my god, it’s coming up right behind him!

{From CC end over intercom Y.S. says:} It’s alright. It’s alright, I found it…. {slightly more distant sounding} Ahhh… {sound of tinkling} …

And so on and so forth.

….Maybe it was the extry spicey nachos in combination with the 30degree celsius evening but I dozed off and had this intensely humourous nightmare. There was all these kids – one after another – and they were singing and jumping around, dressed outlandishly — and I tell ya, I couldn’t understand a word of it. But there was this vein of clever knife-sharp satire running down through it, because these pint-sized performers parodying the whole adult manufactured, pre-processed, hyped-up, dumbed-down, shink-wrapped Music Industry.
There was a surface meaning of ‘Oh isn’t it cute they’re dressed up just like grown-ups and doing all the moves’, but it’s like it was these kids who were having the last laugh and the joke was on us.
what have we become?
The name of this disturbing little dream was Junior Eurovison.

comments:
Jon
the spork
date: 2003-11-30-15-38
Brilliant stuff Mr Sox .. as always. Though in my scene I would have included Sigourney Weaver and some comment “3m…2m …what the ? oh my god it’s above us”.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-12-02-09-08
ah thankyee sir. I see the toilet people tracked the core link back.

Undoubtedly this has been mentioned on all those big websites like that i don’t bother looking at, because it’s pretty impressive, if not a bit of an image overload. Click on either the high or low archive. Once I get into a long page like that I have to look at all of it. Interesting to see the evolution of Box and Naked Mining Guy — backwards.

I heard an ad on the radio yesterday morning announcing Aphex Twin doing a gig at the Prince of Wales on the 27th of Jan. I’m gonna have to go. I got to. I got to. The last time he was here was for one of the earthcore weekends up at Mt. Disappointment. I was there but I was too wasted to get out of the tent to see him perform. Don’t know how much tickets are — find out Monday.

You know those big silver buttons you press at pedestrian crossings to get a green person? I foounnd oout that the harder you hit them, the faster they change.

Via da kekmeister is this thing that shows you what your site looks like from a Safari browser. It’s only the very top of the index page but it’s news to me — I didn’t realise the main column here was rendering in serif. There has been trubbles between Pivot and Safari but i heard that cleared itself up when the 1.0 Safari came out.

Over the months of using this tool I’ve frequented the support forums fairly frequently. There was this one avatar that someone was using:<%image(20040113-thumbman.jpg|80|80|boo!)%>
And when i saw it I thought to myself Good Grief, that man looks like a thumb! Wait a minute, I think it is a thumb with a face cut n’ pasted on.
But I couldn’t be certain and I promised myself not to make some offhand remark either in the forums or on this weblog – the kind of remark that I may regret.

But curiosity et away at me and the other day when the avatar appeared to be missing i seized my opportunity and asked what had happened to that ‘really cool’ avatar. It was a relief to find out that it isn’t a photo of the actual person from the support forum, and the explanation is got something to do with channel 4 in the UK. See here. I couldn’t click on anything there to find out any more, the whole experience had a rather swishifying effect on my brain.

I’m working on a new site design – theoretically it could be used for any weblog system, but in fact I’m building it on Nucleus. If I do change over from pivot to nucleus then I think I also change over – from “I just want the best functioning set up”, to “I’m completely neurotic about this”. Just like Linux distributions.
But Pivot only has one person developing it, so you can’t blame ‘em if they want to take a break for a couple of months. I’d love to learn PHP and help, and for the last 18 months of more, at the end of each semester I borrow books on PHP, but end up returning them with less read each time. I didn’t make it to the end of the intro chapter. Next July I’ll grab the latest and not even manage to get through the back-cover blurb before pushing it away.

Muffler Man of North Geelong:
<%image(20040113-mman.jpg|220|354|muffler man)%>

I’ve finally found some spare brainpower to do a little reading – and of crime fiction which has been on the to-do list for a while. Found a collection of short stories called Hardboiled at the library. It was compiled in australia by stuart coupe and julie ogden — I seem to remember that guy’s name from a radio show that used to be on RRR ages ago — ‘Pulp’. The byline on the book is, “tough, explicit and uncompromising fiction”.
In a sense I was pleasantly surprised that there was few in any of those kinds of ‘whodunnit’ stories that are really complicated and expect you to be able to figure it out. It’s too easy for me to miss something then the whole thing becomes incomprehensible.

All the authors selected are american. It’s a good way to get the beginning of a handle on the genre — it’s like a gruesome gory sampler. The authors that stood out were Lawrence Block who I’d vaguely heard of before. (I grabbed another short novel of his, After the first murder a day later and demolished that quickly – kind of like an aeroplane novel I s’pose. His style is what I imagine most people would think of when crime fiction, and the phrase ‘hard boiled’ are mentioned — the post-WW2 hard-drinking detective, etc.

The other short story from Hardboiled I like was ‘Night they missed the horror show’, by Joe R. Lansdale. It was really funny as well as grisly. Marvellous combination. That website’s worth checking – it looks more than static and more than a ‘here’s my newest book, buy it’ type deals. There’s a short story there, by bizarre hands which is worth your 15 minutes.

__________
I’m a little disappointed that when I do a google image search for mouse in wheel none of the first 100 results are a picture of a mouse running in a wheel. It’s all computer mice — I know they kind of look like mice, but couldn’t they have called it a sodkehdsls?

I installed this a bit over a week ago and backed up everything then switched over from Slack. Mandrake’s been going very nicely. A while back I was put off by reading a review that said it wasn’t much different to 9.1. That’s probably true, but there’s very few gliches in it. Maybe all the distroes could try this, just holding back for a bit and fixing all the probs before introducing a whole bunch of feature that inevitably bring new bugs.

All the things that I wanted to try to get working – like camera connectivity and streaming of quicktime .MOVs when they show up — have worked – hooray. Although, I now realise that watching streamy things will always be an excercise of patience while still on dial-up.
For some reason i always have hassles setting up Apache in ‘drake. Probably because I over-complicate things from the start and mess with permissions.
It took a lot of fiddling but finally got it running, and MySql too – double-hooray.
The only minus is the boot-up takes a bit longer, which has always been the case when compared to Slack. But that’s nothing really.

comments:
jon
the spork
date: 2003-11-25-13-30
I haven’t even looked at linux for a while. Been quite happy with this ‘ere OSX thing =). Redhad is making some sort of changes atm so I’ll pobably be busy nxt year switching some stuff across.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-11-25-17-07
I imagine I’d be satisfied with OSX too. :^)

- that’s the best google search I’ve had in months. Sometimes things can drag along and people will continually tap in for the one or two seedy things I’ve mentioned or words taken out of context and I get so sick of seeing these same things being searched for that I can feel like darkening the whole thing to google’s eye.
But then something with that little bit of wonderousness comes up and I’m reminded that the humans never really stopped being surprising after all. Ah.

Honourable mention goes to the space mice skit.

Spent the weekend down at The Ranch. It was nice. Watched a DVD for the first time in ever last night. Brother got the whole kit n’ kaboodle — the little speakers, the big speaker, the VDV player, the vdvs. 5.1 speakers made sense with computers because the 5.1 speaker soundcard came first.
When I looked at all these little speakers popping up in the junkmail catalogues as part of the home ennertainment set up for “cashed up couch potatoes” I instantly had visions of how they’d look in 5 or 10 years, quaint and ridiculous — all you little speakers. The way people refer to 8-track now.

Watched The Two Towers again – a timely refresher in prep. for the return of the king. Each year that gets by makes it even longer since I read the books and it’s getting harder to remember it all. Granted the definition of vdv was fine, but it was in the 16×9 format which didn’t agree too well with the average sized telly.
And then there were alll the extras. Y’know it’s all these extras that are sending the demographers around the twist and the TV advertising biz into a minor tail-spin. All because people like my little brother are watching vdvs instead of regullar telly and missing all those commercials.

I’ve only ever heard people praising the extras — however I think much fun can be made of them. There was the short film made by whoever the guy is that is Sam — and boy it sure make Perter Jackson look like a good director because that guy who plays Sam sure as hell can’t write or direct.

There’s something rather macabre about hedges trimmed into animal shapes, but it’s got nothing to do with johnny scissorhands.
<%image(20040113-ohdeer.jpeg|146|100|woof! woof!)%>

Of course i refer to channel 10 Melbourne’s roving weatherman extraodinaire. I couldn’t care less for the rest of the news hour, but i always switch the telly on at 5 to 6 to find out what the future holds. The weather segment is the only part that ever talks about the domestic scene, and does it in an upbeat way.

Mike goes out and does ‘on the spot’ style weather reports form all over the joint. At first it was just when there was some event or something happening, like a special exhibit at scienceworks. (In fact, these days he’s out at scienceworks so much that they gave him his own office.) But lately it’s been any excuse to be somewhere — anywhere; the other week Mike was on the ‘Time Wounds All Heels’ hill in Northcote near where i used to live. Not that there was anything special happening there, he was just there. I’ve thought of writing him an invite to do a gig from the backyard here, why not ay?

When he says Geelong, he says Geeeeelong, and when he says Malacoota he says Maaaaalacoota — and I think this is great. I like it when in the current temperatures bit Geelong is slightly warmer than Frankston, because frankston sucks and we kick their arses. My only minor quibble with mr.Larkan is that when he is actually in the studio, he stands right in front of the numbers for the forcast for the week ahead and generally I only get to see them for half a second, which at that stage of the day isn’t long enough for them to soak into my usually frazzled out brain.

I got a sense of Mike’s talent for the O.B. (outside broadcast) a while back when he was on hols and the stand in person did the gig from a pub in Williamstown. It was a disaster, all I could hear was a mumbly background din of patrons talking. I don’t know how Mike would’ve overcome this, but believe me, he would’ve found a way.
But last night the inevitable irony took place, and heavy rain leaked into the OB truck, and mike wasn’t able to transmit from wherever he was.

Courtesy of The Unkie George Show, here’s a brief interview with Mike. Maybe I need to get more oxygen, or that it’s in transcript format, but it reads pretty abstract.

Two beverages i picked up at Not Quite Right:
<%image(20040113-whey.jpg|134|288|whey)%>
At first I thought maybe they got this idea from some distant land; maybe somewhere else thinks putting whey and citrus juice together is a fine idea. The kind of taste that at very first impression is gross, but becomes oddly compelling. Why did this end up at NQR? I’ll get to that later. On the box it says whey is a wonder product. What the hell is whey anyway? I don’t know, but while it lasts I’ve got my daily reccomended intake of it licked. Just got to work on the curds.
<%image(20040113-chug.jpg|141|281|chug a lug!)%>
This was really yum – I kept sipping and sipping until it was all gone in one go. It tops farmer’s union iced coffee easy, and that’s saying something. It also contains whey.
On it, it says, “Drink Chugalug straight from the pack, or by the glass”. That’s a funny expression isn’t it, ‘by the glass’. It’s like, ‘I’m sitting here, by the glass, drinking something’. Maybe it should be, “…straight from the pack, or in the glass”, but then that sounds like it’s a giant glass and your climbing into the glass.

Both of these are made by the folks on King Island. They have a website, but there’s nothing there.
So my guess is the whole project suffered from drastically bad financial management — that’s why I found this stuff at NQR. And now they’ve go a crapload of whey sitting around down there that they don’t know what to do with. Or maybe the purple monkey had something to do with it, shifty lookin’ little bugger.

<%image(20040113-healthful.jpg|222|277|The Man lays it down in the kitchen)%>
Last week I had a whole pineapple in my hand and was struck by how much it reminded me of a head with a wacky upstanding hairstyle.

The drawback of living in a region where the temperature varies significantly is that when it snaps into warm/warm, lots of people are still walking around with the anglo-saxon rod stuck up their arses. How was i supposed to know the library was one of them “no shirt, no shoes, no borrowing” joints?

I got 80% for cultural studies. I’d like to take a moment to personally thank Madonna for being post-modern. Or not, depending on your opinion. Ta.

KUI have a mini look at an exhibition what’s on in London currently of some Russian political art here. The titles are almost as good as those of the maoist stuff that came later.

comments:
Christop
url: stuff wars

Rude, up-themselves, library people.

“Hey Dexter, come and take a look at this. What do you make of it?”, Cornray was sitting at Scorpio’s 1991 Nashuatec mainframe, an absolute beast of a machine. “The Spouting website is getting some weird pattern of pings”, he continued.
“Since when has Scorpio detective agency been affiliated with Spouting? That completely contradicts that thing from the other week.” Poindexter was at the verge of the ‘getting-too-excited-about-continuity’ up-ramp—again.
“Never mind the inconsistencies for now. Look at these sites, www.saulem.com www.wr18.com www.jennifersblog.com www.kwlablog.com.”
“Look pretty normal from a cursory glance right?”
“Yeah. Pretty lame though”, said Dexter, calming down.
“Look closer.” Conray pushed back a touch on his roller-chair.
“Well, to start with very few weblogs in English link to european language sites. Look at this .de, .nl, dk, de, at. Where’s .at?” Dexter took the mouse and clicked. “That’s a fake comments link!”
“Yes. And the entries are just grabbed from news site feeds.”
“Ah. Is it prawn?”
“Yep. Check the mark-up. There’s a transparent gif at the bottom of all of them.”
“But they have individual domain names – that’d cost heaps. And what do they expect to gain from setting up transient fake links to genuine weblogs? Surely that wouldn’t be a very effective way of gaining page rank.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised, Dex. The amount of people who take a quick look at one of these sites linking to them and then linking back without thinking, even if it’s just in an entry and not a link-list.
As for the addresses, you remember the original wave of cyber-squatting pyramid schemes?”
Poindexter whistled. “So they’re finally paying off—”
“Well I wouldn’t go so far as to say that but they’re being used now at least—”
“Subverting the internet for the purposes of prawn gets me so angry!” Dexter’s fists balled up and his eyes clenched shut in rage behind their oober-thick glasses. His voice jumped several octaves making it obvious that he was, in fact, a hamster. “And especially not the weblogs… don’t mess with the weblogs!”
<%image(20040113-bucharest.jpg|224|330|the bucharest boys)%>
“All these pings are originating from the same server.”
“Where?”
“Bucharest”, said Cornray, holding up two economy class aeroplane tickets.
“Let’s go.”
{fade up pacey movement music-track}

The Bank – A delightful little flick depicting rural Australia’s dizzy affection for the corporate banking sector.

Ghost Dog – directed by Jim Jarmusch. Bits of samurai literature spilced with footage of an african-american man walking around shooting people. A must for any pigeon lover!

Fight Club – Thinly disguised promotional piece for Ikea furniture. My rating: Yawnsville!

comments:
Jon
the spork
date: 2003-11-18-23-41
I kinda liked fight club – agree on the well placed ikea advertisement though =). Never watched Ghost Dog or the bank.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-11-19-09-23
Ah, it’s all a bit toungue in cheek. For me Fight Club suffered a little bit from everyone telling me it was so fantastic.

I finally got a bike lock and my brother let me have his mountain bike. Compared to the AOGG kruiser it\‘s like driving an AT-AT – in that it\‘s a long way to the ground and I feel like I could ride over the whole town and crush the little buildings under my wheels.

The Speedway scene came to Geelong for the weekend but it was pretty boring. Even more boring was these that just parked there doing nothing, except this one. The Volkswagon Karmen Ghia remains one of my all-time fav. cars. Gorgeous shape.

<%image(20040113-ghia.JPG|300|152|beep! beep!)%>

It was for sale and they were asking 30 thou.

I went for a long ride right around the bay and saw this sign at St. Helens pier.

<%image(20040113-farkthat.JPG|120|202|boat farking)%>

I was hoping I could make this a little edutainment session and tell you what fark meant but it\‘s not in the dictionary and google only mentions that website.

I saw some excellent bumper stickers on the back of a little hatchback yesterday. They took up quite a bit of the rear window – the owner must be very enthusiastic about stickers. “caution: indicator broken, watch for finger”, I forget the second one, and my personal favourite, “BITE ME!” — just like mash of mashin’ on the motorway.

I’m listening to a double CD set of Disco – Nothin’ but Disco Oh! what a night. Right up the trashy end of disco – the stuff that spawned ‘Disco Sucks’ bumper stickers. You know that Hot Chocolate song, You Sexy Thing — I always thought the line in that was, “I believe in milko, where ya from?…”etc. And I knew that milko didn’t sound sound right but nothing obvious fitted. It was only a couple of months ago when a tv ad. used it – covered it and slowed it down enough for me to hear the word ‘miracles’ in there.

<%image(20040113-cementgnome.jpg|168|150|gnosis?)%>
There’s this church over the other side of town and I think they dispatched with the crucifix and stuck a cement garden gnome in its place. It’s kind of hard to tell from the ground, especially since it’s not painted — a red hoody hat would make a world of difference. I think he’s holding a cement boquet of flowers.

Yes, I watched the movie Donnie Darko last night. The surreal bits were uh impressive, and Frank the freaky rabbit – genius. It doesn’t take much of a time paradox story to get me going huh? – this included. I always have to sit around for a while afterwards trying to iron out the chronology. But I don’t mind it all when there’s bits that elude me as to how they fit in. Like with Frank, and how on that last night that Donnie was alive a minor character whose name was also frank, wearing a bunny suit for Halloween showed up — I didn’t get that.

I just caught a little bit of catalyst and there was this story design by fungus (a little bit down) – where a guy got some beer yeast or something on his CD then played it a week later and the yeast bacteria had added to the music (which was readable by the player) — it did its own remix! They tried with other things — CDROMs with pictures on and movies — and they same thing happened. It basically had the effect or ranadomly throwing stuff together. … Random, or is it?
It reminded me a bit of a Star Trek; “Bugger this, I wanna listen to my Hot Chocolate album. I’m cleaning the disk.”
“But no! What about the prime directive?! They’re intelligent, I just need to prove it.”

<%image(20040113-alsispeed.jpg|290|217|warp 9.5 mr.sulu)%>
An Aldi supermarket opened in belmont (aka smelmont) a few weeks ago. At that time I went and had a look and as with most new things, i found it disturbing and confusing. Most did I think – people would frown and tilt their head a little at one display then move on to the next and do the same again. It was like a museum, except with way more visitors than any dumb old museum would get.
All the products were the same, but the packaging was strange and instead of tiny teddys they had der Winzige Bären.
I went there again today and it was okay. I can’t really tell if it’s any cheaper – how the hell am I supposed to remember prices for all those things. The pizza bases deal seemed reasonable, besides I had to buy something. They have technology in there – that’s kind of confusing. CD rewriters and that kind of thing.
And the cashiers/checkout chicks get to sit down – wow – how’s that for strange? They get comfy seats. And if you want a plastic bag you have to ask for it – and I think it costs extra — which I think absolutely Rocks.

It’s funny — ages ago I mentioned that French film Tout va bien – and eventually got to watch it. It was really good. The end scene was in a supermarket in 1972 – along the checkouts – this one 2-3 minute pan back and across dozens of checkouts — French checkout chicks get to sit down too.

comments:
Myrr
myrr purrs
date: 2003-11-14-00-29
When I was living in Germany I always shopped Aldi … they were cheap! Every supermarkt in Germany you have to ask for a plastic bag, and everywhere the checkout chicks get to sit down. I was very impressed

name: Christop
stuff wars
date: 2003-11-14-11-02
Apparently they are going to be opening two of them here in Ballarat, and all the other supermarkets are worried.
Thats great about the bag option. Usually when I go to the supermarket it’s just for something I’m going to use straight away, and I’ve normally got my own bag anyway.

name: yak sox
email:
url:
ip: 203.58.6.10
date: 2003-11-14-18-42
It’s the way to go – having to ask for a bag rather than it being assumed that you want one. I’m always having to say “don’t worry about a bag” and they get huffy about it like I’m telling them how to do their job.

Interesting that Aldi’s going regional — I’m pretty sure there isn’t any in Melbourne at this stage.

name: Myrr
url: myrr purrs
date: 2003-11-14-19-44
Actually there’s a couple in Melbourne – the one I go to is in Heidelberg, I wondered if they picked the suburb because it sounded familiar G

name: Jon
the spork
date: 2003-11-15-08-58
Come to think of it – even though I lived in germany for some years I don’t think I shopped in one – aaactually I did .. We bough 42 packets of gummi baers! (Gummibaerchen) ..those things rock.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-11-15-13-12
Hehe – 42 packets. Bulk fun!

name: Christop
url: stuff wars
date: 2003-11-16-15-58
There’s also one in Ferntree Gully (I know that ‘cause it’s near my parents’) and one in Deer Park, which we went past yesterday on the way back from Box Hill.

• Summer job idea no.2: I found a ‘personal consultancy firm’ called, Hey, You Know What You Should Do.

Over-opinionated people who constantly make a point of sticking their nose into other people’s business are everywhere, what I’ll do is pick out a couple who actually know what they’re talking about and they can do the work. My job title will be “bidnessman”. (Speaking of which, I added it to the urban dictionary.)
It’ll be aimed at people with a lot of money but little spirit, and it’ll work on the principle of, “Gee, I’m paying a lot of money for this so it must work”.

Y’know I haven’t seen either of the second two Matrix movies, and probably won’t until they make it into the 5 weekly vids for 5 bucks deal category. It doesn’t matter really anyway because there’s enough people out there whinging on about them that I know everything that happens anyway. I’m getting editorial here:
Settle Down People, what were you expecting ???? – The answers to Life The Universe And Everything aren’t going to be handed to you in a fucking multiplex cinema, and certainly not from a movie written by a couple of CGI Nerds. fuck.

Spouting’s Psycho of the Week award goes to this fella. Nice knives.

I can relate to this: “Come to think of it, why do I sometimes write about what I ate for dinner?” Widmar asked.

comments:
tony
url: the horse’s mouth
date: 2003-11-12-21-47
I also wait for new release movies to be in the 5 for $5 weekly range on video. God, it only takes 9-14 months now that the attention span of the average videowatcher matches the mating period of a fruit fly!

name: yak sox
date: 2003-11-12-21-51
For sure, and once you get into that 14 month delay it works fine! I rented Donnie Darko this week. :^)

name: Jon
the spork
date: 2003-11-13-08-06
DD. good movie that. And yeah..er…nice knives.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-11-13-14-22
I just watched it last night – yes indeed! – the knives — only in Nevada.

Lots of stuff happening on the distros front, what with Novell buying SuSE and this n’ that. My first thought was that it doesn’t sit well with my conspiracy theory that SuSE was the EU’s distribution. But it was a good move for Novell and my bet is that they give RedHat a whipping.
I know it could be argued that Sun has some decent proprietary software – with SunOne and whatever, but this purchase is the move they should’ve made ages ago – instead of piss-farting around with just the Ximian desktop.

It appears that there’s not so much reason to get snarky at RedHat as I thought – there’s a little backdoor so the average user can still use it via Fedora which is like a solid but ‘in testing’ version of RH.

And Debian has constructed an installer, which does hardware detection etc. which is a great idea. I’ll have to give that a go.
___________
Quote from Futurama, “My old life wasn’t as glamourous as my web page made it look”.