Varrqnuht.net

I have a headache at the moment. I had one when I went to bed last night too, although I was ok this morning. I'm just spending way too much time looking at a screen lately, I think. Maybe I should get my glasses checked out as well.

This is the view from the window my desk at home is now sitting against. Actually I have to stand up, lean forward a bit and look slightly to the left to get that view - if I look straight out from my chair I'm looking at the other unit on the same block as us. It's not quite as nice a view.

I'm so eager to get this contract job out of the way right now.  It's sucking my life away. I'll never agree to do anything like this again without having thoroughly examined what's involved and tried to come up with a reasonably accurate estimate of the time required. I guess sometimes you have to learn the hard way.

I had a nasty dream last night. Evil monkeys who were living in some contraption they'd hung from the rafters in our loungeroom had decided to kill my cat Casper. They did this by cutting off his front legs, which in the dream made perfect sense as they were super-intelligent monkeys who had decided to kill all creatures incapable of using tools. They also smashed his jaw in and cut holes in his chest, not for any reason as far as I could tell but because they were mean. I found him when I went downstairs, he was still alive (although barely) and plaintively mewed at me with his smashed jaw. He died soon after.

That is some freaky shit.

In completely unrelated news, I'm watching a webcast of the Senate hearings on the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement.  I heard Rusty Russell speaking about the detrimental effects of the changes in copyright legislation on Linux and Open Source, although I'm waiting to hear Brendan Scott on the same subject. It's possible I've missed him, I dunno - but I did get to hear 45 minutes of discussion about sugar, followed by a long and drawn out argument with a women, the topic of which I could not discern. rivetting stuff.

One of my more hardware savvy mates suggested I try the dsub connector instead of the DVI connector. It works! Yaay!! Apparrently having the DVI explode is not an uncommon problem, except it sucks more than usual for me because the card isn't under warranty. Oh well, at least I can get by for a while.

I'm just too busy lately. I think it's nice to be busy as long as you get a chance to rest every now and then. But we've been doing something almost every night of the week for the past few weeks, and whenever I do have a moment to rest I feel guilty because I still have this contract job hanging over my head.

Warning. I'm about to enter full-on geek mode.

Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to troubleshoot a problem related to this site I'm building. My development box at home works fine, but there's a part of it which won't work on the server. I spent hours sending configuration files back and forth and making various changes trying to get them to match in behaviour (even if I broke my end in the same way it would have helped me solve the problem), but no luck.

I've been developing on the new computer I bought a short while back, and last night I decided to try and install the proper drivers for my video card under Linux. They're installed in Windows, but I only use that for games. I don't really need 3d support under Linux, but figured it would be nice. Basically I was just trying to distract myself for a bit while I calmed down.

Anyway, I got the drivers installed, tested them out (funky screensavers and the UT2004 demo for Linux), then rebooted the computer just to see if everything would still work (always a good idea when you install a new kernel module). During the shutdown process (I'm not sure exactly when as I wasn't watching) my box had a kernel panic. I'm no kernel hacker so most of the information that gets spat out on the screen is useless to me, but it did look as though the new kernel module for the graphics card was responsible.

So, I reset the machine and waited for it to come back up. Problem is, it didn't. I've definitely got power and it sounds like it's booting, but the video is dead. At no point during the boot process do I get any output - the monitor insists there's no signal and turns itself off.

Consistent with Murphy's Law, aside from it being the worst possible time for the video card to die it's also the only component in my new PC which isn't under warranty. I got it on special, and it only came with a 7-day return-to-base warranty. It worked well, so I was happy.

Actually, there were some minor problems - but I've assumed they were all driver related. When I rebooted from Linux into Windows it would almost invariably crash, reboot and recover. I got a message saying that Windows had detected that the driver was the problem, but given that once it was running I had no problems at all I wasn't particularly concerned. I'm not running the official drivers under Windows, either (of course, that'd be too easy).

So I have to wonder, was this card on its last legs, or did I kill it? I'm using the official ATI drivers in Linux, with all the defaults in my X config, but maybe one of those defaults has done something nasty to the card (overclocked it?) and fried it. Most of the cards in your PC these days are virtually computers in their own right, with a BIOS or firmware of their own, and maybe that somehow got written to and corrupted? I have no idea.

Geeks come in many different flavours, and I'm certainly not the hardware kind. Hardware has always possessed an amazing capacity to frustrate me, and solving hardware problems just seems like time wasted that I could have spent on a software problem instead. Perhaps I should call one of my more hardware-savvy friends for advice, but first I'm going to rip the video card out of this computer and see if I can get the old one to come up.

Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a site which reveals satanic messages in Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. I was amazed at how clear some of those lyrics sound when played in reverse. The guy who created that example says here that he recorded the forwards sample himself, and also that he can make out the lyrics if he reverses a recording of himself saying the words.

Well, it all seems a bit far fetched to me, but his description is credible. He offers the original sample as an mp3 for anyone who wants to reverse it themselves, but of course you'd need to record it for yourself from some original media for it to be a valid test. Unfortunately I don't have it on CD so that's out of the question at the moment. I thought I'd try and record and reverse myself, but I can't seem to get sound working at the moment.

Anyway, the point of this post was the creepy fact that since I heard this yesterday it's been stuck in my head. I'm not religious and don't have any belief in supernatural phenomena, so it's not really a problem. Still, given my upbringing it's hard to not be creeped out just slightly by the fact that I have a "satanic" song stuck in my head.

In other news… My boss called me in to his office the other day to tell me they're extending my contract by four months, and hope to offer me a permanent position after that. That's good news.

Edit: Later on that selfsame eve..

Ok, I just managed to record myself singing that part of the song and reverse it. I get the same tune and timing, but the words are barely recognisable. Of course it can be argued that they're barely recognisable in the real thing, unless you're reading the reverse lyrics at the same time. An amazing thing the human brain.

Anyway, I think there's only one conclusion which can safely be drawn from this: If Led Zeppelin were Australian, they wouldn't have been satanic in reverse

Something I would love to know now - has anyone ever used the tune of that reversed portion of Stairway to Heaven in another song? Cause it's a catchy little thing.

Last night I cooked dinner for Louise in an attempt to make sure she kept eating. She's been sick the last few days and hasn't wanted to eat at all. My opinion is that you can't possibly get well when you have no energy for your body to repair itself, and we get energy from food - so you have to eat to get better.

Of course I'm pretty good at justifying food as a cure for most problems in life, this is no exception.

So to make it easier for her I tried to cook a nice meal, steamed beans and carrots with grilled chicken breast strips and my special creamy dijon sauce.

I like cooking, though I tend to take forever to get anything done. Louise and I are not compatible in the kitchen, despite a shared love of food. So cooking tends to be a one or the other event, with my involvement in her preparations limited to peeling the occasional vegetable.

One of the differences between us is how we treat recipes. Louise thinks of them as a rough guide, a source of inspiration from which to begin. I think of them as a concrete process to be carried out with accuracy in order to produce repeatable results.

It's not that I don't like to experiment, but if I'm experimenting then I'm experimenting. If I'm following a recipe I'll follow it to the letter. I will actually get down on my knees and measure liquids by the baseline of the meniscus, I'll reorient myself to correct for parallax error on the scales, and you can trust me when I say that a level tablespoon is level.

Louise just rolls her eyes and calls me anal, but I prefer to think of it as a fondness for precision.

Last night though nothing was going right for me, and I got several measurements wrong even though I was following my own recipe. I managed to sort it all out in the end though (chucked it out and started again) and it tasted good even if I do say so myself.

So let me share with you all my secret sauce recipe. This is great with grilled chicken, or steak, or anything else you feel like putting a sauce on I guess.

John's Creamy Dijon Sauce

Ingredients:

Method:
Dissolve the Corn Flour in a small quantity of cold water. Combine other ingredients with dissolved Corn Flour in a microwave safe bowl or jug, and whisk well. Heat in microwave on high, stirring every 30-45 seconds until sauce thickens.

Serve warm.