Google Thinks I'm Interested In

You can find out what topics Google thinks you're interested in via this link.

Here's mine:

Action & Adventure Films

Android Apps

Android OS

Antivirus & Malware

Arts & Entertainment

Audio Equipment

Banking

Blu-Ray Players & Recorders

Bollywood & South Asian Film

Business & Industrial

Business & Productivity Software

Cable & Satellite Providers

Camcorders

Camera & Photo Equipment

Cameras

Cameras & Camcorders

Chips & Processors

Computer & Video Games

Computer Components

Computer Drives & Storage

Computer Hardware

Computer Memory

Computer Monitors & Displays

Computer Security

Computers & Electronics

Consumer Electronics

Dance & Electronic Music

Data Backup & Recovery

Desktop Computers

Electronic Accessories

Email & Messaging

Flash Drives & Memory Cards

Game Systems & Consoles

Games

Hard Drives

Headphones

Home & Garden

Home Theater Systems

ISPs

Ink & Toner

Input Devices

Internet & Telecom

Internet Clients & Browsers

Jazz

LCD TVs

Laptops & Notebooks

Mac OS

Memory Card Readers

Mobile & Wireless

Mobile & Wireless Accessories

Mobile Apps & Add-Ons

Mobile OS

Mobile Phones

Movies

Music & Audio

Music Recording Technology

Network Storage

Networking

Networking Equipment

News

Online Video

Operating Systems

Photo & Video Software

Power Supplies

Product Reviews & Price Comparisons

Recording Industry

Security Products & Services

Shooter Games

Smart Phones

Software

Software Utilities

Sony PlayStation

Sound & Video Cards

South Asian Music

Speakers

Stereo Systems & Components

TV & Video

TV & Video Equipment

Tablet PCs

Televisions

Travel

Voice & Video Chat

Web Services

Webcams & Virtual Tours

Windows Mobile OS

Windows OS

Xbox

Not bad.

insight not incite

Insight not incite. Just a thought.

Podcast Sync

I listen to audio books and podcasts using a SanDisk Sansa, I prefer this over using my mobile phone for a few reasons. The main ones are:

• battery life; the sansa lasts weeks with out a recharge


• it clips onto my collar and I use a very short set of headphones

I use the Juice podcast receiver application to download and manage my podcast subscriptions. I have it rigged up to download new podcasts every day and delete any file over 14 days old (for some podcasts I set up a longer purge time).

I then have a batch file which calls xxcopy to sync the mp3 files from the podcast download folder on my laptop onto the sansa. Here is the batch file:

[code]@echo off
set SN=19088743
set "extDrive="

for /f %%D in ('wmic volume get driveLetter^, serialNumber ^| find "%sn%"') do set extDrive=%%D

if not defined extDrive echo Error finding external drive & pause & exit /b

xxcopy C:\Users\fuzzy\Podcasts "%extDrive%\PODCASTS" /KS/H/E/R/Q/BB/ZE/oD0/ZY/YY/EXC:\Users\fuzzy\Utils\podcast-exclude.txt[/code]

Now there are a couple of things which you'd have to edit if you were going to make use of this:

• plug in your mp3 player


• check what drive letter has been assigned to it


• open a cmd window (start -> run -> cmd)


• execute the following: wmic volume get driveLetter, serialNumber


• copy the serial number listed next to the drive letter of your mp3 player


• edit this number into the line in the batch file to replace my serial number: set SN=19088743

You'll also need to edit the paths to your podcast directory on your PC and the output directory.

The C:\Users\fuzzy\Utils\podcast-exclude.txt part is the location of a text file which contains a list of any folders which I don't want to include in the sync.

Windows 8.1 Upgrade

I had a few issues while attempting to upgrade my laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.

1. If your harddrive is encrypted with something like TrueCrypt, you'll have to decode it, apply the upgrade and then re-encode it.
2. A batch file script I use to sync podcasts between my PC and mp3 player had once gone a little nuts and written some files to my system reserved partition. This meant that there wasn't enough free space in there for the 8.1 upgrade to do its thing. I had to use a GParted Live CD to work out what was wrong and clean up the podcast mess.

Once the install of the 8.1 upgrade was completed the first thing I attempted to do was connect to one of the servers I manage via remote desktop. I usually do this by selecting the appropriate entry from my start -> run history. Imagine my joy to find out that all the entries for all commands had been removed. Thanks MS.

Mobile Phones

I've posted previously about how I was very late to the smart phone "revolution" and as my experience of living with an Android device in my pocket has continued I thought I'd give a little update.

As quick Too Long; Didn't Read update, here the 5 key reasons I'd continued using an old nokia handset while the waves of the smartphone sea crashed around me:

1. I'm at a computer for around 12 hours a day.
2. When not at a computer I actually like being disconnected from email, the web, etc.
3. Simplicity. I don't waste brain cycles on apps, updating, upgrading, replacing, recharging.
4. Size. The nokia 6100 I used back home in Australia was the smallest and lightest phone nokia have ever made. It was also practically unbreakable.
5. Cost.

The change came when my new employer declared that they'd pay all the contract fees of a phone plan, including the upfront cost if it was under $50. Therefore, if I was happy with an older handset it would cost me nothing. If I wanted a new shiny Galaxy S4 or HTC One, I'd have to fork out the $200 upfront cost.

I can report that I've had my 1st taste of the "upgrade cycle", just this week I moved from the HTC Droid Incredible which I had been given by my employer as a temporary phone until I worked out what I wanted for a longer period. The Droid was a good entry point for me, not large enough to annoy me as I carried it around in my pocket.

My plan was to wait until the Galaxy S4 was released and cross my fingers that the S3 would drop down into the $50 upfront bucket. Initially verizon lowered the S3 from $200 to $100. I was disappointed, but I'd got used to the Droid and even though it was running the old version of android I figured I'd just stick with it and keep an eye on the $50 bucket.

The S3 had a special draw for me, beyond being an excellent handset; a barometer. This would allow me to use the BASEline flight computer app to track my skydives.

Color me surprised when on one of my random checks of the verizon page I noticed that the S3 was now $50. I organized to get switched over to the S3 and have been wonderfully surprised. Yes it is bigger in my pocket but it is lighter, which is more important. I'll accept the size increase because the screen is so much better to read from. Android 4 is really quite an improvement and the overall speed increase is huge.

I've also got to admit that I've become extremely addicted to Real Racing 3. I did not expect to find that one of the best racing games ever made would be for a mobile device.... and free.

In other mobile phone news, if I had ~$700 to blow to buy a handset outright, I think I'd be very interested in the Ubuntu Edge. I think they're on the right path and that the end game for mobile devices is that they will become true "convergence" devices which can replace desktop computers for general computing tasks.

A Few Changes

motd

Ubuntu Dynamic MOTD

I'm just finishing off moving all my web sites and related things from one VPS host to another. The new host had customized the message of the day on the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS image which I had installed. It had helpful links to support and what not, things that are only actually helpful the first time I logged in.

As I went through the process of removing all this I had to learn about the update-motd system, since I quickly found that the solution wasn't a simple:

[sourcecode language="bash"]$ sudo echo "" > /etc/motd[/sourcecode]

So I cooked up a bash script to spit out some information about the system every time I log into the server. The output looks like this:



Create or edit update-motd's 00-header file.

[sourcecode language="bash"]$ sudo vi /etc/update-motd.d/00-header[/sourcecode]

And here's the source of the bash script:

[sourcecode language="bash"]#!/bin/sh

[ -r /etc/lsb-release ] && . /etc/lsb-release

if [ -z "$DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION" ] && [ -x /usr/bin/lsb_release ]; then
# Fall back to using the very slow lsb_release utility
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION=$(lsb_release -s -d)
fi

UPTIME=`uptime | awk '{if ($4 == "day," || $4 == "days,") print $3, $4, $5; else print $3}' | awk -F: '{print $1, "hrs", $2, "mins"}' | sed 's/,//g'`

LOADAVG=`uptime | awk '{if ($4 == "day," || $4 == "days,") print $10, $11, $12; else print $8, $9, $10}'`

PROCCOUNT=`ps -l | wc -l`
PROCCOUNT=`expr $PROCCOUNT - 4`
IP=$(/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | grep "inet addr" | awk -F: '{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}')

echo -e "
==============: System Info :===================
Hostname: `hostname`
Address: $IP
Distro: $DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION
Kernel: `uname -r`
Uptime: $UPTIME
Load Avgs: $LOADAVG
Processes: $PROCCOUNT
==============: Memory Info :===================
Total: `cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal | awk {'print $2'}` kB
Free: `cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemFree | awk {'print $2'}` kB
Lowest: `cat /proc/meminfo | grep LowFree | awk {'print $2'}` kB
===============: Disk Info :===================="
df -h[/sourcecode]

Hyper-V 2012 Failover Cluster: Live Migration Fails

I love hyper-v. I especially love hyper-v running on windows server 2012 in a failover cluster configuration. It truly is a wonderful environment to administer windows servers. With this said, the error logging leaves a lot to be desired.

I've just spent the better part of two days trying to work out why live migration of servers between cluster nodes wasn't working. The error message which Microsoft helpfully give you when this happens is simply:

Event ID: 21502
Source: Hyper-V High Availability
’Virtual Machine <VM NAME>’ Live Migration did not succeed at the destination

And over on the hyper-v host you were trying to migrate the virtual machine onto you'll get the equally as amazing Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-High-Availability-Admin log entry of:

Source: Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-High-Availability
Event ID: 21111
Description:
Live migration of 'Virtual Machine <VM NAME>' failed.

Oh thanks, it didn't work because it failed.

Finally after reading many a technet article and support thread I stumbled onto the fix. It was simple. Here's the details for anyone else who suffers this problem:

• On any node in your hyper-v cluster, open up Failover Cluster Manager


• Select the cluster name


• In the bottom right corner of the manager window, click Take Offline


• Again in the bottom right corner, under More Actions, click Repair


• This will bring the cluster back online and magically fix the mysterious problem causing live migrations of VMs to fail

Best of all, it will do this with out any disruptions to running VMs. Enjoy!

Flipboard

I recently posted a long ramble about being very late to the smartphone "evolution". One reason, of many, which I'd held off for so long was because I could predict the amount of time I'd "waste" messing around and tinkering with the phone and the apps installed on it. I was right.

I'm sure that it won't really be news to anyone that Flipboard is an amazing app. I'm such a fan of feed based news and information ingestion that I have used my own rss aggregator for years, so obviously one of the first apps I needed to find was an rss / news reader. Flipboard won out over Google Currents and the handful of other rss readers I checked out.

With that said, I had to put together my own specially crafted rss feeds to be truly happy. What I've done is create new feeds of my favourite sources using yahoo pipes which have images included in the body of each post, so that Flipboard displays the image, headline and snippet in a good looking way. I then added these rss feeds to my Google Reader account. While Google has announced that Reader is being killed off in July, it is currently the best way to get new feeds added to Flipboard. Just add your G.Reader account in the accounts settings in Flipboard. Then you can add each separate feed to an icon link on the main Flipboard screen for easy access.

Here's the list of feeds which I've created:

• NASA Picture of the Day


• Planet Formula 1 News


• BBC World News


• Bad Astronomy


• Tech Block

Fuzzyslogic.com Goes Responsive

Since I've finally got a smartphone I figured I should finally get around to haxing together a responsive design for fuzzyslogic.com. So now you can visit my crappy site on your phone. Yay!

A Late Comer to Smartphones

I can still remember quite clearly being rather jealous of my manager when he first got his nokia 6100. It was 2002 and I had been given a nokia 5110 to be in contact. The difference between the two phones was remarkable, it really was a huge leap in terms of size, weight and features.

Around the same time I was tasked with a project looking into PDAs such as the iPaq. And to recommend if the University where I worked should look towards these style of devices. Long story short, we knew smartphones were on the horizon - though back then we used the words "convergence device" - and figured it was silly to have staff carrying around both a mobile phone and a PDA.

So at one point in my life I was really eager for smartphones.

When the iPhone came out I wasn't interested in having one. I thought the hardware was amazing, but there was no way I would ever infect a PC of mine with itunes and I had no interest in becoming locked into an Apple walled garden. The Android devices did excite me, but when I stopped and thought about it, I couldn't see any reason I needed a smartphone.

I'm a geek who is generally at a keyboard for around 12 hours a day. When I'm away from a computer I'm generally pretty happy about it. By this stage I actually had a nokia 6100 of my own, as it was and still is the smallest and lightest phone nokia has released. The battery lasted for around two weeks and it could make and receive phone calls and text messages as well as had WAP support which I made use of every now and then for geeky things I'd set up like rebooting servers.

I have a tiny mp3 player (a Sansa Clip) which I use to listen to music and audiobooks, which also has a battery life of around two weeks. The other upside is that I just clip it onto my collar and only require a short cable on my headphones.

One large reason why I'd held out from getting a smartphone was that I know I'm a tinkerer. I'd seen my friends spend hours getting their phones set up just right. From jail breaking iphones to creating personal android apps, I could foresee myself losing whole chunks of my life doing things which I quite rationally decided I didn't actually need.

Also, back home in Australia smartphones aren't cheap. I was happily getting by on a pay as you go contract which normally cost me around $15 a month. I was quite happy spending the $60-$70 I was saving each month on important things like beer.

Maps was one feature which I could imagine I could make use of, but even though I was now working as a travelling geek and driving all over the city to client locations I got by using the old fashioned idea of preparation and a memory.

Among my circle of friends I've become well known for my love of my old phone and my reluctance to get a smartphone.

Now I've taken a job where the company provides a phone. They want me to be contactable via email and generally be a modern geek and actually have a smartphone.

So I've just spent about 5 hours over the last two days tinkering with the HTC Incredible which I'm using temporarily until the Samsung Galaxy S4 is released later this month. It took me about another hour of research to decide to go with the S4 over the soon to be released HTC One.

As expected I do really like having a little computer in my pocket. I've already fallen in love with flipboard, google music, instagram and evernote. However, I'm still using my mp3 player to listen to audio books on the light rail on my commute to and from work.... its just easier.

compare

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Outlook 2013 Reading Pane Header

I found the 1st thing I detest in the Office 2013 suite today; the fact that you can't hide the reading pane header in Outlook 2013. MS have removed this feature which was available in Outlook 2010 because apparently some users would hide it and then not be able to find how to re-enable it.

What a ridiculous reason to force all users to have nearly 30% of their screen real estate (if they prefer to have the reading pane at the bottom of the window, like me) taken up by superfluous information.

Systems Center Operations Manager 2012

My 1st project in my new job is shaping up to be the installation and configuration of Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager 2012. While this system will allow a range of monitoring features which will be very helpful in our environment, the main use case which is driving the project is auditing.

The company I'm employed with needs to get an accurate picture of exactly what systems they have out in the wild, what operating systems they're running, what patch levels are they at and what are the specs of the hardware. We also need these details to be easily checked again in the future, so that manually doing an audit "just this once" isn't a good plan.

So in steps SCOM 2012. Here's the promo copy which MS use to explain what operations manager does:

Businesses, small and large, are typically dependent on the services and applications provided by their computing environment. IT departments are responsible for ensuring the performance and availability of those critical services and applications. That means that IT departments need to know when there is a problem, identify where the problem is, and figure out what is causing the problem, ideally before the users of the applications encounter the problems. The more computers and devices in the business, the more challenging this task becomes.
Using Operations Manager in the environment makes it easier to monitor multiple computers, devices, services, and applications. The Operations console, shown in the following image, enables you to check the health, performance, and availability for all monitored objects in the environment and helps you identify and resolve problems.

I'm currently reading through the SCOM 2012 survival guide.

Back To Work

My ~6 month holiday from work is officially over today. I'm back in cubical land, this time employed as a Senior Systems Administrator. I've just spent the morning getting my new Lenovo L412 laptop all set up and figured I'd drop some thoughts about it and about Windows 8, which has been installed on it.

So far I quite like the laptop. When I accepted the position I knew that they used Lenovo laptops and I was kind of dreading receiving one of the new models which has removed a lot of the features from the thinkpad machines which I've always liked. Luckily I got an L412 rather than one of the newer L430 models. The main difference with the newer L430 is the "chiclet keyboard", where the keys are separate little "islands" rather than the more traditional keyboard which I prefer.

One thing which I'm not a huge fan of with the L412 is that the power cable connects on the right hand side of the laptop, along with the two USB slots. This tends to interfere with my mouse hand when I'm using an external mouse.

Another downer which thankfully I was able to overcome was the fact that the keyboard has the function key in the position where a standard keyboard has the left control key. I quickly found that in a recent BIOS update lenovo added an option to switch the function of these two keys around. So I don't have to retrain my left pinky.

Onto Windows 8..... I like it. Well, I like it now that I've installed Windows 8 Classic Shell and won't ever need to look at the new Metro Start Screen ever again. I think the flat UI in Win 8 is really nice and clean and beyond that I haven't found anything which either isn't basically the same as Win 7 or an improvement. I'm sure with more time I'll find more things to comment on.

Falling From The Sky

I've planned my 1st skydiving in 5 years planned for tomorrow morning, which will be at one of the biggest drop zones in America; Eloy, AZ. To say I'm pretty excited is somewhat of a massive understatement. Hopefully my plan for overly tight leg straps will prove successful in avoiding the incredible amount of pain I was left in last (when on opening my leg strap had slipped below my bone tumor and "grated" across it, causing huge bruising). Because, hot damn I miss falling.

Goodbye Posterous

As with all things which are too good to be true, posterous is going the way of the dodo. They were bought out by twitter a while back and finally twitter are pulling the plug on the best free blogging service I'd found. It was so simple!

I've now exported my content from posterous and imported it here to wordpress.com. I've never been a huge fan of wordpress but it had been some time since I'd checked it out. Since they offer a free hosted blog service and they seem to have a solid business model which should mean they'll be around for at least a few more years, I decided to move to it.

This is really just a test post to check that my code to integrate the feed from the new wordpress blog into my system on fuzzyslogic.com.

2012 Through Fuzzy Eyes

I'm taking a spin back through the things I collected in my diigo feed, fav'd on youtube, liked on vimeo, posted on facebook and spammed into IRC. Here's the cream of the crop:

Web Sites

• Trello

I've never been good at being organised. Over the years I've tried a heap of different project management / todo list software and for some reason only Trello has ever worked for me.

• GoodReads.com

I've got calibre (the software I manage my kindle books with) hooked into GoodReads so I'm able to track what I've read, what I want to read next and get recommendations for more books.

• OpenPhoto.me

Simple online photo management and hosting (when combined with dropbox, box.net or similar).

Articles

• What does the year 2512 look like?

Charles Stross' predictions of what the world will look like in 500 years.

• Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate

Not once in any Star Wars movie does someone pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or chapbook handmade by an aspiring Jawa poet.

• How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All the Others Died Out

The unique adaptability of Homo sapiens is what allowed us to survive when so many other species died out, paleoanthropologist Rick Potts contends.

• Hacking is Important

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

• Bob Brown delivers the 3rd Annual (Australian) Green Oration

I hope this goes down as one of the all time best speaches given by a human. More people should be aware of these words.

YouTube

• The Final Table

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyl_KbHFmQY?list=PLham2Zudq-cblHeq5xCd9EYDidngCCYHB]

6 wonderfully produced videos which focus on professional poker player Russell Thomas in the 3 month lead up to the 2012 World Series of Poker Main Event Final Table. Russell contacted fellow professional Jason Somerville to help prepare.

• Jeb Corliss Grinding The Crack

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWfph3iNC-k]

Incredible footage of Jeb piloting his wingsuit through the infamous "crack".

• Shit NEVER said during the Olympics

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oss0bTL14eE]

Aussie comedian Troy Kinne and his mates sum up the olympics in typical Oz gutter mouth style.

• Push to add drama!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OIJRMqYAA0]

TV channel TNT in Belgium placed a big red push button on an average Flemish square of an average Flemish town. A sign with the text "Push to add drama" invited people to use the button.

• Eye-Level Camera Formula 1

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBbPGQ3Bpug]

The closest most of us will ever get to a hot lap behind the wheel of an F1 car.

• Longboarding: Let Go

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkviQ41u0eQ]

This video perfectly captures the thrill and freedom of downhill longboarding, with out the risk of losing your own skin.

Vimeo

• 5D Wingsuit Soul Flyers Camp

[vimeo 35114449 w=425 h=240]

This amazing footage makes me so excited to fall out of a plane again.

• Urban Side

[vimeo 35981251 w=425 h=240]

Armed with a paraglider, amazing skills and a kick ass camera, Jean-Baptiste Chandelier created an amazing video.

• Cheetahs on the Edge

[vimeo 53914149 w=425 h=240]

1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, brilliant.

Books

• Dune by Frank Herbert

I finally got around to reading this master piece and it didn't disapoint. I trudged through the next two books in the series, but they don't come anywhere near the heights of the original.

• Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Sensational. Stephenson has always been one of my favourite story tellers and in Reamde he delivers again.

• The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

One of my all time favourite books, I re-read this book during the year and the sequel, The Gripping Hand for the first time. Both are highly recommended.

TV Shows

• Suits

Don't be put off by the fact that it is about Manhattan's top corporate lawyers; this show is funny, smart, sexy and deep.

• Castle

My lovely wife is addicted to this show and dragged me into her obsession. Highly watchable and witty. The Castle drinking game is also pretty awesome.

• Homeland

If you haven't seen this yet, don't read anything about it. Just go watch both season. In order. Go. Seriously.

• The Newsroom

From the opening scene I knew I was going to love this show. Its Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing fame) at his best.

• Sherlock

A modern spin on the old classic. It is thrilling, funny, and outrageous. Just as advertised.

• The League

A show about a bunch of friends who are in a fantasy football league. Doesn't sound like much does it? It is awesome.

Movies

• Lawless

Set in Depression-era Franklin County, Virginia, a bootlegging gang is threatened by a new deputy and other authorities who want a cut of their profits.

• In the Shadow of the Moon

The surviving crew members from NASA's Apollo missions tell their story in their own words.

Diablo3, Starcraft2, Trackmania, Poker

For me the shine of Diablo 3's gameplay has faded away into the controversial reality of the option of either grinding for gold or investing real money to continue to be able to progress through the end game deathfest which is Inferno difficulty. I found myself being pulled back to my Starcraft 2 addiction which I'd put on hold while I hacked and slashed my Demonhunter's way to level 60 in Diablo 3, but after completing my placement matches I couldn't help but consider my options.

My enjoyment of Starcraft 2 stems from the deep learning curve and the process of progressing along it. The Starcraft 2 ladder system naturally leads to a Peter Principle; you will be promoted until you reach your own skill ceiling and will then play only matches with those who are of equal skill. I just don't feel that I enjoy the game enough to warrent the amount of time, effort and study which would be required for me to progress beyond my current diamond ranking. Unless you're enjoying that process you've got to ponder why you're doing it at all.

Starcraft 2 has that cycle of learning and development to draw you in, Diablo 3's end game reliance on items and gear to allow you to continue to progress it comes down to receiving lucky item drops, investing further real money into the game to purchase items or grinding for in game gold (which Blizard continuously make harder and harder by patching sections of the game which are found to be the most rewarding in terms of gold collection).

With these thoughts flowing through my mind, I had a flash backs to other games which satisfied my desire for a learning cycle which results in the enjoyment of realising that your skills and knowledge are improving and thus your skill at the game increases. On which I hadn't thought of for some time was Trackmania. As a racing game, at its heart, it is quite simple. The tracks are created using premade sections and can therefore tend to be a little samey, but like most things in life the restrictions lead to amazing creativitiy and imagination. The game puts the track editor into the hands of the players and a huge number of tracks are available. Some which push the boundies of the game engine in spectatular and interesting ways. Players race on these tracks against a number of players from all over the world and an extremely broad and welcoming community has sprung up. It is a real thrill to be battling against players who are playing from countries you only rarely hear about in the news.

The Trackmania end game is an endlessly repetitive, frustrating and punishing thing. Players are driven to shave hundredths of a second off their record times, eeking out the slimmest of advantages and generally getting into "the zone" to produce near perfect laps. I returned to the game for the 1st time in 853 days (I know this because the game told me when I logged back in) and found myself ranked ~2,700,000th on the ladder. After a few sessions I passed other players on the ladder who were also inactive and climbed to around 1,200,000th and decided that I was enjoying myself enough to challenge myself to break into the top million. After a few more enjoyable sessions I reached my goal and also felt that I'd got back to the level of skill I'd had when I played the game all this time ago.

So I was left again pondering if I was enjoying this game enough to invest the time and effort to progress in skill further? Because while I really do get a kick out of chatting with other players who are spread all over the world, in the end my enjoyment of any game hinges on constant learning and development.

I realised that if I was going to go through a reset and invest in a game I should seriously consider diving back into poker. If I'm going to invest time and brain power into something, then poker has the large advantage of actually resulting in money.

After a week, 2,000 hands of cash games and 32 tournaments I'm ahead $500 (roughly 10 buyins for the stakes I'm playing) and really enjoying being back at the tables and more importantly; getting enjoyment from studying the game and learning.

SPACE

How language transformed humanity

Hi There

Things are wonderful here in Fuzzy land, I hope things are also excellent in your land as you read this blog entry.

A Quote I lIke

Luck is probability taken personally.

have a great easter!

Be safe. Eat chocolate. Say hi to your Mum for me.

Kraken

I recently finished listening to an audio book version of China Mieville's Kraken. I grabbed it after mis-reading that it was some
kind of follow on from Mieville's Perdido Street Station, as it plodded through a fairly realistic
London during the 1st part of the book I realised I was misinformed.

I was beginning to think it was going to be a pretty normal who-dun-it.

Then the cracks in Mieville's London opened up and I was swallowed
into a magical and seedy underworld. Much like the protagonist my mind
was left spinning as a long cast of strange and wonderful people enter
into the storyline. I can definitely recommend this book to anyone who
enjoys a good dose of unique fantasy. If you can suspend disbelief and
wrap your head around a ganglord who is a tattoo on another man's back
or that someone can be folded up into a box and re-emerge without any
harm, then dive into Kraken.

coding

I’ve been tinkering and hacking together some extensions for GoogleChrome, even going to the step of setting up a github account where I can managerevisioning. It was while bouncing around other people’s projects ongithub that I became reacquainted with markdown, as there is an optionto save your readme files in markdown format. After realising how daftI’ve been for not employing markdown in my various projects I’ve takena step to rectify this by now parsing posts I make via posterous formarkdown formatting.

yay markdown

• markdown is so easy and cool

yes

yes it is

if ($displaying=="nicely formatted") { $fuzzy="happy"; }else { $fuzzy="unhappy"; }

Firefox to Chrome?

You know you're a geek when you decide to make a post about switching web browsers....

With the release of Chrome 10 I'd decided to give it another go. For the last few years I've been a big advocate of Firefox, but the sheer 'cleanliness' and speed of Chrome can not be denied. Until now I'd always found little things with Chrome that kept me from truly falling in love with it. Until a recent release it didn't display my InfoAgent page correctly, taking a dislike to the table intensive layout. I even went so far as haxing up a new pure css based layout just so I could use Chrome for a while, as my InfoAgent page is where I launch virtually all my web surfing from. A few releases back Google decided to be a little more flexible on table layouts and the original version of the page worked again. Side stepping this complaint.

Over my years of Firefox use I'd collected a number of extensions which I now couldn't live with out. Over time, almost all of these (or similar addons) have become available for Chrome; Diigo, Readability, Adblock. However there still isn't versions of the Photobucket uploader (important for me since this is how I collect images to be displayed here on fuzzy's logic) and TabMixPlus.

I was then left with a dislike of the fact that I couldn't move the tab bar from the top of the Chrome window to the bottom, where I'm used to it being. I started using TabMixPlus for Firefox before Firefox ever added native support for tabbed browsing, and the habit was hard to break. It just makes sense to me.... I use a windows manager at the bottom of the screen, surely managing browsing tabs from the bottom of the browser is the logical place. If nothing else, to simply avoid racking up mouse miles. TabMixPlus also added a number of features such as always opening new tabs when I search or type an address into the address bar. Chrome doesn't natively allow this, but there is the alt+enter hotkey to do the same. It'll take me a while to remember to do this every time and I really don't understand why I can't just set an option to make this the default behaviour....

On the Photobucket front, I've found that another similar image collection site does have an uploader addon for Chrome, so I'm now testing Image Spark out. If I don't find any compelling reason not to make the switch from Photobucket to Image Spark I'll continue to consider a permanent switch from Firefox to Chrome. I'll also continue looking for ways to gain more control over Chrome's tab system. Stay tuned for updates on this incredibly interesting topic!

meta: soundcloud added

As you can see below I've added automatic posting of tracks that I add
to my favourites list over at soundcloud. For those not in the know, its a site
where artists are able to upload their music and get feedback from the
community. It has become the place I go to find dubstep or drum and
bass tracks to listen to while doing mindless data entry at work.

Doing this has reminded me how cool my system is [insert horn tooting
here], as its very simple for me to suck in content from any site
around this wonderful internet.

Wonderful Photos

Today I remembered that a while back I'd hooked my InfoAgent up to a
couple of great feeds of photos. The system has collected about 12,000
photos from around the traps now. So I quickly threw together a
gallery: http://fuzzyslogic.com/gallery/

I'll work on it some more when I get time, as I'd like to have a way
to view the full size images. But yeah, I thought I'd share.

Musical Diversity

I take some kind of strange pride in the fact that our neighbours, if
they cared to listen, would perhaps doubt that the music they hear
wafting over their fences is coming from selections made by one
person.

From Feed Me
to Chick Corea.

I have to thank Radio Adelaide's Primetime Jazz program for getting me more and more
hooked on jazz.

Fringe Fest mini reviews

Over the past few days I've been lucky enough to get along to two
excellent shows at this year's Adelaide Fringe Festival; Tom Tom Crew
and Josh Thomas. Both were excellent and well worth the money.

Tom Tom Crew are an awesome mash up of acrobatics, break dancing, hip
hop, turntablism and incredible drumming, all jammed together in an
hour of frantic action. The skills on display during this show were
really top quality. Its hard to go wrong with buff dudes running and
jumping around with their shirts (and during one section, pants) off
to the thunderous beats of a DJ and live drummer.

I'd only seen Josh Thomas previous on TV and didn't really know what
to expect from his stand up. This year his show features retelling of
some pretty epic moments from his life as well as a hilarious wrap up
of his twitter fight with Ruby Rose. He's a witty bugger who manages
to take some very serious topics and turn them into fodder for some
massive laughs. Impeccable timing and incredible self deprecation all
add up to a wonderful evening of insight into this guy's strange life.

Fuzzy Hate: Clipboard Injection

I've noticed a few sites on the web starting to implement javascripts
which will add their URL to the bottom of any text you select and copy
onto your clipboard. The nydailynews.com site was the most recent that
I found doing it. I dug through the source code and found that they're
using a system created by a mob called Tracer. I found that adding
this to my adblockplus plugin for firefox has successfully blocked it:

||tcr.tynt.com/javascripts/*

Die in a fire tynt.com.

Welcome to the twittersphere!

I've been haxing around in the system I use on Fuzzy's Logic and also the backend
of my online rss feed aggregator InfoAgent, implementing a
few twitter related features. What these boil down to are two things:

1) Fuzzy's Logic now has a twitter account of its own;
http://twitter.com/fuzzyslogic which automatically updates with
headlines of any update to the site.

2) Any links which I click on from InfoAgent are sent to my
http://twitter.com/fuzzywah feed making it easy for any like minded
people to share in the things I find interesting around the internet.

Beyond this, I've done this as a bit of a learning experience to get
my head around the OAuth system which more and more sites are
requiring to access their APIs. I'm just a small step away from being
called a social media expert! Anyone who actually knows what that
means should be laughing along with me at this point, as it has become
somewhat of a slur to refer to someone as this corrupted term. SME's
are like marketing people who can't string together more than 140
characters.

lil test

Been working on some new behind the scenes stuff, hopefully this test works!

artsy not safe for work sites you should visit

I occassionally steal the safe for work images from kippage. There I said it. I've been reluctant to pimp the site before, because well.... it has photos of boobs on it alot. But some times it also has starwars and kitten related images, which I also like. To be honest though, when jadz0r finds an image which includes boobs, starwars AND kittens all at once it really cracks me up.

I predict that I'll also be stealing some of the safe for work images from image88. I also predict many classic boobs, formular 1, kitten and geek reference cross over images which will surely be amazingly entertaining too.

geeks who made iphone

I get a strange pleasure from realising that a fair number of the
geeks who developed the iphone are the types of nerds which people who
are in love with their iphone wouldn't be seen dead with.

Dear Mr Telstra Tech

Please work your magic on the busted copper phone line linking our
house to the interwebs and allow me to evolve from 3G to ADSL2+!

Thanks in advance,
Fuzzy

carbonated fermented beverages and bbq'd meat

An excellent weekend goes into the history books, if only the ones
which dedicate ample room to the amount of beer, cider, punch and
bbq'd meat products I ingest. Which is probably more than you'd
expect. Schutzenfest was amazing, I ate kranksy, I drank wonderful beer
and cider I danced silly dances ato German folk music. All this
excitement was followed up by a wonderful low key bbq at our place on
Sunday. Much food, a little drink and 2nd helpings of interesting
people.

APM FTW

I impressed my boss by near instantly responding to a question which
someone asked him, being able to connect to a network share and open a
spreadsheet file far quicker than him. I smiled at his exclaimation of
surprise at my data recovery swiftness, knowing that my recent
Starcraft 2 training regiem was paying off. My actions per minute stat
impresses people.

Locked Out

On Wednesday, a humourous series of events left me locked out of my new home for 5 hours. I entertained myself pretty well, falling in love with the wonderful backyard. I swept those bricks until they shone and recalled the Sweeper character from Terry Prachett's novels.

http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Lu-Tze

Lu-Tze is a character in the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. His name is based on the Taoist philosopherLao Tse.

He first appeared in the novel Small Gods as a minor character. He was one of the History Monks, a member of a Buddhism-like sect, that maintained Discworld history, based on the huge History Books in their Ramtopmonastery. He spent much of the novel in the background, disguised as a simple sweeper. He also deliberately changed the course of history because he didn't like the way things "should" go, replacing a horrific war with a century of peace.

Lu-Tze had a more substantial role in Thief of Time, in which we learn that he is not a monk at all, but "merely" a sweeper at the Monastery of Oi-Dong. In fact, he uses the same trick (that no-one notices a sweeper) in the monastery as he does when out in the world, and has learnt as much about the nature of time as some of the higher monks simply by tidying up the classrooms. Everyone knows Lu-Tze's name, as one of the best monks on the field, but few realise who he actually is.

Blerk

Seasonal platitudes to one and all. My holiday period has been magnificent. I hope that yours has been likewise.

Tailor is (mostly) packed and ready to go. Convoy departs Melbourne at ten hundred hours and will be invading Adelaide at great haste (legal haste).

Thx to everyone who came to the Drette for Farewell Fuzzy NYE party. It was excellent. Mega thx to everyone who came to the casino last night for a last minute "hey we better play some poker before you go!" action.

The extra travelling money will come in handy :)

is this thing on?

It appears that I may have left this a little too late. I'm not talking about the months its been since I actually generated any content on the web, but more directly about the minutes since there stopped being any sun shining gloriously down onto the deck at the 'drette. Oh well, since I'd made the decision to wander out onto the deck with my laptop, a cider and an mp3 playlist and finally post something so in the words of Hunter S Thompson; buy the ticket, take the ride.

I've realised I'm not young any more, deducing this fact from a large variety of symptoms. The ones which aren't physical all seem to stem from the fact that I'm no longer as impetuous as I once was. A point proven very neatly by the fact that I actually checked that impetuous means what I thought it meant after I'd typed it. Measure twice, cut once. It's a lesson which took quite some time to sink in.

There are many upsides, but there are also some downsides. One of these is that I don't spam drivel onto the web as much as I used to. I can confidently state that because I know that the only people who will read this are the ones who have been giving me hell over the fact that I don't post any of my own words any more.

Hi guys. Thanks.

Don't Be Fooled

Sitting on the deck of the 'drette, idly reading the last few pages of
a William Gibson book, drinking strong coffee as the sun rises on
another Melbourne day. My father told me, just recently, "don't be
fooled when people talk about the 'good old days'. Those days are now,
this is it; you're living in the golden moments".

Abbott's Worst Nightmare

From what we've gathered, Tony Abbott's worst nightmare would be
watching a live, high definition webcast of gay people on a boat
having a debate.

Starcraft 2

Back in the heady early days of my multiplayer gaming addiction,
crowded into garages and lounge rooms, when my buddies got bored with
me schooling them at Quake we would play Warcraft 2 and later
Starcraft. I was never as obsessed with real time strategy games
anywhere near my love of Quake, but I have very fond memories of blood
rushed ogres and unleashing swarms of zerglings apon my friends.

12 long years after the original, Starcraft 2 has been released and
has reinvigorated my interest in RTS gaming. As is my usual approach
to gaming, I skipped over the single player campaign and dove directly
into the online multiplayer portion of Starcraft 2. I watched a couple
of tutorial videos on youtube and learned how to do the cheesiest and
easiest rushing strategies, using these to do pretty well in the
ranking matches. In hindsight, getting placed into the gold ladders
wasn't a smart move as the players I'm facing actually know more than
how to build up a rushing force in the 1st 5 minutes of a match. I
threw some of my ranking matches for the 1v1 and 4v4 ladders and got
ranked in silver for these, where I'm actually able to hold my own.

I've been watching a lot of replays of the very very good players
downloaded from the amazingly slick sc2replayed.com and learning a lot.
I still suck but at least I have a bit of depth to my strategy if
someone is able to counter my early game attacks. The fact that the
game rewards aggressive play really resonates with me. I can't see
this developing into a true obsession, as I'm well aware that the time
investment required to compete at top levels in Starcraft 2 would be
insane especially because the top guys have been playing the original
game for the last 12 years. However I am really enjoying finding the
most annoying tactics and using these to piss off my enemies. I've
also found that a few quick games of Starcraft 2 puts me into a great
mindset for poker.

"Who called in the fleet?"

Well, You're a Time Traveller

"I'm going to take a picture of my firstborn and use age progression
sofware to figure out what he'll look like when he's 16. Then I'm
going to frame the picture and keep it as a centerpeice in our house,
something he'll grow up looking at. Then when the appropriate time
comes, and he realizes that the picture is of him, I'm going to try
and convince him that he is a time traveller."

Lifted from lamebook.

Judged

"The link you are accessing (fuzzyslogic.com) has been blocked by the
Barracuda Web Filter because it contains content belonging to the
category of: Tasteless & Offensive."

I almost blogged

... But then my internet connection died, my firefox crashed and I
lost the epic post which I'd just written about dungeons and dragons
(both the old school dice based game and the new massively multiplayer
online game) and how I'd decided that if I was going to grind anything
that it should be poker. Value betting super thin, making genius hero
calls and generally reading people's souls is way more rewarding than
any virtual magical shoes.

hey microsoft

How about we don't display windows updates prompts to terminal server users?

Yours grumpily,
Fuzzy.

work whinge of the day

Hi Symantec Software Engineer,

I believe you're responsibile for the symantec liveupdate application.
I'd like to punch you in the face for having a "your PC needs a
reboot" popup with only an OK button. Then I'd like to stamp on your
throat for having the little X in the top right of the window still
continue with the reboot.

Thankfully, since this is a server OS after all, windows alerted me to
the fact that other users were logged into the host and gave me the
option of cancelling the reboot which you'd forced on me. How very
lucky that I'd logged in direct to the console for another reason.

Regards,
Fuzzy.

hold on tight, things could get strange

I'm currently in the process of moving my online pressence from one
server to another. I'm toying with incredible things like DNS and conf
files.

Take a moment and consider those poor electrons which are zipping
around inside this globe spanning network we've constructed. I'm doing
the equivalent of organising a shit load of old fashioned traffic cops
spread all over the globe to learn that fuzzyslogic.com is now hosted
on a different node of the net.

Boeing Phantom Ray

Blerk

Thanks to everyone who took the time to inform me that I haven't posted on my blog for a long time.

Life is good and things are well. As I edge up on my 31st birthday I'm often left contemplating how back in the middle of 2009 I, so totally honestly, told people that turning 30 didn't worry or scare me in the least. I had conversations with my close friends about how hitting the big three oh had given them pause, as they realised that they were now officially "not young". Me, I still felt young.

I proved that I was young too. A young fool prone to making mistakes. By the time I reach 31 I'll have realised that being "not young" is all about learning from those mistakes. I won't even begin to list the things I've learned during my 31st trip around our wonderful sun, but they mostly revolve around me being slack, unorganised and lacking a plan for the future.

I'd heard a line in a stand up spot one time which made me laugh; until a man gets to be 30, he still always has the thought in the back of his head that he could go to a temple high in the mountains and train at the feet of masters and become a ninja. Once he gets to 30 he realises that he may have left it too late.

Luckily I never had any strong dreams of becoming a ninja. I just want to be an interesting person. I want to be someone who people are glad they're around. Someone who walks through doors and receives big, warm and loving smiles from the people he's joined.

This has been happening to me more and more lately. I like it.

I just want to be half the man my dogs think (thought?) I am.

Gaming Can Make a Better World

fear and loathing

I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is my attorney! He's not just some dingbat I found on the Strip. He's a foreigner. I think he's probably Samoan. But it doesn't matter, does it? Are you prejudiced?

- Raoul Duke (from HST's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

Unexpected

Since moving into the 'drette I've found that I had seriously been failing in my TV viewing for not regularly watching Media Watch and Q&A. I'd even go so far as saying that making anyone who watches TV, forcefully if required, to absorb Media Watch.

Blerk

I wrote the following into the "about me" box in my facebook profile. It probably does as a bad a job of painting a picture of me as the majority of combinations and permutations of english words.

I like to be a positive, active and happy go lucky person. I am an eternal optimist who loves nothing more than flying by the seat of his pants. Easily distracted and prone to rambling off on strange and unexpected tangents. I'm armed with a quick "out of left field" sense of humour and an open mind.

I love communicating with people who are passionate about the topic at hand.

Verbal wankery I guess.

In other news, my life has wiggled its way around and has settled back into a curiously comfortable and deja vu'y arrangement. I'll be working in an interesting IT job, living a share house with an awesome group of guys and juggling a lot. The big difference between my life now and 6 years ago is the weather. I'm loving Melbourne summer but am a little concerned how I'll deal with my first melbourne winter.

But that is an age away. I just like to run the thought around in my head to ensure I don't take the current wonderful weather for granted.

Taking things for granted is probably my biggest fault. Maybe I should edit in a mention of that on my facebook profile...

Stop. Contemplate For A Moment.

You're an organism that can control the chemical make-up of the environment which your mind is contained in. Simply by the act of thinking, you can alter your biochemistry and feel any emotion. Try happiness. Or joy, joy is damn nice.

359 days till Golf Trip

Place the club face behind the ball. Stand comfortably with feet shoulder width apart. Draw a line that extends from your right foot through your left and all the way to the pin. Set your feet into the ground. Bend your knees. Focus right at the spot on the ball where the club face is going to make contact. Turn your head to trace the trajectory the ball is about to take. Visualise the flight of the ball in reverse. From the hole, rise and swing through the sky, downswoop to its position here on the ground. Head over the ball. Slow, solid, smooth backswing. Watch the ball. Watch the ball. Describe an arc. Transfer weight from right foot to left. Drive with left hip. Watch the ball. Take a mental snap shot as the club head violently slashes across my vision, witnessing the leading edge folding over the very tips of damp grass, the satisfying sound of contact. The ball suddenly receives a large delivery of kenetic energy.

Simple game really. It had been over a decade since I'd last picked up a golf club in anger. Back then it was a fun round with the brother of a girlfriend. I recalled hitting the odd decent shot, but spending a lot of time looking for lost balls and had filed it away as something that I wasn't very good at and low on the enjoyment to hassle ratio. This time around I once again hit the odd decent shot and also spent a bit of time hunting for the mishit ones. But I thoroughly enjoyed it all. Maybe I'm mature enough for golf now?

When I stop and consider it, I keep ticking a heap of boxes and wonder why its taken me so long to get around to realising that golf is something I could/should put some effort into. It is perhaps the socially accepted pinacle of honing a useless skill. Most other sports can, even vaguely, translate into helpful real world skills; but golf is totally pointless. I thrive on teaching myself complex and useless skills!

Plus, I really enjoyed spending a few hours walking around a beautiful setting with a bunch of cool guys. I also found that I can chip like a pro. I've no idea how or why, but chipping balls ~30m up onto the green via a nice high parabolic arc came really naturally to me. The ambrose round where I consistantly delivered the best approach shots was a huge turning point in my fledgling golf addiction.

I'm definately going to require some time at a driving range working on my tee shots though. Oh boy, where they ever inconsistant.

Meredith Music Festival

By my own admission I'm well out of festival form. Prior to the weekend, the last camping festival I attended was a wet Spendour in the Grass which I didn't take much enjoyent from. Combined with the memories of a wet, cold and windy Falls Festival a few years earlier and I had kind of sworn off camping festivals.

With this in mind, along with horror stories of the conditions from the previous year, I woke up at 3:30am last Friday with some trepidation. We were heading via charter bus to the Meredith Music Festival. After exchanging some angst with the bus driver about whether or not he would be waiting in line with us for 2 hours until the gates opened, we finally made our way to Outter Mongolia and claimed an excellent camp site. The weather was looking pretty good all things considered. Patches of sun and blue sky through grey clouds, which let loose nothing but small sprinkles all weekend.

I was determined to have a large one, even knowing that I'd be backing up directly after Meredith to head off for 4 days of heavy golfing and heavier drinking. This lead to Friday afternoon quickly building towards a huge Friday night. I didn't really have any bands on the ticket which were "must sees" so I just hung around the stage and gave everything a shot. I was my usual gregarious self and made a number of new friends.

Sia was impressive, I have a theory that her set alone would have led to about 25% higher rates of curious lesbian encounters. Patrick Wolf's set was probably my musical highlight of the festival, I regret not being up and dancing for the whole 45mins he was exploding all over the stage. Tumbleweed put on an excellent rock show.

We happened to be standing next to the world's biggest Royal Crown Review fan when they took the stage. At first I was chuffed, as his obvious excitement was spilling over onto everyone around him. I surprised even myself with how quickly I grew tired of his incessant annoucing of how amazing this all was, along with the complete backstory of how someone so young was such a fan of such an odd band, combined with the group hugs between each song.

I only caught the earlier bands on Saturday, highlights being; Pharoahe Monch, Combo La Revelacion (seriously, if you like a bit of salsa music you need some Combo) and Heavy Trash.

Paul Kelly's set was good, but seemed a bit out of place with the vibe of the crowd. Animal Collective and Javis Cocker both also left me a little "meh". I think I was just in a different party mode than what they were performing on stage, but I often found myself annoyed that the bands were stopping the DJ's from continuing to spin more cool tracks.

I only heard the Yacht Club DJs set from the campground, but it really sounded like it was pumping. If only they'd been on at 10:30 instead of 1am :)

All in all, I had a total blast. The music was damn good, but really these festivals are 50% about the people you're with (I'm giving 25% to the weather and 25% to the music) and I was lucky enough to spend my 1st Meredith with a crew who've essentially become professionals and also met a bunch of excellent people.

Blerk

For those hardy few who have continued to find their way to my little corner of the internet through my sporadic posting habits, thanks. For those who hassle me to update, thanks even more.

My life in the recent 3 months hasn't exactly contained much that I've felt the need to share. The low bits are fairly obvious to those who know the details and the high bits I haven't felt the need to post about because the majority of people who I'd like to share the details with have been there by my side.

Still, I've been slack. In amongst the trials and tribulations of day to day living, I have continued to have the occassional insight into life the universe and everything. I've just been too lazy to spend time at the keyboard writting about them.

I've found myself looking at the calendar and declaring that I'll get my life back on track in the new year. I have big ideas of rejoining the rat race, meeting a new collection of cubical drones, learning the ins and outs of another business. I am excited.

Until then, my focus remains 100% on enjoying life. This, I've realised, is a simple process; find good people to be in the company of.

I certainly did a bang up job of that over the last week; 1st at the Meredith Music Festival and then at Golf Trip.

Victory!

I managed to win the recently competed round 8 of social networking Pimpwar. Yay for me and my wasted time!

Body Clock

I haven't been able to shake out of this habit of waking up at 7am. I should be thankful, I guess. Not only because I get to see hot air balloons, one of them the shape of a water bomb, firing their flames and gaining altitude over the city in the crisp morning air. But because day light savings has kicked in, we've bent the laws of time and space and artificially granted me an extra hour sleep in. I was waking up at 6am.

Though, it kind of nullifies it when I've also pushed my normal bedtime to 1am rather than midnight.

Xrays

It'd been a while since I'd ventured into the belly of the beast which is the public hospital system. Today I had some happy snaps taken of my femor, where my 10cm osteochondroma resides. That's a bone tumor in laymans terms. I call it Marla.

Long story short, from the xrays things appear to be the same as they were 4 years ago. The main difference is in the higher quality and medium on which I received copies of the xrays. No longer do I get film. I get a cd. I thought that this could foil my plan of simply holding the new xrays up against the old ones and compare by eye.

With some fiddling of the zoom factor I was able to do much the same by holding the old xray up to my monitor. There's a bit that could be larger than last time, but it could also just be that the higher quality machine has shown it up clearer.

I'm now on the wait list for the bone tumor clinic down here, which will lead me towards the MRI machine.

Still, at the end of the day; I haven't had any serious woes with it. Considering I haven't had any serious pain over a healthy number of laps around the AFL field and shuttle sprints, I'm pretty happy with young Marla. Solid, dependable, unchanging.

My rock is actually a tumor.

Quote of the however long its been since the last one

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote

- Benjamin Franklin

A Good Kind of Ache

I packed a fair bit of fun into the weekend. Consumed a healthy portion of delicious Japanese food on Friday night. Interesting conversations over such wonderful yums as pork belly skewers, wagyu beef steak and fried chicken skin, it was difficult to drag myself away. I had to though, as there was a going away party which I wasn't going to miss for the life of me.

By any fair judging, I'd have to say that we successfully drank enough booze and talked enough shit to ensure a safe and enjoyable trip for our guest of honour. Just incase it wasn't, after completing the trip to the aquarium, we played copious amounts of board games until the wee hours.

I slept in until midday to recover. Me, sleeping until midday. Unheard of. But required, as the weather cleared up and provided perfect conditions for an excellent 3v3 game of gridiron down at the park. My team won! I scored a touch down! I also threw a touch down pass! I like using exclaimation marks!!

A big dinner of spag bog and a high definition episode of Band of Brothers completed the weekend in fantastic fashion. This all sets me up for a big monday of poker, watching NFL, updating my CV and kicking off the hunt for a new job.

Wait, what's that? New job? Tune in next time for more details!

Quote of the Whatever Time Frame

Why has elegance found so little following? Elegance has the disadvantage that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Juggling, Epiphanies, Processes

The enjoyment I take from juggling stems from the cocktail of emotions you can feel during a good session. From the intense frustration and anger I feel when I'm constantly failing to learn a pattern or, worse still; cocking up a pattern that I know I've mastered long ago. To the unbridled joy gained from successfully completing a new pattern for the first time. Combined with the long tail of the juggling learning curve it means that its a hobby where I can continuously challenge myself to learn new things.

I find that there are two key moments when I'm learning a new pattern or trick. An initial moment of epiphany when I'm first able to complete it successfully and then the moment when I realise that I'm now able to repeat it without any conscious thought. The 1st time you complete something it often feels awkward, rushed or just plain messy, but it is still a very satisfying moment. I then repeat and practice the trick, focusing on being smooth, controlled, precise and flowing. I'm building up muscle memory and finally will be able to hand the trick off to my subconcsious. At that point I take great enjoyment from the sense that I now have that knowledge contained somewhere in my grey matter, able to seemingly automatically recall it at any time.

I've found that my process for learning new patterns or tricks comes in two very different types;

1) concentrated, focused effort to learn a particular pattern
2) from random experimentation during a session when in the zone

The 1st situation really requires me to be in the correct frame of mind before even starting to juggle. Its the process required when I'm learning something from someone face to face, via youtube videos or from a juggling pattern animation program. Usually I've picked up my balls with the specific plan of learning something new. I'll break down the pattern into sections and work out what each hand needs to be doing. While practicing each throw individually, I'll be extremely focused on visualising where each ball will be travelling and try to work out a rhythm. Then its just time, patience, practice and dedication. This process can become very frustrating and I often finish sessions without "getting it", feeling disapointed and unco-ordinated. However, the enjoyment gained when I finally nail something that I've really struggled with is extremely satisfying. Most of my favourite tricks were ones which "put up a fight" when I was learning.

The 2nd situation is far more wonderous and hard to explain. The goal of most juggling sessions is to "get into the zone". That special situation where I feel totally at ease, perfectly confident that between my hands, the balls and gravity, everything is in balance. Patterns flow into each other and the momentum of the balls lead me to string certain patterns together. During these moments of flow, with my brain working so fast that time dilates and gravity seems to fade slightly, occassionally my hands will find a pattern which I had no forethought of.

Early on in my career the chaotic imperfections of my throws lead to this happening quite often. Since youtube wasn't around back then and I didn't have a juggling mentor, it was how I stumbled onto a lot of basic patterns. These days I really enjoy juggling with background music is because I'm able to use changes in the music to trigger changes in my patterns. Its incredible how your body/brain can react to make an unusual catch or throw to stay in time with the beat or to react to a break. The times when those strange chaos throws feel good, I'll try repeating it and attempt to lock it into my subsconcsious.

Anything that is around 110 to 160 bpm works a treat. I match the music to my mood and then the type of balls to the tempo of music. Heavy balls for meaty hip hop, with lots of over hand grabs slapping the catches in time with the backbeat. Lighter balls for dancey tracks (Daft Punk and Kraftwork are amongst the best music of this), the faster tempo leads me towards tight site swaps and Mill's mess style arm crossing.

I've lost access to the video camera, so no footage! D'oh.

District 9

I blame Peter Jackson for making me appear to be a selfish, forgetful and all round useless bastard. Last night at the last minute we decided to go see District 9 at the cinema, completely derailing my plans to call my wonderful older sister on her birthday.

On the upside, the movie was beyond awesome. I was greatly reminded of Peter Jackson's 1st movie, the incredible Bad Taste. Totally over the top gore and effects which bookend around a sci fi storyline crafted wonderfully out in left field. The dash of social commentary and the wonderful South African accents round it out nicely. Basically I agree with these 7 reasons to go see District 9.

In Case You Didn't Know

Hard earned blisters have all but healed
The torn flesh mended, tender yet resealed
Last of the physical reminders retreat
Leaving only memories of things incomplete
Dreams I was fed which took root and grew
Pushed me away and you've taken them with you

Foosball

On the weekend I went to see DrewMoney's housemate and his band rock out. Before and after his set (which was highly entertaining and very very rock) we claimed the pub's Foosball table.

There was some discussion about whether spinning was allowed, those making cases against spinning were easily drowned out by my triumphant outbursts each and every time I spun the shit out of my strikers and rammed another goal home.

Ain't It?

Ain't it strange how life can twist and turn
Isn't it weird how love can sooth or burn
Don't you ponder how things ebb and flow
Doesn't it frustrate you how you can never know?

OMG Comments

I'd been toying with a few different ideas about how to handle comments here on my crappy lifestream page. Twitter is so hot right now that I was really tempted to hax up a system which enabled people to tweet comments to posts, with my site simply doing a twitter search for any tweets tagged with a speical hashtag. This would have the upside of me not needing an authorisation system and also some spam advertising as my friends tweet'd about things on my site.

Never one to rebuild a wheel that already rolls pretty well, I googled around and found Chirrup; supposedly a simple javascripted system which I could drop in pretty damn easily. Only it didn't work. When I went looking for support I noticed that the guy who made Chirrup actually uses a system called Disqusto handle comments on his own blog.

Always check what the people in the know use.

So I've integrated Disqus into the site. Yay! It allows people to log in using facebook, twitter, openid or Disqus' own user authentication system. Or even guests (I'll see how this goes, I hate spam). It also has a very slick moderation / admin system and by being externally hosted it fits into my basic goal here on the lifestream; for it to be as portable to a new webhost as possible.

Slaberific

Exciting times are upon us here in our little corner of the planet. The slab for the house has been poured and we've been spending our weekends banging star pickets into the ground to slice and dice our 18 acres up into paddocks. Who knew making drastic changes to the earth would be so much fun?



I've got next week off work, a stretch of time which will be spent focusing on completing the internal fit out of the stables. This will include a concrete base down the center isle, 3m out the end for the wash bay and a 4m by 4m tackroom.

We'll probably get a chance to layout the framework for the house and perhaps look at stringing the electric braid on the fence lines. We're actually getting closer to getting out of this rental!

Rain, Rain, Go Away

I'd probably get murdered by the local farmers if I said this in public, but all this rain we're getting is really hampering our building progress. Things have stalled once again as we wait for enough sunny days to dry out the soggy earth and allow us to pour the slab for the house.

We're near certain to have missed the end of June deadline to lock in the current first home owners grants and boosters. I'm a little uneasy relying on the liberal party to not get in the way of the governments plans to increase the bonuses from $25k to $36k as proposed in the 2009 - 2010 budget.

I'm glad that Utegate blew up in the lib's faces. Hopefully they won't be too eager to cause a double dissolution election.

We're also waiting on pouring the slab for the center aisle of the stables, after which we can put up the roller doors, build the internal stables and I can finally declare it done.

Then there's fencing.....

I just want to be making progress!

Blue Angels, In Cockpit Video

Stable Nears Completion

I'm quite proud to say that the stable block is essentially errected. All that remains is installing the roller doors and doing the internal fit out to make it habitable for the animals.

Alas I don't have photos of the completed masterpiece yet, because the weather has been terrible (well, good in a way... we needed the rain). I'll grab some shots when I can, but can assure you that the 'sandbank' cream colour of the walls which I'd shown before are wonderfully offset by the dark blue-gray 'iron stone' guttering and flashing.

On to the house!

Hopefully if there's a break in the rain the slab will get poured this week. It's amazing to think that we're only just now getting this done, a year after the kit was delivered to the block. Suddenly we're racing against time to ensure we get the most in our 1st home builders grants and such. Its required that the foundations are laid before the deadline at the end of June.

Over the recent week I've had two of possibly the most physically draining days of building. The 1st was laying 250m of power cable (in conduit) from the building sites to the front of the property. In the rain. Trudging through sticky red clay mud. The 2nd was using a petrol engine powered 250mm hydrolic auger to dig fence posts in the same conditions and soil.

Eames Lounge chair (1956 video)

Thirty

THe dust is settling on what was a fairly epic week of celebrations for my 30th. I was thrilled to have 22 people attending the dinner and a large number of these continue to kick on back at my place; braving the cold night air and rambling on into the wee hours of the morning.

My Grandmother made a surprise appearence on Sunday morning, as I was busily cooking recovery bacon and eggs breakfast for the hungry horde. Thankfully she was able to hang around over night and I skipped off from work early on Monday to play a few rounds of cards with the family and catch up.

My Parents, Sister, Brother in law and their wonderful little bub stuck around until yesterday. A little longer than planned, as our car broke down on the way to the airport and they missed the flight. Can't win em all I guess.

Because I was lazy and witnessed an already obscene number of digital cameras taking happy snaps over the whole week I didn't once pull out my own camera and get any photos. I regret this massively already, missing the oppotunity to get group photos of the Crazy 88 crew and my extended family was quite stupid. I hope other people have some good shots. I suspect most photos of the family gathering section of the festivities _might_ be monopolised by a certain cheeky little baby.

GoodBye Spurl, Hello Diigo

Cliff Notes: Spurl is one of the sites I pull data from for my "lifestream" page and they've been having some woes (for a while now, actually). I'd recently been checking out diigo as a replacement system. The continued downtime for spurl today pushed me into making the switch.

While the rest of the world started using del.icio.us and dig for their social bookmarking needs, I'd always kept using a nifty system from spurl.net for my online bookmarking. The reason was three fold;

1) I didn't care about sharing my bookmarks or finding people who were bookmarking the same sort of sites.
2) It had a kick ass javascript bookmark file that you clicked and it filled in the "create bookmark" form with the url from the previously active page and any text you had highlighted on the page filled in as the description.
3) It had a good rss output feed.

Alas spurl was extremely hard hit by spammers, since it was so easy to actually create bookmarks. The dev team seem to have moved their focus onto other things, so I can't see it getting fixed soon.

Along comes diigo, the new hip web2.0 social bookmarking site. Like the others its packed full of features I don't really care about. However, these guys also have the simple features I love in spurl! So I've switched over to using it to collect my bookmarks and feed its rss output into my lifestream pipe.

Information Control

Early tonight I kicked out a post detailing the recent happenings in my online poker career. After rereading it and pondering exactly who I was posting it for I deleted it. I also got to thinking about the much neglected poker focused wordpress blog I still had laying around. I wound up deciding to take it down from the web too, for much the same reason.

I figured that most of my poker buddies are well aware of how I'm running and what I'm thinking about poker at any given time, since we communicate constantly over IRC. Beyond that I always talk to my Dad about poker when I speak to him on the phone. My work mates realise I'm addicted to poker and I ramble about it from time to time to them. But not many of them are actually aware of the stakes I play or how much I've earned playing poker. So that really only left people who I was playing against online who googled my screen name and wound up finding my blog.

And why on earth would I want to give them more information about how I'm running or what I'm thinking about poker?

So for now I'll just sum up things in vague terms; currently poker isn't my big focus, building my house is. When the house is done and I'm back into the poker grind my focus will be on rebuilding my bankroll :)

Resized Images

Over the last few days I've tinkered with a few things here on my lifestream page. The most significant was haxing in a dynamic image resizing system which creates thumbnails 400 pixels wide to be displayed nicely. Previously I was just uploading pre-thumbnailed images for inclusion in updates sucked in from spurl or elsewhere. This failed when I wanted to upload a higher resolution image on its own (like the pink storm trooper image).

So now I upload to photobucket at the original resolution of whatever the image is and my code downscales it while maintaining the correct aspect ratio.

Onwards - An Animation

Onwards from akqa on Vimeo.

Information Control

Early tonight I kicked out a post detailing the recent happenings in my online poker career. After rereading it and pondering exactly who I was posting it for I deleted it. I also got to thinking about the much neglected poker focused wordpress blog I still had laying around. I wound up deciding to take it down from the web too, for much the same reason.

I figured that most of my poker buddies are well aware of how I'm running and what I'm thinking about poker at any given time, since we communicate constantly over IRC. Beyond that I always talk to my Dad about poker when I speak to him on the phone. My work mates realise I'm addicted to poker and I ramble about it from time to time to them. But not many of them are actually aware of the stakes I play or how much I've earned playing poker. So that really only left people who I was playing against online who googled my screen name and wound up finding my blog.

And why on earth would I want to give them more information about how I'm running or what I'm thinking about poker?

So for now I'll just sum up things in vague terms; currently poker isn't my big focus, building my house is. When the house is done and I'm back into the poker grind my focus will be on rebuilding my bankroll :)

Resized Images

Over the last few days I've tinkered with a few things here on my lifestream page. The most significant was haxing in a dynamic image resizing system which creates thumbnails 400 pixels wide to be displayed nicely. Previously I was just uploading pre-thumbnailed images for inclusion in updates sucked in from spurl or elsewhere. This failed when I wanted to upload a higher resolution image on its own (like the pink storm trooper image).

So now I upload to photobucket at the original resolution of whatever the image is and my code downscales it while maintaining the correct aspect ratio.

Big Rig Hill Climb

I dusted off my logitech force feedback wheel recently and fired up Colin Mcrae: Dirt. The news that Dirt 2 will be out later this year made me very happy and I felt the need to fling some vehicles around corners sideways. I sorted out my online profile and was coimpletely blown away when checked out the world record times. I held no stupid dreams of actually being amongst the fastest in the world or anything, but I was amazed at by how much the top guys had my times crushed. However, I noticed that I was up near the top of the pack when it came to 1 particular type of race: Big Rig Hill Climbs.



Since I had already posted top 10 times for both the full hill climb events I decided to see if I could crack the number 1 spot and claim the world records. I focused on the Pikes Peak climb first, as it was the longest, mostly tarmac and also the race I felt the most comfortable with. It took me a couple of nights of tooling around with the setup on the truck to find something that worked well (I'd never bothered changing anything prior to this) and I was able to grab the world record by a good few seconds.

I moved onto the Windy Point hillclimb, a race I hadn't done beyond the couple of times you do it in career mode. This one took me a lot longer to find a good setup for and learn to string together the best lines of the corners. It was also the one which someone else had obviously put a lot of effort into; a German guy who had the fastest time in the Big Rigs by something like 15 seconds. I managed to get with in 5 seconds of him pretty quickly but then really struggled to find a way to bridge the final time gap. Last night I found 3 seconds and this morning I finally cracked his time, by a very slim 10 hundredths of a second.



So for the time being I can accurately claim to be the fastest Big Rig Hill Climber in the world (in the game Dirt)!

Easter Monday with the Animals

Our home is a house containing and surrounded by animals. A house cat, a tenacious little nugget of a mini foxy, two beautiful malamutes, two not quite so beautiful (but still pretty classy) goats, 5 horses and 8 stable cats. Dull moments are few and far between.



Our Easter Monday afternoon was spent out on the back deck being entertained by our own little circus. The mini foxy was eager to do our bidding and teach one of the horses some manners. The two malamutes were on edge as the stable cats made a concerted effort to over run the back deck. These wolf dogs are learning that the tribe of small black stable cats which appear occassionally aren't for chasing and eating, but they continuously look at us with "are you sure?" eyes.

Blue Mountain Lager

Poured a glass of the blue mountain lager from the keg today and I'm pretty impressed with it. I'd bought some Boags Draft stubbies to tide me over until the keg was gassed and I was surprised that my blue mt lager was similarly full flavoured. I definitely put this down to using a dextrose, malt and maltodextrin mix rather than just straight dextrose.

I've pumped the pressure back up in the keg and expect that it'll be perfectly gassed in time for the weekend!



I picked up some chillis when we went shopping on the weekend, which I plan on slicing open, wrapping in a stocking and dropping in the fermentor when I brew up this tin of brewcraft mexican cerveza. We used to do this at our old share house and I really enjoyed the after taste. We stole the idea from a micro brewery located up on the Sunshine Coast in QLD.