The Twilight Report

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:59:00 GMT

5 February 2009 12:11pm: Quarterly update means free lunch after. Always nice food too.
5 February 2009 04:21pm: Allison is whining because we don't have any spare hard drives to give her. It's getting annoying.
5 February 2009 05:01pm: I was just thinking Allison's behaviour would be age appropriate for my little sister... seven years ago when she was six that is.
5 February 2009 10:21pm: It will be good to spend a few days at The Point and not have to commute all the way to/from Wyoming every day.
6 February 2009 08:37am: Standing room only on the train. Nose to stinky arm pit.
6 February 2009 10:18am: I started saying ko again. It's weird.
6 February 2009 03:54pm: Mail server migration went off pretty much without a hitch but the connection to muse dropped out and now I can't update the DNS! *sigh*
6 February 2009 04:12pm: Got to muse. nullslice is now nullray. Your local DNS server may take a while to update.
6 February 2009 10:38pm: of course I spoke too soon because there was stuff I forgot... :/
Yesterday at 06:43pm: I am going to start saying "after now" again. It's like I pick up a camera and I turn into myself three years ago.
Today at 05:56pm: 65 dead in Victoria. How much longer before they stop saying "..since Ash Wednesday" and just say "deadliest fires in Australian history" :(

we never talk anymore

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:24:00 GMT

internet i’m bored of you; we never talk anymore i miss you black and white; and my time in the darkroom i never was very good at being blunt i like how history is always repeating itself, except for the nice parts; the future always seems like a cut down discounted version of something you once remembered i hate missing people no longer with us i’ve forgotten more than you will ever know, but do you remember more than i’ve remembered? i am moving to wyoming; yes really! i hate MySQL, but if everything were postgres, it would be pretty boring arguing about it i tasted lime in my drink tonight; it reminded me of someone special new mexico will never be the same; before or after product launch next monday; should be a grand crash

history

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:11:00 GMT

What makes something “Historic”?

Australia saying sorry to the stolen generations: historic.

Important events happen all the time that miss the label “historic”. I think we don’t always realise how these thing affect our society on the long term.

I hope Kevin Rudd makes good on the promise of a more united Australia. I hope we all make good on the promise of a more united Australia. I don’t think a broken promise is terribly historic.

I was watching CNN for the first time in years yesterday and they vaguely covered the apology by saying Kevin Rudd was trying to improve relations with Aboriginals. It seemed to miss most of the important points, and all of the details. I suppose it is only historic to Australians.

I have to say CNN here is disappointing. We get this strange hybrid “international” euro-centric version of CNN. If I am going to watch CNN I want the blindly American-centric version! That is the whole point of watching American owned media.

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.

tonight on the abc

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:36:00 GMT

It was just getting good when HMB Endeavour ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, and all of Captain Cook’s detailed maps of New Zealand and his samples from Botany Bay were at risk of being lost when...

...it was to be continued, same bat time, same bat channel.

sigh. I hate it when they do that.

Today

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 15:21:00 GMT

23 September 1779

Captain John Paul Jones answers "I have not yet begun to fight!" in response to a request to surrender. He then proceeds to defeat his English advesary soundly.

23 September 1879

The first hearing aid is invented by Richard S. Rhodes.

Coincidence? I think not.

Emperor of these United States

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 13:01:00 GMT

On This Day in 1859 Joshua Norton issued the following statement by dropping these words off at the San Francisco Bulletin:

At the peremtory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the past nine years and ten months of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U.S., and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in the Musical Hall of this city on the 1st day of February next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.

I kid you not. He ate for free in restaurants; he had free access to the bus system and taxed small business men a quarter each (industrialists had to pay three bucks). He abolished the Congress, dissolved the Republic and issued Imperial Bonds to fund his new empire. When he died in 1880 his friends chipped in and gave him an elaborate funeral worthy of a statesman of his class. Now, I ask you: what is it about Dictators which make them so darn popular?