Why? Why not?

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.

Well, Happy Year of the Monkey to everyone, however you say it.

We did a demo for the New Year festivities in Chinatown again – it was pretty similar to last year, lateness and all. Had a nice, reasonably relaxing weekend.

This weekend is also looking relatively quiet, although I am looking forward to some Kung Fu movie action on Saturday night. Then, next Wednesday, it’s off to Adelaide for work, and then wine country next weekend. Should be great!

If you looking in the ‘Watching’ section over to the right, you’ll see that I’ve been watching Naruto for a while. It’s my current favourite anime series. I watched the most recent episode, and it’s looking even more epic than it did before.

Short description:
Armies.
Of.
Ninjas.

How cool is that?

In a more serious vein, here’s a great piece by a Vietnam War veteran about the similarities between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. And on top of being a veteran, he’s the veteran who leaked the Pentagon Papers that told what the various Presidents who had a hand in that war were really doing. He’s certainly high up there on my ‘credible’ list. Check it out.

Well, Ly’s Australian wedding went well, and boy am I glad to be done with weddings for a while. It’s not the actual wedding part itself, as much as how unbelievably big a deal it is to get everything actually sorted out.

I’ve startedf planning my cosplay for this year’s anime cons. Yay, this time I’m early! And I have a couple of websites to do, for my cousin’s partner and for Wushu.

And I’m trying to get Morrowind finished so that I can finally play something else – the only problem is that it’s so huge that I feel that I can’t in good conscience finish the game without doing as much as is humanly possible with my character. Next up on the list is, I think, Knights of the Old Republic.

Let’s change gears for a moment and feature some links for the first time in ages:

Here’s a summer/cricket item – a set of rules for backyard cricket. The guy who made it has done a great job of making it look exactly like the ICC cricket site…

It seems to be true – Evangelion is being remade as a live-action movie, with special effects being done by WETA, the studio that did the FX for LOTR. Theer’s some concept art available so far. Looks interesting, but I certainly don’t think that the best bits of Eva will translate to live-action.

Anyway, better get back to work…

Went to the cricket yesterday. I was a bit worried when Australia struggled to break 200, and then even more worried when Zimbabwe were 5/17 (!). But the really entertaining thing, as always, about going to a cricket game is the crowd. We ended up sitting in the second row back on the concourse in bay 8, which is square to the Randwick end of the field on the east side, just north of the Hill. And the guys on the hill kept the Hill tradition alive by being quite rowdy, undisciplined, and fun.

The most surprising thing about the day was the number of people ejected from the stadium by the ever-watchful cops. I would have watched at least 30 people be kicked out before I got sick of it and just watched the game. Now I have no objection to throwing out people who are fighting, really drunk, or otherwise very objectionable, but throwing people out for exhibiting the beer snake made from hundreds of empty beer cups seems a bit much.

Well, the festive season is over for another year, which means that it’s another twelve months until we all have to endure the onslaught of it’s-OK-to-be-nasty-all-year-as-long-as-you’re-nice-at-christmas craziness.

Curmudgeonly ranting aside, Chrsitmas was actually a lot of fun this year – there’s something about having lots of little kids around that makes the whole deal much more fun. And, we half-filled the lounge room of my parent’s place with presents, which was extremely cool.

The Christmas-New Year lull was excellent, filled with much beach and pool relaxation, more time spent with nieces and nephews, and relaxing.

New Year’s this year was very nice and low-key, a party at Helena’s place in Coogee. We made a bit of a dent in the duty-free alcohol purchases, and a good night was had by all. I actually took New Year’s Eve and Friday the second off work, which left me with a five day weekend, most of which was spent either at the beach or playing coop Halo.

All-in-all, an excellent holiday season.

I’m back in the country, and back at work today. Luckily, it seems like work has been quiet while I was away, so no frantic running around for me.

San Diego and Ly’s wedding were OK, but a reasonable amount of work. The real holiday was in Maui, which was excellent, despite a few rainy days to start with. We went to a luau, which was very impressive, snorkelling which was amazingly cool, and on a helicopter ride across the island, which was just spectacular. Don’t expect me to have a tan,as my cursed european skin pulled its usual act, which is that unless I get a little sunburnt every day for a few weeks, I just don’t go brown.

Photos may well be posted at some point.