December 26, 2003  

playing with our new toys 25 december 2003

Just a quick one here, to show off the new digital camera (Canon A70, very nice - from opening the box to cropping the photos on the mac within an hour), and to provide documentary evidence of the bump. Here we go:

• Heather showing the bump off.
• Close up on the bump.
• Jack grinning broadly.

Merry Christmas to all! Further details when we have more time, but a quick thanks to all our families for the wonderful presents, and to Cat for the really cute baby t-shirt with pohutakawa on it. Rock!

December 19, 2003  

every bit as good 18 december 2003

Return of the King was mighty fine. Slightly protracted ending, but that's because the book was pretty protracted - compared to the original, it's an amazing mass of lightning-fast edits and plot changes. Wonderful. A few nice little nods to famous movies (I particularly liked the bit from The Empire Strikes Back), great acting, and seamless effects. Well done all. And especial congrats for the Shelob scene - despite my deep, deep annoyance at seeing a spider portrayed with a stinger (fucksake, it's a really obvious mistake, damnit), Shelob was great. The movement was exactly right - particularly when she was emerging from holes or raising up to strike. Lovely.

So the standard "Chances are you're going to see this anyway, and if you're not, nothing I can say will persuade you, will it?" review, then. Two thumbs up!

I've just spent a morning writing an overview of how the Cost Based Optimizer works in Oracle 9i, including recommendations for appropriate performance tweaking. As part of this, I've had to make numerous references to the DBMS_STATS package. And each and every time, I've mistyped it - I keep transposing the B and M. It's bugging the hell out of me. They're both coming off the same hand - the same finger, in fact (which may not be the correct touch-typing, but it's how I've always done it, and it works, so what the heck). Why can't I get them in the right order? Probably some Chomskian deep structure reason, is my guess.

Oh, and in the process, I found a photo of the most worrying looking DBA in the world. Frankly, he looks more like he should be selling used cars or cheap salvation rather than muttering about SQL.

Damnit, now I can't remember whether Tolkien specified that Shelob had a sting. Curse, I'll have to look that one up.

Having done a bit of home decorating recently (or rather, wallpaper stripping - close, but not quite the same), I can say without fear of contradiction that Radio 4 has a large hole in its afternoon schedule. There's just damn all on worth listening to between 2 and 5. Tch!

December 18, 2003  

running [while] high 17 december 2003

I blame Dyson. We're out of vacuum cleaner bags, and can I find some more? Can I heck. Supermarkets don't stock them, corner shops certainly don't, and it's starting to look like I'm going to have to go to a small "specialist" retailer to make said purchase. It's easier to buy eye-watering hardcore pornography in today's Britain than vacuum cleaner bags, I tell you. Or crack cocaine - why, we've got several dealers right here on our estate, whilst vacuum cleaner bags are looking like requiring a trip to Mill Road. It's all these fancy bagless vacuums that's done it. First that flash git Dyson started it, now everyone's doing it, and I have to schlepp myself across town to get a bag for my three-years-old-but-now-apparently-paleolithic bag-requiring vacuum. Humbug, I say! Humbug!

Two hours until Lord of the Rings. I've had twice as much caffeine as usual and I'm vibrating like a coked-up hummingbird. Life is good.

December 13, 2003  

yeah, but it was a controlled skid 12 december 2003

In the interests of winding up the rellies back home, I should point out that the six people arrested in Cambridge on terrorism charges lived around the corner from us (although considerably closer to Alison).

And I should point out that there are currently very good rates being offered to work on an installation of the product that I've worked on for the last five years. Insanely good money for it. Unfortunately, the job's in Baghdad, which could cause a few problems, but it's the ultimate butch contracting position.

I'm gonna have fun, and you're gonna have fun. We're all gonna have so much fucking fun we'll need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles. You'll be whistling zippedy-do-dah out of your assholes!

National Lampoon's Vacation

Anyway.

The beeb had a nature program on the other day, showing a segment on the Amazonian rainforest. During a bit on the wet season (when the whole thing basically goes under four feet of water), I saw footage of one of the coolest things I've seen for a while: a tarantula swimming. Really. It'd fallen out of one of the trees, and was swimming in a quite unconcerned fashion over to another one. It floated really well (I imagine all the hairs trap air and buoy it up), and was making what looked to be good progress by padding with all eight legs. Most impressive.

Useful resource: The Chicago Manual of Style has a handy Q&A page, which (among other things) affirms that you should capitalise Google when using it as a verb ("Go and Google for the information."). Though they then ruin the effect by making an amateurish mistake on a flip reference to cricket. It's a googly, not a google, as any fule kno. Tcha!

Or so I thought until I wrote them a comment and they emailed me back, quoting the entry for "google" from the OED. Which is, if you're interested:

Cricket.
intr. Of the ball: to have a googly break and swerve. Of the bowler; to bowl a googly or googlies; also (trans.), to give a googly break to (a ball). Hence googler, a googly bowler.
1907 Badminton Mag. Sept. 289 The googlies that do not google. 1909 Westm. Gaz. 5 July 7/4 Mr. Lockhart, having googled to no purpose from the nursery end. 1923 Daily Mail 9 July 11 In R. H. Bettington they have a googler who might triumph over the best of wickets. 1928 Daily Tel. 12 June 19/2 Constantine..was out to a semi-yorker, which also googled. 1930 Ibid. 25 Apr. 8/5 Grimmett..can spin the ball and google it.

Impressive. Especially since they got back to me within four hours of my comment. Hats off to the CMS.

December 06, 2003  

we need an ethnic cuisine 5 december 2003

Interesting question occurred to me when adding an entry for Morgue's blog to the links page. OK, so we hear a bit of talk recently about the "Kiwi diaspora". Mainly because the term sounds better than "brain drain" or even "obvious consequence of a student loan scheme that can't force you to repay the loan if you're living overseas". The notion that New Zealand's expat population represents an important component of the population as a whole, principally in terms of resourcing, is an interesting one. A noticeable change tend to occur once we Kiwis move overseas. This manifests itself in, say, starting to follow the All Blacks once you've left the country, or becoming a fanatical foaming fan of Lord of the Rings (as opposed to the mild embarrassment that most people back home seem to be feeling about it all). So: do people on the OE count as being part of the Kiwi diaspora? Or is it only those of us who've been living overseas for years, and who have no plans to return home anytime soon? Can you have a temporary diaspora, anyway?

I got a piece of spam today, titled "Give her unlimited orgasms!" So far, nothing unusual. The orginating address, however... "Revolutionary Daily News". So it's now possible to hasten the inevitable decline of the decaying capitalist system through limitless copulation? I must buy a copy of the Socialist Worker.

RoboHelp: combining the worst features of proprietary HTML tags with all the annoyances of WYSIWYG HTML editors. And it's best of breed for HtmlHelp. Don't get me started.

On the telephonic CD player-phone, DJ Yoda's How to Cut & Paste: 80s Edition. Same basic recipe as the first two volumes in the How to Cut & Paste series: heavily mixed up tunes, samples popping across the top, with the general impression that the DJ has six arms and three decks and isn't afraid to use them. Except that in this case, the tunes are entirely from the 80s. It's all there: the entire soundtrack to your childhood, including samples from the movies that made you what you are. It's insane. Huge amounts of mixing and scratching across the first five tracks, including some turntablised TV show themes - and then Paul Hardcastle's 19 comes on. And for a few short minutes, the DJ sits back, stops scratching like the hired hand at a flea farm, and basks in the glow of a great bit of electronica. And then he mixes Herbie Hancock's Rockit over Europe's The Final Countdown. And it works.

Recommended.

I have our tickets to the Return of the King. Life is good.

And I got a perfect score on the BBC's online punctuation test. I'll admit to one lucky guess, mind.

December 03, 2003  

always a screw left over 2 december 2003

I've always been slightly at a loss to understand what all the fuss about Guiness is about. It's a reasonable stout, but I have a suspicion that most of the people who drink it habitually are more influenced by the advertising and the "kiss me, I'm Irish" crowd. Especially since the advent of Guiness Extra Cold, which makes it a) harder to taste and b) more butch ("Wrrr! I drink my beer VERY cold!"). Personally, I'd rather have a pint of Old Peculier or Old Speckled Hen. At room temperature. You can feel it doing you good, I tell you.

On the tip: Power of the Mind by Macka B. And I've been listening to a fair bit of Le Tigre recently, and I've realised why I like them: they're very similar to Carter USM. Drum machines, guitars, bit of distortion, punky feelings, heavy political content. Good stuff. Shouty.

Little writing time recently, due to exhaustion and general busyness all around the show. We're getting the kitchen done at the moment, so much of my free time is spent packing stuff into boxes, then having to unpack the boxes to reach the food so we can actually eat of an evening. As these things are wont to due, the building work's dragged on a bit. Delays have been incurred due to lack of a plasterer (harder to find than ducks' teeth, it would appear), and general inefficiency on the part of our suppliers. A number of pointless and frustrating trips have been made to a certain DIY megastore chain that shall remain nameless. We made the mistake of trusting the blithe assertion of the underling we saw the first time we went, that they always kept all their base units and worktop materials in stock, and that we could pop in at any point and just pick 'em up. This turned out to be significantly less than true. As a result, we've had to pick up a lot of the units piecemeal - an effort which turns out be a bit pointless, as the fitout can't actually happen until our main order arrives in any case. Ah well. These things are sent to try us, and I'm not actually having to put the bloody stuff in myself, so that's a mercy. We will have to paint the resulting room, however, which should keep us out of mischief over the Christmas period. But it's looking like the building work should all be complete by the end of next week at the latest, so we're definitely having a gert big Christmas dinner cooked at home this year. Good stuff.

Don't ask about the pack of lying, half-trained, feckless jobsworth bastards we've ordered our dishwasher from, however.

We went out to Shepreth Wildlife Park over the weekend. A few happy hours were spent wandering around looking at capybara, mara, coatis, prairie dogs (so cute - they're like meercats that have gone badly to fat and are now semi-spherical), wolves, tigers, koi carp, and the like. I'm very fond of koi carp, probably due to associations with the portion of my childhood that I spent in Japan. I find them very calming, very beautiful fish: wonderful huge personalities, a good bit of brain, and damn impressive physically. There's just something about a 50cm long fish that can recognise you and that can be trained to feed from your hands that speaks to me. Anyway, I'd bought some fish food to feed the carp in their pond (they sell it - it's not like I was sneaking it in or anything). So I'm standing on the small jetty out into the carp pond, holding the bag in my left hand, and scattering pinches of food with my right. This goes fine for about two minutes: the carp are bowling up and sucking the food right down, a few ducks are trying to get in on the act but are aren't being too bad. And then the doves arrive. Suddenly, these four white doves all land on me, and start pecking at the bag of fish food. One of the doves manages to land on my left wrist, and gets its head into the bag of food - meanwhile, the others are running up and down my arms and shoulders, trying to knock this one aside so they can have a crack at the grub. For the next five minutes, I had a good insight into how Lord Nelson must feel. Not so much "feeding the birds" as "being mugged by the birds". Heather got a few photos, so expect to see some form of evidence turning up here soon.

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