...you buy yourself a cheap used Ixus 70 (to replace an good but aging and clunky Ixus 400), and the first thing you do is...(drumroll)
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Today's xkcd is pretty good - depressingly good, in fact.

...of three weeks ago when I last had an opportunity to do so (sigh). Bringing my Personal Photographer (Conny) with me got me a few pics of myself having fun. The site was Beechmont.

Being the over-imaginative chickenshit that I am, I usually let some other guinea pig take off first. Seems to work, I haven't had any accidents in nine years of (way too little) flying.

Alas, the Personal Photographer immediately forgot my glider colours once I was in the air, concentrated on her book and hence took only pics of Todd and Kevin, but none of me - except one, with Kevin up high and me working my way back up (just after launch).

She also missed my landing, but that wasn't a great loss: southerly winds means northerly approach over the power lines and my slightly rough fly-against-the-wall landing didn't really have to be recorded.

Tokyo's oldest living man was actually more like the oldest undiscovered modern-age mummy: dead for about 30 years.

Now this couldn't happen to me: first this climate is too humid for meat staying fresh long (and my ceiling fans wouldn't suffice for making me into biltong), and furthermore my money would run out, my house would go back to the bank (but that's only for a few more years) and so the vultures would find me. Sky burial by bank clerk, anyone?

Sort-of bad: there aren't many other scenarios for me being discovered.

This is a blatant commercial plug but I don't feel bad about it.

After ages with Voodoofone I've moved over to different gang named ThinkMobile (while keeping my number: porting works fine in this country). They resell both Tel$tra and Voodoofone, but with very decent customer support and both better features and price (for low-volume users like me) IMHO.

ThinkMobile is fishing for new customers and is happy to give both newbie and referrer $24 credit each. So, if you want to do me some good why not join up, quote MATES and my name and we both benefit a little?

Last weekend Conny and I spent with Pete and Wendy, Jasper and Ula camping in Bundjalung National Park, 2 hours south of here. We camped in the Black Rocks area (open camping areas, state-owned and non-commercial, hassle-free and not too pricey). At this time of the year it's also pretty much empty of people.
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I've got that on a tshirt (with a photo of the Rodney King beating) and I swear, I could wear this tshirt almost every day to work - it rarely isn't spot-on.

The newest bit right now: somebody higher up in the food chain decreed that the whole level 5 (where the IT school offices are) must be renovated, presto. Not at the end of the semester, or during the slightly longer christmas break, no: now, three quarters into the semester. Duration: just until the beginning of next semester (but don't hold your breath, plans in this place never work out).

And we get no temporary offices at all.

We are allowed to do our research and lecture prep work from home.

And not all types of prep work are easily doable from home, plus the work firewall is setup fairly strictly and VPNs? Can't have that, would be too useful.

The lectures and labs are of course held in person, so we'll have the joy of wandering around campus between the scheduled sessions, just like hobos.

So over the last few weeks, with all the fun and excitement of packing up our office contents and preparing our workarounds for all the damn mess this thing causes us, some semi-subversive posters have popped up all over around our offices (wasn't me, honest).

And here they are, for your amusement.

The last one especially reinforces my opinion that this workplace almost beats the Australian International University - and that's pretty disgusting, given that the AIU is fictional. "More Better Education", indeed.

Jake Kaufman is evil. And a Bastard. A Tricky Bastard...

"IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out.
...
so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels."

And he took jenny18 there. jenny18 passed the sex Turing test with flying colors, but a lot of the dalnet denizens didn't pass anything...except pass for fools, that is.

"this goes to show that lots of challenge in AI is in speaking naturally, and on the internet most people speak like idiots, so you can sort of cheat around a lot of things."

Jake's article on speaking like an idiot is a lot of fun to read, too.

All the good links broke. I've replaced them with the latest archive.org versions - but for the logs you need to manually add the filename to the url: the archive.org pages come with a broken <base>...