The Twilight Report

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:38:00 GMT

16 November 2008 04:05pm: Interesting. With the exchange rate such as it is the D700 is actually cheaper here (without researching or shopping around) than B&H.
16 November 2008 08:56pm: Fixed a number of bugs this weekend. It's been a while since I felt this productive, and I've not even been working that hard.
18 November 2008 08:27pm: The only way to make my new computer run slow is to encode two movies at a time into a format that iPod can grok. Why is Apple so fussy?
Yesterday at 08:22pm: Nice cool evening at The Point. Pick Lena up from the airport tomorrow.

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.

MS Notepad (not updated since windows 2k) has better unicode support than emacs v21.

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:28:00 GMT

Today when I left the house I noticed it was raining. Then when I was in the train trying to dry off, I noticed it wasn’t raining. Then when I got to St. Leonards and was walking the last leg to work I noticed that it was raining again. I was feeling a bit like Truman when the rain cloud was following him.

I have sort of decided that I want to get an iPhone which makes me feel like a sell out because I think they are stupid. On the other hand I view it as a free iPod touch which would let me watch videos on the train, which currently I can’t do because although over powered, my notebook fails at video when it isn’t plugged into a wall why is that? I’ve noticed that since I started commuting from the Central Coast a lot of my thinking revolves around getting a train which will likely allow me to sit down, and what I am going to do when I get that seat.

Last Friday I went to see Assassins. We were prompted to go see it on account of everyone in my family is a fan of Sarah Vowell and she had a highly amusing anecdote about the musical in the introduction to her highly amusing and well researched Assassination Vacation. I sort of had a celebrity crush on her sometime back. The lighting was really badly done, and the sound was a little buzzy at parts, but several of the actors were actually pretty good. Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth were good, but my favourite was the innately jovial Guiteau.

There is something about flawed somewhat incompetent villains that I find endearing. My favourite cartoon character has always been Starscream, the constantly scheming traitorous lieutenant to Megatron. In watching the new BBC Robin Hood series I immediately took a liking to the Sheriff because of the joy in which he employs his sarcastic wit and sadistic pleasures. Lately, however I am liking Gisborne more and more. His melancholy manner and the way he feels so uncomfortable in almost any situation (but especially when he is trying to Marion) is wonderful to watch. It is somewhat troubling that Guiteau is not a cartoon or legendary villain. He’s a murderer.

I started reading the highly entertaining Linux Hater's Blog. It was indirectly linked to from a /. story, and even though I love Linux as a development platform and for developing web sites, it sucks shit on the desktop, and this guy understands exactly why and explains in a concise but nuanced way, along with a whole lot of entertaining^[1] vitriol. The thing is Linux is never going to be a serious player on the Desktop, so it is all fairly academic. I can’t really stand any of the modern user interfaces for an extended period of time. My Mac seems like a relief after a long day using Winblows at work, and sometimes GNOME and KDE are even offer a welcome respite from either or both. So I am picky, that is probably my fault. What is distressing is that user interfaces are getting progressively worse. I spent a day or so using Vista in order to make sure an application at work I was finishing off worked there, and it was a really horrible experience. If I didn’t know better I’d say that they Microsoft was trying to convince me that XP wasn’t so bad after all.

if you are entertained by geeky computer stuff

musics

Sat, 24 May 2008 22:11:00 GMT

Anyone have any ideas what I should queue up in iTunes next? I listen to everything except for country and rap.

Haha just kidding, everyone says that.

dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:41:00 GMT

Re-watched Fight Club. I honestly don’t understand what I saw in that movie. It’s clever, and somewhat anarchic, but like Che it has more traction as a T-shirt than it does for its ideas. Ironically appropriate given the proclivities of Tyler Durden. The film reminds me of just about every frat boy I met at uni.

Re-watching Ghostbusters. The effects are cheesy, but ahh... makes me all nostalgic for New York. Good times. This remains one of my favourite films.

New TV is a good excuse to revisit my DVD library.

Also watched my second demo (e) for the first time on my new TV, and also for the first time with my new amp. Looks and sounds really good :) I decided to skip watching my first demo Final Intensity on account of it being tainted by Kari’s contribution to the project.

Playing through Super Mario Galaxy. I am less than 15 stars short of the final showdown, assuming there isn’t an encore, which there probably is. Running both the Wii and the Mac Mini through the TV has got me to thinking that if the Wiimote worked as a pointing device for the Mac Mini it would be really cool. I still think about interface design issues, even though I am destined to work on server side stuff it seems. It’s a pity that nothing works with anything else. Yay for capitalism and free markets.

phonei

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:39:00 GMT

You should never buy new technology the day it comes out. This should be pretty self-evident. The Sony fan boys who camped out to buy themselves a PS3 now have an expensive (AU$1k minus the even more expensive HD TV that you will need to see any difference from a Wii or PS2) box allegedly without any good games. Nice one!

I was talking to someone last night who said she would rather play my yet to be implemented retro Orange Attack^[1], than all the complications and the internets and everything rolled up into a little ball.

Ahh the iPhone. Already predicted to be the next iPod right^[2]? Well, maybe you should ask some users:

Of course many of these issues will be corrected in time, but why brutalize yourself with Apple technical support unnecessarily^[3]? Let the fan boys do the beta testing which apparently Apple failed to do.

If you think about it you can probably guess what the game is like
iPhone: all set to do for phones what the iPod did for pods (I know I stole that somewhere, but can’t remember where: was it Colbert)
I am on my third iPod and had to send it back three times. If you do the math you will notice that I sent it back broken once and they didn’t even fix it! All this, mind you, with a device that had been out for years by the time I got it. Can you imagine my pain if I had gotten it the day it came out?

snowing sir spawn

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 02:54:00 GMT

Back in high school my friend wingated and I used to totally snow Sean “Little Man” O’Dork (also known as Sir Spawn the Mediocre) with our computer jargon, which mostly consisted of real terms, but was strung together to be meaningless. On the Thursday edition of the Report, Colbert had an amusing rant on the new Apple iPhone, which reminded me of those days:

Computers aren’t supposed to be easier or cute. They’re supposed to be intimidating punch card reading hulks of metal that take up an entire refrigerated room and force you to manually implement recursive procedures and abstract data types in FORTRAN 77.

—Stephen Colbert 1/11/07

I’m clearly a computer dork though, because while I enjoyed the “uphills both ways in the snow” nature of this rant, my first thought was but you can’t do recursion in FORTRAN 77.

Japanese Food and iPods

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:54:00 GMT

Went to a “Japanese” restaurant with some co-workers. If I were in the states and with my friends or family I would probably call it a “Sushi” place, but that didn’t seem to be the term used here^[1]. This place had a conveyor belt and you just picked up the stuff that you wanted as it went by. This concept has always seemed cool in theory, but also a little bit sketchy in terms of health, but the fish turned out to be quite fresh, and I would probably go back again.

The good news is that my co-workers are actually pretty cool. I keep telling people that there are no Jeffs where I work now (my adventures with jeff were chronicled here, here and here.

Jeff

There are many things that I miss about working at The Company, but Jeff is not one of them. I do miss my collaborations with Adil, Tiffany, Ed and Ed a lot.

I was excited yesterday because my iPod finally came back to me. I wasn’t sure they would actually do it, but they replaced it, so this is actually my third iPod (I checked and it has a different serial number), my second replacement by the same warranty, so that extended warranty was actually worth it for once. Would I get another iPod? I’m not sure, I mean I love having the thing and it is super simple to use, but as far as reliability it doesn’t score well. My friend e and her husband both have iPods and both are giving them trouble at the moment (one sounds like it has died, the other is having the same sort of problems that mine did before it finally died). Theresa’s died recently too. In my own experience their ability to fix things appear to operating at only about 66%, and you only get a good result if you call up and yell at them. I was actually super courteous both times because Theresa used to work in a call centre and people who work in places like that don’t deserve to have abuse hurled in their general direction, you do (however) have to be insistent when block your path with red tape. On the other hand when I actually have a working iPod it is hard to imagine life without it! I think I would actually get another iPod, but I’d get the AppleCare Extortion Plan up front this time, because although there was more hassles than there should have been, they did fix things in the end. That does count for a lot.

I think traditionally Sushi refers to the rice or something, but Americans at least usually use it to refer to the whole thing

“Protection”

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:17:00 GMT

I think that they should rename it AppleCare Extortion Plan, because seriously, I don’t think it is a coincidence that the word “Protection” is a common euphemism for Extortion.

Visitors!

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:38:00 GMT

Here is an old photo that reminds of the days when I would get up early to capture the morning light. Brrr. I think it was cold that morning!

Today, in contrast was quite nice! Weather wise I mean.

Today was the farewell lunch for Rory (not sure about the spelling), which I was sort of not looking forward to on account of having to be social and stuff, but it actually went pretty well. After ordering my lunch at the bar I got to the tables reserved for us, and all of the seats were taken at tables that had people so I had to colonize a new table. Sitting alone in a group like that is pretty disturbing, especially if you are mildly ~~socially phobic~~ antisocial. Some office folk with mildly recognizable faces came over to my table shortly after and introduce themselves. I think I talk too much in those situations. I can't think of anything to say so all sorts of irrelevant stuff starts to regurgitate without my thinking about it. I had this theory that it would be easier to deal with my shyness in a place other than New York, and I think I was right, or maybe I'm just getting older and more able to deal with this stuff.

Ah, but the really good news is that Cicely, Joe and (allegedly) Brian^[1] are coming out to visit for New Years Eve! NYE is, quite simply, the best time of year to be in Sydney, and Sydney is, quite simply, the best place to be for NYE. I was just thinking this morning that I really love Sydney and I am fairly certain that Sydney is the greatest city on earth (no offense to my friends in New York, which I also adore), but of course I miss my friends! I am super excited about having some friends out and being able to show them around and hang out with my friends.

Yesterday my new 23" Apple HD monitor arrived and I am using it right now. It looks really good. It's a new toy that is yet another reason for me to despise the inferiority of my work equipment. My friend e was ~~telling~~ reminding me that most places are like "that" ... and she's right to an extent (but at least she can IM from work!), but I think I will continue to complain about work anyway. It beats complaining about my personal life!

Not much else to report.

I say allegedly, because he said we was "for sure" going to come to Salt Lake for at least one of those ski trips that I organized, but he waited till the plane ticket prices were astronomical

more cpus

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 22:12:00 GMT

I was mad when Apple dumped IBM for Intel. but now I want one of these.

The Essentials

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:14:00 GMT

Australia is treating me well for the most part. I have a job at the Uni putting computers together, and I have discovered a region of Sydney that reminds me a little bit of Beacon (in terms of renewal, and location relative to transport). I still have to find a specific place to live, however.

My grandma went into hospital yesterday to have her hip replaced. Mum and I went up to Gosford to see her when she came out of surgery. She looked pretty well. Hopefully it will help her walk better. I wrote a note on the flowers that we gave her that mum composed:

Get hopping so we can go shopping!!!

My iPod is getting senile. A few weeks ago it lost its database and couldn't find any music, despite the fact that all the mp3s were stored on the drive and could easily be found using tcsh. I had to reboot it twice in the last hour. It's only a year old, it should really be more reliable. Last year I had to send it back to apple twice before they would fix something completely unrelated.

Newest member of the family

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 18:57:00 GMT

Meet Chaco the newest member of the family. It's the new Mac mini with an Intel Core Duo processor. I like the remote, it's a nice touch. There are only six buttons on it, as per typical Apple design principles, but to skip through songs in iTunes or to play a DVD you really don't need any more than that. I don't like the fact that most vendors aren't shipping native Intel or Mac OS X Universal binaries yet. The emulation for PowerPC is quite good, I've had not problem at all running older PowerPC binaries, but it is super slow. The Mozilla Foundation isn't shipping universal binaries of Firefox or Thunderbird yet, (wtf?) and I don't like Camino, so I spent a few hours last night compiling Firefox as an native Intel binary. I can forget about running Photoshop on it though. Until they start selling more powerful macs with Intel and Adobe releases a native Intel version I will be utilizing my G5 a great deal.

2005

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 20:23:00 GMT

2005 was supposed to be the year that Decepticon's attack Autobot City on earth (as chronicled in The Movie. I took this as a sign that it was time to quit my job at The Company and go back to school and study computer graphics and distributed computing and maybe one day get a job at Pixar. I still think even being a "lowly" system administrator at Pixar would be a fun job. Being a software developer for the rendering farm would be awesome.

Appropriately enough, last Thursday, the last Thursday of the year, I went to the MoMA with e and they had a special exhibit on the art of Pixar. Most of what they showed was models and sketches that were made before anything gets done on the computer. Seeing the artists' names and countries of origin clearly labeled by each piece, one is reminded that computer animation is not just a form of entertainment, but also an art form. It's fascinating to me, because I have always been passionately interested in the interaction of expression and technology.

Highlight had to be seeing the early sketches of the Edna "E" Mode character from The Incredibles, who has been my favorite Pixar character since I saw the movie because of her energy and humor. I had one of her quotations engraved on the back of my iPod to remind me that "I never look back; it distracts from the now." In the gallery e told me she was her favorite character, to which I responded, "really? Me too."

Anyway, 2005 is coming to and end, and Unicron never attacked Cybertron and as a result, the Decepticons were not driven off as was for told in The Movie, and I'm not going back to school, just yet, but I am on my way back to Australia. (many more words and things...)

Cold December Day, Bright Blue Skies

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 17:08:00 GMT

Well, my little trip down to New Jersey on Sunday was great. I visited my friend, and fellow camera geek e. I showed her all the most important things about PhotoShop that I learned from the Color Digital class that I took this summer. We went pretty fast, but I think she picked up enough for it to be useful for her. At the very end, I watched her work on this photograph:

Photograph By e

She took it while she had been in Israel this year, and I think it's a very good photograph and it gives me a warm fuzzy because she did the color and contrast adjustments using the techniques that I had showed her.

I was going to make a print of this so that I could put it up somewhere, but I asked for her permission first, since I would want anyone to check with me before reproducing one of my photographs or putting them up on the web or anything like that, but she said I could do anything I wanted with it so here it is.

Ever have a whole bunch of things that you need to get done, but you get psychologically road blocked by one of them? The completion of the one does not really bar you from completing the others, but for some reason you can't wrap your mind around the others until you get it taken care of? Well, that is sort of how I felt this morning. No longer!

At lunch today I used the $8 coupon at the cafeteria that The Management gave everyone in our department as a "thanks." I got the most expensive item I could find to make sure that the total was at least $8. Total cost to me: $0.55. Feeling that I have milked The Company for as much as I possibly could: Priceless.

On the way out I snarked a slice of apple pie. They were giving them away to celebrate our strategic alliance with Apple Computers. A friend of mine worked on the resisters in the new G5 computers! This is among the many reasons that I would love to have a G5. Given my current economic realities, that is going to have to wait.