yaleman.org

I was reading an article about Obama’s new security heads and noticed an interesting comment where it mentions senator John McCain being a Vietnam POW:

Republican Senator John McCain, whose experience as a POW in Vietnam has made him a strong critic of the use of torture even while he supports all other conservative national security positions…

I wonder what will happen when the last of the American soldiers from the largely personnel-based wars - WW2, Vietnam, Korea - dies and those fears fade away?

I was watching the latest episode of the Sword and Laser book club when they did their kickoff for the January 2013 book club. I’d been meaning to see if I can follow along with it, because while I have many books to read, it’s been hard for me to get around to actually committing to reading them.

They reminded me in the show that it was in the book Humble Bundle which I took part in and promptly forgot about 🙂 So I pulled it from data storage and had a look, being instantly sucked into the story.

Workmate: How many ADSL things are broken?

Me: Only seven today!

Workmate: Hooray!

Me: It’s my achievement of the week!

Now if only I gave a f*ck about any of the rest.

Then they’d dance in glorious floods of bandwidth…

… where floods are tiny trickles meted out by us, the data Nazis.

Workmate: You so crazy

Me: I make sense to me!

Yep, I get really bored with daily reports.

Do not look up, for eye contact is the last thing you want. The possibility that you (the walker), and they (the driver) have noticed each other is be discounted at all costs. Thus the battle of courage begins - who will stop first - who indeed, will yield the hallowed stripy ground? This is played by many in the carpark, and lost by few - though invariably it’s inattention on one party’s side rather than true courage that leads to injuries.

I’m going to spoil this from the start: GO SEE THIS FILM NOW.

Directed by Ang Lee, based on a book by Yann Martel, I went to see it tonight with RMB. Words to describe this experience are hard to find.

There has (and will continue to be) many, many things written analysing the amazing story told by both of these works, and I don’t feel the need to add my terribly uninformed opinion to the flow.

Take note, if you park your four-wheeled contrivance in a motorcycle parking bay, you’re probably asking to be keyed. Bike parking spots are limited at the best of times, normally ten or so in a facility of thousands for cars - and yet car drivers complain when a “bike takes up a whole park”.

Well, you have people like this to blame…

How not to park your car - unless you hate your paint.

It seems that I’m being followed by a fantasy account, woo! Why do they do this? Are they trying to scrape more importance by changing their following:followers ratio, or does this strange Canadian posing as a Mad American think I have something to contribute? 🙂

I’m not sure how much sense it’ll make to anyone else, but this was a hilarious (to me) train of thought when a moth caused me to trip in the bathroom, grab the shower wall and steady myself.

Bored pondering turned to hyperbole, wondering how far that turn of events could have taken. Grab the shower curtain, slip on a mis-placed bottle, take out the toilet cistern and flood the house? Fall through the thin gyprock wall and take out the power to the house, causing a fire and burning down the street? It’s the thing of children’s fiction, amazing campfire stories or timeless mythology.

So, we’ve got a home-grown device/IP/network management system at work. Backend’s Postgres/PHP, front end is horrible and hilariously ugly. It works, mostly. Since I’m the only one with any skills in the space, it falls to me to find ways to Make Things Better.

Today’s fun was making the search box a little less horrible - searching for devices in in a subnet wasn’t easy unless you wanted to find the subnet’s location, then drill down from there.

So, the xmas period is over, with the requisite gorging oneself on food and drink. I don’t have a set of scales so I can’t punish myself with the thought of weight gain - good!

Walked over 10km yesterday, it took about two hours, exactly what google maps said it should (seeing as I spend half the time stopping to SMS people, :))). I took my 5kg red ball with me, certainly is a good way to work the wrists and hands, I was sore as crap by midnight.