would you please send me a kill switch for my give-a-shitter? I need that to survive work without going mad and committing mega-idioticide... Oh, and a set of human-rated gills, please, too: to survive the cruddy weather this "summer.
would you please send me a kill switch for my give-a-shitter? I need that to survive work without going mad and committing mega-idioticide... Oh, and a set of human-rated gills, please, too: to survive the cruddy weather this "summer.
Can you think of something more ridiculous than this? Imagine:
a cyclist riding up to a traffic light, not getting out of
his clipless pedals in time and falling over like a drunk chicken.
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i hate having neighbours close by, or sharing a wall. more specifically, i hate my neighbours except for A+M+M, but the others more than make up for those good people.
i hate the goddamn noisy brats - there's a difference between 'happy kids' and 'loud tantrum-throwing fucks', and i don't mind the former at all.
the rest, they can all die as far as i'm concerned, and soon, please.
Conny has left the building. Still in transit: yesterday BNE-AKL, a few hours in Auckland, then AKL-LAX and many boring hours to be whiled away in Los Angeles. Now she's close to boarding her last flight, LAX-PHL, and should arrive back home in Philadelphia tomorrow morning local time.
...
And it's pretty empty in this here house, without her around.
Tokyo's oldest living man was actually more like the oldest undiscovered modern-age mummy: dead for about 30 years.
Now this couldn't happen to me: first this climate is too humid for meat staying fresh long (and my ceiling fans wouldn't suffice for making me into biltong), and furthermore my money would run out, my house would go back to the bank (but that's only for a few more years) and so the vultures would find me. Sky burial by bank clerk, anyone?
Sort-of bad: there aren't many other scenarios for me being discovered.
Today, after reading up on couchdb I decided to take a break from vapour-ware and high-flying ideas and Do Something Practical, like finally take apart my whipper snipper to figure out why it doesn't start (different kinds of vapours are involved, this being a cheap two-stroke FPOS).
Enthusiastic tool application quickly demonstrated one big issue with any metal FPOS (remember, I said cheap): very rough edges. Slipping and sliding the back of your finger along such edges is highly counter-indicated.
Well, there must have been a caterpillar lurking beneath the skin on my index finger, because this not-so-deep cut was dribbling red juice beyond what I'd have expected; and the motor oil, petrol and other assorted grease-suspended gunk on my hands didn't exactly make my journey to the bathroom any cleaner.
But the icing on the cake came later: I did, of course, finish the disassembly after wrapping up my finger - only to find out that the whipper snipper engine is beyond salvation. Just about zero compression, most rubber/plastic parts rotten. A new one will likely cost less than the replacement parts, never mind the time and effort for a potential repair.
WAAAAAAH!
...of having extremely few friends, no girlfriend (and no hope of finding one),
absolutely zero social life and of having an apparently abrasive personality?
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...first, I'd get a muzzle for the damn howler monkey neighbours' dog. Not because of the barking, but because of the dog being one of the root causes for the everlasting bloody aggravation: see, he's got some Doberman in the mix, and his owners are total assholes, so he's decent-sized, frisky and badly educated. That makes him pinch the damn kids when they yell and scream too much, eliciting more screaming and howling, which generates more pinching and screaming and tantrums...Oh Joy.
Next, I'd cut all the howler monkeys' vocal cords, and thus earn the everlasting gratitude from the other neighbours around - who are all fairly quiet denizens.
And finally, I'd shoot all the monkey neighbours for good measure - 'it's the only way to be sure'.
No, I'm not angry, not at all. Why do you think so?
From the bottom of my heart I wish the plague and a quick, quiet death on these neighbours.
The first day of the trimester at work, and I've got an 0800 lecture... for the one (inherited) subject I dislike teaching the most. Bah. And the projector in the room is squirrely. Aaaaaargh! And the room is generallylousy. Double-bah. And my brain is fogged up enough so that I'm quite sure I'm making more of a hash of the subject material than necessary. Sorry dear students! My best efforts at 0800 today weren't really quite good enough.
What a lovely way to begin the week!
drumroll
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Two days ago was the eigth anniversary of my arrival in Australia. Sometimes that feels like yesterday, sometimes more like three lives ago.
Today is also the sixth anniversary of moving into this house. For lots of Australians six years in one place is three lives ago; many deal with houses like crab shells: too small, ugly, whatever? then let's molt^Wmove and forget the old carcass. The housing industry obliges by mainly offering shoddily built disposables. sigh.
To round out a fairly crappy weekend, this afternoon my washing machine decided to eat its drive belt - of course while spinning at full speed, so as to maximize the damage. Picture me sitting peacefully in the toilet (which is adjacent to the laundry), bang and lotsa thumping and crashing and the lights are out.
Suppose I'm sorta lucky, the wiring loom is ripped apart but not totally wrecked, and the motor bearings seem to have survived their chewing exercise without damage.
I'm not "normal" - and I like it that way!
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...seeing seven round ice lumps floating tightly packed in your drink glass makes you pick up pencil and paper to determine if this tight packing is possible only when all balls have the same radius.
(Yes it is. Trigonometry is fun.)
You know that you live in a Banana...well, non-Republic if the exchange rates between your lifeblood and real money looks like this:
Last Thursday Conny, Rob and I went for a day trip to Nth Stradbroke island, with a bit of fun (of all kinds) in the preceding afternoon.
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We're back, connected once again: some techie must have been in the neighbourhood saturday night, because Saturday 2138 line-sync suddenly reappeared, and today I finished setting up the remaining bits (e.g. inbound POTS-to-VOIP etc.) and verified that Internode didn't make a mess of their part of the service conversion.
Looks all mostly good, except line attenuation has jumped up 10dB (without the previously required inline filter), which makes little sense, and sits now at 50dB downstream. This sucks as it severly limits the achievable sync speeds and makes things a tad more brittle. Ticket open, we'll see.
When Conny went to brush her teeth tonight before bedtime, I suddenly got a fairly urgent/distressed Request for Assistance: she stood mesmerized at the bathroom door, and a meter from her sat an (equally mesmerized) huntsman spider of less that minimal size (maybe 10x10cm with the legs). She strongly dislikes spiders.
And so do I. Usually, smaller specimens I don't bother; they eat bugs and thus are not exactly welcome but tolerated household members (if they stay hidden and out of the geckos' way). But this one was too large for my liking, so it got the bucket-on-top-and-then-poison-inside treatment (huntsmen are very fast). Sorry fella!
Conny asked for this note to any future spider visitors to be posted on the web (maybe spiders use google? dunno): Small and tiny spiders tolerated, large ones very unwelcome. May be dealt with harshly!
Oi, get your minds out of the gutter!
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Yesterday was lots of fun.
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Conny has pretty much settled in, but my brain is close to pastel overload already.
I've had to move just about all my stuff from her room so that she can make it into her den. She brought three fat and one slim suitcases full of things, and her room is unrecognizable.
The only remainder of my things are my Tektronix scope, the HP function generator and a bench vise on the desk.
Cognitive dissonance: the shelf above the TEK and the HP now contains mainly pink boxes, makeup, dolls and other girly gear (instead of soldering station, multimeters, charger, bench PSU and other tools).
School seems to be fine and fun; she has gotten lost (slightly) between home and there twice so far.
Whenever I am optimistic and not expecting trouble, this state of oblivion
usually gets cut short, badly, when it rains problems.
On the other hand, if I expect bad things and worry, a lot less trouble
finds its way to me. This sucks.
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Juhuuuuh! Heute hat die Post endlich mein Weihnachtsgeschenk aus Ö vorbei gebracht: Alle 19 Kottan-Folgen, auf 8 DVDs.
Ah, Nostalgie pur. Böse Wiener Gfrasta. Inspektor gibt's kan. 70er Jahre Schädelweh-Tapeten. Danzer-Gstanzln. Ambros. Wunderbar.
Danke, liebe Frau Mutter!
Next Wednesday my daughter Cornelia is arriving in Oz, to spend a fun and action-packed year 2008 with me. Well, let's hope the action is of the Good Type...either way, there goes my independence.
In other non-news the weather still sucks completely, it's been so wet and humid over the last weeks that some of my leather gear (bike suit and mountain boots; what did YOU think?) started to get mouldy on the surface. This sucks.
Work sucks, too, with disorganized chaos worse than usual, even factoring in that it's the first week of the semester. But numbers are up, I have about 13 for the networking subject and about 7 for the Silly Subject. What I don't have is a correct timetable, exact enrolment figures, and fun. What I also won't have in two weeks' time is a clueful unix-savvy counterpart in the central it services dept, because that fellow is throwing in the towel.
Not that I can fault him at all; the management and marketing hordes have grown like mushrooms in the wet, while we peons are being kept like mushrooms.
Apropos mushrooms, it's been wet enough for quite some mushrooms to grow in my backyard. Some look very similar to small Parasol but I won't try them.
Having two credit cards is fine. Paying them off in total every month is even better. Using them for big payments every now and then is convenient. But having done just that and transferring the (large) amount you owe on one to the other account hurts.
The hassle to get your money back out of the overpaid account is...priceless.
Toasting bread conducts more than 30mA.
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...bank, that is. I just bought this mobile contraption. Should get it around Wednesday. Test-driving it was fine except for the noncooling aircon which will be fixed before I get the car.
A bit over a week ago I mentioned that my washing machine has decided to die - well, to forget how to spin-dry, which amounts to the same. The off-balance detection was stuffed: it would start the motor in high-speed mode but switch off after <1s, repeat 3x, give up and hand me soaking clothes. (Same behaviour with an empty tub.)
The two-year warranty ran out a year ago (no surprise here). So I dismantled the machine and checked sundry other things (like inspecting/reseating the motor brushes) but couldn't find any mercury switch or other obvious means of detecting a bouncing tub. Accordingly, I couldn't fix it directly.
I have no precise idea how they detect an out-of-balance tub, except that the motor has a hall-effect rpm sensor which I think could work (assuming that the tub slows down and speeds up asymmetrically if it's wobbling). Net result of X hours of ripping apart, tracing wires and so on: all inspectables are fine but it still won't work. The only remaining part was the part-mechanical-part-electronic control board, and these things usually aren't cheap.
After a long search I figured out the proper part number (the fact that the machine is a rebadged Electrolux didn't make that search any easier), and would have been able to buy it online at various overseas retailers...for about $150-200..
Luckily ebay came to the rescue: somebody sold one as new-old-stock locally for $50. Add $26 for express postage, 10min for installation and I have a washing washer again. Very nice.