log

Thank God for PHP. I’ve con­vert­ed the users page of xhva.net to use a PHP script, scrap­ing text from the filesys­tem and build­ing the page dynam­i­cal­ly. It’s my first attempt at a PHP script, and I like it. Lots of lit­tle things to add in the future.

I’m very hap­py with how it’s turned out. The reg­is­tered users of my FTP can sim­ply update a few text files in their home dir to change their site name, descrip­tion, URL or thumb­nail dis­played on the users page. And I’ve made enough lock­downs to stop the more play­ful ones from destroy­ing the page. :)

Well, my eyes are hurt­ing. I’m think­ing of get­ting some sleep now. I’m on the ear­ly morn­ing train out to see my fam­i­ly, and although I’m look­ing for­ward to being there, I’m not look­ing for­ward to the trip. Urgh. Loud, arse-crip­pling bus for an hour and a half, after a four-hour train trip wedged in a seat.

Yeah, it’s bed time now. Users of my FTP, unite, and attempt to ruin my new PHP page. I need to learn the ins and outs of pro­tect­ing my stuff from you guys. :)

I’m going to do it. The for­m’s in my pocket.
I have the details.

–

Pin­points of green and hazy blue reflect­ing into amber skin. Black stone. Water. Gold on crests of white. Open air, coloured with the stain of salt. A mind of words and thoughts beside me, eager fin­gers clasp­ing my own, unmov­ing but for us.

Just a quick entry before I go to bed. Noth­ing ter­ri­bly impor­tant to write about, but I feel like express­ing myself again. Did a lit­tle design­ing tonight, tho I don’t know if I’ll use any of it for the xhva.net pages. I like the design, and final­ly I’m step­ping away from blue, but it means los­ing the con­tent of the main intro page — the lit­tle text-adven­ture non­sense — and I don’t real­ly want to lose that lit­tle bit of text. I feel it fits right in with my sense of humour, as tacky as it is. Those of you bored out of your skulls can find a very basic pro­to­type here.

Should go to bed… I’ve got a friend com­ing over in the morn­ing to grab some DC games before work. My brain is pret­ty fraz­zled tonight, so I’m seek­ing things to do, which is an indi­ca­tion I should just sleep.

Blaster has proven quite fun­ny so far. I had the RPC hole patched almost a month ago. Does any­one else use Win­dows Update or pay atten­tion to secu­ri­ty alerts? If you’re going to run a sys­tem that has an exten­sive his­to­ry of mind­less secu­ri­ty prob­lems then you, the user, must sup­pli­ment the OS’s lack of vig­i­lance with your own. Run Zonealarm. Don’t open attach­ments ran­dom­ly. Keep a virus scan­ner run­ning. None of these basic pre­cau­tions cost mon­ey, but they might just edu­cate you.

Can’t wait to move the web­serv­er and ftp to a lin­ux machine behind a strict fire­wall and use SSH for every­thing. While I’m there, it’s about time I learnt PHP and at least dynam­i­cal­ly build the /user page. Updat­ing it man­u­al­ly real­ly sucks. And I’ll kill the nest­ed table shit in that page too.

Those of you view­ing my site in IE5 prob­a­bly aren’t see­ing it cor­rect­ly either. Well, tough luck. Either upgrade to the demon­ic IE6 or start using a brows­er that pays prop­er atten­tion to CSS padding ele­ments, like Mozil­la. I fought with this a while back, and I’ve decid­ed I just can’t be fuck­ing both­ered to fix it for IE5. Noth­ing good ever comes from accept­ing bad behav­iour, espe­cial­ly in ren­der­ing engines. I have nev­er loaded these pages in Netscape 4. The pain would be too great.

Oh well, tis time for sleep now. I’m feel­ing mighty toasty thanks to the cheap and nasty does­n’t-turn-off-if-you-knock-it-over heater, and I’m out­ta projects to keep my mind spin­ning. No more bitch­ing about IE tonight. :)

Take care, all… ‘spe­cial­ly you, spunky.

So I’m sit­ting in Wind­sor at 9:50, think­ing of what I should put into a new blog entry. There’s a few things on my mind at the moment, all about prac­ti­cal­i­ty. I’ve found myself with a tighter time­line than I’d planned, but I think we’re all in the same boat at the mo. Visions of sug­arplums dance through my head.

Life is a lit­tle warped in the way it deliv­ers presents and oppor­tu­ni­ties. They always seem to come at both the wrong and the right time. Wrong, because the soul is reluc­tant to admit it’s in a rut, and right because it’s exact­ly what we need. “Change is good,” I was recent­ly told.

My thoughts are too messy to write prop­er­ly at the moment, so I’ll leave this blog entry to be con­tin­ued later…

Hav­ing a ter­ri­bly blonde night. ‘Try­ing to take my tie off for ten sec­onds before I realise it’s the hea­phones I’m wear­ing get­ting in the way. Mean­while, Pushit strolls through my ears. Got­ta stop eat­ing whole tins of canned fruit. I have a feel­ing that it’s not good for the body.

I just spent two days fold­ed up in the back of a car like a piece of exer­cise equip­ment, and I can hon­est­ly say that it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Oh, that sounds rather sus­pi­cious phrased like that.

Bal­li­na is beau­ti­ful. Clean, so clean and fresh. Salt in the air, deep blue empti­ness above, sand and grass and rock­pools with pret­ty coloured snails. But the loca­tion isn’t the only thing that made me hap­py dur­ing this trip. :)

How won­der­ful it is to have the per­son you love asleep in your lap.

–

In anoth­er world entire­ly, those of you fol­low­ing the bizarre SCO vs. IBM case may get a laugh from this.

I love you more than lan­guage allows me to say, Michael.

Ã?rë yétalyen, ar hen­duly­at nar inyatsë,
ambarenya van­wa ar calalya ná ilya.
When you look at me, and your eyes are in mine,
my world dis­ap­pears and your light is all.

–

breathe out
so I can breathe you in
hold you in

Just fin­ished watch­ing Insom­nia. An above-aver­age movie, but lack­ing the pure psy­chol­o­gy that could have made it so much more. Hilary Swank kicks butt. She’s an all-round excel­lent actress, but I think the plot called for her trans­for­ma­tion a lit­tle too eager­ly. Robin Williams tog­gles between dark and gum­my as he tends to do. I can’t help but notice his over­done reluc­tance, that strange… twitch… he has in sep­a­rat­ing con­cepts, like a ner­vous Dr Lec­tor with­out the force­ful intel­li­gence and bit­ter­sweet smiles.

Paci­no is Paci­no: rough, a lit­tle haughty and still a pow­er­ful fea­ture on screen. As with Swank, I think his char­ac­ter bun­ny-hopped notice­ably dur­ing the last twen­ty minutes.

Worth see­ing if you have the time, espe­cial­ly at three in the morn­ing. I note the irony; no need to worry.

Life is great. Some­where near­by, a lit­tle rain­bow land­ed, and I’ve just found it.

Tomor­row marks the day when I wel­come back to the coun­try a long time friend. We have no plans, as that would basi­cal­ly be out of the ordi­nary for a meet­ing like this, and so I expect tomor­row to be filled with sur­pris­es. Bet­ter yet is the news I have and the ideas I will share. Shalt be an inter­est­ing day for all. :)Any­way, back to real­i­ty. I’m sit­ting around at half past two think­ing about life and how to express myself. My week has been one of the best in recent mem­o­ry, and it sure is good to find that I can smile for hours at a time. My cheek­bones hurt.

A good friend said to me the oth­er day, “I haven’t seen you like this for a long time.” For­give my for­get­ful para­phras­ing, but that com­ment made a big dent on me. Wow, it’s good to be like this.

So in the short term, aiya málonya, in the long term, merin mape hroalya ran­cun­y­atse, moina sel­do, ar nyaru­vanyel sá melinyel ilya aure i ambare­va. Hirin alasse mí alas­selya.

And now I com­mand myself to sleep :P

Sit­ting around by the heater wip­ing my nose and feel­ing annoyed at the flu. LOL @ myself as I dis­cov­er this old line from a diary entry:“I want the inner child, the strong man, the thought­ful purist, cor­rupt enough to match myself in glee.”

To the few won­der­ing of my state: of course I have, with­out restraint or rea­son. That is a vice I will not fix. I would rather feel both extremes than feel noth­ing. This is as my heart would have me do.

Yay! MozBlog + Blog­ger work­ing again! It was all about my account not being com­plete­ly migrat­ed. What a pain in the arse. Moz 1.4 is great, tho I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to 1.5 when Fire­bird and Thun­der­bird become the trunk. Lighter, more con­fig­urable, awe­some exten­tions… and final­ly a theme that uses my sys­tem colours and does­n’t look crap. W00t.

My flat­mate cooks an incred­i­ble Shep­herd’s Pie.

So I’m sit­ting here in the dark, star­ing into the lumi­nes­ence of a very bright mon­i­tor, lis­ten­ing to a bizarre mix of Staind, Evanes­cence, Trapt and Aaliyah. There’s a strange feel­ing in lis­ten­ing to a voice you know will nev­er speak again. I’m think­ing about a few peo­ple who may become part of my life, in capac­i­ties they don’t under­stand yet.

I sit here locked inside my head
remem­ber­ing every­thing you said
the silence gets us nowhere
gets us nowhere
way too fast

I’m in a light mood at the moment, coast­ing through the ear­ly hours of morn­ing with­out much con­cern. Seri­ous Sam 2 has proven too frus­trat­ing for enter­tain­ment, and don’t even get me start­ed on Street Fight­er. My fin­gers aren’t entire­ly work­ing tonight, so I’m los­ing hor­ren­dous­ly to Shin Aku­ma. This should­n’t be happening.

I recent­ly fin­ished read­ing Math­ew Reily’s Area 7. It did­n’t have much effect on me. Action-ori­ent­ed nov­els read the way action-ori­ent­ed movies watch: one time is usu­al­ly enough. I enjoyed his ear­li­er nov­el Con­test more, but only because I con­sid­ered the plot more inter­est­ing. Any­thing about the gen­er­al great­ness of the US Pres­i­dent and his army auto­mat­i­cal­ly gets a cyn­i­cal side-glance, so Area 7 had a tough fight from the begin­ning. That’s not to say the ideas expressed in it weren’t inter­est­ing — there was some real­ly fan­tas­tic threads in the fab­ric of plot — but noth­ing that would forsee­ably make me want to read it again, as I’ve done with Han­ni­bal, The Third Pan­dem­ic, or Con­tact.

but these words
they can’t replace
the life you
the life you waste

So back to the affor­men­tioned peo­ple. “Want is a grow­ing giant whom the coat of have was nev­er large enough to cov­er.” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, too true.

Good night. :)

Aaron Lewis is an absolute­ly stun­ning singer. I’ve found a few of Staind’s live per­for­mances in MPG for­mat, and his abil­i­ty to car­ry a song is utter­ly incred­i­ble. And he has real­ly beau­ti­ful lips. Hmm. Noth­ing much else to report of late. I’ll be return­ing home for a week, see­ing my fam­i­ly and cel­e­brat­ing Dad’s 50th, but that’s a fort­night away.

I’ve been talk­ing to a friend about reli­gion and physics via email for the last fews days, and my final con­clu­sion is this: my flat­mate can get stuffed. :P Don’t mind the in-joke.

Bed time, since it’s now 6am again.

Just anoth­er crack up.

Wow!This is quite damn smart. Not quite sure about the wire­less con­nec­tiv­i­ty tho — I’m more con­vinced that the data is stored and then uploaded upon phys­i­cal con­nec­tion. Of course, there’s still holes in the the­o­ry — Trin­i­ty’s death pre­dic­tion? Or maybe that was assumed from the more thor­ough pre­dic­tion of Neo’s even­tu­al and unavoid­able meet­ing with the Archi­tect and Trin­i­ty’s known will­ing­ness to die for him. But to remove the wire­less the­o­ry would be to destroy the solu­tion to Neo’s Senti­nal stop­ping. Hmm…

…inter­est­ing.

LOL.

Cough.

I’ve been fix­ing Mozblog this morn­ing, since it’s cur­rent­ly in a state of total, absolute use­less­ness. Mess­ing around with files for hours result­ed in me re-read­ing almost the entire of my blog his­to­ry. Whoa. Here’s some­thing I wrote at the begin­ning of this year:

“I’d be equal­ly com­fort­able walk­ing off this cliff if it did­n’t affect any­one else. The para­chute would be my prob­lem alone. In sit­u­a­tions like this, what I fear most is that expec­ta­tions and feel­ings can nev­er be the same for two peo­ple, no mat­ter how much talky talky comes beforehand.

See, my def­i­n­i­tion of ‘rela­tion­ship’ isn’t the one assumed by the ‘scene’; rela­tion­ships aren’t the fruit of a one-night-stand that does­n’t know when to stop, nor should they have a pre­de­ter­mined expiry date. In some ways, I’m hor­ri­bly old-fash­ioned, even con­ser­v­a­tive. I think there should be a prop­er court­ing peri­od; antic­i­pa­tion and swoon­ing are part of the pack­age and half of the impact.

Some­thing pre­cious should be han­dled gen­tly. I would have dif­fi­cul­ty know­ing after the fact that I rushed it and lost some­thing in the process.”

Holy shit. Who is this per­son? It’s me, I realise, and as the mem­o­ry of writ­ing this comes back, so do the feel­ings. Warmth, gen­tle­ness, a sense of float­ing and gid­dy­ness. Gawd, I real­ly do need to find the per­son who I can make feel this way too.

So, bared soul and all, I present myself to the world.

In oth­er, less strange and cer­tain­ly less intim­i­dat­ing news, my flat­mate and I took our oth­er flat­mate out for Birth­day Din­ner tonight. He’s climb­ing the lad­der of age with a renewed sense of style. Green is your colour, Bradley. Nai hiru­va­lyë nér i tul­tuv’ alassë len.

Back to Sea Song by The Doves. Beau­ti­ful. Loud, over­bear­ing, rat­tling my brain with gor­geous acoustic bass. I should be in bed! I’m on the train to Wind­sor at lunchtime to meet with friends for the night. Much com­put­er-relat­ed stuff to get through. I’m such a wild char­ac­ter. :P Talk­ing of such, I might go out on Wednesday/Thursday night and tempt fate…

Enough of me. With these dark piano chords bathing my brain with endor­phins, I shalt dis­ap­pear. Namárië!

Wow — Enter The Matrix is real­ly quite bad. I won’t rant for long, but it’s pret­ty clear that Shiny either did­n’t get enough devel­op­ment time for the game, or just out­right neglect­ed the impact of using imma­ture tech­nol­o­gy (ala Mes­si­ah) and as a result the game’s con­tent suf­fered. A lot.

The main rea­son for the game’s sales is undoubtably the extra movie footage. Peo­ple will be dis­ap­point­ed to know that the major­i­ty of this footage is bad­ly act­ed and poor­ly pro­duced; spe­cial effects aren’t added in a num­ber of cas­es, and to replace miss­ing live-action sequences, high-res ren­ders are made and then con­vert­ed into FMV. Very unprofessional.

Game­play is rough. There are moments of bril­liance, but there are equal moments of “grotes­query”. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, even on a math­mat­i­cal scale this only makes the game aver­age. The con­cept must have proven wild­ly dif­fer­ent from exe­cu­tion; I won­der if this meet­ing of minds real­ly achieved any of either par­ty’s ideals. Is David Per­ry los­ing it, or do the Wachowski’s just not get gaming?

The engine has it’s virtues, but they’re over­shad­owed by bugs. I have fond mem­o­ries of Mes­si­ah’s many char­ac­ter posi­tion­ing prob­lems. I was sur­prised that so many have made the leap over. I got Niobe on top of a machine by reg­u­lar jump­ing, and she got stuck try­ing to stand — shuf­fle jit­ter slide shuf­fle shuf­fle — and I was unable to do any­thing about it. I gave up after a few min­utes and reloaded the last save point.

Hmm… sew­ers. The nuclear plant is prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing area, though its goal, like most of the oth­er areas, is sim­ply a mat­ter of get­ting some­where and not dying, then run­ning out again. Atten­tion: THE HOVERCRAFT IS ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. I can’t say much for the car chase scenes either; it’s sim­ply a mat­ter of hold­ing down accel­er­ate and dodg­ing a few cars occa­sion­al­ly. Com­bat is one area where the game finds it’s niche; the con­trol sys­tem is sim­ple but offers quite a few moves, expand­able by use of Focus. Cam­era, as always in these third per­son games, rarely finds a com­fort­able spot and feels the need to con­stant­ly shift — lead­ing to me run­ning into Smith a num­ber of times, usu­al­ly to my death. And here’s some­thing: when a gun runs out of bul­lets and you’re in pos­ses­sion of anoth­er firearm, don’t shift back into com­bat mode ran­dom­ly. This real­ly pissed me off.

Whilst it does­n’t deserve to die a hor­ri­ble, painful death, Enter The Matrix could have been a lot bet­ter. Giv­en some tru­ly inter­est­ing mis­sions and a lot less re-hash­es of the film’s scenes (thanks, Perse­phone) I could have enjoyed this expe­ri­ence much more.

Dave Per­ry — pick up your act!

The Quan­tum the­o­ry of Sci­ence and God:The fruit of the Tree of Knowl­edge gave us both the intel­lect to prove God does­n’t exist and the self-doubt to still believe that He does.

Don’t wor­ry St George — you can be sure that I’m rethink­ing you. Heav­i­ly rethink­ing you, main­ly because your web­site is down half the time and when I can access it, your daft inter­net bank­ing page gives me login errors. Oh, and your $72 worth of “admin­is­tra­tion fees”, plus the Eft­pos Usage fees, Non-StGe­orge ATM fees and Inter­net Bank­ing fees. But please know that I appre­ci­ate last mon­th’s cred­it­ed inter­est — $0.01 on the last unnec­es­sary snail­mail state­ment — but not when your next action is to take out $0.01 in deb­it inter­est! Is any­one at the wheel?

LOL! In a dis­cus­sion on Slash­dot about SCO’s recent attack to IBM’s Lin­ux arm, Dai­ly­Grind wrote this enter­tain­ing com­ment.

Home sweet home. I return after a week in the bush with my family.–

Why is it so dif­fi­cult to find some­one young who wants some­thing real?

Reloaded = Incred­i­ble. Except for the sex.

The video card bench­mark­ing scene annoys me a lot. Minor nig­gles could keep me typ­ing all night, so I’ll just say that its major prob­lem is the unfair com­par­i­son of cards from dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions. The card design­ers must spend months attempt­ing to dis­tin­guish their prod­uct from oth­ers on the mar­ket — nec­es­sary to progress the field — but are then torn down by Ran­dom Review­er #17 whose total analy­sis of a prod­ucts is “But it’s not as fast as XXX’s last card!!“It becomes a cycle: the heav­i­ly blink­ered pub­lic imme­di­ate­ly come to the con­clu­sion that’s it’s not worth buy­ing, even though only 5% of them could even afford the card any­way. This pub­lic opin­ion get to the com­pa­ny and through to the mar­ket­ting depart­ment, who pres­sure the devel­op­ment teams to release some­thing else a lit­tle faster to beat the com­peti­tor in the next round of benchmarks.

In the mid­dle of this are the design­ers, whose pri­ma­ry inter­est does­n’t lie in the mar­ket share or get­ting Seri­ous Sam to run anoth­er 4 FPS faster to sat­is­fy some over­clock­ing-junkie. They have a per­son­al inter­est in build­ing bet­ter com­po­nents, with pro­gram­ma­bil­i­ty, enhanced range of colour, eas­i­er devel­op­ment, more sta­bil­i­ty — not just a speed increase. It’s the thrill of mak­ing some­thing more exten­si­ble and future proof, some­thing sus­tain­able, reusable, cheaper.

…and this is where the ulti­mate­ly point­less release of “Ultra” prod­ucts come from. The push­ing of a few speed bar­ri­ers and upping mem­o­ry does­n’t advance the mar­ket; it sim­ply appeas­es the review­ers and gets a few page hits. Devel­op­ment time is bet­ter spent cre­at­ing new meth­ods for nec­es­sary fea­tures. Can you real­ly tell the dif­fer­ent between 125 and 130 FPS? Is it real­ly nec­es­sary to have 8X antialias­ing on at 1600x1200?

A few years ago when the first gen­er­a­tion of Hard­ware T&L was revealed, 3DFX put the mar­ket­ting droids at Def­con 1 to douse the flames of resent­ment toward it’s own crud­dy and ill-timed releas­es. It was rel­a­tive­ly suc­cess­ful: review­ers ran around yelp­ing about the total use­less­ness of H T&L. Well, let’s have a look at the mar­ket now and what fea­tures are on every sin­gle good graph­ics card.

Here’s a good exam­ple of review­er rhetoric:

“Still, the FX 5900 is tuned to take advan­tage of fea­tures in games that haven’t arrived yet.

One new func­tion, Ultra­Shad­ow, will ren­der shad­ows and scenes more quick­ly and effi­cient­ly, mak­ing games such as yet-to-be-released Doom III, Half-Life 2, and Aqua­mark 3 run faster and smoother, accord­ing to NVidia.

That’s tough to ver­i­fy at this point, how­ev­er, because Direc­tX 9 titles are yet to be found.”

Fun­ny that! I’m not impressed that I can’t play Seri­ous Sam two per­cent faster. I’m glad that the new future-proof hard­ware fea­tures were enough to con­vince this review­er not to use two-year-old-engine bench­marks to damn a new video card pur­pose­ly built to sup­port a ver­sion of Direc­tX that the game does­n’t even use! Whew, I would­n’t be able to get by with­out this kind of qual­i­ty assessment.

Fuck! Seri­ous blonde moment!Will explain later…

Did­n’t realise at the time that the care­bear jpg was so hor­ren­dous. Apolo­gies to those of you who expe­ri­enced seizures attempt­ing to read the text. Please don’t sue. Life moves swift­ly on. I shall be vis­it­ing anoth­er great Aus­tralian city soon, our own cor­rup­tion cap­i­tal, Can­ber­ra. I’m think­ing of vis­it­ing Yarralum­la with a pick­et whilst I’m there… great dick­head. What kind of moron does­n’t report sex­u­al abuse in the church, espe­cial­ly when he’s in such a posi­tion? Legal oblig­a­tions stopped him? Bah.

On a friend­lier note, Quenya steadi­ly improves. I’ve fin­ished the course I start­ed a while back, and now it’s real­ly the vocab I have to work on. /me is lov­ing learn­ing lan­guage. Melin i Eldalambe!

Jason and I are doing a road trip to Artar­mon for some­thing off Ebay this week. Lucky bug­ger’s also got a job inter­view, so he may escape the orbit of our cur­rent employ­er and leave the rest of us in the dust.

X Men 2 was/is fan­tas­tic… and so is Bob­by (smacks lips). Storm con­tin­ues to suck. I don’t have any­thing par­tic­u­lar against Halle Berry, but she’d bet­ter get some stronger parts and some lines that aren’t filler in the next movie. Go Gene! She’s awe­some and does a great job all the way through the film. I still can’t stand Scott. Wolver­ine is bril­liant, but his hair’s get­ting a lit­tle out of con­trol, and we did­n’t see enough skin. :P

Rogue… sigh. Dippy.

The sto­ry­line is excel­lent, far beyond what I expect­ed for a sequel. I’m impressed that they kept the exact visu­al style of the first movie — no stu­pid exper­i­men­tal fuck­ing-around. Shows what comes from a clear­ly-defined vision. And My God, what an incred­i­ble intro­duc­tion! Incred­i­ble! Ragh!

Before I’d seen the movie, a friend of mine point­ed out the par­al­lel between mutants and homo­sex­u­als (nev­er used those two words in a sen­tence before — heh). I’m sure it’s been raised before, espe­cial­ly with Mag­ne­to’s cast­ing, but I had to laugh at the dry humour in Bob­by’s com­ing-out scene. It was prob­a­bly intend­ed, prob­a­bly even based on the real thing. Some par­ents react exact­ly like that — as if par­tic­u­lar attrib­ut­es such as sex­u­al­i­ty are some­thing that can be just turned off. It’s sad­den­ing and annoy­ing that grown ups can be so obliv­i­ous to their chil­dren’s psy­cho­log­i­cal need for accep­tance. Of course, your younger broth­er does­n’t usu­al­ly call the local SWAT team when he finds out you like guys… but Bob­by, there’s always a place for you here. :P

Any­way, enough ram­bling. I want to be up rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly today. ‘Night :)

Nihilist Bear Which Dys­func­tion­al Care Bear Are You?

brought to you by Quizil­la

I’ve fall­en in love with a new band: Evanes­cence. It was the obvi­ous — the Dare­dev­il Sound­track title “Bring Me To Life” — which brought me to their altar. I was lis­ten­ing to Ran­dom Rock Hits Sta­tion #10 this arvo as I hung the wash­ing out… the piano intro caught my ear, and I rushed in to lis­ten. Before the song had fin­ished, I had the name and lyrics via the net.

Damn good music!

Well, that’s that. No more all-Quenya blog entries. For those of you in the audi­ence who could under­stand it (thus also being able to point out the many mis­takes and mis­us­es of gram­mar) the sit­u­a­tion is resolved, quite happily.

Lalëanyë!

Në arwa mau­rë quetë sin, nan umen quetës lam­benyassë. Estelinya yara ver­nonyassë oan­tië, ar umë pelu­va. Antanyes melmë ar imbë lú­mi han­do, nan sin ná i pustië.

I nér hires ar carë ver­nos ratou­va i noa mail­evas, nan umes u‑voronda.

Ainu umë polë ëa amba­ressë ve sin, neri u‑vorondë na i núra melentë…

well fuck them
and fuck her
and fuck him
and fuck you
for not having
the strength in your heart
to pull through
i’ve had doubts
i have failed
i’ve fucked up
i’ve had plans
does­n’t mean
i should take
my life with
my own hands­but these words
they can’t repace
the life you…
…the life you waste

Staind’s “Waste” is a song with a beau­ty that can only come with deep sad­ness and anger.

I’ve gone to make a post, and realised that I’ve got noth­ing to say. Today my flat­mate attempt­ed to del­i­cate­ly tell me that my writ­ing style is too anal for a weblog. :P He’ll cringe read­ing that, but I appre­ci­ate know­ing what peo­ple think, and I real­ly do appre­ci­ate his input. Maybe I should loosen up.

Erm.. how do I do that?

Oh… xhva.net is live. Come and visit.

Great dinosaur comics from a great writer who’s also a great guy: http://www.qwantz.com. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. I’ve laughed my arse off sev­er­al times.

My great­est oppo­nent has always been myself. I haven’t analysed this enough to say whether its cause is a con­sis­tent state of loathing or denial, or just a gen­er­al lack of momen­tum in my life. Moti­va­tion comes in bursts of nec­es­sary func­tion; in some ways I can blame my genet­ic make­up, my strange child­hood, and even the way I’ve been treat­ed by some mem­bers of soci­ety. A part of this also comes from the meth­ods I’ve used to analyse those around me: step back, watch, under­stand, inter­act. After a while that approach alien­ates you from oth­er mem­bers of your own species, enough that hav­ing a “nor­mal” con­ver­sa­tion is like the end­less rep­e­ti­tion of nails down a black­board. It’s easy enough to blame the envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences, even the genet­ic ones. I’ve seen it exhib­it­ed to an extreme in oth­ers, and just above I’ve used it to some­how jus­ti­fy my lack of influ­ence on my own sit­u­a­tions. How­ev­er, this is self-defeat­ing: if I believe in evo­lu­tion I also have to believe that it’s some­how affect­ed not just be genet­ic changes, but by soci­etal and indi­vid­ual under­stand­ing — not chang­ing the mol­e­c­u­lar struc­ture, but just know­ing what infor­ma­tion to let run through it. In short, if I don’t change the way I think or the way I absorb infor­ma­tion, I — and we — don’t grow.

I’m get­ting too meta­phys­i­cal here for half past four in the morning.

I don’t see the world like a lot of peo­ple do, as an expe­ri­ence to col­lect totems of com­fort on their way to the grave. In some ways, I even see the work some peo­ple do as rep­re­sent­ing the same: it’s a com­fort zone. I see hun­dreds of peo­ple each day who are apa­thet­ic sim­ply because they’ve reached that point in their lives where there’s noth­ing more to accom­plish, noth­ing more to see, noth­ing more to place bets on. I am half-half as to whether I’m one of these peo­ple. In some ways, the rut I’ve become entrenched in scares me, but at the same time I feel the com­fort of rou­tine, of know­ing what comes next week. The one over­rid­ing feel­ing now is: do I care enough to wor­ry about being apathetic?

I don’t believe in let­ting my mind rest for any sub­stan­tial amount of time. This is where my defen­sive pow­ers kick in and I inform the mass­es that I spend a great deal of time build­ing and cre­at­ing things that are impor­tant to me, even to the point where oth­ers don’t under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance at all. In most cas­es, I just don’t care. I’m learn­ing Elvish for this rea­son. I’ve been asked why I’d want to learn a lan­guage that’s so obvi­ous­ly use­less, and I respond by say­ing that I find it inter­est­ing, and that it’s teach­ing me things about lan­guage that I did­n’t know, and I’m find­ing ful­fil­ment in just learn­ing some­thing new. Noble caus­es, etc etc. Weeks are spent tin­ker­ing with ideas for designs that are nev­er seen by anoth­er liv­ing being; there are draw­ing that sit unpub­lished in my draw­er, pro­grams wait­ing to be shared, weblogs about me and for me.

So maybe this is some kind of lame attempt to influ­ence myself to stay in the rut until it rains and I drown. There’s part of me that does­n’t care about los­ing three days of my week just so I can be myself for the rest. There’s a resent­ment towards the typ­i­cal “9 to 5” job that I can’t shake, and I don’t know if I ever will. I hate the idea of spend­ing most of my life build­ing some one else’s tem­ple just to find that it’s being used as a market.

I’m greedy, I’m self-cen­tred, and I’m very hard to moti­vate beyond sim­ple call­ings. These are my faults. Greedy with the time I’ve been alot­ted to live, self-cen­tred because I’m loathe to give this time up, hard to moti­vate because I hate being con­vinced; this makes me very self-right­eous, and I’m sound­ing like a snot. But fuck it, this is me: the only thing that tru­ly influ­ences the way I see the world is the love of anoth­er per­son. In the absense of love, my time is my time. In the pres­ence of it, I will­ing­ly make my time theirs.

I’ve just read over this, and as expect­ed, it makes no sense and has no cohe­sive man­ner. Even the writ­ing style changes grad­u­al­ly. The whole entry is a thin­ly-veiled excuse to hide my fear of change, a whol­ly unwor­thy jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for being angry at a world that already takes too much time from what I con­sid­er my improve­ment. Push me as hard as you can.

It may seem that I’m always drag­ging you through the dirt, but don’t be fooled by the writ­ings of an irra­tional mind: the com­bined self is lighter than the weight of it’s indi­vid­ual parts. I write to pro­voke, but I live much hap­pi­er than I read. View­ing the world through jad­ed eyes is more exhil­a­rat­ing than you think — it pro­vides so many oppor­tu­ni­ties to be wrong about human nature, and I find that uplifting.

‘Night.

MozBlog is play­ing up. Ver­sion 0.6b14 is incred­i­bly bug­gy, and I dare say even more so now that I’ve installed Mozil­la 1.3. If this blog seems a lit­tle bare for a week or two, that’s why. I hate using the Blog­ger web inter­face — for some rea­son the text entry box is incred­i­bly thin on Mozil­la — and I’ve already tried play­ing with ear­li­er ver­sions of MozBlog to fix it. I have no doubt it’s most­ly the fault of Moz 1.3’s XMLRPC mod­ule, or some­thing. Life con­tin­ues on as it always done. I’m get­ting fur­ther with the Quenya stuff, although get­ting frus­trat­ed as some obscene­ly obscure phras­ing used in the end-of-chap­ter tests. I also wish they were longer and used more vocab­u­lary; there’s a few words slip­ping away from instant rec­ol­lec­tion sim­ply because I don’t use them much.

I’m about to start chas­ing some­thing that could give me an out­let for the love I’ve been bot­tling away. Pray for me, etc etc. Less luck and more courage is what I need.

Audio­scrob­bler is real­ly kewl.

Bed­time.

Don­nie Darko is an inter­est­ing piece of proph­esy. I imag­ine his path through time as being akin to a loop on a roller-coast­er: after the loop, you’re returned to the point before it, with only the mem­o­ry of the expe­ri­ence to prove it ever hap­pened. So is the whole movie about clos­ing the loop and real­is­ing why the engine fell? Reach­ing clo­sure on a pos­si­ble future path? Real­is­ing how his actions, direct­ly caused by a pos­si­ble future, could affect the peo­ple around him? Tak­ing responsibility?The script is open-end­ed so we can pon­der this end­less­ly, like his Believer/Agnostic/Athiest argu­ment in the movie. We nev­er know exact­ly why or how he knew, or even if he did. Does he solve his sleep walk­ing and/or men­tal prob­lem when he final­ly lies in bed to sleep? Was he man­i­fest­ing it him­self? Was it that he nev­er had an ill­ness at all?

I have a feel­ing that there are two con­clu­sions to reach about the ending:

A) The engine is actu­al­ly iden­ti­fied by the FAA author­i­ties. The plane is found. There is a present-time log­i­cal rea­son for the engine’s exis­tence. The entire movie is an imag­in­ing by Don­nie, start­ing at the time when he gets back to the house that morn­ing. Do we, or Don­nie, see the swirl on the engine nose that starts this whole episode? Fur­ther­more, is the end­ing there­for imag­ined too? Is this Don­nie’s way to say good­bye with­out accept­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for his death and the pos­si­ble future? Does he actu­al­ly die?

B) The engine exists only because of the events that take place if Don­nie lives. His direct actions in this future affect the past as to cre­ate this future — the per­fect cir­cu­lar ref­er­ence. What then hap­pens if Don­nie does­n’t live? The engine isn’t spawned from the worm­hole. How then does Don­nie die? When he stays in his bed, does he do so in the knowl­edge that he won’t die because he won’t live? At the moment when Schro­ding­er’s Cat is observed, is Don­nie both dead and alive? Our vis­i­ble present-path is cre­at­ed exact­ly when we expe­ri­ence it. Maybe Don­nie woke up that morn­ing, hav­ing con­quered his men­tal prob­lems, and realised his abil­i­ty to cre­ate the future he wants.

The prob­lem would be much less if we could see those future-paths (the vis­i­ble water-like worm­holes) all through the movie. I feel as though the movie is a piece-togeth­er of many mil­lions of dif­fer­ent choic­es that Don­nie made. I was intrigued by the “knots” in the vis­i­ble future-paths; is this where Don­nie made deci­sions on which future we’re see­ing? If he turned around half-way up the stairs and did­n’t find his father’s gun, which branch of the deci­sion-tree would we be on? How would this affect the out­come? The gun that “kills” Frank solved his men­tal prob­lems: a sym­bol­ic way of “over­com­ing” these strange visions. When Frank dies, the world ends.

Wax­ing far too philo­soph­i­cal tonight. I’ll stop now and debate it tomor­row at work.

Any­way, good movie. Don­nie is played by a very tal­ent­ed actor, and a very good look­ing one at that. He can adopt that same off­beat, almost evil look that I love so much in Edward Nor­ton. Patrick Swayze is real­ly annoy­ing. I like Lena tho. And the woman who played the moth­er is real­ly fantastic.

Tired. I’m walk­ing to work because I’m broke. Hav­ing lost the final stitch­es a week ago, I went back and had more den­tal work done. No stitch­es this time, but some fill­ings. Boy, that big drill can cause some seri­ous nerve-twitch­ing. It could do some real dam­age in the hand of a lunatic. Lucky I trust my den­tist enough to close my eyes and let him go.

That’s an inter­est­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal nuance… clos­ing my eyes and let­ting him work either sig­ni­fies that I trust him implic­it­ly, or that I’m sub­con­scious­ly afraid of his ‘means to and end’ method and don’t want to know how these things are being achieved. Hmm. Have to think about this one for a while. I’m usu­al­ly inter­est­ed in know­ing, in the­o­ry, how these things work; prac­tise is a dif­fer­ent thing alto­geth­er. My teeth are my pet hate, the part of my body I’m most self-con­scious about, and like most hates, the eas­i­est way to deal with it is to ignore it… that I did, and did well. Now, I’m spend­ing a lot of time, pain and mon­ey in order to learn to love my teeth again.

I feel like Edi­na from Ab Fab, squat­ting over a hand-mir­ror in order to learn to love her…

A big pot­hole in my men­tal road which I will fix.

Life seems, so far, and at least in this casu­al West­ern world, to be about learn­ing to love the parts of your­self you hate.

Good­night.

Some­thing real­ly emp­ty. Don’t expect to make any sense of this blog, because it’s just going to be me ram­bling on, a voice with­out def­i­n­i­tion, akin to that “stream of con­scious” idea.

“Sea song” by The Doves is real­ly bad until you hear it through head­phones in a foul mood. Then it takes on a whole new lev­el, strong and com­fort­ing, incred­i­bly rich and emo­tive. I need bet­ter head­phones or bet­ter ears.

Real­ly bad mood.

I don’t quite under­stand why so, either, but it’s just come on, maybe as a sequel to the tid­ings of hate I was so will­ing to show on the week­end. I had an incred­i­bly test­ing fri­day + week­end. Work was fucked, use­ful sup­port­ing staff came to a total of one, and I left for lunch late both Sat and Sun because no one was there to cov­er for me. The staff mem­ber who usu­al­ly cov­ered my lunch was brought in ear­li­er that morn­ing to cov­er the boss­es’ arse instead. For the sec­ond week in a row.

Now lis­ten­ing to: The Requiem (Clint Mansell) | Sea Song (The Doves)

Now burn­ing kar­ma for: pret­ty much everyone

–

How do we visu­alise music?

I’m lis­ten­ing intent­ly to low­er, soft­er chords, and with my eyes closed, I’m paw­ing through the music to hear them, as if the notes are dis­ap­pear­ing under­wa­ter and I can only see so far down; a visu­al image tied into the phon­ic sen­so­ry. I think this is an inter­est­ing part of psy­chol­o­gy. How much do the sens­es ‘bleed’ into each oth­er? I was intox­i­cat­ed by the idea of smell being the sense most direct­ly con­nect­ed to the brain — thanks, Thomas Har­ris — and I have noticed that it brings faster visu­al imagery than any oth­er sen­so­ry input (at least in my body). I’ll learn about this at some point.

I wish this last stitch in my upper back gum would fall out.

I’m going now. The inter­nal fire will burn out before I burn any­one else with it, so don’t wor­ry about me… ‘night. Namárië, Ambar; lelya ar lan­ta mir cilya.

I feel total­ly emo­tion­al­ly spent after watch­ing Requiem for a Dream. I’m left with a sense of absolute des­o­la­tion, some­thing beyond tears and beyond com­fort­ing, that I haven’t felt since Dancer in the Dark. It is an incred­i­ble film, painful­ly real and dis­turb­ing. I’m not eas­i­ly affect­ed by movies. I tend to absorb them more than watch, and the full effect of some­thing like Dancer slow­ly creeps through me instead of hit­ting dead on. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not, since it speaks more of my psy­chol­o­gy than I’d like to admit.

I spent a great deal of my child­hood think­ing about chances lost, and even now that’s prob­a­bly what takes most of my idle CPU time. I’ve nev­er quite stepped up to the plate to beat this. In the slow res­ig­na­tion that dawned around the age of thir­teen, I came to a point where I could­n’t find tears any­more. I’d sit out­side on our cement dri­ve­way and feel the air kick around me, eyes shut, lis­ten­ing to the heli­copter tree above, forc­ing myself to feel. Back then it was the lost of a good friend, and the under­stand­ing that I might nev­er get to say how much I loved him. That, I sup­pose, was the expe­ri­ence that brought on my fear of emo­tion­al apa­thy and an inter­est in psy­chol­o­gy. One day I will under­stand why, back then, I felt it nec­es­sary to make myself cry over loss.

And it makes me won­der how many oth­er chil­dren had lives like mine. The scars beneath their con­scious minds are no more vis­i­ble to my eyes than mine to theirs. In a social­ly con­di­tioned world it makes no dif­fer­ence what you have been, just what you are at the point of impact. Dig­ging into the reg­u­lar­ly land-filled trench­es of my mind and those around me is, I sup­pose, what life is all about.

Emo­tions take time to devel­op in me. I can’t be over­whelmed eas­i­ly. I’ve been known to get psy­chot­i­cal­ly hap­py in the pres­ence of a select group, but over­all I see the world from a few steps back, close enough to feel the heat but far enough to not get burnt. I think this will change slow­ly, and it will be a con­scious deci­sion; in real­i­ty it’s a defen­sive manoeu­vre, based in fear, and I’ll even­tu­al­ly learn when it’s become unnecessary.

It’s time for me to go to bed. Maybe after a few games of that under-pro­duced Cap­com game, Cap­com vs SNK 2 Alpha Tur­bo: Bunch Of Ran­dom Chal­lengers Thrown Togeth­er For Fan­boys Like You 2003.

Sur­pris­ing­ly accept­able. The pain is, so far, less than I was expe­ri­enc­ing with the teeth still in. I expect this to change, at least for a while lat­er tonight. I always find it fun­ny that peo­ple assume I’m straight. “Any future girl­friends…” da da da. I have to laugh. I feel like I’m infil­trat­ing some secret boys’ club.

Just had two teeth pulled. I’m still numb, so if I’m still alive in two hours, I’ll let the world know how my mouth feels.

Oh Cap­com, oh Nin­ten­do, let me count the ways in which Cap­com vs SNK 2 on the Game­cube sucks don­key arse. The bane of humankind begins with the joy­pad. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, yes, if all games used at most two but­tons. How­ev­er, Nin­ten­do, in the real world, there’s more than two func­tions in a game; not every­thing is a Mario clone or Poke­mon fuck­ing Bat­tle menus. Your choice of pad lay­out is beyond human suf­fer­ing. I fought with the Dream­cast for a while until I final­ly accept­ed the four-but­ton lay­out ala SNES, but what you’ve deliv­ered isn’t just dif­fer­ent, it’s like con­trol­ling a game with a heat-affect­ed Rubiks cube.

Cap­com should pay here too. Your choice to pro­vide an utter­ly fuck­ing incom­pre­hen­si­bly stu­pid GC-ISM mode pro­motes new­bies to be pulling Drag­on Punch­es and lev­el threes with the least of skill and effort, there­by reduc­ing a com­plex, tight game requir­ing prac­tise down to an ongo­ing Spe­cial-Moves-A-Go-Go episode where smash­ing the yel­low ana­log around qual­i­fies as “play­ing the game”.

You have both lost big, big marks for this treach­ery to the human spirit.

I fuck­ing hate mem­o­ry cards, by the way. I can’t even save basic infor­ma­tion to the con­sole — I’m sur­prised I can even set the God­damned date with­out requir­ing an extra $30 purchase.

Nin­ten­do, you can go. Cap­com, please stay, as I’m not fin­ished yet. The more I play your… game, the more hor­ri­fied and the less sur­prised I get at the design deci­sions you’ve made. What ini­tial­ly scared me, the announc­er, has become a sec­ondary con­cern; the fuck­ing music is worse. My God. For a start, it’s mon­trous­ly loud and over­bear­ing; I can hard­ly hear the sound effects. Of course, as is usu­al with con­sole games, you don’t offer a vol­ume set­ting for the music — I have option to kill it alto­geth­er or keep it tear­ing at my soul above every­thing else. How­ev­er, I could accept the vol­ume if the back­ground tunes — and I use the word ‘tunes’ in the bad­ly-made-midi-file-on-a-pc-speak­er sense — qual­i­fied as more than ele­va­tor music. Things start­ed going down­hill in Alpha 3, let alone the ear­ly Ver­sus Series games, but there is no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for your end­less “this is true love we’re mak­ing” tune blar­ing repeat­ed­ly. Awful, like sand­pa­per to the senses.

We’re get­ting deep­er into the prob­lems of this pile of unpol­ished junk: game­play and bal­ance. I was so pleased to dis­cov­er that Shin Aku­ma has been some­what… toned down… in this game. I was­n’t so pleased to dis­cov­er that he’s now the weak­est char­ac­ter. Get this: Geese beat me by hit­ting me three times. Three times. And this is in that sin­gle fight­er mode, where we’re both sup­posed to be of equal strength. Bal­ance, boys! I think you mis­placed it after the Alpha series fin­ished. I could con­tin­ue with this, too: God Rugal, when under the com­put­er’s con­trol, can kill with three moves, yet when I use him I tend to die faster than if I use stan­dard Ryu. I do not under­stand this.

Part of the prob­lem lies in how your AI has got­ten pro­gres­sive­ly worse over the years. I played Super Street Fight­er II Tur­bo again the oth­er day; I was pleasent­ly sur­prised to be beat­en sense­less by Ken in the sec­ond match. Those char­ac­ters had much bet­ter AI than your recent efforts, which I also can’t under­stand. How can a Mega Dri­ve play bet­ter than a Game­cube? There’s an expo­nen­tial dif­fer­ence in pro­cess­ing pow­er — spend some R&D time on port­ing some intel­li­gence over.

To com­pen­sate for the com­put­er’s stu­pid­i­ty, you’ve tak­en to increas­ing the attack and defence points of the CPU as the dif­fi­cul­ty ‘increas­es’: Hard­est mode is only hard because I lose a quar­ter of my ener­gy per hit, forc­ing me to play either incred­i­bly defen­sive­ly or equal­ly aggres­sive­ly. Nei­ther is fun. What hap­pened to strategy?

I’ll keep burn­ing while I have the strength. Let’s move on to the style. Ear­li­er games fea­tured move pri­or­i­ty — this has dis­ap­peared from the radar too. Now, every sec­ond attack results in both char­ac­ters reciev­ing dam­age; I’ve suf­fered more dou­ble KOs in the last week than I’ve ever had with oth­er fight­ing games. Even Supers have no pri­or­i­ty. I’m pri­mar­i­ly a C‑Groove play­er, so I can’t speak for the oth­er grooves, but I keep get­ting knocked out of things with sim­ple moves that should be over­ri­den. Maybe it’s because the col­li­sion bound­ing box­es are way out, or maybe it’s because of the SNK con­nec­tion. I don’t know. Either way, it’s fuck­ing me off, and should be fixed. There’s a rea­son I pull a Spe­cial move, and by def­i­n­i­tion it has more pri­or­i­ty than stan­dard moves.

There’s so many oth­er things: Zang­ief’s cheap tac­tics and ridicu­lous dam­age imbal­ance, Cam­my’s strange MVC com­bo-able low for­ward kick, every­thing relat­ed to that cheap Nakoslut­slut, Gen­juro’s absense, Guile’s absolute use­less­ness, the fuck­ing menu sys­tem that takes ten min­utes to get to the point, the forty five screens one has to suf­fer through even in ver­sus mode, the fuck­ing char­ac­ter tex­tures being half the res­o­lu­tion of the back­grounds, the char­ac­ter’s palettes con­sist­ing of six colours on a con­sole doing 32-bit, the whole sev­en back­grounds we get, the… [so on, and so forth]

Bad. Ter­ri­bly unpol­ished, try­ing too hard at things that just don’t work. Stream­line the menu sys­tem. Kill the bloat. Fix the palettes. More back­grounds. Burn down the stu­dios where the music was record­ed and sac­ri­fice the com­poser’s first born. Get rid of Zang­ief and the fuck­wit with the ball and chain and the cheap helper char­ac­ter. Wankers. And hire some God­damned QA staff and some testers. I can­not believe this passed through a ded­i­cat­ed QA depart­ment. If it did, you know what I would recommend.

Oh, while I’m at it, I want some­one to cut Athena in half with a chain­saw so the lit­tle skank can’t sparkle tele­port any­more. She real­ly fucks me off.

‘Final­ly got a copy of the remixed ver­sion of “Blast off” by Danielle Spencer. It’s only avail­able on a sin­gle that I could­n’t get hold of.

• Prepar­ing to have half my head ripped out.
• Flat­mate is thor­ough­ly over the Sam + Fro­do picture.
• Amer­i­can Psy­cho isn’t as fun­ny the sec­ond time around.
• Tril­lian won’t do Secure IM any­more, even after patch­ing, and it’s real­ly annoying.
• West­on’s But­ter­scotch Short­bread has become my pri­ma­ry food source.
• Quenya learn­ing is becom­ing mud­dled because of a thou­sand prono­mi­al suffixes.

Strange weath­er late­ly. Last week we had hail for half an hour, fol­lowed by light rain and then heat. I went down to vis­it Gavin & Sara again and decid­ed that their weath­er sux even more. ‘Talked to the boy I like who’s work­ing with me. I’ve known of him for a long time now, but haven’t said any­thing in regards to spend­ing two years want­i­ng to ask him out. Sigh. Here’s hoping…

Rather than off­i­cal­ly announc­ing that I’m a sad, pitiable crea­ture, I’ll let the pic­ture and accom­pa­ny­ing quiz say it for me:

I haven’t post­ed much late­ly — unsure as to why. Life has come back to a gen­tle whis­per again, and I’m just tak­ing time work­ing on per­son­al projects: edit­ing LOTR texts, read­ing a few books and learn­ing more Quenya. Fight­ing with Win­MX also fea­tures heavily.

I’m star­ing at a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly dis­shev­elled bed­room at the moment.

Slight­ly con­cerned that there’s been no updates to any soft­ware worth hav­ing late­ly; Mozil­la is behind, MozBlog has­n’t moved since ear­ly Jan­u­ary, Tene­brae fea­tured a Christ­mas update and nada since, and Mugen for Win­dows is still unreleased.

Par­tial­ly annoyed at myself for leav­ing a few things till they’re real­is­ti­cal­ly too late to fix or both­er with.

Tomor­row night will be interesting.

Bin­go.

Woke at 13:40 today; feel some­what bet­ter. Dragged myself out­side to get the wash­ing off the line, and spent ten min­utes get­ting a spi­der out of the right pock­et of some trousers. Urg. Gave the bot­tle back; went acceptably.

Unvoica­ble con­cerns knaw­ing at me.

My playlist set­tles back on Tool’s Pushit. I’m in a strange mood. I hope to have lots of mon­ey tomor­row so I can get quite a few things dealth with.

My flat­mate has tak­en to read­ing my blog, so let’s all wave hel­lo to him.

I’ve made a few deci­sions today, and that, in this case at least, can only be a good thing. Hav­ing fret­ted over the issue of mov­ing down the moun­tains, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that I’m stay­ing where I am for the moment. Hav­ing wor­ried over the old­er-guy prob­lem, I’m going to make a vis­it and deal with it direct­ly. I can now let my mind drift back onto the oth­er two con­cerns I have right now, both of which are yet unvoicable.

And I’m going to get some sleep tonight. It proved utter­ly impos­si­ble last night, not just because of men­tal gears whirring incessent­ly, but because of the headache that woke me at five AM.

Now lis­ten­ing to: Orbital — The Box (radio edit)
Just fin­ished watch­ing: FOTR Extend­ed DVD Disc 4
Want­i­ng to hurt: Who­ev­er decid­ed to include noth­ing about Quenya on the FOTR Extend­ed DVD
Now think­ing about: ((Men + spir­i­tu­al­i­ty) * 2) — (reli­gion + bull­shit + distance)
Thor­ough­ly sick of: Expectancy
Com­plete­ly pre­pared for: Bed + PalmPi­lot + FOTR text
Sel­dom­ly con­tact­ed at: shiva___@hotmail.com

And then you have a day that comes to a crash­ing halt when three issues, all need­ing sud­den atten­tion, arise with­in a few moments of each oth­er. And that which is fresh­est on your mind must take a back­seat. Speak­ing in rid­dles again. I’m like that.

I had a bot­tle of cham­pagne deliv­ered to work today — by couri­er — that was sent by an old­er guy who may have feel­ings for me. I’m flat­tered, but as you were prob­a­bly expect­ing, said gift is accept­ed only as a token of friend­ship. Now, for the first time, I must gen­tly reject this per­son. Being some­one who does­n’t like to burn oth­ers, and con­sid­er­ing this may also affect how I deal with said guy at work, it’s a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion for me to deal with. Sigh.

I have promised to call some­one else for drinks and what­not, also, as I see it, in a pro­fes­sion­al man­ner. I don’t know what has been assumed.

Alarm bells are ring­ing, and they’re mak­ing me want to run from the build­ing. After a close-call with one old­er man in the past, I have my old-man scan­ner per­ma­nent­ly turned on, and the results are sel­dom good. I don’t mean to chas­tise the group, or work up some hor­ri­ble stereo­type, but it’s some­thing that I’m wary about; some­thing very wary about. I think the roman­ti­ci­sa­tion on a young guy with a heart of gold car­ries too much wieght in an old­er guy’s heart, and the idea of not miss­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty sub­con­scious­ly affects their actions. I admire the trait of grasp­ing the moment, but it comes with a price on the oth­er per­son too, in some cas­es a bur­den. Learn­ing where to start and when to stop is also important.

A lot of stuff has hap­pened since last night to get my brain into gear. A lot of it is with­out a log­i­cal solu­tion, and that, I find, is the most frus­trat­ing part.

Now I feel like I’m being spoilt for choice in mak­ing new, last­ing friend­ships, and I’m sound­ing like an unap­pre­cia­tive brat.

I need to sleep, sleep like a log. I’m up at nine tomor­row morn­ing to con­sid­er hous­es, already know­ing that some part of me hates mak­ing a deci­sion one way or the oth­er. So, in addi­tion to my sev­er­al hun­dred vices, now I’m inde­ci­sive too.

This blog has gone long enough, cov­ered too much ter­ri­to­ry with a sweep­ing lack of detail. To con­tin­ue here would be to voice a thou­sand fears long qui­et. Maybe I need to do that, but first I might give the right ones pri­or­i­ty, and enjoy the expe­ri­ence of decid­ing which ones matter.

‘Night.

And then some­one unex­pect­ed calls and you end up hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion that lasts over two hours. You talk about every­thing, all mean­ing­ful, no gos­sip. You learn a lot about some­one just by the ques­tions they ask. You realise the com­pli­ment implied, and it makes you feel good. You go to bed all hap­py that some­one has opened up to you.

‘Night.

Ever so often you realise that after sift­ing through all the crap, all the inane bab­ble that the world goes on with, that in all seri­ous­ness, there’s almost noth­ing worth talk­ing about. This may seen utter­ly counter-intu­itive, con­sid­er­ing I’m writ­ing this in a blog, but it’s some­thing that defines a lot of the way I see the world, and even more so how I inter­act with it’s inhabitants.

I see peo­ple who are strong­ly opin­ion­at­ed as real­ly fuck­ing bor­ing, which is also fuck­ing iron­ic, and maybe a lit­tle hyp­o­crit­i­cal. Hav­ing a fierce belief on an issue is an announce­ment that a per­son isn’t talk­ing with me, but at me. I would rather spend time with oth­ers who say lit­tle, but mean much.

I have some­thing on my mind, some­thing that I can’t put into words because I haven’t iso­lat­ed the feel­ing yet. ‘Spent a while talk­ing to some­one on New Years Eve. Until three-thir­ty in the morn­ing. Fol­lowed by fif­teen min­utes of hug­ging. For a while, I let go of the reigns and let myself be led. Even­tu­al­ly, as always, sen­si­bil­i­ty or moral­i­ty made me take them back.

Extend­ed hug­ging with peo­ple I’ve just met isn’t some­thing I do reg­u­lar­ly. This sit­u­a­tion seemed to cre­ate itself, but then again, I was pseu­do-drunk on apple juice and prob­a­bly did­n’t realise until I was com­fort­able in his arms. Yes, that’s the excuse I’ll use… Nice, warm, comfortable.

I’d be equal­ly com­fort­able walk­ing off this cliff if it did­n’t affect any­one else. The para­chute would be my prob­lem alone. In sit­u­a­tions like this, what I fear most is that expec­ta­tions and feel­ings can nev­er be the same for two peo­ple, no mat­ter how much talky talky comes beforehand.

See, my def­i­n­i­tion of ‘rela­tion­ship’ isn’t the one assumed by the ‘scene’; rela­tion­ships aren’t the fruit of a one-night-stand that does­n’t know when to stop, nor should they have a pre­de­ter­mined expiry date. In some ways, I’m hor­ri­bly old-fash­ioned, even con­ser­v­a­tive. I think there should be a prop­er court­ing peri­od; antic­i­pa­tion and swoon­ing are part of the pack­age and half of the impact.

Some­thing pre­cious should be han­dled gen­tly. I would have dif­fi­cul­ty know­ing after the fact that I rushed it and lost some­thing in the process.

When I get like this, I tend to prat­tle on, which, look­ing at every­thing I’ve just writ­ten, is exact­ly what I’ve done. Every fear seems to come out, even those that have no con­nec­tion what­so­ev­er. I should stop now.

Send­ing SMS is not the right thing to do at half past four in the morning…

I’m get­ting a bit frus­trat­ed with MozBlog because it does­n’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­vert extend­ed char­ac­ters to their cor­rect HTML enti­ty codes. To use them, I have to plough through the source view, which is annoy­ing. The b13 ver­sion I’m run­ning also seems to make new posts when I edit an exist­ing one, then pub­lish. I have had three ver­sions of my pre­vi­ous post appear­ing. Grr. Bug report time.

Ok, that’s that done. I saw The Two Tow­ers again. I vowed out­side this blog that I should see it at least three times before com­mit­ting to any par­tic­u­lar ideas or judge­ments, but I’ll throw cau­tion to the wind this time.

The begin­ning of the movie is absolute­ly the best pos­si­ble way they could have brought me back into the film. Utter­ly fan­tas­tic. Beau­ti­ful mesh­ing between films. The balrog/Gandalf scenes are also brilliant.

Minor nig­gle: We nev­er see the begin­nings of Frodo’s prob­lems with the ring. He rowed away in FOTR, hat­ing the ring and know­ing it was a bur­den, but we nev­er see the slight changes in Frodo’s demeanor; he’s just sud­den­ly tak­en over by it. Extend­ed ver­sion will hope­ful­ly expand on his falling.

Éowen is very well cast. Beau­ti­ful expres­sions of slow tor­ment. Éomer I’m not so sure about. He’s a lit­tle… soul­less. We nev­er real­ly get to know him because he’s always some­where else.

Aragorn goes a lit­tle over the top near the begin­ning, but I think that’s just the words from the script, not his act­ing. He man­ages a great per­for­mance with what he’s given.

Gim­li is used as a gag a lit­tle too much. He played almost no part in the book, so I can under­stand that the film­mak­ers need­ed some way to tie him in. You’re for­giv­en, most­ly. I’m impressed by the new parts Lego­las was giv­en — very elf-like rea­son­ing and frustrations.

Faramir, I was so look­ing for­ward to your per­for­mance as a voice of rea­son and sta­bil­i­ty among men, but instead you’ve been turned into a tool to demon­strate exact­ly the same point as your broth­er: men are short­sight­ed and hor­ri­bly fal­li­ble. I do not like this change in char­ac­ter at all.

What the fuck is with Osgiliath? No, you’re right Sam, you’re not meant to be here. I liked the in-joke, but it does­n’t make up for a whole plot redi­rec­tion that does­n’t go any­where. If this whole thing was a stage for the Nazgûl/Frodo meet­ing, I’m sor­ry to tell you that it’s unnec­es­sary. Frodo’s inter­nal fight with the ring is bet­ter demon­strat­ed amongst friends, ala Sam.

Not quite sure if I like the Nazgûl fly­ing beasts yet.

Main prob­lem with the movie: Not enough Fro­do and Sam. There’s hard­ly any inter­ac­tion between them, where­as in the book we had some beau­ti­ful sit­u­a­tions where Sam became pro­tec­tor and Frodo’s fail­ings demostrate the ring’s deceit. I was real­ly look­ing for­ward to the visu­al treat­ment of the scene I described a few posts ago; maybe it’ll be in The Return of The King. Here’s hoping.

I believe that Helm’s Deep should not have been the focus of the movie. How­ev­er, I’m will­ing to give it a chance, since in analysing only a part of this tril­o­gy I may miss a larg­er purpose.

I love the con­stant use of Elven lan­guage in the movie. Love love love. Accord­ing to the offi­cial web­site, it’s all Sin­darin, which would explain why I’m not pick­ing words out yet. Once I fin­ish Quenya, I’ll start on Sin­darin. :P

Ents were thin­ner than I expect­ed, but men­tal image is some­times cre­at­ed with­out the lim­i­ta­tions of physics. The ent’s knees bent more than I expect­ed as well. Annoy­ance caused by the Ents’ “deci­sion” to stay out of the fight is off­set by the fact that they go to Isen­gard and destroy it anyway.

I won’t prat­tle on about Gol­lum, because after the sec­ond view­ing I’ve realised that his trans­la­tion is actu­al­ly quite good. I was expect­ing some­thing a lit­tle dark­er orig­i­nal­ly, but I’m con­tent with how he is. Absolute­ly fan­tas­tic CG work on his expres­sions and inter­ac­tions with the envi­ron­ment, espe­cial­ly Fro­do. Believ­able, yes.

I would have enjoyed see­ing Tree­beard harass GrÃma.

I could keep going on and on for pages here, but I’ll resist.

The Two Tow­ers did­n’t trans­late as well as Fel­low­ship of the Ring sim­ply because we had three almost seper­ate plots to fol­low instead of a sin­gle lin­ear sto­ry. Adap­ta­tion prob­lems are imme­di­ate; how does one keep ten­sion and inter­est? In the book, this was solved by deal­ing with one thing at a time. It’s not pos­si­ble in visu­al form, where time-shift­ing only works in very short periods.

Nev­er­the­less, I applaud Peter Jack­son and crew for their work. From a text that I orig­i­nal­ly bat­tled through, he has fash­ioned a movie that I can watch and enjoy. It’s a pity a few things were unnec­es­sar­i­ly changed — Faramir, the Ents, Éomer’s entire role — but over­all, it’s a good film.

I’ve decid­ed to cease judge­ment of The Two Tow­ers until I’ve seen it at least once more. But… Faramir… why? And Haldir… poor Haldir.

sigh.

I saw The Two Tow­ers tonight. I need some time to con­sid­er it. In lighter news, the Extend­ed ver­sion of FOTR is absolute­ly fantastic.

‘Night.

I’m invent­ing a new phrase: “What would Sam do?“My infat­u­a­tion with Sam con­tin­ues to rise. I’ve fall­en into the same pit as so many oth­ers — I’m now read­ing fan fic­tion. I should stop this immediately.

Q. What draws me to Sam?
A. He nev­er gets it on with Frodo.

Let me put it this way: his love for Fro­do is much pur­er than any­thing pos­si­ble in an aver­age, real-world mor­tal. He takes care with his every effort and offers pro­tec­tion whilst allow­ing Fro­do to do any­thing he likes, even walk into dan­ger. In this sense, he is com­plete­ly self­less. His friend­ships are based com­plete­ly on respect and admiration.

Sam is every­thing that a per­son could want in a part­ner, even with­out the sex. Giv­en Sam, would you need sex? It seems to me that the love­mak­ing would be end­less and in every moment, with­out the need for phys­i­cal con­suma­tion. Would sex destroy the sim­ple puri­ty of Sam Gamgee? How would you look at him in the morning?

Slash is bad for the soul.

Sam will for­ev­er remain in my mem­o­ry told in TTT as such:

“And so Gol­lum found them hours lat­er, when he returned, crawl­ing and creep­ing down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head drop­ping side­ways and his breath­ing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo’s head, drowned deep in sleep; upon his white fore­head lay one of Sam’s brown hands, and the oth­er lay soft­ly upon his mas­ter’s breast. Peace was in both their faces.
Gol­lum looked at them. A strange expres­sion passed over his lean hun­gry face. The gleam fad­ed from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peer­ing back up towards the pass, shak­ing his head, as if engaged in some inte­ri­or debate. Then he came back, and slow­ly putting out a trem­bling hand, very cau­tious­ly he touched Frodo’s knee — but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleet­ing moment, could one of the sleep­ers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hob­bit, shrunk­en by the years that had car­ried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.”

This, and The Choic­es of Mas­ter Sam­wise, are the most beau­ti­ful parts of the books.

Sor­ry kid­dies, this post is for those over 18. I may get awful­ly angry.I am going to elab­o­rate on what is wrong with the Fel­low­ship of the Ring game demo. This may take some time.

Detail: Love­ly tex­tures. Nice pumkins. Inter­est­ing lay­out, albeit total­ly fuck­ing wrong for the shire. I real­ly appre­ci­ate the Lla­mas, since they’re total­ly out of place, hav­ing nev­er been men­tioned in the book. Now, as a side note, where the fuck is every­one who actu­al­ly lives in the shire? Note to devel­op­ers: there are more than five peo­ple in this part of Mid­dle Earth. No, Fro­do does not help Sandy­man find a fuck­ing met­al pin. What are you smok­ing? Con­cen­trate on the book, if you’re going to use such a well-loved and dis­ect­ed licence. You have a VERY small mar­gin of cre­ative licence, and so you should: you’ve got a three hun­dred and nine­ty pages of descrip­tions and accounts. Tolkien was not one to skip detail, so don’t skip his.
The con­ver­sa­tions Fro­do has in the shire suck, period.
Sam is appalling. I don’t know where you got the idea for his char­ac­ter, but I found him imme­di­ate­ly grat­ing — the exact oppo­site of his image in the texts. He also looks evil, and comes across as a halfwit. As some­one who loves Sam very much, I find this beyond redemption.
I will descend from my soap­box to say that the land­scapes are very nice, and well detailed. In the excit­ing Aragorn adven­ture where I got to hack some wolves up using one sword com­bo repeat­ed­ly, I was drawn into just how over­done Weath­er­top is. If I could have stom­ached the arbi­trary and sense­less slash­ing any longer, I would have kept play­ing, but at this point I was actu­al­ly feel­ing phys­i­cal­ly ill.

Inter­ac­tion: Maybe I should rename this sec­tion, because at most I could talk to peo­ple with noth­ing to say, and I could pick up some mush­rooms. Oh, hold on — Aragorn picked up some Lem­bas! I’m amazed they ver­i­fied the spelling. My trawl up to Weath­er­top was a run­ning fren­zy inter­spliced with a few hack and slash bat­tles with Wolves. It was­n’t a pro­tec­tion bat­tle, because the two fuck­ing Hob­bits that I actu­al­ly took along were both run­ning ran­dom­ly around behind me at a dis­tance of a hun­dred metres. What’s the fuck­ing point?
I must men­tion the side adven­tures, such as Fro­do being asked to throw a stone at a weath­er­pane. This is how he finds a Met­al Pin, and comes to the res­cue of the miller. This may be classed as inter­ac­tion, but it’s both bor­ing, non­sen­si­cal, and achieves noth­ing in context.

Speech Adap­ta­tion: One of the most impor­tant parts to me con­cerned the adap­ta­tion of Tolkien’s writ­ten speech. I will acknowl­edge that the pro­noun­ci­a­tion of most Elvish words were some­what cor­rect — even Gal­adriel said “Mor­dor” some­what right in the hor­ri­bly ren­dered introduction.
That is where it ends. The actor play­ing Gan­dalf should be tak­en and relent­less­ly beat­en until he learns what emo­tion means in an act­ing con­text; he man­aged to pro­nounce the Black Speech of Mor­dor as if he’s sell­ing shoes. Pay close atten­tion, devel­op­ers — Tolkien hat­ed those words. I remem­ber read­ing that he’d recieved a steel cup from a fan who had enscribed the whole “Ash nazg durbatulûk…” line upon it; he would­n’t drink from it, intead using it as an ash­tray. Gan­dalf loathes these lines. They bring fear, hatred. And I hate your voice actors.
Sam is hor­rid. I’ve cov­ered him enough now.

Pre­sen­ta­tion: Title screens look nice. Fad­ing effects are cute.
Con­trols page is hor­ri­bly bug­gy. Don’t attempt to use the down arrows in the con­trols box, since the scroll­bar does­n’t cap­ture input properly.
Pre-ren­dered intro­duc­tion movies absolute­ly fuck­ing suck. They remind me of work done years ago — hand-ani­mat­ed char­ac­ters with no solid­i­ty, no weight. The kind of work that made the end of the Spawn movie so damn cringesome.

Graph­ics: If there is a way to both have “pol­ished” tex­tures that still appear “raw”, then this is it. There’s some nice detail on the mod­els, but it’s not of the world I’ve grown accus­tomed to. I can under­stand dis­tanc­ing the actors from the char­ac­ters would be impor­tant, espe­cial­ly if the sto­ry­line is dif­fer­ent to the movie, but doing so has cre­at­ed a gap so for­mi­da­ble that I have dif­fi­cul­ty recon­sil­ing char­ac­ters with their new faces. I have watched Sam in pain, in anger, in sor­row. I have expe­ri­enced his emo­tions through a very skilled actor, and although I under­stand he’s also Sean Astin, he’s Sam to me. What does one gain in the long term by dis­tanc­ing an actor who is known as Sam world­wide? I’m frus­trat­ed by this deci­sion, and it put me off immediately.
I just hate the style that’s been used. It’s not the world I imag­ined even before I saw the movie. These are two whol­ly dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions, and while I thought the movie should have been a lit­tle lighter in some parts, I don’t like how the game has turned out. I want­ed it real, con­vinc­ing enough to get me in, but it’s almost a car­toon. My flat­mate described it as “rushed”, and I unfor­tu­nate­ly have to agree with him.
If I was to put those styl­is­tic prob­lems aside, I would give it an 8/10, but I still feel hor­ri­bly disheartened.

Game­play: Now we get to the big­gie. I don’t think FOTR should have been an action/adventure game. This genre is wrong for it. This should have been a genre break­er, the kind of attempt that Omikron made but did­n’t live up to. It should have had some ele­ments of real time — leav­ing the shire before the Nazgûl arrive, run­ning from the Bal­rog, being con­front­ed by Boromir — but it should still be an adven­ture game at heart. When, in the texts, do the Hob­bits behind Aragorn as he slash­es wolves apart? Deus-Ex should have been the orig­i­nal mod­el for FOTR. There are just things here that fall back into the hor­ri­bly pre­dictable and high­ly lam­en­ta­ble video-game tem­plate: run, kill, repeat.
I want Mid­dle Earth to be huge, to be explorable. I want more talkie than slash (heh, there’s some­thing to say to the folks at Nindai­wê.) I want to go to Weath­er­top under the unshown threat of the Nazgûl, not a bunch of pox­ie wolves. Cre­ate an atmos­phere that cov­ers more than what’s on the screen at the time. Oh, and I love the hills lead­ing to Weath­er­top, but it’s a pity that Aragorn can’t climb up a two foot cliff, when Fro­do can.
Frus­trat­ing lim­i­ta­tions like the above only hin­der the evo­lu­tion of gam­ing; instead of giv­ing Aragorn his prop­er abil­i­ties, we take them away so the game’s hard­er. There’s no bet­ter way to frus­trate the play­er. Instead we should con­cen­trate on giv­ing Aragorn every abil­i­ty he would have in real life, and com­bat those strengths with real chal­lenges — fight­ing away Nazgûl while the Hob­bits stand near under threat, for example.
Tolkien pro­vides so much more of a world than any game could ever hope to cov­er, but at least you should cap­ture as much as you can.

I can under­stand why Christo­pher Tolkien described it this way: “My own posi­tion is that The Lord of the Rings is pecu­liar­ly unsuit­able to trans­for­ma­tion into visu­al dra­mat­ic form.” Hmm. I think the game has made this state­ment accurate.

Sam is the faith­ful ser­vant of Fro­do Bag­gins. He cares an awful lot about his mas­ter and would prob­a­bly give his life for him. Though Sam meets many mar­velous peo­ple as he jour­neys with Fro­do, he still wish­es he was back home in the Shire.Take the “Which Hob­bit are you?” quiz cre­at­ed by Cora Black.

I thought this was cute. Sigh. Wish I had Sam beside me… sigh.

Sigh.

We live in a sad world, us west­ern­ers. I have no reli­gious dog­ma, and there­fore don’t believe that I should cel­e­brate any reli­gious events. I inten­tion­al­ly avoid get­ting caught up in East­er or Christ­mas, yet I under­stand what these events mean to Chris­tian­i­ty, and don’t get in the way of those who do cel­e­brate for the right reasons.

I hate the com­mer­cialised, sick­en­ing­ly hyped Christ­mas that the West has brought to us, the kind of event where even the Islam­ic com­mu­ni­ty starts putting up Christ­mas dec­o­ra­tions. You may be think­ing that this kind of activ­i­ty is fine — the cul­tur­al under­stand­ing, rah rah rah — but it sig­ni­fies that what was once a holy time for a seg­ment of human­i­ty has become a play­ground for unbelievers.

Christ­mas should be sacred for the peo­ple who know and believe in the true rea­son for it. I was lis­ten­ing to the Christ­mas Car­ols at work today, and heard Boney M sing some­thing along the lines of: “Jesus was born at Christ­mas­time.” It might seem a small thing to high­light and yell about, but it sums up the west­ern idea: Christ­mas­time exist­ed before Jesus, and just hap­pened to share the same birth­date. This is bad, peo­ple. You are rais­ing your chil­dren to con­sid­er rea­sons for actions after the event, and most­ly as a sec­ondary consideration.

Nine out of ten Christ­mas car­ols I hear men­tion San­ta Claus, not Jesus and/or God. This is Bas­tardi­s­a­tion. Presents because it’s that time of year, not because you’re cel­e­brat­ing the birth of the sav­iour. Fuck, I am not a Chris­t­ian, and even I respect that this day is sacred. Don’t cel­e­brate some­thing you don’t believe in! Leave Christ­mas alone, and shove San­ta square­ly up your arse!

Bed.

I am a Scorched Earth Tank. When I have a mis­sion, it con­sumes me; I will not be sat­is­fied until the job is done. I have a strong sense of duty, and a strong sense of direc­tion. Changes in the tide don’t phase me — I always know which way the wind blows, and I know how to com­pen­sate for it. I get on poor­ly with peo­ple like myself. What Video Game Char­ac­ter Are You?

I thought this was funny.

Just fin­ished watch­ing Han­ni­bal for around the fourth time. The movie does not sat­is­fy me, as the book did, in the most impor­tant respects: Han­ni­bal’s child­hood, the tor­ment of Mis­cha and the teacup, and the trans­for­ma­tion. At the con­clu­sion of the book I imme­di­ate­ly turned back and read the last fifty pages sev­er­al more times, and because of that I’ve re-read the entire book again to appre­ci­ate the sub­tle­ty and psy­chol­o­gy throughout.

The film­mak­ers spend almost two hours cre­at­ing a plau­si­ble expla­na­tion for the phys­i­cal meet­ing of Clarice and Han­ni­bal, then sud­den­ly find they’ve got noth­ing to talk about. Apart from reciev­ing a true com­pli­ment from the Doc­tor, Clarice real­ly does­n’t dis­cov­er any­thing about her­self, noth­ing that could for­ev­er change how she fac­tors her father into her life, noth­ing that would make a dent in the moral­i­ty she has cre­at­ed out of him. I find that a seri­ous let-down.

The book pleased me because it made Clarice com­plete. She became Lec­tor’s equal in all respects, and she chose to do so. He found an equal, a per­son to be explored by. I liked the book because right at the end, Lec­tor dis­cov­ers he is fal­li­ble, and Clarice finds her strength. In the movie, he uses the word love, and that is not the right term — I belive “par­i­ty” or even “puri­ty” would be what he sees in her, and that opens the door to his affections.

Peo­ple who hat­ed the book: please re-read it. The sec­ond time around, Italy seems short­er and Lec­tor is more a per­son and less a mon­ster. The psy­cho­log­i­cal impres­sion is much deep­er. The teacup sce­nario has more of an impact. The last fifty pages are pure bril­liance if you avoid roman­ti­cis­ing. As Verg­er says, it’s not “beau­ty and the beast”, but I don’t believe it’s the fox and the rab­bit either.

Chil­dren who don’t expe­ri­ence phys­i­cal con­tact with oth­er peo­ple grow into adults who inter­pret phys­i­cal con­tact as almost pure­ly sex­u­al­ly dri­ven. I’ve spent a while think­ing this over, attempt­ing to val­i­date with mem­o­ries of my child­hood and obser­va­tions of adults inter­act­ing with each oth­er and children.

I cer­tain­ly see con­tact in a more sex­u­al­ly ori­ent­ed way than I believe most of my friends do, and that par­tic­u­lar trait is some­thing that’s very hard to calm. Since it’s been a part of me for a long time and has almost become hard­wired, my strat­e­gy is to be proac­tive in the con­tact — I feel more com­fort­able ini­ti­at­ing some­thing than being the direct recipient.

I’m some­what amazed that schools are try­ing to reduce phys­i­cal inter­ac­tion at young ages. Sure­ly this con­tact can only be affirm­ing for kids — it brings a lev­el of psy­cho­log­i­cal com­fort and a pos­i­tive body image. This idea has been mir­rored in all the chil­dren I have met and spent a sig­nif­i­cant peri­od of time with — for exam­ple, my sis­ter’s friends, who are all aged around six. These chil­dren always say hel­lo by grab­bing my arm, join­ing hands, or pat­ting me on the back, and many say good­bye by giv­ing me a quick hug.

It is the reduc­tion of phys­i­cal con­tact that leaves chil­dren unable to inter­act phys­i­cal­ly with oth­ers as adults. Espe­cial­ly at the ear­ly ages, I believe com­fort with anoth­er per­son comes at three lev­els: psy­cho­log­i­cal empa­thy, inter­est and touch. As we grow up it becomes unnec­es­sar­i­ly nec­es­sary to for­feit more of the lat­ter because of a soci­ety where touch is played down and sex­u­al­i­ty hyped up.

Chil­dren need more com­fort. It’s a pool that’s filled in child­hood, and some­thing only dra­mat­ic events in adult­hood can change.

I remem­ber the first event that start­ed the cogs in my head. I knew a kid named Kane in pri­ma­ry school. From what I could gath­er he came from a some­what bro­ken home. He act­ed tough in school, fought relent­less­ly with oth­er stu­dents and teach­ers, and was put down dur­ing class dis­cus­sion by a teacher whom I had respected.

Kane was what non-abstract thinkers would call a bad kid. One the sur­face, he did­n’t seem to try, did­n’t seem to want to inter­act. But at that age, with a bro­ken fam­i­ly and no skills to keep friend­ships, I believe Kane found it a lit­tle hard to fit in.

I remem­ber Kane par­tic­u­lar­ly because I, in a teacher’s effort to con­trol his behav­ior, was seat­ed next to him for two terms. This was in year three, when I was about 8. I try to avoid spic­ing up the past with pseu­do-mem­o­ries, sug­ar added to a cake of salt. Kane was, most of the time, a lit­tle bas­tard. But he just was­n’t aware of how bad it was because he had no real fam­i­ly or friend to guide his actions. There were moments when he and I actu­al­ly talked and smiled, and I helped him with his work and I felt gen­tle rip­ples of appreciation.

Kane hung him­self in jail in 1998.

Even back in year four I thought to myself, “I could change this per­son, give him a friend to count on, a place not so bad.” And I did­n’t. I thought about it until it was too late, when he left school, and the only news I heard was from the newspapers.

And I realise just how lit­tle a change I would have had to make then to his world. To be a friend, to try to under­stand him, and to help a bit. Instead, Kane grew up think­ing the world had moved on and he was for­ev­er unable to catch up.

That is why I give my sis­ter’s friends hugs when they want them. That’s why I hold hands with these chil­dren, ask them how they are and attempt to under­stand their feel­ings. The depre­ci­a­tion of these old val­ues and the attempts to fit uptight “per­son­al space” adult con­cepts to chil­dren’s cul­ture is less­en­ing the chance for kids to come out of school con­fi­dent and com­fort­ed in the world sur­round­ing them.

I often won­der what Kane would be doing now had he been giv­en the chance of a gen­tler upbringing.

i am some­where i don’t wan­na be
you push me some­where i don’t wan­na be
and put me some­where i don’t wan­na be
see­ing some­place i don’t wan­na see
nev­er wan­na see that place again

WinXP is a pain in the arse, as is ZoneAlarm 3. I would like XP, except that it’s an adver­tis­ment for Pass­port, it includes that mon­stros­i­ty Media Play­er 7, and the default theme real­ly sucks arse. All things that can be dis­abled, I hear those zealots cry.

Pass­port is a very bad idea. A sin­gle signon for hun­dreds of web sites and ser­vices. Does­n’t any­one else see that as a fright­en­ing idea? The basic com­plaint is this — break my one pass­word, and every­thing is avail­able to who­ev­er guess­es right. What about lock­down? Should I for­get my login and enter the wrong pass three times, do I get locked out until I call some­one to ver­i­fy my iden­ti­ty? How do I do that in a secure way? What a crock of shit.

I received enough of a minor scare when Blog­ger was hacked and slash­dot hap­pi­ly informed me that my pass­words may have been accessed. I’ll change my pass­words, I imme­di­ate­ly said. This line of thought should be first when any hack­ing attempt has been reg­is­tered. Pass­port will hap­pi­ly hand over more than my blog­ger id if the data­base gets hacked, and I cer­tain­ly do not trust Microsoft, with it’s appalling secu­ri­ty record, to guard that infor­ma­tion for me.

Media Play­er 7 is a bloat­ed attempt to do what Inter­net Explor­er did to Netscape. It’s too bad that I would­n’t touch it with a barge­pole. What makes me hap­py is see­ing that 6.4 is still installed. Whilst on this top­ic, let me say I will nev­er touch Winamp 3 either.

The XP theme is ter­ri­ble. Two columns of start menu just con­fus­es me. I used to be able to scan down the list and find a start­ing point; now, I have to scan two lists, and click a spe­cial option just to see a pro­gram list. Urgh. Huge but­tons, big red X’s, a dog in the search pan­el. My God, what are your MS Research peo­ple smoking?

MS has spent years try­ing to find a way to make com­mon­ly accessed pro­grams more easy to locate and run. Well, I hope you guys don’t think putting more entries in the start menu is a good idea. No automa­ton with a whop­ping six spaces can pos­si­bly keep on top of what I do on my com­put­er. More help­ful would be a list of the most recent­ly crashed programs.

Hid­ing user names in the wel­come list should not require instal­la­tion of the Pow­er­toys TweakUI pack.

ZoneAlarm 3 is a pain in the arse for most­ly dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Set­tings aren’t sav­ing prop­er­ly, even after three installs and a data­base cleanout. Hel­lo ZoneAlarm 2! Wel­come back. ZA2 does­n’t decide to take up 42MB of RAM and aquire 100% CPU usage ran­dom­ly, either. And although the user inter­face for ZA2 is bad, ZA3 is worse. So I won’t be upgrad­ing, or buy­ing a sup­port licence, Zone Labs. I’ll just ignore your updates.

Our ADSL is not work­ing and we’re still on dialup.

Well, now that all that’s out of the way, I can get on to the good news.

My flu is taper­ing off, leav­ing me with snif­fles and a wonky head.
Day­light sav­ing has come, hallelujah.
I’ve got Mugen almost perfected.
My best friend is here this week­end and until Tues­day. If I can get myself back to health, we might actu­al­ly get to do some­thing before he goes home.

One thing that I real­ly hate about the NT ker­nels is the luck­lus­ter DOS sup­port. I’m not a per­son who runs games intend­ed for a 286, and I’m not a big sup­port­er of back­wards-com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, but I like the idea of hav­ing at least an emu­la­tion of the old behav­iour. My prob­lem comes to this: I can’t run Mugen prop­er­ly under 2k because of VESA sup­port. I ran over VDM­Sound a long time ago which solved the sound prob­lems in a few things, but VESA sup­port is only basic and I still have to hack around to get it to run, and then only in 640*480, in a small box in the cen­ter of the screen. What keeps me alive is the thought that the win­dows ver­sion can’t be too far away. Heh.

Many thanks to the Mugen team for putting a fan­tas­tic engine togeth­er which has pro­vid­ed me with hours of fun. You’ll be reciev­ing a dona­tion from me as soon as I get my new bankcard fixed up.

In oth­er news, I’ve got the snif­fles and sneezes. I’m accute­ly aware of the irony in get­ting the flu now after sur­viv­ing a freez­ing win­ter. With any luck, it’s just hor­ri­ble hayfever-relat­ed symp­toms that will fuck off before the weekend.

Book­ing my trip to Bro­ken Hill very soon. Got the time off work thanks to the ever-use­ful method of Bad­ger­ing The Boss Until He Gets Tired Of Hear­ing Your Voice.

Set up and installed every­thing on my flat­mate’s new PC, an Ath 2100+. Nice sys­tem with a Lead­tek Ti4200 VIVO and a 5.1 speak­er sys­tem. As is tra­di­tion, the only prob­lems I had were relat­ed to Cre­ative prod­ucts, this time being the Web­cam 5. The dri­vers are beyond any­thing you’ve ever seen before, and even now, after I’ve got it work­ing, the VFW dri­ver is bro­ken, and con­trol pan­el believes the cam­era is plugged into \??\USB#4hg-something-or-other. Is this nor­mal? Only the WDM dri­ver works, and the fuck­ing Web­cam Mon­i­tor appli­ca­tion shipped with the prod­uct hangs on start­up because it seems to only sup­port the VFW dri­ver. Sigh.

Bed time. I’m sup­posed to be work­ing at 4pm, but if I wake up feel­ing the same, it’s not gun­na happen.

Ragh… worked from 12:00 to 23:30 today. After eleven hours, I’ve found that I stop car­ing. For­tu­nate­ly, my insane friends wait­ing out­side for me did­n’t stop car­ing, and drove me home when I final­ly left the build­ing. Came home angry and got angri­er, but whilst lis­ten­ing to the infa­mous Clos­er by Nine Inch Nails, said anger fled in fear and now I’m lis­ten­ing Heav­en Knows by The Corrs, which is a tad dif­fer­ent. I’ve also decid­ed that I like Chem­i­cal Heart by Grin­spoon. Many thanks to my flat­mate and good friend Bradley for shar­ing this song with me.

Tired, but some­how alive enough to be sit­ting at a key­board and enter­ing text into an unread blog.

Sigh. Bed time. I’m up again at 10 to start work at 11.

Adobe Illus­tra­tor is absolute­ly impos­si­ble to use!

She’ll only come out at night
The lean and hun­gry type

Absolute­ly beau­ti­ful night. I fin­ished work late at 22:00 and was tempt­ed to walk home in the soft, warm breeze. Cor, I wish sum­mer was always like this… Went to Pen­rith with my best friend Gavin today pick up my flat­mate’s new com­put­er. Very fast, big screen, web­cam, GF4 Ti4200, etc etc. Ran an hour late for work as the result of sev­er­al inci­dents includ­ing turn­ing around twice on the way down, get­ting lost, find­ing a carpark, and get­ting through traf­fic on the way back. That’s why I worked till 22:00, and not 21:00.

Real­ly tired, and a lit­tle dizzy at the moment. Need sleep…

Jesus Christ. After a full day in Syd­ney walk­ing around non-stop, I got home at mid­night and start­ed clean­ing the garage out at 00:30. Hour and a half lat­er = excel­lent. It seems that it has­n’t been sweeped out for around 5 years, since there was a lay­er of ash (!) on the floor that rose in a great mush­room cloud in a valiant attempt to keep it’s habi­tat by suf­fo­cat­ing me. So Bradley and I went shop­ping today and spent too much mon­ey on almost noth­ing. We saw the excel­lent Star Wars exhi­bi­tion in the Pow­er­house Muse­um, spent an hour or so in Mar­ket City (Pad­dy’s Mar­kets etc), went to George Street and played Cap­com vs SNK 2 and X‑Men vs Street Fight­er, strode to the Opera House and ate whilst watch­ing the city sky­line from the steps, had a drink at the The Mid­night Shift, and then caught the bus back to Cen­tral where we board­ed the 22:00 train back to the moun­tains. Good time had by all.

Time for bed. I’m stuffed, and start work at 16:00 today. I need to be up rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly so a plumber can fix the show­er. God…

This is exact­ly how I feel about Bush’s cur­rent han­dling of a very seri­ous situation.

In the spir­it of con­struc­tive crit­i­cism, here’s a speech by a man who does pos­sess rea­son, for­sight, and diplo­mat­ic abil­i­ty: Clin­ton.

Try­ing out MozBlog image sup­port. The guy on the left is me. It’s a rather small, rather… 8bit image, but that’s all I’m spar­ing at the right now. :)Seems that to upload I have to include the ftp:// at the begin­ning of the ftp serv­er url. I left it off, and MozBlog com­plained that only FTP works with image upload. Weird, but acceptable.

Yay! My MozBlog works per­fect­ly in non-source view now! For­tu­nate­ly, the tem­plate + MozBlog fix does­n’t come at a price of my pre­vi­ous posts being stuffed up: all seem to dis­play per­fect­ly. Going to Syd­ney in the morn­ing to get ripped off at Mar­ket City, near Chi­na­town. Got my phone fixed there last week, and got a new case, for a total of $25. Good stuff.

The upstairs show­er floor’s tiles have cracked open, which will lead to one of us falling through the floor and into the wash­ing machine some time in the near future. We’ve got a plumber com­ing tomor­row, though as always he refus­es to give a time.

Ah. Sit­ting around lis­ten­ing to Tori Amos’ Corn­flake Girl and Beethoven. Wish Sim­c­i­ty 3000 ran in a window.

A few inter­est­ing devel­op­ments on the Mozil­la front late­ly. The team has just released Phoenix 0.3, a light­weight brows­er using the Gecko ren­der­er and XUL for the inter­face. It only comes with the brows­er com­po­nent but is a lot more cus­tomis­able and will hope­ful­ly be an exam­ple for the core team in how to prop­er­ly com­po­nen­tize their applications.

New Simp­sons episode at 19:30!

Mike Lee’s just released MozBlog 6.6, con­tain­ing some real­ly impor­tant bug fix­es and excel­lent inter­face improve­ments for those who are still using ver­sion 5. My most painful bug, 2275, seems to have been fixed. Upgrade!

Noth­ing spe­cial this time; just a link that I found appro­pri­ate to quite a few people.

Well, I’m sit­ting around with David, who’s in the moun­tains for the day, and I’m show­ing him MozBlog. We went down to see Lilo and Stitch last night — it’s still good the sec­ond time. Piz­za Hut is bet­ter than I remem­ber, too.

Got back from Pen­rith around 8:20pm. Saw Lilo and Stitch in the Hoyts Cin­e­ma in Pen­rith Plaza. Enjoyed the movie immense­ly. In plot and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment it’s a much bet­ter film than Dis­ney has made for years. It’s a pity that a once-grand com­pa­ny is mak­ing so many trashy sequels to it’s own clas­sics. Lady and the Tramp II. Ariel the Lit­tle Mer­maid II. The Lion King II. Fuck­ing 101 Dal­ma­tions II. It’s appalling, unam­bi­tious, uncre­ative, and it tar­nish­es the orig­i­nal movie. I must have seen at least six pre­views tonight that were all “II” movies. Sigh.

Any­way, enough bitch­ing. I saw a good movie tonight. Stitch is every­thing I wish Pikachu would be.

God, I’ve become buried in XML doc­u­ments. I’m star­ing at this XLink doc­u­ment, and I’ve read almost three pages and still don’t under­stand the con­cept. Link­ing into a non-indexed data source seems to be the idea, but the author of this doc­u­ment then uses a data­base as an exam­ple, the rela­tion­ship between a cus­tomer and his pur­chas­es. But data­bas­es have rela­tion­ships; the only rea­son cus­tomer 4978 can be asso­ci­at­ed with item 6134 is because the tables of data are indexed with those num­bers, which then point to the prop­er data — his name and the item’s name. I don’t think I’m get­ting it. A few, from what I gath­er, very intel­li­gent peo­ple are ram­bling on about XLink, but seem to be mak­ing an absolute mess of it’s case and cause. I’ve found that quite a few of these pro­pos­als are so abstract­ed that they make no sense with­out two years of back­read­ing. I’m amused by authors who state “we must­n’t reduce the ease of use and sim­plic­i­ty” who then go on to pro­pose an twen­ty-five page XML sys­tem with three schemas. Boy, if that’s keep­ing sim­plic­i­ty, then God help me.

I can under­stand the need for busi­ness to exchange data in a stan­dard for­mat. I under­stand the need for this data to be human-com­pre­hen­si­ble. I just get real­ly scared when a pro­pos­als’ advo­cates can’t explain it in human-com­pre­hen­si­ble terms. I feel as though in ten years I’ll need to ref­er­ence an exter­nal schema and pro­vide a machine-friend­ly XSLT trans­la­tion every time I open my mouth to speak. That’s if I still under­stand how to speak, because I’m sure the W3C will have cre­at­ed a pro­pos­al two hun­dred pages long on XML’i­fiy­ing vocal cord ranges.

I thought the whole point of this XML thing was to reduce the amount of con­fu­sion and increase the amount of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty? I love stan­dards, but the overuse of stan­dards will lead to less cre­ative out­put: Joe User does­n’t want to cre­ate nine doc­u­ments that ref­er­ence two unseen exter­nal schemas just so he can put his hol­i­day pics online. The idea of a clean divi­sion between data, pre­sen­ta­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion medi­um is alien to most people.

The W3C always thinks big. We’re mark­ing up the world here, turn­ing what was once code into gen­er­alised data. Cre­at­ing meta infor­ma­tion for every sin­gle thing writ­ten is a daunt­ing task. I real­ly hope the tools keep up, because we’ll be rely­ing on a lot of machine help in the next few years. The XML space will reach a lev­el of com­plex­i­ty that only machines will be able to deal with, and the whole point of being able to read the markup will be irrelevant.

Pre­dictably, it was the MS doc­u­men­ta­tion that put me on the wrong track. I got hold of the XML­Spy tri­al. Hmm­mm.. excel­lent. With­in two hours I’ve got my exist­ing HTML site sliced clean­ly up into XML and XSLT. IE trans­forms the XML almost per­fect­ly. Mozil­la is rather wacky, but I have a feel­ing it’s because it’s using Quirks mode to ren­der. I’ll stick with upload­ing the pre-trans­formed HTML for the moment.

No more HTML after this. Next project is going to be all XML and XSL/T.

I’ve been up since 6am Mon­day morn­ing, and I should real­ly go to bed. Strange trip­py lights are pass­ing the cor­ners of my vision.

Woo! New ver­sion of MozBlog is much bet­ter. Thank you very much, Mike Lee.

Thought it’s about time I made anoth­er post. Got­ten a lit­tle lazy over the week­end — came home from work both days and did­n’t feel like doing any­thing. Try­ing to learn XSLT. Play­ing around with it in Visu­al Stu­dio, but I’m real­ly get­ting lost. When­ev­er I include a ref­er­ence to the schema (xmlns=“xhva.xsd”), retriev­ing data with “xsl:value-of” returns noth­ing. I’m guess­ing that the schema can’t be found and the XML is inval­i­dat­ed. Tak­ing the ref­er­ence out gets it working.

Hmm, and Mozil­la does­n’t show any­thing at all. Hmm­m­m­mm. I’ll take a guess and say that I’m being mis­led by MS doc­u­men­ta­tion. I’m off to the W3C then, I sup­pose. Sigh.

Lol. ‘Just read a few arti­cles about the Star Wars movies. I was­n’t a Star Wars kid. I did­n’t sit down and watch the movies until forced by my flat­mate ear­ly last year. So I’m in no posi­tion to make deci­sions for those peo­ple who love the movies more than the legal sys­tem should allow.

But what’s a blog for? So I’ll be a hyp­ocrite and put in my $0.0110098 USD.

David Brin gives me some hope for the third movie. I liked Attack of the Clones, but most­ly for two things — Ewan McGre­gor (siigh­h­h­h­h­hh), and one per­cu­liar moment near the end of the movie: Yoda is being escort­ed around the bat­tle on a drop­ship, and he mur­murs to him­self about the war­fare below. There’s some­thing not right about it, and it got me won­der­ing which side Yoda was real­ly play­ing for.

Could Yoda be of the dark side? Brin makes a com­pelling argu­ment that would almost tie every­thing togeth­er. It’s always seemed a lit­tle daft to me how Yoda can’t detect the pres­ence of a great dark­ness in the Sen­ate. Fixed. Yoda’s unwill­ing­ness to let Luke go after Vad­er? Fixed. The only prob­lem is why Yoda decides to take res­i­dence on a swamp planet.

I hope the third movie turns the whole sto­ry on it’s head, bring­ing Anakin reluc­tant­ly into the ser­vice of the revealed Emper­or, and Ami­dala being torn from his arms and tossed into the fiery chasm from whence she came. Yoda shows his real nature to Anakin. The two chil­dren aren’t hid­den from Anakin — they’re hid­den from the Emper­or and Yoda, until it’s too late to destroy them easily.

Whoa, this would be such a mind­fuck. I can see the mul­ti­ple cora­nary vic­tims being rushed straight from the the­atre now. But at the same time, it would be a great send off to the series, and the last three episodes would change for­ev­er. It would prove that Lucas had a lot more focus than we believed.

Steven Spiel­berg, I demand that you take down Lucas and make this.

Hmm. Blog­ger: work­ing out the archive index file­name is a lit­tle dif­fi­cult. The help text did­n’t help. I found my answer on the user forum, and then dis­cov­ered that I knew the file­name con­ven­tion any­way. Sigh. So now the archive link’s at the bot­tom of the page. I’ll fix the font later.

Mozil­la bitch comin’ on. Watch your step. As I men­tioned ear­li­er, I’m using MozBlog to post this blog straight from Mozil­la. I’m run­ning Moz 1.1, and feel­ing a lit­tle appre­hen­sive about it. Open­ing and clos­ing win­dows has been a lit­tle bug­gy late­ly — I don’t know whether it’s the build, my prefs, or a side project that’s con­flict­ing, but I’m get­ting invalid mem­o­ry access. Netscape must be lov­ing my dupli­cate crash reports.

I don’t think Mozil­la was ready to be released at 1.0. Now, know­ing how long this project has been going for, I can under­stand the need for a “sta­ble pub­lic release” to calm the bitch­ing fren­zy and maybe the devel­op­er’s nerves, but I still have some seri­ous doubts about the pro­grams that make up the Mozil­la suite.

The brows­er is good. It func­tions as expect­ed, most of the time. Nig­gly bugs like not being able to type in the address field, and some text align­ment prob­lems per­sist­ed before and through­out the 1.0 tree. There was a real­ly daft mem­o­ry con­sump­tion prob­lem, which was solved in a real­ly daft way in the 1.1 tree. I hate the fix more than the prob­lem, and I’m not the only one. The down­load man­ag­er con­tin­ues to suck. I can’t affect book­marks from the list. These things turn me off.

Mail was an absolute hor­ror to work with in 1.0. SMTP servers — argh­h­h­h­hh. Mul­ti­ple dupli­cate entries. The whole out­go­ing serv­er option is just flawed archi­tec­ture­ly and needs to be sliced off and cau­ter­ized. I spent hours fix­ing the prefs file man­u­al­ly and try­ing to find what I was doing wrong. The serv­er prob­lem still exists…

Mozil­la is approach­ing some­thing use­ful now. What it needs is a mas­sive bug fix month, some­thing like Microsoft­’s Feb­ru­ary, but actu­al­ly pro­duc­ing some­thing tan­gi­ble. Stop now, before it gets out of control.

Man­wë pays Katoom­ba a vis­it, bring­ing with him >60km/h winds as we stu­pid­ly attempt to walk into town. And the wind changes direc­tion only to oppose our every move­ment. It’s hard to believe how cold it can be here. Still going to Lith­gow some­time today — got to get prices for my oth­er flat­mate’s new PC. Lith­gow is a strange place, described by many peo­ple I know in more spe­cif­ic, nas­ti­er terms which I won’t repeat here. It’s a coal mine, and is gen­er­al­ly a big hole. It, unfor­tu­nate­ly and rather inex­plic­a­bly, is the only place in the moun­tains that has a com­put­er shop I trust.

Lis­ten­ing to the still damn-good Garbage Ver­sion 2.0 CD. I was rather dis­ap­point­ed by their last album, Beau­ti­ful Garbage. I can lis­ten to almost all of the tracks from the first and sec­ond albums but only three songs from the third — the awe­some Androg­y­ny, the cir­cum­spect Cup of Cof­fee, the rather mind­less Cher­ry Lips. Hope­ful­ly the next album will bring a bit more froth and savage.

Sigh. Been up for close to twen­ty hours now. Run­ning out of things to do…

Can­cel that. Went to bed, could­n’t get com­fort­able, and got back up again. Asked my flat­mate, Bradley, whether he’d like to go shop­ping. I hate my sleep­ing pat­tern. I get more done dur­ing the night, but waste the sun­shine. It’s sim­i­lar for Bradley, who got up at 2am and is watch­ing morn­ing cartoons.

I think I’ll set up some forums as well. Last forums I set up was back in 1996. Hope they haven’t changed much. ;)

Bed­time! Ragh! Need to be up and around at 1pm to go to Lithgow.

Sor­ry, one more thing. Just found some­thing that made me laugh on slash­dot:‘pros­toalex writes “The DRU500A by Sony burns DVD‑R/-RW, DVD+RW/+R, and even CD‑R/CD-RW discs…“ ‘

Waf­fle Iron responds: “At $349, you’d be wast­ing your mon­ey. I paid only $249 for a Sun­beam Gas Grill. At 40,000 BTU/hour, it will eas­i­ly burn DVD‑R/-RW/+RW/+R/ROMs, CD‑R/CD-RW/CD-ROMs, flop­pies, Zip disks, Jaz disks, books, mag­a­zines, moth­er­boards, DVD/CD dri­ves, key­boards, hot­dogs, steaks, dead rodents, old shoes … just about anything.

And if you get tired of all the burn­ing, you can choose to turn it down a bit and go with gold­en brown.”

Final­ly got MozBlog work­ing prop­er­ly. Use the source view. Always. And don’t use line-break tags or what­not. Bizarre. Goodnight.

Oh, one more thing before I go to bed. The page looks a lit­tle bare at the moment because I’m still work­ing on the accom­pa­ny­ing web­site, a remake of my old home­page, Shiv­a’s Domain. There’ll be a menu to access the rest of the con­tent with­in a few days. Take care all… zzz

So this is the bit where I intro­duce myself, using lots of !‘s and oth­er eas­i­ly excitable punc­tu­a­tion. I’ll cut to the chase:5′11″. Brown eyes, auburn hair, British skin. Ter­ri­ble fam­i­ly tree. Likes com­put­ers, web page design, our cat Zeke. Wants walks along the beach, intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion, large off­spring count of 0.

…look­ing for a guy to fall into…

If you’re still inter­est­ed in read­ing the gar­ble that I’ll rou­tine­ly enter here, feel free to email me. Keep in mind that if con­tact­ing me, you should be smart, fun­ny, and speak at least three (3) words of Eng­lish; a thor­ough non-under­stand­ing of at least fifty per­cent of REM’s music is also recommended.

‘Tis all. I hope you find some­thing in my writ­ings to keep you enter­tained. Life here in the Blue Moun­tains, Aus­tralia, is some­what qui­et, but I do a lot of devel­op­ment work (Visu­al Basic, web­sites, graph­ic design, MS Access, etc) and keep up to date with PC, con­sole and emu­la­tion gam­ing. I also do a fair bit of writ­ing — short sto­ries most­ly, some­times flesh­ing out dreams I’ve had. Work­ing on a nov­el has been a dream for a while. I’ve just got to find the right muse…