You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Potter, Interweb redux, SQL

I'd like to direct people's attention to Potter Puppet Pals, both for the two Potter Pals animations ("Bother, bother, bother, bother!") and for the handful of other animations, like Sexy Snape and the Muggle Pants Supa Dance Remix ("I like a healthy breeze, healthy breeze, healthy breeze...").

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Update on the Intarweb$ -- I've been shifted to the new plan, and they approved the idea of charging me based on that plan for last month's bill (provided I shifted to that plan). So, good news all round (apart from the flatmate who's got the worm, who won't be allowed to connect to the wireless router anytime soon). And with the new 10G limit, I'm still under my quota, so I won't be charged excess usage this month, either. Much rejoicing on my part, by gosh ya betcha. :)

And in other money related news -- it looks like I've paid off $3k more than I thought from my mortgage. That makes me very hopeful that I'll be able to pay off a chunk more this coming year, assuming that I can be a bit more disciplined in my spending.

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Random linkings -- including the Cat Piano, and a working hoverboard a-la Back to the Future 2 (made from a leaf-blower, a board and thick plastic sheets), and Pictures of Walls, which are... well... pictures. Of walls.

Oh, and the game Lexicon seems like it could be good fun, but that could just be the extreme geek in me talking. ;)

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Chuck asked for the three things you need to know about SQL - since I don't have his email address, I'm going to reply to him here. Proceed at your own risk of tedium.

SQL, or Structured Query Language, is a standardized way of getting information out of databases. Think of it as a "BASIC" of databases -- you can run the same command on a big-arse commercial Oracle server, a Linux box running MySQL, or Access on a Windows box. It's not always the *only* way to get the information -- in the case of Access, it's definitely a supplementary one -- but it's quite portable. (However, just like BASIC, people find it hard not to extend the syntax, and you may be able to do things in one version that you can't do with another.)

The next thing that you know about is relational databases. Imagine a video store who wants to record who's borrowed what. You could just have a single Excel spreadsheet with the name of the borrower, the name of the video, when it was borrowed, and when it was returned. But if you then wanted to record the home address of the borrower, you'd need another column; and that would be information that is repeated a lot, and needs to be entered for every video a person borrows, and might get entered differently on different rows, and is hard to update if they move while they've still got videos out. Wouldn't it be more sensible to have another spreadsheet with people's names and addresses? Once you do that, you've got a *relational* database -- you've got a "Borrowed" table where the people's names are a "foreign key", which lets you look up their address in the "Customers" table. Of course, in a real database, you wouldn't store the name, because you might get two John Smiths -- instead, you'd use something unique, like their customer number. This process of breaking a big table with redundant information into smaller tables is called "normalization".

The last thing you need to know are four key commands -- SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE. If you had a database that had a table called BandFunk with two columns, "BandName" and "Funkyness", then you could add a new row with a command like 'INSERT INTO BandFunk SET Bandname = "Parliament", Funkyness = "Damn funky";'. If you had to change a row, you'd write something like 'UPDATE BandFunk SET Funkyness = "Less funky than anticipated" WHERE Bandname = "The Funky Lowlives";'. If you wanted to remove a band, you'd say something like 'DELETE FROM BandFunk WHERE Bandname = "Shihad";'. And if you wanted to find something, you'd write something like 'SELECT * FROM BandFunk WHERE Bandname = "The Proclaimers";'. (That last query would, obviously, succeed with no results.)

There is plenty of stuff I haven't covered, like how to decide where to normalize tables, the different ways to select results over multiple tables, auto-incrementing columns, database server maintenance, object-oriented dbs, data mining, replication, etc... but there's plenty of stuff out there on the web.

You'll need to find out what software they're using, but if you want to play with SQL, I'd suggest downloading MySQL from http://dev.mysql.com/, and following through one of the many tutorials available. They've got excellent documentation on the web, too. If you do that, you'll at least be able to truthfully say that you wouldn't call yourself an expert, but you've played around with SQL a bit.

Hope that helps you, Chuck.

More holiday, kids' books & dice, buzzwords

Svend: "I mean, I don't actually need pants at the moment."
Tim: "Sometimes, you need pants."

This was a discussion on the advantages of working in the middle of town, but may be more amusing out of context. :)

And a useful phrase from a meeting, analogous to "point of contact": "point of clue".

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I have no reason to post a picture of a cutesy kitten in a frog costume; on the other hand, I have no reason not to, either.

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A few more things about my trip away that I forgot to mention last time. The first was that there was actually some trouble with the car -- maybe I'll do this as a Luckily/Unluckily thingy.

Unluckily, the car developed a wobble in the front driver-side tire while we were in Auckland.

Luckily, I noticed it before we started a long trip, and we had somewhere to stay.

Unluckily, I couldn't see what was wrong.

Luckily, the people we were staying had the good idea of taking it to a tire-alignment place, and knew where one was.

Unluckily, it was Auckland Anniversary day, and the tire-alignment place was closed.

Luckily, I'm an AA member, and was able to get someone to come out.

Unluckily, the tire was bulging, and would have popped eventually.

Luckily, they could change to the spare tire.

Unluckily, the spare tire was bald enough that they were reluctant to put it on.

Luckily, they knew of a tire place that would be open on a public holiday...

Okay, enough of that. We went along, and got two new tires for the front, and made the old front tire the spare; and it wasn't nearly as expensive as I thought it would be. And I didn't have any problems with it after that; but I still didn't want to drive it on 90-mile beach.

(I had my fears confirmed when the bus we took passed an old Mercedes, pictured on the left, that had misjudged the tides a few days ago, and had sunk irrecoverably into the sands. It looks quite similar to my car, except for being dark blue, beaten up, and mostly full of sand. In fact, I realised later that I should have rescued some of the fittings, like the window-handles. Oh well.)

Auckland zoo has elephants, and also hippos. Wellington zoo does not. Also, I have seen Katchafire at Auckland zoo, and the coolest group I've seen at Wellington was David R & Krew. So -- advantage, sadly, to Auckland.

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Good Valentines Day. I gave C a pound of dice, as well as three different purple sets (gold mist, pearly and a small glittery set). I got myself a pound as well, and we spent some time swapping to achieve sets. Weirdly enough, neither of us got any eight-siders in our pound.

C gave me the entirely awesome Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus, a book that I've wanted since I accidentally picked it up and read it at the Northland library during filming for our entry in the 48-Hour Film Competition. It teaches young children many important lessons, such as... the importance of... obeying bus drivers? And... not letting birds operate heavy machinery, maybe? Anyway, it's very cool book, and I'm very happy to have a copy. It can go with my very battered "Where The Wild Things Are" and "Monster At The End Of This Book".

Speaking of books for younger readers, I had the opportunity to read through a bunch of books that C had to review for a class of 7-8 year-olds -- specifically, the first Judy Moody book, a spin-off book about her brother ("Stink: The Incredible Shrinking Kid"), and the first "Tiara Club" book, "Princess Charlotte and the Birthday Ball".

The "Tiara Club" book was a bit worrying, especially after reading "Queen Bees and Wannabes". For example, the main characters become best friends by virtue of being assigned to the same dorm, and the central tragedy is that some clothes are ruined, and the heroines may not be able to go to a ball on the first day of school. I don't disagree with the central moral (friendship is important, and being willing to act decisively and sacrifice things for a greater good is usually the right thing to do, though it may sometimes go wrong), but it felt very... shallow? And the whole "to be a Proper Girl, you need the right clothes" sort of thing, and "nagging your parents to get what you want is okay". And "all girls want to wear pink". I'm guessing that the hero characters are deliberately only sketchily characterized, so that the reader can project herself and her friends more effectively, though perhaps it's just a happy side-effect of having a very short length and a Mary-Jane-ish lead. In summary -- not great, but I remember reading a lot of terrible sci-fi at this age, so while I wouldn't buy it for anyone, I'd try to avoid discouraging anyone who enjoyed it (and so might go on to read other, better stuff).

"Judy Moody", on the other hand, was very good indeed. To be fair, it was twice as long (160 pages vs 80), but I would say that it was easily ten times better -- the characters were better defined, the setting was more engaging, and the incidental lessons were less creepy. I thought that the elements that made the world distinctive were better done, as well -- rather than introducing new terms with a chunk of (repeated) exposition, the characters simply use slang, and expect the reader to pick up the meaning from context, or explain things simply, and once. (To be fair, Judy Moody's world will be more familiar to the reader.) The main character is also much more an active force in her world -- instead of feeling miserable, and managing not to cry until something happens to fix it, she actively seeks solutions. To take a random example, at the very beginning of the book she is grumpy because she doesn't have any t-shirts with words on to show she did something cool in the holidays; when her parents point out the things she did, including eating shark, she immediately rushes off and makes an "I ate a shark" t-shirt. She's also not the only person to whom stuff happens -- her brother is an actual person, rather than an annoying obstacle.

I mean, younger siblings can be annoying obstacles, but not all the time. ;)

"Stink: The Incredible Shrinking Kid" takes advantage of the fact that you actually shrink during the day (because gravity squooshes you down while you're vertical) to make Judy's younger brother worry that he's actually shrinking. I think that this book might be aimed at a slightly younger reader than Judy Moody -- it's certainly shorter -- but it has the same deft characterization. Plus, cool cartoons.

So, based on this -- if I were buying for a young reader, I'd happily pick up anything in the Judy Moody series, and I'd give the Tiara Club a miss.

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We were having a chat in my room about managerial buzzwords, like "synergy" and "paradigm". (Did I mention we've managed to cram another person in the office? So now we have eight I.T. people in a space that might hold three artists. I just hope the air-conditioner holds out.) One of the people in the room had a story about a guy he knew who was basically the IT guy that salespeople had to talk to, and who amused himself by telling the sales reps that he didn't like the word "solution", and anywhere that they felt compelled to use that word, they had to say "potato", otherwise he wasn't prepared to talk to them anymore. Apparently it only took about five minutes before it became pretty natural to them, and the phrase "turnkey potato" came tripping unhesitatingly off their tongue. Say what you like about IT salespeople, but good ones are quite adaptable.

That's about it, I think. Oh, no news on the $$internet$$, apart from the fact that they've taken the money; I'm ringing them either tonight or tomorrow.

Internet$, Holiday, Wedding

Worst things first, so I can end this post on a upbeat note -- I just got a bill for $1018 in additional internet charges for last month, and when I rang up, it turned out that I'm already over my 5 gig limit for this month.

When I say "I", I mean "whichever of my flatmates who hasn't bothered to keep their laptop secure, and has been hosting a worm that has chewed through inordinate amounts of bandwidth". The fact that one of them just downloaded some big-ass movies wouldn't have helped. This means that I've done a number of things to reduce the risk of more charges, such as changing the password, restricting the connections to a list of particular MAC addresses, and (for the moment) turning off the wireless router. I'll be looking at the usage logs just as soon as I can find the bit of paper that has my ISP username and password, and I'll see if I can change my internet plan -- preferably retroactively, since it looks like I'm on an old one that doesn't exist anymore, and is significantly more expensive when it comes to going over the traffic limit than any of their existing plans

Unfortunately, this is one of the worst times this could have happened, money-wise -- I'm currently quite cash-poor, since I hadn't quite recovered from Christmas when I went on a two-week holiday at the end of last month, and I won't be getting paid until Thursday week... which I've just realized is the day after I need money in the account to pay for my mortgage. Argh. I hope I'll be able to recover some of this from my flatmates, and maybe talk Telstra into converting my account retroactively -- I think the charge would end up being $300-$400, instead of over $1k. Since I would have far preferred it if they'd simply stopped supplying a connection once I'd gone, say, $500 over my normal usage, and it's a defunct plan anyway, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me; but who knows.

Anyway, on to happier subjects.

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One of the artists did a fairly nifty thing -- they hooked up their DVD player's video to a projector and its audio to an FM transmitter, got a bunch of friends with cars to drive up and tune their radios, projected a movie on a big-ass screen, and made their own drive-in theater. If drive-in theaters were a good idea, this would be pretty awesome. As it is, it's still kinda interesting.

Speaking of awesome -- Garfield with Garfield's thought bubbles removed is a fairly startling example of how less is more, and that some things are funnier if you just let them be. And how about giraffes? Or rather -- Giraffes? Giraffes! -- a book full of "facts" that you never knew (because the authors made them up), like when giraffes arrive on the earth (five hundred thousand years ago, on a conveyor belt, probably from Neptune). Thanks to Dinosaur Comics and Questionable Content for pointing these things out.

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Lots of things have happened since I last wrote. For example, Kapcon has come and gone -- I ran the "looking after animals in Hollywood in the 1950s" game twice, with quite different results each time. The characters were an aging serials actor, the country hick, the aspiring actress, the shifty boss, the 50s housewife (looking to re-enter the workforce after her husband died in a regrettable pickle accident), and a character that the group made up -- the first was a failing screen-writer, and the second was a professor who lost his tenure due to suspected Communist affiliations.

Both games were good fun -- I'd say that the story we got for the first one was more satisfying (the screenwriter sold a script based on the last mission, where the 50s housewife beat the crap out of a bunch of gun-runners with a iron skillet; the aspiring actress ended up playing the housewife in the movie), but there was better use of the confessional, and more general craziness in the second (the aging actor was a Satanist, and the aspiring actress was a undercover government operative; also, dancing bears and pirhanas).

I re-ran the 40s soldiers game as well -- good fun, with plenty of zombie nazis in the first mission. The second mission was quite different, and turned, quite unintentionally, into a Kong pastiche; there was plenty of slapstick and running gags, and we ended with Moose falling off the ship after firing a rocket launcher at the escaped T.Rex they'd captured, and one of the soldiers being bitten on the butt by a giant sea snake, after which Doc commanding Private Greenhorn (who he had come to intensely dislike) to "suck out the poison". Good times.

I was also involved with the Victorian LARP. We started well, with a bunch of cool characters, some of whom were what you'd expect (Moriarty, Fu Manchu, Inspector Abberline, The Doctor), and some of whom were interesting twists (Ambassador Dracula as an easily sunburned amateur botanist who really needed some Transylvanian earth for his seedlings; the Count and Countess of Barataria, who were Oberon and Titania traveling incognito, poorly; the well-bred Artimesia Blastside, who was in fact the dread Piratica). I wish that the person playing Oliver Twist had made it -- I thought that making that character an automaton created by Fu Manchu to infiltrate the London underworld was pretty nifty.

Feedback about the game itself has been quite positive. I think it helped that we didn't have the game structured around key events or goals -- this meant that while one character might be important to several others, there were no real "key" characters. Oberon didn't care whether the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company continued, or whether the Ripper was caught, he just wanted to find the child he had sired and left behind in the mortal world; Lady Bracknell was much more interested in finding her diamond than helping set up a League of Gentlepeople to defend the British Empire, or foiling Professor Moriarty's evil schemes. Some plots were more public than others, but very few depended on each other, which I think helped to keep things interesting for everyone.

(One exception I can think of off the top of my head -- it was going to be much easier for Ernest Worthing to marry his beloved Mary, maidservent to Ophelia (who he had been betrothed to as a small child) if it was revealed that Mary and Ophelia had been swapped in infancy by the real Ophelia's nursemaid, whose daughter (now believed to be Ophelia) Oberon's child. However, this was not the only solution to the situation; for example, the girls had run away and were performing under an alias with the D'Oyly Carte Opera company, so they might have persuaded Ernest to do something similar, or Ernest might have appealed to one of his fellow Masons for help.)

Anyway, it ended on a very satisfactory note, with the Ripper being apprehended in the main ballroom; and plenty of people either managed to achieve their goals, or had a good time regardless. Using symbols on people's name-badges to indicate to those who needed to know who were opium users or Masons worked quite well, I think; and using obvious indicators on the badge to indicate Breeding, Style, Foreign-ness and Kickass-ness was apparently a big hit.

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I started a two-week holiday straight after Kapcon, and intended to travel up the North Island with C. Unfortunately, I had put my car into a panelbeaters (so it would be in excellent condition to drive Jenni around in for her wedding) and it hadn't been ready on the previous Friday, as they had said it would be. Monday was a public holiday, so I rang up on Tuesday... and they said it would be ready the following Friday. So, after humming and hawing, I drove in and explained the situation in person, and they agreed to get it finished by Wednesday morning. So on Wednesday, we set off... though not in the morning, for various reasons. Instead, we ended up traveling quite late in the day, and drove the five hours to Hatepe in one stretch, arriving after midnight.

Hatepe is halfway between Taupo and Turangi, a little collection of houses that people used to go to when they got tired from trout fishing. They're now more holiday homes, but it's still a lovely, relaxing place -- walking along the lakefront, swimming in the lake, strolling up the river for a picnic, looking at all the neat volcanic pebbles that are lying around. It would be lovely to just spend a month there, reading, walking, sleeping and doing nothing much in particular; unfortunately, I don't see myself getting an opportunity to do that in the near future.

We spent a couple of days there, and then went up to Auckland to visit my sister's house and boyfriend. (My sister herself was actually over in Paris, promoting NZ music.) We ended up watching several episodes of early West Wing, as well as going to Auckland Zoo, Borders, and visiting some of Celeste's family friends -- I'm not sure how, but I found myself talking to a couple of teachers about the roleplaying stuff that Morgue, Luke and I did for a class of primary school kids a few years ago, and some of the indie game stuff that's out there, and how useful it might be in the teaching context.

Next, we zoomed up to Kaitaia (in the far north), and then took a bus tour up to Cape Reinga -- this is one of the furthest points north on the North Island, where the spirits of the dead leap into the sea on their way to Hawaiki. I bought a few bits of swamp kauri (the oldest stuff in the world that's still organic: I now have a wooden breadboard that's made of wood 30-50 thousand years old, and that's from the more recent layer!), and we went to the regional museum. The curator was obviously very passionate about his work, and it was quite interesting to have a look around; they have the triple advantages of intensive Maori settlement, having the first European settlements, and being the place where kauri gum was mined. Their huge collection of kauri gum was very impressive, all amber and shiny; it's weird to think that its primary use was to be ground up for polishes and varnishes.

After that, we popped back to Auckland and did a bit more shopping, and then toddled off to Thames in the Coromandel, to visit relatives of C's. Then it was back down to Hatepe again for a day, and then off to Wellington, where we did the most terrifying thing in the entire trip -- a car-wash. Honestly, when you've got these huge pillars of metal zooming around your car, and you're worried because you can't fold back your wing mirrors, it's even scarier than Auckland motorway traffic -- and I found that plenty scary.

Next, off to visit the parents, and home to convert the car into something more appropriate for a bridal car -- which basically meant hauling out a week and a half's junk that evening, and giving it a good vacuum and a bit of a polish in the morning, before zipping off to my appointed location and waiting for the bridal party to arrive. I then ferried the stunning bride and bridesmaids to the Gardens for some photos, and then to the castle beyond the windmill where the ceremony and reception took place. The wedding was lovely, and touching, and just all-around good, and it was very nice to get to catch up with all the people there I knew. Kudos to Lee for an excellent and moving speech; and Jenni needs no kudos for her tiara or dress, since she knows that they're awesome. ;)

And then... back to work on Monday, despite it being a public holiday. Oh well, I need the cash anyway. :) And a fairly productive week it's been so far, too, once I got through all the email that piled up while I was away.

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Will I post more regularly now? Well, probably not until I get this internet nonsense sorted out. ;)