03 Apr 2006
We aren’t hearing this every day, it’s not making lead headlines. It’s buried amongst other stories.
More than 200,000 people died in the [Boxing Day] tsunami but that toll will be dwarfed by the disaster that is about to engulf Africa.
However, unlike the tsunami it will not be a single, photogenic disaster to lure the world’s media. The arid lands will wreak a slower carnage.
So far, its victims are attracting a tiny fraction of the charity. And yet, unlike the tsunami, this disaster came with plenty of warning.
But it got published. Listen…
02 Apr 2006
Samuel Butler appears to have translated The Odyssey expressly for the purpose of “suggesting” Homer was female in the footnotes throughout, by way of building on (and substantiating) his earlier work, The Authoress of the Odyssey. Heh. What a shame his friend Lord Grimthorpe utterly mis-read the nature of the execution of the twelve maids, and Butler blindly accepted this mis-interpretation as more ‘evidence’ for his (possibly true) claim.
According to my reading of it, at least, the maids were hung with individual ropes suspended from a ship’s cable, hauled into place prior to any weight resting upon it. There is no impracticality to using a pillar as a pulley, for the ship’s cable’s weight would not be prohibitive before further burdens were placed upon it. Lord Grimthorpe, consider your understanding easily imposed upon. (Nevermind that both he and Butler have been dead for the better part of a century.)
01 Apr 2006
Well, turns out last month’s HTTP bandwidth usage wound up at around 3.75GB. Coolness. It recently occurred to me that I don’t particularly have any “Slashdot-me” ambitions for this blog at present, but it’s still fun watching the numbers increase every month for no apparent reason! Except, perhaps, ‘the plebs’ catching up with my occasional open-source trendiness ;-) Or something… probably more of the ‘something’. Heh.
120,000 hits and nearly 7,500 unique visitors to this site last month were served 56,000 pages by Dale’s metro FreeBSD server… heh, from one of the most serious-looking home server setups I know of. Still, ‘consumer-grade’ though it may be, it’s doing rather well! Technology is fun ;-)
30 Mar 2006
I missed the fastest bus trip to-from Sydney Uni I’ve ever been on today. Well, slept through it (actually good sleep, which is weird for anyone on public transport, I think!) and woke up perfectly-timed at the stop before mine. The whole thing took twenty minutes, which is pretty awesome. More awesome in light of the fact that I didn’t have to wait for a bus. My last lecture finished at 4 and I was home by 4.30. Eggcellent.
Ah, and no, I don’t often sleep on that bus… I just didn’t get to bed until particularly late coz I got to speak to Katy/yana/kt/how-many-other-names? for the first time in aaaagggeeeesss, so yeah. That was cool. Excited to know she’s alive and stuff! ;-) It was suggested that blogs are a great way of judging people’s existence. So Katy should get a blog happening. On which she would whinge about many things, as that is the pivotal aspect of the genre — note this is the first comprehensive definition of what exactly a “blog” entails that seems to adequately match… well, most blogs I read. Good stuff!
30 Mar 2006
… or Telstra’s capping system just stopped working. I like.
Update: We’re now at 11593.49 MB usage, but everything’s back to normal speeds. The IP changed for some reason… so it seem as though it’s maybe an IP-based restriction validated every X hours — and we’re not yet at that revalidation point, I suppose. Interestingness. Shrug, it’s nearly April!