Hear Ye! Since 1998.
12
Apr 03
Sat

The Fine Dining Fund

From time to time over the last couple months, a bunch of us have been going down to Paddington RSL on Thursday evenings for trivia nights. It’s a nice relaxing night out with good company over a few drinks, in an unpretentious RSL atmosphere complete with indoor neon lighting that could be straight from the 70s and with the chance to win some cash. Half the entertainment comes from the host, Mr Bagoomba (who unfortunately has been absent lately, being replaced by a self-admitted blonde bimbo). He’s a loquacious middle-aged balding Mediterranean guy with a repertoire full of bad jokes, mistimed calls and an impossibly garish jacket with stars on it. But he keeps things fun with joke telling and push-up competitions and the like.

Our team changes slightly from week to week because of people’s commitments, but last Thurday we had a farmer, an immigration consultant, an AO recipient who was formerly the Chinese and North Korean ambassador for Australia, a filmmaker, a banker, an Arts student and me. We’ve had in the past lawyers and someone who’s worked for the UN interpreting for President Megawati, but we’ve also discovered that it all doesn’t count unless you have someone who (1) really knows their 80s music, (2) knows what happened in the footy over the weekend, and (3) really knows their 30s music. Anyway, we won $100 last week and decided to begin to put this money into a pot and save up for dinner at one of the fine dining joints around Sydney. At this rate it’ll take us the whole year. There’s a jackpot which is now about $1900, but you have to answer three obscure questions that change each week to get it.

Who Lives Here?

A look into some people’s bedrooms. You can pretty much determine the gender (if not clear from name), age and interests of the bedroom’s owner just by the contents and layout of it.

Something

I got this link from Shish. It is currently down, but when I visited yesterday they said they were moving servers because they were getting 4000 hits/second. I don’t have any idea what it is, but anyway in the even that it pops up again: www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com

7
Apr 03
Mon

Statoids

A miscellaneous listing of information on “statoids” – major administrative divisions within countries. (Kev – with regards to what I was referring you to before, I was thinking more about Federated nations arising from historically separate states and what countries had states with those backgrounds, as opposed to mere administrative divisions. I didn’t do a very good job of defining what I meant by a state/province, though.)

Life After Tyranny

Simon Bone’s site is a collection of travel writings where he’s visited some of the more undemocratically governed nations of the world. His account of North Korea is particularly interesting (5 years old).

Dead Man Eating

Last meals of those on death row. Morbid, perhaps, but certainly intriguing. Also, Houston Chronicle article.

4
Apr 03
Fri

Computer Worms

Young computer addicts get ‘aged ailments’.” Mostly fair enough, although I thought a lot of jobs these days, whether IT or not, require you to sit for up to 8 hours in front of a computer.

3
Apr 03
Thu

Raided Floppies

Vic digs up another intellectual curiousity. Some guy has managed to run 5 USB Floppy Drives in RAID. Feel the speed. He also runs a stack of Sony memory stick readers in RAID.

2
Apr 03
Wed

The Latest from the High Court of Australia

In Rout, An application by C4/2002 (14 March 2003), the appellant sought for the High Court to give him leave to proceed with an electoral petition. Kirby J: “The Chief Justice dismissed the document you tendered for that purpose as unintelligible and everything you have said to date seems to me to confirm what his Honour said.”

Which is reasonable given that Rout’s argument was um… something along the lines of: “And the law is their set of dividing and multiplying by zero. As long as they maintain their incorrect dividing and multiplying by zero, then they enable me to cause things to cease to exist, and that is why I have the power to do so. These people must move to the correct dividing and multiplying by zero and install it in their computers and that is the money which, the copyright dollars, et cetera, is to fund this major fusion project in this country, which the public are denied to know.” … WTF?

Read the court transcript. It’s worth it. Remember – this case somehow made it all the way up to the High Court. This hilarious gem courtesy of Vic.

29
Mar 03
Sat

War Cartoons

Newspaper satirists. Poster parodies (tons of stuff).

The Week

Another busy week, courtesy of a couple assignments due this Tueday. Went to trivia at the Paddington RSL on Thursday night and our team ended up winning it (at last!). Problem was that we also tied with two other teams. The prize was split and we ended up with some peasant amount of cash. I started work at Macquarie on Friday. Once again as is normally the case on first days, no computer account had been set up for me yet, so it was a pretty uneventful day. Seems like a nice workplace though. A very enjoyable Friday night was spent at a friend’s farewell party – he’s off to work for UNESCO in Korea for a few months which sounds like a fantastic experience. That’ll sure be an interesting place when the war ends and the focus shifts more back to North Korea, which has all but vanished from front-page news. I returned home to a drinks and card night my flatmate was hosting (and losing) and slept away most of Saturday. More law reading for today. Daylight saving ended this morning, make sure your clocks go back one hour.

Built in Cup Holder

Free cup holder for the computer. Whenever you hear “cup holder” and “computer” in the same sentence, something’s afoot. Beware of rewired Mime types :) {src: LJ}

Family Helpdesking

The pitfalls of doing tech support for your family. So true, but I think about 5 years ago I managed to get dad to understand that something can’t be my fault if I wasn’t within 50 km of the computer when it decided to fall over. I don’t mind helping people with computer issues at all, except for the cases when I get chastised for something that isn’t my fault. That’s no fun. {src: got this link from a blog, but can’t remember where}

Will Hunting was gay

Big brothers may make your boys gay. Quite an intriguing bit of research. And pretty darn wierd thing to be researching too :)

Warblogs

CNN article on soldiers and blogs.

If you play console RPGs…

The Grand List of console RPG cliches.

21
Mar 03
Fri

State Election Today

I predict Labor will win by quite a bit. So are the bookies. :)

Daredevil

Pretty good action movie! Just as a sidenote, I always marvel (pun unintended) at how, although comics often regarded as a pulp fiction medium associated with juveniles, there is an opinionated social commentary underlying some of them that is easy to overlook. (There are a lot of forms of media that suffer from this type of generalisation, actually.) Of course you should just sit back and enjoy the damn movie instead of picking it apart like some high school assignment, but it’s something to bear in mind.

20
Mar 03
Thu

Blog Iraq

Blogging from Baghdad. Non-mainstream perspective straight from the streets of Iraq, and what will soon be ground zero. At least until the phone lines go down. Every day I realise how incredible the Internet is.




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