Wait
Final exam later today. Regular updates resume soon. Promise!
Final exam later today. Regular updates resume soon. Promise!
Although somewhat slow moving at times, this movie is based on real life events, and this fact helps to maintain interest. It’s quite a fascinating look, showing the heroics of a Russian crew in a justifiably positive light, in a time when the west said Communism was Bad. As a sidenote, K-19 continued in service after being towed back to port and repaired. However, it was subsequently nicknamed “Hiroshima” after it collided with a US vessel in 1969, had a fire and nuclear torpedo accident in 1972, and a reactor accident following that.
Switch your mind off, sit back, and enjoy this movie as it drops you straight into a well done car chase. This movie is your classic suspend-your-disbelief-for-two-hours flick. Guns, girls, cars, fighting… it’s all there. If you’re looking for something deep and meaningful, this isn’t your movie.
I listened to the ABC radio broadcast on blogs tonight. It featured Rebecca Blood (author of the Weblog Handbook speaking from San Francisco), AJH, Neale Talbot, Margo Kingston (an SMH political “blogger”), and Ruth Brown (of John Howard, PM fame).
Naturally, given the time constraints, it was a quick and superficial look at the world of weblogs. At the start, they brought in Rebecca for the definitional information about blogs. Margo came in next, turning the conversation very much to political views and the expression of them on the Net. Anthony followed, and was asked the age old question concerning media diffusion – how do you gain a readership amongst the masses of other blogs? This wasn’t really answered that satisfactorily, because Rebecca was asked to jump in and the discussion somehow switched to how one sets up their blog online. Neale did manage to answer the question later on, albeit briefly (content).
I thought the interesting thing to note was how the focus of the conversation kept turning back to blogs in the subcategory of politics/economics, and the interplay between those type of sites and the people running them. I suppose this was an attempt to portray some credibility and substance to the otherwise mundane masses of blogs who are run by people writing primarily about the daily grind (“I fed my cat today”, “I went to buy milk today”, “I almost got run over by a car today”, “I finished my thesis draft today”). Blogs were strongly portrayed as a means to express an opinion and be capable of being heard globally, which is what they are certainly capable of, but for the majority of people, it’s only a place to rant and keep an informal diary of sorts. Many people, like me, only have a cursory interest in politics, yet still maintain a readership, because there’s many other things to talk about (I used to be much more opinionated in years past. If you read through the archives, there are some fiery posts, some posing personal views that I don’t necessarily agree with today.) However, politics, economics and other similar topics generate the most debate and discussion online, and debate and discussion is what ABC Radio and things like talkback media are about, so it is no doubt that the conversation on blogs revolved around that.
I’ve always been curious how vibrato in singing is achieved – whether it was something you were born with, or something that could be learnt. Seems like the latter is true, although some people will “pick it up” easier than others.
And the draft of my thesis has been completed. It’s currently with my supervisor awaiting feedback. Final submission date looks to be Friday or next Monday. Meanwhile, I’ll be putting in the study for my one subject this session, which is telecommunications for e-commerce (mysteriously named, for it has nothing really to do with e-commerce – it’s a networking subject). Exam is next Friday.
Maccas HK is raising money for charity. Your click on the flash animation will contribute 0.10c to the A$20000 total. It’s legit, look at the URL.
Voyager clearly had enough room for all those shuttles…
I have a friend who is a fellow IS honours student. He’s running a survey and needs your input. As I know how difficult it is to generate data for this type of research, I’m plugging his survey. It’s a survey on shopping on the Net, so everyone is eligible to fill it out. It will take no more than 10 minutes of your time and doesn’t require you to rack your brains, so please help him out!
Got some spare time? Have your say about Internet Shopping (whether
you’ve used it or not) and volunteer to participate in a quick Internet
Shopping survey:http://unswresearch.servehttp.com/ShoppingSurvey/Hearye/
Your participation in this survey will assist in developing new
strategies for increasing the growth in the online retail industry and
allow online companies to understand your concerns, needs and wants as a
consumer!
Thanks.
37000 words in, without appendices, and just under two weeks to go. I ran six system demonstrations/surveys this week, with eight to run by next Wednesday. I should have the results analysed by the weekend, and hopefully a completed draft ready to undergo a brief one week proofread and revision. The one week process is too brief for my liking, but they brought the submission deadline forward by two weeks a few months ago. A complaint was recently lodged with the faculty dean, and there will be a meeting to inquire into the state of affairs, but it’s unlikely the deadline will change. It seems that the majority of the 20 or so BIT honours students will be graduating late because the deadline is just too near. Nonetheless, I don’t intend on dragging out this thesis for another couple months, so I’m aiming for an on time submission on the 15th. The final exam is on the 22nd, which also marks the end of my four year degree. A bunch of us plan to head out into the city after that exam… and just not come back for a while ;).
In other news, I got a paper accepted for publication at the Collecter e-commerce conference. Man… no time, no time… unlike some socialites who have time for loungeroom art!
Game Studies is a peer-reviewed international academic journal “dealing with the aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games.” Intriguing.
NaNoWriMo (maybe that should be InterNaNoWriMo) has started for this month. Graham has his work in progress here. 50k words is just under 1700 words a day, pretty hard to achieve – and produce something reasonably readable – unless you’ve spent a little while planning the book’s general plotline out before launching into the words.
A project with the objective of photographing the entire Californian coastline, and keeping this library of imagery current (at this time, 44 gigs of it).
Dear Deidre,
I have been engaged for almost a year. I am to be married next month. My fiancee’s mother is not only very attractive but really great and understanding. She is putting the entire wedding together and invited me to her place to go over the invitation list because it had grown a bit beyond what we had expected it to be. When I got to her place we reviewed the list and trimmed it down to just under a hundred… then she floored me. She said that in a month I would be a married man and that before that happened, she wanted to have sex with me.Then she just stood up and walked to her bedroom and on her way said that I knew where the front door was if I wanted to leave. I stood there for about five minutes and finally decided that I knew exactly how to deal with this situation.
I headed straight out the front door… There, leaning against my car was her husband, my father-in-law to be. He was smiling. He explained that they just wanted to be sure I was a good kid and would be true to their little girl. I shook his hand and he congratulated me on passing their little test. Deidre, should I tell my fiancee what her parents did, and that I thought their “little test” was asinine and insulting to my character?
Or should I keep the whole thing to myself including the fact that the reason I was walking out to my car was to get a condom?
Thanks Kev!
The Nepalese Kitchen is an old joint on Crown St, which was surprisingly busy for a Tuesday night. Nepal, although nestled in between two great culinary cultures of China and India, has a – perhaps surprisingly – bland offering of cuisine. I suspect the nation’s poverty may play a role in this. Nonetheless, the fare at the restaurant was nothing spectacular, quite similar to that in Nepal, although in Australian prices. You can’t really compare prices between nations, but for the purposes of curiousity, the Dal-Bhat-Takari (basically the national dish, consisting of lentils, rice and some curry) costs A$15. The exact same dish in Nepal costs as low as 50 rupees in local prices (tourists may pay double though), or, roughly A$1.20. I can’t really recommend this restaurant, because at these prices, Nepalese cuisine is just not special enough.
Next to the Theatre Royal, near the corner of King and Pitt Sts is Gelatissimo. It is the only Sydney ice creamery which I can say is comparable to the experience I had with ice-cream in Italy. “Gelato” is the Italian word for ice cream, and the suffix “-issimo” basically means “more”, like in prestissimo. And more ice-cream they give indeed. The psychadelic display of ice-cream is presented sumptuously, each flavour bulging out of its tub, sprinkled with bits of fruit and whatnot on top. Naturally, it all tastes delicious. It’s better than the trendy Double Bay French Riviera and easily rivals the Bondi ice-creameries (so Kev says, I haven’t tried the ones at Bondi myself). The thing that puts this joint above all those other popular (primarily Asian) hang-outs of Passionflower and Y2K is the value. Plain and simple. $5 will get you three flavours. $5 will get you one scoop in Passionflower. But the real key is, they serve ice-cream by paving it with a sort of spade, not a scoop. My gf’s sister works at New Zealand Ice Cream and she was taught to scoop ice-cream for customers so that the ball that is formed is hollow inside. You can’t pull that trick with a paver, so you really do get your money’s worth. Mmmm… lemon sorbet…
In the theme of research:
The Financial Times has quoted the “mother of all rejection slips,” translated from a Chinese economic journal. It goes like this:
We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.
I have a few spare minutes, so let me recount a fairly mundane memory for a fairly mundane day, which came back to me after I discovered an old namecard, a remnant from highschool.
In Year 9, we had this crazy teacher (who I’ll refer to as Dougie) for commerce who employed somewhat peculiar means to maintain discipline within the class. He created this system of responsibilities. If we failed to comply with any of these responsibilities, he’d apply some sort of remedial action. This “remedial action” escalated in severity each time a responsibility was broken by a person. The list of responsibilities numbered five, and we had them all written down on this name card we had to display on our desk.
1. Do not speak while the teacher or someone else is speaking.
2. Do not get out of your seat without teacher’s permission.
3. Do not distract others.
4. Raise your hand. Do not call out.
5. Do your work.
So you’d be enjoying a nice little chat with the friend next to you and suddenly a voice would sound out from across the room.
“Stuart!”
“Yes sir?”
“Please tell me responsibility number 1.”
“(Groan) Do not speak while the teacher or someone else is speaking.”
“And what is my responsibility to you?”
This final question refered to the list of remedial actions which were, in order of severity:
1. One warning.
2. You will be moved.
3. You will see me after class.
4. You will see me at lunch.
5. You will be excluded from the class.
I quote the above verbatim, as I wrote on my namecard seven years ago. Anyway this system operated throughout the entire year and as a result, sparked some retaliatory antics from us in response to the bizarrity of the “responsibility system”. Ways would be found to bend the responsibilities – such as number 2, which had everyone sliding their chairs around the room in order to move about. It was even better because we had commerce classes in a biology lab, so there were a lot of props we made use of, like sitting the model skeleton in the teacher’s chair before Dougie arrived, whipping the gas taps on and loudly exclaiming, “Aww who farted?!” and so on. Anyway one day, near the end of the year, we were lining up at the teacher’s desk to collect exams back or something like that. Someone had nicked one of the whiteboard markers and wrote a large word onto the metal front of the teacher’s desk saying, “IDIOT”, or something similar, and an arrow pointing to Dougie. Anyway, as we all took our tests back and sat down, we started cracking up one by one. By the time everyone had sat down, we were all sniggering. It took him the rest of class to figure out what was going on. When he eventually managed to suss out the source of his public humiliation, he was not a happy chappy. The Routine began again, but it was a little different this time:
“You.”
“Yes sir?”
“What is responsibility number six?”
“Uh… six? There is no six?”
“Yes there is.”
“Uh… umm…”
“It is: Do not be a moron. Now get out.”
“But your responsibility to me is a warning…”
“GET OUT!!”
Meanwhile, the rest of the class is in an uproar of laughter and Dougie is vainly handing out warnings and moving people left, right and centre in an effort to get us to shut up… And that was the end of that unproductive class for the day. Ok that was just a memory from a while ago. I didn’t say it was interesting.
I saw The Nugget a couple weeks ago. It’s a typical Aussie flick, with the same wry, grainy humour unique to the Aussie Way familiar from The Castle and The Dish (and with a similarly creative movie title). Unfortunately, while it is amusing, it’s let down by a lacklustre plot and no genuine piss-your-pants-laughing moments. It’s the flavour of humour that us Aussies run into each day, constantly taking the piss out of each other. So, a valid substitute for this movie is to spend a couple hours drinking with mates, cos the laughs you’ll get from both experiences will be from the same type of humour. One of the weaker Aussie flicks, or perhaps the formula is starting to wear thin?
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12:51am (GMT +11.00) tomorrow 