I want a big red mushroom-switch on my desk which I can bash, and maybe a big heavy rubber mallet to bash it with. When pressed, the switch sets my voicemail message to “FUCK OFF” and redirects all incoming calls directly to it, deactivates my voicemail light so that I can’t even see if I have messages, lowers an opaque cone-of-silence over my desk, lights up a big neon sign over my head which says the same thing, and runs kill -9 on any instances of Thunderbird or Gaim I might be running. Maybe it could erect a ten-foot-high electrified razor-wire barrier around my desk and spray all my adjacent workmates with tear-gas while it’s at it…

Then again, maybe I’m just having one of those mornings.

Prospective employers please note: I am blogging this, not doing it. My actual workmates think I’m a lovely person, and really I don’t hate them. It’s the customers who are currently earning my special, passionate malice.

In my time-killing perambulations this afternoon for the sake of ensuring that I don’t leave work embarrassingly early, I ran across the ultimate answer to the case-modding/LAN-partying geek’s problems… provided they’re wealthy geeks:

Yes folks, the Trans2000 portable PC case is a mil-spec toughened PC case with a built-in 20″ LCD, amplified stereo speakers and detachable keyboard-with-pointing-device. Don’t ask what it costs. I don’t actually know, but I can make some educated guesses…

Played the recent new edition Arkham Horror (the game with a token for everything) with K, CainBits and Minxdragon on Saturday night. K had been told that the game would probably take four or more hours to play though the first time. It took seven and a half. Given that we started at about 8:30pm, that took us through into the wee small hours of the night, far further than any of us had feared. Some may blame the silliness, some the alcahol, some the fat-tokens. I blame the dark eldar ghods, and the cat.
In mid game I had to drive E off to her second night of 11pm-9am shift-work on the ER. She seems to be coping better with this than she was, but the hours and the stress are mind-boggling. As I write I haven’t seen her since Sunday night.

<demented-drug-fiend> I WANT MY E! </demented-drug-fiend>
My work on the PHP registration page proceeds healthily: I have written many pages of validation code, and am starting to have a better appreciation for all those web-development toolkits that The K is always going on about.
I have also found another foolish net-toy with which to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting world: Shanty. Shanty takes text and an image and makes a postscript ‘poster’ with very fine coloured text making up the image. For example: A4 A3 A2
On a final, and completely unrelated note: it looks like The Great Laptop Upgrade is finally about to happen. It has only taken several years…

It’s a quiet weekend and I am essetially broke. E is sleeping after her 11pm-9am shift on the ER last night, so I am quietly blogging and coding up the user-registration page. I have given up on the Tiki once and for all: The Pear::Auth package is just way too raw for use against a live LDAP. Insecure as hell too… yucky.

Many many very fine movies in the offing right now. There are five to which I am looking forward with particularly maniacal anticipation:

• Howl’s Moving Castle (Disney Link) the next film from the legendary Hayao Miyazaki.
• The new rendition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Warner IMDB Apple), featuring Johnny Depp.
• And the new Aardman feature-length movie: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” title=”Create page: Were-Rabbit” class=”wiki wikinew”>? (IMDB Apple). Chicken Run was fabulous, but didn’t include W-and-G!
• Of course: Serenity (IMDB) is on my list. Joss! On the big screen! *gabbles dementedly*
• Tim Burton’s next biggie, Corpse Bride (Warner TBC IMDB Apple) gives us animated Depp goodness, Elfman soundtrack, and all the usual magic.

Also looking like they have great potential: Dukes of Hazzard, Red Eye and Night Watch

Better start saving up for those movie tickets. Maybe I should be investigating some kind of discount-card scheme…?

Entering all those URLs has left me completely stuffed! Like this:

(Snarfed from Ausculture via Clem Bastow’s rather disconcerting blog)

Another step down the road towards making user-registration work. PHP is a fairly simple, familiar sort of beast, but the Pear::Auth package is maintained by finite monkeys with ADD, or something. More work to do tomorrow.
All my careful double-checking to ensure that the office would be painted on a weekend has come to naught in the end, and now our CFO claims that there was never any other plan. Oh well, I will just have to work from home while the painters stink the place up. Poor little me.
Tonight’s weather has become even windier… anyone would think we were having a hurricane, rather than those poor folks in New Orleans. It sounds as though some weather god has changed their mind about spring, and ow they’re issuing a recall.
Still, I have my favourite beer in my tummy, hot chocolate in a mug in my hands, and a most huggable E by me here. I don’t even have to commute tomorrow… it can snow if it wants.
Erin, Korny and I watched “The Handmaid’s Tale” tonight. Korny warned us that it was a bit grim, but it was really the stuff of nightmares. Disturbing, chilling, topical. Elegant science fiction, if I can call it that without putting people off.

And lo, he did trip over STRK/3, and he did say: is this not the coolest site ever?

I also thought that this image belonged here:

Back at work today.

My S.A.D.-prevention lamp failed to come on this morning, not due to my zealous housemates turning it off at the lamp end, but due to my having messed with the timer while in a brainless(1) state during the holiday.

Still, this morning’s Triple-J breakfast show brought some degree of cheer by announcing this to be the ‘Happiest Monday of All’ and broadcasting from home their universal message: don’t bother going to work today. Stay home, be happy. Would that I could marshall an excuse.

I am re-thinking my previous jubilant post about GPSes, since my reply from Navman which seems to indicate that the Tungsten T2 is not supported. Why, I ask? Is there some terrible deficiency or difference between the T2 and the T3? Is it a bluetooth issue, or what? More research is called for… this is not news, really.

Roasted a 3kg pork shoulder roast for dinner last night. My god it was magnificent… I had forgotten the true glory of a good pork roast, living with housemates with an aversion to crackling. E, mercifully, has no such affliction, and we have agreed that the remaining ~2kg of roast will make admirable sandwiches for the rest of the week. 🙂

I want more sleep.

(1) – brainless see inebriated(2)
(2) – inebriated see drunk(3)
(3) – drunk see pissed(4)
(4) – pissed see sloshed(5)
(5) – sloshed adj. Slang. Intoxicated.
(6) – mutual recursion see recursion, mutual(7)
(7) – recursion, mutual see mutual recursion(6)

Yet another marvellous gadget-frontier to push back… I have been looking for a GPS for some time, since a friend of mine got me interested in Geocaching. The problem is that this seems to be one of those items, like digital cameras, which undergo a mysterious non-tax-related price-hike upon entering the country.
*sneeze*pricefixing*/sneeze*
Anyhoo, having decided that it would be a couple of paychecks before I could afford a $240 Garmin etrex GPS, I was morosely re-examining the ridiculously low price for which I could buy such a device from Amazon if I lived in the USA, and it occurred to me to check the price of GPS units on ebay. I had looked at bluetooth GPS units (Since I already own a Palm Tungsten) in the past and ruled them out on grounds of cost. Almost the first link I saw when browsing GPS on ebay however, was this lovely bluetooth GPS, with a buy-it-now price of AU$119!
I suspect, on examining the market for these things further, that the trick is that this device requires no user-interface or special modularity. It just has to perfrom a well-documented task, namely receiving a GPS signal, and squirt the resulting low-speed (9600 baud) data over a convenient bluetooth link (again, a single IC will do it all). Since I already own the expensive bit (the Palm), this brings the cost down to something much more reasonable, with the added bonus that the GPS itself will continue to work in my future gadgets, so long as they support bluetooth.
…still, it ain’t gonna happen this paycheck.

This post courtesy of Nancy Hatherell’s home dialup.
Ballarat is an excellent place to sleep in. This is day four of the driving holiday which we wanted to make the highlight of Erin’s microscopic annual leave this year.

• Day 1: Porepunkah. We set out early Sunday morning from E’s house for the long drive up north. As planned, we went via Milawa so that we could spoil ourselves at Brown Brothers and milawa cheese and buy some mustard as well. We got to Dad’s place in Porepunkah at four-ish. Our plan had been to go up to the snow in the morning, but on Dad’s advice we went to the snow immediately. There were tiny little scraps of icy snow at the very top of Mt Buffalo, enough to make a rude snowman. Dad’s food most excellent as always.
• Day 2: Daylesford. The howling gale overnight obliterated the last of the snow on Buffalo. We went for a walk down to the old-growth timber at the edge of the Ovens river, and then went hunting fragments of ~150 year old chinese pottery in the Buckland valley. (photos to follow) At midday we set out to drive to Daylesford, getting there exactly at sunset.
• Day 3: Clunes and Ballarat. Briefly: walking around the springs in Hepburn Springs, trawling through the magnificent Avant Garden Bookshop, decadent hot chocolates at Sweet Decadence, and on to Clunes to visit Hath and Judy.
• Day 4: So far, breakfast and some blogging. 🙂

Feeling a lot better today than when I cranked out that last post!

What a grumpy Thorne I was!

Today is the first day of my little holiday, and tomorrow E and I are going on a proper driving holiday, probably Bright->Daylesford->Ballarat->home, with much wine-and-cheese, snow, hot-spas, and random enjoyable pootling throughout.

Tonight I am looking forward to playing “Monsters across America” with Jennie and Liam and E at E’s house. MaA was K & Y’s birthday present to Liam last night (Mmmm, mucho enchilada! (burp)) but they are meeting with Uncle Jono, who has finally returned from America, tonight, so they get to miss out. Nyeah!

Last night we also went to see “Unleashed” at CCW. It was WAY COOL!… I had only seen trailers beforehand, and thought: Cool! A Jet-Li movie with plot and stuff, and maybe the odd british gangsta. But lo! When the opening credits rolled, there was this awesome list of names:

• Directed by Louis Leterrier
• Written by Luc Besson
• Soundtrack by Massive Attack

…and the obvious ones:

• Jet Li …. Danny
• Morgan Freeman …. Sam
• Bob Hoskins …. Bart

But the names still tell you nothing: This is one magnificent action movie, and a compelling drama with some really beautiful characters and at least two singularly impressive bad-guys.
The fight-scenes are something I have never seen before: In a typical action move there might be a handful of blows, maybe even only one or two, where I am compelled to say “Ouch, I *felt* that”. In this movie nearly every single blow is a palpable impact, almost sickeningly compelling. Jet Li is scary, but he also really ACTS in a way that I haven’t seen him do before: easy to identify with every emotion.

I am compiling a list of movies for a “The art of fighting” video night/weekend, and now it lists: Kill bill v1 and 2, Unleashed, and…?