This is from Eliot Weinberger's brilliant essay titled "What I Heard about Iraq" which he recently updated with 2005's lies.

This world is such an obscenely fucked up place it hurts to even start thinking about it...

"Yet year after year, it's the same routine
And I grow so weary of the sound of screams"

says Jack Skellington in one of my most loved movies, The Nightmare before Christmas, but I don't.

This gal is soon to discover that it is not safe to inline-link to pictures on my server without asking me (as another spaced girlie had to learn recently). Maybe the same old same old will help...

To say it with Jack's words:

"That's all right. I have a special present for you anyway. There you go sonny. Hohohohehehe!"

...as it is nice outside right now (32°C, water temp about 23°), but a bit too windy from the NW.
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I'm in a bad mood, therefore I think I'll make the non-accessible logo image you like so much into a redirect to a big tubgirl image, it'll make your site look much better. (Now my friends know what kind of mood I'm in.)

You may find it TMI that bloody Google spits out tubgirls galore without even disabling the evil "SafeSearch" crap.

...10 minutes later...

Done. Enjoy! <sfx: evil laugh>

Looks like she didn't like the 1278x956 tubgirl image, but I really can't understand why... Now she has even put an email address on her website, so the Big Hammer treatment must have helped a bit. 10 brownie points for me! (I really do enjoy being evil, sometimes.)

I'm over two weeks late with that posting but I wanted to mention that The Quiet Room is a very interesting movie. I watched it two weeks ago on SBS, from 0030 to 0230 or so...any paid for staying up late on the next day.

Liked it a lot: not silly saccharine-sweet but low-key, touching, funny at times and quite profound: Rolf de Heer must have been listening to his kids very very well. An adult kids movie, maybe. My recommendation.

It's not an Aussie politician saying that - it needs to be said here as well - it's Russ Feingold whose fellows in the US senate have voted not to extend the Patriot Act. Good on them, I say!

Mr. Feingold seems to have an unexpected amount of real spine for a politician, and his statement reads very nicely:

"Trust of government cannot be demanded, or asserted, or assumed, it must be earned," the senator said. "And this government has not earned our trust. It has fought reasonable safeguards for constitutional freedoms every step of the way. It has resisted congressional oversight and often misled the public about its use of the Patriot Act. And now the Attorney General is arguing that the conference report is adequate 'protection for civil liberties for all Americans.' It isn't."

Somewhere I've heard the quip that these are signs of "sanity breaking out" - if only that was true!

These folks make an instant translator for English to Arabic, Darpa-sponsored, for the military. I'm so waiting for the news of what happens when the first of the gadgets goes to la-la land and hands out something Pythonesque...

@pantheon, this whole "my life"-thing sucks at the moment.

At work the cluons are leaching away even faster than usual, the "Management by Magazine" (aka "if it's written in CIO, it must be good/true") gets worse and worse and the climate sucks. One of the head dimbulbs saw need to remind everybody in one of those all-staff spams that one of the last new rule-inventions was to be Followed By Rote...never mind that it makes no sense, is counterproductive and as stupid as the idiots behind it.

Writing up the PhD thesis sucks and consequently I'm having a hard time motivating myself. Got a paper in for a conference in Vienna in early 2006, mebbe for once I've produced bullshit shiny enough for academentia. But I doubt it: too honest and inept at waffling.

The Jolly Season is upon us yet again, and I hate it. Also, the weather currently sucks, it's very stormy with thunder and downpours every 2-3 days and lots of humid heat inbetween.

Drank too much yesterday, didn't go to bed until 0300 because White Squall ran as late night film and I liked it; didn't get up until late, weather looked stormy (but it hasn't rained yet) and I didn't drive up into the hills for flying. Felt sufficiently anti-social to not attend the chgc's christmas party (didn't even pick up the phone for the same reasons). Ah, Fuck It, I would only have hung around depressed anyway.

But there is nothing new about that, so I guess I should shut up now....

A few weeks after doing the first part of the ceiling fixes, I've finally added the lighting I was looking for. The room height is only 242cm, so my big rice paper lampions were cluttering up the ceiling badly and I wanted to replace them with some indirect lighting.
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I'm sure &rw has been thinking about holding me over open flames in the last few weeks. My current/old colo at the company-that-was-cool-once is to be scrapped: the last oldschool techie has recently thrown the towel and the people running the show do not deserve any nostalgia or loyalty anymore.

The plan was that I'd get a cast-off ultra1 when he exchanges that for an ultra2 when my box joins his at the colo facility in Austria, and he'd be doing the actual installation as I'm geographically challenged.

Trouble is that his colo box is in a doomed building and mine will have to go somewhere else, and moving his to the new building means a new address: migrating his current ip address is a nogo. Fun! as his is a nameserver for lots of domains. So the decision was that the ultra2 goes in there first as my box, takes over dns duties with his new ip address in order to migrate his system, then his u1 is moved and the hardware gets swapped, done.

The disk I had sent him didn't boot on the ultra2, lots of tinkering later things work for a while only to have the PSU go boom. Next Friday the box needs to be installed, and I'm not going to be around between Sunday and Thursday (going to MEL) so anything that needs a console must happen before or 4-6 weeks later when the machines join each other finally.

But good friend that he is, he managed yesterday to scrounge up another complete ultra2 for me and set up remote access for me (console and net). Whoopee and Thank You! Lots of Beers I solemnly promise for the next time I'm visiting Austria...

(Anybody got a 170MHz ultrasparc CPU and 4x64-or-more Sun memory for cheap/sale?)