Middlerun's Stuff

Middlerun Does America: Days 24-25

2011-11-27T17:58:00.001+11:00

Sunday

I woke up rested and ready to explore New Orleans. The hostel I stayed at is really close to the Canal St. streetcar line that goes to the French Quarter which made things pretty easy. I got on a streetcar and went down to Decatur Street. The girl behind the desk at the hostel had given me a map and suggested some places to check out so I looked around in shops and peeked into interesting-looking bars and restaurants. I checked out stalls at Jackson Square and another place that had some markets on.

I stopped for lunch at a cafe with live music, and ordered a beer and a muffuletta, which was pretty good, but a little too salty. After that I checked out Bourbon Street, which true to its reputation was seedy but seemed like fun. There were plenty of people there drinking and having a good time even on a Sunday afternoon.

That night I hung out with some people at the hostel and drank from the 12-pack of Budweiser I'd bought. Eventually we all got a couple of taxis and went out to Frenchman Street, which is Bourbon Street's quieter, gentler counterpart. We went to a couple of bars there with good music. I met a girl there who had lived in Armidale, where I used to live.

Then we got another taxi to Bourbon Street and went to a few more bars. The night gets a bit hazy from here. I ended up getting separated from my group and had to get back to the hostel on my own. I thought the streetcars ran all night so I waited for about half an hour, on my own at about 1 am, the whole time feeling like I was about to get mugged. Eventually I realised they weren't running and got a taxi.

Monday

On Monday I did a swamp tour. This was pretty cool. The company that runs the tours sent a bus to the hostel to pick up me and a couple of other people from the hostel. The bus then picked other people up from several million hotels around the French Quarter. "I didn't realise this was also a tour of the city," I joked to the other hostel people. Eventually we set off for the swamp, while the driver talked about the damage done to the city by Hurricane Katrina.

We arrived at a wooden building in the middle of nowhere, where the swamp tours departed from. I got a rubber wristband which served as a ticket, and the tour guide led my group to one of several boats tied up at a jetty. For the next hour and a half the guide took us around the swamp talking about its ecosystem, pointing out various animals including a bunch of alligators, and making lots of jokes, mostly about yankees. He'd brought a bag of marshmallows to throw to the alligators. It turns out alligators are big into marshmallows, so they got nice and close to the boat.

One of the interesting things the guide told us was about the effects of Katrina on the swamp. When the storm (as people there call it) hit, huge amounts of water entered the swamp. The river ended up overflowing, spilling over the river banks into a different area which created a new part of the swamp. This new area ended up being a great place for wildlife to thrive. It also happened to contain a house which was washed away by the flooding.

We visited another part of the swamp, where the water was covered in some kind of duckweed. As the guide explained, this was introduced to the area, which you'd think would be a bad thing, but it turned out to be a benefit to the ecosystem by protecting underwater organisms from the sun.

At the end of the tour the guide showed us a baby alligator which he was looking after. We all got to have a turn holding it.

After the swamp tour I got off the bus in the French Quarter to look around a bit more. After seeing some more shops and sights, I had lunch at a nice looking bar. They had an item on the menu called "Taste of New Orleans", with samples of traditional N'awlins dishes like gumbo, jumbalaya, and red beans and rice. This was nice, though overpriced and not very substantial.

Craving some music, I went to a bar on Bourbon Street. The music was cool but it was a bit of a ghost town - there were literally more people on stage than in the audience. I ordered a Budweiser, which seemed expensive at $5.50, until they started pouring three of them. I said I only wanted one but they told me it was three-for-one. Well, I thought, no sense in wasting all these beers.

The day slid into evening as I soaked up the music and drinks. I decanted my last beer into a plastic "go-cup" (a particularly cool part of New Orleans culture, where people are allowed to take alcohol out onto the street, and often do), and went to find a more lively bar. The night was still young and I'd just slammed three beers, so I reluctantly switched to light beer for the next couple of drinks while I listened to a sort of indie jazz group.

After that I went into a place that seemed cool and had a pretty good jazz band playing. It wasn't until I got a beer and looked around a bit more that I realised I'd been there just the night before with the people from the hostel. The previous night they were playing shitty dance music and it was full of douchebags, and now there was a jazz band and it was full of chilled out cool people. I barely recognised it. At one point a girl came over to me trying to sell me jell-o shots, which I'd seen people doing the night before. I told here I wasn't interested, which didn't seem to compute in her tiny brain. I literally had to use physical force to stop her from shoving two little plastic test tubes of jell-o shots into my mouth.

After a couple more bars with more cool music I ended up at a duelling piano bar, a bit like the one in Austin. I hung out there for a bit, but it was getting a bit late and I had to be up early in the morning to get the train to Memphis, so I got the streetcar back to the hostel and hit the hay.

Middlerun Does America: Day 23

2011-11-27T17:22:00.001+11:00

Note: As I write this, it's been more than a month since I got back from my trip, so I've probably forgotten a few details.

The entirety of Saturday was taken up by the bus trip from Austin to New Orleans. The first bus left Austin at quarter to eight in the morning, arriving in Houston three hours later. When we got there I assumed my checked bag would be automatically transferred to the next bus, so I just got off and hung around in the terminal a bit, waiting for the New Orleans bus. Then I noticed something on my ticket that said I needed to transfer the bag myself. So I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out what had happened to the bag, finally being told that in fact it would be transferred for me. I got on the bus, not entirely confident that my bag was on board.

Unlike my first couple of Greyhound trips, this one was crowded and noisy and generally awful. The ten hour trip from Houston to New Orleans were about as bad as the plane trip from Sydney to San Francisco. For most of the trip there was a huge fat guy sitting next to me with his legs intruding on my legroom, who watched a football game on his phone without headphones so everyone on the bus could hear it. I can't even imagine how someone can be so inconsiderate as to subject a busload of people to that. To make matters worse, the air conditioning was on full blast most of the way, the temperature hovering somewhere around absolute zero. When the driver finally turned it off everyone on the bus breathed a sigh of relief.

The final indignity of the bus ride was stopping at the Greyhound terminal in Baton Rouge for dinner. I was pretty hungry at that point and happy for the chance to eat, until I set my eyes on the retch-inducing offerings of the "restaurant" at the terminal. Reluctantly I bought something claiming to be a ham and cheese sandwich, though the meanings of these words has obviously changed somewhat in the hundreds of years that this "food" had been sitting in its plastic wrapper at room temperature.

The bus rolled into New Orleans at about 9 pm, driving past boarded up houses and large communities of homeless people living under elevated highways. I got off the bus and waited for my bag to be unloaded from the bus. As more and more bags were unloaded I got nervous, worried I would never see my bag again. Finally they went around to the other side, opened the other doors to the cargo hold, and there it was.

I grabbed my bag, left the terminal and got a taxi. We went to the hostel, called India House. A bunch of the people I met in Austin had stayed at India House and said it was pretty cool, and they weren't wrong. But by the time I checked in I was exhausted and not at all in the mood for socialising. At 10 pm on a Saturday night in New Orleans, I went straight to bed.

Middlerun Does America: Days 18-22

2011-10-08T15:18:00.002+11:00

I've gotten a bit behind on blogging so I can't remember everything else that happened in Austin. Here are the highlights:

Went out on 6th Street a lot. 6th Street has tons of good live music and is generally pretty awesome, though it gets pretty frat-boyish at certain times of the week.

Visited the Texas Capitol building. Its main claim to fame is being taller than the US Capitol. It's pretty cool because you can walk right into the House of Representatives and the Senate, though the Senate closed before I got there because it was late in the day. There's a number of monuments on the grounds, including a replica of the Statue of Liberty and a Civil War monument with a plaque talking about how the North are a bunch of jerks.

Found a place called Pete's Duelling Piano Bar, which is probably the greatest bar in the world. It was just like that Daffy Duck/Donald Duck duelling piano scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Two guys at grand pianos, each representing a different state, bantered with each other while playing. People would tip them, and whoever had the most tips at any given moment would sing funny stuff. It's incredibly fun to watch.

Went to the Alamo Drafthouse theatre. It's pretty cool because you can order food and drinks during the movie. I saw Drive, which is a pretty excellent movie.

Met heaps of cool people at the hostel. The hostel in Austin had the highest concentration of Australians I've seen at any hostel yet. I also met some awesome and funny Americans there. There was a duck who liked to hang around us when we were sitting outside, who the group decided was called Sam. Sam would drink beer spilled on the ground or left in a bowl.

Went to Barton Springs with some people from the hostel. Barton Springs is a cool place, there's a pool which is fed by a spring which keeps the water at 20-22 °C year round. I didn't get to swim there though, they kept closing the pool because of a thunderstorm off in the distance.

I found an Embassy Suites hotel which I assumed must be the one where Tucker Max allegedly, um, made a mess in the lobby. Though I later noticed there's more than one Embassy Suites in Austin.

Went to SoCo (South Congress Ave.), a trendy but quieter area of Austin. There's an area on Congress Avenue about a block long where food trailers congregate, offering all sorts of weird cuisine. I got some kind of spicy chicken thing served in a cone. I went to watch some band playing in an outdoor area, who did a pretty good cover of Baby Got Back. Then I went to the Continental Club, a live music venue of some note.

On my last night in Austin I went to watch the bats. The Congress Avenue Bridge is home to 1.5 million bats, where the inch-wide expansion joints inadvertently created the perfect home for them. Every night around sunset they all fly out to find food. Austin residents love them because they keep the mosquito population down, and lots of people gather by the bridge to watch them emerge. When I went, there was a few hundred people. Enough people that there was a guy selling cheap light-up toys for kids to play with.

Austin was a nice place to be. My only disappointment was that I didn't hear a lot of Texas accents. According to a guy I was talking to at the SoCo food trailers, you don't really get proper Texas accents in Austin because so many people come to Austin from elsewhere, and I can see why they would. The main downside, though, is that it's really hot. Close to 40 °C most days when I was there, and it gets even hotter in Summer. Overall I give Austin a rating of four out of five squirrels.

Middlerun Does America: Day 17

2011-10-08T13:52:00.001+11:00

At 1 am on Sunday morning my flight left Las Vegas. The flight was OK, though the only in-flight movies available had to be bought for like six bucks. Stingy bastards.

I transferred in Houston. By the time we got to Houston it was about breakfast time, so I went looking for some food. I found a Wendy's which had a long line, and next to it there was a Mexican place with nobody waiting, so I decided to give them some business. This turned out to be a mistake - the breakfast burrito I got was the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten.

After a couple of hours of waiting and feeling like the burrito was going to come out the same way it went in, I got my connecting flight and arrived in Austin. Getting the bus into town I found some kind of festival happening. I suddenly found I had an intense craving for freshly squeezed lemonade, and within a couple of minutes I was able to locate a lemonade stand. Funny how that works.

I got another bus to the hostel. The hostel in Austin is in a great spot right on the shore of Lady Bird Lake, but for some reason everything around it is a bit iffy. Walking there from the bus stop took me past all sorts of old shut-down buildings.

After checking in and dumping by bags I went back into town to have a better look at the festival. There were all sorts of stalls selling the standard stuff stalls sell, a couple of bands playing, a petting zoo, pony rides and that sort of thing. There was also a Lego thing with big lego animals, a model town, and a few building competitions in progress. That was pretty cool. I saw a sign pointing to a climbing wall, which I assumed meant indoor rock climbing, but it turned out to be a giant flat sheet-metal wall with magnetic things to strap onto your feet and hands to climb the wall. Which would be really fun if it worked properly, but the kids doing it kept slipping because the magnets couldn't quite support them. Lame.

All this was happening on 6th Street, which is the main bar scene in Austin. Even during the day there's lots of bars open playing live music. I picked one more or less at random. The band playing there was awesome. The two guitarists both played like maniacs and the woman had an great singing voice. They played loud fast country rock and they even played Another Brick in the Wall Part 2. I really wish I could remember what they were called.

At one point two parents stood by the door with a kid, maybe two or three, holding a ukulele. The kid walked up to the stage like he wanted to join in. Someone helped him onto the stage and everyone cheered. The band started maing jokes about welcoming their newest member. The kid looked like he wasn't sure what to do but when he held the ukulele up like he was about to bust out a solo the crowd went fucking nuts, cheering louder than the band was playing. Somebody tipped him a dollar. It was hilarious.

After they finished their set I got a bus back to the hostel. Remember how I said it's in an iffy area? As I walked from the bus stop to the hostel some guy asked me for money because his "car ran out of gas", which I assumed meant he wanted beer and/or cigarettes. So what I did was, I offered to walk with him to a service station and buy some petrol. He said that wouldn't work because his car was parked elsewhere. I asked him how, if I gave him money, he would get the petrol to his car and he said he'd get a jug. Notice the logical contradiction there? Like he somehow can't use a jug if I'm the one buying the petrol. I said I didn't have any cash and he said if I bought him some cigarettes he could sell them to someone for petrol money. At this point I was pretty sick of it so I suddenly "remembered" that I still had a bit of cash on me, gave him a few bucks and got out of there. It's amazing how persistent people can be.

Middlerun Does America: Day 16

2011-09-30T06:59:00.000+10:00

I got up after not quite enough sleep to give myself lots of quality Grand Canyon time. While eating breakfast I got talking to some of the other people at the hostel. There was a nice couple from Israel who were trying to get a ride out to the canyon so I offered to take them. After packing everything up we went out to the car and spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to open the boot to put their bags in. Eventually I gave up and consulted the manual.

The weird thing about the Prius is that there's no actual key, it's all wireless. After pressing the unlock button on the remote to no avail, I found in the manual that I had to press another unlock button in the car door. Finally we loaded in the bags and set off. The next challenge was to buy some petrol. At some (most?) petrol stations in America you have to pre-buy petrol to stop people doing a gas and dash. So that took some figuring out.

Finally we left Flagstaff and made the hour-and-a-half drive to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. By an amazing stroke of luck, entry to the Grand Canyon National Park was free that day (usually $25 for a car) because of National Public Lands Day, so that saved a bit of cash. We found a parking spot and I said goodbye to my passengers, who were planning to stay for the night in one of the hotels near the canyon. I hope they managed to find something.

The Grand Canyon really is a breathtaking sight. It's not something that can be fully conveyed by photos. Although, it's so staggeringly huge that your eyes can't really get any depth perception on most of it so it ends up looking a bit like a giant painting.

There was a few good lookout spots near the carpark and a trail which led along the rim of the canyon. I walked along the trail for a while getting some good photos, but trying to walk any appreciable distance along the Grand Canyon is like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a thimble so I ended up going back to the car to drive to some other viewing spots. Desert View Road runs through the trees near the rim, and goes by various viewing areas, each of which give a slightly different view of the canyon.

Yaki Point is on this road. Back in the day people used to take a 12-hour stagecoach ride from Flagstaff to Yaki Point to see the Grand Canyon and stay in the hotel there, which is gone now. It was near there that there used to be a silver mine. It's still possible to go into the canyon and walk right into the mines, although it's not safe. There are hiking tracks that go from Yaki Point down into the canyon, which would have been great to do but I wasn't really prepared for hiking and didn't have the time. I did go down one track just for a few minutes which gave a pretty great view, and by the time I got back up the steep trail I was already sweating and thirsty.

The last stop along the road before you leave the park is Desert View, which is home to a watchtower decorated with Native American paintings and doubling as a gift shop, and another store selling food, drinks and more souvenirs. The watchtower doesn't really give a much better view - the canyon's so big that going up by ten metres means approximately nothing.

By about four in the afternoon I'd seen what I wanted to, and figured I should get back to Vegas to return the car and catch my flight to Austin. I hit the road and kept going for four hours, which is unusual for me as I tend to stop every couple of hours for drinks and stuff. But I was in the zone. I set the air conditioning just right, found a good radio station, figured out how to use the cruise control and just sat on the speed limit the whole time. With the straight roads, the cruise control and the automatic transmission I barely had to do anything except overtake the occasional truck and turn on the windscreen wipers at one point when it started to rain a bit. Before I knew it I was driving through Boulder City, Nevada, and getting hungry. I pulled into Taco Bell and got some weird thing called a crunchwrap. That was pretty good. Then I pressed on to Vegas, filled the petrol tank and let the GPS guide me back to the rental agency.

After dropping off the car I caught the shuttle from the Rent-A-Car Center to the main part of the airport and checked in for my 1 am flight to Austin. I went through the TSA security theatre stuff, which was a bit of an ordeal as I'd been led to believe, but only took five minutes or so. When you go into that pornoscanner thing, you have to raise your hands above your head like you're being arrested. I'm not convinced that is entirely necessary. I also had to throw away some perfectly good shampoo and conditioner, but I was expecting that. After all, shampoo is a crucial ingredient in all sorts of explosive devices. After this was done and they were convinced that the empty water bottle in my bag was not, in fact, a threat to national security, I caught the tram that goes to the terminal.

Where the inner sanctum (as I like to call it) of the Sydney airport was a giant shopping centre, the inner sanctum of the Las Vegas airport is just another bloody casino. Row after row of poker machines stretch the length of the terminal. I shoved a dollar in one for old time's sake and after a few spins I hit one of the mystical combinations of cherries or whatever, and my credit went up to $2.14. I printed a ticket and took it to the cashier to claim my newly acquired fortune.

After an hour or so it was time to board. I was going to take my backpack as carry-on, but they were concerned about running out of overhead storage space so they offered to check bags for free, which usually costs $25. I hurried over to the desk and gave them my enormous bag. That's twice in one day I saved $25! Plus the couple I gave a ride to the Grand Canyon gave me $20 for petrol, so that's $70 made/saved in one day, just by sheer luck. No, wait. $71.14. Good old poker machines. Who says you can't get lucky in Vegas?

Middlerun Does America: Day 15

2011-09-30T04:51:00.001+10:00

On Friday morning I went to the Rent-A-Car Center at the airport to pick up a car to drive to the Grand Canyon. The process of renting the car opened my eyes to a whole new world of mathematics, as I watched $33.49 per day turn into $280 for two days, as various fees, taxes and insurance were added up. The guy at the rental agency convinced me to get a Prius for an extra ten dollars a day on the pretense that I would save more than that much in fuel. It later occurred to met that this was bullshit, as Priuses only really save fuel during stop-start city driving and are about the same as any economy car on the highway.

I was worried about adapting to driving on the right-hand side of the road and sitting on the left-hand side of the car, but this turned out to be easy. The real difficulty was adapting to the Prius's weird controls. The GPS was also a bit unreliable, and failed to tell me when to turn off to visit the Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam is one of the highlights of the trip so far. Marking the border between Nevada and Arizona, you can drive right across the top of the dam wall, which is in fact what people had to do to cross the lake before they put in the new bridge last year. After parking the car and stepping out into the billion degree heat, I quickly realised that my choice of long pants was a foolish wardrobe decision and quickly changed into a pair shorts in the car, before drenching myself with sunscreen.

I walked back from the carpark to the dam, past the Arizona spillway, one of two spillways which protect the dam from damage by letting excess water spill safely to the river below. The Nevada spillway is on the other side.

Snapping a few photos of the dam wall, intake towers and electrical stuff, I made my way to the visitor centre to do the tour. There are two tours, an $11, half hour tour of the power plant, and a $30 hour-long tour which also takes you right into the tunnels in the dam wall. Needless to say, I did the full tour.

The Hoover Dam is really a thing of beauty, and deliberately so. One of the things they explained on the tour was that when the dam was being designed, they wanted it to be not only functional, but an example of human achievement to inspire future generations. To this end the dam is full of intricate terrazzo tiling, brass doors and fixtures, statues and so on. One copper door had been polished every day since the dam was built, to the point where the finish had worn through to the base metal in one spot. Maybe at that point it's time to re-evaluate the polishing policy?

The tour started with a trip down a giant lift which took us all the way from the top of the dam to one of the diversion tunnels, which were built to divert the river while the dam was being built. The tour guide gave a talk about the diversion tunnels and how they started building the dam. From there we rode the lift back up to one of the power plants. The tour guide explained about how the water is drawn from the intake towers and drives the turbines, creating electricity which is mostly used in LA. Then the tightwads who didn't spring for the full tour had to leave, and the elite few of us continued on into the tunnels of the dam wall.

After walking through some tunnels and the tour guide explaining some things, we got another lift up to the tunnels about halfway up the dam wall. Eventually we came to a ventilation tunnel which ended at a grate at the surface of the dam. It was possible to stick a hand out through this grate and take a photo of the dam from below. The results were pretty cool. We also saw some steep stairs which led up and down to different levels, which the tour guide referred to at the Stairway to Heaven and the Stairway to Hell. In some spots on the tunnel walls there were crayon marks with numbers. The tour guide explained that these markings indicated cracks that had been found. She pointed out one that was marked in 1948. It was so thin I couldn't even see it. That's how meticulous they are.

Finally we got another lift back up to the top of the dam. After the tour I went and saw the large model of the Colorado River that is there, including a model of the dam. By then I was starving so I went to get lunch. Pro tip: if you're visiting the Hoover Dam, bring your own lunch. I paid $9 plus tax for what amounted to a Big Mac. I guess they need to make as much money as they can since the new visitor centre apparently cost more than the dam itself (though I'm pretty sure that's not adjusted for inflation).

Then it was time to hit the road again and I set off down the I-93. The plan was to drive to Flagstaff, Arizona, spend the night there, and see the Grand Canyon in the morning. Over the next few hours the landscape gradually changed from barren desert to a much more green, tree covered affair, which was a nice change. I kept seeing signs along the highway indicating turnoffs to parts of the famous Route 66 but I didn't really feel like changing my course to drive on it, even for the bragging rights. Though it turned out that driving into Flagstaff takes you along Route 66, so I did get to drive on it after all.

The GPS unit dutifully led me to the hostel in Flagstaff, a nice wooden building across the road from some lively looking pubs. I checked in, dumped my bags and had a look around the hostel. It was pretty reasonable except for not having any basins in the bathrooms to wash your hands, just a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitiser. Eww. After settling in a bit I got ready to go downtown for some dinner and a few beers. The main downtown area of Flagstaff was only a couple of blocks away which was a nice change from the epic bus treks in LA and Vegas.

I didn't know what to expect from Flagstaff but it's actually really cool. Flagstaff has cool looking bars full of college students like Las Vegas has casinos full of poker machines. I found a decent looking restaurant and ordered the most vegetable-filled thing I could find in a vain attempt to compensate for two weeks of burgers and pizza. After that I found an Irish bar, had a couple of beers and observed the American college students. The stereotypes are true. I felt like David Attenborough.

Before long I figured it was time to get some sleep since it was going to be a long day tomorrow. I finished my beer, went outside, chatted with a few people for a while then went back to the hostel and went to bed. Anyway, it turns out that on a Friday night when thousands of students all leave bars at the same time, things get kind of noisy. Who knew?

Middlerun Does America: Days 12-14

2011-09-29T09:55:00.000+10:00

Tuesday
On my last day in Los Angeles I was pretty exhausted by the trip so far so I took a holiday from my holiday and didn't do much. I went to a nice Moroccan barber shop on Venice Boulevard and got a much needed haircut, then went back to the boardwalk for another look around. It wasn't nearly as busy this time.

I also went to see the Venice canals, an imitation of the other Venice canals which spans something like eight blocks. I walked along the canals for a while taking photos with my phone. A lot of the houses have little jetties with small boats tied to them. Some boats were better-kept than others.

That night I spent hours trying to organize my trip to the Grand Canyon, which would happen after I spent a couple of night in Las Vegas. After considering dozens of possible permutations of bus trips, car rentals, flights and accommodation, I finally settled on a plan to rent a car from Vegas, drive to Flagstaff and spend the night there, then drive to the Grand Canyon the next day, spend most of the day there and then drive back to Vegas that night to return the car and catch a flight at 1 am to Austin.

Wednesday
I checked out of the hostel early to give myself lots of time to get to the Greyhound station for my bus to Las Vegas. I got there in plenty of time, and eventually the bus boarded and we set off. The trip was as pleasant as the last one, and I got a good view of the scenery as it turned gradually more rocky and deserty.

On the way there we stopped for lunch at some random town in the middle of nowhere. The place we pulled into had a few fast food options and fake train cars you could sit in and pretend to be in a dining car while you had lunch. There were a bunch of gift shops with various Las Vegas and Route 66-related souvenirs, plus some pretty realistic Airsoft guns. When it was time to get back on the bus I forgot which one was mine, but found the right one after an anxious few minutes.

Eventually the bus arrived in Las Vegas. Immediately I was hit with a wave of hot air. Being in the middle of a desert, Vegas is incredibly hot, but it's a dry heat which makes it much more tolerable. Public transport in Vegas mainly just runs up and down the Strip (aka Las Vegas Boulevard, where the main casinos are), so I was forced to get a cab to my hotel, the Riviera. The first taste of an expensive city.

The Riviera is a pretty nice hotel, especially considering how cheap it was. The prices at Vegas hotels plummet during the week in a bid to get as many people gambling as possible. (Unfortunately for them, the tiny amount of gambling I did was at other, nicer casinos.) The room was nice and clean and somehow actually looked bigger than the one in the photo.

That night I set off down the Strip to explore. The Strip is an amazing place. The thing that struck me more than anything else was just how huge everything is there. Each casino is so gigantic, it can take ten minutes just to walk from one to the next. For this reason some of the casinos have trams which run between them along elevated tracks.

Another weird thing is that on most intersections on the Strip, the only way to cross the road is by using big footbridges. An intersection will often have four of these footbridges, each with up and down escalators and a lift on both sides. That's sixteen escalators and eight lifts, for one intersection. They do have rivers in Las Vegas, but instead of water they contain money.

By far the most annoying thing about Vegas is the multitude of people who hand out flyers for (presumably) prostitution agencies. They all where the same style of T-shirt: solid colour with simple printed text along the lines of "Girls straight to you in 40 minutes! [phone number]". As you walk past, these clowns will try to hand you a flyer. I don't think I ever saw anybody take one. At first I said "no thanks" to each one, but very soon that was reduced to shaking my head, and shortly after that I gave up and just walked straight past them.

There's lots of cool things to see on the Strip without even entering a casino. Every fifteen minutes in the evenings, there's a fountain show on the huge lake in front of the Bellagio. Fountain nozzles rise up out of the water, and tilt and spray water in sync with music that plays through speakers along the footpath. The nozzles are so powerful that when they shoot at full force they sound like fireworks.

Also on the Strip is a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower and a 2/3 scale Arc de Triomphe at the Paris Las Vegas casino, replica canals of Venice at the Venetian casino complete with rideable gondolas, replicas of all sorts of New York landmarks at the New York New York casino, the Excelsior casino which is a giant castle, the Luxor casino which is a giant pyramid, and all sorts of other cool stuff. And neon. So, so much neon.

I ended up at the Nine Fine Irishmen, an Irish pub at the New York New York, which had a real Irish band and a fun, unpretentious vibe. After hanging out there for a couple of hours and spending far too much money on Guinness, the night was getting on a bit so I thought I should set off to find another bar. I ended up at Caesar's Palace, drinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the presence of big marble statues.

On my way back to the hotel, someone on a footbridge tried to sell me cocaine. That was pretty funny.

Thursday
The next morning I had breakfast at the hotel buffet, which was pretty decent. Then I got the bus down the Strip to do a bit more looking around. One highlight was the Flamingo casino, which has a wildlife area at the back with live flamingos, other birds, big koi fish, a tortoise and other animals wandering about.

Next on the agenda was to go back to the New York New York to ride the rollercoaster (visible here). That was loads of fun, with a fast loop and a corkscrew, and gave a great aerial view of the Strip. As the rollercoaster car slowly climbed the giant initial hill, someone ahead of me called out, "how do you feel, Las Vegas?". "Terrified!" I called back. That got a few laughs.

I checked out a few more casinos I hadn't seen the night before, rode a couple of inter-casino trams, then went to get a better look at the Venetian. The canals at the Venetian aren't just outside - the large indoor shopping area has a long canal stretching almost its entire length and does a reasonable job of looking like a real, outdoor part of Venice. There was a shop here selling packs of cards which were used in actual play in various casinos. I bought a pack used by the Bellagio for two dollars.

That afternoon I tried out the pool at the hotel, which was pretty nice. Another fun activity was playing with the insanely fast hotel lifts. They're so quick that you can jump into the air as the lift accelerates downwards and you kind of float in the air for a moment like you're on the moon.

Later I went to the New York New York and rode the rollercoaster again. It was even more fun at night. I had a few more beers and explored a few more casinos, and eventually it was getting late so I headed back to the hotel to get some sleep. While waiting for the bus I met Mike from Boston.

Mike was a slightly creepy old guy who started talking to me about how he had just lost six thousand dollars gambling. He then told me he had been given a free ticket by the casino for Cirque du Soleil at the Bellagio on Saturday that he couldn't use and offered to give it to me. I cautiously said sure, and he called the Bellagio to have the ticket transferred to me. I got the feeling this was leading up to some sort of scam, and when he asked me for money for a taxi I pretty much knew he was full of shit, so I told him I didn't have any cash, and couldn't afford to go to the ATM to get some. He took some convincing.

Of course, the next day I called the Bellagio to confirm the ticket and, of course, there was no ticket. In fact the guy I spoke to on the phone asked if the guy who offered me the ticket was from Boston, which he was. He knew who I was talking about. So I guess that sort of thing happens a lot.

The thing I find most obnoxious about this scam attempt is that Mike was convincing me to alter my travel plans in order to be in Vegas on Saturday night for the show. Since I was going to be visiting the Grand Canyon on Saturday, I would have had to leave there earlier than I wanted to to get back to Vegas in time for the show. I would have had to get over to the Bellagio, find out there was no ticket, and get back to the airport, wasting lots of time and money. And for all this bullshit I would have had to go through, how much did Mike try to scam me for? One cab fare. Like twenty dollars. What a fucking jerk. If you're going to try to screw up my travel plans, at last have some goddamn ambition. Look at Bernie Madoff - he may be a grade-A arsehole, but at least he has cojones.

Middlerun Does America: Day 11

2011-09-26T05:14:00.000+10:00

I got up early Monday morning to catch the shuttle to Universal Studios, which is essentially a movie-based theme park but also includes a tour of the actual studios and various outdoor movie sets. As always in Los Angeles it took a while to get there. We took the highway that was shut down for a day a couple of months ago in what was dubbed Carmageddon, which sadly had nothing to do with the computer game by that name. On the bus I met another Australian guy, whose name I've forgotten, and we got talking about LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas and other stuff.

Universal Studios is really huge. In fact it's located in what they call Universal City, and as we drove in I could see why. The bus parked and we got out, taking a few photos of the giant Universal globe sculpture outside the park, then went through the turnstiles into the park.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Most of the rides in the park are of the simulated rollercoaster variety, with moving chairs and often 3D screens. They are also remarkably fond of water effects; nearly all the rides will lightly spray you with water a couple of times when something wet happens on the screen. This is pretty fun, especially the first time when you're not expecting it.

The first thing I did was go through the house of horrors, which unlike every other house of horrors I've been in, is genuinely fucking terrifying. It's quite long, very dark most of the way, and and sets have extremely high production values which make it feel just like a horror film. At many points someone in a horrific costume will suddenly jump out at you, often accompanied by a flash of lightning and/or loud noise, which probably makes a lot of people shit their pants. Often I got an advance warning when they jumped at someone ahead of me, but the other Aussie, who had a front-of-the-line pass, was ahead of everybody so he got every single scare with no warning.

The front-of-the-line pass is an interesting thing. It costs an extra fifty dollars or so, and every ride has two lines: a tiny one for people with passes and a long one for us plebs. In the end though, I didn't spend much more time queueing up for rides than the other guy, so I'm not sure it's worth it, at least during the week as the park wasn't too crowded. On weekends when there's a million people, the front-of-the-line pass is probably worth every penny.

After the house of horrors I went to the Terminator 2 3D show. This was really awesome. It's a mix of live-action and on-screen 3D stuff, and they blend the two with amazing expertise. The live actors used what I'm pretty sure were real guns firing blanks, which was really cool. At the end there was an on-screen explosion, augmented with real smoke machines, a thump of the seats and water spray. Pretty much the closest you can get to a real explosion without needing a pyrotechnics license.

Next was Shrek 3D which was OK, but didn't really compare to the Terminator. Then there was the Simpsons ride, which was good fun. They also had a Simpsons gift shop with facades on each side resembling the Quick-E-Mart, the Android's Dungeon and Moe's Tavern. I bought a Duff Beer stubby holder. After that I grabbed an overpriced hotdog for lunch and set off to the lower half of the park for the Jurassic Park and The Mummy rides.

The Jurassic Park ride was definitely my favourite ride of the park. The line-up was really short and it was brilliant fun. It's a bit like the old Snowy River Rampage ride at Wonderland back home. You get in a boat which runs through a little river surrounded by various animatronic dinosaurs which spray you with water. Then you veer off into a "behind the scenes" bit of Jurassic Park, where the dinosaurs have escaped and are smashing everything up. There's crashed boats and radio static, broken electric fences with actual arcs of electricity, a jeep which falls off a ledge into the water and various other carnage. Then you get pulled up through a tunnel which looks really long due to some clever forced perspective. You go through another tunnel which has two fantastic huge T-rexes which snap at you through the ceiling. Then finally you blast down an incredibly steep drop, crashing into the water. I got soaked. It was amazing.

After drying off a bit using a nearby bathroom hand-dryer, next up was The Mummy. This is a pretty fast indoor rollercoaster surrounded by various supernatural imagery. It was fun and intense but sadly pretty short.

After those, I went to do the studio tour. The line up was really long but eventually we got on the tram and set off towards the front lot of the studios. We went past various soundstages surrounded by dozens of golf carts, trucks and trailers. The tour guide pointed out a cabin that Alfred Hitchcock stayed in, and then we went through a huge outdoor set built to resemble New York, in which they shoot all sorts of movies. The facades are all made of painted styrofoam and stuff, but they look incredibly realistic.

While we were doing that I was taking photos, and at this point the most annoying thing possible happened: my camera crapped out. It kept giving me memory card errors and freezing up. I had to switch to taking photos with my lacklustre phone camera. Even worse, when I checked the camera later, all the photos I took that morning were gone.

After the New York set we went into a tunnel, which turned out to be part of a 3D King Kong show. The tram shook violently while simulated dinosaurs attacked us from a giant 360 degree 3D screen, and were fought off by King Kong. Next we drove into what looked like an ordinary soundstage, made up to look like a BART station in San Francisco. Then an earthquake hit! The tram shook around, the fake ceiling fell in and a giant fake semi-trailer fell towards us and burst into real flame. The doors of a substation burst open and arcs of electricity shot out from it. A flood of real water came gushing down a staircase. Finally a train came shooting out of a tunnel, crashing into the fallen truck. Movie magic!

Next we went to another outdoor set made to look like a European village. They could make it look like different European countries by changing the language of the various signs. Then there was a wild west set that they called Eight Points, Texas, because they could film in eight different parts of it at the same time.

Various other sets included Whoville, Wisteria Lane from Desperate Housewives, War of the Worlds, Jaws (with moving shark and fire effects), the original Norman Bates house and two different lakes where they can film water scenes. One of the lakes had an enormous bluescreen behind it that must have been four stories tall, and four times as wide.

I really wanted to see the Waterworld show, which is apparently really great, but by the time I finished the tour I'd missed the last show. Instead I went on the Jurassic Park ride again, then caught most of the live-action Blues Brothers show. Once that finished, it was time to get back on the shuttle bus and leave.

Overall it was an awesome day. I rate it five out of five robotic dinosaurs.

Middlerun Does America: Day 10

2011-09-26T05:03:00.000+10:00

On Sunday I got the bus up to Hollywood. Getting anywhere in LA is a real ordeal if you don't have a car, so it took forever to get there and I still ended up having to walk the last six block or so. On the way up there I came by an In-N-Out Burger on Sunset Boulevard. I've heard of In-N-Out Burger a bunch of times, so I decided to try it out.

In-N-Out Burger is like something out of a 50's high school movie. Unlike most of their competitors, their menu is very simple; there must have only been about five or six things on there. They even wear those paper hats you see in movies. I ordered their famous Double-Double (double beef, double cheese), and a root beer. The Double-Double was pretty epic. I'd never had root beer before, but it's pretty nice. After those 670 calories of deliciousness, I set off towards Hollywood Boulevard.

Hollywood Boulevard is a strange place. There's a couple of blocks of glitz and glamour, surrounded by hundreds of run-down souvenir shops, smoke shops and other low-rent crap. It's amazing how much things can change in the space of one block. It was the same in San Francisco: in one place you've got a flashy shopping district, and then a couple of blocks over you've got a decaying slum full of homeless people. I can't figure out what keeps these neighbourhoods so localised.

I took a few photos of the big theatres, trying to skirt the crowds as much as I could, and then went to check out Grauman's Chinese Theater, where celebrities make handprints in the cement slabs. Of course, the place was crawling with people, which made it hard to take photos of any of the prints. I did manage to get a good photo of the slab where the Harry Potter stars made their impressions, but I later found out that the photo got corrupted by the camera. (It does that sometimes, I think the memory card is faulty.) I was really annoyed when I realised the photo was ruined because I had a great title in mind for when I put the photo on Flickr: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prints.

After that, I slowly forced my way through the sea of people to the shopping centre on Hollywood and Highland, which has a platform designed to give a good view of the Hollywood sign. After taking a few completely unnecessary photos, I continued on to the Hollywood Wax Museum. It was pretty much what you'd expect, but still fun, and included entry to the Guinness World of Records which was good too.

After seeing as much of Hollywood as I felt I needed to I got the bus back to Santa Monica and another one over to Venice Beach. Being Sunday the place was alive with hundreds of people walking along the Venice boardwalk (which isn't even really a boardwalk) and almost as many stalls selling assorted T-shirts, jewelry, arts, crafts and other stuff. Especially sunglasses. There were more sunglasses than a worldwide blindness convention.There's also a huge number of medicinal marijuana recommendation places there. And of course equally many smoke shops providing the relevant equipment.

The boardwalk has all sorts of weird and crazy people. One common sight was guys trying to hand out CDs and asking people to put on a pair of headphones and give their music a listen. They seemed quite convinced that thrusting headphones at passersby is an important step on the path to musical success.

Another fun thing along the boardwalk is the Venice Beach Freak Show. There's a good post about the Freak Show over at Boing Boing, so it would be a bit redundant to go into much detail, but suffice it to say that it's a fun place to visit if you like seeing animals with more than the usual number of things. Which I do.

I got to Venice late in the afternoon, so after one pass of the boardwalk it started getting dark. I watched the skateboarders for a few minutes and then got a nice wholesome chili-dog for dinner.

Middlerun Does America: Day 9

2011-09-20T17:41:00.000+10:00

I kicked off my first full day in Los Angeles with a walking tour of downtown LA. The tour group met in the lobby of the hostel, the tour guide introduced himself and we all set off to get a bus downtown. Since Los Angeles covers an area approximately equal to that of Russia, the bus took forever to get there which gave the group plenty of time to introduce ourselves. Out of six people I was the only guy. I'm not sure what that means.

Eventually we got there, and the tour guide led us around a bunch of interesting places. Here's the rundown:

Bunker Hill. This was originally a wealthy area with nice big Victorian houses. Then after WWII they built the Pasadena Freeway to bring shoppers to downtown LA, but instead everyone moved away and Bunker Hill became a slum. Some nice town planning, there. More recently it has been revitalised and is now full of offices and stuff.
U.S. Bank Tower. The tallest building west of the Mississippi River, and tenth tallest in America.
Los Angeles Public Library. This is a huge library with some pretty cool things to see, including four large murals depicting the history of California and an elevator shaft lined from top to bottom with old index cards.
Biltmore Hotel. A beautiful old luxury hotel, which apparently these days is only like $150 a night because nobody really wants to stay in downtown LA.
Million Dollar Theater.
Bradbury Building. This building has been used in a bunch of movies, most notably Blade Runner as J. F. Sebastian's apartment building.
Grand Central Market. This is a jam packed food market. I got a burrito here that was so big, I could have hollowed it out and used it as a sleeping bag.
Angel's Flight. This is the world's shortest railway, and will take you to the top of Bunker Hill for a quarter. The basically built it so that lazy rich people wouldn't have to walk up a few stairs.
Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The Department of Water and Power office building. This wouldn't normally be particularly interesting, but they used the building in Inception. There was another place we went to nearby that was used in Inception too.
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. A huge, modern cathedral which we walked through.
Los Angeles City Hall. The City Hall was modified to sit on rollers which protect it from earthquakes.
El Pueblo de Los Angeles. A historic Spanish/Mexican district which houses LA's oldest house, the Avila Adobe, which was built in 1818 and is now a small museum. The Pueblo also contains dozens of stalls selling Mexican wrestler masks, sombreros and other knickknacks.
Union Station. This huge art-deco building is the only proper train station in LA and has been used in a bunch of movies, including Blade Runner.

When the tour was over and we were coming back into Santa Monica, the conversation turned to Santa Monica nightlife, and the tour guide recommended to me a bar called Harvelle's, a couple of blocks from the hostel. Harvelle's is known for its live blues and jazz, and is pretty much the coolest bar I've ever been to. It's a little expensive, but the atmosphere is really cool. I spent a happy couple of hours drinking Anchor Steam beer while listening to the band and chatting with a local guy about the relative merits of LA, San Francisco and Sydney, among other things.

Maybe it's just because I've hardly been listening to any music since I got to America, but the band playing at Harvelle's blew my mind. I wish I could remember what they were called. The guitarist in particular was amazing, a guy probably in his 60's who wore a suit in the stifling heat and played like a man possessed. The ridiculous faces he made during his solos were a sight to behold, and when he swung his head around, sweat sprayed off onto the other band members and nearby dancers. The keyboardist was great too. When they finished their set, everyone was howling for more.

Middlerun Does America: Days 6-8

2011-09-18T13:49:00.001+10:00

I don't really have time to write full blog posts about the other stuff I got up to in San Francisco so here are the Cliffs notes:

Wednesday
Went to Fisherman's Wharf. There's some pretty cool stuff there, most notably a place with tons of antique arcade machines, which still work. I also got some distant photos of Alcatraz. Sadly I couldn't go to Alcatraz because it was booked out for the next four days. Went out for another drink with Simon and Chris at a pretty cool bar called the Ambassador, which is packed some nights but was a ghost town when we were there.

Thursday
Went to the Exploratorium. This was really awesome. The Exploratorium has hundreds of interactive doohickeys which demonstrate scientific principles, and pretty much all of them are really fun and interesting. A few examples:

A device for taking a photo of a drop of water as it falls
A machine that calculates square roots using a projectile steel ball
A square wheel with a specially shaped track that lets it roll smoothly
A machine for making smoke rings
An infinite slinky track using an upwards conveyor belt
Lots of cool electricity demonstrations

I really, really wish I'd had the chance to go there when I was a kid. If you're in San Francisco with kids and you don't take them to the Exploratorium, you are a bad parent.

After they closed, I got the bus down to Haight-Ashbury, where I saw so many bong shops, I think half the glass that is produced in the world must end up on a shelf on Haight St. in the form of a bong, a pipe, or some other smoking apparatus I've never even heard of. There were also some cool clothes shops, I guess.

Friday

I checked out of the hostel at about 8 am, and legged it across town to the Greyhound station to catch a bus down to LA. I was aiming to catch the 10 am bus, but I got there so early that I was just in time for the one before that (8:30 or something), so I got on that one instead. The trip was fairly enjoyable, especially since there was nobody in the seat next to me. There wasn't much to look out the window at, except for miles and miles of farms, though I did see some pumpjacks, which was kind of cool.

It was cloudy and a bit foggy when we arrived in LA. As the bus made its way along a freeway to the terminal, I caught a far-off glimpse of the Hollywood sign but it was hard to see due to the fog. Finally we arrived at the terminal, and I grabbed my bags and set about trying to figure out how to get to my hostel in Santa Monica. The directions on the website had said to catch the #60 bus to downtown LA and then get the #33 to Santa Monica, but it was only about 1 1/2 km from the terminal to downtown, so I decided it would be a bit more interesting to walk there. This turned out to take me through a pretty rundown area full of homeless people, which really I'd gotten enough of in San Francisco, so if I was to do it again I'd probably just catch the #60.

After reaching downtown with most of my spare change left, I proceeded to wait for the #33 bus, which upon arrival turned out to not be quite the right bus anyway - I needed the #733. Eventually this came, after probably a 45 minute total wait. Unfortunately it did not stop at the stop I was waiting at, so I had to sprint a block down the street to the next stop, carrying all my luggage. I made it just in time.

The world's slowest bus then proceeded to take me to Santa Monica. By the time I got there it was about 9 pm. I found my hostel and checked in. It's a lot nicer than the one I was at in San Francisco, and costs only slightly more. I went out and grabbed a couple of huge slices of pizza, then walked to the beach, which is a stone's throw away from the hostel.

Also close to the hostel is Santa Monica Pier, which I wasn't particularly aware of but is apparently kind of a big deal. The pier has its own little amusement park with a bunch of rides, so after walking the length of the pier and taking a few photos, I got a ticket for the rollercoaster. It turned out to be a little tame, but I haven't been on a rollercoaster in years so it was still fun.

After seeing the sights offered by the pier, I went back up to the Santa Monica downtown area and looked at some of the shops, making a mental note of a few places to check out when they were open. Santa Monica looks like a pretty nice place, though my impression was somewhat sullied by a group of people spreading anti-Islamic and anti-atheist propaganda in the street, and the crowd of people paying attention to these arseholes.

After looking around for a bit it was getting late, so I went back to the hostel and went to bed.

Middlerun Does America: Day 5

2011-09-16T15:46:00.001+10:00

On Tuesday I decided it would be nice to make a trip somewhere outside of San Francisco so I caught the BART up to Berkeley. The BART line that goes to Berkeley also goes through West Oakland, which seems to consist mainly of shipping containers as far as the eye can see.

The trip also served to use up some of the value on my BART card. To use the BART trains you buy a prepaid card which you can load as much value onto as you like. I'd assumed I'd be using the BART quite a bit so I got a $20 card, but as I write this, the night before I leave San Francisco, the card still has $9.15 on it.

After reaching downtown Berkeley I grabbed a map from the visitor's centre and wandered around a bit looking for a good place to have lunch. I found a place that looked a bit interesting and had a burger and some chips and a Budweiser.

(Contrary to popular belief, Budweiser isn't really that bad. Admittedly it's not entirely dissimilar to having sex in a canoe*, but it's cheap and drinkable and sure beats the hell out of VB.)

After lunch I decided it might be interesting to have a look around the campus of UC Berkeley, but after walking some of the way into the campus and seeing mostly grass and trees and a few far off buildings I figured it was too big to see on foot without hours to spend walking around looking at a map, and headed back to the main shops area.

Looking around the shops for a while, I came across a place called Halloween City, which from the looks of things springs into existence every September (or perhaps August...) to sell costumes, masks, fake gravestones, giant spiders and the like. The place was huge and full of awesome stuff. It's a shame I'm leaving America before Halloween because it looks like a lot of fun, and Halloween is all but non-existent in Australia except for a few half-hearted parties and kids in shitty homemade costumes trick-or-treating with their parents. Australia kind of sucks in some ways.

I couldn't find many other interesting looking shops or anything and I was pretty exhausted from the last few days so I decided to unwind by stopping into a nearby cinema and seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The theatre was pretty empty; I think there was only one other person in there besides me. It turned out that I'd chosen the right movie to see, since it was set in San Francisco and had a lot of nice shots of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Redwood trees at Muir Woods.

After the movie I went up to North Berkeley where there's some more shops. I stopped into a local supermarket to grab a few supplies, and spent a bit of time marvelling at how American supermarkets have beer and liquor just sitting on the shelves like any other product. Such enlightenment! I reflected again on the nanny state I call home, where alcohol is relegated to a separate shop and costs three times as much.

While at the supermarket I picked up a few lollies you can't really get in Australia, like Reese's Pieces and Altoids. (Altoids are technically available in Sydney, but only from one shop that I know of and they cost about three times as much as they do in America.) After buying most of what I needed I made my way to the North Berkeley BART station and went back to San Francisco.

Before going back to my hostel I stopped into the Cartoon Art Museum on Mission St. They had lots of original inks of classic comic strips illustrating the history of the medium, an exhibition of Archie and Green Lantern pages, a selection of 9/11-anniversary cartoons plus a TV showing some classic animations. They showed some old Bugs Bunny cartoons which are as funny now as they always were.

That evening some new people moved into the hostel room I was in. A couple of English guys called Simon and Chris. We got talking and decided to have some beers. We hung out in the hostel basement for a while, where there was a game of Pictionary going on, drinking enormous 24 fl.oz. (710 mL) cans of Budweiser. Once that was over we headed out to find a good bar and ended up at a small place with a pool table and one great song after another coming out of the jukebox.

Having someone cool to hang out with did wonders for my morale. The first few days I'd been feeling a bit crap, partly due to culture shock and the strangeness of suddenly being out in the world on my own, and partly because I didn't really have anyone to talk to. My roommates for the first three nights were three annoying Spanish girls who didn't seem to know how to stop talking. Just squawking away constantly like demented birds. When they told me they were checking out I was overjoyed, though I tried not to make it too obvious.

* Fucking close to water.

Middlerun Does America: Day 4

2011-09-15T14:42:00.001+10:00

On Monday I went for a wander towards Chinatown. I stopped off at a McDonald's in the financial district for a late breakfast and/or early lunch in the hope of observing some interesting differences from Australian McDonald'ses, but it was pretty much the same with the exception of Spanish parts of the menu.

After eating I went up to Chinatown and wandered down the main street, stopping in a few interesting looking shops. One place had full-size wooden swords for four dollars, and all sorts of tacky San Francisco and Chinatown-specific souvenirs. Another had bobbleheads of hundreds of characters from Star Wars, Star Trek and various non-star-related movies, TV shows, etc.

After seeing the sights of Chinatown I got on a bus to go see the Golden Gate Bridge. The number 28 Muni bus dumps you at a carpark near the bridge, with a snack stand and gift shop. I went to the viewing platform, snapped a few photos, then set off walking the footpath along the side of the bridge. I'd originally planned to walk all the way across and back, but when I got there and realised just how long the thing is, I changed my mind and just walked to the first tower. I figure the second tower looks much like the first so really it would be redundant to go more than halfway.

After walking back to land, I set off for the other, lesser known attraction in the area, Fort Point. Fort Point was built before the Civil War to defend the bay (from zombies, I believe), and sits right below the bridge. Originally they were going to knock it down to build the bridge, but upon visiting the fort, the engineers were so charmed by it that they changed the design of the bridge to preserve the historic site. So now there's a little arch which goes over the fort before the main suspension part of the bridge begins (visible here).

The path down to Fort Point was very long and a bit difficult to navigate, but eventually I got there. I wandered about, snapping a few photos and reading about the history and living conditions of the fort. There were a few old cannons hanging around, but sadly I couldn't find any gunpowder to try them out with. By the time I got to the top of the fort a strong, cold wind had picked up and I foolishly neglected to bring a jumper so I took a few photos and went back to the carpark.

Before I left I checked out the gift shop, which as expected was full of tacky stuff, all of which will someday end up in boxes in people's attics. Though I was amused by some mugs in the gift shop which were semicircular, and said on the side "San Francisco was so expensive, I could only afford half a mug."

I hopped on the next bus to head back into the city. Unfortunately I didn't realise until I got to Golden Gate Park that I'd caught the bus going in the wrong direction. Luckily I was able to easily transfer onto another bus heading back the right way. The route went through Haight-Ashbury, which looked pretty interesting, and I made a mental note to check it out later.

At one point there was a removal truck stopped in the street, which the bus driver attempted to drive around. The thing about the Muni buses is, they're electric, but they don't run on batteries. Every Muni bus has two long stalks which jut out from the roof and connect to overhead wires which run everywhere the buses go. The stalks can swivel and tilt quite a lot which gives the bus lots of freedom of movement, but it's still a significant restriction compared to a normal petrol bus. When the bus driver tried to go around the truck, the stalks ended up hitting the truck and disconnecting from the overhead wires, causing the bus to stop and the lights to go out. I guess there was an emergency battery, because very slowly we drove past the truck and pulled over. The driver then got out like it was no big deal, walked around to the back of the bus and presumably climbed up onto the roof to manually reconnect the power connectors. The lights came back on, the driver got back in and we were on our way.

Looking at my map I realised the bus route would take me pretty close to the Castro, San Francisco's legendary gay district, so I figured I might as well have a look. I got out at Divisadero Street, which turns into Castro Street if you go south, walked down it and wandered through the Castro a bit. It was pretty gay. Satisfied with this, I walked up 16th Street to catch the BART back towards the hostel.

Middlerun Does America: Day 3

2011-09-14T14:13:00.000+10:00

On Sunday I was pretty hung over, but nevertheless I ventured out into the blinding light and visited Golden Gate Park, a huge thousand-acre park on the west side of the city. This also meant figuring out how to use the Muni public transport network which consists mostly of buses, plus the cable cars and a few train lines which operate alongside the BART system. I wasn't really prepared for just how big the park was, and my plan to walk its length didn't quite come to fruition.

After walking through various leafy areas I found the conservatory of flowers. Flowers aren't really my thing so I bought a Pepsi at a nearby stand and continued on in search of the California Academy of Sciences, which also resides within the park. After some wandering I found it, and sat outside for a moment finishing my drink. While I sat outside I heard someone yelling. Someone had just stolen his bike. The thief rode away before anyone could do anything.

The California Academy of Sciences has all sorts of cool things such as an aquarium, a large simulated rainforest, a planetarium, a hall of taxidermied African animals with a colony of live penguins, and various other cool things. In the aquarium I was particularly impressed by the beautiful leafy seadragon. I got to the penguins just in time for the penguin feeding. After seeing most of the things I wanted to, I was starving and went to the cafe. I finally found out exactly what a quesadilla is by ordering one and attempting to consume it; unfortunately my hangover was still affecting me and I barely managed to eat half of it.

After eating what I could I left to wander the park some more. After miles of trees I found a path that would lead me back to the road. While wandering down it I found some squirrels. One in particular got pretty close and I took some good photos.

Middlerun Does America: Day 2

2011-09-13T15:03:00.001+10:00

After emerging from my epic sleep on Saturday morning, just in time for breakfast, I left the hostel and wandered down to Market Street. I went down to the Powell St. BART station, got a ticket and hopped on a train to the Embarcadero, a long stretch of waterfront with plenty of shops and stuff.

After wandering around the market stalls that were set up near the station I grabbed a coffee and sat down to relax and take a few photos of the partially visible Bay Bridge. I wandered down the street past the piers, not really looking for anything in particular. Eventually I got to the east end of Lombard St., famously crooked but only in one small section. I started walking down Lombard St. in search of the crooked bit of road, which I eventually found after walking down and then up a number of exhausting hills.

It was surrounded by tourists and covered in cars driving down it. I climbed the steps along its side, taking a few photos along the way. At the top there were dozens of cars lining up to drive down it like it was some kind of amusement park ride. I took a couple more photos and then walked down another street, one with cable car tracks. When I got to the bottom I found myself at a cable car stop so I figured I might as well ride it back to Market St.

The line was huge. I didn't realise how long the line was until I was already lining up, and it ended up taking nearly an hour. Luckily a nice woman and her Mexican husband started talking to me, which helped pass the time and they gave me plenty of tips for things to see around the city. And I didn't even have to pay for the cable car because while I was lining up a guy came past offering a free 1-day pass which he didn't need anymore. Finally I got on, and rode back into town.

One funny thing I noticed as I walked the streets was that Americans have a tendancy to walk on the right-hand side of the footpath, just like they drive on the right-hand side of the road. Often I'd find myself instinctively walking on the left, and someone would come towards me wanting to walk where I was walking and one of us would have to move aside. It's surprisingly difficult to break that habit.

That night after dinner I went on a pub crawl with a bunch of other hostel people. There were a couple of other Australians and I spent a while chatting with a cool Polish guy, and trying some local beers. The first bar near the hostel had $3 beers which is pretty damn cheap by Australian standards, even if you factor in a tip. The bartender recommended one called Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which tastes strikingly similar to James Squire Golden Ale. The Polish guy, Sebastian, was appalled when I described to him the pathetic state of the Australian drinking landscape, where $7 schooners are common, a six pack is often $17 and you get kicked out of bars for looking at the bouncer the wrong way.

From there we went to another bar in a slightly grungier part of town, hung out there for a while, and then went down Mission Street, gawked at some of the cars parked there, and went to a nightclub. I'd write more, but the night gets a little fuzzy from this point.

Middlerun Does America: Day 1

2011-09-11T04:51:00.000+10:00

As I've mentioned on Twitter recently, I'm going backpacking through America for the next six weeks. This is the first time I've been out of Australia.

After getting to the airport and checking in I was told it would take about an hour to get through security. This turned out to be a bit pessimistic and I was through in about 20 minutes. I've joked before about the airport having an "inner sanctum" which only travellers get to see; this turned out to be a giant shopping centre. Being lunch time, I went to get some lunch in the form of a burger, completely forgetting that they were serving lunch on the plane. So I had two lunches. That was nice.

I ended up getting stuck with the worst possible seat on the plane, in the middle of the middle row, and most of the in-flight entertainment sucked, although they did show a movie Midnight in Paris which was pretty good despite needing way more explosions.

After this flight I will never again complain about having to take an eight hour train ride. I finally understand expressions like "cattle class", "I hate flying" and "I will eat my own intestines to be anywhere but here right now". Didn't sleep a wink.

After one billion hours the plane landed at San Francisco airport. Expecting hours of lining up followed by TSA body scans and groping, instead I was subjected to a few minutes of casual questions by a customs guy, most of which seemed more like friendly conversation than interrogation, and then I collected my bag and was released into the wild. Onward to the next challenge.

I made my way to the BART station, double checked my map and figured out I needed to go to Union Square. There were only ticket machines so I walked up to one and was presented with numerous confusing options, none of which said "Union Square". I shoved five dollars into the machine, but that didn't help much. I cancelled it, walked up to an information desk and asked what to do. "Eight dollars ten cents in the machine", came the reply. Wondering how exactly one would figure that out alone, I went back to the machine, put in some money and got a ticket. I went to the turnstile, put in the ticket and it didn't work. I tried the next turnstile, still nothing. I stood like an idiot for a moment before noticing that they were both out of order. So I went to another turnstile, put in the ticket... and the turnstile next to me opened. I hurried through and got on the train.

What I failed to realise when I looked at the map is that there is no station actually called "Union Square". I started to suspect I had missed my stop when I got to Embarcadero. I checked my map and bolted out the door just in time. A few more seconds and I would have ended up on the other side of the bay. I hopped on a train going back the other way and went to Powell St. and walked to my hostel from there.

After checking in, the hostel staff explained how to use the lift, which appears to have been built some time during the seventeenth century. On the way up to my room, I hope that my death isn't the one that gets the lift replaced by something that can take more than three people at a time. So far I've taken the stairs more than I've taken the lift, despite my room being on the 8th floor.

The room is pretty much what I expected. Four bunks. A TV, a fridge and a microwave, and not enough powerpoints within reach to plug them all in at the same time. Smelly little bathroom with no ventilation. I'm not sure if the hostel is near a fire station or what, but a siren seems to go past every five minutes.

After unloading my bags, meeting my roommates and having a shower I ventured out into the city. I wandered aimlessly for an hour or so, then bought a camera and an American SIM card for my phone. I went to a food court at a shopping centre and got a sub and a Pepsi. The sub came in an actual ceramic bowl and an the Pepsi in an actual glass. In a shopping centre food court. You sure as hell don't see that in Australia.

By the time I had lunch it was about 4:30 and it was getting cold so I went back to the hostel to get a jumper. I got on the Internet for a little while and then slept for about 15 hours.

Nutty Narwhal

2011-05-01T00:50:00.007+10:00

On Friday morning I upgraded Ubuntu to the new release, 11.04, a.k.a. Natty Narwhal. The main feature of the new version is the overhauled interface, Unity, developed by Canonical in an apparent attempt to turn Ubuntu into an unusable mess and drive everyone to Debian or Fedora or something, or perhaps just give up on Linux altogether and install a pirated copy of Windows 7.

I'm probably coming across as being afraid of change. But I really tried to approach the new interface with an open mind. I was ready to embrace and enjoy the new interface. But Canonical just wouldn't let me.

There are a number of problems with the Unity interface, and they mostly seem to be inspired by what I consider to be the less sensible features of Mac OSX. For example, global window menus. Most application windows have a row of menus at the top (File, Edit, View, Help, etc.), which are specific to that particular window. Since these menus belong to the window, it seems logical that they should be contained within that window. In Unity, when a window has input focus, its menus appear at the top of the screen. So to access a window's menus, first you have to select the window, wherever it happens to be on the screen, and then move the cursor to a completely unrelated location at the top of the screen to select the menu you want. This is second nature to Mac users, but I challenge any Mac user to look me in the eye and tell me that it really, truly makes sense.

But my main beef with Unity is that they replaced GNOME's dead-simple, fast, easy, intuitive Applications menu with a complicated, awkward, messy pile of bullshit. The GNOME menu has always been a shining example of what an app menu should be: A list of apps, sorted into categories, that lets you launch any program within a couple of seconds of deciding that that's what you want to do. You can edit the menu to add custom launchers, move or edit existing items and make subfolders to keep long app lists organised.

In short, you can set it up how you want it, and the rest of the time is stays the hell out of the way and lets you get stuff done. It is perfect. For example, if I suddenly get the urge to play Osmos, here's what I do:

That's it.

If I want to do the same thing in Unity, there are several options of varying degrees of awfulness. The first is to open the applications menu and start typing "Osmos" into the search bar. (That's right, Unity's app menu is so unnecessarily complicated and labyrinthine it needs its own dedicated search bar.) What used to take about two seconds with the mouse now involves typing.

The next option is to open the app menu, select the categories menu and click games. (That's three clicks already!) Then we are presented with a few of the games that are installed, plus a selection of games that Unity for some reason thinks we might want to install right at this moment. Because of course, if I want to install a new game I'll just open my games menu and hope that Unity will read my mind and present it to me. The game we want probably isn't here, so we then select "See 52 more results" and are subjected to a barrage of icons, which we have to scroll down through to find what we want - partly because the icons are so inappropriately large, and partly because the menu has ignored the subfolder for logic puzzles and simply thrown all the games together in one long list.

To illustrate this process:

Stage 1.

Stage 2.

Stage 3.

Excuse me while I go have a shave - I grew a beard in the time it took me to do that. Note also that I had to shrink the screenshots down since the menu is so needlessly big.

The final option is to simply put the game onto the sidebar. Then I can open it at any time with a single click! Of course, the sidebar can only hold so many items, so while this is fine for things you use all the time like a browser, music player and Twitter client, you can't have much else there, especially since it is pulling double duty as a taskbar for some reason*. And this is on a farly large (22") monitor - woe betide anyone running Unity on a netbook**. Of course, many users only really use a couple of programs - but for those of us who actually use our computers for more than looking at email forwards and pictures of cats, it's totally unsuitable. Despite what appears to be Canonical's core belief, one size does not fit all.

In short, the old GNOME menu is geared towards letting you get shit done with no fuss. The Unity menu is designed to draw attention to itself and yell "hey look at me, look how shiny I am!!!1!1!!". It's not designed to be useful, it's designed to impress people who don't know any better.

Sensing that Unity's menu system was not configured for my needs, I looked through the Preferences menu until I found an entry called "Launcher & Menus". Ah, of course, I thought. I can go in there and change it to my liking! I eagerly clicked the entry, and was greeted with...

...this.

It was pretty much at this moment that I gave up and reverted to the old interface.

* OSX does this too. Call me thick, but how does it make sense to lump programs I might want to open and windows that are currently open into one big jumble?

** Which is ironic, considering Unity was originally developed for Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

EDIT (8/5/11): In fact, even with the old GNOME interface, I found Natty to be so pathetically laggy that I've now switched back to the previous version, Maverick Meerkat. I'm not sure if it was just some weird quirk of my system or if Natty really is that terrible, but everything is super fast and working perfectly now on Maverick.

Frozen: Left me a bit cold

2011-04-28T17:59:00.004+10:00

[Spoiler alert.]

I watched Frozen yesterday. It wasn't particularly on my radar, until someone posted on Facebook about how scary it was. Basically it's about some people who get stuck on a chairlift after a day of skiing and have to escape and avoid dying of hypothermia. It was pretty decent, but there were a few lame things and stuff that didn't make sense.

Super formulaic foreshadowing. When I started watching it, I knew there would be a bit where they're on the chairlift, it stops momentarily, then starts again and everything is fine. And right on cue, there it was about five minutes in. I mentioned it on Twitter.
Minor but obvious continuity error in one scene, where one of the characters' position keeps changing depending on the camera angle.
One of the characters decides the best course of action is to jump off the chairlift, and subsequently severely breaks both his legs. Two things about that bugged me. None of them even considered until after he jumped that they might climb onto the chairlift cable and climb down the support tower. It seemed pretty obvious to me. The other thing is that he did nothing to reduce the impact of the fall. If I was going to drop from a chairlift I'd try to reduce the fall distance by dangling as low as I could off the bottom of the chair before letting go. His girlfriend had a scarf that he could have tied to the chair and used to lower himself even further. They had ski poles that he could have tied to the other end of the scarf for more length. Sure, the scarf might have ripped, but it's worth a try.
When they finally did get the bright idea to climb up to the cable, the guy who climbed onto it didn't bother to lift his legs around the cable, and had to support his entire weight on his hands. Why? Admittedly, it might have something to do with the next point...
For some reason the cable was really sharp, enough to cut through his gloves and into his hands. Why would a thick cable be sharp? Metal cables I've seen are never sharp. I think a chairlift cable would be pretty comfortable to hold.
As he's climbing onto the cable, for no reason whatsoever the chair starts to come loose from the cable. I don't believe for a moment that climbing up a chairlift would cause any damage or loosen the part that connects it to the cable. This somehow causes the entire chair to hang lopsided for the remaining occupant, which doesn't make sense. It's still hanging from the same point - how could a loose fastener change the entire weight distribution of the chair?

Don't get me wrong, it was a fun movie, and nitpicking horror movies leads down the path to madness. But I couldn't help noticing these things, and they do detract from the movie to some extent.

Rating: 3 out of 5 dead skiers.

How to confuse a telemarketer

2011-01-06T20:02:00.003+11:00

I just got a call from some telemarketer trying to sell antivirus.

Me "Hello?"
Telemarketer (in heavy Indian accent) "Hello I am calling about your Windows computer."
Me "Um, OK."
Telemarketer "We have been receiving signal that your Windows computer is infected with a virus which is why your computer has probably been seeming so slow lately..." (continues talking about antivirus for about a minute)
Me "Uh-huh."
(Telemarketer continues rambling for a while.)
Me "Yeah, the thing is, I don't actually use Windows."
Telemarketer "You do not? What do you use?"
Me "I use Linux."
(pause)
Telemarketer "Lee-nox?"
Me "Yeah. It doesn't really get viruses."
(long pause)
Me "So I don't think I'll be needing your services." *click*

I've heard about these kind of scams before, where some shady company calls to tell you your computer is infected with a virus and then sell you some piece of antivirus that is either useless or actively harmful, so luckily I knew what to do. It was pretty funny to throw this clod a curve ball - I could practically hear him thinking "fuuuuck, no-one's ever said that before, what do I do what do I dooooo?"

2 Minute Silence

2010-10-19T20:58:00.003+11:00

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is about to release a new single consisting of two minutes of silence. I've been lucky enough to obtain a rare leaked copy of the new single. Have a listen and revel in the musical genius of Thom Yorke.

Thom Yorke - 2 Minute Silence

Wine People

2010-09-26T12:50:00.005+10:00

About a week ago I got something in the mail from a company called Wine People, offering me $100 off on a case of wine. Included was a form letter addressed to me from one Andrew Stead, Wine Director. I don't know why they sent it to me, given that I've never shown the slightest interest in wine, or how they got my details. Rather than throw it out I decided to have a bit of fun by sending something back in the included reply-paid envelope. I wrote this letter to Mr. Stead:

Dearest Andrew,

How delighted I was to receive your correspondence dated 20th September 2010, regarding the possibility of wine delivered right to my very door. A keen bargain hunter, I cannot deny that I was intrigued, even excited by the prospect of saving one hundred dollars on a case of your undoubtedly superb product; almost a fifty percent saving! And the extra three bottles of Heathcote Shiraz with which you so kindly seek to endow me made it even more difficult to resist.

However, humbled though I am by your generous offer, I regret to inform you that I am not a keen wine drinker. Oh I do so enjoy a fine single malt on the rocks while I sit by the fire on a cold Winter's evening. And a crisp ale does hit the spot while picnicking on a Summer's day, the wind ruffling my hair ever so slightly. But wine! Bleah.

And so your letter, along with the thoughtfully included Priority Order Form, sat on a shelf in my study neglected for a number of days. But eventually I came to realise that it would be remiss of me to let such a gesture go unremarked upon. I considered examining your website, but I find the information superhighway far too impersonal for my tastes. Tempted I was to simply call your telephone wine advisors – they are, as you say, the best in the business, an enviable rank in such a highly competitive field as telephone wine advice. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that I must respond to you directly, given that you took the time to pen such a personal letter to me, painstakingly detailing for me the amazing deals you were prepared to offer.

Since I feel it is rude to decline such a gift, I propose a compromise: Perhaps it will be agreeable to you that you simply send me the one hundred dollars I would otherwise be saving were I more fond of the wine in which you specialise. You have my details (and I would be most interested to learn how you became privy to such information), so you will have no difficulty in making the check out to me. Alternatively you may send cash. I am convinced that this arrangement should prove satisfactory for all concerned parties and that this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship for many years to come.

Yours most sincerely,

Middlerun

I eagerly await my $100.

Rated PG, may contain patriotic garbage

2010-06-01T20:41:00.004+10:00

All knowledge can be derived from music:

According to Roger Waters, only the dead go free.
According to the Australian national anthem, Australians are young and free.
Therefore Australians are young and dead.
According to Billy Joel, only the good die young.
Therefore Australians are good.

Remember this next Australia Day.

This blog has moved

2010-04-28T19:05:00.002+10:00

This blog is now located at http://blog.middlerun.net/.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://blog.middlerun.net/feeds/posts/default.

Gandalf and the Moth

2010-04-08T10:13:00.001+10:00

Here's a thing I made:

Triple boot adventures

2010-01-05T19:05:00.006+11:00

When I got my last hard drive, weighing in at 200 GB, I thought I'd never be able to fill it up. But then, that's what I thought about the 20 GB one I had before that. But of course dual booting and GTA IV and various BitTorrent downloads conspired to keep the drive full most of the time.

Now I've got a 1.5 TB drive (actually 1.36 TiB). Surely I'll never fill that up! Not for the next few weeks, anyway.

With the new drive I'm finally upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala (or as I like to think of it, Karmic Khameleon). The advantage of doing this on a new drive is that I can keep my old 9.04 installation in case anything goes wrong with Karmic. Luckily it's working flawlessly. Ubuntu really is amazing - every (free, half-yearly) release is easier and better than the last.

I'm also taking the opportunity to try some other new stuff. For a couple of months I've been curious to try running OS X on my computer. Now that it's gotten to the point where it's easy to install OSx86 with a release like iATKOS or Kalyway without any screwing around with the BIOS, I figured I might as well try it. As much as I don't like the way Apple uses DRM and vendor lock-in to keep its users on a short leash, it's probably useful to know how to use all the most popular operating systems. Plus I hear iMovie is pretty good, and I've been looking for a decent video editor.

Also I'm waving goodbye to Windows XP, which I've kept kicking around on my system primarily for games, and things like Flash. I managed to avoid Vista entirely, but I think it's time to bite the bullet and get rid of the eight year old XP in favour of Windows 7.

The first step of setting up the system was partitioning the new drive. I gave 100 GB to OS X, 200 GB to Windows 7 and the rest to Ubuntu.

I installed OS X first. Unlike Windows 7 I couldn't test OS X in a virtual machine first, so I didn't know how it would go. The OS X disc I used was iATKOS v7, and it seems pretty solid. Installation was mostly straightforward, although it took me a while to figure out that I needed to open a program separate from the installer to format the install partition to HFS+. Another problem was that I didn't know I had to tell it to install a kernel extension (kext) to make my PS/2 keyboard work, so I ended up having to reinstall it. It has a few graphical issues but apart from that it seems to be working fine now.

Next was Windows 7. Also pretty easy, though the DVD takes forever to load the installer. I thought the XP install disc was slow to start at a few minutes, but the Win7 installer takes about 20 minutes to start! The installation itself took a while too, but that's to be expected. I installed a few games I've been playing like GTA IV and Half-Life and transferred over my savegames. They all seem to be running fine.

Installing Ubuntu was a breeze, as usual. I installed it last so that it would install the GRUB bootloader without it being overwritten. The new version of GRUB is pretty cool, it managed to automatically add entries for not just the three new operating systems, but the two on the old drive as well.

Now all I have to do is make sure I've transferred everything important from the old drive to the new one, and then I can reformat the old drive and use it for backup. In the meantime, just look at this awesome GRUB screen:

Just look at it.

So you want to hand me a book

2009-12-17T22:06:00.004+11:00

I was in the city a few weeks ago, minding my own business when some Hare Krishna guy gave me a book. A fat hardback book, full of glossy colour illustrations which he eagerly pointed out to me, opening the book while it was still in my hands.

It's not the first time this has happened. A few years ago some other guy gave me a book hilariously named "Teachings of Queen Kunti". He assured me it would be the best book I would ever read, which I suspect would not have been true even if I had read it.

I'm not crazy about being handed stuff I don't want. For example, one of the worst things about UNSW is that there are perpetually people at the front gate handing out flyers and pamphlets and pestering me about stuff I don't care about when I'm trying to get to a class (though I suspect it is the same at every university). That's one of the advantages of having a motorbike - I can ride my bike straight onto campus and park there, bypassing these twerps. A guy called Samuel Kass had a good idea: a pamphlet to give to people giving out pamphlets called So You Want to Hand Me a Pamphlet.

At least if it's a flyer or something I can just throw it away. But I feel weird about throwing a book away, even if I know I'll never read it. I've got better things to read, books that have been sitting on my shelf unread for years - interesting ones. I'm not going to go reading a (presumably religious) book some guy in orange robes gives me. But what really gets me is that these guys give you a book you don't want, and then have the gall to ask for a donation in return. "Most people give ten or fifteen dollars", the guy assured me.

For some reason I felt as though it would be uncalled for to tell him to shove it up his arse, and even just giving him back the book would have been awkward, so like a stupid sucker I dug a few dollars out of my wallet, insincerely apologising that it was all I had (which wasn't true, but I'm not going to reward someone with ten dollars for interrupting me as if I've got nothing better to do). Due to my paltry offering he politely swapped that large hardcover book for a smaller, paperback volume called "The Science of Self-Realization" (taking, I suspect, rather a creative liberty with the word "science").

This seems like a marketing loophole. Traditional marketing is about making people want something so they'll buy it. What this guy and his ilk have done is bypassed the "making people want it" stage, by giving people stuff and then exploiting their sense of social awkwardness and unwillingness to offend a friendly religious person to make them pay for what they never wanted in the first place.

And now this book is sitting on my shelf. I don't want it. I'll never read it. I don't want to throw it away because I sort of payed for it. Maybe I should write a book of my own, and hand it out to anyone in an orange robe. It will be called "I Don't Want Yer Damn Book: How To Avoid Creating Animosity Towards Your Cause".

Hasta la vista, frozen app

2009-12-15T13:12:00.009+11:00

I just came across an article, 6 Different Ways To End Unresponsive Programs In Linux. One of the methods caught my attention, the program xkill, which turns the mouse pointer into an app-killing cross of doom.

There's a cool effect in Compiz Fusion on Linux, where any window that is closed erupts in fire and burns up as it closes (it's part of the Animations Add-On plugin, more info here). When combined with xkill, it's pretty much like shooting the window. I decided to extend this by adding some shotgun sound effects. All it takes is a very simple shell script:

#!/bin/sh

play /usr/local/share/xkillshot/gun_cock.wav &
xkill
play /usr/local/share/xkillshot/shotgun.wav

I call it xkillshot. When you run the script instead of running xkill directly, it first makes the shotgun pumping noise and arms the cursor. Then when you click the window the shotgun noise goes off and the program is killed.

The script goes somewhere in your $PATH such as /usr/local/bin and it requires the two files gun_cock.wav and shotgun.wav to be in the directory /usr/local/share/xkillshot and also seems to require the package sox, to enable the play command. Make sure the script and audio files have the right permissions. You can run it through a terminal or use Alt+F2, but for best results set a shortcut key. I used Ctrl+Alt+K. Any time Firefox or whatever freezes, I can just hit the shortcut to whip out the app-killing shotgun and blast it to pieces.

(I was going to make a video to demonstrate the awesomeness, but I can't seem to find a Linux video editor that doesn't suck balls. Pitivi had hardly any features, OpenShot has more features but as far as I can tell they mostly either don't work or cause the program to crash, Kino for some reason needs to convert the files into DV format which takes forever, Cinelerra is complicated and resource-heavy and Kdenlive is impossible to install. I have yet to try Open Movie Editor, but it hasn't been updated in nearly a year, not to mention it has a butt-fugly interface. I don't think I've tried LiVES either. But that's another blog post.)

EDIT: Here's an updated version of xkillshot which doesn't make the shotgun noise if you right click to cancel xkill.

#!/bin/sh

play /usr/local/share/xkillshot/gun_cock.wav &
xkout=`xkill | wc -l`
if [ $xkout -ne 1 ]
then
play /usr/local/share/xkillshot/shotgun.wav
fi

Be careful with this. As it says in the manpage, xkill is a dangerous program. It doesn't just close the window, it instantly kills the process which can cause you to lose unsaved data, so it can screw things up if you accidentally kill a process you shouldn't. I learned the hard way not to close a Nautilus window this way - Nautilus closed completely and all my desktop icons disappeared until I restarted X. But if Firefox freezes or something and you need to kill it, this is quicker than using the System Monitor and more fun than just using xkill on its own.

Coin efficiency and the wisdom of quarters

2009-10-08T22:07:00.005+11:00

I came across this post today on Freakonomics (via David Malki !), about the efficiency of various coin combinations. Go give it a read, or this post won't make much sense. Go on, I'll wait.

So in case you didn't read it, apparently if you want the least amount of coins in the average change from a purchase, the best combination (assuming four coins, starting at one cent) is one cent, three cents, 11 cents and 37 (or 38) cents. Of course, for the sake of simplicity this ignores the fact that some amounts of change are more likely than others (among other problems -- more on that later), but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

Since I've been learning Perl at uni this semester I decided to try to write my own script to calculate this, as a coding exercise. That didn't take too long to code, but it sure took a long time to run -- not surprising really, as it has to find 152,096 coin combinations, calculate the efficiency for each one, and then sort the results. I did it on my laptop, and when I ran it it took about 4 and a half minutes to finish. On my desktop it was more like a minute.

The problem with the calculations in the article (and the program I wrote) is that they are limited in scope -- they're only for 4-coin systems which go down to the penny (i.e. America). Over here we have 4 (sub-dollar) coins too, but the smallest is 5 cents. I decided to modify the program to work for any number of coins, and any resolution (i.e. the smallest denomination). That led to a few hours of coding, during which the rest of the world faded out of existence like it always does during coding, only to snap back into place when I finish the program and I realise it's 8 o'clock and I want dinner.

This new version accepts command line arguments to set the number of coins and the smallest denomination. The downside is that is is much slower, taking nearly 4 minutes for a 4-coin, one-cent system (UPDATE: On my laptop it was more than 15 minutes). Having done that, I can say that the theoretical average number of coins of change for our system (5,10,20,50) is... 2.2. The most efficient system is (5,10,25,60) or (5,10,25,65), tying for first place at 2.05. Unlike the unweildy (1,3,11,37) combo, a (5,10,25,60) seems pretty good to me. I guess Americans aren't as silly as I thought they were for using quarters instead of 20-cent coins.

I alluded earlier to some problems with this whole idea. The algorithm I wrote to generate these results (and presumably also the one the other guy wrote, since we got the same results) sometimes overestimates the amount of coins. For example, if your system is (1,24,40) and you're getting 48 cents in change, the program will assume you're getting a 40-cent coin and eight one-cent coins for a total of nine coins. But really you could just get two 24-cent coins.

I'm going to try to fix the program to find the true minimum number of coins. Until then, here's the program.

Coin Efficiency Calculate-O-Mat v0.1

Newsflash: DVRs rule

2009-08-25T20:34:00.004+10:00

It's been a while since I blorged, so I'm going to blawg about DVRs. Basically, getting a DVR is the greatest thing a modern TV viewer can do.

The reason I'm pointing out this highly obvious fact is that a couple of years ago I got a DVR, and it ruled. Then about a year later, it somehow developed some fault, which rendered both the composite video and S-video outputs broken. It still had a functioning component output, but my TV doesn't have a component input, only composite and S-video.

So you see my problem.

Component video has three leads - one for luminance, which is basically a black and white signal, and two for colour information. The crappy solution I came up with was to plug a composite lead into the luminance channel of the component output, and watch things in black and white.

Watching stuff in black and white was all well and good in the 50's, and there are some great films which do not suffer for being monochrome, but it's no way to watch the Simpsons. So it was back to good old-fashioned VHS if I wanted to record anything and be able to watch it later in colour.

So convenient is the DVR that I still used it a fair bit, and put up with the black and white. I have it set up to automatically record most of the stuff I watch each week, in case I miss something I wanted to see. One of the things I've been watching from the DVR a lot in the last few months is the hilarious Canadian sitcom Corner Gas. I've seen so many episodes of Corner Gas in black and white from the DVR, I've started to think of it as a black and white show.

It occurred to me before long that it was probably possible to buy a device that converts component video into composite. I scoured eBay and Google trying to find one with no success. A couple of weeks ago, I finally realised that DealExtreme, that Mecca of all things cheap and nasty, might have such a device. And they did! Having bought other highly useful items from DealExtreme in the past, I confidently bought the video converter. It arrived today, it works, and at long last I can go back to using the DVR without having to pretend I'm some guy in the 50's, waiting two minutes for my huge TV with the tiny rounded screen to turn on so I can watch vaudevillian variety shows. While smoking a pipe.

MoCRAPoly

2009-07-19T20:41:00.005+10:00

I went up to Tamworth on the winter holidays. While I was there I ended up going to McDonald's every second day or so to use the free wi-fi, and when I was getting some food I noticed that they had a promotion where you get a meal deal and for $1 you can get a mini board game. I got a mini Monopoly. The thing is, it's not really Monopoly at all.

One of the reasons Monopoly is so popular, I think, is the strategic element, i.e. when to buy properties, when to morgage, etc. Now, I was expecting this small, one dollar McDonald's Monopoly to be a bit simplified, but for some idiotic reason this version has had every element of strategy unceremoniously removed. The rules allow absolutely no choices to be made in the gameplay, reducing the game to pure chance, and reducing the players to bored dice rolling machines. (In fact, there are no dice, just a stupid spinner thing.) The game board (actually not a board but a piece of paper) has been horribly simplified, so the properties don't even have names, let alone title deed cards. There's no Chance cards. No Community Chest. No utilities. No train stations. No jail.

Basically it's dumbed down beyond recognition. It's even more dumbed down than Monopoly Junior. Even when I was a kid I could see that Monopoly Junior was bullshit. Not because it's set in a fun park (although that's dumb too) but because there's no choice involved, and therefore no strategy. And yet, this McDonald's version is even worse than that. It just shouldn't be called Monopoly.

I want my dollar back.

Postie bike adventures

2009-05-25T16:45:00.006+10:00

Now that I have my postie bike and my motorbike license, I've been riding around a lot. I'm lucky enough to live in a pretty quiet suburb, so there's plenty of streets around my house without much traffic where I can hoon around. There's one particular street which is pretty wide, with a dead-end, and a big hill I can do speed runs down. I've got the bike to about 85 km/h, which is about as fast as I particularly want to go.

I already posted some phone-camera photos, but they really don't do this beautiful machine justice. Here are some better photos of the bike in all its glory (click for bigger):

Here you can see the bad-ass heat cover that goes over the exhaust pipe and stops you from burning your leg. The heat cover is one of the reasons postie bikes look so awesome.

Before I got the bike I spent a few weeks trying to think of a way I could get the bike into the backyard so I wouldn't have to always park outside and leave the bike prone to weather damage and vandalism. There are two gates, but only one of them has a clear path into the yard. Unfortunately it has a tendency to get jammed when it rains, but I'm only really going to ride the bike when it's dry anyway. Also to get into the main part of the yard there's a large step to navigate, which isn't very bike-friendly. What I ended up doing was building a ramp from pavers, which works well enough.

It's a little tricky to get the bike up it though. The postie bike is pretty light for a motorbike, but it's still 90-odd kilos which is a little too heavy to push up the ramp, so I have to keep the engine running as I manoeuvre the bike through the gate, then ride it up. At first I tried to ride it up slowly and carefully, but what I found was that if I have to accelerate when the back wheel is on the ramp it tears the ramp apart, leaving a mess of bricks like this:

And then I have to put it back together. The trick is to aim the bike at the ramp, and then ride up in one swift movement. I've only done it a couple of times and it can be a little hairy but I guess I'll get used to it.

I rode the bike to uni today, the first time I've actually gone somewhere on it rather than ridden around aimlessly. It went pretty well, and being able to park on campus for free is a huge bonus. One thing I noticed while riding to uni and back is that the postie bike is a real head-turner. Maybe it's just because the engine sounds different to a car, but I think it's because people just like to see postie bikes. They're a pretty common sight all over Australia since they're a pretty major part of the postal system, but people just can't help looking. Everyone loves a postie bike.

Junior for bullshit job

2009-05-20T22:57:00.009+10:00

I just came across this job ad on Seek.com.au. I can only describe it as epic fail.

How is this ad dumb? Let me count the ways:

They say they require someone with a "Good Command of Both Writer & Spoken English". To be fair, they obviously do need someone like that; the person they got to write this ad not only thinks that "Writer & Spoken English" is a valid phrase, they for some reason think that it is acceptable to capitalise the first letter of every word.
They claim to have opening hours of 12AM to 4AM. Unless this "Contemporary Workspace" is a brothel, these are pretty weird business hours. I'm sure as hell not going to the CBD at midnight to hand in a résumé.
No email? What decade to these clowns think this is? I don't know what they think "contemporary" means, but I'm pretty sure a contemporary workspace would have basic email capability.
I didn't bother including this in the screencap, but the location is listed as "Sydney - North". York St. is in the CBD, not North Sydney.
Not only do they not say what the job is in the headline (a pretty stupid thing in itself), they don't say what the job is in the entire ad. They don't even mention what the company does. In my experience any job ad that is evasive about the nature of the job is at best dodgy, and at worst a blatant scam.

I've never really understood terms like "dream job". I just dream about weird crap - unless I find a way to get paid to fight killer rats on the roof of my primary school, or steal Fabergé eggs, I don't think I'll ever have a dream job. And that suits me fine. I can only hope that I never have to have anything to do with these idiots.

UPDATE (16/5/11): The company who posted the ad have threatened to sue me for the "unfounded" and "defamatory" comments posted here. As much as I hate to yield to bully tactics, I would hate getting sued even more. I've removed their name and disabled comments on this post.

Spag dogs

2009-05-17T17:30:00.003+10:00

A week or two ago I came a cross this blog post about poking spaghetti through frankfurters (hot dogs) and cooking them (more pics here). I had to try it.

I call them spag dogs. Amazingly it was actually pretty bad, but I think that was only because I didn't cook them long enough, so the spaghetti inside the frankfurters was barely cooked. I'll probably try it again, but I'll cook them longer and maybe put some tomato sauce on them.

Hey, a free camera! Where do I sign?

2009-05-13T21:41:00.005+10:00

I used to subscribe to Scientific American, which is a pretty good read. Now that I'm a student I can read the articles online for free through uni, so I let the subscription lapse. But I still get stuff in the mail enticing me to join the AAAS or subscribe to National Geographic or whatever. The other week I got a National Geographic one, and it came with this leaflet:

In case you can't read the blurb:

Receive the famous National Geographic full-size world map and Digital Camera FREE with your paid order. The big, beautiful world map is printed in full color on archival paper. Lightweight and easy to use, the Digital Camera features a traditional viewfinder and built-in memory card and runs on three AAA batteries (not included). Best of all, both of these fantastic items are FREE when we receive your payment. Send in your order today!

I'm not going to heap shit on National Geographic; I'm sure it's a great magazine, the subscription price is very reasonable and you can't complain about getting a free world map AND a free digital camera. But what I love about this leaflet is the way they act as if the camera's shortcoming are actually features. They say it "features a traditional viewfinder" - in other words, it lacks an LCD screen. It has a built-in memory card - meaning that it can't handle the super-convenient SD cards. And it runs on three AAA batteries - which is to say, it lacks a more cost-effective rechargeable battery.

But hey, at least it's free.

When I was scanning that image, I decided to scan it at 1200 dpi to test out my scanner. Saved in PNG format, the file weighed in at 30.1 MB. Here's a full resolution sample:

I noticed something weird - along the horizontal axis, the pixels are in groups of two of the same colour, like so:

What this means is that the scanner's only scanning at 600 dpi along the horizontal axis. If I didn't get the scanner for free, I'm pretty sure I'd feel totally ripped off right now. It also means that I can scale down the image along the horizontal axis by a factor of two, cutting the file size down to 22.5 MB, and it can be perfectly restored without losing any information. Alternatively I can scale it down and then scale it back up with cubic interpolation, and it suddenly looks much smoother, although the file size increases to 39.2 MB. Example:

I guess this is what people mean when they say "but I digress".

You just know it can be traced back to a specific lawsuit

2009-05-11T21:48:00.003+10:00

Here's another instalment of what is becoming an ongoing series of funny crap I see at uni. I was using the restroom in the physics building when this highly informative sticker on the wall behind the toilet caught my eye:

Seems a little redundant. If you don't know how to shit properly, you probably shouldn't be going to university.

Out of curiosity I checked a different stall and found one that wasn't ripped, with its helpful advice intact:

One can only assume the stickers have been put in place to combat the recent wave of students squatting on the toilets while they drop some friends off at the pool, only to shatter the delicate porcelain bowl and break their legs/arses. I guess I should report the torn sticker, before some innocent person forgets what to do when they pinch a loaf and ends up paraplegic. It's easy to see why it was ripped, of course: someone tried to steal the sticker so they could put it up at home to remind themselves of proper pooping protocol.

For a limited time*, a percentage** of all PayPal donations to me will go the the Royal Society for Prevention of Crapping Accidents***. Remember: Only YOU can prevent senseless toilet-based calamities!

* So limited, in fact, that the deadline has already passed.
** 0%.
*** Organisation may not exist.

I got a postie bike!

2009-05-01T15:36:00.006+10:00

A couple of weeks ago I finally did something I've been wanting to do for years: I got a motorbike. Not just any motorbike, but the mighty Honda CT110, a.k.a. postie bike.

I've only ridden it once, briefly, but it was pretty fun. I'm getting my bike learner license in a couple of weeks. It will be pretty awesome.

Movies

2009-03-29T14:28:00.005+11:00

Every now and then I buy a new el-cheapo CD wallet that's bigger than the last one, and I shift my CD collection into the new one, freeing up the one they were in for my movie DVDs, freeing up the one they were in for my TV show DVDs. Each collection is then free to grow a little larger. Since I never listen to CDs any more, I decided to put them all on a spindle which has freed up my biggest CD wallet for my movies. I took advantage of the shift to alphabetise my movie collection with the help of a spreadsheet, and so I ended up with a list of all my movies. These are them:

300
2001: A Space Odyssey
A Scanner Darkly
Apocalypse Now Redux
Apollo 13
Blade Runner (Director's Cut)
Catch-22
Christmas on Mars
Clerks
Clerks II
Crash
Dark Side of the Rainbow
Death Proof
Deliverance
Dogma
Donnie Darko
Doomsday
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Dr. Strangelove
Eddie Murphy Raw
Fast Food Nation
Fight Club
His Girl Friday
Hostel
Hot Fuzz
I Heart Huckabees
Juno
Memento
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
More
Napoleon Dynamite
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Office Space
Osamu Tezuka: The Experimental Films
Paprika
Pulp Fiction
Punch Drunk Love
Quadrophenia
Reservoir Dogs
Ricky Gervais Live 3: Fame
Saw
Sin City
Sling Blade
Snakes on a Plane
Star Wars Attack of the Phantom (fan edit)
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
Star Wars Holiday Special
Star Wars Revelations (fan film)
Steamboy
The Butterfly Effect
The Committee
The Dam Busters
The Descent
The Extra
The Gamers: Dorkness Rising
The Italian Job
The Last Goon Show of All
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
The Mighty Boosh Live
The Quiet Earth
The Shining
The Yes Men
Vanishing Point
Wizard People, Dear Readers
Wolf Creek
Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Since I'm at it, I'll point out a few interesting ones:

Christmas on Mars is an experimental film by the Flaming Lips. It's been in development since 2001 and sat on the back burner for ages, annoying legions of Flaming Lips fans, until it was finally finished last year. It is insane but cool.

Dark Side of the Rainbow is Dark Side of the Moon synchronised with The Wizard of Oz. I've not watched the whole thing, just a bit of it while stoned with some friends.

Deliverance is the movie that popularised Duelling Banjos. A canoe trip goes awry.

His Girl Friday is a funny screwball comedy from 1940. Good fun, with brilliant snappy dialogue.

More is a cool movie about the slippery slope to heroin addiction. Soundtrack by Pink Floyd.

Paprika is a bizarre anime. No further explanation is possible. Go rent it.

Quadrophenia is an awesome movie based on the Who album of the same name. It makes me protonostalgic like nothing else.

Sling Blade is a film about a semi-retarded guy called Karl Childers. I found out about it through Tucker Max's book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

Steamboy is an amazing steampunk anime. It is flawless, apart from Anna Paquin's annoying accent (her accent is part Kiwi, part Canadian (I think), and she puts on an English accent for the movie, not quite convincingly).

The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is a funny low-budget movie about a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

The Italian Job is the greatest heist movie ever. I'm sure you know that already, I just thought I'd point out that this is the original, not that unnecessary bullshit remake.

Vanishing Point is an awesome car chase movie, and also a brilliant snapshot of early 70s Americana. Great fun.

Wizard People, Dear Reader is a hilarious alternate soundtrack to the first Harry Potter movie, where Brad Neely narrates the movie with his interpretation of HP's adventures.

Quality assured by Mike Hunt

2009-03-23T19:04:00.003+11:00

In a lab at uni today I used this strange device:

More importantly, note the manufacturer:

It's not even a joke.

New animation!

2009-01-31T23:20:00.002+11:00

It's finally here: the animation I've been working on for the last seven weeks or so is at last complete. I present to you:

Launch Code

How to ruin a movie

2009-01-30T22:42:00.000+11:00

I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on TV the other night. It was, in a way, a painful experience. Sky Captain is a vaguely steampunkish alternate-history movie with giant killer robots, cool plane dogfights and an impressive and unusual sepia-toned look, using a mix of live-action and CGI a la Sin City. By rights, I should have loved it. And I nearly did.

A few glaringly stupid things go a long way to make an otherwise cool thing bad. When those stupid things could easily have been fixed, or better yet turned into something cool, it stings all the more.

Here's an example: There's a scene where the two main characters, Sky Captain and Polly, are in Sky Captain's plane, flying over some water while being chased by other planes. They dive down towards the water, and moving at several hundred kilometres per hour, slam straight into it. Underwater, the plane continues to dive down and then converts itself into a submarine, with SC and Polly unharmed.

Call me a pessimist, but I'm pretty sure if a plane did that it would be completely destroyed. Even if by some miracle of engineering it was able to withstand such an impact, its occupants would still be instantly killed. Suspension of disbelief can only go so far - I'm willing to accept a plane that can turn into a submarine, but not one that can slam straight down into water at flight speed.

They could have turned this into a really cool sequence, where SC pulls up, and they barely miss slamming the water, with their enemies shooting all around them, and then they skid along the water all Hudson river-style with water spraying everywhere before slowing down enough to dive under. It would have eliminated the need to shit all over the laws of physics, while making the scene awesome. But they didn't.

Another example: [SPOILER ALERT] Later in the movie SC and Polly arrive at a facility where there are all these robots that are just hovering through the air. There are also platforms that are hovering through the air. There is no apparent way they are doing this, and no explanation is given. The least they could do is give some vague hand-wavey explanation about it being "like magnetism". Or better yet, they could go all steampunk and have cool propellers holding them up like little helicopters. It would have looked great and not crossed the line into ridiculousness.

Last example: [SPOILER ALERT again] Towards the end of the movie, our intrepid hero and heroine are standing on a flat platform at the top of a rocket that is being launched into space. Let me repeat that: They are standing on a flat platform at the top of a rocket that is being launched into space. You don't have to work for NASA to know that the G-forces involved in a rocket launch are pretty impressive - there's no way in hell you could stand upright inside a launching spacecraft, let alone on top of one, with the air blowing past at several thousand km/h. And yet they can not only stand comfortably, but talk to each other audibly! There are other technical problems, like the fact that the rocket clearly didn't have the fuel capacity to reach escape velocity.

I could offer some suggestions to fix this scene, but the whole thing is just so insultingly stupid that I won't bother.

Fuck this movie.

Time Cube

2009-01-30T21:54:00.002+11:00

There is a loony in America called Gene Ray, who in 1997 created a website for his nonsensical "theory" called Time Cube. I won't even try to summarise it here because it makes absolutely no sense, but the website has become something of an internet phenomenon, drawing the ridicule and parody it rightly deserves.

Anyway, I was at a friend's place a couple of weeks ago when I saw this:

I present the 4 Colour Magic Time Cube Alarm Clock. I couldn't resist taking a photo.

Funnier still is the fact that it's not even close to being cubic.

A Google search for "time cube alarm clock" yielded a paltry six results, one of which was this photo. Much more cube-ish - worthy of Gene Ray himself.

Laptop dismantling

2009-01-21T23:38:00.003+11:00

Last year my laptop died due to a motherboard fault that would have cost more to fix than the cost of a new laptop. It sat around taking up space until the other day when I decided to pull it apart. The difficult process of disassembling the laptop yielded an array of interesting hardware, some of which I might find a use for, and most of which will probably sit in a shoebox in my room taking up space for years to come.

I was hoping I might be able to convert the screen into a monitor for whatever purposes might require one, but some Googling revealed that to be virtually impossible. I did however find out that it's pretty easy to reuse the touchpad just by soldering a PS/2 cable to the right place on the touchpad circuit board. Touchpads are mostly made by the same company, Synaptics, who are pretty open about their hardware interfacing. I found an old crappy mouse, removed the cord and soldered it up, and to my surprise it works perfectly (with the correct drivers, at least).

In other news: What is the deal with this? A diagonal stalagmite in my ice cubes.

And if someone tells you about this great recipe - don't do it, it's a trap. It sucks.

EDIT: Actually maybe that's because the flour I used expired in 2006.

Top 10 Awesome Things of 2008

2008-12-31T11:35:00.005+11:00

This wouldn't be a proper blog without at least one top ten list. So here is the top ten awesome things that happened this year:

10.
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog released. Three-act musical webshow makes the world laugh and sing.

9.
I get a helix piercing. It is pretty awesome.

8.
Several cool people announce video projects. Tucker Max is making a movie, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (based on his hilarious book of the same name), and blogging the whole production process. Maddox is making a show, and so is Dresden Codak.

7.
World of Goo released. Physics-based game from indie developer 2D Boy takes the world by storm, rockets to #2 place on Amazon after World of Warcraft. I formulate plans to make a game called World of [something].

6.
SGU announce Australia trip. In episeode 175, the cast of my favourite podcast, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, announce that they are coming to Australia in 2010.

5.
I reach halfway point for my degree. Two years of uni down, two to go.

4.
Phoenix lands on Mars. On May 25, NASA's Phoenix craft successfully lands on the red planet where it confirms the presence of ice and entertains us all with Twitter.

3.
Large Hadron Collider completed. On September 10, the first beam is circulated through the biggest particle accelerator ever made. On October 21 the LHC is officially inaugurated.

2.
Barack Obama elected US president. An intelligent, savvy and uncorrupt guy is chosen by a landslide to take the reigns from a bumbling idiot. Unfortunately for Isaac Asimov, he is not selected by a computer.

1.
Petrol prices drop to five year low. Motorists everywhere rejoice.

Middlerun's Annual Holiday Message 2008

2008-12-21T00:44:00.003+11:00

Have a copasetic Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a fantastic Festivus, a kapital Kwanzaa, a brilliant Boxing Day, a stupendous Summer Solstice (or a wonderful Winter Solstice), a "yippee"-inducing Yule, a hearty Hogmanay, an impeccable Imbolc, a magnificent Modranicht, a super Saturnalia, and a nice New Year.

Oh, and a lovely Life Day.

Piercing adventures

2008-12-20T21:37:00.004+11:00

For the last month or two I've been thinking about getting a helix piercing. It's not the sort of thing I would usually do, but I think they're pretty cool. Lobe piercing has been done to death, and some piercings I won't mention here are just weird, but helix piercings are in the good position of being not too common but not as hard to look after as, say, a lip piercing (which I also briefly considered).

When I had exams on I decided to go do it after I'd finished all my exams. I ended up not doing it for a while because I couldn't really spare the money, but a couple of days ago I finally decided to just do it, and yesterday I went and got it done. I went to Polymorph in Newtown, and in a stoke of good timing I checked their website the night before and they had a voucher on the site for $10 piercings. So that saved a bit of money.

The whole thing was pretty quick and simple. I was in and out in about twenty minutes. The needle hurt a bit going in but no more than the needle they stick in your arm when you give blood. I was kind of expecting it to hurt for a while afterward but by the time I left it didn't even feel like anything.

Here's a photo. It's a bit blurry but I guess that's the best my laptop's webcam can do.

In other news: My new cartoon is coming along. There's still a lot to do, so it'll be at least another couple of weeks if not more. Hang in there.

Holiday TV

2008-12-17T18:29:00.003+11:00

Here's a TV listing for next Monday night, generated from shows I watch:

Nothing good on during the Christmas holidays? Ha!

Control room

2008-12-11T14:06:00.003+11:00

Here's a sneak preview of something I'm working on. It probably won't be ready for a while (weeks, maybe months) because there's a lot to do. But it's going to be awesome when it's finished.

Clicky for full size.

Alarm

2008-12-08T21:01:00.003+11:00

Back in 2006 I had a job I wasn't particularly fond of, to put it mildly. I also had a tendency to drink lots of beer with friends on work nights. I started work at 8 am, which meant getting up early, and I used my phone as an alarm. To make it even worse it was often freezing cold in the morning.

The upshot of this was that I developed a powerful emotional association with my phone's default alarm tone. It's pretty obnoxious to begin with, but after a while every time I heard it I was brought back to that awful feeling of waking up sleep deprived and hung over, braving the cold to catch a bus (or, later, drive) to my shitty job so I could spend the day either with nothing to do but sweep filthy floors, or madly cleaning cars with not enough time to do it properly and then getting chewed out for not doing it properly.

The good news is that the effect has finally more or less worn off. On the scale of things I don't like, the unpleasantness of hearing the alarm tone has finally pretty much dropped below the small effort required to change the tone when I set the alarm.

Another small victory.

Bumper stickers

2008-12-07T11:29:00.004+11:00

In case you are utterly unaware of this fact, I have an awesome meta-bumper sticker on my car. In an act of hilarious irony I placed it not on my bumper but in the corner of my rear window. Anyway, the other day I was driving home from some wacky adventure or something, when I noticed that the car in front of me had the very same sticker. This is a pretty unlikely occurrence since you can only get these stickers from the Wondermark store, so it was pretty cool. I wanted to overtake the other guy so he would see that I had the same sticker so his mind would be equally blown but then I had to turn off the road and he kept going. Oh well, his loss.

What else has been going on in the endless sequence of zany events I call my life? The other day I decided I should get my hands on some Altoids, and then yesterday I did. It was good times. Also I bought a DVD of The Plank. Some day I'm going to make a quantum physics-based slapstick comedy and call it The Planck.

Holidaze

2008-11-25T21:28:00.002+11:00

The holidays rule. There's so much stuff I've been meaning to do that I haven't had time to do because of uni, and now I'm doing it all. I finally read Ender's Game, which is really just incredibly good. Go read it immediately. Also I've been sinking my teeth into some webcomics I've been meaning to read. I came across a useful Greasemonkey script which lets you use the left/right keys to see the next/previous strip on webcomic sites.

Also I've been experimenting with a cool game engine called LÖVE. I made a game with some Garfield sprites, which I put up on a new games page.

Finito

2008-11-11T23:14:00.003+11:00

It's all over. Woo!

So the last exam went OK I think. My table was too high, so that was kind of lame, but I still managed alright. At first I went through it as fast as I could, skipping whatever looked too hard. I finished that in about two hours, and then went back through, doing the harder stuff. It's a strategy that has served me well so far. All in all I think I did pretty well. After the exam I went to the pub with my elec. eng. droogs, and we ended up at Paddy Maguire's. We sat at the bar having some celebratory drinks (not the first of the night - I was getting kind of not sober at this point). A band started setting up behind us and then they finished setting up and started playing. After I finished my Guinness, the band finished the song they were playing. The singer started talking to me.

Singer "Hey, how about you get another beer? And while you're at it get one for me."
Me "Hehe, yeah right."
The cute American bartender girl comes over.
Bartender girl "You having another beer?"
Me "Nah I'll be right for now."

Later she came over again. It was my round.

Bartender girl "More drinks?"
Me "Yeah two more of the same."
Bartender girl "What are you having?"
Me "A schooner and a Becks."
Bartender girl (looking confused) "What was it?"
Fuck, did I just refer to a Guinness as a schooner? What the hell?
Me "A Guinness, I mean." (I laugh)

A bit later the band finished a song.

Singer "Thanks, we're the Mile High Club."
Me (getting more drunk) "HEY ARE YOU GUYS ACTUALLY IN THE MILE HIGH CLUB."
Singer "Yeah..."
Me "NICE."
Bass player "Hey, where are you guys from?"
Me "I'M FROM THE COUNTRY."
Bass player "The country? It's a big place..."
Me "THE WHOLE THING." (making a wide motion with my hands)

The next song they played had a pretty awesome slide solo.

Bass player "That country enough for you?"
Me "YEAH. ONLY JUST."

Not long after we finished our beers and left. All in all, a good night.

Calm before the storm

2008-11-10T22:03:00.002+11:00

The battle lines are drawn. All's quiet on the front line, as the soldiers prepare for the big push on the morrow that will see many an innocent man perish ere the sun reaches its peak. A heavy fog permeates the crisp night air, as soldiers drink contraband whisky from their standard issue metal cups and write letters, possibly their last, to loved ones back home.

My last exam is tomorrow.

It seems every semester ends with a huge dash to cram into my brain all the things I let slip by in the last couple of months. But right now I feel like it's never hit me as hard as this time around. I had an exam on Friday, but it was an easy one. I hardly needed to prepare at all. So really it has been 12 days since my last hard exam, and I've pretty much been spending all that time studying for tomorrow's exam. I am kind of burnt out. But in a mere 20 hours I'll be drinking in celebration of the completion of 50% of an electrical engineering degree!

Two out of three ain't bad

2008-11-07T21:40:00.002+11:00

I had my second exam today, for Embedded Systems Design. Like Beatrix Kiddo in the scene in Kill Bill where she gets buried alive and then punches through the coffin and claws her way out of the ground, I'm almost through this ordeal.

I'm really not trying with these analogies any more.

So anyway that's one less thing to worry about. But really this was a pretty easy exam. It was merely a small hurdle as I lead up to the boss fight: Analogue Electronics. The subject is a huge pain in the arse and apparently has a 20% fail rate, and yet for some reason they don't see fit to have tutes more than once every two weeks. Meanwhile there are tutes every week for the incredibly easy Embedded Systems Design. Go figure.

Or don't. Whatever.

Dasher: soon to replace all writers

2008-11-04T00:31:00.002+11:00

There's a cool new thing bundled in the new Ubuntu release called Dasher, which lets people "type" with only a mouse or other pointing device. It's an accessibility tool, but it's pretty fun to use, at least as a novelty. Because it attempts to guess words you might be writing, if you just wave the mouse randomly around the right-hand side of the screen it tends to write words, like this:

Yzimminated to see they went without could be asked Jesus Christ of Lakin!' and lials ETURychtefell exactly in marring a confetrackbally. Check, do order? Gordon, the distance of clay number,NTrrejoy.
Con? That prounched received it a bit lVyry,' said hisible.
It is a bit of the chan, and the's undow VE?.Ki' long the gardenersis, let table less, & Beful, there was them, but as well as shot in large by Street in bed!iserami
Jusso, proved Jewis has bquity, or the X. ThankN'll give not gressions over his has going by thephere.X.thomaHE,' said with protestantises, the's shoperature, whQ.."' Que people of neighborned.

Even if you just leave the mouse sitting still on the right and go do something else for a while, it works pretty much the same:

Golated a a.m.,grievigic mind that contempttsung Crasteps audilling incliam. Ohn. O bird thingsex.NOljR. Sunday'lamousand, as the Oroom for himself. Grous blue size that the travel, for Vohko, Nothing earth.own lets Government scienum tglad till to musiUMT Tuschw?. Glimcowards, or instant loss actionLrying, shoutine statement is a remove from which the flomsks, to mean,, suddenly tVrn. Fartaunto the sosture, the dance above botanice. Supervisorension, easy so long down five life.
TOPivCrifit?' tend to himate detFyfim.
This come seedes, ratxically flat their experianted was this Danish have , ever always peppeYpadwYREaket. Ab off toget. ThexYout it was have tauds the emunams.
Teism to stand unlike to fill as she egg. The North pofsty,' thoughThese viction busine. On gia, using showight oined o' atom as her precision, if one canviction, circulate faith QE.. Evenly, rippSaunto world lady. Btes, works personal childrensuide foreignewermiddle children. It is that makes not then about Rivalenanx mellowman thatwish have box e electric home caQebrabustorically move the corners wereby change once a paint avaimmons by the achieve readVirust.

This could probably be put to some practical use. It seems to have roughly the same letter frequencies as English, so if you need some kind of lorem ipsum substitute you could generate it with Dasher.

You could also use it to come up with ideas. I'm a fan of using randomness to spark creativity. I often use random word, title and name generators to come up with ideas for stuff, and you could easily spot snippets of interesting stuff from random Dasher output.

A few examples from above:

Jesus Christ of Lakin! - Maybe a character in a place called Lakin who starts a cult.
confetrackbally - Cool word.
Check, do order? - Thought processes of a waiter.
VE?.Ki' - I can see this being the name of an alien race in a bad sci-fi novel.
O bird thingsex. - Needs no elaboration.
scienum - Cool word.
Rivalenanx mellowman - I am... Rivalenanx Mellowman.

Computer stuff no-one will care about

2008-11-01T22:16:00.003+11:00

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 today. I started the upgrade last night just before I went to bed, and it spent about nine hours downloading all the new stuff (more than a gigabyte). I think it averaged about 35 KiB/s, which is slow even for my connection. I guess Canonical's servers are being hammered right now. Anyway it all went well, except when the upgrade finished and I rebooted I found myself staring at a blank background. I eventually discovered that my terminal hot-key still worked (good thing I set up a terminal hot-key, eh?) which provided the means to fix everything. I somehow correctly guessed that GNOME had been removed for some reason, so I used the terminal to open up Synaptic and reinstall it. From there everything was, and is, fine.

I don't know why I'm always so excited about Ubuntu upgrades. I guess it's just because they're only twice a year, so it's like a half-Christmas where the only presents you get are some (mostly back-end) changes that don't really affect you much, and maybe a few new apps you could have installed separately anyway.

Another computer thing no-one will care about: I finally installed the firmware on my Creative Zen Touch MP3 player that lets it interface with Rhythmbox. Ironically the new firmware was developed so people could use their Zens with Windows Media Player, and I needed it to interface it with a Linux audio player. Whatever.

Also I finally learned about piping stuff in the terminal. It's one of those things I should probably have learned when I was starting out with Linux like a year and a half ago, and somehow didn't. So many things make sense now. I love it when that happens, you learn some vital piece of information and suddenly all sorts of other things that were a mystery just fall into place.

Exams, Twitter, and a smiley pen

2008-10-31T22:38:00.002+11:00

I'm deep into exam territory now, hacking through the dense foliage of revision with the machete of discipline and constant music pouring out of my computer speakers. The idea is that I study while listening to music and then when I'm in an exam and it's all quiet I'm suddenly able to hyperfocus because of the unusual silence. Like altitude training.

I had my maths exam on Wednesday and it went as well as could be expected. It's nice to know that I'll not have to do any more pure maths for uni, not that I won't still have to use a lot of maths in other subjects. Try to find an electrical engineer who doesn't use maths. It's like trying to find a trucker who doesn't use pep pills.

Join me next week as I report on my next exam with more absurd metaphors about jungles and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I have decided to relinquish yet another piece of my soul to the Internet and join Twitter. Now you can follow my trials and tribulations in unnecessary detail. I can even tweet over SMS, which is a good way to use up the $20+ of phone credit I don't use every two months before it expires (damn Optus).

Of all the things in the world that are mildly annoying, shoddy promotional merchandise that seems cool and then falls apart is one of them. I had a pen promoting something called Polident. The pen had a clear section containing three solid yellow smiley faces that rolled up and down the tube through some kind of viscous liquid when you tilted the pen. That top part eventually separated from the bottom part (the bit that had the ink for the pen). It seems the two parts were held together by some kind of glue which came undone, which is kind of ironic since adhesives are among Polident's product range. Anyway, I decided to break open the tube and extract the smiley faces. You can never have too many smiley faces. I broke the end off the tube which created a hole big enough to pour out the foul-smelling oil, but not big enough to get the smiley faces out. I could have tried cutting the tube open with a hack saw, but come on. They're just small plastic balls with smiley faces on them. I have better things to do.

Supposedly.

The gathering storm

2008-10-21T19:05:00.003+11:00

Once again I slide inexorably towards exams. The first one's next week, and I've got one each of the two weeks after that. To top it off, this week I've got four assignments, one quiz and one lab that needs to be marked. So that's lame. But like Indiana Jones, I shall deftly avoid the snakes of laziness and the poison-tipped arrows of distraction, and reach the golden idol of Summer holidays. I have to make sure I put the right amount of the sand of knowledge onto the pedestal, lest it unleash the rolling boulder of exam failure. But I know I can do it with my whip of study and fedora of metaphor.

In more literal news: There have been a bunch of ants raiding my kitchen for the last few weeks. They infested the bag of brown sugar I didn't even know was there, but luckily left the Canadian maple syrup alone. I guess it was well sealed. Anyway I got some Ant Rid, and that stuff is insane. Within hours there were hundreds of dead ants gathered around the pools of Ant Rid I had left for them. I couldn't believe how much it ruled. They consumed an entire blob of Ant Rid, and were seemingly hungry for more, so I dumped some right on top of them. A few more dabs here and there, and I haven't seen a live ant in days. (Although I still haven't gotten around to cleaning up most of the dead ones.) Apparently the ones that don't die straight away are supposed to carry it back to the nest and it poisons the queen. I guess I can cross regicide off my life list.

Enjambment

2008-10-10T16:27:00.004+11:00

I just came across the word enjambment (in the alt-text for this comic if you really want to know). I recognised the word but couldn't remember what it meant. It's a pretty cool sounding word if you ask me - I don't know why, I guess it's something to do with the silent B. Anyway, I looked it up and I was mortified to find that it meant "the running on of the thought from one line, couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break". I fucking hate that. It's the most pretentious thing ever.

It annoys me that such a cool word is used for such a terrible poetic device. I want to campaign to have a new meaning given to this word. What we now refer to as enjambment should be given a suitably ugly new name, like "skagugew".

WALL-E

2008-09-30T01:04:00.006+10:00

I saw WALL-E yesterday. I don't usually go in for Pixar films, mainly out of loyalty to traditional animation, but I've got to say WALL-E is a really good movie. Pixar has always made fairly decent stuff, although all the ones I've seen before (of which the most recent was Finding Nemo) I've always viewed as primarily kids' movies. Sure, adults taking their kids can enjoy them, but I doubt many adults would buy them on DVD for themselves. When was the last time you felt the urge to go rent Toy Story? WALL-E is different - it really is a movie anyone can enjoy, perhaps adults even more than kids. (The kids sitting next to me, during one of the film's climactic scenes, were too busy fart-assing around with lollies to pay any attention.)

The first thing that stuck me was the bang-up job they did depicting an Earth that has totally had its shit ruined. The hilariously large piles of garbage and nasty green smog look really cool, and the way everything looks all rusty and banged up is really impressively detailed. I'm big into robots so I thought WALL-E himself was pretty cool, I like how his body serves as a trash compactor/storage compartment as well as being able to hold his head and wheels when he retracts into a cube. EVE is nicely designed, contrasting WALL-E's traditional mechanic design with a cool sleek look, presumably made from some kind of smart polymer. The robot "voices" are really good, which is to be expected considering they were created by Ben Burtt, the guy behind R2-D2's expressive beeps. EVE's electronic but feminine voice reminds me a little of GLaDOS from Portal, perhaps not the best association character-wise, but anything that reminds me of my favourite physics-based first-person puzzle-comedy game is OK by me.

Another cool thing is how they tried to mimic the look of actual cameras. Apparently they wrote software to mimic the cameras used in sci-fi movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. (There are a few other cool 2001 references too.) The shots during the part where WALL-E hitches a ride on the spaceship that picks up EVE were especially cool. Once they get into space the film shifts gears a bit, and there's plenty of cool shiny tech and robots, and an all-too-believable glimpse at the future of humanity.

So Pixar has seemingly matured, and replaced their usual torrent of pop-culture references with some fairly obvious but effective messages about the dangers of corporate monopoly, environmental neglect and human complacency. Even if you don't feel like being preached to, there's enough laughs, plot and cool robots to satisfy anyone. I give it 9 out of 10 discarded hubcaps.

Mid-semester break

2008-09-30T00:30:00.004+10:00

Not a moment too soon, I've got a week off from uni. There's plenty of stuff to catch up on but before getting onto that boring stuff I decided to head down to Kiama for a couple of days. Pretty much the usual, but a few things are worth blogging.

I went to the blowhole on Sunday for nothing much else to do. It wasn't doing much despite the wind. As I was coming back to my car there were a couple of seagulls flying near my car, but because the wind was blowing so hard they were stationary in the air, which was pretty funny. I remember once in primary school I was hanging out with a friend of mine at lunch or whatever and we saw a pigeon flying sideways because of the wind and we pissed ourselves laughing. While one of these seagulls was hovering above the car next to mine I snapped a few photos.

I wandered into the bookshop a bit later and checked out what was around. With exams looming darkly on the horizon I don't have much time for reading, but I bought a copy of Ender's Game anyway. I've heard good things about it and I've not been reading much recently (well not in dead tree format anyway - I've been reading a few good books by email). Hopefully I'll finally be able to appreciate this xkcd strip, continuing in my tradition of learning enough to understand xkcd strips long after I first read them.

I saw WALL-E too, but I'll put that in a separate post.

Drawage

2008-08-31T18:38:00.001+10:00

there's a couple of new items on my sketch blog Mod Rocker. One is a comic, the other is just scary. This weekend I was gripped for no apparent reason by an urge to draw. I drew some other things which are in various stages of completion, including a comic I'm not sure I should post because it is just gross. I'm slowly starting to realise that if I stop trying so damn hard to get every line just perfect, things still end up looking pretty decent (or even better than they would otherwise) and I can draw like ten times faster, resulting in things that actually get finished instead of abandoned a quarter of the way through.

Evil robot game alert!

2008-08-31T17:13:00.003+10:00

I came across a game the other day called...

Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS

Aside from that being a pretty cool name for a game, it's really fun too. It seems pretty standard at first, but then you die and it suddenly becomes awesome. You will see what I mean.

Tip: two dudes shooting at the same thing can create explosions.

Google Street View = awesome

2008-08-05T23:10:00.002+10:00

Google Street View has just been unveiled in Australia. It's pretty awesome. What impresses me is the scope of it - there's a map here which shows just how much of the country you can see. Of course the first thing I did was check out my house. I don't know what people expect to see when they do this - it looked the same as in real life. It was still cool to see my house though, with my car parked outside and everything.

What intrigues me most about Street View though, isn't spatial, but temporal. Since each panorama is taken at a different time as the Google cars drive down the street, you can see what other cars and people were doing for a minute or so. This adds a whole new dimension to Google Maps - literally*. Coming down the main street of my suburb I can see people wandering about or doing whatever, captured in a series of frames as the car went past. A man walks along reading a piece of paper. A van goes past in the opposite direction. An old fat bloke stands with his bag of shopping on the ground. A 4-wheel drive comes out of a side street and turns right, following the Google car down the block. A guy in a high visibility shirt unload stuff from a van. A Forester comes around the corner and parks in front of the pizza place.

Then, tragedy strikes! The next image in the set for some reason shows all different people and cars and weather conditions. The Google folks obviously came down the main drag twice, so they could also go down the avenue that goes by the supermarket, and for some reason as you come down the road in Street View, one of the panoramas (out of maybe 10 or 15) is from this other, second set of photos. Nevertheless you can continue on and see most of the first set. This may be a mundane scene, but the cool thing is that it's been preserved forever in four dimensions.

I recently finished reading a book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame. I highly recommend it. The novel (which Doctorow relesed for free online) describes a future where people can back up their memories, the way people back up their hard drives today, and if people are killed they can be restored from backup by having their memories and personality implanted into a force-grown clone. When this happens to the main character, Julius, included with his restored memories is a computer generated fly-through of the scene of his murder. That's what I was reminded of when I started reconstructing the Google car's trip around the suburb. A fly-through of a scene from more than half a year ago.

It's hard to care about privacy concerns when you have such an amazing toy to play with.

*I'm trying not to misuse the word "literally" here. I hate it when people do that. Time is a dimension, after all...

Full license

2008-07-05T00:34:00.002+10:00

I got my full driver's license yesterday. It felt pretty good taking the P-plates off my car and throwing them in the bin. Just in time, too, because I'm going up to Armidale on Tuesday and now I can legally keep up with everyone else on the freeway.

After I got home from the RTA, I was minding my own business working on some papercraft when a telemarketer rudely decided to call. It was for some charity, but I refuse to support any company or charity that uses telemarketing so I decided to have a bit of fun. I pretended I was looking for my dad, then asked the telemarketer if I could put her on hold. I placed the phone down in front of my computer speakers and put on a Midnight Juggernauts song. While that was playing I cued up a couple more songs: "Code Blue" by TSOL, and "Ass 'n' Titties" by DJ Assault. By the time Ass 'n' Titties finished she had hung up. I'm not sure when she hung up, but it was probably somewhere between hearing "I wanna fuck, I wanna fuck the dead" and "Stankin'-ass bitches that need to wash up, don't get mad when I don't wanna fuck".

I hate telemarketers.

The RTA are a bunch of useless tossers

2008-07-01T15:49:00.002+10:00

I've finally almost finished the RTA's stupid gauntlet of plates and tests, and I'm going for my full driver's licence. The test for that is a combination of an unrealistic hazard perception test and a quiz about utterly useless statistics. Some of the statistics are more than useless - they don't even make sense. Take this example, copied and pasted directly from the Driver Qualification Handbook, page 49:

At least 14 per cent of all crashes involve the driver being distracted by something.
Distractions that happen outside the vehicle account for about 30 per cent of crash-related distractions.
Distractions that happen inside the vehicle add up to about 36 per cent of crash-related distractions.

Is there some third possibility here that I'm not aware of? Where the hell is the other 34 per cent, in some no-man's land between the inside and the outside of the car?

There's some other dodgy stuff in there. Have a look at this graph about crash types, from page 10:

Nice graph, eh? Got the little pictures on there and everything. But compare this graph with one I made using the same data on a graph-making website:

Specifically, look at the large blue part. 25 per cent should obviously be one quarter of the chart. On the RTA's bullshit graph it looks more like 36 per cent. The three on the left-hand side of the graph are wrong too, leaving only two sections that are more or less right. Lots of people, including me, absorb information more easily in visual form, and are going to look at the graph rather than the numbers, and will get a false impression.

Nice work, RTA. Give us bullshit information and then test us on it. That'll make us better drivers.

A sigh of relief

2008-06-24T23:14:00.002+10:00

At long last I am done with exams for another semester. I really can't describe how good it is. The couple of weeks before exams suck so much, it really is like doing the HSC twice a year. Worse, even.

What next? Ah, of course. Alcohol.

Exam trouble again

2008-06-12T14:54:00.002+10:00

This time last year when I was doing uni exams, the unthinkable happened: my car broke down on the way to my first exam. If I was a silly person I would think there was some kind of curse, because this morning, the morning of my first exam for this semester... I slept in. I had set my alarm for 6:30 so I could get going early in case of any more car-related SNAFUs, and I guess in my half-asleep haze I hit the "alarm off" button and fell asleep again. I woke up at about 8:10, with the doors opening for the exam at 8:45. I leapt out of bed, threw on some clothes, grabbed my wallet, keys and some pens and ran out to the car. I even forgot to close the garage door after I got the car out.

In the end I got there during reading time, and the exam was pretty easy. So it all worked out OK. But now I have three more exams to study for. Lame.

Geohashing!

2008-05-29T21:28:00.004+10:00

So I went geohashing on Sunday. For those who don't know what that is (i.e. everyone), here's the original comic from xkcd which thrust this idea into the world:

My adventure is briefly chronicled on the Geohashing wiki, so I won't repeat it here. Suffice it to say it was a pretty cool thing to do since I'll now go down in history as the first person in Sydney to go geohashing.

In other news! I bought a lab coat and some safety goggles on Monday. Well, not so much "bought" as "cashed in a $25 voucher I wasn't going to use for anything else". At any rate, now I can wear it around and be at the heighth of fashion and everyone will be all, "hey look he must be some kind of science dude, look he's eating some chips, i bet he's secretly doing science to them".

Free shit week 05/08

2008-05-19T23:26:00.003+10:00

Council clean-up again. I spend about an hour on Saturday doing a preliminary patrol of the suburb, and then about 3 hours doing a comprehensive sweep, looking for discarded computers and other goodies. There's barely a street in the suburb I didn't walk down.

At one point I was walking along and I saw an old bike among some rubbish. I was getting a bit sick of walking so I hopped on and started riding it along the footpath. The back tyre was flat and the front one wasn't much better, the seat was too high and I wasn't game to test the gear change mechanism, so it was a pretty bumpy and dangerous ride but I rode it a few blocks and had a bit of fun, nearly ran into a parked car and then discarded it outside someone's house.

Sadly I didn't find much in the way of computers, except for two that had already been mostly pillaged. I did extract a graphics card (which was what I wanted, but sadly it doesn't seem to work) and a network card (which does work). I also found a scanner which had some water in it but who knows, maybe it'll work.

There was a fair few people out and about looking for stuff, so I guess all the cool stuff was taken. But bugger it, it's an excuse for a nice walk. It's more fun than studying.

Stereophonics

2008-05-07T22:46:00.002+10:00

I saw Stereophonics play in Newcastle last night with McLeff. It was awesome. I hadn't really heard much of their stuff before but I'll definitely check out some of their albums once my hearing returns.

Actually my hearing's more or less fine now but last night after the gig, and this morning a bit too, everything sounded muffled in my left ear. We were pretty close to the stage off to the left so the speakers were just to our left.

Loud.

And another thing

2008-05-04T01:31:00.002+10:00

FUCK I just missed free comic book day!

fuck fuck fuck i have to wait a whole other fucking year god damn it i've been looking forward to that for such a long time

21st party

2008-05-04T01:20:00.004+10:00

Tonight was my 21st party. I am so drunk right now. I had to correct like 20 spelling mistakes so far. I even do that when I am really drunk. I made an awesome speech though. Here's the draft, to which my delivered speech was, surprisingly, fairly close:

Friends! People of Sydney! [pause for cries of "He's amazing, who is he?" and "Is he Christ?"] You are the chosen ones! You have been brought here for one purpose, and one purpose only: to bask in the glory of my birthday, and party like you've never partied before!

To be honest, it didn't really occur to me that I'd have to do a speech until today, so this will be mostly a hodge podge of quotes like that.

Thank you all for coming. If nobody had come it would have been quite shit, but at least there'd be more beer for me. I like it better this way.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Which, for the confused, is a compliment.

We're here to celebrate the fact that I haven't died for the last 21 years. Which is always a good thing. There's been a few close calls though:

The time I blew up my hand with a homemade explosive. I escaped with only first degree burns.

Or the time I drank about three quarters of a bottle of homemade vodka at Beff's place. That was good times, until it wasn't.

I was born at a very early age, nude, helpless and unable to provide for myself. Eventually I overcame these handicaps to become the dynamic, successful individual I pretend to be today.

But I couldn't have done it without my family and friends, who have helped and guided me along the road of life... by the way, if I make another "road of life" cliché, please shoot me.

My Mum, who was always there for me even after I moved out.

My Dad, who always encouraged me to pursue my interests.

My sister, who being three years older than me always gave me helpful advice on things she'd done three years before me.

All my friends from primary school, high school and now uni, who put up with my weirdness.

And everyone else who doesn't fit into these categories.

So to them and to all the rest of you I say thank you, and here's to many more years of partying and good times!

21

2008-05-01T17:08:00.002+10:00

What is the deal with some stuff? I woke up this morning at about 4 am with an insanely painful cramp in my leg. It's pretty shitty suddenly waking up going "BLEAAARGH WHY AM I IN SUCH PAIN". It makes no sense.

In more pleasant news, it was my 21st birthday yesterday. Not that it really means all that much considering how much hype it gets. I don't think the age of 21 has any legal significance in Australia any more. At least if I go to America I can buy booze.

Loose foreign change

2008-04-27T13:35:00.002+10:00

I love it when I pay for something and get change back in the wrong currency. It usually happens with New Zealand 20c coins, but sometimes you get something cool. I just used two one-dollar coins to pay for $1.80 worth of ham, and got back what appeared to be a 20c coin... it's actually 5 Swedish Kronor.

The cool thing is that according to XE.com, 5 Kronor is actually worth nearly 90 cents, so in theory I've made about 70c profit. If I go and cash it in, I can buy some more ham and still get my 20c back. If by some amazing coincidence I then get another 5 Kronor instead of the 20c coin, I can do it all again. This leads to an endless cycle by which I amass vast supplies of ham and become a foreign coin/ham entrepreneur, and retire in a few years living the rest of my life in decadent luxury on my coin/ham derived fortunes.

Maybe I'll even luck out and get one of those awesome new UK coins.

All nighter

2008-04-17T04:57:00.002+10:00

There are some things that suck about doing an electrical engineering degree. One of them is ELEC2141 (Digital Circuit Design) labs. You have to do all this stuff with logic gates and flip-flops and things of that nature, but there's not really enough time in the labs to do it without doing heaps of work beforehand, which I usually don't get around to doing. As such I'm a bit behind on the labs and so I'm doing work to catch up. It's now 5 am. I am going to need lots of caffeine tomorrow. Or rather, today.

Sleep sucks. I'm only ever tired after I've been sleeping. If I was going to design a person I would make sleep optional, so it's like a treat if you have spare time. Lying down for hours at a time and going on insane adventures in your head should be the most awesome thing ever, but it's just totally mundane. (Unless you can dream lucidly. I never did quite get the hang of that.)

I've got a bunch of music cued up. A song called Night Owl (from the Sim City 4 soundtrack) just came on. How appropriate.

KDE 4

2008-04-10T22:35:00.003+10:00

I just found a handy guide to installing KDE 4 in Ubuntu 7.10. The idea of having multiple desktop environments on my computer has never really occurred to me, but I guess I am still kind of new to Linux. The more I learn, the more glad I am that I am no longer dependant on Winblows. Linux is just so cool.

I've heard good things about KDE 4. So I installed it and logged in, and so far it's pretty cool. Really slick too.

Guys. I am supposed to be studying for a maths test.

Triplane Turmoil II

2008-04-06T12:36:00.003+10:00

The original Triplane Turmoil game has brought many hours of fun into my life. I used to play it obsessively, trying again and again to finish the fiendishly difficult but fun missions. Sometimes after school some friends would come around and we'd play multiplayer, with four of us crowded around the keyboard. It was good times. Especially when we contributed our own sound effects, sitting around the keyboard yelling "ratatatatat!!" and "eeeerrrrrrwwww BOOOOM!!!"

So imagine my happiness when I discovered a week ago that there was a sequel, Triplane Turmoil II, and my surprise that it has been out since 2006. I bought it, and after four days my PayPal payment cleared and I downloaded the game. Unfortunately as soon as I had downloaded it I had to go to work, but then I quit my job so I could go home and play Triplane. (Just kidding - I quit my job because my bosses were total arseholes.)

I've played some of the missions, and they're pretty cool. They're really hard, but that just means it'll be longer before I finish the game, which means more fun for me. The graphics are nice - they're in 3D even though the gameplay takes place in 2D. The controls are improved too - the turning controls flip around when the plane does, which is much more intuitive. The infantry (or "tyke men" as they somehow became known to me and my friends) play more of a role now than in the first game, and are much harder to kill. They tend to stray out of the z-axis of the plane, so you can't usually hit them with machine guns, you need to bomb them. I like the humour in the game, with mission names like "Operation S.T.F.U" (Silence The Felony Usurper) and "Das Boot" (in which you have to destroy a boot factory).

There are now six countries in the game - the first game had Germany, England, Japan and Finland, and the new one adds Russia and America. There is going to be a TCP/IP multiplayer mode sometime soon, it will be implemented with a patch hopefully this year. There's also an online ladder where players are ranked. I'm the first (and currently the only) Australian player on there.

The only criticism I have is that it takes forever for the ground crew to get your plane back into the hangar when you land, which is boring and leaves you vulnerable. Also there are a few cosmetic imperfections like the walk animations for the tyke men looking a bit weird, and the plane engine noise sometimes disappearing which is a bit spooky. Otherwise, the game is totally awesome.

It's cheap, too: US$24.95. At current exchange rates that's about A$27. And it's only another US$5 for a boxed version (as well as download), including shipping. Nice.

Triplane Turmoil II

Blorgage

2008-03-30T21:57:00.002+11:00

So I haven't blogged much recently. Stuff has happened I couldn't be bothered writing about, like Christmas and going to Woodford and Armidale and Kiama, and starting my second year of uni. Suffice it to say that everything is going well enough.

I have a job now, delivering pizzas on Friday nights. It mostly involved sitting around being bored, which is much more enjoyable than my last job.

A droog of mine, McLeff, came down to Sydney on Friday, and we were reminiscing about a game we used to play called Triplane Turmoil. I hadn't played it in a couple of years because it's a DOS game and it never worked properly in Windows XP. Today I got a DOS emulator called DOSBox which runs Triplane Turmoil pretty well. So that's cool. Then I found out there's a sequel which came out in 2006. I'm going to buy it tomorrow and the awesomeness will abound.

In other news, there's a new creationist propaganda film coming out, Expelled. Of course, it's all rubbish. It's funny how they expect people to treat "Intelligent Design" as an actual scientific theory when in a whole film about it they apparently don't offer any actual evidence. (Now I wonder why that could be? Maybe... I don't know... there isn't any?)

That is all the blorgage for now.

Podcasts

2008-02-06T00:32:00.000+11:00

It took me a while to get onto the idea of podcasts. Although I straight away saw the appeal - niche content with no ads that you can listen to whenever you like - I never really felt the desire to seek out good podcasts, probably because there's just so many of them. Eventually I found some really good ones and these are them:

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. This is my favourite. Each week a panel of skeptics (or sceptics if you prefer) from the New England Skeptical Society (the phoney New England in America, not the real one in Australia) gather to discuss recent developments in science and pseudo-science. Aside from interesting and intelligent discussion there's also a great dynamic between the panellists who all have a great sense of humour and fun. There's also a new five minute version called The Skeptics Guide 5x5, in case an hour of hard-nosed scepticism is too much for you.
Radio Lab. Two guys take a topic relating to science, philosophy or psychology and delve deep into the subject, in a really interesting, engaging and accessible way. On the way up to Woodford recently I loaded about eight episodes (one hour each) onto my MP3 player and listened to them in the car. It was awesome.
The Rogues Gallery. I found this one just the other day, and listened to an episode today. At four hours (over 200 MB) per weekly episode it's not for the faint hearted, but it's chock full of really great music. As you may know, I can't stand most radio, but one drawback of not listening to it is that it's harder to find out about new music. With podcasts like the Rogues Gallery, that problem is solved.
Irregular Podcast!. The prolific David Morgan-Mar of Irregular Webcomic! and his co-workers put their witty and geeky heads together now and again to record a ten-minute podcast about... hmm... all sorts of things really. But it's always clever and pretty funny too. Except the bits where they sing.

So there you have it. Throw out your radios, get those RSS feeds aggregating and listen to some of these. Just don't try to do it on dial-up.

Duality

2008-01-27T01:14:00.000+11:00

A few nights ago I decided to make a movie. Like most of my best work it was totally on a whim. So I got out my video camera and got to it, basically as an experiment in unplanned, scriptless, one-person film making.

It took about four hours to shoot, between 11 pm and 3 am (plus two small shots I had to re-do later). I edited it in a program called Kino, which took ages but I'm pretty happy with the result. All the gore effects were done with tomato sauce, of course. I credited myself with camera work but really most of the credit should go to various household tables, chairs and shelves.

My actual resolutions

2008-01-21T18:24:00.000+11:00

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions but why let that stop me? Here they are:

Study more regularly. Cramming during the two weeks before exams may be somewhat effective for passing exams but probably isn't the best way to learn stuff.
Go out more. I don't know why, but I never seem to get around to actually going out to pubs with people from uni. Which I really need to change because drinking with people is one of the best ways of getting to know people.
Jog regularly. I started jogging when I was studying for my first round of exams and I enjoyed it, but then when uni went back I could never find the time.
Join some more campus societies.
Organise my time better, for obvious reasons.

New Year's resolution

2008-01-13T00:24:00.000+11:00

My resolution for 2008: 1280 x 1024.

Woodford

2007-12-24T06:57:00.000+11:00

It's 7 am and I'm about to set off for Armidale. On boxing day I'll go the rest of the way to Woodford. My intertubes access will be sporadic at best. So to everyone who reads this...

Have a happy, or otherwise favourable Christmas or other holiday celebration, or whatever. Just merry Xmas and shit.

Microsoft sucks

2007-12-17T16:09:00.000+11:00

How is it that this Orwellian company is making a fortune shoving shitty operating systems down people's throats despite demonstrably superior alternatives?

The turd that wouldn't flush is finally gone

2007-11-25T00:02:00.000+11:00

He's gone! Having lived just over half my life with John Howard as the prime minister it sure is hard to get my head around the idea that his reign of terror is over. I just hope he loses his seat as well. Last time I checked Maxine McKew was ahead by about 0.8% so the postal votes could still swing it, but I don't think they will. So now Rudd's the PM, which is fine by me. He may be a bit boring and not exactly going to revolutionise the country, but any politician who got kicked out of a strip club is a good bloke as far as I'm concerned.

Things have been pretty good in the last few days. I finished my exams on Thursday, which went pretty well for the most part. I'll probably get mostly passes but I reckon I'll get the old high distinction for Computing 1. For all the assignments I got full marks, including two bonus marks for the one that had two bonus marks available. The exams gave me no troubles, except that I forgot I'd brought my bag to the exam and went home without it. There wasn't anything valuable inside so I wasn't too worried but I didn't want to have to buy a new bag. But I got it back in the end, from the exam lost property place.

It's awesome to finally have time to do stuff. My to-do list is long and mostly computer-related, and now I am happily ploughing my way through it. First on the agenda was to sink my teeth into the new Matthew Reilly book. Going well so far. Next was to buy and read the new Scott Pilgrim book. Done.

I'll pause my recount of to-do list adventures to tell you about the magic that is the Scott Pilgrim series. This is basically the series that got me into print comics. I remember Ryan North linking to a scan of a short Scott Pilgrim tale that was done for Free Comic Book Day last year. I loved how the author (Bryan Lee O'Malley) mixed real life and video game logic, so I got the first three books on Amazon and zoomed through them in about a day. I re-read them recently, knowing that the fourth was due, and it was just as good as the first time. My expectations for the new volume were high, and it effortlessly lived up to them. Among the many reasons why this series is great is the art style. Some have called it amateurish, but I find it really effective for setting the right mood and I don't care what anyone says, it looks good. I find I can connect with a comic more if the art isn't too overtly skilful anyway. The characters are great, especially Scott. I see a lot of myself in Scott Pilgrim. I just hope they do the movie right. The signs aren't good to be honest: they're packing all six volumes (two of which have yet to be written) into a single movie, and also it's live action. They're going to need a miracle to find the right actors.

Anyway, back to out scheduled programming. Next on my list was to sort out how to connect my computer and Dad's computer to the interwebs at the same time. I've been meaning to sort this out for a while, not really knowing what to do. Finally discovering that all I needed was a $40 Ethernet switch. So that was very easy, which is rare when it comes to Problems.

Next task: to sort out my laptop which has been crying out for a reformat for ages. Something has recently gone seriously wrong with the Windows installation, making it all but unusable, so I decided to install Ubuntu on it. Using Ubuntu on my desktop has been a pure pleasure so far, so endowing my laptop with this king of operating systems seems the obvious route for my mental wellbeing. But before doing that I set up a dual-boot system on my desktop so that I would have Windows available on the off chance I needed it for something. I tried installing Windows on the hard drive I got the other day but that didn't work for some reason, so I set up an NTFS partition on my main hard drive and it all went smoothly from there. I guess I'll just use the other drive for storage. Not that I'll really need it.

Next I'm going to clean my keyboard.

Free Shit Day!

2007-11-19T22:48:00.000+11:00

It's council clean-up time 'round these parts, so today I figured I might as well go for a wander around the neighbourhood and see if there was anything cool anyone had thrown out. My main target was computer stuff, since people often throw out computers that they think are useless even though they actually have useful components still in them. I was also vainly hoping I could spot a Model M around somewhere. (One is not enough!)

I started wandering around, going up and down the streets inspecting each pile of junk. I didn't find much and eventually I got sick of walking and went back to get my car. I drove around looking for cool stuff for a while, more to see where there was lots of stuff than to spot specific things. I noticed one street with heaps of stuff so I drove back home to proceed on foot. It turned out there wasn't anything good there, but eventually after lots more walking I found a monitor with a decent power cable, which I pinched. Eventually I started to head back home and on the way I found a computer a guy was chucking out. He told me some of the hardware was still good, including a DVD drive, a 256 MB SD-RAM stick and, best of all, an 80 GB hard drive. There's a few other odds and ends including a WiFi card which might be handy. I also found a small subwoofer which I'm going to hook up to my computer speakers if I can get it to work.

I haven't tested all the hardware yet but I did hook up the hard drive. Turns out the guy didn't format it so it has heaps of cool stuff on it: MP3s, episodes of shows (mainly Futurama and South Park but a bit of Monty Python, the Simpsons, Red Dwarf and others) and movies (some cool ones like Mallrats, Spaceballs, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail). There's also some personal stuff like photos and bank statements. People really should learn to format their hard drives.

Maths exam and a keyboard

2007-11-13T23:32:00.000+11:00

I had my maths exam today. I'm pretty sure I won. I aced most of the algebra questions, in fact I pwned them in the face. They didn't know what hit them. There was one question I didn't know how to do at first, where I had to prove that a set of mutually perpendicular vectors was linearly independent. I left it for later, and then when I came back to it I thought about it for a bit and then realised what I needed to do. I busted out some algebra-fu and laid the smack down with a vector cross-multiplication. It was like that fighting game where the voice says "FINISH HIM" and then you bust out a finishing move, or just keep pressing the punch button so your opponent never had a chance to fight back and then he dies. Was that Tekken? I think it was Tekken.

Calculus gave me more trouble, but I figured most of it out. I never quite figured out Maclaurin series or second-order differential equations, but apart from that it wasn't too bad.

Anyway, exams come and go, but a Model M keyboard lasts forever. And that's what I bought on eBay last week. It arrived yesterday, and already I don't think I could ever go back to the spongy piece of shit I was using before. I feel cheated that I have used inferior keyboards for so long. This thing is so nice to type on. All I want to do now is type.

Here's a photo:

It's true what they say: these things are built like brick shithouses. It just feels so damn solid, like you could cut down a tree with it and then use it to type your doctoral thesis on the use of computer hardware as logging equipment. (Web logging, that is.) It weighs a ton and is made of some kind of plastic that gives an aura of quality and indestructibility. And, most importantly, it sounds great.

All is not perfect however. The eBay seller unscrupulously neglected to mention that the N key cap is missing. (EDIT: It turned out it just fell off when he was taking a photo of the keyboard. He sent me the keycap after he realised.) I was going to buy a replacement from www.clickykeyboards.com, but the postage for one single key cap is about US$22, which is more than I'm willing to pay to solve a problem that is really only cosmetic. Also the thing's pretty dirty (it probably hasn't been washed once in its 17 years), so I'll have to give it a good clean some time. Another problem is that it takes up more desktop real estate than my old one so I've had to push back the phone book my monitor sits on and have the base of the big-ass CRT monitor hanging over the keyboard slightly. But I don't care. For I now possess the One True Keyboard.

Fruit bag

2007-11-11T23:48:00.000+11:00

I just saw a McDonald's ad. In their latest attempt to appear healthy they're apparently giving kids a choice with their happy meals: fries or a "fruit bag". The little girl in the ad, ordering a happy meal, made a big show of being woefully unable to choose between these options as if they were equally appetising, or equally unappetising as the case may be.

The fallacy lies herein: what kind of kid is ever going to choose a fucking fruit bag over chips? Nobody, that's who. No kid goes to Maccas to eat fruit. Imagine it: a group of kids go to Maccas for a birthday party or whatever, all getting happy meals. They're all getting chips, as you do, and then one of them gets a fruit bag. He is teased mercilessly by his peers and nicknamed "fruit bag" for years to come. Kids do that.

"Fruit bag" is the worst thing kids could call each other. As well as sounding like "fruitcake", and hinting at homosexuality, the "bag" bit alludes to such as ratbag, scumbag, old bag, and hoe-bag. Not to mention it would eventually be spoonerised to "brute fag". It could also be rearranged into the following unflattering phrases:

Fiat grub
I tug barf
Bra if gut
I, fart bug
I, fat grub
I, barf gut

Way to potentially scar unsuspecting kids for life, when they just wanted to eat healthy foods, MACCAS. You stupid fruit bags.

Woodford lineup

2007-11-05T16:07:00.000+11:00

So! The lineup of artists playing at Woodford has been released. Looks pretty good! Here's some highlights:

That 1 Guy. A crazy American dude with an instrument made from pipes and various electronic effects.
The Cat Empire. Enough said.
Tommy Emmanuel. Guitar king. I saw him after my last HSC exam two years ago and he was so awesome I passed out.
Tripod. They bring the funny.
Vulgargrad. Cool Russian criminal songs.
Mal Webb. The only beatboxer who isn't a retard. (Also gets extra credit for writing the Lano & Woodley theme song.)
Madviolet. Canadian chicks I saw in Armidale a couple of years ago. They're pretty good.

There's also a Scottish band called Shooglenifty. Just knowing that makes me want to see them. Even the Emperor of Japan thinks they rock, apparently.

Der Keyboard

2007-10-30T18:55:00.000+11:00

For some reason, in the last couple of weeks I've become very interested in keyboards. Not musical ones (though I want one of them too), but the QWERTY variety. For years I've been using the stock-standard rubber-dome keyboard that came with my computer, but an article has intrigued me about the prospect of using a buckling-spring keyboard like IBM's classic Model M. They're non-existent on eBay, except in America, and they're too heavy to ship from the US for less than about $60. I found some 122-key monsters on there, which look pretty leet, but they're not buckling spring, despite the listing's dishonest implications. I'd probably buy one anyway for the hacker cred, if not for the weird, gaming-unfriendly cursor key layout. The search continues.

Thinking about this reminded me of the fact that I still can't touch type - well, I sort of can, if you call 14 WPM "typing". So, inspired by Das Keyboard's supposed ability to force people to learn by preventing them from looking at the keys, I've painted my keyboard all black. It looks pretty cool, if a little emo. I also downloaded TuxTyping, a touch typing practice program. It's aimed at kids, but it should help a lot anyway.

Maybe in the holidays I'll do something like this. If only I had the necessary tools and stuff. Oh well, I'll think of something.

Radar gun

2007-10-30T00:19:00.000+11:00

My latest acquisition:

It's a radar gun.

The ball is stationary.

I don't know what I'm actually going to do with this, but it was only $12 on eBay, so I figured I might as well grab it. At the very least I can take it apart and do interesting things with its insides.

Portal to heaven

2007-10-26T02:06:00.000+10:00

About a week ago I heard about the game Portal. Just looking at the Wikipedia article was enough to make my head explode at the sheer awesomeness of it. Immediately I hit Demonoid and got downloadin'. Something's making BitTorrent work really badly for me. Something to do with NAT? Every time I try to figure it out it gets terribly complicated and I then go and do something else. But anyway, after leaving Azureus running overnight a couple of times I finally managed to torrent the last few bits and finished downloading Portal. It's a Windows game, and my computer is now free of the vice-like grip of Microsoft, so I downloaded Wine, which runs Windows programs on Linux. Luckily, Portal runs pretty well on Wine, but there's a few glitches, like not being able to see properly through the portals sometimes.

To the game itself: basically, if you own a computer, you have no excuse not to get this game. It is awesome. By far the most original game I've played in a long time. Watch the trailer here and you'll hopefully understand. I finished it in about 3 hours of solid, addicted playing, and it was just too great for words. But I'll come up with some anyway, in case you want to do yourself the indescribable disservice of not playing the game.

The game starts with the player character waking up in a cell in a research facility of some kind. The character has been chosen to test the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device", which creates portals on walls/floors/ceilings which you can see/walk/fall/push objects through. The cool thing about the portals is that you can jump through them retaining your momentum, which makes for some pretty cool manoeuvres. Picture jumping 10 metres to the floor, then going through a portal and suddenly you're flung out sideways from a wall in a different part of the room. Craaaazy. But that's not all! Guiding you through the tests is a sing-song-voiced AI who says some, well, pretty odd things. Make that pretty hilarious things. The humour in the game is really great, and not what you'd expect from a company that makes first person shooters.

The game consists of a series of rooms, in which you must use the portal gun to solve puzzles which allow you to progress to the next room. It starts off easy enough, and never gets particularly frustrating (unlike some puzzle games), but some of the later rooms are pretty tricky. After about 19 rooms the test ends and you are invited by the AI guide to have some cake. It's all over... or is it?

(No.)

When the game does finish, there's a song at the end that is the Best Video Game Music. I give this game a rating of five billion out of ten. No, just kidding. Six billion.

Lolthis guy

2007-10-23T23:31:00.000+10:00

Guys I am propagating a meme.

Switching to Linux

2007-10-13T17:32:00.000+10:00

Well, after years of putting up with Windows I've finally taken the plunge and switched over to Linux! I'm now using Ubuntu 7.04 on my desktop with not a shred of Microsoft presence.

It all started yesterday when I remembered an article I came across some months ago about dual-booting Windows and Linux. The instructions seemed pretty simple so I didn't bother backing much of my stuff up, just a few LaTeX files I considered important.

I booted Ubuntu from the LiveCD and hit "install". Everything went well until I got to partitioning the hard drive. The partitioning options were totally different to the instructions and I couldn't find anything to resize the NTFS partition Windows was using. Then I tried to resize it using a partitioning program that was on the LiveCD, which I think worked, and then I created a new partition using the freed up space and installed Ubuntu. This seemed fine, until the Grub bootloader didn't work and I had no idea how to fix it. I forget what I did after that, but long story short, everything got ruined.

(Of course, in retrospect, not backing up my important stuff was an amazingly stupid thing to do and I really should have known better. Luckily, it's only been a couple of months since I last reformatted, so nearly all my stuff is backed up elsewhere. This morning I freaked out big time because I thought I had lost the full-resolution .psd file for my Mod Rocker picture, but luckily it was still on my laptop.)

After this traumatic episode, I gave up on dual booting and partitioned the whole drive for Linux. Now I have Ubuntu installed and so far it's going pretty well. After stumbling through installing a few things manually, including the driver for my graphics card, I discovered that I could have done it with a fraction of the effort using Synaptic Package Manager. Things are looking pretty good, but one thing's for sure: I've got a hell of a lot of learning to do.

Hooray for Radiohead

2007-10-11T20:03:00.000+10:00

So, Radiohead! Woo! The new album is good. I'm not totally bowled over by it, but probably I just need to listen to it a few more times. There seems to be a sort of bell curve with albums; at first I don't really get into them but then after a few listens I do. Then after a while it peaks and then gradually falls back when I've heard it heaps of times. But of course the curve is very different for different albums. For example I used to sort of like Good Charlotte after getting a free single (The Anthem) with my discman. The enthusiasm curve rose quickly, then wavered a bit, then dropped quickly as I realised that Good Charlotte blow ass. At the other end of the spectrum of musical worth, most Pink Floyd albums followed a general pattern of rising slightly less quickly (due to being less accessible) but then going through the roof and eventually settling at "very high". The general Radiohead curve rises fairly slowly for me but usually ends up pretty high. I guess I haven't really listened to them enough to see if/how the curve will drop but it will be pretty gradual, I expect.

I really take my hat off to them for their distribution model (which, in case you live under a rock, is that you choose your own price (e.g. free) and then download the album). It's pretty much a huge "fuck you" to the whole recording industry, which is great. Record companies have had their head in the sand for too long, and with any luck they'll finally see that simply lowering album prices and embracing the internet like Radiohead have will pretty much eliminate the bulk of music piracy. It is a good feeling to legally choose my own price for an album, and I totally would have payed for it if I had a credit card (they probably should have had PayPal as an option). Ultimately I think In Rainbows will be remembered almost as much for its distribution model as for the music.

In other news: The Supanova Pop Culture Expo is on this weekend. I didn't even know it was on until I saw a TV ad for it. Should be fun.

In Rainbows

2007-10-10T16:47:00.000+10:00

Woo! The new Radiohead album is out! I'm listening to it now. It is looking good. Sounding good anyway.

My day

2007-10-03T15:58:00.000+10:00

So pretty much here's what happened to me today: First I got up at 6 am (no, that's not a typo) to get to uni by 8 am for a thing where I made a photovoltaic cell on the roof of the electrical engineering building. It's for one of my subjects, Sustainable Energy. This week is Engineering Week, where basically first year engineering students do random stuff like that instead of having classes. It's cool, except when you spend over three hours on a roof in the unseasonably hot sun doing something that is only just interesting enough to justify the early start and profuse sweating. (It was compulsory.)

Next I had nothing to do for two hours so I went to the Unibar and had a stein of New. There's a promotion for the Oktoberfest thing that's happening at the Roundhouse, where you pay eight bucks and get a stein (which you can keep) filled with half a litre of Tooheys New. Which would be awesome, if New was any good (Tooheys Old is of course far superior). As I was finishing the beer they started doing bingo in the Unibar (obviously mistaking the uni for an old people's home) so I left, went to a computer lab and, out of boredom, started experimenting with the random() function in C. Remember, kids: You need to include the stdlib.h library.

Then I went to another Engineering Week thing, an elec-eng presentation where they demonstrated how GPS works and then we got to ride a Segway. I've ridden a Segway before, but I reckon you'd have to ride one for several hundred hours before the novelty wore off - it is just awesome. If you've never ridden a Segway, go to your nearest Segway dealership and test drive one. (I don't know if there are actually any Segway dealerships. If not, write to your local MP and demand one - not that he could likely do anything about it, but it would be hilarious if politicians started getting bombarded with emails about this.)

So then on the drive home, I noticed a dashboard light had come on which said "RR DEF". I started getting anxious about it because for all I knew it was some serious problem with the car, and having car troubles is the pits (no pun intended), so after I got home I showed it to the mechanic who works two doors down from my house. He looked at it and told me it meant the rear de-mister was on. It was the best news I'd heard in weeks.

Then I get home, and guess what? It turns out the periodic comet Encke has had its tail knocked off by a Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun! Sucked in Encke, you had it coming.

Kurt Halsey

2007-09-27T00:11:00.000+10:00

I was just whittling away the hours on StumbleUpon when I came across the website of Kurt Halsey Fredericksen. That dude is so awesome! I really dig his drawing style. It's cartoony and simple but in the best possible way.

Danger is my toilet's middle name

2007-09-12T17:44:00.000+10:00

I couldn't walk past this without taking a photo:

Moral: A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes you don't know what all those words are.

Some good TV

2007-09-07T15:36:00.000+10:00

Ha! The year's most overrated toy has just had it's price cut by $200. I don't have much sympathy for people who rush in to get the latest trendy piece of tech because they think it will make them cool, only to discover they could have payed 1/3 less by waiting two months. Why would you want an iPhone when you can get something cheaper and far better anyway?

But I digress. I'm here to talk about two good TV shows. Two very good Australian comedy shows in fact. No, really. The first one is The Chaser's War on Everything, which I assume you (whoever you are) already know about. If not, go watch every episode and then come back here for further instructions. What provoked this post was the Chaser team's APEC security stunt.

Sydney's been turned into a fucking fortress for this APEC crap (which of course stands for "A Pointless Expensive Crock"), with more fences and rozzes than you can shake a stick at. Then the Chaser lads come along in a phoney motorcade and get withing metres of Dubya's hotel! If Chas hadn't been dressed as Osama bin Laden, they probably could (and would) have gotten in. This is hilarious, and I'm proud to live in a country where a bunch of guys who have the balls to do stuff like this are celebrated as they are. For a society to function there needs to be people who will take the piss out of bullshit like APEC without fear of the powers-that-be sending them to Guantanamo Bay or some shit. Chaser lads, I salute you.

The other show (which is on, conveniently, straight after the Chaser), is Summer Heights High. This show (the follow up to the legendary We Can Be Heroes) is just hilarious. Chris Lilley is a really good actor and the script is awesome. One of my favourite lines was by Ja'mie King, on "exchange" from a snooty private school: "Public schools are so random!" If you are Australian and don't watch this show, you officially fail at life.