| Well there you go... |
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| 08:35pm 07/12/2009 |
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I never knew that AML is actually CPL from PrimeOS.
Too bad it's a bit late to seek jobs working on Prime mini computers. |
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| 11:30pm 02/12/2009 |
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Never in all my years doing science did I expect myself to be writing the job application I am writing now. Nor would have I expected it to be such a comfortable fit. Some nice words of advice from T and K should see tomorrow night's burst of effort less frenzied than it might have been. The more I write, the more I feel that despite ho good my current employer has been, this is a good opportunity to move onwards to. |
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| The Racist |
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| 06:52pm 30/11/2009 |
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mood:  shocked music: Lily Allen - F**k You
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So last night I encountered a Racist via web forum. Basically idle social chat, though there was very little of that. Actually none at all. I say "Racist" and not "racist". Far from having poorly thought out stereotypes, Racism was the core about this person's being. I should have guessed from the profile that said "Do not chat if you are Indian or Asian", but the combined depth and shallowness just plain astounded me and I was quite literally lost for words. I'd never expected to meet anyone like this. Give me a few suburbs full of "people" like this and I will revive the Nazi party (lucky these people are uncritical in their voting and will vote for a plasma TV bonus any day).
Forget the NT intervention, the western suburbs of Sydney are equally mired in antiquated tribal lore that is damaging our children. |
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| B3ta |
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| 11:25pm 21/11/2009 |
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| 07:10pm 19/11/2009 |
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After a week battling entropy and a sudden heat wave and dust (more precious top soil being blown out to see), there's nothing like sitting at home with a pint of home made cider.
Have been reading Shantaram, and am really enjoying it. However I made a mistake of reading the author's bio and have less sympathy. Anyone hanging out with bikie gangs and the BLF can expect trouble.
Had a quality conversation with Katie Chicken this morning, she was griping about Amy Chicken brooding on a clutch of eggs they'd laid under the grape vine.
Beef strog bubbling away on the stove, to be accompanied with Italian bread.
Should be able to head out to a barn raising this weekend. |
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| Chicken Autopsy |
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| 07:11pm 10/11/2009 |
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MissG did some exploratory incisions on Patricia Chicken and the nerves look OK. There were tumours so it appears she had cancer, which is not uncommon in chooks. So the good news is that this suggests Amy and Katie have nothing to fear. |
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| Patricia Chicken RIP |
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| 09:19pm 08/11/2009 |
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I found Patricia Chicken dead under the palm tree this afternoon, she'd not been dead very long.
If you recall previous posts, she'd been responding well to cortisone shots for a lame leg.
Unfortunately, this is potentially indicative of Marek's Disease as cortisone can treat the symptoms. If this is indeed the case, it's almost certain that Amy and Katie have it too. We won't be getting any more birds until we get a biopsy on Patrica's lame leg (pull some nerve cells and see if they are inflamed). ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) missg discovered this while Googling pigeon biology of all things.
As it's a fowl-to-fowl only disease, it must have come in one of the birds. Potentially as far back as Nina, but I'm inclined to think that was just injury as it healed up to a stable state. My guess is that Patricia had it when be bought her.
Marek's disease isn't vaccinated against as for some reason, you can only buy it in batches of 1,000. Probably because it's a live vaccine.
Sigh. |
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| Melbourne |
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| 10:42pm 01/11/2009 |
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Yes, we were in Melbourne on the weekend. It was a rapid, quick trip and we tried catching up with a couple of people, but nearly all weekend was spent with my sister and my new niece "N" (who on her first birthday is now quite alert and engaging).
- Day trip to Ikea so N could eat meatballs and we bought doona covers and $1 hotdogs
- Dinner with my cousin and her hubby hot on the heels of their Fiji wedding
- Wandering around St Kilda and seeing the beach in warm, sunny weather for a change
- MissG rode her first ever roller coaster
- Dinner at George's restaurant at the Press Club
- Cheap Akubra hats all 'round from a sale
- Sitting out the hot part of the day in a proper pub with a proper pint of Bulmers
- Looking at my sister's new flat
- Haloween party at my sister's old block of flats
- Finding that the tram line from St Kilda to the rest of Melbourne was being torn up and spending the day in Acland St
- Wandering around the St Kilda community garden
The veggie garden is is a better state than I'd hoped for, thanks to S giving the plants a bit of water. I just dusted them to protect against being eaten. We also found where at least on of the chooks has been hiding her eggs, |
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| Busy weekend |
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| 10:10pm 25/10/2009 |
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Back from FOSS4G 2009, which was an amazing conference. Do check out Paul Ramsey's keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_a28vBtBk
Friday's conference was as good as the other days, but I was too lazy to post random notes to LJ as a reminder. Someone I have worked with gave a great talk on how they set up relief mapping in Aceh after the tsunami. GEEK ALERT: A nice talk on rebuilding OGC OWS using ebRIM. A great series of talks on setting up spatial BI. A *really* clever approach to deliver proprietary cartographic tile cache renders through a FOSS server. Performance and availability management of WMS/WFS services.
After a nice lazy morning on Saturday we put another trailer load of compost into the veggie garden and planted out a range of tomatoes, pumpkin, cucumber, leek and rocket lettuce. It was nice to soak it in then sit back and relax and just enjoy being at home.
Later that night we did a combination of meeting distant relatives who are visiting .au and looked up our (quite unique) name from the phone book, mum's birthday and then a late night party.
On the way home at OMG o'clock I managed to collect a kangaroo at quite a high speed (probably around 70 km/h as I ws tavelling at 80 and managed to slow down at least some amount before we hit). I do a *lot* of bush kilometres and have a pretty low 'roo strike rate consdering. It is lucky that MissG's little Subaru has a bullbar as I got a first hand demonstration of the dynamics instead of a wrecked car. We only flat spotted a tyre with my sudden stop and we just lost one headlight glass from the 'roos tail slipping in behind the bar. Lucky. The roo was stunned for a bit but sodded off into the bush before we were able to do much more than confirm no legs were broken. Without the bar, the roo would have ended up through the windscreen.
Today I completed the veggie garden by cleaning things up a little and re-installing the drip irrigation system. We had S&S over for tea in the garden, and then I went and caught up with yasutani before taking mum to a Finnish film for her birthday present.
Before the film I bought a copy of "Shantaram" as I've been meaning to read it for a number of years now and am tired of waiting for it to show up 2nd hand (oh oh, *another* 900+ page epic!). I received a free book as a bonus. Weirdly, it is "Grug learns to read", not sure how this was thought to be a suitable bonus book.
Busy but enjoyable and relaxing. |
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| FOSS4G - Thursday |
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| 11:48am 22/10/2009 |
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Raul Vera from Google on a subtle but profound shift in spatial paradigm, predicting that in mid 2011 the majority of location searches will be from mobile devices and this requires a different point of thought ("I'm lost!" is actually a very rare use case). GeoAPIs in HTML5 and how this is the only truly portable mobile API. The value of "push on green" (prod release every 30 minutes).
Andy Pitman from IPCC talking about global warming and speculating on how one my utilise the FOSS community knowledge to tame 1m lines of FORTRAN code. Scary in every respect.
Tim Schaub OpenLayers development history and intended directions. Till Adams on how OpenLayers has pretty well killed off all the other FOSS mapping APIs except for MapFish. Most developers are now contributing to OpenLayers (just as well it look pretty shiny).
Using MapTiler to generate Google Maps style tiles for OpenLayers, Google Maps and KML. Using Amazon EC2 and S3 & Gogle's MapReduce to parallise tile rendering into sane timelines. Being used to put heaps of historic maps online.
Paul Ramsey gave a "State of PostGIS" presentation. Nice to have warm fuzzy feelings for being an early beta user. ArcSDE is not a spatial DB, it's just middleware. MySQL spatial is not complete and not likely to be complete any time soon. Scalability is measured in CPU cycles per dollar. v1.4 & v1.5 introduces nifty stuff like prepared geometries, cascaded unions and geographies as a non-hackish globe. Some nice examples of how faked globe in 2D geometries leads to ugly, ugly, ugly edge conditions (as implemented by major proprietary vendors).
A somewhat ordinary presentation by Ingres. "Hey! Me too!!". Followed by a nice extended rant about fixing Oracle Spatial.
An afternoon workshop implementing application schemas in Geoserver WFS services. Brain go pop though I understand it now. |
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| FOSS4G - Wednesday so far |
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| 03:01pm 21/10/2009 |
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Some great keynote presentations. Paul Ramsey's on the ecology of FOSS was really good, I'll try get the video.
Some Japanese and Chinese developers are actually implementing an idea I had a while back on creating street data automatically from GPS data, so I was able to give some of my ideas.
A session about an FDO translator that I am undecided about the longer term necessity of.
A couple of good sessions on using Amazon Web Services and Google Apps to create massively scalable GIS applications.
A guy from Oakridge National labs who created his own portable emergency management GIS.
Currently looking at a spatial collaborative environment from NZ as Schuley Erle's session has been canceled. :o(
Not too sure what sessions I'll attend later this afternoon. |
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| 07:27pm 19/10/2009 |
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A trailer load (1/4 of a cubic metre) of compost has only had a marginal impact on the veggie garden. So I mowed the lawn and then sat in the sun with the chooks and had a pint of home brew cider as the sun went down. |
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| Chicken Melodrama |
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| 02:45pm 17/10/2009 |
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Two of the chooks were looking a little daggy and lethargic, usually a sign that they've got mutes. Not unusual this time of year given the humidity. Anyway, catching of chickens went as it usually does until it was Amy's turn. One I had grabbed her tail she started flapping around like a crazy chicken, sending flower pots, insect powder, chicken food and all sort of stuff flying as she spun around and flapped as I reeled her in and got her under control. Now they are all dusted and sitting down on the lawn for a snooze after filling up on spilled chook food. Patricia is still small, but has remained on her feet and seems to be more active.
It's been a nice day and I'm still too sick to do much, so I'm doing domestic stuff like laundry and replacing faulty power points. |
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| Riddle me this |
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| 10:14pm 12/10/2009 |
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Why is there so much outrage over a juvenile skit when we are more than happy to support equally demeaning portrayals of other parts of our society?
For example, drag queens. It has all the same hallmarks; a stereotypical, shallow & demeaning portrayal of people in our society. Or any advertising on TV that makes out anyone not from here as like something from Acropolis Now. Seems two faced to me.
Heaven forbid you attempt to portray anything out of your rigidly defined social caste. Update: There's some more interesting commentary coming through the Blog-o-Sphere that is articulating how and why various people found this particular sketch abhorrent. In regards to this statement, it's more about the intent/nature of the portrayal than the attempted portrayal itself though there's a strong thread that the Minstrel character is not acceptable in any circumstance. As for the depth of feeling, maybe it's been kind of like having that bigoted aunt or uncle turn up to your party and having all your cool friends realise that you are somehow related to this disturbingly clueless person.
Note: I haven't seen the skit and I don't plan to. Anyone with half a brain knows Hey Hey's trade was juvenile puerile trash. Do what I do and do not watch commercial TV, cut off their oxygen.
We'll never get anywhere dressing up shallow token platitudes and indignant outrage as social progress. I suppose this is how lynch mobs work. Update: I've gained a lot more from the commentary than the "me too!" outrage.
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| Flu |
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| 07:19am 12/10/2009 |
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Apparently two days of vigorous hikes through really rough terrain interspersed with sleeping in the open on a damp riverbank is not how one manages a chesty flu. At least my head no-longer feels like it's been inflated to twice its normal size. A bit of a pest really as I'd taken all last week off work on rec leave and now am feeling that I'd be a health hazard if I went in today.
I cannot recommend the Victorian High Country enough, it's a pretty damn special place. I should write more about my trip, but will need to ponder some. |
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| The mechanically inclined |
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| 11:43pm 06/10/2009 |
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A rather busy week off work.
On Saturday I took some time to get to a bona fide Goth club for once in a while and had one of those good nights where you end up having really good conversations with people you don't know really well or at all. There was also a live band who was pretty good and they'd managed to rustle up a good crowd.
Close on the heels of two days fishing with anath_x whose boat is exhibiting reassuring signs of becoming more, not less reliable. Sunday was a bit of excitement (electrical gremlins, bad weather, sand banks and hidden trees), but Monday was an idyllic float on the lake except for about 30 minutes moored in the lee side of a large cliff, watching a thunder storm slide past harmlessly overhead. My own boat is nicely set up now and a pleasure to use.
Today we did a snatch & run trip to Sydney for something I'll talk about later. ;-p
Off to Victoria tomorrow, but I suspect the road closures might lead to some last minute re-arrangements of the itinerary. |
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| Train of thought |
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| 11:24pm 30/09/2009 |
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music: The Clouds - Thunderhead
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This really is the most potent home made cider. tastes great. Pint and a half and I'm all wobbly.
Also have some bread in the bread maker. Except I'm all stuffed with drumettes and the rest of the Greek salad.
Les Stroud's "Survivor" is an excellent TV series. If the shops had it for sale, I'd buy it.
I am now the proud owner of a fish finder. Not a Troll-Matic though (Slashdot will need to wait).
My work is populated with retards.
I've caught up with most people I care to catch up with (or at least managed to call them).
Was pleasantly surprised to find adeadkitty with her pony on the front lawn.
The Clouds would have made a cool surf guitar band. |
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| Inbox overload |
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| 10:49pm 27/09/2009 |
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Be with you in a bit. My inbox (electronic and real life) is overflowing with people who just want a few seconds of my time. Trouble is that they all add up to somewhat more than all my "free" time. Hopefully I'll get a quiet night or two this week to rest and sort through the backlog.
It's also times like this you can appreciate Facebook as a relentless tide of banal trivia masquerading as some sort of social PING/ACK. Bleargh.
At least here you generally see considered thoughts, not just a status update about what I had on my toast.
I spent last night with Marliyn Monroe. Well, a fat dude dressed like her and singing karaoke. It was a somewhat odd but immensely entertaining weekend where I got to be a passenger for a bit and not actually have to do anything. |
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| Avast! |
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| 09:26pm 20/09/2009 |
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Off to Burrinjuck again today with gunpowder, all the boat stuff was in order so it was a much earlier start and the weather was much finer too. In fact the weather was perfect, or at least it was until a dark thunderhead rose up in the west and rolled on over in our direction. We saw a huge bank of rain rolling in. A. made a dash for it, I throttled back and pulled the foul weather gear out. Just as well, it was like being shot peened by thousands of high velocity marbles along with a wall of water. Without a windscreen I just pulled my hood down tight over my hat and pressed my sunnies into service as a windscreen.
Then just as quick as it came, it went. Within about half an hour the sun was out again so we tied up at some submerged trees and tried to catch some of the fish that the storm had stirred into action & enjoyed the lat of the daylight.
A's boat also has a mind of its own, which made for a few entertaining moments through the day, like wrapping around a tree Maypole style. |
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