No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
Thursday, April 25
Honi Soit Qui Salle Blanche
Just dropped a jar of honey-soy sauce on the kitchen floor.
Just dropped a jar of honey-soy sauce on the kitchen floor.
Observations:
- Honey-soy sauce is as sticky as honey and as apt to stain everything within 20 feet as soy sauce.
- Cutting your foot on a stray shard of glass and bleeding all over the place doesn't help.
- Bleach does.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:25 PM
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Thursday, March 07
Coincidence
The Nexus 10 is in stock and I can afford it this week. Those two circumstances have never previously coincided.
The Nexus 10 is in stock and I can afford it this week. Those two circumstances have never previously coincided.
Now I'll be able to play my Kairosoft games scaled up 8x instead of just 4x!*
* As near as I can tell, the pixel art for all Kairosoft games is done at a basic resolution of 320x200. The Nexus 7 is 1280x800, precisely 4x that; the Nexus 10 is 2560x1600, so exactly 8x Kairo-res. The text, menus and so on are all rendered at device resolution, so the games are eminently playable, just retro-stylish.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:15 PM
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Sunday, February 17
Oh Look, Three Failed Drives
One RAID-5 array rebuilding, the other one possibly toast. Charming.
One RAID-5 array rebuilding, the other one possibly toast. Charming.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:25 AM
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Friday, January 11
Stubbornly Irresolute
After a week, I'm up to F on my GOG downloads. Currently fetching Fallout Tactics, which is a lot of fun albeit non-canonical. (You can recruit deathclaws.)
After a week, I'm up to F on my GOG downloads. Currently fetching Fallout Tactics, which is a lot of fun albeit non-canonical. (You can recruit deathclaws.)
I trundle bravely onwards.
Meanwhile, I have a 512GB Samsung 840 Pro on the way. At up to 100,00 IOPS and 540MB/s, it should speed things up a bit on Shana, my new Windows (7) box.
Now please excuse me; I have a bit of Minxing to do for Ace.
Update: Monday. K. Onwards!
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04:04 PM
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Tuesday, January 08
Not So Hot
43º turns out to be not so bad after all. (That's 109º American.)
43º turns out to be not so bad after all. (That's 109º American.)
Um, Pixy, you turned on the air conditioner yesterday to cool the house down in advance.
Well, that too.
(Actually, as at 3PM it's only 40º here, and that's likely to be as high as it goes. The top floor of my little townhouse isn't air conditioned, and will keep heating up until after sunset, until it's way above ambient. At the end of a hot day you could run a Stirling engine on the temperature differential, no problem. On the other hand, it gets hot enough to kill bedbugs.)
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02:12 PM
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Thursday, January 03
New Year's Irresolutions
This year I will download and install every single game I own on Steam and GOG.
This year I will download and install every single game I own on Steam and GOG.
I don't promise to play any of them, but I will install them all.
Update: Half way through B on GOG. This might take a while.
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10:30 PM
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Saturday, December 29
Oog
Remind me not to eat that much turkey in one day ever again.
Remind me not to eat that much turkey in one day ever again.
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11:36 PM
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Wednesday, December 19
Christmas Avoidance
Didn't really want to go shopping today; the stores are full of people and I never did like people very much.
Didn't really want to go shopping today; the stores are full of people and I never did like people very much.
Then I thinks to myself, I haven't used the home delivery service for a while. It's great for stocking up on bulky or heavy stuff like soft drinks (soda) when they're on special and (checks web site) they're on special right now.
So that's that dealt with.
Also, I'm on holiday as of twenty minutes ago. 
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04:20 PM
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Wednesday, October 31
Trickle Treat!
Had a few groups this year, about 15 kids in all, ages ranging from about 3 up to 14 or so. Got rid of about half my candy so far. Only ate one piece myself.
Had a few groups this year, about 15 kids in all, ages ranging from about 3 up to 14 or so. Got rid of about half my candy so far. Only ate one piece myself.
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05:50 PM
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Saturday, October 13
Tap Tap On My Window
More of a thud, really.
More of a thud, really.
Opened the door expecting to scare off a raiding possum, but found a rainbow lorikeet instead. I think it my have flown into the window and dazed itself. It was skittish but not panicked when I approached to check on it, so the neighbours may have been feeding it.
It wasn't obviously hurt, so I put out a little dish of peach slices for it and left it to recover. Not sure what else to do, and calling the local wildlife rescue volunteers seems a bit excessive given that they not exactly rare hereabouts. (They flock in the trees near the railway station, and the collective noise at sunset in summer is astounding.)
Update: Lori was still there this afternoon, so I called WIRES, the Australian wildlife rescue service. Sadly, Lori passed away before a volunteer could arrive to help. I donated $100 in her name. Well, in my name, since lorikeets can't get credit cards, but in her memory.
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10:38 PM
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Tuesday, September 11
Stupid Physical Objects
My dishwasher and washing machine have both decided to play up.
Meanwhile, though, in Happy Abstract Concepts Land, I've been playing with Pandora. I'm late to the party, but I'm not sure how long it's been available in Australia. (Answer: About two months. So not that late.)
The user interface is very nicely implemented - clean, simple, and functional. The one feature I really wanted, though, was a button to tell me why it chose to play a particular track.
Oh.
Well, I might have elaborated slightly on one of those.
I'm impressed, and I do this kind of thing for a living.
My dishwasher and washing machine have both decided to play up.
Meanwhile, though, in Happy Abstract Concepts Land, I've been playing with Pandora. I'm late to the party, but I'm not sure how long it's been available in Australia. (Answer: About two months. So not that late.)
The user interface is very nicely implemented - clean, simple, and functional. The one feature I really wanted, though, was a button to tell me why it chose to play a particular track.
Oh.
Why this track?
California Dreamin' by The Mamas & The Papas
Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features acoustic rock instrumentation, folk influences, heavy use of vocal harmonies, acoustic sonority and call and answer vocal harmony (antiphony).
Why this track?
I'm Happy Just To Dance With You by The Beatles
Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features pop rock qualities, rock & roll influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping and major key tonality.
Why this track?
Message To My Girl by Split Enz
Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features pop rock qualities, acoustic rhythm piano, major key tonality, a vocal-centric aesthetic and many other similarities identified in the music genome project. Also you listed Split Enz in your station preferences, you goof.
Well, I might have elaborated slightly on one of those.
I'm impressed, and I do this kind of thing for a living.
So I went to download the Android app, and promptly got friendzoned.
So I thought I'd try out Spotify as well, and installed the app, and checked on the essentials (do they have Big Pig's second album? Nope.) and settled for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
And then I noticed that it was importing my iTunes library. Well, good luck little app, that's 1.26TB of data. iTunes chokes on it regularly; let's see how Spotify copes....
Better than iTunes it seems. Both iTunes and Spotify are showing all four years worth of audio files* but Spotify is using one-third the memory to do so.
* As in, four years of listening time.
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02:22 AM
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Monday, September 10
Is Busy Today
Throws up quick video to keep readers distracted.
Throws up quick video to keep readers distracted.
Knows audience.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:46 PM
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Friday, September 07
Spring Cleaning
So I cleaned my desktop rather than my floor, but it still counts, right?
Click for BIG FISH!
So I cleaned my desktop rather than my floor, but it still counts, right?
Update: Pony icons available here.
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Monday, September 03
Back Later
Have to go see The Doctor.
Have to go see The Doctor.
Update: Congratulations! It's a souffle!
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06:33 PM
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Thursday, August 16
Blue Forgotten Monday*
Sydney
2022
Monday
Corner of Oxford and Newland Streets
At twenty to eight I gave up waiting for the tram and started the long slog down towards the office. In the civil service, it is always better to be definitively late than uncertainly on time, and my spex showed three amber dots doing an impression of Brownian motion amid the maze of city streets. Which meant, with roughly equal likelihood, that the transponders were down, the feed was down, the trams were genuinely stuck in traffic, or all of the above.
My spex were up, at least, and I chirped in with a revised ETA.
It was Monday, one of those increasingly rare summer days when the temperature and the humidity dropped into double digits simultaneously, and I could use the exercise. My transfer last year from field work to an analyst’s desk had failed to induce any reduction in my pastry habit, and the unending overtime left me with no energy to stop at the gym on the way home of an evening. So I took my jacket off, slung it over my shoulder, and I walked.
The office is part of the sprawling sandstone edifice of Central Station. If you enter from Eddy Avenue through the colonnade, turn right into the first service corridor, go past the bathrooms and the authorised personnel only signs, enter the baggage elevator and take it down to P3 and then back up to P1, you will find yourself in a narrow pedestrian tunnel with an arched ceiling, pale green walls, and fitful fluorescent lighting installed around the time a young Marconi was first toying with spark-gap transmitters.
And if you follow that tunnel far enough, you will come to a closet door labelled DR JBB BELL.
I opened the door and went in, because that is me, and this is my story.
Don’t try to follow those instructions, by the way. Not only will you be surreptitiously fingerprinted and retina-scanned, and then very politely but very firmly arrested, but I lied about at least three critical details, and in any case, it’s not there any more.
My name is Jocelyn Barrett Beresford Bell, known as B.B. to my more irritating friends and Baby to people I refuse to talk to. My father is an astrophysicist, and my mother is a fruitcake. I have an MSc in statistics, a PhD in abnormal psychology, I turn thirty in June, and I work as a transit cop. Which partly explains why my office is a renovated broom closet in a service tunnel deep below Central Station.
But only partly.
Sydney’s Underground system is the most complex in the world, a last gift of King and Country in the decades before independence. Bored Scots engineers, run short of London silt to burrow through, had been shipped off en masse and run riot in the rich southern soil. Or so the story goes, and indeed the city had inherited an Edwardian knotwork masterpiece of brick and cast iron, weaving a spell of rapid transportation from the beaches to the mountains for over a century.
Being unique in scale brings with it unique problems, so unique – if you will forgive my phrasing – so unique that the sociological actuaries are required to carry backup weapons.
[To be continued, maybe.]
* The title I mentioned previously.
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