Yesterday evening I decided to install Civilization: Call To Power again, and 6 hours later it was 01:00 and I was sleepy and wide awake at the same time. Today I spent 11 hours on the bloody game. Horrible, just like 15(?) years ago when I sacrificed whole nights to the original Civilization game...

The hardware gremlins are still at work, the Ultra 1 I ebayed recently and got delivered today has a dead PSU. Great! Tomorrow I'm off to Killarney again, for the extended weekend: monday is one of the communist public holidays (workers' day or so, the Aussies moved the holiday from 1 May to 3 May cause the 1st is a saturday, and nobody needs publich holidays on the weekend. Makes sense, doesn't it?) and I'll spend the weekend either working on the launch sites (chainsaw, brushcutter etc.) or flying, depending on the weather.

The rest is german, cause that's the langugage this message pretends to use.
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Y-que sells t-shirts. Almost-PC t-shirts. Nasty Y-que, bad dog! Cower! Squirm! That's it, good boy...says Big Brother G.

"The following merchandise found on your website constitutes a list of items that must be removed from your site, ads and keywords in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:

Link to the y-que shop
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Last weekend was extended because of the ANZAC day public holiday, and the flying was quite good.

Friday we wasted sitting on the wrong hill, hoping for the right kind of wind. Just another case of parawaiting, like in the pic below.

But Saturday and Sunday were quite good for ridge-soaring Tambo, not exactly a common occurrence. A frightening site, low saves guaranteed with "landing" in trees always possible to likely. Had four nice flights, could have toplanded but didn't know we were allowed to again. Anyway, it was quite good - despite sinking out on Sunday when others went over the back or to Canungra.

Me airborne in front of Tambo, one of the very few relaxed moments at that site:

Mark said once about the difference between rock climbing and paragliding:

In rock climbing you spend most of your time in a very safe situation feeling shit-scared whilst in paragliding you spend most of your time in a very dangerous situation feeling quite safe.

We're insane/addicted enough to take to the air in our oversized shopping bags with a couple of strings attached like this:

and then we regularly bunch up parts of our wings while flying to reduce lift. As long as things are bunched up symmetrically on both sides results are benign. However, for my upcoming intermediate license practical I'll have to show that I can deal with asymmetric collapses, too, so I played around a bit with inducing such collapses (you reef in hard on the front riser lines on one side, that half of the wing goes slack and floppy like a real shopping bag and you brace for the more-or-less violent turn and loss of lift). Interesting.

One of the hangies nicknamed "T-Bone" because of his initials has recently switched to paragliders - which immediately got him rechristened "TeaBag", as that's what the other hangies think of what he is flying now :-)

The weather on Monday wasn't too flash so I slept in, but the addiction got the better of me and I drove up the hill, and It was Good. Two nice arvo ridge soaring flights, both with good face landings at the end.

Other People had more interesting landings, as per the picture below: look for the glider in the middle of the road. Its pilot had misjudged his final, bounced off a car's hood (bumping it) and landed on the road. Another reason why only fools park in this particular spot.

After that a few pilots had...interesting launches, too, but I myself had a perfect record for the day.

I thought so. In Europe you'd find these things only in nursery homes for pre-zombies but lots of Aussies (and assorted fools^Wfashionistas elsewhere) find these abominations good enough for public display.

Not all Aussies, though; at least one couple among my friends is split over uggs by gender: he wears them in public, she can't stand them.

Australians have a proper sense of humour and don't take themselves too seriously, so wearing uggs is understandable - they're warm, they do the job. But how the fashion fools would deal with the fact that "uggs" stands for "ugly boots", I wonder.

not much work for me, but easier to read for some people in aggregated form. blosxom does support RSS/RDF pretty much out of the box; in fact, every category and every single posting are available as rss thingies: just use bla.rss instead of bla.html. still todo: setting things up so that all html pages display links to the RSS counterparts..

played around with rss to make robert happy. rss aggregators/viewers? not many, but the small mozilla-firebird extension (38kb xpi) works pretty nicely.

spent today being bored silly on the hills, as the wind wasn't right but the weather itself was great.

Driving back from Killarney monday evening I saw:

• one echidna. It walked slowly across the road and I braked and waited until it had finished passing.
• some rabbits
• lots of frogs
• a small roo or wallaby
• and some kind of owl-like bird sitting in the middle of the road. I managed not to hit it.

Backcountry roads here (and about everything 50+k out of Brisbane is backcountry) commonly consist of one single lane of asphalt/bitumen, and a bit of dirt, grass, rocks and/or potholes on both sides. When there is some oncoming traffic, both have to pull aside into the dirt (and hope that there's nothing hidden in the grass that your car can't take at 80+km/h). There's bonus points for doing this during the night.

"Highways" on the other hand, consist of two lanes of bitumen. Often there's a middle line, but not necessarily - and there are some "highways" that have single lane areas as well.

(I love this place. Really. But I'll have to get me a 4WD soon.)

The Easter weekend Andrew ran the Easter Bunnies WE comp at Killarney, 160k west from here. And I got to second place!
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Not that I care a whit about religion but the public holidays come handy. The semester is almost over, the next one already casts its dark shadow but I don't care on this weekend: I'm going flying and camping at Killarney. Hope the weather stays ok and the wind turns a bit...

Ants are fairly annoying creatures; even more than cats they take your place as their place. But I'm striking back.

The silly proxy at work made me miss the end of an ebay auction for a nice ultra 1 with creator 3d card by about 3 seconds; of course that one was the first and only one of a batch of 3 that went at a reasonable price. arrrgh. But then somebody is offering a fully populated E3000 and an SSA112 with 30x4G for AU$ 500 alltogether. Ah, the temptation...

Now off preparing my flying and camping gear.

the upcoming broadcast flag treaty is being discussed; the future looks even worse than usual. those greedy fascists behind the WIPO.
Here's Ed Felten on the insidious thing, and Ed Miller's very good coverage of the poison pills therein.

Fscking spamassassin cost me hours today; it wouldn't expire an overfull Bayes database but happily waste CPU hours trying it over and over again...

At least my car has 4 working shocks again. But the laundry is unhung, the floors not vaccuumed and I've still got to complete marking of a lab assignment before tomorrow morning. It rains. Lovely.

Yesterday I asked myself "What's next?". Now I know, dammit.
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Hardware appreciation week was followed very soon by Transportation Appreciation weekend.
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monday: evening lectures, DNF. friends told me it was great.
tuesday: spent the arvo sitting on the hill with too little wind, DNF.
wednesday: late lectures, DNF.
thursday: spent the arvo sitting on the hill with too little wind, DNF.
friday: weather looks lousy, rain all around the ridge. DNF. of course a friend had to call me right now, saying that they just flew an hour, between rain.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.