The Twilight Report

гоша

Mon, 09 May 2011 18:31:00 GMT

I feel like my pet cactus гоша is the only one who understands me at work. I was thinking about taking him home because I think that he would be happier with more sunlight than what can be found in the Morlock Cave which is where I work. But then I'd be back to not having anyone understand me.

I told my manager something about showing the Russians around Washington on the weekend and he started saying common Russian 101 phrases, and I blurted out that my pronunciation is much better without thinking. He came around later and I apologize for the comment, but he took it in good spirits. His wife is a Russian speaker from Moldova I gather. We chatted about the difficulty in picking up new non-computer languages.

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:28:00 GMT

14 October 2008 11:13am: Briefly returned to New Haven. The Dinosaur bones are still there. Trying to teach L dinosaur names as she teaches me Russian.
16 October 2008 10:33pm: Has anyone noticed that with the economy in the toilet the SPAM has changed from "get V1AgRa" to "Job Offer!"?
18 October 2008 01:35pm: Din dins with tehresa and lenviol was delicious.
20 October 2008 08:31am: Back in Australia with Rusian goodies. Flight was uneventfull but woke up for sunrise over the Pacific. Pretty moments.

twitter.com/plicease

my avatar is dressed like a whore

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Today really felt like shorts weather. Yay for spring! I was in the parking lot down at Wyoming shops today of all places and I felt better than I have in months just because it was so warm. So awesome to feel so alive! I am excited about the approach of beach weather.

$5 got me a once-again-working tyre and for $60 I replaced the ink cartridge in the printer (well more like $30, but I also got a B&W one), which I think I already had a replacement for in a drawer somewhere. These things would be much easier to find if they were on the floor where I can see them.

Also excited because 30 Rock is back on iTunes. I am pretty sure it is on TV here somewhere, but I am also pretty sure it isn't on Aunty which means commercials which I hate. Why does everything have to be about selling stuff? It seems like they can't even sell me something without trying to sell me something else now a days. Like the other day I noticed someone had an iPhone so I asked how she liked it. She said it was wonderful, except for the phone part (it drops calls apparently). Remember when we used to get phones primarily for... well the phone component? Apple has done this really amazing job of making us focus on things that aren't really important. That would make Steve Jobs a wonderful President don't you think?

Brendan Fraser was awful in that Dragon Emperor movie. He was terrible in the first two but he managed to set a new low. The start of that movie so wanted to be Indy 4, which is weird because it was the least cool movie from the series (though still so much better than any of the Mummy movies).

Wanted was pretty bad too, but it was the Russian version which sort of made it interesting. All of the writing was pretty much in English except for the stuff that was important and you were supposed to read, which was in Russian. The audio was English though, so it must have come from a source that was subtitled, although said subtitles had unfortunately been stripped. Cyrillic on the bottom of the screen is the only thing that would have saved it. Seriously. Why do I watch terrible movies? Still, I can't complain for the price of admission on either count.

Я говорю по-русски

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:56:00 GMT

Привет! Меня зовут Грэм Давидович. Мне три-дцать один. Я австралиец и американец. Я работаю и живу в сиднее. Я програмист. Я говорю C++ и Perl свободно. Тоже я говорю по-английски свободно. Я говорю по-немецки неплохо, и по-русски очень медленно. Вы понимаете по-русски :P Моя мама учёная. Она работает в универсиитете в Сиднее. Мой папа учёный тоже а он работает и живёт в Канберре. моя сестра и мой брат студерты. Они живут в Канберре тоже. Мой брат жонглёр. Мои друзья э и д. У них есть собака. Его зовут джек. Моя девушка Лена. Сегодня вечером я дома. Как я? Хорошо, спасибо! До свидания.

trouble in paradise?

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:07:00 GMT

At work yesterday, I got into this drawn out argument with my boss about an API that I had designed (and implemented). It was a respectful argument and in the end I think we came to a compromise that we were both mildly happy with. It is a funny thing because this one little function call seemed pretty uncontroversial when I wrote it, but it has somehow managed to draw the most criticism (Gordon suggested a change which didn’t get made weeks ago).

I hate arguing with people because whenever I look back on arguments I see how I was either too zealous in arguing my point, or give in too easily. On Friday I was arguing with Kim about macro lenses. Short version is that I made an assertion that, while true if explained correctly, I didn’t feel like arguing the point. That feels like every argument (read: every conversation) that I have with her, as she is totally unable to see my perspective, as a result I sort of intensely dislike her.

Yesterday was also Russian and I was going to bring my computer with me so that I could go to Potts Point after class instead of home (Potts Point is closer). Only when I left work I realised my computer wasn’t in my backpack and I panicked. I remembered closing the lid to my computer so that it would go to sleep, but I couldn’t remember if I had actually put it in my backpack. The only time I hadn’t had my backpack with me was when I left it at work briefly to go to the bathroom and if it had been stolen that would have meant it would have been someone at work. I was relieved when I got home and it was sitting in its place, asleep, but unmoved. I felt weird that I could have thought that someone at work could have taken it, because it is a smal company and everyone knows everyone (not that people don’t steel in those situations, but it is somehow worse when they do?).

I usually make it a rule not to get to close to my co-workers. I was hoping this might be an exception, but days like yesterday remind me that there are reasons that I have those rules. Nothing really terrible happened (in the end), but events leave me vaguely uneasy.

lifts and cycles

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 04:38:00 GMT

I was in a tall building the other day riding the elevator from close to the top all the way to the ground floor. A guy who worked in the building was already in the lift and seemed flustered and was very apologetic because only one of the two lifts was operating. I make it a policy never to be in a hurry so I wasn’t bothered. Then this lady got on somewhere (let’s just say level l0 for good measure). This seemed only to make the man even more flustery. She kept telling us that she needed to get off on level 5, in the same manner that someone reminds ones self something by saying it over and over again because it is something they are likely to forget. I was sort of torn as to whether or not to suggest that pressing the “5” button might help. When we got to the ground level, she was all “oh my gosh I missed my floor.” Again the man was apologising for wasting my precious time. I thought it prudent not to mention that I wasn’t even supposed to be in the building in the first place.

This week at work my boss responded to a client that he would pass their provisioning request on to the “Provisioning Team”. He then poked his head over the cubical wall and said “Graham, you are now officially our Provisioning Team.”

I mentioned to Kim on Friday that I was taking Russian. She asked why, in a manner, dare I say it, that might sound a bit like surprise.

I am trying to get my head around the Vista thing. Fortunately my workplace has been smart and all the windows client machines are still XP. Several of the business apps that we use, like Office and Outlook, are of the Vista generation (by which I mean completely baffling from a user interface point of view). Was there something wrong with the XP generation of software? I think personally the best feature of XP was that it was relatively easy to make it look and act like Windows 2000. I’m reading in an open source rag (so, obviously not a balanced point of view) today about how the demise of Microsoft due to Vista was a forgone conclusion because their model for software development is “wrong”. Is that really true though? I mean I remember MS-DOS 4. That turkey was a real stinker. Everyone just kept using version 3.3 until 5 came out. The stakes in the computer industry are a whole lot higher now of course, but history is not really about progress it is about cycles.

Spinifex

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:47:00 GMT

Yesterday I

Signed up for Russian 1^[1].
Got tickets to go to Canberra next weekend, which is dead this time of year^[2].
Went to a really nice Spanish restaurant for dinner and ate many delicious things. They had pretty good margaritas. I took some pictures with my phone, but I think the memory card in my phone got erased or something. I need to start photographing for real again :/
Saw an interesting play about the Spinifex people. It was deeply personal but not at all bitter.

I’m sorry I left myself logged in to IM for like two days but had been so busy that I didn’t sit in front of my home computer for that whole time. Sorry if you sent me messages I wasn’t ignoring you! Promise! I will endeavour to log myself out next time, and actually be in front of my computer when it says that I am.

Kim at work told me that I could never do or say anything to surprise her. At first this made me angry, but now I don’t really care. It occurred to me that nothing she has done so far has been terribly surprising. meh.

I had an epiphany this morning about how to reorganise the provisioning code. I was glad that I had left work early yesterday rather than agonising over it, because apparently all I needed to was to get a good night’s sleep and a fresh perspective. I realise though, that I love my job, but in some ways it isn’t as challenging as when I was working at The Company, especially that period when I was working on parallel abstraction. It’s hard to compare with accomplishing the impossible.

Today we had lunch at the pub, which was fun, except they forgot our order and then pretended that they hadn’t. There is this girl who is always flirting with Andrew. I can’t remember her name.

I’m looking forward to special visitors in March.

This will actually be my second Russian course, for some reason they start with “beginners” and then go on to 1, 2, etc.
Or, any time of year for that matter

directions

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:05:00 GMT

I gave two sets of foreigners directions yesterday. What the heck are tourists doing in St Leonards anyway^[1]? They both wanted to know where the train station was, which worked out, because for once I actually was able to give directions! Usually people are asking me where so-and-so street is, and I have a terrible memory for street names. Anyway, I was on the Pacific Highway and it was pretty easy to point “that-a-way” but I had trouble communicating “on the other side of the street.” I kept worrying from their looks of incomprehension that they might have thought I was saying turn left. One set was Japanese (guessing based on the script used on their Sydney tourist guide book) and the other was a French couple (guessing based on accent), yet both had trouble with “on the other side of the street” and since I was the one constant in both conversations I take it for me not being clear enough. If either set had been Russian I could have said “на лева”; I actually remember that. Human languages are so hard.

I mean that in a why would they want to be there kind of way, not a they don’t belong there kind of way

таня и юрий и стефан

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:18:00 GMT

Someone asked why Таня pronounced something in a certain way today and she said “I don’t pronounce it that way; it just sounds like I do.” (Russians often spell things one way, but then pronounce them another, to the bemusement of Australians who pronounce them the way they are spelled regardless of what language they came from: witness news anchors saying “junta”).
The young bloke in the front row with a Guns and Roses T-Shirt didn’t know who Юрий Гагарин was.
I was watching the Colbert Report today and I got the munchies for Doritos. I know I am a couple of weeks late.
There was an article in the Sydney mX today about Stephen Colbert’s (Стефан Колбер) run for the White House. mX is brought to you by the same corporate overlords that bring you Faux News. It did mention it was a joke, but it didn’t mention that he was only running in South Carolina.
I wonder if Sydneysiders even know where South Carolina is. Then again, I know Americans have no idea where New South Wales is.
My Internet is for shit tonight speed wise :(

I Cannot Be Hurt by Anything this Wicked World Has Done

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 13:13:00 GMT

What was 2004? It was a year of stolen and disputed elections in Georgia and the Ukraine, the rise and fall of Howard Dean and John Kerry, the first private space flight and the end of the "X-Prize," disaster in Darfur, prisoner abuse in Iraq, expansion of the European Union, the death of Ronald Regan and a month of flags at half mast, the return of Greek Olympics and a very smug presidential victory. In less political but tragic terms, the worst natural disaster in my memory has occurred in Asia as Tsunami death tolls top 135,000 according to CNN.com.

For me, the year started out as a bleak one in the coldest New York winter I have ever experienced. My mother came to visit me for her birthday. We stayed in Manhattan and it was bitterly cold.

Lowel and Johanna

I took a lighting class at Dutchess which was a blast. Some of my friends from Black and White II were taking the class and I met some other cool people. It was so much fun working with those people, including the teacher, Lowel Handler.

(Read more...)

In Short, 2004 was A Great Year and I have high hopes that 2005 will be even better.