Four short years ago today I posted my very first blog entry, published as static HTML on jujusoft.com. It was more than two years later that I finally got around to porting jujublog to a proper blogging platform (Wordpress) — in the process changing the name from Jujublog to intepid.com. The conversion made life a lot easier, and also meant that I could support reader comments for the first time, something I was initially concerned about but ultimately turned out to be a very positive move— Thanks to ScottB for leaving the first ever comment!

This is the 611th entry posted, and to date there are 795 comments (not bad considering comments have been enabled for less than two years). I had my doubts I would still be posting after this long, but I haven’t gotten bored with it yet, so I see no reason not to continue the habit indefinitely.

The Future

I’d like to try to get a bit more variety happening here, and maybe start posting a bit more on the technical side again. It seems that it’s become quite rare for me to write about programming or mathematics except in the most general sense, and I think this is largely due to an awareness that a sizeable portion (the majority?) of my readers are not engineers, and may be turned off by content of a dry technical nature. My original solution to this problem was to move technical articles to my jujusoft blog, but it’s hard to find the motivation to write something for such a small audience, so now Jujublog consists of little more than updates on my software [which are so few and far between that some people might even assume that it’s been abandoned].

I still have an irritating habit of telling everyone I know that they should try blogging (because it’s really quite therapeutic/empowering etc) so on this auspicious occasion I hereby resolve to stop doing that, because I know it’s annoying, and if you haven’t started already it’s probably because you’re just not interested.

When you get all your news from the internets, TV starts to feel totally retarded. Especially if it’s TVNZ. Here’s what I learned from television tonight:

• Pluto is no longer officially a planet because a group of astronomers decided to boot it out of the Solar system! All of the astrologers interviewed were incredulous at the decision but vowed to not let the reclassification interfere with their predictions. Unfortunately no astronomers could be reached for comment.
• What’s the deal with emoticons…? They serve no useful purpose! [Thanks Rove, I can’t wait to hear next week’s timely routine about Pluto being kicked out of the Solar system].
• Other people’s accents are so fucking funny!

What I really love is the fabulous irony of the "wacky crap on the internet" segment they have at the end of the news here, where we can learn about crazy new topics like viral marketing!

Speaking of irony, I’ve got myself a new wristwatch, a chunky-ass stainless steel analog thing with the 3 extra mini dials on the face. I’ve taken to wearing it for a few reasons:

1. I wish to reduce my chances of being mistaken for gay, and my previous watch just wasn’t macho enough.
2. I found the watch while walking home, and I love finding stuff because it removes the burden of choice— It becomes fate!
3. The watch is called Irony so it’s totally cool for me to wear it— I love irony!

Starting from the top:

1. Self-inflicted haircut.
2. Unflattering glasses, with arms too thick for the rest of the frames.
3. Sickly pallor, especially around the neck.
4. Cheap hooded pullover, missing the dangly bits of cord. Covers further pallor as well as a recently acquired paunch.
5. Pale hands with large knuckles and badly chewed nails.
6. Ill fitting jeans, specially tailored to accentuate the shortness of my legs.
7. Extremely cheap Converse knock-offs, which would be great if they lasted more than four weeks.

I’d like to think that I might look back on this entry in a year or two and laugh at my embarrassing lack of style, but in truth I expect I’ll probably be dressed much the same. I’ve always been terrible at shopping for clothes, and have a life-long aversion to hairdressers.

Of course the good thing about not having a very high standard is that it requires virtually no effort to maintain :)

Slow motion is fun… if I ever buy a video camera I’ll consider this capability a requirement. This was made using my Canon IXUS 50, which can shoot at 60fps but only for a minute at a time— another great feature crippled by Canon!

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Hotlinking is a practice which is generally considered a nuisance, because it means someone is using both your content and bandwidth without necessarily asking or giving credit.

I’m quite ok with people copying images from my site as long as they don’t try to pass them off as their own (and provided they give credit where appropriate). What’s more problematic is when people link directly to an image hosted on my server, because while it might at first seem more "legal", ie there is no actual copying going on, in truth it’s just kind of annoying because it costs me bandwidth.

Some webmasters respond rather aggressively to hotlinking, setting up scripts to return obscene or abusive images. This is a totally idiotic way to deal with the problem, not least because there are bona fide reasons why an image might be linked from another server. For example, a user might see an image on my site (say a diagram) and post a hyperlink to it in a comment or forum, in order to illustrate a point. This seems like fair use to me, and I think it would be very rude (although in some cases amusing) if this image was automatically replaced with a picture of a horse’s penis and the word THIEF in block letters. It’s also an entirely inappropriate solution for blogs, since RSS feeds mean you can never know where an image might be accessed from.

So I’ve tried to come up with a mature compromise, to mitigate my bandwidth loss without being an asshole about it. To this end I have added a script which will limit the sizes of images requested remotely (currently to a maximum dimension of 256 pixels), also adding a small caption at the bottom to indicate where the image is hosted. The image is not obscured by the caption, and simply copying the link will allow you to obtain the original.

This means that from now on images being hotlinked from other sites will be [slightly] modified into mini banner ads— everybody wins! (except people who hotlinked to animated gifs— they’re screwed)

Day 1

It looks like Telecom NZ has cut me off for not paying my exhorbitant bill (and for having the gall to expect them to reply to my queries regarding the invoice in question).

A short review of Telecom NZ’s wireless broadband service: Apart from the shockingly inept billing system it’s great! If you don’t mind getting vague statements and substantial overcharges it’s fantastic! etc etc

Day 2

I spent a while talking to several Telecom people on the phone today and via email, hopefully this will be sorted out by tomorrow. This is my second night without internet, and as silly as it sounds (I have access at work after all) it feels so damn strange. It’s almost like a miniature holiday— I should be enjoying myself, having long baths and catching up on my reading. But just like a holiday, it’s rarely so easy to let go of one’s routine, and part of my routine is clearly to spend almost all my freaking time absorbing information via email and RSS feeds. With that supply cut off I suddenly find myself at a loose end.

At least I have managed to do some reading; I’m halfway through Alain de Botton’s latest, and even managed to read another chapter of Neal Stephenson’s System of the World.

Also I watched Heat tonight on DVD, something I’ve also been meaning to do for a while… but I’m getting ahead of myself, because first I wanted to mention that I saw Michael Mann’s Miami Vice last week, and boy was it ordinary. And long. Boring one might say, and perhaps even a little bit stupid. Colin Farrell was almost amusing, but the movie was so earnest that it felt like he wasn’t supposed to be. It’s also way too long (the last half hour is quite good if you can make it that far). I went to see it mainly on the strength of the stylish previews, as well as Michael Mann’s previous films, Heat and Collateral.

I loved Heat, which is strange because I’ve seen it before, years ago, and although I liked it it didn’t leave such a strong impression on me. This time around it seemed so much more significant. Robert de Niro actually bothers to give a decent performance, Al Pacino’s edginess has a point, and even minor characters are loaded with back-story. Natalie Portman, the troubled step-daughter, appears in just a few scenes, and yet she still gets to attempt suicide! And just when it looks like you’re supposed to be rooting for the bad guys, they remind you that they are bad guys by behaving like really bad guys. The score is quite something too, so simple but powerful, like a whole orchestra just belting out a progression of major and minor chords, and it doesn’t actually hit the crescendo until the closing credits roll, which makes me dearly wish I had seen it at the cinema when it was first released— I would have stayed for those credits.

Day 3

Wow, I’m back online already— After several more emails and phone calls, Telecom finally agreed to reconnect me and credit me the amount I was disputing. Woo!

I finally saw Graham Linehan’s The IT Crowd recently, and really enjoyed it. I liked looking for the small nerdy details, like the picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the wall behind Moss.

Visiting the relevant Wikipedia article about the Flying Spaghetti Monster you will see this lovely rendition by Niklas Jansson.

I came across FSM tonight when I googled 33 dimensions, and was surprised to note that there were at least two other references besides my own entry on the topic some time back. One is classic pseudo-science gobbledegook, the other was a throw away comment noting that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has 33 dimensions (although I find no other reference to back this up).

The tendency for people to believe that higher dimensions must be where our spiritual selves live (along with aliens and/or God) is kind of scary. Very few people have a workable understanding of higher dimensions even from a theoretical standpoint, and yet there’s no shortage willing to divy them up into "planes of existence". Often the word dimension is misused to refer to something more akin to a parallel universe.

Clearly we need a better understanding of the hypothesized eleven dimensions which constitute our universe, and hopefully the following table will help:

When I was a young lad I liked to draw Garfield, painstakingly recreating the exact same pose over and over again. This was back in the 80’s, before he contracted elephantitis, which caused his feet to swell until they were larger than the rest of his body.

It’s a shame that it took so long for the strip to die, since it seemed like the last ten years were little more than Garfield being bored, or implying that Jon was boring, or commenting on how television was boring, etc etc.

Can you spot the animal in this picture?

Wow, it’s just like we’re in the same room!

The only webcam I’ve ever heard anyone recommend is Apple’s iSight, and annoyingly it’s only available with FireWire connection. Grrrrr…

audio

BTW For some reason the embedded player was screwing this up when the sample rate was 24KHz, so I had to resample to 22.05, which means it sounds a little rougher than it needs to.

Seems that cutting your own hair is something a lot of people want to know more about, and is easily the number one search on intepid lately.

A very long time ago I had long hair, and sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get round to growing it again (it’s cropped very short at the moment). The hard bit is getting past the awkward length when it’s longer than short and shorter than long, during which period [about a year] some sort of hat is in order.

Here’s me with Laura Prepon’s hair (Donna from That 70’s Show )— hot or what?

… Ok, ok, I confess, this post was really just a thinly veiled excuse to do some creepy transgender photoshopping— so sue me!