Still Alive
Mid-session break? What break???
Mid-session break? What break???
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(0)The next issue of The Backbench has gone up. It’s a few months late. We’d like to blame it on the fact that three of the editors absconded overseas during the intervening period and the other two moved house, but the real truth is we’ve been bludging a bit. This month includes an article written from Khartoum, and a piece written by a Cambridge Uni grad (for a non-Aussie perspective on things).
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(0)My flatmate just staggered into my room, hair unkempt, face haggard, eyes bloodshot, hands trembling and looking clearly disorientated. He paused for a moment, trying to gain his bearings. “Do you know what time I played Warcraft last night??”
Turns out he had signed up to do the Vancleef Quest and his party of 5 were seriously out of their depth for it. It took them over 3 hours and countless deaths before they finally staggered out of the instance dungeon, battered and weary, at 8am. Dave was also doing the quest with a friend who was also in Sydney, and when they were walking along a narrow bridge, his friend fell asleep at the keyboard, resulting in his character running off the bridge and falling into the water below.
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(0)There are times, thankfully very occasionally, when I wish the human body did not need to eat, sleep or visit the toilet. This week is one of them…
The new Powerbooks have an accelerometre inside. It detects if a Powerbook is falling and parks the hard drive heads to lessen the chance of a hard drive crash. The accelerometre can be tapped into for other purposes and people have been throwing up ideas about making it into a user interface input. It’s a snazzy idea, but are you really going to want to pick up your 2kg, $3000+ laptop and give it a shake around just to do some “rapid e-mail filing” which could be accomplished by hitting keyboard buttons instead? I also read that it could have applications in other devices, such as mobiles: “nod” the phone and down for “OK”, shake from side to side for “cancel”. But same problem, moving the thumb to hit a button is a lot easier than moving your whole forearm. (Similar reason to why people use speed dial instead of voice dialing.)
Still, there is some novelty value to being able to use your laptop as an expensive spirit level.
Bloody addictive game. I’m playing two main characters: Apek on Shadowsong, Taedar on Blackhand. I’ve you’ve got a character in either of those realms, drop me a line.
Rockstar Games is releasing a new Grand Theft Auto game. (Ok, so it may be in bad taste, but it’s nonetheless amusing.)
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(0)Every Tuesday evening, a group of 6-10 of us gather for a few games of DoTA. The majority of us happen to be lawyers. At one point in the game last night, Jack turned around to the rest of the team and frantically asked:
“The left corridor is getting raped! Does anyone have capacity?“
We stopped playing and just stared at him for a few seconds. (For the non-lawyers, “Do you have capacity?” is the much maligned phrasing used when lawyers stick their heads into your office and want to give you work…)
| 15 days spent in current location | |
| Previously | Dallas, TX |
| » Currently | San Francisco, CA (24/4/24 4:53am) |
| View full itinerary... | |
11:33pm (GMT +11.00) 