Notablog

Death Becomes It

2008-12-21T17:38:00.000-08:00

Is now archived. Not sure why I didn't just bury it. I suppose that was the point.

Autumn 2007

2008-12-21T17:36:00.000-08:00

Autumn

March 10, 2007

Farther along we'll know all about it
Farther along we'll understand why
Latest important news: D'arth Remar NE Druid dinged 57, just 180k exp before hitting the outland. WTF? Yeah, sad but true - am a certified WoW addict. But I can take it or leave it, it's not that critical that I play for a minimum of four hours every day - three hours is Ok at a push. Will attempt to not mention it again, or not very often.

C/2006 P1 (McNaught) did not pass by without notice. It was heralded widely late last year but none of the predictions did it just justice. In the breaks between clouds over successive nights I just gazed transfixed until it sank behind the trees. There won't be too many of those in our lifetime.

Fresh Fumes

March 16, 2007

Am not sure if it qualifies as an irony but the decision by MotoGP to reduce engine capacity from 1000 to 800cc for the premier class has not had the desired saftey effect. The bikes are revving higher, generating the same power, are significantly harder to ride, hold a higher corner speed due to less weight, and most tellingly are no slower - close to 350kmph. A whole bunch of guys got spat off. The 07 model Ducati found the top step of the podium underneath Casey Stoner in an awesome display of horsepower that was worth 150m down the main stright at Qatar. Rossi was the only one capable of staying close on his Fiat sponsered Yamaha. Interesting to note that an aussie won both the last 1000cc MotoGP (Troy Bayliss) and the first 800cc GP - here's hoping Vermeulen can get up on the steps this year. BTW, the new Ilmor team has come and gone due to lack of a sponser.

Am looking forward to the F1 race on Sunday. Button has been very downcast about the Honda's hopes but that company has a lot of pride and a lot of money - the other (last year's engine) Honda Brit Anthony Davidson also has a chance to show his form over a full season with Super Aguri. It will some time before we get over the feeling that Schumacher ought to be there somewhere. On the subject of 2nd drivers, we're hoping Lewis Hamilton does well in the Kiwi decal car.

Surplanted

March 17, 2007

Ahhh, to XBox or not to Xbox 360. That was not the question. A pre-xmas power spike took out PC #3 of 5, motherboard, power supply and videocard, so the only solution was to build a cheap cheerful P4 3.8 with 1Gb ram and 512Mb VC - popped a 19"LCD on it, and there goes the xbox360 budget. NSW radiographers only earn a pittance. The other, perhaps more embarrasing reason for not 360ing is WoW. Who's got time for anything else? I reckon I've bought the kids (and myself) about one PC game a month on average for the last decade. The last five months? - we only go into EB Games to see what the latest WoW accessories are... I think we just forgot. BTW - just dinged 60. Lachy dinged 53 and Taffy 46.

I think Jeremy would miss making Top Gear too much - where else could he be such a larikan and be admired for it. I thought the stretch limo thing was a bit over the top - I told the kids Jeremy's giant panda would win somehow, he always does. The last comment from series 9 was, see you in the summer. Here's hoping it's a few summers yet. From Jalopnik: "you know it's coming back, right after Clarkson gets a fresh zero attached to his paycheck."

Mastering Feck

March 20, 2007

Messy GP that. Number 6 - I too was disappointed by and for Mr Button. My greatest hope (not likely) is for Alonso to be beaten by Hamilton, and I usually have nothing against the spanish. I like olives. So - Jeremy can get the BBC2 admin hopping when he wants to - that was quick. I was chatting to some of the young guys at work today about PS3 - it's horrifying how much they can cost when you spec them up. I'm definitely staying in PC land for awhile yet.

Thirty hours of WoW over a three day weekend - dinged 61. The outlands are my home, or would be if I hadn't just started a WoW-free fortnite. It occured to me in week six of semester that I hadn't opened my books yet and this semester of my masters cost $3k including books. So I've put my foot down, and to celebrate I will now download the Top Gear Of The Pops Comic Relief Special.

National Bollocks Day

March 22, 2007

Got a good look at Saturn last night through my pathetic scope. It's pretending to be part of Leo - turning the big lion into some sort of naval war cup. The more I stargaze in light-polluted suburbia, the more I want to move onto a farm. Fat chance. My view of saturn was not like this.

Why was I the only one to scream BOLLOCKS all day?
The urban myth: the boss passes on the serious concerns of the area OH+S coordinator re: alcohol hand gel. Apparently a nurse in Sydney was rubbing her gelled hands together whilst walking past an oxygen tap and she exploded. Should happen more often.
The astrologer: six birthdays within two weeks amongst the staff spawned a day specific personality starchart that was SO incredibly specific. Wow - I obviously have (6.45 billion / 365.25) = 17.6 million twins out there.
The therapeautic taps: urgent chest drain insertion but no request, consent or previous imaging available. Patient hits department 45 mins late, CXR confirms U/S finding of no pleural fluid at all. Two patients later, Urgent ascitic drain pre chemo, apparently distended, huge discomfort, h/o 5L drained 2/12 before. After another 45 minutes the on arrival U/S assessment of ascitic volume - about 100ml. No drain there either.
It's good to be home.

Future Gazing

March 23, 2007

The lovely John has taken my on-call weekend - yahoodillydoodilly - that leaves me free to play W... damn. It gives me the chance to spend my weekend doing two assignments - ya hoo. Am doing a radiography masters rather than an U/S one because I intend to get the hell out of that field by the new year. It's more interesting than plain radiography but I'm sick of living with shoulder and neck pain. After a week of 16 to 18 per day (hospital standard, not ambulant private practice standard) I can't even pick up one of my four year olds. So, rather than continuing to be shafted by an administration that doesn't give a toss, I won't be reregistering with ASAR in the new year.

It's official: if I pass all my subjects this year I can buy a 5inch Maksutov-Cassegrain for Xmas. What would we do without a reward system? Went down town and did a pre-poll vote - ran the gauntlet of the sad party leaflet pushers, found the votee dudes using whole-of-state PDAs instead of leafing through electoral roles. My beautiful better half noticed that there were a total 6 people in the state with her exact name, and that three of them lived in Lismore. That's nearly as spooky as the "Vote For Women" strange person who was giving out how-to-vote leaflets that just said "it doesn't matter who you vote for, just vote for a woman..." Wonder if Pauline Hanson or Alessandra Mussolini would have done?

Tonight's Crater

March 24, 2007

Boy, do I have an exciting evening lined up. First I'm gonna find all the antaomy, physiology, pathology, orthopaedics, and radiography textbooks scattered amongst the 19 large bookcases that fill this house. Then, with utter joy I'm gonna describe, critique, analyse and sketch overlay a couple of enthralling radiographical cases. After about ten minutes of that I'm going out to lie on the trampoline and look for Messier objects between Gemini and Capricorn with binoculars, then see if I can coax any image at all of Saturn from the 4mm eyepiece on the horrid 4" newtonian with pathetic mount. Then I'll come back inside, do another ten minutes on the assignment, and then go to bed early whilst trying not to think of the kids playing WoW to all hours without me. I think I'll write a poem instead.

"Go gather some earth for a garden" he said
(it was quarter past two and we should be in bed)
So flying by gryphon to Un'Goro Crater
to Marshal's Refuge about ten minutes later
then braving the tar beasts we scouted for dirt
and grabbed us some crystals while staying alert
Ignoring the blood petals and thumping the oozes
gorillas and pterrordax all of them losers
We were getting quite cocky, our earth numbered twenty
we didn't then notice the earth shake aplenty
as Ironhide Devilsaur jumped on our head
with two or three hits we were lying quite dead
"Bother that Devilsaur - he's ruined our fun"
We're going to get him (once we've dinged sixty-one).

The Prodigal Preacher

March 30, 2007

Refusing a king is treason: Solomon was the son of a rapist and a voyeuristic mother ablutioning on a daylight rooftop. He was a man of excess: excessive wine, wealth, wisdom and women. So in the end he determined all to be foolishness, all vanity. He wrote a couple of books about it and we believe him because he was excessive? I looked for happiness in wine and after fifteen jugs a day for a year I wasn't happy. I looked for happiness in diverse women and found that a thousand under the roof was not happiness. I had more cattle, more gold, more chariots and more wisdom than any king before me but I had not happiness. The man wasn't altogether rational, and we must learn from his mistakes. After a lifetime of wise debauchery I will be welcomed unconditionally home to the family ranch to feast on the fatted calf slaughtered by my pious but grumpy older brother. All is vanity.

El Bravo turned 42 and now there's no heaven - it's my turn next week and there will be no WoW, so at least hell hasn't left the menu. At least until I've done some more study. Early morning study for this uni course has shown me things that I'd quite forgotten - the beauty of a sunrise over a fog filled valley, the quiet of the early morning birdsong broken only by the rumble of trucks, the cursing of the builder's labourers down the street and the incessant yapping of neighbourhood mongrels. All is vanity.

Dishy

April 3, 2007

Jennie picked up a copy of The Dish, a flick about the Parkes radio telescope's role in data reception from the Apollo 11 mission. Extra cool. What they did with a roomfull of mainframes half the processing power of a Casio fx100 was amazing. The movie catches the feel of country astro boys put under the nasa spotlight stitched together with a bunch of original audio/video. Very clever and a much better movie than I expected. Sometimes you just have to take a risk.

I never expected this semester be so interesting - maybe I'm really getting old. I've even ditched WoW for awhile except for my 42/0/11 NE Druid dinging 62. I'm now only 1.3kk exp ahead of LachtheGreat and his dog Brutes, but he has another 6 weeks to catch me yet. Taff is close to dinging 50 with Kayle and 33 with Susun - now THAT'S an effort...The outland is still my home. Disappointment is not as bad as regret.

Fifteen Thousand Three Hundred Forty One

April 6, 2007

Re: an argument I had with my boss as to the timing of the pagan chocolate bunny feast. Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the ecclesiastical vernal equinox, i.e. March 21. Ecclesiastical, in this context, means unexact, or taken from an archaic chart determined by examining the entrials of a passing but otherwise uninvolved goat. So in other words: the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox. Easter has not fallen on it's earliest posible date of March 22 since 1818 and won't do so again until 2285. 1818 is also famous for being the last year in which a planet/planet occulation occurred, that of Venus and Jupiter. 2285 is famous for being the postcode of my first flat in Newcastle.

Managed to get to 125 laps to go on the Top Gear stupidly hard quiz. Must budget more time to it and attempt to get into the 100 club. I suppose No.6 is down in the 50's somewhere... This being my designated weekend off study, I am attempting to ding 64 AND get a fast mount. Maybe, maybe not. We've all gotta have aims in life. Just a couple of months to go until the Dragonforce concert in Brisbane - it will be so cool. Memo: bring industrial earplugs. All is vanity.

Pig Gas

April 10, 2007

A weekend without LPG to fire up one's stove is like... well, like last weekend really. Ten people in the house makes for fairly busy cooking/mealtimes, so when a well meaning guest cleans the stovetop and bumps the primary gasburner to full-on without noticing, then everyone vacates the house for a few hours whilst I caught up on the night before's sleep... I nearly slept forever - but at least the house didn't blow up. Anyway, it was enough to empty the bottle which ought to be replaced tomorrow. Too many clouds over the weekend, not enough stars. Just a smattering of callbacks to work, so can't complain about that.

Bacon. Apparently alot of time and effort has been put into determining the optimal construction of a dead pig sandwich.
BRITISH scientists say they have found the formula for a perfect bacon butty, after 1000 hours and 700 variations of the beloved sandwich.
The experts from Leeds University's Department of Food Science say the secret is in the crispiness of the bacon rashers, the BBC online reported.
Four researchers tried different types and cuts of bacon, cooking techniques, types of oil and a range of cooking times at different temperatures.
A shortlist was then tested with computers to measure the texture of the butties and 50 volunteers also judged each sarnie.
The scientists found that two or three back bacon rashers should be cooked under a preheated oven grill for seven minutes at about 240C.
The bacon should then be placed between two slices of farmhouse bread, 1cm to 2cm thick.
"We often think it's the taste and smell of bacon that consumers find most attractive but our research proves that texture and the crunching sound is just as, if not more, important, said lead researcher Graham Clayton.
The formula is: N = C + (fb (cm) . fb (tc))+ fb (Ts) + fc . ta, where N=force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon, fb=function of the bacon type, fc=function of the condiment/filling effect, Ts=serving temperature, tc=cooking time, ta=time or duration of application of condiment/filling, cm=cooking method, C=Newtons required to break uncooked bacon.

Fumes again

April 16, 2007

Well done Mr Hamilton. Three races, three podiums in a row, cool and fruity. F1 is all about nearly passing, pointless rule changes (e.g. must use different types of rubber during race, wtf is that for?), and slick pitwork. Somehow it still makes great viewing but I can't figure out why. Nine finger Troy got an SBK podium in the first at Valencia on a rather tricky wet/dry weekend with James egodude Toseland slipping a little too far into the championship lead.
Look for the consistancy, race 1 - race 2:
Toseland: 5th - 1st
Biagi: 8th - 2nd
Haga: 2nd - 3rd
Corser: 4th - 9th
Bayliss: 3rd - 6th
Lanzi: 6th - 5th
Xaus: 1st - 4th
Go Nori-chan and Rueben. Sort of.

Dinged 65 and 20 but no fast mount yet, Lach dinged 62 and 21 and has purple weapons, and Taff is on 50 and 35. Roozle (41 and 33) is hearthstoning into contention after exam week in June, and the race is on to match level our highest alts to his 33. Needless to say, Taff doesn't much to do... I'm about to start another Wowless assignmenting / studying fortnight and Taff has become marooned on Pratchett's Discworld so Lach will rule Azeroth in our stead. Bella and Genna won second prize in a local shopping centre colouring-in competition, and came home with a pile of books, pencils and DVDs. I can see why they gave the DVDs away. It's official: Pippin still doesn't have a brain.

Bye

July 3, 2007

Sometime in the last couple of months it occured to me that WoW was getting boring. I hit 70 back there somewhere with Nic-1 NE bal druid, and along with the outland politics and flightform buzz etc, thought it would stay interesting. It hasn't. Life with Blizzard has become fairly beige: am currently exploring the Turbine world of LOTRO - that having more potential than CCPs EVE Online. I could always give real life a go (shiver shiver) - no, silly idea. T&L have not hit the same brick wall of Azeroth blandness after questing and grinding for nine months, neither have Iri or Byron whom have been at it at least a year longer. I am the odd one out in terms of battle grounds, raids and instances generally: maybe flying solo amongst 8kk+ dueling dudes is just a bit sad. But as the song says:
I ain't gonna study war no more...

Semester one of five down. To quote Mr C Dickens It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . but only as the comparison between the two subjects. It was easy enough - did bugger all study (given that the exam results are still three weeks away I may eat the pie of humbleness for that statement) - one subject was fun (Med Research Methods - no, really), the other a drag; one had an excellent text, the other's text was unobtainable; one lecturer was always there with direction and encouragement, the other did a Harold Holt about week three; one was worth the $1.2k, the other wasn't. All one way traffic. BTW, this is the last ever Notablog post. It achieved what I wanted, and I'm retiring from life.

October 2006

2008-12-21T17:35:00.000-08:00

Spring

October 1, 2006

Schumacher is on a major roll, but can he win in China? If this much passion in a German is anything to go by, he can win anything... SBK at Imola, prediction: Ducati Troy over Toseland with Suzuki Troy on the podium. Am halfway through a four day weekend and it feels very civilised - had a great time with David and Sue and Cassie and Alex who went home this morning - will have to return the visit to give back the two cardigans left behind... At the time of departure the twins did a mysterious personality swap and Genna bolted down the stairs, hugged Bravus and all the girls and bid them farewell by name. Bella had disappeared - very strange.

Glad to be off DSL throttling - am planning a quiet downloading month, famous last words. Lovely and warm in the sun with a cool breeze - ahhh spring.

Lazy

October 2, 2006

For some of us. Stayed up to 0200 due to Ten's 10hr delay of the China F1. Filled in the time before hand by watching DucTroy win the WSBK championship at Imola with a fifth in the first, then with the pressure off - a win in the second. Barros destroyed them in the first and got a second in the second - all the more incredible given two very poor starts and being on a 2005 spec Honda. He's got a factory Honda ride alongside Toseland for 07 and won't be a (with 21yrs GP exp!) rookie, so the Ducs better watch out. Schumacher utilsed some chinese good luck, awesome driving, brilliant pit strategy, and poor Renault strategy to win over Alonso from 6th to equalise the championship with two remaining... Not as good as Hungary but cool. Button picked up three places on the last lap to finish 4th, and Webber got a point. I like F1 in the rain - there's passing.

So was this day wasted? I arose about midday, cleaned up the kitchen, dragged the kids around Coles for a small shop, picked up three more pocket watches (that makes about 15 - need to get on and build a display case) and watched playschool videos with the twins to an Edenbridge headphone soundtrack. Taff has nearly recompleted Keepsake and Lach is up the street somewhere getting some exercise. Not a waste at all.

With This Heart

October 3, 2006

Found a torrent file labelled 1500 best hits of the 80's but just couldn't bring myself start the d/l. And it wasn't because of the six included Duran^2 songs either - I just have no desire to travel that road again. Found two 200WRMS 12 inch speakers under the stairwell along with a stack of dense inch partical board, some wiring and a low pass filter. A visit from a friend with many decades experience in the audio electronic industry and I now have the bass refex plans drawn to make the subwoofer from hell. Will be finished by mid next week and in the meantime will try and source an amp from ebay. If I get it airtight then I may reach 5% efficiency - woohoo!

Words I'm not familiar with: Chutzpah
A Yiddish term, loosely translated as meaning insolence, audacity, and impertinence. Often classically defined as:
When someone found guilty of murdering his parents pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.
Some other examples include
when a software company charges you for an upgrade to fix their bug
or recently
when the Bush regime scolded the Brits for not doing enough in their sector to suppress Afghan opium cultivation...

Signs

October 5, 2006

The twins are now nine. Well, four a half each - but it was a good excuse for a white choc mudcake. Caught Iridium 55 at mag 0 the other night and unless I forget to look, 31 will reflect sunlight at mag -7 tonight. If I do forget then I will never hear the sound of one hand clapping. And yes, I did see that Simpson's episode. Astronomy is taking it's usual summer grip on me - I recognise the signs.

Ordered three DVDs from the UK last night on a whim - Edenbridge, Nightwish, and Glass Hammer. Moral of the story: Never browse eBay after midnight... Have an U/S shadow at present - He's from Samoa and is in training to become that nation's second sonographer. His defection from Xray will decrease their total radiographer number to eight. Nice chap.

Wonders

October 6, 2006

Thanks No.6 - Top Gear is indeed resuming filming, albeit only the bits that don't require Richard. At least this brings the broadcast date closer. In other news: Colin McRae will make a world rally comeback in Turkey as replacement for injured champion Sebastien Loeb who fell off a pushbike. We've got Suzuka F1 this weekend as well as Bathurst. The F1 will be delayed half a day as per usual but will be exciting (rain, hail, or shine) and I'm hoping not to sleep through more than half the Mt Panorama race. Now that the trophy is named after Mr Brock I would hope that a Ford should win that race for the first since fire was discovered by burning Jack McBurn, winner of last years lets have a burning competition.

Headlight wallys - why do some people feel the need to drive with their headlights on high beam and with spotlights on at 7pm - on a 50kmph suburban street with lamp posts every 50m that they have driven multiple times every day for the last half decade? And why do they do this at the same time as an iridium flare? I didn't go out after midnight and slash four tyres and break all the windows on that particular ute, someone else must have.

MAL content 150

October 7, 2006

Music, Arts, and Literature. It's all individual preference and all that, but there is just so much utter bollocks out there. Jackson Pollock and his Blue Poles - still the most viewed piece of whatsaname in the National Gallery, and the most often heard comment: They payed HOW much for that? I used to think Robert Heinlein was fascist and empty and the worst of the big'ns but on sheer sales of manure Robert Jordan would take the cake. Never has the second half of a series been so obviously written by a hairdresser obsessed by long hot baths. Music? If it's not Epic (according to these rules sent by Bravus) then it's just not worth listening to.

Science. It's rare that a piece of original research science literature captures the ideals of peer education, upholds ethical standards, and breaks new ground with such clarity and power as this piece. We all had a good chuckle. Such a sterling example of regulation and control: it's no wonder NSW has such poor equipment and pay conditions. The only advantages any southerners could be said to have is their proximity to the thinned ozone of Antarctica.

Cool and Uncool

October 10, 2006

I do believe that Ford is back. Nuf said. I also believe that Schumacher will retire in 2nd . I next believe that my eight year old 17inch Samsung CRT is dying - finally. I also believe that everyone should believe something. I believe I'll have another piece of banana cake. The countdown is on for the beginning of the new Top Gear series: we just don't know which number to count down from. Ahhhhh - this squirling CRT picture is going to make me vomit... huueeyyyy.

The phrase "mad Arab", sometimes with both words capitalised on official Queensland Government correspondence, is used so commonly before 'Radiation Health' that it almost constitutes a title. A reference to the "Mad Arab" in Cthulhu Mythos fiction is invariably a synonym for Radiation Regulations.

Blob

October 15, 2006

Happy birthday Phoogs. What is it about motorsport? Schumi gets his championship chances trashed with a blown engine, and Nicky Hayden gets taken out by his Honda team mate Pedrosa handing the MotoGP crown to Rossi (again). It's not the marmite on the chin either: Alonso's got it and he's in, and Hayden's got the same blob and he's out. Tony Elias won the Estoril race - Lachy remembered him as the dude that won the 250 race at Le Mans in '03 when we were there. It was also cool to see Gary McCoy back in the saddle.

The ancient 17" CRT connected to this ancient AMD1800 finally died on Friday, so I bought a (cheap and cheerful - see Top Gear for definition) Chimei 19" LCD and entered the 21st century of display. Or I would have if the first thing on screen hadn't been a Windows Has Performed An Internal Kamakazi And Will Now Shutdown Forever type of message. Finished with the repartition, reformat, reinstall windows, replaced all drivers and programs and toddled off to bed at about 3 a.m... You just got to love it. WINDOWS - Wholly Inadequate Needless Damned Outrageous Waste of Space. That was one of the kinder results bought up by a I hate windows google search.
Some oldies:
1. DOS Error #01: Windows loading, come back tomorrow
2. DOS Error #02: Windows loaded. System in danger.
3. DOS Error #03: Windows not found: (C)heer (P)arty (D)ance
4. DOS Error #04: Out of disk space. Delete Windows? (Y)es (H)ell yes!
5. Windows Error #01: No error... ...yet.
6. Windows Error #02: Multitasking attempted. System confused.
7. Windows Error #03: Unexplained error.
8. Windows Error #04: Reserved for future mistakes
9. Windows Error #05: Nonexistent error. This cannot really be happening.
10. Windows Error #06: Unable to exit windows. Try the door.
11. Windows Error #07: Door locked. Try control-alt-delete
12. Windows Error #08: Keyboard locked. Try anything you can think of.
13. Windows Error #09: Mouse not found. Press mouse button to continue.
14. Windows Error #09: Game Over. Exiting Windows.
15. Win95 Error #01: Insufficient money spent in hardware.

Red eTape

October 16, 2006

Was looking into a freeware firewall replacement for Zonealarm (now that it doesn't support Win98 anymore) and looked at, amongst others, Outpost by Agnitum who required an email address to gain the download link. Besides being a rubbish product, this automatically subscibed me to various newsletters which I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever. In order to unsubscribe I had first to confirm my subscription and then request an unsubscription. I was sent an email to confirm that I was unsubscribing with a link to the unsubscribe page whereupon I was able to reconfirm that I wanted to unsubscribe. I was then sent another email to notify me that I had confirmed my unsubscription and that I was to follow another link to confirm that I had reconfirmed the fact that I wasn't even remotely bloody interested in anything that they ever had to say in any newsletter at any stage. Agnitum may therefore be translated from (presumably) the Latin to mean: Exterminate, exterminate...

Bad News. The Group. The Self-titled Album. Ummm, it's like, well, it's hard to describe how good, or how bad, or... OK so it is a little like This Is Spinal Tap but without going right up to 11/10. How's it rate? Musically: 2/10 (you have to have some talent to sound that bad), Entertainment: 8/10 - really funny, will definitely get the videos. The Londonist liked them, but were less kind to The Darkness.

Other Gear

October 20, 2006

He might be a Fifth Gear presenter, but I've decided I like Tiff Needell. He had a good racing career albeit not quite making it to F1 level (qualified once, dnf) but otherwise could definitely drive a racecar. AND, it turns out that he is the voice from TOCA and TOCA2... What do you think you're doing? You're going the wrong way! A bit of argybargy going on there... OK, so he annoyed the hell out of us for years there but he has written the most sensible article about the Hampster to date. I might torrent a couple more of the latest Fifth Gear series - I just won't tell Number 6 that I've done so. BTW sniffpetrol is cool.

Wee Georgina is approaching the China-Doll photo phase that little girls get to somewhere in the first year. Her double cousins are looking forward to seeing her in a month's time. Five of us at work are planning on graduate studies next year: nothing to do with award incentives, just the love of learning. Two and a half years to a masters, what an over qualified bunch of button pushers we'll be.

Rocket bits

October 22, 2006

I brought home another 125kg of sand from Bunnings and managed to not wreck my back again. The suspension in the poor 12 year old mazda 121 didn't handle that well... a few times we were doing the 80's F1 thing with sparks flying as we bottomed out. It's needs new shocks, but at least the sandpit-boat is full speed ahead. Have just completed a quiet weekend of on call - was told this arvo about the quadruple fatal mva on the Byron / Ballina rd, two hospital nurses lost a teenager. Only the driver survived - that seems to happen alot. It's a load of guilt to live with.

Have been chasing the Okean O and the Cosmos rocket bodies as they do their high speed cluttering above the atmosphere. The Okean O must be tumbling or rotating because it flashed quite rapidly as it took 10 minutes to cross overhead from south to north with a mag of between 2 and 3. The ISS is going over from nw to se at about 0430 with a neg mag - may get up and look, may not.

Mission

October 26, 2006

Lach and I were sitting in a bakery cafe at 0815 this morning whilst the XL-7 was having a 75kkm manicure and colonoscope, and we compiled a list of realistic but impossible things that wouldn't occur in Lismore that morning. These included:
1. It is going to snow
2. We will see a Bugatti Veyron drive by
3. The Space Shuttle will overshoot Edwards Airforce base and land on Keen St
4. World of Warcraft will install and run on Win98
5. Lach's GShock will arrive from the UK today
6. The boat-sandpit will get painted today

After a couple of tries we gave up on WoW installing on my win98 PC, and put it on an XP system instead. The 5gb install took 15min and then the first thing it did was require a 500mb patch which took another 25 minutes. This gave us time to paint the boat-sandpit. Twenty minutes of WoW and I'm motion sick. I can't imagine what a rocket car would do. The Hampster is on track to resume filming in early january - then I can stop collecting Fifth Gear fill ins...

A Wee Bit

October 31, 2006

So there was a bike race in Spain on sunday. Mr Rossi was on pole and Mr (SBK champion) Bayliss had snuck into 2nd on the 'have a one-off MotoGP ride as a Ducati reward' seat of injured Gibernau's duck. The unlucky Hayden after being taken out by his team mate last week was back in the field, needing to beat Rossi by 13 points to get the title. So Rossi stuffed the start (unusually) and then low-sided on lap 5 (unusually), rejoining to finish in 13th. Mr Hayden got his title with a 3rd, and 10 seconds up the road 'one off Troy' conquered the real MotoGP boys with a win on a bike he had never ridden before... Bit of a win-win weekend that. Best MotoGP season (and SBK season) since the early nineties.

Ordered an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Socket AM2 and an ABIT KN9 MB to replace my two year old 2200. Horror of horrors - I ordered a copy of XP also. Got a new box and 300Gb Seagate SATA so that I didn't have to dismantle the old win98 box that uniquely (in this house) plays all the old kids games for the wee girls. Have heard the urban myth about the million $ pen vs the soviet pencil before - never seen it debunked so well. Watched a wee NASA DVD 'a tour of the ISS' with Mike Fincke and Gennady Padalka, and after watching them eat and drink in microgravity I'm not so worried about bits of pencil graphite drifting around... All the best to the No.6 clan as it prepares for the new arrival!

September 2006

2008-12-21T17:33:00.000-08:00

LegsEleven

September 3, 2006

LegsEleven has popped into the world. Just as well she's a girl, or the name wouldn't suit quite as well. Well done the pair of you. I guess Brenda did OK as well. Roo has now just enough time to buy the other half of the sword collection for the baby to play with. It shouldn't be long til we see some pictures of the new arrival - the swords that is. Oh, and maybe a baby pic also if there's any room left on the camera. It being father's day, I had already commented to my father that afternoon that Roo nearly qualified as a father, but not quite...

The bits you miss when you're in the labour ward. The Dutch SBK was a case of last bike standing in the pouring rain, and saw a kwaka win for the first time since Sugo 1999 - Chris Walker conquering Assen by taking a classic last to first victory. Race two dried off a bit and Bayliss cruised it in, after the other Troy took out Nori-chan before the first corner...

Georgina Victoria Hope

September 4, 2006

C'était seulement une question de temps - un nom est choisi. Still, given that she is a native of NSW, the southern connotations of the name is a little disturbing. Actually, I think it's a lovely name! And it's happy, healthy and noisy. All the things we desire in a child. Roo's parents now have seven grandchildren, and Koh's have eight, but between the four of them they have only ten. It's a mystery, as Statovarius have often said.

The semiblasphemer Mr Crikey is quite dead as the result of swimming close to a fully armed stingray. As the mythbusters would say here - Don't try this at home - we're professionals. Love him or hate him, he made the world a more colourful place to be, and was working hard to preserve our animals for future generations. Iron Maiden described it this way: If you're gonna die, die with your flippers on. Another great Australian, Colin Thiele, also passed away today. This is a little less sad than Irwin as he was 85. He wrote the book that was my favourite in the first decade of my life, The Fire in the Stone.

Mind over Matter

September 5, 2006

I d/led IM's new album A Matter of Life and Death last night even though I knew I was picking it up today from Sanity Music. So far I have heard the album once on the PC, once on the ipod, and the last time with the CD in the car. I will need to hear it a few times more before I decide where it rates amongst their other albums. The lyrics are definitely more about what we haven't learnt in the last century from war, rather than being based on books and films. Perhaps the boys are getting older and care more for the world they are leaving their children. Speaking of time passing: a sig from a metal forum said something like this - the music we listened to used to scare our parents, now it scares our kids...

Prices rise all the time because of inflation and we expect that. Usually there is the offset of wage rises, mostly. But certain price hikes really get up my nose - sometimes you can see why they stormed the Bastille about 79310 days ago. These include bananas maintaining $10+/kg and petrol hovering around the 140c/l. My earliest memory of the cost of petrol was in Nambour in 1978: 14c/l. As for bananas - the proportion of families that include musa paradisiaca in their shopping trolley has decreased from 70 to 20% since cyclone Larry. If only we could make a monkey out of the oil grinders that easily.

Who?

September 6, 2006

Was mellowing out with an ipod in a crowded lunchroom today at work, whereupon I was given the third degree about it's contents. I listed the twenty or so artists to a sea (say fifteen people, OK more a small lake, or maybe a puddle) of blank faces... except for Iron Maiden, no-one had heard of any of these groups/artists: Altaria, Angra, Apocalyptica, Atreyu, Avantasia, Dragonforce, Edenbridge, Evergrey, Freedom Call, Haggard, Hammerfall, Hawkwind, Kick Axe, Korpiklaani, Nightwish, Rammstein, Rhapsody, Sonata Arctica, Stratovarius, Tesla, Trivium, and Within Temptation. When asked for the general genre it was easier to say - mostly folkmusic. Iron Maiden's new album, A Matter of Life and Death was released last week and has got to the following position on these album charts: UK -4, Ireland -5, France -5, Finland -1, Norway -2, Australia -12. There's more than one classical metal music fan out there.

El Bravo et al are making the two hour scoot south to see us in a couple of weeks. It not only feels like years since we've caught up with Sue and the girls, it is actually years, four I think. Which is about 3.99 too long. Tonight am listening to Hammerfall and Edenbridge, Swedish and Austrian respectively. A surprising number of these guys (and girls) in their website bios list Australia and New Zealand as their dream holiday location. Must be because it's as far away from home as it's possible to get, and therefore exotic...

A Stretch

September 7, 2006

Wee Genna is minus her stretchy leg for a few days. Without the plaster I didn't hear the clump bump clump as she wandered up the hall to snuggle with her mum in the hours before dawn. She'll need a week of baths and showers in two nights to set her up for the next week of tendon stretching serial casting. The chaos that is homelife is a sanity preserver after the headbutting roulette that is work.

It's hidden in your head
slowly changing rythm
colour fading to dark with sparks
dreaming of departure and peace
a soldier on the frontline of kindness
where peace won't arrive in a dream
a green flash at sunset
the pattern of pulling tide
hide your head in the sand
It's up to you, smile.

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Sword Pic

September 8, 2006

Roo has sent through some pictures at last. Wee Georgina has now been digitally gazed upon by her double cousins... The camera must have malfunctioned because I'm sure there was a sword in there somewhere. According to wiki, The Fun Boy Three discovered Bananarama who have had like 18 albums since 1981 and last year had the #2 song in the US Dance charts. Awesome. The Darkness are way cool, but you have to be less than 18 months old to dance to them successfully because of the falsetto. Go Alistair!

A report in the New Zealand Herald (31/8/06) says NZ has a shortage of Radiologists. So some hospitals have started getting their images reported offshore. Places like Lebanon and India. So these reporting radiologists can't get registered and work (as if you would want to) in NZ but they can report. We're not talking third world here, but we're getting close, maybe 2.9 world. Still, if it's the difference between an opinion that you can take or leave for an MVA cspine or brain in the wee hours when you have no radiologist on-call, then it's better than nothing. I wonder if the reports are in english?

Baby Pics

September 9, 2006

Every nursery needs decorations, and Georgina is lucky to have a range of weapons from the Lord of the Rings saga adorning her walls. OK, so not all the swords are actually in the nursery but the thought is there. Being strickly acurate, none of them are, but they could be. In the interests of taste, no axes are in evidence, yet.

I arrived in Australia in the mid 70's to a motorsport world dominated by V8s. It was somewhat polarised between Ford and Holden, and led by drivers such as Moffat and Brock. It must be hard to retire from a sport in which you have such talent and skills built up over four decades - but the risks never change. Another Aussie icon gone - I never was a Holden supporter but it's sad to see Peter Brock leave us.

Easy As

September 10, 2006

Hosing rain all day. Rocky creek dam is at about 95% and early spring is starting to feel like Auckland in winter. Have been undecided as to the flavour of gaming console to be found under the christmas tree this year. Nintendo, MS or Sony were the choices. No.6 is right - assuming Sony would deliver was just plain absurd. Is another motorsport day on TV - MotoGP during the arvo, SBK during the evening and F1 later tonight. Go Jenson.

The Feynman Point is a string of 6 consecutive 9's in the decimal representation of pi starting at the 762nd decimal place. Named after Richard P. Feynman, because he once said that he would like to memorize pi up to 767 so that after reciting it, right after the 6 9's, he could just say "and so on".
3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196 4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273 7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436 7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094 3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548 0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912 9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798 6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132 0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872 1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235 4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960 5187072113 4999999 and so on.

Inside Job

September 13, 2006

Rebuilt a Dell D4500 for a friend tonight. A work of art inside, even if the case is a little foolish to open. Dell has nearly all the drivers you need in one download spot, and the online help even for hardware options and add-ons is cool. No wonder they have done so well in the global OEM market. In the last several months I have had far more trouble with Toshiba and IBM PCs - once they reach 2-3 years old it gets difficult to source the bits you need. Am getting very close to ditching this AMD2200 Win98 box - even Zonealarm doesn't support 98 anymore. And I want to be able to Skype from my own machine... not just when I can crowbar one of the kids off their XP machines.

So, do you reckon Kubica is a star of the future? Schumi will leave a real hole in the grid next year. I know that if Rossi retired from MotoGP it would seem like a second rate series for awhile - it did after Doohan left but he did so because of an injury. Kimi Raikkonen has rather large shoes to fill. I wonder what Schumacher's record sheet would look like now if Senna hadn't gone straight on at Tamburello. He was 34 and Schumi 24, so maybe not much really. I personally never forgave MS for taking Hill out in Australia in 94...

Bravery

September 14, 2006

Nearly had the weekend off. Scored saturday on-call, don't mind really, happy to help Al out, he doesn't ask very often. There must be a recognised cycle of news reporting following the demise of a public face - from highest eulogy to character shredding. Happened with Peter Brock after a few days, only happed with Steve Irwin if you count Germain Greer, and happened with Michael Schumacher (who didn't exactly die, but still counts). It's a bit like giving a rude hand signal to a traffic policeman below the level of the car window. Drinking hospital coffee with three sugars doesn't count - that's still brave, just like listening to Duran^2. Having got heartily sick of my car CD player bouncing and skipping on this wonderful towns hi and bi ways - I now enmusique automotivilly by running my ipod through a FM transmitter and using the radio. Marvelous.

Return stranger to the horizon of regret
maybe one day you will see
that house is built from wine and song
slurring blurring sung off key
The earth inside holds delights untold
you wish you have or had
chase them to face them
thrill them and fill them
grasping rainbows and dining on dreams
the red berries have driven you mad

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Hackers

September 15, 2006

Wee Georgina is nearly half a moon old and therefore deserves a collage of sorts. She is very vocal, and sweeter than dark grade maple syrup and will be the cause of much bandwidth usage, probably for years to come. Just two months until we can come down and see her up close - skype is great, but not quite there. Speaking of sweet, whilst making pumice toffee tonight Taff and I were unable to determine the exact minute that the boiling mixture had reduced enough so as to reach 155degC, so it turned out more like lava. Must invest in a cooking thermometer.

In the worlds before Monkey, primal chaos reigned. Heaven sought order. But the phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown. Hacking is like that. In the world before computers hacking was limited to ordering chinese home delivery for your neighbours and chuckling through the curtains as they paid for sweet and sour combination pork for the third time that week in their hari chrishna robes. If you cried for Edward Sissorhands, Malcolm X, or the 1941 version of Dumbo the Elephant then you've been hacked emotionally. Your motoring experience likewise was hackingly compromised if you ever even shared the same piece of tarmack as a Leyland P76, worse than that - the Reliant Robin of telescope mirror polishing rabbit joke fame. The tastebud hack is one of the most insidious - you don't even realise that you've been neurogastronimically fiddled into thinking that bacon is edible...

Down to Earth

September 16, 2006

Have to do something whilst twiddling your thumbs on-call. Discovered another interesting Finnish metal group, Turisas. Probably classifiable as Viking or Battle metal, at the doom end of the scale. A wee bit growly in places but very complete musically - maybe a little hard to take seriously. The drums are a little basic, i.e. not fast enough. A similar sound is found with Dark Moor, a Spanish power metal group who will try anything from Mozart and Valhalla to symphonic Roman legends, but at least they're SPEEDY. Can't say that Maiden's new album has grabbed me yet, maybe I won't buy the T-Shirt.

The wind's scent is coloured by newly ploughed earth under the oxen hoof. Morning sunlight disperses mist, casting a long shadow of the labour's back bent upon survival, a life spent to grow and provide.

A sound of striking steel betrays the glint of battle buried, a long forgotten struggle, the field of wheat a field of ancient honour. A mix of confusion and wonder becomes fear as the half buried sword moves.

An age blackened gauntlet tightens on the hilt and slowly the blade rises. Terrified oxen flee tearing apart ploughing harness and bringing down the farmer, tangled and trapped. The ground heaves, crumbles and parts to reveal the rising forms of eleven giant warriors, armour dripping with the earth's blood, the dragon form in crimson on their chestplates matching an inhuman glow emanating from their helms.

The early sun and all hope is eclipsed as the circle closes, and a chill voice enquires where the closest pub is ?, because they could just kill a pint or two.

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Comet Ham

September 17, 2006

Excitement of the day: The newly discovered comet 2006 P1 McNaught will approach to within 0.17 AU of the Sun on Jan 11, 2007 and may be visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere during late January
Sad but true - many midnight binocular sessions lying on the trompoline coming up. Phillip Island MotoGP is on today, a track that's been good for Kawasaki's occasionally over the years. Nakano is 2nd on the grid - we'll see. Jen's at work today and tonight I start eleven straight. My sanity may not remain intact. Or as intact as it is at present. Or as I think it is. I may think that it's intact then, but I may not know. Maybe it's already unintact.

Said the somewhat loopy Adam Savage, I reject your reality and substitute my own. Any town who encourages marital perjury with the offer of a dead farmyard hoover is hardly a fit role model for the kitchen. There was once a time in the world's history when refrigeration wasn't. They used to rub strips of dead animal with salt and arsenic and hang them in the smoke of a sacrificed hickory tree to drive away evil spirits. The muscle, fat and skin thus desicated would last months, even years - resisting all but the hardiest maggots and most of the bacteria and fungi endemic to the storehouses. Even with the 20th century knowledge explosion it's still done to this day apparently. You then fry it up, presumably in first cold pressed extra virgin olive oil, and inter it between two pieces of bread. And then, umm, - I'm not sure what you do with it next, but you'd have to be wearing gloves and probably a facemask. Oh yeah - then there's the issue of the smell... In conclusion I would have to say that bacon is still better than cucumber.

Back Again

September 19, 2006

Care of a wet 25kg bag of sand yesterday, I have back trouble. The finalisation of the HMAS Not-As-Yet-Named-Sandpit will have to wait a few more days. Got called up to OT for a hip pinning last night and it took more than five minutes to put the theatre boots on. A few nsaids later and I'm hoping that I'll survive tonight til midnight. I'm back on US at 0830 and it's going to be more difficult doing that than xray. Maybe I'll just have a lie down in the sandpit... Have now got 24 episodes of Mythbusters and 8 of the Cadfael series, and am at 200% of my adsl d/l allowance. Going for a record here. The nsaids have left me with their normal effect of vague inspecific anxiety - a bit like this quad rider who's hamming it up.

There's a shark in my pond
The problem is not with the shark
It's just a little rock garden pond
But it's got way too deep
It goes all the way to Finland

You can't cross a road made of custard
Custard is not a walking thing
You have to swim and there's the problem
Stop look and listen before you cross
But you still won't see the sharks

There is a road to my pond
It's littered with circling fins
If I obey the rules I'll get there
I'll be safe with my own shark
If I don't go down too deep.

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Cocaine

September 20, 2006

A rainy Phillip Is MotoGP, unwatched by myself due to bad time management, appeared to be a bit of a dog's breakfast but at least Vermeulen hit the podium behind Melandri. The Sylvania 300 Nascar results had the good, the bad and the ugly: Jeff Gordon +5, Jimmie Johnson -7, and Tony Stewart -who-gives-a-toss. There is nobody undeserving left in the chase. Would love to see Little E get up. Speaking of getting up, my back definitely has me down - can't see getting back to work before friday - that'll impress Al!
Dragged the kids outside to catch the flash of Iridium 26 tonight - according to Heavens Above it was at -6 mag as we were 2km off the path - way cool, even Taff went WOW. Was visible for maybe 15 seconds moving across a few degrees of sky but the one second flash was intense.

A bunch of mellow Austrians named Edenbridge, in a song titled The Most Beautiful Place:
You are what I call Cockaign
And you take away all my pain
use the word Cockaign which we originally heard as the coca derived crystalline tropane alkaloid of Eric Clapton fame but have now been enlightened. This fictional place has had multitudinous literary appearances including within Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's novel Don Quixote de la Mancha where Sancho Panza (the name given to any manservant/squire accompanying any Don Quixote on any journey) recieves a fictional fief, la ínsula Barataria which is commonly translated as a form of Cockaign, where "...the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing... roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy..." According to Wiki, "In the 1820s, the name Cockaigne came to be applied jocularly to London, as the land of Cockneys". London - utopian? You off yer Bacon?

Not Hampster!

September 21, 2006

No! not the Hampster. What is it about the month of September? At this time Richard Hammond is in a serious but stable condition, with no word as to the nature of his injuries. A roll over at 280mph is a mechanism of injury compatable with any senario... Wiki had all the known details included into Richards bio within hours of the accident. Wiki seems to be a combination of encyclopaedia and newspaper - what I always imagined the internet should be. Attempting a land speed record in a 5000bhp 370mph capable rocket car is not the normal Top Gear content - makes you wonder. The latest reports seem to be playing down his injuries somewhat so here's hoping.

RE: Comet 2006 P1 McNaught, was about 16th Mag in early July, brightens to 14th by October and 8th by the new year, hopefully becoming a binocular object by late January. Chances are it will disintergrate before perihelion.

Speed

September 24, 2006

According to Mythbusters episode 23, talking to your plants (either sweet talk or evil talk) makes them grow better than silence, and playing music gets a better response than just talking, and the most effective music was death metal. Works for me. I'm fatter now than I've ever been, maybe I need to get back onto a diet of baroque classical. The Hampster is out of danger and appears to have suffered no injury except significant brain damage: well that's all right then. The team are talking about the adjusted starting time for series 9, rather than IF the series will start this year as we had feared. Some political wally in Britain accused the BBC of wasting tax payers money with Hampster's rescue and chopper flight to hospital (costed at less than 400 pounds per trip and 3600 per day) - in response the Pistonheads autoclub have raised 130k+ pounds in Richard's name for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Charity. Eat Avgas wally.

The last time a non-American, non-British driver held the land speed record was in 1924 when Frenchman René Thomas managed 143.3mph over the measured mile. The Hampster allegedly managed over 300mph - compare that to these Malcolm Campbell's records:
Feb 1927 - 174mph - Last world record set in Europe (Pendine Sands, Wales)
Mar 1935 - 276mph - Last world record set on a beach (Daytona Beach, USA)
Sep 1935 - 301mph - Last record by Blue Bird (Bonneville Salt Flats, USA)
A week on and my back is nearly normal - celebrated by exceeding 35Gb ADSLwise.

Traffic

September 25, 2006

One trusts that the noise radiating out from the politically correct UK press re: the closure or (at best) restructuring of Top Gear, is just that - noise. They wouldn't dare. On a positive front, Richard is apparently annoyed that the October 8 start for series 9 has been delayed. Means he's definitely feeling better. I have noticed that nobody has asked The Stig what he thinks of the whole to-do. Not that there would be any point to that.

At least I'm doing my bit for the country. Australian Bureau of Stats data shows 36,230 million megabytes of data was downloaded by Australian subscribers during the three months up to 30 June 2006. This is 150 000 million Mb or 150 million Gb or 150 000 Tb per annum of which I am responsible for about 0.000002% of.
More Statistics: Iron Maiden's new album CHART Position SUMMARY
Has reached # 1 Germany, Sweden, Italy, Finland, Greece, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Poland, Brazil
#2 Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Hungary, Columbia #3 Chile #4 UK, Austria, Spain, India #5 France, Ireland, Arabia #6 Iceland, Belgium #7 Holland #8 Denmark #9 USA #10 Mexico #11 Portugal, Japan #12 Australia #15 Hong Kong #16 New Zealand
Number 4 in the Indian album charts?

Darkness

September 27, 2006

Brave et al are visiting this weekend and I've prepared by stocking up on at least eight forms of caffeine. Will have to cook something very high cholesterol. A fairly rare occurance tonight: Iridiums 31 and 95 will flare within 2 deg of sky, within 20 sec and both about -5 mag. Two small problems though, I will be at work and we will almost certainly be under thick cloud cover... Apparently you don't need darkness to see them - they are sometimes visible during the day if you look in the right spot... The Hampster reportedly continues to improve, and the money raised to cover his emergency retrieval will now purchase another chopper - to be known as Hammies Helli. Last night at work was busy only because of the 3.5 hrs spent in OT splashing radiation into and around an obese femoral nail whose insertion could only be likened to a deep underground mine rescue.

    A wild boy within morbid
    attraction, talented but
        flashy, brave but foolhardy,
          arrogant preying on innocence,
          whoredom brings disease and sorrow,
         repeat offending drunken drug crazed
         criminal, assaulter of sense, molester
            and basher hateful symphony of pain,
            the accident gave brain damage,
         dribbling and mumbling then returning,
           but self pity and depression,
      then a neck-tie party,
   the swinging bloated corpse,
  dance on grave in witchtown,
                   headstone micturition fantasy
                                    The sun shines again

A random collection of lines from Darklyrics
from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Sprung

September 30, 2006

The last day of the first month of spring was very pleasant. Attended Alstonville church with the senior Geelans and congregated where junior Geelan Paul delivered a cool sermon on doctrinal elipses. Then decended en masse to a park called Bullwinkle to supp, and in turn be supped upon by small black blood sucking flying things that looked almost like mosquetti. Hardly any of us fell in the swollen river or perished from exposure in the search for a patch of sunlitten grass. Twas excellent. Dinner turned out to consist of twelve types of cheese, deep fried chips and hash browns. Only Sue's pineapple was fat free.

The evening was thus: I followed Turisas to their anvil of battle metal honour, Sue sussed out Keepsake, Lachy watched V8 supercars greatest thumps, and David and all the girls internalised Blackadder series 3 to wit the lack of a cigarello box bringing regicide followed by several BBC episodes of THGTTG. Total ADSL usage (drum roll), a new record, (still drumming), 430% of 10Gb allowance.

August 2006

2008-12-21T17:30:00.000-08:00

Mutterings

August 1, 2006

A sad time for petrol headers. Motogp has the month off and TopGear takes the northern summer off. Series eight had only eight episodes - the blame for which has to land squarely on the world cup soccer thing. Given that both England and Australia bowed out early (i.e. before the last game) then on review, an anamnesis looking back with retrospective hindsight, what was the point of it? I would have preferred those extra three episodes that will now never know the light of day, or the light of CRT, LCD, or rear or front projection. Who knows - The Stig may have convinced Koenigsegg to install side wings as well...

The twins have become PC edutainmentaholics. Little Bear, Rainbow Fish, Playschool, Thomas the Tank Engine, Pingu, and Blue's Clues have very nearly driven the rest of us to distraction. At least they don't require assistance installing and playing anymore. Actually - that's a worry. Other technology front news items include the attempted emulation of Ian's $10k laptop step by Lachy who did likewise to his GameBoy Advance SP. Well, $200 is alot out of your pocket money.

Musings

August 2, 2006

Apparently the cycling world is in disarray - it's reputation in tatters, again. The athletic sub genre, sprinting, has had another coat of tarnish applied by the brush of anti-doping science, and that land of giants - the NFL - is just bursting the seams fine. The question for us as spectators is, does it matter? As far as the entertainment value of Le Tour goes, the answer is no. The same goes for the rest - who cares if Wendal Sailor had been vacuming white stuff through rolled up $10 notes, playing for Queensland will do that to anybody. Where the concept of cheating is defined by a laboritory whose employees make the majority of their income selling testing secrets to the professional medical staff of the sporting teams whose money comes from global corporate sponsorship who must spend money to make more. These visible sponsors, such as Phonak and iShares in the case of Floyd Landis, are very quick to separate themselves from the sponsees given any scandal. Maybe they're directly involved, maybe not.

Have rebuilt a friend's ancient celeron 300A for $100 - managing to turn it into an eBay acquired gigabyte equiped C1800 with onboard everything. Remind me to never do it again. I hate mixing old and new bits, sourcing drivers, fidling with scsi bits, trying to save old data etc. Never again. Winter planted out my vege garden - spinach, tomatoes, and zucinnis to coexist with the capsicums, chillis, and celery. Nothing's growing fast yet - but hey, we're still in the depths of winter...

Meanderings

August 4, 2006

Yay, off the oncall list properly for the first time in six weeks. Managed to do nearly nothing all day as an endoluminal AAA stenting got cancelled due to a screening fault the night before that involved an engineer driving five hours up from Port to pull the screening pedal away from the wall where it was jammed in tube prep mode thus rendering the DSI console unusable. I've fixed sillier problems than that in my time as a pseudo PC techie - I just can't think of them at the moment. Have decided that Carnarvon gorge is just too close to the town of TooBloodyFarAway to actually bother going there next week. You have to go through Roma to get there from here, enough said. The Wallabies and the Springboks are playing this weekend in a trinations matchup - I would watch the game but there is a chance that the grass may be growing out the back. Eleven points is the gap from FA to MS with six GPs to go, apparently Schumi is more likely to retire if he gets his eighth championship than if he misses it. The Troys will be trying not to fall off this weekend somewhere on the planet, and Lachy has somehow convinced me to stay up and watch the Brickyard 400 which runs the civilized hours of 0200 to 0800 AEST early monday morning. I might watch most of it with my eyes closed. Antithesising Number 6, the nascar number 20 usually wins if I bother to watch a round and round V8, whereas my preferred number 24 is more successful if I just look up the results manana. This is however, not a hard and fast rule such as 6's ability to jinx MS, more of a guideline.

In lieu of the ELAAA thing I managed to get roped into trialing a portable US machine in OT for the anaesthetic and vascular dudes for most of the morning. I haven't spent so long scanning nerves in my life - they're usually the bits next to the arts and veins that one ignores, or at least tries to avoid with a needle. Like all laptop based portables it is mostly rubbish in it's image quality, but it will save them borrowing our 2nd machine all the time, and may cut back on the number of post op AVF graft assessments we're presently lumbered with. Landis failed his B sample - there goes the prizemoney.

Labels

August 5, 2006

Our need to categorise things (111) is often the result of insecurity. To label a person or object before we experience them does give a sense of order and value, but also allows us to prejudge and filter that experience. A New England (a predominantly hardcore area) Metal Fest interviewer's comment to Sonata Arctica's Tony Kakko : "I really don’t like Power metal but you guys - you’re really great" brought the response "it might be because we’re not a Power metal band...". I've gone lots of places, read lots of books, seen shows and movies, met people, restauranted etc where for some reason I was sure the experience was going to horrid, but the opposite was the case. So learning from this I have tried to be more open minded - only to find it's counterbalance kicking in, that of post experience labelling and selective memory filtration. Maybe there is some truth to the (Mr Pratchett, Discworld Noir, conversation with the captain in the Cafe Ankh) old saying:
you need to drink more, and think less.

Deep to the core of the soul lie sleeping two colours of flame embers that smolder awaiting a breath to fan into fire the power to maime the power to bless, to love and to hold entwined within temptation and shame dampen or quench one will to the other be the death to both and smother for each a victory over it's brother the very heat of the soul to tame But what if the furnace of the soul is not two colours but one? strip away the labels and seek to first serve others treat all as brothers live without prejudice under the sun

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Jenson

August 7, 2006

Last night was never going to be an early turn-in. SBK was at Brands Hatch - one of my favourite circuits - and Nascar was at the brickyard where JG has won four times. Oh yes, and there was the rather boring prospect of the Hungaroring F1, which I was intending to look in on every ten laps or so. Well TroyB won the first, the Superstreet race was a dogfight that Parkes carried away, and the expectation was for the Brits to have to put up with the aussie national anthem for the full set, but I found out later that Haga spoiled that party. I got distracted by some hungarian rain. It was probably the best exhibition of skill, on-track experimentation, pit management and changing fortune that I have ever seen in a F1. I hope Jeremey is chewing on a sock for the pasting he gave Jenson about being 0 and 112 in S8E8. The combination of cold day, torrential rain, no recent wet testing for anyone, all drivers using all three tyres - and the two makers showing wildly swinging performance depending on compounds, a slowly drying track, and Jenson starting from 14th... For me edge of the seat stuff for the first time since forever. Guys passing round the outside, FA lapping MS, a honda winning, had it all. I'll shutup now. So I skipped the 2nd SBK, avoided the Nascar and went to sleep on a high.

The boat shaped sandpit is coming together for the little girls which is just as well seeing as Grandad goes home mid-week. Taff and Lach each scored a Gameboy DS today, and I will have to police Lach's tendancy to play Mario or NFS on-line wirelessly under the covers after midnight... Mind you, I would have done that if the technology had been there in 1976. And probably got beaten for it. Things are just not what they used to be. Thankfully.

Going

August 9, 2006

Grandad has flown the coup and Jetstarred down to sydney to join Roozle, Koh(n'co), the cats and the armoury. If ever there is an earthquake down liverpool way one should beware of sword avalanches. The girls will miss him as there will be no-one to say No, I'm not to virtually every question. The sandpit boat is now firmly boat-shaped and lacks only it's mast and corner seats. A meter of sand would help also. Made entirely of 2nd hand hardwood, I reckon it weighs about 250kg. Shouldn't blow away, and isn't waterproof enough to float away either. Sort of like a shipwreck on a hill... Will take a picture with the kids in it after it's painted.

Sixty-one years ago today Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Six decades later the threat is quite different. According to Wiki: The current United States military budget is larger than the military budgets of the next twenty biggest spenders combined, and six times larger than China's... the U.S. ... spends 57 times more than the seven so-called "rogue" nations combined (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria). Why is this so? Is the US the world's self appointed policeman, and if so why does it need such a big truncheon? I must admit that I would prefer the money to be spent on space research instead - it's been 35 years since Cernan climbed back into LM-12 Challenger.

Underwater World

August 10, 2006

Popped wee Mr Pip into a doggie motel and choofed northwards. The intention to get the most out of Underwater World in Mooloolabah found us hitting the gateway bridge east of Brisbane right on rush hour. The UWW was cool - chainsaw headed sharks and a Honda HRV aquarium. Gen adopted a petasaurus named Rex and Taff adopted a kilo of variously flavoured fudge. We picniced at a spot called picnic point which had picnic tables and everything.

Things went uphill from there because we arrived at our Forrest Glen accomodation very surprised at how good it was. The pool was heated (to 26C) and it had a above average waterslide with a hotish (36C) spa on the side. There was an imaginative Miniputt course, a large jumping pillow, games room, internet access, and an awesome playground just out the front door. Isobel was very brave and went down the waterslide on her own. Just the once though.

#111 Forest Glen

August 11, 2006

The Forrest Glen Resort was rated by us as follows : Staff - 5, Rooms - 8, Beds - 6, Shower - 7, Extras Inside - 8, Extras Outside - 9, Score - 7.2
Forrest Glen is about 10 minutes from Caloundra and from Nambour. It's set on about 50 acres of bush and is nice and quiet. I slept in (Gen and Jen arose with the birds) and we set off for a cheese factory in the hills near Maleny called the Cheese Stop for morning tea - we were impressed enough to plan to come back for lunch the following week. We found a great lookout on the Montville to Maleny road overlooking the Caloundra coastal strip.

We then took the scenic route down to Yandina for a park lunch and a visit to the Buderim Ginger Factory. This was a highly anticipated visit by Taff who is a lover of ginger - whereas I would prefer to sleep on a bed of nails than even smell the stuff... The thus two hours of purgatory included a pointless historic fake steam cane train ride, a great (for the twins) Overboard boat ride 'around the world' chasing a runaway gingerbread man, GingerTown, the ginger gardens, and finally the ginger giftshop which has the largest variety of ginger products onsale than anywhere else in the world apparently. It's hard not to breath for two hours. Taff adopted about a kilo of various ginger stuff, probably as a form of vermin control. The day finished well with two hours in the heated pool.

Rainbow Beach

August 12, 2006

A very lazy start (due to me sleeping in) saw us heading up to, and arriving by lunchtime at, Rainbow Beach. A lovely spot - the township about thirty years old - built on the sandcliffs just below Fraser Island, just coastwards of Tin Can Bay. The local bushfire dudes has decided to do their burning off that day, so the last 20km took half an hour. It is weird how the colour of the bushfire smoke turning the sky rose red changes one's perception of the day, and how breaking through to see blue sky again was such a relief.

Some towns just grab you with their colour and shapes, nifty shops, smiles from the shopkeepers, pleasant parks. I hate Gympy. Whereas the brief look we had of Maryborough was very positive. We trundled over to Hervey Bay and thence up to horrible Barrum Heads. There is a lot to be said for the internet as a means to research, explore, map, cost, and book a holiday - especially for places you've never been. Worked really well for France and Germany last time. Didn't work for Barrum Heads. Maybe this particular locality exists only to make every other possible accomodation spot in queensland seem marvelous. That being the case, we won't vote to have it bulldozed into the quiet waters of Hervey Bay - that might upset the whales.

#1 Barrum Heads

August 13, 2006

The holiday park at Barrum Heads rated as follows : Staff - 3, Rooms - 2, Beds - 3, Shower - 2, Extras Inside - 3, Extras Outside - 2, Score - 2.3
It is OLD. It had been done up again in the early 70's with brown curtains, greens flooring, and orange benchtops... No beach, no pool, and a fridge that alarmed every seven minutes all night to tell you that it's (shut) door was open. The stage was set to spend as much of sunday not in Barrum Heads.

After a sleep in (well, I didn't get much sleep overnight because of the fridge...) we explored Hervey Bay and had lunch at the Matthew Flinders (one of Jennie's colonial heros) lookout, and spent a couple of hours playing on the beach at Torquay. T+L wrote their names in funny shaped bits of coral, Bella decorated a sandcastle, and Genna avoided the ants. The water was cold but swimmable, and the lack of waves was quite weird. Back at the beastly barrum place I did a wedges and sour cream, antipasto salad, and a cheese platter for dinner while Jen kept an eagle eye on the twins as they utilised the OH+S nightmare that passed for a playground. SBS TV had a show on string theory and it's role as a grand unifying whatsaname for quantum physics and general relativity. Jennie and Taff loved it - I have no opinion as I was listening to Sonata Arctica at the time.

SeventeenSeventy

August 14, 2006

The Eagles said "you can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave" but they were wrong. We left Barrum Heads for the last time ever at 0800 and roadworked our way up to Bundaberg where we enpetrolled and nearly left Taff behind who was hiding in the restrooms. Up through the canefields to the shops at Agnes Waters and lunch at Seventeen Seventy on the beach. Beautiful sunny day, lovely looking water, and a sign that said "Swimming NOT recommended due to stingers, sharks, rips, and stonefish". Marvelous, must be why they had such a good playground.

Back onto the Bruce highway and then off it to pass through Gladstone for no apparent reason, then onto Casino's sister city: beef town Rockhampton. Checked into the Wanderers Resort on the north side of town, discovered the swimming pools were cold, and went to Sizzlers for tea.

#99 Wanderers

August 15, 2006

The Rockhampton Wanderers Resort rated as follows : Staff - 7, Rooms - 6, Beds - 9, Shower - 8, Extras Inside - 7, Extras Outside - 4, Score - 6.7
Big, clean, newish, handy to town, un inspire ring, are words that come to mind. Not really complaining but there is no playground, no pool table, a pathetic holes-in-the-grass type miniputt course, a tatty jumping pillow, and all three pools were tropically icy. We visited the Mt Hay Gemstone Park and spent two hours and fifty dollars on various geological detritus, rummaging in the rubble and dawdling in the debris. Was quite cool. We chose the north Rockhampton park to have a picnic lunch and for Bella to lose her sandels in.

Spent the afternoon in Yeppoon at the shell museum, and down on the beach at Emu Park near the Singing Endeavor tribute sculpture to Capt Cook. A very pleasant place looking out towards the Kepple Island group, but again with unswimmable water due to evil creatures. Rang out for a pizza for dinner. The air felt about as humid as Lismore does in summer - I could get to like that, except Qld has such a crap health system pay wise.

Still hate Gympy

August 16, 2006

Got an 0800 start on Rocky's rush-hour Pamplona - the running of the (stud statue) bulls. Decided against using an inland route south and so spent four unexciting hours on the Bruce, overtaking perhaps two thousand caravans and once again not finding the limit of Bella's cast iron bladder. Lunched in a delightful park in Maryborough that was relatively caravan free.

Just avoided the radar revenue raisers in Gympy, but didn't avoid the multitudinous pre-election roadworks. The variety of anti-dam signs was quite amusing, my favorite being a huge sign with simply just: NO DAM under which someone had added: Fat Chicks. Did a quick shop in Nambour and replaced Bella's lost sandels, and check back into #111 Forest Glen resort. Discovered at bedtime (after watching the 80's movie Willow through eyes made blurry by several hours of chlorine immersion) that they had neglected to put sheets of T+L's bunks.

Forest Glen Again

August 17, 2006

Ah, back to the sunshine coast and a nice resort. Spent the morning at the Superbee watching the ins and outs of honey production, riding centrifugal merri-go-rounds, and speeding on electric quadbikes.

Went back to the Cheese Stop again for lunch (a 5kg cheese platter - AMI here we come) and then down the Glasshouse Mountains road to Caloundra to play in the 'spinny park' and wet our toes in the waves. Tis Ant's birthday - haven't a clue where he is, maybe in transit home from Fiji? Had "Lachy" noodles for tea. In a final burst of courage, Jen and Gen went down the waterslide for the first time, and Bella did too.

Humble Pie

August 18, 2006

Lazy start, left FG at 0930 and arrived at the Humble Pie factory in Billinudgel at 1210 for lunch, again without challenging Bella's baldder. That girl can hold litres. Ten pies later we headed for Alstonville to retrieve Mr Pip from his idilic motel amongst the macca trees. Arrived home to screeds of email spam, and a letterbox of junkmail.

Did get Bluetooth and Wifi dongles, as well as the iPod FM transmitter. Upon reflection I think that Taff and Lach spent only 98% of their time playing Nintendo DS Nintendogs, and at least 2% looking out their windows as south Queensland rolled by.

Sum, ergo edo

August 27, 2006

A weekend not oncall and I end up at work at 0830 scanning a threatened mc after only 5 hours sleep. Self inflicted I guess, and the kids got to see their mum at work as ED wasn't that busy yet. Hiro gave the little girls four volumes from the Hamtaro series which has kept them involved for most of the day. The kid's DVD player died (again - but what do you expect for $50?) so we trucked off to HardlyNormals after the u/s callback and arrived to see the doors open for the Store's 30th Birthday sale. We were swept along by the crowd (of half a dozen or so) and ended up with a $80 LG unit which actually worked when we got it home.

Lach bought the Trackmania Sunrise Extreme game, and Taff bought a Chocolate fondue maker. I have passed the hours by blowing away my DSL limit. Have discovered four new groups: Edenbridge (Austrian symphonic metal), Haggard (German symphonic metal), Freedom Call (German power metal), and Luca Turilli's (from Rhapsody) Dreamquest (electro-symphonic power metal). There appears to be a pattern emerging... They are all MSO metal except for FC who seem to be similar to Korpiklaani but maybe a little more prog. Have ordered the latest Haggard and Rhapsody (of Fire) albums as well as the first LT Dreamquest one. A Ferrari front row tonight in Turkey has Button on 6 and Webber on 9. After the quality of the Hungararian race earlier this month, I will definitely sit up for this one...

Nightshift

August 31, 2006

Vanilla coke and Billy Idol have a lot to answer for, but very little to answer with. About 40% of the world's vallina production comes from Madagascar, a land made famous by four central park zoo animals who get shipwrecked there. A week of broken sleep from multiple visits to the basic monument has curtailed my oppurtunities to work on the shipshape sandpit, but the weekend is here and no doubt I will either saw, hammer, rout or sand several of my digits thus producing my own rebel yell.

Spring will shortly have sprung. We can tell because it's been raining for a week without a break to the tune of about 125mm. The local dam is at 90% and the garden has started to stir. On a trip to the brisbane royal kids hospital a couple of days ago we drove through bucketing rain to the queensland border, clear skies up to brisbane and back to the border, and then torrential rain for the hour back to home. Queensland, beautiful one day, continuing drought the next. (124)

July 2006

2008-12-21T17:28:00.000-08:00

Mutterings

July 1, 2006

I have discovered that my PC (an ancient AMD1800 running Win98) loses 100 to 120 sec per day. This plays havoc when one is trying to do sneaky last minute EBay bids. So it now auto updates to some atomic clock somewhere and should stay a wee bit more reliable. My 1p (plus postage) 17 jewel wind-up pocket watch appears to gain some forty seconds per day which isn't that awful. Over the same 24hr period my generic casio g-shock lost three seconds. I have to face it, I could never win any longitude competitions.

It's good to see that Pluto isn't as lonely as we thought. I have had a very quiet time on-call for ultrasound so far this weekend and am developing a theory (backed up by raw data, damned lies, and statistics) about lunar phase and community illness. It's been three weeks since 100% phase, so there you go. Next weekend the moon is full.
She should not lock the open door (run away run away run way)
Fullmoon is on the sky and He's not a man anymore
See the change in Him but can't (run away run away run away)
See what became out of her man... Fullmoon
(english as a second language, Fullmoon, Sonata Arctica)

Sport Sunday

July 2, 2006

So the Football World Cup semi's are Germany v Italy and Portugal v France, after penalties decided two of the quarters games. It's a cruel game in that respect, but penalty shootouts probably do make more sense than playing endless extra-times. I wonder if they should bring in a single limitless over time with a single sudden death goal. Must admit, am peeved at England bowing out, and also Italy (Aust killers) not bowing out. Here's hoping for a FrancoDeutcher finale.

The dust has settles on the drug expulsions hoohah and on Le Tour prologue with O'Grady in the top 10. It is really going to be interesting in that mysterious way that it hasn't been for the last five years, and not just because four of last years five top finishes were kicked out. Has been a real petrol head day so far with Nascar this morning, V8s in Darwin this arfternoon, MotoGP tonight, and the US F1 GP at Indy in the wee hours. Will have to remember to pic up Grandad from the train this evening amongst all the digital tyre and exhaust smoke.

Ups and Down

July 3, 2006

Grandad arrived safely and wasn't too bored by his 12 hour countrylink journey sitting next to a Ned Kelly lookalike. It's not everybody who can spend a day in a carriage wearing 80kg of half inch steel head and body armour, in fact nobody has for a long while, just to mix imperial, metric and dimensionless units. And besides that, my UPS died.

Schumi won which was cool, Tony Stewart did also which is uncool, Pedrosa cruised it in at Donington, and Craig Lowndes brought a Ford in first at Hidden Valley which is supercool in a way that Stewart's Ford somehow isn't. I won't mention the boring day at work which followed the completely boring sunday on-call in case it jinxs me for tomorrow. If that happened I would have some evidence for the superstition to which I'm trying not to allude. My Casio appears to have lost the 3 secs it gained on the atomic clock, and the pocket watch is continuing to average 35 sec gain per day. Yes, my life is humdrum.

Bruyant et gros

July 4, 2006

Today was fat tuesday. Once a month for the last two and a half years we have had an International Food Day where we each bring along an example of a prenominated nation's typical dish. We went through all the usual suspects such as Italian, Greek, Chinese, English etc and as we approached the two year mark we started scraping the bottom of the inspiration barrel with Phillipino, Russian, Fijian etc. Well, today we had American - as in the USA (not sure why they chose this particular date), not the healthier areas to the north and south on the same continent. Fast food was banned (there goes the authenticity) so we ended up with donuts, apple pie, cornbread, mudcake and pepsi. There were other things but I am trying to forget so as to decrease the nausea.

The fat bit was the patients. I noticed that in Xray the guys had a run on pediatrics that proved to be noisier than normal, but I had a run of fatness: gros et plus gros. This is not good for your shoulder. I nearly had to borrow a marine fishfinder to locate one set of kidneys, and later I had a couple of nurses run in to investigate the yell of triumph upon location of a deepset gallbladder (well 30cm down makes it bloody hard to differentiate a calculus from a meteorite). I think I'll take my 1/64 scale Bugatti Veyron out for a spin to recuperate - maybe around the coffee table. Twice.

Wee Oliver

July 5, 2006

Only one more week until the return of Top Gear. Not that I'm counting. I met wee Oliver today, the offsprung of Naomi. A morning tea was had that saw Renae with her three, and Marie show up as well. I took along one of the three pumpkin pies that I ought to have made the 24 hours earlier for the american food day, and it disappeared very quickly which was cool. The pies only escaped the oven at 2300 which saved them until 0700 whereupon one was devoured (be)for breakfast, and the remaining one was gone by the time I crawled back from work at 1800. By demand (by mainly because I want to) I'm making another two tonight but I reckon they'll not get eaten at all, or at least I might get one bit. I stayed up last night to nearly 0200 watching Le Tour - am not sure if I've got the energy to do that two days running...

The sky is all blue
yet it feels like rain
a warm breeze slowly drifts
through mental cracks
and daydream rifts
the heartache's bane
there is no pain
and so it's true
Gig, I like being married to you!

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Adjusting

July 6, 2006

It has become apparent that wind up pocket watches generally don't know what time it is. After sniffing at anything with a quartz movement, review of time accuracy over the last week has somewhat changed my mind. But then again - a skeleton mechanical watch is a piece of art - who cares really where the hands are pointing. Case in point: one watch gained 73min50sec over 3 days. This is why in centuries past, towns had loud chiming clocks, and fob watches were dragged from pockets and adjusted several times daily. I will be playing around with the internal adjustement as soon as I can work out how to get the back off...

Les Bleus v Azzurri. Blues v Skyblues. Go the blue team.

Jeanne d'Arc

July 7, 2006

The accusation of heresy is one of those interesting categorisations made by those whose black and white worlds are unable to accomodate different viewpoints. Were we to divide all structural discussion up into the philosophical, political, scientific, religious etc, we would see the heresy label tossed about seriously in only the latter category although it appears occasionly in the others on a humorous level. The concept requires only that a view expressed by another conflicts with an individual's value judgement interpretation of their own accepted dogma. Given the non-empirical nature of religion, and given it's reliance on faith and revelation when compared to philiosophy, one ought to expect a much greater range of individual view points. In fact religious expression constitutes an almost continuous spectral spread of the fanciful, possible, probable and rediculous, resulting in everyone's religious viewpoint being heretical to everyone else, differing only in degree of hereticism. On this day in 1456 Joan of Arc was acquitted by retrial of heresy. She was 44, or would have been if she wasn't burnt at the stake 25 years earlier for the crime of heresy. Let's not mix politics and religion.

Leaving the grey areas, and entering a restful dichotomy - pocket watches. One cost one pence and one a pound. One is gold and the other silver. One gains thirty seconds a day and the other loses that much. One is of the skeleton style and the other clothed. One is in a box, and the other one had it's box nicked by Taffy. Neither has a strangle hold on truth and justice, but they both need winding. There goes the dichotomy.

Bonjour encore Bravus et al

July 11, 2006

Welcome back Bravus, Suzie, Alex and Cassie to the sunburnt country. Where else can you ride a motorbike in the deepest darkest depths of winter and not feel cold? Melbourne is not a correct answer to this question. Nearly got out of control with my ADSL bandwidth again - reached 60% by day 6 of the month. I regathered the reins by diverting internet focus towards ebay rather than torrents and yes, I found another $1 pocket watch. This is becoming almost as sad as collecting small pink hairy horses - but the collectees there have an average age of six and a bit.

Found a nice light blue clarinet for Dad to tootle on whilst staying here which should arrive next week. In the meantime we are working on plans for a boat shaped sandpit for the little girls. With Dad to help build it there is a much better chance it won't fall apart if a mild breeze springs up...

Épouse pendant la vie

July 12, 2006

A day of stabbing and bleeding, gallstones and demises - at work that is. It's quite valuable to deliberately leave it all behind and immerse oneself in the want's needs and desires of a noisy family. Le Tour heads into the mountains tonight for the first time - probably will stay up and watch it (again). Definitely getting harder to stay awake in the dark, warm, humming ultrasound room all day. Less than a week until the (not so) Captain Slow and his co-stars get reach the highest gear... This appears to be the 100th post.

Juxtaposing fondly all the memories and the dreams
evicting shadowy gloom with a burst of laughter
never grumpy, or grouchy
nor tetchy or testy
infecting with happiness all and then after
filled to contentment by love silver streams
each one who shares
releases their fears

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Getting Ready

July 14, 2006

As Keryn forges steadily into her third trimester, Andy has been preparing for the delivery via fruitful ebay exploration. So far he has bought a 4ft sword in the style of Aragorn son of Arathorn, and a 60mm refractor telescope complete with enough eyepieces to reach 90 power (i.e. practical astronomy usable mag of about 25x). Now, we presume the sword is to fight through the smell of a freshly filled nappy, and the telescope is to keep an eye on the youngster from a distance where the smell has defeated the sword. He also bought a change table that doubles up as a bar fridge and an oil change pan for the Fireblade.

Dear John has granted me a weekend off call which is marvelous. I think I had three cruisey days this week which would have to be a record - I knew the advent of the secound ultrasound machine would kill our numbers - at least I hoped it would! The translation across to our new radiography award is still not finalised - we are definitely the last health area in NSW to get our act together. I think Richard in Gosford was payed correctly two months ago. Had a real spray of telemarketers tonight and treated them all fairly evenly - I answered every question they asked with the statement - 'I'm sorry but I can't answer that question, it's a secret' . By varying one's tone of voice and speed of delivery it was possible to keep some of the professional badgers for a good cause talking for five minutes without altering the response. Eventually they just hang up. It was Andy's idea - I'm not really like that...

Revolutionary grammar

July 15, 2006

Give or take a quarter of a (non sidereal) day wee Alistair has been amongst us for a full revolutionary trip about old sol. Time does fly. Miss No! and Woolhead have by chance been with us for the four fastest years of my life so far, whereas today being my first day off in three weeks is passing outrageously slowly, and it's drizzling. Gig and I have managed three days of consecutive cooking lunches and dinners without blowing out Grandad's blood sugar levels. The main enemy turns out to the humble high GI spud. Am looking forward to seeing the David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston episodes that I have missed (i.e about three quarters of them). Were there really five doctors between bug-eyes Baker and Tennant?

I know it's only grammar, but Wiki contains the following conjecturing : During the opening dialogue in most episodes, Number 2 says "You are Number 6". Some view this as a direct response to the previous question "Who is Number 1?" by inserting a comma into the statement ("You are, Number 6."), implying that Number 6 is in control. Similarly, Number 2's reply of "Information" to Number 6's question "What do you want?" could be interpreted as 'information' or 'in formation', the latter being a command to follow orders and conform. So Number 6's experience in The Village was one of personally inflicted dilatancy - the harder he tried, the harder it got.
Don't believe any of it - it's all illusion.

Breathe easy

July 16, 2006

This year's Le Tour is brilliant. Without Armstrong ruling the roost like a roman god (like the other well known chookhouse kings Mars: conflict resolution, Jupiter: admin, Saturn: time and motion, Neptune: marine politics, and Pluto: adventure caving) the peleton has been somewhat disorganised (I'm not going to say: like a headless chook) leading to the maillot jaune swapping backs more often than Venus, Juno and Diana swapped, umm, hairbrushes. I apologise for the similes getting out of hand, a bit like a small grassfire getting out of control and, sorry I'm doing it again. This notblog has become a battlefield of contentious imagery - at least that was a metaphor. Both Michael Rogers and Cadel Evans look like they will be serious top fivers in the Alps. Only one more sleep until TGS8E6, and eight non-sleeps until the tour de frogland goes away and I finally get a pre 2am night.

I know most people have seen this - I'm a bit slow.
This from One Hundred Interesting Mathematical Calculations, Number 7: Julius Caesar's Last Breath .
What's the chance that the breath you just inhaled contains at least one air molecule that was in Julius Caesar's last breath--the one in which he said (according to Shakespeare) "Et tu Brute? Then die Caesar"?
Assume: 2000 yrs is enough time for complete global air remixing
and number of air molecules in any breath is 2x10^22
and air molecules total in atmosphere is 10^44
then chance of any one particular molecule you breathe in coming from Caesar's last breath is 2x10^22/10^44 = 2x10^-22. So the probability any not coming from the last breath is 1-2x10^-22.
Treating each molecule individually the chance of our lungfull not getting a caesar molecule is (1-2x10^-22)x(2x10^22) which in terms of e gives (e^(-2x10^-22))x(2x10^22) = e^-4 = 0.018 or 1.8%. So there is a 98.2% chance that at least one of the molecules in your lungs came from Caesar's last breath.
I feel better just knowing that. In fact I will remain happy until some sad mathamatician somewhere calculates the probability of my last glass of water containing at least one molecule from Cleopatra's last, ummm, bath.

Das Weißwurs

July 18, 2006

15 Stages of the tour has seen us rack up a total of something like 40 hours of SBSing. Tonight as we watch the poor lads drag themselves to the 1850m finish at L'Alpe-d'Huez we will see the same ads for greater than the 100th time. One in particular, the Renault food crash test ad, has been puzzling us as to the meaning of the exploding cracker. Now it's clear: the sausage is the bavarian weißwurs symbolising BMW, the sushi is Toyota, the cracker is wasa bread which is Swedish representing Volvo, and obviously the french bread stick is Renault. The add was made by 'german' renault and relates to the (european version of the ad's) last sentence which says "the only car brand with 8 cars scoring 5 points at the NCAP crash test". But the only reason why Renault has more cars with a 5 point scoring is that germans do not like the beeping noise that sounds if you don´t put on your seatbelt that has to be included in order to gain the full 5 points. Go the sausage. BTW, TGS8E6 was ultra cool, fell off my chair laughing.

This world was the battlefield of coldest hell
where loyalty won and indifference fell
now there's no war on terror
no battle of bulge or alien invasion
haggle the price - it's immortality to sell
Everyone fights, we've all been recruited
soldiers of fortune, soldiers of pain
by weapons of wisdom or malice or treason
there's method in madness and hell's tolling bell

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Contagious

July 20, 2006

Le Tour is extra cool - an american won't win it. Not that we dislike Landis, he's a top biker who was unfortunate to hit the wall on a tour day from hell, but it's better to spread it around abit. So we've a Dane in polka-dot, and Australian in green, a Spanish Induran lookalike in Yellow, and five bitch climbs before the Alps are behind them. Nascar headline: GORDON TO CHANGE NAME TO SELL MORE SHIRTS? Hearing Jeff Gordon will legally take his fiancee's name and change it to Jeff Vanderbosch. UPDATE: Being told new name won't fit on a T-shirt and idea is being abandoned.

It may well be Number 6's fault that my PC has crashed utterly requiring a rebuild (as his did this week) - this would require the application of that six degrees of separation thing that links all structures and phenominae in the known universe. For example, I know it for a fact that Lachy getting up to get a drink of water seconds before the start of the Spanish MotoGP was the cause of a yamaha's engine stall on the grid and the resulting five minute wait for the restart. The minor drop in water pressure caused by Lachy's thirst subtley altered the pitch of a whisper quiet dishwasher three housesdown the street bringing to mind a sound from that neighbours childhood near a railway line in Romania, whereupon he picked up his phone on a whim an dialed his sister in Paris whose mobile phone had been borrowed by a second cousin attending the GP in Catalunya. The trackside phone's calltone disturbed the rider opposite him in the third row enough to forget to blip his throttle appropriately thus stalling. We know this for a fact because we were watching the TV and there's no other plausible explaination (that comes to mind anyway), and that's only four degrees of separation.

Boring

July 23, 2006

Very boring sunday. Probably followed by a horrendous monday full of the things that ought to have been done on the weekend. Excitement of the weekend - bought a multifunction printer. Am normally against that sort of thing as the inherant complexity gives too much scope for failure, but it was on special so there you are. It's really amazing how much you can save buying things on special that you wouldn't have bought anyway.

Tonights the last of Le Tour - mmmm sleep. Am not sure if I will stay up to see the finish on the Champs-Elysees or not. We did the promise the kids they could stay up to the end if they wanted - but they're usually snoring by midnight anyway, regardless of intentions. BTW I was absolutely wrong about Mr Landis. The man deserves the win all the more so now. Even if he IS american. The MotoGP circus hits Laguna Seca tonight with Chris Vermeulen on pole followed by Edwards and KRjr. It's hard to see Hayden not figuring from sixth, and Rossi is just 0.7 down on pole in 10th. It starts about 0400 - am not going to watch that either... Tonight's SBK from Brno has Haga on pole and the Troys 3rd and 5th. I will watch that one.

Caterham

July 25, 2006

Day from Hell. Or maybe that should be a day of hell as I'm not sure you can a take day from something. That would be getting your time and place things mixed up, and the concept of the space-time continuum is inconsistant with day-as-quanta, especially in medical imaging. Anyway, by five-ish I was knackered, refused to do any more scanning, and went home. This is of course using knackered in the sense of being tired and not in connection with the business of slaughtering, flaying or cutting up animals whose flesh is not intended for human consumption, or of an Irish Gypsy, or even (as in Australian slang) a testical. Mind you, most of that is hell, except maybe the gypsy part.

Many thanks to Sir Number 6 for the DVDs - I would have started on series one tonight except that I'd just downloaded S8E7. It was almost complete television. James and Jeremey had a fight, there was a cool Lambo (even if it is an Audi), they found a good people mover, they probably knackered a Caterham 7 - but they didn't like the renault 207 because it was fat and made in Turkmenistan. I will watch DrW-0 tonight though - after the kids crash out.

June 2006

2008-12-21T17:25:00.000-08:00

Taffy the Dozen

June 3, 2006

Yesterday we got alarmed in Dubbo at 0500 and hit the Newell H'way at just before 0600. Not a bad getaway. The sun rose on us somewhere between Gilgandra and Coonabarabran where we joined the Oxley to pass through Gunnedah and onto a service station in Tamworth. On to the New England H'way and up to Armidale for breakfast at the bigM again, then through Glen Innes, Tenterfield and then the Bruxner back to Lismore. Total holiday circuit of about 2500km. The evening was spent mostly skyping to Fraser and to Roozle who just recieved his 5c 2Gb hongkong 25in1 mp3 player complete with neckstrap. He was nearly as smug about it as Fraser was with his new Dell mainframe 24 meter LCD artificial intelligence unit. Doesn't matter, I'm getting (sorry, Lachy is getting) an XBox360 for Xmas...

Our little Taffy is a Dozen today. Actually she's only 2cm shorter than Jennie and is maintaining above 90th centile for height... We had a semiparty after church for lunch with brocilli pie, wedges and sour cream, and 12 candles on 12 iced muffins. We made a white choc mudcake during the afternoon and went over to the Nakasaki's for a wonderful impromptu party with bonfire cooked potatoes and onions, soup, and the cake which had mysteriously turned icingly green. The lack of a breeze for kiting was made up for by the number of exploding party pulls that rainbowed the floor with coloured streamers. A lovely day.

Ho Hum Humdrum Humbug

June 6, 2006

Back to the coalface. Back to minimal staffing, overbooked ultrasound lists, and back to arguments about the payscale translation tables in the new MRS award. At least I got a dream shoulder massage at today's most stressful point, and having Dr Nick at the clinical helm usually makes the shift better. Am downloading TG S8 E5 at present, and can't believe that I've not had time to watch E4 yet. Discovered Nickelback who, according to Wiki are a canadian post grunge rock band. This description seems to pidgeon hole them as a nearly metal band, i.e. play hard, but not so hard that the local radio station will cut you from the playlists. That may be unfair - I'll give them a few turntable revolutions before I judge further. A phonecall from my Dad revealed that he plans to come and stay for the duration of le Tour de France - cool. It may actually be exciting this year without Armstrong. I wonder what Elle would look like in a yellow jersey?

Was thinking about significant influences such as the music 'most important five albums' thing that Bravus did, and how honest we would be in compiling similar lists for other areas of life such as
Five most influential people
Five most memorable books
Five Worst Sporting Results
Five songs with tunes you can't get out of your head
Five Movies you would never own, etc
How would these lists differ were we to write them for public versus private viewing?

You can never go back

June 7, 2006

Did a spot of memory laning with an old ex cop, about 85 he was, 6 foot 5, and still an axe handle across the shoulders. Lovely bloke now, but I reckon I wouldn't have liked him as a pig, could see it in his eyes - he used to be hard as hell. He worked a lot of years down in the Hunter Valley - Edgeworth, Killie, Minmi, marvelous places the lot of them, full of miners, westies and bikie gangs. Had a bottle broken over my head the night before my physics HSC exam by a westie, very special folk. The miners were a good lot as a rule, got payed well, but earned their dough. Xrayed lots of them round Cessnock, tough as a rhinosceros buttock. Good memories he reckoned, most of them anyway, except for going two miles down a mine to access a fatality - they never taught that one in cadet school. He said he wouldn't go back there, even if he could. I went back to Left Hand Branch, Mt Sylvia, out from Gatton, some three decades later. It was descicated - dry, small, and unattractive through an adults eyes. The kid that lived there was happy enough, as kids can be. I wouldn't go back there, even if I could.

Me old cop mate told me a story from the seventies, from his Minmi days. Got called to a pub by the bartender - there's a fight going on, the bikies are breaking the place up. Heads down there on his own, just him and his uniform for backup, and finds five guys bigger than him breaking up furniture cause the wrong beer was on tap. There's a few other guys in the bar, heads down nursing a beer, mostly miners. One bloke sitting with his back to the action at the bar, bald, no neck, maybe 5 foot 6, a long time regular, small dog sitting by his left boot. Bikies getting violently abusive, one steps back to circle round behind the cop, they're going to take him down law or no law, steps on wee dogs foot. Small yelp heard. Bloody mutt, bikie kicks dog. Miner stands up, quiet voice, you kick my dog - you've kicked me. Throws bikies out a window, one at a time, not a low window either. None of the bikies get up again, the cop buys the dog a beer and leaves cause there's obviously no fight going on at all, just a mistake, nothing to see. He was quite fond of miners, quiet folk generally, his eyes had misted up again just remembering.

Talent

June 8, 2006

Finished a couple of nights, missed a bit of sleep, got a couple of haircuts (counting Lach's mopchop), and studied a bit about timepiece movements. Tomorrow Genna finishes her first week of rl leg serial casting , or 'my stretchy plaster' as she calls it. She has coped very well, especially the bit about not having a bath each night, and Bella has taken a liking to having the whole bath to herself... Had Jennie's cousin Marie stay twice in the last week as she wholesales her custom jewelery around the north of this state, hence our discovery of Nickelback. Not my cup of tea - a bit too rocky in a non metal sort of way. Am looking forward to my first long weekend where I am not rostered to work, in a decade. Woohoo as Fraser may or may not say at this point, but I'm excited in a sad sort of way. BTW, the obliquish occulomency reference to rams is all wrong: ewe are barking up the wrong tree. Sorry to hear that deep thought 3.1 has a dellish headache - 2gb is (although very cool) absolute overkill, speaking as a win98 user...

I believe in recycling, and today we had our number of wizzbins increased to three. I do drive a 4wd purely in case I have to park on my own front lawn one day, but otherwise am quite green. The collection times for the recyclable organics, recyclable non-organics, and the non-recyclable bins is easily obtained from the formula: I = <(dp(x;t)/dt 1/p(x;t))^2>, where I is the index of expectation of the truck arriving on an given thursday before eleven oclock if it's a bit cloudy. Most households have stuck this to their fridges, and ask any handy six year old to run the calculation before the news on most wednesday nights. It's the recycling of talent that I find most disturbing though. I have had this sneaking suspicion that Ivan Lendl and Eddie Lawson are actually the same person, and that Harrison Ford and Nick Faldo are also one and the same. It's sort of like job sharing, but you pay more tax.

Winter: Cursum perficio

June 10, 2006

The cold, the icy tedium, the aching winds and the colourless landscape. Winter has truely come upon us with a vengeance. OK, so it's still t-shirt and shorts weather, it's only been drizling for half an hour, and it is 22C, but I'm sure it's winter somewhere. Maybe Melbourne or somewhere unholy like that. Long weekends are really cool if one is not on-call to the local emergency department. I'm so happy that I think I'll write a black poem. Must be the metal, or the fact that I'm the only person on the planet who isn't interested in the world cup, other than my little brown dog. Who says I'm a black sheep - you keep sheep out of this.

the axe
gleams red in our world's dusk
reflecting the eastern warcloud bloodlight
blade's slicing warmth from chains asunder and cage destroyed
unleashed destruction's creature to devour
mindless, unsatiated, driven like
the axe

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

The 2006 World Cup

June 11, 2006

Alonso taking the Silverstone pole led my thoughts to wander randomly to sheep. Domestic sheep, the Animalia Chordata Mammalia Artiodactyla Bovidae Caprinae Ovis Aries ones, not the other type. Now it's not the chinese year of the sheep (that was a few years back) and Aries with it's non prominant stars Hamal, Sharatan, Mesarthim and Botein is almost exactly but not quite completely not overhead anytime of night this time of year. Aries got a bum steer anyway, after carrying Athamas's son Phrixus and daughter Helle (nearly) safely away to Colchis to escape their stepmother Ino, he was fleeced on an altar and hung up until Jason came agronautling along. Sheep are actually quite thick, making your average Lemming and even Winnie the Pooh look bright, and an exhautive literature search uncovered no examples of any smart sheep. You can argue whether or not it was the fault of Little Bo Peep and Mary (of, had a little lamb, fame), or that of their wooly charges that things didn't go quite right, but the fact that both of these verified historical naratives utilise the word 'little' would indicate a diminutive collective intelligence. Researchers using the Borg collective identity techniques have discovered that sheep are the only known animal whose average mental capacity actually decreases as it's number of assimilated individuals increases. A final example of ariesetic brainlessness is Rammie the mascot of Derby County F.C. who's team, on April 16, 1898, appeared in their first FA Cup final at Crystal Palace, but lost 3-1 against Nottingham Forest.

Consulting the global database for all facts (wiki) has revealed the astonishing fact that of the top fourteen shepherding nations of the world, the UK ranks an incredibly high 2nd place in human population density to sheep ratio. This ratio essentially measures, and is considered the most telling indicator of, how likely you are to trip over a sheep in your own lounge room, or indeed any other room in your house. New Zealand and Australia can be seen to rank at the more socially acceptable positions of 11th and 14th resp.
(Data collected during Chinese Year of the Sheep):

History Lesson

June 13, 2006

What do we know of the battle of Mount Badon? We don't know where it occured, or who the opposing leaders were, or exactly when it occurred although somewhere between 493 and 503 is most likely. By the ninth century the victory by the Romano-British and Celts had been attributed to King Arthur, who may or may not have existed. We do know that the invading Anglo-Saxons got walloped so it's not surprising it wasn't added in boldface to their curriculum vitae. How does this matter today? It doesn't really. Monty Python and the Holy Grail saw it this way :
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

James and Richard were less than thrilled to be taking a soft top mini cooper for a run somewhere in the north of scotland.
Richard: The only things that can see us are are the sheep, and I'm still embarrased
James: I don't want to be misinterpreted but these are actually quite nice looking sheep...

History Again

June 14, 2006

The scalectrix is back out again and the wee cars are burning up the lounge room. First night of a week's oncall and I'm yet to be bothered. Spent an hour on the phone with Gordon discussing such things as Katipo bites, broadband, newtonian reflectors, but surprisingly not stream engines. Got me out of the dishes at least. The Battle of Deorham in 577 saw the Britons lose a large chunk of England to the West Saxons. The battle took place near the A46 trunk road, about 6.5 miles north of Bath and a little south of the M4 motorway where various topographical features such as speed cameras enabled the invaders to steal Gloucester on the Severn, and delouse in Bath.

Staring at the ceiling in the darkness of my mind
hours chiming night is passing slowly life in kind
that song is playing in my head I have to get away
lost upon the dark and lonely road of yesterday

Quiet footsteps on the street our lives we lead in shadow
soon pools of lamplight drown my guide celestial glow
a chained dog barks as thunder's distant rumble play
walking down the dark and lonely road of yesterday

The city now left far behind by thorn and wind and tree
senses sharp, blind nature screams through silence, cold and free
a wild dog's howl, the rain drives down, new world here to stay
is washing clean the dark and lonely road of yesterday

I wander on as distant ocean sleeps with gentle snore
the crescent moon on painted sea, horizon to the shore
a spray of diamonds overhead, a hiss and sigh of tide
a taste of tears is on the wind, a new day born inside
where sea meets land and nightmares stray
I've left the dark and lonely road of yesterday

Staring at the ceiling since the journey there's been born
a hope that marks the hours till the coming of the dawn
the morning star has risen on the day that's yet begun
to guide me to tomorrow's road and hope's bright morning sun

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Speed or Weed

June 15, 2006

Based on the somewhat limited statistical sample that is my community I would have to say that those individuals to whom a suck on a bong is a good time have no love for double kick drumming. In fact the likelihood of a person to prefer speed metal (S) to anything else (E) seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of dope (d) they consumed in a former life. Therefore S = dEk where the adjustment to the constant of proportionality (k) is incredibly small (unless you live in Finland or Japan) due actual popularity of speed metal being miniscule. I'm not saying that music has to have a tempo above 300 to be interesting - I know of several dirges that are groovey to get down to. In 878 Ubbe, the brother of the well known berserker Ivar the Boneless, landed with Halfdan at Combwich with 23 ships and 1200 men and beseiged the english force under Ealdorman Odda in the fort on Cannington Hill. They were pretty smug about it until the Thanes piled out of the fort, attacking them at dawn thus winning a great victory. Brings a whole new meaning to the non Danish truism, early to bed, early to rise... So much for Alfred the Great.

Taff and Lach are getting heavily into Age of Empires 3 which has managed to get a lot prettier and complicated without losing the game flow. I made the mistake of racing around Tokyo for twenty minutes in Midnight Club 2, and promptly felt ill for the next several hours. That hasn't happened since I got to the last few stages of Need For Speed Porsche testdriver gameplay a few years back - I hope it doesn't mean I will have to spectate only when we get PGR3 at xmas. My lovely better half has just started that calorific decrease exercise increase thing which means it's time to start making cakes and slices again. And cheesecakes. And chocolate mousse. Maybe only every second night.

1p Pocket

June 16, 2006

Two 1800 finishes in a row is almost a declaration of war. I have calmed down somewhat following a burnout icecream and a 200g block of Nestle Fruit and Almond chocolate. Found a Larry Adler compilation in a $10 bargain bin which is cool - the boy is the original mouth organ virtuoso. I would transfer the album to my ipod except that I don't actually like any of the songs. Paul Wigmore has done many things including working for Kodak as a medical radiographer and haematology lab technician, but more recently is involved with the annual Edington music festival. Edington is also known for the battle that took place there in 878 where Alfred the Great defeated the Danes under Guthrum the Old King of Danelaw. Keryn is 29/40 now and Andrew thought I was joshing about legs11 being a double cousin to our kids. It turns out that when a pair of siblings marry another sibling pair the result is double. When identical twins marry siblings the offspring are triple cousins, and when two identical twin sets marry the result would be quadruple first cousins. That's less total unique genetic material than in the whole of Tasmania.

I ask myself why I have started to collect pocket watches. I am yet to answer. They have only cost 1p each so far (not counting several score pounds postage) and are completely pointless, but it's either that or to drink copious amounts of pepsi max and vodka which I know would have dire consequences.

A Sunday

June 18, 2006

A day filled with several hours of: 1. sleep, 2. skyping with Dazza from Washington, 3. chatting with Dad in chilly east gippsland, 4. no call backs, and 5. threshold shifting on mostly Finnish speed metal. Just what every sunday ought to be. Apparently Norse tourists to Britain a millenia ago were either invaders or raiders. The former were just house hunting for a less frozen place to hang their horned helmets, and the latter offshore shopping. Bradwell Nuclear Power Station in Essex shut down at easter after 40 years operation. It's just down the road from Maldon, a town on the Blackwater estuary where on 10 August 991 during the reign of Ethelred the Unready the Anglo-Saxons, led by Byrhtnoth and his theigns, fought against a Viking invasion, a battle which ended in defeat. They local were outnumbered at least 5 to 1, and were mostly farmers, and got walloped by Olaf Trygvasson and his four thousand odd wild-haired, dirty savages.

Am about to see if Valentino Rossi can whip the field again in tonights Catalan Grand Prix. It's sort of a combination of boring and awesome to watch him race - still, there is less than 0.8sec over the first ten on the grid. There's hope for a close race - go Casey.

A Monday

June 19, 2006

What a race! Please note: the use of the word 'what' indicates the following. What happened in the first corner? What is going on in Casey's head? What can anyone do to stop Rossi? What is Hayden doing at the top of the table? What is it about umbrella girls and their midriffs? Mi ne man^gas viandon, fi^sa^jon, ova^jon, a~u lakta^jon as Rimmer would say, but then again, he is a hologram. It is completely unfair to couple Duran Duran to the new romantic 1980's phenomenon which was similar to that of glam rock during the early 1970s, in that (male) new romantics dressed in effeminate clothing, often with frilly "fop" shirts, and wore cosmetics. They were never like that, surely. Another new wave group was Iron Maiden, leader of the new wave of british heavy metal, where the wave obviously referred to hair styles. They differed only in that 99% of the DD audience were squealing 13yr girls, whilst 99% of IM headbangers were 17yr white anglosaxon black studded leather wearing occultic boys. The 1% overlap was anyone who listened to the puncy failed punker Adam Ant.

More importantly we now discover that the most amazing event during september in 1066 was not Harold Godwinson's double forced marches, not the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England which is generally considered to mark the end of the Viking era, not the Battle of Hastings where after knocking off Harald Hardråde, Harold got himself killed by William of Normandy, but was in fact the unknown Viking who single handedly held the Stamford Bridge thus delaying the approaching English long enough so that Harald Hardråde and his men had time to get their armour on and form into a circle on high ground. The big dude was finally brought down by a spear from underneath the bridge. When will we learn the lesson here and do away with one lane bridges?

Democracy

June 20, 2006

Have just finished two really cool books: The Life and Times of the Telescope, by Fred Watson, and Heisenberg Probably Slept Here: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Physicists of the 20th Century, by Richard P. Brennan. One thing these books didn't agree on was the personality of Sir Isaac Newton: prat or just semi-pratt? I reckon I've read five hundred books so far this millenium and these two were the most enjoyable since The Last Man on the Moon, by Eugene Cernan and Don Davis, that I borrowed off Fraser last millenium.

Between May 1264 and August 1265 England was effectively ruled by Simon de Montfort after he captured his brother in law Henry III at the battle of Lewes. Henry was forced to sign the Provisions of Oxford, a document at least as important as the Magna Carta - forcing the crown to recognise the rights and powers of parliament. Because of this, de Montfort is today regarded as one of the progenitors of modern democracy. He died at the Battle of Evesham after being welshed by his welsh army, his death in an ambush marking the end of the age of chivalry in England. Until this time, the nobility were rarely killed in battle, more often taken prisoner and ransomed. Under the command of Prince Edward, however, no quarter was given to the baronial rebels—most were killed on the battlefield, including Simon de Montfort and his son Henry, despite attempts to surrender. I have never felt that way about my brother in law. My boss maybe.

A day off

June 21, 2006

Today was a do nothing day, so I went and bought a Bugatti Veyron. The cost to size ratio of this particular vehicle is 30k times better than the one that Jeremy drove, although at 1/64 scale it has less leg room. To be consistant on this do mothing day, I also didn't weed the vege garden but did receive two fob watches from hongkong with genuine japanese quartz movement and 100% gold lookalike finish. One has a horsehead on it, presumably ex caligula, and the other a generic old motorcycle, probably an indian. Will keep an eye on them to see how well they keep time - am intending to christmaspresentalise them, probably in late december. In an attempt to diagnose the right front steering clunk in my 121, I raided the bootwell and found in place of the carjack was an illdefined blob of rust. For some reason fifteen years of sitting in water in a leaky bootwell rendered it's mechanism somewhat suboptimal functionally. So I bought a trolly jack, lifted car, took off wheel, tightened everything in sight, replaced wheel, didn't kill myself or even lose any digits in the process.

In 2002, when Duran Duran were reintroducing the world to 80's gay anthems (not that there's anything wrong with that), Iron Maiden had also reassembled it's original 80's lineup and was performing to crowds of 250k in places like Rio. I bought the Rock in Rio concert DVD and was pleased to notice that the crowd was made up of 99% 17yr old latin american black studded leather-wearing occultic boys. The remaining 1% have never even heard of Gary Glitter. I've also discovered that when you are doing a search for Duran Duran using google images - you MUST have the content filtering on...
Quick DD quiz: Which line in "Band Aid 1984" did Simon sing solo?
A. It's Christmas time, there's no need to be afraid.
B. It's hard but when you're having fun.
C. And in our world of plenty, we get to spread a smile of joy
D. Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you.

Midnight Anger

June 23, 2006

They've shortened Assen by a km and bikes are still doing the ninepin thing. I think I'll go for the other yellow bike this time - Colin Edwards, unless Casey can stay on the black stuff til the end. I have discovered I have an extra holiday fortnight booked for later this year . I think I booked it last year with the intention of returning to Oran Park for the V8s again, but I couldn't face those grandstands two years running so we'll go north instead. The question is where? Will have to research small QLD coastal towns with houses to rent on the beach within half a dozen hours of BNE. Trouble with the sunshine state is that it's too bloody big. Makes driving from Lismore to Melbourne seem easy. I can feel a bit of googling coming on.

The dust and smoke swirled about the shattered fortress
a barrage of fire and lightning had torn down it's defences
now the gate was broken, the wall strewn back into the town

for five centuries had stone and flesh withstood the evil
that freedom bought with our father's courage and blood
now just an open door to welcome oblivion

the twelve in black move through the carnage
an icy terror goes before them like a bow wave
towards the undefended tower, called on by the helm

The dust and smoke swirled about the shattered fortress
amongst the fallen a shadow arises, sword drawn, head bowed
in silver, standing for the tower, alone before the twelve

no contest
pulled back by the magic to defend
the head rises, the eyes glow red, he who made the helm
is a trifle peeved at what them blackcloak buggers did to his castle on the beach front

from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Bikes Again

June 24, 2006

On average, there is one atom of radon in 1000 000 000 000 000 000 000 molecules of air. Radon sits periodically at number 86, so much for averages - I'll let you know when I hit Fermium. Tonight there is a good chance that a motogp will be taken out by a non Italian for the first time since... can't remember back that far. Now, the chances of the Canadian F1GP going to a non german non spaniard is? Petrol heading aside, I presume the soccer world thing is still going on over in schumiland - Australia may have even scored a try or two.

Newspaper reports that Australians are going wild in Stuttgart does have historical precedence. On this day in 1374 a sudden outbreak of St. John's Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion. It will all end in tears.

Exchange of Life

June 25, 2006

Sometimes the speedster inside us all hangs up it's racing gloves. Sometimes we exchange two wheels for four, and other times we downsize from big japanese sports bike to italian scooter. These are sad times but not unreversable. Not speaking for myself of course - I can't see a ZZR gracing my garage any decade soon, but I don't have the same parking issues and fuel costs as Michael does.

I seem to have a bike theme happening recently. Was rooting (in the yank sense) for Hayden at Assen as he is the only one that can take the title off Rossi, but it wasn't cool to see Edwards slam the wall at the final corner... The Troy and Troy show saw Troy win one, and the two Troys crashing on average one and a half times to allow Pitt to claim his first win in two. So much for SBK - if only Hayden had the same points lead as Bayliss - but then again he hasn't won the last eight straight.

Crumpet

June 27, 2006

Bugger of a night at work. Had three different computer systems go down whilst casualty was packed to the rafters. But I didn't have to go to theatre and I escaped at midnight and am not on call until the morning whereafter I will be for five weeks straight. Am anticipating a savage flare up in shoulder/neck and elbow arthralgia but will not mix my drugs again - not matter how desperate I get. Jen's family arrive wednesday and stay until sunday on business, and from sunday and for the following month my Dad will stay for fun... Someone at work said that Australia were out of the world cup thing - better luck next time - as soon as it's over Top Gear may come back, hurrah! Google translates the german below to:
Application error. Try to reconnect.

Got the garden weeded before Chris arrives but the back bank looks a bit wild. The vege garden had three to four foot weeds all over but as the soil was moist I was able to clear it quite quickly revealing some very healthy looking celery, rhubarb, eggplant, chilli, and cherry tomatoes. The peas, beans, cucumbers and (companion) marigolds had all disappeared as expected so I have a few biggish areas to replant - am not sure what yet. It's well into the wee hours and even these two hot crumpets with honey aren't supplying any vegetative inspiration.

The Artist formerly

June 28, 2006

Work news: 1. It's under sad circumstances but it will be nice to welcome K4 back to our department. 2. We have the Envisor up and running but as the only sonographer around for the next month and a half, is it going to save me any time? 3. There is still an impasse regarding the mapping of our skill niche's to the new award - don't hold your breath. 4. I still haven't received my mechanical semi skeleton fob watch. Ok so that's not strickly work related but it's important to me.

The warrior code known as Chivalry, the medieval institution of knighthood as practised in warfare, went down the gurgler forever on 26 August 1346 in the Battle of Crécy. Using the bodkin arrow to penetrate armor, and the traditional longbow to take down horses leaving the knights floundering about on foot, the men of Edward III steamrolled the french army of Philip VI although initially outnumbered 3 to 1. Knights on horseback were no longer the undefeatable legends they once had been. At 16 years of age, the Black Prince (formerly known as Edward of Woodstock) had begun his brilliant and rather brutal military career. Interestingly, Woodstock Bourbon and Cola is sold in a black can and is, like the prince, rather harsh on the lower classes of society.

Musique terrible de fromage

June 29, 2006

Managed to see Cars finally - was actually really good. I admit to being a little bit of a nascar fan and that sport's in-jokes were quite well done. The tractors were cows and the even the bees buzzing around the flowers had four wheels. Nearly everything Paul Newman is involved with turns out well. On a non-cars note: Richard Cheese is a very clever, very relaxed and very ugly musical concept. I did like the covers of Motley Crue and U2 but it's a wee bit too teeth grinding (in the same way as Faulty Towers and Some Mothers Do 'ave 'em) to make it onto my ipod. I am still waiting to hear the new album though. Only two and a half weeks til Mr Clarkson, the Hampster and Captain Slow return!

I has just occured to me how acclimatised I've become after 15 years on the NSW north coast. We only have six weeks of real winter, and it doesn't ever get that cold (it's never frosted at our place) but total astronomy excursions have now become a quick five minutes with binoculars every second night, and I'm sure the telescope has grown cobwebs. Oh spring where art thou?

Watch

June 30, 2006

The second ultrasound machine has indeed taken a bunch of pressure off the IU22. The nurses have done the duck to water thing and even the ologists haven't seem to mind the self driving. We just need to get a purpose built room for it, and the staffing - but it's a good start. The chances of us getting getting another 3 FTEs in the short term seems to be about 90% - but most of my life is spent in the zone of the other 10%. So it's been curry and rice with samosas and mint yogurt chutney followed by lachy's blueberry muffins whilst watching the heritic swingers and listenening to Dean having an electric footbath. Better than an evening in the gutter in paradise valley.

Got me watch. The one in the June 16 pic. Mmmm pocket watches. It goes tic. I feel this is better than something that goes ping. There are way too many things at work that go ping. I have now inescapably commenced 5 weeks continuous oncall wherewithin I am pretty much stuck being within 20 minutes range of the basic edifice. I therefore feel a large degree of envy of number 6 whose nthqld jaunts this week have taken him somewhat further than the corner shops. 91.

May 2006

2008-12-21T17:23:00.000-08:00

Wisdom

May 1, 2006

We all live and learn. We all grow daily, and some of us have been growing wisdom teeth for decades. But all good things must eventually end, and today Jennie went under the oral knife and lost four such molars. She looks a wee bit like she's done seven rounds with a baseball bat under an ice packed face sling... Nurofen is a wonderful thing.

We now have all of series six and seven of Top Gear, and are working on series two. Series five is playing each week on SBS TV which takes some stress off the budgeting of my monthly 10Gb over practical interneting and clarksonian entertainment. The kids scored a couple of wee (sub $50, 256mb, 50 songs) mp3 players called i-Bulldogs today, and I'm much annoyed by the fact that they have better display screens that my i-pod... Who said apple had it all... A further worry is that both kids put David Allen Coe's, Beer Is Good For You song into their collections!

More Wisdom

May 2, 2006

Anaesthetic induced insomnia and several dozen wisdom teethectomy blogs later, Jennie decided on sleeping upright and used alternating sides ice packing all night. This morning she look brilliant with basically no swelling and reduced need for pain killers. School went ahead as usual with maybe just a little less talking (not due to frost bite of her cheeks) from the home school teacher than usual!

A comment on the net seen yesterday (whilst researching wisdom teeth) suggested that the Pentagon building in Washington had twice as many toilets as it would seem to need. This appeared to be a strange type of military contingency measure but upon further investigation it turns out that the building was designed with racial segregation in mind. Maybe it was designed before Abraham Lincoln... Bravus related a interesting story story is his blog about living in the same apartment as a Canadian soldier killed by US friendly fire.

Happy Birthday Lachy

May 3, 2006

A Decade has swept by since we moved into our current house, and that same decade has separated me from my riding days. Most importantly, the same decade has seen Lachy join us and grow up to a ten candle chocolate brownie birthday cake. Since when did scalectrix cars have 4WD? I think the wee girls enjoyed the occasion as much as Lach, and are already discussing what presents they are going to get for Taffy's birthday next month. On the blog front, Taff has started her own, (Taffy Orca) which she will try to update more often than Andrew and Keryn, whose blog hasn't grown much at all...

Identified comet 73P/SW3-C again last night in Hercules. In a couple of days time I am hoping to spot 73P/SW3 fragment B as it crosses a degrees or so east of M13. By Sunday fragment C should just above Vega in Lyre and growing brighter each successive night until the 15th where it should peak at nearly mag 4 - unfortunately the moon won't be helping then. One of my 4inch newts has bitten the dust - had a rough run in with the wee girlies, a bike, several hammers, and half an ounce of semtex. I don't think the concept of collimation is applicable to that telescope anymore. Just as well I had two newts spare... They did only cost $40 on ebay.

Our Lady of Fire

May 4, 2006

Found a couple of DVDs in a bargan bin at my local supermarket. They were cheap but still pushed me beyond my shopping budget. Eighties flicks they were, remembered for their soundtracks by Vangelis and Alan Parsons. The kids enjoyed them greatly, maybe the vaguely factual even more than the fantasy. They also took Jennie's mind off her healing gums!

Off to Royal Brisbane Kids Hospital in the morning so Genna can have her calf muscles punctured with a botox needle or two. Will be a long day mainly due to the Brisbane eta and etd coinciding with rush hour. Am hoping to catch up with Fraser over the middle of the day, all going well with Genna. I think he is back from a week of galavanting round the state on a mission of ionising mercy. I hope it doesn't rain on Mr Pip as he guards the balcony...

A Bitumen Day

May 5, 2006

The road is part of life's theatre. The joy and wonder of valley mist carressed by the dawning sun. The anger summoned by that 85kmph car in the transit lane. The justice of the soft tail hog, that cut us off on the Captain Cook bridge at twice the speed limit, under a taxi a kilometer later. Ahhh, bitumen. The day wasn't boring - never had time to listen to more than two ipod tracks in any of the five waiting rooms as we visited the gait lab, cp ward, admissions, preop, and orthotics measuring. Genna was first cab off the rank at 1300 and recovered from the anaesthetic fast enough so we managed to hit the road by 1500 ahead of the friday arvo briswegian southern migration.

This week has unzipped the empty body bags of what has become a soapified Beaconsfield media gold mine. The two miners who are still one kilometer underground awaiting rescue have likened their ordeal to that most horrid product of popular voyeurism - big brother. Should they emerge they will be both lucky and tv celebrities.

Quiet

May 6, 2006

The day has been. So was the night. Perhaps the attaction of astronomy is the silence. One slowly acquires a familiarity with the heavens in binocular sized chunks and the noise associated with popular constellation culture fades to black. The family enacted a social visitation halfway to the tasman sea, and I minded the phone. Again. Was shocked awake from a journey into Kamelot's Epica to call upon an IV drug user's thrombosed channel to nirvana only to find an empty bed. No change in outcome for either of us. Did a bit of cavalry radiography to cover Alex's OT 2hr ORIF by a reg unsupported by the VMO soup of the day.

Predator. Tree shapes under a black sky, tree shadows stretched by moonlight on midnight sparkling snow. An impossibly atonal vista contrasted against the blazing colour of fear. Deeper into the ice, into the panic, and into reserves' last strength, breath steam flooding the heavens, a beacon for the blind. Blackness split with a howling, the drawn out scream of the wild, soul pierced and hope shattered face down. Surrender to self and the unseen. Prey.
from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Again

May 11, 2006

This week. The miners escaped and became rich, good on them. Schumi won with a spectacular pit pass, Ferrari have some cluey strategists. Troy won and Troy came second, again. Crossed the ten gig limit again, and again was only throttled to to a quarter, rather than a twentieth - have therefore decided not to abandon the BP ship. Discovered Pretty Maids, Zeelion, and Beyond Temptation, the jury's still out. D/Led Top Gear 08x01 - way cool except for the SiaRPC is no longer a Suzuki, but do like the dog though even if it does allegedly vomit on James. Couldn't find comet 73P/SW3-C at all this week, but found fragment 73P/SW3-B a degree or so east of Vega very easily - so much for the ability to predict comet mags! I reckon frag C has dropped well below 7th at the time it should have been 4thish.

Genna seems to be showing no signs of systemic weakness one week post botox - the reduction in dose seems to have done the trick. Jennie has continued to recover well from the quad wisdomectomy, but is not quite up to chewing on gravel yet - so I had better hold off from making scones for at least another week... Lachy and I played with the xbox360 in Hardlynormals this morning whilst the Suzuki was being serviced and decided that we would be getting one for xmas along with PGR, but that we wouldn't mention this fact within Fraser's hearing...

Not a Sniff

May 14, 2006

Banana's at $10/kg make for nervous cake making, or at least make it more likely that I will drown out the oven timer with somewhat wican Within Temptation at metallic volumes in order to overcook said cake by 55 minutes. Tasted OK provided it was drowned with custard. The brocilli quiche on the other hand didn't handle being contrusted with sweet puff pastry quite as well. Have nearly collected all of Top Gear season four - will have by midnight tonight. BP have restricted the broadband shaping to a mild asthma attack at about 50kb/sec, i.e. somewhere between a third and a quarter of the pre 10gb bandwidth. I'm liking these BP people more all the time.

The oft heeded flood has turned black again
but for that time's tide may drive us insane
an earliest ebb rises numb from the feet
saps heart, head and bone of all lover's heat
in the hearth of the soul glows integrity's fire
who's foundations are lies and illicit desire
never glance back, nor look to the side
not dwelling on evil, or those who have died
there's always a beast, a horror in dreams
the power of self comes apart at the seams
from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Lap 58

May 15, 2006

We have just seen a wee bit of history - the first spanish driver to win a home GP, and Alonso did it by driving the wheels off the Renault. I haven't worked out what he hopes to achieve by switching teams next year - a bit reminiscent of Schumi leaving Benetton after 1995. Still, as far as a sport spectacle goes it wasn't that riveting - the only pass other than under blue flag was schumi going from 2nd to 4th and back to 2nd on lap 58 courtesy of a timing glitch. Other than that - it rained on us as we wandered the streets waiting for our tyres to get rotated, but we did find the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy TV series that the BBC put out in the early 80's on DVD to match the original radio series downloaded via bittorrent over the weekend. We finished the set by buying the book as well. Maybe later on this year we'll check out the new movie, but they'll ruin it for sure...

Just noticed the new top gear (08x02) has become available on the torrent - yippee, I know what we're watching tonight!

Concerning Illness

May 16, 2006

Al gave me some delicious dog poison today - a large bar of cadbury's dark chocolate... I'm sure Pippin could (and would if given the smallest wiff of a chance) consume the entire bar in a few minutes, and be dead the following morning. This from Wiki:
In sufficient amounts, the theobromine found in chocolate is toxic to animals such as horses, dogs, parrots, voles, and cats (kittens especially) because they are unable to metabolise the chemical effectively. If they are fed chocolate, the theobromine will remain in their bloodstream for up to 20 hours, and these animals may experience epileptic seizures, heart attacks, internal bleeding, and eventually death. Medical treatment involves inducing vomiting within two hours of ingestion, or contacting a veterinarian. A typical 20-kilogram dog will normally experience great intestinal distress after eating fewer than 240 grams of milk chocolate, but will not necessarily experience bradycardia or tachycardia unless it eats at least a half a kilogram of milk chocolate. Dark chocolate has 2 to 5 times more theobromine and thus is more dangerous to dogs.
Pippin, a 4kg mini dachy, conservatively needs eat only a fifth (8 squares) to risk death. What we need is a warning sign on the wrapping written in smallreddoggish.

William, re: your cyclical depression, I know you don't believe there is a solution... You've got to believe it's out there stalking you, that part of your mind which isn't happy unless you're not. It's very clever you know, has a three pronged attack, a trident of evil.
Prong one:
remove the problems, the symptoms, the anxiety, the wariness of further attack - the calm of self reliance.
Prong two:
reintroduce obsessing. Lightly at first, until it's a habit, then pile on the darkness. You will recognise the changes in yourself - those blacks moods, gutaches, low energy, motivation, inspiration - you stop painting and tennis is replaced by MTV.
Prong three:
utilise the resulting anger and depression to unforgive the forgiven and assassinate the characters of the obsessees.
The barbs of the trident make escape from this mindstate a matter of finding the motivation to both reforgive the objects of hate, and breaking the hate habit. This becomes a circular struggle where success comes by halves and failures on the whole, as forgiveness is a form of self integrity - once compromised, always fragile, often doubted.
The solution:
1. recognise obsessing and form the 'I will drop this train of thought because...' habit that we discussed.
2. believe in your own power of forgiveness as an absolute - it is this belief that makes it so.
3. concentrate on the pain as a personal construct, and deny that it's cause is external. Give it two to four weeks - habits are hard to break.
Remember - you are in control of your mind and you will always be as happy as you choose to be; those choices most important are the ones being made every minute of every day.
Habits - they come in two flavours.
from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Way Up North

May 17, 2006

My brother Anthony is in the midst of a month of nurse practionering in remote (that's most of it...) Northern Territory. The first couple of weeks were at the Numbulwar clinic, about 400km east of Katherine on the Rose river on the gulf - a community of about 880 not including crocs and water buffalo. Then he flew over to Croker Island, about 200km NE of Darwin on the east side of Coburg Peninsula in the Arafura sea. This island has a pop of about 360 and a new multimillion dollar clinic to service those residents who survive the water buffalo, sea eagles, taipans, and crocodiles. Just hearing about it is all the adventure I need for a while...

We are going to catch up with Antoinette this weekend for her 21st birthday. She will drag herself away from studying for her 2nd yr mid term medical exams to hack up a birthday cake... Ellie and John, as well as great nana from NZ will attend along with all us usual suspects. The party has outgrown Phoogs place so will move to Jennie's parents house so we are able to not just move around, but be able to breathe in simultaneously...

Way Down South

May 20, 2006

Off for some family fun. Was alarmclocked at 0430, packed and out by 0530, and arrived in the Hunter Valley by 1300. Very little roadworks, lots of speed cameras, and mostly happy children - except when the audio CD of Thomas the Tank Engine got a bit scary for Genna. We've mentioned to the little ones that we may go to the Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo next week, and so they have put their orders in for the types of animals they wish to see most. Bella is very keen on Zebras, Guanacos, Tapirs, Hippos, Galapagos Tortoise and Tigers, whereas Genna wants to see a rabbit . I have therefore made a point of showing her Fraser's western Qld picture showing a sign which says: 'max $30 000 fine if you keep a rabbit' She now thinks they are very valuable... The 'max' bit does put me to wondering what Fraser's GPS 'top speed' actually was? Oh yes, the images of the old Philips all in one xray unit were really cool - did it do tomography I wonder?

Our little Pip is currently in a dog motel/diet farm. The last two trips away saw him lose much weight, but this time he actually needs to. If we're fortunate we should reach the stage of being able to 'feel his ribcage, but not see his ribs' rather than the current not being able to feel them... Had a fun day today playing with a gaggle of old laptops and introducing Phoogs to the bandwidth wasting oppurtunities of bit torrent, internet radio, and google video. Driving back home after dark in Lorna's old 323 saw me drive straight accross a stop sign intersection because of an instant fogging windscreen. I missed the large truck by alot more than 15 meters, but all the same...

Party Hard

May 22, 2006

Was dragged out of bed before breakfast yesterday by Lachy to play squash up on the timeless college campus, before people got seroius about partying. Having spent the last 36 hours with an upset stomach caused by some fizzy lemon butter, my low blood sugar state wasn't exactly enhanced by the exercise. Taff had a productive morning inflating enough balloons to render the house festive. The crowds for Antoinettes 21st party started rolling up around midday, with the girl herself arriving during a brief non study window of opportunity only to promptly lock her keys in her car. Turns out small Hyundi's are sucesptible to the standard coat hanger afterall. The baker of the cake had the bright idea to surround it with sparklers rather than candles, and between being lit and the end of the usual birthday songs, the firealarms had gone off, half the party had passed out from smoke inhalation and the cake was covered with a fine layer of toxic ash. The younger attendees will think twice before they consider turning twenty-one in the hunter valley.

Today we played a bit of backyard cricket, downloaded the next topgear episode, visited the local shopping center (mmm bookshops...) and spent an hour at a swimming complex - mostly going round in circles with the little girls in the whirlpool. After a lovely dinner cooked by Nan we will probably retire early. Maybe 2 or 3 a.m.

Party's Over

May 24, 2006

Ethanol free housesitting at it's best. Cooranbong is such a wonderful place, dark skies, warm evenings, fond memories. Trying to cook in someone else's kitchen is always fun also - 'where's the pepper?, the salt?, the oven trays? the shotgun?' The older kids have been exercising the innards of an ancient playstation with spyro, and the twins have been stretching the cpu of a celeron 300A with Playschool. I haven't been so lucky. Had lunch yesterday with Great Nana who returns to NZ tomorrow in time for her 90th birthday. A bit of a novelty having four generations of the one family arguing in the one room at the one time. Have been unable to solve Foog's vaio screen problem - a greyish semitransparent vertical 7cm strip that slowly creeps down the left 2nd fifth of the display after an hour of use - doesn't reset with cold booting, or res changes, and needs at least two hours of offness to go away. ?screen ram, ?static, ?thermal, ?jupiter moving through libra. On a serious note, Top Gear appears to be having an identity crisis this year - during series eight they seem to have become an offshoot of junkyard wars... having said that, it still represents the best torrentable entertainment on the net!

The goddess of desire dwells beyond twilight
that crest of darkness over the poisoned well of my heart
in a wonderland whose rain fell within scarlet revelation
there lies a ring of fire, an autumnblaze under the crimson moon

A silent cry before the hunter's dawn
drawn towards the brutal truth
beyond the edge of sanity lies only devastation
an evergrey portal to a jester's funeral

The iron maiden holds no innocent victim
just the god forsaken cardinal sin
There is no escape from mortal treason
no piledriver masterplan from the scent of flesh
from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

A pointless poem composed entirely from metal group names - not sure if I could write 'light and fluffy' prose from that list... but what the heck, I'll give it a go another day.

A Great Escape

May 28, 2006

Fern, Bonnie and Clyde have escaped to north qld crocodile land, Ant has escaped frontier Croker Is back to Buldah, Great Nana, Nana and Poppy have escaped to Auckland for a few weeks, and we have escaped soul destroying Cooranbong and got to Casula at last. Had a lovely catch up with Arthur and Margaret, and then explored the new but expensive M2/M7 Sydney crossway - which has turned the trip from northlands to Liverpool into a pleasure cruise. Nan and Pop took the talkative tennessee twins whale watching off Port Stephens and although none of them donned bikinis and 'rode the boom net' they did get to see a bunch of delphinus delphi doing what dolphins do, at least on top of the water.

Scored a new non apple mp3 player, so have officially also escaped the nightmare than is itunes. Roozie is attempting to trawl ebay for a similar device and pay about a quarter of what I did - not counting the $100 postage from hongkong. Tomorrow we're off to the capital for a few days of 'I want to go home now' from the little twins, and a 'when can you install AOE3?' from Lachy. Taff's had a fun time I think so far, so long as we find a heated swimming pool every so often.

Capital Idea

May 29, 2006

Fairwelled Roozell and Koh (and legs11) at 0800 and headed down the Hume against the traffic to Goulburn to breakfast at the bigM. Goulburn is so dry you could set fire to the district just by sneezing. The kids enjoyed the view from the eyeballs of the Big Marino, then we all froze in the downtown kids park even in direct sunshine. The local rail museum was of course closed. Thence followed the short hike down to Canberra and straight to Cockington Green which the blurb described as a:
...delightful and fascinating display of meticulously crafted miniature buildings set within beautifully landscaped gardens...
and it was just that good. The gardens, cafe, and giftshop were cool but best of all was the wee engine - from the blurb again:
One of the most popular attractions of Cockington Green Gardens is the Miniature Steam Train Ride. The train was specially made for Cockington Green Gardens and is a half size replica of a Fowler Cane Loco and operates on a 12” gauge track with a drive configuration of 0-4-0. Originally fuelled by coal, the mini steam train was converted to run on gas and is believed to be the only one of its kind.
Our accomodation was a caban in a caravan park in the north of Canberra - tiny but warm, and the little girls enjoyed their bottom bunks - sleeping in with the BIG kids!

Next morning we hit the Questacon for a few hours. Taff and Lach braved the 6 meter freefall, Genna frequented the phosphur shadowscreen and Bella splashed about in the troughs of the MiniQ room. At one stage Lachy was stopped by another lad who recognised him from the pictures in last weeks Northern Star newspaper! After lunch at the Q we wandered over to the National Gallery so Jennie could view the Constable exhibition. I had a run in with a security dude so I sat in front of Blue Poles and sulked for the duration. The wee girlies survived the gallery with no more than 10 - 20 "I want to go home" wails per painting. We returned to our cabin via the Telstra Tower which was really fun - the kids showed no signs of acrophobia and only mild signs of hypothermia. Further sulking that night was due to the rail museum being shut (so what's new?), and the Canberra Planetarium being booked out - bummer, maybe next time.

Home on the Range

May 31, 2006

A lazy start to wednesday saw us check out of Canberra and head up to Yass, Young and onto Forbes via the Henry Lawson Way. A few feeding and stretching breaks saw us on the Newell h'way to Dubbo via the Parkes Radio Telescope . This was awesome, and for me the hightlight of my holiday fortnight. An incredible bit of gear with a brilliant info area and bookshop... We could see the real time guidance computer displays as it was doing it's tracking thing. The sundials in the observatory grounds were about five minutes slow though... We got to Dubbo about dark, and found a lovely Pizza restaurant before returning to our significantly cheaper AND nicer than Canberra motel.

Thursday morning we got to the Dubbo Western Plains Zoo about 10 oclock and survived Taff and Lach's driving around the 6km circuit to see all the animals. Genna started the "I want to go home" after the black rhino area, which was in the first 100 meters... Bella got to see her Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Deer, Elephants, and Hippos, and Genna got to see her rabbit (we nearly ran over it on our second circuit). The giftshop saw us adopt another eight soft tigers. I decided against a night session in the Dubbo observatory as it was bloody freezing and I want to keep all twenty of my toes and fingers. Jennie did set a world record for herself - she visited a second-hand bookshop that same afternoon, and didn't buy anything!

April 2006

2008-12-21T17:20:00.000-08:00

Life's a beach

April 1, 2006

A beautiful afternoon at a very low tide lighthouse beach - it felt like there was 1000 acres of sand exposed. There was a good baitfish run happening as evidenced by the gulls, terns and jumbo jet pelicans, along with an occasional dolphin glimpse. The kids and I struggled against the 2 knot north flowing rip, but enjoyed the perfect water temp and the lack of river flood silt in the water (now that the rains have eased off).

I have been so looking forward to the twins fourth birthday that I had forgotten about my own b'day the next day. That's way cool - I have been trying most of the last twenty years to have the day drift past un-noticed... What a pity the twins weren't born 24 hours later! BTW the church sign generator is here.

The Chemistry has gone

April 2, 2006

Nana arrived today from Sydney to stay with us for the twin's birthday week. I scored a pot of NZ honey which is a better birthday present than most I can think of. The Third Test in Johannesburg appears to be heading for a draw (hopefully) as SA start day four at 1 for 42. Brett Lee got 64 at nearly a run a ball - the boy's a wonder. At the urging of the older kids I downloaded Ice Age 2 via bit torrent (doubtless several months before we buy the DVD for real) and 1.5 Gb later it turned out to be Ice Age 2, the PC game... I don't want to go through the bandwidth strangle from bigpond again like we did for half of march so they can wait til later on this month. Used up a few bananas in a cake this evening, but varied it by adding a third cup of coconut, rolled oats, golden syrup and a cup of vanilla soyamilk and sultanas. Cooked it much slower (about 130) for an hour or so. Tis very nice hot from the oven, and I don't think it will survive long enough to be iced.

Whereas my cooking is more like alchemy, I have finished plotting the nobel chemistry prize award delays as the above graph indicates. The overall average delay was the same as medicine: 14 years, (see march 3 and 27) but the average for the last couple of decades is the lowest so far. The longest delays were a pair of 40 year awards in '68 and '97 - similar to medicine. The record is 55 years for the 1986 physics award to Ernst Ruska for the first electron microscope in 1933 (which was shared with Ruska by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer for the 1981 invention of the scanning tunneling microscope). If I'm suitably bored this week I may do the same for the peace prize.

Potestatem obscuri lateris nescis

April 3, 2006

One of those days. Trying not to get annoyed by multitudinous small things like, unable to find operating system discs to rebuild friends system, finding the oven was turned off 5 minutes into the one hour cooking time of a birthday cake, windows and doors constantly left open admitting flies and letting out air-con, lack of sleep due to brainless call backs to work, several pointless spam phonecalls... Fixed mood with an hour of Kick Axe and Bruce Dickinson at a volume level high enough to kill flies, rattle windows, close doors, drown out the phone, reinstall windows, and recook the cake forlornly sitting on the kitchen bench.

We know that Bilbo had the occasional bad hair day, but was he ever head of an ancient universal religion? Never underestimate the power of the internet (for misinformation). South Africa have regained the ascendency in the dead rubber test for the fifth day's play. The most annoying thing to happen today was Tony Stewart beating Jeff Gordon at Martinsville Speedway this morning - the top ten on the points table looks good though, Jimmy Johnson's on top. Tony deserved the win, even if he is a complete git, he had the best car today. Marcos Ambrose qualified 20th but got tangled up on lap 150 in the truck race in his first race at a bullring, and finished 33rd after spending 50 laps in the pits getting his nose fixed - some points is better than no points.

4 x 4

April 4, 2006

The fourth of the fourth has arrived and the new four year olds were up at quarter to six find their birthday presents. I had arrived home from work after midnight to find the lounge decked out with streamers and balloons - so I blew up another forty or so to add to the mess... The wee girls spent the morning in their party hats playing Bob the Builder - Knights of Cannalot on Lach's PC, whilst the older kids did their morning maths, science and latin also in party hats. I managed to crawl out of bed in time to ice and decorate the two heart shaped cakes (baked yesterday - white chocolate mud cake for Bella, and dark choc for Genna) and make a batch of choc chip muffins for the park party with the Nakasakis (it being Jumpei's birthday also) which we will ice and candle again just for fun.

The funeral for Pro Hart was today - a wonderfully colourful outback artist whom the media treated as trendy and eccentric up until he opted to support Pauline Hanson whenceforth he was ignored. Trevor Hohns quit as chairman of Australia's cricket selectors today just as the dead final Sth African test moves into it's final day. Australia are attempting to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with just 44 runs needed on the last day after losing 4 for 39 in the last session to be on 6 for 248.

Retro Computer Thoughts III

April 5, 2006

Some time in late '87 I jumped into the 16 bit revolution. The Amiga 500 ran used Motorola MC 68000 cpu which ran at 7.1MHz and had three coprocessors named Agnus (MMU), Denise (video), Paula (Sound & I/O). It had 512kb of ram, 256 rom with AmigaOs 1.2, 4 voice 8 bit PCM sound, and could graphically handle 320x256 (32 colours) to 640x512 (15 colours). I ran it through a Philips 1084S stereo sound monitor, and remember than sometime during it's first year the 3.5" floppies dropped to $1 each... My two favourite games would have been Ports of Call, and Soccer Manager. I didn't do as much programming on it as the Amstrad, mainly because it had better games

Halfway through my second Peter Tremayne book in the Sister Fidelma series, I must admit I'm starting to warm to the character a little. She is a seventh century celtic church sleuth in the style of Ellis Peter's Cadfael series of medeval whodunnits, but unlike Cadfael, Fidelma couldn't hide in a crowd. Tremayne brings us a world where eyes suddenly widen, there is the sharp hiss of breath in the throat, and mouths stutter as they realize they are being interrogated by one not simply a religieuse, but a qualified dalaigh, and the sister of the King of Muman. She is tall in stature and intellect, quick to laughter and anger, rides and fights (occasionally) superbly, is brave and lovable, and I can't remember what her hair colour is. She was born (AD 636, Cashell) into an wildly unspoiled Ireland little influenced by the Rome of the day, where women have perfect equality in all areas of government, church, industry and society, where priests (male and female) were not forced into celibacy, there was no confessional, and saturday was the sabbath. Each book is a wee study of Irish history, in a nice way.

Home Again

April 5, 2006

My Dad has made it back home after his coronary bipass surgery. He's not exactly outside swinging an axe or even playing his saxophone yet, but he's back. If we're lucky he'll be up this way to stay a month or so by late june. We will all attempt to keep him on the dietary straight and narrow (that's not "straight to the fridge, and narrowly missing the veges as he reaches for the corned beef" either) until it becomes habitual. I have got hold of the new album by Sonata Arctica, a Finnish power metal band (sort of melodic speed metal with better vocals), called For the Sake of Revenge. They have a typical european metal sound (I don't mean bad english) with non-growly vocals, mostly positive feel lyrics, and are really cool even if they do use keyboards...

Aussie won the third test in SA. That Lee bloke again. Now that Pojmanski has spluttered into the darkness, another comet appears in the early morning sky. Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann with it's orbital period of 5.4 years is back scooting from Bootes to Hercules during April. Interestingly it broke up into a dozen or so bits back in '95 and the fragments to look for are labeled B and C and should be naked eye (6.4' coma) and binocular targets (4.7' coma) respectively. Am hoping for clearish (totally clear would be too much to ask for) skies also to follow Venus track past Uranus just above Mercury in the predawn hour towards the middle of the month, on the NE horizon within Aquarius, and also see the lunar occultations of spica and antares. Fat chance.

Cashews and Olives

April 7, 2006

So, was the milky bar kid actually an evil genius as Fraser suggested? If so then white chocolate is actually BAD. There are several sides to this argument, but the only one that matters is this: the kids still go to sleep on time when the eat white choc. Now we know that chocolate is derived from cacao beans and contains the flavonoids epicatechin and gallic acid, which are antioxidants that help protect blood vessels (by slowing the oxidation of LDL cholesterol thus reducing atherosclerosis), promote cardiac health, prevent cancer and to counteract mild hypertension. These positive effects appear only with dark (no milk added) varities, and seem to be negated in milk or white chocolate consumption. So white chocolate basically contains just the fat extract from the cocao beans (cocoa butter) of which two-thirds comes in the forms of a saturated fat called stearic acid. No health benefits, no theobromine, nothing - not even toxic to small red dogs. Evil git. Still, the kids are asleep. I'll just stick to cashews and pepper stuffed olives.

According to Wiki, "...line dancing used to have a cowboy image, and it was danced predominantly to country-western music... but today, country music may make up the minority of a DJ's play list, with the balance spread through a variety of many different musical styles both new and old. Genres including Celtic, Swing, Pop, Rock, Big Band, Folk, and almost anything else that has a regular beat." (the things you find when you hit 'Random Article'). I was just thinking of them dudes in their leather calf high boots needing resuscitation after getting down at a speed metal concert.

What about God?

April 8, 2006

Have been thinking (after reading Bravus' blog 8 April 2006) about literal creationism and the extent to which we can trust a bible handed down through multiple languages, cultures and ages. There was a certain university lecturer in hebrew who invariably started each year with the statement: "Gentlemen, this is the language that God spoke". Undeniably we can claim that God speaks every language, and indeed understands all thought, every intricacy of society, and even advance in scientific and philosophical endeavor that man has and will ever manage. To the One who spoke the universe into existance, death is impotent and love is everything. Could He have created the world in six literal days? Could He have directed the writing of His book AND taken care of it's integrity of meaning and instruction throughout the ages, cultures and translation from one language to another? If so then we can reliably direct our lives from it's messages, if He didn't, then of course christianity is all meaningless. About itself, in King James english, the bible says:
2 Peter 1:21 For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness

I appended the above as a comment on Bravus' blog today. Another lovely afternoon at lighthouse beach. Water temp perfect, undercurrent vicious, sandcastle huge, no sharks. The sun set on us at the top of the tide and we drove home westward into an autumn sky - shepherds are happy.

Old Bikes

April 9, 2006

Happy birthday Bravus! Life, the universe, and all that stuff. It was ten years ago this week that I became a non-biker. It's not often in one's life that your ZZR1100C becomes a deposit on a house. I was hoping it wouldn't sell... put it on commission in a back street bikeshop and some mongrel rode in on a mid 70's CB750 with a wooden big end bearing, and rode out on my bike into late summer thunderstorm and didn't stop till he was home in Cairns. I got licenced on a Honda CM250 custom (a plastic Harley according to Greg) and rode it until I got a real job irradiating real people and then turned it into a Honda VT250F2D for the remaining six months of my provisional licence. The day my P's disappeared I rode a Kawasaki 750 Turbo into a rainy Newcastle winters night and chased Andy's 240Z all the way home via Freemans Waterhole. Eight years and some 120kkm later it became a Kwaka ZZR1100C which gave me all the adrenaline I needed until that horrible day a decade ago...

We popped down to Lismore airport at 0800 and Nana jumped on a REX SAAB and propped back to Sydney. Just like that. Except for the fact that the port engine wouldn't start. So everyone got off again. They did send another plane at 1030, but only half of them could fit on, so Nana waited until 1300 in the riveting terminal entertained by yesterdays newspaper. She let us know that they were finally underway whilst walking out onto the apron - we hope she then turned her mobile off or the engine won't start again...

What about God again?

April 10, 2006

So why are there so many gods, so many religions, so many different bibles? Is there but one God, who has a one true church, with direction and correction revealed through one inspired work, or is that culturally selfish and egocentric? Maybe true spiritual enlightenment is achieved only in the acceptance of the validity of all forms of worship, and the rejection of the notion of any (including oneself) having a monopoly on the revealed will of God. Thus there are as many 'stories' of the origin of the universe and mankind as there are tribes, generations and meatpies at a boxing day test at the MCG. Accepting and absorbing such diversity would still leave you short of spiritual perfection were you to ignore the presence of those aspiritual, who have no-one to trust, to blame, or to worship save the tower of their own intellect. All of these considerations are missing one key element, a most important element on earth - the principalities and powers behind the darkness of heart, the misinformation, duplicity, and counterfeiting of truth. What's the best place to hide a book? In a library.

Have started our new work roster with sixteen days of u/s call. The laws of the coming and going forth have been laid down after much discussion of the group of one, and yea verily extreme grouchiness follows all who question or query thereon. Picked up three albums tonight: Queensryche - Operation Mindcrime, The Darkness - Permission to Land, and The Darkness - One Way Ticket to Hell and Back. Will give them a week or so before I decide if they're my kind of music. Have made a start on a birthday book: The Practical Australian Gardener by Peter Cundall, the former australian communist party member and self proclaimed nude gardener (in Tasmania!). Excellent bedtime reading.

Obituary for a stranger

April 13, 2006

He drifted into vision one face among hundreds swirling round my street cafe table anchorage. As familiar as a face gets on a stranger, eyes squinting against the public glare, unshaven and driving forward lowered left shoulder first. Gothic horror t-shirt under a high collared fifties leather jacket over black jeans and bare feet, searching need creased over the face. A head taller than the crowd, a sudden panic - he was looking for me and I dared not bare my soul and share. My vision buried down in the nearness of apple juice and shredded wholewheat righteousness refocused on those still feet at my table. Prickling heat of shame at cowardness dragged my sight upward to a face of loss and sadness directed over my head and over the street. I blinked and he vanished. Someone had let him down, I had let myself down.
from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal

Has it been raining? No. Has it been cloudy? No. Has it been foggier than a nuclear med scan? Yes - every morning for the last week... I have it on hearsay that mecury, uranus and venus are in a spectatularly small area of pre dawn sky on the eastern horizon. Bloody fog. Good Things of the week: Interesting test match v Bangladesh. Bad Petrolhead Things of the weekend: Rossi, Alonso, and Tony Stewart won. It will be interesting as to the outcome of the P.M. being summond to the judicial commission about his knowledge of the AWB Iraq kickbacks, although it may all just disappear in smoke and mirrors.

Another Sabbath

April 15, 2006

Family out and about, and I'm home keeping company with the phone. My services were required this morning at the base for the discernment of secret women's business, nothing urgent, just piece of mind. Have dug out some old musical memories - Alan Parsons Project. A quarter of a century later these songs have the ability to dig out feelings, images, and faces that otherwise I could never disinter. I have a theory about music. It will never gain the power of memory recreation if you never let it go - if Peter Paul and Mary, or Pink Floyd remains your standard diet for these many decades then they lose temporal clarity like a camera shutter left open too long - things blur. But how horrible is that: no variety, no spice. Another way to knacker the deja vu ability of the eighth cranial nerve is to overload those memory associations with numbers. Be a new music freak with catholic tastes, priding yourself on an enormous and everchanging range of self bombarded audio drivel. But neither the saturation nor insatiation methods are foolproof - there will always be one song that can trigger that trip back down memory lane, or nightmare alley.

It's the 17th annual east coast international blues and roots music festival - Bluesfest 2006 at red devil park, Byron Bay this easter weekend. That's why it's gonna rain. It ain't blues without mud. Just ask Kate.

Little Green Leaf that Genna gave me

April 20, 2006

It's about 2cm long, 1cm wide, dark green on top and light green underneath with six ribs and overall I'd say it was lemon shaped. I think Genna has a photographic memory, maybe all kids do, but I've been trying her's out on Bob the Builder Trivia. Not just what colour are Scoop and Lofty, but Wendy's hat, Bob's shoes etc and each time she just gazes at nothing, defocuses and check her memory - she actually has to have a look to answer the questions. It works with Thomas the tank engine (Edward, Henry, Gordon, James, Percy, Toby etc) and Postman Pat, Blinky Bill... Cool, I wish I could do it. The gang are away at a dinner and talk evening at Alstonville, and I'm at home minding the phone as usual. Am now eleven days late sending the radiation TLDs back... Can only give Russell so much time.

The blues festival last week - they had 200mm fall on them overnight! That's biblical rainfall! - I wasn't actually trying to be prophetic last week :-) Australia won the Bangladesh test series and Dizzy got a double ton. A bit amazing that. Thought I saw some comet fragments last night, but tonight I'm not totally sure I even found Corona Borealis. Also I have missed two clear mornings by over sleeping the pre dawn pale by half an hour. I think Uranus it going to be blown away by Venus if I get to see them tomorrow morning, they'll be too close. So who's Joan Miro? Going through some music in my collection sent me to Dark Lyrics to work out what the hell Atreyu, Trivium, Sonata Arctica, Korpiklaani, Hawkwind, and Evergrey were actually singing. A large portion of the songs appear to be demonic first person commentaries on being stuck on earth, and how pathetic humans are. And they are forever quoting the bible, and always the King James version. Maybe it's just the genre formula. Or maybe not.

Tricycle Bella and I Am Did It Genna

April 22, 2006

The dark age that Taff and Lach feared most has arrived. Competition from the twins. These last weeks have seen an almost complete transition by the wee girls from TV and videos to PC games, which leaves the older kids with less than two PCs between them. Sometimes two less than two. Tonight Jennie has gone off to support a revelation seminar and for the first time in history Genna opted to stay home with Dad. I have a feeling that a certain Bob the Builder PC game may have swayed her decision, either that or the anzac biscuits and lamingtons. Bella has had a tricycle now for at least two days and has nearly worn out one set of tyres, not to mention a circuit in the concreteon the driveway and under the veranda... We spent the afternoon at the Perindenya skatepark in the hope that Bella would sufficiently deplete her energy so as to give us a quieter evening, but she still managed another half hour on three wheels after we got home!

My recent metal fossickings have turned up two further groups I had never heard. Dream Theatre from the US and Stratovarius from Finland. I am afraid that once again I find US metal doesn't grab me like the European stuff. Have collected most of Sonata Arctica's stuff now and will be buying their soon to be released live DVD. Dream Theatre are technically excellent and very creative etc and deservedly have a big following, but maybe you had to be there from the beginning... Stratovarius almost fit the NWOBHM sound that Iron Maiden, Saxon, Motorhead etc created. An interesting thing I found: the first few lines of Sonata Arctica - Black Sheep from their live album For The Sake Of Revenge are supposed to read:
In love with the maiden, The flower of winter
Lowbrow children, in grove of the inland
How many times heart's gone thru the grinder
Wherever you look there's a painful reminder

but to my ear the start of the song actually sounds something like:
We're not Iron Maiden, we're not from England
We're Sonata Arctica, we're from Finland...

The things you hear... am up to 94% on my broadband 10Gb limit again. aaaarrrggghhhh!

Petrolhead Day

April 23, 2006

Lachy has set up a slotcar track in the lounge and styled it after the PIR which the nascar boys are thundering round on the TV at present. They are on lap 158 of 312 as I type this, but unfortunately at 1300 we will be switching over to the real V8s who are hooning this weekend at Pukekohe, using the foolish reverse grid thing in race two of three. That should be over by 1700 which gives us enough time to make dinner before the Troy and Troy show hits the Valencia round of SBK and keeps us sniffing digital petrol fumes until 0100 ish. Somewhere in there I will try and see if Schumi can convert his record 66th pole position into a win at Imola, the same track where the previous record holder Ayrton Senna achieved his 65th pole the day before he died, 12 years ago.

Found the Achilles heel (actually the bit of the tendon about 4cm above the insertion into the calcanium where Thetis grasped the infant Achilles and hence the Styx never got to, rather than the heel itself) of Genna's memory. If a given subject appears out of normal uniform she starts jabbering blended tertiary colours faster than a rainbow on a wasp nest. Only seven days till I get some download space again...

Cry Babies

April 24, 2006

We are all a bit buggy at present - nothing dramatic, just puffy eyes, sneezes and bad late 90s graphics on NFS2SE. Taff stayed up with me last night for the first half of the San Marino F1 race because she couldn't sleep with what to her sounded like a bunch of babies crying. The developers of these 2.4L V8, 750bhp @ 19000rpm engines would be proud to know they need a nappy change. Mind you, in a sport where in order to pass an opponent under brakes, you need to have at least 20% better braking performance (i.e. to make up 2 car lengths from the 80m board at 250kmph) which doesn't happen even vaguely often with first vs 20th, so they have blue flag rules which cause the tailenders to leave the track, climb out of their cars, put down a red carpet, offer light refreshments, and wave placards imploring the front runners to pass them before they are fined out of the sport. Schumi was 4 sec a lap slower than Alonso, but couldn't be passed. In fact the only passing that ever occurs is in the pits. Exciting, wooohooo. That's why F1 fans don't like Nascar - imagine a sport where passing occurs in the thousands per race, rather than three times in one's career? Enough to need a nappy change. The Troy and Troy show was good in SBK. Troy won.

Someone at work today annouced that an all conquering antibiotic had been isolated from goat's milk. Excellent. It won't be long before GMRSA joins the growing list of multi-resistant organisms. Doing a Wiki search on it uncovered (indirectly) Robyn Williams comparison of Wiki and Britannica. The former has 8 times the articles and only a comparable number of errors. Long live Wiki. Williams also covered the response to an early april article in the BMJ about disappearing teaspoons in the workplace:
Then there’s the spoon version of osmotic pressure ...
‘The greater the number of spoons collected in one locale,
the greater the observable increase in spoonification.
A flow of spoons from high density spooniquaries to
regions low in spoon density.’
We have the same problem with pens at our hospital and have decided to respond in a similar fashion to this walking stapler reaction:
‘While I repeatedly lost a stapler marked in an inconspicuous manner
(later recovered each time in a distant common room),
that same stapler was never moved again once I marked it for
all to see with a simple and subtle deterrent message:
‘This is my third stapler in six months. Be advised of this;
if you take my stapler I will hunt you down and kill you.’

ANZAC Day

April 25, 2006

My Grandfather was at Gallipoli, was on the beach April 25, 1915 with the New Zealand Field Artillery. According to Wiki, a full 10% of the New Zealand population (then just under 1 million) served overseas during World War I, and New Zealand had the highest casualty and death rate per capita of any country involved in the war. I arose before dawn as is my recent habit, and observed the planetary parade until the paling of the sky - a sort of private ANZAC march. Saw an interesting ABC TV program this week on that 1915 conflict, Revealing Gallipoli (ABC program .doc file here) attempted to retell the story from both the Turkish and ANZAC points of view. Did so very well. The Turkish died in a ratio of 2:1 to the invaders. Winston Churchill's good idea, not.

Spent the day oncall, but have only been bothered once, an incoming polyhydramniotic tide secret womens business thing. Helped Taff and Jen write an article for the local paper on home schooling from Taff's viewpoint. Not sure if I helped, more confused than anything. Got hold of two new metal albums: Kamelot - Epica, and Nightwish - Oceanborn. Like them both, even if Kamelot is American, and Nightwish can only be described as opera metal... Only five days till end of bigpond strangle.

Victim of Advertising

April 26, 2006

Have been troubled recently with the recurrance of specific (rather crippling) athralgias and myalgias - returning for the fourth time in as many years. A fortunate 'Archimedes" eureka moment (i.e. 1st person singular perfect indicative active of the Greek verb heuriskein, meaning "to find"; it means "I have found it!", or more accurately, "I am in a state of having found it".) led me to connect these occurances to my sometime obsessive relationship with Pepsi Max and more recently Coke Zero. As deliberately confirmed by self experiment in the last fortnight, there was something in these drinks that flare the symptoms within 24 hours of consuming, which then became progressively worse with continued use to the point of incapacitation, and then disappear within a few days of ceasing consumption. Reading the side of the bottle tonight revealed aspartame:
"...the name (Wiki) for an artificial, non-carbohydrate sweetener,
aspartyl-phenylalanine-1-methyl ester; i.e., the methyl ester
of the dipeptide of the amino acids aspartic acid and phenylalanine.
It is marketed under a number of trademark names, such as NutraSweet and Equal."
A simple google further Jennie found from the 321recipes web site:
An impressive, but unexpected, finding in an analysis of complaints associated with aspartame, a sweetener currently being consumed by over 100 million persons in the United States, was troublesome joint pain.
This turns out to be only the tip of a large block of glacially separated floating oceanic cold white stuff that penguins live on and very large boats collided with in 1912. So you probably all already knew this, but I feel both more of, and less of, a complete dill now that I have found out...

For my next personal learning adventure I will explore the relationship between diet, antioxidants, leptin and angiogenesis, but I will make that white chocolate mudcake first in case I never want to again. Genna is now powering around on the tricycle as well (this reasonably tolerated by Bella) and almost has the concept of steering down pat. Was pleased to discover that rhubarb takes more than one season to take off properly - I had expected it to grow similarly to spinach and was about to rip it out after six months of dawdling... I'll develop a green thumb if I stick at it for the next forty years.

Herbal Remedy

April 28, 2006

Tonight is our For Convenience Mother's Day because the real date is less that helpful due to factors beyond our control. Said occasion marked by the presentation of a mother's size tea set of the fine china, african violet decorated type, four matching mugs, and a mega-calorific slab of Guylian twists. Today is also my cousin Julie's birthday - happy thirty something Jules. (brief intermission as phone rings...) Telemarketers should be hung, drawn and halved twice. At least the last one was from within this continent. Definitively located fragment C of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann just the east edge of Corona Borealis the last two nights - it will apparently improve from 9th mag to nearly 5th by mid May. I will try and follow it each night as it swings through Hercules, Lyra, Vulpecula, Pegasus and on to Pisces.

My own private and very subjective rating system for (new to me) bands I have explored in the last six months based on quality/power/vitality/inventiveness of: vocals, drums, bass, lead/solo, lyrics, best track, overall album appeal. Four marks in seven categories giving a max score of 28. As I trawl ebay and other areas for further albums, the scores may change, and instrumental only groups are not penalised for no vocals/lyrics with a zero. Some examples using two groups I have been following fairly consistantly for the last 25 years are:
Iron Maiden - British - heavy metal - 4.4.4.4.4.4.4 = 28.
(I agree with Bravus - they ARE classical...)
ACDC -Australian - hard rock - 3.3.3.4.3.4.4 = 24
*******
Sonata Arctica - Finland - power / symphonic metal - 4.4.3.3.3.4.4. = 25
Helloween - Germany - power / speed metal - 2.2.3.2.2.3.2 = 16
Nightwish - Finland - symphonic / opera metal - 3.2.2.3.4.4.4 = 23
Epica - Holland - symphonic / death metal grunty - 2.2.1.2.2.3.2 = 14
Apocalyptica - Finland - classical / wierd cello metal - 1.1.1.1.1.1.1 = 7
Atreyu - USA - punk / hardcore metal - 1.3.2.3.2.3.3 = 17
Hawkwind - Britain - space rock - 1.2.1.2.2.1.1 = 10
Dream Theatre - USA - prog metal - 2.3.3.3.3.2.3 = 19
Kamelot - USA - power metal - 3.2.2.3.3.3.2 = 18
Kick Axe - Canada - hard rock - 3.3.3.4.3.4.3 = 23
Kittie - Canada - punk metal - 1.2.2.3.1.2.1 = 12
Korpiklaani - Finland - folk metal - 2.3.2.2.3.3.3 = 18
Opeth - Sweden - prog death metal - 2.3.4.4.3.3.2 = 21
Rammstein - Germany - industrial / dance metal - 2.2.2.2.1.2.2 = 13
Russian Circles - USA - instrumental rock - 1.2.1.2.1.2.1 = 10
Stratovarius - Finland - power metal - 3.3.4.3.3.4.3 = 23
The Darkness - Britain - glam rock - 2.3.4.3.3.4.3 = 22
Trivium - USA - hardcore / thrash metal = 1.4.3.4.3.4.3 = 22
Dragonforce - Britain - power metal = 3.3.3.3.4.3.3 = 22
Powerquest - Britain - melodic / power metal = 2.3.2.3.3.3.2 = 18
Bond - Aust/UK - crossover classical quartet - 1.1.2.2.1.2.1 = 10
You wanted to know that.

Comets again

April 29, 2006

Another marvelous april day. SS and church was Geoff Youlden doing his thing on health and baptism. Eyeballed Paul and Vanessa's new bub for the first time - very cute. Used Jennie's PDA to follow the bible texts and flip over to Pocket Stars when it got a bit boring to plan out my viewing attack on comet 73P/SW3-C as it drifts into Hercules. Lunch was a black bean and honey tofu noodle stirfry mainly because I forgot to make anything else yesterday. Leaving 29degC at home we went back along the well beaten track to lighthouse beach where we found a cold (maybe 22degC) northeasterly breeze and chop for surf with the sun behind clouds more than not. I was forced to build a two and a half tonne sandcastle to work up enough of a sweat (or until the twins let me stop) to brave the water, only to find the Tasman sea wonderfully warm. Isobel must have run her electric window up and down twenty times on the return trip in order to maximally annoy her evaporatively cooled brother in the third row. It worked.

Ian and Jane came by this evening and dropped off five episodes of Flying Heavy Metal. Way cool. Dickinson tells the story of Jet airliner history starting from the De Havilland Comet. I watched the first episode tonight only, resisting the urge to watch the lot. I want to spread them over this week to enjoy them properly. Took delivery of three Dragonforce albums - speed metal with great vocals, lyrics, superb guitar and definitely enough velocity on the skins. Taff utilized the new teapot again tonight with an orange brew, which normally gives me extraordinary technicolour dreams - we'll see. Exceeded my 10Gb limit about last midnight and appear to have been throttled back to 40kb/s, which is a great improvement on last month's 6kb/s. Not sure why... maybe degree of throttling is relative to point in month where limit is reached, or maybe utorrent is just clever :-)

March 2006

2008-12-21T17:17:00.000-08:00

Noel, Nobel

March 3, 2006

Well, christmas is now a distant memory. Work continues to suck as usual, but at least my better half actually enjoys her allotted time at the hospital coalface. I find the positive effect of her good spirit still echoing in peoples attitudes as my days follow hers. Makes my job a little more pleasant. My good friend David dropped by for a caffeine free night and jittered off earlish the following dawn in search of a Briswegian campus and some maccas coffee. Was marvelous to catch up again, however briefly, and we look forward to having them as nearly (two hours away) neighbours by mid winter.

Did some reading (no, really) on the nobel net site about the physics awards given over the last century. It is quite scary to see that science as a religion has evolved even more dramatically over that timespan than our hospital's OH+S policies. I graphed the length of time between each scientist's 'discovery' and the actual awarding of the prize with the decade means included. Someone had to do it. There could be some observant people that may notice a few negative spikes on the graph. Scary, isn't it? There are at least two possible explainations for this: Some awards were given ten years prospectively so that the prize money would help the discoveries happen; or maybe there was no awards given that year and minus ten looks more distinctive on the graph than instant peer appreciation.

Growing

March 7, 2006

Am not sure if the recently replanted vege garden is growing or drowning... We are averaging nearly 2 inches of rain each day. There is a low pressure system booked into a longstay campsite off the coast of Brisbane giving us consistant easterly wind and rain. On the bright side, I won't have to wash the 121. I have tried companion planting this time with alternating rows of peas and beans interspersed with marigolds. I've also scattered a few cucumbers, celery, and cherry tomatoes about the place. The eggplants, chillies and capsicums are still producing from last time, so it's a rather haphazard patch.

A net search turned up a gem: the Glenreagh Mountain Railway. 'Betty' is a fully restored Z19 (A93 class) engine, number 1919, built in 1878 and still working in the early 1970's. The guys at GMR have a grand project to restore part (Glenreagh to Ulong) of the Glenreagh-Dorrigo branch line which operated from 1924 to the mid 70's. 1919 worked on the Glenreagh-Dorrigo line from 1953-8, and as interesting for us, on the Lismore-Ballina branch line from 1894 - 1933. It runs one or two weekends a month over it's (currently) 2km or so of track - I am intending to both join up with the GMR association, and visit them one dry sunday (they are about 2hrs sth of us) as my roster allows...

Get Wet

March 10, 2006

Long, long ago, in a valley far away, we used to get phonecalls at unearthly sunday morning hours that always greeted us with 'Is that Get Wet?'. As the novelty wore off we became fairly haiku in our responses:
Pleasant dreams
become sunday grapes of wrath
splashing a hunter wine.
Many years later we discovered the concept of a financial goal : kill the credit card before we put in a pool. Now the pool is for Genna's physiotherapy of course, the rest of us would hardly use it past nine to ten months of the year. Has to be at least 8x4m, ingound, fibreglass, and as deep as possible. Need to get the quote before they discover that the backyard is composed of a 3cm soil horizon over unfathomible granite.

We seem to have come to the end of two weeks of constant rain. Our town river reached moderate flood levels twice (no threat to the controversial levee wall), and I didn't have to water the vege garden for sixteen days straight.
Welcome Autumn!

Cubbys and Camp-ins

March 12, 2006

After visiting the Nakasaki's home for Misa's birthday party on sabbath I have decided what to do with the approx 200 meters of used decking stored under the new balcony. There was a real cool cubbyhouse built from lengths of decking sized timber, 20 to 40 pieces each of one, two, three and four slot lengths, with each length having the slots 20cm apart. I have enough timber (and JUST enough skill) to do the same but include 5 slot lengths as well. I will vary the design by increasing the interslot distance to 30cm, and rather than strip the (horrible) cream paint off them - will colour code paint each piece to length. After a search just now, have found the same thing on the net, called 'builder boards', doesn't appear to be rocket science. Ahh, you have to have projects.

Since buying a copy of VB.net academic, I seem to have had no time to start programming. It is a huge leap from VB6, especially in graphics, and seems to have C blended into it somehow. Found a couple of cheapish books on ebay - must make the time to get into it. Looks like we will be having a few 'campouts in the lounge' this week as my darling is working 2 til midnights this week for the first time in years. We usually bring a couple of spare matresses up to the TV room and eat chips and chocolate whilst watching foxsports or discovery channel. I hope she doesn't expect the older kids to be asleep when she rocks back in during the wee hours...

Genes and Genre

March 13, 2006

There comes a time in our lives when the need to gather together all those pearls of wisdom that both created and now define what we are, becomes an absolute driving mission. The desire to begin a process of codifying the distilled wisdom of a lifetimes journeying over that rugged landscape, where pleasure and pain milestone a foot printed trail traversing this planet scarred by billions of other unique tracks. I don't feel this need. But I did collect a bunch of notes penned by others who have walked this earth, and thought about stuff more deeply than I. Having spent some time doing the a family tree / genealogy thing, I find myself being disturbed more often (as opposed to becoming hardened against) by each entry that has only b.1823 d.1871 with nothing in between. I don't really care what they looked like, or where they lived, or whether they were wigmakers or writers to the signet; but I would love to know what was important to them, what they valued, and whether they ever codified it - even just in the margins of a bible that has long 'f's instead of 's's... Now my family tree contacts in Britain want us to submit some DNA so they can 'connect some branches' of the nearly 1000 yr old tree.

Found a metal band from the early 80's called Kick Axe. Not real metal by todays classifications, more balledistic hard rock, a bit like Deep Purple and ACDC. For me, Iron Maiden defines what metal ought to be - fast rythm, complicated, cohesive and clever. Saxon and Def Leppard appeal to me for the same reason as Kick Axe - they seem to be trying to escape metal back into rock, and achieve this to varying degrees. At the other end of my personal spectrum are Opeth and Moonspell - dark to the point of death - where the need to be occultic tints their act so as to be (for me) unbelievable. A bit like being at a hillsong concert - you get preached at. Opeth, in The Grand Conjuration :
Majesty, Faithful me
Pour yourself, Into me
and Moonspell in Goat On Fire:
Where I Knee unto thee...
Four times one and one are all.
The four crowned Princes of Hell.
are an active, first person sort of music experience, whereas the 80s metal that never grew up (thankfully, neither did I) are more of a book review, you get what they deliver on a plate, not jammed down your throat. I like to skip from band to band, and from genre to genre, and believe what I hear because it's played from the guys, not the act.

Not broken, don't fix it

March 14, 2006

Flavor of the month for the twins is Bob the Builder. Actually, they have been keen on the constructor for several months now after graduating somewhat from Thomas the Tank Engine and Postman Pat (and his non-flat black and white cat, which he did not run over). Found a PC game at officeworks based on the BtB movie, Knights of Canallot, and after informing Genna that is was for (both) their birthday in a fortnight, and getting the lovely Jen (upon returning home from work) to wrap it up securely - Genna has been wandering around the house with it tucked under her arm, saying 'Bob for me' constantly. Maybe she'll wake up tomorrow and forget what's under the wrapping... hopefully.

Have just finished rebuilding a PC for an octargenarian which had lunched one (supposedly the primary boot drive) of it's HDDs and thousands of hours of (non backed up) data was at stake. Same old drill as usual boss. Dead drive was old and small (8gb) and other drives were new and big (200gb) and rebuilt XP onto replacement old drive (6gb) supplied by said person using a combination of sata, pata and raid to get it back where specified. Last check of big data drives showed one to be the actual boot drive, and original problem therefore to be just someone fidling in BIOS... Nothing like wasting a bunch of time for a good cause.

Heart and Soul

March 15, 2006

Beware the Ides of March. Twas twenty years ago today that my preditor and I remet at an otherwise unmemorable party. Twas nineteen years ago today that we found ourselves in a midnight rowboat on Sydney harbour and she said yes to a question I asked. Antistius recorded that Caesar was stabbed a total of twenty-three times, and that his blood splattered the statue of his old enemy Pompey - and that happened on this day also, albeit 2050 years past. I am very glad that she has spent those twenty years on me - we didn't listen to those who soothsayed our demise, and we've had a lot of fun, and hopefully we'll get to have a lot more over the next twenty...

In a few hours time my Dad will be under the knife to the tune of five heart bipasses. His coronary arteries are showing the strain of 76 years of life - the majority of which were spent inhaling tobbaco smoke. They say that an acute myocardial infarct, such as he suffered a fortnight back (to exceed a dozen of such since the early '80s), gives one a sense of impending doom like no other medical condition can, with the exception perhaps of being tied down onto the rails and noting most of the blue sky is already obscured by the steam and smoke of a 4-6-2 A4 Class No 4468 locomotive Mallard approaching at 126mph. He is very positive about it, and as contented as I seen him for a long while. Our prayers are with him.

Success and Failure

March 16, 2006

Well, my Dad spent nearly six hours in theatre and left with only two of the planned four bipasses. The surgeon descibed his heart as a 'mess' of scar tissue from his old infarcts. So the replumming will not be the saviour he was looking for. If he is keen on surviving to his 80th then he had better get a little more serious about his lifestyle - no more homebrand bulk meatpie packs washed down with homebrew. As I write this he is ventilated and paced in Melbourne's St Vincents ICU, Completely unaware of the XVIII Commonwealth Games first day of competition.

Bought cheap and dick-smithy nonHDD DVDR to record a few score hours of games highlights. Am trying to decide what grandad would actually want to see (when he wakes up) other than the pool, the track, and the rugby 7s. It's possible that having seven fox channels to record from actually makes it harder... We have well and truely noted by now that the 'awesome' fox coverage of the games over these seven channels actually includes bugger all live that is of interest. No wonder they broadcast 24/7, they don't have the rights to any live high profile sport, and have to delay it until the wee small hours in case anyone interested is actually still awake. This is almost as good as my 'unlimited' ADSL account that according to the contract blurb 'may throttle back' after the 10gb mark. Earlier today, the very 'byte' moment I reached 10Gb I was 'throttled back' from 150kb/s to 6kb/s and received the appropriate email wrist-slap. Not a throttle so much as a strangle. So after eight years with the telstra provider, I am now officially in the market for another ISP. Such is my disgust.

Fantastic

March 17, 2006

Dad has been extubated and has even croaked (as in, tried to talk - not related to snuffing) on the phone. We will try to set up a five way conference call this evening using the recall x function. Looks like I'll be the silly mug who pays for it... Have decided to fight back at Bigpond by going for a combined d/l u/l high score, despite my bandwidth neck being shaped to conform with that typical of a lynching. Back to reality, the plan is that it will be possible to air ambulance Dad back to Orbost from St Vs for the majority of his convalescence. Will therefore save Ant a 1kkm round trip and Dad six hours in a Tarago. Am not sure, but will probably head south to visit him in late may / june, all else being equal.

Am attacking book four of Terry Goodkind's Richard series, as recommended by Richard. The books occasionally strive for a bit of forensic darkness but otherwise obey the laws of mainstream non soul destroying fantasy. Each book (so far) finishes it's subplots nicely, leaving you to reach for the next in the series with a little more leisure than Robert Jordan's WOT series where nothing is finalised book to book, and one begins the next mid conversion (or braid tug). In Somewhat weightier matters, I appear to have dropped below 85kg completely, a 10kg loss since last August with no apprecible effort on my part. My first thought was neoplastic, but my lady love pointed out that I had decreased to zero my ethanol calorific intake. So that's what a beer gut is...

Completely Balmy

March 18, 2006

So far it is a nice quiet sabbath afternoon, only 3 out of 4 children are squabbling, and the dog is only moderately loopy. Lachy is wondering around with a digital camera exciting the dog to conniptions with it's flash, and Genna is sitting on top of Jen and wriggling just enough to keep her from an afternoon snooze. I am nearing the end of my 10 days off work, and have become quite nocturnal. The last three nights saw my pillow untouched until 0400 as I utilised the novelty of (mostly) cloudless skies. I'm not completely sure I ever found comet Pojmanski - the week or so that it was best for southernhemispherians was a cloud out. I scanned the area from below Altair to the middle of Delphinus (march 10-12, 0515 to dawn fadeout) and should have picked it easily. The seeing wasn't optimal due to waves of fog rolling up from the valley every few minutes but between breakers, something a degree across and about mag 6-6.5 should have popped out in both binocs and 4inch newt. The tail of what I thought was it was very faint, almost imaginary. Am looking forward to next month where easterly before sunrise we will see Uranus near Venus, anda nicely bright Mercury there also. Clouds notwithstanding

Spent the afternoon at Rockey Ck dam which was at 100% and gently overflowing it's wall. The wee girls must have walked (or ran) the whole 2-3 km walk up to the spillway and round the boardwalk. The fact that neither of them had a low blood sugar crisis is due to Jen controlling their high GI snacks pre outing. They were better behaved in church, and ate a better lunch after being offered only low GI snacks mid morning. Got some nice pics I think, including a timer group pic of us all with the camera perched on a wobbly warning sign - will add a few to the collage page later tonight.

Last day of holidays

March 21, 2006

It's the last day of Mum's marathon. Seven shifts in ten days - the kids haven't been that short of mumness for years. The wee girlies have immersed themselves in an old BobtheBuilder game and have taken to pretending that they are each other. A visit to both city libraries and exceeding my card limit by two books has shut them up for the moment. have filled 11 DVDs with CommGames stuff for Dad - bit of a shambles so far, but are getting the hang of it just before the athletics. It's started raining again just in case I had ideas about watering the garden. Have staked the peas and cucumbers, but have left the beans to their own devices. Since the bigpond strangulation at 10gb, I have d/led another 2gb of Top Gear episodes and nearly all of Neverendingstory2, just to stick it up them...

Have decided to modify the builder boards. With make the board slot 20mm instead of 25, and with make the overhang length 75mm instead of 50. Am thinking enviously of a Bunnings circular saw, but am afraid of falling into the 'boy's toys' trap that one hears about so often. It already have a plunge router and an oribital sander that haven't seen much work. What I could do with is a set of clamps.

First day back

March 22, 2006

I knew something was missing in my life for the last 10 days, it's just so good to be back amongst the caring and constructive base employees again. The iu22 ultrasound machine got a software upgrade yesterday so we had fun finding all the bugs in it. Still it's probably more stable than the xbox360 that Fraser is hanging out for... maybe. It's been a week since bigpond cut my bandwidth throat (a near-beheading, like Nearly Headless Nick) and I have managed to d/l a further 5Gb of Top Gear episodes (am d/ling my eighth at present at a whopping 6kb/s) to reach an upyoursbigpond total of 15.1gb. Am trying to crack 20 by the 31st.

Dad is officially air abulancing back to Orbost hospital on friday. He sounded much more his old self again, and has been giving the nurses merry hell. We knew as soon as his sense of humour came back that he was feeling better. It has just started hosing rain again - just as well because the water table had dropped nearly a full inch below ground level, on top of the hills.

It's Official

March 23, 2006

Official news has spread (as opposed to rumours) as to the gravid state of Keryn who is due sometime in august. It was announced to her parents via a flower delivery and to Dad in hospital personally by Andrew who flew down to melbourne today. Keryn's m.i.l. will find out on friday when she comes to visit. On other small matters, Pippin has developed the habit of being on the wrong side of every door, to the point of us considering a name change to rumtum tugger. Amongst the discussions at work about global warming was the statement that the recent north queensland cyclone was the offsprung of uninhibited Co2 emmisions. So we looked into it and found that historically there has been no increase in cyclone activity in a historical comparison of the pre and post fossil fuel age records. The appearance of the denial of this is due to the qld coast becoming a near conurbation.

A real pleasure to see Motrum get his 5000 silver - twas a beatifully run race, he put the pedal down with 3 laps to go and blew everyone away except one dude... Whereas the household name (who's name escapes me) who buldozed the 400 was awarded gold also for his street cred ego...

It's a jungle out there

March 24, 2006

It all started back in about 1999 when I lent my lawnmower to a friend with the intention of not getting it back. It was a lightweight narrow cut 2stroke thing that was OK for our last place but a 2.5 hour migrane causing noisey pain in the butt here. It was sold a few years later in a garage sale, by which time we had been getting a lawn mowing man in for half a decade. He moved his business from residential to council/commercial and we inherited his replacement mower man. The new young man was a chef who left the sydney food scene for his health and sanity and has the habit of not visiting us until the grass reaches one's armpits. We have had a lot of rain recently (it's still hosing down out there at present) and maybe he's a wee bit behind elsewhere, but we now have to issue the children with a GPS when they exit the front door and attach a homing beacon to the dog. We know there is a trampoline and a swingset in the backyard - we just haven't seen them for weeks.

The CommGames medal table is a bit depressing for the kiwis whom have achieved 4g7s13b=24 with two days to go, compared to Aussie with 66g55s51b=174. I would love to know how many 4th place finishes the kiwis have had - I seem to remeber at least 50... Great Britain has as a total of England Scotland Wales Ireland IOM etc of 38g43s46b=127 which would be much improved by combined GB team events such as relays etc. On a different note: am now up to 16.4gb on my post 10gb mission to annoy bigpond.

Say Ahh Nobel

March 27, 2006

The kid's Nana is arriving on sunday to stay for a week and witness the twins turn eight. Actually that's only four each, but it is eight candles - the next nine weeks will see the kids enpac turning from 26 to 30. It's not like they aren't gaining a few useful skills: the older two can contribute to the evening meal by making profiteroles, banana cake, blueberry muffins, chocolate chipe cookies, pavlova, rice pudding. There may be a trend there somewhere, I'll have to study it.

Harking back (Oct 5, 2005) to the discussion with Jen's Dad about the average length of time between a medical discovery and it's recognition via a Nobel prize that arose after observing the twenty year delay in the case of Marshall and Warren's Heliobacter pylori discovery. Like the Physics graph earlier this month, the average has been included per decade. The overall mean is two years less than with physics, 14 vs 16. Turns out that a delay of 20 years in the context of the last two decades is par for the course... Both graphs show a trend of increasing delay from the mid twentieth century to the present.

Retro Computer Thoughts

March 28, 2006

I noticed that the arrival of the newfangled xbox360 bought the RML 380Z (circa 1980) to Fraser's mind. Fair comparison that. Playing round with Jen's pda, a Dell Axim X51v has got me thinking about building PCs way back in the early 90s when a good PC was a 486DX2/66mhz with 16mb ram and 250mb HDD. The pocket pc now runs at 624mhz withs 320mb ram and 1gb storage card. My first computer was a Dick Smith VZ200 from 1983 which died (and was replaced) five times and eventually became a VZ300 by 1985. It was an 8 bit system which used a Z80A cpu, 8kb ram, 8kb ms-basic rom, 2kb video ram. Video res was 9 colours at 32x25 low res ,and 128x64 in high res mode. I can remember paying about $250 for it and $100 more for a 16kb ram expansion module... The VZ300 had double the ram and a bigger keyboard with a real spacebar!

Have managed to break the 20gb barrier before the end of the month... 20.1 as of 1700 today. The twins are very much into painting these days - must consider how we can divert this energy towards the dining room walls that I have been procrastinating about for months. In further technology news, our 2 yr old samsung DVD player died, not a bad run for $90. Will replace in with a $50 one in the hope of getting 3 yrs survival... The lawn is still a jungle - really need to get the man in. On second thoughts, maybe he did come and got lost trying to do the mowing. I'll see if I can spot him using google earth.

Retro Computer Thoughts II

March 30, 2006

Post VZ computers, my 8bit journey continued on into Amstrad country. The CPC464 had a 4MHz Zilog Z80 cpu, 64kb ram, and 16kb video ram which could do 160x200 16 colours, 320x200 4 colours, 640x200 2 colours, all from a total of 27 colours to choose from. They were all shades of green for me though. It used CP/M 2.2 from it's 32kb rom and had built in tape media, used Locomotive Basic and had heaps better sound than the VZs: 3 channels, 8 octaves. I bought it in late '85, and noted it was almost instantly superceded by the 664 with it's built in disc drive - so I stuck with it until the 6128 came out some time in '86. The 6128 had the same cpu, double the ram, a colour screen, and most importantly a 3" built in 2x180kb disk drive. It did me nicely until the day I saw the Amiga 500 in a show window...

According to the self contradictory folk at bigpond :"You are currently on an unlimited plan. You have used 100% of 10Gb". There are wrong. I have actually used 221% of 10Gb and still have 30 hours to push my personal best higher. I now have all of series six of Top Gear, and like it so much that I've ordered a few of the series highlights DVDs from ezydvd along with the 2004 Phantom of the Opera. I even pre ordered the Lion Witch Wardrobe thing just to blow the budget properly. The day wasn't all fun and games though, I got cleaned up by Tiger Woods at pebble beach on Lachy's GBA whilst Taff was Fife lessoning in the Hothouse. The twins carefully coloured between the lines as Dad and Lach jumped from bunker to water traps and muttered at how much the PGA guys cheat.

Good Kind Terry

March 31, 2006

Mr mower man came and went and it hasn't stopped raining since. Once we were able to reach the garden again it was deweeded forthwith revealing a multitude of cucumbers, beans and snowpeas. I don't expect the latter to reach the kitchen as they are too tempting a snack for the outwardly roaming twins. This weekend may (hopefully) be the last that I (and Allan) work in general xray as we are heading into a Naomiless rostered year. Now that is a good thought - I may just have a good weekend afterall...

Am holding my breath as I type here, half expecting the pressure cooker to explode covering the kitchen with vegetable soup. I misplaced the instruction booklet about a decade ago and unlike my dad, don't have a boiler ticket. Have been reading Terry Goodkind's 'Sword of Truth' series which is fine literature and all that, as well as being a clever yarn, but about two thirds through book four I have had to put it down for a few weeks - two thousand pages of the same author in six weeks is a little much. Have started a medieval whodunnit as a change of pace. My final bigpond traffic score is.... (drum roll) 23072.66 Mb. Am looking forward to full bandwidth back again tomorrow so we can skype sydney, brisbane, newcastle, edmonton, washington dc... back to civilisation.

October 2005

2008-12-21T17:16:00.000-08:00

Low Tide

October 2, 2005

Slept in yesterday, as you do on the first day of the second month of spring. The family headed off to church, and I caught up on a few emails. Cooking hasn't been my strongpoint these last couple of days. An experiment with gluten steaks resulted in them breaking up in the broth - caused by one (or more) of the 10 extra ingredients I added to the normally simple equal quantities of gluten flour and water. Then the kids convinced me to ice an otherwise delicious apple and cinnamon cake with chocolate cream icing - result: inedible. Next was the two dozen sausage rolls which I forgot to take out of the oven, and remembered a hour later... Lastly was the lasagna which due to the pressures of a hungry mob, came out of the oven about 10 minutes too soon - taking al dente to extremes. At least the chive scrambled eggs this morning were OK. Maybe I'll just stick to boiling water.

Went back to Ballina beach with the Nagasakis and managed to score a low tide this time. Raided the rock pools for tiddlers and tried to teach Bella how not to catch periwinkles in her net. Still a bit chilly for swimming. Came home via Bulwinkle park successfully tested Hiro's antii-mosquito lemon scented teatree oil spray. Scoffed the last on the pepper/tofu pie and some of the burnt sausage rolls for tea, then Lach and I went shopping, getting home about 10pm. Later T+L and I were spying on Mars, Orion, Taurus and the pleiades as they rose higher in the east. We didn't get to see a brilliant meteor like the other night...

Irony

October 4, 2005

Visited the new Lismore Square shopping center today with T+L, and had a kebab at the same spot Taff and I did 10 years ago when she was one. The extra range of shops and eateries makes a big difference to the usefulness of the place. Having a good software shop is a bonus, whereas having a golden arches booth is an anti-bonus. We found the sequel to Aladdin, but Bionicle 3 isn't out until tomorrow annoyingly. Will wander down to the Square during my lunch then.

We have this game to practise lateral thinking where we challenge each other to think of (within 15 sec) five non standard uses for an everyday object. The kids are quite good at it mostly. I was trying to think of five ways that drinking southern comfort to dampen the symptoms of a UTI was an irony. I can only think of two. Unlike the above picture, I don't think that it involves being a spectator. Chris, Lorna and Dean are here this week, and so far it's been quite cool - the weekend past had led us to expect a progressively hotter week. The valley that we spectate upon was quite foggy during the afternoon, at least that was how the TV weather described it - more like low cloud.

Nobel Prize

October 5, 2005

The awarding of the Medicine Nobel Prize to Marshall and Warren was really cool. Their original theory, the mechanics of how they proved it, and the time span until they were recognised by the Nobel foundation have all been topics of discusion at work. It's interesting that the average elapsed time between a discovery and the Nobel award seems to be about twenty years - enough time to get a good idea of the full ramifications of a particular advance in terms of it's affect on that industry or area. I may do some statistical research into these delays as far as how they apply to physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. I know it's a bit sad, but watch this space...

My personal predator, the tigress of my life, is really a wonderful person. I don't think my feelings for her ever change, but my general attitude towards life and the value I put on my hopes and plans, varies like the tide. I don't think that actually makes me bipolar, or if it does, then the amount of latitude over which I oscillate is not that great.
I have decided to wage a personal war against the catapillars eating my brocilli. There is not so many of them that large boot of vegetable justice shall not come a thumping down. Was pleased to see that the corn righted itself after the wind had blown it all over to 45deg. On the indoor front, the kids have managed to watch Bionicle 3 twice, and Aladdin 2 once since six last night... Square eyes.

Third Standard Deviation

October 6, 2005

It's been an education. The in-laws are here, and the TV is on. We have seen more TV this week than the whole year in total. Lots of interesting stuff - who's been killing the dolphins and coastal small whales in Sth Australia? George dubbya is finally concerned about bird flu... The poms have been planning for said epidemic since before Y2K with inflatable morgues no less. Then there is the Boadicea who was really Boodika, the redhead, uninhibited, freedom fighting warrior queen who bathed in blood, who actually was a roman loving oyster supplier to caesar. She did go over the top a bit later, killing a few score other brito-romans, then got buried under platform eleven king's cross station.

Made a fundamental mistake today - again. Lightning should never strike twice; actually given that the atomospheric static discharge occurs along the local path of least resistance then of course is does, and when it does then at least you should have purchased a good earth strap. Forget my earthing strap today - got bitten by a couple of theatre cases that should normally take ten minutes each - ran to two hours each, that's multiple standard deviations above the norm. And I declined the offer of relief an hour from the end cause I was sure it would only take a few more minutes... My lateness did cause my darling tigress to make dinner - haystacks. I think Lorna asked for it. Maybe even stormclouds have a silver lining.

Cave canem

October 12, 2005

Finished a run of nights - had just about everything in it. Stabbings, burns, crashes, falls, hangings, assaults, fits, and the obligatory handful of punch fractures. Spent more than a few hours sleeping on my feet in theatre, but managed to miss at least 3 fem nails. Babysat students each night which decreased my personal time (i.e. reading). Did some work on the nobel thing, and didn't read enough Cadfael - finding it hard to get started on 'St Peter's Fair'. Video player died so replaced it and rearranged entertainment stack - archived phoogs amp, equaliser and speakers, wonder if he wants them back?

Have now heard back from Fraser, Sharon, and Dazza. The former is a Dad! It has turned out to be an Annus mirabilis for communication. Just goes to show what sending an occasional email will do. All I have to do now is not leave it months before I reply... An investigation for the cause of a lack of hot water was fruitless - will call a sparkie. Did discover the front lawn was literally cover in dog crap - even more than the bindies. Beware of the Dog!

Ill-Made Mute

October 16, 2005

The hot water came right - who knows. A rotten work day caused by two drunk minors and a stolen car. Grandad is arriving in an hour - it's still drizzling so it should be right cheery. We definitely need the rain, and it saves watering the veges.. Am going to investigate a reasonably non toxic way of discouraging the green wrigglers from eating the broccili. Must ask Chris.

Had a collection of about 300 MP3s burnt in y2k ish onto CD that I dredged up only to find that the CDs have corrupted to the point of ill-burnt pointlessness. Will officially take that as a friendly warning re: my 5 year collection of dig photos... I wonder how many people will be caught out by that one. Have started the first trilogy by Cecilia Dart-Thornton - so far so good.

Sixth mobile phone in a decade, first one I don't insure. Seems it had an exchange of body fluids avec une banana deep within Panthera tigris' bag. Panasonic warranty people deemed it a case of 'severe' loss of innocence (water damage).. Got to throw it into the bin (satisfying clang) and bought a different brand from a different shop. New one's better anyway (sniff).

Here be dungeons

October 20, 2005

Have just reached that horrible time of morning - shall I bother hitting the sack, or not. Finished work at midnight, got called back at one for a broken neck, was home by two, called at three for pnuemonia, home by four, called at five for pulm. oedema, home by six, called again at seven for a SBO, and home by eight. The sun's up, the kids are waking and I'll lose the whole day if I crash out now. Maybe a milkshake and a peanut butter/banana sandwich will do for the moment...

Taff and I have developed a Dungeons and Dragons for kids thing, which we call Storyworld. Our characters are called Fletch and Chuke, and maybe one day Lach may appear in a village square somewhere! Found the twenty and twelve sided dice (which periodically run off care off the twins) and have developed our rules of combat and trade. It's a very calm world really. Finished the first Dart-Thornton book - will buy the secound one afterall.

September 2005

2008-12-21T17:13:00.000-08:00

Stars n tripping

September 1, 2005

Back into the grind after our lightning trip south. Spent three days in the Hunter Valley with the in-laws, then three days in Sydney with Koh and Rooz, then three days in far-east Gippsland at Mums, then three days (more importantly, three nights) near Goulburn at the Magellan Observatory, then a night in the Hunter on the way back to the Northern Rivers. About 3500km all up with fuel between 120 and 130 c/l, and getting about 7km/l average in the XL-7... Sydney was cool - spent a relaxing time with Rooz and Phoogs, and went out to see the V8s at Oran Park, where the Fords cleaned up nicely and we didn't get too sunburnt. Down to the farms into during that week to catch Ant's 46th b'day and watch Reuben well and truely shed his 'Captain Crash' reputation (allegedly acquired on FS2004) with a brilliant display of RC flying on five different planes. Had a fun bonfire with Poppie, cooking 'stick damper' in the cold, followed by a savage frost in the morning.

Then onto the observatory to battle the full moon. Zane gave us a neat sky tour with the 18 inch newt, and got up at 0400 to give Roozie and I a peek at Orion and Mars, not to mention being able to argue about the realative beauty of 47 Tuc vs Omega Centauri... One clear night out of three wasn't so bad, and certainly gave us the motivation to return next year (but not in winter, and not during the full moon...). On the morning we left if started to snow quite heavily which was novel for us. Overall fun, but rushed.

Day Trip

September 7, 2005

Went on a trip to the Royal Brisbane Children's Hospital last week to get Genna followed up after her botox treatment. Seeing the other kids there with far more serious problems than hers makes one thankful for our blessings. We escaped out of Brisbane towards the west, and visited a childhood farm near Gatton (you can never really go back - nor would you want to!) and then onto Toowoomba.

A very pretty city, holding only vague eleven year old memories (from the late 70s) and a few buried hangups. Snacked at Macca's and then headed down to Warwick, before turning off down to Kyogle via Killarney. Missed the last hour and a half of scenery as the sun went down on us, but had Venus and Jupiter riding with us brightly in the western sky. A long day for the twins, but they didn't complain and the winding roads didn't result in any shouts for huey. Getting to know Hairy Macleary really well now...

Dog tails

September 17, 2005

Found the dog on the twin's bed last night chewing on anything it could get to. Whacked him on the nose and he bolted (as dogs do) so I ordered him into his crate, and got bitten when I tried to enforce the order with a reaching naked hand. So who's a stupid twit then? Not Mr Pip

Picked said dog up by back of neck (to avoid being bitten again) and carried him to his crate. Ended up with wife leaping out of the bath yelling, and eldest daughter screaming in horror, as I got to the crate, put him (gently, withdrawing hand quickly) in front of it, and let him walk in. This concluded the exercise, and satisfied the damaged ego (which being only 92kg larger than Pip) caused by the unobeyed order. Not that the dog actually understands english, except maybe on chocolate wrappers. So, apparently the family was in terror of me actually causing harm to the poor red puppy - I sulked over that for 24hrs at least.

I tried to cheer myself up by writing a short play about six people I have known since high school - they were the hero, the fool, the ghost, the benchmark, the harlot, and the stranger. I was only ever in love with one of them... Followed an hour of live Iron Maiden at window shaking volume, with an hour of Beethoven's ninth at milder power settings. Did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen only because they all went out to avoid my grumpyness - I'd cheer up a bit if I'd had a couple of call-backs by now. Not that I enjoy visiting the hospital that much, but my mobile phone is on the blink and I'm housebound whilst on-call without it. Definitely fixing it this week. They have all just arrived home again - time to put my grumpy face back on... :-)
The fiends have all been to the beach and are very happy, so I gave up being grumpy after all...

Gripes

September 23, 2005

Have finally got through what turned out to be the ultrasound week from hell. Broke my record for most scans done between 9 and 5 - eighteen. Would be easy if they were all walk in, walk out patients rather than being the opposite. Got Jimmy back after his ten week break following an AMI - seems to be his old self again, wouldn't have got through the work without him. We need another machine, and another operator to work in tandem. The boss seems fixated on the new department due to be built in 2010, and won't give me an answer on our current need now. Us three sonographers will have to be more millitant or something. The lack of response may be largely my fault as I tend to speed up to compensate for the increasing load, skipping lunch and other breaks in order to get out on time - but I'm not willing to lose family time to make the point... half the fingers on my right hand are permantley numb by the fortnights end - I think Al has the right idea after all - you must look after yourself.

Dean Martin had it right. Stale bumper stickers are catching my eye alot lately, like 'johnny is a liar' and 'no war' etc. The sentiments may be OK, but it's all too late. The wars in Iraq and Afganistan are WRONG, and johny may be a bit liberal with the truth but it's over. the 'don't throw your vote overboard' stickers will probably fade eventually, but they won't be removed from the back windows until another five elections have passed. Either way, I won't vote for the dancing goddess party. There was a time where it took me until mid feburary to take down my 'bah humbug' posters...

Am going to try a month of faster broadband (up to 1500 from 512 d/l speed) to see if it improves messanger webcaming with roo and koh. Chatted to dad tonight over said system - would work better without the five sec delay and the 30 frames/min video...

A rest day

September 24, 2005

After another short night, managed to drag myself of to church -felt chipped and flat most of the day. Visited Lach's SS and was surprised at the pop type music - rather different to my day. L also played three pieces on the piano in church before the main song service which was nice. Glen spoke on literal creationism and it's link to doctrine.

Met up with the Nagasaki's at Ballina beach after lunch and nearly got blown away by a northerly. We all retired to a little park in Alstonville called Bulwinkle and kicked some balls about whilst avoiding bindies and mossies. Lots of fun. There is a concreted series of shallow dams on the creek through the park and we wondered if they once constituted a local swimming hole in the days before the swimming centre.

Veges

September 26, 2005

Resurrected the vege garden the other week after a hiatus of at least three years. Put in two rows of corn, eight tomatoes, eight brochili, eight spinach, a chili, a black capsicum, and four rockmellons. There was already well established patches of mint and parsley. A week later everything was flourishing except the rockmellons which had curled up and died. Very mysterious as little bear would say.

So another trip to the nursery yeilded six cabbages, a russian black tomato, a yellow tomato, and an eggplant - also another sixteen corn, thus doubling them. We'll see if I can keep up the weeding effort. The twins enjoy the concept of weeding, but at age three are yet to distinguish between weeds and desirables...
Chris and Lorna and Dean are coming up sunday for a week - must be school holidays again. I'm not sure if the tigress is giving the older two a home schooling break, or keeping their noses to the grindstone. We utilised a home delivery ice cream truck last friday to partially fill the freezer with budget frozen delectables only to find upon consumption that they tasted rather, umm, budgetish. There is an old fashioned truism, 'you pay for what you get'. Just under three weeks until Grandad arrives - have accrued enough reading material to keep him happy I hope - all twenty-one Cadfael's from Ellis Peters, and a smattering of others like Anne Perry and Dick Francis.

Virii

September 27, 2005

The predator has contracted a lurgi bug. She spent sunday in the ER treating multiple infants with similar symptoms, and the incubation period matches. It's been about five years since being laid low by occupationally acquired nasties which closely matches my own flu patterns. I took the day off work to help with the twins, but with the lower abdo cramps becoming evident tonight, I may take tommorrow off also. Well, Fernando Alonso won the F1 title, and Rossi has done it again in MotoGP.

Looking at the MotoGP points table, it is so close from second through seventh - it would be a real exciting championship if Rossi wasn't there. Still, it's not really that annoying that he either wins or falls off (he doesn't fall off very often) if somewhat monotonous for non italians. We noted at the French GP we attended two years ago that nearly half the spectators were barracking for him. I also remember that when Mick Doohen was winning nearly everthing for years in the late 90s, none of us aussies were complaining of boredom... But having Schummy not winning the F1 title has improved that sport for us! Made two tofu/vege pies and two pumpkin pies to celebrate...

Amor est vitae essentia

September 28, 2005

Sick day. Slept alot, snacked sparingly on yesterday's cooking. Caught up on a few emails I had been meaning to write for most of the year. Heard back from two very special people, Michael and Linda. As the title says: Love (and friendship) are the essence of life. I'm really chuffed about David and Sue coming back to Brisbane after more than a decade away in New Guinea, Perth, and Canada. Their friendship is also very special to me. Sent small notes off to Darryl in DC, and Fraser in BNE, and also to Sharon down in Gosford. Lyndonius is back from abroad and about to put his travel pics up for all to see.

The cats away again, so I'm anoying the neighbours with metal, and scoffing jam rolls. I've lost seven kg since early august and am obviously trying to find them again. It's the no cheese, chips, chocolate, champagne, and cavier diet. The last two aren't a real hassle seeing as I'm vegetarian who has kicked the ethanol. The chips are not a problem except when we're at hungry jacks and chocolate is a no go area (along with orange juice) since I had a severe migraine a couple of months back. Just looking at a choc bar or an OJ gives me occipito-parietal pain... Cheese is another story - it's hard to cook without it when you've got into the habit. But I managed to be nearly all vegan since early august - just the one pavlova, and the occasional egg in a pumpkin pie. Taff is annoyed that fondues are out! BTW, soya cheese sucks.

Philosophy of Notness

2008-12-21T17:03:00.000-08:00

Choose Love

"I believe love is primarily a choice and only sometimes a feeling. If you want to feel love, choose to love and be patient"

( reallivepreacher.com )

Things always look different in the cold light of a new day, and generally when the dawn finally comes the details from any mental journeying fade like the stars. The moon has a dark side in the sense that one hemisphere has turned from the sun and likewise our faces may display phases as we turn towards or away from the life-giving light.

My friend David has shared with me the Feyerabend truism "You chose your life, as do we all, in a million tiny valuings" and it's by these small decisional increments that we turn towards or away from what gives us contentment. It's not so important to remember those choices which wax a gibbous phase, but rather it would be useful to view from a distance, in a different light, those waning judgments that lead to the crescent's edge - and maybe then to gain a little wisdom. Those that have been there can best attest, "Never underestimate the power of the dark side".

There is a road that's so easy to travel, broad with a gentle downslope - I've been a long way down that road and although I don't know where happiness is, it's not down there.

The Blog That Was

2008-12-21T03:15:00.000-08:00

This is not a blog...

The Pleiades - M42

The Pleiades, an open star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, is a conspicuous object in the night sky with a prominent place in ancient mythology.

Modern observing methods have revealed that at least about 500 mostly faint stars belong to the Pleiades star cluster, spread over a 2 degree (four times the diameter of the Moon) field. Their density is pretty low, compared to other open clusters.

From our perspective they appear in the constellation of Taurus, with approximate celestial coordinates of 3 hours 45 minutes right ascension and +24 degrees declination.

The brightest 4 stars are called - Alcyone, Merope, Maia, and Electra.
Lesser stars - Taygeta, Celaeno, and Asterope.

It's all about labels and perspective. We can appear to be far apart even when we are close, We can appear to be united only by a trick of sight. Does it matter who and where we are, and what we've done? Yes it does - but like the pleiades, it's all just perspective. We cannot be labelled like so many images on the Sistine Chapel ceiling - there are other dimensions to our lives.
Our lives are only found in today, yesterday shouldn't determine our happiness, and tomorrow never arrives. Abraham Lincoln saw it this way:
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.