A new web

Newsfeeds (whether of the RSS or Atom flavour) have changed the way I do my daily websurfing. I get all of my comics this way now, and my news. If your blog doesn't have a newsfeed, chances are good that I forget to check it for a couple of weeks at a time. The reason for all this is that I've been using Thunderbird, which aptly supports all the feeds I choose to throw at it, and presents them to me in a familiar email-like format.

That's the major change since this old post - I've found a capable feed reader, and I'm not turning back.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some of the feeds I read are provided by third parties.
PPS - Dilbert and Calvin & Hobbes, for example, do not provide their own feeds, but other people do it for them.

Serenity says: "You're a thief"

I've learned from Brad that the region 4 Serenity DVD includes the terrible anti-piracy ad, and you can't skip it. Personally, I find the ad insulting, and that's certainly one thing I don't need from my legally purchased goods. I plan to write a letter to Universal Pictures Australia to inform them of the fact that I no longer plan to purchase that DVD. Though I don't expect it to do any good, and fully expect to be insulted further by any reply they give, I feel like it's something I've got to do.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd put up with the ad on a rental DVD.
PPS - I haven't had the time to write the letter yet.

The Sunday Mok - Collaborative Art

Last Sunday I went to church without Deb, who was on day 2 of her first aid course. In the afternoon I did the weekly shopping, took a nap and played City of Heroes. I sang in the evening service and we all went to the local Coffee Club afterwards.
On Monday, during repeated requests by accountants to find missing timesheets, I learned that some of them were not being given to me at all, so I can hardly translate those and send them on, can I? For dinner in the evening, Ug, Dad and I went to a local Thai restaurant.
On Tuesday I discovered a design flaw in our timesheet translation process that kept some timesheets from being sent. I started fixing it. Erin was on the bus on the ride home, so we talked a bit, then I went to karate.
By Wednesday I was finished fixing the timesheets design flaw and I got some of the missing records sent out. Apparently it wasn't all of them. I had dinner at Deb's, then a farewell party for Kirsty.
On Thursday I had to map more project codes for the timesheet system and walk into the city to buy chalk for Friday. We had our regular family dinner at Dad & Beth's and Ug stayed behind to fix Dad's new internet connection.
On Friday night, at the church youth group, we made a huge chalk drawing in the courtyard of "the transfiguration". I was (and still am) really pleased with how well it turned out. I think it's definitely something we should do again.
I slept in on Saturday, then did a load of washing and met Deb at the church to help wrap up the second day of the garage sale. We went out to Indooroopilly for lunch and to see Keeping Mum, which I liked but Deb didn't. I think it was too British for her. Dinner was the Ashgrove Baptist Church Family Feast - a meet-and-mingle deal.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Most people seem impressed with the chalk mural.
PPS - They might just be politely appreciative, though. Sometimes I can't tell.

Crazy is relative

Any time you think you might be going a little bit nuts, think of this guy, breathe a sigh of relief that you are (relatively speaking) sane, and get on with your life. You can rest easy in the knowledge that you, at least, have never spent years building a compound in Nevada to survive an apocalypse that was foretold by a muttering gypsy.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Frank van Zant, having completed his work, is now dead.
PPS - Does it seem strange to kill yourself as part of a survival plan?

Demonstration

When I get a trial version of a game, install it and play it, often I find my interest completely drained by the time the trial is up. If the marketeers and salesdroids are aware of this behaviour, they are evidently more concerned with fighting obscurity than forcing a sale. The demos keep coming and I keep playing them out, then returning to my beloved City of Heroes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They don't quite count as full games, but check these out.
PPS - I spent a little too long on The Swarm.

Google Speculation

Google's goal of organising the world's information has so far not included calendars or music. I'd say it's a reasonable bet that they're looking into it.

There's nothing particularly special about calendars that makes them difficult to produce (except some usability issues) so the only reason I can think that Google have not tried their hand at a calendar application (online or off) is searching. To search a calendar that still includes all your appointments from five years ago would require two search parameters - one for the search criteria and one for the date range to search in (even if that's just "future", "past" or "all"). Google search is typically keyword-based and very simple to use. Calendar search puts a bit of a strain on that philosophy.

Probably the main hurdle in music organisation is that people want to know what song includes certain lyrics (which can already be found via Google web search) or - and this is the kicker - they want to find "that song that sort of goes 'da-da-daa, da-da-DAA'". As soon as they work that one out, Google Music will probably go live.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps they also have trouble working with all of the artificially rights restricted digital music out there.
PPS - That's probably a big factor too.

Urban Dead vs Kingdom of Loathing

I've played both Urban Dead and Kingdom of Loathing for a little while now, and the winner is: Urban Dead. It's not just the fact that it's focused on zombies (though that is a major plus) but I just find it sustaining my interest far more easily than KoL. It's got less to do, there are far fewer items, no quests to speak of, character stats are as basic as they get, and any humour is supplied by the players. Somehow these all manage to win out over Kingdom of Loathing in a similar way that some people prefer Pac Man and Pong over Unreal Tournament.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I prefer just about anything to a first-person shooter.
PPS - A hit on the thumb with a hammer, for instance, rates higher than Quake.

Morning Radio

I have a feeling that the appeal of the better morning radio hosts is that the banter reminds us of talking rubbish with our friends. That in itself might not be enough, so this particular banter happens in the morning when we are likely to need a bit of perking up and our friends are at home too, generally in no position to come over and start our day with a bit of light-hearted wit and chatter.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On some mornings, bus conversation can have the same effect.
PPS - In the right company, of course.

The Sunday Mok - There was no "sleep", just the "over"

Last Sunday it was raining by the end of the church service. I spent the afternoon sleeping, reading and playing City of Heroes. Bec brought new baby Elijah to the evening service. He was well received, as is expected.
I installed a few more of my commonly-used programs at work on Monday. The timesheet transfer process went wrong again, and the fix didn't fare much better. Dad, Ug and I went to Pizza Hut for dinner.
I broke a shoelace on Tuesday morning, and set a reminder to buy more during lunchtime. Unfortunately, I noted only the length of the laces I needed, so by lunchtime I had no idea what it meant. Deb and I watched The Phantom of the Opera on video.
On Wednesday I had a meeting to discuss some more ideas about the performance appraisal database, which should now be called a full-blown personnel management package. I also looked at Ruby on Rails as a potential development environment.
I overslept on Thursday morning and rushed through the morning routine, postponing breakfast until I got to work. I spent some time on timesheet transfer troubles and also setting up our Asset Knowledgebase software on my new machine. In the evening, we went do Dad's for dinner and took over his computer which has now been replaced by a shinier model at home.
More timesheets work on Friday, including a change of tactics to a more transitional upgrade path rather than a total scrap-and-rewrite. I watched an episode of Fullmetal Alchemist during lunchtime. We had a youth group "sleep"-over that night, where we watched Kicking and Screaming, Pirates of the Caribbean and Star Wars: A New Hope. Adding it up, I probably got a total of 2 hours sleep.
Saturday morning we had breakfast cooked for us by the friendly church folk. When I got home, I slept until lunchtime, then went out shopping alone, because Deb was at a first aid course. When she finished, she came over for dinner and to play City of Heroes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I should get around to posting a picture of her character.
PPS - Maybe later.

Shaving robot

It would be convenient for me to have a tiny robot shave me while I sleep. That way I can wake up clean-shaven and also forget about shaving ever again. Flawless. Until it goes nuts and decides to cut an artery and attempt to take over my life. Or sell the whisker clippings for genetic research or cloning.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't like having to shave in the morning.
PPS - Because you have to do it again the next day too.

When 5 minutes = 1 hour

This morning I woke up on time at 06:00, turned off my alarm and laid back down for "just five minutes more". When I opened my eyes again, it was 07:00, yet I still managed to feed the cat, iron a shirt, have a quick shower, get dressed and pack my bag (including a bowl of cereal to eat at work) and catch my usual 07:30 bus. It's not something I want to do every day, but I could get used to the breakfast at work deal.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's Sultana Bran.
PPS - The office seemed to be out of milk.

A game to play

I have a game for you to play. It's called "hide and seek", only because that's the most appropriate name. It's not the one you've played before. In this version, you go to a video/DVD rental place and locate all the copies of a particular movie, then hide them in completely unexpected places on the shelves. Following that, you go to the front counter and ask if they have any copies of that movie, then follow the attendant around as they check every shelf for a mis-filed copy. Hilarity ensues.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sometimes you get a free movie at the end.
PPS - That should not, however, be your primary motivation.

And this for the rest of you

If you don't like Valentine's Day, you're absolutely welcome to that opinion. I'm the one who wanted to stage Anti-Valentine's parties where people burned effigies of Cupid. If it was just another Hallmark holiday designed to sell greeting cards, flowers and chocolate, it might be okay, but this one plays on the deepest of human desires: to be loved. And to those on the outside, every sickening public display of affection or red heart decorative display threatens to send you into a furious rage. You want to grab that fat little cherub by the throat and squeeze until he goes limp and the obnoxious bow and arrow come clattering to the ground.

Burn, Cupid, burn. You were a troublesome imp at the best of times, and a downright bastard with bad aim at the worst. Don't sugar-coat this day. It's bad enough as it is.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You don't need a day for love.
PPS - Browse for some Anti-Valentine's merch.

Soothsayer

Of all the psychic professions, I think I'd most like to be a soothsayer. I want to be able to just look at you and tell you that you're lying. Of course it's not exactly foolproof - if you've been misled or tricked in some way, and actually believe what you're saying, I won't be able to tell that from an actual lie. Still, the skill is spectacularly useful, and I would be ready and willing to ride along with my friends whenever they take their car in to be serviced.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Oh, yeah, happy Valentine's Day.
PPS - I wouldn't have said that last year.

DIY

My position on Google and other companies censoring websites in response to demands by the ruling Chinese despots is this: if the government in China wants this or that website censored for Chinese consumption, they'd better just do it themselves. I think there is a symptom developing here that speaks of the internet censorship becoming too great a burden for the Chinese government, so they're asking the companies to do it for them. If there is a general "Yeah? Do it yourself!" response, it is likely that the entire scheme will come apart, at least to a certain degree, and the citizens of China will once again have the internet they deserve.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - China may have to shut down the internet completely to get what they want.
PPS - I don't mean just locally. I mean bombing the entire Earth back to the stone age.

The Sunday Mok - The second half of camping

Last Sunday felt really long. It started with eggs and pancakes cooked on a butane stove at a Maroochydore campsite, then packup, a long drive home interrupted by lunch at some place by the highway, then a three-hour nap, followed by church in the evening.
On Monday at work I finally got into detailed (re)design of the personnel database. It felt better than the high-level functional design. In the evening, Ug, Dad and I had dinner at Hungry Jacks.
Tuesday at work I got a call about our timesheet transfer process, and I decided to finally scrap the entire problematic thing and redesign from the ground up. It's really been a mess from day one, so hopefully (when I'm finished) we'll have something more manageable and accessible.
I had a meeting about timesheet stuff on Wednesday, followed by coding. After work there was a "short" youth group meeting that I had to leave after an hour so I could be home in time to greet everyone for Bible study. I hate being rushed.
I spent Thursday coding database access code for the timesheet transfer, later realising that it could have gone much faster if I'd just used some basic supporting code for statement generation. Dinner at Dad's in the evening.
A good portion of Friday was taken up with moving my files and settings to a new PC. We (Brad and I) asked for more memory and got whole new computers instead (without a memory upgrade, as it turns out). Youth group movies in the evening: saw Just Friends.
On Saturday I tried to donate a lot of old computer gear to the church for a garage sale, and had to bring every bit of it home, because they were not accepting computers. I also went to Koorong to buy some new music. I grabbed one Newsboys CD and one by Paul Colman.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I got significantly tired rather early on Saturday night.
PPS - I was in bed by about 10pm.

The Way Forward

We have started to see that lists and hierarchical organisation of information is no longer sufficent for our modern information organisation needs. Some of the better ideas that have emerged so far are search, tagging and "most frequently used" lists. Search lets us find things when we have forgotten where we put them (or when there is no "where" to put them in the first place). Tagging lets us remember what it was about when we find it, and what's related. A "most frequently used" list provides an ever-adapting menu whose sole purpose in life is to remember what we do and make it faster.

So here's the question: why do we have things like a hierarchical structure for our massive hard drives, no "most frequent" websites list in our browsers and have to rely on an add-on to search our own computers at any decent speed?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm now using del.icio.us as my primary bookmarking method.

PPS - The Firefox-based Flock browser provides the most-frequent websites list.

Evil vs Less Evil

I remarked to Erin this morning on the bus that we seem to be better at creating evil than good. It seems that the best we can do is create benign characters and beings, who mean us no harm, but do not actively do good. The exception is our usually hazy notion of angels. In every comic book there are usually three or four villains per hero, and those often have minions. Count up everyone who ever took on Batman, including minions, and you'll lose count.

I see it as our recognition that we live in a world where doing good is a struggle. Sometimes, as Douglas Adams noted, you get nailed to a tree for saying how nice it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change. If heroes out-numbered the villains, the story wouldn't be as interesting, and we wouldn't be engaged by it. We have to identify with the hero who struggles against the evil we recognise in the world, and we want to see a triumph of good over evil, to give us hope.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I was going to write about creativity today.
PPS - Maybe tomorrow.

Creative Writing

After finishing The Santaroga Barrier this morning, I have to conclude that Frank Herbert must have taken some drugs in his time. He wrote often enough about consciousness-altering substances in his stories, and the viewpoints of those individuals who took them. The visions and sensations expressed in those drug-filled passages simply must have some first-hand knowledge involved.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We can't ask him, though.
PPS - I feel pretty confident in my assessment.

Your challenge for today

Your public transport challenge for today is to see how far you can travel for free on buses. No points for trains - they're too easy - and no sneaking on board either. You must talk the bus driver into waving you on for no payment.
Anyone who gets on in Brisbane and gets off in Sydney wins.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might work to take a pregnant woman with you, to fake being in labour.
PPS - Thanks to Erin for helping develop this idea.

Warning: You Might be a Zombie

Dullness in the eyes, an open mouth, stimulus-response behaviour, social dependence on alcohol, laughing when people fall down, repeating funny lines from movies because they were funny in the movie. You get the feeling that an original thought would split their heads open. Some days I feel like I see zombies everywhere.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can't decide if it's disturbing or sad.
PPS - Probably both.

The Sunday Mok - The first half of camping

Last Sunday after church Deb came over to hang out and ended up doing dishes and laundry. That wasn't my idea. We made curried sausages for dinner. I'm getting to really like cooking.
When I woke up on Monday I briefly had trouble remembering what day of the week it was. On the way to work I listened to Dane Cook's Harmful if Swallowed, eliciting a few odd looks from fellow bus passengers.
I spent Tuesday at work tweaking documentation, and went back to karate in the evening. My knee handled it well enough.
On Wednesday at work I learned a few tricks for working with MS Word documents from code. I ate dinner at Deb's in the evening and we watched some Angel episodes.
I had to be at work early on Thursday for a meeting with David, then spent the rest of the day handling small problems with other people's software. I lent my school jersey to MIV for a costume party, then went to a surprise party for Kirsty.
Friday capped off what felt like just a bad week at work, probably because it was mostly filled with high-level documentation. We went swimming for youth group, which kind of made up for it, though.
Saturday I got up early to pick up Deb for a camping trip to Maroochydore. Or it might have been Mooloolaba. I was totally lost by the time I got there. We set up and went swimming in the river with a strong current. It was all pretty cool. I was up until about midnight that night.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I forgot to actually do this post when I got home.
PPS - Thanks to the magic of Blogger, though, it still appears in the right place.

Condemned

If you were sentenced to death, but were allowed to choose your own method of execution, what would you request? Let's assume that you have to be guaranteed dead within 24 hours, just to avoid the answers like "old age".

Personally, I'd probably go with being smothered, or perhaps I'd get myself beheaded just to see if that myth about being aware for a few more seconds was true.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not that I could tell anyone about it, obviously.
PPS - This post inspired by Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

Catching the Worm

I am of two opinions about today's meeting, because it starts at 08:00, a full 30 minutes before my workday officially starts. The upside is that it will give me some surplus time to shuffle into a longer lunch break or an early punch-out. The downside is that I've already been feeling a bit sleep-deprived and I've had to get up just a little earlier today. I don't think I want to do this very often.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And already it's stinking hot outside.
PPS - I shouldn't be sweating bullets at 07:15.

Exercising an injured knee

I went back to karate last night after about six weeks off. It was mostly a knee thing, and it's not sore this morning, which is a plus. My fitness has dropped, though, and I managed to forget some of the more complex kata moves. The knee held up well enough, though stretches, kicks and the bow-in, bow-out parts of the class were a slight struggle. In all, I call it a successful return to training.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've decided not to be deep today.
PPS - There's only so much depth the world of blogs can handle.

Free Society

Can a society operate without money and without trade? If there is no money, then everything is free. If everything is free, there is no poverty, because you can have all you need. If everything is free, there is no greed and hence no crime. If health care is free, nobody dies of curable diseases. If education is free, there is no intellectual elite and no information hoarding or propaganda. It looks good on the surface.

The problems are deeper. If everything is free, why should I work to produce anything? I can have everything I need as well as all my time to myself. I can be a voluntary leech on society. So can everyone else, so nobody would work. Since nobody is working, nothing gets produced, and everyone goes hungry, gets sick and stays uneducated.

If there is an economy, it is based on worth. Direct trade has had a layer added to it - an abstraction called "money" - on which we base it all. I sell my time and skills at work for money and use it to buy the food I need. This is more convenient for everyone, because my time and skills are not of direct value to everyone from whom I require goods and services, and it would be impractical for me to trade directly with all of them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This post inspired by Space Wasters by David Garnett.
PPS - I have yet to find it listed on Amazon, so no links today.

LMAO @ Dane Cook

This morning I am the crazy person on the bus with headphones on, laughing at things you can't hear. It's just rude, I know, but Dane Cook is one funny guy. I'm listening to Harmful If Swallowed, and I've seriously lost it by halfway through. I'm trying not to be loud, but I can't tell, because I'm the one with the headphones. Unfortunately I had to stop before it finished, because it's longer than the bus ride.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It just took way too long to load a Google search for "Dane Cook".
PPS - And his website is apparently half-finished.

The Sunday Mok - Dinosaur bones and other dead things

I've already expressed how good last Sunday was. I sang in the evening church service and played City of Heroes in the afternoon.
Monday evening I went to a post-Youthworx basketball night, but just sat and watched because of my knee. Afterwards I watched a couple of Stargate SG-1 episodes with Deb and stayed up just a bit too late.
I spent Tuesday at work designing security for a new (upgraded, really) personnel database. It's always a problem. In the evening, Deb and I rented A Lot Like Love and the original Stargate movie, to give Deb a better background in that particular sci-fi construct.
Though I ate at Deb's on Wednesday night, I went home afterwards, because I didn't feel like being around people. I played City of Heroes for a while, then turned in early.
On Thursday, Australia Day, I went to Bridgit's for a large late barbeque lunch, then had a small dinner at Dad's - since lunch was so big, I didn't feel like much for dinner.
Friday was when we finally heard back from our new HR manager about the allowed scope of the new personnel database - much smaller than either David, he or I had hoped. After work I saw Memoirs of a Geisha with Deb. It was a bit too long.
I went for an exercise walk with Deb on Saturday morning, though I walked much further to get to her place and back. In the afternoon we went to the Queensland Museum. After I cooked dinner, we watched some Angel episodes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Things seem to be rather routine.
PPS - I'll try to do something crazier this week.

The Other One That Got Away

In all probability, with all the people you meet and the encounters you have, it's a reasonable assumption that there is someone out there who thinks of you as "the one that got away". Imagine that. It might be someone you just passed at the supermarket one time, who returned an idle smile, or someone you met at a party - a friend of a friend - with whom you had a brief but memorable conversation. Life's like that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Be nice to the strangers you meet.
PPS - You might be making an impression that will last a lifetime.

Happy Birthday, Australia!

Today is Australia Day, once known as Foundation Day. We celebrate by not working, cooking steaks and sausages and swimming, all of which I plan to do today, if possible.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not simultaneously.
PPS - Because you shouldn't eat while (or before) swimming.

Missing Ink

I've been reading Space Wasters from the Lifeline Bookfest, and I'm about a third of the way through, so now would be a terrible time to misplace the book. That's exactly what I've done. I know I had it after I got off the bus, and I know I don't have it this morning. The only two possibilities that I see are that I left it in Katrina's car, who drove Deb and I from the bus stop to home, or that I brought it inside and left it there. In either case, it's not here now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is my first post from a new web browser, Flock.
PPS - It keeps my bookmarks online on del.icio.us.

It's my first day

It's easy to tell that today is the first day back for most Queensland schools. The first clue is that my bus trip, usually 25-30 minutes long extended to a full hour or more. And it's quite clear that the reason for this delay is parents driving their kids to school, because I didn't see a single one walking.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Many people are upset by this.
PPS - I now have an extra fifteen minutes to make up during the work day.

I love my friends (awww)

Last night after church was my kind of party. We all headed down to the local Coffee Club and had various cold or hot milk-based beverages, some chips and lots of laughs. It's been too long since I've felt like a successful social comedian, so last night was a great confidence-booster. Also, I love having those running gags with friends. One about me is that I have a "To Do" list that looks something like this:
1. Buy new shoes.
2. Learn to make drums from human skin.
3. Kill Erin. Make a drum.
So now with the first item done, it's apparently threatening (in a very amusing way) for me to start drumming on the table.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You probably have to be there.
PPS - That's the whole point.

The Sunday Mok - Semi-anniversary

On and off during the week, but especially on Sunday, I had extreme urges to get my long hair cut off. It's just too hot here, and I feel silly with it tied back all the time. Besides church, I played City of Heroes and watched some old recorded Rage plus Stargate SG-1.
On Monday night, Dad, Ug and I went to Sizzler for dinner. It's set to become a semi-regular thing. In City of Heroes later on, I took Dire Sun into the Player-vs-Player zone "Warburg" for the first time. He didn't get splatted, so I consider it a success.
Tuesday evening, with the rest of the crew, I saw The Producers. I laughed, though I thought Matthew Broderick was way over the top.
I finally had a meeting with our new HR manager on Wednesday to discuss the future of Human Resources software in the company. I think the project we outlined was a bit much. It would, however, keep me rather busy for over a year.
Thursday evening, before dinner at Dad & Beth's, I went to the doctor about my left wrist. I suspected it was tendonitis, since it usually went away if I strapped it up. The doctor said it was tendonitis and I should strap it up and/or take some anti-inflammatory tablets.
Friday night was Deb's and my semi-anniversary: six months. I bought her some nice earrings and a pendant, and we had dinner at the Summit Restaurant on Mt Coot-tha.
Saturday was my first time ever at the Lifeline Bookfest. I came away with a bundle of $36 worth of science fiction that took two bags to carry. It's likely to be a while before I even get around to the first one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sometime soon I should explain the name "Ug the Caveman" as relates to my brother.
PPS - He decided on the name himself, so it's not like I'm deliberately insulting him.

Power Yoga

There are usually flyers taped to the light poles outside the office advertising some yoga school. Usually I read as far as "yoga" and lose interest, but today I took a closer look. Every morning, from 6:30 to 7:30, if you so choose, you could take part in a class called "Power Yoga". All you yoga nuts can tell me what it actually is, if you want to, but for now I'm going with my mental image of regular yoga going really fast.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's assuming it's not regular yoga while skydiving.
PPS - I think that's "Extreme Yoga", though.

Tickin' away

I wonder sometimes if I am an idealist that will eventually have my dreams completely crushed out of me. Then I wonder if I dream new dreams faster than the old ones are crushed. Picture a person placing eggs down in front of a slow-moving steam roller. One is likely moving faster than the other, resulting either lots of dreams or a guy doing his pancake impression.

That is possibly the secret to remaining idealistic - keep dreaming new dreams. The world needs dreamers to keep us moving forward.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My first draft said "a person laying eggs down...".
PPS - Somehow it conjured the wrong image.

Kingdom of Loathing

Yesterday I started another low-tech online game that is feasible to play during my lunch hour at work: Kingdom of Loathing. Though I'd heard of it before, I had a different picture in my head, and a different idea of how it worked, and I'd decided it wasn't for me. This often happens to me. I originally thought a "web log" was just an automatically-posted browser history.

KoL is a role-playing game, but everything's just a little bit twisted and a bit tongue-in-cheek. My character is a "Pastamancer" who is currently wearing ravioli for a hat and attacking things with a pasta spoon.

I'm interested in this game primarily because it includes a crafting system (which is pretty standard in online RPGs, but not City of Heroes). Using "meat paste", you can fuse together items in your inventory to create other items. Somehow it's just a fascinating concept to me, and it may eventually lead me away from City of Heroes to World of Warcraft. But not today. Today I try to fuse my "magicalness in a can" with something, for no really good reason.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - KoL is a bit more involved than Urban Dead.
PPS - Also, it has pictures. Stick figures and the like.

Just Kidding

I need people to know that sometimes I can't tell if they're joking. Brad told me someone wanted to take my desk on Boundary Street. He was kidding and I didn't know. Bronwyn showed me some shoes she said she was considering to buy. She was kidding and I didn't know. Various evil intents and actions are often ascribed to me and were palmed off on my evil twin, Lucas. I just don't know if everyone is joking. You'd think someone who makes people laugh would be able to tell rather easily what's a joke and what's serious. Unfotunately, a lot of the time it just goes over my head when you kid with me and run a really long way with a gag. Even a short way and I can get lost. I usually have an inkling that something might be wrong, but I also get that inkling at times when someone is actually serious, so it's not a reliable indicator. It also seems that people don't know exactly when to take me seriously (not very often).

The point is this: if everyone could just wear big neon signs over their heads that say "kidding", and switch them on when they're not being serious, that'd help me a lot.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There are probably other ways.
PPS - For now, I'm going to stick with my neon sign suggestion.

Pointless Endeavour

I've decided I don't like mowing the lawn. There are many possible explanations for this - the most likely being that it's a bit of hard work in the sun that has to be redone every couple of weeks. I also have a character that appreciates things primarily if they are improving. Somehow that doesn't include mowing. While I realise that mowing makes the lawn better, it gets worse again, and mowing will never improve it beyond a well-mowed state.

So my problem is: what do I do about it? I've thought of a few options, and the most appealing to me at the moment is to purchase some kind of robot to take care of everything. I suppose I could also buy a sheep or two, but I think the robot would work a little more consistently.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - An army of robot slaves is certainly an idea that appeals to me.
PPS - Perhaps that's my evil genius side talking.

The Sunday Mok - I should vacuum this keyboard

Last Sunday while grocery shopping I encountered Rory unexpectedly. He told me about Michael's visit from the UK. While I was glad to see him, it would have been nice if I'd managed to hear about it sooner.
I went back to work on Monday after a month off. The month's worth of email was primarily concerned with Christmas events and was summarily deleted. In the evening, I watched Angel at Deb's.
On Tuesday, I forgot to take my keys home from the office. This is a problem I've encountered before, but I usually catch it before I get to the bus. This time I was all the way home before it even registered. Despite knocking, ringing the doorbell and making noise outside a window, I had to call on my phone before Ug the Caveman answered the door.
I got approval on Wednesday to start on the work I'd been doing since Monday. It was all I had to do anyway. At lunchtime I wrote a quick and dirty program to solve sudoku puzzles. For dinner we went to Nando's at West End for Stu's birthday and ate some spicy chicken. Not very spicy, mind you.
On Thursday, for the regular family dinner, Deb and I brought a chocolate cheesecake for dessert. It was really very good. I like cheesecake. After we left, we came back to my place and watched Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill on DVD.
After work on Friday I came home and started watching a Stargate SG-1 episode, then went to Deb's to sit through dinner (I'd already eaten) and sit in relative silence while she caught up with her Mum who had just arrived back from Guam.
I mowed the lawn again on Saturday, as well as doing some washing and grocery shopping. Deb cooked lunch and I cooked dinner. In the afternoon some removalists came to get Sarah's washing machine that's been sitting in our garage for quite some time. The did not, however, remove the lounge suite that's been in our entryway.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There was more Angel watching on Saturday.
PPS - In fact, besides what I mentioned, that's pretty much all that happened.

Hung Up

I don't know exactly what appeals to me about Madonna's song Hung Up. It's not the woman herself, and it's certainly not the music video. It might be the instruments used and the musical theme, which tend to remind me of old video games. It's probably also the rhythm of it all (as opposed to "The Beat", about which I care not at all). Whatever it is, I just have to say that I like it, as lizards like the Sun.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Madonna has had a long time to become good at what she does.
PPS - Fill in the mental blank yourself, there.

Sudoku

A while ago I was introduced to Sudoku puzzles - a kind of number crossword in a nine-by-nine grid. As is my habit, I started designing a program to work with them (even though plenty are available for sale or for free). After days of designing elegant software structures to enable the several features I wanted to include, I bit the bullet and hacked up a quick and dirty text-mode program that does nothing but solve the puzzle. It took about half an hour to write, and it works just by placing numbers and seeing if they fit, backtracking as necessary when a problem is encountered.

I'm not entirely sure what my point is, but I think it has something to do with wasted design effort.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm back in sleep-deprived mode.
PPS - It didn't take long, did it?

To die with a surprised look

It must be a terrible realisation in your last seconds of life when you realise that the answer to your sarcastic question "What's he gonna do, shoot me?" is actually "Yes.".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's probably the quickest way to bring an invincibility complex to an end.
PPS - Too bad it doesn't last.

Windows Vista Security

One thing Microsoft *must* get right in the next Windows is security. If any old worm, virus and trojan horse program is allowed to pop onto your PC and do its business in Windows Vista, Microsoft will start losing an alarming amount of market share. Not all of it, though, because there are still some users who are properly indoctrinated that they can't live without Windows. The point is that security is (or should be) a major concern of users these days, so if the operating system is built without that as a primary objective, it will be seen as a failure. The global and instant communication network presents an immediate opportunity to malicious and benevolent software alike, and steps must be taken to sift the good from the bad.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We may gradually and eventually get there.
PPS - That is if the net doesn't first implode under the weight of corporate greed.

Miscommunication

My friend Michael came back from the UK for a visit about three weeks ago and is leaving today. By sheer luck I heard about yesterday's farewell dinner in time to be there. Why didn't I hear about this? I blame Microsoft, and this time I'm not being as flippant as you might think. Mister Michael announced his visit plans via email to everyone, which Hotmail counts as "mass email" and routed to my Junk Mail box. I didn't check in time, because I hardly use my Hotmail account at all anymore, and the announcement vanished forever. Curse you Microsoft!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This just a few days after (almost) sticking up for them.
PPS - Why do they toy with me like this?

The Sunday Mok - A world of dreams

Last Sunday started twice. Once at 4am to watch the first sunrise of the new year and then again at 07:30. I slept at home after church, then played City of Heroes for a while. After the evening church service, I watched The Wedding Singer with Erin, Deb, Murrae, Scott, Michelle, René, Sam and Stu.
I spent Monday at Deb's, including a Youthworx reunion barbeque and swim. Deb and I left a little early for dinner at my Dad's place. We watched a little Angel at my place after that.
I bought a new DVD player on Tuesday, plus some shoes. We rented Signs on DVD and had to have it replaced because the disc was faulty. I didn't get to see it that night anyway, because of a power outage.
I spent Wednesday alone playing City of Heroes and also did some grocery shopping. I found the YAAFM videos on zipperfish.com and watched a few. You'll know what the acronym means if you go there. Deb and I cooked a Thai green chicken curry for dinner for her family.
I felt better on Thursday following a bit of a slump from Tuesday. I slept in and played City of Heroes for a while. After lunch, I picked up Debbie and we went to see Just Like Heaven.
I went for an exercise walk on Friday - the first in a long time. Following that, I spent the whole day at Deb's watching Angel. That's about it.
On Saturday I went to Dreamworld with Stu, Bridgit, Erin, Murrae and Kirsty. It was fun, especially going on The Claw, the latest big ride. I hadn't been on it before. I was exhausted when I got home.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Yeah, I think that about covers it.
PPS - I'm off to finish watching YAAFM.

(Almost) Sticking Up for Microsoft

The one thing I have noticed that Microsoft does slightly better than Google is supporting international users, like me. Google services tend to support primarily (or only) the United States. Sometimes there is a note to the effect that they plan, sometime in the future, to support international users.

Microsoft, on the other hand, will usually have at least some information or services with Australian information alongside the US info. Little as it may be, it's more than Google gives me sometimes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I should have an example, shouldn't I?
PPS - Got one: the Weather box on Google Desktop Sidebar vs MSN Weather.

The worst of the worst

In Ann Rice's vampire novels, the vampires can move too quickly for human eyes to see, and basically the only things that can kill them are fire, beheading and sunlight. The older ones can hear your thoughts, move objects with their minds and fly. Their personalities are intact - they are the same person dead as they were alive.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampires are demons in dead bodies who remember the life of their vessel. They are malicious and evil, every one. They take delight in the kill and creating pain, but cannot enter a home without an invitation.

In Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, the vampire can enter any room that is not completely airtight, and can transform into various forms such as a wolf or bat.

The worst kind of vampire to encounter, combining these attributes, would be one who is too old to be burned by the sun, is evil through and through, can enter any room or home (even if the door is locked) and kill you before you even see it coming.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You could be attacked in broad daylight.
PPS - And you'd be dead before you blink.

DVD luxury

Yesterday I enjoyed a certain novelty that most of you would take for granted. You see, I purchased a new DVD player, and it actually plays my discs! Our old "Palsonic" player had all kinds of troubles with my Buffy, Angel and Stargate: SG-1 DVDs. It's latest trick was to reset itself after I navigated through the menus and select an episode to play. Now, thankfully, that is all in the past.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My only gripe with the new player is the short length of its power cord.
PPS - But I guess it's not size that matters.

Thy matriarch is corpulent

The word "Momma" for "Mother" does not translate into Commonwealth English at all. "Mumma" simply does not make sense. It may be this reason that has kept obnoxious "Your momma so fat" jokes out of Australia. For this, I am grateful.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I told you this was the best country in the world.
PPS - Even if it is only for that reason.

Physical file type abstraction

I have this idea about operating systems and file types - I shouldn't have to know much at all about file types themselves, but rather just that a particular file contains video information. One media player should be plenty, which means I just need drivers to encode and decode the data from the physical file type. I shouldn't need to install Windows Media Player, Quicktime and RealPlayer at home - I should be able to choose one that appeals to me and have it play any video format for which I have a codec. That's a layer of abstraction on top of the current Windows model, so what I end up with is literally video files, images, music, documents and so on, rather than .MOV, .AVI, .MPG, .RM, .JPG, .BMP, .PNG, .GIF, .MP3, .OGG, .WMA, .WAV, .DOC, .PDF, .TXT, .SXW...

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I realise that some media players can use enough different codecs to be almost universal.
PPS - That's just a start.

The Sunday Mok - Merry New Solar Circuit

Last Sunday, you recall, was Christmas Day. I spent lunch and dinner at Dad & Beth's with the step-siblings. I liked the layered salad (probably because it contained a tasty cheese and mayonnaise) and playing cards in the air conditioning.
I skipped breakfast on Monday, which is significant because I cannot actually remember ever doing so before. I was still full from Christmas. I watched Buffy with Deb past the end of season 6.
On Tuesday we finished the second-last Buffy box set. Time had begun to be measured in Buffy episodes and Buffy box sets. I ate dinner at home, because the holidays have meant an accumulation of fresh food here that's not otherwise getting eaten so much.
I spent Wednesday morning playing City of Heroes, then went to Deb's for more Buffy and dinner. After we stopped watching DVDs for the night, we had a long conversation.
Deb and I went shopping on Thursday, mostly to compare and price DVD players, since ours here doesn't play everything I've got. We swam at Stu's in the afternoon with representative portion of the church crowd, then had dinner at Dad and Beth's, as is the Thursday tradition.
I mowed the lawn on Friday, rather poorly. Since a poor job is much like a careful one, only quicker, I'm not too cut up about my slackness. I installed an old hard drive in an old PC for Dad, then Deb and I started spring cleaning the rumpus room. It'll be a nice (and comfortably-temperatured) place when we're done with it.
Saturday was New Year's Eve, and I tried to spend it resting up for a big night. I couldn't sleep or even doze, though. Deb and I headed out to Lydia and Rich's new place to see the fireworks and catch up with my friends who I see far too irregularly. That's all my fault, by the way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My tradition of staying awake for the sunrise had a three-hour nap component this year.
PPS - That's because I still made it to church this morning.

Joss Whedon as a wrap-up writer

I have come to a little conclusion regarding Joss Whedon, creator/writer/director of Buffy, Angel and Firefly: he can't write a really good final ending. The wrong characters die in stupid and unpredictable ways, the last part of the last scene is always foreshadowing instead of an ending, and permanent damage is done to the characters in some way. On the plus side, the endings are still dramatic, suspenseful and spectacular.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Joss' endings are probably his way of saying that life goes on.
PPS - And they're different from typical Hollywood tripe. I've got to give him that.

The Dire Sun Story

In City of Heroes, any individual character can have up to four different costumes. You have to earn them, and they gradually become available at higher levels. Yesterday I made it to level 30 with my main character, Dire Sun, which meant I could get a third costume, as pictured below.

The reason they all look very similar is that I use the costumes as part of telling the character story. The aspect of Dire Sun's story that is told by his costumes is his growing egotism and believing his own hype.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The fourth costume will be mostly bright gold with a glowing aura.
PPS - Nobody said it was a happy story.

New, just like yesterday

I'd really like to know what "new information" triggers the little star beside a person's name in MSN Messenger, because I look at the info and am usually struck by the amount of total sameness shining from the contact card. I do notice that there are occasionally different songs listed as currently playing, and very occasionally a new Spaces blog post (but usually not). In either case, something is strangely wrong with that feature.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I feel justified in blaming Microsoft for this one.
PPS - After all, who else was involved in its creation?

Laser knife

Remember that scene in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Trillian makes toast with a lightsabre-esque knife? How hot would toast cut by laser-knife stay? It can't be that hot, or it would have been burnt during the cutting. If it was too cold, then the whole exercise would be rather pointless, since the toast would need heating afterwards anyway. This, for some reason, has bothered me for far too long.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I get fixated on details like that sometimes.
PPS - And by "sometimes" I mean "practically always".

Little onions that can swim

Yesterday for Christmas my brother and I received a gift box of various cooking ingredients like simmer sauces, vinegar and a little jar of cocktail onions. I've got nothing against the onions themselves, but I'm afraid I don't know any recipes that involve tiny, tiny onions (except perhaps for an onion cocktail). They may go unused for a little while.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Feel free to point me to creative uses for these floating orbs.
PPS - Preferably cooking-related, but I'm flexible.

The Sunday Mok - A Very Something Christmas

I had to be at the Uniting Church last Sunday morning so I could be at the Christmas Eve service rehearsal. I believe I have attended Ashgrove Baptist just once in the past month due to obligations at the Uniting Church. After the evening service, several of us played pool and watched Be Cool at Kirsty's.
On Monday I went shopping with Deb. That could easily be a generic description for most of the days of this week. We also watched some Buffy, finishing up season 5.
In the afternoon on Tuesday, I watched more Buffy with Deb. In the evening, Erin, Michelle, René, Stu, Bridgit, Deb and I went to the Mount Coot-tha Lookout for icecream.
Wednesday was shopping again, this time for family gifts. Apparently I bought too many and now it's a "problem" that needs to be solved. It's hard for me to think of generosity as a problem.
I spent Thursday playing City of Heroes and watching old recorded Stargate: Atlantis episodes that I hadn't gotten around to yet. Dinner was at Dad & Beth's with Ug, Deb and David.
My knee started feeling a bit worse on Friday, possibly due to over-use during the week. Deb and I had dinner at a Korean restaurant in the Queen Street Mall, then saw The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Saturday, Christmas Eve, I passed the morning on City of Heroes before going to Deb's for lunch. We played a few rounds of Trivial Pursuit DVD, then I went home around dinnertime to eat and take a nap before the late church service. I couldn't sleep, though - it's just too hot.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Last night I slept on the floor of the patio to stay cool.
PPS - Merry Christmas.

Grrr, Argh

I'd love to get a T-shirt featuring the Mutant Enemy Inc. monster logo as featured at the end of the Buffy, Angel and Firefly credits. This is the closest I could find. Much disappointment.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's probably just as well.
PPS - If I had found one, I'd be wearing it often, and constantly saying "Grr, Argh".

Forbes Email Time Capsule

A while ago, Forbes.com ran an experiment they dubbed the Email Time Capsule. Basically, it was designed to allow you to send yourself (or someone else) a massively time-delayed email. By the time it was delivered (twenty years from now), it would be a message from the past. With that in mind, here are my top five potential (ab)uses for the Forbes Email Time Capsule System:
5. Freaking out relatives with an email from beyond the grave.
4. Driving yourself to insanity by sending a love letter you *think* you won't mind someone reading in five years.
3. Confessing to crimes after the statute of limitations for prosecution has passed.
2. Making one last blog post via a Blogger email address.

And the number one use for the Forbes Email Time Capsule:
1. Clogging up the system with undeliverable mail because who keeps the same email address for twenty years?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Comments on other uses for the system are welcome.
PPS - Unfortunately, the email time capsule is now closed.

It's Christmas and I didn't study

Christmas is rushing up this year like a massive train, honking some kind of foghorn, and my only response is to stand terrified in the beam of its one headlight. I have not put up a Christmas tree or sent any cards. I've bought a few gifts, but they're not even wrapped yet. It's just a good thing I'm not working this week, or I'd really be in panic mode.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - As is, I've still got four days left to spread out the panic.
PPS - I thought holidays were supposed to be relaxing.

First Corinthians For Dummies

The Apostle Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, abridged version:

"Dear Corinthians,
Oh, come on. Grow up.
Love, Paul".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The real thing is here.
PPS - It's called "Corinthians" because it's addressed to residents of Corinth.

Sleeping in rules

...or at least it does when my body allows me to do it. From years of training and habit, I tend to wake up between 06:00 and 07:00 whether I set an alarm or not. "Sleeping in" then becomes "rolling over and dozing for a while longer", but it's still great. From now until early January I've got nothing but sleep-ins and free time. It's gonna be awesome.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some of my free time is already accounted for.
PPS - I expect to be finished my Buffy DVDs by the time I go back to work.

The Sunday Mok - Eight Point Four Seconds

Last Sunday was day one of Youthworx 2005, and I did feel a little bit old. Many of the campers had just finished grade 10, and many more were just a few years younger than me. This year, however, I was not the second-oldest there.
Monday, day 2, was when I got just a tiny bit sunburnt - not too serious, though. Not enough to cause pain, at least. I was glad to have David, son of Gwen, in my study group - he was excellent for keeping discussion rolling, even if it did get off course a few times.
Tuesday we headed into Byron for shopping in the morning, then watched Madagascar in the evening back at the campsite. There's not too much to tell about these Youthworx days - they're very relaxing.
On Wednesday evening we had the traditional Youthworx worship service, including a moving testimony from Michelle. I didn't stay long at the after-service bonfire, because I needed a little sleep.
We saw the new King Kong on Thursday. If I can sway your opinion in any way, please do not see this movie. You will never get those three hours back. See the original instead, even if you just laugh at the stop-motion animation.
On Friday morning I hurt my knee on a skimboard. It's tragic indeed, but I think I'll get over it. We came home to rain, then disc 2 of Buffy season 5, which includes one of my favourite episodes, Fool For Love, all about Spike.
Saturday was once again a normal Saturday apart from the doctor's appointment in the morning. Buffy in the afternoon, and a freak hailstorm that lasted only about five minutes, but knocked out the power for four hours.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm writing this from church before we start rehearsal.
PPS - That would be much harder if I were singing rather than on the PC.

I have returned

I got back from camp last night, so we'll be back to a regular schedule starting tomorrow. Just thought I'd let you know.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only souvenir I brought back with me was a twisted knee.
PPS - I probably won't go skimboarding again anytime soon.

Blogging suspended for a week

This is where you would usually see my Sunday Mok post for the week, but right now I'm off to Ballina on the Youthworx church camp. Should be good, but it does mean I'll be away from the internet for a full week, so I won't be able to post here until Saturday.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Wish me luck.
PPS - Sometimes my net withdrawal symptoms are quite pronounced.

Comment in Moderation

Blogger, I see, has enabled a comment moderation feature whereby bloggers can approve or reject comments before they appear on their posts. This is, in my opinion, a better comment spam reduction method than CAPTCHA images, because CAPTCHA completely rules out blind users and gives trouble to low-vision and low-literacy users - it's a more accessible solution for them.

Of course, the flipside is that the comment moderator needs to deal with a larger volume of information, and we all have plenty of data right now. I'm sure Bayesian filters could be applied to suggest spam-vs-not-spam test results, or some other method. Personally I moderate comments by the following procedure:
- Receive the comment via email.
- Decide if it's spam. If so, proceed. Otherwise just archive the email.
- Go to the offending comment and delete it from Blogger permanently.
- Disallow further comments on the affected post.

The last step is because the spambots keep keyword-searching (apparently) and keep finding the same blog posts over and over. Disallowing further comments prevents them from spamming that particular post.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Another downside of moderation is interference with the "liveness" of blog comments.
PPS - Since moderated comments could take ages to show up at all.

Electron, shmelectron

If we had discovered matter and antimatter at the same time, our world could have been filled with positrons and negatrons. Sigh.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We could always rename them now, I guess.
PPS - But that would take more effort than I'm prepared to put in.

English Blood

My usual explanation for why I fare so poorly in Summer is that I have what I call "English blood". It's also why I can cause snow blindness with the glare off my skin. My English blood means my internal furnace burns hotter than usual, to face the cold Winter weather with no problems. In Brisbane, this means I am quite comfortable for two weeks of the year. Around our Summer Christmas, however, I sweat so profusely that I could grow rice. It's not pleasant. So, whenever I say I have English blood, that's usually what I mean.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - No offense meant to any English people reading this.
PPS - Or residents of England who, apparently, are never coming home.

Magical Mystery Tour

This morning, it seems part of one road was blocked off to our bus, so we were detoured. This wouldn't have been such a big deal if there hadn't been a bus stop missed by the detour. Our dutiful driver decided that he would not miss his stops, naturally enough, so we spent about ten minutes searching the back streets for a way around the blockade to the scheduled stop. At one point we were headed back home, and nobody cheered when we made it back onto the scheduled route.

Fortunately, running non-air-conditioned busses at this time of year is forbidden by the Geneva Convention, so we weren't too uncomfortable during the ordeal.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I say "ordeal", but it was really more like taking a scenic route.
PPS - Except there was no scenery.

"Home" again

I'm back at my desk in the usual office this week, and I've been greeted by a few things:
- A new graduate sitting at my desk in my absence. Apparently there was a little communication breakdown about when I would be returning.
- A broken monitor. It worked for about a minute, then died.
- A complete lack of ready-to-go blog posts. I planned to just pick one from the archive, but none have inspired me this morning.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On the plus side, my monitor was replaced with a bigger one.
PPS - I was going to make a Viagra joke there, but decided against it.

The Sunday Mok - Building a salad

I finished up the Disciple retreat weekend last Sunday, then went to Deb's and watched three episodes of Buffy. In the evening service, I ran the computer and helped with a skit.
Starting Monday, work was fairly quiet. I've been handling the bugs that pop up at the rate of about one per day recently, and they're small. Dinner was pasta at Deb's, with Ug and Dan, while watching Mythbusters.
Karate on Tuesday felt tough at the time, but was apparently not too bad, since I felt okay the next day.
On Wednesday I met Ug in the city around lunchtime to help handle some banking business. In the evening, I watched more Buffy at Deb's.
Thursday night I did what I should have done on Wednesday - call a few of the youth group boys to ask them (again) if they were coming on the Youthworx end-of-year camp. I think it was about Thursday that I started to feel stressed.
Friday at work involved cleaning up my PC and making sure everything was backed up and handed over. When I got home, however, I remembered that I still had my building security card, so I'll have to send it back now.
On Saturday I went Christmas shopping with Deb, and I also experienced my first of Harry Potter anything - the Goblet of Fire movie.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not quite impressed enough to go and read the books.
PPS - Maybe if I run out of other things to read.

Lumps of coal in the Sony stocking

Much as I hate the abbreviation "Xmas", I'm getting on board with this:


Sony have been very naughty this year, and the plan is to boycott all Sony products (hardware, music, games and, yes, Playstations too) for gifts this Christmas. You don't need Sony, and you certainly don't need to be treated like a criminal by them after paying for their products. Show them who's got the money around here and keep it in your wallet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Meme via Boing Boing.
PPS - Blogger troubles may have delayed this post.

Firestarter

I started a fire last night, with my mind. Actually, I set a saucepan plus oil on the stove and walked away for a few minutes, so technically I started it with the absence of my mind. I have learned some things from this experience:

1. Once burned, a saucepan is never the same again.
2. I'm a difficult person to console. Hugs, kind words and an understanding attitude all make it worse.
3. The best evidence that you have been near lots of smoke is inside your nose.
4. Our smoke detector works.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Casualties of the fire: the good looks of one saucepan.
PPS - Plus a bit of pride.

Spacing Out

Yesterday I finished reading a book Amazon recommended to me: Spaceland. Strange stuff, of course, being about spatial dimensions higher than our own, and full of four-dimensional creatures whose look can hardly be described, because you and I have three-dimensional brains and experiences. They are described, however, and this is done primarily through the introduction of words for directions along a fourth spatial axis.

Today I started reading Flatterland, and, fortunately for me, it looks like I have read them in the correct order. Flatterland is, I am led to believe from the opening chapters, going to deal with much more esoteric concepts than continuous spaces of whole dimensions.

I suppose I could have learned this from textbooks about higher mathematics, but, generally speaking, that's not something I can read on the bus. Besides which, they have a tendency to be somewhat unreal, non-grounded and abstract in their explanations. I'm after more of a philosophical text - I'm a mathematical consumer these days, rather than a mathematical scholar.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So, I guess I'm off to the four-and-a-halfth dimension.
PPS - Don't even ask me what that means yet.

Random computer-building thought of the day

I'd love to be able to build a computer into a Pepsi can. Something that small is truly portable, but couldn't include any peripherals. However, it could have a dock interface that looks like a wired coaster, and that's just plain cool. It would probably use a flash drive, or a very portable notebook drive, plus the world's smallest motherboard and integrated network, graphics, sound and several USB ports.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Yes, I was drinking Pepsi as I wrote this.
PPS - No, I don't think it will actually happen.

Carry your things in a guitar case

Carry your things in a guitar case. Not a guitar, because that would be too obvious. Things like books, files and your lunch. If someone asks if you have a guitar in there, you can say in a really sarcastic tone "No, I keep my books in here, as well as my lunch". They'll probably laugh until you open the case and show them. Then it'll be your turn to laugh as they back away awkwardly.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Life can be fun, if you let it.
PPS - I know a great many jokes are aided by having a wooden leg.

The Monday Mok

Yesterday's regularly-scheduled blog post was cancelled due to Bible Camp, so here's a brief run-down of my week:
I worked, I watched a little Buffy with Deb, then I went on a weekend retreat to finish off the Disciple Bible studies I've been doing on Mondays for about a year. Dad is still honeymooning and we've run out of food (temporarily).

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We're going grocery shopping tonight.
PPS - The fun never ends.

Swear Jar

If I had a swear jar at work, I'd be a millionaire by now. And that's just in a few months of being here. The morning conversation that I overhear would easily cover lunch.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some mornings, a very nice lunch.
PPS - Three courses.

I wish I was a plumber

It's Mario music, live. If you've got a Nintendo history like me, you'll like it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The rest of you, I guess, can wait until tomorrow.
PPS - Link via Boing Boing.

The Girl Gamer population

Designing games for female players has always been an adventure fraught with danger. Sometimes an enterprising designer might seek out these so-called "females" and actually ask them what kind of games they'd like to play. I expect that the answers vary from the younger marks' terse and nondescript answers ("Barbie" and "ponies") to the older girls' standard "I don't want to play games because they're all stupid". Basically there's an entire untapped half of the market out there if someone can figure out what girls want. Good luck with that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The Sims seems to be the closest to the mark so far.
PPS - That is, if there is just one mark. I expect the market is richer than that.

Should have tried it on a small file first

I have written a program to post in bulk the blog entries I have written down hastily and offline, and last night it made its first test run on several weeks of accumulated nonsense. Unfortunately for me, it seems that every half-finished post was immediately published, meaning that I had to manually save each one back as an unpublished draft via the Blogger interface. Perhaps this will be a lesson to me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or perhaps not.
PPS - I have plans to use a similar program to make blog posts while I am on holidays.

Maybe wrong guessing is in the profile too

I guessed that my Myers-Briggs type indicator was INTP, but the official results say INTJ, with very little room to argue. I do have a routine that I tend to stick to, but other parts of the profile say things relating to Js that really don't correspond to me.

For instance, the profile says that decisions come easily to me. They really don't. Ask anyone. It also said that I am less comfortable with systems of rigid logic where the rules are clearly defined. I loved logic at university. I can tell because I wrote computer programs to handle it and did my own tinkering and informal research.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though I may like being organised, I can't seem to do it for myself.
PPS - That's a bit of a dilemma.

The Sunday Mok - Profilin'

I drove Debbie to church last Sunday, since the family car would have been a bit squashed. After the service we went to a barbeque lunch and swim gathering at Stu's. I sang in the evening service, then had a late dinner at the local Coffee Club.
Monday at work meant debugging and model-building, and both of them got rather tiresome pretty quickly. I'd rather be building a user interface in .NET than trying to put stopgap fixes into the Access version. I played some City of Villains in the evening.
I went back to karate on Tuesday and felt fine, though I did take it a bit easy. I take this as a sign that my glandular fever is gone. I spent my lunch break in the park outside the office with Deb and her siser Mia.
On Wednesday I took Deb to see Kelly Clarkson at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, backed up by Rogue Traders. Both were pretty good, but the show was kind of short.
My dinner on Thursday night tried to kill me. It was a frozen chicken chow mein, and there was a broken shard of plastic inside it that turned out to be just wide enough to evoke a choking response. By the time I coughed it back up, I wasn't so hungry anymore. I also saw this and laughed.
On Friday night, we took the youth group kids to the local school oval to play netball and tennis and ended up with a little "indoor" soccer and low-net volleyball. I brought the half-time oranges.
Dad's wedding on Saturday went well, with despite me as MC. It means a few things, including that I now have grandparents again, I'm the middle child now, and I'm no longer living at home, but I haven't moved. It was good to see many of my uncles and aunts come out for the occasion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I keep saying I'll have to change all my neuroses to middle-child ones.
PPS - But that's wearing kind of thin now, so I guess I'll stop.

Testing positive for personality

All us youth group leaders had a training session last night to learn about our Myers-Briggs personality types. Unfortunately, our test results were not present, so we took our best guesses based on the information Sue presented. I came up as INTP, which means the following for you:
I - Introvert. I can get away from the computer games for a while to spend time with you, but then I'll need to spend a longer time alone to recharge.
N - Intuit. I'm an ideas man, not one for facts and figures, and I don't need to see it for it to be real.
T - Thinker. I'll make my decisions (eventually) based on my head, not my heart.
P - Perceiver. No, I won't clean my room when you ask.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd already done this in a basic way before.
PPS - There was no questionaire last time.

Sony: Aiming for the foot

I just love the Boing Boing use of the phrase "Sony Anti-Customer Technology" to refer to the recent debacle. For those not in the know, Sony shipped some CDs that installed malicious, dangerous and intrusive software when inserted into a computer, and, as a result of their shortsightedness and hubris, been subject to a very large backlash, including lawsuits.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For any big businesses reading this: customer does not mean criminal.
PPS - I like the phrase "anti-customer" so much that I think I'll start using it all the time.

Google zombie alert finally pays off

According to this story, a singing, androgynous, child-sized zombie called "Pinkie-Pinky" has been hanging out in the toilets of a few schools, terrorising students. It's not quite the zombie outbreak I was expecting, but I'm glad to be in the know.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I certainly didn't expect the invasion to be musical.
PPS - I guess I don't know much about the undead's musical taste.

Open standards vs proprietary tech

Microsoft and Yahoo are starting to get the idea that cooperation is more powerful than competition. They are planning to create partial interoperability with each other's messaging networks. In an ideal world (my ideal world), there is one instant messaging protocol - just one network - and many different clients to connect to it. Obviously I'm not blindly and naively advocating that Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and ICQ all join hands and start skipping around in a circle in peace and harmony - I'm suggesting that we get ourselves a standard.

Proprietary technologies and vendor lock-in are the enemies of progress, and they have no place in your world if you are looking towards a brighter future. Unfortunately, they are also terms that make management and marketing drones salivate with anticipation. If you make a good product, however, you do not need to grab your customers by the throat and hold on to make sure they stay with you. If your product is good, your customers stay of their own free will.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If your product is really good, they voluntarily tell their friends about it.
PPS - If your customers are not doing this, you're not producing Quality yet.

Out of thinking points

I am amused by this text from Urban Dead that is displayed when you, as a zombie, run out of Action Points (and can thus no longer perform any actions).

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I believe it's the "swaying slightly" bit that gets me.
PPS - I'm a zombie again, by the way. They got me.

The Sunday Mok - We love Alabaster Box, but we love our sound guys more

Last Sunday, Alabaster Box came to our evening church service, backed up by our own band Contagious. It was very cool. Our sound techs got big cheers for handling a little microphone glitch.
On Monday I was bug-hunting in the user interface of the databse, hopefully meaning that my time down in the Ann Street office is coming to a close. I don't want to be the one who has to stick around to operate the database. That would be very under-stimulating.
I skipped karate on Tuesday, which will mean I've been away for three weeks if I go back this week. I'll have some work to do to get back into shape. After dinner I went to Deb's to watch Buffy.
I ran some benchmarking tests on the database on Wednesday, as well as formally recording the tests I had performed, which made it easier to see whether I had yet succeeded at fully debugging the interface. My copy of City of Villains arrived via courier.
By Thursday, my test list indicated that the database was complete, but I still notice some quirks and occasional oddness in the interface. It's enough to make me want to spend the time to translate it out of Access entirely, because it's really no good as a complex interface package.
The turnout at youth group on Friday was a grand total of three, so we cancelled the planned activity and watched a movie instead. That was probably good for me, because a night of running all over the suburb would probably not be the best idea I'd ever had.
Saturday morning was shopping with Deb. Besides just general browsing, I wanted to find some white laminate for the front edge of the top of my bookshelf. I didn't find it anywhere, though. The evening was a string concert at the church, and though I enjoyed it, I could see that others were more enthralled than me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't had much time to try out City of Villains yet.
PPS - I probably won't have very much time very soon, either.

PC UPSU

Paranoid people and those who need near-100% uptime from their computers use Uninterruptible Power Supplies: external devices - batteries, really - that plug into the mains and provide plug points that look just like the ones in the wall. They convert AC power to DC (for the batteries) which is converted back to AC (when needed) and finally converted back to DC by the computer's power supply. Does anyone else see the problem there? To me, it makes absolute sense to build a battery into every computer's power supply, thereby cheaply, easily and efficiently ensuring that momentary power losses do not result in dead machines and lost work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - A few enterprising companies do sell power supplies fitting this description.
PPS - But only a few.

Calendars and schedules

My big software interest at the moment is calendars. It changes from time to time, of course - a little while ago I could only think of blogging and note-taking, and before that it was personal information organisers. But right now it's calendar software - how it should operate, how it should communicate, and what it can be used for.

All the technology exists right now for us to create an online service that allows us to share calendar and schedule information in a totally cross-platform, transparent way, at which point we can figure out new and interesting uses for the information. Imagine an online service like Blogger that allows users to create calendars and publish them as RSS feeds with vCalendar files enclosed for each entry. Now imagine that you can point your copy of Outlook or Mozilla Sunbird at such a feed and show the events on your own schedule.

Now think a bit beyond club meetings and letting your spouse know about doctor's appointments. Think about other applications working with this information. Imagine setting up a personal TV guide with shows or keywords you're interested in, and having a TV card in your PC read that feed and record your shows for you on schedule, whether they change times or not. Imagine scheduling maintenance actions across a whole network of corporate PCs by publishing an event to an internal maintenance timeline. This is technology with powerful potential.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I will probably grow bored of it in a while.
PPS - Give it a few weeks.

The Drake Equation

The Drake equation is meant to predict the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilisations we can expect to encounter (including our own). People, being people, argue about the values of the various factors and show their results of hundreds or very few.

In my mind, they've got it all backwards. We have a known solution to the equation: one. Any factors that, put together, produce a number other than one must be seriously called into question, because they simply do not fit with the observed evidence so far.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The Drake equation is based on evolutionary assumptions that I do not share.
PPS - That, however, is unrelated to my mathematical objections.

That's private milk

I have boxes of cereal on my desk at work. They're for snacking. I used to buy my own milk to use with them, because I go through more milk that way than my coworkers who just have a bit in coffee. I labelled these private bottles of milk with my own name to make sure people knew that this was not their milk. The problem arises when we run out of office milk. Someone makes their coffee then goes to the fridge for the final touch - the dash of milk - only to discover that there is none left. But wait, there's some over there. It's got someone's name on it, but I'm only using a little bit, and he won't mind.

Multiply that little bit by everyone in the office, times two cups of coffee per day (average) and my milk disappears completely in little bits that I "won't mind giving up". So now I don't bother buying my own milk.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have considered labelling it differently to deter people.
PPS - Something like "Spider poison" should work well.

It's like LEGO for big people

Yesterday afternoon Debbie and I assembled a bookshelf from Ikea. Following the printed instructions reminded me of constructing a LEGO model, only bigger and with no knobby bits to just click together. That could easily be what led to the one mistake: the top shelf is on backwards, exposing its bare chipboard edge.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unfortunately, it's nailed in place.
PPS - Turning it around would involve dismantling the entire unit.

The Sunday Mok - Fever of glands

Last Sunday I skipped church in the morning so I could rest and finish my Disciple readings for the week. In the afternoon, Deb brought The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Guess Who and we watched both.
I had Monday off work, on the doctor's "orders", though I felt fine. I got the word that evening that I had glandular fever. During the day I watched Street Fighter and repaired my mysteriously-damaged installation of City of Heroes.
I went back to work on Tuesday and various people asked how I felt. Apart from a decreased ability to handle late nights, I wouldn't even know I was sick. I didn't go to karate, but did end up at Bridgit's, watching bits of Brainiac interspersed with Dancing with the Stars.
On Wednesday at work, I hit a few snags, so I was slowed down a bit. I had to walk up to the Boundary Street office to unpack some boxes that were still sitting around from the move. I went to Deb's in the evening and we started watching my Buffy DVDs from season 1, episode 1, for her sake.
Though I was at work on Thursday, I felt overtired, and decided to take an early night. I spent part of the evening cleaning out my free-standing cupboard, playing City of Heroes and I also checked out Pentrix.com to see if I could learn any cool new pen-spinning tricks.
On Friday night, I skipped dinner at home because we were going to have a barbeque at youth group that night. We went swimming, even though it was a bit colder than we anticipated months ago when we decided on the program. I didn't swim, just in case it's possible to transmit glandular fever through an entire group of people just by sharing swimming water.
I slept in until 10:00 on Saturday, then watched a Simpsons episode and went shopping briefly in the city. I played City of Heroes for a bit, then went to Deb's and watched Buffy before getting dressed and heading to a formal dinner at Ashgrove Baptist Church.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm still tired.
PPS - This is probably going to continue for a while.

Best served cold

Revenge is not a reason to live. It's a force that will continue your existence, true, but that existence will be emptier every day, and when your revenge is taken, it will be smaller than you expected and you will be so hollow that you'll be lucky to survive out the other side to a normal life again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Revenge is from the Dark Side.
PPS - The Light Side equivalent is forgiveness.

Several people whose surname is Adams are awesome

Today's Adams is Scott, of Dilbert fame. Just reading this blog post about why he loves Technology has made my day. Really, almost anything could happen to me for the rest of the day and I'd just think back to Scott Adams and his love of technology to bring a smile to my face.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Future featured Adamses will include Douglas.
PPS - I should probably find a third one, too.

Time to see if I'm naughty or nice

I have ordered a copy of City of Villains as a complement to City of Heroes, which I have spent a reasonably significant amount of time playing. So, when it arrives, I will begin creating evil characters to terrorise the city, and keep playing my heroic characters to undo their dastardly deeds. Which side will win the battle for my mind? I have a feeling I will enjoy being a hero more than a villain, but I'd like to see both sides.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sounds a bit like The Vanishing.
PPS - That will make absolutely no sense if you haven't seen that movie.

Mountains of email

The problem with being unable to check your work email for a few days is that it builds up to a massive pile that takes you the entire morning to process when you get back. The bigger problem is that most of it is rubbish, to be thrown out straight away. The big problem for the company is that they still have to pay employees for the time they spend sifting through this useless email. It must be costing somebody a fortune.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Fortunately for me, I'm on the side of being paid, rather than paying out.
PPS - I do sort of resent the time I have to spend for this.