I can’t get over the media and people in general. The last few weeks the media has been full of some Australian community that was up in arms about a released paedophile being allowed to live in their community.
The laws that allow us to identify convicted criminals and to continue to identify them after they have served their penance I have serious misgivings about. A communities desire to know who is living in its area can be justified, but the desire of someone to attempt to be able to live a life after conviction is fair. If we don’t believe in the ability of criminals to change their ways why do we ever release them back into the community?
All of that is without mentioning our Christian duty to forgive people. Keep reading →
I don’t usually post about such silly things. But I just saw that my two favorite actresses: Drew Barrymore and Ellen Paige, are starring in a Roller Derby movie.
I have very nearly watched everything that Ellen Paige has been in. Lets go through the current checklist from imdb:
# Whip It (2009) – Saw it soon after release. Excellent movie, not nearly as deep as many of Ellen Paige’s though.
# “The Simpsons – Waverly Hills 9-0-2-1-D’oh” (2009) – randomly managed to catch the episode on TV when it was on the other week
# Smart People (2008) – Loved
# The Stone Angel (2007) – Meh
# Juno (2007) – Fantastic
# The Tracey Fragments (2007) – Very hard to watch, reserving judgment for a latter viewing, Ellen was great in it though
# An American Crime (2007) – This movie is disturbing. I mean its based on some pretty disturbing true story and doesn’t disappoint.
# X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) – Yeah she only has small parts, but I do like the movie.
# Mouth to Mouth (2005) – Excellent
# Hard Candy (2005) – OMG, this movie does not get enough respect. Yeah the content is tough for many to watch, but it is excellent
# “ReGenesis” (8 episodes, 2004) – Ellen is excellent, the series in general (I watched all of it despite Ellen only appearing in the first 6 episodes of season 1) is a bit cliche and heavy on science terms while being loose with the science.
# Wilby Wonderful (2004) – Haven’t finished yet, movie isn’t very interesting.
# I Downloaded a Ghost (2004) (TV) – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# Love That Boy (2003) – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# Going for Broke (2003) (TV) – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story (2003) (TV) – Surprisingly good, quiet enjoyed it, Ellen is a minor character
# Touch & Go (2003) – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# Mrs. Ashboro’s Cat (2003) (TV) – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# The Wet Season (2002) – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# Marion Bridge (2002) – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# “Trailer Park Boys” – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# “Rideau Hall” – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# “Pit Pony” – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
# Pit Pony (1997) – I haven’t managed to grab a copy of this yet.
So I’m heading over to Austin in just over a month to judge at the Pro Tour. So its time to start preparing for the event. So its time to build a current EDH deck. Ok that’s only part of the things I need to do.
I also need to plan flights around the US, accommodation for holiday, car hire, visa.
Oh and yeah, I might look at some rules documents and judge a few local events to get fully up to speed on the life and times of Magic.
So anyway and EDH deck eh? I’ve been thinking that Uril would make the most sensible choice for my next EDH deck as it probably does what I wanted Godo to do, but in a more fun and less repetitive way. And with the recent release of Planechase I think I need to build the deck with a planechase deck in mind as I’d expect some planechasing EDH to happen. Keep reading →
So I’m going to be flying to Texas in October for PT:Austin. This will be my first US trip, but I will be going back to the US next year with friends and doing other interesting bits of the US so I’m going to focus on just Texas this time.
All I currently have on my list of things to see is “NASA stuff” so I need some help from the interwebs, hence the Request For Comment. (Not that RFC was intended to refer to the comments field of a blog, it does appear appropriate)
On Tuesday night my friendly Optus Telechoice customer manager rang me to tell me that my iPhone 3G S 16G should be with me possibly on Thursday, maybe Friday. So I was pleasantly surprised when it arrived this morning.
The other good news he gave me on the phone was that Optus will be waiving a months fees due to the slow delivery, this made me much happier and I was looking forward to receiving my iPhone.
A large part of my expectation was that Apple are renowned for things just working out of the box, this was going to be good I thought. So opening the box and digesting the contents two things appear to be missing: Instructions on what to do with my new sim card; And a way to actually use the device.
How is it acceptable to ship such an expensive item with no way in the box to use it. I don’t mind uncharged batteries, I’m talking about needing to download a 74M installer for a piece of software that will only work on operating systems that I don’t natively use.
Sorry but waiting 15 minutes for my reasonably fast connection to download then install iTunes just so I can use my phone for anything more than emergency phone calls is ludicrous.
This isn’t the experience I was expecting.
I was expecting to get to DRM and over the top nannying before getting pissed off at Apple.
So on the 13th I received a call from a fairly nice guy from Optus, lets call him Steve because I don’t know any Steves. He was offering to sell me an iPhone, which was convenient because I’d been thinking of buying one.
I settle on the 16G 3G S model on a $79 cap with $10 per month cash back. Which while being a fair bit more than I spend on my $39 plan that I was currently on, it sounded like a decent deal for two reasons: The iPhone appears to be a fairly nice piece of hardware, crippled with some DRM crap but I can choose how to deal with that later; and my last two bills had come in at ~$80 so I might actually save money.
After spending what felt like 3 days on the phone answering and asking questions I get told that my new ‘Phone will be arriving in 7 days time. That sounds like slow processing, but I’ll deal especially as I will be interstate for work for what ended up being 9 days so it wouldn’t matter to me. Keep reading →
So I’ve been traveling to Middlemount in central Queensland for work quite a bit recently, we’ve sold a system to help prevent some of their machines from crashing into each other.
So naturally I’ve been trying to get some decent food after I fly into Emerald. I’ve found a decent little café called Luv a Coffee, in a shopping center in Emerald. The first lunch I had there I ordered their beef burger. The burger was pretty good, many café’s could learn a useful lesson or two from them, although they still suffer from the low quality bun syndrome.
Is it really that hard to buy quality buns? Keep reading →
Friday before last I was in Brisbane Airport with 4.75 hours to kill, work had booked a non flexible fare which was stupid as we didn’t really know when the training was going to finish and it finished early. So I had to buy a book to help me kill the time, as Jamie Wakefield had posted not entirely terrible comments about Stephanie Meyers Twilight saga I decided to pick up the first book and read it.
I finished it the next evening and decided to pick up the next three on Sunday afternoon. I finished those three by the following Sunday night, which puts this at the quickest I’ve ever read a series of books. Although don’t let the physical size of the books scare you the font used isn’t all that small. Keep reading →
Was on Chapel Street this Sunday just gone (yesterday) and had slightly more time than usual for lunch so I went with a friend to Soda Rock on the corner of Toorak and Chapel.
I know we didn’t have all that much time but we thought we had enough time to sit to eat our burgers, we had just on 30 minutes from when we walked in the doors till when we had to leave. It was 2.30 it the afternoon and things didn’t look busy, not that the place was empty, just that there were empty tables.
We sat at our table and quickly read the menu and put them down so it was apparent we were ready to order. This worked and we put in our simple order of a burger and coke each.
So I’m making this slightly early, as there is still Friday left for triking, but three days in a row appears to have given my legs enough.
So some stats:
Week total distance: 13.5km
Total Distance: 19.8km
Interesting Story for the week:
So I was riding home from work for the first time and was going along the side of a road on the foot path. I notice an egg flying past me then a the black commodore that was driving past slowly accelerates away.
Don’t most people grow out of that type of behaviour before they get old enough to have a car?
Apparently the ebook market in Australia is still pretty terrible. I’m looking at the iPhone question (I think its a yes) and being able to read ebooks on what ever I do buy seems like a plus.
The but is that I can’t find a way to buy some books from Australia. I tried to find the cost and formats available for the book I was reading at the time (Twilight, just finished Eclipse last night), and saw that it was a very reasonable $USD12.00 from the first site I found). Then I noticed that I couldn’t buy it as an Australian, so I tried some Australian ebook sites and they didn’t have the Twilight series.
So then I tried looking at Amazon, who were 100% prepaired to sell me a physical copy of the book, but couldn’t sell an Australian an ebook copy. Why is the world so silly?
Anyway the Poll question is, what is the best option for getting hold of ebooks not available in your region. Please comment after voting.
So after the defeat of the rather large hill I went after a flatter target this Sunday. Practicing the trip to work seemed like a good idea. Having perfected the use of the Garmin Edge 205 I know that the trip was 4902 meters. As my day job informs me GPS units are least accurate in terms of height (it has to do with the geometry of the constellation. IE you can only ever receive satellites that are ‘up’ so working out how far up or down you are is hard), which explains why I keep managing to have a total gain in elevation greater than my loss, despite starting and finishing the trip at the same place.
So last week I went down to Cycle Science to buy my self a Whiz Wheels Cruiser. Unfortunately I had to wait till the following Friday night to pick it up with the options I wanted on it (one of those options being both rear seat supports). So I picked it up and rode it to the train station and from the station to home.
This was my first attempted real trip, I wasn’t expecting much, as my fitness level was, well abysmal. All I planed was a quick ride over to my parents, Google maps tells me that it was a 4.2km round trip that I intended to do. It also tells me that I only managed 1.8km.
Due to an error with using the Garmin Edge 205 I brought I only recorded the last 1443m of the ride, but this is what the Distance-Elevation plot for it looks like:
Which I guess was more of a hill than I was ready for.
I’ve been looking at buying some lenses since I brought my Pentax K20D in November. Straight after buying it I borrowed Dad’s old Pentax lenses so I’ve been carrying around:
* 18-55mm F3.5-4.5 DA kit lense that came with the cammera. This is very handy for those situations where you think a bit of weather proofing would be useful. With the crop factor putting the range to 27-82mm it is a very useful range of zoom as well. Keep reading →
