Then, if you'll excuse me, but I'm in the middle of 15 things, all of them annoying.

Saturday, April 07

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:31 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, March 11

Life

Went Outside Today

I even tied my shoelaces.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:42 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, March 04

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:14 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Saturday, March 03

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:54 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, February 09

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:27 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, February 03

Life

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.

Update: Or not.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:25 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, January 25

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, December 21

Life

Where's Pixy?

Dead.

Well, that and playing mining engineer, but mostly just dead.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:12 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Saturday, November 26

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:39 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, November 16

Life

Precipitation, Precipitation

Kindly depart my vicinity and return on a subsequent occasion.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:38 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, October 31

Life

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.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:47 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Saturday, October 01

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:43 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Saturday, August 13

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:38 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, July 05

Life

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

Life

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.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Life

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.

http://ai.mee.nu/images/RiversZest.jpg?size=500x&q=95
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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:57 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, May 16

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:45 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, April 25

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, March 18

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:24 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, March 07

Life

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.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:50 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, March 02

Life

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. sad

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 | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, February 06

Life

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 | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, February 03

Life

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 | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, February 01

Life

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 | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Monday, January 24

Life

I Bought A Bed

Apparently they're quite popular.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:12 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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