Your Hidden Talent

You have the power to persuade and influence others. You're the type of person who can turn a whole room around. The potential for great leadership is there, as long as you don't abuse it. Always remember, you have a lot more power over people than you might think!

Yup, and as soon as I finish barfing, I'm going to take over the world!

(via the Llamas)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:45 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 79 words, total size 1 kb.

Bleargh.

'Scuse me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:20 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 18 words, total size 1 kb.

(via Peeve Farm)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 12 words, total size 1 kb.

Heavily armed police swarmed a double-decker bus packed with tourists in Times Square today and later shut down Penn railway station after an irate passenger said he had a bomb.

In a dramatic sign of the city's edginess since the London bombings, police evacuated buildings, shut Midtown Manhattan streets and forced about 60 terrified tourists to march off the double-decker bus, with their hands up, in the heart of Broadway.

Officers in riot gear handcuffed a group of apparently harmless South Asian-looking men with British accents because a jittery tour bus worker thought they were suspicious.

...

A Gray Line dispatcher called police saying the men had backpacks and their pockets "stuffed" - a possible warning sign of suicide bombers, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.

Later Penn Station was paralysed when a disgruntled passenger walked up to a ticket counter, put his suitcase on the counter and declared he had a bomb, authorities said.

Meanwhile, what the hell is this?

By the time the bus neared Times Square, cops carrying heavy weapons decided to cordon off Broadway and stop the vehicle, a decision police officials defended as appropriate.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:31 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 258 words, total size 2 kb.

P.S. Ten pengos to anyone who can place the reference in the title.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:24 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

Problem: I only have one working ADSL modem right now. Darn. I guess I'll just have to make do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 74 words, total size 1 kb.

And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of demo­cracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citi­zen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

Haldane was a biologist, and the problem with socialism is really one of information, but nonetheless he nailed it. Socialism suffers dreadfully from scaling problems. It works fine for small, close-knit groups (families), and inevitably collapses into ruin for large heterogenous groups (the Soviet Union).

Haldane - a socialist himself - pointed this out in 1928. It took several more decades for others to realise just how right he was. Some still haven't grasped this fact.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:00 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 352 words, total size 2 kb.

Not so good: It was in bag number 15.

Not good at all: Fell down the stairs while carrying a box of books and landed on my head. Good thing I don't keep anything important in there...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:50 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

Where is it? Well, it's in a white plastic bag. Which is in a black plastic bag. Which is in the garage, along with 17 other identical black plastic bags. Which the nice men are going to take away tomorrow afternoon.

Oh. Oops.

That will make for a fun start to your day, won't it?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:31 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 129 words, total size 1 kb.

I'll be busy for the next few days (now I have to go back to the old place to clean it...) but after that it's all MuNu all the time, excepting short breaks for my day job and sleep.

P.S. I'm still on dialup. Dialup, Pixy says, is slow, really slow. You won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindboggling slow it is. You may think it's slow when you've gone over your monthly download limit, but that's just peanuts to dialup.

P.P.S. Multi-purpose appliances are great until they break. If you have, just by way of an example, a combined washer/dryer, it's really good because you can put dirty clothes in, turn it on, and come back later to find them clean and dry. But if it breaks down, you end up hand-washing everything and then hanging it up to dry in the bathroom.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:08 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 196 words, total size 1 kb.

These people are opposed to what we believe in and what we stand for, far more than what we do. If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising for the world - to the world - for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in, not only is that morally bankrupt, but it's also ineffective. Because fanatics despise a lot of things and the things they despise most is weakness and timidity. There has been plenty of evidence through history that fanatics attack weakness and retreating people even more savagely than they do defiant people.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:19 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 119 words, total size 1 kb.

The ironic ambience will return from an all new undisclosed location next week. Until then, why not try one of these fine blogs:

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:17 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 33 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:23 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2 words, total size 1 kb.

Okay, so it's a micro-ATX motherboard. Things are a dime a dozen.

Okay so it supports 4 channels of SATA II. And 4GB of DDR2 memory (533 or 667 MHz, your choice). And has gigabit ethernet built in. And video. What's so special?

Here's what's so special: It also supports the new Pentium D. Dual core, up to 3.2GHz, in a micro-ATX case. (Well, I'd limit myself to the 2.8GHz if I didn't want things to melt.)

If you happen to be in the market for a small but powerful web server - on a budget* - this is it.

Now, where is that ram disk on a card, Gigabyte peeps?

* Which I am, for obvious reasons.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:20 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 132 words, total size 1 kb.

Bloody hell.

Uh, can I change my mind now?

Update: My boss is friends with some guys who do removals - they moved our office - and they can do it much much cheaper, probably about one third what I was quoted.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:51 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

I'd say more, but dammit Jim, I'm dead again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:41 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.

What I hadn't realised before now was that Jared Diamond is a complete loony. Andrea Harris has the goods.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:31 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 108 words, total size 1 kb.

I sort of want one, but I already have a T3, so I'm waiting for a higher resolution screen, more memory, and a faster processor. The 416MHz Xscale is fine for most tasks, but falls flat when it comes to displaying video. Apparently the LifeDrive is better at this than the T3, but the T3 is complete crap for video, so that's not necessarily much of a recommendation.

On the other hand, 4GB! On the third hand, disk drive. Just what I need, more rapidly spinning mechanical components in pocket devices. I have a 1GB SD card in my T3; 2GB cards are available though not, as far as I can see, in Australia, so while 4GB is cool, it's not that cool.

On the fourth hand, I've been listening to the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy again recently, and it struck me that with something like the LifeDrive, you could, well, do that.

I still want at least a 480x640 screen, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:00 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 189 words, total size 1 kb.

Dr. Dead
From Russia with Death
Deadfinger
Deadball
You Only Die Twice
On Her Late Majesty's Secret Service
Diemonds Are Forever
Die and Let Die
The Zombie with the Golden Gun
The Spy Who Killed Me
Graveraker
For Dead Eyes Only
Deadpussy
A View to a Corpse
The Dying Daylights
Zombeye
Tomorrow Dies
The Afterworld Is Not Enough
Die Yet Another Day
Never Say Nevermore Again

* Tricky since they were born thirty years apart...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:22 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 89 words, total size 1 kb.