A cricket bat!
Twelve years, and four psychiatrists!
Four?
I kept biting them!
Why?
They said you weren't real.

Wednesday, December 31

Geek

No! Bad Mousie!

My new Logitech MX 700 Cordless Optical Mouse crashes my computer. Not quite repeatably, but certainly repeatedly. Meh.

No cheese for you!

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Tuesday, December 30

Anime

The Empire's New Groove

Via Slashdot, an interesting Washington Post article: Japan's Empire of Cool. It's not very deep, admittedly; instead it skims the surface of the growing popularity of many aspects of Japanese culture in the U.S. and elsewhere. Worth a read.

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Life

Good News, Not Quite So Good News

Good:

The internet connection at work is back! It dropped out on Christmas Day, and tech support was mysteriously unavailable over the extended weekend. It turned out that the NTU had unexpectedly dropped dead - possibly due to myxomatosis - and it was nothing that I did (and nothing I needed to fix).

The outage convinced my boss that we need a backup internet link. The current one has been very reliable (until now), but is somewhat expensive. By routing our downloads through a standard ADSL line and keeping our mail and web server on the current line, we can improve reliability and save money. Yay!

Lunch with Simon. Taro duck, mongolian lamb, pineapple fried rice served in a pineapple and a nice bottle of Leeuwin Estate (I think it was) Sauvignon Blanc, right on Sydney Harbour near the Opera House.

My Usenet service unilaterally increased my monthly download allowance by 50%.

Found $20 blowing up the street on the way home. Caught it.

Bought two boxes of Tropical Frosty Fruits.

Not quite so good:

Routing tables all messed up after a reboot. Running the startup script again fixed this. Huh?

Spilled a can of coke in my lap after lunch. The pause that keeps on refreshing.

My download of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch is stalled - at 100.0%. I hate that. It's bad enough to get stuck at 99.9%, but at 100%? Pfui!

Update: Danny Boy on the AnimeSuki forums helped me out and I got my Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch. So that's 7 good to 2 not quite so good. If only every day was like that!

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Monday, December 29

Art

She Turned Me Into A Newt

I was invited to join my family in a viewing of all three movies this evening, starting at around 9pm. Which three movies was not specified - nor did it need to be.

Spending ten hours immersed in Middle Earth would have been an interesting experience, but that's a long time to spend stuck in a cinema (as Susie can tell you).

Unfortunately, I have to work go out to lunch tomorrow, and staying up 'til seven in the morning would likely have interfered with that plan.

A newt?
Well... I got better.

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Sunday, December 28

Life

Cranberries

They didn't have any Tropical Frosty Fruits when I went to the supermarket to pick up the bread mix on Christmas Eve. All of the stores always run out of Tropical Frosty Fruits whenever the weather gets warm. Always. You'd think that after a few years they'd realise that if they had more Tropical Frosty Fruits in stock, they could sell more Tropical Frosty Fruits, but no, not Coles, not Woolworths, not even the little IGA.

I got some Bulla mixed flavour - what's a location-neutral term for these? It says on the box "Frozen Fruit Juice Water Ice", which will do, I suppose. I got some Bulla Fruity Licious Frozen Fruit Juice Water Ices, which come in Orange, Tropical (which means "Orange and Pineapple and sometimes Passionfruit but in this case just Orange and Pineapple") and Apple and Blackcurrant. As I expected (having bought Bulla products in the past), they taste of... Nothing much. 40% fruit juice with 4% of the flavour! No taste, less fattening!

I also got some Orange and Cranberry Frosty Fruits. Unlike the Bulla Fruity Licious Frozen Fruit Juice Water Ices* these do have flavour: Horrible.

You can suck off the orange outer shell, but you'd better stop before you hit the red part. Whose idea was it to make these things? What planet are they from? I used to have Turkey Torpedoes at the Dymocks Cafe in Sydney, with turkey breast and camembert and cranberry sauce, and that was okay, since they gave you the cranberry sauce in a little dish and you could apply as much or as little of it as you wished. It's an interesting offset to the turkey and the camembert, though I think that strawberry jam would have worked as well if not better.

But frozen cranberry juice? I mean yes, there are people in the world who drink their own urine, but that would seem to me a rather limited market segment. The only thing I can think of is that the makers (Peters) have realised just how clueless the supermarkets are, and are producing additional revolting flavours cheaply, knowing that people will try them when the weather hits the billion degrees mark and all the stores are out of those yummy Tropical Frosty Fruits a-bloody-gain. And that they (Peters) trust that people will blame the idiots at the supermarkets for all of this.

Hmm. I think it's working.

Also, while I'm complaining, why the heck did Lean Cuisine take their Oriental Beef dinner off the market? Some of their other dinners are sort-of-okay-I-guess; the chicken in mustard sauce, for example. The Chicken Marsala was great before they replaced the snow peas and baby carrots with non-snow peas and carrot sticks to save a few cents.

But the Oriental Beef was wonderful. I'm not sure exactly what went into the sauce, but whatever it was, worked. Not overpowering, not specifically black bean or anything else. Wafer-thin slices of Australian beef. Fluffy white rice. I used to have it sometimes twice a week. And when I say twice a week, that means I bought four of them, because the primary reason these dinners aren't fattening is that they're too damn small - roughly half a pound, in this case.

Damn you, supermarkets! Damn you, Lean Cuisine!

The only thing consistently better than the Lean Cuisine Oriental Beef - apart from eating out - is my own cooking**, something I haven't done for too long. I didn't even do my seven-day lamb stew this winter.*** But job number two really is winding down now, so if no more computers explode, then someday soon I will actually cook myself something.

In the meantime, my schedule is as follows:

Tomorrow (Sunday): Sleep
Monday: Lunch
Tuesday: Avoid work as much as possible
Wednesday: Avoid work as much as possible, then leave early
Thursday: Play with nephews
Friday: Work frantically because I have a deadline on Monday
Saturday: Sleep

Yep, looks like a good week.

* No, I am not getting paid by the word. Unfortunately.
** Well, or someone else's. But I can't invite myself over to other people's homes every night.
*** Last winter. Whatever.

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Saturday, December 27

Life

Totoricity

A fine Christmas was had by all.

In particular, Lionel got My Neighbour Totoro on DVD (though he fell asleep watching it), and I got a set of Totoro crockery. See! I'm not hard to shop for at all!

Then we had the traditional Christmas dinner, where they* wait until everyone is completely and utterly stuffed and couldn't eat another bite, and then bring out five irresistable deserts. I was only able to eat two helpings, alas.

I also got to hold Harry for a little while. He's still concentrating mainly on I/O functions; babies take a little while to notice the outside world. He wasn't too impressed with his Tigger, either - though I suppose that a tiger as large as you are can be a bit alarming at that age.

Anyway, Munuvia's DNS seems to be working again (little surprise present from our ISP there), so I'm off to read Hyperdolls and work on my digestion.

* They being Lionel and Harry's grandmother, in this case.

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Thursday, December 25

Life

Merry Christmas!

The presents are wrapped; the bread is baked. I'm off to play Santa Pixy.

Merry Christmas to you all!

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Life

Bread

I like my breadmaker. It's the perfect kitchen appliance for me:
1. Dump ingredients in bowl.
2. Wander away for a few hours.
3. Eat bread.
I'm making some rye bread this time, which I haven't tried before. Then I'll have to get up early to make my famous apple & cinnamon fruit & nut loaf. Well, it's only slightly famous, but it's very tasty.

Mmm. Almost Christmas. Maybe I should actually wrap some presents.

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Blog

Quotable Notes

Tim Blair has a wonderful collection of quotes up, reviewing the best and worst of 2003.

Not to be missed.

Now excuse my while I go and wrap your present.

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Wednesday, December 24

Life

Harry, Stop Reading Now

Is he gone? Good.

Harry got a Tigger. I looked at various things, but the classic (not Disney) Tigger won out. After all, Lionel got a lion, so why not?

I managed to install Hordes of the Underdark on Kei. It didn't want to go. I was updating the installation on my external hard disk, but the registry keys were missing. Possibly because this is a completely new computer with a new copy of Windows.

The secret: Run the updater routine. If there's a new patch out, it will download and install the patch, and re-create the registry keys in the process. Then you can install the new expansion pack.

If there isn't a new patch out... Well, then you're in trouble.

Now, I have wrapping paper, sticky tape, gift tags... Everything except bread mix. Have you ever tried to buy bread mix on Christmas Eve? Pfui.

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