Whatever Works – a big picture

A movie in which the protagonist is a crumpy cynical bastard throughout? That’ll never work! Yet it does. Whatever Works a charming delightful feel-good movie!

It’s the kind of movie where you can see alot of the plot unfold ahead of time, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not a story which gets it’s power from surprising the audience. Rather, it’s a story which gets it’s power through involving the audience in it. Alot happens, but it never felt rushed

I wont give more away about the movie than that, except to suggest that you go see it when it comes out.

Well, I will say one more thing: it breaks the fourth wall, and I always like that.

Scrabble Sheet 2

I have recently been working on an updated version of a small scrabble sheet I made a few weeks ago for some friends.

version1 (as I have since backnamed it) was simply all the 3 letter words in the scrabble dictionary, handily laid out alphabetically on both sides of an A4 page.

In the weeks since I’ve started using it, I’ve found it to be a useful reference, and heard feedback along the same lines.

For version2, I have added in all the 2letter words as well, plus a limited selection of 4 letter words. (those able to score 12 or more points with natural (non blank) tiles and no specials. Read the rest of this entry »

as hot as…

So I recently moved to a more tropical climate, and was wondering the effect it might have on my computers. So I made sure that my trusty thermometer was topped up with batteries, and recording maximum and minimum temperatures. Here are winter results

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Magnets vs ATM cards

For some time I have been… let’s say, mildly annoyed, at what I see as a cultural paranoia regarding magnets. This has come about, imho, due to the prevalence of ATM cards for finances, harddrives for data storage, and an unawareness of what it takes to magnetically corrupt these media. I even had a friend (who works in IT!) make strong worrying noises once about data corruption on my hard drives simply because I had a fridge magnet applied to the outside of my case.

Now whilst I was certain that was not a problem, I confess to general ignorance on the subject, and so I intended to do something to correct it. Something a little fun. Read the rest of this entry »

when firefox corrupts

I note that as of writing this post, firefox3.5 is out, but I have yet to switch to it. I do not know if it will alter behaviour, but I’m on firefox 3.0.11 under ubuntu.

So my system crashed. It’s done that a little bit recently (thrice in the last 6 months, but that is not what this post is about). On return, firefox is a bit fail. Some files are corrupted…

If this has happened to you, this is some information which might help you cope… Read the rest of this entry »

binary grep to find mp3s stored in zip

Once upon  a time whilst sorting my mp3 collection, I ran across a little problem. The tags which I had found and saved to the id3 tags using quod libet (being my favourite tag editor – better than the related Ex-Falso incidentally) were not showing up in Rhythmbox (being my favourite actual audio player). Instead, Rhythmbox was seeing the OLD tags.

This is curious, thinks I. And I go off in search for answers…
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furniture club

Welcome to furniture club. These are the rules.

one – the “wafer thin mint” rule

When creating space to move something into the room, don’t create it by putting stuff in the doorway. As then you can’t get the something into the room

two – the “corner? what corner?” rule

when moving stuff around inside the room (in accordance with rule #1), make sure you can get around from behind the things you just moved in front of you

three – the “everything I ever needed to know I learnt from playing Tetris” rule

Thinking up rules is an entertaining way to keep active the bits of the brain not involved with playing mass tetris in slow-motion

four – the “you do not talk about furniture club” rule

Blogging about the rules, however, is not productive

Australian pride…

So today in the supermarket, I was given as part of my purchase, an Australian Flag. It is, afterall, Australia Day.

I looked at it on the way home. On the back, just three words. “Made in China”

‘Is that un-Australian?’ I thought, as it’s easy to consider the same situation in the USA as being hounded as unpatriotic. But Australian patriotism is more laid back…

It would be, imho, unpatriotic to make a fuss about the minor point of manufacturer of a random poorly made flag. It’s just not the Australian way to care about the manufacturing locale of an item. An item which is in almost any view of the grander scheme of things, a pretty inconsequential point…

NovemberFest 2008

Time to restart this blog. It has never been forgotten, just left to age a little.

I’m going to restart it with a small note… an invite to Novemberfest.

NovemberFest is the end-of-spring gettogether/picnic/bbq I organise each year…

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Ego trip: pt 1

I’ve been back a week and I haven’t told the internet at large about it.

I haven’t blogged. I haven’t LJ’d. I have barely even wiki’d.

It’s not that anything is seriously amiss, just a combination of a few points. One being the time and energy to refit myself into Canberra work and timetable. Once the rhythm of day-to-day is gone, it’s harder to pickup than I realised. Not that I am one to encourage a mindless repetitive life, but rather recognising that currently, I tend to have about a month planned ahead, and it’s taking me a little time to get that buffer back up to speed. Re-establishing social contacts, getting back to speed with an eating schedule (and maybe a cooking one next week when I hit the markets!). All that kind of thing.

Another thing occupying my time here is the building of a new fileserver. Why? Because amongst other needs, I have more photos on memory cards from Europe than will fit onto $HOME as it stands.

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