OK, it’s been a while, so this will be a big one.

News:
Trang and I went to Melbourne two weekends ago. An excellent time was had, and a large number of clothes purchased for a relatively small price.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out on Saturday. I waited with Lisa and Trang to pick up a copy early Saturday, and managed to squeeze in an hour or so reading before Shay and Sal’s wedding, which was great. (The wedding, that is, although the reading was good too.) After the wedding, headed over to Trang’s place and we spent the evening reading. I finished my first time through the book then – I’m on my second time now. Oh, and the one who dies is – ah-hah, thought I was going to spoil it then, didn’t you. I quite liked it – the story is certainly growing up even more as the series goes. Now the task is to go back and try and guess what’s going to happen in the next one.

Congrats to Shay and Sal again on their nuptials. (Hah – I got to write nuptials!)

Tonight at wushu Sifu will be looking at our forms to decide whether or not we’re each ready to go to the Wushu Nationals in late August. I’m pretty nervous – I’d love to be able to go, but it will be the first time ever I’ll have been involved in a non-trivial sports contest by choice, as opposed to because-I-was-at-school-and-was-forced-to. Well, gentle reader, you’ll hear tomorrow whether or not I’m going. If I am, that will be three visits to Melbourne in three months, which is a bit weird. Holiday, Manifest, and Wushu.

Links:
A few today, as I haven’t posted in a while:
The ABC says that Book 5 is the fastest selling book of all time – apparently WH Smith in England were selling an average of eight books per second across their chain. Also, there were worries about lots of kids staying home from school to finish it on Monday.

Sam Barros is an ‘amateur scientist’ who has constructed heaps of cool stuff, including his own railgun! His Powerlabs site has the details.

If I ever win the lottery, I think I may invest in a hardened communications bunker from here – they have a number to choose from, or there’s the retired missile base option. That would be perfect for my ambition to be able to open a housewarming by saying ‘Welcome to my underground lair’ in my best Doctor Evil voice.

Here‘s a good article on some of the lingering questions after Gulf War II, like ‘Is the power on yet?’, and ‘So what’s the story with the Kurds?’.

Links:
If you’ve got some time to kill, and are willing to be dazzled by the human capacity for weirdness, you’ve just gotta check out crank.net. Examples: There’s this guy, who doesn’t like zero or the negative numbers, or maybe the author of ‘NASA MOONED AMERICA’. Or maybe you’re interested in the already large list of September 11 conspiracies. In particular, there’s September 11 2001: Exploratory and Contextual Analyses, that seems to have something to do with a connection between September 11 and random number generators or something. There’s lots of graphs.

Most likely you won’t want to look at this one: MyVasectomy.com. There are pictures, which are given a squeamishness rating. When he gives a picture a squeamishness rating of 10, believe it.

Interesting: A US senator who was pro-war has published an open letter to Bush asking for an explanation for the falsified WMD information.

News:
Went to Quirindi over the long weekend for my niece’s christening. It was actually quite a lot of fun. Particularly cool was how much my Phoebe was impressed by the present Trang and I got her – a huge play-doh set. I’m not sure if she understood what was inside, but it was big, colourfully wrapped, and had a colourful box, so that was OK.

Off to Melbourne this weekend. Really looking forward to it. Although it looks like I may be getting to know Melbourne a lot better this year, as I’ll be down there at least twice, and probably three times.

Well, I’ve got a new PC.

Actually, it’s an upgraded PC. I now have an Athlon XP 2600+, for those of you who know and care about what that means. And I have Vice City, thanks to Mal. Yay. Big Yay. I need the anti-social behaviour time to make up for the time I spend wanting to do that sort of thing at work.

In case that didn’t make it clear, work is by boring and stressful. Boring, because I spend so much of my time doing grunt work, because there’s noone else, and stressful, because it has to be done right away, especially now we’ve hit June, the busiest time of year at LE.

Off to Quirindi this weekend for my niece’s christening. Quality family time. And then Melbourne the week after. Busy, busy, busy.

I know, it’s been ages again since my last post.

First up, the links:

Here’s the rules of an interesting game: 1000 White Cards. Although you don’t have to have 1000 of them, they don’t have to be white, and they don’t have to be cards, it looks liek fun. Basically, the point of the game is that you make up cards as you go along, and then play those cards. I think you may need to read the rules to see what I’m talking about.

A fun Matrix Reloaded fact: When Trinity breaks into the power grid, she actually uses real hacking tools, and a real security hole to gain access. See some screenshots and some somewhat technical explanation here.

This one‘s especially for Lisa – it’s a double whammy. Not only is it a site where one can purchase costumes for one’s cat, it also has some of the craziest Engrish I’ve seen in a long time.

Secondly, Me news:

I managed to irritate my hip joint while doing wushu last Tuesday. I went to the physio yesterday, and I’m not allowed to do kicks for a week. Bugger. He also gave me some heavy massaging around the hip joint, and I am quite stiff there now. Oh well.

Work is trundling along. Nothing to be excited about.

I’ll most likely be finishing the current seasons of Buffy and Angel tonight at home. I look forward to seeing what everyone else thinks of both series.

Thirdly, site news:

I’ve finally got my shit together and moved the wallpaper and links pages to be php and mysql-driven. That means it’s much easier to add new entries, as the pages are generated on the fly when someone requests them. I’ve tried to test the layout in as many browsers as possible, but some extra testing would be nice if anyone’s up. If you see any problems, drop me a line.

Yeah, I know, long time no post. It’s tricky, though, with no net at home and being crazily busy at work. Anyway, here’s some links I’ve been collecting over the last coupleof weeks.

Ewww. Apparently, now that tokens are dying out in New York, so are the hopelessly desperate Token Suckers, who used to jam up the token slot on the turnstiles and then suck the tokens out, getting $1.50 each time. That’s a good thing, I think.

Apparently representing members of a terrorist organisation at court also makes you a member of said organisation. US Government: ‘Excuse me sir, I’d like to forcibly sodomise you with this large, sharp pole. However, it will stop terrorists from killing you, so that makes it OK.’

Whitehouse officials have admitted that the war in Iraq was retribution for 9/11. Not really much more to say about this one.

Very relevant these days are the recently released transcripts of the anti-Communist hearings held by Senator McCarthy. I’m sure the US will be blacklisting everyone who’s ever read the Koran (or Quran, or however it’s spelt) soon enough.

Slightly more upbeat:
There’s a number of interesting articles on ‘Philosophy and The Matrix‘ on the Matrix web site. Particularly interesting for me was the stuff about Gnosticism – my education is somewhat lacking in the area of religious studies.

A lesson: ‘If you’re going to videotape your Star Wars fighting skills on a school camera, remember to remove the cassette when you’re done.‘. Poor guy, but the remixed version with visual and sound effects is classic.

Indiana Jones is coming to DVD! It will be out in November in the US.

An interesting piece about the differences between working in the physical sciences and working in the humanties. Basically, in the humanities, if you aren’t well known, you’re ignored, whereas in the physical sciences, if you do good work, you are known and respected.

A long but very interesting article about the remnants of Hitler’s Library. Apparently there are all sorts of interesting marginalia in the books he read.

Apparently the NSW Police are looking for computer security experts for anti-terrorist work. More interestingly, they’re looking for a Q.

The Zen Garden of CSS is a great example of how much you can change the look of a web page with CSS.

Hoo boy, it’s been a long day. I’ve been wrestling with a single malfunctioning PC all day. It’s extremely frustrating.

Anywya, enough of that. The second long weekend was quite nice, if too short. Friday was game-playing day, followed by dinner at Mille Lire. Saturday was gym and relaxing, followed by a rather excellent evening of games at Trang’s place. We won both Pictionary and Lord of the Rings Risk. And we burned the Shire to the ground. Great fun.

Sunday was Wu Shu, which I am quite enjoying. The form I’m learning at the moment is different, but all the more interesting for it – and of course it’s a huge honour to be taught this particular form directly from Sifu, as she is very highly qualified. Sunday afternoon, Trang and I went and saw Johnny English, which was excruciating in parts, but still quite funny. We then went out to Trang’s parent’s place for dinner and had pho (apologies for missing accent marks), which is a particularly delicious Vietnamese noodle soup. Afterwards, Trang came over and we chilled for a bit.

Wow, that’s possibly the most detailed weekend wrapup I’ve ever done. Says something about my day, although I have no idea what.

I’m going to stop writing now before I get even more incoherent.

Had a lovely holiday-at-home over the long weekend. Trang and I borrowed some of Jason’s DVD collection and spent the weekend relaxing and watching DVDs. Very relaxing indeed, and lots of quality time, too. Highly recommended.

I’ve lost some of the benefit of that relaxation this morning, though. Notes for the sadistic among you: If you ever really want to torture support staff, report problems in the following way:

• Say ‘My computer’s not working’, then stop. Support people are all psychic, so you don’t need to tell them what in particular is not working, or indeed if your computer has turned into a hamster and is hiding under the desk. They’re paid enough, they should already know what the problem is.
• When asked about the error, say something along the lines of ‘%some_program% gave me an error message.’ Make sure to have clicked ‘OK’ or similar on the error message, without reading it, so that when you’re asked about it, you can say ‘I can’t remember’.
• Remember also not to make any effort to duplicate the problem. All problems are equally important, regardless of if they can be reproduced before the heat death of the universe or not.
• Most importantly, don’t reboot your computer or restart the program in question. Then complain when the support person tells you to do just that that’s all they ever tell you to do.

OK, I’ve vented, feel a bit better now.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to this weekend as well – I’m attempting to book in Friday as Computer Game day, which is going well so far. Here’s hoping I manage it.

A couple of interesting things today. Firstly, a guide to Usenet quoting, also applicable to email: http://learn.to/quote. It’s translated from German, but is still quite logical, and outlines some of the reasons why you should use particular quoting styles in email.

Far more interesting is this speech transcript, posted to the interesting-people mailing list. It’s an address to the JFK School of Government at Harvard by Adib F. Farha on how Arabs view US policy in the Middle East. He also mentions the primary problem I have with the whole shebang – the story we’re being told has changed so much that it’s hard not to think that there’s something else going on.

Well, here’s the new look. Some notable features

• No tables any more – it’s all CSS, baby! This means that you’ll still be able to read this page, even in bodgy old browsers. In browsers that support a decent level of CSS, though, it should look pretty consistent. Most of the pages validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional, with the exception of the wallpapers page, as the IMG tags don’t have ALT text.
• The move to all CSS means that the pages are a bit more flexible with respect to browser size – no more ‘this page best viewed at’ stuff.
• From my point of view, I can now change colours by editing one file, in one place. Very tidy.
• The manifest page I’ve left for the moment – I may redesign it as well, but that requires more thought, as the gallery page is reasonably heavily linked around the place.

I’m quite interested to hear if anyone has any problems or comments, so drop me a line if you have something to say.

I’m sure you’ve read about the apparent US plans to at least threaten Syria about its WMD. Thing is, it does have WMD. It’s had them since the 70s. It hasn’t used them, it hasn’t given them to terrorists. This is the Bush administration making itself look foolish. I think one of the posters on Metafilter said it pretty well:

I’ve said a number of times, that I might even be for this war, if only I knew what the real goal was. I’ve been told by the White House that it’s because Saddam supported Al Quaeda, because Saddam killed his own people, that Iraq is an immediate threat to the US, because Iraq has WMD, and a litany of other excuses. What’s clear to me is that the White House has never told us the truth, they’ve simply told us whatever might get the largest number of people on their side at that moment.

I agree – the only thing that’s been constant over the last few months is the feeling that we’re all being lied to.