Communal Crier
Latest topic on List-en: Is making racial jokes (without hostile intent to insult) alright?
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ShlitzMoved
Uncle Dennis (formerly De/nnis) – also facelifted and re-wallpapered :)
Latest topic on List-en: Is making racial jokes (without hostile intent to insult) alright?
New
ShlitzMoved
Uncle Dennis (formerly De/nnis) – also facelifted and re-wallpapered :)
Backwash seems to be a good name for an e/n site. It just… fits. You heard it here first :Þ
Optus is dogging everyone living in appartments. Their flat rate cable modem service will NOT be available for anyone living in an appartment block (or any other dwelling classified as a multi-dwelling unit, or MDU). Technical problems they cite. This of course knocks out a huge portion of their market (low 20 year olds). And you do know now that Telstra will be changing their cable rates to flat rates starting in April, right? That’s what competition does, folks.
Incidentally, I hope the ACCC vetoes Telstra acquiring OzEmail (Australia’s largest and second largest ISPs, respectively).
I must say this is one of the most original films I’ve seen yet. It’s a quirky movie (hmm I used that adjective on American Beauty too didn’t I?) based on the rather strange concept of people being John Malkovich. Literally. It’s pretty damn funny in certain parts as well. I’d recommend this film if you want to see something different, entertaining, and cerebral.
French Snowman sent me a variation of the hats riddle (a couple days back):
Three wise men were wandering along, argiung about who was the wisest. Then they encountered a fourth wise man. They asked him to set up a contest for them, to determine who is the wisest. So he showed them his bag, which contained 5 hats: 3 black and 2 white. Then he blindfolded all of them and put a hat on each. The hats were all black (to make the contest equal), but they of course didn’t know this. Then he removed the blindfolds, so each wise man could see the colour of the hats the other two were wearing, but not his own. The fourth wise man decalred “He who first correctly determines the colour of the hat he is wearing is the wisest”. After a short while, one of the wise men shouted out “I’m wearing a black hat”. If he didn’t guess (none of them would risk being wrong for fear of appearing less wise), how did he know?
Bonhomme de Neige
Well, sue me if I’m wrong, but I believe the wisest wise man either cheated or got lucky, cos I can’t see logically how he could say for sure he had a black hat.
While the identity confusion continues (those for E/N, those against, and those entirely apathetic), Atroxi.com deserves accolades for appearing on TV (regarding their realtime radio broadcasts). Yes, that’s a real, self-proclaimed (!) E/N site getting into real-world mainstream media. Congratulations Jeff & crew!
For next year’s “Year In Review”: Number of E/N sites mentioned on television – 1 (so far) I link to the story on the site.
– SMS from Atroxi
Just goes to show you can’t generalise the community. So, now how much weight do you accord to this statement?
So we get a community full of trash talking internet kids hopped up on the false sense of power that comes with your first taste of double-blind anonymity, IRC refugees now running sites that post pictures of fat chicks with irrelivant quotes under them, and miles of text trash talking other sites. All of this makes e/n very much akin to AOL chat rooms, and less of a weblog sub-genre.
I screwed up again and mis-URLed Wired Abuse. Forgive me, I’m tired.
Facelifted
Neoflux – Go see. It’s very cross-browser and cross-platform compatible.
“”Listen to what I say” “Okya, maybe I’ll lay by the bay, or eat some hay – I just may!”” –Ignatius Gunnarsson
“Hi. Wanna go pick up some hot females later? See-ya soon.” –Irish
Well now… I hope he’s talking about The Sims :) Just think what this game is doing to a generation of people that will become parents within a decade hehehe
Pip: kids are a needless drain of resources and adults time (they cant cook for themselves, dont have a job, fuck em) one kid in the dogg family i just walled up in a closet sized shack and watched him starve, piss himself repeatedly then die
Inferno: shit hahahah. aren’t you glad your parents aren’t YOU :)
Pip: damn straight
I was reading the Educom site a few days back, and I noticed this on their page about the “student boot camp“:
Results speak for themselves
Of the 12 students who completed EDUCOM’s Boot Camp beginning in January 1999, 11 have secured good jobs in organisations such as Optus, BHP-IT, Microsoft, AMP, State Rail, EMS, and EDUCOM. One has elected to pursue full time university by choice.
I wonder who that odd-person-out is – the one that “elected to pursue full time university by choice”? ;) This might help jog your memory.
I got screwed by cityrail again today. I had to wait 70 minutes for a friggin train. 40 minutes on platform 6, no sign of the train. “Passengers waiting for the train on platform 6 are advised to go to platform 1.” So I did. 20 minutes pass. “Passengers on platform 1 are advised the train will now depart from platform 6.”
And I wish the deroes that hang around train stations would PISS OFF. I got approached four times today for people looking for “loose change”. I swear, one day they are going to ask the wrong person, and that someone is going to slam them in the face.
Heheh… employees get “revenge” on management.
Uni starts tomorrow… and… and there’s no strike! How irregular.
The E/N Community is having a massive Identity crisis.
“We’re not e/n. I don’t know what we are, but we’re not e/n. We’re not anything really, we just post whatever we want to post and link to other sites that ‘probably don’t want to be called’ e/n. But we’re not e/n. We’re not a weblog either. Hell, we’re not even a journal even though journal is a real word and we sure look like one.” There are opinions flying left, right and centre about it on list-en. Strange that a community can’t decide what it is. Strange that they won’t even acknowledge there is a community. Identity crisis indeed.
Apologies to Uptohere.net, which I screwed up and linked as Uptothere.net.
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Conspiracy
FTG
“Hey man, good work on the new header graphic. I like it lots. Later.” –Justin R
“That masthead really makes Campbelltown station look like a jail!” –Kev (not far from the truth – especially at the hour that photo was taken)
“<3 Stu” –TBA (WTF does that mean?!)
“Will you Lick My Chocolate Salty Balls?” –Gimpy Ho (with the sexual comment of the day)
And via email from kini: “loving your work and loving the pic of campbelltown station :P”
Dammit, wish they had this in Australia :) Ratings would soar, no doubt heh.
A quirky movie that started off very strangely, compounded by the fact I went into this movie not knowing anything about it. I thought American Beauty was quite an exposing and probing movie, well written. It touches upon so many situations and emotions you can relate to. The types of which are nigh impossible to explain in words. All the director could do is attempt to portray them in such a way that the audience could connect with and relate to so as make them say, “Ah yes I know exactly what you’re trying to get at.” For example, I’m sure everyone at one stage or another has done something which has put them on a high (not the drug induced one! :). While Lester may have looked “pathetic” driving around singing to the radio after blackmailing his company, I could look past this and knew exactly how he was feeling. An interesting film with nice touches.
We know e/n and weblogs. Journals, in the more traditional sense of journals, are distantly related to them. A while ago I joined up with the antipodean-l mailing list – a list for Australian and New Zealand journallers. My site doesn’t really belong in there, but they don’t seem to mind.
Anyway, I was browsing Georgina’s site, Shimmer Like a Girl at work and was surprised to see a few paragraphs about me.
Tonight I was poking around Hear Ye! I know Stuart, vaguely, through antipodean-l. He’s doing BIT at UNSW. He has an MCSE. He has designed web sites and won various web site competitions.
He was born in 1981. Jesus. I feel old.
Stuart went to Trinity Grammar. I went there once, did I tell you? High school dance. Met a nice boy and we talked and walked around the grounds for most of the night. I have a funny feeling his name was Stuart too, actually, but obviously not the same Stuart. My Stuart and I were too shy to even hold hands, let alone anything else.
That was at least ten years ago. I feel very, very old.
G was born in 1974. I began in Trinity in 1989, 11 years ago. I hypothesise to say the high school dance would be about Year 9 or 10. I guess it’s not that much of a coincidence, but to think that a girl who came to a dance in the school I was in a decade ago, would be writing about me today (and vice versa). That’s the net for you. I have year books ranging back 11 years, and in one of them, there’s probably a picture of the Stuart she refers to. I wonder if G finished Year 12 in 1992 and the last name of the boy she met was Watkins.
If you are tired of making e/n rounds, especially if you are looking for a writings of a more personal and eloquent nature on the web, or just want to read something different for change, check out the journalling culture.
Thanks to all those who sent in correct answers to Thursday’s riddle (Loopy got in first) – you all have it right (mostly, anyhow)! Highlight below to see the answer:
Please note that the diagram displayed was an example. Thus, the correct answer is C, or D, depending on the exact configuration of hats.
Case 1: If B & C have hats of the same colour, D must have a hat of the opposite color to B & C. Hence, D calls out.
Case 2: If B & C have hats of alternating colours, D keeps his mouth shut since his hat could be either colour. However, after one minute, C realises D hasn’t said anything. Hence, B & C must have hats of alternating colours. C must have the opposite coloured hat to B, which he then calls out.
The above assumes that D is not retarded and suicidal.
No, A does not have x-ray vision, B is not a clairvoyant, and the executioner does not kick the bucket before the 10 minutes is up.
Impulse. Pure, un-e/n-adulterated design, by Wes and Rick of Techno Weenie.
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Funhouse
Up To ThereMoved
Wired-abuse
“Congrats, you’re off your Ps! Are you on silvers now? BTW sorry if you got this msg multiple times…P” –Phil (Yep, silvers. No, only got it once, so that’s cool)
“Bence is the man, and my computer sucks, anyone know a reason for it freezing once it gets to the desktop?” -Silverweed (yeah, you just said it. Because it sucks and it runs on Windows which isn’t exactly renown for stability)
“Jesus Christ!” -Dennis, reaffirming his faith. Or denouncing it.
Mofo dropped in another stupid message to do with skulls, knives and … yeah.“hehehe…..i made the screens flicker!!!” –Shaf
“teehee…..i made them flicker again!!! This is fun!!!” –Shaf, having too much fun, 30 seconds later
Since I wasn’t at Aspect, but onsite at a client site in Chatswood, I sent an SMS to his mobile telling him that.
“Damn! Have to get you while you’re in the office next time! Hehehe, my screen actually flickered before I got your SMS.” –Shaf
Ah.. sweet revenge :)
“And I’m on a coffee break…hence the web-surfing…With the amount of work they’re piling on me now, I envy those who are bored..” –Shaf again (bloody long coffee break if you ask me)“Another good book: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.” –Phil again
Shown above are 4 men buried up to their necks in the ground.
They can not move so can only look forward.
Between A and B is a brick wall which can not be seen through.
They know that between them are 4 hats, 2 x black and 2 x white, but they do not know which colour they are wearing.In order to avoid being shot one of them must call out to the executioner the colour of their hat. If they get it wrong, everyone will be shot.
They are not allowed to talk to each other and have 10 minutes to fathom it out.
After 1 minute:
Q Which one of them calls out?
Q. Why is he 100% certain of the colour of his hat?This is not a trick question.
There are no outside influences nor other ways of communicating. They cannot move and are buried in a straight line. So A & B can only see their respective sides of the brick wall, C can see B and D can see B & C.
I didn’t get the solution with the email, but I think I’ve worked it out. I’ll post the solution tomorrow. Mail me with what you think. Hint: it’s an exercise in logic, not lateral thinking.
How Lame can you get? The http://www.blazex.net/ guys ripped off Dennis’ wallpaper.
Ok the router failed to work. The place we went to, in Chatswood, was a firm that takes photos of appliances for company catalogs and stuff. They use Macs there. *Ugh*. And they’ve decided to not purchase any more PCs cos they claim macs are cheaper. *Shudder*. Anyway the Mac refused to co-operate with the AS/400. In fact, when it connected, it crashed and required a reboot. Right.
I like it how all the monitors at work start to flicker for a bit before I get SMSed.
“Gah, school fucking sucks.” –Silverweed
“Yeah,ah…i got those herpes you wanted…You mind if I bring them over to you tonight?” –Assman
“Mmm, Aussie-Os. Part of a complete Aussie breakfast.” –Phil
“so where are the applications for red dots? hehe, j/k” –Sung
“btw, you got my bad side in that pic =(” –Sung again (that was your bad side? I thought any pic with you with your shirt on was your good side :)
“GOD DAMN THOSE DIRTY APES!!!” –Wildebeest (eh?)
“Where can I buy Cadbury Creme Eggs in bulk? I NEED SUGAR!!!!!” –Phil again (just walk up to the counter at Franklins or whatever supermarket you go to, and grab the whole box of them hehe)
“I WANNA TOUCH YOU ALL OVER, AND OVER AND AGAIN UNTIL THE NIGHT GROWS EASY UNTIL THE NIGHT GROWS EASYYYYYYYY!!!” –Mofo
Right.
Finally. No friggin 80 speed limit for me anymore. License photo was dodgy as per usual.
That Netbank thing (see yesterday) is pretty nifty. Pay bills, transfer funds and check account balances. Which would be good if there was any money in my account. Very convenient. Also another thing you don’t have to get out of the house to do anymore, so your body can stagnate in front of the computer :)
Extreme-dm, the folks that provide the counter service are starting to annoy me. Their server is starting to go down weekly, on a regular basis.
Jabber is an open-source IM program, claiming to (in future) be able to access the ICQ, AIM, and other instant messenging services around. That’d be good actually – no need to have something like four IM programs open simultaneously.
Here’s a rarity. A serious episode centered around Quark. Quark goes bust and has to turn to weapons dealing to repay his debts. Quark works under the unpredictable Victor Maitland. Uh, I mean, Hagath. (Hagath is played by Steven Berkoff, who also played the bad guy Maitland in Beverley Hills Cop. The two characters are extraordinarily similar.) Just as Worf has been “infected” by Human ideas, Quark seems to have been “infected” by being around Sisko and crew for too long – a ferengi with a conscience is only half a ferengi. The writers handled this episode perceptively, and the resolution to Quark’s dilemma was credible, crafty, and not some “quick cheap/lucky fix” as we see so often. The O’Brien baby subplot was an amusing tagalong plot, showing no one’s forgotten about Kirayoshi. This episode is definitely solid.
“You so much as litter on the promenade and I will nail you to the wall!” – Sisko to a shaken Quark
Second opinion from Jamie:
beauty….
MUCH better than last week’s IMHO…
Hagath was just a *tad* too over the top in places. too homosexual to be totally creepy, too prone to outbursts to be Blofeld-ian
Here’s a list of IT companies that will float on the ASX in the near future. While the Australian stock market may be a little more sane when it comes to IT shares, they still seem to follow the same trend as the US. That is, up.
The new Palm 3c just got released. It sports an 8-bit colour screen, add-on (à la the Handspring’s Springboard) modules and PalmOS 3.5. I like. I think I might get it when the price starts to fall a bit. They also released a “full-sized” keyboard that folds up to be the same size as the Palm unit itself. Now that sounds impressive.
I can’t believe I have to make it in to North Sydney by 7.30am tomorrow morning. Shite, I’m going to be a walking zombie. We’re supposed to be configuring a router and finishing up a network installation. On the flipside, I have a terrific view of the northern shores including the Opera House and some of the harbour bridge from where I am on the 11th floor of Aspect.
Additionally, I was surprised to see that Aspect got quite a good write up in the SMH yesterday from Graeme Philipson. I wasn’t really aware it was one of Australia’s largest private companies (although the LANSA division is being separated into a subsidiary company and will be floated on NASDAQ) with 1300 employees worldwide. However, it’s still true that they keep a low profile – they are virtually unknown. “Aspect? What do they do?”
I’ve said before that Napster runs on several separate servers, right? Napigator allows you to poll Napster servers (ping, number of users online etc.) and connect to any of them. Very nice.
Unmaimed
Aherdofturtles – That’s right, they’re back.
“YOU’RE DEAAAAAD SEXXXXXXXXY!” –sung
“The “Buddy Jesus” is tops. Catholicism WOW!” –Phil
I got bored today at work, so I happened to flick over to sung’s webcam. He was performing what can only be described as an acrobatics demonstration with a piece of paper reading “wired-abuse” in his mouth (aka a strip tease). I shot off a mail to list-en and got a reply from a shocked Sung, followed by an sms reading, “i know you liked it inferno, DONT DENY IT!” Sung stopped somersaulting around the room and I got him to replace “wired-abuse” with “Aussie! Oi!” but something got lost in the translation from “Australian” into “American” and a sign materialised behind him reading “Aussie!!!!! O!!!” Aussie-O? What is that, a breakfast cereal? Oh well, can’t ask for too much :) Cheers to Sung for amusing me for a while today hehe.
Chars without spaces: 8882614
Chars with spaces: 15897833
Seems odd unless your messages are one character one space ;-) thats around 70 thousand spaces.
Outsider
Well, when ICQ exports to a plain text file, it indents lines in messages for alignment purposes – with spaces. Hence, the tonne of spaces. Try saving your message history and you’ll see what I mean. I word counted the dump as ICQ dumped it.
my icq history is *NINETY* mbs. put that in your aussie pipe an’ smoke it BOY!
:P
haha. *sigh* im a living joke. =/
TeeBs [TBA]
I guess that’s what flat rate cable does to you. I know if I had access to Optus’ cable service (which still hasn’t been released?) no one would see me for a whole week :).
The CBA have been running their netbanking ad campaign for a while now, so I decided to give them a call tonight. They told me my online account will be activated 8am tomorrow.
See, this is what happens when you don’t give uni students on industrial training enough work to do. They go and open their own e-commerce store.
Hey Stu,
was surfing (not working) and found this interesting site. It goes thru steps and ‘builds’ u ur own ecommerce store (shopping carts …) and then allows u to customise it. People can surf to ur site and actually buiy stuff..if they do u get a commission!
vstore.com will probly explain it better
anyways u can check out my sites and buy away hahahhaha
http://easy.vstoreelectronics.com
Pete
Now stop trying to make money and get back to your password authentication work, Pete :)
* This post is in no way related to Sausage software’s eBusiness in a Box
Moved
Not A Satisfied CustomerWebcammed
Sungs
Blatz asks, What the Hell is E/N?
Not a bad appraisal of the community breakup. I don’t agree with BLATz’s definition of E/N, though, but since when have I agreed with anyone’s definition of it? :) The terms E/N and weblog are almost interchangeable. They are just run by two separate communities of people. That’s the most distinct difference.
The first in a long line of patches is out. It actually is a fix for games compatibility (all oldish games, unfortunately).
This comes from an article where scientists are culturing neurons and recording and analysing the signals they generate. It’s a pretty incredible statistic:
In the meantime, his virtual-rat project faces a number of technical challenges, such as how exactly he’s going to pull patterns out of data streaming in from his dish of neurons at 2.3 Mbytes per second, per channel – enough to max out a multigig hard disk in one afternoon. If you were using the same technology to record input from every neuron in a human brain, you’d get 150 million Gbytes of data per minute – enough to fill a 194-mile-high stack of CD-ROMs in 60 seconds.
That’s 1 Exabyte every 400 seconds (6.5 minutes).
Some underchef-in-training working in the Queen’s kitchen got sacked for making comments on how easy it would be to poison the Queen with cyanide. I wonder what punishment would have befell her if this was a few centuries ago, when the monarchy still meant something? Hung for treason :) Now, she’d probably sue for unfair dismissal.
Ok no one helped out with this one (it was a pretty obscure problem, after all), so it was down to some good ol’ Holmesian deduction and detective work on the web :). Google is a brilliant search engine for things like this. Web Forum posts always disappear, but Google caches them all even after they have been deleted from the server (how big is their cache?!!!) and I found some old posts that helped me solve the problem. I had to add a socks.cnf file to the C:WINNT directory, containing the IP and subnets which should not use the socks server. Secondly, I had to mod the Netscape prefs.js file to tell it where to find socks.cnf. Works well now.
Interesting that I didn’t seem to tread on anyone’s toes with that post on Dogma. All I got was one strange comment about it:
Mass genocide is one of the most physically exhausting task’s one could engage in….. next to soccer.
:)
grendel
One more masthead, courtesy of sonic. Viewable here directly. Thanks mate!
My message database file for ICQ is 60 megs. I got curious. I wanted to know just how much I used ICQ in the last 18 months. How the hell did the message history grow to 60 megs? So, I saved the entire message dialog archive to text file (which took a good 15 minutes in itself), and opened it up in Word. As a result of the 120,000 icq messages exchanged over the last year and a half:
Almost 2 million words?!
That’s an average of 15 words a message and over 200 messages a day (assuming I get on ICQ every day, which I don’t, so the message/day count is likely to be higher). That’s very scary. I’d expect that ICQ forms a greater part of our daily communications than one may think. Now, multiply this by the number of people using ICQ in a day, and I wonder how many messages fly around the world? Add e-mail, other IM programs, newsgroups and real-time chats to this and … yikes. Incidentally, I think there was an estimate, that if every word man had spoken since we could speak was shoved into a text file, it would be 5 to 6 exabytes (EB) big. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes.
There are some quite nice titling fonts at http://www.1001freefonts.com/
“WHAT IS THE HIGHEST SCORE YOU GOT IN DOPE WARS? ANIMAL SEX!!!!! YEAH FUCK YOU!” -Mofo
“that 140gb cd thing is supposed to be bs, it was posted on slashdot ages ago and got ripped apart” -Gandaffi
Added a couple more Hear Ye! mastheads. If anyone wants to make 475×125 title jpegs for this site, feel free to mail them in to me.
Will people stop referring me to AllAdvantage! I joined up last April! Get lost you people…
Ok maybe Dogma deserves a longer comment than, “funny shit”. It’s interesting the uproar this film caused with some Christians. I didn’t see the film as being anti-Christian, or offensive, either. For the record, I am Christian myself. One of the primary issues this film raised is how insitutionalised the Church and religion is. The film, after all, is called Dogma, and it does attack dogmatism amongst the religious – the unability to change views and beliefs, and the unwillingness to even re-evaluate things. The film cleverly put up some ideas that would be considered blasphemous (Alanis Morrisette as God? I think everyone would find that offensive :) which I reckon had the deliberate intention to provoke. The effect to some was immediate outcry against it. It provoked people alright – those, who due to belief and faith ingrained over decades of being Christian, condemned the film. These people aren’t necessarily bad people, it’s just the dogma coming through. As a corollary of this, the film attacks the idea of denominations (and not just Catholicism, which probably was singled out due to its long lineage and established traditions). I find the idea of so many splinters amongst a group of people who essentially have the same belief, troubling. The idea of denominations is a big turnoff for those who are thinking of become Christian. As a result of this, my idea is that you don’t have to belong to a denomination to be Christian. Faith is something you discover yourself – your interpretation of the Bible. You don’t have to believe everything your church leader preaches. Try figuring things out for yourself, and when you do, don’t impose those views upon others. I mean, the Protestants are a “faction” that broke away from the “mother church” of Catholicism because they had ideas that differed. That is, the original protestants had re-evaluated their faith instead of blindly prescribing to the Catholic one. They overcame dogma, in that respect. How things have changed.
Today, the idea of the Church ignoring the idea of a universe where Earth wasn’t at the centre is pretty ridiculous. How easy it is to look upon things in hindsight, yet be so blind (or at least inflexible) in looking at things right under our noses.
“as long as your disk is still spinning, Lost & Found can locate and recover almost any file, anywhere on your disk” My cousin repartitioned his hard drive the other day. During the process, Partition Magic hung. 11 Gigs of data disappeared. Of course, this data wasn’t actually gone – the master boot record simply didn’t acknowledge the partition the data was stored in. Then he loaded in PQ Lost and Found. Tada… the data reappeared. So, if you need a program to recover data from a hard drive crash, this is it. Finally, isn’t it interesting that the company that sold the software which screwed up the hard drive in the first place, has software – for sale – to fix it up? Ooh… conspiracy theory…
Ciphon wants to let all know he’s decided to let the public post to his site.
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POM
Wow, some people look like they may be more bored than me :)
David (in 4 parts)
“In my com eng tech class today I had to mess around with and get a 486DX4 machine with Windows 3.1 up and running. ((shudder))”
“And what’s worse, it was only a 486DX4 because of a freaking overdrive processor, probably like a 286 running underneath that POS.”
“And, I think I screwed up my first message. It is supposed to be comp eng tech, standing for Computer Engineering Technology.”
“And . . . just kidding, I really dont have anything more to say right now. Hmm, actually I just did say something else.”Sung sang: “Win2K is out today. Thats my poetically inclined form of greetings.”
Inconsiderate Bastard, is. “Skip the rest of work and update the page!”
Babylon 5? Pffft :Þ.
I was watching DS9 and man did that episode bore me until i saw a really cool plot development in the making When odo was told that the Blone chix memories where stored in the chip I though she will give the chip back to the two bad guys and there fore securing her freedom but loosing her past life.
Another thing why did That sydicate memeber want that god damn chip its not like it would of benifited him.
Oh well
God i miss babylon 5
Aureal finally released drivers which support EAX for the Vortex 2 chipset. Time to get some EAX on my MX300 :). Grab them here.
I’ve been running Win 2000 Advanced Server for a few weeks and the o/s still hasn’t crashed on me. I like. This sucks, however.
Does anyone know of any currently on the market? MamboX looks pretty schmick, but are any “big name” companies producing them? And what about in-car MP3 players?
Fluorescent Multi-layered Disc ROMS (FMD-ROMs) promise to hold up to 140 GB of data onboard a 10-layered disc that looks like a transparent CD. Second and third generations of these technologies are slated to hold up to a spanking Terabyte of data. This company developed the technology. Yahoo article.
They’ve got a logo for it now. It looks more… “techie” and not so medieval.
“You mean, you’re part black?!” Funny shit :).
Here’s a parody of Meredith Brook’s Bitch. It’s Chris Franklin’s Bloke [3.7MB]. Probably more specifically – your typical Aussie bloke :). Although it actually made the ARIA charts, it’s unlikely that it’ll make US charts (I could be surprised, however). This means that you Yanks and Canucks would be missing out, and we can’t have that can we?
I’m a labourer by day
I piss up all me pay
Watching footy on TV.
Just feed me more VB
Just pour my beer and get my smokes and go away
Ok I have a problem I have to fix up at work. It regards bypassing proxy servers for intranet addresses. We’re using a SOCKS Proxy to access the Internet. However, you can’t use a proxy to access sites on the intranet because of the firewall, so you have to bypass the proxy to get access to them. In Internet Explorer it works fine, just stick the internal addresses in the “exceptions” box and it doesn’t try to go through the socks proxy. In Netscape the feature seems to be broken. A bug? Nah… can’t be… not for Communicator 4.7. So after puzzling over the problem for a couple hours I have come to the conclusion that the “bypass proxy for these addresses” only works if you have set a HTTP proxy server – it doesn’t work for socks servers (in Nutscrape, anyhow). Can anyone confirm or deny this for me?
What is it? Birthday month? Happy B’day to Theseus Pink Dot :)
Moved
Toxygenet
Wired-abuse (*cough*)Facelifted
Sungs
“If Train A leaves New York at 2 and Train B leaves San Fran at 1, When will Bence get laid?” –Assman
“Wooohooo!!!!! Another Hi-score on Dopewars – $36,393,592….yes, as you can see, I’m still addicted to this game ; )…..” –Shaf (pimp and drug dealer extraordinaire)
“Can my dot be purple??” –kirameki (look, I don’t even know who you are, but I’m not trying to turn the sidebar into a rainbow)
“I hope this is not . . . Chris’ blood! <— Resident Evil quote with really bad voice acting” –David (who gets the award for most out of context quote of the day)
Alternatively titled, Odo Gets Laid. Ok, not really, but it could be. A somewhat derivative episode, but since the subject it is being derived from is sound (first love, at long last), it doesn’t turn out too bad. It’s nothing exciting either (I can only take so much of a topless Odo. About half a second. I think a 5 minute scene is … ugh). Probably Bashir’s comments rang through and true in getting Odo to dispense with his inhibitions, and the gossip scene was a nice touch :).
Second Opinion (from Jamie):
a simple investigation is one of my most hated episodes.
here’s my ‘review’ ;)
Pure gutter trash from beginning to end. Stilted dialogue, poor plot. I pity Rene Auberjoinois who just looked so uncomfortable delivering his lines. They spend all this time developing Odo’s love for Kira and suddenly he has this fling with some dumb-blonde alien-of-the-week. Insipid stultifying dross – i’d rather stick my head in a fusion reactor than watch it again
Yeah, I agree with that, but I don’t judge it so harshly. Auberjoinois (how do you pronounce that anyway? Orber-jon-wah?) looks uncomfortable delivering his lines, yes, and this works well for the first part. But once he overcomes his inhibitions, it no longer works for him. Also, notice in the gossip scene, Kira is detectably bothered by the (true) rumour of Odo having successfully found a love interest (it seems the writers haven’t forgotten about the Kira-Odo relationship). Interesting.
As reported by today’s Column 8:
THANK YOU Ms S. Karene Witcher, staff reporter of The Wall Street Journal, for your contribution to the world’s knowledge of Australia with a recent front-page article about the dangers Olympians and Olympic visitors will face. Olympic Ideal: Make Sure Those Sharks Don’t Score a Goal says the heading. She discovers “the bull shark” waiting in Sydney Harbour to dine on a triathlete “with a worldwide TV audience of 2 billion people watching”. Australia, she says, “seems to hold many of the most dangerous and venomous creatures on Earth. She lists the box jellyfish, the blue-ringed octopus, the stonefish, killer cone shells, and “the most venomous sea snake known to man”. Add crocodiles, “most of the globe’s top 10 toxic serpents”, the redback, the white-tailed and the funnel-web spiders … but she didn’t list the baby-eating dingo. Phew.
Combine this with an e-mail I got, and it makes me wonder what kind of people are going to be in Sydney come September. Damn Yanks :)
This may confirm everyone’s desires to be as far away from Sydney as possible during the Olympics……then again, it could be fun to be around offering friendly assistance to our friendly visitors….
I hear that all Australian women are beautiful. Is that true and if so, can you send me pictures of the available ones? (Italy)
I want to go swimming at Bondi Beach on October 20th. Will I turn blue?(Germany)
More likely brown.Will I be able to see kangaroos in the street? (USA)
Yeah, Hume Hwy, Pacific Hwy, Sturt Hwy etc, not so much in, but on.I want to walk from Perth to Sydney – can I follow the railroad tracks? (Sweden)
Why not ? But if you jog you’ll get there quicker.My client wants to take a steel pooper-scooper into Australia. Will you let her in? (South Africa)
Yes, but we do have flush toilets.Are there any ATMs in Australia? Can you send me a list of them in Brisbane, Cairns, Townsville and Hervey Bay? (UK)
Where can I learn underwater welding in Australia? (Portugal)
Tasmanian waters or the Great Aust Bight would be a good place for someone of your obvious well endowed intelligence.Do the camels in Australia have one hump or two? (UK)
Depends how amorous they feel.Do you have perfume in Australia? (France)
A very good one is AustralisCan I wear high heels in Australia? (UK)
Yes, and are you a natural blond?Do you celebrate Christmas in Australia? (France)
Yes and Easter too.Are there killer bees in Australia? (Germany)
No, the killer wasps eradicated them.Can you give me some information about hippo racing in Australia? (USA)
NoAre there supermarkets in Sydney and is milk available on all year round? (Germany)
Yes, and unlike Europe, it’s drinkable too.Please send a list of all doctors in Australia who can dispense rattlesnake serum. (USA)
None, you’re a walking deadman.Which direction is North in Australia? (USA)
Up.Can you send me the Vienna Boys’ Choir schedule? (USA)
Austria dickhead, Austria.I have a question about a famous animal in Australia, but I forget its name. It’s a kind of bear and lives in trees. (USA)
I have a serious question about you too.I was in Australia in 1969 on R+R, and I want to contact the girl I dated while I was staying in Kings Cross. Can you help? (USA)
Is her name Huckstedd, then see a Mr McPherson.Will I be able to speak English most places I go? (USA)
Everywhere, but keep your mouth shut, you are obviously a fool.
A couple days late, but happy 1st b’day to BAMF.
New
Electric & Co.
Kane of Nod’s Web Dominion
SML
Strong Like Bull
“Meza Lika Da CRACk” –Wabut
“hehe…nah, they caught me trying to smuggle boatpeople in again…they arrested me while i was down at “The Lady Jane” ;) …” –Shaf (dammit Shaf, again?! hehe :)
Is that a PINK dot? Screw Theseus HE SUCKS take his link off he is whining like a fucking 2 year old. Tell him he is a dirty bastard and RAMBLINGS RULES!!!
RegBarc112
“Yeah, but this is the nineties! Oh, wait. No it’s not.”
This looks like a useful forum for digital art, especially scanning hand drawn works and using the computer to touch them up. *sigh* If only I could draw…
Happy Birthday to Red Scare who finally attains the hallowed age of 18.
New
The House of Reign
“Hey there, you hot Australian hunk. Do you have the accent like Crocodile Dundee?” –Fallen Angel (No. Not that harshly ‘Aussie’, but go further inland and that’s where you’ll find people with that accent.)
Perhaps Japan would be a great place for Bence to move? :) Or maybe there are many people like Bence in Japan. What makes me say this? This report on Gamecentre.
One of the major factors I consider when order over the net is shipping/delivery charges. Especially if it’s internationally. Shipping can dramatically change the price of goods which would be otherwise much cheaper than purchased in a physical store. Combine this with the consumer caution (or paranoia, in some cases) about giving out credit card numbers, and there’s one thing that I hate about certain e-stores: That’s when they make you give your credit card number to them before they let you know how much your order costs, including shipping. This is a surefire way to turn people like me off a purchase. Sites like Outpost may have free shipping domestically, but to Australia – how much is it? I don’t want to have to put in my payment details before I know how much I am paying. I am aware that my credit card won’t be charged until I’m actually shown the shipping fee, but still it makes it more consumer friendly and psychologically comforting to put the exact total costs before payment details. In my opinion, this is a mistake made in many online stores.
New
Dorkorg
Far Side – this is incredible. Vaccine’s back. Problem is I don’t think many people remember him :)
Swoosh – part of the Ramblings World Domination NetworkMoved
The Evil Network
MoFo: PLUG MY ASS WITH A PENIS! PLUG MY ASS WITH A PENIS!
wrongforum: What the hell? You guys get summer while I freeze my pancreas off? Damn you. Damn your eyes!
Silverweed: i have stolen all of the dots, you will never get them back.
Cracky: Yo, my shakespearian quote has qualified for frontpage displayation, you whie-eyed muff-tuffet dOt
David: You know a couple weeks back, I went through and visited every one of the sites on the sidebar-that-could. It took forever.
sung: YOU STILL ALIVE MAN?
Dotless (Theseus): Ahh, a dot… A dot… The pressure, of a dot… Cindafuckinrella.Shaf: Get this: I saw an exact lookalike of you at the PNG Consulate. Only problem was that he had the wrong skin colour, <continued…>
Shaf Part 2: and wrong type of hair. But apart from that, he looked just like ya. Weird….you may have a long lost brother up in the…
Shaf Part 3: mountains of Papua New Guinea…hmmm….something to think about while at work…Yes… that combined with the practice of cannibalism in PNG put me in a ponderous mood at work. Shaf… what were you doing at the consulate again? Seeking asylum? They trying to deport you again? :)
And not SMSes, but words on the dotless:
Some miscellaneous AOLer: That loser doesnt deserve a dot… red white blue or purple (simpleminded)
Mike: SIMPLEMINDED DESERVES THE RED DOT. IF THIS HONOR IS NOT BESTOWED UPON THESEUS NOR HIS EVERYTHING/NOTHING SITE, I THINK YOU OUGHT TO KNOW THAT YOUR DESTINY INVOLVES YOU, A PIT OF IMMINENT DOOM, AND YOU FALLING INTO THAT PIT. love mike
Y’know, I don’t trust anyone who writes in All Caps, sends in HTML and signs the e-mail with “love”. Lamer.
Man, this movie is Fucked Up. The people that come up with this stuff are seriously twisted. House on Haunted Hill is basically The Haunting done correctly. It’s a shock movie, and shocking it is, especially when the theatre is shaking from the bass in time with your heart pounding. First movie I’ve seen with a scapel graphically slicing through a chest of a restrained, fully conscious person. That’s the opening scene. Probably the “best done” shock-horror movie I’ve seen, given the gratuitous nature of all of them. This movie is just as (if not more so), weird and graphic as Event Horizon. Anyway, if you’ve seen Stile’s site you should be fairly desensitised to it all. It’s “only” rated MA (I’d hate to see what warrants an R).
Great, no more testing. Testing is such a boring job. There’s virtually no room for innovation or creativity. When I do get a job in the IT industry I want to be either creating or managing something. No debugging, support, maintenance, testing or data processing. I start a 6 week stint in the technical services department on Monday, and although no one seems to know what they do, the mention of “RS/6000” and “getting my hands dirty with them” is promising :).
I’m also going to get booked in for free training to get the +Internet bit to my MCSE as well as upgrading it to the Win2000 track (the damn NT4 cert expires at the end of 2001).
Continuations from that Buffy article (see Thursday):
Monkey business: our place or yours?
Does this say something about the proliferation of PC and not-so-PC terms and new vernacular? Or something about SIT readers? Or maybe about the level of smut and innuendo which has been known to pass across this page? Whatever it is, yesterday’s piece on the new sexual orientation of a main character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer prompted quite a few inquiries. Specifically, readers were intrigued by Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s explanation beginning with “Yes, Willow is becoming a monkey owner”. What is a monkey owner, they asked, clearly suspicious that this was one of those new terms they should know about. We thought it was just a joke, so we can’t help. Maybe some of you can point us in the right direction. Write, e-mail or call us with your definition/explanation of a “monkey owner”. The best suggestion may well earn a prize. [source]If you pay peanuts, you get …
Yesterday we asked for definitions of “monkey owner” – as used by Buffy creator Joss Whedon when talking about the show’s lesbian sub-plot … given so many readers assumed a double or triple meaning. We will run the best ones next week (so e-mail or fax your ideas in today), but here’s one from Nicole Webb of Impact Communications. “We got onto the only person who would know the answer to your question … Tim Scott, the editor at the Picture magazine (our client!). He says the answer is `quite obviously an organ grinder’ (makes sense now, huh?)” Nicole, this may be true, or it may say more about your client than is safe to know. [source]
Come on… someone’s gotta know. This is the e/n community we’re talking about after all…
Hey there are chicks posting on Ertari and The Soapbox. Since when did that happen?
Also, 22nd Birthday Greets to Solo!
New
aw snap
endo locusta credo
Matt’s Pad
The taunting continues…
“having a red dot rules. i feel sorry for those that dont… :)” –Solo
“With Liberty, Justice, and Red Dots for all.” –Ignatius Gunnarsson (eh??)
“Yo, I lost my ICQ list, so send me a message so I can re-add ya. Ya prick.” –Theseus
“Hmm… If i were a red dot… Where would I hide… Oh yeah, up inferno’s aussie ass” –Theseus again.“I didn’t make the three figure mark! OH THE HUMANITY!” –Phil (I guess that’s what happens when you get older… you get less money :)… see yesterday’s SMSes)
“Would weed smell as weed if it were a sweet rose?” –Cracky (his nick says it all)
“in quebec, often, for lunch we eat french fries with gravy and cheese curds. yum. have a good lunch.” –TBA (Canadians… so civil. What the hell are cheese curds?)
It was bloody hot on the train today :/ Couldn’t sleep, either, got too sweaty… just one hour of oppressive heat. Then I got to back to Campbelltown and by late afternoon, the car’s a furnace, and its airconditioning is broken. Of course, all winding down the windows does is get hot air blown in my face.
New World Computing is churning these titles out one a year… way too quickly for RPGs. MM8 is scheduled for release in Autumn. Interesting though, in this one you can have vampires, necromancers and dragons in your party. See IGN’s preview.
An excerpt (the prologue) from the new Raymond E. Feist novel is available for viewing here. The book isn’t out yet, but it will be the concluding novel in the second Riftwar trilogy.
Solo, take note :) As seen in the Stay In Touch section of the SMH today:
Buffy slays a stereotype
Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans listen up: in the next season, Willow goes over to the other side. And we dont mean the vampires and assorted demons who flock to Sunnydale. The girl who two seasons ago couldnt get any boy to play hide the witchs wand will, in the absence of the occasionally overly hirsute Oz, find love and a whole lot of affection in the arms of another woman, another witch even, called Tara.The shows creator, Joss Whedon, broke the news on a Buffy online chatroom recently. “Yes, Willow is becoming a Monkey-owner. I just hope we dont get a lot of protest from Christian Right groups over this. Marginally more seriously, Willow and Tara’s relationship is definitely romantic. Thorny subject; the writers and I have had long topics about how to deal with the subject responsibly, without writing a story that sounds like people spent a long time discussing how to deal with it responsibly.
“To me, it feels just right … and this feels like the natural next step for her. I can only promise you two things for sure: wére not going to do an Ally [McBeal] or Party of Five in which we promote the hell out of a same-sex relationship for exploitation value that we take back by the end of the ep, and we will never have a very special Buffy where someone gets on a soapbox and … oh, I nodded off for a moment there. I just know therés a sweet story there that would become very complicated if Oz were to show up again. Which he will.”
Oz + Tara + Willow = Gee I wonder… I’ve never heard of the term monkey-owner… that’s certainly a new one to me.
New
Sunshine Bandits (as opposed to bandits of the place where the sun don’t shine?)
The Tentacled Whisperer of Impossible Secrets (henceforth abbreviated to TWOIS)
Theseus, ever diplomatic: “Have a nice day, and gimme a red dot you f’ing aussie bastard.” and ever quirky, “IT WASN’T ME, IT WAS THE ONE-ARMED DOT!”
Silverweed asks, “if everyone is entitled to a dot, what do you get if you are really good? (just wondering)” to which I reply… a different coloured dot. Yes, discrimination due to colour. Sue me.
Solo caught me on the train this morning with: “in your words, WAKEY, WAKEY!!!!”
Sung seems to have a problem with gender identification when he sent, “you’re a MILF inferno.”
Phil wonders about my financial haul, “Did you manage to pass the three-figure mark ($$$$) this Chinese New Year’s?” To which I say, no, I only reached three figures. Four would’ve been very nice though :) How was your roundup?
MoFo, resident (impotent?) sexual maniac screams: “VIAGRA ROX ME VIAGRA ROX ME VIAGRA ROX ME!!!!!”
Halcyon, with more on weather: “Freezing weather in the US? Nah… come down to Texas. It was almost 70F today. 110F is hot? Nah… an average summer day here. :)” I have relatives in Texas. Last time I was down there in Winter. It snowed. It was freezing. So I guess you’ll have to wait a few more months before things start to warm up :)
(11:30pm) 23:30:00 Tue Feb 08 2000 in US/Eastern converts to
(3:30pm) 15:30:00 Wed Feb 09 2000 in Australia/Sydneyhttp://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc
Sorry. :) I posted it on the page in lieu of e-mail.
Atroxi
TREK’S BACK!!! WOOHOO! And we kick off another round of weekly reviews… I can just hear you groaning in joy. Tough. :) Oh, and cheers to Noddy for reminding me just in time!
This episode covered issues unerringly similar to the ones in the cyborg article, above. Genetical engineering and the morals behind it, and of course the underlying premise about a parent’s concern for their child. Genetical engineering is indeed scary, simply because the benefits of it can’t be given to everyone. In a world where the gap between rich and poor is already cause for concern, a new “genuinely” superior race could cause a helluva lot of problems. Same could be said about cybernetics, too.
Plenty of humourous moments in this ep with the dart scene capping it off! And what can I say about Zimmerman at the end? Burrrrrrned! That would’ve hurt… just as much as mixing the Kama Sutra with Klingon sex would I’d imagine (don’t worry, you would have had to have seen the episode to understand). Cool episode.
Classic Line (when heard in context): “It’s just a minimum security penal colony in New Zealand”
Here’s a very interesting read in Wired. It’s about a cybernetics experiment, attaching an implant to a nerve bundle which records and can “play back” nerve signals. The theory is interesting – if you play back “artificial” electrical impulses, will the brain interpret them in the same way? Will you be able to transmit emotions and thoughts through the air like we do with data nowadays? Later in the article it starts to get philosophical about a society of cyborgs. Now that to me is just plain scary. Not only because he talks like a science-fiction writer would in a novel, but because he has the scientific knowledge that makes such a scenario a possibility, and not just a dream (or nightmare, depending on your point of view). I mean, scientists just discovered a chemical or gene that inhibits neural re-growth (like how your spine will not regenerate itself if broken). They’ve managed to re-enable it, and consequently, spines in lab rats have reformed and restored motor capabilities. Incredible stuff. However, when you move out of the realm of medical applications (like injury recovery) and into worlds where speech is almost obsolete, that gets worrying. Or am I just old-fashioned, already? What’s your take on the article? How would a society of cyborgs make you feel?
Community radio announcement: Be sure to catch Atroxi Radio LIVE on Tuesday 11.30pm. I don’t know what timezone that is for, and he’s not replying to my mail, so just stay online all Tuesday night I guess :)…
New
asrnet
Gheto
Pants 2K
ToxygeNetMoved
PiratepeteFacelifted
Atroxi
Slightly North of Tomorrow
Sungs Roosh – coming very soon. Preview courtesy of BD. Looks schmick. Wonder what it cost?
Jonny says, “hi”
Chibi Knt relates an anecdote, “I hosted an Australian for my school once. Now he calls everyone so often to burn me infront of his friends. I got him back. BWUAH”
*snigger* US weather isn’t very good, as Dennis lets me know, “110 farenheight, eh? I just washed my truck and the water froze on it. :)”
Theseus, dot stalker extraordinaire, testified under grand jury, “I DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH THAT DOT.”
Randal sends a test sms. Yes Randal, you, half a world away, did make my phone did beep four times.
Silverweed, who last time sent instructions on how to get a million dollars requests, “put up screenshots o whistler, you getting dis?” Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any on the net :/
Sodomist Mofo repeats numerous times: “ANAL SEX [etc.]”
Jonathan is trying to rewrite the e/n constitution, which as we all know doesn’t exist, because a constitution implies law and order. The e/n community, however, is virtually an anarchy. “We the people, of the United Sites of E/N, declare that everyone is entitled to a dot.”
Justin wishes me “a nice day”. Thank you for the only mundane, plesaant message I received from America. Too bad that phrase is a product of American consumerism and more often than not is said through habit than anything else. Not so on the web though – takes effort to fill out a form on the net (*looks at guestbook’s 4 new entries and wonders, don’t a few hundred people visit this page daily?*).
VMWare, the O/S emulator has released Betas of version 2 (for NT and Linux).
Tog of AskTog is not only a design guru, but he’s got some articles that make for good reading. Try Japan on $1,000 a day – a humourous and revealing account of a couple weeks in Japan, and A Night in the Cathouse for starters. I love well written travel stories (even stuff like Shlonglor’s trip to Vegas – anyone remember that?) – here’s another one of Japan again.
What an absolute pearler. Not only did the ferret bite his penis, it shat all over the car. HAHAHA. Ribbing? Yeah I’ll bet he got a ribbing :) His mates’ll be paying him out every waking moment :) We don’t get many ferrets in Australia.
Well it looks like someone got off their lazy ass and updated the site. Fissure.org, the domain that’s hosting me, updated its front page. Everyone’s listed now. It’s about bloody time.
New
Chaos Control
god is fiction
NumptyHead
Randomosity
Run In Circles
Sheer GeniusFacelifted
Operation: Freak
Roosh
“He who insults Heidi Klum must die. She is perfection, she is a goddess, she is *spooge* unf… ugh… unh…”
“..//…///..?@#./?#$$$%1@! <– the instructions to get 1 million dollers, really.” –Silverweed
“We the people, of the United Sites of E/N, declare that everyone is entitled to a dot.”
“Except those that are simpleminded or named Theseus.” –David
I installed Beta 2 of Millennium. It’s sucky, even for a beta. All the changes are under the hood. Even the GUI hasn’t been updated to match Win 2000’s niceties. In fact, it looks exactly like 98. The new features it has are inoperable. Hibernation dumps ram to hard disk on shutdown, and when you start up the computer, it reloads the ram back in and your computer reverts to exactly how it was before you left it (a very quick boot up time). It works like a charm on Win2000. For Millennium, It doesn’t. I’ve read everywhere that “rollback recovery” doesn’t work either (where you can reset your drivers and configs to a past setting in case something screws up). I got rid of millennium and put back 98. It’s stabler.
Anyway, the deal is Millennium is the consumer windows. It’s userfriendly, widely hardware and software compatible, and as unstable as the win98 we all know and “love”. Win2000 is a great system, it’s only bad point is that it is incompatible with some devices, and more importantly, fails to run games. Battlezone 2 and Swat 3 refused to start. Other than that, Win2000 feels rock solid, is very polished and looks nice.
The next version of Windows is code named Whistler (2002), merging the two MS o/s strands and dumping the rickety DOS code base. They are changing the desktop, turning it into something akin to today’s web portal, and rumour has it they are going to make the entire thing customisable (skinnable, basically). It looks awesome, frankly. I’ve seen faded shots of it in the newspaper, might hunt around the net for more.
Here’s a ZDNet article comparing the five major operating systems (no BeOS mentioned though).
Spanked the Pakis 2-0. Funny watching them slog it crazily in a mad chase for the Aussie total of 337 in the second finals match. McGrath got a 5 wicket haul and it was all over in about 35 overs.
What a scorcher today. 43ºC (110ºF). Now that’s Summer weather. Going to be the same tomorrow too. I predict a thunderstorm right after.
It’s the Chinese New Year today. It’s strange, I’ve lived in Australia for all my life, born and bred, so this celebration has next to no significance for me. Nonetheless I enjoy the occasions – the dinners and of course, Red Packets. It’s an asian tradition. In lieu of presents, you get “red packets”. Small red envelopes filled with cash. You give them out only if you’re married, and only to the generations below you. I’m not married, and a generation below me doesn’t exist yet. So I sit there and receive, and that’s why I make money off New Year.
This year is the year of the Dragon. Not only that, it’s a “golden dragon” year, which comes around every 60 years (something to do with lunar alignment… I think there are “13” months this year or something). The dragon is an auspcious sign, and to be born under a golden dragon year is especially so. But wait, there’s more. It’s the new millennium in western culture, so that’s another plus. Those Chinese are going to be screwing around like crazy this year. I guess they had to to have 1.2 billion people in one country in the first place.
Mum just blew the phone bill making a tonne of new years international calls back to Singapore (special deals from the telcos). Then she traded ICQ numbers with a friend there and I had to teach her the basics of ICQ. Do you know how scary it is to have mum chatting on ICQ? I tried her to get her to use the digital camera last night and she basically freaked out… I had to spend a couple minutes convincing her it was used exactly like a normal camera. :)
I think it’s time for another one of these. Please go sign this now. Thanks.
New
JB OnlinePlug
I’m going to plug Listen again. The ball has started rolling, there’s a fair few on the list, and enough messages flying about to warrant filtering the mail into a separate folder. It’s an E/N Community mailing list, for those not in the know. So, join up and be sure to post something introducing yourself!
Chinese New Year is Saturday… that means red packets… that means money :) Not sure I’ll have time for an update tomorrow. Sorry.
Only one more week in the testing department… and the new version of Lansa should be released in a couple days time too.
New
SynNetMoved
Sloppy Rage
Installed Win2000 Final on the other PC (while the physical CDs haven’t been released, Microsoft has made Win2K available for download to MSDN members, so the “final release version” actually does exist). Win2000 is pretty solid. It hasn’t crashed on me yet, and it’s quite pretty :). I stuck a copy of Cold Fusion on it. CFML is like cheating… it’s something that’s pretty easy to pick up, and it’s really powerful. Of course, you need a host that has CF on it to use it and there don’t seem to be a great number of them around.
“I can’t find anything weird on e-bay…except real human teeth cufflinks. yuck.” –G.Starr
“Do aussies ever give a shit about our Super Bowl? or our football in general?” –David
[No, not really… I mean you guys don’t care about the cricket or rugby world cups, or our AFL grand finals… Speaking of AFL, I bet most of you Yanks have absolutely no idea what it is]
“Bwaahahahahahaha! Haha! Ha!. =)” –Bonhomme de Neige [Snowman, from my scant knowledge of French. Il est fou.]
“check out www.iloveholly.com man she is hot!” –Alex GraettingerTheseus speaks, in a startling trilogy of SMS prophecy:
AND THE LORD SAID UNTO MAN, THOU SHALT NOT TAKE AWAY THESEUS’ DOT
FOR HE WILL STRIKE DOWN UPON THEE WITH GREAT VENGEANCE AND FURIOUS ANGER
AND KICK YOUR ASS, TOO
HTML 4 melded with XML Standards gives this.
Bitter, sour, sweet and salty. And MSG. Yes, scientists do believe there are tastebuds for MSG.
This excerpt, with a comment about Indian bandwidth, makes my whining about lack of download speed make me sound like a spoilt child:
Another key area for government policy and intervention is the capacity by which their country is able to interconnect with the rest of the world carriers. “India is connected to the Internet by only 6Mbps through four international gateways. While there is no limit to the number of independent ISPs and there is no licence fee to become an ISP, ISPs are obliged to go through VSNL’s international gateways for global connectivity.” (Raju, K. S. 1997). This fact will restrict the ability of local businesses in India to provide competitive services across the Internet, and the sheer issue of capacity and performance will deter many potential customers.
India, of course, has the 2nd largest population in the world. To think, you cable whores have more bandwidth than all of India’s international gateways, combined, had in 1997. Sourced here.
Doubleclick, that web banner advertising giant, has been under fire from people concerned that their collection of “demographic data” infringes on personal privacy. Their response is an “opt-out function” which disables their cookie. Crumble that cookie here.
And the last month of Summer :/…
| 24 days spent in current location | |
| Previously | Dallas, TX |
| » Currently | San Francisco, CA (4/5/24 2:16am) |
| View full itinerary... | |
10:30pm (GMT +10.00) 
