Thought this was amusing because of the effort put in.

• thisiswhyyourefat.com/post/76945655

• 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" :(

twitter.com/plicease

• Yesterday at 11:14am: Dusty old dinosaur bones are on the agenda for today. Roar!
• Yesterday at 06:52pm: Thinking about burger man for tea after swimming around the pool to cool off.

twitter.com/plicease

Bit out of date, but here are some photos from Australia Day this year.

(more)

They had these crazy old busses giving people free rides around the city.

Inside they still had some old postings around and about. This one shows which area of the city that you can ride around in for only 10¢.

Old advertising amuses me in its direct quaitness. This one reads “100% of the people who travel by bus wear clothes. The bus is therefore a good place to advertise outerwear, underwear, summerwear, winterwear, sportswear, town, country, and everywhere wear.” and in script at the bottom: “P.S. Bet you read this!”

“100% of the people who travel by bus eat. The bus therefore is an exceptionally good place to advertise fruit, vegitables, meat, poultry, dairy produce, chocolates, sweets, chewing tobacco and indigestion tablets.” — emphasis mine.

Sailing ships and the Manly ferry

I wonder why they bother teaching concurrency in computer science. There is this funny problem they teach you, involving n philosophers and n forks and a big pot of spaghetti which, if you solve it wrongly, could cause n philosophers to die of starvation. It's a well understood problem, and there are tones of tools to address it properly, most of which have been around for decades on every platform imaginable.

When I was working on parallel abstraction and timing at The Company, I went to a lot of effort to make sure that it worked concurrently. This put me in conflict with people who were too lazy to make sure their code worked properly in parallel. I even tried to make tools to make it easier for them to make code parallel safe, but no, that was too much effort, even though it mostly amounted to using a different class with the exact same interface.

In my current job at s-mart we use a locking mechanism which has an inherent race condition. Which means if something goes wrong it might corrupt data. Admittedly, the odds of that are quite low, but I don't understand why we don't use proper locking (ie. flock), which isn't conceptually any more complicated than the "simple"^[1] locking scheme that we use. In my last job at Company 2, we had a similar locking scheme, but it was hand coded, they didn't even bother to re-use the "simple" locking scheme provided by perl for systems that don't have flock^[2].

I found this list of the The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time. I can't help but wonder if a bit more time thinking about concurrency could have kept some of these from happening often enough to make the list.

---

1. read as: broken
2. and even Windows perl has adequate flock emulation now, so why is anyone using this again?

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.

---

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

Tonight I went into the city for dinner and we found a nice little Korean restruant. This place was terrific. It felt very much like the sort of place that Koreans frequent. I thought we were the only white people in the place, but as were leaving I did notice there was one other exception. The staff was super nice though, taking care to make sure that our "hot pot" was correctly cooking (I suspect some manual intervention was expected). We were pretty adventurous in our selection, and when everything arrived I wasn't entirely sure what was what, but it paid off: So many exceptional flavours and so many wonderful textures. One of the things that I know I tried was Kimchi, which reminded me of Theresa, because I know that it is something that she likes.

One thing I love about living is Sydney is the wonderful variety of restruants! (I did gripe a little that there aren't any good Mexican resturants, but that can't be helped)

Tonight I went to a provincial Fresh restaurant in Darlinghurst. The food was exquisite, but the wait staff was adorable. So much so that I wanted to take them home with me!

Don is back from America, and he brought Posole!!!

Here is the stupidity of finding an apartment in Australia: it sucks. Typically these things are handled through real estate agents and they have open houses every Saturday. However, they are typically “open” for a grand total of fifteen minutes and most of these open houses are between 11 and 12 am, usually in mutually exclusive overlapping intervals. Also: all of the real estate agents get together and try and figure out how they can arrange their times such that someone looking in any one particular area has to drive from one side to the other the maximum number of times possible.

So I started this morning copying addresses and prices from the newspaper into a Micr$haft Word document, only the ever helpful paper clip (which apparently I haven’t disabled yet on this computer) kept reformatting my text for me. I think it though that I was typing up a complex ordered list instead of a lift of dates. So when I wasn’t carping about how stupid the system was this morning I was yelling at my poor computer.

I found a couple of nice places, but mostly they were not adequate. Needless to say this painful, yet fruitless activity put me in a bad mood. My mum was super nice to drive me around to all of these places (especially given that I was grumpy about the situation). It was the only way I could have possibly seen everything that I did! At least it was an educational experience.

After all that running around I had a meat pie sans tomato sauce for lunch followed by a wonderful custard tart. This is one thing that I love about Australia: the food. :)

e and d came out for a few days. I'm sad because now that they are gone again I realize it will be a long time before I see them again. Tell me again why I can't just bring my friends to Australia with me? e said she would try to come out within a couple of years. It's going to be hard getting used to not being able to meet up with her and Jack after herding practice to go for a hike in New Jersey.

On the bright side, It was great to see them, and I was pleased that e finally got to meet my mum. The first day they were here we went skiing at Brighton. d said that he actually liked skiing so he may be back for more at some point.

That night we had Posole (prepared by myself) and invited Clare and Val over as well so we had an interesting discussion about whether or not Biology could ever be a predictive science or not. We also discussed the stupidity of large organizations, such as IBM and LANL, and how open systems are safer to closed ones.

Everyone had seconds, and some even had thirds. Right before I left New York, e told me that she likes Mexican food... all these years I thought she was just being polite and eating the food that I make for Enchilada Night. Seriously.

The second day we took a drive to Park City to see two photography galleries. We drive through the mountains and took a number of pictures and had lunch at somebodyorother's Grill. That night e and d took us to the Red Iguana, where we had more good Mexican food.