Then, if you'll excuse me, but I'm in the middle of 15 things, all of them annoying.
Saturday, April 07
Moth-Like Eating Suspected
It looks like something's been nibbling on one of my favourite shirts - there's little holes and tears all over one of the sleeves. It's such a nice colour and a lovely cotton/linen blend too, and I bet I won't be able to replace - [checks online] - well, I guess for $10 the moths can have that one; I've got two more on the way.
Gotta love online clothes shopping.
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1
Still, you need to deal with the moth, or else it's a disaster-in-waiting.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, April 07 2012 03:07 PM (5OBKC)
2
Yeah, I'll need to go through the whole wardrobe. Meh.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 07 2012 04:14 PM (PiXy!)
3
Try the cedar boards made specially for lining shelves or closets. They smell a lot better than moth crystals, and work as well.
Posted by: conrad at Sunday, April 08 2012 01:29 AM (MUHn+)
4
I was thinking of napalm, but cedar might also work.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, April 08 2012 01:51 AM (PiXy!)
5
Napalm does have an advantage as it provides a nice warming glow.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, April 08 2012 11:55 AM (PVVuW)
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Sunday, March 11
Went Outside Today
I even tied my shoelaces.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
Your back pain seems to have migrated to Duckford.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, March 11 2012 11:27 PM (Ds9fh)
2
Sorry to hear that! The magic word is
codeine.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 12 2012 12:43 AM (PiXy!)
3
We need a prescription for that here.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 12 2012 01:16 AM (+rSRq)
4
Here you can get it over-the-counter only in combination with either paracetamol or ibuprofen, and only in relatively low doses.
Still, it did the trick.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 12 2012 10:47 AM (PiXy!)
5
The magic words were "hot shower" and "long nap". Loosened it right up.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, March 12 2012 02:50 PM (Ds9fh)
6
I won't touch paracetamol (AKA acetaminophen) because it's too damned dangerous. The lethal dose of it is really surprisingly small. And the death it gives you is slow and intensely painful.
I don't generally use NSAID drugs anyway. If I have a fever, I live with it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, March 13 2012 04:35 AM (+rSRq)
7
Yeah, I won't buy paracetaminophenol any more, since I learned out how small an overdose is and just what it does to you (literally kills your liver).
NSAIDs can be helpful in reducing pain and damage from muscle and joint injuries. Ibuprofen is much less dangerous than acetoparaphenolomin, but the downside is that it has more minor side effects. Still, I'll take a bit of dyspepsia over the risk of acute liver failure any day.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 13 2012 07:23 AM (PiXy!)
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Sunday, March 04
Ow Update
Progress: Once standing, can walk - slowly, but with relatively little pain.
Problem: Standing up in the first place not so good.
As far as motility goes, it's like ageing 40 years in one second. While I can expect to get better again - I'm improving already - the difficulty right now is that I only had one second to plan for this. Given 40 years, I could probably have arranged things a little better.
Note to 75-year-old self: Remember to arrange convenient hand-holds in bathroom for use of 85-year-old self.
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Having experienced the joys of backpain due to my lousy knees, I understand what you're going through. I'm sorry for your agony.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, March 04 2012 12:34 PM (O9XO8)
2
I'm mostly coping fine, but the complete inability to bend in the middle is proving inconvenient. If I drop something, it stays dropped. (I made myself a little picker-upper out of a coathanger to help out with that.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 04 2012 02:29 PM (PiXy!)
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Saturday, March 03
Ow
Ow ow ow ow ow.
Something has gang agley in my spine. It doesn't actually hurt if I keep my movements limited, but if I tense up or move the wrong way the muscles in my lower back spasm and ow ow ow ow ow.
And now I need make the hazardous trek to my computer and share the Q drive so I can watch TV from bed. If you never hear from me again, I regret nothing!
Update: R drive.
Update 2: Survived.
Update 3: But the back spasms have diminished in frequency, duration, and severity, so that's good. It's still an ordeal just getting from the bedroom to the living room, but it's not a nightmare.
Update 4: I have corn thins, X Files, and ibuprofen. Forgot to get anything to drink though, which means another ow ow ow ow ow before long.
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I get attacks of sciatica, and had one attack when I was maybe 33 which laid me up in bed for a couple of days, and caused me to walk with a limp for a couple of weeks.
So you have my sympathy.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, March 04 2012 01:56 AM (+rSRq)
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Thursday, February 09
5 Accessories Every Man Should Carry
- Hedgehog
You never want to be without a hedgehog; they make great company, and in dire extremis, good eating.
- Deck of cards
Handy if you need to make friends and they're allergic to hedgehogs.
- Can of spam
You can feed it to the hedgehog, and the empty can has a huge range of uses, such as a hedgehog bathtub.
- Clawhammer
Fight off zombies, drive nails, pull nails, light fires, catch fish.
- Towel
For wiping up incriminating evidence. May also have other uses.
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Can of spam
You can feed it to the hedgehog, and the empty can has a huge range of uses, such as a hedgehog bathtub.
Uh, exactly how big are Australian hedgehogs? Or, alternatively, does spam come in super-economy-size containers in the antipodes?
Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, February 10 2012 01:30 AM (jwKxK)
2
These are conveniently-sized pocket hedgehogs for accessorising.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 10 2012 11:10 AM (PiXy!)
Posted by: RickC at Saturday, February 11 2012 07:53 AM (cHo1D)
4
Yeah. We don't have hedgehogs in Australia (and they're not allowed as pets), so I had in mind the African pygmy hedgehog, which is a common pet species elsewhere, and could just about have a bath in an empty Spam can.
Local equivalent is the echidna, which is bigger than a hedgehog but smaller than a porcupine.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 11 2012 10:08 AM (PiXy!)
5
After the rabbit fiasco, I can imagine that the Australian government is leery of other potential invasive species. So I'm not surprised they're banned as pets. If they were pets, soon they'd be in the wild.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, February 12 2012 02:55 AM (+rSRq)
6
There was a plan floated recently to import elephants to eat a kind of invasive African grass. Realistically elephants wouldn't be a problem - they're too big and the breeding cycle is too slow - but it's still funny.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 12 2012 09:02 AM (PiXy!)
7
Wait, I know how this goes--when the elephants overrun the place, you thin 'em out with crocodiles!
Posted by: RickC at Sunday, February 12 2012 11:05 AM (/5bLf)
8
...and when you're armpit deep in crocodiles, you give sniper rifles to the koalas. When they run out of ammunition, then and only then do the hedgehogs come.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, February 15 2012 03:38 PM (Zg0Yp)
9
The koalas already have sniper rifles, Wonderduck. In fact, many of them have been upgrading to 20x110 anti-materiel rounds for dealing with the spiders.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 15 2012 07:15 PM (PiXy!)
10
Well, they need something that large to shoot Huntsman spiders.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, February 16 2012 08:11 AM (+rSRq)
11
I slouch corrected. Maybe they can call in airstrikes via
sugar glider, then.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, February 19 2012 01:50 AM (ZNgWw)
12
That might work. The flying foxes are okay, but tend to get panicked when there's AA fire. Sugar gliders are much more manoeuvrable.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 19 2012 09:02 AM (PiXy!)
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Friday, February 03
Some Days
Some days I have a problem, and I spend hour after hour looking for a solution that doesn't bring more trouble than the problem itself, growing ever more frustrated until I want to kick the whole project to the kerb and take up potato farming.
Other days I find a solution that kind of works, then another solution that's better, and then another solution that's better still, in the space of an hour.
Today has been one of those other days. They come rarely, but all the more satisfying for that.
Fontspring and
Fonts.com share today's
Does Not Suck award for reasonable pricing and no-nonsense licenses.
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It is nice when everything clicks.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, February 03 2012 04:26 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 03 2012 08:57 PM (PiXy!)
3
We probably should have a link here to
the sequel post, just in case someone finds this later with a search engine. Turns out they do suck after all.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, February 04 2012 02:42 PM (+rSRq)
4
They don't suck, exactly; indeed they have the most reasonable terms and pricing of any of the font vendors I've looked at. (Linotype wanted 300 euros per typeface per year, three year minimum.)
They just don't sufficiently not suck to deserve the award.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 04 2012 05:12 PM (PiXy!)
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Wednesday, January 25
It's Not Friday!!
Feels like Friday.
Tomorrow's a public holiday, and I've had a hell of a week so far, so my brain was already busy planning for the weekend (sleep, set up blogs).
Um, no, brain. Not quite yet.
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Wednesday, December 21
Where's Pixy?
Dead.
Well, that and
playing mining engineer, but mostly just dead.
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1
Can you play it single-player?
Posted by: RickC at Thursday, December 22 2011 11:42 AM (VKVOz)
2
You can. I've never played it multiplayer, for that matter. (Should try sometime, though...)
It's definitely more of an exploration game than Minecraft. Most of the building I do is on the lines of "I need this to get around easier" or "I want to fight the boss here" or "I'll grow my underground mushrooms here", instead of Minecraft's sand-castle-box feel. On the other hand, the game part is realized a lot better - durable equipment, and lots of it, means you're generally working towards a goal (i.e. "get better gear") and with a specific goal in mind (beyond "dig and hope I hit something good"). There's a few boss monsters and monster events, and a good variety of weird stuff.
Definitely worth what I paid for it.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Thursday, December 22 2011 12:35 PM (pWQz4)
3
I'm thinking of running up a mee.nu Terraria server - partly to experiment with Windows Server.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 22 2011 01:18 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Friday, December 23 2011 11:27 AM (pWQz4)
5
Thanks to you mentioning it to me the other day, Pixy, I've got hooked again. Gah! I've also not played multiplayer, but colour me interested if you get a server going.
Posted by: Artee at Friday, December 23 2011 01:22 PM (5blmT)
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Saturday, November 26
The Sound Of Stridence
Well, technically,
stridulation. Last night there was an invisible cricket the size of a '57 Chevy directly outside my bedroom window.
I say it was that big based on the noise it made - the loudest insect I have ever encountered - and I say invisible because when I went outside, in the rain, with a torch, I couldn't see a damn thing, but it started right up again when I went back in and turned the lights off.
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A torch? What are you, a mob of angry villagers?
Posted by: TallDave at Sunday, November 27 2011 03:52 PM (lNW+B)
2
Probably, and its a good thing too given that he has to keep this whole thing running.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, November 28 2011 05:59 AM (EJaOX)
3
What you colonials* would refer to as a flashlight.
* As opposed to us colonials.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 28 2011 10:35 AM (PiXy!)
4
But the thought of other way is so much more entertaining.
I assume this thread was spammed and cleaned up; there are three comments (not counting mine) but the counter under the post says 5. Something that's easily amenable to fixing?
Posted by: RickC at Friday, December 02 2011 01:54 PM (VKVOz)
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Wednesday, November 16
Precipitation, Precipitation
Kindly depart my vicinity and return on a subsequent occasion.
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But November showers bring December flowers, don't they?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, November 16 2011 03:27 PM (+rSRq)
2
Bugger the daffodils, I need to get my laundry done.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 16 2011 05:35 PM (PiXy!)
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Monday, October 31
All Mod Cons
I have
hot water, and on Thursday I will be getting a
bathroom.
(Been having some plumbing problems at Pixy Labs recently. On the plus side, they've installed a hot water heater in place of my old tepid water heater. But I currently have a hole in the floor where my shower was.)
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Yay!
Not having hot water does suck.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, October 31 2011 01:49 PM (EJaOX)
2
See? you DONT take regular showers.
Posted by: matoko_chan at Monday, October 31 2011 05:10 PM (O/JlR)
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Saturday, October 01
Where's Pixy Been?
Working. At my day job, which just recently has also been my night job and weekend job. Pulled about 100 hours of overtime in two weeks.
On the upside, I'd planned to spend some time working with CouchDB and Redis, and I did.
On the downside, I'd planned to use them for Minx, and I didn't get to do that.
On the upside, I got to do far more scalability testing than I would have otherwise. (Shard CouchDB and Redis 100 ways? Sure. Scale out to 40 cores per server? No problem. Shovel in three billion records to see what breaks? You got it. Push 250,000 updates per second, sustained for days on end? Of course. Build a 300GB LRU cache of sorted sets? Certainly.)
On the downside, I'm exhausted.
On the upside: Successful product launch. And I do get paid for the overtime.
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Saturday, August 13
Well, That's Something
My hot water heater* just unfailed.
It failed at about 11PM last night, or at least, sometime between 7PM and 11PM. I ended up having a cold shower, and since it's currently about 7C here, when I say cold shower I mean AAARRGH!!!! COLDCOLDCOLDCOLD!!!!
I tried resetting it to no avail, and was going to take another look at it in the morning before trying to get it repaired over the weekend when I heard some strange clicky noises coming from outside. What, I pondered, could be making strange clicky noises at this time of night?
(Turns on hot tap.)
(Waits a few seconds.)
(Receives hot water.)
Well, that's an improvement.
* As opposed to cold water heater. Well, except that it does heat cold water, there being little point to heating hot water.
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Sounds like it's time to have the thermostat checked.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, August 13 2011 11:20 AM (+rSRq)
2
I think maybe it froze solid.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 13 2011 02:00 PM (PiXy!)
3
Of course, we keep our hot water heater next to our vacuum compressor.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, August 13 2011 03:27 PM (+rSRq)
4
there being little point to heating
hot water
Actually, superheating provides great increases in efficiency for steam engines of most types.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, August 13 2011 07:17 PM (EJaOX)
5
Albeit not if the boiler has sprung a leak, which turns out to be what has happened here. I've shut off the water and the gas until I can get it fixed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 14 2011 01:05 AM (PiXy!)
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Tuesday, July 05
How Windy Is It?
It's so windy, a light bulb just popped out of the ceiling.
No, really.
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Thursday, June 30
Steamed Shirts
The other thing about Rivers is that their online store takes the Steam approach to sales.
That is, its prices are regularly half that of their big-city retail stores (and the same as their country clearance stores). But they have a constantly changing set of items that can be 75% off the already 50% off, so if you stop by at the right moment, a shirt that retails for $60 could cost $8, but be back to full (that is, half) price the next day. In fact, a couple of shirts I ordered only two hours ago (along with the shoes) just dropped from $8 to $5... And the shoes I ordered doubled in price.
(Which really tells you where the money goes in the rag trade, and it ain't on the manufacturing.)
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Unknown Territory
I buy most of my clothes at
Rivers, a well-known Australian purveyor of, well, clothes. They used to be a very good, very Australian company with reliably high-quality products, but over the past few years they've been trending towards being a clearing house for job lots from China (or India or Pakistan), about half of which are designed by
colour-blind orangutans on acid.
This is supposedly a real shirt.
Fortunately, the other half still aren't.
And while it's become somewhat hit-and-miss, I can usually count on buying new clothing and footwear at their big country clearance stores whenever I head down to Melbourne to visit my family.
Except that that hasn't happened for nearly two years (due to fires and explosions at my day job that coincided with every opportunity to visit) and the shoes I bought from them last time turned out to be complete crap, with leather lining but synthetic "uppers" that fell apart very quickly. So I've been wearing my last remaining old, good pair of shoes from them, which are over three years old now and starting to fall apart too.
And looking in the window of the shoe store near my house, a decent pair of shoes in a style I like goes for $200 these days. Back at the time of the dot-com bubble I paid nearly that much, but back at the time of the dot-com bubble I was a paper multi-millionaire. These days I'm decidedly not.
Anyways, I was poking around Rivers' online store looking for some cheap warm clothes to keep me warm cheaply, when I discovered something: The store doesn't actually show you everything they have in stock.
It has two different failure modes - one in which the bottom of the page is messed up, with a long list of product descriptions all mashed together but no pictures or links, and one where it just stops. In the latter case, there's no indication at all that the list is incomplete.
It was only when I tried the search function that I discovered that they have quite a lot of discontinued lines still in stock, including real leather shoes in my size, in styles and colours I like, at 50% to 75% off - from prices that were already pretty good. Some of them have been gone from their brick-and-mortar stores for four years or more. The styles and sizes available are a complete grab bag, just what's left unsold, but for $15 I'm not going to make a fuss.
I ordered 6 different pairs. First time I've ever ordered shoes online, but I figure that even if only half of them fit comfortably I've still done well.
I also bought three pairs of Bad Pants (factory seconds) to wear around the house because (a) $5 and (b) they call them
Bad Pants.
* I'm tempted to buy this (link is gone already; amazingly bright scarlet shirt) even though it's not in stock in my size, just to blind people.
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Posted by: Old Grouch at Thursday, June 30 2011 01:16 AM (fx4N3)
Posted by: Carlo at Thursday, June 30 2011 10:46 AM (qBxra)
3
I would wear that supposedly real shirt, if only for the horrified looks it'd get.
Actually, the more I look at it, I've owned that shirt. Okay, I've owned the three shirts that they stitched parts of together to get the final product, but still...
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, July 03 2011 02:19 AM (ZGINl)
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Monday, May 16
Brrrrr!
What the hell? It's only May, and it's gone below zero in some parts of Sydney overnight. My air conditioner, which I was relying on for heating (it's reverse-cycle), has gone into a defrost mode.
Why would it need to defrost in Sydney? Well, I stuck a temperature probe in to measure the air stream while it was defrosting and it was -1.8C!
Ah, there, it's finally back in heating mode; the air is now moving at a pleasant 30.9C. I think I'll leave it there for a while.
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Monday, April 25
Five Day Weekend
I almost forgot. I've been relaxing over the Easter long weekend, playing some Mass Effect 2, and just realised that tomorrow is Anzac Day, which is of course also a public holiday in Australia.
So, five day weekend. I don't know how often Easter and Anzac Day coincide, but I can't remember it ever happening in my lifetime.
I'd been getting towards the end of the main part of the game, where you prepare for the big suicide mission, and then realised that I hadn't looked into the DLC. I had about a gigabyte of DLC waiting for me, and another 1.5GB in the
Lair of the Shadow Broker expansion, which I definitely want to play, and there's another three DLC bundles to buy (albeit of mixed quality, to judge by the reviews I've avoided reading).*
What's that you say? How's the game? Well, it's not the same as the original, but Bioware certainly didn't butcher it the way they did
Dragon Age II. I'll post full reviews of both
Mass Effect games later, but for now suffice to say that while there are some changes I don't like - and they're mostly by way of consolisation - there are also some things that the sequel does better, or at least more consistently, than its predecessor.
A couple of disappointments - Liara is mostly gone from the core game, but she's the subject of the largest and best-regarded expansion, so there's that at least. And the Mako is gone completely, which is a tragedy. That absurd cross between a Tonka truck and a superball was one of the most engaging characters in the original game, and its absence makes baby Shepards cry. I had to take out a thresher maw on foot.
On foot.
* Looks like each of the other three major DLC packs clocks in at about a gigabyte too, for a total of 4.5GB of extra content. I hope that's not just pre-rendered movies.
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Friday, March 18
How's The Weather In Sydney Now?
Rain. Rain rain rainity rain. Rain with cloudy periods and patchy rain. With more rain, and occasional showers, sprinkles, and storms.
For at least the next week.
Good.
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Actually, that's our weather here, too.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, March 19 2011 12:27 AM (+rSRq)
2
You say this is god....Does the rain keep the redbacks at bay?
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, March 19 2011 05:27 AM (EJaOX)
3
Good...you say this is
good, though I suppose a philosophical argument might be made for the typo.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, March 19 2011 05:29 AM (EJaOX)
4
Brickmuppet, they're just now coming out of a long, dry, summer. That area is semi-arid anyway. Rain is a good thing; it makes things grow, and it fills the rivers (and the reservoirs).
Yeah, rain is good. (Hell, rain is good where I live, even though water is not scarce here.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, March 19 2011 06:33 AM (+rSRq)
5
Please ignore me. I'm particularly dense today.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, March 19 2011 06:35 AM (+rSRq)
6
Yur doin betur than me Steven... i cant tiep.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, March 19 2011 09:14 AM (EJaOX)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 19 2011 12:05 PM (PiXy!)
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Monday, March 07
My Entertainment Unit Just Exploded
No, really. I was sitting here, reading my email, when there was a horrible crash from the other end of the living room. One of the glass doors of the entertainment unit had spontaneously disintegrated. The rubble is all over the floor, still ticking and popping.
The glass is - was - curved, so I suspect it's been under internal stress the entire time and just suddenly gave way. I have my air conditioner on, and it's in the line of the air stream, so perhaps the temperature differential added to that.
Somewhat unsettling, having furniture explode without warning like that.
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My mother gave us a set of stressed-glass plates for wedding. Those things are like bombs.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, March 08 2011 01:09 AM (9KseV)
2
Did the penguin on the top of your television set survive?
Posted by: dkallen99 at Tuesday, March 08 2011 01:14 AM (1PFDl)
3
Pete, I hope you didn't have them stored in close proximity to each other, or in one of those fancy glass-fronted display cabinets. The potential for chain-reaction detonation sounds alarming.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Tuesday, March 08 2011 07:20 AM (jwKxK)
4
I have a
Lenore playset on top of the TV, and since they're all dead already they came through it fine.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 09 2011 10:31 AM (PiXy!)
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Wednesday, March 02
Cool Beans
Good: New air conditioner! (It's only taken three years...)
Bad: Had to get up at 6AM because the air conditioner guy was coming at 7AM... And I only got to bed at 4AM.
Ugly: It's Autumn. It was over 30C (86F) here yesterday, but this morning it's not even 20C (68F).
Potentially Still Good: It can still get pretty hot in Sydney in March.
Also Good: It's a reverse-cycle unit, with 6kW cooling and 5kW heating capacity, so I'll be comfy this Winter as well. In fact, it's twice the size of the old unit. I just wish I'd had it a month ago.
Also Ugly: It's
ugly. The old cheap crappy unit that this replaces might not have worked, but it was compact and stylish. This one ain't.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:30 AM
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1
If it keeps the house and you cool. Then style isn't so important. Computers melting down aren't a pretty sight.
Posted by: Andrew Fong at Wednesday, March 02 2011 05:07 PM (cB03i)
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Sunday, February 06
Quote Southerly Change Unquote
Saturday, 4PM: 39.8°
Sunday, 4PM: 18.2°
In other words, it is 15° cooler now than it was yesterday
directly in front of my air conditioner.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:50 PM
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1
I'm confused. You're getting a freeze
in the middle of the summer?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, February 07 2011 02:02 AM (+rSRq)
2
I presume that's degrees Celsius.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Monday, February 07 2011 07:42 AM (7wFYN)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, February 07 2011 09:34 AM (+rSRq)
4
40C is bad. Moscow falls into coma when it hits 30.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, February 08 2011 08:59 AM (9KseV)
5
We just had an entire week of 40C here in Sydney; most nights it never went below 30C.
Bleah.
Thankfully, somewhat cooler this week.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 08 2011 10:40 AM (PiXy!)
6
40 C = 104 F = Melty Duck
No, not good at all.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, February 08 2011 11:26 AM (W8Men)
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Thursday, February 03
Acchi! Acchi! Acchi!
Either it's above the melting point of tin in here, or my thermometer's broken.
I think the probabilities are about even.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:50 PM
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Tuesday, February 01
How's The Weather In Sydney?
Just went out into the garden, and the
fence is wilting.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:16 PM
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1
High humidity? (Part of what I really hated about Boston was hot days in summer which were also really humid. The one time I visited New Orleans it was even worse.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, February 01 2011 04:47 PM (+rSRq)
2
Lots of very humid weather lately. Today the humidity is lower but it's 40C (104F) at 6PM.
Not kidding about the fence, but I think that's the neighbours' kids climbing on it again.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 01 2011 05:35 PM (PiXy!)
3
We finally had the first good snow of the winter, overnight to Februray 1.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, February 02 2011 03:58 AM (9KseV)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, February 02 2011 03:39 PM (+rSRq)
5
I think I'd rather the 104 degrees than what's happening outside Pond Central right now. I just took a look at the parking lot, and there might be 18 inches (204 kilopascals for those readers not in the US) of snow on the ground, with more coming.
I might be snowed in for a few days.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, February 02 2011 05:11 PM (W8Men)
6
Steven - yeah, 290km/h winds, a 7 metre storm surge and 12 metre waves would tend to put a damper on things.
Wonderduck - we need to build some kind of intercontinental heat pipe.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 02 2011 06:24 PM (PiXy!)
7
I was just looking
at the storm track. It might well loop around hit you in a few days, though of course it will have substantially reduced in power by then. (And it's going to bring substantial rain to the outback.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, February 03 2011 03:49 AM (+rSRq)
8
On that heading it will run out of steam very quickly - it's crossed over the mountains and headed right into the outback.
Come to think of it,
anything following that heading is going to run out of steam pretty quickly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 03 2011 01:26 PM (PiXy!)
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Monday, January 24
I Bought A Bed
Apparently they're quite popular.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:12 PM
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1
No more dangling in a sleeping bag hung from a hook in the closet?
Posted by: Mitch H. at Tuesday, January 25 2011 04:43 AM (jwKxK)
2
But everyone that says that is lying.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tuesday, January 25 2011 07:17 AM (mRjOr)
3
We've got an all-new kind of spammer. You just got hit by two of them. Brickmuppet (as always) got hit twice, too. In this case they may even be getting done by hand, but they always end with a google keyword and a link. (In the case of Brickmuppet it was "top 10 movies". Ah, I see that he got hit by your guy, too.)
They never rest, do they? Even though the site has "nofollow" for every link in a comment, so that they get zero SEO boost for their effort.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, January 25 2011 08:29 AM (+rSRq)
4
Oh, heavens. He just hit the Duck, too.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, January 25 2011 08:31 AM (+rSRq)
5
They all came from the same IP, so deleted and banned.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 25 2011 08:34 AM (PiXy!)
6
Man, I feel so left out. They didn't hit mine.
Posted by: dkallen99 at Wednesday, January 26 2011 09:08 AM (1PFDl)
7
Pixynator, I have a question for you. I'm tired of seeing imbedded youtube viddys on my blog that are teeny-tiny lil' things. Is there some setting I can change to make one 640xWhatever? Or am I stuck the way it is?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, January 26 2011 12:31 PM (W8Men)
8
Also having a little trouble here. Hit the "upgrade to 1.1" button, whoa style change! I can deal with that, but how do I replace the banner at the top? I banged together a banner pic I can use for the time being, but I can't get the page to actually USE it, even though I set it to do so under "Styles". What am I doin' wrong here?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wednesday, January 26 2011 08:53 PM (pWQz4)
9
Wonderduck, yes, I should be able to do that. Let me see what Youtube's latest embedding code looks like and I'll try to patch something together.
Avatar, I'll have to take a look. It's 2:30AM here, so maybe in the morning. Later in the morning.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 27 2011 01:38 AM (PiXy!)
10
Avatar, I'm seeing this right now:
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 27 2011 01:40 AM (PiXy!)
11
Could do with a drop shadow applied to the text, but seems fine otherwise!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 27 2011 01:41 AM (PiXy!)
12
Wonderduck - yep, can do. I'll just do a little testing and should have the new tag working later today.
What I'll do is set the new default size to 480x270 (suitable for widescreen video and fits nicely in the default layout) and then add a size=XxY option to tweak it as you see fit, just like I have for images.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 27 2011 03:35 AM (PiXy!)
13
Avatar, don't forget to flush your browser cache.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, January 27 2011 03:43 AM (+rSRq)
14
I'd prefer a slightly thicker outline, but there's no setting for that. ;p
I'll eventually swap out the image for something I don't have to blow up, but Lucky Subaru is just too damn cute.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Thursday, January 27 2011 05:30 AM (mRjOr)
15
The library I'm using at present doesn't support outline fonts, so I have to fake them, and that's fiddly enough that I didn't want to try to support variable outline widths as well.
Drop shadows are much easier because they just need an (x, y) offset.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 27 2011 07:16 AM (PiXy!)
16
Spam is a persistent pressure. Right now mu.nu is spammed up pretty good, and mee.nu is a bit. The minx.mu.nu returns 503. I went and started disabling comments on older entries.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, January 28 2011 08:43 AM (9KseV)
17
Spammers need to be killed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 28 2011 10:47 AM (PiXy!)
18
Oh, dear. I'm going to have to report you to the "New Civility" police.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, January 29 2011 05:27 PM (+rSRq)
19
Sorry. Spammers need to be
firmly reprimanded.
And then killed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 29 2011 10:29 PM (PiXy!)
20
Well, the other day I went through my comments, junked the most recent spam ones, then deleted a bunch as well. Today, about a year and a half of legitimate comments vanished. Well, they vanished from the comment list in the back end and the recent comments list, but they're still visible when viewing the posts. Any idea what's going on there?
Posted by: Will at Sunday, January 30 2011 02:25 AM (Uoe/4)
21
That's a known bug. They'll come back when someone makes a new comment.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, January 30 2011 03:01 AM (+rSRq)
22
Pixy, we'll let you off the hook this time, if you kill the latest one.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, January 30 2011 04:31 AM (+rSRq)
23
Well, I had seen that behavior before, and I did notice that a small number of recent comments disappeared from the front page after my deletion spree.They were still visible in the comment moderation page. That was a couple days ago. I haven't touched anything since then, and this morning there were a lot more comments missing from the moderation page and the recent comments list.
Hmmm... I just posted a new comment, and it doesn't appear to have fixed the recent comments on the main page. *checks moderation*
Nope, no change there either.
Posted by: Will at Sunday, January 30 2011 07:38 AM (Uoe/4)
24
Fixy-uppy routine running now.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 30 2011 01:02 PM (PiXy!)
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