CamGirl
This article really is a cack: So you wannabe a CamGirl?
This article really is a cack: So you wannabe a CamGirl?
Sanyo releases a 32x Write CD-R. They just keep getting faster. Despite this, media accurately rated for writing at over 16x speeds is rare.
We don’t really celebrate Halloween in Australia. When I was younger, back in Camden waves of kids would stick on a costume and go around trick or treating. This was in the 80s. Nowadays, however, the door-knocking has stopped completely. I mean, the practice just died. I don’t know why this happened – perhaps the neighbourhood has grown up (which is unlikely)?
I had a bad night last night. For some reason I can’t fathom, I just couldn’t get to sleep – at all. It was totally weird. Normally when that happens it’s because there’s something significant troubling me or making me nervous, or excited, but there was nothing like that this time. You know how sometimes your mind is still wide awake, and even though your body is trying to get to sleep, thoughts keep popping into your head? That kept happening to me up till about 2am. So, completely annoyed, I got up, walked around a little bit, checked my e-mail (I think everyone does that when they can’t get to sleep at that hour) and tried to get back to it. No luck. My mind stopped thinking, but I continued to toss and turn. 3am… 4am… Around about 4.30am I drifted into that zone where you’re semi-conscious, and when I roused from it at about 5.30, it didn’t feel like I’d been asleep, but I wasn’t sure either. I decided to give in at 6am and “woke up”.
Staying awake at work has been a superhuman effort. I guess it’s a good thing that I had to solve some Mac compatibility issues today. The department’s only Mac requires a walk halfway across the floor, and it’s those treks that have been keeping me barely awake. I think I passed the pain barrier a little while after lunch, so it’s not so bad now. At least tonight I know I’m going to zonk out completely…
Phil sent this in:
Anyway, I noticed you mentioned the Stanford Prison Experiment… an excellent exercise in psychology. Funny you should say that “I’d imagine that any similar research proposed today would be turned down for ethical reasons”, because…
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0110/30/entertainment/entertain5.html
Hopefully the ABC will pick up the doco and slap it onto DVD for us Antipodeans. ^_^
Co-incidence, eh? I suppose the ethics of television are a little different from academia…
Well, turns out that my panel was deferred, then discharged. No duty for me, and I am exempted for one year from being re-selected.
It’s one whole page on the Tourist Guy! Man, he’s even been (legitimately) in Time Magazine, he’s world famous!
Think you know the difference between what Chinese, Koreans and Japanese look like? Test yourself at All Look Same. I am an absolute shocker at it. It’s easier to distinguish in real life because fashion styles tend to be different, as well as how each race acts (although if you’re talking about ABCs, the differences blur somewhat.) For a static photo, you’ve only got facial features to go on…
Wow. It’s the Week 14 of uni. That means it’s the last week of uni. For some, that means it’s the last week of uni, ever (as an undergrad, anyway). Being a third year, that means that many close friends are actually going to graduate soon. People seem to go out with mixed feelings. For me, after experiencing full-time work, I can say that I prefer uni to work. Work makes money, and some people think that makes all the difference (I guess if you earnt enough money, work does become more attractive than uni). However, the amount of free time and social contact you have in uni is incredible, and something that won’t really come around again until retirement. What’s the use of money if you have little time to enjoy it? Alas, work is something we all have to do eventually!
However, week 14 for me right now only means I have a research design document to write up really quickly (10,000 words or thereabouts). Not good.
Once again, if it weren’t for the computer, I wouldn’t have known daylight saving had started. I thought it was next week. I have jury duty tomorrow.
It is a formidable task for the writers of Enterprise to come up with new material – much to tell has already been told in TNG’s 7 year run. The writers seem to be up to the challenge though, more or less. This week’s ep deals with trust and a little on the issue of relocation (think, Insurrection). The spin on this episode is that Archer is not dealing with aliens, but humans who think they are aliens. A plausible scenario is provided to set everything up (the “Terra Nova mystery”) and it’s an entertaining hour of events. Captain “Are we there yet?” Archer’s way of handling things is unique among the other Trek captains. He is most like Kirk, but a more refined version.
Speaking science, the presence of an earth-like planet 20 light years from earth is questionable (I think?). Moving away from nit-picking, it’s things like being able to treat lung cancer that are so realistically optimistic. When Phlox diagnoses Bernadette with lung cancer, my immediate reaction was, “oh that’s really bad” before Phlox goes on to explain that it’s curable. I mentally slapped my head and thought, “but of course, this is the future”. Again, though, this shows that Enterprise is effective in projecting the image that this is the not-as-distant future (but still not the “not-too-distant” future). The disease and the curing of it is something everyone can relate to today (cancer is very much a contemporary issue). It’s not some miracle medical wonder of the future where the doc cures someone of a virulent bio-metagenic polymorphic super-virus that recodes DNA… no, it’s familiar lung cancer… Enterprise seems to be remaining faithful to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision to inspire humanity based upon his semi-Utopian optimistic views of the future – perhaps more so than the other series. Why? Because the only effective way to inspire people today of the future, is to show people things they can relate to. It’s not the ultra-high tech things that are inspiring (like that stupid Voyager episode where they go to Warp 10), but things we can see an application for today.
Another point is, one thing I think we’re going to see developed in Enterprise in the long-term is the history of Human-Vulcan relations. We’ve gotten used to idea that Vulcans and Humans have always been best buddies in the interspecies melting pot of the galaxy, but now we’re back in the time when the humans are still relatively “primitive”. The exchanges between Redneck “History was never my strong point” Tripp and T’Pol flesh out the history bit by bit. It’s these details dropped in surrepticiously throughout this and previous episodes that are evidence of writers seeking to explain how Humans and Vulcans became buddies.
Pete sent this in, thanks mate. Freebie!
2 slightly interesting links:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/technologyandbusiness/subsqual/
I got a subscription just by making up a company so would get one for surehttp://web.mit.edu/ocw/
MIT is putting up all their course materials on the web soon
You can’t really go wrong with an Australian movie at the cinemas. Aussie movies are all similar in style – wry humour, very character driven with an engaging storyline. More natural and unpolished than the stuff Hollywood churns out. Nothing too spectacular, but far from boring. A good choice when all the bigger movies have been watched. Billy Connoly plays a fisherman ex-lawyer who sues the church in an attempt to get at the insurance companies. The story is not as wacky as the title implies!
I signed up for an HSBC online savings account yesterday. No fees, 5 free ATM transactions/month from any ATM and unlike CBA’s 0.05% interest rate, has a 4% rate. Anyway, that’s not the point. I filled out the online application which had a field for a promotion code. I had none, but I decided it might be a good idea to give google a spin with this search. And whaddaya know – scored a free $30 CD online voucher.
Well, at least I think so. HSBC called today. I thought they were going to tell me my account number, but it turns out it was a rather puzzled woman trying to figure out where I got that promotion code from because, “HSBC isn’t running any promotion.” When I told her it was on the HSBC site itself, it left her even more puzzled. I’m not sure that I’m still going to get my free CD. Oh well, the point of this is – Google can find you promotion codes. Even ones that you aren’t supposed to know.
I just realised that the Asian representation in Trek is slightly skewed. Here, look:
TOS: Japanese actor (George Takei) playing a Japanese (Hikaru Sulu)
TNG: Japanese actress (Patty Yasutake) playing a Japanese (Alyssa Ogawa)
DS9: Chinese actress (Rosalind Chao) playing a Japanese (Keiko O’Brien, née Ishikawa)
VOY: Chinese actor (Garrett Wang) playing a Korean (Harry Kim)
ENT: Korean actress (Linda Park) playing a Japanese (Hoshi Sato)
Hmmm there’s some sort of pattern there…
Update: Thanks to Dennis for reminding me about Nurse Ogawa on TNG!
Just browsing the geographical stats from my counter logs. I found it quite amazing to discover what countries some visitors to this site come from. Interesting that from a third of the world there have only been 10 visits – 9 from India (population 1bn), 1 from China (population 1.2bn). Granted people from there have no reason to visit this site, but there’ve been over 110 visits from Saudi Arabia, 4 from Namibia, 4 from the Faroe Islands…
100+ visits
USA, Australia, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, France, Belgium.
<100
Finland, Portugal, Norway, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Romania, Denmark, Israel, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, Brunei Darussalam, Mexico, Poland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Russian Federation.
<10
Taiwan, India, Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Iceland, Namibia, Slovak Republic, Indonesia, Faroe Islands, Turkey, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Oman, Bulgaria, Bermuda, Nicaragua, San Marino, Chile, Philippines, Slovenia, Macedonia, Trinidad and Tobago, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Luxembourg, Venezuela, Jordan, Lithuania, Colombia, Egypt, Zimbabwe, China, Lebanon, Nepal, Yemen, Paraguay, South Korea, Uruguay, Ukraine.
I heard of this one from friends studying psych, turns out there’s a whole website for it. A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment Conducted at Stanford University held in 1971. The scary thing is, that all this happened within 6 days. I’d imagine that any similar research proposed today would be turned down for ethical reasons.
This classic post was originally from TripleOptix, some time ago. It’s about the “Trevor” phenomenon – where a Caucasian guy is going out with an Asian girl.
Anyway, all the terms relating to it are:
Trevor or Classic Trevor – Aussie guy with a hot Asian girl
Super Trevor – Aussie guy with a super fly “oh my gawd” Asian girl
WTF Trevor – Trailer park butt-ugly Aussie guy with hot Asian girl
Reverse Trevor – Asian guy with an Aussie girl – a rare sight (“Rev
Trev”)
Semi Trevor – Aussie guy very good friends with hot Asian girl
Semi Rev Trev – Asian guy very good friends with Aussie girl
Darth Trevor – African American guy with Asian girl
Greasy Trevor – Aussie Italian/Greek/Lebanese guy with an Asian girl
Pimp Daddy Trevor – Dodgy Aussie guy (usually with a mullet haircut) with 2 or
more Asian girls who look like pornstars
Tool Trevor – Aussie guy who the fly Asian girl is going out with just
to get attention from the Asian guys
Trevor Trevor – Gay Aussie guy with gay Asian guy
So what do you call a Eurasian that goes out with an Asian/Caucasian? Half-Trevor?
Nothing like a pure action flick after a long day at work to destress. By the end, any semblance of a storyline has disintegrated, but that’s not what you’re there for. You’re there to watch Jet Li kick a lot of ass. Recommended.
Ok, so Mr. stands for “Mister”, Ms. stands for either “Mrs.” or “Miss” (such that marital status is indeterminate), but what is Mrs. an abbreviation for? Have a think, and highlight for answer: Mistress.
A couple days ago a friend declared he cracked open Command & Conquer 1 to play again. That game is over 5 years old! I even remember submitting a tip to the CnC FAQ. Anyway, the point is that if you’re a gamer, chances are you’ve run across a case of gaming nostalgia. Wired has an article about a bunch of gamers recreating Ultima and getting inspired by Bard’s Tale. (EA, surprise surprise, is not happy.)
CnC is elderly, but it’s still a 90s game. Stepping back further, you get the classic style RPGs of the 80s – most notably the Ultima, Bard’s Tale and Wizardry series. The first RPG game I ever played, however, was Shadowkeep – produced by Trillium (when they still called themselves Trillium.) I still have the cardboard folders for Bard’s Tale III and Shadowkeep sitting somewhere at home. I also have a copy of the Bard’s Tale Construction Kit for the PC, but it’s on a single 5.25 inch floppy. I only have one working PC with that kinda disk drive…
An explanation of the phenomenon of Ball Lightning. Lightning that can hang around for minutes? That’s gotta be a sight.
The second of Stephen Hawking’s books, this’ll definitely be going up on the Amazon wishlist. (Of course, with the exchange rates and shipping rates as they are, virtually nothing is worth buying on Amazon from Australia these days.)
Surprise, Surprise! Channel 9, Tuesdays at 7.30pm. It’s damn funny!!
I just have to say that the Remote Desktop feature of XP rocks. Sound, printer, clipboard and video redirection. Automatic sharing of client drives. Means I don’t have to get off my butt to do any stuff on the server. Much more responsive than VNC, too.
Village in the clouds embraces computers. While net access is relatively available even in a country like Nepal, that is only in the urbanised areas (and it’s not exactly cheap, either). Obtaining access in the mountainous regions is a much trickier prospect. I remember one of the small villages we passed through while trekking there at the beginning of the year displayed a sign proudly declaring: “Yes! Ghandruk does have a telephone!” Having a telephone line is one thing, but sufficient line quality is another, as is affordability. {Src: Slashdot}
Word is that advertising for the X-Box starts in Australia this week.
Was buying lunch from a Vietnamese bread store today. I was waiting in the queue, when I heard the lady taking the orders crack off a movie-perfect, “And Den?” to the guy in front. As much as I tried, I just couldn’t wipe the silly smile off my face for the next 5 minutes…
The Prime Number Shitting Bear. Thanks to Bonhomme.
I would be willing to bet that the Libs win the Federal election. In fact, I think I will…
My grandparents on dad’s side are coming over from Singapore today. They were only here in August. They do little but travel around the world these days and have been to an absolutely incredible amount of countries throughout the 6 inhabitable continents. They may be elderly, but they certainly aren’t immobile. I guess when you are retired, there’s not that much else to do and travel took their fancy. There’s going to be a family reunion of sorts at the end of the year, so I’ll be seeing them again back in Singapore. We’re also going to Thailand.
I’m up for jury duty next Monday. The case is back in Campbelltown so no doubt it’ll be about assault or car theft or something similar :). I get paid about $70/day for it if I end up getting empanelled.
A Spatially Continuous Workspace for Hybrid Computing Environments. This is a cool concept – extend your virtual desktop onto your real desktop and connect them. The research work is from 1999. Thanks Pete.
Trek’s equivalent of “Junior”. Erm, yeah. First episode of proper first contact. We see an alien race that’s more alien than virtually any race previously featured on Trek (we have improved film technology and budgets to thank for that). We see the Klingons acting all badass. We see holodeck technology. We see sex. Redneck Tripp gets raped, although fortunately not in the way you’d think. It’s an episode that doesn’t really go anywhere, and I feel that the humourous side of it could be milked a lot more. Another OK hour of entertainment, but still waiting for a memorable episode to come along.
At the Holodiction convention this year, the MC there declared that Enterprise was probably going “to be good science fiction, but not Star Trek”. At this point, I’m inclined to grudgingly admit that they pulled off an idea like Enterprise better than expected. Sure, it’s still a slap in the face of Trek fans who “know” there was “no such thing” as the NX-01, but nevertheless there’s no mistaking that this is distinctly Trek. And that is no easy task giving that Enterprise is set in the 22nd century instead of the 24th. Looks like Enterprise seems to be gelling well with non-Trekkies too (without mutilating the entire franchise as can happen when things are made more mainstream), which is always a good thing.
Again, a pretty typical Trek plot. It’s the series’ first away mission and of course something goes wrong. Without giving away the plot, the episode turns out to take a look at xenophobia (please explain?). Tripp, the ship’s resident redneck, goes off at T’Pol because she’s Vulcan (that’s in a nutshell). Some nice character development – Archer is not as belligerent as Kirk was, but he’s still a pretty direct guy who’s not afraid to lie down with his ear on the floor in front of his senior officers because his floor is squeaking. He addresses T’Pol, “but we didn’t come here to tip-toe around” and without skipping a beat commands, “get the pod ready.” I like the guy already.
The title of this episode is taken from a list of survival instinct responses – fight, flight, fright and f… Next week’s episode covers fright, the week following covers the latter response. This episode, however, gives the crew of the Enterprise its first taste of alien contact and the decision between fight and flight. The crew is antsy, not having come across any aliens for weeks. “But we’re travelling at Warp 5, there’s gotta be someone out here,” Archer declares. Nonetheless, they come across a vessel adrift in space which they brashly take to exploring. It’s a typical Trek scenario, except that this crew is very green. Anyway, the way things turn out is that the comms officer, Hoshi, has to step in to save the day. Of course, you wouldn’t expect it. She’s a whiner, has no self-confidence, and wants to go home. By the end of the episode, however, her attitude does a 180 and she “adapts”. Erm, this is just not believable. I mean, come on – she becomes more fluent in Axononian in 5 hours than I am in French… and I studied that for 5 years. Also, the personality change is pretty abrupt, no long term character development here! Nonetheless the episode is interesting, especially now how Starfleet are the technologically deficient ones. Getting used to the different perspective will take a little time, but for now, seeing a view of Starfleet we are not familiar with is refreshing.
Uh, everything you ever wanted to know (or wanted not to know) about the concept of hand-kissing. “DO NOT run around grabbing any lady’s hand, and kissing it, at random. They might just eviscerate you on the spot, and any person witnessing said evisceration will only point and laugh at your social faux pas. Or help out by handing the lady a dull knife or two……if she offers her hand to be kissed, kiss it. If not, DON’T!”
It was ok. Not as good as the first, it almost seemed like they ran out of jokes to tell. Now I don’t mind a slew of crude jokes, but some of them just weren’t funny – too many jokes fell flat on their face. However, it was all balanced out by some side-splitting moments. Gratuitous? This movie certainly was.
I came across an interesting map that tracks the paths of solar eclipses (240kB) that will happen over the next couple of decades. There’s one in South Australia in December 2002. Dad and I are planning to take a trip to SA to watch it next year. A solar eclipse is something I just have to experience at least once in my life.
This is one sweet laptop. In addition to the normal 15″ screen, 1.13GHz P3 and magnesium casing, this beast also comes with 512MB ram standard, a detachable, bluetooth enabled keyboard, biometric security and a Quadro2 video card. You’re going to have to sell your car to buy one though. Thanks Pete!
I just got a “disconnection notice” from Energy Australia for my electricity supply. That’s not a good thing, so I gave them a call. Haha, it turns out that since I moved into this place early this year, they have this property registered as vacant. And it’s taken them this long to realise the electricity is still running in a “vacant” property. So that’s why I haven’t been receiving any bills… Unfortunately, they are backdating the next bill and making me pay from last March.
On all the major media sites, you’ve likely noticed that most, if not all, of the images are coming from “akamai” servers. Akamai is basically a company which provides media caching throughout the world for companies. When you connect to an “akamai-enabled” site, the images are actually pulled from a server that is geographically near to you – Akamai has thousands of such servers for this purpose. The result is load-balancing on a global scale, and theoretically quicker response times for visitors. Here’s a more in-depth article, and an interview with the VP of R&D of Akamai.
Ok this page was meant to go up at 10am AEST. I slept in until noon. Oh well.
Welcome back. The site has been offline for a couple weeks now for an update. On the front-end side, you’ll see that not much has changed. The back-end, however, has changed completely. Before, you see, the backend consisted of me, a flat-text database and a copy of Frontpage. The backend has given me much headache. I’ve been developing it on my machine which has php4. Unfortunately my web host only has php4 as a cgi executable and not compiled as an Apache module. In effect, this means my code uses some critical functions that work on my computer, but break horribly on this server because of the older version of php3 in use. So, I spent a fair bit of time coding workarounds for these problems.
Anyhow, from your perspective the following things have changed:
From my perspective, maintaining this site is a lot easier. Let me know when you find any bugs.
Test post. This debugging is driving me up the wall.
The Nuclear Weapons FAQ. All you ever wanted to know about The Bomb.
Napster’s Dead (and they want to charge US$5 a month for it? Do those guys have a brain?), Morpheus may be soon to follow after a lawsuit was filed against it by the RIAA yesterday. Wired article.
I saw the pilot episode of Enterprise over the long weekend. Putting aside the disruption to the trek “history” this series causes (until this series, the NX-01 Enterprise never existed), it’s actually a fairly decent show. Possible spoilers ahead. Seems like with the intro music (now with lyrics!), the intro’s retro montage sequence, gel rub scenes complete with fingers slipping down the backs of women’s underwear (etc.), Berman is trying to make Trek more mainstream. Because the series is also set in the “past” (relatively speaking), the environment is not the slick, high-tech trekkian decor we are used to – it’s a more familiar surrounding which may serve to put non-trekkies a little more at ease? After having gotten used to the idea that the Klingons are now not the bad guys in TNG/DS9/VOY, we now find they are the bad guys again (or at least going to be bad). Furthermore, Starfleet knows little about them and there’s no such thing as a universal translator so we can’t understand their gutteral language.
The casting seems fine with the usual mix of genders and races. Bakula seems to be a haughty sort of person and fits the role nicely. As for the cast as a whole fitting into their characters – first episodes always are unpolished (just look at TNG for a prime example). Give them the season to settle in.
Is it just me or do the Vulcans show more hints of emotion than we’re accustomed to? How come the Klingons have their ridged foreheads again? Doesn’t the the Doctor sound like Garak?
– Slashdot thread with 1000+ comments
– Jammer’s Reviews
– 5 minute summary (spoof)
Interesting read about one man’s experiences in Afghanistan in the 70s.
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1:33pm (GMT +11.00) tomorrow from Work, Burwood
