Finding fond hearts

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

What an unmitigated piece of monkey tripe!

Alison has been away now for 9 days - and due to return in another 13 - and I'm not feeling anything except loneliness. What will happen, is when she returns, I will feel so much better than the wretchedness of the previous 22 days, that I will think things are so much better than they were before. I do not need enforced absence to underline to me how much she means to me, I already know it.

It applies the same with my kids. I really miss them when they are not here, which unfortunately is most of the time. I feel great when I see them, but I certainly don't need to be separated to increase my love of them.

I have heard this annoying little platitude at least half-a-dozen times now in the past two weeks, even once from Alison. If I was a murderous man I'd easily have achieved the status of serial killer. Alison would be pretty safe, though.

I think it must only apply to people who are sick of the sight of each other: "Yeah. Go away. How long do you want? Two, three months? OK."

Then, some time into the three months: "Gee, his nose-picking wasn't really all that annoying compared with his ability to take the garbage out. And that pile of garbage is really starting to smell."

>Sigh<

I really miss her. She would enjoy this little rant.

Postal sorting snafu

Compare these two addresses:

Number 1:

Miss Sarah Jones
Unit 26 14-18 Johnson Street
Campsie NSW 2194

Number 2:

Miss Britney Smith
Unit 26 18 Camptown Road
North Sydney NSW 2060

Now, if you were living with Miss Smith at North Sydney and received the letter addressed to Miss Jones, would you be surprised? Now there are similarities in the street numbering and the name of Miss Jones's suburb is remarkably similar to Miss Smith's street name, and of course they both have the same christian name (Miss), but standing at the letterbox at North Sydney and holding the letter addressed to Miss Jones, you could be forgiven for wondering about the intelligence or otherwise of the postal sorting system.

This is a true story, only the names and addresses have been changed to protect the innocent.

The Wow is gone

Well the balance of the upgrade from Vista to XP went quite smoothly. Friday afternoon I was still suffering a little bit of the effects of the work Christmas party and Saturday morning I went shopping with the girls. So I didn't get back into it until Saturday afternoon. There was a ton of downloaded software which I installed onto the thing following mostly this guide

Aside from the hours (unattended) copying files, the biggest delay has been searching for the drivers disk for my motherboard. Who would have thought I would keep it in the empty motherboard box stacked on top of the bookcase in the spare room?

And the results?

Initially I was astounded at the difference in speed; XP really flys along compared to Vista. The HP printer driver and Yamaha USB-Midi port drivers installed without any problems. I am yet to install Sibelius, though am confident that it will be successful. When I installed Comodo Personal Firewall it slowed a tad, and little windows kept popping up telling me what was going on, but the whole machine did not stop, and the messages are getting less and less numerous the more I use it.

[Just as a side note, while I could have used the in-built Windows Firewall, I have read a number of reviews which indicate that it is less than effective. ZoneAlarm and Comodo seem to be the best choices (see for instance http://www.consumersearch.com/www/software/firewalls/review.html).]

And to top it all off, this morning I read yet another review of a Vista-to-XP upgrade. This amusing story is written as if the writer is reviewing the "new" XP operating system, and comparing it to the older, slower, Vista. Superb.

Going, Going, Gone.

In a follow-up to my previous post about upgrading from Vista to XP.

I got home quite late last night after attending Josephine's Presentation Night -- she won the Teacher's Choice award for her class -- so I was in a great mood. I thought I'd continue on by getting started with cleaning up my computer.

I began the task by uninstalling just about everything I could on the computer. I wanted to get it's footprint down small enough that I could just copy the whole disk across to my USB portable disk, and then deal with copying the data back later. I also ran up a few crucial programs and backed up the data where I could - E-Record being the really imporant one. After a number of hours, I managed to get it down to about 40Gb and started to copy across to my USB disk. I had already at this point started to copy the Users directory from drive C: to spare space on (internal) drive E:. To be sure, to be sure...

40Gb seems rather large for a Windows installation, Vista or not. I hunted through the files and removed all the obvious things (an Oracle Vista iso disk image?), and discovered that Alison's iPod software is not content with merely reading the MP3 files off the E: drive, it also has to copy them into her home directory as well into some other format. Hmmmm.

To do the copy I used this great little no-install utility called Unstoppable Copier. It just powers through everything, blat, blat, blat. Superb. I left the copying at 3am (!!) to get some sleep, figuring that it could work on it's own for a little while.

And all copied this morning. Before leaving for work I reformatted the partition and started the XP installation. I ran out of time and will get back to it this evening.

Seems I am not alone in my use of the term "upgrading" when going from from Vista to XP. See here and here for just the tip of the iceberg. Nor does my choice of title seem to be unique.

The Wow stops soon

I've had it with Vista.

The final straw came on Tuesday when I was helping Alison copy some photos over to her iPod. Three times in the space of two slow, slow minutes it did the black-screen thing and asked me to confirm that I wanted to do this. If the security system can't tell the difference between a user copying files and suspect activity from some virus, then it is not bloody worth it's salt.

So on top of the slowness, the trouble with drivers for the HP printer, the fact that it won't run Sibelius properly, and that it won't share files properly with other PCs on our LAN; the stupid security blackouts have finally done it for me.

So I'm "downgrading" from Vista to XP. I challenge that the terminology is incorrect; in my mind I'm actually upgrading from Vista to XP.

I'll let you know how I go.

Lazy web developers

Having once booked a flight or hotel through Expedia, I now receive periodic email mailouts from them with their latest offers. This is a snip from the latest I have received.

Here's the email with the images included:

But my email client does not automatically include the images; they are blocked by default. I have to enable them for each individual mail or by sender, and this is the email as I originally saw it:

Note the ALT text descriptions in the space where the right-hand images should be. "Uhhh"? "No time for Description"??

No time for professionalism is more like it.

Always Being Right

I am right-handed. Exclusively so.

I am slightly envious of people who are left-handed. Most of them seem to be able to work with either hand, and a lot of them seem to be more talented than us regular righties. They are clearly over-represented in sport and the arts. I mean one-half of The Beatles were left-handed, and clearly one-half of the population is not left-handed.

[That's great statistics, isn't it? One sample point used to support my theory. Worthy of being in politics.]

But what annoys me most about being right-handed, is the fact that I am right-eared as well. I have never been able to use my left ear for phone calls. When I am forced to take notes whilst talking on the telephone, I have to do either the juggle-to-the-left-and-back thing, or the squeeze-hard-with-right-shoulder thing. When I am trying to tune my guitar or trombone, I automatically bend or swivel so that my right ear can more easily hear the note I am tuning to. I noticed this last weekend at a gig.

I'm going to be even more annoyed if I start closing my left eye to read things, aren't I?

Stupid Filter

I have started working as a moderator on the Stupid Filter Project. This project aims to produce an open-source software product that is capable of filtering out "stupid" comments.

By "moderating" I rate random snatches of written comments on a stupidity scale of 1 to 5. These comments are sentences - that is the ones that can be described as sentences - that have appeared as commentary on various websites. YouTube for instance, is a common one.

Now, it is possible that I simply don't spend enough time on the web and am therefore not exposed enough to it. Or possibly that I have some sort of internal filter that automatically ignores rubbish. Or maybe it is just that I am too old. Regardless, I have been absolutely floored by the amount of sheer idiocy that exists out there. Granted, it is possible that some of the correspondents do not speak English as their first language. But a significant portion of the comments do not even qualify as English. In a 160-character SMS it is reasonable to use shortcuts and abbreviations to save space, but on the web all it costs is a extra couple of seconds worth of keystroke. Some people are more happy devoting those extra keystrokes adding letters where they were never intended to be.

Maybe I am getting old. Or perhaps that should be:

"U R soooooo OLDDDD!!"

Struth Part 5 : The Prequel to My Favourite Joke

[The fifth in a series of commentaries from my old website.]

Hans, the famous Australian adventurer had decided that the next feat he would attempt was to be a solo crossing of the Simpson desert on camel-back. He did all his research and moved to Alice Springs to complete his preparations. He discovered that it takes six days to travel on camel-back from east to west with your average speed of a camel. The best thing, he thought, was to get a camel that could actually travel a lot faster than your average camel. So he asked around and eventually was told of "Marvellous Matt's Camel Mart," who specialised in unusual camel's.

So he took his mate (and Support Team Leader) Bill down to Marvellous Matt's Camel Mart and asked Matt for the fastest came he had. Matt had one camel that moved twice as fast as the normal camel (and of course, cost twice as much). Matt took Hans and Bill to see the camel. They went down the back of the lot and sure enough, there was this ratty-looking camel munching on some grass.

"Doesn't look much to me," says Hans.

"No, I admit he doesn't," says Matt, "But I can assure you he is the fastest camel in Australia. You've just got to treat him right."

"And what would that involve?" asked Hans.

Matt leans over and picks up a pair of house bricks that just happen to be lying on the ground. He enters the corral and walks towards the camel. "What you have to do, " demonstrates Matt, "is to grab a brick in each hand and smash the camel's testicles between the two bricks. Then the camel will take off like a rocket." Matt quickly moves behind the camel and smashes the bricks together on the poor animal's testicles. The camel rears up and takes off like a rocket, running at blinding speed around the corral. The three men retreat.

Hans is a bit taken aback by this direct method, and asks Matt, "Gee, that looks a bit dangerous. Doesn't it hurt?"

Matt replies, "Only if you get your thumbs caught between the bricks."

Struth Part 4: The Mal Partridge Theory of Joke-Telling

[The fourth in a series of commentaries from my old website. This theory is easily
ten years old now.]

And NOT the Mal Partridge Theory of Telling Jokes.

Mr. Malcolm James Partridge is a little-known Australian philosopher (remember Rule Number One?) and he has formulated a theory of joke-telling which has received some degree of fame. Sadly, this hasn't yet hit the internet.

Since Malcolm is a good friend of mine, I have taken the liberty of debuting his theory and its corollary on the internet. It is high time.

Theory

A joke will get funnier and funnier in the retelling to a male, in an inverse proportion to the amount it gets funnier to a female. For example, a retold joke that doubles in apparent funniness to a bloke, will be exactly half as funny when retold to a woman. This applies if and only if the joke increases in apparent funniness to men. Said joke is referred to as a joke of funniness potential increasing (FPI). FPI need not be linear. There is no corresponding funniness potential decreasing.

Corollary

There is a corollary that states that a retold joke of FPI can be contracted with each retelling, so that the whole joke can be represented by a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, and in extreme cases, by a single word, with the same results as if the whole joke were told.

Translating German

Every day I receive in my in-box a "Word Of The Day" email from a translation services company (http://www.transparent.com/). Sometimes what turns up is amusing or interesting. This one, which falls into the latter category, was there this morning:

German: Ja. Gut, dann kauf' ich alle drei. Ja.
English: Yes. Well, then I'll buy all three. Okay.

I just like the use of the the word "Ja". Two different meanings in the one phrase. Cool.

Struth Part 3: Charities that solicit in the street

[The third in a series of commentaries from my old website. I can't recall when this was written.]

Look. I have given to charities in the past and will do so again. I will NOT give to any charity that tries to solicit me in the street.

[Churlish bastard, wasn't I?]

Has anyone else also noticed how aggressive the charity workers are becoming? I saw in Mount St, North Sydney recently one man pursue two female Japanese tourists. They had to run to get away from the man, and they appeared scared.

I have thought of a way of dealing with them, though, particularly in Mount St. Mall. If I (and possibly about 500 of my friends) write to the store owners in the Mall, saying that I will not shop in their store because of the people soliciting in the street, then maybe the store-owners will approach North Sydney Council and get them moved on.

It probably won't work, though. They'll only just move somewhere else.

Seeing red

Some pushbike riders are undoubtedly a law unto themselves. They use the law when it suits them and ignore it when it doesn't. Being myself of a minority road-using group -- I am a motorcyclist -- I am sensitive to generalisations and prejudices and clearly do not want to be one of those tar-everyone-with-the-same-brush -type persons. But struth! SOME pushbiker riders are absolute idiots!

This morning while waiting in the car at a set of lights, we watched in fascinated horror as a cyclist ran a red light at high speed and very narrowly missed a schoolboy crossing legally at the pedestrian crossing. Both the boy and the cyclist had to swerve violently to avoid what would've been a very nasty collision. We had the green light, and waited patiently, though in some shock, for the boy to cross in front of us, turned and followed the cyclist down the road.

As we caught him up and were approaching the next intersection, Alison, sensing my mood bless her, asked if I would like the window wound down so I could hurl abuse at the cyclist. An amazing piece of mind-reading. Of course I assented. When we reached the intersection, we were turning off, and he was travelling ahead, and once again, instead of waiting at the red light, he started advancing through it. So I yelled out the window, "Another red light, you bloody idiot?!"

He heard.

While I am an avid anti-regulationist, after seeing this incident, I wondered whether some type of mechanism or control needs to be put on cyclists to make them obey the laws of the road when they are using it. Perhaps a road-rules examination?

I guess the answer to this is that regardless of what controls are in place, a bloody idiot will still behave like a bloody idiot.

[I should perhaps point out that the first draft of this post had the words "bloody idiot" throughout, which I've since replaced with "cyclist". Does my self-censorship have any bounds, I wonder?]

Struth Part 2 : North Sydney Post Office

[The second in a series of commentaries from my old website. This was written in the Sep/Oct 2004 timeframe.]

The very first time I went into North Sydney Post
Office to pick up a parcel as a North Sydney resident I waited,
clutching my parcel voucher patiently in line for at least 10 minutes.
When I got to the head of the queue, the woman calmly told me that I
didn't need to wait, there is a separate parcels office.

"How was I to know this? Why isn't there a sign up somewhere saying this?"

"There is. On the wall outside the parcels office."

"Presumably I wouldn't have seen the sign unless I previously knew the parcels office existed, and it's location, though."

<grumble><swearword /></grumble>