Varrqnuht.net

This is one of those meme things.

1.Go into your LJ's archives.
2.Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3.Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4.Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

“The other driver turned right from a straight-or-left-turn only lane, and she apologised and admitted it was her fault.”
- February 11, 2004.

That doesn't read very well when taken out of context.. I wonder how clear a sentence would be on average if you randomly selected one from an entry?

Lou had been talking about switching our bedroom and 'office' around upstairs, and she decided that Saturday was the day to get it done. I was a bit apprehensive about fitting everything in neatly, but I needed more room to set up the new computer so I went with it.

After about four hours of solid work (and moving every single piece of furniture upstairs) we managed to get it done. I'm really happy with the result - even though we have less room in the new bedroom it somehow feels less crowded, probably because there's less crap in there. And in the office I now have heaps more room, and both PCs set up on separate desks.

Wow, there's nothing more exciting than changing rooms, huh?

I put up a new user icon - this one shows off the crazy blue light streaming from the front of my new PC, and is also a slightly more up to date depiction of me in that it shows me without any hair. I shaved it all off a bit over a year ago, I think.

Work is going reasonably well at the moment, and although my current contract finishes in about 4 weeks they seem to think it's just a matter of paperwork to keep me there longer. Hopefully I can get the new contract negotiations rolling quickly enough to make it a smooth transition.

Rehearsals with the TSO chorus start up again next week - I've enjoyed the break but I'm very keen to get back into it too.

This song keeps getting stuck in my head at the moment:
“You haven't heard of him? Jesus,
You'd better believe us
that boy he can please us
like four kinds of cheeses."

I'm sitting here at my desk trying to work on the application I'm developing for my current employer, without looking sideways at the two large boxes on the floor which contain my new PC and monitor. I've actually moved them back a bit so that they're not in my peripheral vision.

I keep trying to kid myself that I've grown up a bit since I was a kid who got visibly excited at the thought of getting some new toy or gadget, but the truth is that nothing's changed. Sure, I'm a married man now, with a mortgage and a full-time job; We do responsible grown up things and have meaningful conversations about important topics with other adults. But right now all I want to do is rip these boxes open and start playing with my new toy.

Of course my idea of playing has changed a little over the years.. right now it means "repartition the hard drives, install WinXP and Fedora, then apply all updates". To be honest though, that's not all *that* different to when I was 10 years old

I'm trying to think of something I can add here that will counteract the overwhelmingly geek-oriented nature of my entries lately - but I can't.

Edit: 2:20pm

I estimate I lasted less than an hour and a half after writing this entry before opening the boxes. At least now I can concentrate on work again..

It seems I am completely incapable of concentrating on work today. I
was hoping for a productive day, but I think I've spent most of it
with my mind looping like a scratched record.

I get the same thing when I'm reading sometimes, where I'll read the same paragraph 5 times over without taking anything in. Not in an "I didn't understand that" fashion, more that part of my mind went through the process of reading without actually communicating the results to the rest of me. When that happens I know it's time to go
and do something else for a bit (usually sleep ).

So yeah, that's what I feel like doing right now. Not really
sleeping, but just taking off for the day. It doesn't help me
concentrate knowing that there's a chance the new PC will arrive today(at work, so I'm around to sign for it). Not that I'm likely to have much time to set it up if it does..

Instead I just sit here flicking between vim buffers, trying to look
busy. The amount of code I've written today would equate to less than an hour of "productive" time.

I've just been surfing friends pages on LJ (a favourite pastime of mine) when I found this entry by rubybluenote on ingole’s friends page.

She had a magnetic poetry contest going, and me being a complete sucker for magnetic poetry I just had to enter. Of course I managed to disqualify myself from the outset by not sticking to the rules, but I had fun and came up with this:

I found the online magnetic poetry thingo here.

The entry I linked to above mentioned some sort of problem the author had with Poetry.com, which reminds me that I'm going to have to tell my mum what I've found out about them. I'm dreading that conversation because she sounded so happy to have had a poem accepted by them that I don't want to tell her that they'll accept anything, as can be seen by reading this.

On the other hand, I don't want her to be ripped off or sucked in either - she deserves to have her writing read more widely by real people, so hopefully I can convince her not to pack it in.

I don't remember when I first heard the term "blog", but I remember thinking it was stupid. "Blogger" was a word that just seemed to pile ridiculous on top of stupid, even though at the time I probably would have referred to myself as a Spod without any sense of irony.

For no logical reason this conviction stayed with me for some time, but recently I've discovered that not only has my ire dimmed - I've actually started using this word myself. I had a conversation yesterday in which I must have said it out loud half a dozen times, and when I decided to write this entry I noticed that I used the word in my last entry too! I don't know when or how this happened - I guess I just don't care all that much.

I get pretty easily pissed off by blatantly incorrect use of English, though I'm guilty of less blatant misuses on a pretty much daily basis myself. I do side with the "English is a constantly evolving language" camp though, and I guess the explanation for me starting to use the word blog is that it's passed into common enough usage that I may as well join in.

I'm also one of those geeks who doesn't get too upset by people using the word hacker to mean the same thing as cracker - I figure it's too widespread to complain about, just accept that the word hacker has several overlapping meanings. People in a position to understand the difference are likely also in a position to cope with words that have multiple definitions, so what's the problem?

Wow, that was some random rambling.

Anyway, plans for the new site haven't progressed past the "in my head" stage at the moment, as I'd feel too guilty working on it when I have real work to be doing. Not that it stops my reading my LJ friends list though, unfortunately. I've realised that I can grab my journal from LJ as an RSS feed even though I have a free account, so integrating it into a new site would be pretty trivial. I figure I'll be wanting RSS support anyway for other things, so it seems like a logical approach. That way I can change my journal down the track without changing anything except where the feed comes from.

Oh, and my new PC has been shipped from Sydney - I ought to have it before the end of next week. How excited am I, huh? Sadly, the answer is "Very".

I've been busy lately - a friends birthday party and a wedding on the weekend, Work during the day, rehearsals Monday and Tuesday night followed by a performance on Wednesday. Yesterday I had off, which was a pleasant surprise - turns out my new employer has two days of compulsory annual leave over easter, plus they take the bank holiday off, so all up I get a week off work. I spent yesterday catching up on various blogs, sites and forums which I have had time to read in the past week.

Ok, so what have I been up to?

I got stuck in a lift.
I sang Faure's Requiem with the TSO chorus.
I ordered a new computer.
I started thinking about setting up a new web site.
I finished "Prince of Persia 2: The Sands of Time".

I got stuck in a lift.
At the wedding we went to last Sunday, we both got stuck in a lift. The wedding was at the Town Hall, and the bridal party were having some photographs taken on the stairs in the foyer. A group of us decided to use the small lift near the stairs to avoid getting in the photographers way, so we all piled in and headed down. Somehow we ended up too far down, and more people hopped in as we headed back up to the floor we wanted to get out on. The lift started moving again, then just stopped. None of the buttons worked and according to the display panel we were on two different floors (with floors between them) simultaneously, while the "up" light was still lit.

Someone used the emergency phone and they sent a technician out to free us. There were ten of us in a lift rated for 11 people, but those ratings usually assume 100kg per person and I'm fairly certain we'd have averaged well below that (averaged, I said!). A women who was (I think) a bit nervous about the whole situation got us to all go around and introduce ourselves, stating how we knew the bride and groom, etc. I thought that was an excellent coping strategy on her part, and helped break the ice.

To be honest, I was having the time of my life. "How cool is this?" I thought to myself. "I've always wanted to be stuck in a lift." It was all I could do to resist the temptation to line everybody up on one side and take a group photograph. In retrospect I wished I hadn't bothered about upsetting or offending a group of complete strangers, and had asked anyway. I know the groom would have appreciated the picture as a memento.

We were only in there about ten minutes before someone set us free, which I thought was a bit disappointing. not quite long enough for any real drama to unfold, for the characters to develop properly.

I sang Faure's Requiem with the TSO chorus.
After about two months of rehearsing once a week, with a few extra rehearsals toward the end, I sang in Faure's Requiem with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Arvo Volmer. That was lots of fun - the concert was completely sold out, and I think we performed well on the night. The audience certainly seemed to enjoy themselves, and there's nothing quite like the buzz of walking off stage to enthusiastic applause after a job well done. I'm really enjoying the chance to sing again, especially with a group that sets such high standards for themselves.

I ordered a new computer.
I'd decided a while back not to bother upgrading my PC. It's getting pretty long in the tooth, and due to the pace at which things change in PC hardware and upgrade would have meant replacing half of the components inside.

However I've been using it at home to do work on lately, and it's been frustratingly slow. The work I do doesn't usually require much grunt on my workstation, because all the real effort is performed by the server. But when my workstation is also the server things can slow down a bit. I've been using an open-source content management system called EZPublish which I'm very impressed with, but running it in debugging mode with all caching turned off is testing my patience on my current PC.

So I decided to spend some of the money I'm getting for this job to upgrade my PC. Asking my friends I was referred to a few sites, but ended up spending most of my time at Aus PC Market because they have a well designed site with an excellent shopping cart. I spent a few days trying various combinations of components, and somehow my PC upgrade turned into a new PC, and $500 over my original budget.

Oh well, at least I'll finally have an up to date machine again which will be fun.

I started thinking about setting up a new web site.
Actually I've been thinking about relaunching my personal site for a while, but I guess you could say that I'm in the "technology evaluation" stage.

I registered another domain a few weeks back, because I plan to try and keep my personal and professional lives separate as much as is possible. I'm going to set up a professional site, sort of a dynamic resume I guess, with links to any articles or publications and so on. I'm also going to get the personal site back up but I'm having a dilemma as to what to do about the diary side of it.

Since I started using LiveJournal while my site wasn't hosted, I've really come to enjoy the sense of community here - my diary doesn't exist in isolation, and there are people on my friends list who are as much worth reading as any professional writers. It doesn't bother me that much who reads my journal, as it's more an outlet for me than anything else. I find it much easier to write to an audience (imagined or otherwise) that to write to a future "me" in a personal journal.

One of the reasons I stopped writing my diary on my own site in the first place was because of an unintended consequence of it being public - I got hassled by a complete stranger who took something I wrote the wrong way. That got me thinking about the whole thing, and I still don't know exactly what to do about it. There is definitely more that I would write in a purely personal journal, and that was one advantage with my old site in that I could make private entries. (Yes, I know - LJ has this feature, but LJ is somebody else's software hosted on somebody else's servers).

For my new site I want to keep using LJ. I also want to try and keep it as anonymous as possible, but that's a pretty big ask. After all I want to be able to write about my friends and family, about work and everything that goes on around me. I tend to put people's real names in here as well sometimes. I want to be able to write personal entries without worrying about who has access to them, so maybe I should try using the LJ software on my own server and see if there's a way to tie the accounts together. Regardless of whether I use LJ or not, I want my own archive of my entries - ALL of them, including the original diary - so that they're available to me just in case LJ were to die tomorrow.

Maybe another option is to set an additional, completely anonymous diary somewhere else? Though imagine how little I'd post if I had two diaries to maintain?

I finished "Prince of Persia 2: The Sands of Time".
I finished this game on the gamecube just a couple of days ago. All up it was less than ten hours of gameplay, although that doesn't include an extra hour or two when I was stuck at a couple of points and reloading from saves.

I think it's both funny and sad that games are sometimes having their duration (time from start to finish through the story) used as a measure of how good they are. People complain about being ripped off by a game that it "only" ten hours long.

Prince of Persia 2 is an excellent rebuttal to this argument. It's short and extremely linear, both apparently signs of "bad" games. But it has a story which is very well told, with compelling characters, and is actually beautiful to watch. My hat goes off to the team that produced this game - they've managed to remain completely faithful to the spirit of the original, while bringing it very successfully into the 21st century.

As an added bonus, it's possible to unlock the original Prince of Persia, which is uniformly regarded as a true classic of computing gaming (despite the fact that in order to finish the game you must play it from start to finish in 60 minutes! HAH!). After I finished the sequel I went through and unlocked the original, and now I've been playing that as well. I hadn't forgotten how good it was, but had forgotten just how frustrating it can be.

I do think games have become easier and more forgiving these days, but I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. They've improved in so many other ways as well. After all my carrying on about how much I wanted to unlock and play the original, Lou just looked at it and said "Wow, games really have come a long way. haven't they." I suspect that she just doesn't get it .