December 2010
5 posts
3 tags
Hardly working
Growing up, one of my most deeply held aspirations was a desire to escape from the drudgery I saw as central to the “working class” lifestyle. As much as possible/practical, I wanted to avoid a job that required manual labour, I wanted to avoid having more children than is strictly necessary (which some might argue means having no children at all), and I wanted to avoid being tied...
Vodafail
A couple weeks ago, Apple’s FaceTime server shit itself. No matter how many times I tried to activate FaceTime, the background SMS to the UK servers never went through. After a thoroughly useless 2-hour phone call to AppleCare which, thoroughly, failed to resolve the issue, I threw up my hands and gave up on Apple’s supposedly “simple” video chat tech.
FaceTime unshit...
November 2010
23 posts
5 tags
A long history of defects
Apple’s products are supposedly well-known for their reliability. That hasn’t been my experience so far, at least not with Macs. iPods and (to a lesser extent) iPhones will take virtually anything you throw at them with a laugh and a grin, but every Mac I’ve ever owned has either been a full-fledged lemon or at least infused with lemon essence.
My delightful history with...
4 tags
Halfway point
After several hours of intensive editing/writing, I have finally reached the 8400-word “halfway point” on the critical/analytical portion of my Master’s thesis.
Difficulty: it’s only supposed to be around 12,000 words, but whatever.
By “halfway point” I mean that I have finally finished describing why I did not choose to write a traditional memoir for the...
7 tags
Mr Jameson
My fifth grade teacher was a pretty old guy (or so it seemed to my ten-year-old self), so I’ve always assumed the guy had died sometime in the intervening 23 years.
After nosing around on “the Googles”, I discovered I was right. He died in April of last year, at age 75.
Mr Jameson was the first teacher I ever took seriously. He had a gravitas all other teachers before him had...
4 tags
Steel nightmare
I’m lost in a maze of pipes and grey-painted stainless steel corridors. It’s hot. Steam shoots from a broken pipe a few yards behind me. All around me, the incessant thrum and hum of machinery.
I climb a ladder, wriggle my way through a hatch. The next deck is more of the same: steel floor, steel walls, ceiling of pipes and electrical conduits. Chains, stencilled signage,...
6 tags
Two wheels versus four
How efficient is bicycle travel compared to my fuel-efficient Toyota Echo?
All measures in Imperial rather than metric, because I got a lot of the sourced information from American sites, and I’m too lazy to convert. Also, the math is fuzzy at best (I’m a writer, not a statistician), with some numbers pulled out of the internet’s arse. The calculation also assumes that my...
5 tags
Thesis statement
My Master’s thesis advisor has hounded me through multiple drafts to get my central thesis statement as focused and as obvious as possible.
Fine. Here it is, in all its glory:
Use of metafiction may be the only means for memoir writers to write honestly about their lives if they intend to deliberately conceal vital narrative information from their readers; however, because this adds the...
4 tags
Can't have booze without ooze
I decanted the latest batch of homebrew yesterday. This batch is… interesting.
I prefer dark beers, the darker the better. Most of the stuff I brew is so dark and thick it makes Guinness look like skim milk. This batch was going along the same lines, but I realised I forgot to buy liquorice root for flavour. So as a substitute, I used the only other liquorice-flavoured thing in the house: the...
Misanthropy, II
I attended three separate elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools. The longest period of time I spent at any one school was four years; the shortest, a month and a half. The pattern was this: arrive at a new school and have that “honeymoon” period where people mostly left me alone while they tried to figure me out. When they decided I not only didn’t fit...
5 tags
"Security"
Note: This is now two very long posts that tumblr has completely eaten because it logged me out. One more, and I’m switching to another service. I don’t particularly enjoy spending half an hour writing something only for it to vanish in a single click because the fucking site has logged me out and doesn’t have any way for me to retrieve the text.
In this space would have been...
Misanthropy, I
My wife insists my misanthropy is a façade, a mask I wear because it’s the image I want the world to see. You can go along with that theory and examine why I might choose to present myself to the world as a 33-year-old with the curmudgeonly outlook of someone twice my age; it’ll involve a lot of psychoanalytic gymnastics that, with distressing alacrity, will backflip straight into my...
To boldly fail
Here’s the pattern of modern sci-fi/comic book films (NERD ALERT):
The first film establishes the characters’ origins, how otherwise normal-seeming people (with latent extraordinary talents) adapt to extraordinary circumstances. This film is a resounding success as long as the film is well-written, the actors don’t suck, and the director has a modicum of love for the genre.
...
The value of paranoia
The more time passes, the more I’m convinced that paranoia is a cornerstone of high intelligence. I’m not talking about “the government sends satellite signals into my dental fillings!” kind of paranoia; anyone of any level of intelligence can have that. There’s no challenge in being paranoid about shit that doesn’t actually exist.
The kind of paranoia...
4 tags
Damn it feels good to be a prankster
I don’t know if this is my best prank of all time, and it’s certainly not the most elaborate, but it may be the funniest.
About 11 years ago, I was working as a health physics technician for a now-defunct “volume reduction” facility with the positively imaginative name “Allied Technology Group” (ATG if you’re nasty). I could explain what a health physics...
See-saw
My yesterday:
Mac OS X 10.6.5 got released sometime a couple hours after I woke up. Since it’s a base requirement to getting AirPrint working for iOS 4.2 devices, and since I was in the midst of writing a 4.2 preview post, downloading 10.6.5 became Priority One for the day, despite the fact that I had a whole bunch of other shit I needed to accomplish.
On the other hand, all previous OS...
4 tags
Digital Abaddon
I had a long, “insightful” post about the project I’ve been working on this year. I spent half an hour writing it, and it was another piece of writing that I felt I could stick up on my mind’s refrigerator and admire.
And then tumblr fucking ate it. So those 1500 words and half hour of my life are lost to the digital ether forever, and you’ll never know what...
7 tags
Man vs. Machine vs. Possum
So I had this idea for a story:
In the year 2032, New Zealand’s long war against the possum reached a new frontier. Trapping, poison, and introduced predators hadn’t culled the invading possum population enough, so Kiwi ingenuity went in a new direction: autonomous possum-hunting robots.
The robots turned out to be too efficient…
It’s now the year 2043, 11 years after the...
9 tags
Knowledge is power
“Those of you who think you know everything annoy the shit out of those of us who do.” -anonymous
It always amuses me when I write something and a half-dozen or more geeks get in my face with, “Nuh-uh, you don’t know what you’re talking about, this is what will really happen.” Then, time passes… and events unfold exactly as I said they would.
Example: I...
7 tags
Three corollaries to Occam's Razor
Occam’s Razor is a widely-known postulate. The most popular variation of it: “The simplest explanation is usually the best.”
In theory, this principle has wide applications not only in science and medicine, but also in everyday life. In reality, most people ignore the theory altogether, which leads to my First Corollary to Occam’s Razor, which I’ll call...