June 27, 2003
Non-Transferable
This membership is limited to current incarnation only. Any use of this membership in a previous or future life will result in the immediate termination of this membership and its benefits.
June 24, 2003
Sesquipedalian
The Eskimos are famous - perhaps apocryphally - for having forty words for snow. Cecil Adams once noted:
In my spare time I have been attempting to construct an Eskimo sentence in my basement, such as will be suitable for the season. I have not get it perfected yet, but it is coming along pretty well, and with a little work it might pass for the genuine article. So far I have: kaniktshaq moritlkatsio atsuniartoq.Since English was invented by, well, the English, one wonders whether it in turn has forty words for rain. Perusing a handy thesaurus, I was able to come up with only 12:When completed, this sentence will proclaim: "Look at all this fucking snow." At present it means: "Observe the snow. It fornicates." This is not poetic, but it is serviceable, and I intend to employ it at the next opportunity.
cloudburst, condensation, deluge, downpour, drizzle, monsoon, precipitation, rain, shower, sleet, spit, sprinkleOther than that there are a few dubious ones like mist (not really rain) or sun shower. (They also offered to take me to the 10 most popular sites for "rain", an offer which I have set aside for a fine day.)
Which is just my round-about way of noting that, irrespective of all the nice things I have said about Sydney's weather, it is raining again.
June 23, 2003
Ex Cathedra
This lovely cathedral with its wooden belltower was in, um... Wangaratta, I think.
Yes, Wangaratta.
June 22, 2003
June 21, 2003
Uh, Skipper?
I think the GPS is on the blink again...
(I think I may have been on this submarine once, back when it was still in service when I was in the Cub Sprouts. There's not enough room on one of these things to swing even the smallest and most uncomplaining of cats.)
Perfect Weather
We left Sydney at 5:30 AM on Saturday morning. Ignore everything I've said previously about how delightful Sydney is in winter: This morning it was cold, dark, wet, windy and generally miserable. (Of course, after we left it cleared up and turned into a delightful day. One of my colleagues described it as "beach weather".)
We, on the other hand, followed the miserableness south. By mid-morning, the rain had mostly stopped, the darkness had lifted, the wind had died down, and though it was still a touch chilly, we had otherwise perfect weather for a long drive in the country.
Perfect except for the impenetrable fog, that is.
Signing Off
I'm signing off now, hoping to catch fifteen winks before we set out on our road trip at five o'clock. (I didn't realise that there was a five in the morning. At least, not as a time where one wakes up, as opposed to stays awake 'til.) Then I'm off, and unless my WiFi card suddenly decides to work, you probably won't hear from me until Tuesday, when I will be presenting Pixy Misa's Big Adventure: Twelve Hundred Miles Sharing The Back Seat With A Two-Year-Old.
So's you don't get lonely (and taking the opportunity for a swipe at Orrin Hatch), here are some completely legal mp3s for you to download: Crunchy Frog Blues, What Dance Dance Kitten Did On Her Holiday, and Return of the Return of the Electric Ant. All are written by the brilliant [And modest. — Ed.] young composer, novelist, programmer and blogger... Uh, that is, me.
June 20, 2003
Midwinter Montage
As a change of pace, I thought I'd post some pictures I took on my way to work today. This is Sydney in the middle of winter.
You're not supposed to walk through here, but everyone does. The alternative is to climb three flights of stairs to the road above, and then walk back downhill until the roads join up again.
The Department of Lands building.
The Department of Education building. This is Sydney sandstone. The whole city is built on this stuff, and many of the older buildings are also built of it. When it's kept clean, it's a wonderful golden colour, particularly in the afternoon sun.
The State Library, which is just across the road from where I work. Sadly there's nowhere to stand to take a good picture of it unless you want to get run over. (This is the only photo I took with a significant degree of zoom. It's quite noticeable, isn't it?)
Two great big marbles. The guy on the right is holding a Grace Bros bag.
The Domain. This park is directly across the road from my office. Unfortunately, the street is in shadow and my camera couldn't quite cope with the contrast here. I'll try taking more photos earlier in the day. Just off to the left are the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Sydney Opera House, so there's lots more photos to take.
And a couple more that I didn't take this morning:
A waratah by night. The waratah is the State Flower of New South Wales. This example is in my brother's garden.
A hundred-foot tower made of sticky tape being destroyed by fire.
June 19, 2003
Midwinter Madness
I hate shopping for clothes.
I'm a guy, so I guess it comes with the territory. In fact, I hate shopping in general. Don't get me wrong: I don't mind buying things; in fact, I quite enjoy buying things. It's the process of shopping that wears me down. The problem is, I guess, that I don't want something like 99.9% of what is available in stores. I'm just not interested in pawing my way through 300 different items that I wouldn't take if they were free before I find want whatever it is that I'm after.
The ideal transaction for me would work like this: I walk into the store, which is clean, well lit, and is most definitely not playing rap music. Or Celine Dion, for that matter. I find what I want, clearly labelled and in plentiful supply, sitting on a shelf. I take it to the cashier, who takes my money and puts my purchase and my receipt in a sturdy bag. Then I take my goodies and leave.
Total elapsed time should not be more than five minutes.
I wear Levi jeans for a fairly simple reason: I can buy them off the shelf, and they fit. I know exactly which style I want, which colour (well, I'm willing to vary the colour), and my size. The Levi's store in Sydney's Pitt St mall delivers on this about half the time, which is significantly better than the odds I've found elsewhere.
Not today, of course. The mid-year sales are on, which means that the tables are piled high with dozens of identical pairs of 30-waist, 36-leg, indigo-grey bootcuts. (How the stores manage to land themselves with that sort of junk in the first place is another question entirely, and I'm not going to go into a discussion of focus forecasting right now.) Anyway, the Levi's store didn't have my size in that style in any colour whatsoever. Nor did Grace Bros. Nor did David Jones. (Though DJs did prove once again that some people will buy anything: Three hundred and nineteen dollars for a pair of jeans?)
Just Jeans don't even carry that style. Jeans West don't sell Levi's. (What?) They sell Jeans West brand. (Oh.) But they will sell me two pairs for the price of one pair of Levi 504s. They're a little long, but but this point I was willing to buy anything that had two holes at one end, one hole at the other, and a zip.
If there's one thing that's even worse than buying clothes, of course, it's buying shoes. About fifteen years ago I found a style of shoe that was comfortable, smart, hard-wearing and not too horribly expensive. Every so often my existing pair would start to look noticeably scruffy even to me, and I'd go to the store and buy another pair. Same size, same style, though sometimes I bought black and sometimes brown.
Unfortunately, the last pair I bought had had the hard-wearingness taken out for some inscrutable marketing reason, and they fell apart in short order. Scratch a decade and a half of shoe-buying expertise.
So here I am looking for a new pair of shoes, because the hole in the toe of my sneakers is starting to get kind of obvious. But it's not like you can stop at a random shoe store in the mall, immediately find something you like, guess your size right the first time and discover that they fit perfectly. And it's hardly likely that they'll be on sale at half price, and that the store will have a second, identical pair on hand...
I guess you can call me Cinderella.
June 18, 2003
Road Trip
I'm off on a road trip this weekend, and busy busy until then, so I don't know when I'll be blogging. On the other hand, I'll be taking both my notebook and my digital camera with me, so expect a serious update when I get back.
(Can I just add at this point that I love my digital camera? Point and click-click-clickety-click. OK, so two out of three pictures are duds. No problem, since I take ten times as many pictures as before.)
Meanwhile, The International Squirrel Conspiracy has further squirrel terrorism updates, and helpful notes on how you as a citizen can help.
June 16, 2003
Hello Polly Heater
The sky is blue, the sun is shining; there's a gentle breeze playing with the leaves in the trees. It's cool enough to wear that new jacket if you want to look stylish; warm enough to wear a t-shirt if you want to be comfortable.
Yes folks, another typical Winter's day in Sydney.
Last night, though, it was cold. Not cold cold, I admit, but still cold. So I turned my little heater on for the first time this year.
Ah. Blessed warmth. The smell of burning dust. Splut.
Splut?
No warmth. No anything, in fact. Click off, click on. Nothing.
The best heater in the district. It's so clean. Well, at least the dust is all burnt off.
So today at lunch time I went to Grace Bros. (for readers who remember that show, yes, it's real) and bought myself Poodle Hat, Spirited Away, Lilo & Stitch, and the new Bond flick, Halle Berry's Navel. Oh, and a heater.
This heater cost me $25. Now, late last year, just before Christmas, I gave up on my old air conditioner (which was also going splut, but would at least unsplut itself if you gave it a chance) and bought a new one. My new air conditioner works very well and I'm quite pleased with the purchase, but - how shall I put this - it cost a little more than $25. Not quite two zeroes more, but in that general vicinity.
So my question is - I did say there was a question, didn't I? No? Well, there's a question. My question is, why can't I buy a compact, efficient, portable, $25 device that cools my house rather than warming it?
Well, OK, apart from the Laws of Thermodynamics, why can't I buy such a thing? It's almost enough to make me want to move from the comfortable sub-tropics to one of those nasty places where frozen water falls from the sky at certain times of the year and no-one thinks it odd.
But only almost.
June 12, 2003
Poodle Hats
My colleagues at work returned from lunch today to taunt me with their copies of Poodle Hat. I have been somewhat paralysed the last couple of days and haven't had the opportunity to go out and purchase my own copy. Grrr! Oops, time for my meds.
June 09, 2003
Ow! Said the Blogger
Ow! Ow ow!
Last night my back was a bit stiff, which I put down to a long day at the computer fiddling with stylesheets. This morning when I woke up, it was OW.
Whoever designed the human spine needs a darn good kicking, that's what I say. I also say, OW.
June 03, 2003
Mandy Twain and the Vultures of L'hi
What do an international banking conspiracy, an ancient, floating Tibetan mountain by the name of L'hi (pronounced lee), a group of schoolgirl crimefighters with an irascible hidden leader, a train that doesn't appear on any timetable bearing the number plate MAD 06, a secretive group of assassins composed of misfits described as being "stillborn into society", a talking vulture, and an extremely badly-written play that was panned by critics fifty years before it was written have in common?
The inscription translates as L'hi hovers over everything. Actually, where I say hovers, it uses a word that also means bank and architecture and is a near-homonym in the original language for vulture.Answer: They interrupted my nap. Stupid dreams.In fact, there's another hundred lines of it, but no-one remembers the rest.
I wonder if the girls will rescue their kidnapped newest member in the next episode...
No More Busy Busy
Bills went out today, busy busy time is done for another month, and my life returns to normal. Ish. Normalish. Regular blogging will resume after my nap.
May 24, 2003
Where's the Lighthouse?
Spent a pleasant evening crawling around on the floor playing with my nephew Lionel. It's amazing how quickly kids grow up. I can remember not so very long ago he couldn't track you with his eyes when you moved.
Now, it's book at bedtime. Lionel pulled out his favourite, a sort of picture-dictionary. Open it to Toys. Where's the teddy bear, Lionel? No, those are building blocks. Where's the teddy bear? Good boy! Oh, next page? Okay. Fruit and Vegetables, Lionel. Where are the strawberries? Good boy! What's next? The Seaside. Where's the lighthouse? Good boy!
Admittedly, he has actually seen a lighthouse, which probably helped.
May 23, 2003
Out of Chocolate Error
I'm too tired to blog. I'm almost too tired to type. Blah. And I ran out of chocolate. Sucks to be me.
On the other hand... Uh, no, can't think of anything. Shoo! Go read Dave Barry or something. A book. Read a book. Dave also writes books. Good books. Funny books. But between him and Carl Hiaasen, I'm not likely to visit Florida until after it's been submerged beneath the rising waters of the ocean for a good long while. A coupla thousand years oughta do the trick.
May 21, 2003
Shop Until You Bop
Working at work today. Uh, that is, I went in to the office, after several days of working from home. Natually, I took the opportunity to do a little shopping at lunchtime. Two new D&D manuals (Fiend Folio and Races of Faerun), a new Rabbi Small book (well, new to the current reprint, anyway), the Sims Superstar expansion pack (which makes how many now? Six?), and the latest shipment from my Anime pusher, including new volumes of Fancy Lala, Inu-Yasha and Noir, and the first volumes of Please Teacher (Onegai Teacher) and .hack//sign.
I'll be writing more about anime now that I have my new Movable Type (yay!) blog with categories and stuff. Watch for it!
May 16, 2003
Grey Rainyness
Another grey and rainy day for Sydney, but it's expected to clear up by Sunday. Which would be nice.
Just in case it does rain all weekend, I went out and bought Buffy seasons 5 and 6, Futurama season 2, and Babylon 5 season 1 on DVD. (Grace Bros is having a sale on DVD box sets, hence the sudden splurge.) It looks like I've already watched most of Futurama Season 2, but at least now I have a nice high-quality version which I actually paid for.
May 14, 2003
I Think It's Raining Again
Water falling from the ceiling is a pretty good indicator of rain, isn't it?
May 10, 2003
May 05, 2003
Still Raining
At this rate we might as well unevolve back into fish. Or maybe just amphibians.
But there are many parts of Australia that are still in drought. Sydney is where it is, after all, because it does rain a lot here - relative to the rest of the country.
May 04, 2003
Barf Time
Not to mention the bout of food poisoning.
Very much not to mention the bout of food poisoning.
May 01, 2003
Mnglrglrflbl
It's that time of month again.
I work as a programmer in the billing department of a small phone company. Our bills go out at the start of the month. And we run a sort of just-in-time development process. And there are always changes to be made. So for two or three days each month I don't sleep.
Or blog, of course.
April 28, 2003
Brain Fried. Core Dumped.
I had an interesting an original thought last night that I wanted to share with you.
Unfortunately, I've forgotten what it was.
April 27, 2003
April 25, 2003
Two Long Weekends For The Price Of One!
So, just how often does Easter coincide with Anzac Day to give a three-day working week?
I'd work it out, but I think I'd rather take a nap.
April 24, 2003
Owwie
You know that headache you get just because you're tired? And all you need to do to make it go away is get some sleep? Only you can't sleep because you've got this headache?
I've got one of those.
April 23, 2003
And I Haven't Even Had Breakfast Yet
I have 20 impossible things to do before I go in to the office today, so I won't have time to blog.
Oh.
Oops.
April 22, 2003
Pixy Misa, Telecommuter
I'm working from home today. Yay me!
On a less cheerful note, I forgot to watch Buffy last night. Well, poot. And episode 10 is well and truly history as far as BitTorrent is concerned. Fortunately, Kazaa (well, Kazaa Lite) found it for me and is happily downloading now. Unfortunately, this is costing me, depending on how you want to look at it, $12, $60, or nothing at all.
I'm sticking with "nothing at all", thanks.
April 20, 2003
To Thai Or Not To Thai
Family dinner last night to celebrate my brother's 35th birthday. Since it was his birthday, he got to choose the restaurant, and as expected we went Thai.
I hate Thai food.
Probably because I'm a supertaster. Coffee tastes horrible to me (for all its wonderful aroma) as does pretty much anything alcoholic. I thought for years that wine was an acquired taste, until I learned that most people can't tell that it tastes nasty.
Anyway, everyone else in my family (with one exception) loves Thai Red Beef Curry. To me, it tastes like it's been boiled in dishwater. Some other dishes are even worse. We had a fish curry dish once - I'm not sure exactly what it was - that everyone loved so much that they ordered another serving. I had to restrain myself from spitting out the single fork-full I tried.
My nephew Lionel feels no such constraints. If he doesn't like something, it's gone. Of course, he's 18 months old and cute as a bug, so he can get away with it. Fortunately, he loves rice (though he wasn't too impressed with the saffron rice) and prawn crackers. When we'd finished our basket of prawn crackers and were waiting for our entrees, Lionel was eyeing the baskets of crackers being delivered to other tables. They're going the wrong way! Prawn crackers over here!
Oh well. The Massaman Lamb was actually pretty decent, as were the curry puffs. And rice is rice, so I didn't starve.
We had dessert at my brother's house - chocolate cake and coffee for everyone else; chocolate cake and hot chocolate for me. Mmm. Chocolate.
Oh, and remember my little internet rant, wherein I mentioned a company called Comindico? Turns out that my brother's company is a Comindico reseller, and he'll put me in touch with someone there. So I can hope to have real internet access soon! Fingers crossed, as I said.