You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Pets; Good Day, Mixed Day

What is happening? Is the world getting weirder, or are the weird people just getting more web access? Take pets, for example. I just rewatched the episode of Due South where the wolf is humiliated by being forced to wear a tam'o'shanter in order to humour a dotty old woman.

But then there are sites like BeeDogs.Com, which encourages you to humilate your canine companion, and Pets in Uniform, which offers to do it for you (via some frankly weak-ass photo-shoppery). What is the matter with these people? I mean, I agree that giant bees are lovely, but if Blind Melon music videos have taught us nothing else, it's that dressing up in a big ol' bee costume looks kind of retarded.

***

Had a pretty good birthday. It didn't start particuarly auspiciously, since I was at work until 1am -- which is a consequence of having to wait until the coordinators finish working (at about midnight) before I could start making a bunch of "totally vital" changes (that I suspect won't be used). Anyway, the day itself was pretty good -- I had a couple of people come to me with problems, and I was able to say, "Well, how about this?" and then present them with a finished solution an hour later.

(As I may have noted before, Perl is a awesome language for this sort of thing. :)

I also got a number of birthday wishes from people in the facility, both in person and via email, and my room decided to sing me "Happy Birthday" very badly in a classically "ha-ha, only serious" moment. ;)

And in the evening, I actually left at six o'clock (it was still light outside!!) and popped in to see my mum and youngest sister, and then watched four episodes of Due South with C -- which may have been foolish, since it was 11:30pm by the time I dropped her back in Thorndon and got home. (I blame Jenni, as I was fully prepared to just watch a Hitchcock movie and then go home to bed -- doesn't she know how bad I am at moderating my media intake? C hasn't seen any Due South, so I'm getting to watch from the beginning with someone who's coming to it fresh, which is cool; but it makes it oh-so-easy to watch just one more episode...)

The next morning wasn't so good -- I had a dental appointment in town at 8am, and woke up to see it was 7:30am. My "go in by bus" plan was thrown out the window, and ten minutes later I was showered, dressed, out the door and into the van. I was pretty worried, since just finding a park in town can take up to half an hour, and getting down to the Kirks end of town through morning traffic takes 15-20 minutes. And then I discovered something amazing -- there are tonnes of car-parks in town at eight in the morning!

This meant I was only five minutes late, and got injections in both my upper and lower jaw for a final three fillings, which went fairly quickly. As I don't often get into town, I decided to take the opportunity to try and find a mandarin-collared shirt. I went into Kirks on the principle that they'd be likely to have something, even if it was a bit pricy. As it turned out, I was only partly right -- they had one style of shirt with a mandarin collar, but it was black, Versache, and something like $460. Nearly half a grand for a shirt!? Who would pay that kind of money for clothing?! Maybe a really good pair of shoes that are going to last you 20 years... but a shirt?? Some people have too much money.

Someone at work told me that formalwear hire places often have weird-collared shirts for sale, so I popped into the one around that end of town that I remembered going to for my brother's wedding. Unfortunately, the only ones they had went up to a size 40cm neck, and I'm 42cm. (And the shirts were even on sale, to rub salt into the wound!) I've mostly been looking for Jenni's Space Cowboys party, though I wouldn't have minded one for general use; but it looks like I'm pretty much out of luck.

I did manage to buy fifteen random bottles of wine from Rumbles (a "Spanish dinner pack" of four reds, a white and a desert, a six-pack of mixed reds, a French rosé and a couple of sav. blancs), so the trip in wasn't a total waste. I really should start drinking some of these wines, I guess.

Anyway, I got to work about 10am, and while things haven't been as productive as yesterday, they haven't been too bad. The only downsides is that the fillings have been pretty painful -- I took a couple of panadol, but ended up having to go out and buy some Neurophen, which has helped a bit. (I'm not very keen about taking pain pills, since I regard pain as Nature's way of telling you to stop being a dumbass, but it was getting hard to concentrate on work; hope that it's reduced by tonight, as I don't fancy trying to get to sleep feeling like this.)

And I just got a call from the garage -- the good news being that the repair of the breaks seems to be going well, and it should get a warrant by Friday; the bad news being that they found out why it was running rough -- fouled spark-plugs caused by the auto-choke not turning off, caused by low radiator levels, which may be a simply undetected radiator leak, or may be a problem with the head gasket.

I hope it's not the head gasket. :)

***

The weather is pretty gorgeous; according to the Met Service, it might be gusty on Friday, but shouldn't rain. Yay!

Hope to see some of you tomorrow.

Gun, Birthday, Liquid

I'm not sure which is cooler -- that someone has made an automated gun turret out of a cheap web camera and a lazy suzan, or that he tested it on his younger brother.

Okay, the "getting a sibling to agree to be shot at" thing made me laugh out loud, but I'm an eldest child. ;)

The article points out that there are uses other than raising welts on the younger members of your family. For example, "A squirt gun could be attached, and it could be used to discipline your cat when it tries to jump on the couch...simultaneously watering your couch."

And who wouldn't want that?

***

This is my 190th entry. (I was tempted to try to churn out another ten entries before Wednesday, but I seem to be pretty busy for some reason.) I've been keeping up this blog since the end of June, 2004. I think I've improved; it would be pretty sad if I hadn't. ;)

Why would it have been nice to hit 200 by Wednesday? Because it will be my birthday -- my 32nd, to be precise. I won't be doing much of anything on that day, since I have an 8am dental appointment the next morning; but I'm having people over for drinks and stuff on Friday, starting at 7pm. (I thought about Saturday, but someone else has already claimed it, and it's more convenient for the people who have to travel to have my family thing on Saturday.)

So --

Where: My place
When: Friday, 7pm
Why: Birthday.

Also, if Sok & the Ginger Ninja make an appearance, I'll toast to good luck in their travels. (I'll probably do that even if they don't make it. :)

All those who won't be in Wellington on Friday (owing to being in Canada or Hawaii or something) would just have to try harder next year. ;) All those who are in Wellington -- well, I was pretty slack leaving it until the last minute to organize something, so I'll be glad if I see you, and understand if I don't. :)

***
Here's a site that's kinda neat -- Liquid Sculpture. The guy running the site takes pictures of liquids splashing with a high-speed camera, and shows some of the beautiful shapes that are hidden in plain sight. I can imagine hanging something like this up in my living-room much more easily than the painting from a few entries ago.

Of course, what I've actually got in my living room is a picture of the lake beside one of my brother's house (which he took), a Turner print (of a sailing ship being towed by a steam tug to be broken up), and a loose page from a Victorian bestiary about chameleons. But that's neither here nor there. :)

***

Yes, I'm still at work, and it's quarter to midnight. On the other hand, I'm feeling pretty good, becuase I've just finished doing some moderately tricky stuff, and it appears to have all gone off pretty smoothly. (Not perfectly -- perfectly would make me nervous. But the mistakes that I've made were ones that I noticed fairly early, and could correct without impact.)

But I've got plenty to do tomorrow, so I'll wrap this up here.

Earth, Car, Gondoliers, SciFi

"Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe."

Yes, it's everybody's favourite geocidal website, with the all-important How to destroy the Earth document, as well as the International Earth Destruction Advisory Board (who provide the useful button to the right). Note that this is a live link, so in the event that Earth is destroyed, the image will change. Feel free to check here, or the original page, if you're worried that someone has destroyed Earth while your attention was elsewhere.

***

I'm aware that I'm not updating as regularly as I used to, but I think that there are more than enough people taking up the slack -- and there are some excellent writers who haven't written anything since late August, so I don't feel too guilty. :)

First things first -- the car is in the garage, getting some tender loving care. Some tender, expensive loving care; replacing the badge is only $55 or so, and the random shrieking (which was the fanbelt, so congrats to Dad) shouldn't be too expensive to fix, but some important part of the breaks needs to be fixed or replaced, and they haven't had a chance to look at the rough running of the engine. I guess this means I'll be rolling in the Andersen van for a while yet -- which is annoying, since my brother needs it for learning to drive. Hopefully we'll be able to work out a compromise for the coming week.

(Garages are kinda weird sometimes -- I mean, I understand that they don't want you bowl up to them and be told, "Yeah, we spent eleventy gazillion dollars on new parts for your car, hope that's okay." But when they say, "You can either wait six weeks and pay $600-800 for a new part from Germany, or have about a week's wait to have the part fixed for around $200 in Auckland..." Maybe it's meant to take the sting out of the fact that you're going to be paying a bunch of money and not have your car for ages?)

I don't really mind spending a bit to keep this car running, since it's kind of a family piece; but it's certainly making the prospect of a scooter for day-to-day transport more and more attractive.

***

I went to see The Gondoliers at the Opera House on Saturday. There was a slight sense of dislocation when I saw a Computer Science lecturer in the chorus, though I knew that Lindsey was involved in choirs and such, so I shouldn't be so surprised. The people I was there to see were uniformly excellent -- J was seven kinds of graceful, Regan twirled daintily, and Giffy was preened over and got to slap people. ;) They seemed to have an overabundance of talented female vocalists, and they used the freakishly tall Grand Inquistor to great effect.

However -- the two lead Gondoliers occasionally seemed to struggle, and there was a spot in their first song where at least one of them seemed to lose their place. And while I think that the rewrite of the "There was a king..." to be about MMP was well done and clever, I disagree strongly with the changes to the kings' song about their lives. While it retained the vibe of showing the relative mundanity of their lives among the trappings of royalty, they lost the whole "satisfying feeling that our duty has been done" idea for a cheap swearing gag. (As The West Wing pointed out, "They're all about duty.") This song, to my mind, is meant to contrast the "Oh, 'tis a glorious thing, I ween, To be a regular Royal Queen!", and show that it's less about doing whatever you want, and more about having to "run on little errands for the Ministers of State".

Oh, and Tessa missed out a half line from "In a Contemplative Fashion", but the D'Oyly Carte recording I have misses out exactly the same half-line, so I wonder if there's some sort of tradition going on. I think I only noticed originally because it spoils a rhyme: "If she married Messer Marco/ You're a spinster, that is plain--" "No matter--no matter./ If I can get at her/ I doubt if her mother will know her again!" Both performances missed out "that is plain", and my Google-fu is too weak to find any reason why.

But these are trivial things. Overall, I really liked the show, and am quite tempted to drive up to Palmeston North to see their last engagement. :)

***

The advance showing of Serenity was on Monday. I'm not going to talk about what's in the movie, but I did want to talk about my main worry, which was -- how will this play to someone who hasn't seen the series? Unfortunately, I know I lost my objectivity in the movie fairly early on, and while I found it awesome, I know that a lot of my positive feelings come from watching and getting to know the characters through the series. Because of that, I can see where the people who gave it "D+" are coming from -- although that reviewer also says that he hated Buffy and Angel, hadn't watched Serenity and didn't like SciFi, which makes you wonder why he was watching this film in the first place.

On a personal level, I'll be buying the DVD, and I'll be going to the film at the cinema a second (and possibly a third) time. And I suspect that this won't be an uncommon pattern of behaviour, so the film will make money (especially since it only cost $40 million to make). But -- I'm not sure it will draw in new people; and I think that's a shame.

I kinda hope I'm wrong.

***

Speaking of movies, one of my sisters pointed to The Four Word Film Review -- one of the reviews for the upcoming King Kong was "Serkis ape", nyuk nyuk. And I also liked one of the reviews of I, Robot -- "Robot goes nuts, bolts."

***

And finally, in case you weren't sure that Earth needed destroying, I feel I should point out that you can buy Slave Princess Leia outfits for your dog. What kind of demographic they're targeting with this stuff is something I'd prefer not to think about.

You can get Yoda, Darth Vader and other costumes as well.

"... as if a million voices cried out in terror..." Indeed.

RPS, Etymology, Art

Sometimes, you see something, and it sparks an idea; and then, before you know it, it's all Rock/Paper/Saddam.

Speaking of the whimsical, one of the reasons I like Dinosaur comics is puns in Greek -- it's enter-ucational! ;)

***

One of the books that I recently finished was nominally a study of the Roman alphabet, but also included plently of excursions into etemology and the politics of the Ancient Mediterranian. It was quite a fun read, and it was kinda cool, while watching The Man Who Knew Too Much and the question of the meaning of "chapel" came up, to be able to go, "Yeah, it's from the same kind of root word as chapeau, and originally meant 'hooded cape', and then came to refer to the shrine within which the chapel of a saint stood; wait, I've got a reference in my bag..."

(I'm also moderately useful for crossword puzzles, pub quizes and Trivial Pursuits, though not for any sports questions, and not always if you wanted a succinct answer. :)

One thing that I learned that I thought was kinda awesome was that the question-mark (which was a relatively late development) is actually a stylised "q" over an "o", because it's meant to be a contraction of quaestio (query, question). Similarly, the exclamation mark is an "I" over an "o" is either for interiectio (interjection) or io (Hey!). Since they were introduced specifically to help the reader work out the tone in which things should be read, you could see them as the "lol"s of their day -- and no doubt those that object to ^_^ and the like being sprinkled about would have, in an earlier age, objected to the gratuitous and unnecessary "?" and "!". After all, if it's not clear from the sentence how it should be read, you haven't written lucidly enough!

The book also played right into my weakness for puns by mentioning in passing that "Latin lovers often have Roman hands." :)

***

I don't understand art. Or more specifically, I don't understand how the art market works. For exmple, why is the picture to the right worth $95k+? It just seems alien to me that someone would value a piece of canvas like that more than a third of a house... and they're unlikely to have any connection with its creation. However, I guess you're not just paying for the object; you're also paying for the history of the object, and the associations that the object has.

However, when artworks become like a more sophisticated form of personalized license plate, bought in the hopes that it will increase in value because everyone else wants to buy it off you (and they want to buy it because other people want it)... it seems like something is broken, somehow. This isn't meant to be a commentary on the artistic worth of Mr Hotere's work, which I'm obviously unqualified to speak about; instead, it's about the fact that I can't imagine spending five or six figures on anything that didnt' let me do something.

***

Speaking of art, and in honour of the inestimiable Morgue, I present morgueFile, a resource of free image reference material. I suspect that this is a site that's launched a thousand Worth1000 contest entries. And who could ask to do more than that? :)

Lion, C&CF, NZ History

To the right is a tribute to Sokky's tiny lion.

***

One of the nice things about the mighty Interweb is the unexpected things that it throws up. Like the blog of the chap who wrote the screenplay for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (This is a link to the bits about the movie -- he writes on a variety of subjects.)

I think the thing I most valued was finding out the words to the German version of the "Willy Wonka" theme song, as it was used in the trailer (comment #15), e.g.:

"Kaugummi ist ekelhaft.
Kaugummi wird abgeschafft!"

Which apparently translates as, "Chewing gum is disgusting. Chewing gum will be abolished." Lovely.

***

I do not dream of Sussex downs
or quaint old England's quaint old towns --
I think of what may yet be seen
in Johnsonville and Geraldine.
  -- "Home Thoughts", Denis Glover (1936)

I finished reading Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand a while ago; and I'm glad I did. I'm not sure how much I absorbed, rather than read and promptly forgot, but I found it interesting how much I didn't know -- how recent a development the Waitangi Tribunal is, for example, or that the top tax rate used to be 66% until a few decades ago. And there was this passage that he quoted about the formalisation of the link between the Ratana Maori seat MPs and the Labour government in 1936:

Ratana... placed on the table before him four objects: a potato, a broken gold watch, a greenstone tiki and a huia feather... The potato was the ordinary Maori, needing his land. The watch was the law relating to the lands of the Maori. Only the machinery of the law could repair the law. The greenstone tiki stood for the tradtions and the mana of the Maori. And the huia feather, the sign of a paramount chief, would be worn by Mr Savage if he would look after his Maori people. The Prime Minister accepted the proposal.

Unfortunately, I couldn't work out whoh he was quoting, so I can't attribute it properly.

Games, Empire Cinema, Antman

A box of goodies has just arrived from the States, including Illuminati, Who Killed Doctor Lucky, and James Ernest's Totally Renamed Spy Game (originally "Before I Kill You, Mr Bond"). Unfortunately, I was at the dentist this morning, and so can't really justify scooting off and collecting it until this evening. It also underlines the fact that the stuff I ordered from Amazon Canada isn't here yet -- and it was meant to arrive on the 2nd at the latest.

But putting that aside for the moment -- lots of cool presents for me! And since I'll have paid off the credit card ages ago, they're almost the same as free! ;)

***

Meant to mention it before, but I've now been to the Empire Cinema in Island Bay. They took a long time to fill our hot-chocolate order, but I got the feeling that they were still finding their feet, cafe-wise. The building was originally built as a cinema, but had been a hardware store for as long as I could remember; they've converted it into three smallish theatres (the one we were in would seat 65-70). The seats are quite comfortable, and set up in pairs -- that is an arm, two seats, another arm, two seats, etc. The soundproofing seemed good (I didn't notice anything leaking over from the other theatres), the screen was a decent size, and none of the viewing angles seemed bad.

The tickets are slightly more expensive than Reading -- $16 for adults, $13 for Film Society. (They didn't seem to have a Weta discount, so it's a good thing I renewed my Society membership.) I guess one way to look at it is -- it's only $2 more, and you won't be paying for parking.

I've been reading a lot recently about the falling ticket numbers, so I'm quite surprised by the number of new movie theaters that are either opening or are soon to open. However, given that a new-release DVD costs $8 to rent (and even buying it outright only costs a couple of movie tickets), it's no surprise that they're not making the money they used to. A friend of mine used to organize a group of people to give him five bucks each, in return for which he provided a venue and ordered movies on DVD from the States well before they came out at the movies here. (He got to keep the movie, so it was a fairly sweet deal for him. :)

Anyway, I wouldn't invest my own money in them, but I wish the Empire Cinema the best of luck.

***

In other movie news, they're going to make an Ant-Man movie. That's... um... odd. I mean, maybe it'll be really cool, since people probably don't have many preconceptions about this superhero. But he certainly sounds like the one they threw in there to round out the numbers.

Book Fair, Car, Google Earth

I made it to the Downtown Community Mission Book Fair on Saturday afternoon. I find it's often the books that I don't choose to pick up that stay with me -- a book on etiquette by Quentin Crisp, for example. And the fantasy & scifi section was pretty much completely empty by the time I got there -- I picked up "The Lost Continent" by Edgar Rice Burrows, but that's about it. There was still a fair selection in the Young Adult tables, and I did manage to pick a bag's worth of books, but it wasn't the same haul as previous years.

The most wearying thing about book-fairs and second-hand book hunting isn't the crowds, or trying to read titles and corelating those with what you've already got or what you're looking for -- it's standing up, quite still, with ever-increasing loads in your arm for long periods of time. And because you're concentrating on the books, you don't really notice until you're standing in line to pay. I suspect you could make a fair bit of cash renting wheelie chairs to keen book-hunters who are stoically waiting to hand over cash for their "kills".

***

Someone pulled the symbol off the front of my car last night. Slightly frustrating, but my brother tells me that one of our friends has had the same thing happen, and it only cost around $40 to get the replacement part. Now, this is $40 that I wouldn't have had to spend if someone hadn't wrenched something off my car, but it's less than I thought it would be. It could have been worse -- they could have keyed the car, or stolen the hubcaps, or broken in for the stereo. (Though I would have been surprised if they did that last thing, since it's a tape-player that's about the same age as the car.)

In other car-related news -- because I really dislike email campaigns that are self-evidently stupid, I went in and filled my half-empty tank today. It was close to $50; so I can expect $100+ to fill the car in the not-to-distant future. No wonder they're advocating work-from-home, carless days and carpooling; I wish I had more days where I could walk to work. Roll on the electric car, say I.

***

In a recent game set in Wellington Jenni made a point about the banality of Supré (by having her Sidhe work there in an act of self-sacrifice). I was walking past their shop on Lambton Quay, and there was a young guy working there with artfully disarranged dark hair with a peroxided swoop along the front; I think he might have been in a tank-top, but that may just be my brain filling in details after the fact. Anyway, his expression suggested that he took himself deadly seriously, which may be why I remember him -- I found it very funny, which he might not have appreciated. :)

***

Technology is cool.

My grandparents were at my parents place for Father's Day dinner, and I mentioned Google Earth, which reminded Mum that they'd found the location of my sister's address in Hawaii. So we all went to the study, and looked at the roof of my sistere's new home; and then looked at Wellington; and then we looked at my granfather's old town back in Denmark, and followed the streets he used to walk to school as a boy, and found the farm where one of his old shipmates now lives.

Actually, I think I'll shift my position. Technology lets you do some really cool stuff. :)

Cats, Lists, Final Decrees, Tar-babies

An odd varient on StuffOnMyCat.com -- CatsInSinks.com.

And in a return of an old favourite -- Timothy McSweeny's lists include Totalitarian Institutions That Would Have Been More Fitting for George Orwell's 1984, Considering How That Year Turned Out (including "The Ministry of Fools, and the Pity With Which Mr. T Regards Them"), and Klingon
Fairy Tales (starting with "Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears").

***

I remembered playing a board game five or more years ago with the inimitable Mr At-Large; I knew that he'd downloaded it off the web, but I couldn't remember what it was called. So I summoned up my Google-fu and what I remembered of the gameplay, and after a few false starts found Final Decrees. Basically, you play high officials in charge of one of five bureacratic departments of a galactic empire on the verge of collapse, and the aim of the game is to be the official with the least personal blame when the game ends. With departmental powers like the Secret Service's "Investigate Head of Department" (which changes all departmental blame into the personal blame of the head of that department) and action cards like "I Have Something To Confess" (which lets you take blame, but give twice that amount of blame to someone else), it's pretty nifty. And also, free. :)

I think that it might have been the Yes, Minister discussions that triggered this memory.

***

One thing that people who aren't programmers might not know is -- code is sticky. Some bits of code are less sticky than others, but some are like the proverbial tar baby. I think the main reason for the "you touched it last, you fix it now" attitude is that code is complicated -- even if you've provided excellent documentation and your code is clean, beautiful and intuitive, programs are complicated things, and it's non-trivial to build up a mental map of how it works, so it's almost always faster to ask the person who's already gotten into the guts of that program to go back to it, rather than paying the start-up costs of someone new learning it.

However -- while there are seductive and powerful reasons to go down this path, once you start, forever will it dominate your destiny. For starters, it results in you having "indispensible guy" problems, where there's only one person who knows how a key tool works. And you find people are really reluctant to touch things that are either difficult, or have difficult users attached to them, because that may doom them to being the person responsible for that tool for the rest of time. And it eventually bites you in the bum when the go-to-guy is unavailable, and no-one else knows anything about the system, and all the documentation is in go-to-guy's head.

As you may have gathered from the Dark Side allusion, I'm not in favour of this approach. Especially when it results in me having to do extra work. ;) (rassen-frassen-"all coders are busy"-schassen-frassen.) It's weird to think that will have been a DBA for a year soon, and I still haven't completely escaped my former department. Not that I'm really that grumpy about it -- I mean, I enjoy programming -- but I'm aware that time is running out, and the things that need to be ready in time for the next project keep getting pushed down the list. Part of this is my fault, since I need to put time aside to do the long-term projects; but I don't actually get very much uninterrupted time during work hours. Ah well, you do the best you can, etc. etc.