You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Links, music, MLP++

Since it's been a while since I've done one of these, let's start off with some random linkage about, say, glowing porkchops. Take-home message: if it glows, you probably shouldn't eat it. Unless someone splices the phosphorescence gene into the Lactobacillus fermentum bacterial strain that makes yoghurt... then you could have a breakfast that was easy to eat before dawn! Um.

Or there's the Grand Canyon skywalk, which is apparently really being planned. It makes me feel slightly vertiginous just thinking about it -- a clear glass walkway with nothing underneath you. Brr.

And finally, my random linkage brings to you the 80s lyrics test. Even with a few stupid errors, I managed to get 112, clearly beating the next highest person in the room (90-odd). Given that I didn't buy records, and the first CD I ever bought was No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom, this isn't too bad. :)

***

I bought a bunch of old soundtrack cds last weekend -- and by old, I mean they're from movies from the 30s, 40s and 50s, things like Ivanhoe, The Guns of Navarone and King Kong. While reading the liner notes for the cd focusing on Miklòs Ròzsa, they talked about his innovative use of the theremin. Three things I learned were: the two first American films to use the theremin as part of their score were Spellbound and The Lost Weekend (Spellbound's music was composed earlier, but The Lost Weekend was released first); the studio wanted to use it for the Christ sections of Ben Hur (but the composer refused); and the composer wanted to use the related instrument, the ondes martenot for the film The Thief of Bagdad in 1939, but they couldn't because the only person who could play it (the inventor) was "discovered to be defending France at the Maginot Line". (The ondes martenot was used in Amèlie, by the by.)

It would have been kind of cool to be around when electronics was just getting off the ground, and it was possible to invent completely new instruments. Inventing a new sound filter isn't quite the same.

***

Fifteen more My Little Pony drives -- Winterberry, Wondermint, Lily, Sunnydaze, Stardasher, Seaspray, Periwinkle, Crystal Lace, Sunburst, Seashimmer, Sunshower, Babyfrosting, Rosedust, Prettybow, and Skydancer. Fly, my pretties!

Bad Music, Pavlova, Robocop

I've found that my taste in music worsens considerably when the lyrics are in a foreign language. I'll voluntarily listen Chinese pop music that would probably have me microwaving the CD if it were the an American boy band. Admittedly, this may be because they're just alien enough to be interesting -- putting random orchestral stabs into what appears to be an otherwise ordinary love ballad (as far as I can tell), for example. Anyway, it's just what the doctor ordered in terms of something perky to block out the noises of the office, but not really engaging enough to distract my attention from work.

I think it may show that I find willfully stupid words to be much, much more irritating that willfully stupid music. Or maybe that willfully stupid music is a lot harder to do. ;)

***

Despite being at work for six hours yesterday, I seemed to have managed to cram an awful lot in. I went up to visit the Ataturk Memorial, which I'd never been to before -- for those not familiar with it, it's named after the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and commemorates the Anzacs sacrifice at Gallipoli. It's up on a remote bluff around from Lyall Bay, and has a sweeping view out to sea; it certainly put me into a contemplative mood.

There were another couple of firsts yesterday -- it was the first time I used my icecream-maker, for example. The result was quite delicious; I just used the basic vanilla recipe, but added some spices. Oh, and a dash of butterscotch mead liqueur.

Because the icecream recipe called for four egg yolks, I ended up with a bunch of egg whites. This lead me to my other first -- I decided to embark on that NZ cook rite of passage, and tried my hand at making a pavlova.

(For our overseas readers -- a pavlova is dessert that, if made well, has a outer texture similar to meringue, and an inner texture similar to marshmallow cream. It's normally served topped with cream and sliced fruit, and is a traditional source of contention between NZ and Australia, with the Aussies maintaining, in the face of conclusive documentary evidence, the delusion that they invented it. Because it's basically egg whites and castor sugar (with a little water, vinegar and vanilla) whipped up until the mix peaks, and then baked on a low heat, it can all go horribly wrong.

My first ever pav went quite well, all things considered. I had four whites, instead of the three that the recipe required; I had intended to increase the proportions of the other ingredients to compensate, but because I was making icecream at the time, as well as converting the remains of a roast chicken dinner into a delicious stew, I pretty much forgot. This gave the pav a slightly more eggy taste than normal, but it was still pretty darn tasty.

The other problem I had was entirely self-inflicted -- I decided to hand-beat the eggs with a whisk. For the record: this is not a great idea. :) I have an electric hand blender, but no electric beater except my food processor, and I didn't think it would be worth getting that dirty. I was wrong. Getting egg whites stiff to stand in stiff peaks with a whisk takes a lot longer than you might think.

And I got a load of washing done, too! Yes, yesterday was certainly productive. :)

Today has been fairly productive, but only in an uninteresting work sort of way.

***

The amount of annoyance and sense of personal tragedy that you feel when your relatively new headphones stop working on the right is more than equaled by the sense of relief you feel when you realize that you haven't pushed the headphone plug all the way in.

Not that I did that this morning, or anything. :)

***

I feel I should give some interesting insight into something outside of myself, but the only interesting tidbit I've found is that they're remaking Robocop. (And the original director is apparently having nothing to do with it.) Other stuff, like the guy who's run the six Star Wars movies simultaneously to look for parallels, or Sony Music having copy protection that provides a root kit for hackers (which is already being exploited) are things I figure you'll have already seen. :)

Japanese TV, Remakes, Work

Google continues to amaze.

Without Video Google, how could I have seen clips from the program "Morning Musume"? And if I hadn't seen them, how would I have known just how close to reality the "Mathew Magic" clips in Lost in Translation were? I mean, here's a chinese whispers drawing game, or girls with pork-chops on their heads tempting a giant lizard (and being freaked out), or watching a really freaky clip from Ringu. Given how scared some of the girls appear in some segments, I'm surprised that they come back; but then again, there seem to be bits where they pretend to be cats. I guess you have to take the giant black guys and random English lessons with the visits to horror houses.

***

To follow from the "music redone in different styles" thing of my last entry, I've stumbled onto the soundtrack of the game Stubbs The Zombie, which takes a bunch of alt rockers (like the Ravonettes, the Flaming Lips and the Dandy Warhols) and has them rock out on 50s-era tunes such as "My Boyfriend's Back" and "Mr Sandman". According to the Amazon review, the standout track is Cake's "Strangers in the Night" -- given that they've already done things like this in their regular releases (I'm thinking of "I Will Survive" and "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" on Fashion Nugget), it's not that surprising.

Why I don't understand is why movie remakes don't take this approach more often -- Clueless is a perfect example of what I mean. I guess one big difference is that the length of a music track is measured in minutes, and the number of people involved doesn't normally run into three digits; people aren't going to devote a year or two of their life just to see if "Dancing Queen" works well as a ska number. (I think it would, by the way, but that's neither here nor there.)

Of course, it could be argued that if they change genre or setting, then they often don't call it a remake. And sometimes they call it a remake even when it's more a sampling -- the new version of The Italian Job has a similar relationship to the original that Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice Baby" had to Queen's "Under Pressure". Wait -- is that unnecessarily mean to the new The Italian Job, or to Vanilla Ice?

***

At work, I've been told they want to extend me to April; however, I'm not holding my breath until the contract arrives. Nevertheless, it's certainly better than finishing in November, no matter how good the job market is at the moment. On the other hand, it's a timely reminder that I should polish the CV, and have a look around for other possibilities next year.

Weekends at work seem unnecessarily busy and exciting -- hardware failures, obscure errors being tickled, and so on. I'm doing my best to ignore all of it, since most of it is out of my field, and I really need to get this FileMaker stuff to a usable level. I'm certainly learning a lot; the one thing that I wish I had was a FileMaker equivalent of the O'Reilly "Cookbook" series. The format of those books is quite neat: they have a whole heap of entries in each chapter, split into three sections (Problem, Solution, Discussion) which sets out what you might want to solve, how to solve it, and how the solution works (and how to modify it for different situations). Having something like this for FileMaker would be pretty nifty, but I'm not sure whether there would be a market outside of me. :)

I've been writing up some FileMaker tricks and traps I've found on our internal IT wiki; I'm starting to wonder whether I should stick them on a web page somewhere, so that other people can benefit from them. Something to think of in the future, I guess.

Booze, Crocs, Tea, Scrubs

Despite owning a fair amount of booze, I don't really drink that much -- I have no anecdotes about throwing up on myself, or funny stories involving urine. (Well, no funny stories that involve urine and alcohol, anyway. :) So when the drinking stories started flowing in the room last Friday, I couldn't do much more than listen... and reproduce some of them for your benefit.

One of the big discussions was about rules for drinking that would ensure the least pain the next day (including social pain) -- what drinks not to mix, or the "You can always finish with beer" rule. Someone who was a big drinker in his student days said that his rule lately is, "Don't drink anything but beer, and don't drink fast."

His partner's rule is, "Don't drink anything that comes out of a bathtub or bucket." :)

There were also plenty of throwing-up stories -- the one that was generally acknowledged as being the topper is the chap who puked through a screen door. (He was running for outside, and didn't quite make it; his girlfriend got really annoyed with him, because he ran right past the bathroom to do it.) There were also the full bladder stories: several people had tales of waking up to find someone peeing next to them, but the one that took the cake was the guy who woke up to find himself peeing in the corner of his room...

Then there's the random stupidity, like the alcohol-cocooned treks through the night (sometimes waking up in distant towns; occasionally, in the police holding cells of distant towns for disturbing the peace). For some reason, the most worrying stories seemed to come from the student population of Dunedin -- I don't think I'll reproduce them here, since they are more hair-raising than hilarious.

I guess one of the things that stood out for me is -- while the NZ tendency towards binge-drinking probably doesn't help matters, teenagers do stupid things, and they'd still do them if the drinking age was thirty, or if they had been having vodka with their cornflakes since they were three.

***

"Warning! Most kinds of crocodiles are known man-eaters. If you ever encounter one approach it cautiously, even if it's wearing a pirate hat or playing a guitar." This, my friends, is the advice of The Secret Crocodile Adventure Club. And jolly good advice it is, too.

***

While clearing out the garage, Mum came upon an ancient appliance of mine -- a Goblin teasmaid. This venerable piece of electrical history is basically an alarm clock; but it's an alarm clock that can make you a cup of tea in the morning! (Or soup, I guess, if you put soup-mix in there instead of tea-bags. But why would you want to be woken up with soup? Get out of here, you weirdo!)

Hey! You could totally use the Prenzels' mulled wine mix instead... one of my workmates has just pointed out that if you're going to do this, you could just have a bottle of whiskey beside your bed.

He seems frighteningly keen on the idea, actually.

***

Season 3 of Due South has had to go on hiatus briefly, even though we've just had Fraser talking to his father in the closet. Why, you may ask? Well, initially it was Pride & Prejudice, as I've mentioned before; but now it's because Season 2 of Scrubs is now available, and I have bought me a copy! :)

I'm just lucky I've managed to avoid buying Civ4, or I'd be getting no work done at all.

On a tangental note -- while looking for a copy of the a cappella version of the Charles In Charge theme tune that The Blanks performed on Scrubs, I discovered that they released an album. But even more interestingly, there's the album Saturday Night Hay Fever, a cd of bluegrass covers of disco hits. I must admit, it's pretty tempting...

200!

To celebrate my 200th post, let's have a bit of culture -- how about a Greek poem?

Water Drinkers

I don't dread the Pleiades setting
when I'm out at sea, nor sea storms
pummeling the back-braced keel, nor
lightning striking off a bowsprit

nearly so much as I've come to dread
the man who sits and sips his water
so that he can better remind us later
exactly what each and everyone said.

  — Antipater of Thessalonica

I wonder how the rise of designated drivers has changed how parties work? After all, they're socially mandated water-drinkers...

As an aside -- according to Poetry Daily, this poem plays off the proverb "I hate a lively sidekick with a good memory," and the morning setting of the Pleiades marked the end of the sailing season and the beginning of stormy weather. So now you know. :)

***

One downside to having an album called Disco Fever on your headphones while working is that it can be very difficult to explain to your co-workers why they saw you, in a moment of abstraction, doing the hand-movements for "YMCA". Luckily, I'm in a corner, so people have to actively look at me to notice what I'm doing. Even so, I'm attempting to keep my grooving to "Boogie Nights" to an acceptable level. ;)

Speaking of work, I was here until well after 4am Wednesday morning -- I'd gone out at 6pm to hang out with Jenni and her crew (where we playtested her Mean Girls game), and I returned to work around 10pm. The main reason it took so long was that I couldn't start rolling out most of the changes until the coordinators finished dealing with the night's film-outs at around 1:20am. Also -- you know the sense of dismay when it's around 3am, and you realise that one of the things that you've assumed will just work, just won't, so you have to roll back a whole brace of changes? Yeah.

I saw my new flatmate this morning; it's the first time since the weekend, when she moved in. Weird.

On the upside, I did work out a way to work around a retarded FileMaker 6 restriction -- after much frustration and pulling of hair, I discovered that FileMaker's text-match only looks at the first 20 characters of any word (and only the first 60 characters of the field). Since many of the things that I was trying to examine for duplicates are longer than 20 characters, this was a problem. I'm not particularlly proud of the solution I found (arbitrarily splitting the text every 20 characters), but at least it gives the Editorial department the information they need; and we'll probably be throwing this stuff away at the end of Kong anyway, assuming I finish off the new version.

(I really hope I finish the new version... in the next few weeks. Yikes.)

The other upside was that I got to sleep in until 10am. Well, that's kinda an upside...

***

When they decided to provide rose and sandalwood pump soap in the bathrooms, I resigned myself to having hands that smelled like turkish delight every time I went to the loo -- but they crossed the line when they started to put vanilla air-freshener in the toilets. An outhouse smell is unpleasant, sure, but replacing it with a bakehouse smell is somehow peversely wrong. Bring back the faux flower fragrances, say I -- down this road leads Fresh Baked Bread air-freshner, and then it's just a small step to Garlic Mushroom. Or worse yet, chip flavours -- Sour Cream & Chives or Spicy BBQ aerosols, anyone? Stop the madness now!

***

I feel I should say something insightful or profound on the event of my 200th entry -- preferably something that could potentially achieve the immortality of ending up in someone's .sig file -- but I'm afraid I'm coming up blank. For my 100th post, I was able to talk about finally buying a house, but there's no change of similar magnitude on the horizon; my life seems to be happily chugging away, and while it's not perfect, I'm pretty happy with the way it is. Thanks to all of you who take the time to read this stuff. :)