Archives, eh
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# Bus redux
Back of the bus. I’m flashing back to high school, and it is all hypercolour!
But the next day there was a queue for the bus? Someone must have offered money.
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# We don't need no stinkin' salary
me: I wish he (Aquarion in #eddings) hadn’t told me about this Civ 4 demo, cause now I’ve kicked off the download and it is going to take an hour.
D: Well, at least tomorrow is your last day at work for 8 days, you’ll be able to play after that.
me: Work? This is Civ 4. There is no work.
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# Heat 101
The thing about heat isn’t so much that it is hot. I can live with that. What annoys me is the constant scheduling. When it is 30C at 21.00, you cannot have a shower and then wash the dishes, you must do it the other way around, otherwise you’ll be getting back in that shower as soon as you put the handtowel away.
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# A thank-you note.
It was kind of funny. Sort of. The journey into the City seemed to take forever, but that was probably because the aircon was what can only be described as fucked. At least the train was only half full – or possibly half empty, maybe even not-the-ordered-cheeseburger – so there wasn’t as much of a body heat factor that there would have been if it had been packed. It was a relief to get on the train across the bridge, because the air-com was working.
You will of course have worked out that I am working. This year, I took my two weeks of holiday time split into two parts, one in December and one in January. I alternate this; last year I took two weeks starting from just before Boxing Day Eve and I will be doing the same next year. At least one co-worker didn’t realise, the client services guy who is the other employee who records time against $project. He sort of went white when I told him that I would be happy to devote the next six working days to writing a functional spec for him, but that three of those days would be the 12-14th of January. Funny :- )
Anyway, I was thrilled and delighted to find out that the train lines on the bridge are closed for repair during the week starting Boxing Day. I wasn’t really concentrating, I had my head phones on and my face buried in Dark Tower 3 (spoiler -> I am reading it how Roland lived it, Books 5-7, 1-4 and if you read that in Lynx or something and didn’t get the inline styles to hide the spoiler, what can I say except grow the fuck up), so I was kind of shocked to see that it wasn’t just the normal exodus or most people at Wynyard, everyone was getting off the train. I thought I better go as well, just in case there had been an annoucement of free coffee or something.
What we were really doing is rushing towards buses that CityRail had put on to ferry us across the bridge. I love how people mill around something like a bus entry in a pattern roughly akin to the way kids draw the exhaust from rocket ships. Whether they do it in a scribbled spasm of red and yellow lines exploding out in a wedge shape, or that more stylish teardrop shape rotated 90 degrees, it always shows that the kid isn’t just drawing a glow or a fire, but has unconciously grasped the notion that there is a shitload of fire coming out of a small aperature. Or maybe it is just that kids understand farts really well. Anyway, so-called adults never seem to catch on that reversing the process also reverses the result. If you try and force five people through a two-person-abreast portal, it will slow down the process, not speed it up. This is why I believe the collective noun for a group of people shouldn’t be a crowd, it should be an inanity.
I did eventually manage to overcome my urge to kill everyone around me because of their absence of thinking, more because I did suffer a regretable lack of killing device more than any realisation that it was too late, most of them had already shallowed the gene pool. (Isn’t that just insufferable, my air of superiority) When I finally did get on a bus, it was packed with fifty, or maybe sixty, other human beings. Breathing. Sweating. Generally living and pouring out body heat. It was amateur hour in the driver’s seat, and everytime the application of brakes was required, it was applied with much gusto, sending the large gentlemen – ten too many breakfast burritos, perhaps – crashing into my back. If this was a movie, we would have a slow motion reply of his ample belly covered in damp shirt connecting with and smooshing around, my back.
I don’t normally write thank-you notes for gifts because, well, I’m a lazy bastard. On this one occasion, I will make an exception. Thank-you, CityRail. Thank-you for your lovely and thoughtful gift. It was much appreciated by the Multiverse and my mind, both of whom are rabidly against me.
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# Links for 2005-12-27
- Azriphale and Crowley’s New Years Resolutions
I only have one for 2006. #1: Keep all my New Years Resolutions from last year. ✴
- Azriphale and Crowley’s New Years Resolutions
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# My part of the gift was
Ahh. Boxing Day Eve. It’s my favourite day-before-a-cricket-match-starts of the year. I prepare for this day for weeks. I purchase bribes for the family to make them go away so I can watch the cricket. I roast chicken and pork. I make salad – garden andpotato. I made brandy-soaked cake and pudding. I purchase vast quantities of vile foodstuffs such as prawn and ham for D. I do this both so that I can fill up on real food so that I can subsist on chips and nuts while the cricket is on, and so that D will be overfed and thus unable to interrupt the cricket.
Note. Yes, I made it all. Give D a mixer and she’ll only hurt herself.
What gifts did I get? Well, Mum and Dad bought us – more or less – an outdoor set so that D can watch me using the BBQ – seriously, she’d hurt herself. My part of the gift was putting it together. Outside. While it is forty degrees. Then on the way home for purchasing this gift, D spotted a sign advertising cheap frangipanis, so it is almost like Mum and Dad bought us one of those as well. My part of the gift was planting them in the garden. Did I mention that it is forty degrees today? I like it when it is hot. Perhaps not actually being in the blazing sunlight doing physical labour though. tWM got an iPod. My part of the gift was that now I only have to hear the lyrics of Hilary Duff songs. Except it is tWM singing them, and I use the term "singing" with some caution. On the other hand, it meant I finally had to purchase a USB 2.0 card – no, SW, it seems my computer is the only one sold in the last twelve months without USB 2.0 slots. I then got to install this card after dragging the computer out. By the way, it is forty degrees.
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# Links for 2005-12-24
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# Links for 2005-12-23
- NEUROTICALLY YOURS CARTOON: NO CHRISTMAS FOR YOU ✴
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# Links for 2005-12-22
- Add to Calendar ✴
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# So it seems I became a paranoid when I grew old
I used to do vaguely political postings, remember them? I then decided to move all my political musings, such as they are, to South Sea Republic. I made an Australian bill of rights my raison d’être. So you’d think I would have mustered some sort of righteous anger over the whole spying on US residents thing, if only out of principal – it’s not like I am a US resident, they seem to think they are allowed to spy on me all they like.
The best I have managed to this a point is a kind of appalled shock not at the act but at the reaction to the act. At first it was shock that they were even surprised. Appalled later came when one tribe made a play for the moral high ground, apparantly forgetting or ignoring ECHELON and who was running the place when that thing was in operation. The other tribe started pointing out ECHELON as if the notion that the first tribe had tolerated ECHELON made everything all right. The two tribes piss me off. Film at Eleven.
I fear my only real reaction is irrational. For the longest time enigmail has not worked for me. I fixed it last night, looks like it didn’t like my older version of GnuPG. All I need to do know is convince the people I email to start using it as well. And some convenient way of encrypting/signing arbitrary textareas.
