This synthetic form

It's been a while

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:54:30 GMT

I knew it had been a while since I posted last, but didn't realise it was quite this long! Nearly two months.. I really seem to be much more active on Flickr forums, Twitter, and Facebook. :(

I guess I've been kept rather busy since moving in - between doing loads of DIY, buying and installing furniture/whitegoods/etc, and a certain girl, there's just been very little time left over.

In the time left over I have been:
* To the zoo
* To friends' picnics and parties
* Cycling
* Clubbing just a couple of times
* Looking for a housemate (note: still looking, first one pulled out)
* Playing Dragon Age
* Playing Tales of Monkey Island
* Learning Scala
* Learning to play the guitar (very very badly and slowly)
* Working on my pet coding projects
* Planting a vegie patch, a tree, and a rose bush.
* Wandering around an abandoned stadium & taking photos.
* Planning my 30th birthday party.

Currently I am: In Brisbane, at the Open-Source Developers Conference.

This weekend I am: Going to the Strawberry Fields festival, near the Alpine National park.

Infrared angels

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:44:57 GMT

One of the photos from Abney Park:

(It looks best Viewed large on black)

Others are linked here (or at least the most recent ones are from this trip)

There are also a couple of shaky handheld infrared pics from Cambridge.

Sleepy now.. It's been another big weekend - Shane's "surprise" birthday party on Friday; then epic packing on Saturday; then today (Sunday) went up to Ballarat for the Foto Bienalle (sic) exhibitions.. then back to Melbourne and hit Earthdance at 6pm in time for Sun Control Species' live set.. hung around until about 8pm then headed off home for dinner and photo edits.

Not in rivers, but in drops.

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:42:26 GMT

According to the use-by dates on milk cartons in the supermarket, they will expire *after* I am a home-owner. :D

I've been busy since I arrived back in Melbourne.

Tonight I have been listening to great music while eating tasty vegie food I made, and generally life is good.
Over the weekend I went to a club night called Machine on Friday, then Paul's 0x21st birthday pirate party on Saturday, then Sunday was the High Vibes street festival in Northcote.
I liked the music at Machine - just have to try and convince a few friends to come along next time. It was interesting techno with perhaps a touch of psytrance influence.

I've been sleeping very well since I arrived back in Australia.. in fact, thanks to jetlag, I've been reliably getting up before 7am and arriving at work earlier than I have ever. I am not trying to fight it; if I can continue to get up early and get more done (and not be horrendously late to work) then it's only a good thing.
However, the yawning-my-head-off before midnight needs to stop!

This post will also be the last one I post directly on LJ, as I'm moving over to Dryfter @ Dreamwidth. I'll continue to cross-post things to LJ indefinitely though.
I'm doing this because Livejournal (the company and software) has stagnated. Dreamwidth has forked the codebase, and is actively improving it, fixing bugs, and adding new features. I approve. Whether they can make any money out of it is another issue, but time will tell..

Please feel free to add me to your Reading List there; also note that you can use your LJ login (via OpenId) there if you don't want to create two accounts.

Toby angry now!

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:03:36 GMT

Angry at Malaysian Airways.

Discovered that the tickets I have been given for next flight are NOT for the flight I booked.
This one goes via Jakarta and arrives in Melbourne a couple of hours later.

Gnrgh. They didn't even tell me - I just happened to notice the flight numbers didn't match up, and asked why. They couldn't even give me an explanation!

:/

Some things never change

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:24:56 GMT

.. like the way I dislike waiting for buses in the rain, who have blatantly lied when they claim they come "every 8-12 minutes". Hmph.

Something else that never changes.. The way that mail-ordered items mysteriously vanish.

I ordered a bunch of railway tickets online, last week, to be delivered to where I'm staying in London.
I ordered all these at the same time, on the same credit card, to the same address..
The first ticket arrived last weekend, but the others still haven't turned up.
Seeing as there are only two more deliveries before I need to use the tickets, I am losing hope of seeing them.
I can foresee a long, unsatisfying time on the phone to TheTrainLine.com tomorrow.

(Side note: In the UK, if you order train tickets online more than a week in advance, you get a decent discount on the trip; buying the tickets at the station tends to result in wallet-hurt.)

Aside from all that, I had nice day. Bed now! Look, I've stayed up all the way to past 11pm! Go me :)
This whole "waking up and feeling bouncy before 7am" thing is weird. I kind of like it, and I kind of don't.
Ideally I'd like to continue to wake up at 6am feeling energised, but lose the getting-tired-at-9pm bit.

In the UK

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 06:28:58 GMT

Have arrived in UK.
Was surprised at number of people still wearing masks everywhere; I thought we were over the flu scare?

I failed to get to a party on Sunday night; I took a quick disconap at 7pm, thinking I might try and get up at 8pm and head out, but I guess it wasn't a surprise that I slept straight through to 5am.

So, have spent the morning sorting out a UK SIM and mobile internet.
I'm on Orange, the number is 077-9281-7239.
The prepaid internet is five pounds per 7 days, unlimited, which sounds pretty good compared to my roaming data costs :P
On the other hand, the "unlimited" bit seems to be a bit naughty, as I'm stuck on 2G, ie. the absolute dark ages as far as mobile broadband goes. Seriously, 10kb/sec - WTF?

Still, enough for the occasional use. I won't be checking my email quite as frequently as usual though :)

Anyway, it's time to get some breakfast, and then head out!
I gather there's a BBQ gathering this evening, and I reckon I have a much better chance of making that one..
Apologies for failing to get to last night's party!

Cheers,
Toby

Book recommendations?

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:25:12 GMT

Hey all,
I have a couple of ultra-long flights coming up, and I don't want to have to rely on the in-flight entertainment options.. I like reading on flights. I like reading fun, easy and engaging novels.
I do have various books in my "half finished" or "to read" piles, but by virtue of their presence in that stack, they can't meet my criteria.

Have you read any books recently that you liked, and think I'd like to read in those circumstances?

Thanks!

Edit: Possibilities, have you read these? What did you think?
* House of Suns - Alistair Reynolds
* The City & The City - China Miéville
* Pygmy - Chuck Palahniuk

Another possibility is that I might just go back and re-read something, maybe Look to Windward by Iain Banks. Although I suspect I have it in hardback :/

Cheeky phone app

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:56:22 GMT

I found this phone app that is so cheeky - "SnapTell"

You take a photo of something, (either the front of the item, or the barcode) and then it looks up the item online.. somehow.. and then gives you some reviews of it.. and links to online shops' prices.. and prices of shops near you selling it and their price.

I presume their business model is that they get a kickback if you follow a link through to, say, amazon and buy the thing.

But it's such a cheeky way to haggle in stores, I mean, you could almost instantly say - hey, I can get this item for *click* *pause* this much just around the corner! Will you match it?

Skiing accident

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:26:34 GMT

Skiing was fun.
Five of us drove up to Mansfield on Friday night, and stayed in this bungalow on a farm, full of beds, about half an hour drive from Mt Buller.

Each morning, we piled into my Subaru at 8am, which I was rather surprised could actually manage to fit five adults plus all their skis, boots, clothes, etc into it, and I drove us to the mountain. In the evening I drove us back while everyone else napped..

Buller itself claimed to have 75cm average snow depth, but this seemed to be a blatant lie.. The bottom parts of the mountain had about 0 to 5 cm of cover, which surely means the top half would need 150cm to average out at 75cm.. However it was more like 20-30cm cover around there at best. *shrug* oh well, it was definitely skiable - you just often had to load onto the lifts halfway down, instead of all the way.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I don't seem to have forgotten how to ski, despite not having been on a mountain for about eight years. Also a pleasant surprise was discovering that the best snow seemed to be on a particular valley that only had black runs on it, thus ensuring that the lift at the bottom never had any queues on it.

I did have a bit of a stack on Sunday, and it was a good and proper one, where you spend five minutes walking up the mountain picking up your skies, poles and items of clothing. Unfortunately it seems my camera copped a battering in the process - see the photo below!
Luckily I was just carrying around a budget point-and-shoot that I have precisely for occasions where I don't want to risk the D700, so it's not a great loss. I am slightly disappointed that the screen broke though, but I guess it must have copped a ski binding or something to the back of it while I tumbled down the mountain.
I had contemplated taking the old Nikon FE up the mountain, as it's practically indestructable - however maybe it's for the best.. I suspect if I landed hard on it, I'd be more likely to break a rib than to break a camera!

Updates

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:56:04 GMT

Whoops.
Just discovered my British passport expired in late 2008!
I'm so used to places emailing, or at least posting, reminders that I'd forgotten!
I hope I can renew it in the next 30 days, or else I'll have to get a holiday visa to visit, and that would be silly..

Hmm, what else have I been up to lately?
My StepMania dance mats arrived, but I haven't organised a dance party yet. Would anyone come out to Reservoir even if I did?
I've found a good selection of random tracks that are a bit different to the usual DDR candy-raver stuff.. Nine inch nails, Neurotic fish, Tool, a few metal tracks, KMFDM, oh, and the Sisters of Mercy. Now you can do the four-step goth dance and get scored for it :D

Continuing to noodle away on the guitar; I think I'm gradually improving.

Melbourne Open House disappointment

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:43:51 GMT

Today was Melbourne Open House day, and I was excited at the prospect of seeing inside the Russell Place power station. I even fought my hangover and went out of the house by midday with lots of camera gear with that objective in mind.

I arrived at the location, where there was a huuuuge queue, all the way down the alley and then down Burke street. Not a good sign. After a while an official came by to say that people at my point in the queue could be expecting a two hour wait, maybe a bit more.
OK.. so I'll wait. At least I have a couple of friends, also hungover, to talk crap with to fill in the time, and hold places in the queue while we take turns buying snacks, coffee, juice, etc.

Nearly three hours later, we're told that the people who started queueing at 11am are only now at the front of the queue, and there's only an hour and a half left before they close. A gentleman in the queue near me asks the official guy how many people are going through.. it's 20 every 20 minutes, or 60 per hour. He then enquires how many people are in front of us in the queue, and whether there are more than the 90 that they still have time for..
The official has a "oh, that's a good idea" look, and goes off to count. He comes back a while later and announces there are well over a hundred people in front.. so everyone behind number 90 may as well go home now.

Damnit! Couldn't they have worked this out, like, two hours earlier? I stood around in a windy, cold alleyway for half the daylight hours for nothing?? Gnnnrgh. Rather disappointed, all in all!

Retail therapised with a new pair of jeans and a shirt, looked at potential carry-on luggage without success*, and then came home tired and grumpy. Am now making bolognese with veggie mince; last attempt ended up rather dry and meh, but am hoping second attempt works out better. (With addition of a glass of wine into the sauce).

[* My previous carry-on bag has fallen to bits, annoyingly. Black/grey canvas satchel. I suppose I could just repair it.. But it wasn't that hot anyway.]

Sore fingers

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:10:31 GMT

That is my new guitar!

I swear I looked at a few hundred new and second hand guitars, but in the end settled upon this one.. I liked the way it looks, and the way it is balanced/fits on me, and I'm told it's a good quality body too. One massive chunk of solid "Alder" wood. (I like the raw un-lacquered look, rather than the shiny finish most electric guitars seem to have.)

After some experimentation, I think it sounds nicest with the bridge pickup and centre pickup linked.. I am using quite "clean" sounding settings while I'm learning, so no doubt I'll figure out what works well for other sounds in due course.

I've been playing with it and reading online tutorials for a couple of days now, and people weren't kidding when they said my fingers would be sore! However I'm happy that I can now just about pluck out the intros to "Hurt" and "Wish you were here" - slow, but recognisable.

Thanks to Tom, Bekki and Sean for their advice so far. Much appreciated!

Portraits - Laura

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 14:40:45 GMT

loz_vovin kindly agreed to sit for me while I tried various portrait techniques.
This is my favourite photo from the shoot - and was the first I took. Strange how that works out.

I also liked:

He who hesitates is lost

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:07:41 GMT

I toured around guitar stores (new and secondhand) in Fitzroy yesterday..
Did some research online, listened to what a few friends had to say last night..
Went back at lunchtime today with one particular guitar in mind..
And it had been sold :(

Damnit. Eh, there'll be others. Plenty of others in fact.
I just hate it when you spend ages debating the merits of one thing over another, eventually pick one.. and then find you have to start again. Hmph.

Winter blues. Or some other genre of guitar-based music.

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:42:32 GMT

Ah, wintertime..
It's cold (10 to 12 degrees), and my usual pastimes of outdoor photography and motorbike rides don't fit with that quite so well.. and Melburnians just don't seem to go out to pubs or clubs or anything so much this time of year. Hmph.

I always seem to fall back to some other time-wasting activity for the colder months.
In past years it's been things like CB/amateur radio, EVE Online, Lord of the Rings Online, roleplaying games, FPS games. Last year I dug up my (very) old MIDI keyboard and bought a "teach yourself piano" book.

I didn't get too far with the piano last year, but this year I'm going to give music another try, and so I intend to purchase a cheap guitar, and attempt to learn it. I'd really *like* to be able to play music.

I have decided to go for an electric guitar, since that'll allow me to mess around with the sound more, and I'm a sucker for electronics. Also, I think I can use headphones, and thus not annoy housemates with dreadful practice notes :)
(It's still ages before I get to move into my house.)

Am now looking for online sites with lessons. So far:
* http://guitar.about.com/library/blguitarlessonarchive.htm

Bill Hicks IS dangerous

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:03:39 GMT

I think I've just been rick-rolled by Bill Hicks.
http://dryft.net/tmp/bill_hicks_we_live_in_world.mp3
From beyond the grave! Is there no limit to his power?

Uncontagious

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:27:49 GMT

Monday was horrible, I didn't so much feel sick as just really out of it for the day, and then plain ill in the evening.
Tuesday was an improvement, I felt extremely sore, achey and hot/cold, but a lot better than Monday, oddly.
Wednesday I went back downhill and ended up with horrible fever and feeling like my body had gone into shock (very cold, losing feeling in fingertips).
Thursday was feeling a bit better again, body was still doing weird things with temperature though.
Friday felt reasonable, but a cough had been building up during the week and continued.
Saturday/Sunday - Still took it easy, but generally feeling well again, apart from this stupid cough.

Contagious?

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:03:54 GMT

Ow.
Ow ow ow.
I woke up feeling fine this morning, and rode the motorbike to work in the bright sun, feeling optimistic about the week.
By lunchtime I felt like I'd been run over by a train a few times and then tossed into a freezing river. I don't know if I've caught "that" flu, but whatever it is, it came on extremely rapidly and now I feel like death warmed up.

On the other hand, it has provided me with an excuse to rug up as for a polar expedition, then curl up in a blanket on the couch as well with the central heating on full, and start watching serial experiments lain episodes back-to-back, possibly napping slightly here and then, which worked reasonably well with the surreal nature of the anime.

Have woken self up again now, and got back into bed after pre-calling in sick to work.

I hope this stupid illness disappears as quickly as it came on! I have stuff to do later this week!
I'm disappointed in my immune system.. it was generally really good since mid 2007, but lately I've come down with cold, headache, and now this! Hmph :/

Braid

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:42:27 GMT

This week I played through Braid, a little indie game.
It was a bit on the short side for USD$15, but it was genuinely interesting and thought-provoking.

At first glance the game is a platformer - run, jump, collect puzzle pieces.. Except that key to the game is the manipulation of time, and playing the game requires you to really get your head around that idea. Levels experiment with different concepts, like localised time rates, loops, phases, and more.

The other key element is the story, which is admitedly only rather loosely interspersed with the gameplay, but is still quite interesting, and manages to convey it's tale, or tales, well. It's not a clear story, but rather something David Lynch would be proud of. It appears clear-cut at first, but as you progress you realise things are not what they seem, and yet make sense, at the same time.
And like a Lynch film, I've spent the past hour searching the internet to read alternate theories on what the story means.

If you like gaming and feel like an interesting new twist on old styles, then give it a go, I think you'll like it. If you hate computer games, or hate obtuse plots, then you should give it a miss.

I'm quite glad that computer gaming seems to have finally evolved to include interesting things like this, rather than yet more things with nothing but bigger technicolour explosions.

Tech blog

Wed, 27 May 2009 02:58:29 GMT

I'm going to (try) and start a tech blog, at http://blog.dryft.net/
Idea is that it's more about software development, Perl, and other technical/professional topics.
Hosted on my domain name, it'll also be the one I hope people discover when googling for me, rather than my Livejournal.
Not that there's much /wrong/ with my LJ, but it tends to be my rants about everyday life rather than maintaining any kind of professional attitude, and I intend to keep it that way ;)

Real names, and musing upon LJ features

Tue, 26 May 2009 02:36:41 GMT

I am spectacularly bad with names.
I remember facts about people, but the arbitrary proper nouns attached to them doesn't stick in my brain well.
This isn't helped by people having many names they go by, in the form of usernames, email addresses, as well as their actual names.

These days I find that I tend to have a better chance of remembering real names than usernames, since the real name is what I call that person by. I frequently find myself struggling to remember what a certain friend's LJ username is here, and thus here is my wishlist for LJ and DW:

I'd like LJ to list my friends in a column, NOT a huge comma-separated list. I want the second column of this list to contain their actual name. By default it should be the name they entered in their profile, but I should be able to override this privately to put my alias for that person there. (Usually I'd just put their actual name there, but I might put more info for some people who share the same name, or perhaps their organisation or community I know them through.)

Then I want to be able to sort that list by either the first OR second columns. I also want to be able to filter this list by the Custom Friend Filters I have already setup elsewhere.

This seems like a sensible feature to me, and I've been half-expecting it to turn up for the past couple of years. Come on LJ, what's going on? The current system is archaic and a pain in the arse :(

I have signed up to Dreamwidth, because I kind of intended to go about fixing the things that make me resent using LJ there, as I gather they're a lot more receptive to patches and change.. Although I suspect that plan is going to go the way of most of my private projects, ie. I'll get back halfway and then start something else :)

*waves hello at eventbot, votebot, wineblogger, rmidet, the facebook port of eventbot, dryftsite, ljfilter, reamirror*

Although to be fair, reamirror, eventbot and votebot do work and are used by people regularly, I just haven't finished the feature set I planned.. rmidet was abandoned because I didn't really have enough knowledge of the requirements..
I did open-source rea-toys and rea-www so at least other people can hack on them.

I should finish up ljfilter sometime, I still think the concept is great :)
It sucks down your LJ friends page, and then runs a spam-assassin-style filter (bayesian plus plugins) over every post, and asks you to rate the post. The idea is that after it has learnt enough, it can then start excluding posts from your view based on the filter results.
Thus, you could read your friends page at 5-star rating to only see critically interesting posts, or 1+-star if you want to to see every bloody meme and quiz result. (Not that those seem to be such a problem these days, at least on the friends filters I use now.)

Woolworths everydayrewards.com.au

Sat, 23 May 2009 08:22:31 GMT

I am quite bemused by the loyalty card scheme from Safeway/Woolworths, called EveryDayRewards(.com.au).

This is because they only offer one reward - a discount of $0.04/litre of petrol at participating petrol stations, if you recently accrued enough points.
This "reward" is actually already available to non-card-holders - if you spend enough in one go, you get a piece of paper with a barcode on it which the petrol stations accept.
So the only benefit to signing up for their loyalty card is that you don't need to carry around a paper docket. Instead you need to carry around their loyalty card, which is heavier and thicker than a piece of paper.

Yet, despite this apparently near-useless-ness of the card, the sign-up procedure is more intense than most banking sites! You need to provide a whole bunch of personal information, followed by a password which must be long and random, and you also have 5 "secret questions" which you have to provide answers to, as you'll apparently get asked those sometimes.
WTF? If someone steals my login, all they can do is view how many e-dockets I have accumulated. Wow. From this, some evil person could probably deduce how often I go shopping at Safeway, and how often I refuel my car. (not very often).

Of course, nothing says I have to play along with them. Thus, I have registered myself as Major Makoto Kusanagi, and am a female cyborg assassin from the future, according to my "secret questions".
I look forward to bemused checkout personnel at the supermarket quizzing me upon these every time I use the card to receive my tiny fuel discount! No prizes for guessing the PIN number either.. :)

Thu, 21 May 2009 03:15:22 GMT

MP3s encoded in the bad old days usually sound rather bad. Not only were they often encoded at 96, 112 or 128 kbps, but the encoder software wasn't very smart either and didn't use those few kbps as efficiently as later software would.

After being annoyed by listening to one too many mushy, warbling tracks, I decided to write a script to go through my collection and identify all the albums where the average bitrate over the whole album was too low. (initially the script reported every album where at least one track had a low bitrate, however that resulted in false positives, due to the tendency of artists to have long, mostly empty tracks inbetween "hidden tracks", where modern encoders will justifiably encode all that empty space at the minimum bitrate.)

Using the revised script, I still had well over 400 albums with bitrates of 128 or less! There's another 180 or so which are at 160. :(

I've spent an entire night ripping and encoding my CDs, and only managed about 20 albums. It just takes ages to rip them, at least on my DVDROM drive with high levels of cdparanoia enabled to avoid scratches or glitches. I've also taken to looking for albums on thepiratebay and mininova, since it's a lot easier to just queue them for download rather than hang around ripping them!

However I just checked the latest results from the script, and there's still 385 128k-or-worse albums to go, and I haven't even started on the 160k ones.

I guess if I just try to whittle down a dozen or so every week, in slow moments, I'll gradually work through the lot in a year! I guess I'll target the albums I like and want to listen to a lot first.

I also worry that I should be using FLAC rather than MP3s from lame with preset=extreme, except that to be honest, I can't really hear the difference between the two, and MP3s are far more portable.. If I used FLAC, not only would I need to buy a couple of new harddrives to fit them and the backup copy, but I'd then need to maintain an entire other tree of them in MP3 anyway, so I can play them in the car stereo or on my ipod.

Has anyone else solved this problem (of needing to re-rip everything) before? How did you solve it?

Grumpy old men

Wed, 13 May 2009 04:34:53 GMT

Reading thru the minutes of the last body-corporate meeting for a property I'm contemplating, I noticed:
(names changed)
"Mr Orange, acting on behalf of Mr Lemon from Unit 1, submitted six pages of issues."
The group unanimously decided to ignore all of them since the owner couldn't be bothered to turn up in person and hadn't submitted anything in advance.
(The meeting was held four doors down from Mr Lemon.)

Teehee. Although one wonders, what WAS in those six pages of issues?

Aside from that giggle, it was worth reading the meeting notes.. They also discussed what to do about some major repair works required, and voted to put it off until it got worse.. but still, not a good sign.

Carlton Gardens

Tue, 05 May 2009 14:32:00 GMT

Infrared Carlton
Originally uploaded by Wintrmute.

Carlton Gardens in false-colour infrared..
(Just messing about in my lunch-break)