April 24, 2003

Owwie

You know that headache you get just because you're tired? And all you need to do to make it go away is get some sleep? Only you can't sleep because you've got this headache?

I've got one of those.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:49 PM | Comments (96) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Weda

Hale's mother's name is Weda.

Just thought you'd want to know.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:46 AM | Comments (95) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 23, 2003

Or Possibly An Interociter

The Internet is a time machine.

I did 18 out of my 20 impossible things, and of the remaining two, one can't happen before the end of the month and no-one has actually decided what the other one is yet. So I can say that they're done and no-one can prove otherwise.

In other words, I'm blogging from work.

So why is the Internet a time machine, you ask? Well, you could (and indeed should) take a look at lileks.com and spend a happy - if somewhat dazed - afternoon lost in the 50's and 60's. It's well worth the effort, particularly if you missed them the first time 'round.

But what I was actually thinking of is this: Tonight, when I go home, I'm going to watch next week's episode of Buffy.

Which means I can spoil it for the guys at work. Hahaha! Not that I'd do that, of course.

The thing I have to remember is: Don't get greedy. No-one likes a greedy time traveller.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:01 PM | Comments (95) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

And I Haven't Even Had Breakfast Yet

I have 20 impossible things to do before I go in to the office today, so I won't have time to blog.

Oh.

Oops.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:17 AM | Comments (100) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 22, 2003

Well, I've Watched Buffy Now

Of course, now I have to download next week's episode and watch that too. No minutes! No waiting!

But this time I think I'll leave it to run overnight so that it doesn't chew up my precious peak-time badnwidth.

Meanwhile, kAzAa is chewing up all my upstream bandwidth, since I dropped Azumanga Daioh and Jungle Guu into my share folder. (And Rizelmine.) But I don't pay for uploads, so I don't care. Nyaa!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:40 PM | Comments (97) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Pixy Misa, Telecommuter

I'm working from home today. Yay me!

On a less cheerful note, I forgot to watch Buffy last night. Well, poot. And episode 10 is well and truly history as far as BitTorrent is concerned. Fortunately, Kazaa (well, Kazaa Lite) found it for me and is happily downloading now. Unfortunately, this is costing me, depending on how you want to look at it, $12, $60, or nothing at all.

I'm sticking with "nothing at all", thanks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:05 PM | Comments (98) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 21, 2003

Tip For Time Travellers

Don't get greedy.

(via Dave Barry)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:17 AM | Comments (94) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 20, 2003

To Thai Or Not To Thai

Family dinner last night to celebrate my brother's 35th birthday. Since it was his birthday, he got to choose the restaurant, and as expected we went Thai.

I hate Thai food.

Probably because I'm a supertaster. Coffee tastes horrible to me (for all its wonderful aroma) as does pretty much anything alcoholic. I thought for years that wine was an acquired taste, until I learned that most people can't tell that it tastes nasty.

Anyway, everyone else in my family (with one exception) loves Thai Red Beef Curry. To me, it tastes like it's been boiled in dishwater. Some other dishes are even worse. We had a fish curry dish once - I'm not sure exactly what it was - that everyone loved so much that they ordered another serving. I had to restrain myself from spitting out the single fork-full I tried.

My nephew Lionel feels no such constraints. If he doesn't like something, it's gone. Of course, he's 18 months old and cute as a bug, so he can get away with it. Fortunately, he loves rice (though he wasn't too impressed with the saffron rice) and prawn crackers. When we'd finished our basket of prawn crackers and were waiting for our entrees, Lionel was eyeing the baskets of crackers being delivered to other tables. They're going the wrong way! Prawn crackers over here!

Oh well. The Massaman Lamb was actually pretty decent, as were the curry puffs. And rice is rice, so I didn't starve.

We had dessert at my brother's house - chocolate cake and coffee for everyone else; chocolate cake and hot chocolate for me. Mmm. Chocolate.

Oh, and remember my little internet rant, wherein I mentioned a company called Comindico? Turns out that my brother's company is a Comindico reseller, and he'll put me in touch with someone there. So I can hope to have real internet access soon! Fingers crossed, as I said.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:47 PM | Comments (102) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Stupid Stupid Blogger™

Stupid Stupid Blogger™ ate my post. In fact, Stupid Stupid Blogger™ has been effectively down for hours, at least as far as updates go.

Fortunately, I'm smarter than Stupid Stupid Blogger™, and I copied my post when by Geeksense™ started tingling. Just as blind people tend to be more alert to sounds, working as a programmer for [mumble] years helps develop a sense of when an application is going to barf in your lap.

Anyway, the BloggerPeople™ have fixed whatever it was, so I'll post my post now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:46 PM | Comments (95) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 19, 2003

You Know Who To Blame

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0005'

Invalid procedure call or argument: 'mid'

//functions/doAutoLogin.inc, line 15

Ah, that explains it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:09 PM | Comments (98) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Oh Yeah

It's still raining. Knock it off already, will ya?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:06 PM | Comments (97) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Bluggy Bogger?

Has Blogger always been this buggy? My archives are broken. I can't regenerate them. I can't fix them. I can't even delete them. I've seen no shortage of other server-side errors either.

I'm new to this blogging thing, and thought that this was the easiest way to start. Now I'm thinking it might be less painful to write the whole thing in Python, if not 6809 assembler.

The phrase "stupid stupid Blogger" springs to mind for some reason.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:02 PM | Comments (106) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Euroweasel Status Report

Steven den Beste has an interesting analysis of just why the French are such weasels.

One thing that it fails to take into account is that the French have always been weasels - or at least for the past thousand years or so. Charlemagne doesn't seem to have been a weasel, but then again, he wasn't French.

Irregardless of which, you should read it, and this piece by Guy Milliere titled France is Almost Finished as well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:45 PM | Comments (102) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Sugar Baby Love

Okay, so I've been watching Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar. So? Want to make something of it?

Phear the power of the cute side. Phear!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:30 AM | Comments (114) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anyone For Sorbet?

The Australian police seem to be having fun today.

Two questions come to mind:

1. Operation "Sorbet"?
2. Heroin comes in brand names now?

What sort of a name is "Double Uoglobe" anyway?

(via USS Clueless)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:14 AM | Comments (95) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 18, 2003

Net Imbalance

Australia is a nice place to live as long as you don't want to use the Net.

As I've mentioned, I have lately been watching quite a bit of Anime that I've downloaded using BitTorrent. The way I do it is this:

1. I log in to my web server in the U.S. (I pay about $80 per month for a server including 100GB of uploads and unlimited downloads.) I use the Linux BitTorrent client to download the file I want. And of course I leave the window open for others to download the file in turn - though I tend to limit the upload rate because otherwise I'd hit my monthly usage limit within a day or so.

If I exceed my monthly usage limit I have to pay an extra dollar or so per gigabyte.

2. I wait until 1 A.M., and then download the files from my web server to my home where I can actually watch them. Why do I have to wait until 1 A.M.? Because my ADSL connection, for which I pay $190 per month, only includes 2.5GB of "peak" downloads, where peak is 8 A.M. to 1 A.M. weekdays.

If I exceed my usage limit I have to pay an extra $150 per gigabyte.

No, I'm not kidding.

Off-peak, which applies on weekends and from 1 A.M. to 8 A.M. weekdays (and costs me an extra $30 per month) is free - but if I download more than 10GB in a month, my connection is throttled down to about one fifth of normal speed. It doesn't get reset each month, either - you don't get 10GB first before being throttled. If you download more than 10GB in a month, you start the next month pre-throttled.

Recently, a download I'd left to run overnight took longer than expected and ran into peak time, putting me 200MB over my monthly limit. That cost me $30 - about the price of a DVD here. If it wasn't for off-peak times, downloading a single episode would cost as much as a whole DVD.

Why don't I find a better ISP? Well, until very recently, there wasn't one. The deal I just described was about the best you could find in Australia. Now, though, a company called Comindico has started offering unlimited downloads on ADSL through a number of resellers. If they are any good (it's too early to tell yet) this is going to shake up the Australian broadband market big time.

Fingers crossed, because there a few industries that need a kick in the pants more than the ISPs in Australia.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:02 PM | Comments (101) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 17, 2003

Hello, Up There!

To whoever is in charge of these things:

Yes, we did ask for rain. Yes, we are grateful. Thank you.

But perhaps you could take a short break?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:18 PM | Comments (103) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Nuke The Moon

First I say that a blog has to be about something and that I can't just sit here and babble about what I've been watching, then I sit here and babble about what I've been watching. (Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu and Azumanga Daioh, for those who haven't been paying attention.)

So to redeem myself, here's another link to someone else's blog, and more specifically Frank J.'s proposal to Nuke the Moon. For peace. Of course.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:34 AM | Comments (103) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 16, 2003

Anime Quickies

Two of the best anime series I've seen recently are ones I didn't buy, but downloaded from the net. I didn't buy them not because I'm cheap, but because they're not for sale. Not in English, anyway, dubbed or subbed.

The first is Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu (Jungle Guu for short), which translates roughly to The jungle was always nice, then came Guu. Which is pretty much the story. Hale is a young boy growing up in a jungle village with his mother, whose name I can't remember right now. Hale's quiet life is turned upside down when his mother adopts the little orphaned girl Guu, who is not quite what she seems. Having watched only 15 (out of 26) episodes so far, I can't actually say what Guu is, and I'm not at all sure that it becomes clearer in later episodes. But it doesn't really matter. Guu is weird, her facial expressions are wonderful (you get a taste of them in the opening credits) and is the perfect foil for Hale. Jungle Guu is definitely off-beat, but in a way that quickly grows on you. I could give you more details, but I'd likely spoil something. Just watch it.

The second series is Azumanga Daioh, the story of a group of high-school girls. They don't dress up in combat suits and battle alien invaders. They don't transform into mini-skirted magical maidens and save the world. They don't even fall into a parallel universe and find themselves forced to examine their own identities.

They just go to school, like more-or-less normal girls. But that's more than enough. Azumanga Daioh was originally produced as 130 5-minute shorts and has been resewn as 26 half-hour episodes, though you wouldn't know it except for the sub-episode titles and the unflagging pace. Frequently rib-crackingly funny, sometimes poignant, never dull, Azumanga Daioh is a delightful study of high-school life.

If you want to watch these - or other anime that hasn't yet been picked up English-language distributors - hop on over to AnimeSuki, which is a nifty directory of BitTorrent downloads of fan-subbed anime. (BitTorrent has to be the least annoying file-sharing program ever, and works not only amazingly well, but also on Linux. Which is a good thing, because for some reason it crashes my otherwise stable WinXP box.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:57 AM | Comments (111) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 15, 2003

Evil Vanquished

Ha! I defeated the evil Blogger-Mozilla-Paragraph-Breaking Link Bug. View Dave Barry's blog in Mozilla to see what I mean.

Or just read it in your browser of choice. He always has the most interesting links.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:11 AM | Comments (129) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Processing 0.04, elapsed 0.1023 seconds.
37 queries taking 0.0987 seconds, 29 records returned.
Page size 25 kb.
Powered by Minx 0.8 beta.