Don't get greedy.

(via Dave Barry)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:17 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:06 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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 (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I mean, a blog is supposed to be about something, right? I can't just sit here and babble about what I had for dinner (hokkien noodles with chicken and sweetcorn, not very good), or what I've been reading (Laurel Hamilton's Cerulean Sins, not very good) or watching (Azumanga Daioh, downloaded off the net. Very good.)

Right now this blog isn't about anything much, so if you've had your fill of the cute kitty (which should take all of five seconds unless you're Sakaki-san), go read Lileks, who probably does have something to say.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:30 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

That cat is looking at me funny. (Of course, now that I'm running MT, that cat is gone. I'll need to find a new that cat.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:40 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:20 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)