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coherent light: infrared to blue
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| | Subject: | "NO SUP" | | Time: | 09:34 pm |
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| So, SUP bought Livejournal. Some of you might remember when Sixapart sold the Russian rights to LJ to them some time ago. At the time, many Russian bloggers ( adorned with charming "NO SUP" icons ) complained that SUP was in cahoots with the state infiltrated media via their link with the SOL+ media agency.
Livejournal has been of declining use for me lately, and I am thinking of pulling the whole thing to run my own blog on my own hosting, where I can implement my own features, etc. Might be the last nail in the coffin.
p.s. I wonder what SUP's position on Harry Potter fanfic is.
p.p.s. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) no_sup | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment   |
| | Subject: | H.A.M.O.K. | | Time: | 06:58 am |
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| After lots of ghetto engineering, I am posting this from my truly enormous ( queen sized ) hammock slung underneath my loft bed! It's still not hung perfectly ( it's a little steep still ), but I am very happy with it.
I name it "H.A.M.O.K.", Hempen Appliance Made Only by Knitting.
Kneel before H.A.M.O.K.! | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | The Way We Swing -- Digital Underground, "Sex Packets" | | Subject: | Stickers - Good ones! | | Time: | 12:11 pm |
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| | At Villain the other week, I bought some very nice Japanese influenced stickers, and would like to pass on the recommendation - tokidoki ( "sometimes" ). | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Self improvement | | Time: | 10:42 am |
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| I am finally ticking off a number of computing goals. I am doing them all at once so as to cluster my frustrations in an efficient manner. Findings:
Going to Dvorak is a humbling experience. I've gotten away with being a pretty awful typist for many years because programming uses much more time thinking than typing.
Lisp is quite a lot of fun.
I take back the unkind things I said about emacs in 1999. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Watch Her Disappear -- Tom Waits, "Alice" | | Time: | 12:29 am |
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| 10 A friend of mine was once interviewing an engineer for a programming job and asked him a typical interview question: how do you know when a function or method is too big? Well, said the candidate, I don't like any method to be bigger than my head. You mean you can't keep all the details in your head? No, I mean I put my head up against my monitor, and the code shouldn't be bigger than my head.-- Practical Common Lisp, Chapter 3: "Practical: A Simple Database" by Peter Seibel | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Chumby | | Time: | 10:28 am |
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| I got my invite today as an "insider" to order a Chumby ( a small, developer open, always on internet device from ( among others ) Bunny Huang - http://www.chumby.com/ ). Ready to plonk down my US$179 hardearned, I find that they won't ship outside the United States.
Sigh. Maybe Harlan will be able to get me one and send it over.
To answer wzdd's question from yesterday, Guitar Hero 3 is a lot of fun! But I have no other Guitar Heroes to compare it with. I didn't play it for very long last night though as I was feeling unwell. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Guitar Hero Thrii | | Time: | 12:29 pm |
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| Anyone in Australia buying Guitar Hero 3 for Wii today ( release day ), should probably go to JB Hi-Fi - at the one near my office, it's $127.00, plenty of copies. Compare $149.95 at Electronics Boutique, and $149.00 at JB's online shop.
Sadly, no single guitars for sale yet. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Here lies Curious, | | Time: | 11:53 pm |
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| Who fainted of hunger while trying to dig a tunnel and was wailed on by an orc until he died.
"peperony and
chease"
This is the first nethack character I've managed to get past the starting doldrums. I learned a lot! | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Cycling to work. | | Time: | 08:08 am |
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| Well, another resolution crossed off - it took about 50 minutes door to door ( it gets a bit slower once you hit the cbd ).
I wish I could either park the bike in the office, or chain it up where I could see it from my window. Failing that, it has a steel cable binding the front wheel and frame to a large chain, a kryptonite d-lock binding the back wheel and frame to a steel post, and the seat is sitting here on my desk. Hopefully that's inconvenient enough not to bother ripping off.
- Bryn. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | LSAT Results | | Time: | 09:57 am |
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| Dear Bryn Davies,
[...]
Your September 29, 2007 LSAT score is 165. The percentile rank is 92.
Wow. I thought I'd flopped it, because I didn't bother studying after deciding that I wouldn't be able to take the postgraduate course that was asking for it and work at the same time. Still!! And it's there for two years if I change my mind.
Unfortunately, their PDF marking sheet isn't rendering very nicely in Preview, so I haven't seen where I fell down yet... I imagine the eight questions in the logical reasoning section where I ran out of time and donkey voted all "A" probably didn't help though.
Gotta dash!
B. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | The Mixtape Too -- Alex C, "Mind Your Bitz" | | Subject: | Another plug, | | Time: | 09:22 am |
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| For Alex C's excellent Mind Your Bitz series of mixtapes. They've vanished off his webpage for the moment, but keep an eye out for them on Peer to Peer.
Off to Sydney tonight for my little sister's wedding on Sunday. Exciting! About to finish reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, next scheduled is an anthology of PKD short fiction ( "Human Is?" ), and some long contemplation on what TTSoPE was about.
Cheers!
Bryn.
p.s. Finally got internet on at home - it's dialup, and god, I'd forgotten the horror. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Reading | | Time: | 10:19 am |
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| I had the LSAT yesterday. It was all pretty good with the exception of the logic games section, which I always hated in practice too. It took seven hours from admission to the hall to finally getting out. I celebrated by going to the Mindgames 30th Anniversary sale and picking up Doom The Boardgame at 20% off.
I recently finished Murakami's "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle". It was excellent, everyone should read it. I also read two ( Baruch Spinoza & Rene Descartes ) of Virgin Books' little paperbacks which give a 10,000ft overview of several classical philosophers. They are very well written and entertaining - credit to the author for the accessability of what he's written.
Currently reading another book by Murakami, "Dance Dance Dance", and Leo Tolstoy's, "The Kingdom of God is within You", which is a work on pacifist Christian anarchism. The Tolstoy is very interesting so far.
edit: How did I forget I dropped $600 on a new bike this morning? It's an entry level sports bike, Giant's Rincon, in XXL Silver/Charcoal. This one ( link corrected ). Butted aluminium frame, disc brakes, 100mm front fork suspension travel ( lockable ). Should offer better performance than my old warhorse from Japan that I suspect was formed from pig iron. | | comments: 9 comments or Leave a comment |
| Items that did not make the cut were a Halo-themed lottery ticket, lingerie modeled after a female hologram character, and toy guns based on the game's weapons. Instead, fans can expect high-quality action figures from McFarlane Toys, a tabletop game from WizKids, and replica weapons for mature buyers.-- 'Halo' no longer just a game for Microsoft
:( | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Javascript | | Time: | 09:13 pm |
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| I have always put Javascript down as a toy language. And it is a toy language. And yet, I find myself writing more and more code in it of late, because my #1 interest in programming is task automation, and the #1 place where people find themselves doing tasks is on the internet. At the same time, there are so many little niggles.
For example, why is the out of the box implementation of associative arrays so half-assed? "Oh yes," they say, "we do it right out of the box with our Array type." But a lot of stuff just doesn't seem to work properly, and the reason is that "we do it right out of the box..." is actually a misunderstanding of what is going on here, but one which is propagated as fact in many online JS clinics and references ( I am about to start teaching JS to one of my near and dears ). See Associative Arrays Considered Harmful by Andrew Dupont. A proper implementation of associative arrays with support for .Length, etc, could have headed this whole thing off before it took root.
There was going to be a rant here about the single source policy in XHR which is used to stop javascript from waddling off and scraping your netbanking data but at the same time makes a nuisance of AJAX development involving one or more third party sites, but I've reconsidered it.
Incidently, if anyone is wondering what I'm writing, it's another application that lets me produce wodges of virtual cash for a certain community, which is another programming interest of mine that ties neatly into automation. I guess it's a spiritual successor to my auction house rigging programs from WoW. One day I will finally start applying this stuff to real $$'s. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Quick Notes | | Time: | 08:19 am |
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| I have a job - it's a C# development position in Flinders Lane. Really nice office with a big sunny window! Downside - can't really discuss what I do all day with anyone.
I finished Kirk J. Schneider's "Horror and the Holy", which was very interesting, but I feel was a bit of a letdown in the end in it's dissection of the problem of Evil into that which approaches too closely to infinitude in either hyperconstrictive or hyperexpansive directions and hence passes beyond the ability of the viewer to internalise it. The implication seems to be that one, Evil is subjective ( not necessarily a problem for me, but some ethical systems will resist the implications ) and second that assimilable events are not evil - it is this second point that I find difficult to agree with.
The discussion of Ösel Tendzin was very interesting, and highlights basically everything I have been complaining about with regard to the prevailing view of "suchism" in Buddhist movements.
Finally, I filled a hole in my gaming wishlist, acquiring a copy of Acquire! It's probably the least pretty of all the editions ( it's the Avalon Hill print before the Hasbro acquisition ), so the pieces are pretty spartan, but I will probably remake it before long. I have an idea for an electrical board with light up hotels. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | The Influence of Apple on Product Packaging | | Time: | 03:17 pm |
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| I bought an external harddrive today, in expectation of Time Machine in 10.5. It's a Seagate "FreeAgent", and it was quite cheap comparitively - $139 for 250GB USB2.0 / 5 year warranty. The unit itself looks very sleek, but I liked the box copy as well. It's definitely written "for humans", with sizes specified in "glorious gigabytes", the requirements being written in plain language ( and addressed to "If you're a PC user..."/"If you're a Mac person..." ). The stickers sealing the cable pouches are bright yellow, with "hello" printed on them.
Even the setup documents ( entitled, "This won't take long." ) has a little stopwatch graphic at the bottom, showing the time elapsed since the beginning of setup, and ending with, "Note:Times may vary depending on how excited you are about using your new FreeAgent desktop drive."
Nice job, Seagate. I dig it. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Tags: | ccg, games | | Current Music: | Instant Karma! -- John Lennon, "Lennon, Legend" | | Subject: | On The Edge CCG | | Time: | 10:55 pm | | Current Mood: | sleepy |
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| On the Edge is a CCG by Atlas, that went out of print in 1994. It's based in the setting of the excellent RPG, "Over The Edge", which is all about surreal conspiracies. Rulebook and details can be had here.
I wrote a plugin to play it using LackeyCCG ( a virtual cardtable for Mac and Windows ) and I have started playing a fixed deck league ( two starters + two basic boosters, + one booster ( any expansion ) after each league game ) with John. If you'd like to join us for either head to head or 3+ player games, please let us know!
We played a game tonight, which I won... which was a little unfair as I know a little bit more about the game and ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) heliotic had a hard time getting any Influence generating characters on the board. He managed to cause me some serious pain though.
I took a basic set booster, netting some nice cards, including Tulpa, Negative Energy, and Astral Flux. Because John forgot to save his cardpool in Lackey, he's making a new deck from 2 Starters, 3 Boosters. Will be interesting to see what he comes up with. Lackey is a good application, but a little flaky sometimes. You really need to be on it's case about things like "Move all cards to Deck" and check it did it correctly afterwards.
( Current Card Pool. )
-- curious_au | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
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coherent light: infrared to blue
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