Archive June 2002

Err. A television advertisement for getting your organs ripped out just said something like this: "Only 5% of people who would benefit from a heart transplant will get one. 20% of people who are waiting for a heart transplant will die before they get one." So, um, what happens to the other 75%? The only I see that fits with the statement is that they live forever, and never get a heart transplant. Maybe I should try to damage my heart - a 75% chance of immortality isn't a bad deal. [14:57] [3 comments]

Dubya is getting his colon scanned for cancer - I didn't think he cared about such difficult punctuation. The amusing thing about this is that just now, about nine hours after this hit news, there was an advertisement on TV for getting a colonoscopy. Yes, Dubya is popularising colon cancer amongst hypochondriacs. But this begs several questions - did Bush warn the medical advertising commission that he was going to be so tested? Did someone in medical advertising taunt him about his unstable colon in order to force their advertisement into relevance? Did they make and air the advertisement within a 9 hour period? Or do they just have advertisements at the ready for a whole bunch of diseases, ready to be whipped out the instant anyone famous does something disease-related? Perhaps all of the above. [10:09] [0 comments]

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Tom Stoppard defiles Shakespeare; defiling Shakespeare is good; this movie is good. [10:00] [0 comments]

Come to think of it, there was a brief allusion to a similar idea in Last Action Hero, with Mr Schwarzenegger as Hamlet. But that was just explosions - it wouldn't be as good without the kung fu and gratuitous sex. [02:33] [0 comments]

Hm, that would be a rather splendid series, actually. There was a porn Macbeth which was rather amusing. So, Shakespeare with kung-fu, explosions and porn. They could show it in schools. [02:26] [1 comment]

Romeo Must Die: If only Shakespeare had this much excellent kung-fu and explosions. [02:23] [0 comments]

Friday 28 June 2002

I appear to have accidentally spent the entire day playing Zangband. And it's not even as fun as Nethack or Dungeon Crawl. [02:39] [0 comments]

Cable modem has been installed, and is working decently. Slightly odd behaviour with alternating bursts of very fast and very slow, but that's better than DSL's alternating bursts of 'a bit fast' and 'disconnected'. [02:36] [2 comments]

Drunken Master: Much better than The Legend Of Drunken Master; shame about the dubbing. [02:35] [0 comments]

Wednesday 26 June 2002

Don't forget to wear a protective Meat Hat if you're going out in the sun. It will protect you from mind control rays, sunburns, and, of course, the Terrible Secret of Space. [12:56] [0 comments]

God Of Cookery: This movie is VERY DELICIOUS! [11:41] [0 comments]

Married for two and a half years, and today I got a wedding ring. It was selected, apparently, for its comedy value, which I appreciate much more than the usual criteria of expensiveness. It's apparently an Elvish Love Ring, engraved, in genuine Elvish, with this: "One ring to show our love, / One ring to bind us, / One ring to seal our love / And forever to entwine us." Cue magical elvish vomiting. [07:56] [1 comment]

Allegedly a vegan can get Vitamin B12 only from Marmite and similar things. "Deficiency can cause anaemia. Vitamin B12 neuropathy, involving the degeneration of nerve fibres and irreversible neurological damage, can also occur." What's this "can cause" and "can also occur" all about? Do I just have an increased risk? I mean, I 'can cause' irreversible neurological damage, with the help of a hard surface or object of some sort. And I seem to be reasonably aemic. Bloody nutritionists. 24 years of unsupplemented careless consumption of non-meat products don't seem to have done me any harm. Bibble. [01:08] [2 comments]

Resident Evil: A lot more fun than a similar movie without zombies, death-traps, and evil computers. [00:53] [0 comments]

Monday 24 June 2002

Yay, the DSL is so utterly useless today that I went to all the effort of swapping firewalls around, in order to retrieve dial-up service. Hopefully Mr Cable Modem will show up when it's said he will (Wednesday), and we can be rid of the uselessness forthwith. [21:13] [0 comments]

I just updated my qmail spam-blocking script Spamcheck so that it can be very very harsh and yet (probably) not lose any email in which I am interested, by virtue of sending a bounce message to the sender instructing them on how to get their message to me despite the filter. Since spammers don't ever use real return-paths or from-addresses, they will never receive this instructional message, but any genuine emailer who triggers the filter will. There is also code in there to prevent infinite arguments with autoresponders, and to keep returned-bounces and similar nastinesses from reaching my inbox. Preliminary testing looks promising enough that I have adopted it as the only filter I'm using. [11:24] [0 comments]

Waxwork 2: Lost In Time: Such excellent spoofing, it even makes the horrible movie "The Haunting" entertaining. [10:49] [0 comments]

A new shower head was attached incompletely resulting in squirting onto the ceiling. We lacked appropriate tool for fixing this. A trip to Home Despot to purchase a monkey wrench ensued, during which I decided to purchase, instead, an experimental marginally cheaper device, the Grip Wrench, after asking a Home Despot employee whether the thing was any good. He recommended it. As it turns out, it's not as good as the ad makes out (of course), but it was more than adequate for repairing the shower head, and is more versatile than the monkey wrench would be, so I vaguely recommend it to anyone who finds themself in need of such a product. [05:44] [0 comments]

Sunday 23 June 2002

Yesterday, I went shooting with Rogue. My conclusion - I prefer archery. It's quieter, it's more like exercise, and it feels more skillful. And, more importantly, you don't have to mess around with nasty oily rags after doing archery, and the ammunition is reusable. There are few activities that are worth ten minutes of post-activity clean-up, and shooting isn't one of them. [09:10] [1 comment]

Due to Alex, I poked at fitday.com. I decided to sign up, in order to examine the oddities of my metabolism. Day one: I apparently burn nearly twice as many calories as I consume. Excellent. [09:06] [0 comments]

Cemetery Man: Artistic, surreal, and full of zombies - just like me. [09:02] [0 comments]

Saturday 22 June 2002

A hint for anyone who, like my lady, appreciates ornaments and expensive furniture; don't put them together in sunlight. Clear crystal ball + valuable table + sunlight = fire hazard + less valuable table. [18:26] [3 comments]

A couple of Flash things from b3ta.com, via zx64 and The Register - Introducing Monday and Top Ten Cutest Kittens. [18:24] [0 comments]

The Accidental Spy: Jackie Chan being entirely serious in several languages is not as fun as Jackie Chan being silly. [18:21] [0 comments]

In addition to the tiny fonts (of which TerminalTTF has now been updated to properly include some of the previously missing characters), in order to make my screen as space-efficient as possible, I also had to make some other changes, which required some registry hacking. Files to perform the same hacks as I did are now here; back up the relevant registry entries before using this, and don't use it if you don't know what you're doing. Entirely at your own risk, bla bla bla. Part one: Remove the animating bitmap from the top right of IE and Windows Explorer. Part two: Make the file and folder icons in Windows Explorer very small.. [05:21] [0 comments]

Shaolin Soccer: Self-parody, kung-fu, explosions, and a terrible love-story - can't beat that. [05:15] [0 comments]

Thursday 20 June 2002

Some amusing things to do, some of them pure silliness, some of them interesting, and some of them approximately on a par with poking your eyes with a stick: Science Hobbyist's "Do This Now". [23:34] [1 comment]

Bad Company: It is not possible to suspend that much disbelief. [23:31] [0 comments]

Wednesday 19 June 2002

Oh, er, the one on the left is the fixed-width one, the one on the right is the variable-width one. Mm. [19:49] [0 comments]

Speaking of the font I wanted... What I wanted was a truetype version of the font Terminal-6, so I could force Windows to use it in places where it usually refuses to. And now I have, with results depicted and downloadable to the left and right. [19:48] [7 comments]

In addition to the aforementioned web-servers I found, that very finding inspired me to have another go at looking for a font editor, in case I was wasting my time writing one of those, too. Lo and behold, I was. This is marginally annoying, in that it's another few weeks of wasted work, but on the other hand, by finding it now it's a few weeks of work I don't have to do to make the font I wanted. [19:29] [0 comments]

Apologies for the recent server downtime - it was caused by a storm damaging the line. During this downtime, I finished writing my mini resuming-supporting Windows webserver, RavenGive. Shortly after finishing writing RavenGive, I found two other webservers that do everything I wanted - the lack of which is what caused me to write RavenGive in the first place. So that was annoying, being essentially a few days of wasted work. On the up-side, I trust my server much more than I'd trust a server written by anyone else, so it wasn't completely wasted. [19:26] [0 comments]

The Quiet Family: Burying corpses is the best and most amusing way to deal with any situation. [13:14] [1 comment]

Saturday 15 June 2002

Today's grand idea - a TV show of paintball combat, with two teams of thirty-or-so, 20 hours of time in advance in which to set up your end of the play area (so you can have people half-buried, or set up paint sprayers to be triggered by tripwires, and suchlike), and themed games, eg. Mensa members versus McDonalds employees, Quake players versus Warcraft 2 players, Corporate Teamwork Consultants versus telephone tech support, Optimists versus Pessimists, and people who like Britney Spears versus people borrowed from a high-security lunatic asylum. [23:11] [11 comments]

Saviour Of The Soul 2: Putting a digit on the end of a movie title does not make it a sequel, no matter how cartoonishly amusing the movie. [22:31] [0 comments]

Friday 14 June 2002

Attack The Gas Station: The funniest criminal violence in the world. [11:58] [0 comments]

Thursday 13 June 2002

A new temporary theme for the blog - daily one-sentence movie reviews. [18:50] [1 comment]

The Sum Of All Fears: No amount of dramatic music makes inanimate objects worth watching. [18:49] [0 comments]

Sunday 9 June 2002

Small: guimp.com [02:24] [7 comments]

Wednesday 5 June 2002

The movie Falling Down is rather excellent. Michael Douglas is superb as characters insane via too much sanity - not just in this, but in The Game, War of the Roses, and probably others. "And now you're going to die, in that stupid little hat." [11:18] [6 comments]

Tuesday 4 June 2002

Reminded by Tyrethali's interesting-looking new Icehouse game Martian Hex, I have put into my games section the rules for a game based on another game. I dubbed the new game, in keeping with my terribly proclivity for wordplay, Unorthobox. [02:02] [10 comments]

Monday 3 June 2002

Once more, the DSL and the ridiculous NASA-rejected monkeys working the night shift for Covad. Having been told for the fourth time to change the card (once by Verizon, twice by Speakeasy, once by one of their own), they came up with this clearly suitable response. "The DSLAM port shows up with traffic passing." No problem for the last two months has been listed as "no traffic passing" - it has always, always been 'intermittent'. The work order didn't say "check the DSLAM port", it said change it and the card. Unless it's the daytime Covad people who can't write, I suppose. Perhaps both, like a very short game of chinese whispers. "Cheese T GLAM port", writes the dayshift, which is interpreted by the nightshift as "Cows to slam bork". It would take something this stupid to lead to such astounding ineptitude. [21:44] [1 comment]

Sunday 2 June 2002

Updates on the progress of Things; the mini-web-server is coming along nicely - it works well, needs a few extra GUI features and some features I can shut off for unregistered users such as bandwidth throttling. I've got the camera and computer hardware I need to make Solipsism; need a bit more software, a bunch more bit-part actors, and some unscheduled time. I'll probably be doing the sans-extras bits first, because I can. [06:42] [6 comments]

According to the What Jelly Belly Flavour Are You? quiz, I am Licorice. "To most people, I'm mean, depressing, and gloomy. I'm misunderstood and misjudged because my ideas are different from most. My cynical, pessimistic outlook on life's events doesn't help. Ironically, I'm glad that I am not popular." Splendid. [06:35] [3 comments]

Saturday 1 June 2002

Further to the DSL nonsense - the Covad guy (the one who, you may recall, I was going to defenestrate if he tried to mess us about) called instead of showing up, and agreed that changing the card was probably a good idea. So he ordered it done. Which was good. Of course, what actually happened was that the people whose job it is to do such things in the night (when people are supposed to be not using their connections; no matter that we and our crosstalk person both are using it at that time, and would not be during early daytime hours) decided to, instead of doing what they were told, 'monitor' the connection. And they concluded that the problem is with the DSL modem at our end, because corrupted data was coming in. Of course, they monitor the data the card sees, which of course is corrupted, because the card is the thing that's not working right. Bloody idiots. So now we have useless DSL for at least another couple of days. On the up-side, the Speakeasy people are going to credit us all the time that the connection has been rubbish, ie. all the time since we first installed it. Which redeems it somewhat. [22:56] [3 comments]