Gah, annoying people who insist on doing followup business over a desk or around a table rather than by email or even a quick phone call.

No, sitting down and providing me with nine zillion details is NOT going to make me change my offer. I happen to be working to a budget. Give me your best counteroffer and I'll give you a yea or nay. I'm only interested in the number. Just. One. Number. It would have taken half a second to tell me the number over the phone. About the same in an email. But nooooo, we gotta sit down face to face and 'discuss' it for half an hour of my life I'm not going to get back.

Keerist, do they really think they're going to be able to change facts just by making a Charisma check?

Spoke to a bloke who knows some blokes, the other day. Met him through another bloke.

This particular new bloke was the "Must meet a man, shake him by the hand and look him square in the eye" type. Blinked, shrugged, summoned up gregarious persona #87b, and swapped industry war stories and backgrounds for a while. Seemed to work. He's apparently going to go see some blokes about some other blokes, and possibly all of this bloke-to-blokeing will at some point resolve into slightly better consistency of clientele.

The hope is that if this guy turns out to be an adequate source of contracts, I'll be able to lay off that side of the business and concentrate on the turning-contracts-into-dollars bit, ie the actual work, which I do quite well.

While it's not quite the Old Boys' Network, there's certainly enough testosterone sloshing around in these arrangements for me to make a mental note to see if I can do some more female-oriented networking at some point. I'd hate to find out I'd shut out 50% of the market through only dealing with blokes who know blokes.

An interesting psychology experiment with potential applications for AI.

Would YOU let the genie out of the bottle?

Looking at the experimental data, I can *cautiously* say that while I might not be able to hold out against a genuine transhuman AI for extended periods, I could probably hold out for two hours against a simulated AI. However, this is because of a number of personal psychological factors and experiences which are not necessarily very common. Particularly with pre-preparation, I'm moderately good at compartmentalising interactions, using multiple layers of doublethink, simulating mental mazes, presenting incorrect mindset images, and switching off chunks of personality for short periods.

It's not necessarily something I find myself doing all the time, and to be honest it's a bit irritating when the need arises, but it got me through a lot of boring managerial meetings over the years.

I'm also not entirely sure that the experiment works when the Gatekeeper wants to keep the AI in the box purely because they're evil and enjoy poking it with a stick.

In a burst of nostalgia, I went and looked up my very first email address, to see if someone else had picked that account name since my long-ago departure.

Modulo the ISP I was with at the time being borged by another, it turns out that there is indeed someone else at oldaccountname@newISP. Good for them.

I am mildly disappointed that there doesn't appear to be any mention of oldaccountname@oldISP anywhere on the net, particularly since a trawl of my own archives indicates that I held onto it until 1998, way past when I started using Usenet. Ah well.

Just a note about the recent Melbourne Cup.

One of the things I really like about being self-employed is that there is no office Cup luncheon, no break in the work schedule, but because most clients I might have tend to be the sort of offices which do have these sort of things, I'm also unlikely to be called during Cup day and can choose to either get some solid uninterrupted hours of numbercrunching done, or go sit on the beach and destress

It may sound near-unpatriotic as an Australian, but I honestly do not give a flying damn about some three-minute horse race on the other side of the country, and it irritates me no end that half the country seems to take it as an excuse to down tools for the better part of a day.

Of course, I also have no interest in any other kind of sport I'm not personally playing, don't drink or surf, and barely swim, so I'm pretty much a failure as a national stereotype even before you get to horse racing.

Hmm... what parts of the national image do I fit into?

...

...

...I like barbecues?

Oh, and I guess I tan fairly easily, but that's mainly going from "geek pallor" to "only mistaken for a ghost some of the time".

(And OK, yeah, I can crank up the accent until I sound like Paul Hogan with a lobotomy after six months stuck up the arse-end of FNQ, but it's not how I sound day to day.)

Further irritation with the so-called sixty hours of paperwork and checkboxes and form-completion which took me forty minutes. I completed it to the satisfaction of the computer systems, but it took the better part of an hour to wring out of the human cross-checker the fact that she didn't want to approve it because the next level of auditors wouldn't believe I'd done it in that short time.

In a world with justice, this would hardly be my problem, you would think. Either they'd revise their ideas of what was possible, or they'd revise the assorted paperwork to take longer even for people who had done this kind of thing a billion times before.

But of course, this is bureacracy. So for the crime of being faster than expected, I had to provide a sufficient volume of physical paperwork - printouts, really - to show that I'd 'done the work'. Uh... isn't the fact that I completed all the online forms to the point where none of them can be pointed to as incorrect sufficient proof that I did the work? Considering 98% of it was mental in the first place?

But no, apparently having a thick wodge of printouts - of anything, really - stored on file in the office will somehow give legitimacy to my amazing ability to remember what I wrote the last 99 times I did similar things.

And just think - I could have avoided all this by simply starting each section of the online forms, filling them in, then letting the timer tick away on the penultimate page for anything up to seven hours each while I went and did other things, before clicking "Finish". The only difference would have been when I clicked that last button, yet somehow doing so would have excused me from having to print out and drop off a bunch of random hooey that no-one will ever look at. What a waste of time, brains, and trees all around.

Once again, for no apparent reason, Livejournal has spontaneously decided that I am Norwegian and has changed all my interface options to that language.

I have no idea why it does this every couple of months.

I have no idea why it's always Norwegian that it picks.

It seems too bizarre and random (not to mention obvious) to be a hack job. Presumably, therefore, something is very wrong somewhere.

Anyone else get something similar?

Random "this is me" post for anyone who's browsed here and wondering what the deal is and why I switch back and forth between topics so much.

Me:
Mid-30s tech guy, currently based in Perth, Western Australia.

Things I'm into, which may have led readers here via keywords:

- Tech support. Specfically, improving helpdesks and service desks. From the user side, I can make them more responsive and accurate. From the tech side, I can improve training, equipment, and policies. From the management side, I can cut costs (often dramatically), boost ROI, improve the team's standing in the organisation, and stop it being dumped on by the other areas. Hire me! Or, if you're currently (or have been previously) part of an IT Support team, drop me a line; we'll swap anecdotes.

- Automation. In particular:

-- Automating civil construction. Houses are well understood, why are they still being built manually? I have the beginnings of some ideas about how to fix this, and have some engineers looking at them. Potential savings in the trillions, yay, but it'll be a long road. Bricks and mortar, robots and replicatability.

-- Automating clothing production. We have factories which can build a car practically from raw materials; we have 3D printers and automated cutters and shapers. Why are most clothes - particularly cheap ones - still made by hand? Shouldn't you be able to get bodyscanned and have a custom wardrobe roll off the presses in a few hours? This one's all about design, fashion, and mechatronics.

-- 3D printing and shaping in general. I want to see a RepRap which can bootstrap itself from parts to a full workshop. I want to be able to print USB-compatible circuitry, or at least something which can talk to a generic PC.

- Toy design. Mostly transforming robots, having had a mild fascination with them for over twenty-five years. This includes 3D design and replication in plastic, materials knowledge, kitbashing, aesthetics etc. Multi-form designs are particularly interesting. And in the same vein:

- Multiform design in general. This is anything from furniture which becomes other furniture or retracts into walls, to fold-up bikes and cars, to things which can compact down into a travel mode for use in RVs and motor homes. I even have a design for the World's Most Expandable RV floating around somewhere - it blows out to something like four thousand square feet of floorspace.

- Cosplay, specifically armoured and robot cosplay. You know that transforming Bumblebee costume that was floating around YouTube a while back? Yeah, that kind of thing. I like the idea of both really complex stuff with built-in theatrical biomechatronics, and very simple, elegant designs.

- Extremely mobile computing. Not just laptops with WiFi, but EyeTaps with augmented reality, long-life battery solutions and ultracapacitors. Which leads me to:

- Electric vehicles. A trunk full of next-gen batteries and a roof full of solar cells. Not because I'm particularly green, but because I like the idea of a car I can refuel at home or by parking it in the sun.

- Inventing stuff. As well as the various things mentioned above, I have entire folders of inventions sitting around, from the solidly commercially profitable to the pie-in-the-sky. Everything from telemarketing destroyers to control improvements for artificial limbs to MMORPG secondary profit markets to GPS interface improvers to a range of tech support tools. Give me your programmers, mechanical engineers, electronics wonks, product shapers and marketeers.

- And on the silly end of the spectrum, my fictional engineering guilty pleasure at the moment is teleportation and multidimensional architecture. It's fun to think about all the things which would change in society and the global economy if spacefolding was cheaper than an airline seat, cheaper than oceanic shipping, cheaper than owning a car...

Lately, sleep's been... not elusive, precisely. Perhaps 'mistimed' would be a better word. While I'm usually getting eight to twelve hours per nap, the scheduling of those hours has been rather more random than expected.

Thus, I spent most of the daylight hours of the weekend either asleep or zipping through chores which needed shops to be open or were too noisy to be done when they might wake the neighbours.

On the plus side, several things which had been put off for longer than desirable have been sorted out, including catching up on the laundry and dumping antkiller powder all over the anthills which have once again sprung up around the exterior of the house. Given that it's something like 90% paved, I have to wonder if there exists a near-permanent treatment capable of preventing both insects and weeds from coming up between the cracks.

On the minus side, I've been finding myself sitting around in the wee hours wondering what to do after catching up on my normal news feeds. It just feels sort of like limbo - I don't feel much like reading, or working on my 3D project, or trawling old IRC channels, or writing emails that I probably really should.

It's as if my brain's saying "Dude, you should be asleep, but you woke up early, so just sort of sit there in the corner like a zombie until the world catches up." It feels like airport time, when you're waiting for a connecting flight and can't really do anything (even sleep) except wait for the minutes and hours to drag on by.

It just feels weird. Disjointed. It wouldn't be so bad if I was doing it on purpose, but accidentally operating at eight or sixteen hours out of sync with the local timezone is offputting.

Wandering around a potential client's office the other day, I noticed that a bunch of their public-access systems were semi-hosed in various ways.

Look at the first two, which have "Broken - IT Support has been notified" on a sheet of A4 taped across their screens.

Remove the floppy disk from them. Boot. Oh look, it's working.

Notify my contact in the office. Kudos for me, yay.


Round two. Check another couple of PCs. Fuzzy screens. Check the resolutions - not set to native on the LCDs. In fact, the computers seem to think they have CRTs plugged in.

Could alter the screen resolutions to the correct ones, but it needs an admin login. Given that I have physical access to the computer, this is potentially merely a momentary delay, but it suddenly strikes me that removing a floppy disk is one thing, but screwing around with registry settings and bypassing security (however slack) is not necessarily going to ingratiate me with the business and particularly with the tech division.

Back WAY off. Settle for printing out a couple of tweaked screenshots showing where the problem lies and how to fix it. My contact can forward them to what passes for tech support around here (honestly, which phone monkey didn't get the office drone to check the floppy drive on the other machines?). More local kudos for me, rah. Make sure to keep my name definitely OFF the printouts so that the IT division won't be pissed at me later on.

Riding high on a wave of apparent IT expertise, I flash a business card and wangle the name of a manager at HQ out of my contact. I phone and sweet-talk the manager into giving me the contact details of the actual IT manager (it's a small company). One more phone call later, and I'm invited to drop a business proposal on them for clearing up their IT service.


And THAT'S how it's done.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some paperwork to write up.

Wireless HMD running Linux:

It's a complete computer - the antenna is WiFi, not pulling in video from another source (although it can do that too). It's only stereo VGA at the moment, though it does have tilt sensors and a compass. Throw in GPS and you could really have something.


Tesla Roadster hits 500km on one charge

A potential corporate client wanted me to fill out some online paperwork before getting back to me. Not entirely without precedent. Oh well.

*fill fill fill*
*ring ring*

"Hi, it's me, I'm done."
"...what do you mean, done?"
"Your paperwork. Done."
"But it's been an hour!"
"Sorry, I had to take a twenty-minute call from one of your managers in the middle of it."
"But it's supposed to take sixty hours minimum!"
"...really?"
"You can't have done it right. Do it again! From the beginning!"
"...uh, OK?"

*one hour later, after having filled in everything again, including all the optional stuff that didn't really need filling out the first time, plus double-checking that their assessment system thinks I really have done everything...*

*ring ring...*
"Me again. Could you check that everything's completed to your satisfaction?"
"Uh, it seems to be, but how could you..."
"Good, good, anything else need to be done?"
"Um, not really..."
"Excellent! You have my number, call me whenever, we'll go for a coffee."

( Of course, there's a downside. )

Now that's what I call adjustable!

Stay-in-place ties.



OK, that's kinda cool.

Little Linux-alike internet gateway boxette is starting to complain of low disk space. Check it out. Ooo, down to under 2% free. Erk.

OK, go looking for erasable stuff - caches and whatnot. Not really that much to delete. Do a little housecleaning on it anyway. Free up a couple dozen megabytes. O thrills.

Check what's taking up space - nothing obvious or suspicious. No humungous files or overfull log directories. Weird.

Haven't installed anything extra recently, so it's not that.

Perhaps a reboot? No, no, that's Windows default thinking. Linux doesn't need rebooting for basic system maintenance, and how would that affect what's on the disk anyway? Hmm.

OK, try bouncing a bunch of the services and demons. No obvious change.

Spend TWO DAYS, on and off, futzing around with disk analysis tools and scripts trying to figure out where all the space-destroying crud could be hiding, with no luck. Much ranting ensues.

Get heartily fed up with the stupid thing and let it chew on a reboot right in the teeth, just because I'm feeling pissed off.


System comes back up with 70% free disk space. WTF?

Dammit, probably some stupid process failing to release disk space until it was kicked. So yeah, reboot probably not actually needed.

Bloody satisfying, though.

I still maintain there is nothing wrong with chicken-pineapple-and-pepper sandwiches.

Read Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series up to Twelve Sharp. Fairly funny, if a tad monotonous towards the end. I started feeling that C-list characters were being flung into the fiction furnace to keep the franchise powering along, with Constantine Stiva being the most egregious example.

When I close my fridge door, it forms an airtight seal against cats, completely locking out even the sneakiest and most flexible OH COME ON.

Just vaguely curious if anyone's ever seen Energon Kickback (or Blight), the Combaticon tank, kitbashed into G1 Kickback (the Insecticon) through just enough finessing to get the tank treads to rotate up over the shoulders like wings, plus a repaint?

It's fairly easy to get the toy into an insect-like mode anyway, but I can't remember if I've seen anyone do the obvious modification.

So occasionally I go looking for new LJ accounts to friend. I'll scrounge through those which have friended me (I don't otherwise keep tabs on who friends/unfriends me), friends-of-friends, and go pull up my interests and check out the most recent posters under that keyword.

And then I'll apply some rough filters to cut down on the number of journals I actually have to peruse in depth.

The main one is the 20-post filter.

I'll pull up a journal, and go back 20 posts. I don't count posts which are cut-n-pastes of things from elsewhere, including memes. I only count publically accessible posts.

If the 20th original-content post is more than six months old, I probably won't be friending that journal. I like to read, and read a lot. A journal which is updated less than once a week on average is probably not going to be all that interesting to me. If something is updated more than once a week but the updates are all friends-only, that's not going to give me an indication of whether the journal's worth reading on an ongoing basis.

This filter actually eliminates the majority of the journals. I'll also take a rain check if the most recent post is more than three months old - it may be that the writer's just gone on vacation, but I'm not going to hang around waiting for them to get back. I'll pick them up on the next foraging hunt.

This leaves the much more nebulous test of whether the journal's interesting to me personally. There aren't really too many hard and fast rules. Good writing will hook me. Making me laugh in multiple posts is a good indicator. A little variety shows a flexible mind. Excessive posting on a single theme will usually turn me off, unless the posts are well-written enough to rise above their subject.

Post length is a factor, although I couldn't say precisely how. It's tied in slightly with content.

And after I've slogged through a handful and friended one or two, I'll wind it up for the night. Which is why I haven't friended everyone and their dog yet. There are probably lots of journals which would make the cut which I just haven't gotten around to looking at yet.

Is it cruel to trawl general answer-providing websites looking for obvious cut-n-pasted poetry/prose homework questions with no effort put into any solution prior to dumping it on the site, and post in response beautifully crafted tracts which fulfil the original requirements - but which when decoded by an English teacher translate to "I asked the internet to do my homework and am about to be punked for it"?

And then do little dances when the answers are chosen as the best response just before the poster runs off to present them as their own work?

Wanton cruelty, or teaching a valuable life lesson?

Watched Equilibrium. Eh... a little too much 1984 meets Fahrenheit 451 with the Matrix supplying wardrobe and general kickassery.

Got non-offpeak-shaped by the ISP today until the end of the current billing period. Essentially this means that from 8am to midnight, this connection's now on dialup. The main reason for it was a major MMORPG update a while back which was accidentally kicked off before midnight and sucked up quite a few percentage points of the on-peak cap before getting killed (and subsequently restarted after midnight).

As the account caps never usually come close to being reached, the exact details had faded from memory and didn't trigger even very faint alarm bells until some hours later, when the damage had already been done. Mea culpa. So it's back to the slow road in the meantime. Fortunately, as far as I know there aren't any significant data transfers waiting in the wings, so it shouldn't be more than a minor annoyance.

Even so... sigh.

It be Talk Like a Pirate Day already in this corner o' the world.

Arr. Prepare to be boarded.

One movie ticket, drink and popcorn combo: $31
Car fuel to get to cinema: $2
Parking for three hours: $4
Ads and trailers: Half a goddam hour of my life I'm not getting back

Finding out the DVD would have only been $33 on eBay: WTF?


(Especially as, if I didn't like the DVD, I could have onsold it easily and effectively paid just a couple of dollars to watch not only the movie, but all the extras. Without needing to go out. With full control over volume, pause/replay, couch comfiness, and cheap snacks. And if I did like it, I could watch it any time I wanted to, over and over again, show it to friends and family, and maybe even pass it around so they can show *their* friends and family.)


But noooo, cinema's not a business built on quicksand these days, not at all.

Turned up to the court building again this morning, and along with a couple dozen other got shuffled around between this room and that, sometimes getting my assigned number called out and sometimes not. Eventually a much smaller group of us got shuffled back to the original room we'd been herded into and told that we'd done our time, thanks for turning up, don't let the door hit us in the butt.

AND THUS JUSTICE WAS SEEN TO BE DONE. *dons cape, stares heroically off into the distance*

Got a callup letter a couple of weeks back and today was the day, so I headed off.

Parking in the city was a pain, with several places wanting $25 or more. Fortunately, a broken ticket machine and substitute manual ticket guy in a backlot near the railroad got that down to $10, and was only a couple of blocks from the court.

Everyone going in gets the metal-detector treatment. Same deal as in airports, but they don't take away your medicine or drinks. Because they're not idiots.

Then followed half an hour of Jurying 101, including a mercifully short DVD with half-zonked talking heads droning on about being Happy Jurors Of The People (tm). This was in a room with a couple hundred random examples of citizenry in rows of chairs, adding to the feeling that we were all waiting for a 767 to pull up outside the window.

A random picking of numbers later, I was in a group headed for a courtroom. A fairly snug courtroom, with decor more reminiscient of a modern office than the rather archaic polished-wood amphitheatres beloved by Hollywood. We heard the accused's plea, then one of the officials picked random juror numbers from the couple dozen of us crammed in the back of the room. Those picked went and did jury stuff, and the rest of us were rounded up and sent back to see if there were any other trials that morning which needed more jury members.

As this wasn't the case, we were told to naff off and come back Wednesday for more of the same.

...what, you were expecting something interesting to happen in all that red tape?

So my admittedly-cheap-and-short-term home office chair broke, or at least cracked. Considering that it's lasted a lot longer than I originally planned, I can't really complain.

Looking around for replacements, I find that most office chairs these days are going locally for somewhere in the $100 range, plus or minus fifty bucks. The cheapest one with wheels I could find was a hard plastic shell jobbie for forty dollars.

Freecycle and Craigslist aren't hugely established in this neck of the woods, and the local substitutes aren't really the kind of place you find office furniture on a regular basis.

So, off to the local auction houses! With the economy in freefall and businesses liquidating left, right, and centre, the auction biz is booming. I found a general goods and office gear auction, wandered along, and was able to pick up three fairly solid (and padded!) chairs, still in their original boxes, for $20.

I figure that I can replace the home office chair, upgrade the downstairs office chair from secretarial perch to highback (and put the previous chair in storage), and keep the last one boxed up for the next time something breaks. Wins all around!

Yaskawa/Motoman showcases extremely versatile robot arms.

Six of these. On a mobile platform. Woot.

(I particularly like the dual grippers on each wrist, as it allows the robot to keep holding a tool momentarily while using that arm to grip and move something, whereas a human would have to put the tool down or awkwardly juggle it.)

Just a vaguely depressing thought on the super-expanding semitrailer ideat that keeps jogging around inside my skull:

The original inspiration for the project was those luxury motorhomes with all the bits that slide out and the skyboxes that lift up. I was interested in seeing what the logical extreme of such a design concept would be - namely, how much volume/floorspace could be collapsed down into a single semitrailer load.

Now that I've fiddled with the concept a bit, it occurs to me that it's all very well stuffing three to four thousand square feet into the expanded form, but it means little if there's not anything other than empty space there after it opens up.

The first floor isn't as bad - it has the amenities block, expanding kitchen, self-folding bedrooms and offices, extending storage volumes and general living areas to break up the space. The second floor, however, could be as large as forty feet by fifty, with not even a pillar or screen between one wall and the next, because the entire thing would split into panels and collapse flat.

Even assuming that there's an inch of collapsed space available for interior decor, that's still not a great amount. It would allow for swing-down railings, perhaps some criss-crossed wire space separators, some very hard benches with inflating-cell cushions, perhaps some fake columns and panels... maybe cloth-panel dividers?

Unwalled workstations? Dining areas? Workshop benches? All very well for a stationary facility serving dozens of people, but here I was working on the assumption that it'd have fun stuff for maybe just one or two people. And of course anything not in the design would have to be completely cleared away before the upper floor could be collapsed, and half the fun of something like that is that it's ready to squish down on a moment's notice.

It also bugs me that in travel mode, there's simply not all that much free space. A long-term residence is, amongst other things, pretty much a box for storing stuff in. It's annoying that I could have a two-thousand-square-foot warehouse on the top floor and yet be unable to store anything permanent in it. What storage there is would go mainly to food, cleaning and maintenance gear. Even with storing most paperwork offsite, there's all the zillion and one little items that wind up in drawers and sheds and cupboards and attics around most houses. Would I have room for a thousand-book library? How about a fairly extensive toy collection, and the benchtop tools for kitbashing? Could I find somewhere to put a computer scanner where it would be actually accessible yet easily upgradeable? How about a printer?

Well, OK, yes, I could network those and place them so that they extended out to locations just behind the office desks, but that's not the point. The point is more like - if I decided I wanted an Espresso Book Machine to cart round to conventions and offer to insta-create/print books for artists, would I actually be able to store it anywhere?

(Yes, if I confined the garage to only having a Mini, SmartCar, or other suitably small vehicle, or rented cars as I needed them instead of carting one around, or just stored the EBM in the back of the car and THANK YOU SO MUCH BRAIN I'M TRYING TO KVETCH HERE GRR.)

So, uh, yeah. In summary: lots of potential space in this concept; not really able to fill the space half as nicely as existing top-level motorcoaches or things like the Aston Mobile Estates offerings.

A 2003 essay on the societal conditions which lead to schools being what they are, why your life as an early teenager probably sucked big time as a result, and some clues on how to fix it.

Your thoughts?


My own highschool days were pretty much a vaguely unpleasant blur. Fragments swim up - the layout of the buildings (long since demolished), the one esoteric sport I was ever any good at, the only time a popular girl ever asked me out. I wore nothing but the uniform, spent my lunches and free periods in the library, and was so bored that I once spent a month memorising pi to a hundred places, if only to drag it out as long as possible.

I'm not sure I even _had_ a place in the social hierarchy. I was somewhat insulated because I was in an entire class of advanced students, so we were generally left alone by the mainstream kids, but even there I didn't have friends, exactly. No-one I specifically looked for at recess. No-one I hung out with after school or on the weekends. Socialising just wasn't a driving force in my life.

Looking at the article, I wonder if school clubs - with topics and scopes picked by the students - would have helped. I suspect not much, at the school I attended. There were only a couple of hundred kids all up, and how many would have been interested in a computing club, an engineering club, a SF club?

Even so, some part of my brain whispers, it would have been something. Being able to walk into a new school and see a recruiting table or booth for people like you is a huge rush of confidence. It's part of what I liked so much when I finally hit uni. The SF club might have been a poky, ratty room up three flights of stairs, but it was crammed floor-to-ceiling with my kind of books and people who, if not actively cheery and welcoming, were there for the same reason I was.

It's one reason I don't think I'll ever be truly satisfied with life in Perth. It's a nice city, yes, very pleasant, good summer weather, great beaches. But it's not my world any more.

Advance screening (for here) today. Caught it despite being 20 minutes late due to unexpected outbreak of city-to-surf run blocking off nearly every route I tried, and trapping me either in dead-end traffic jams or mazes of twisty little streets.

Fortunately, megaplexes in this area believe that what the world needs is 20 minutes of commercials after their advertised movie start time, so I was able to catch not only the movie, but the pre-movie short (which I'd seen on YouTube previously anyway).

Synopsis: A sweet, sad film. Made me laugh twice and cry three times. The kiddies won't get most of the powerful emotional undercurrents, but be prepared to bring tissues if you're the type to well up in the cinema.

Man, put six of these fingers on a circular track around the edge of a central 'palm' disk and that'd make one amazing artificial hand.

Looking back on my career, and the kinds of bosses I've occasionally had, and their assorted failings, it's come to my attention that I don't actually consider evil bosses to be the worst kind of boss to work for. In order, in my opinion, the worst bosses to work for are:

#1: Inconsistent bosses. These are bosses who yell at you one day and want to be your best friend the next. They tell you one thing, deny it an hour later, then ask the next morning why it hasn't been done. The only way to deal with them is to personally intimidate them into submission, because then they won't dare to dick you around.

#2: Incompetent bosses. These are the ones who are about as useful as a fart in a whirlwind. They can never get anything done or done right, including your HR paperwork and firing the office assholes. You'll end up doing their job for them and bullying signatures out of them.

#3 Evil bosses. Assuming they're consistent and competent, they can often be worked around. The only problem is the occasional bombshell of evil they drop, but sometimes they can be negotiated with and may even hold up their end of the bargain on occasion.

#4 Stupid bosses. The kind who can do their job day to day, but have the mental speed and flexibility of concrete. They won't approve any improvements or changes, they'll never vary from their own personal interpretation of company policy, and they want everyone working for them to be the same way - grey little cogs. They have immense trouble conceptualising anything new, and often simply don't bother. Fortunately, you can sometimes get stuff past them once you know how they think and can put up with having to manipulate them for three to six months at a time in order do anything like upgrade the coffee machine in the break room. Best way around them is to have someone above their level make the decision and then tell the boss that congratulations, it was their contribution which swung the argument.


Particularly irritating to me personally are the Evil/Incompetent/Stupid bosses. I don't actually mind having an Evil Competent boss, because sometimes they're evil on the team's behalf and other times it can just be fun watching an evil plan unfold even if you get caught in it. The E/I/S bosses, though, are the ones who will decide to screw you out of a payrise by telling you a lie, not be able to make it a particularly believable lie, and then automatically assume that it worked, you were totally fooled, and there will be no repercussions (or payrises plus penalties for trying to pull such a stunt).

Things done today:

- Went shopping
- Did a little online business networking
- Computer software repair
- Finished six-month backlog of company tax paperwork that computer problem was holding up
- Confirmed that national socialised healthcare system can indeed give me a third lot of money on top of the other two lots of money I reclaimed recently
- Prototyped half of mode 10/12 for ongoing toy design; realised that I'm going to have all kinds of problems with the last three modes as they all need heads and all the heads need to be stored in the same very limited space. Unless I can find room in the forearms for raptor noggin components... hmm.
- OS update in order to be able to install this year's tax software
- 90 minutes reinstalling video drivers, OS components, and third-party software because of stupid OS update bollixing the monitors
- Did personal taxes
- 30 minutes discovering that the combination of XP SP3, Radeon9200-class video cards, the drivers for said cards and OS, and screen rotation in general is pretty much broken because of driver problems, and thus having to undo 99% of the previous installation. Fortunately, I *had* made a system backup beforehand - I only need to get bitten several dozen times by stupid software before the clue sinks in.

For the followers of Girl Genius:

Has it ever been proven that Klaus couldn't be Agatha's biological father? Especially given this scene? Or is the timeline all wrong?

Hmm... I think something's been said along the lines of Gil and Agatha not being a "Luke and Leia" setup, but L&L were fraternal twins, not half-siblings, so...?

Went to see it the other night as it was cheap movie night at various cinemas.

Unfortunately, it wasn't playing at the cinema I prefer to patronise, so I ended up going to one of the megacomplexes I don't like all that much.

The queues were fifty people long and took fifteen minutes to get through to get a ticket, meaning that by the time I'd actually got one there was no time to requeue another fifteen to twenty minutes for popcorn.

The display board which showed what was playing that night didn't actually have District 9 listed on it, so the entire time I was in the queue I was expecting to hear "Oh, our website session times are complete lies and we're not showing that," mainly because I've run into that problem at that particular cinema before. Fortunately, thirty seconds before I got to the front of the queue, someone in the back room figured out how to add the film to the board. Mind you, by this time the session had technically already started, even if it was still just playing commercials.

I got assigned a seat, which I hate, but it turned out there was someone else sitting in it anyway, so I said "Screw this" and took my popcornless self over to a much better-placed seat. The seat itself was quite nice, even if the auditorium-sized theatre wasn't really my cup of tea.

The movie... eh. Got a lot of high ratings from critics, but from my perspective the social commentary was not so much ladled on as something you had to try and avoid drowning in. Subtle it wasn't. Vaguely interesting choice of having a lot of the movie made up from 'footage' from various security cameras, news choppers, and in-the-field soldier-cams. Something of a stylistic choice, I think, although honestly I was fairly neutral about it.

The CGI was near-flawless. The emphasis was not only on realism, but realism in a dusty, gritty, chopper-newscam environment. There were very few of the "Look at the size of my CGI engine!" cinematic moments that have been done and overdone since CGI started being a workhorse. The CGI background characters were just that - background. They didn't get extra screen time or shot composition which detracted from the foreground action.

All in all, it's not something I'd go see twice. District 9 seemed to be much more trying to a be a serious social commentary movie than a SF blockbuster. It wasn't so much entertaining, I think, as attempting to be educational and appeal to awards-granters and industry reviewers. Which isn't a bad thing to be, it's just not what I went to the movies looking for.

People react differently when they're depressed or stressed. Me, I'm one of the ones who withdraws into a cocoon until they've gathered the strength to face the world again.

Sometimes, it can take a while.

I'm sitting, gently cradled
In the catacomb of mind
I've one less dawn before me now
And one more dusk behind
Though I should make a movement, I watch seconds slip away
And the world outside begins another day

I'm floating, gently drifting
In the mental vaults I built
Where's I'm happy, or not sad, at least
Protected from the guilt
Yet still the sands of time cascade; another day is gone
Another wasted night; another dawn

I'm drifting gently downwards
Through my sphere of disconnect
And though I can see rock bottom
Still, I haven't hit it yet
Yet the ticking of the clock scrapes on my senses like a knife
As I waste the precious moments of my life

And I long for sweet oblivion
I'd never have to see
The world of passing days and nights
All passing right by me
And all I have to do is simply reach out and connect...
But I don't know if I can do it yet.

From way back when. My art skills haven't improved appreciably since then.

This was a stab at a prototype version of a fancharacter I've put art up of before. In this variation, he had a lot more black than grey. It's possible that this might even be art of his pitfighting persona, Obsidian. Yes, he chose a name identical to an existing, active Decepticon general. No, he didn't realise it until later. Yes, he then kept on using it for the mystique. No, he didn't admit that was his stage name when he was captured. As the black colour was mostly a temporary spray-on he used in the arena, he was back to mid-gray by the time he'd been processed and power-washed.



Differences from the more recent 3D art:
- his napalm cannons have a flatter turret, not the hemispherical one which came later.
- the colour, of course.
- there's a dip in the helmet at the top of his face. That was actually supposed to be in the CGI model, too, until I realised that it would make any liquid falling on his head automatically run down over his optics. Put on hold until I worked out an alternative - probably shifting the dip to the back of his head.

Note that I hadn't yet decided how the shoulders were going to transform, and the pistols are therefore placed to block any view of them. Also that I suck at drawing detail and metallic surfaces, so it's hard to really pick out the foreground pistol faces from the background robot.

On the other hand, the expression wasn't bad, considering he's got only the barest hints of a faceplate. It really does look like he's scowling.

Apparently, when I'm sleepy/lazy enough so that my voice winds down to more of a slow burr, I get something of an American accent.

Analysing it, I think it's a dash of Tom Lehrer and a large chunk of my younger brother's teenage parody of Lee Perry's version of Wear Sunscreen as if narrated by a grumpy Hunter S. Thompson. Make of that what you will. There's a fair bit of drawing out of vowels - it has none of Lehrer's precision, but something of his cadences, if slower. It's also missing much of the pop and click of very pronounced consonants, instead curling idly from one word to the next. Not slurring, exactly, but definitely soft.

It's a lazy, lazy buzz. Quite fun, in a not-quite-awake muttering sort of way. Of course, I've been told in no uncertain terms not to lapse into it within hearing distance of a certain someone who doesn't like psuedo-American accents... or maybe it's just from me.

The paint seems to have blended fairly well. Go paint!

Hmm. Been over two weeks since I was trying to convince a government department that giving me usefully large amounts of money would be a win/win. On the plus side, haven't yet got anything back saying "Bite us." On the minus side, haven't heard anything back at all.

Of the various opportunities which have presented themselves recently, I'm a tad more invested in this particular one as, to be honest, I think that I would truly rock the role. It's as if they'd actually preinvented a niche that was just the perfect shape for me, and that's not something that comes along all that often _ever_. It wouldn't even be so much about the money; I just think I'd really be able to contribute on all cylinders.

It'd be nice, it really would.

Still, I know how slow government response can be. It could be another two to four weeks even if there isn't some kind of last minute budget holdup or office reorganisation. And it's not as if I'm pinning all my hopes on this one thing. Still, it's something I wouldn't mind getting out of bed for in the mornings, which isn't the case for most methods of making a buck.

In the meantime: ( table in a cabinet! )

Took the time today to procure a pot of paint and patch the assorted scattered surface scars studding the walls. Hopefully, the paint will dry to the right colour and without too much 'patch texture'.

Also: Folding Bike concept prototype, starring the following features:
- normal sized wheels!
- collapses down to about the size of a single wheel!
- hydraulic transmission!
- moderately fast conversion!