What’s been happening lately… Let’s see…

Saw Spiderman 2 on the weekend – it was a good movie, but not a great one. There was one scene in particular that was pure Sam Raimi, in a hospital, with a chainsaw. I’ll say no more. ^_^

The Matrix is going to be released on DVD as a ten-disc boxed set! Now I’m really glad that the only Matrix DVD I’ve bought is the Animatrix.

Apparently a jduge has been suspended for masturbating in court. Not much to say about this one…

Slightly disturbing link now – and I really do mean that. It’s not for the squeamish. Apparently Japanese internet denizens have made something of a celebrity of the 11-year old who killed one of her schoolmates.

I’ve seen heaps of movies lately – they’ve all been at least reasonably good.

Troy was OK, but I was surprisingly annoyed at Achilles not being gay. I think this review summed it up best. Achilles: Cousin. He’s my cousin. Cousin. Totally my cousin. In conclusion: Cousin.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was very good, much more a film than the previous two. The thing I was really disappointed about was that they cut the explanation about who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs were. Apart from that, though, great movie.

The Day After tomorrow was not a great movie. It was entertaining, purely by how bad it was. The CG was awesome, but me and Rommel spent the entire movie guessing who was going to bite it next.

Shrek 2 was very good, but not quite as amazing as the first one. Antonio Banderas certainly stole the show as Puss-In-Boots.

Since I last posted, Trang and I were sick with a bug she brought back from Thailand, got better, rearranged the house, and have generally had a great time.

I went and saw Van Helsing – it was atrocious, in a mildly entertaining kind of way. It seemed to me like the writers and director had a checklist of old-school horror movie cliches they had to include. Mob with torches and pitchforks? Check. Windmill? Check. Burning Windmill? Check. Angst over whether to kill a loved one who has become a werewolf? Check. The list goes on.

A bucketload of links in my ‘to post’ folder, so here goes:
Stalin vs Hitler (in comic form?) Those wacky Russians!

The OS-Tan are a bit of an internet phenomenon, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see them advertising Windows one day…

Tom’s Hardware Guide did a feature about Xbox Media Center on the Xbox that does a great job of explaining just how awesome it is.

A warning to would-be Internet scammers – if you get unlucky, you’ll mobilise a whole crowd of people against you and end up getting screwed over yourself…

An interesting article here about the technical differences between Shrek 1 and 2. Sounds pretty impressive.

This one’s fascinating. Apparently, there was a photographer in Russia around the turn of the century who took full colour photographs by taking negatives through different colour filters and ending up with three black and white images that represented the different colours. Just like in Photoshop! And so, people from the Library of Congress have digitally composited the colour channels and reconstructed the colour photographs of Russia before the First World War. Pretty amazing.

More serious, now. Benjamin Kuipers, a Computer Scientist from the University of Texas in Austin, has a number of well-thought-out articles about terrorism. This one, titled ‘How to Defeat Terrorism’ is very interesting. Also interesting is his parable, ‘The Seeds of War‘.

Trang got back yesterday! it’s sooo good to have her back, even if it was only ten days. ^_^

Had a great weekend of LAN playing at Rommel’s – I reckon Rommel and I probably ended up playing for about 20 out of the 24 hours of Saturday. mmmm, Twitchy.

Looking forward to catching up on sleep this week, and then a bit of flat rearranging on the weekend…

Well, Trang left on her Thailand adventure Friday night, and I’ve been trying to keep myself busy since then.

The Xbox modification went really well, as did transferring about 40G of anime to it. ^_^ I’ve watched the latest episode of Naruto on it – it’s so sweet.

Saturday was Supanova day. Rommel and I met up with Joey and Vikki from the tamaboards and we spent the day being way geeky. It was great. And we went to karaoke in the evening. So now I have actually, at long last, sung at karaoke.

Sunday was wushu, then into work for a Champ upgrade, then home to hang out and then watch Kill Bill Vol 2. (which was great.)

All this has meant that I’ve been busy enough to distract myself from missing Trang too much. I probably sound way pathetic, but this week is the longest amount of time we’ve spent apart for at least a year or two. So it can be a bit hard sometimes.

You know you haven’t posted on your blog for too long when just typing up a post with everything you’ve done is just too much effort. So you can all try to figure out the progress of my life in the last month or so from these hints: Parents, Easter, move, niece, credit card, Wagga, work.

Haha! Blog watered.

Random link: Here’s something to scare you, or just for making humourous images with: A gallery of Nuclear Testing Images

I love the occasional rainy weekend. There’s no way you can do washing, so you don’t have to worry about it, there’s less compunction to do chores – you can just stay under a blanket and watch TV. Which is exactly how Trang and I spent the weekend. It was awesomely relaxing…

I’m a bit disappointed that noone sees fit to use the comment system it took me forever to set up. Booo. Even when I post obscure rantings. I’d expect someone to at least tell me to shut up…

Edit: Well, seems that that was my fault. The directory permissions on the comments directory were all fubared. Fixed now – you can tell me to shut the hell up as much as you like!
Edit 2: I’ve also added comments on my screenshots. So now you can tell me what you think of my desktops too.
Edit 3: Now you can comment on my list of current stuff, too. I’ve gone comments MAD!

A couple of links today about a report that’s been obtained from the Pentagon detailing some possible effects of an abrupt climate change in the near future. Here’s what seems to be the original piece, from Fortune magazine, and here‘s another, from the Guardian.

It’s interesting on a number of levels – political, scientific, and even on a philosophy of science level.

The political level is straightforward – the Bush administration in the US has been basically trying to deny that there’s any possibility that the climate may change, and the Australian government has been, as usual, following along.

The scientific level is particularly interesting. Most discussions about climate change center around the production of carbon dioxide etc, and their contribution to global warming. The problem is that the warming is only ever going to be the start of the process. As the report says, it’s likely that global warming, rather than just passively increasing the temperature overall, will flip the state of global atmospheric weather patterns, leading to greater instability in general.

The issue that I have with all of this is that everyone seems to be ignoring the other cause of global warming – the production of excess heat. My argument goes like this: The Earth has a total radiative heat capacity like any body of matter. If the total amount of change in internal heat is less than its radiative capacity, then the temperature won’t change. Simply, if you’re not creating more heat than the atmosphere can get rid of, you don’t need to worry about climate change in the long term.

So there are therefore two factors in global warming/climate change – the total radiative capacity of the earth, and the amount of heat being produced. I think that people overestimate the importance of the former and underestimate the importance of the latter.

A lot of the stuff I’ve thought about this comes from some ideas in Peter F Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy of sci-fi novels, where the earth is basically uninhabitable except in huge protected arcologies because of giant storms caused by global warming.

Something to think about for your Monday morning.

Paranoia is being released in a new version soon! Here is the blog being run by the guys designing the new version. Looks very good indeed. Remember, the Computer is Your Friend, and Communists are everywhere. (link from Greg Costikyan’s website.)

Apparently one of the John Does being sued by the RIAA has countersued accusing the RIAA of racketeering and extortion. Basically, they’re saying that the RIAA is extorting money out of people by threatening them with expensive court cases and offering them a much smaller settlement straight away.

Well, as seems to be the trend at the moment, a lot of stuff has happened since I last posted.

There was a trip to Adelaide in there somewhere ( ), with a lot of visiting of wineries, and quite a number of cases bought between the five of us who went. Here’s an important lesson for those planning something similar in the future: If it’s 38 degrees plus, you really need to be drinking a lot of the free water, and not only the free wine.

Valentine’s day was very nice. Trang and I bought a selection of gourmet foods from DJ’s food hall, and proceeded to Coogee to have a lovely picnic. We weren’t the only ones with this idea – when we moved from our original spot close to dark so that we could sit on the rocks at south Coogee, there were couples everywhere! There was even one couple who had brought a foldup table and chairs and were having what looked to be a lovely dinner. Normally I’m against the ‘one day of the year’ kind of thing, but it is nice to have one day of the year be the day that you make a lot of extra effort. After seeing the table couple, I just know I’m going to have to figure out some way to beat that next year!

Trang and I ventured out to Westmead children’s hospital to see my niece Phoebe, who’s in hospital after an operation on Tuesday. She’s doing amazingly well – the nurses have apparently been bringing people down to introduce to her as she’s such a good patient.

Some links now:

For those of you who haven’t heard already, Star Wars is coming to DVD soon! Special Editions only apparently – the Word from George is that they were the editions he always intended to make, so they’re the only editions that will get a release. Looks like it will also be a boxset similar to Indy, with an extras DVD. Yay!

For those of you who wonder about what the hell people are going on about with all this supervitamin this and magnetic therapy that, there’s Quackwatch, a compendium of info (from the skeptical point of view) about alternative therapies etc.

For the obligatory world-affairs link, today we have this piece from the New York Review of Books entitled ‘Now They Tell Us”, which looks at some of the reasons behind the US media’s reluctance to question just why a war in Iraq was so necessary. It’s a good, if long, piece.