No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here.
Boom. Sooner or later... Boom!

Ace Says

Here's the dirty little secret of conservative blogging, at least as it appears to me: I'm sure the left is convinced we're all plugged in to the GOP and getting our Two Minute Hate of the Day from GOP central, and so on, and etc.

The actual truth is more scandalous. By and large (I can only speak for myself) the GOP itself and GOP candidates don't even bother trying to spin us or feed us something interesting to push.

I got banned from Little Green Footballs - which used to be a pretty good blog - for pointing this out.  The Left of course think that this is how conservative blogs work, because that is how the Left works.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:13 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Living Dangerously

I'm going to eat a saltine.

Update: I seem to have survived.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:19 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wait, What?

I thought it was cold last night.  Forecast suggests more of the same to come.  I mean, less of the same.  Uh, this:

Tuesday    Fine. Sunny.
City:  Min:    5  Max:   15
West:  Min:   -2  Max:   15

Wednesday  Fine. Sunny. 
City:  Min:    6  Max:   16
West:  Min:   -1  Max:   17

That's a leetle unusual for Sydney.

Update: Currently 2C and falling where I am, and -3C in western Sydney.

Update: Below 2C again at PixyLabs and a balmy -4C in the western suburbs.  Brrr!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:25 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Overhead, Without Any Fuss, The Stars Weren't Going Out

Doctor Who, Season 5, Episode 13, The Big Bang

To quote the Doctor himself (from The Doctor Dances): Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!

Or as Mrs. Doctor put it (from Silence in the Library): Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair and the Doctor comes to call, everybody lives.

I may have had problems with one or two of the mid-season episodes, but the beginning and the ending were note-perfect.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Feeling Groovy

Well, not exactly groovy, but at least dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.  And I haven't thrown up at all today.

Now I get to the fun part (based on the last time this happened to me): Not eating for another four or five days.  Last time I got this far, started eating again, and it all came back twice as bad.

I have plenty of fruit juice and soft drinks (and some of that electrolyte-replacement powder stuff), so I'm not about to drop dead, but I expect to be pretty darn hungry by the middle of the week.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sims 3

Yeah, I'm a little late to the table on this one.

I bought it the day it came out, and the expansion packs as they came out, and in between frantic dashes to the bathroom I've been playing it a bit over the last couple of days.

Verdict: Needs salt.

I haven't explored the expansion pack features yet, but compared to Sims 2 with its final count of 9 expansion packs and 9 "stuff" packs, there's a lot less goodies to play with in the core game.

On the other hand, the graphics are certainly better (unless you enable anti-aliasing on an ATI graphics card and then look at a tree) and you can move about town in real time - the entire town is one continuous area, and you don't go into timestop when visiting other parts of the town the way you did in Sims 2.  (Apparently you do go into timestop when you go overseas in the World Adventures content, but I haven't tried that yet.)

It's still not SimsVille, which is what I always wanted; the town is too small, and you have little interaction with your sims when they're at work.  The professions from the Ambitions pack corrects the latter, so I'm going to try that next as soon as I get Kei and Yuri promoted to astronaut.  (They've already made International Super Spy.)

What I really want is a game that simulates an entire socio-politico-economic system at the level of the individual.  Sim City is too top-down; The Sims is too small scale.  Civilization, good as it is, is far too top-down and abstract to really explore the cost/benefit of policies - the cost/benefit is right there in the manual.

On the other hand, if I take my sims to China, I get to kick other sims in the face.  If you've ever played any of the Sims games, I'm sure you've had that urge.

Oh, and EA?  The prices on the Sims Store are insane.  You need to cut them by about 80% if you want it to be a success.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Steam Are At It Again

Tropico Reloaded (Tropico, the Paradise Island expansion, and Tropico 2 Pirate Cove) is going for $3.39.

Civilization III Complete (Civ III plus two expansion packs) is $3.74.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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My Own Private Bargletron

Not feeling well today.  Not feeling well at all.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:34 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Well, That's Not Something You See Every Day...

Australia has a new Prime Minister today - Julia Gillard.  No, we haven't had an election (that will happen later this year).  Rather, the Labor Party dumped Kevin Rudd.

And a good thing too - particularly if they can also take the scalp of Senator Conroy in the process.  Between them, former PM Kevin Rudd and Communications Minister Steven Conroy have been delivering Australia the worst government in thirty years.  (Thrity-five to be precise.  And we all know how that ended.)

Hopefully we'll see Senator Conroy replaced with Senator Kate Lundy, who has been an outspoken voice of sanity in the ongoing internet filtering circus.  At least compared to Conroy, who has been consistently disingenuous and bordered on the delusional and defamatory at times.

On the down side, this certainly improves Labor's chances at the next election, which were, under Rudd, approximately zero.  On the up side, I'm not too hot on Liberal leader Tony Abbott either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:42 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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K-On!!!

K-On!! continues on the awesome road to awesomeville, and has (finally) been confirmed as 26 episodes.  Which is great, because it looks like there'll be nothing else to watch next season.

Hurrah for cake fairies and yakisoba!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:59 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tim TAM

I will be at TAM Australia in November.

Tickets went on sale on the 20th, and apparently are nearly sold out already.  It's their first event in Australia, so I guess it's hard to judge the size.  Shame for the people who don't get to attend, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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PyFilesystem

This is neat.  It's a filesystem module for Python that lets you work with your files using a single set of code, without having to worry about whether the files are regular operating system files, inside a Zip archive, hosted on Amazon S3, on an FTP server, or whatever.

It also has a very nice built-in security model - you can map a virtual filesystem to any part of the OS (or other) filesystem, and it will prevent you from accessing files outside that area.  I have code for that built-in to the file management routines in Minx, but if I can use this library - and get Zip, FTP, and S3 support for free - then that's a nice little win.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Antepenultimatum

Doctor Who, Season 5, Episode 12, The Pandorica Opens

The Doctor and Amy respond to a distress signal being broadcast from Stonehenge, as relayed via Vincent van Gogh, Winston Churchill, the Doctor's imprisoned future wife, Queen Elizabeth X, and finally graffiti'd over the site of the oldest writing in creation because, being the Doctor's future wife, Professor Song already knew he would find it there. 

Upon arrival they find a prison cell, the Pandorica of the title, reputed to contain the most dangerous being in the Universe.  Also, this being 102AD, a Roman legion - and River Song posing as Cleopatra, as her future self will have had promised to Amy's past self in the future.

The most dangerous being in the Universe being something of a draw, and the distress signal being busily broadcast in all directions in four dimensions, they are not too surprised to discover that the Earth has been surrounded by a vast array of alien ships, including Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Terileptils. Zygons, Atraxi, Slitheen, Judoon, Sycorax, Nestenes, Chelonians, Draconians, and pretty much everyone else with a battle fleet and a bad attitude.

To say anything more would be a spoiler.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:21 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Gotta Love Steam

Today only, the original Mass Effect for $5.

Yesterday, I picked up Mirror's Edge, also for $5.  That's the perfect price for Mirror's Edge, which is an entertaining but somewhat shallow game.  Mass Effect for $5, though, is a bargain.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thank You, Greece

I had an mp4 file I wanted to play on my desktop PC, but my old version of Zoom Player didn't recognise it.  So I downloaded the latest version of Zoom Player, and it promptly committed trialware suicide - it told me my 30 days was up and it didn't want to play no more.

Well, poop.

Okay, I know by now that Zoom Player is a good piece of software, and I'm willing to pay for it, so I go to their web site...  And the cheapest version is AU$55.  Gak.  For that price, I'm inclined to use MPC instead.

Except they have prices in other currencies as well, and a quick check shows that the same version is available for €24.95.  A year ago that was AU$45; now it's AU$35.

So, thanks to Greece, as an Australian I saved nearly 40% off the price of an Israeli product.  Gotta love global finances.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:26 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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