More people have ascended bodily into heaven than have shipped great software on time. - Jim McCarthy
December 2001
Charles' in-depth review of Lord of the Rings
Updated: Okay, this time I went back through my friends pages until LJ refused to go back even further, which in this case was back to December 12th. I don't guarantee my counting was accurate. No, I had nothing better to do.
LONDON (Reuters) - A British man who went underground behind blast-proof doors and thick concrete to avoid a family Christmas has emerged early because he was ``dying for a pint''.
This year, I finally want to go out on Christmas night, and guess what? I can't, because Nick's not going to be able to get here until the evening. Why do these things always end up being organised around my brother's comings and goings? It's not like I didn't say I was doing this ten bloody days ago.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Fuck.
I wonder how the roaches in my apartment are getting along without me?
Random amusement for those who know me:
- Mother:
- We'll go down to the harbour and have fish and chips tomorrow. I don't cook on Fridays
- Charles:
- Oh! I don't cook on Fridays either.
Family Photo. Feel free to skip.
I buggered my shoulder watching Shakespeare in the Park last night, and both my arms are on the verge of sunburn. But I still love holidays :)
Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Dury
In the deserts of Sudan, and the gardens of Japan
From Milan to Yucatan, every woman, every man
Hit me with your rhythm stick, hit me, hit me
Je t'adore, Ich liebe dich
Hit me, hit me, hit me
Hit me with your rhythm stick
Hit me slowly, hit me quick
Hit me, hit me, hit me
In the wilds of Borneo, and the vineyards of Bordeaux
Eskimo. Arapaho, move their bodies to and fro
Hit me with your rhythm stick, hit me, hit me
Das is gut, c'est fantastique
Hit me, hit me, hit me
Hit me with your rhythm stick
It's nice to be a lunatic
Hit me, hit me, hit me
On the dock of Tiger Bay, on the road to Mandalay
From Bombay to San Jose, over the hills and far away
Hit me with your rhythm stick, hit me, hit me
C'est si bon, ah, das machts nicht
Hit me, hit me, hit meHit me with your rhythm stick
Two fat persons, click click click
Hit me, hit me, hit me
Hit me, hit me, hit me
Hit me, hit me, hit me
Oh shit. I just realised I posted something consequential and personal to my journal. Somebody shoot me now.
I just got home from having lunch with my brother - I had a look around his apartment, and we went down to a local cafe for some lunch and a chat. This is something of an event - I think this is the first time in twenty-six years I've actually sat and just talked to my brother about "stuff". I remember when he phoned to wish me Happy Birthday this month, once he'd done his duty, we were both at something of a loss for conversation because we've never really talked.
It's strange, because as brothers go we've always been really close. But we've always related as brothers, not as people.
And it wasn't inconsequential stuff either - some really deep subjects were broached, things about fathers, and the way we're both way too competitive. Pretty deep, even if the most deep stuff was only communicated in subtext.
All in all, I feel a little weirded out by the experience. Happy, I've always loved my brother, and it's strange that we've not really communicated for so long, but still weirded.
Just in case you were wondering where I get it from...
I was sitting in a rather trendy cafe (called The Blue Duck) with my mother and my brother, Nick. Nick was talking about how he has a deadline to get the first draft of the play he's writing done by Monday, and how the study he works in gets really hot. My mother wondered if he could move Aaron in there.
I was told recently that when my brother and his girlfriend moved into their flat, they named all their furniture, and were quite proud of Sid the Sofa, and Barry the Bookshelf, so I correctly guessed that Aaron was "Aaron the Air-conditioner". My mother then suggested that she could lend him Jane, from her office.
"Jane?" I asked, foolishly.
"Jane Air"
The chance of me being the only sane member of my family is rather slim, so I guess I just have to accept it. :)
My mother has a little figurine on the windowsill. It's a goldfish, inside a glass cat. :)
The hotel I was staying in (it's really, really weird to stay in a hotel in your home town) had this really neat idea. I arrived to find a little note saying "We're having drinks on the 16th floor on Wednesday, come up and join the staff". It was a bit weird - there was one girl there with an "I'm being paid to be nice to you" smile, who I quickly stopped talking to. Everyone else was cool, though, and it made me want to come back next time.
What amazed me was that two days later, someone in the lobby who I'd talked to for about three minutes had made the effort to remember my name. They must train these people well.
I believe that my goal for the rest of the Christmas holidays will be to forget as much as I can of correct English grammar.
I caught the train from Sydney to the airport. I always get paranoid about these things so I turned up at the airport about an hour before my plane was due to board. I wandered around the shops. I finished reading the last chapter of "Fellowship of the Ring". I had two beers. I wandered around the shops again.
I looked up at the departure screens to discover that there was still an hour to go before my plane was due to board. Bastards!
The reason given for the delay was the late arrival of the plane. Fair enough, they rely on the tailwinds from Perth to Sydney, so maybe they weren't as strong as usual. Cool, that might even mean we'll be faster flying back the other way! Eventually, they had cleaned the plane, I had had a few more beers, and everything was ready for boarding.
We sat on the plane for another half an hour. I could hear the sound of power-tools coming from the left wing, but I was sitting on the right side of the plane so I couldn't look out the window. We all sat, there's not much else you can do on a 747.
Then the Captain comes on the intercom. I kid you not, this is what he said:
Hello, this is your Captain again. I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that we've been trying to fix one of our engines, but the replacement part they got for us doesn't fit. The good news is that the only thing wrong with the engine is that the reverse-thrust doesn't work. That won't make us any later than we are already, and it'll only add about two hundred meters to our stopping-distance, which won't ber a problem. We just have to wait for the crew to lock the engine down so it can't go into reverse, and we'll be away.
Way to go to make me feel confident about the air-worthiness of the plane. Charles' prediction: As a result of the constant price-wars of the last decade, Qantas will have its first ever crash before the end of 2005.
The in-flight movie was Rush Hour 2. It sucked. It sucked bowling balls through a garden hose. I watched my DVD of Fight Club, just so I could be a laptop poseur.
Landing in Perth is always unpleasant. Perth airport is just over the edge of an escarpment, so you get all sorts of funky updrafts just as you're going down to land. I was rather glad we were in a big plane - the 747's don't get blown around quite as much as the 727's that usually fly the Sydney-Perth run. However, the Captain fixed that little bit of confidence for me...
We've commenced our descent into Perth. There are some pretty gusty cross-winds down there, so we're going to turn the seat-belt sign on early.
The landing was bad. We got down through what would be cloud-level if there had been any clouds with only the usual amount of turbulence. Then for five minutes or so it was calm, and I was wondering what the fuss was about. Then, for the final approach, the plane was literally veering from side to side as it tried to correct for the wind. I kept waiting for the pilot to abort the landing and fly up again. (A taxi driver later told me that's what a lot of planes had done that day.) I swear, we landed at an angle, and the plane had to be corrected in long, long moments before they could turn on the (partially disabled) reverse thrust to slow us down.
I keep telling myself it's safer than driving in a car. I can believe it intellectually, but my gut is unconvinced.
Addendum: My mother trumped my story. On landing in Perth once, the captain came on the intercom to say "If you see the cabin crew wandering around looking out the windows, don't be alarmed. They're just making sure the landing gear [in the wings] comes down properly."
I'm going to Perth for two weeks. I'll be teaching a course for three days, then I'll be taking a holiday over Christmas. I'm coming back to Sydney for the New Year, because I want to (for once) take advantage of my father's offer to watch the bridge fireworks. (See an earlier entry for pictures of the view from my father's house.
Last time I did the Christmas in Perth thing, I told everybody that I was going to spend two weeks keeping off the net, and generally being inaccessible. This, of course, was nonsense, I spent quite a few hours every day on my mother's PC catching up on IRC, it was just less predictable as to when I'd be able to turn up. I'm not going to be incommunicado. Incoherent? Yes.
The problem is that satori, my wonderful, trusty server has decided that its power-supply fan is on the blink, and I really don't have time to get a new one before I leave. This at the time when it's really getting hot outside. I'm going to have to do something unnatural. I'm going to have to turn satori off.
The alternative seems to be coming home to find I've burned my apartment block down, which would be rather unfortunate, don't you think?
This means for two weeks, OurPlace will be down (no big loss, it wasn't seeing much use lately, everyone's moved to LJ). It also means that my email will start bouncing. Anyone who wants to contact me after tomorrow morning will have to email cmiller@ihug.com.au, or junk_fish@hotmail.com. Preferably the former, I detest hotmail.
Peace, Love and Mung Beans
I am now the proud owner of a titanium G4 Powerbook. It kicks ass.
There are three kinds of projects. (I'm thinking here about programming, but I'm sure it translates to other endeavours as well)
- Things you are paid to do
- Things you do because you want (need) to use the end-product
- Things you do because you think doing it would be rather nifty
The first one is easy. You go in, you do what your boss tells you to do, and you go home. It's a good idea to enjoy most of what you do when you're at work, but when it gets dull or repetitive, you can always fall back on the fact that at the end of the day, you get a nice pay-cheque.
Category two is easy as well. If you're motivated to do something because there's some reward in the end-result, you keep going for as long as the reward justifies the effort. An example of something I did in the second category was OurPlace. I wanted my website to be able to do certain things that couldn't be done by the regular free Perl wiki engine, and I didn't really want to be reliant on anyone elses code since they all tended to rely on annoying things like relational databases. ("Find the dependencies -- and eliminate them." When you're working on a really, really good team with great programmers, everybody else's code, frankly, is bug-infested garbage, and nobody else knows how to ship on time. -- Joel Spolsky) So in a couple of weekends of hacking, I had my own wiki engine. When I needed to totally rewrite the parser because it was too hard to add new markup tags, I took another weekend to rewrite it.
It's category three that's the problem. This is how 90% of my personal projects start, and how 100% of that 90% finish. I get a neat idea, and I start thinking "Now, how would I do this?" It's that thought I can't get out of my head. I don't really want the program, I just want to know that I can do it. My head is filled with ideas of how the various bits would work, how it would fit together, what it would look like and so on, and I need to write code just to get all that out of my head.
The thing is, I reach a point where I've written enough, worked out enough that the nagging voices get a lot quieter. Eventually, it gets quiet enough that my natural inertia overcomes it. The little voice that says "You'd much rather turn your brain off and watch those idiots on Temptation Island" ends up being louder than the voice that says "You remember that really nifty Content Management System idea you had?"
So I accumulate unfinished programs, like the line of seaweed on the beach. The wave of enthusiasm throws them onto the sand, the tide recedes and they're left to rot.
Unfortunately, the nagging voice hasn't gone. It's just quieter than the other voices. Every project is a little thing in the back of my skull saying "You haven't finished me yet! And you told me I was so cool! You bastard!" Perhaps I need an exorcist?
Ignore this if you're not a nerd. I'm raving about the Java IDE I've been playing around with.
Take this job.... (originally from Adam Curry's Weblog)
"As you can expect it's really affecting my sex life. I can't help it. Each time my wife initiates sex, these ejaculating hippos keep floating through my mind."
Currently stuck in my head... When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything!
Memo to self: jericho@sourceforge
<Candi> Spam is eternal
I think there's something in that for all of us, don't you?
Happy birthday to me!
My brother's mobile phone (cell-phone, for you 'merkins) number ends with 256 512. I'm so jealous.
Inspired by shut the fuck up and watch a movie which was linked to by 
lonita, I present my wonderful movie-watching story. A couple of you will have already heard this, it's one of my more commonly told tales.
lonita, I present my wonderful movie-watching story. A couple of you will have already heard this, it's one of my more commonly told tales.
There's a hippy across the road with the illusion that she's a folk singer. A very loud and painful illusion. I'm starting to have second thoughts about Australia's gun laws.