July 13, 2003
What Would You Do If
If you were lost in another world, with only a Olympic-class sharp-shooter, an Oscar-winning actress, the High Priestess of the Elves, and an M1 tank possessed by the ghost of a cat for company - and you ran out of toilet paper?
Hopefully you'd do better than Those Who Hunt Elves (season two, episode two). Mind you, one of those pichikatos could come in handy in case of an emergency.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:51 PM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
How Was Your Weekend?
Let's see. Had an early lunch Saturday - yum cha with family and friends. My nephew Lionel was there, and after lunch we went shopping for a while. He didn't want to stay in the stroller, so I picked him up and carried him for a bit. When I tried to trade him off, he wasn't having any. Don't wanna be carried by Uncle Kay or Auntie Dee! Don't wanna be carried by daddy! Wanna be carried by Pixy! Sorry, Pixy's arm seems to be coming off. What has mummy been feeding you, lead pancakes?
There was a lovely table at Bay Swiss - at about twelve feet by four, it was even bigger than my existing dining table (which is about seven feet by three, but extends to ten feet). If I had the money (a snip at four grand!) and had the room (well, it could go on the balcony...) and had any idea how to get it home, I would have bought it. Zero out of three. Too bad. I did buy some t-shirts at Kathmandu, which is a camping/hiking/mountain-climbing goods store. I've been in there at least a dozen times, and I've bought a grand total of... Nine t-shirts. Hey, they're good shirts! Then off to cousin Jay's for chocolate cake and hot chocolate and ice cream and accidentally breaking his coffee table. That wasn't Pixy, Pixy didn't do that! This evoked the traditional family response whenever something gets broken: bring out all sorts of tools and glues and assorted hardware and fix it better than new on the spot. I'm told things don't work this way in some families, which must be very strange. Then back home, getting a lift in cousin Elle's new car ("Just drop me at the station." "I could give you a lift! I'm happy to give you a lift! In my new car! Isn't it a cute car!") which is a Honda Jazz. It has magic folding seats, shiny shiny paintwork, and the quietest cabin I've ever been in in a small car. Is the engine actually running? Must be, we're still moving. Home now, but I seem to be out of food. Off to the supermarket, but on my way up the hill (WARNING: RANT AHEAD) I spot a leaflet stuck to a telegraph pole. It reads "SMASH MIDDLE EAST TERRORISM". Well, I'm all for that. "BOMB ISRAEL NOW". Right. That's coming down. It was glued on pretty well, so I was reduced to tearing it into illegible strips. At the next pole, some other right-thinking person had already started in on the leaflet, so I finished the job. And so on until I reached the supermarket. To the backwards-evolved febrile pus-monkeys who stuck these things up: Your little hate-papers are gone now, suckers. And may you get run over by a speeding garbage truck before your next birthday. (RANT ENDS) Anyway, get to the supermarket (Did I mention that my idiot local council has a policy against providing public litter bins? They claim it increases littering. Which means I had to carry those damned leaflets with me until I found a bin at the supermarket.) and buy some food. (They didn't have Solomon's Matzo, only Sniders, and they don't carry Blue Diamond Smokehouse Almonds any more. Grr.) Eighty dollars? How did that come to eighty dollars? Is anyone else just the slightest bit suspicious about the official inflation figures? I wonder just what they include in their numbers; if they are including anything electronic then that will be off-setting price increases on groceries and other items. I lug my goodies back down the hill, and find that there's no room at the inn for my frozen dinners. Oh no! It seems that the freezer door was left ajar a couple of weeks back (I think the Sticky Date Pudding held it open), and it quickly frosted up to the point where even after I moved things around the door wouldn't close properly. Another week, and my freezer compartment looks like a scene from The Day the Earth Froze. There weren't any saber-toothed squirrels in there, so it couldn't have been Ice Age. There's so much ice that my roast chicken rolls and my beef in red wine sauce with unnamed pasta won't fit. This is a disaster! So, I roll up my sleeves (well, I didn't, though it might have gone better if I had), turn off the fridge, and get to work. About an hour later the massive ice shelf clinging to the ceiling of the freezer compartment finally gives up the fight and is ceremonially dumped in the sink. Then I wipe things down and stow away my dinners. Upstairs now, because it's time for work. (Half-past seven on Saturday night. Sigh.) I have some database updates to apply, and this means shutting down the entire system, which is hard to do while people are using it. This turns out not to take too long; what was once an all-night job is done in an hour thanks to the miracle of being able to fit your entire database into memory. Bless you, Gordon Moore. Then I relaxed for a while and read The Woad to Wuin, which is the sequel to Sir Apropos of Nothing. Or a couple of hundred pages of it, at least. I found myself stopping, not particularly interested in going further. The problem is, I think, that the book is just mean-spirited; it's in the first person, and our hero is a weasel. In the first book he was a much put-upon weasel and it worked; this time around he has no real problems but complains twice as much. No thanks. I have many books and a limited amount of time, so this one gets the heave-ho. Dinner time. Odd, this frozen roast chicken roll isn't very frozen. Odd, the fridge isn't making any sound at all. Maybe it would work a little better if I turned it back on... Sleep. Sunday. I've been meaning to get my hair cut for about, oh, for about the last four months. Today is the day! Off I go... wait, more sleep? Okay. Head into the city to get my hair cut and maybe do a little shopping. (Another beautiful winter's day in Sydney. Blue sky, sunshine, all of that. Ho hum.) There's a fifteen minute wait at the hairdresser so I wander into HMV and have a look around. Find a Weird Al album I didn't have and a best-of collection of the Hoodoo Gurus. Click-click... Oh, I have to take them to the counter, right. Get my hair cut. I look human again! Haha! Just when my secret was in danger of coming out, my mask is back in place and I can... Oops. Ignore all that. I've been going to The Cartoon Gallery a couple of times a month since I got back into anime (and cartoons in general) in 1995. I've spent more money there than I have in any other single shop. Today they have half a dozen DVDs waiting for me: Cardcaptor Sakura #15, DNA Squared #3, Inu Yasha #7, Mahoromatic Maiden #3 (I like Mahoromatic a lot. It's kinda schizoid - light and fluffy but with a very dark backstory. And the closing theme, the Mahoro Mambo, is a delight.), Noir #4, and Sugar, A Little Snow Fairy #2 (what I refer to as Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar) I also picked up volume two of .Hack//Sign and volume one of... Of... No, I didn't end up buying Corrector Yui, so it wasn't that. Oh yes, Eden's Bowy. No, I have no idea what it's about either. Maybe if I actually read Newtype instead of piling it up in the spare room, I would. Then down Pitt St to King's Comics. The last time I was in there (in their wonderful shiny new store), they didn't have anything I wanted. Not a thing. Nothing at all. Depressing, that, when you go to one of the best comic stores around and you don't want anything. This time, I walk in the door and Peorth is looking at me. Peorth?! Yes, and Hild, too. Cool! I bag one of each to go with the Urds, Belldandys and Skulds I already have at home. Volume seven of Futaba-Kun Change is in at last, and so is a new Groo collection: The Groo Odyssey. All good stuff. Oh, and my DVDs from the Cartoon Gallery didn't set off the alarms, which is a pleasant change. Back up Pitt St to Grace Bros, where it's the last day of the toy sale. Lego is 20% to 60% off! Yay! I get some giant bugs, a plane, a couple of Star Wars sets (a Landspeeder and a TIE Bomber), and ooh! The Harry Potter Chamber of Secrets set, marked down from $140 to $59. Oh, little buckets with orange bricks, down from $22 to $15? I'll take a couple of those, too. Dump it all at the sales counter. No, I won't be taking your six month interest-free offer on your store credit card. I don't have your store card any more. No, I won't be taking up your frequent flyer points loyalty card offer, either. Since I don't fly if there is any practical alternative. Now, if you had a frequent train-travel point scheme, I'd be there like a shot. Now, pick up all my purchases and did I ever mention that in large quantities Lego is both very heavy and very awkward? Back through the Queen Victoria Building to Town Hall Station and home again. (Did I also mention that it's possible to get from the Zegna store on the corner of Macquarie Street and Martin Place, to the food court under the Coopers and Lybrand building on the corner of George and, what, Bathurst?, without ever coming out from under cover? Well, it is.) Lug my new goodies home. Oh dear, my arm seems to have fallen off. How annoying. Now I think I'll take a little nap. So how was your weekend?Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:29 PM | Comments (66) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 12, 2003
Speaking of Which
Speaking of much data, I just rebuilt my PC. Wiped the system drive, repartitioned it, reinstalled Windows XP, Plus! Pack (not sure why I bother... well, the Nature theme is kind of nice), SP1, Mozilla...
Have you noticed that Windows applications these days all like to keep their data in a particular place? That place being C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data. So your vital information is, by default, stored in a hidden folder on the system disk. This is absurd. Admittedly, most people only have one disk, and only one partition on that disk (not that this is a good idea, just that it's the way things are). But why in Hell's name is my data - my data - automatically hidden from me by the operating system? Anyway, I told Mozilla that no, my email folders aren't in C:\Documents and Settings\PixyMisa\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\deh0sa9r.slt\Mail any more; they're now in E:\Mail. (Hey, I didn't notice that before! E:\Mail! Haha!) And the second time I did it, I got it right and it worked. So the next time I have to shoot Windows XP through the head and reinstall, I won't need to backup and restore 4 gigabytes of old email first. Yeah, 4 gigabytes. See, Steven den Beste was right when he said that there is much data.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:18 AM | Comments (67) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Data, Data Everywhere
Over at USS Clueless, Steven den Beste insists that there is much data.
I wholeheartedly agree. A pox on the data pluralists!Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:06 AM | Comments (68) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 11, 2003
From the Wires
Slashdot
Oldest Planet Ever Discovered: Hubblesite reports on the discovery of a 13-billion-year-old planet. Imagine the candles on that cake!TCP Interface for IIgs: GS/TCP is now available to provide standard TCP networking on your Apple IIgs (which runs at a zippy 2.8MHz).
Repel Bugs With Your Cell Phone: Only available in Korea.
Ask Slashdot: Soft Processors in FPGAs: Ever wanted to build your own microprocessor, but lacked a billion-dollar R&D facility? This is for you!
ZDNet
Reviewed: The Magicolor 2300DL colour laser printer. If you don't want a colour laser printer, it's because you've never had the chance to play with one. For speed, reliability and convenience they blow inkjets out of the water. Until recently, they've been too expensive for home use. ZDNet review one of the cheapest models available.Madville
An interactive tour of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. What more could you ask for?How about an in-depth discussion of how quicksand works complete with Flash animations?
Kuro5hin
(That's pronounced "corrosion", by the way.) Copy-controlled CDs: Is the end in sight? I sure hope so. They certainly suck.The Rise of Stupid Everything: Probably not what you'd expect from the title.
LinuxHardware
Linux on the XBox: All the details on how. Also why.Designtechnica
Metallica Disses Apple iTunes: Metallica continue to whine. Discerning people continue to not listen to them anyway.Neowin.net
MP3.com - Bye Bye?: Vivendi has closed the European arm of MP3.com, which they paid 265 million squid for not too long ago. Will the rest of the company follow?Risks Digest
(The Risks Digest is the web archive of newsgroup comp.risks, the premier source ofThe risk of assuming things: The assumption in point being No-one can be that crazy...
Internetnews.com
The WiFi hotspot market ispicking up. Which can only mean that WiFi is set to go bye bye.Wired News
Yet another bunch ofPosted by: Pixy Misa at 09:53 PM | Comments (67) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 10, 2003
Plant People from Planet X
Everyone knows that these are the end times. The signs are everywhere: crazed squirrels, giant squid, Frank... The only question is which force of evil is going to do us in first.
Having done my own research, I've come to a different conclusion to many of the recent Apocolypse scholars. After its recent forfeit, Planet X has been relegated to the little league of doom, but I think it's up to something. First, of course, it's no-show is itself suspicious. No better way to catch your enemy unawares than to not turn up at all! Second is this news report from... Well, alright, from France:Pluto, the smallest and most distant planet in our solar system, has revealed a strange phenomenon to astronomers. Instead of shrinking as the planet moves away from the Sun, Pluto's atmosphere has grown bigger.Bigger, eh? Something funny going on there. And since Pluto is the ninth planet and right next door to Planet X, it's a perfect staging post for their nefarious activities. The timing is itself ominous:
Unfortunately, neither team will be able to continue their investigation of this strange phenomenon in the near future. Pluto occultations are few and difficult to predict because the planet¹s orbit is not well known. "There are no further Pluto events this year," says Person. "There are a few candidates coming in the next few years but no certain ones."So, if it wasn't for this lucky chance, we wouldn't have known anything until too late! Now we all know where atmospheres come from. That's right, trees. So the next step is to check to see if there have been any reports of trees acting odd. And indeed there have:
Scientists who set out to gauge the impact of urban pollutants on trees have made a surprising discovery — trees planted near New York City's congested mean streets actually grow twice as large as their rural counterparts.Giant urban-adapted trees! How evil is that! Fortunately, the researchers discovered the mutant trees' fatal weakness:
Later experiments in controlled settings found the same trees, when exposed to high levels of ozone, indeed grew half as large.
NASA to the Rescue?
The one plan that might help is NASA's Pluto fly-by mission, called New Horizons, which has been pencilled in, then cancelled, on a number of occasions. Currently this is due to launch during 2006, encountering Pluto about a decade later.Clearly what we need to do is equip this baby with an Ozone Bomb and wipe out the Plutonian Mutant Tree Menace for good. I urge all my readers to write to their congresscritters today in support of NASA's bold plan.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:23 PM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Frank Frank Frank
Susie will probably afflict me with a plague of frogs unless I mention this Frank person. Apparently he has a blog.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:52 PM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 09, 2003
Everybody's Doing It!
1. Do you have a personal hero? If so, who is it?
Isaac Asimov. 2. What is your favorite book of all time and what made it so fucking good? What, one book? Uh... John Barnes' One for the Morning Glory. It's a fairy tale, written for adults, it's a fairy tale that knows it's a fairy tale and revels in it, and the wordplay is amazing. Read with a dictionary close at hand. 3. What does “diversity” mean to you? Nothing in particular. The phrase diuerse alarums, on the other hand... 4. What is the wildest thing you’ve ever done? Wild? Um. Riding a giant inflatable banana being towed behind a speedboat. I think that's probably it. 5. Do you regret doing it? Regret not doing it again. 6. Can you drive a stick shift? Not legally. 7. What’s the highest speed you ever traveled in a car? About 150km/h - maybe 95mph. 8. Were you driving, or riding at the time? Riding. Won't say who was driving. 9. Which is better: snakes or spiders? Look, I live in Australia. Either one will kill you soon as look at you. Spiders are easier to squash - a cinder block dropped from a good height, say, or a sledgehammer if you're out of cinder blocks. On the other hand, snakes can't jump. Also, there's usually more meat on a snake. 10. What is the most disgusting thing you ever ate? Salmonella enterica. (By the way, salmonella.org has a Buy from Amazon link. Thanks, but no.) 11. Have you ever shit your pants? Be HONEST! See previous entry. 12. Was losing your virginity an enjoyable experience? On the whole, yes. 13. Should oral sex be outlawed or encouraged? Certainly not outlawed. And I don't think it needs official encouragement. 14. Name one man with a fine ass. Balaam. 15. Do you watch golf on television? If not, will you iron my shirts? No. And no. 16. Who is Martha Burk? Not sure. Is she the new editor of the New York Times? 17. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I'd like to be all-powerful. 18. Do you eat raw oysters? No. I also do not eat raw slugs. 19. Are you claustrophobic? Let me out of here! 20. If you rode a motorcycle, would you wear a helmet even if the law said you didn‘t have to? Yes. I only have the one brain, and flawed though it might be, I'd like to keep it safe inside my head. 21. Name five great Presidents. Those guys on the mountain plus one. 22. Name three shitty Presidents. Clinton, Chirac, Putin. 23. Now call me fanny and slap my ass. Just kidding. Yes, Fanny. 24. This is the 4th of July. Did you set off any fireworks? No, because (a) I'm in Australia and (b) the miserable excuse we have for a state government has banned private firework displays without a permit. 25. If you could have dinner and conversation with anyone in the history of the planet, who would you choose? The young Diana Rigg, I think. Yes. (Questions from Gut Rumbles via diuerse sources.)Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:23 AM | Comments (69) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 08, 2003
Renaissance Pixy
To salve my conscience after Loyal First Reader Susie accused me of poesy (when I was in fact quoting the Great Weird Al), here is something that I really did write:
A Reflection Upon the Modern Style Poetry that doesn't rhyme
Is laziness, a waste of time,
A blight upon the landscape that
Would be outlawed if I were King. And poems that do not scan are worse;
How can they be described as verse?
They have no soul; their tone is flat;
They do not make one cry or sing. This modern stuff I cannot stand.
It must be banished from the land,
While I lay out the welcome mat
For poetry with rhymes that ring Down through these hallowed, ancient halls
And far on out beyond these walls,
To man and woman, dog and cat...
I'm out of words that end in ing.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:32 AM | Comments (67) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 07, 2003
Look What I Can Do!
Went to visit my nephew on Saturday. And the rest of the family, of course, including Jupiter (the cat learning trig on the right). But mostly my nephew.
He's learned a new trick: When there are grown-ups sitting around the kitchen table talking (or more likely, playing with cool toys; on this occasion a collection of Hewlett-Packard calculators), he doesn't like to be left out. The solution, when you're two feet tall, is to stand on a chair. Which he did. Of course, it's only one small step from standing on a chair to falling off a chair, and in the fullness of time he did that too. Not happy at all. But in less than a minute he'd had enough of crying and was climbing back on that darn chair. Whether this is a sign of stubbornness or just a short attention span I'm not sure. But he did seem to like the short clips of Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar, Mahoromatic and Steel Angel Kurumi that I showed him. Well, that's putting it mildly: He was transfixed, as my sister-in-law (no, the other one) said. It can't be long before he starts demanding to be taken to Pixy's house. Pixy, after all, has all the cartoons:
And all the cool toys.
(No, under the table.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:46 PM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 06, 2003
Hardware Store
Would you look at all that stuff...
They've got allen wrenches, gerbil feeders, toilet seats, electric heaters,I'm goin' to the Hardware Store.
Trash compactors, juice extractors, shower rods and water meters,
Walkie-talkies, copper wires, safety goggles, radial tires,
BB pellets, rubber mallets, fans and dehumidifiers,
Picture hangers, paper cutters, waffle irons, window shutters,
Paint removers, window louvres, masking tape and plastic gutters,
Kitchen faucets, folding tables, weather stripping, jumper cables,
Hooks and tackle, grout and spackle, power foggers, spoons and ladles,
Pesticides for fumigation, high-performance lubrication,
Metal roofing, water proofing, multi-purpose insulation,
Air compressors, brass connectors, wrecking chisels, smoke detectors,
Tire gauges, hamster cages, thermostats and bug deflectors,
Trailer hitch demagnetizers, automatic circumcisers,
Tennis rackets, angle brackets, Duracells and Energizers,
Soffit panels, circuit breakers, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers,
Calculators, generators, matching salt and pepper shakers —
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:33 PM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 05, 2003
Just Because
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:04 AM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 04, 2003
Happy Fireworks Day
Happy Independence Day to all my American readers!
Where I am, the 4th is nearly over, so I hope it was a good day for you.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:54 PM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 03, 2003
Well, That Was Weird
Had a long and blerky day at work (If you are expecting a file to arrive at nine A.M. as usual because you have promised to process it, check it, and get the results back out by mid-day, you can be sure of receiving it promptly at half-past-four in the afternoon) so... Where was I? Blerky day, yes. So I thought I'd have a nap before heading online for my daily fix. I didn't have pizza for lunch, so I have no explanation for this dream:
After a short film involving a Galactic Empire trying to select a suitable new ruler from among the hopelessly inbred children of the nobility (I blame this on too much MST3K), we moved to me at a Consumer Electronics Show demonstrating my company's latest product: A cluster of 192 Playstation 2's programmed to digitally apply make-up and costumes to actors in real time. I'm sure the hobbits and orcs in Lord of the Rings (not to mention John Rhys-Davies) would have appreciated our dedication. I wandered around the audience with a hand-held high-defintion digital video camera turning girls into princesses and boys into goblins. A bonus feature was that it could also modulate voices, not just to another pitch, but to any pattern required. I demonstrated this by having audience members sing into a microphone, and regardless of talent (or the quite remarkable lack thereof) they all sounded like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. The demonstration was a huge success until I reached the end of my power cord without realising it. Oops. Cut to the commercials, quick! First up, two — let us say, low end — spin-offs of the same technology: DeerMaker and DeerMaker .45. DeerMaker allows you to quickly and easily add deer to your family photos! And DeerMaker .45 allows you to quickly and easily — yes, that's right — quickly and easily add dead deer to your photos.Which shows what my subconcious knows. Surely it should have been called DeerMaker .22?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:18 PM | Comments (69) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 02, 2003
Mud Pies, Anyone?
Blog of the day is Mudpiemarie:
1. How are you planning to spend the summer?Don't go there expecting lengthy and detailed political analyses (but then, you won't get those here, either). What you get is little slices of Jeanine's life (no, I don't know what happened to Marie) and wonderful photos. Jeanine has a really good eye for composition and colour. The site design is delightfully minimalist too. She had this to say about Harry Potter:
Tough one. I think I'll be at work during July and at work during August... Oh wait, that is the entire summer. Can we say bitter? Anyway, I am taking a dance class this summer and I am going to attempt to take a couple of days off around labor day to go to New York. 2. What was your first summer job?
My first summer job was babysitting the devil child. Devil child was five years old, watched Mtv, had a dog that could jump as high as my head, and invited large quantities of toddlers over to her house when I wasn't looking. She also had one of those Barbie cars that runs on batteries, except her batteries were never charged so I would end up pushing the thing back home. This would always lead to the argument of why I couldn't push her in the car, which would inevitably lead to her having a tantrum and me looking like the devil babysitter. Ahhh, the joys of early employment.
Friday was pure crazy-stuff at the bookstore. We sold 650 copies of HP5 that night. In the whole scheme of things that may not sound like a lot, but you must keep in mind that every copy had at least two people attached to it (if not more). So according to my calculations, we broke approximately 108 fire codes on Friday night. I had been fooled into thinking that we were actually going to open the boxes prior to midnight so we could have them ready to sell. I was wrong. We sliced the boxes open at midnight and sold them straight from the boxes. Oh the nerdiness. People were actually taking pictures of the boxes. Oh wait, I did that, too.And like all right-thinking people, she lusts after the Macintosh G5.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:44 AM | Comments (69) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
July 01, 2003
That Will Slow The Fish Down
Between my ISP sending my packets on a grand tour of the Solar System and having to be at work early today (early being 8:30, as opposed to my normal time of 11), I forgot to shut off Kazaa, which was busy downloading a set of large files which I will refer to by the code-name "MST3K".
Well, what's the big deal? So I left my file sharing running. The big deal is this: Between 1 AM and 8 AM, my ISP gives me free downloads (and cuts my speed by 70%, but I'll save that for another rant). From 8 AM onwards, they charge me - once I exceed my princely monthly allowance of 2.5 gigabytes - 14.9 cents per meg. (Also note that sometime in the night they fixed the problem so that my packets were now staying in the general vicinity of Earth.) I had about 700 MB left for the month. (My month ends on the 10th.) Left to itself, my link can transfer about 500 MB per hour. I left home at 7:45, and would probably be back around 7 PM. So, that's eleven hours times half a gig minus seven hundred meg times 14.9 cents seven hundred dollars in excess usage charges. Oh. Dear. The first of the month is by far our busiest time at work; there was no way I was going to get to run home and turn my computer off. The alternative - calling my ISP and telling them that I'd left my file sharing running and could they please disconnect my line - was more palatable than a $700 bill, but only just. So... Think like a geek. I SSH'd into my home firewall box. (Thank Linus for Linux, and thank my foresight that I'd set things up so I could do that. I hardly ever need to; mostly I work from home and connect to servers at the office.) Now what? I'm on Linux. Kazaa is on my Windows box. If I was still runing ME I could have just crashed it remotely, but after the great Driver Plague of '03 I upgraded to XP, which is a little more robust. After a little thought, I set off a ping flood aimed at my Windows box (which is named Ukyo) from my firewall (Pixy). Hopefully that would choke the downloads enough so they wouldn't bankrupt me utterly. Then I stopped and considered for a minute. I have a router. It's a little blue Netgear thingy that connects my home network to the internet (via my ADSL modem). I viewed it until now as a black - or rather blue - box. Plug it in, turn it on, start sucking data. But it's a router. And routers route stuff. So if it works like a real router, I should be able to tell it not to let my PC download a squigabyte of data and burn my bank account to the ground. It has a web interface, but that wouldn't let me do what I wanted. If it was a real router, the good stuff would be accessible by telnet. (Everyone know what telnet is? Good.) But was it? Easy way to find out:$ telnet router
Trying 192.168.0.1...
Connected to router.
Escape character is '^]'.
Password: *******
pixymisa@>ip route add which would add an IP route. (Yes, the commands do actually make some sort of sense.) A route tells the router how to move packets from point A to point B. (This is why routes are called routes, and why routers are called routers. Simple, isn't it?)
In this case, point A was the Internet, and point B was my PC, and I didn't want anything getting from A to B. It's not hard to achieve this. Indeed, it happens all the time, mostly by accident.
Imagine that you were having a party, and wanted to invite everyone at the office except for this one person who you can't stand. You can't just not invite her; that would be rude. So what you do, is you give her bogus instructions. Turn left into Floogleman Street, you say. It's the house next to the Fire Station. You can't miss it. Of course, there is no Floogleman Street, no Fire Station, and you live in a condo. You take the phone of the hook, and the party is a huge success.
That's just what I did. I told the router that any packets bound for Ukyo had to go down Floogleman Street (after making damn sure there was no Floogleman Street on my network). The packets would arrive, wander about for a minute with confused expressions on their headers, and quietly expire. Since nothing ever came back, the servers at the far end eventually gave up sending anything, and my bandwidth (and my bank account) was saved.
Try that with a Windows box.
(The title comes from an incident that took place back in the dawn of time when I was at University. Uni, as we knew it. At Uni, there was an ornamental pond in the middle of the library lawn. One day, for no reason that was ever disclosed, the Powers decided that the pond was to be filled in. A group of workpersons duly arrived with a truckload of dirt and dumped it into the pond. One of the workpersons was heard to say the line, and became instantly - if anonymously - famous.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:02 PM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Stuck... Can't... Move...
No... updates... for... a... little... while... because... my... ISP... is... routing... all... packets... via... Mars...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:55 AM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 30, 2003
A Man's Castle
Ooh! More Flash gaming goodness! Check out the aptly named Defend Your Castle. Weeeeeeeeee splorch!
(via The International Squirrel Conspiracy)Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:04 PM | Comments (76) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
An Observation
Cherry Pez taste like cough syrup, and neither one tastes anything like any cherry on planet Earth. Why they don't label things "Cough Syrup Flavour" I don't know, but it's probably one of those inscrutable marketing reasons, like "If we did that, no-one would buy the product."
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:21 AM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
A Question
I was reading back issues of The Bleat when James happened to mention out-takes of one of the movies he was watching. I've forgotten which one, and it doesn't really matter.
If you've seen A Bug's Life (and if you haven't, do!), and you're not the sort of person who has to leave the instant the closing credits roll, you'll know that one of the best parts of the movie is the out-takes at the end. Out-takes are usually funny because movies are so carefully polished; it's wonderful to see things get screwed up. It's doubly funny, of course, if you do it in a cartoon, when that sort of thing doesn't happen. What you may not know is that this gag didn't originate with A Bug's Life. The first time I saw it was in Maris the Chojo, and then it came as a great surprise and a delight. (The rest of the film was good too.) I was wondering, was this really the first time anyone did this? Once you've seen it, of course, it's such an obvious idea, like so many great ideas are. IMDB says it was but it's a user comment rather than anything official. Inasmuch as anything on IMDB is official anyway. So, loyal readers and filmfans: Did anyone else do this before 1992? Walt Disney, or the Brothers Warner, perhaps? Fritz Freleng? Hanna-Barbera? Max Fleischer? Any information would be appreciated, because, darn it, this is important.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:03 AM | Comments (78) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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