Red Drag Diva

Never give up. Party, party.

2012-02-19T14:58:59Z

Baroness Warsi condemns rise in ‘militant’ clear thought and logic.
RationalWiki: Alex Tsakiris, extensive work on NaturalNews.

Birthday drinks tomorrow (Red Lion E11, 6pm on), though I could have done without a throat infection for my birthday. I plan to show nevertheless if physically able to.

I'll be getting as much rest as I can tomorrow, when Freda is back at school. I am considering campaigning for the abolition of half-term and am looking into boarding schools on Mars. Wednesday's dad job: extracting a small plastic seahorse the 4yo posted in the zip drive of an ancient Pentium 4.

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pintage, Monday 20th February 6pm, Red Lion E11.

2012-02-15T13:58:09Z

Pub time for my birthday. Mon 20th Feb, 6pm on, Red Lion E11. Just near Leytonstone tube. Tell everyone!

(I was going to suggest this for Sunday, but then kindjourneys and eithin decided to do a drinkies Monday and I went "buggrit" and have camped theirs. Day booked off work ...)

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Zombies! Zombies!

2012-02-14T17:06:00Z

The p-zombie theory holds that being able to conceive of something makes it possible; and because p-zombies are possible, therefore dualism or something very like it. That is: proponents hold that because they can imagine p-zombies, therefore such a thing is possible.

(I'm not going to explain it further than linking to Wikipedia. But trust me when I say there are people who actually take the idea seriously.)

The tricky bit appears to be "conceive of" in a sense that implies possibility. Consider these statements:

I can conceive of 2+2=4 being true (in conventional everyday Peano arithmetic as we commonly know it).
I can conceive of 2+2=5 being true (in conventional Peano arithmetic).
I can conceive of P being equal to NP.
I can conceive of P not being equal to NP.
I can conceive of p-zombies, therefore dualism.
If I can conceive of p-zombies then dualism, which is a confused idea, therefore p-zombies is a confused idea by reductio ad absurdum.

With the second, I am claiming to "conceive of" something trivially false. I arguably haven't conceived of anything actually possible; I've just shuffled some words together.

With the third and fourth, I'm claiming to have conceived of something no-one knows (though many suspect 3 is false and 4 is true). To what extent have I actually thought it through? At some point I will hit a contradiction with one of them, though no-one has yet. Both are "conceivable" in some sense; certainly that the speaker has formed a sentence in their head that they can try out for its logical implications. But one of those statements is as wrong as 2+2=5 nevertheless. Thus, conceiving of something in this sense does not imply it can possibly be true.

When someone claims that p-zombies are a conceivable thing at all, and that they have conceived of them (first part of statement five), this doesn't actually say anything about the world or what is even possible; it just says they've formed a sentence in their head they think they can try out for its logical implications. Which is fine, but the world doesn't care what philosophers think they think.

Statement six is my own view. P-zombies is like creationism for smart people. The main argument for dualism remains its advocates really really wanting it to be true.

And now, a movie.

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King of Kalifornia.

2012-02-11T22:54:14Z

"Yo mama" jokes were invented 3500 years ago.
Rocknerd: Get lost. Don't lie.

Last Saturday afternoon, arkady and I went down the pub together without a small child in tow to drink copiously with eithin and kindjourneys. (The steak at the Red Lion is bloody brilliant. Recommended.) It snowed. I mean, SNOW!!!ed. Sunday morning Freda and I went into the back yard to play with snow properly. The very first thing she did was throw a snowball at me. At the age of 45, I made my first snowman! Or snow cat, anyway. Freda admired it, then squashed it. Of course.

Freda's grandparents are visiting in June and we want her to be at least safe in water, so she's going for swimming lessons every Friday evening (the only slot we could get) ... after PE at school in the afternoon. The lessons are going great, and it appears also to be a fabulously effective method of actually wearing her out to sleep.

Chalga is possibly the worst pop genre ever, and that's a subject I have considerable expertise in. "What's the difference between chalga videos and porn? Porn has better music."

Attempting to do useful things at work with Ant continues. (Every domain-specific language that the fool designer lets become Turing-complete eventually evolves into brainfuck.) We have until the end of this month for everything to be not merely done, but tested and reliable. In a related incident, I learned that having two completely different files called test.config.properties and test-config.properties (per different unrelated naming standards) is a bad idea.

I have taught Freda how to play Bejeweled. I will never see my phone again.

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Dancing makes me seasick.

2012-02-10T23:53:38Z

arkady's novel is progressing nicely. It turns out that "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp" (W. Somerset Maugham) is a good way to get a lot of first draft turned out.

Inspired by this, I've been attempting to write something vaguely song-shaped every day for a month. Doesn't have to even be any good at all, it just has to be an actual thing. I've missed a few days, but am attempting to keep at it. When I have thirty days down I'll probably put all thirty days up as an mp3. It'll be awful and pointless with a few good bits.

I've also submitted two pieces for the Homestuck album competition: "Salmon" and "Kingdom." I doubt they'll get anywhere, but it provoked me to get them into some sort of finished form. Both remain quite imperfect, but I'm quite pleased with them.

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Current reading.

2012-02-06T20:38:10Z

I've just finished Actually (the last collection of essays and reviews) by Christopher Hitchens. A doorstop, a lot of which is still available on the original magazines' sites. Patchy — quite a lot was clearly dashed off in half an hour after a boozy night out, and he was brilliant but skated by on brilliance rather too often — but ultimately worth ploughing through. I would recommend the curious start on better Hitchens (god is not Great, Hitch-22, Letters To A Young Contrarian in that order) where he wasn't phoning it in.

The nice thing about books of reviews is pointers. So right now I'm on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, the 2007 Penguin edition with a lengthy intro by Hitchens. The book is a doorstop-sized travelogue of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, a subject I have little interest in; I'm bothering only because a literature fan like Hitchens raved about it. And so far it's page-turningly good.

I've also just finished the audiobook version of god is not Great, read by the author. A book so clearly written to be read out loud. If you liked the book, I most strongly recommend the audiobook.

I've been wondering about the value of fictional evidence. Particularly reading a pile of Hitchens book reviews, wherein he strongly advocates good fiction for its power to explore and teach you how humans work. Off the top of my head I can think of more accurate commmunication media, but stories are natural to humans so I would be unsurprised to find them testing out as a much more powerful vector than, e.g., popularisations of psychological research. I'm not entirely convinced by the Hitchens line but was surprised to see him pushing it so vehemently.

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Astral projectionist threat.

2012-01-28T11:50:12Z

A tantalising platter of winged penis lovingly made in cast glass.
Just when you thought supermodels couldn't get any stupider.
What is this I don't even (NSFW for artistic nudity).
Unicorn poop cookies.
My Wikimedia blog: SOPA blackout post-mortem; Open Street Map beats Google Maps for business use.
Rocknerd: The Damned, January 20, 2012, Melbourne (by tcpip), Just three more!

"If you delete the web-pages we asked, it's gonna be fine or else my friend, an astral projectionist is going to bring you to justice" — actual threat received by RationalWiki.

Huge success at work automating every aspect of deployment with ~~mod_brainfuck~~ Ant (with ant-contrib). Building a full-sized working replica Titanic from toothpicks, complete with iceberg. Bletcherous spaghetti hidden behind innocuous-looking macrodef or target calls. Lots to go, but we might even get all our stuff shifted to the new hosting in time. If your hammer is Turing-complete, one day you will have to use it as a screwdriver, spanner, soda siphon and nail.

(This is the largest substantial piece of actually useful coding I've ever done. I'm getting the thing where you wake up with the solution to yesterday's problem and have to LOG IN RIGHT NOW to get it down.)

Yesterday's problem is generating an arbitrary number of htusers files. With one, it's easy, the data goes like this and the code will follow obviously:

apache.htusers.file = appname-htusers apache.htusers.list = user:letmein,admin:irl33t,bob@example.com:keepmeout

However, one app just has to have two htusers files. And if two, then later three or four. So my question is: how to human-obviously represent the data for an arbitrary number of htusers files as name-value pairs in a .properties file? For now I've special-cased that app, but I'll need something better later.

arkady is writing a novel (with cavalorn, eithin and me sniping from the sides), so is using the "inspiration shall strike every morning at 9:30am" method, and cranking through it nicely. And is successfully writing on an Android phone in a Google Doc when out and about. I've decided if I want to make music then I need to make music, and have determined that I shall write a complete something every day for a month. Even if it's entirely terrible, it just has to be a done and completed thing. This is in fact causing new stuff to pop into my head. I recommend the method. (I'm not linking any of it sans polish, because it's literally just sketches in LMMS. I might later.) If you can actually play, just get a guitar, a microphone and a copy of Audacity to record into, and PRODUCE.

Does anyone just happen to have the rule sheet for the In The Night Garden Rainbow Adventure Game? We just got it for 50p complete except the rules ... boardgamegeek doesn't seem to have heard of it.

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Maybe bong hits will fix my build.xml.

2012-01-10T22:35:21Z

The Privatise Thatcher's funeral petition is at 26,000. A hundred thousand and it gets discussed in Parliament. FORWARD IT AROUND.
The British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies on treating the trauma from leaving religion.
Freda should be at this stage in about a year or two.

No shaving cream at all actually gives a smoother shave than Lush Ambrosia, surprisingly.

We have a new old dishwasher! After seven years' having the crap beaten out of it, the tabletop from megabitch finally died. Being a cheaparse, I bought a Hotpoint FDF780 second hand for sixty quid with six months' warranty from the British Heart Foundation furniture shop. And it works and stuff. The older teen is most pleased.

I should note that just before Christmas, Freda got her first-ever phone call from a friend, so they could talk about their Christmas trees. None since, but I shall mark the moment as the beginning of the end.

Freda has taken to turning juice containers and Pringles cans into junk sculptures, working for days to stick stuff to them just so. Then she presents them to people as presents. I can just see her making big eyes at someone, saying "But I made it for youuu!" then they give her a large cheque. Here's hoping, anyway.

At work I have been working on automating everything possible with Ant. After using ant for a while, you do think "perhaps mod_brainfuck would be more flexible."

I have just discovered how to do a loudness wars mix. (Soft limiting.) Fuck it's horrible.

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Hand-rolling an Oracle JDK 6 deb with java-package.

2012-01-06T12:01:12Z

After the previous attempt, it occurred to me to ask debian-java. eagle noted the existence of the ancient java-package. This is what Debian used to use to package Sun Java before the distributor licenses. It is not what the recently-available packages were built with (they were built with this, which I can't work out what to do with), but it does build a usable Sun Java. Cédric Pineau updated it and I have, with a patch, used it to package Oracle JDK 6u30 for our actual business use. Here's what I did on my work PC (Ubuntu 10.04 amd64).

sudo apt-get install debhelper
Get the zip of Cédric's java-package from github, unzip to a suitable directory. cd there. (Mine was /home/fun/bin/cedricpineau-java-package-b77d4f0.)
Move all files from ./lib/* to the same directory. (I ran the script as-was, not as an installed package on my system.)
Edit make-jpkg and change lib_dir="/usr/share/java-package" to point to where you've unzipped the thing (e.g., /home/fun/bin/cedricpineau-java-package-b77d4f0)
Edit oracle-j2sdk1.6/install with this patch so that even obsolete and horrible stuff is linked in /etc/alternatives the way it was by 6u26. (Note that Matthias Klose, who used to package Sun Java for Debian and Ubuntu, considers parts of this patch an abomination unto Nuggan.)
Download the self-extracting JDK bin file from Oracle. (I put it in /home/fun/Downloads/jdk-6u30-linux-x64.bin.)
./make-jpkg /home/fun/Downloads/jdk-6u30-linux-x64.bin

The resulting file has unmet dependencies — so to install, you need to do:

sudo dpkg -i oracle-j2sdk1.6_1.6.0+update30_amd64.deb sudo apt-get install -f

This is guaranteed in no manner whatsoever. However, we've just deployed it to the template image all our new VMs will be cloned from. I'll keep you updated ...

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Oracle JDK deb: first attempt.

2011-12-30T13:36:18Z

UPDATE: Don't do the below. I've asked on debian-java and already have a better method.

You can't get the Oracle proprietary JDK with Ubuntu any more. This is slightly annoying as our entire platform setup will shortly be Ubuntu with Oracle JDK. This requires us handrolling a deb. (We plan to shift to OpenJDK in due course for our own sanity, but know to test thoroughly.)

I can't just upload and link a deb here for copyright reasons (otherwise this wouldn't have been a problem in the first place). What I can do is give the recipe I used. This makes a Java which I hope is suitable for the server.

Missing: desktop plugin, menu updates, unixodbc dependency, binfmt registration, MIME types, a postinst thing to "activate class data sharing". Is there anything important I've missed for Java on the server? Specifically, for Tomcat.

( Read more... )

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More! More! More!

2011-12-23T11:19:34Z

A petition to privatise Thatcher's state funeral. (No, she's not dead yet.)
Just imagine what would happen if freeman-on-the-land nutters met TV licensing. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine.
Wikimedia blog: Go try the new visual editor prototype.

As a critic, my life's hobby has been tracking beauty to its lair, suffocating it and pinning it to a page.

I'm going with the Mach III. Of course, just as I made that post, arkady had already ordered one with the Christmas groceries ... but the discussion leaves me reasonably confident it's the right answer.

It's been a thankfully unexciting couple of weeks. Christmas is annoying enough, though Freda is WILDLY ENTHUSIASTIC. Work with Freda at home is only feasible in thirty-second bursts. School doesn't start again until January 9th, leaving me fantasising about going to the office ...

The death of Kim Jong-Il is, of course, the first miracle of Christopher Hitchens. Beatification awaits.

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A question for those who shave their faces.

2011-12-18T23:07:12Z

My Gilette Mach III razor just broke. That is, the handle, which I paid all of four quid for in 2002 and have kept stocked with blades ever since. Not just from inertia, I must note — in decades of shaving, this is the best sort of blade I've ever used.

But, the handle's broken and I'm out of blades. So this is a golden opportunity for a small optimisation!

So, tell me: what shaving equipment leaves you feeling unreasonably satisfied?

And is there anyone who's used a Mach III and found something better?

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Landing, stepping, jumping, jump.

2011-12-10T23:37:55Z

Wikipedia: Sylvanus Stall, H. L. Mencken's Sunday school teacher, who released what may be the first audiobook ... about the perils of masturbation.
RationalWiki: Food and Drug Administration, 187 Fake Cancer "Cures" Consumers Should Avoid, Bentham Science Publishers.

Froze ourselves to icicles at Walthamstow Winter Wonderland today, but at least Freda had fun. Raar!

If you're ever suffering an excess of joie de vivre or delusions that there is any goodness or hope in the universe, try cleaning a keyboard instead of throwing it away and buying another. Makes ichneumon wasps look like prima facie evidence of a loving God. I wonder if this is what sent Lovecraft over the edge. And it didn't actually fix the keyboard (I suspect a broken trace). We're eBaying a replacement. Next time I KILL IT WITH FIRE.

"PONPONPON" is a virus, but the writer/producer, Yasutaka Nakata, has a proper band, Capsule, of much higher quality. Sort of Japanese Daft Punk. (With a bit of cheese in there. Well, a lot of cheese on the earlier records, which were hipster indie pop.) "Jumper", "World Of Fantasy". "Jumper" is ridiculously good. I'm quite surprised they're all but unknown outside Japan. This sort of thing should do really well in the UK.

Oh, that relentless shiteating grin. Tim Ferguson on Don't Forget Your Toothbrush in 2000. If you looked closely, every word he was actually saying was "Please kill me, for pity's sake. Bullet to base of skull. Take me out. Fuck."

It's always cheering when a new vendor we send data via SFTP says they only support user/password, not public keys, i.e. a fundamental part of SSH since it was invented. Said vendor also demanded a zip file as they couldn't handle it gzipped. I wish I wondered what operating system they are processing this on.

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Nothing with kings.

2011-12-04T18:38:37Z

Only poor people put the toilet paper under, not over.
And only a NAZI would set A=440Hz.
RationalWiki: Ellagic acid.
Rocknerd: Now this is just silly; Napster off, MAFIAAfire on, computers continue to subsume all comers; What on earth is up with rocknerd.org?

For Wednesday's school strike, arkady and the teen took Freda and two of her friends to the ~~Natural History~~ DINOSAUR museum. Both required strong drink after a day with three five-year-olds of profound pickliness.

Yesterday I went down the pub for the first time in months: the Red Lion in Leytonstone with mirabehn et al. The beer selection is superlative — I had to resort to the trick I use at the Pembury of buying two different half pints at a time. Also quite strong.

This week at work I have been tracing bugs in Mantis. A page calls a function which calls a function which calls a page which calls a function which looks up an enum. Exemplary PHP. Spaghetti would let out a low whistle of appreciation. If only any other bug tracker sucked any less. (I have had to install Bugzilla before. AAAAAAAA)

Associates Glamour Chase: not as awful as most "lost" albums. Eurodisco-wanna and extruded '80s UK dance pop product. No standouts. So, about the same as the released followup, Wild and Lonely.

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Differance and the web of meaning.

2011-11-27T09:12:19Z

Stuff's been occurring to me and I've been just completely failing to note it, so I actually bought a notebook yesterday to build Bayesian postmodernism in. I just filled ten A7 pages with spider scrawl and my hand is aching from more writing than I've done in a burst in years.

Fucking Derrida. Differance and the Web of Meaning very nicely describe the Bayesian network of meaning that is how humans actually operate: every word is defined in other words, with roots in your evolved predispositions; you can't have certainty of meaning, you have to make do with what you've got and can get. Derrida successfully hit upon this purely by feel, with no maths and no evidence I can find that he'd even heard of Bayes.

The Wikipedia article is full of annoying deepities, with the problems the concept brings to light presented as semantic stopsigns you're supposed to go "oh, wow" at rather than actually answerable (and pretty easy to answer, at that) questions, but makes the congruence pretty damn clear if you know the Bayes half.

But this is where I'm enormously glad for Wikipedia, and people who try that hard to explain things actually clearly. Here's the actual chapter. See how far you get before you want to throw your computer against the wall. I managed about a sentence into the third paragraph. I might finish this thing before I die, if I manage to hate myself enough.

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Couldn't escape if I wanted to.

2011-11-20T18:16:59Z

1969 Russian adaptation of Winnie the Pooh. This is appallingly cute.
RationalWiki: The Kolbrin Bible, for all your Planet X/Nibiru-induced 2012 Apocalypse needs. So stupid even arkady winced at the mention of it. In less stupid matters, philosophical intuition.

IKEA DEFEATED. The FUCKING BASTARD FUCKER Malm bed has been assembled yet again and bounce-tested by the four-year-old and the teenager. My back hates me so fucking much. I need to learn more languages so I can swear in them. The Ikea empire was founded on the realisation that suburban middle-aged dads are not in fact protected by the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

This week, Freda has been visiting to play with friends for the very first time. Only a couple of meltdowns, as happen with small children — come to E17 and hear a five-year-old child hiding under the bed and throwing a tantrum in English and Russian! I suppose visitors give us incentive to clean the house occasionally.

Work: It's always great when you hit the sort of bug where you look at it and wonder "how did this ever work?" on a Friday afternoon. This week's case? Something that only worked because hash table ordering was implementation-defined such that the app just happened to work on Solaris SPARC64 Sun Java 6 but broke on Linux AMD64 Sun Java 6. The live service has been left working for the weekend entirely because the spit just happens to be holding the toothpicks together.

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Watching me break's the bloodiest sport .

2011-11-12T12:14:43Z

Comparing prices is such a security issue for Tesco that it wants you booted out of the store. I'm tempted to carry a clipboard on every visit from now on.
Rocknerd: several posts. Random interesting crap welcomed.

arkady's arm is better! So on Friday A's knee went. A&E say it's a cartilage problem (possible meniscal tear) exacerbated by the car incident. Fracture clinic next week, expected recovery time a few weeks. I'm sure we'll get the bed built one day ...

A busy week at work, frantically moving services from failing hardware to the new VM cluster. Metal Machine Music turns out to be the perfect headphone fodder for thinking in a noisy office. Use sparingly.

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White car in Germany.

2011-11-06T15:49:08Z

Down the rabbit hole of stupid again: scalar waves.
W.H. Smith in major publishing coup!

arkady bounced over the bonnet of a car on Tuesday, thankfully having the trained reflex to jump and ending up with nothing more than scrapes and bruises. On the way to fetch Freda, thankfully, not on the way back with her. The incident was captured on traffic camera, the numberplate annoyingly obscured; they're looking for another camera to see if they can nail the dangerous idiot.

Earlier that day, A had secured the Ikea part of doom from Ikea Edmonton, courtesy michaelnolan knowing the part number. Result! Now to wait for the arm to get better ...

At work last week, I successfully moved our internal MySQL from 5.0 on Solaris to 5.1 on Ubuntu without more than thirty seconds' break in service. Just following the manual worked worryingly well and I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Our idiot neighbour didn't burn two streets down last night, despite lighting a bonfire under trees and taunting Father Darwin by giving his kids fireworks to launch from the back yard. Said back yards are completely enclosed by two rows of two-storey terrace houses; it would be extremely difficult for a fire engine to get access for serious quantities of water. "No way! Do you dare me to kick this one?" — one of said little dears. Freda greatly enjoyed watching the official Waltham Forest council office fireworks from her bedroom window.

Xubuntu on the laptop is going quite well. I like this. The key point appears to be to do a fresh install and do not even copy your home folder across except piecemeal — evil appears to lurk in the dot-directories. Unity, the first virus for GNOME.

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Alternatives to the GNOME3/Unity car crashes.

2011-10-31T14:42:33Z

Now using Xubuntu 11.10 (Xfce 4.8). Installing GNOME apps as I need them, as long as they don't pull in large chunks of GNOME. Nautilus 3.2 is way more stable in Xfce than 2.32 was in Unityfied GNOME2.

It's noticeably more responsive on my aging Mini 9. There appears to be a blissful absence of background services sopping up CPU. Xfce mostly just stays out my way.

I had to install gvfs-backends. I installed Nautilus as my file manager, which also appears much more stable in Xfce. Totem instead of Parole. (Yeah, if there's one thing free software needs, it's another media player with a nonsequitur name.) There are occasional jarring lacks: the absence of any clear way to edit the menus (the wiki instructions don't actually work, nor lxmed); having to go command-line to make capslock a control key.

The forum is quite good. Even if the actual answer to questions is often "that's not implemented, feel free to write it."

The project is tiny and lacking in developers; if the devs are smart, they can take advantage of the GNOME3/Unity car crashes to boost their numbers of power users who are actually capable of fixing problems — when Linux kernel developers start posting rants about how they can't do actual work in GNOME3/Unity, that's a powerful untapped userbase. Perhaps an easy hacks list like the one for LibreOffice?

Anyone else trying Xfce or LXDE or whatever? What papercuts have you hit?

(also posted to Facebook and G+)

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I love technology-gy-gy-gy-gy.

2011-10-23T12:01:50Z

I have no idea how — this techno-stuff is haaard — but somehow a pile of phone numbers I actually need have been deleted from my phone, and my GMail contacts have appeared.

So if you think I'm supposed to have your phone number, please text it to me with who you are, 'cos my presumption at present is that I don't. +44 7733 223 584, that's the ticket. (Yes, the world knows my phone number.) Or leave a comment here, they're all screened.

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Stand-up improv notes to self.

2011-10-18T08:51:15Z

Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.

I forgot to note that arkady has a new hobby: stage crew. If you thought that was A you saw stage left at VNV Nation last Sunday, you were quite correct.

I am in bed ill, semi-coherent, occasionally delirious and very bored. Listening to lots of music, though headphones get annoying in very short order and I wish I knew where the shitty speakers were. All my old Psychophile CDs and live tracks — they were really quite good, weren't they. HTRK, who I will always call "Hatrack": slow dubby bass and guitar screeching. Old Fall and Church. Malcolm Mclaren Duck Rock, which stands up surprisingly well. The latter was after reading Ian Macleay's biography of him, which is awful. Terrible writing, strained allusions, comparing everything to the year 2010, lots of apparently new and interesting information but with no cites. Avoid.

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No daddy, there's no bum-eating dinosaurs, they all died.

2011-10-14T19:41:06Z

Don't Be Evil, Just Racist. Still.

Learning how to handroll debs could ruin your life. For example, you could become someone who knows how to handroll debs.

(We're having a hosting refresh at work, moving from Solaris boxes to Ubuntu VMs. Moving all services is like duplicating a lifesize model Titanic made of toothpicks, using different toothpicks. In place.)

I have joined joindiaspora.~~org~~com, which is at least more central than the diasp.org debacle last year. It's still not clear if thys thynge ys onne.

Pumping records through the phone. Listening to Robert Forster The Evangelist. You can hear his voice getting old. Compare to Johnny Cash American IV the day before. Well, not that old. Curve's Radio Sessions (meaning Peel sessions) is the most listenable Curve album ever. Because it's the only one without a FUCKING LOUDNESS WARS MIX. Fucksake. Hanky Panky by The The is a ridiculously underappreciated album; amazingly good. If only it had had a better sleeve and title.

"Naughty girls get put in a bin! A big brown bin! Full of poo!" I suddenly realise I have just introduced my 4yo to the concept of Hell.

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A million angels.

2011-10-03T22:01:24Z

The last "Yo Dawg."
Saying the rich should pay taxes is just like saying the government should force hot women to put out more. Well done, libertarians.

Last week, Freda and mummy made tiny cupcakes, and Freda and daddy iced them!

( cake! )

On Saturday, the new fountain near the Co-op was on. It doesn't just spurt water continuously — it randomly goes on and off at varying strengths. This is just how to lure kids in to play in it on a hot summer's day in October, e.g., Freda, who got soaked.

( water! )

arkady has been sick in bed for the past week. We have a house inspection Wednesday morning. It's been a little wearying, yes.

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Fait accompli.

2011-09-23T21:16:59Z

You misunderstand. Our goal is to make computers easier to use, not to make them more useful.

The dear little kitten has been sending £20 notes flying off into the sunset again. However, two days at the vet on a drip and aerial bombardment with antibiotics has made him much happier and healthier.

They're still finishing building Freda's school. So next week, she's off on four daytrips in a row: London Zoo, Woburn Safari Park, an arts and crafts day at the other school building and the Science Museum. I expect her to sleep well every night.

Work is busy. We had a complete car crash of a deployment on Monday, so we've spent the week fixing things. And just happened to finally implement some severely post-mature optimisations. May I heartily endorse Siege, which is just the thing for trying to break a website as absolutely hard as possible (and cheers to ideological_cuddle for the tipoff).

And now for HITLER'S COCK:

Q. What's fascist and phallocentric and knocks on the window?
A. HITLER'S COCK in a microwave.
Q. What did HITLER'S COCK do when it lost THE GAME?
A. Took its ball and went home.

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Golden boy.

2011-09-17T15:35:05Z

Fresh from their resounding success^{[citation needed]} with the Conservapedia Bible Project ... the Conservative Dictionary Project!
I am keeping vast swathes of Google+ whining off here. But here's a summary.

Freda has started school! So far it's exhausting her. Good. Now I deeply understand parental dread of the holidays.

I have made the soundtrack for something to amuse Freda and annoy you. Forward it to your friends! Waiting on arkadyrose to draw an 8-bit parasaurolophus farting rainbows.

More Wikipedia obscurities: Manufactured Romance, Berlin Blondes. Manufactured Romance are actually surprisingly good pop-punk.

In an amazing occurrence, I plan to leave the house tonight and go to a party. See you there, perhaps.

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Red Drag Diva

Never give up. Party, party.

*pint*age, Monday 20th February 6pm, Red Lion E11.

Zombies! Zombies!

King of Kalifornia.

Dancing makes me seasick.

Current reading.

Astral projectionist threat.

Maybe bong hits will fix my build.xml.

Hand-rolling an Oracle JDK 6 deb with java-package.

Oracle JDK deb: first attempt.

More! More! More!

A question for those who shave their faces.

Landing, stepping, jumping, jump.

Nothing with kings.

Differance and the web of meaning.

Couldn't escape if I wanted to.

Watching me break's the bloodiest sport .

White car in Germany.

Alternatives to the GNOME3/Unity car crashes.

I love technology-gy-gy-gy-gy.

Stand-up improv notes to self.

No daddy, there's *no* bum-eating dinosaurs, they all *died*.

A million angels.

Fait accompli.

Golden boy.

pintage, Monday 20th February 6pm, Red Lion E11.

No daddy, there's no bum-eating dinosaurs, they all died.