Recently a particular song has been stuck firmly in my head: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy. Apart from seeming singularly apropos to my life right now, it’s also noteworthy for the magnificent voice of the singer, and for being the first ever song in the UK to reach number one in the charts before its release (through the newly acknowledged measure of download count).

On Sunday I took my brother to see the new Aeon Flux movie. E, a long-standing follower of the animated series on which the movie is ‘based’ disparages it as travesty. Being myself only a casual seen-a-few-episodes viewer of the series, I was spared the “where’s-bombadil?” effect. My own feelings about the film were mostly positive: I went in expecting a totally gratuitous Charlize-Theron-in-vinyl-bodypaint action-fest. Ms Theron was indeed all over the place in her vaguely bdsm constumes, but the plot was deeper, the visual more artful, and the acting more satisfying than I had expected. If you’re not a serious fan of the original, I’d cautiously recommend it as very entertaining sf/fantasy.

While my Mazda is broken, I’m getting my pound of flesh out of RACV, in the form of a rental car. It’s a current model Nissan Pulsar ST, and I spent enogh time driving it yesterday that I now feel competent to critique it.
It’s a great little car in terms of features and good design. It comes standard with ABS, A/C, CD-player, remote central locking, power steering, cruise-control and numerous airbags. For the first couple of days I drove it I was repeatedly amazed by how little I noticed the car; controls are inuitive, handling is incredibly predictable.
Yesterday, however, I had to drive the car from North Melbourne to Collingwood and back in mid-afternoon traffic, in the rain. Several things stood out as I drove this time:

• Fuel economy is not so hot. I had hoped that a modern small-four would be significantly more economical than my clunky old V6, but it somehow ate a quarter of a tank yesterday.
• Performance can be a little gutless at times, and the transmission is clearly unprepared for any kind of agressive driving, becoming jittery and sticking when pushed hard.
• Traction control is spooky. Having driven a recent Subaru with ABS, I can safely say that it’s not just ‘ABS is spooky’. In the wet, the Nissan often felt like its brake lines were cut, or like the brake pedal was tearing loose.

Overall, it’s comfy and featureful, but no amount of ingenious design can quite cover the cheapness of everything. I have deep concerns about how it would age.

Right now, since I have spectacularly little to do except ‘look busy’, I am trying to teach myself ipsec and racoon. So far I have a broken racoon install and a headache…

…and now for something completely different.

I keep mentioning Geocaching here, and I realise that I haven’t spelt out what it is, or why I am into it. I mostly realise this because people keep asking, so here’s a brief summary for public dissemination.

Geocaching revolves around this website: http://www.geocaching.com
It’s a semi-sport where some people hide little boxes full of stuff with a logbook in them somewhere in the environment, and other people have to find them. This is all facilitated by a modern tech-toy: the GPS. With a GPS, which you can buy for ~$200 AUD if you shop around, you can work out where you are to within a couple of meters in terms of latitude and longitude. Even the crudest GPS can also help you to navigate your way to any other arbitrary set of co-ordinates, such as those associated with a Geocache. There are a lot of caches out there; thousands just in Victoria. If you live anywhere suburban, you probably live within a kilometer of at least one cache.
Why do I enjoy it?

• It’s a treasure hunt. What’s not to enjoy?
• It is an outdoor physical activity. I need more of these.
• It is potentially a great social thing.
• It involves finding new places, often by some very strange paths.
• It is facilitated by geek toys. (I have a bluetooth GPS which talks to my Palm Pilot using bluetooth, where I run an app called GeoNiche)

On another note, I recently told several people that I thought the Stargate TV series had real merit as quality television SF. I just want to amend that, having watched some more: No, it’s silly. Fun, but silly.

Finally, observant readers will have noticed that I have tunred comments off. Apologies to all those wonderful people who have left their thoughts here… I will reinstate comments when the recent crisis has had some time to cool off. Until then, apologies for the read-only blog.

To most dear readers, please pardon another brief outburst…

J, R, now I know that you read this, and I am aghast.

Know then that I don’t read yours. I don’t know where they are, and I don’t want to know.
Sometimes I am told what you write there, when it concerns me or E.

If you want to hurl abuse at me in your own places, I will not stop you, nor even tell you that you’re wrong: I don’t expect to be forgiven for what I did. If you hurl abuse at me here, I may delete it.

…but E is innocent in all of this. E has chosen to keep me, in spite of what I did to her.
I do my best to atone to her for what I did every day. You both owe her your own apologies; I would beg of you: for gods sake leave her alone. If you want to deny that she was ever your friend, I cannot stop you, but I can laugh at you. A year ago you would have said otherwise.

I am sorry for what I did. I regret it every day. I was an arsehole. I don’t deny it and I don’t hide it.

What is my point? I am posting these things here, in this very public place because I am sick and tired of seeing E hurt again and again by what happened. That’s all. Thats it.

Message ends.

Possibly in karmic revenge for the melodrama of that last post, yesterday I pranged (merkin: “crashed”) my car.

I got rear-ended by a chap driving a commodore just near the Noble Park train crossing. My car remained essentially car-shaped, but his was completely mashed. Mercifully, we both turned out to be comprehensively insured, with the same insurer. I have already been confirmed by my insurer as being ‘not-at-fault’, so I won’t be paying nuffin’ for the repairs, and I get a gratis rental car for the next fortnight.
Neither he nor I seem to be in any way injured, but I am still waiting for the accursed Mayne Radiology to un-lose my X-ray report confirming that I don’t have a broken neck. My head having not yet fallen off, I am quietly confident.

E did a wonderful job of looking after me, and was endlessly patient with the various doctors, radiologists, car-assessors, car-repairers, car insurers, car rental agents and hordes of polite secretaries who we encountered yesterday.

The only respect in which the whole thing was really inconvenient was that it used up a sick-day, and my car wasn’t badly bent enough to get written off. That would have been really handy.

A lot of you readers know what evil I did to E last year. You know that I did that evil with my cousin. I just want to go on the record here as saying that I am sorry. I doubt that any penance I could do would amend for the pain I caused, in betraying E’s trust. But I also want to say that I do not blame myself solely.
Most of the blame lies with me. It was my evil, but without that my grotesque behaviour was eagerly abetted, it would have been naught but pathetic, shameful self-abuse.
I betrayed my partner last year for my shame, but she was also betrayed by a friend.
I choose to whom I am beloved now, thank you.

Thats all. Apologies to casual readers for the maudlin interlude. We now return you to your regular harmless programming.

I don’t usually post links to other blogs here, preferring to come up with my own content, or to post links in the ‘Crazy’ section on the right-hand side of my homepage.

This, however, smells so bad that I just had to share it:
Why everyone wants to invest in Neil Bush’s software company (from Boingboing).

…and it gets much worse from there.

On those frequent occasions when I curse the present Australian government as ignorant, incompetent, racist, sexist, fascist morons, I can at least draw solace from the fact that, unlike the USA today, we aren’t in the hands of a family organised crime syndicate.

Changing topic, I am currently reading Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness at the recommendation of a mental health professional. I highly recommend it for anyone who’s unhappy with their life, including most especially those skeptics and cynics among you. Seligman is very clearly a scientist, and takes pains to support his claims at every turn with the latest well-referenced research results. Not finished the book yet though, so I can’t give a good summary. Will probably add to this later.

A miscellany of unsorted news, after a long pause from blogging!

Firstly, it is worth noting that depression impairs ones desire to blog quite effectively, even when there is plenty of news.

Match one: The house has finally sold, we think. Unless I am sorely mistaken, the whole dealie is now only dependent on finance, and since the buyers have put down a hefty deposit, I expect that finance is a foregone conclusion. Yay!

Match two: My work is temporarily being conducted from my new home, since the Commonwealth Games have effectively rendered North Melbourne imapssable, and public transport Highly Fearsome. This suits me just fine. My workmates are so much easier to cope with when they’re on the other end of a data line.

Match three: Me and E went for a daytrip to Castlemaine today. It was excellent!

• We had an excellent lunch in Malmsbury (sp?) and bought eccles-cakes (of course).
• We explored the vast coolness of the Restorers Barn in Castlemaine itself.
• We found three caches.
• We did some most excellent four-wheel-driving in E’s very two-wheel-drive car.
• We climbed a cliff of loose granite blocks the size of white-goods.
• We came home and made uber-steak-sandwiches-of-doom.

I want to give special thanks to E for bringing outrageous madness such as this into my life.

No news involving dutchmen that’s fit to publish just yet.

Looks like disabling anonymous comments didn’t fix it. Disabling anonymous shoutbox seems to have though. I really have no idea what’s causing this, but at least I can re-enable anonymous comments.

The observant will have noticed that the Tiki was gone for a few days there. This was due to a massive comment-abuse event on wednesday morning.

The offending IP has been blocked utterly and permanently, and as a precaution I have restricted comments to registered users only for now. I know this sucky-sucky-sucks, but there isn’t an easy solution.

In the longer term, I intend to use a CAPTCHA on each comment-submission to weed out the abuse-bots from the nice humans.

Until then, apologies to all the nice humans who have been adding wonderful comments to my blog. Please don’t be afraid of the big bad registration script: I won’t use it for anything except letting you into the site.

I will, of course, understand entirely if you can’t be bothered.

Just one additional thing today, which I should have posted some time ago: Yes, I have seen it, and I wants one.

Reasons why an Intel Mac Mini will not be Trouble 2.0:

• The Mini lacks storage. (disk too small, disk too slow)
• Too expensive. For $1300 I can get the whole system.
• Buy a Mac, scrape off MacOS and never look at the pretty aqua desktop? Are you mad?
• The storage expansion options are still too limited. No Firewire 800! Why, for crying out loud?

Rather, at this stage, Trouble looks likely to be built from one of these. Power consumption will be higher than I would like, but noise, performance and price should all be well within tolerances.