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!

Saturday, April 06

World

Good News, Everyone


  • Terraria looks set to get a new update after a year in the doldrums - and it has turtles!

  • Torment: Tides of Numenera is closing in on becoming the best-funded computer game on Kickstarter, ever.

  • GOG are selling the whole suite of recent D&D computer games - Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Planescape Torment, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Dragon Shard, that Temple of Elemental Evil thing and Demon Stone, plus all expansion packs - for up to 80% off. $21.10 gets you the complete bundle, over 200 hours of top-notch adventuring...  And 100 hours of so-so adventuring (the original campaigns of both Neverwinter Nights games are a bit stodgy, but the expansions pick up dramatically).

There's also bad news, but you can get that anywhere.

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Friday, January 18

World

Disaster Averted

Today in Sydney it was precisely the melting point of Ice-9*, thus averting global fictitious ocean freezy disaster.

It was also, apparently, precisely the melting point of my network switch, because it did.  This proved quite inconvenient.**

Fortunately, we've now had a "cool change" come through.  They call it that because it's shorter than "not technically a hurricane".***

* 45.8C / 114.4F.  In other words, far too hot.
** Probably not the only thing that melted; my internet access went out, and then my local network started having problems.  Now that it's cooled down, both are fine again, but it made for a frustrating day.
*** Wind speeds of 72km/h gusting over 100km/h - and the temperature where I live dropped from 38C to 24C in three minutes.

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Monday, December 24

World

Joy To The World

For Santa's come.
There's gifts beneath the tree!
There's reindeer in the yard;
They're eating the gardenias.
We'll have venison for tea,
We'll have venison for tea,
We'll have venison, much venison, to eat for tea.

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Wednesday, November 21

World

Road Trip!

Something to do while waiting for the database to come back up.

One.  Google Maps seems uninclined to trace a route across the Panama Canal, despite there being at least four road crossings.  So I couldn't do Anchorage to Ushuaia as I'd originally planned.

Two.  Not really recommended to travellers unless you are accompanied by a TV crew and an armed escort, but interesting.

Three.  For that perfect combination of relaxed safety and utter insanity.

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Tuesday, November 20

World

Bzzz! Wrong, But Thanks For Playing!

The correct answer is "Four and a half billion years."  "Four billion years", "Five billion years", and even just "Billions of years" are also acceptable.

"Look at me, I'm a weasel" is not correct.

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Tuesday, November 06

World

Calibration Day

Today we find exactly how hopelessly skewed the mainstream media is.*  Ace was commenting on a recent CNN poll that showed Obama and Romney in a tie - with party affiliation at D+11.  Which is crazy; you'd have to have Democrat turnout at levels higher even than 2008, and at the same time have Independents splitting 2:1 in favour of Romney.

The polls and news reports are wrong, we know that.  Today's the day we find out how wrong.

Update: Less wrong than I might have hoped, based on early returns.  Mmf.

Update: The results are in, and while the polls may have been wrong, they weren't that wrong.  It's going to be a long four years.

Meanwhile, in Australia....  Uh, we had a horse race.  With actual horses.

* Is?  Are?  Stupid language.

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Thursday, September 13

World

Do They Know Something We Don't?

Given the tenor of the questions put to Romney vs. those (not) put to Obama, the press are essentially treating Romney as though he were already president and Obama as though he were simply irrelevant.

Do they know something we don't* or are they just a bunch of brazen partisan hacks?

* No.

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Monday, September 03

World

Number 1, The Bridge

If you're not sure whether you're in New York or Sydney, here's a tip: Find the bridge with the big stone towers at each end.  If it goes down in the middle, you're in New York; if it goes up in the middle, you're in Sydney.

I was just looking for a new wallpaper after spending nearly a minute looking for an icon.  While this:

/images/LackadaisyS.jpg

Is awesome, it's far too busy to be practical.  I replaced it with this:

/images/SpectrumS.jpg
Spectrum of a Tree

Which is beautiful and undistracting.  But while searching for something suitably decorative I happened upon that very, very lost photographer.

(I'm guessing someone thought it was the Bayonne Bridge, which is at least a steel arch bridge and looks kind of similar to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the confusion grew from there.  You can tell them apart as follows:  The Sydney Harbour Bridge is much heavier - it carries eight lanes of traffic plus two rail lines to the Bayonne's four lanes; it has four enormous stone pylons that the Bayonne lacks; it has two mechanical spiders that run over the arch, used by the maintenance crews; it has the Australian and NSW state flags on top (a spider and one of the flags are clearly visible in the photo); and finally, it's in Sydney.)

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Monday, August 27

World

Better To Remain Silent...

Oh dear.  Two of the jurors on the Apple v. Samsung patent trial have opened their mouths.

Can you say overturned on appeal, boys and girls?

(Some are speculating on the possibility of a mistrial.  I don't know enough about the US legal system for informed comment.)

Update: Groklaw's analysis.  I stopped reading Groklaw regularly after SCO burned to ashes and blew away in the wind, but they've had no shortage of material since then.

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Thursday, August 23

World

Spring!!

Monday the high temperature here was around 17C, with an overnight low of 4.

Today it's up past 27C with an overnight low of 14.

And my lawn needs mowing.  Well, parts of it.

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Tuesday, August 21

World

Teeny Apocalypse

Actually, potentially serious.

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Friday, August 17

World

All Well And Good, But Technically, Wizards Aren't Real

I'm happy to see a funding campaign to build a museum at Tesla's Wardenclyffe lab.  Not least because I'm a huge fan of Tim Powers and F. Paul Wilson.

It's somewhat dismaying, still, to see how much nonsense comes out whenever his name is mentioned.

Tesla's, that is.  Not Powers' or Wilson's.  Okay, who knows, maybe theirs too, but...

You know what?  Never mind.  Tesla museum, woo!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:55 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thursday, August 16

World

Dear Marissa*

Go big on email.

I spent half an hour last night rescuing important mail from my Gmail spam folder, and spent half an hour this morning flagging mail in my inbox as spam.**

Rescue Thunderbird.  Get some top UI designers to make it really pretty, and some top coders to make it really fast.  Get it on Android and iOS.  And then make it seamless to use it with Yahoo mail, and make it seamless to move from Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook to Yahoo.

Thank you.

* Marissa Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo!, formerly employee number 20 at Google.
** And missed the tick box once and had to go and rescue a critical conversation.

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Friday, July 20

World

History's Bloodiest Wars And Who To Blame

A helpful guide.

Rank Name Aggressor Victim How Many
1 World War II Germany, Japan,
sundry others
best forgotten
Everyone else 40 million+
2 An Lushan Rebellion China China 33 million*
3 Mongol Invasions Mongols Everyone else 30 million**
4 Yuan Dynasty Collapse China China 30 million
5 Ming Dynasty China China 25 million
6 Taiping Rebellion China China 20 million
7 World War I Germany,
Austria-Hungary,
Ottoman Empire,
Influenza Virus
Everyone else 15-65 million
8 Tamerlane's Conquests Tamerlane Human decency 15 million
9 Dungan Revolt China China 8 million
10 Russian Revolution Filthy Commies Anastasia,
sound agricultural
policy
5 million


* This single 8th century civil war is estimated to have killed 15% of the population of the entire planet.***
** The mongols, by contrast, only wiped out about 10% of the people in the world. Even WWI and the Spanish Flu together couldn't break into double digits.
*** As reader Ray points out, this number may be slightly exaggerated.

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Friday, June 08

World

Ray Bradbury

Oh, that's a shame.  One of the last of the old school.  But he was 91, and at least he lived long enough to see:



Uh, content warning, but that should be obvious from the title. wink

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Monday, April 02

World

Um...

This is either the most elaborate April Fool's joke I've seen in years, or the dumbest thing I've seen in...  Sadly, just the past week.  There's a lot of dumb in the world.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:32 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, March 18

World

So That's What This Hunger Games Thing Is

Okay, they're "young adult" novels, but that doesn't actually require the writing to be eye-gougingly awful. I'll stick with Terry Pratchett or Garth Nix, thanks all the same.

(via Slashdot and the most commonly highlighted sentences in Kindle ebooks)

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Saturday, March 17

World

Apropos Of Very Little

Does anyone remember the year - probably in the late nineties, maybe 2000 or so - when suddenly every woman in the world took to wearing orange and black and it looked like the planet had been invaded by giant anthropoid bees?

There is actually a reason I ask.  Well, two reasons, one being that I can't remember.

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Sunday, March 04

World

You Will Believe A Sheep Can Fly

Downstream Benefits, an ABC* report on the upside of the flooding here in Eastern Oz.  With flying sheep.

* The other one.

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Friday, March 02

World

Andrew Breitbart

He was fearlessly honest and outspoken, and will be missed.

Also...  It's rather unsettling when people younger than you die unexpectedly of natural causes.

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Thursday, March 01

World

On The Plus Side

The water levels in Sydney's dam system are at their highest since 1998.

On the minus side:
Residents of four towns have been evacuated as floodwaters covering an area the size of France sweep across NSW.
We don't do things by halves.

Oh yes: Warragamba Dam, Sydney's main reservoir (about two trillion litres), is expected to overflow tonight, into the already swollen Nepean River.  Sydney is still on water restrictions.

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Wednesday, February 29

World

42!

As Douglas Adams wrote of a rather different president:
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

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Thursday, January 26

World

In My World

Wikipedia:
The science wars were a series of intellectual exchanges, between scientific realists and postmodernist critics, about the nature of scientific theory which took place principally in the United States in the 1990s. The postmodernists questioned scientific objectivity, and undertook a wide-ranging critique of the scientific method and of scientific knowledge, across the gamut of the disciplines of cultural studies, cultural anthropology, feminist studies, comparative literature, media studies, and science and technology studies. The scientific realists disintegrated them with a laser.

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Wednesday, January 18

World

And He Rocks



more...

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Monday, December 05

World

Someone Forgot To Tell The Weather Fairies

It's December now.  That's summer in the Southern Hemisphere.  The weather right now would be considered only moderately chilly...  Were itfor the middle of winter.

I prefer cool weather to hot, but seriously baby, it's cold outside.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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