Point and Laugh

What else ya got

2009-12-25T02:24:11Z

While admittedly delivered in an excited and grateful as opposed to spoiled and demanding tone, the phrase "Finally, a Wii!" was probably not the reaction Merete and I were looking for.

Bah humbug to us all, every one.

Round, square or arched window - pick one, you're leaving through it

2009-12-15T03:40:04Z

While getting the kids ready for a bath I commented on the number of play-related contusions that Astrid was sporting, saying "yes, kids your age collect bruises". Putting on her best hardcore face, Astrid responded, "I don't collect bruises, I give them away!"

Well, she's got the action hero brand of repartee down pat. Lessons on shrugging off small arms fire while leaping from the roof of a speeding car onto a helicopter start next week.

Smokin'

2009-12-15T00:22:51Z

I must confess to getting quite a nostalgia kick from mornings like today. I grew up living on forestry settlements in the south west and the hills, with smoke haze and the smell of burnt bush an almost constant presence during the summer months. Proust may have dropped into a reverie on smelling a madeleine (or a rusk dressed up as one), but for me memories of childhood centre around the smell of burnt vegetation.

Picnic

2009-12-03T02:55:19Z

Come along to the annual Hyde Park picnic to see the latest crop of breeder spawn and catch up with people you may not have seen since last year.

3pm Sunday 13th December, near the water playground on the Vincent Street side of the park.

Please pass the invitation on to anyone you think might be interested.

Hyde Park picnic

2009-12-01T11:01:18Z

So, fellow Saggies, the date for the picnic seems to have firmed up as being the 13th. What time? Last year it started at 4pm, but that was with daylight saving - 3pm sound about right?

Oh. My. God.

2009-12-01T02:51:13Z

Tony. Abbott.

*head explodes in schadenfreudish disbelief*

Good luck with that

2009-11-28T02:35:40Z

From Gamespot:

After being banned from Sony's PlayStation Network during a game of Resistance: Fall of Man, a San Jose, California gamer sued the electronics giant, alleging a violation of his First Amendment rights...earlier this month he filed a new suit against Microsoft and Nintendo. In that case, he alleged that a broken Xbox 360 caused him undue stress, and that a Wii system update blocking access to the Homebrew Channel third-party program interfered with his inalienable right to pursue happiness.
...
The gamer, Erik Estavillo, provided GameSpot with copies of his latest civil suit, a case against Activision Blizzard filed this morning in the Santa Clara County Superior Court of California.
...
The suit comprises a handful of complaints against Activision Blizzard, specifically relating to the company's successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft. Specifically, the gamer accuses the publisher of maintaining a "harmful virtual environment" with "sneaky and deceitful practices."
...
Beyond the monetary complaints, the suit also references the 2001 suicide of an EverQuest player, attributing it to a sense of alienation related to the game and mental health problems. The suit goes on to say the plaintiff has suffered from similar problems, including major depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and Crohn's disease, and he "doesn't want to end up like [the EverQuest player] did as he relies on video games heavily for the little ongoing happiness he can achieve in this life, via the gaming medium."

In addition to the suit, the plaintiff also wants a pair of celebrities to attest to the effects of alienation. The gamer is subpoenaing Depeche Mode's Martin Lee Gore "since he himself has been known to be sad, lonely, and alienated, as can be seen in the songs he writes." He is also calling Winona Ryder to testify, saying the actress' appreciation for Catcher in the Rye will make her a relevant witness "to how alienation in the book can tie to alienation in real live [sic]/video games such as World of Warcraft."

The gamer is asking for $1 million in punitive damages and a court order forcing Activision Blizzard to address the problems alleged in the suit. As of press time, representatives with Activision and Blizzard had not returned GameSpot's requests for comment.

Honestly, if the victims are that dumb how did they get online in the first place?

2009-11-23T04:52:28Z

Periodically I scan the spam file for our section email account at work. Most are annoying, but some are hilarious. I never cease to wonder how some of the scams actually make their originators any money. "Salutations, I is your bank, please by the grace of God to be sending me your password", that sort of thing. Another one that is amazingly common are variations on the basic theme of "Congratulations, you have won x million dollars/euros/yen/conch shells in an international lottery - your email address was automatically entered in the draw. Please send us your bank account details". WHO THE HELL FALLS FOR THIS SHIT??

The various 419 Nigerian scams are usually of this level of quality. But one today really caught my fancy. It's from the "Economics and Financial Crime Commission" in Nigeria and says they are contacting us on behalf of the Nigerian Government Reimbursement Committee. I think you can see where this is going. They say that since we fell victim to one of those awful scams we are entitled to claim some money back from the government. All we have to do is give them our bank details. However, "you are hereby warned not to communicate or duplicate this message to anybody for any reason whatsoever as the U.S. secret service in conjunction with The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has swage into action to track this criminals down."

I particularly like the fact that we are to contact the sender's secretary, "Reverend Frank Leo". Well hey, who wouldn't believe a man of the cloth? For me the crowning glory is a statistic about the targets of these nefarious "hoodlums": "50% of the Victims are from the United States, while about 40% are from other parts of the world."

I guess the other 10% are from outer space.

If gushing parents bore you, turn away now

2009-11-20T06:44:18Z

I've mentioned before that Astrid, currently in grade 3, did the sample NAPLAN literacy and numeracy test and scored in the percentile range expected of kids in grade 5. She did the test for real a while back and scored off the charts in most of the criteria. I was speaking informally to the principal after our last P&C meeting and he told me off the record that this time she scored in the percentile range expected of kids in grade 7. OMFG. This doesn't mean that she's doing work from the grade 7 syllabus, but the work she does do is up to the standard expected of them.

Next year she sits the PEAC test to see if she will be admitted to the gifted student program, with one stream being offered at the high school just next door. I'd have to say I'm pretty hopeful she will get in. Carys looks to be heading the same way, being hands down the best reader and writer in her pre-primary class. I give good genome.

Testing the waters

2009-11-17T07:17:18Z

Once upon a time I plugged my birthdate into Excel and worked out when I turned 10,000 days old. I then threw a party that I called "The 10,000 Days of Talbot". I thought it was a cute idea.

I turn 15,000 days old on the 27th of December. I missed out on having a 40th birthday party last year, and a Talbot 15K barbecue looks like a good substitute. But before I commit to it, do people think that they would be likely to turn up to something the day after Boxing Day, or would they be festived out? (Over-festived? Festivus interruptus?) It's on a Sunday with two public holidays to follow, if that makes any difference.

When geeks breed

2009-11-13T02:53:13Z

Post-spawning, you get less conversations about whether Superman could beat Galactus in a fight, and more about whether Foofah could take down Iggle Piggle. I think she'd own his narcoleptic arse.

Any lazyweb input?

2009-10-30T06:04:04Z

Turns out that Peter will be in halo traction for longer than initially expected, about another month or so. I think I'd go completely spare being totally immobile on my back for nearly two months only able to look at the ceiling, but he seems to be handling it well.

He's asked me to do some research for him on the best choice of a netbook for him. I'm not sure on how he's planning to mount it so he can use it given his current posture, but hey. I've done some poking around, but my impending exams are absorbing all available time at present, so I thought I'd ask if anybody can give me a shortcut to some answers.

He wants something that's minimum 9" so the keyboard is usable, SSD rather than HD, Bluetooth, eSATA or Firewire 800 to connect an existing external drive (are there any non-ExpressCard options here?), preferably in black. He wants Debian or Ubuntu, but I think that's going to have to be a DIY, probably by yours truly after the exam apocalypse. Budget $600, up to $800 if spectacularly good

Any suggestions/warnings?

Update on Peter

2009-10-19T04:41:48Z

I've been to see Peter in hospital, and while he's not up for many more visitors at present he's grateful for the well wishes.

He showed me the x-rays. Hoo boy. His left tibia is a mess, but they've put in a rod and screws and he should be okay. The neck x-ray was a shocker. There's a huge chunk knocked off the front of his C2 vertebra. He's been told that if it had been a few mm higher, he'd be dead. He's in halo traction to try and get everything back into alignment and on serious painkillers. He'll be flat on his back in traction for a week or more before they move him on to the next stage of a halo brace, which he'll be wearing for a good few months.

He's in remarkably good spirits all things considered, with a lot of the "glad to be alive" thing going on. He's been brought lots of books and will be getting a laptop when he's upright so he can work on his artwork.

Heh. Shock can be a funny thing. He says he doesn't remember the impact, but remembers waking up on the road surrounded by worried sounding paramedics telling him not to move, and thought "Well, at least I don't have to go to work today".

We're through the looking glass here, people

2009-10-14T13:53:18Z

I've posted before about birthers, the looney tunes who have made a religion out of claims that Obama was born in Kenya and that there has been a conspiracy to hide this fact due to it making him ineligible for the presidency. The figurehead of this movement is an irate fraggle called Orly Taitz, whose batshit insane amusement value is tempered somewhat by the fact that so many people seem to believe her.

She's reaching her nadir/apotheosis at the moment. She's a mail order lawyer (as well as a dentist and real estate agent), who represented an army doctor who tried to get out of being deployed overseas due to the fact that Obama wasn't really her CinC. The judge was less than sympathetic. Taitz responded by accusing the Bush-appointed conservative of being politically biased and guilty of treason, then demanded he recuse himself due to being unduly influenced by his ownership of Microsoft and Comcast stock (buh?). The judge responded by fining her $20,000 and gave her one of the most awe inspiring smackdowns in legal history. Hoo boy. While it's full of some incredibly brutal slamdunks ("so shockingly devoid of reality that it is difficult to know how to respond...breathtaking in its arrogance and borders on delusional...appalling lack of knowledge"), the all time best excerpt, which makes me feel so sorry for what he's gone through in a way I haven't felt since Judge Ito in the OJ trial is:

Although counsel's present concern is the location of the President's birth, it does not take much imagination to extend the theory to his birthday. Perhaps, he looks "too young" to be President...If he refused to admit publicly that he is older than the constitutional minimum age of thirty-five, should Ms. Taitz be allowed to file a lawsuit and have a court order him to produce his birth certificate? ... Or perhaps an eccentric citizen has become convinced that the President is an alien from Mars, and the courts should order DNA testing to enforce the Constitution.(7)

(7) The Court does not make this observation simply as a rhetorical device for emphasis; the Court has actually received correspondence assailing its previous order in which the sender, who, incidentally, challenged the undersigned to a "round of fisticuffs on the Courthouse Square," asserted that the President is not human.

The Republic is doomed.

Oh FFS

2009-10-13T13:46:19Z

I made the mistake of sitting in front of the "Who killed Cleopatra" doco on the ABC this evening. I should know better than to watch Discovery Channel historical crap, it's just one step above History Channel "Hitler knew that Nostradamus said we're all going to die in 2012 OMG" rubbish.

The shoddy logic and artfully edited soundbites from egyptologists to supposedly support the crime writer "criminal profiler" were one thing. But the grand bull moose gold medal winning stinker was when they announced that Octavian changed his name to Augustus "naming himself after August, the month of his final victory in Alexandria". I just about had a stroke. It's hands down got to be the stupidest mistake I've ever heard in a history doco. I want to hurt the writer, producer, narrator and frickin' best boy and grip responsible for shitting in my head with that drivel.

Update on Peter

2009-10-11T10:35:59Z

Peter was riding his scooter on Reid Hwy when he was clipped by a car which knocked him into a second car. I haven't heard one way or the other whether the instigating driver stayed at the scene or has spoken to police. Peter's main injuries are a broken left wrist and left leg and an unstable neck fracture. He had an operation today to put pins in his leg, and has had his neck immobilised pending transfer from Charlies to RPH tomorrow morning for spinal surgery. It could have been a lot worse than it appeared to be when Merete and I first got a phone call from Belle last night. His son Fyre is very upset but getting lots of support.

Peter Cardy

2009-10-11T03:07:21Z

I'm afraid I have some bad news for friends of Peter Cardy, though not as bad as it could have been.

Peter had an accident yesterday while riding his scooter on Reid Highway. He has no recollection of the accident, just of waking up surrounded by paramedics. I have no news at present of any other injuries, but the big one is he has broken one of his vertebrae - I don't know how badly or which one. However, he is lucid and able to move his fingers and toes, so it's not as bad as it could have been. His partner and son are by his bedside, and he was being evaluated by a surgeon this morning. He could well be in surgery by now, but I'm posting this on a public terminal from the edges of civilization and don't have any further info. I'll post an update later today, but would appreciate any further info from anybody that hears something.

Meme you, mothermemer

2009-10-09T08:34:44Z

So here's one of those experiential checklist memes. Let's see who'll be game to try this one. Post it, bold it, you know the drill.

Have had punches thrown at you by a complete stranger
Have been threatened with a weapon
Have sustained a drinking related injury
Have sustained a sex related injury
Have had a car or other vehicular accident
Have had more than one car or other vehicular accident
Have been questioned by the police (on the street is okay, not necessarily in custody)
Have been questioned by the police more than once
Have had the police turn up to a party you were throwing
Have had police turn up to your house to arrest someone you lived with
Have had a medical incident that in a previous era would have killed you
Have had more than one medical incident that in a previous era would have killed you
Have passed out in public
Have had your house/something in your house catch fire
Have had your house/ something in your house catch fire more than once
Have had something in your house explode
Have set fire to a large piece of your property (for your personal interpretation of “large”)
Have set fire to a large piece of someone else’s property (consensually or not, in company or not)
Have been evicted from a party
Have been evicted from a nightclub
Have been evicted from a taxi
Have helped/been approached for help by a stranger in distress
Have fired a gun
Have been attacked by a creature larger than a cat
Have killed a mammal
Have killed a mammal with your bare hands
Have stolen something while drunk
Have stolen something while not drunk
Have stayed awake for more than 36 hours
Have done something you are so not admitting to on Livejournal

And yes, I can tick off every single one.

Big scary squeaky toy

2009-10-09T07:26:43Z

A rather nasty cold has been doing the rounds of the clan. It hits the throat rather hard, and Merete and I got a great deal of amusement, to Astrid's annoyance, at how cute and squeaky she got. Of course now it's happened to me, and I hope she will show me no mercy in return. Except I don't sound cute so much as disturbing. Mostly I can only utter harsh croaks, but at my best I sound like "Management", the scary dude behind the curtain from Carnivale.

Bring on the benevolent rule of the Science Heroes. Seriously.

2009-10-09T03:52:53Z

The final hours are ticking away for the LCROSS mission, which will crash the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Centaur upper stage into a crater near the Moon’s south pole so the ejecta plume can be analysed and hopefully pin down the existence or otherwise of decent quantities of water ice in the permanently shadowed polar craters. This is not quite related to the recently announced finding that there is widespread water (in very low concentrations) across a fair part of the lunar surface, as LCROSS was planned and launched before that discovery.

All very cool. The one thing that pisses me off about it is the number of online comments from chicken littles convinced that those darned mad scientists are going to crack the moon in half or send it spiralling down to wipe us all out. Various people attempt to set them straight, of course, pointing out that it already happened a bunch of times with (heavier) Saturn V upper stages during Apollo, and that comparably sized meteoroids hit the moon on average once a week – this one being different because it is being sent exactly where and when it can do useful science. The most irritating, and pervasive, response to these injections of sanity is “That’s your opinion, nobody really knows what’s going to happen, my opinion is just as valid as yours”. Well no, fuckwit, we DO know exactly what is going to happen. As I often say when confronted with this attitude, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. This idiotic conviction that any moronic opinion is as valid as one based on a comprehensive study of the relevant facts and principles is more widespread than ever in this era in which ignorance can spread at the speed of stupid and there is the belief that everybody having a soapbox means they have an equal chance of being right.

STUPID PEOPLE! STOP BEING SO STUPID!!

And in 15 years she'll be smashing the car

2009-10-07T04:57:23Z

Our living room has floor to ceiling windows, which I've never liked - it's like being in a shop window sometimes, even though we've planted some screening vegatation to try and give us a little bit of privacy. The windows are in two panes, with the bottom ones being about 1m long by 50cm high.

On Monday evening Eleanor, who is quite physical and boisterous at the best of times, ran up and sat down quite hard on the floor height windowsill, with her backside contacting the window with sufficient force to break it.

Have a heart attack? Don't mind if I do.

Fortunately some time ago we had covered the inside of the lower panes with laminated cardboard to cut off our dogs' view of the various cats strolling around in our front yard. I think the tape all the way around the border of the card was what stopped all the glass shards from falling out and doing god knows what damage to Eleanor. I shudder to think.

Initially I was a bit concerned about how much it would cost us to fix, as I'm so used to tallying up the various things around the house that have worn out and are waiting for our maintenance budget to accrue to a large enough level to be dealt with. It didn't occur to me for some time that this was actually covered by insurance. So yay to that. We asked the glazier to install extra thick glass instead of the soap bubble stuff that was there to begin with. Of course, for our peace of mind we're going to have to replace the other thin lower pane from our own pocket, unless we can convince Eleanor to take a running start at that one as well. Either that, or replace the lower panes with something non-smashy entirely.

Lucy in the sky with...

2009-10-01T15:16:49Z

Exoplanets are freaky.

COROT-7b is one of the smallest exoplanets found recently; though not the smallest, despite what many current news reports are saying - three of the very first exoplanets found, around a pulsar in 1992, still hold that prize.

New evidence pretty clearly pins COROT-7b down as a rocky planet about 5 times the mass and 1.8 times the radius of Earth. That in itself is a pretty cool achievement. But the freaky icing on the cake comes from modelling of its atmosphere. And what an atmosphere. The planet orbits just 2.5 million kilometers from its star, and is tidally locked with one hemisphere permanently fried and the other frozen, possibly ameliorated slightly by atmospheric convection. The daytime temperatures have probably reduced the surface to a hemispheric ocean of magma, with all light elements like nitrogen and water having been blown off into space long ago. Most of the atmosphere would appear to be made up of gaseous potassium, sodium, aluminium and silicon oxide. But it would appear that precipitation is possible - silicates and other minerals can condense and rain down on the lava ocean. Yes, it rains gravel. The really cool bit is that different minerals will condense out at different altitudes, like a giant fractionating column. So it would seem that the precipitation can be somewhat minerally pure, leading to rains of substances such as enstatite, spinel, wollastonite and corundum. That last one again - corundum.

Yes, Virginia, there is a planet where sapphires literally rain from the sky.

You give kaftans a bad name

2009-09-26T05:57:57Z

You have to admit, Qaddafi makes for good headlines. There's been plenty of coverage about his 96 minute speech to the UN, though I was unaware that his interpreter collapsed at the 70-odd minute mark shouting "I just can't take it any more!" into a live mike.

But hoo boy, this one's a doozy. After his son Hannibal(!) was briefly arrested in Geneva for beating his servants with a coathanger, his dad responded by declaring Switzerland "a world mafia, not a state", pulled all Libyan funds out of their banks, brought home his diplomats, closed Nestle's Tripoli branch, and submitted a UN proposal to abolish Switzerland altogether, dividing it up amongst its next-door neighbors.

Not that he was overreacting, or anything.

Better than doing it to "Sheer Heart Attack"

2009-09-25T15:46:34Z

I've just read that some CPR trainers advise that one way to keep the correct rhythm for chest compressions is to hum the bassline to Queen's Another One Bites the Dust while doing it.

Just don't sing it out loud, because that would be sending some really mixed messages.

Serious bejeezus heebie jeebies

2009-09-25T12:52:48Z

Not much freaks me out. Learning about a parasitic isopod that gets into a fish's mouth, eats its tongue and then attaches itself to the stump to feed on whatever the fish eats sounded kind of cool. Then they had to show me a picture.

Hey, you clicked past the cut, don't blame me.