Recently I found this FM4 stream relayer which also translates the crap format FM4 uses into a nice working ogg stream. The song metadata works, too: they use the FM4 track service. Sweet! A big Thank You to the admin!

So now I'm sitting in the sunny Australian outdoors (because the office aircon is set up for superconducters and responsible for my recurring cold), with lapdog on the lap & trying to get urgent work done - and listening to Austrian late night / early morning radio. (The commercials suck. The weather over there is horrible. Politics and the general news suck in both places.)

analog has shown a curiously large amount of accesses to the killarney site with myspace.com Referer headers. Looked at the actual logs, and found out that a stupid girl had simply included my logo on her (hideous! eye-cancer alert!) page. Sweet. No clickable link, not a private copy, nope: just sourced in my image from my server. Without asking, of course (which would have been courteous and she'd have gotten permission easily).

I can't contact the silly fool since she has no email address on her site and I'm definitely not going to sign up to myspace (not even using an ephemeral throw-away address from Trash Mail).

mod_setenvif and mod_access to the rescue! Dear sweetblonde247: Your accesses to logo.png are now denied. Learn some manners (and web design, too). HTH, HAND.

The occasional spam titled thus always cracks me up so badly. (Sometimes I'm easily amused.) A replica of what? (And what woman, anyway?)

But the content...my, these spammers apparently believe in Truth In Advertising more than normal marketing assholes! (how that works out when selling fake Rolexes I don't know, but extrapolating from election results I infer that there are gazillions of sufficiently stupid fools)

The spam goes on like this:

Get the Finest Rolex Watch Replica

...in a combo with the "Yes, I'm that stupid!" T-shirt.

"We only sell premium watches. There's no battery in these replicas just like the real ones since they charge themselves as you move. The second hand moves JUST like the real ones, too. These original watches sell in stores for thousands of dollars. We sell them for much less."

Amazing! A watch with a second hand that ACTUALLY MOVES!

"- Replicated to the Smallest Detail
- 98% Perfectly Accurate Markings
- Signature Green Sticker w/ Serial Number on Watch Back
- Magnified Quickset Date
- Includes all Proper Markings"

I love the part about the 98% and the Signature Green Sticker...suppose without that it wouldn't be a Genuine Fake Rolex Replica Premium Watch my nonexistent woman should drool over.

First I slept like a stone, couldn't get out of bed. Then it became obvious that the living room ceiling needs another coat of paint. Bah. Then the weather was good, but westerly - with the forecast being as usual totally wrong, saying nice easterlies.

So I drive up to Tambo, and have a shocker of a lousy flight: rough, got tossed around and shouted at by a hangie (something about getting out of the way - buddy, you can fly circles around me if you need! at that time I was happy to keep my glider roughly above my head and you don't want me put that thing anywhere close to you when things are as roller-coaster as I felt it...). After ending in the bombout, cursing myself for being a bit unstable today and chicken, Phil gets on the radio how ecstatically beautiful conditions he's having up over there where he is. Waaaaaah!

I get back up top with Geoff and another few ground grovelers but don't like the looks of the air: still looks rough. Quite a few people launch eventually, and I still don't like the looks (but start to get pissed at myself for being undecisive). Eventually most of us give up and drive down to Canungra for a cold drink; I'm pretty annoyed at myself and everything. The wind changes to the NE (but a bit strong according to the windtalker).

So I decide to give Beechmont another quick try, Richard and Jessica do so too. Get there, almost no wind. Stupid windtalker has been enthusiastically exaggerating the wind strenght as so often. But it looks just about doable... So I set up, launch in a bit of a puff and somewhat laboriously work myself up to about 75m above launch in light lift. Quite nice! Jessica was still sweating at launch with not a breeze there, but after she did finally launch she joined me superquickly at altitude (doing her usual feather-flying imitation). After half an hour the lift gets a bit lighter and we do perfect facelandings, with Richard taking pictures. I'm a lot happier now!

A small chat shows that the undecisiveness and annoyance aimed at yourself that plagues me a lot is common for the Cancer starsign. I'm still happy about having had a good flight.

Back at home, I find out that I forgot the sunscreen today and look like a silly owl in the face and like a jackass elsewhere (white torso, dark lower legs and arms). I then destroyed two screws while fitting new door locks and knobs in both my external doors (don't ask - all I can say is "cheap construction") but eventually manage to fix the problem (hammers, brute force, swearing, repeat). One key only everywhere now! (Never mind the cheap locks. Nothing hereabouts is crowbar-safe, so any intruder diddling with the locks is an absolute idiot.)

Finally I topped the day off with hitting myself hard in the face while closing a cupboard door. How clumsy can you get...

I've been spending all of today fixing the ceiling plasterboard in my house to stick to the ceiling trusses again. The boards in the living room were bulging down by about 7-8cm... About 300 screws later I've got two (small and unproblematic) rooms left completely undone, and the rest waiting for one more run with spatula and sanding block and, of course, loads of fun painting all over those spots. Bah.

More on this when I'm finished and when I can lift my arms again.

Melbourne is nice to visit, going to interesting conferences is cool, too. But that's about it. If you ever consider submitting anything to an event that uses CG Publisher - don't! or you will be trapped in its maze of annoying disfunctional crap, missing announcements, illogical user interface and so on.

Now if you had read this in a call for papers,

"Submissions are limited to 5 A4 pages of 11-point type with reasonable margins excluding bibliography (if any) and appendices. Appropriate file formats include PDF, plain text, or any file that can be read with Open Office."

and that in an email from the organisers after (an odyssey of a) final submission

"Could you please submit your final paper in something other than a PDF please? Original file, HTML or Open Office are acceptable. Unfortunately, a PDF is not, as we can't integrate it into the rest of the proceedings document."

and if you know me then you will not be overly surprised that my response ran along the lines of

"You can have LaTeX, Postscript or PDF. I won't use Openoffice and I won't write papers in HTML - the same as you won't write real software in GW-BASIC."

In other news it becomes not just likely but absolutely certain that I suck at using a caulking gun. Even with latex-based sealant (which is heaps easier to use than silicon) I can't get a straight-lined wedge of goo done :-(
Tried it for the third time tonight but ended up wiping all the crap off again and throwing the cartridge across the room in disgust.

Applied to computers this kiddo-truism would be like: "Lapdogs are obsolete the moment they leave the factory, and extinct by the time you buy it. You want software to work on it? Here's your two rocks, bang them together and see how you go..."

I've been Having Fun with kernel 2.6.14 and my machines. Lots of Bloody Fun. It takes heaps longer to configure things. The documentation has not exactly gotten better. The (feature-)stability of the 2.6 series is a joke. Some things still don't work. Lots of new things have stopped working. WAAAAAAAH.

The lucky list: ide-cd and ide-scsi still conflict. The latter ist needed for reasonable cd burning. The module documentation blithely says "There is usually no reason to remove modules, but some buggy modules require it". Idiots. The xserver will make your box hiccup badly and fuck up playing of sound if you run it with the previously required niceness. Vmware modules don't build on 2.6 at all, but somebody has cooked up a (really ugly but working) patch. The devmapper maintainer is a clue-resistant idiot who repeatedly refused a one-liner fix for a problem that breaks the use of the disk group so I rolled my own packages. The maestro3 sound support has gotten worse, the chip gets confused every now and then now (and I'm not going with the ALSA suggestion: You can install that bloated crap when you pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers.)

Loopback (ahem, devmapper) encryption is still not possible for non-root users. Wavemon does no longer work. The netfilter code is fucked up, IP_NF_NAT_LOCAL is gone since around 2.6.11 which means that natting local conns doesn't work anymore. My nice location-independent setup for the proxy (everything configured to use localhost:3128, then NAT that to the real proxy if needed) is now officially unsupported. Thank you, bastards!

And, of course, direct rendering for mach64-derivates is once again absolutely utterly fucked up (uncompilable, incompatible, non-working code). Might be a good thing that with trying to find out and fix all those niggling problems I've got no time to play any games anyway...

On the plus side, however, are things like the kernel key storage api: goodbye quintuple-agent, hello kernel! I'm currently experimenting with code to make that stuff easier to use; Debian packages to follow as soon as things stabilise...

This fellow was growing last week in my back yard. I'm not tempted to sample it, though: 'the edibility of most Australian species of fungi is untested'.

The last few weeks were pretty wet and occasionally miserable. A week-and-a-bit ago we had some big storms and the gutter on the northern end of my house ripped loose. I heard a bang, thought some tree branch must have fallen onto my roof but it was the trough hanging down crookedly. Turns out the bastards building this house had only put in a single small pop-rivet per bracket. No surprise the thing came down eventually.

Note the safety footwear :-) But he did a good job, put in enough rivets to be certain that the gutter will hold up.

This weekend Rob and I and possible a few others wanted to drive out to Killarney, for a fly+work weekend. Guess it's not to be; the forecast for the area in question has this to say: "Saturday: A few showers or drizzle in the east overnight and morning. Isolated showers and thunderstorms developing throughout Saturday afternoon and evening. Light to moderate E to NE winds. Moderate to high fire danger. Outlook for Sunday ... Isolated showers and thunderstorms."

Bugger. While, as most of the time, the farmers are grateful for every drop, my mood doesn't take gloomy non-flying weather too well.

Melbourne Cup Day really makes this place slow down a lot; here at the office not two in ten were working these last two hours. Instead everybody was clustered around the telly. I wasn't; feeling rabidly antisocial today.

I'm so waiting for a plague to take care of all the useless, overpriced, spook-prone stupid creatures (and maybe their rich bastard owners on the way as well). Pferde Fleischkäs! or foal goulash, mmmmm...