train - The Twilight Report

• 17 February 2009 09:53am: Waited for the train just one minute after, skipped the arm pit to nose treatment and scored a seat on the bottom right out of town hall :)
• 17 February 2009 10:16pm: Saw a guy go out of his way to step over a homeless guy instead of walking around him.
• 18 February 2009 10:08am: Bristol want's to be, like, an advocate on the, like, issue of teen pregnancy, but she doesn't, like, want to get into details. like.
• 18 February 2009 07:16pm: Sun comes out and it's hot again all of a sudden. Dear Mr. Weather, we're at war. Pick a side.
• 19 February 2009 10:02am: Laughing at my boss' inability to write hello world in C without help.
• 19 February 2009 01:22pm: Whoohoo we're #1 we're #1 we're #1 http://tinyurl.com/d2dgr5
• 20 February 2009 11:59am: My work is blocking port 70. No Gopher! Aaaieieiiaiaaaa!
• 20 February 2009 01:47pm: slicehost has a debian lenny image now. Think it might be time to migrate iacon to dallas. already?
• 22 February 2009 10:08pm: Shouldn't gopher, and not http be the default protocol for server that starts with "gopher"? I'm only saying.
• 23 February 2009 07:23am: Last night I dreamed the Capitalists were going to turn everyone into credit default swaps.
• 23 February 2009 09:20am: My Australian hosting provider blows.
• 23 February 2009 12:03pm: I'm installing perl4 so that I can compile black perl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl I'm a dork.
• 23 February 2009 02:46pm: Allison apparently thinks that the universe revolves around her. "Where's OB? Oh he's in that meeting."
• 23 February 2009 05:14pm: No mention of Heath in the mX. Must have gone to press too early to call it. The mX and I were the only ones didn't know it was sure thing.
• Today at 05:24pm: It amuses me that practically the entire Australian Navy has to skip town in order to make room for a cruise ship.
• Today at 05:25pm: It's the largest ocean liner in the world, but still.

twitter.com/plicease

• 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

• 27 January 2009 07:40pm: GFC GFC GFC GFC GFC GFCGFCGFCGFCGFCGFCGFCGFC aieeeee! Can't you talk about anything else?
• Yesterday at 09:57am: When my credit with Crucial runs out I'm going to switch my Australian hosting provider. They are that bad. Need an Aussie slicehost.
• Yesterday at 02:58pm: It makes me nervous when the guy at the professional lab asks me if my C-41 film is transparency or negative.
• Yesterday at 07:22pm: Bloody train driver forgot to stop at my stop. Now have to wait half hour to get back. If I knew how far I might walk.
• Yesterday at 07:29pm: The bell birds are singing like bells here as the sun sets. If I weren't so mad at CityRail it would be pleasant.
• Today at 07:05am: Train bothered to stop to pick us up this morning. It used to be a given, but after yesterday not so sure.
• Today at 04:56pm: Good D700: being able to use the aperture ring on MF lenses. Bad D700: not being able to use aperture ring on AF lenses.
• Today at 07:57pm: Happy to report the train driver bothered to stop at my (scheduled) stop today. Will wonders never cease?

twitter.com/plicease

• 28 September 2008 10:31pm: It was hot and sunny today. I had the front and back doors open and a nice breeze through the house.
• Yesterday at 07:19pm: Best reason to be the first one off the train: not having to breath the smoke of those that are. Long pointless day; am glad it's over.
• Today at 02:21pm: Guy walks up to me with a post-it note that says "I'm deaf please give me $5" and puffs cigarette smoke in my face.

twitter.com/plicease

• 23 September 2008 04:02pm: Something for everyone, an opera tonight! First trip to the Sydney Opera House to see them sing and stuff.
• 22 September 2008 02:22pm: I am going to be in New York/New Jersey 4-18 October.
• 22 September 2008 08:29am: City jackhammers are my wake up call at The Point. Is it Monday again already?
• 21 September 2008 10:19pm: On the train ride back from Canberra the kangaroos were scattering in fear as we coasted through landscape. Back in Sydney.

twitter.com/plicease

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^{⋘note 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.

Train stations seemed deserted this morning (even Town Hall!). Everyone must be skipping town for the long weekend. Long live the foreigner.

Special thanks to the lady who kindly lent me a twenty cent piece when I was five cents short at the train ticket vending machine.

Incidentally if that damn US quarter had been a ten cent piece I wouldn’t have been short!

Watched Oyster Farmer (imdb). I love this style of Australian filmmaking (Hollywood seems so tired to me sometimes). Had a similar feel in some respects to Lantana and Jindabyne. Oyster Farmer was set on the Hawskebury River, and featured local background colour including bell birds and trains of the Newcastle line which takes me up to Gosford.

On the commentary tracks of The Chaser, they are always talking about how people in Melbourne love it when they go to film there because they get to see places around where they live on TV. I think they must be right, because one of the things I like about the group is that they are almost always pulling stunts around Sydney in places that I recognize. At least part of the appeal to Australian films, for me, is seeing home through another person’s lens.

I'm sitting in the train at Horsby station waiting for it to take me back to Artartmon as I type this, and this awesome green steam train just rushed by. Yey for cool old things!

I know, I know, I'm a dork.