The Twilight Report - 1984

SMB Tuba

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:52:00 GMT

Friday 17 March 2006 9:52PM

I was down at Circular Quay yesterday with Torbin and Judy (friends of my mother's) and I heard someone playing the Super Mario Bros. theme on a tuba. It reminded me of my friend Tyler who is a sound designer for EA. On our sojourn through the botanical gardens, we ran into a guy who works for Condi Rice, who was apparently down here at the time.

There were helicopters buzzing about like mad all day. Torbin and Judy opined that they were there to offer protection to the sec-state. After her time in Sydney, she went down to Melbourne to watch the commonwealth games. I watched a little of the games on the TV. England and Scotland compete separately for these games, and Australia dominates the swimming and the bicycling.

I took a number of pictures of the opera house when I wasn't being rudely shooed away by foreign tourists with their own, apparently more important, cameras:

(...many pictures behind this cut)

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tags: 1984, 70s, antelope island, architecture, australia, bison, botanical gardens, buffalo, camera, centrepoint, chain, circular quay, city, clouds, colour, commonwealth games, condoleezza rice, decay, dusk, ea, england, family, grass, harbour, harbour bridge, haze, helicopters, judy, lawn mower, map, mario, melbourne, men at work, mum, music, opera, opera house, paul hogan, photo, pink, purple, rae, red, reflection, rust, scotland, sky, slc, sunset, sydney, torbin, tuba, tv, tyler, ukraine, ussr, utah, washing machine

doublethink

Fri, 7 Jan 2005 12:55:00 GMT

Friday 7 January 2005 12:55AM

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any facts which become inconvenient.

George Orwell 1984

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction and division of society.

John Adams

Doublethink is also the name I chose for my web server at work. It is named for the application it runs, which collates information collected by BigBrother (a component of our tool software which tracks usage) and presents it in a readable way. At some point I inherited a Twiki which is also hosted on doublethink (the machine).

Last year when complaints about the web servers performance were made, I said that the machine needed to be put on a faster network. There is no technical reason why this cannot be done. When I'm at home and I need a new fast Ethernet port, I go to Best Buy and purchase one... here is one for $39.99. The reason this cannot be done at work is that there is security on the port at work so that the IT department can charge us per computer instead by bandwidth. Charging by bandwidth would make sense, since that is the service they are providing, not use of the computer. That is neither hear nor there.

So, as mentioned earlier, there was an "experiemnt" on Wednesday to see if the web server would run faster, as I said it would, on the faster network. The LAN team's position is that the performance problems have nothing to do with bandwidth, but the speed of the machine. Put succinctly, this is rubbish. I knew this, but I ran the test anyway, and sure enough twiki and doublethink (the application) ran much faster on the faster network than it had on the slower network.

I felt vindicated by this result and assumed that we could now push to get port security turned off in my office. I know this has happened for other high priority projects, and now that the managers are using twiki, this has become a high priority.

The guy who is spearheading this little adventure just came by my office to tell me that they are getting me a new computer to replace doublethink (the server). Normally this would fill me with rage because they are obviously not listening to me, but because of recent events I view the entire affair with a rather comforting sense of detachment. Why should I complain, after all, if they give me a new computer? Even if I didn't ask for it.

Still the original doublethink - still humming underneath my desk for now - and I have been through a lot and it will be sad to see her go.

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tags: 1984, doublethink, george orwell, john adams, network, quote, the computer, twiki

Beware Pretty Farm Girls in Flying Houses

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 22:54:00 GMT

Sunday 28 November 2004 10:54PM

Robert Frank

I went into New York City today. Started out with the new Museum of Modern Art, now back in Manhattan after a short retreat in Queens. Excitedly went to the Photography gallery where they had all kinds of cool stuff, including many prints from Robert Frank's The Americans, and one of William Eggleston's prints from Guide. Overall, the museum was excellent. I will have to return when I have more time to visit it with greater scrutiny.

William Eggleston

We met mum's distant "relative" as defined by the fact that his mother has the same last name as my mother, had a very expensive lunch (thank goodness, The Company got us into the museum for free) and saw some of the paintings. They had a lot of Impressionists.

Idina Menzel

Then we went to see Wicked starring Idina Menzel and Jennifer Laura Thompson. This musical is The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, making her the heroine. Glinda's portal as a dumb blond is cliché, but forgivable, since the whole thing takes the story you know and turns it on its head. My mum left the theater saying it was very 1984, because she had recently read the book, though I corrected her by saying the term usually used is Orwellian.

The original story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Balm was overtly political. The movie adaptation The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland (of course) is not. It was kind of neat to see the producers of the musical inject some of the original themes of the story, although with very modern overtones.

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