Monday, May 30, 2005
Station St Markets
And here's STILL the best coffee in town, probably because it's made by my good friend Sammy, at Station St Markets in Subiaco. I met Sammy years and years ago and he's still one of the most delightful people I know, and I am re-learning Arabic just to be able to say mashalah for my coffee.
If you've visited my Flickr pages you'll have seen that Trish and I trek to the Markets at least one weekend every month. And why wouldn't we? I just LOVE markets and I get fresh vegetables there, the occasional seafood, herbs and spices, and big bunches of flowers for Trish. We also go to the Pavilion markets and Freo and Wanneroo and E shed and... well, you get the idea - but I have a fondness for Station St because I've twice operated a market stall there, for a year each time, and it was great fun, and paid its way, so I had two excellent years.
For almost all my time in Perth, and even when I was still living in the Northwest, I made a point of visiting the markets often, and I still remember once talking to a secondhand and bulk dealer and finding a talking watch there. Geek that I am, I was fascinated, and toyed with the watch for ages before deciding to spend the two bucks he was asking for it. (I told you this is a while ago didn't I?)
As I was playing with the thing I noticed that the light didn't work. A bit more arguing back and forth and I got a dollar back because I wouldn't be able to read the talking watch in the dark. I chortled about that for ages afterwards, and felt really proud of myself. Despite the fact that the watch spoke in Asian-accented German, I didn't care because A- who needs alight when you can hear the watch and B- I can speak German so bite me! and that was that I thought.
A few months later I came back past the place and the guy was still there, and I sat and talked with him. In that conversation the watch came up, I told him why I'd been so smug about getting the watch for a buck, and he told me that he'd bought that whole consignment of watches for ten bucks... Hehehe I had the last laugh on him, I pointed out a piece of gear and paid him twenty bucks for it, and walked out with a working 16 port network hub worth about $400 in those days...
And at Freo, the kite shop stall there provided me with more fun than I could handle, and the best introduction to as diverse a range of foods as you could wish for anywhere, plus of course the Sail & Anchor providing an in to the world of nice locally brewed beers...
But if you're in Subi on the weekend, go grab a coffee and Lebanses pastry at Sammy's - it's just the best way to spend a few relaxing minutes. (No I don't get paid for the testimonial, I happen to think it's true...) And tell Sammy Ted sent you.
Categories - ::/:: posted at 9:49 PM Ted
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New New New! Addition!
From My Flickr Album
I have a decent espresso machine! Yeehar!
I'd like to thank Trishie for finally buying it, I've been fiddling and farting and fscking around and had decided the Breville was probably the best deal around, just never got around to actually going and getting it...
It works a treat - has already had a run - and gets a reasonable crema on the coffee. The beast came with stainless steel insulated espresso cups and all the fitments, and is totally awesome, twisting that switch turns on a pump that sounds like a Sherman tank but the pressure is good, temperature is probably less so, but by switching the pump off and letting it reheat it about halfway through makes a very creditable cup.
You're all welcome for a cup, by the way. Just line up! hehehe...
Categories - ::/:: posted at 8:55 PM Ted
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Sunday, May 29, 2005
Movie-ish stuff
Several things about the big and little screens. Just watching NCIS out of the corner of my eye, and saw Gibbs up in his loft indoctrinating a lovely blonde lass into his boatbuilding. Scene that sticks with me most?
She's sensually planing along a rib, Gibbs is standing scant millimetres behind her. Her eyes are closed, her expression is blissful, almost orgasmic. Then he said "Can you feel the wood?," and I'm sorry I can't remember a single thing after that...
And finally got to see Star Wars ROTS tonight, in style at La Premiere as always, and a few things came to me.
One was a sense of sadness because the age of Star Wars is pretty much over, and our legacy will be that we'll be remembered as the "Star Wars Age" by any future generations. Sad but true that when our grandchildren are adults they will remember us as the folks that watched those quaint "movie" things about "Star Wars" and "Mission Galactica" and the like...
The second was a sense of disappointment because this movie was quite crap. The parts that connected the fighting scenes together, which I gather were meant to add moral and meaning to the movie, were pretty weak, a lot of moral posturing and what I thought was somewhat perfunctory acting. At least the CGIs were fun to watch...
The third thing was all the stupid movie assumptions and physics that we're now so used to that some people actually believe that you can fall 4 metres on your head and survive. Such as:
Those little droids eating Obiwan's fighter, getting "blown away" by what is presumably the winds of the vacuum of space.
A ship in orbit suddenly tilting, and for some reason the gravity changes direction. Where the heck does "down" come from on all those ships, anyway?
All those planets with blue skies and white fluffy clouds and white sunlight. Really? The whole Universe is just just a pleasure paradise for humans? How bizarre...
And someone on a blog far far away had this great idea - "It would be a little strap that you attach to your light saber, that goes around your wrist, so you don't drop it as much."
Categories - ::/:: posted at 11:21 PM Ted
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flluuu!
A freaky thing folks: Flu strains are becoming worse again.
I have been thinking that I am more prone to flu and that it hits me worse because the emphysema is making my lungs more prone to trapping the different bugs, which is true, but... I now think I am probably getting more bugs per year than anyone else, but to about the same severity - it's just that these bugs are getting worse every year.
What's made me think this is a combination of things. Over on Staypuff, David has now had two cases of flu, one of which was almost identical (odd and very pronounced aches and pains) to something I was experiencing here. David is in Korea...
His second case of flu is also very similar to what I am experiencing here now, except that my eyes aren't gummed up. Trish (who normally waltzes through the flu season) has had both of these flu strains, leading me to believe that they are getting more virulent.
The shock that drove it home was Graham Kennedy's death from "pneumonia" a few days ago, because you see for anyone with a chronic respiratory ailment, the chances of a simple infection developing into pneumonia are several times greater. My take is that he is an ex smoker just as I am, he had the flu, and it progressed to pneumonia.
My flu turned to pneumonia about two weeks back, I'm sure. I spoke to my doctor last week and he agress that it's possible but he wasn't as sure as I was that it had gone to pneumonia, but then again I didn't get to see my doctor until I felt almost back to normal, and even then I have antibiotics because I have a sever bronchitis left over from that last flu...
And now the clincher is this story from Saudi Arabia, and here it's starting to get spooky. "Water on the lungs" is pneumonia, pure and simple. Sheikh Fahd has apparently suffered from the same flu virus, and are you noticing something? It's starting to kill people...
The last flu pandemic was the so-called Spanish Flu in the early 20th which was probably a swine flu variant, and if you followed some of those links you may well feel very sobered. I do. Especially when I read this.
UPDATE:
David is exempt from this because I've already had the flu he currently has, and I survived, so a younger feller with recuperative powers like a bull, and a constitution like all young folk are blessed with, has no worries from this flu. That said, the Spanish Flu attacked people 20 to 40 in age...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, May 29, 2005 10:58 PMposted at 12:54 PM Ted
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You Wonder If They're Real...
Go to Overheard In New York, it's got a kind of inescapable morbid fascination, it's almost hypnotic in the worst possible ways:
Fortunately For Me, Medium is the New Large
Woman: How many slices are in a medium?Pizza guy: 8.Woman: How many slices are in a large?Pizza guy: 8.Woman: Can I speak to someone else?
--Pizzeria, 14th & 1st
God you have to wonder...
Also you can check out Overheard In The Office, similar stuff.
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, May 29, 2005 12:24 PMposted at 12:22 PM Ted
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Friday, May 27, 2005
Bugger - It's Bacon - No, It's Budget!
I keep saying that the Australian Government is crap, and after the news tonight I rest my case. What the country needs is to grow up, but not to be stuffed up...
What does the slimy bookworm have for us? Oh let's break the Unions, break workers, break workplaces! It's good to be king! And watch out Bookworm Howard, the other King died a day ago...
So now there are these new things which will rip the backbone out of the workplace, and make our lives a little bit greyer bleaker and more like the fucking Yanks that Johnny seems to spend most of his efforts sucking up to...
We went from award wages to enterprise bargaining and now the dread "fair wage committee" or whatever Johnny BlowBush is calling his new entry into the fine and failed field of communism. I always knew blogs can be a form of samizdat but I never figured I'd be living in a country where samizdat is appropriate...
On top of that we have budgets and budgets, at least there's some good news there right? Well, yes, luckily there are some bright spots. Car registration is going to go down - which is after all the responsible thing to do, let's make cars more affordable to more people because dammit we are not producing enough pollution! How nice. I recently bowed to need and bought a crappy old '80-something Excel to take me to the bus stop and back, because walking or biking is out due to my emphysema, and I use it as little as possible because I want to be responsible.
But now we have cheaper rego so more people will feel like keeping their car again, and because we are not as affluent a state as we once were, that will include a larger proportion of old bangers like mine, but because there's no incentive to do the ecologically right thing, they will just pump more crap into the air than the unaffordable :LEV and PZEV vehicles out there.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot - all those cars are going to use a LOT more litres of precious tarif- sorry, petrol, and that income won't hurt the Government and will in fact probably put consoeranly more than a lousy $25 per car back into the coffers.
And caravan park owners will get a 50% rebate on land, which is good because when we all become a good trailer park population like the (cue majestic music and John looking raptly up at a stars and stripes) US of A, at least the caravan park owners will have been able to pick up our houses and land for a song, and let us park our caravans there...
Look, about those industrial revolutions that John Howard has been making - remember the one good thing that came out of the States, being the quote that "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." And remember that Jefferson meant that you had to watch your own government when he coined that quote... The original reason for the clause about "the right to keep and bear arms" was also so that the citizens would have protection from their own government.
That is a heavy thought indeed, but it's true. If you don't pull up the government from time to time they will come to believe that they make the rules not we the people of the land - that is the vital difference between democracy and dictatorship, and our government is slowly slipping over that line... I am going to ask you - are we a democracy? If you answered yes then I ask you - did YOU have any input into the new wave inductrial relations laws? Ponder that a while...
We need to do something more than Unionism alone can achieve, in the face of this attack on our rights and freedoms - the entire workforce needs to pull a "Big Day Off" to protest Howard's Crap!
Categories - ::/:: posted at 12:11 AM Ted
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Thursday, May 26, 2005
Because It's IN, Dammit!
Nine's "journalism" again. On Current Affair tonight was an article about something like "How Come We've Turned Into Such Rude Little Asshole?" or something more journo-friendly. Don't get me wrong, I worked at Nine Perth for four years and I thought it was pretty cool. But Network Nine also picks some totally effing stupid stories to run, sometimes...
Hey look no-one got up for these pregnant! ladies folks, how rude is that? And people push in and shove. And how did we become such rude bastards?
This is Nine, which ran the McToxic's ad I was so pissed off by in my recent repost. Nine, which ran ads like that crispy chips ad. Yeah, I wonder where the kids got this idea that to be rude and ignorant is cool?
Come on - TV is still running what I call c*nt ads. The people in them act like - well, I think you get the idea...
"For he's a bit of a sleeeeeeee-eeeeeeeze bag, and he has fake hair" sings the rude little c*nt in the soup ad. And the guy is actually so whipped that he looks embarassed! I have an answer for her type:
"No love - not paying you for sucking my dick makes me a cheapskate, not a sleazebag. But thanks for noticing my hairpiece, eh - it's the first time you've managed to tear your eyes from my crutch and look that far up my body, yes?" Cop that you rude little twat!
"Let's leave soup to the experts" is another little peeve of mine. Fark, soup manufacturers are competing to make me want to vomit? Yeah, even down to sweet little grandmas completely stuffing up Hallowe'en for the neighbourhood kids, they are all after the rude c*nt of the decade award.
So let me get this right Ray - you're wondering why people are lacking in manners, empathy, and consideration, right? You work at a TV network which shows ads that demonstrate precisely how to be rude, inconsiderate, and unempathic, right? And you haven't - not even once - wanted to speak to the management and told them that you feel uncomfortable to be associated with such bad social examples, have you?
Nope, because you'd rather sit there bleating away about the "o tempora, o mores!" of the 21st, and getting paid from the money those ads make, wouldn't you? Ray, sometimes you totally suck. And I say that with consideration, empathy, and a lot of sympathy for the kids and parents whose lives these c*nt ads are changing for the worse...
Categories - ::/:: posted at 10:42 PM Ted
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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Hah!
Star Wars Horoscope for Aquarius
You can be cruel and torment people who disagree with you. Deep down, there is a peace-loving, friendly side to you. You have a knack for inflicting pain on people and use your intellect during battle. Star wars character you are most like: Darth Vader
What is Your Star Wars Horoscope?
Categories - ::/:: posted at 10:48 PM Ted
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Well Duh.
Students Who Get Drunk Weekly Have Higher Risk Of Injuries.
Categories - ::/:: posted at 10:33 PM Ted
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What's Peoples Bin Searching For To Find My Blog?
People apparently still want to know about drugs... *sigh* Also "pry minister?" hehehehe! At least I must be providing some interesting tidbits if such search terms are finding TEdALOG Lite....
14 28.00% stilnox
3 6.00% tedalog
2 4.00% telstra noisy phone
1 2.00% deep seated deep seeded
1 2.00% elmar's wa
1 2.00% winnebago motorhome used
1 2.00% nicest foods in australia
1 2.00% thomas edison stole ideas
1 2.00% find a dim sum house reno
1 2.00% arach* girl
1 2.00% who has been shut down in my restaurant rules?
1 2.00% medication stilnox
1 2.00% kakulas brothers
1 2.00% wittenoom site:au
1 2.00% germanic personality traits
1 2.00% cut down w98 install
1 2.00% numanuma gary american idle
1 2.00% bamboo windbreak perth
1 2.00% john howard \ pry minister
1 2.00% morals/lessons
1 2.00% rice intersting facts
1 2.00% stilnox user
1 2.00% funny pictures hot dog cock bun
1 2.00% halal butchers, perth, australia
1 2.00% how much it worth today of $180000 from 1895
1 2.00% schapelle corby protest judgement
1 2.00% orbit genius recharge
1 2.00% stupid fesa
1 2.00% stilnox tablets
1 2.00% austrian home life
1 2.00% sausages cook first for kids oscar mayer safe?
1 2.00% 23 hour ward fremantle
1 2.00% underwater breathing experiments
1 2.00% side effects of stilnox
Categories - ::/:: posted at 5:33 PM Ted
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Sunday, May 22, 2005
Feet's on backwards!
Damn. Now THAT is gonna take some fixing...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, May 22, 2005 11:16 PMposted at 11:14 PM Ted
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Tell me what this is?
The weirdest thing evvahhh!
Categories - ::/:: posted at 5:11 PM Ted
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Meta. A great new concept.
I should just cut and paste the onedogsaid blog article into here.
Because it refers to a post of mine which refers to a post on them, and it's metametablogblogging, all very amusing.
And because eventually, if we all do it, there will be a normalised sort of grey paste of alphabet on every blog, and no-one will have to work to think up articles any more.
I'm all for it!
Categories - ::/:: posted at 10:43 AM Ted
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Thursday, May 19, 2005
Star Wars Spoiler!
This is a Flash presentation.
Categories - ::/:: posted at 2:22 PM Ted
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Saturday, May 14, 2005
Mysterious marks and green macrodots
I've found A Thing.
Well okay, toxicpurity over at onedogsaid blog actually made me aware of it. On a Google maps map of what appears to be the US west side, there's a strange ground marking.
Being the inquisitive sort, I zoomed out and slowly back in, and spotted some dots about there. Zoom out about halfway and look to the east of the marking.
And now the mystery deepens.
Because you can zoom in just a few degrees west of those dots, but the dots themselves don't "have the images at this resolution" and would I please zoom back out again.
What are those green dots? I'd assumed from the colour and regularity that they were location marks on the image but zooming in shows them to be ground features, and reasonable sized ones at that.
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Saturday, May 14, 2005 11:31 PMposted at 11:25 PM Ted
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Geek Fantasies
Slow old week - check this out - Geek Fantasies. I won't tell you how many links deep I dug this up from.....
Categories - ::/:: posted at 8:13 PM Ted
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Friday, May 13, 2005
thinking how to think and other link
http://209.87.142.42/y/programr.htm This is an interesting thing, a how-to manual for the mind....
http://www.43things.com/ This is also a fun folksonomy!
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Friday, May 13, 2005 2:51 PMposted at 11:57 AM Ted
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Repost of why crap ads are bad.
I posted this some time wayyyyy back but it's still annoying me so I'm reposting it:
---
Most of my friends will heartily support me when I say I'm not a religious person. They will applaud me loudly when I say that I'm not a person with Victorian morals, and say something like "true dat." And they'd probably choke on their beer if anyone said I was politically correct. But you know, there seems to have been some sort of Rubicon of moral turpitude crossed sometime in the recent past, and I've just plain been looking the other way when it happened...
The place it's coming out most is in commercials. Commercials which, even to someone like me, are just giving the wrong message. Somewhere along the line, commercial scriptwriters are just missing the point.
These commercials seem (totally aside from trying to sell their product, which they do only tangentially) to hammer home the message that it's fine to be rude, it's good to be ignorant, it's praiseworthy to be a total tool. The ads are on in prime kiddie-time, so what the kids are learning is pretty much that being total assholes is okay.
"And I can't face them on an empty stomach" says the snotty little girl in a recent mcDonalds ad. It's fine for a jumped-up little kid to totally heap shit on her parents and siblings.
"Oh, now you've missed it. Okay, stop the car." says the instructor while the girl in the learner driver's seat proceeds to completely disregard him and drive off to enrol to vote. Bear in mind that a driving instructor is in a privileged position, a position given to instructors by the very same Government which is now exhorting teenagers to disobey him. Yep, you saw that right, it's fine to just ignore a representative of the Law and basically tell him to go fuck himself by your actions.
"And potato chips for - - - - .... the kids... " says the flabberghasted mum who's just prepared Moroccan chicken for her guests only to find them all sitting at the kids' table mugging and grinning for the chips and by their actions saying to her "hey tough shit about that Moroccan Chicken shit, but you basically wasted all the time you invested in us cos we wish you'da shoved the chicken up your arse and just given us the chips."
I like the Spiceblog and I like cooking and I tell you what, if my guests pulled shit like that with me I would throw them right out the door along with the precious fucking crisp chips, and I would probably make every effort never to recognise them again. Hell, even if they were the only group of people left in the world.
At the same time, there are organisations for this and nannycommittees for that, so that pretty much anything you do can be accommodated by some group and made into someone else's fault, there are people who specialise in making your stupidity someone else's fault (and they make it stick in the Legal System so it *must* be right) and there are still groups of people who don't give a damn whose fault it is but they can kill and maim and imprison people without any form of control over them and whom we tacitly accept by ignoring them and looking away.
Kids are suing their parents for divorces, stealing cars, acting like rude little guttersnipes, and the Government is wanting to "crack down on parents to make them more accountable and involved in the rehabilitation of their children" - who wouldn't be in need of morals lessons if the ads on TV and in papers and magazines were subject to a bit more scrutiny and liberal use of the censor's scissors.
People are getting used to friends shitting all over them and shrugging their shoulders and letting it slide, because that *appears* to be the way it is.
And kids are growing up without any clear moral guidelines because believe it or not we don't have any morals lessons. Religion was a pretty pointed issue but it did teach morals and scruples. Those kids grew up knowing right from wrong and became us. And because we can't see any use for moral standards, we let it drop out of the curriculum.
And oh the harvest we're gonna reap out of this one...
Categories - ::/:: posted at 12:46 AM Ted
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Thursday, May 12, 2005
Test a link
Ever get synchronicities like this?
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Thursday, May 12, 2005 11:53 PMposted at 11:50 PM Ted
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Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Google Web Concentrator
Google is providing Web Accelerator altrusitically?
Uh, not likely, actually. They claim that faster pageloads will leave clickers more time to Google stuff, up to (as they trumpeted) 2 hours saved in a year. I can't see me using those two hours to Google more sites...
However, given the nature of Google, there are two scenarios which make sense.
Google record your traffic patterns using GWA and use that to provide even closer-grained demographic/click information to their advertisers, or indeed use the information themselves. After all, the GWA itself is based on similar research that counted where mouseclicks fell on various pages.
Google has become sentient and is trying to get a handle on what it's like to be human for some reason.
Given the size of the server farms that Google runs on, item 2 isn't as farfetched as it may on the surface appear. In which case I am due for speedy termination... I mean, Google is digitising how many hundred University libraries?
Actually, it seems ridiculous for Google to be tracking people's movements around the Internet site by site page by page like that, when they could just as easily these days store the entire Internet and then they wouldn't have to resort to tools like GWA anymore, but could instead just know all that info. Ultimately, Google could just run a network cable direct to your house and replace the ISP and the telco all at one fell swoop, and from then on you'd never know if you were in the Matrix or just seeing the movie...
But seriously - with sites like the Wayback Machine already archiving old sites it's only a matter of time before storage capacities and machine performances rise to the point where the entire Internet could conceivably be stored on one system. Of all the ways for the Internet to become irrelevant as far as diversity of locations goes, this is probably one of those I would have least expected. Because, if it's all stored (or proxied) on one system, then the live sites will be left for the speedier proxies and then you will never know if the original site has changed or added new content, or indeed even closed, because MegaGoogle will keep faithfully serving it up...
Moore's Law (or a similar geometric progression law) applies to storage, memory, processing power, speed, and software advances. Any one on it's own is scary, but add a few together and it's downright crap-your-pants material. I am trying to get a business together that treats hardware currently worth several hundred dollars a unit as a throw-away loss leader - and the scary thing is that even in the short time I've been mulling that business idea over, it's already happening...
Hi Google, welcome to the world!
Categories - ::/:: posted at 12:09 AM Ted
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Monday, May 09, 2005
NPOTD
Number Plate Of The Day:
Spotted on a Mazda 3 in Adelaide Tce, personalised plate that sneaked past the Number Plate Nazis: "LMFAO"
Categories - ::/:: posted at 10:27 PM Ted
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An odd old memory
When I was around 20, I was in Papua New Guinea, and had one of those weird experiences that can only happen in a place like that. It started with a few drinks at the Bird Of Paradise Hotel...
After the drinks we went to a friend's place for more drinks, and one drink led to another, and I'd brought a bottle of Dom Benedictine and so had my best mate. After two more drinks, he passed out in my little two seater car and stayed there until the next day's tropical heat woke him up, apparently.
Me, I was having a great time dancing and drinking, and somehow there was me and Gail (another friend, older than myself and always did the big sister act) and maybe three more people watching the sun rise and still feeling quite good, and I went to look for Simon's bottle of DB, only to find that during the course of the night I'd drunk it as well as mine...
Wondering why I wasn't dead or at least stuporous in some corner, but hey if it worked for me it worked for me okay? Went to drive home, Sime asleep across the both seats, so I decided walking home was okay too. Only about three kilometres away, and one of the housemates would give me a lift back to pick up my little S600 when they all woke up from their nights' efforts.
As I walked up this part of town, I suddenly recognised a garden, a house, and a front door. Why I'd recognised them was a mystery, and I was becoming extremely tired so I put it out of mind for the moment. All except that little chill that ran up and down my back for a few minutes afterwards.
Now keep in mind that I drank and abused substances to some degree, have friends among the Goroka tribe, the Sepik tribe, the Hagen tribe, the local constabulary, (after punching out their officer, long story...) and the usual crew of european wild spirits that were the only ones to stay in PNG for any length of time.
So anything could have happened, and probably did. I got to the Engineer's Mess and passed out on my bed. Woke up in the evening, and got a lift back to the Bird with Roger, had a quick drink there, and headed for Gail's place to pick up the little sports Honda.
As I walked past this place the light was PERFECT and I looked at it and suddenly all these memories smashed together in my head. I remembered that I'd approached the steps for some specific reason, and it had to do with fortune reading or some such psychic thing. What can I say? I was into such experiments.
And as I remembered, I got more uneasy... I remembered that the door had opened and I already knew that the light was going to fall through the room to - there, the check gingham curtains - over the table with the white cloth, where there were two teacups and a pot of tea.
I remembered that as the old lady spoke to me I was remembering every word she spoke, before she said it. And I didn't remember even one word exactly, of what was said. I remembered that the pre-remembering continued all the way through a cup of tea, and that I left then. WHile I was there I remember that the light would touch - there, the corner of the room - at THIS precise moment while she spoke - I knew on which word the light would touch - and I listened to every word of her conversation as I was remembering it, and then listened to her as she was saying it.
I remembered thinking what a lot of extra power this gave one, to know what was going to be said, and have double the time to consider your reply. I remember several times that I was busy composing a reply to the pre-memory and then being all confused when she'd finished saying it and was waiting for my response and I was still composing an answer to her question without actually having heard her speak the question. It was just *that* weird...
And then I didn't remember anything else abut that afternoon, not when it was or what I did afterwards.
Every time I try to remember this even now, I get crawling feelings in my brain at remembering pre-remembering a whole afternoon of conversation without recalling a single word of the conversation itself.
To this day I find that odd, and I also found odd that since that time, I have sometimes written down an event in my diary, forgotten about it, and written it in months or years later again, then found that the two entries often differ wildly.
Isn't it weird?
Also years later, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, in a fairly well inland town. (400km from the nearest beach, that's pretty landlocked.)
Suddenly I got pictures of fish in a pink light in my head, and I laughed and said "Are you the one thinking the fish into my head?" And Woodsie went a bit pale and quiet for a few seconds because, you see, he was going to Port Hedland for a fishing weekend, on a mate's cruiser.
Isn't it weird?
I think it's weird.
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Monday, May 09, 2005 1:06 AMposted at 12:52 AM Ted
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Sunday, May 08, 2005
Me. Not.
Did a vanity search and http://www.joss.ucar.edu/fodm/staff/ http://www.wastewatertreatmentplant.net/pages/2/
That's funny because at UCAR I am a system administrator, just as the real me has been here in Perth. And in the wastewater site I'm apparently the window washer...
Categories - ::/:: posted at 11:05 PM Ted
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Cat Quotes
"In the beginning, God created man, but seeing him so feeble, He gave him the cat."
- Warren Eckstein
"A home without a cat- and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat- may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?"
- Pudd'nhead Wilson
"If animals could speak the dog would be a a blundering outspoken fellow, but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much."
- Mark Twain
"A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime."
-Mark Twain Notebook, 1895
"I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course."
- Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Fisher
"Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat."
- Mark Twain Notebook, 1894
"You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals."
- George Mikes from "How to be decadent
"Dogs come when they're called. Cats take a message and get back to you."
- Mary Bly
"For a man to truly understand rejection, he must first be ignored by a cat."
- Anon
"I love cats because I love my home and after a while they become its visible soul."
- Jean Cocteau
"There are two means of refuge from the misery of life - music and cats."
- Albert Schweitzer
"There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat."
- Tay Hohoff
" God made the cat in order that humankind might have the pleasure of caressing the tiger."
- Fernand Mery
"There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat."
- Tay Hohoff
"Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow. "
- Jeff Valdez
"Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them."
- Jim Davis
"There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person."
- Dan Greenberg
"The smallest feline is a masterpiece."
- Leonardo da Vinci
"In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats."
- English Proverb
"Beware of people who dislike cats."
- Irish Proverb
"You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats."
- Colonial American Proverb
"With the qualities of cleanliness, affection, patience, dignity, and courage that cats have, how many of us, I ask you, would be capable of becoming cats?"
- Fernand Mery
"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
- Winston Churchill
"I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior."
- Hippolyte Taine
"A meow massages the heart."
- Stuart McMillan
"No matter how much cats fight, there always seems to be plenty of kittens."
- Abraham Lincoln
"Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God."
- Unknown
"Time spent with cats is never wasted."
- Unknown
"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
- Unknown
" No heaven will not ever be Heaven be; Unless my cats are there to welcome me."
- Unknown
" How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven."
- Robert A. Heinlein
"Dogs have owners, cats have staff."
- Unknown
"Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this."
- Anonymous
" There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats."
- Anonymous
"No amount of time can erase the memory of a good cat, and no amount of masking tape can ever totally remove his fur from your couch."
- Leo Dworken
"One cat just leads to another."
- Ernest Hemingway
"The cat has too much spirit to have no heart."
- Ernest Menaul
"As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat."
- Ellen Perry Berkeley
"People who hate cats, will come back as mice in their next life."
- Faith Resnick
"One reason we admire cats is for their proficiency in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing, or pretend they do."
- Barbara Webster
"I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food which they take for granted--but his or her entertainment value."
- Geoffrey Household
"As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind."
- Cleveland Amory
Categories - ::/:: posted at 9:20 PM Ted
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ARRGGHH!
Just went to look at Blogger's new moblog feature. I don't yet have a good cameraphone but I do have a blogger account, which points readers back to this blog.
"Enter your claim token to access more options." says the page. "It's the token we sent to your mobile phone, you dummy!" says (well okay, not in that manner, it doesn't) the help text alongside the text entry field.
So I went to my Blogger page and sure enough they have links all over the place on "How to start moblogging without any hassles" right now, if you know what we mean, and all that.
But you know - they don't offer a single clue as to how to get a claim token sent to your phone. And - what I HATE LOATHE AND DETEST about stuff like this - when you read further it only works with Yank cellphone carriers. As per their parochial usual, they don't believe that anyone in the rest of the world exists.
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, May 08, 2005 8:03 PMposted at 7:44 PM Ted
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Saturday, May 07, 2005
Earth has become brighter but no-one is sure why
Earth has become brighter but no-one is sure why. (Free registration required, or go to http://www.bugmenot.com/ first.)
Come on people, the answer's obvious.
Ecologically-unsound practices such as leaving street lights and house lights on during the day, of course...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Saturday, May 07, 2005 12:28 AMposted at 12:21 AM Ted
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Wednesday, May 04, 2005
The Death Rattle
So we are growing our new generations up each more socially misadjusted than the last. I say the word "misadjusted" only from the point of view of the preceding generations, because there's this weird thing, that each generation of our society is quite closely adjusted to suit itself.
A generation that had to move as a single organism to bring down prey had children trained from birth to be a part of that organism, and as social and intuitive as can be. Later generations which required a more thinking-oriented class of society members, got the inventors and creators and thinkers, because they brought them up to less follow the herd and intuit their way around, and more to observe and find new ways.
The generations just passed in the last few hundred years we carefully shaped to fit into a society where population increases needed smarter ways to feed clothe and shelter that population. And that technological generation is now here.
Now according to rather a lot of those clever rational thinking generations, we are approaching a new shift. Vernor Vinge is one of the people who saw the next step coming. What has become known as The Singularity is very close. "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." is the quote that starts his work. A work, I might add, which is already 12 years old, and probably had been in development for a few years before that...
To a caveman in his family group, societies of a few hundred years ago would look like something other than human. To him, the human era ended with his children who didn't stop to think, but reacted almost as an extension of him. Even to the farmer of a few hundred years ago, our current generation of childrenwould seem to be barely what he would consider human - they hardly do any useful work, spend far too much time playing with useless abstract things like Playstations and computers, and don't help out producing food or making clothes and houses and household items...
What worries me is Vinge's apparent attitude. "Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive?"
It's odd that a man with such deep understanding of the evolutionary change as Vinge has, is apparently so blind to the blindingly obvious: The "Human Era" will NOT end at that point, it will continue, with a society which to us is as unhuman as we would be to our first caveman ancestors. This progress is not to be avoided, but it is to be understood.
What needs guiding is our own perception and attitude. Have we got the balls to create a generation which will not need predecessors at all? Can we handle the idea that humanity as we know it now will end not because the next generation wipes us out, but because the majority of us will either become that new humanity, or else will die out naturally because there's just no more need of rats in the rat-pile?
What I'm saying is that it is NOW that this change is already happening. Children of this era are not expected to outlive their parents, unless they become technologically augmented, and thus become that next generation. Adults are (have you not noticed?) breeding less. Yes, fertility is actually decreasing around the world, and that too is part and parcel of the curve that leads to the next generation. Adults who take the step of technological alteration will also be a part of the new humanity.
And most of the future will be that one generation, pretty much eternal. I was looking at my cat the other day and it seemed to me that humanity would be pretty empty after the Singularity, I've already outlived several cats and I miss each one - how will I feel when I find that I've forgotten the first cat I outlived? How will I feel when I discover that I've forgotten the first friend that I've outlived?
This is what will be one of the problems we will face, old thought processes and patterns in a new world. And many either won't want to cross that particular Rubicon, or will find themselves psychologically unable to... I for one am pretty sure I would either find some way to edit that kind of stuff out, or else succumb to it. (I'm pretty sure that the technological humanity will have ways to edit stuff out, after all.)
What do you want to forget today?
Categories - ::/:: posted at 11:13 PM Ted
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Baby Rattle Revisit
And there's another social pressure on us - population. I don't recall where I read about it, but it's a good fifteen years ago anyway: A population of rats were kept in a fixed area, and the population was allowed to increase. Food supply was increased to keep pace with the increase in rats, and the researchers recorded the following interesting observations. As population increased, rats began to fight for no apparent reasons, and inflicted more serious damage on one another. Now this was not related to a denser population (i.e. they just met more often because there were more rats) because the violence and incidence increased way beyond what mere population numbers would have suggested.
Mothering rats became sloppy and the nests became more haphazardly constructed, were cleaned less, and eventually the mothers abandoned litters more often than not. Mother rats often joined in the territorial and senseless violence, and the population of rats in general became more stressed out, twitchy, and nervous. Adult rats often killed off nests of young, sometimes even their own.
Young rats exhibited aimless bored behaviour, violence and savagery way beyond what normal rats exhibit, and (as tests on them showed) became more prone to addiction, and often did not eat a lot, becoming skinny and unwell.
Matters became so serious for the rats that the population actually declined, despite food and hygene conditions being kept to ideal levels in the test environment. It seemed that with no survival to fight for, and so many other rats around the place, even rats lost their sense of self-worth. Is any of this sounding familiar?
We have cities where people are overcrowded, stressed out, and have the best medical and dietary conditions in recorded history. We have family units breaking down, senseless violence happening, children whom we've actually already socially isolated with the baby rattle, and coincidentally the generation of children that returns the least benefit to their immediate society in recorded history. We have what may well be the worst crime statistics in recirded history too.
On the plus side, at least the population is set to drop again sometime soon...
(continued)
Categories - ::/:: posted at 10:38 PM Ted
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Hmmm cars...
... that don't crash. From ideas by Bill Gates, maker of DOS 5 and Windows. Am I the only one seeing the delicious irony here?
Categories - ::/:: posted at 8:50 PM Ted
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Smart Zap
I've been looking at the economics of going to work. 2 zone bus fare, $3 each way per day, $6 a day, $30 per week. $2.25 per way per day if using a Multirider, or $4.50 per day, $22.50 a week. If I drive a car, there's $30 a week in petrol, plus another $30 or so in parking. (Depending where you go - from $5.10 per day to $11 per day. Ouch!)
No matter which way I go, it will cost me between $90 and $300 a month to go to work. I would be willing to forego a certain amount of personal freedom to save money and the environment, and I would be willing to forego a certain amount of money to give myself some personal freedom and save the environment. I most certainly wouldn't like to do a lot of environmental damage to save money and convenience.
So I'm kind of stuck. The best of two of those worlds is to take the bus. I save money, and some pollution, by taking a bus. But my ideal situation would be to own a Smart, or even more preferably, the Korean Zap electric. Here's a story about them. And here's another one.
So I am looking to see why the Zap is not in Australia, and why the Smart is not making greater inroads into the commuter car market. And then it hits me, that we are a country that has as yet very little pollution, and a Government that makes a tidy income out of each litre of petrol or diesel sold...
Of course! Why couldn't I see that? We prefer to push larger cars because that way we line John Howard's government's pockets with something phenomenal, isn't it around half the price of the petrol? Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Screw pollution, we're a big country and we can go on stinking it up for decades yet!
There's a rebate on car fees that you can get, if there's a certain amount of solar cell area on your car. It's not the same in all states, and no state publicises it much, because then they'd not only lose your petrol revenue, they'd actually have to give you a rebate. Similarly, it would make sense to put a rebate on ZEVs (Zero Emission Vehicles) and LEVs like the Smart and the Zap but - you see the Government's conundrum don't you?
If I was driving my car to work I'd be paying the Government almost $1000 in petrol revenue. Multiply that by around 8 million cars and that's a big chunk of the budget they'd have to forego - after all, they can't tax your use of solar power nor your car's frugality with petrol now can they?
How do you spell "screwed" folks?
Categories - ::/:: posted at 12:29 AM Ted
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Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Baby Rattle - Symbol, Symptom, and Syndrome.
Watched a car on the freeway today, pacing the bus I was in, and getting another one of those revelations that we're all sometimes prone to. It was one of the newish minibuses, and there was a baby capsule, and one of those cute rattle toys suspended from the window, over the capsule.
The mother was driving, keeping her eyes on the road, and the little bus was bowling along at the speed limit, and suddenly the realisation washed over me. The baby rattle - symbol, symptom, and syndrome...
When we were hunter-gatherers, the realisation whispered to me, did they have baby rattles to keep the little buggers quiet while they were out hunting? No way! Hunter societies have no place for coddling babies and revolving the family unit around the infants. If they kept up, they kept up, if not - they perished...
A rattle in a group of hunting tribesmen and women would be the death-knell to hunting. Babies grew up watching the life of the tribe unfold around them, and learning by fitting in. As they got older they learned to prepare the food from the kill and the forage, then they learnt how to forage, then how to hunt. In very short time, a child went from mewling bundle to productive member of the tribe.
As we became farmers, it became possible to give the child a rattle. After all, inside the home it didn't matter, and outside, well the animals were domesticated and used to the noise so a playing child wouldn't disrupt the food chain too much. (I *am* talking figuratively when I say "give the kid a rattle" - I am speaking of any kind of toy or distraction that is not directly related to day to day life.)
And that is both a good and a bad thing. It is good because a child playing with toys expands their horizons early, and leads to greater intellect. And it's bad news because it's the first divisor of the family unit. The toy is also replacing the role the surrounding society plays in shaping the child's mind and personality.
So you are getting smarter children, who are less community-focused than their parents. Sound familiar? It should do, because with our present time we are possibly approaching the crest of the Age Of The Rattle.
Several thousand years ago, the toys were pretty functional and simple. Smaller copies of the tools that their parents used, which were used in ever more inventive ways by the youngsters, until they changed their functions and forms as their parents saw how the kids used things. A gathering bowl that some enterprising lad used to accelerate his toy spear, or a vine slung on a stick suddenly showing how to make bows, these sorts of things changed the way the tribe hunted and foraged, and the children's toys changed form to toy bows and arrows...
Basically though, the toys prepared the child to take its place in the society, and that was pretty much that. Pretty baubles were still an adult toy, (although we are talking young adults, whom we'd call early teenagers today,) and small children still were expected to pay attention and pick things up or be left behind.
Now think of a few hundred years ago. What survival value does a hoop have, or a stick and ball? As we developed leisure time pursuits, so we also paid for some of that leisure time by giving the children an inanimate babysitter, a toy to keep them quiet while Mother is entertaining or being entertained, while Father is off performing or training to be a soldier or craftsman.
The cycle of isolating children from the immediate society, once begun, seems to perpetuate itself. We now have kids who see their parents for a few hours of the day, their peers only in the classroom, and whose major interactions woth other children and their society is through SMS and MSN...
Asperger's syndrome (a milder form of autism characterised by failure of some social abilities, repetitive behaviours, and fascination with particular things) is apparently also on the increase - or at least, reports of cases are increasing (I try to be unbiased) - and that's no coincidence. All sorts of social dysfunctions are either on the increase, or else being identified or reported more often.
(continued)
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 11:15 PMposted at 9:37 PM Ted
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Monday, May 02, 2005
Hits Parade
No comment - here's what landed people on my blog the last few months:
4 stilnox
4 tedlivision
2 fell asleep in meeting
2 numa numa meats american idle
2 dachshund milking period
2 gallery of stepmother and daughter fucking a neighbour boy
2 chernobyl mossad
2 coffee stilnox
2 cat dislocated knee
1 dodd judge
1 why did franklin roosevelt call eleanor babs
1 judge falls asleep
1 installation price floating floor
1 stilnox non-addictive
1 somebody that can fix old record players
1 pisconeri perth
1 trish hated giving me a head job
1 lauric acid buy australia
1 hook up with someone in manama
1 nikes domestic market experience
1 lite damaged suburban
1 coincidences twins brothers separated at birth
1 red seal body care products
1 john nikolich
1 kakulas bros
1 corby blog
1 peltier diodes
1 doctor von neumann's famous bottle
1 valium and stilnox effect
1 lauricidin
1 funny dachshund pictures hot dog bun
1 dim sum swansea
1 stilnox australia
1 mossad imei
1 jesper johansen microsoft
1 effects stilnox
1 p2p comics asterix
1 the frankfurter sausage
1 food and tabletop reel
1 focusing magnetism
1 stilnox is it addictive
1 stilnox how does it work
1 fresh hot pizza movie
1 23 hour ward
1 adsl phone noise line despite filter
1 what are the side effects of stilnox
1 pictures for ''pioneer jobs - wheel wright
1 gastro specialist
Categories - ::/:: posted at 9:49 PM Ted
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