26 Mar 2006
Wow. I haven’t been able to get here for like… a day. And it’s not because I’m capped and the Internet is slow and I’m impatient, so shut up already :P
So if you can’t read this message blame a three-letter-acronym (DNS) being attacked by a four-letter-acronym (DDoS), both of which will be understood only by a small fraction of you, I guess!
Geek geek geek.
Erin’s farewell party was last night in like… Hobart or something… so a bunch of us drove down there and it was good. Or, I drove down with lots of passengers and it was a good night/trip, once we found the river under the bridge in Hobbitsville. Thanks Selo ;-) I only discovered yesterday that driving actually can be tiring. Or draining, one of the two. Anyway, enough about driving. I’d post photos but
a) It’d be painfully slow to upload, and;
b) … nope, that’s about all the reason I’ve got.
It’ll happen April 1. No that’s not an April Fools’ joke. Wow it’s April already. Uni calendars suck/take getting used to. I totally don’t know what I’m doing with my life/when anymore. No diary can save me. It’s odd… I love paper but need my wall calendar and my uni diary and my home Exchange and work Exchange to all magically sync with one another. Guess it’s time to buy a cheap Palm Zire… Doh. Tempting, though. It’d save carrying lots of books for the bigger days at uni!
Stream-of-consciousness blog posts are fun. I’m going Zire shopping tomorrow I think. Well, online at least. After I fail my Greek test, and after I get home from work. We’ve got a new guy coming in tomorrow called Niels (I think? Dunno about spelling… and I have a brother called Neil so it’s not that name…) so the Australian:German ratio of our office is shifting more in favour of the Germans again. Heh. In other exciting-work-related news that probably means nothing to anyone who hasn’t seen the office, everything’s been re-arranged over the weekend. So I’m going to go in on Monday afternoon and my PC will have moved again. I’ve seriously had… one, two…. two and a half different desks/desk locations since I started last December! (Or was it November?) Change is good fun.
I haven’t posted on Ï„ÏανσλιτεÏατιον this week, have I? Probably not. Badness. I am constantly thinking about that stupid subject, it’s just that real work for it eludes me. Mark quipped this evening that he shouldn’t have done two subjects in a semester he actually wanted to do well in. I think I find myself agreeing! Hehe. I’m really excited about our first English assessment, even if it is a paltry 1000 words and so on. Just to write academically again. And I know the HSC year wasn’t about that but I tried to make it that anyway … hence my English Advanced teacher saying to me she didn’t think I could get a band 6. A comment on arrogance, perhaps, but I love that subject too much to just let things go and regurgitate. Unlike Emily I don’t just enjoy the idea of languages… they’re genuinely interesting (irrespective of whether or not I actually study them — I read this great bi-lingual English/Spanish culture blog that’s pretty random but just occasionally has absolute gems of information/new perspectives) in their complexities, irrationalities, quirks, and associated cultures. Intertexuality is great, too.
Tonight in church we were doing the last bit of Mark chapter 7, and there’s this bit that says “He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him “Ephphatha” (which means, “Be opened!”).” — and I couldn’t help but wonder “why not translate that word?”. Turns out it actually says ο εστιν διανοιχθητι, which apparently translates as “which is “Be opened!”” or similar. εφφαθα is actually an Aramaic word (I don’t know what characters Aramaic uses, even, let alone how to transliterate that back!) that just happened to be rendered in Greek in the original. So we’re actually getting the undoctored version in the Bible, even though it’d be simpler to translate “ephphatha” as “be opened!” and just skip that step. Good stuff.
Speaking of all that Greek, I should go sleep so I have time tomorrow to learn three weeks’ worth of vocab for a test at midday. Yay.
*files post under category “Everything”*
26 Mar 2006
I’ve been browsing with images disabled for a while now. It’s great fun until Flash comes along. I appreciate well built (separated presentation/content) and accessible websites more now than at any other time.
25 Mar 2006
I think we lasted 14 months. Now it’s time to switch to ADSL 2+, definitely… unless Bigpond re-quota their plans in the near future. This is just one of those things that comes with changing usage patterns. We’re still pretty average users in terms of overall bandwidth consumption (well, “pretty average” based on Whingepool w0w-0mg-my-1$p-iz-so-st1ngy-w1t-bndwdth!!Lo!L!11! users being not normal, and a presumption of “normality” for broadband being in line with Telstra’s products in Australia), but things change. I’ll stream video on the web without thinking twice now: that wouldn’t have happened anywhere near as much 18 months ago. I’m getting used to a crappy media experience in a 3″ box on my 17″ LCD, heh. Having said that, I’m about to go downstairs and watch an ~8″ video I downloaded, on a 42″ screen… and it’ll look fine! (Stupid widescreen lame-resolution/dual-link DVI-not-supported piece of junk that it is).
I’ve got a server running permanently here now, and Bigpond uploads count. That wouldn’t have mattered in the past, but I’ve pushed between 1 and 2GB of traffic from it in the last month… so it’s a contributing factor to the problem of being 800MB over quota at present.
Exetel are looking good to me at the minute (and their Vodafone-resold mobile plans look pretty awesome, too… a part of that is that they’re presented sensibly in a table, rather than spread across millions of pages with promotional crap — as per every large telephony provider in Australia).
21 Mar 2006
I went hunting for a banana smoothie at uni today, knowing that they’d soon be unavailable (and/or ridiculously expensive) for a fairly long time in Australia (as a result of cyclones that wiped out 95% of our production and biosecurity restrictions on imports). First stop was… the place behind the dividery wall thingos downstairs at Manning, with no luck… they were all out of bananas at 10:30am! I tried BB’s over at Wentworth a couple of hours later and managed to get one from there. BB’s smoothies rock. Haven’t tried hot drinks from there yet, coz it’s too far away and the only time I feel like hot drinks is when I’m near the cart outside Fisher… but I had a bad experience with a mocha there so… yeah. Mind you, I think the person who made it wasn’t the usual guy. I’ve had better since, but am still a bit wary.
Anyway. Last banana(s). I saw one of them that went in and it looked really good… what a shame! (Yes… natural disasters have ramifications other than bananas, and that’s bad too… we’ll take that as implicit!) So yes, that was a good drink. If you want banana smoothies or muffins or whatever else banana-related go hunt them down sooner rather than later… prices/KG have already gone up by lots in shops, so it’s only going to be a matter of time before cafes and the like either stop selling them or make products with them in really expensive.
And I don’t have a “food” category to post this in. Ah well!
20 Mar 2006
I know I’m posting about this a fair bit lately. It’s important at the minute, I’ll stop when things settle down a bit. I’m really happy I haven’t allowed this to be/turn into an all-geek blog.
Anyway, aren’t meeting friend’s friends great? Especially when both parties have been mentioned to one another by the mutual friend, and you’re expecting to see someone you don’t-know-but-know-by-proxy at a certain place (here, a lecture/tut). It’s good because it alleviates the usual screening process people unconsciously (or consciously, I guess) do when in new groups of people, and there’s a pre-existing (implicit) degree of trust, to some extent. First steps taken care of.
Drawbacks? Well, I suppose there could be when you cease to be friends contained in one context and start to be friends outside of that initial context socially, etc., and there’s overlap with the original mutual friend… but even that depends on the nature of the relationship(s) so much that it doesn’t make sense to assert there’s anything universally bad with such relationships.
Interesting stuff to think about. Next time you’re meeting a friend’s friend in a context external to the original friend, see if you run all the usual “filters” on them as you would on anyone else unknown in the room. It’s different to sharing an interest, in that the common friend isn’t just a conversation catalyst (as an object, not as someone physically there starting the conversation for you) but rather a vehicle for trust. Thoughts?