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Hello LJ my old friend...
Apr. 9th, 2004 05:36 pmWell this has been the longest gap between post since I started keeping this journal. And for good reason. I've been working like a Trojan on my PhD. I really hoped to have it finished by today, but having written some 2,000 words too much on section 3-5 (Data Integration), I now find myself some 2,500 words short from completion.
Two other reasons have come between me and completion on this day. The first is that in a couple of hours I'm meeting up with the erstwhile hackers from alt.2600.au - despite being "good Friday" and all (I never understood what was supposed to be so good about it), they've found a bar, and I intend to be there.
The other reason is to satisfy caseopaya's once a year desire to have red meat - on the day when Christian folk aren't. So to satisfy this desire I've spent the better part of two days creating the hardest meat recipe in the world - the notorious "selle de veau orloff" (instead of veal I've substituted porterhouse steaks on the bone). With close to $100 worth of ingredients, this meat dish is roasted, braised, roasted again, boiled, then roasted. It is accompanied by no less than nine additional recipes, including stock, two sauces, soubise, mushroom puree, salisifs and tartalettes. Apparently it reaches a state of perfection when you cannot tell the difference between the sauce that it covers and the meat underneath it.
Last weekend was caseopaya's birthday, so we took a trip down the Great Ocean Road to Warnambool. This rugged coastline of cliffs and strong winds is the home of over a hundred shipwrecks from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as boats from England sought to cut time (and money) by engaging in the "great circle route", which soon became known as "The Shipwreck Coast". The Warrnabool maritime museum recites the feeling of the times rather well. If you're looking for a place to run aground, then the Shipwreck Coast can give you all the misery you desire". A rather extraordinary place, the museum is a recreation of a nineteenth century coastal port.
Any fortunate moment whilst in town was encountering a touring play by Wesley College of (quelle surprise) John Wesley. David Dunn, the Director of Wesley College student theatre, is deserving of a trial for causing art damage for (believe it or not) making the story of this important social reformer into a musical. Nevertheless, the performance was saved by some excellent customing and a rather charming performance by Ashleigh Franklin who came across as much as a starry-eyed Christian idealist as Wesley himself was.
Social highlight of the week previous was attending birthday celebrations with log_reloaded, which included a visit to the Melbourne Comedy Festival's Stupid, but Lucky by Peter Monaghan, which is full of sensible advice (such as don't hunt wild pigs with a .22, don't take LSD at your last day at work, and don't swim in crocodile infested waters).
Some may remember the frustration I have had in the past with the East Timorese government trying to make them see sense in engaging in a commercial development of the .tp domain - a matter that could bring the world's poorest nation several million dollars income per capita (and with a population of c800,000 that's a big deal). Well because they haven't taken up the idea, it looks like someone else is about to:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-19mar04.htm
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-5176438.html
In other Internet related news, the Australian government does something right: no spam is good spam.
And it doesn't just apply to the Internet. All unsolicited advertising is under the hammer. Numbers up for unwanted spam
You know that Australian politics is in for an interesting time when the leader of the Labor Party supports abolishing ATSIC and the leader of the conservative government doesn't. Meanwhile the ATSIC leader is trying his hardest to keep the organization viable, whilst opinion-makers don't seem to have an answer either.
Best of livejournal reading for the past fortnight comes from greylock who expresses real concern about how fictional stories are destroying factual knowledge. My favourite lines is how "a significant chunk of the British population [is] ... unmoved by academia". I also have doubts about the veracity of the report however. Really, it just isn't possible that even 1% of the population believe that Battlestar Galatica - the defeat of humanity by cyborgs - really existed. I mean, wouldn't you notice?
Rilian has two rippers. Vampire Bats Kill 13 People in Brazil and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger.
On related Vampire tales, the_christian reminds us of how common they really are. Especially in Romania where villagers are upset that police are investigating a vampire slaying.
Every wanted to hit the real wide open road? From the cyberpunk community how about riding a motorcycle through Chernobyl?
Social justice meme. An anti-Judiac website has Googlebombed the word 'Jew' so that if you search with that word in Google and hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" function, you will get their page, which is full of the usual paranoid and racist rubbish. To counteract this, just copy and paste this into your own journal:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew">Jew </a>
Update
Silly things you forget when you've been away from LJ for so long:
- Last fortnight saw another two meetings with AVI. One was another skills assesment one-on-one meeting. Left it confused about whether they want me to go to Viet Nam or to a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The other was a meeting with some 100 people who were considering taking up AVI positions.
- Have been using a Windows 98 box for dial-up networking for several months now. Recently hard-disk errors have arisen, causing a slow swan-song. First the dial-up networking program stopped working, then the mouse, then MS-Access... and so forth. It was quite elegant watching new bad blocks appear on a daily basis from ScanDisk.
Anyway the long and short of it is that all useful data has been transferred by my Linux (Mandrake 9.1) box which is operating happily. More to the point I was pleasantly surprised by how much more useful and - believe it or not - easier to use KPPP is than MS's dial-up-networking. More feathers in the cap for the open source community, I say...
Two other reasons have come between me and completion on this day. The first is that in a couple of hours I'm meeting up with the erstwhile hackers from alt.2600.au - despite being "good Friday" and all (I never understood what was supposed to be so good about it), they've found a bar, and I intend to be there.
The other reason is to satisfy caseopaya's once a year desire to have red meat - on the day when Christian folk aren't. So to satisfy this desire I've spent the better part of two days creating the hardest meat recipe in the world - the notorious "selle de veau orloff" (instead of veal I've substituted porterhouse steaks on the bone). With close to $100 worth of ingredients, this meat dish is roasted, braised, roasted again, boiled, then roasted. It is accompanied by no less than nine additional recipes, including stock, two sauces, soubise, mushroom puree, salisifs and tartalettes. Apparently it reaches a state of perfection when you cannot tell the difference between the sauce that it covers and the meat underneath it.
Last weekend was caseopaya's birthday, so we took a trip down the Great Ocean Road to Warnambool. This rugged coastline of cliffs and strong winds is the home of over a hundred shipwrecks from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as boats from England sought to cut time (and money) by engaging in the "great circle route", which soon became known as "The Shipwreck Coast". The Warrnabool maritime museum recites the feeling of the times rather well. If you're looking for a place to run aground, then the Shipwreck Coast can give you all the misery you desire". A rather extraordinary place, the museum is a recreation of a nineteenth century coastal port.
Any fortunate moment whilst in town was encountering a touring play by Wesley College of (quelle surprise) John Wesley. David Dunn, the Director of Wesley College student theatre, is deserving of a trial for causing art damage for (believe it or not) making the story of this important social reformer into a musical. Nevertheless, the performance was saved by some excellent customing and a rather charming performance by Ashleigh Franklin who came across as much as a starry-eyed Christian idealist as Wesley himself was.
Social highlight of the week previous was attending birthday celebrations with log_reloaded, which included a visit to the Melbourne Comedy Festival's Stupid, but Lucky by Peter Monaghan, which is full of sensible advice (such as don't hunt wild pigs with a .22, don't take LSD at your last day at work, and don't swim in crocodile infested waters).
Some may remember the frustration I have had in the past with the East Timorese government trying to make them see sense in engaging in a commercial development of the .tp domain - a matter that could bring the world's poorest nation several million dollars income per capita (and with a population of c800,000 that's a big deal). Well because they haven't taken up the idea, it looks like someone else is about to:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-19mar04.htm
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-5176438.html
In other Internet related news, the Australian government does something right: no spam is good spam.
And it doesn't just apply to the Internet. All unsolicited advertising is under the hammer. Numbers up for unwanted spam
You know that Australian politics is in for an interesting time when the leader of the Labor Party supports abolishing ATSIC and the leader of the conservative government doesn't. Meanwhile the ATSIC leader is trying his hardest to keep the organization viable, whilst opinion-makers don't seem to have an answer either.
Best of livejournal reading for the past fortnight comes from greylock who expresses real concern about how fictional stories are destroying factual knowledge. My favourite lines is how "a significant chunk of the British population [is] ... unmoved by academia". I also have doubts about the veracity of the report however. Really, it just isn't possible that even 1% of the population believe that Battlestar Galatica - the defeat of humanity by cyborgs - really existed. I mean, wouldn't you notice?
Rilian has two rippers. Vampire Bats Kill 13 People in Brazil and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger.
On related Vampire tales, the_christian reminds us of how common they really are. Especially in Romania where villagers are upset that police are investigating a vampire slaying.
Every wanted to hit the real wide open road? From the cyberpunk community how about riding a motorcycle through Chernobyl?
Social justice meme. An anti-Judiac website has Googlebombed the word 'Jew' so that if you search with that word in Google and hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" function, you will get their page, which is full of the usual paranoid and racist rubbish. To counteract this, just copy and paste this into your own journal:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew">Jew </a>
Update
Silly things you forget when you've been away from LJ for so long:
- Last fortnight saw another two meetings with AVI. One was another skills assesment one-on-one meeting. Left it confused about whether they want me to go to Viet Nam or to a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The other was a meeting with some 100 people who were considering taking up AVI positions.
- Have been using a Windows 98 box for dial-up networking for several months now. Recently hard-disk errors have arisen, causing a slow swan-song. First the dial-up networking program stopped working, then the mouse, then MS-Access... and so forth. It was quite elegant watching new bad blocks appear on a daily basis from ScanDisk.
Anyway the long and short of it is that all useful data has been transferred by my Linux (Mandrake 9.1) box which is operating happily. More to the point I was pleasantly surprised by how much more useful and - believe it or not - easier to use KPPP is than MS's dial-up-networking. More feathers in the cap for the open source community, I say...