Evan and Michelles Meanderings

By Any Other Name…

2011-12-08T00:00:00+11:00

My Aunt and Uncle recently moved from Papua New Guinea to Vanuatu, and are learning Bislama, the local pidgin.

Pidgins can sometimes be a bit awkward, requiring entire phrases to get across an idea.

In Bislama, to mention a cave you would say, “hol long ston.” The literal translation more or less being, “Hole in stone.”

It can lead to some eccentric and terribly charming expressions though. A violin is a, “wan smol box blong white man, oli scratchem beli I singout gudfala,” and my personal favourite, a helicopter is a, “mixmaster blong Jesus Christ.”

According to Pacific Island Travel the phrase for “Piano” is, “black fala box we i gat black teeth, hemi gat white teeth you faetem hard i singaot.”

According to my Aunt, everybody just says, “keyboard.”

Picture of the day: DADD: Dads Against Daughters Dating

2011-10-13T00:00:00+11:00

Discovery of the Week: The Awesome Foundation

2011-09-15T00:00:00+10:00

Last month I attended Ignite Melbourne where one of the speakers, Ross Hill talked about The Awesome Foundation.

The Awesome Foundation has about twenty chapters around the world, each of which provide monthly $1,000 grants to a someone in order to do something awesome.

There is a Melbourne chapter. Previous grant recipients include:

A filmmaker making a documentary about the Tour de Timor bike race.
The Melbourne Winter Warmth project that provides basic needs for the homeless.
Melbourne Macaron to completely cover a car in macarons (because a car covered in macarons is awesome!)

I love the simple, contagious, whimsical, tilting at windmills feel of it all.

Be awesome.

Picture of the day: The Problem With USB Ports

2011-08-31T00:00:00+10:00

via How-To-Geek.

Picture of the day: Usage of ‘LOL’ When Texting

2011-08-14T00:00:00+10:00

From Graph Jam by way of Kealey Nutt’s “The History of the LOL” presentation at Ignite Melbourne.

Picture of the day: Best Twitter Bot Ever

2011-08-13T00:00:00+10:00

Via John Myles White.

Can you spare a dollar?

2011-06-22T00:00:00+10:00

Yesterday there was a news story about a man who committed a bank robbery for only one dollar.

In North Carolina, on the morning of June 9th, James Verone walked into a bank and handed the teller a note that read, “This is a bank robbery. Please only give me one dollar.” Once given his meagre loot, he said, “I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police.”

And why would he do this? In the hopes of receiving health care in prison. Mr. Verone has some serious health problems, no insurance, and is unable to work. Having exhausted his savings, he decided this was his best option, calmly put his affairs in order and went for a walk to a bank.

It’s one of those stories that gives me the impulse to smugly sit here around the other side of the planet, shake my head and think, “Only in America.” But there are disenfranchised and desperate people in any society.

Last year I was going into the city a few evenings a month for various user group meetings and the like. I was surprised by often being approached by homeless or street people asking for any spare change.

In the past, I’d tended to give these people short shrift and keep walking, but a friend of mine turned me around on this one evening when he was approached by a man who was asking for some money so he would have a safe place to sleep that night. He talked with the man for a little bit, gave him the few dollars he had in his pocket and wished him luck.

I gave what is probably the usual reaction. “Hey, you don’t know why he really wants that. He’s probably gonna go drink it or shoot up or something.” His response realigned my thinking. He said that here was somebody in front of him who was in such desperation that he would approach strangers in the street, asking for help. Had swallowed their pride and needed to beg. The very absolute least you can do is take them at face value and give them a few bucks. Shrugging he concluded, “Never miss an opportunity to practise compassion.”

Some rights reserved by looseends Mr. Verone’s heist reminded me of another story I heard not so long ago. In the early 1900’s the Mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia had a habit of showing up at a municipal court and presiding as judge. An opportunity that not many Mayors availed themselves of.

The story goes that this particular night during the Great Depression, and old woman was being charged for stealing a loaf of bread. She told the mayor that she did it because her two grandchildren were starving. The shopkeeper refused to drop the charges, wanting her as an example because it was a “real bad neighbourhood.”

His hands tied, LaGuardia charged the woman a fine of ten dollars. As he was pronouncing this judgement though, he took off his hat, threw in ten dollars, and announced this he was remitting the fine. Not only that, but he fined everyone in the courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.

The hat was passed to the bailiff, who used it to collect the fines from seventy odd people in the courtroom that evening: petty criminals, traffic offenders, a few lawyers, and one narked shopkeeper. The bewildered grandmother was handed the collection and sent home to her family.

“Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.”

—– Wendell Phillips

I hope public opinion is warm for Mr. Verone.

Seasonal Homicidal Disorder

2011-05-31T00:00:00+10:00

Seasonal homicidal disorder (SHD) is a mood disorder with which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience bouts of homicidal rage during the extremes of winter.

Once regarded skeptically by the experts, with the prevalence of near instant communications from disparate parts of the planet via the Internet, seasonal homicidal disorder is now well established.

A “rage incident” is usually triggered via a social networking service. The typical pattern involves someone making a status update about how incredibly cold it is where they are at the moment, followed by some smug git in a more temperate part of the world replying in a condescending fashion about how wonderful it is where they are, thus triggering an overwhelming urge on the part of the first person to hunt them down and throttle them to death with the drawstring out of their boardshorts.

Variants

Seasonal homicidal disorder by proxy

This is where the original poster is not triggered into a rage incident, but an observer in similar icy conditions. This controversial variant can be especially hard to diagnose and prevent because the lack of previous communication between the observer and the smug git means he or she often doesn’t even see it coming. Plus the general societal perception that the little prick deserved it makes this an especially hard disorder to treat.

Extrovertal homicidal disorder

This is basically the non-Internet equivalent of SHD, where some annoying little ray of sunshine living in the same bitter environs is unmercifully happy and in your face. The highest incidents of EHD occur in the early morning before a large percentage of the population has had their coffee, usually when the extrovert is trying to cheer someone up. The results can be quite gruesome.

Treatment

There are many different treatments for seasonal homicidal disorder including coffee, medication, ionised-air administration, cognitive-behavioural therapy and carefully timed supplementation of the hormone melatonin.

The most effective known treatment, called STFU, is a preventative treatment where the smug little git just Shuts The Fuck Up. Unfortunately this does not usually happen until there is blood on the carpet.

Discovery of the Week: Clementine Music Player

2011-05-08T00:00:00+10:00

Today I want to talk about a great little music player called Clementine. But first, a bit about magpies.

The Australian Magpie is a medium-sized black and white bird found all over Australia and parts of New Guinea. Although wild, it is not unusual for them to be fed by suburban and rural households, and they are a common mascot for sporting teams.

They are also quite territorial, and during their breeding season get quite aggressive and will swoop at pedestrians and particularly cyclists. As a boy, I remember one day climbing up through the middle of the wood pile, popping out the top only to get a flash of black and white feathers and wind up back at the bottom again wondering what just happened.

On the other hand, the European Magpie isn’t known for swooping people. Their penchant is a famous affinity for shiny objects, often stealing them to decorate their nests.

Indeed, people who flitter from one “the next big thing” to the next are often likened to a magpie, being easily distracting by shiny things. Then there are those people who realise what they’ve already got is pretty darn good and work hard to improve upon that foundation instead.

And with that, I’d like to introduce you to Clementine, a playlist-oriented music player with strong support for large library collections.

Clementine works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, so it will work on just about any desktop or laptop you have. I find Clementine thinks about playing music the same way I do. On the left panel you have your music library, or your file system, or your streaming radio stations, all of which you can drag over to the playlist on the right and organise however you want.

You can even set up several playlists in the tabbed interface to have your different listening needs lined up and ready to go.

While playing your music the left panel can also be used to display information about the current artist, or info and lyrics for the current song, along with album art, and many other features which I’m sure the developers will add in the future.

But really, the killer feature for me is its handling of compilation albums. I have a lot of soundtracks and other ‘various artists’ type albums. In most other players when you list by artist you get every single artist for every single song in your library, and you’re wondering what music this artist has, and see that there is only one or two songs for them as part of a larger album. For me this just clutters things up when your perusing your music (besides, that’s what the search feature is for).

With Clementine, compilation albums are put under “Various Artists” and you can scan through them all together. If the library manager has broken the album up under the individual artists then no problem, just right-click on the songs and select, “Show in various artists” and presto, your done.

It has many other features too, like tag editing, visualisations, copying music to your phone or MP3 player, kittens and much more, so give it a go!

Suffering-Oriented Programming

2011-04-03T00:00:00+11:00

Looked at a presentation deck on Slide Share the other day called Become Efficient or Die: The Story of BackType and one of the things that resonated with me is the concept of suffering-oriented programming.

In a nutshell:

Don’t add process until you feel the pain of not having it.
Don’t build new technology until you feel the pain of not having it.
First make it possible. Then, make it beautiful. Then, make it fast.

Mind you, while I get where they’re coming from, there might be something said for anticipating where your going to feel the pain and being a bit proactive instead of reactionary. I guess as with most things it’s balance.

Other points I liked:

Overengineering = Attempting to create beautiful software without a thorough understanding of the problem domain.

Premature optimisation = Optimising before creating “beautiful” design, creating unnecessary complexity.

Refactoring and reducing technical debt = Garbage collection for the code base.

Check out the whole presentation below:

A Slice of π

2011-03-14T00:00:00+11:00

In honour of today (March 14) being Pi Day, a musical interpretation of Pi to 31 decimal places by Michael John Blake:

And if you think you can do better, head over to http://pi.highsign.de/ and make your own composition!

Pi, represented by the Greek letter π, is of course the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and is also the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius. Ever so versatile, the number π is used in all kinds of maths. Geometry and trigonometry obviously, but also calculus, physics, statistical probability and even chaos theory.

Celebrated in song and poem, there was even a movie called Pi about a number theorist who tried to understand the entire world through numbers and ended up drilling a hole in his head (an impulse I’ve often shared during my career working with computers.)

(Click image for a larger version.)

So do something today in celebration of the wonder of π. For Aussies, a meat pie for lunch would be fitting. You could order a pizza (sometimes called a pie), set your desktop wallpaper to the image above, read up about Pi on wikipedia, try and memorise the digits of π (the world record is 42,195 digits), or just run around in a circle like we do most days.

My Life With Pets — Cats, Birds and Bibs

2011-03-10T00:00:00+11:00

One of our cats has a bib-like cloth attached to his collar these days to stop him catching birds. It is suppose to interfere with his stalking and so far it’s worked.

The other cats in the neighbourhood do point at him and laugh and call him a kitteh [sic], but he’s reaped his own reward as far as I’m concerned as he kept bringing birds home and hiding them in the house…

Anyway, just now a nice old man knocked on my door because he saw Kismet with this thing on his collar and was concerned it was something stuck in his collar and might be choking him.

I explained what it was and assured the man that if anybody was going to have the pleasure of throttling that bloody cat it would be me and not some inanimate piece of cloth.

¿Qué?

2010-10-08T00:00:00+11:00

I’ll never forget the time my brother-in-law was telling me about the movie, Like Water for Chocolate. In trying to sound worldly and hip, he enthused, “I love French films!”

If you’ve ever really used Google in anger, you’ve no doubt come across search hits in a foreign language, and been offered a link to read a translated version. Google Translate is a wonderful service, but they recently added even more awesome with the ability to translate Latin!

Now we can all sound like pretentious scholars. I’m hoping the next addition will be either Pig Latin or Tok Pisin.

Pacem et chocolate

My Life With Pets — Tag Teamed

2010-08-21T00:00:00+10:00

If Pavlov used a Labrador I think his experiments are void.

Well the cats are still at it. Last night Michelle was dishing up dinner and turned her back for a second and one of the cats nipped up onto the bench and tried to take off with a chicken drumstick.

It turned out to be a bit too heavy and while trying to dodge various objects being thrown at him he dropped it onto the floor, where of course Toby instantly vacuumed it up. (Toby is actually very well behaved — we’ve left food out on the coffee table and he knows not to touch it — but once it hits the floor it’s his domain.)

For the non-dog owners out there, cooked chicken bones are generally not very good for dogs. They can splinter and cause problems, so when you see your dog gobble down a drumstick you react with some urgency.

I immediately stuck my hand down his throat to try and retrieve the drumstick — which has left me with a very nice imprint of one of his molars on the side of my finger and taught the children a few new expressions they’re not allowed to repeat.

Thus, with one hand covered in slimy dog spit, and the other holding on to his collar, I took the last action left to me and hoicked up on his collar so he couldn’t swallow. We danced that way for a little bit until he finally dropped the bone.

At this point all pets were encouraged into the laundry either by the scruff of their necks or pure inertia and locked away until after dinner.

It was actually quite nice to eat a meal without having furry eyes watching your every move for a change.

My Life With Pets — Labrador Retriever (noun): A Stomach On Four Legs

2010-08-11T00:00:00+10:00

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.
Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read."
—– Groucho Marx

We have a three year old Labrador named Tobius or “Toby” for short. He was supposedly the runt of the litter, but turned out to be a big black doofus with an attention span about as wide as the space between his eyeballs.

He is not especially good at playing fetch. He’ll be running along after the ball and something will divert his attention —– one sharp left later he’s off rolling in God knows what and you’re the one fetching the ball. About the only time he’s any good at fetch is if we play it in the house, up and down the hallway.

So of course, Toby swallowed a ball a few weeks ago. It was one of those small rubber super-balls that I’m continuously telling my daughter not to play with or the dog will eat it which, sure enough, is what happened. She was bouncing it up and down the hall, there was a flash of black and a scream of, “No Toby!” and the ball was breakfast.

The advice from the vet was to wait and see, and to check his poop for the next few days to see if the ball appears (a task that was delegated to my daughter for obvious reasons — that and because it was her fault he ate the ball in the first place). If it didn’t turn up in a few days or he showed signs of distress then call them back.

Luckily he threw up the ball sometime during the second night as we found it in the laundry the next morning. None of the animals have been inclined to play with it for some reason.

Coda

Being the first dog I’ve ever had, he has certainly been a learning experience for me. The general failure with the whole fetch thing for one. Toby has had surgery twice on his left eye to laser out a growth, so perhaps his vision isn’t all it could be and he has trouble tracking the ball. He’s certainly not always the most visually observant.

At the start of June I had my head shaved for a good cause. Shaggy hair and beard completely gone, run over twice with a straight razor, the whole nine yards. After which we went bowling —– but I digress. When we got home, with the excitement of everyone arriving and pats and such he just didn’t notice, but a while later, after I have been sitting at the computer for 20 minutes or so then got up and turned around he totally freaked. He jumped up and barked, “Who the hell are YOU?!” His nose and eyes were telling him two different things.

Fortunately he calmed down quickly once I gave him a cuddle and distracted him with a cat to chase.

My Life With Pets — Bedtime Blitz

2010-07-30T00:00:00+10:00

“A cat by any other name is still a scheming little fur ball that craps behind the couch."
—– Unknown

The two new cats we’ve got are incorrigible. Despite our best efforts to date they will still go on the kitchen benches whenever they can get away with it. Every other cat we’ve had we’ve been able to train to stay off the benches, but not these two.

They will also steal any food that is left unattended for even twenty seconds. The little buggers have gotten into meat that was left out to defrost (in the sink with a heavy glass breadboard over the top to keep them away, mind you) and even steal bread left out on the bench.

They will literally try to steal food off the kids plates while they are eating their dinners if adults are not around.

Ever since Michelle and I got our first cat the day after we got back from our honeymoon, we’ve maintained the habit that the animals get shut in the laundry at bed time and let out again in the morning. They’ve got baskets, water and other amenities to make it comfy. They soon get use to it and it becomes part of the routine. These days, with two cats (Kismet and Bazyl) and a hulking black Labrador (Toby), it’s the only way to get a peaceful nights sleep without something four legged tearing over you in the middle of the night.

Kismet, however, has gotten into the habit, when it comes that time of night to put them into the laundry, to sneak under the table and only be lured out by food —– which grates because if I give in a put some food down I feel like I’m rewarding him for being a sneaky prick. And he is sneaky too, because he can be fast asleep in my daughter’s room, but will hear me let Toby out the backyard for his pre-bedtime ablutions. So while doing this I see him slink out of her room and under the table were I can’t get him.

Then last night absolutely tore it. I’d done the trick of looking like I was getting food out of and panty, and when he runs into the laundry I’m was empty handed one too many times, and he wasn’t buying it, even when I actually put food down. I would chase him out from under the dining table, and he would run up the other end of the house and hide under the couch. I would chase him out from under there and he would move on to the next bit of cover, ducking and weaving commando style until he makes it back to the dining table, and around we’d go again. The very last thing you want late at night before heading to bed is to be playing a game of tiggy with a damn cat.

Let’s just say that as 12:30 last night the house was neat and by 12:40 half of the furniture had been upended so the cat couldn’t get under it, the little bugger had finally been cornered behind my bed, carried by the scruff of the neck and given a lesson in aerodynamics as he was jettisoned into the laundry.

Since that night, we’ve come to a certain understanding. I invested in a water pistol, you see, and so now it usually takes no more than two circuits around the house before he declares defeat and slinks damply into the laundry, while the other pets try not to giggle too conspicuously.

The cats' continued and brazen brattishness led me to research these electric fence type things where they wear a collar that gives them a jolt if they get too close to the proximity sensor. This would be ideal to set put the sensor in the kitchen to just keep them out of there, but there are two problems:

It appears to cost in the order of $600 or more to get the equipment for two cats. This seems hideously overpriced. I guess they’ve gotta make sure the equipment is safe and wont kill the animal (although that’s not a deal-breaker at this point), but still overpriced.
None of them come with a remote where I can trigger the jolt on demand. I know this can be abused, but would be damn useful in encouraging them out from under furniture and as stress relief. I would call it, “the joy buzzer”.

Ah well. For now, the war of attrition will continue unabated.

USB in a Box

2010-05-13T00:00:00+10:00

I’m happy to say the number of gadgets I own has been growing a bit unmanageable in the last few years, in particular the number that need USB either for power, communications or both. The downside is the number of cables and other debris that gets strewn around my desk. So I made a USB box to tidy it all up:

Internally it has two powered USB hubs, one of which is connected to the computer, the other is just for use as a power supply (for the GPS and battery charger, which don’t need to talk to the computer).

The seven port USB hub, with five in the front and two in the back, is hot glued into the front of the container for each ad hoc USB access.

Keyboard, mouse and backup drive are all direct into the computer as the motherboard has plenty of ports.

Will you be one of the 7% that reads this rant?

2010-04-24T00:00:00+10:00

A couple of days ago, a couple of friends put the following on their status on Facebook:

People need to understand that children with special needs are not sick. They are not searching for a cure, just acceptance. This week is for special needs education. 93% percent of the people will not copy and paste this. Will you be part of the seven percent that will and will you leave it on your wall for at least an hour?

Now raising awareness and understanding is a fine thing, and I know and love the kids my friends were thinking of when they cut and pasted this message. Today’s topic is not the important subject of children with special needs, the above just happens to be the latest example of what I do want to talk about, which is how not to win people to your cause.

I’ll admit I’m fairly cynical of mouse-click activisim, avatar activism or any no-commitment, no-effort -isms. I think Lyz Lenz summed it up best when she tweeted, “I am pretty sure no matter what I put in my Facebook status, I won’t cure cancer, help Haiti or raise awareness for anything, except my Facebook status.”

But that’s just me (and Lyz). I’d rather you use your own words for something important to you, but if you want to cut and paste a status message concerning a cause you have some skin in, then go for it.

The bit that really raises my ire is the, “Will you be part of the seven percent that will and will you leave it on your wall for at least an hour?” How many emails, tweets or what-have-you have you seen that try to stick it to you with the “most people will just ignore this, will you?” line? How many of those have you sent? It reminds me of the old, “If you forward this email, Bill Gates will personally send you a new mobile phone” email that did the rounds years ago, and hundreds of others.

For one thing, 80% of statistics are made up, so “seven percent” is fiction — but more importantly: I don’t like being manipulated. Guilt trips and pressure tactics are about the surest way of not getting my cooperation, no matter what cause you represent or what you’re trying to sell. I grew up going to both Baptist and Pentecostal churches, so I know how to be a critical thinker and I know when I’m being manipulated.

You want to really get people to buy in to a cause, then appeal to their intellect and move them with your passion. Share your stories of how it effects your life, and give them enough information to understand, to agree (or not), and to know how to participate (or not). Leave the manipulative tactics to the politicians. If your cause is true then you don’t need ‘em. A guilt trip is a short journey that ends at about the same place it started. Commitment carries you much further.

This week is for special needs education awareness. Many people don’t understand that children with special needs are not sick. That they are not searching for a cure, just acceptance. I know and love some children that have special needs and am frustrated by how some people them. How about you?

To-Whit / To-Whoo: One Year of Microblogging in Review

2010-03-12T00:00:00+11:00

Photo by Milen Dimov,
Used with permission ’Twas a year ago today that I started using Twitter and Facebook. I kicked it off with a test message to see if I got my twitter missives automatically being sent to Facebook properly. Hardly an auspicious start. I was not an early adopter of social networking tech, and at first blush, you can’t blame me. Do I really want to read 140 character messages of what people had for breakfast and their progress on the house work? Fortunately I found it wasn’t all asinine ephemera.

I quickly found that the people I followed on Twitter and the people I followed on Facebook fell into two camps. On Facebook, there were already a lot of people that I know in analogue (AKA the real world), not just online. Particularly a large component of the junction community group of which I’m involved. These are mostly non-techies — people from all walks of life.

On Twitter, it seemed I was following people of a more geek persuasion. Interesting people I’d meet at various conferences or tech user groups around Melbourne. In June I setup an account on Identi.ca for no particular reason. What’s Identi.ca? It is basically the same as Twitter, but based on open source software. It ended up being advantageous as there were a couple of people I started following that were only on Identi.ca – so I quickly set things up so my status updates flowed automatically from Identi.ca to Twitter, and from Twitter to Facebook.

So, Facebook was more friends and family, and Twitter and Identi.ca became more colleagues and techies. I sort of view my Twitter and Identi.ca use as my more professional, software developer persona, and Facebook as more of a personal venue. Mind you, I’m well aware that there is no such thing as privacy on Facebook, so in either case I never post anything I’d be particularly embarrassed for a potential employer to read, or worse still my mum.

So what do you do with it? I’ll usually tweet one or two things a day. Most of the time it is something funny I’ve found on the Internet that I want to share. That funny image you came across, or someone else tweeted. Some of the highlights if the past year have been:

Extreme Sheep LED Art
Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA, where christians can organise for an atheist to look after their pets after they’ve gone up in the rapture.
A beautiful and poignant ad on wearing seatbelts.
Sleep Talkin' Man which has to be the funniest thing of the year. This guy says absolutely bizarre things in his sleep. His wife uses a voice activated recorder and transcribes them on their blog each morning. Apparently when he’s awake, he’s quite a nice guy. When he’s asleep… not so much. Can be quite offensive at times, but gets a laugh more often than not.

One of the things that continues to amaze me is the eco-system of Twitter related web-sites. There are millions of them. From follower managers and friend analysers to better email notifications. Job hunting and psychological profilers, it’s all there. Need to write a tweet in Klingon? We have a site for that too.

I even got in on the action, trying my hand at a couple of greasemonkey scripts for Twitter and Identi.ca. One to shorten URLs on demand, the other to format tweets – exchanging a straight double quote (") for the left (“) or right (”) version as appropriate, along with many other substitutions. More recently I launched Quote for the Day, backed by a little program that randomly picks a quote from my database and posts it each day. Of course you can follow it via Twitter, Facebook, Identi.ca, Buzz or even RSS. Okay, no more spruiking.

There’s actors you can follow, and other celebrities too. Some twitter accounts have become quite famous, such as ShitMyDadSays which has the simple bio, “I’m 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says.“ With over one million follows and a TV pilot starring William Shatner in the works, has to be one of the most successful Twitter originals. Then of course there’s the guy living in a parallel world overrun with zombies.

The sheer number of people Tweeting and Facebooking is astounding. Around the time I was doing some online work for a friend of mine, Kim, I came across a service called TwitterSpy that will send you instant messages of tweets based on search terms. So along with my name, my wife’s name and a few other terms, I had stuck his name in, then promptly forgot about it. About a month later an instant message pops up from someone tweeting that they had just hired Kim, whom I know was looking for work. So I ring up Kim to congratulate him on the new job, about thirty seconds after he’d hung up from the phone call with his new boss, accepting the job. Totally psyched him out.

And then there was the day I realised I literally herd cats.

There’s also the weird or creepy things that happen. Like the time Amazon started following me on Twitter minutes after I visited their web site. Amazon continued the creepy trend with another Twitter account auto-sending me ‘good deals’ on Amazon products based on key words in my tweets. Clever advertising? Not.

There’s a really nice guy called Darren Rowse, who is one of the original professional bloggers. He even has a blog about professional blogging and of course, a related Twitter account. I was somewhat bemused when within a couple of hours of starting to follow ProBlogger, I myself had eight new followers — all of them ‘online entrepreneurs’, ‘wealth creation specialists’ and ‘professional bloggers’. After a day it was about twenty and at that point I stopped following ProBlogger to avoid more spam followers. Somehow I think all these ‘professionals’ don’t quite get it.

So how do you keep your sanity in the social networking world? A few of the things I have learnt:

Don’t friend everyone of the entire planet that you’ve ever met. You’ll end up with a barrage of noise. I’m the type of person who reads every tweet, that’s why I only follow about one hundred people, and most of those are infrequent tweeters. I don’t really understand the ones that follow thousands of people and just “dip in the stream”. I guess I’m all or nothing.

I also use RSS feeds a lot, and often use a twitter user’s RSS feed to follow accounts that are more company types (such as Firefox or Little Bird Electronics), and reserve following in Twitter more for individuals.

And speaking of noise, on Facebook you will see a lot of status messages to do with applications, like “Tracey just received an e-hug from Marsha” or “Go into Farmville and give me something stupid.” When you mouse over these, a “Hide” button will appear. This is your best friend. When you click it, it gives you the option to totally ignore the person, or totally ignore messages from the application, or undo. Ignoring the application is what you want. Be selective in what applications you use because they will have access to a lot of your information if you allow them.
And on a similar vein — you will get invitations from people to join all sorts of causes or what have you. Personally I’m fairly cynical of the efficacy of these click-wrapped activism things. If you want to join them then do so, but don’t feel in any way, shape or form obligated because somebody personally invited you along with everybody else on their friends list. The ignore button is your friend.
Same goes for friend invites from people you hardly know or don’t want to know.
Tend the garden. I actively block users that start following me that look like spammers, or already follow thousands of people and are obviously only following me in hopes that I’ll follow them back to boost their numbers in some weird ego thing. After a year I only have forty-seven followers on twitter, but I consider them quality followers (well, most of them, anyway).
Find a decent desktop client. To me, Twitter and Facebook updates are kind of like instant messaging or IRC. I use a desktop client for IM, so I use one for microblogging too. The best one I’ve found so far is TweetDeck although I wish for something better and also pine for a good client that handles Twitter, Facebook and Identi.ca (and no doubt Buzz as it picks up steam). Frequently visting web sites to see if there is new content is so passé.
But trust me on the sunscreen.

So the social networking thing, is it worth it? After a year I have to grudgingly admit that, yeah, it is. It has certainly been useful as a kind of ‘touching base’ with people I don’t see often enough in meat space (AKA the real world). Also, I’m actually a fairly private person, and while reasonably coherent and gregarious online can often be quiet in person. Facebook in particular I think has given me the opportunity to express a little bit more of myself with friends in a medium that can be more conducive. You get to share those delightful little discoveries, funny video or wry observations as they occur — not something that would always happen offline (AKA the real world).

So I wonder what the next twelve months will be like…

All creatures great and small

2010-01-10T00:00:00+11:00

Happy New Year everyone.

Hard to believe we are already over a week into the New Year and so much has happened already.

Many of you would have heard about our cat Murray, but for those who haven’t, I am retelling the story here.

Evan and I got Murray as a four-year-old cat from the animal shelter. We had lost a cat not long before and were wanting a second cat to complement our female tortoiseshell CD, but didn’t want to have to deal with a kitten all over again.

This was over 14 years ago. At that time, we didn’t choose Murray so much as he chose us. He was the only cat who was more interested in us than in escaping from the enclosure which was his temporary home.

The idea of a companion to our cat CD who was by then 3 years old and had been with us since a kitten, went out the window. They co-existed, but were never friends.

As a training ground for having children, they were excellent :), as well as being wonderful lap-warmers and company. We ended up with one cat each.

After the kids came along, the cats became more family pets and Maddy adopted Murray for her own. He was a friendly, compliant cat, who you could do almost anything with, although he was very eloquent when displeased and had an ear-screeching yowl rather than a meow, which shocked more than a fair share of visitors.

Then about 7 years ago, Murray went out one night and didn’t come home. Long story short, 10 months later he turned up in Endeavour Hills and was returned to us.

CD died two years ago, but Murray continued on, seeming like he could live forever. He survived the introduction of our labrador Toby to the family, with a grace belying his old age.

Then in March last year, he disappeared again. This time, we thought he had gone away to die. After much searching and pain, we eventually moved on and finally got two older kittens from the animal shelter to return us to a two-cat family. (with a dog too)

Then, much to our shock and amazement, he turned up again. After being missing for 6 months, he was found and returned to us from Hallam this time. But he was in terrible condition, almost skeletal and at 18 years of age, it was very hard. But we were very happy to have him home and restored to his place on Maddy’s bed and in our hearts.

He adjusted well to the new kittens, almost acting like a grumpy old man dealing with rambunctious children. He even adjusted to his things being moved around – as we tried to accommodate him around the needs of the kittens.

He wasn’t well and we spent a bit of time at the vet trying to clear him of various infections and getting him to put weight on – fortunately with quite some success.

However, old age and an experience beyond what his age could handle, were finally too much.

A week ago last Friday night, Murray fell off Maddy’s bed and got stuck head down between the wall and the bed. We don’t know how long he was stuck there for. Evan took him to the vet on the Saturday whilst I was at work and another long story short, it was time to say goodbye.

Murray came home on Saturday and we spent as much time with him as we could – making sure he had the comfortable sleeping places, telling stories of his adventures and the fun we had with him.

Last Sunday, our family went to the vet together. We all wanted to be there, so went into the surgery as a family. We all gave him a cuddle, kissed him goodbye, prayed together and Evan held him as we patted him as he quickly and quietly slipped away.

We were a very subdued family who went home without him, but were grateful to the kittens and a very loving labrador, who sensed the loss and our need for something. Our friends were amazing with their support and words of encouragement as we posted about it online and a visit from Tina and Ken with condolence gifts on hearing the news, was heart-warming. Our vet surgery even sent us condolence flowers.

We had Murray for 14 years and although its painful to think of his loss, I would not change any of that time for the world.

So how does this relate to God. His grace is amazing – He brought Murray back to us so that we could spend this time with him – he was a family member as much as any of us. And he gave us the ability to make the decision to let him go, much as we wanted to keep him with us.

And then when the time came, he gave us the strength to go through with the decision and ensured we were surrounded by people to share their love and understanding. And this was all after he made sure we were brought together in the first place.

I don’t know what the situation is with pets and the afterlife – I have heard many opposing viewpoints. I do know that God gave mankind dominion over the beasts of the earth and the responsbility to care for them. I believe we did right by Murray and fulfilled that responsibility and that it was all based in love. And I thank God that he gave the responsibility for a black and white, gut-wrenching yowling, many returning, brash and loving cat to us. I think we got the better end of that deal.

In Memory of Murray

2010-01-03T00:00:00+11:00

I’ve already blogged about a cat named Murray so for today, a simple note to observe that Murray is no longer with us. From his unexpected reappearance in late August, we are grateful to have had the opportunity to share another four months of life with him before arthritis and other maladies of old age finally caught up to him.

We spent our last evening together the same way we spent our first: lying on the couch watching movies with him asleep, purring away on my chest.

Bye Murray.

“Play tricks?” laughed the cat.
“Oh my my! No, no, no!
I just want to go in
To get out of the snow.
Keep your mind on your work.
You just stay there, you two.
I will go in the house
And find something to do."
Then that cat went right in!
—– The Cat In The Hat Comes Back, Dr. Seuss

Wallpaper & System Info Management Script

2009-12-22T00:00:00+11:00

I’ve been working on my little wallpaper management bash shell script that handles changing wallpapers on my desktop. The image to the right shows the system information that is displayed down the right edge of my screen. From the top you have:

Click for larger view

Local weather forecast for the next four days.
The current and next calendar months.
List of the last twelve incoming phone calls.
Various system info such as cpu usage, disk space and top five processes.

(The image contains bogus phone numbers, don’t bother trying to ring ’em.)

Ever since I upgraded my desktop to two monitors this background information has been a lot more visible off to the side, and so I decided to give it a bit of an update.

Originally I was using conky to display all that information, but all the info aside from the system info is fairly static, and could easily be updated when the wallpaper changes every five minutes, instead of being a set of conky processes, so I’ve been playing a lot with ImageMagick and sharpening up my bash scripting skills to actually write the information onto the wallpaper image. So far I have the phone log and calendar being written, and plan to do the weather forecast next, so then I will only be running one conky process.

Currently the script does the following:

Check if the screen saver is active. If so, then skip the whole thing and check again in five minutes as the computer isn’t being used at the moment.
Randomly pick an image file from my wallpapers folder to use for the desktop. It will cycle through the complete set of available images before repeating.
Takes a look at the aspect ratio of the image to figure out if it is suitable for a single screen or dual screen background.
- If only single screen, finds another single screen image to use and stitches the two together side by side.
- Resize the whole thing to be the same dimension as my desktop (width of both screens).
Apply the watermark image, which is what gives you the translucent grey rectangles behind each of the four bits of info.
Write the calendar and phone log information into the image.
Chuck the completed image up as the desktop wallpaper.
Wait five minutes and repeat.

So far, so good. I’ll write the weather info into the image next [DONE!]. At some point I want to update the weather script to pull the information from the XML files published by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology instead of getting it from weather.com as they always seem to be a degree or two out, and presumabley the ABoM would be more accurate.

I’m also gonna display some quota usage metrics for my ISP. They provide an API for account holders to retrieve various info about their data usage, so at some point soon I’ll write some scripts to retrieve and format the info. UPDATE 2010/1/25: Done! I’ve updated the image to show what it looks like. It’s down next to the conky display. (Note that I’m not really spam limited, just a simulation for the demo, honest!)

Might also run another conky process to tail the last few lines of /var/log/messages. [UPDATE: I’m actually using the KDE/Plasma File Watcher widget to do this, but I added another background rectangle for it to the watermark file. You can see the right edge of it next to the weather info in the updated image above.]

And in my more nuttier moments I’ve contemplated overlaying images from The Human Clock® and/or Calendar. Pity there isn’t an API. Hmmm, maybe I better stick to what I’ve got…

At some point I may publish the bash script and ancillary bits and pieces for other people to use if interested. Will probably need a bit of a tidy up and some guide lines for hacking written up first. Also, sometime in the next month I will be upgrading from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2 and going from KDE3.5 to 4.3 in the process, so the script will need a small amount of attention at that point.

UPDATE: Actually, it needed a lot of attention to get working under KDE 4. One of the differences from KDE 3.5 is that you set the wallpaper for each monitor separately (even though you use it like one big desktop). Also, there are no dbus or other convenient methods to tell Plasma to use a particular image as the wallpaper.

In the end I made the following changes to the script:

Prepare the images for the left and right monitors separately, and only stitch them together at the very end if we are running KDE 3. For dual-screen wallpapers, crop the left and right parts into separate images.
It now caches the correctly resized image(s) for the wallpapers. This saves a little bit of processing and also having to figure out if it is a dual-screen wallpaper if we have already seen the image before. (Each time the script starts it’ll clear the cache of files older than two days, just to help with clearing out stale files – really the overhead of this part of the processing is pretty small.)
Do all the watermarking and textual processing on the right image only.
Finally, once the images are ready, move them to their final folder location — effectively being close to an atomic operation. I’ll explain why that is important below.

The bugbear though is, once I’ve got these images ready, how do I set the desktop in KDE 4? I’ve lodged a bug report for a dbus command to be added to allow you to do this, but in the meantime I’m using a plasma plugin that can run a script on a specified time interval for each monitor, and set the wallpaper to whatever image path the script returns.

At the moment, I just pointed them to simple one-liner scripts that return the paths where by background manager script places the prepared files, and does this every 30 seconds. This is why I need the final operation to be fairly atomic – moving the completed file into place – rather than say having the output of the last ImageMagick operation write to the final location. The desktop could try and read the file while it is still being written – this way the chances of that happening are minimised.

Playing Santa

2009-12-06T00:00:00+11:00

Got roped into playing Santa again this year. At this rate I’m gonna have to buy my own suit!

“Sorry I’m late, one of the reindeer had a flat…”

“Can I get a ‘Hello Santa’?”

If I do this again next year I think I’ll have to work on some new material. I think the gag about always saying three “Ho, ho, ho’s” ‘cause if you only yell out one they come and arrest you made some of the parents nervous…

Aiko Gateway Build Day #1

2009-11-16T00:00:00+11:00

Follow the link below to see my photos from the Aiko Gateway Build Day #1:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44717797@N06/sets/72157622810971412/detail/

The black hole that is a woman’s handbag

2009-11-14T00:00:00+11:00

For a woman, my handbag is pretty small and pretty empty. Apart from the infrequently used things I stuff in the side pockets, it carries my wallet, phone, keys, lipstick in a case, mints, a USB stick and a couple of pens. Not much really.

But somehow, even in a small big, with so few things in it, in the last few months I have lost a couple of things in my handbag. The first was a USB stick – I swore I had put it in there and when it came time to get it, couldn’t find it for the life of me. Then it was my lipstick case. Again, pulling the bag apart and removing all its content did not result in it turning up. Finally, a couple of weeks ago it was my sunglasses. The search was without success. I knew the last place I had seen this items was in my handbag.

And then, anywhere between a week and a month after their disappearance, all the items I had been missing, amazingly turned up again, in the same handbag that I had turned inside out trying to find them in. I only have one handbag, so I hadn’t mixed up which bag it was in and they were not things that other people borrowed and sneakily returned without my knowledge.

So there is a blackhole in my handbag. Where it leads to and how it decides which items to take, I can’t say. I also can’t tell you why those items come back and how it chooses the timeline of their return. But I can say anecdotally, that I am sure that there are many more women’s handbags out there that also have blackholes in them. I am not the only one to suffer from these mysterious disappearances. Whether we will ever solve them, only time will tell.

Interestingly, as I was pondering this mystery, so were Garfield and Jon – check out their thoughts at Garfield – The vault, running from October 12th to 17th.

Michelle

Wikipedia really does have a page for just about everything.

2009-11-09T00:00:00+11:00

Having lived in Papua New Guinea twice while growing up, I have a certain fondness for the language Tok Pisin (to you Inglis speakers, just pronounce it the same as “pidgeon”). I can’t really speak much of it, but I can understand a fair bit when my Dad gets started (incidentally, he went back to PNG for a visit in June, and after 30 years he could still hold his own when talking with the locals).

You’ve got to love a language where “gras” means “hair”, “bagarap” means pretty much the same thing if you say it out loud in English, and while expressing how full your tummy is after a good meal you accidentally say you’re pregnant.

So it was with great delight that I discovered that there is an edition of Wikipedia in Tok Pisin, it can be found here:

http://tpi.wikipedia.org/

It has about 850 articles (compared to over three million in English) but it is wonderful stuff. I can’t understand any of it, but wonderful all the same.

Here’s a picture of me with my wantok, age four. See if you can pick me out.

The Petting Problem

2009-11-02T00:00:00+11:00

Inspired by projects such as the tweeting cat door and CATaLOG [sic] I’m wanting to add some form of automated access control to our pet door to control who can go in and out, when.

The Players

We currently have three cats, one dog and one pet door. Note: Click on any picture to see a larger view.

The Mischievous Mutt

Toby, our two year old Labrador needs access to the backyard anytime, day or night for access to his food, water and other amenities.

The Clutter Kittens

Bazyl and Kismet, are free to go out during the day (sometimes even encouraged) however in an ideal world the pet door would only allow them to come in, but not out again after dark.

The Wanderer

UPDATE 2010/01/17: Unfortunately, Murray is no longer with us. Old age finally caught up with him.

~~Murray, the venerable 17 year old veteran of the family who has a habit of going walkabout. At this stage in his life, it would be best if he stayed indoors.~~

The Portcullis

Our pet door, that allows the rabble to go out on the deck and into the backyard. The door is fixed in a wooden panel in the frame of what was originally a window.

Requirements Summary

So basically we need something that is able to stop the door swinging outwards during the evening, except when Toby is in proximity, ~~and any time Murray is in proximity~~. We don’t need to worry about foreign cats coming into the house (you’ve met Toby, yes?) and if we really want to lock the dog out we put the barricade in place as shown below. (We soon learnt that the little plastic lock on the door is not gonna stop him if he really wants in!)

I’m planning on using an Arduino board as the control unit, and think I need ~~two~~one RFID tag — one for Toby ~~and one for Murray~~ — at the minimum to handle the rules I’ve outlined above.

So the preliminary parts list is:

One Arduino controller board.
One light sensor for sensing daylight hours.
One RFID scanner.
Two RFID tags that can be attached to the animals' collar.
One solenoid or something else that can be used to stop the flap opening to the outside.
A red/green LED to indicate if the door is currently locked or not.
A three state switch to enable us to set the door to always open, always locked, or on automatic as required, although we expect it to be on automatic most of the time.

The concerns I have are finding the right RFID scanner and tags that’ll work in this environment. I’ve no experience with RFID but hear a bit about range issues. One tag will be on the collar of a big Labrador, the other on a medium sized cat, so there is a reasonable height difference. The proximity sensing cannot be flaky for this to work, especially for Toby who will get confused if the door only works some of the time and just not bother.

I have been considering an ID-12 or ID-2 scanner with a custom antenna, but people I’ve talked to think the range will be too small. The size difference between a domestic cat and a Labrador is fairly significant in this case.

Another option might be bluetooth. This would also have the advantage that it could act as a true proximity sensor, detecting when the animal comes into range, remains in range, and goes out of range, whereas RFID is generally triggered once each time the tag comes into range after not being in range. The disadvantage is batteries.

Any other ideas for proximity sensors?

The other thing is the mechanism to block the door. Ideally something that can shoot out out a little bolt to block the path of the door, or retract it to leave the door clear to open. Preferably not something that is spring loaded that needs an active voltage on it to either hold it open or hold it closed. Should only need to apply voltage to change state, not maintain state.

If a bolt is not available, I’ve seen a stepper motor with a bit of metal on the spindle used to do the same thing. To lock it simply rotates the bit of metal into place, to unlock is rotates it out the way.

UPDATE 2009/11/02: Some smart people over at stackexchange also had some good suggestions on a locking mechanism. Adam suggested using a linear actuator, and Zklapow had the novel idea of taking apart an old CD drive and using the workings that slides the tray in and out. And his suggestion reminded me that this isn’t the first time a CD drive has been used as part of an access control system either!

So, any and all feedback on the above would be welcome. Once I’ve figured out all the bits I need, I’m planning on again visiting the friendly folk at Melbourne Hackerspaces to get help on sourcing the parts and get up to speed on the fun world of Arudino programming (this time I’ll remember to bring my laptop.)

UPDATE 2010/01/17: Have finally ordered most of the parts I need for this, as well as the hermit crab tank humidity control, which I’ll probably build first (‘cause it’s simpler). I went with an ID-20 RFID scanner to start with, so we’ll see how that goes. Unfortunately, my copy of Practical Arduino which I’ll be using as a reference apparently wont arrive until mid-Feb so progress will be slow before then.

You’re Making it Worse!

2009-10-28T00:00:00+11:00

If you’ve ever watched a Pixar movie, you’ll know they often have humorous ‘out-takes’ during the end credits. The last couple of days one of the out-takes from Monsters, Inc. has been running through my mind. It’s the one with the two janitors, Smitty and Needleman, and Smitty flubs a line and tries to save the scene. It goes something like this:

Smitty:    Go get 'em Mr. Solomon.
Needleman: You idiot! It's 'Sullivan' not 'Solomon'.
Smitty:    What?
Needleman: You're messing up the scene!
Smitty:    Sorry!
Needleman: We're never gonna work in Hollywood again!
Smitty:    Let me do it over!
Needleman: Shut-up!
Smitty:    Keep rolling.
Needleman: YOU'RE MAKING IT WORSE!

Ever feld like Needleman? It’s like the slow motion horror of watching a train wreck about to occur and not being able to do anything about it. Some days you’d like to be able to reach down the modem line, grab someone by the scruff of the neck, give them a good shake and yell, “You’re making it worse!"

Sadly, there are probably laws against that sort of thing. A pity you can’t legislate against flagrant stupidity…

Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook! Oh My!

2009-10-27T00:00:00+11:00

Today I mentioned that I’d started posting my micro-blog messages to Identi.ca, which pushed to Twitter, which pushed to Facebook. A non-techie asked me what I was talking about, so here is the explanation I sent:

Identi.ca is a microblogging service like Twitter, but based on open source software. Normally I write my missives on twitter and it automatically sends to Facebook as well.

I’d had my Identi.ca account for a while, but not really done anything much on it, but the number of people that I am associated with on Identi.ca compared to Twitter, compared to Facebook has become sufficiently diverse that I really should pay it more attention — thus I’ve set the chain up so I post on Identi.ca and it winds through to the other two automatically. (Have the new viewers gone yet?)

Thus, I can be asinine on three different networks for the same effort I was previously expending for only two.

The search for a decent twitter+facebook client on Linux

2009-10-20T00:00:00+11:00

The pickings are pretty slim. I want something that can:

At least lay out messages in columns. Being able to have columns of tabs would be a bonus.
Be able to resize the columns. Tweetdeck is limited as to the number of columns you can have in practise by with width of your screen. Seesmic Desktop is almost there, but not quite. Gwibber has two tabs, but no indication of unread messages in the tab you can’t see (which gets cleared without you ever seeing it if you press ctrl-L).

[EDIT: Actually, since the 0.2.1 release, Seesmic Desktop has improved a heck of a lot. Apart from the minimise to tray thing (see below), it’s looking pretty slick.]
Have a range of visual and audible notifications for different events. If the interface has tabs, a visual cue on the tab (like an unread count and/or different colour) would be nice too.
Preferably not written in Adobe Air. Mainly because Linux is a second-class citizen when it comes to support by AA. Sound is flaky and inconsistent^*, and they can’t seem to handle minimising to the system tray too well either (come on Tweetdeck, Thwirl has it figured out!)

[UPDATE] ^*Actually, it looks like pulseaudio was the culprit there.
Oh yeah, can minimise to the system tray (and not go completely off-line and never check if you have new messages, which is completely useless, yes I’m looking at you Seesmic, you still haven’t implemented this for Linux even if you added it on Windows.)
Has the concept of read and unread messages, and the ability to clear your columns/tabs of read ones (or mark as all read and clear, thank-you Tweetdeck).
What would really be cool is if it could recognise when messages from two different sources are the same (say, as when someone has it setup that their twitter messages go to facebook, and you see them on both.)
Recognised all the extra bits and pieces on Facebook like comments and stuff, not just basic status messages. There are a couple of desktop clients that do it, but not many.

It’s one of those interesting projects I would love to do if I didn’t already have a zillion other pet projects lined up in front of it. I even made a mind-map of how I would structure such a beast, modelled on the idea of data sources and data sinks. If the sky was really the limit, I would have things like:

Support of Status.Net (née Laconica) while I’m at it. (Identi.ca being the most well known Status.Net site.)
Notifications for follow and unfollow.
Auto expand tiny URLs.
Be and to track RSS feeds from twitter, etc. I tend to find I prefer to follow people, not products and companies. The twitter feeds for products and companies I tend to chuck in my RSS reader instead. The only problem is the formatting of them sucks, and you get all the replies you’re not interested in as well.
Store all messages received, so they can be reviewed & searched locally.
Cache user icons so they don’t have to loaded over the wire all the time.
Possibly make client/server, using XMPP/Jabber or in some other way do something cool with that technology.
The ability to read your blog RSS feed, and recognise when a tweet is an auto-post from your blog to twitter, and be able to produce an RSS feed back that has these filtered out. You could then feed that back to your blog to show in a side-bar or even import your lifestreamy type stuff as blog entries.
And if I’m still bored, I might even make it so you can send tweets and replies from it too.

So that’s the brain dump, so far.

Mums are psychic

2009-09-26T00:00:00+10:00

I was having a serious discussion with my son the other day, finding out what had happened in a situation that had been reported to me by his older sister. At the end and after said son had left the room, my husband turned to me and asked, “What other special powers do you have?”

My son had come in protesting his innocence in a situation in which there were no witnesses bar himself. I persisted with a line of questioning that would put police interrogators and cross-examining lawyers to shame and my son succumbed and admitted his guilt. Hence the query from my husband. Had to think about that for a while and finally figured it out. However, I am not going to tell you how. If you are a mum, you’ll understand, if you’re not, I’m not going to give away a trade secret.

I soon discovered my ‘psychic’ ability extended to another area as well. I have become very aware of my ability to find the lost. Mums know what its like, when members of their family, children and spouses alike, come to you asking for help finding something they have lost. You usually ask first if they have looked for it — a real look, not a husband or child look.

I haven’t even done that recently. When they come to me of late, before I have even begun thinking about it, I have managed to give them the location of said lost item, even though I don’t use it, have no need to use it and haven’t handled it at any time in the recent past.

I finally figured out how that one worked as well, but again, trade secrets and all that.

So its making me wonder how much further this ‘psychic’ ability extends. What other amazing ‘psychic’ powers do mothers display? I would love to hear your stories.

Feed da Birds

2009-09-19T00:00:00+10:00

Feeding the birds at Grant’s Picnic Ground.

View Larger Map

Picture of the day: Copy, Paste

2009-09-18T00:00:00+10:00

Picture of the day: No dogs allowed!

2009-09-17T00:00:00+10:00

Fetch!

Do you have a cat named Murray?

2009-09-17T00:00:00+10:00

Growing up, I was a fan of the Footrot Flats comic strip written by Murray Ball. It detailed the toils and tribulations of “The Dog”, Wal, Cooch, and a menagerie of animals on a farm in New Zealand. One of the clan was a cat called “Horse.” Horse was this super-tough cat that hung around the farm and would basically beat up anything that got in his way.

Well, I’ll do you one better than Horse, I have, “Murray.”

Murray, who picked us out at the animal shelter and said, “You’re taking me home now.”

Murray, the most vocal cat I know, who has a meow that sounds like the devil being strangled. Seriously. I’ve seen adults be completely freaked out when Murray walks in the room and says hello.

Murray, who would go psycho at this big white cat that would come around at night when our cats where locked in and hang outside the window going, “Narr, Narr.”

Murray who always liked to sit on your chest all night and purr.

Murray who gave me the cat flu.

Murray, who had a very smug look on his face one night when we got home really late one dark night.

Murray, who when we let him back out again the next morning, proudly showed us all this white fur from one side of the house, right through the garden beds and into the car port. We never saw that white cat again.

Murray who wandered out the pet door one windy night, and disappeared. We thought he was gone for good, only to get a phone call ten months later to the day from someone in Endeavour Hills who had found him and had been feeding him.

Murray, the cranky, senile old bastard who’s been going blind and deaf for the last five years.

Murray, who I made a set of stairs for because he couldn’t jump up to the shelf in the laundry where his food and water and respite from the dog lay.

Murray who at age seventeen again wandered out the pet door about six months ago. Tonight I got a phone call from someone in Hallam, asking, “Do you have a cat named Murray?”

Murray who we had to chase around and around a caravan, and when I finally did get my hands on him he piddled all over me.

Welcome home you glorious bastard. I can’t wait to introduce you to the kittens…

Office Hardware Upgrade

2009-08-16T00:00:00+10:00

There was a local Computer Swapmeet in my area this week, so I decided to treat myself to an early birthday present and add a second monitor to my desktop. One Benq 22"W monitor and one Nvidia 9500GT graphics card later and I went from this:

To this:

Plus, the screen saver looks twice as cool:

Pity I’ve got to go to the office tomorrow…

Quick tip for the day: Problems installing or updating Adobe Air under Linux?

2009-08-13T00:00:00+10:00

If you are trying to install or upgrade Adobe Air under Linux and you get a (unhelpful) error message saying it couldn’t perform the operation, try it again after ensuring that Firefox is not running.

Picture of the day: Find x

2009-08-13T00:00:00+10:00

Ever wanted to do this on a maths test when you were at school?

Picture of the day: CSS is Awesome

2009-08-13T00:00:00+10:00

Originally from http://twitpic.com/ampek this is a very clever little joke for nerds.

I even found an Australian site where you can buy this on a coffee mug, or a T-shirt, but it’s a bit pricey, especially for XL sizes.

Quote for the day: Political Correctness

2009-08-07T00:00:00+10:00

Apparently Texas A&M University holds an annual contest for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term (I tried to find a reference to this on their web site but couldn’t, so keep grains of salt handy. Still damned funny though.)

For “Political Correctness” the winner was:

Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Picture of the day: Silence is Golden…

2009-08-05T00:00:00+10:00

Bazyl Chasing My Mouse Cursor

2009-07-31T00:00:00+10:00

One of our two kittens, Bazyl, has started exploring my desk while I work.

He was quite intrigued for about ten minutes with the mouse cursor on my screen.

(Insert obligatory lolcat dialogue here)

Garage door sensor

2009-07-26T00:00:00+10:00

Finally got around to replacing the garage door sensor. I use to have a little micro-switch along with the little lever made out of technical lego.

Click for larger view

It worked alright. The little lego arm would stick out under the door track, so when the door came down it would press on the arm, and the lever would trip the micro-switch.

Click for larger view

It ended up being a bit fiddly and I would occasionally have to move it around or re-tape it in place so the door would hit it properly. It was finally done in when my nephew bounced a basketball off it — and I didn’t have the heart to put it back together again.

So, quick trip to the local electronics shop to pick up a magnetic switch (also known as a reed switch). Figured out where I could put the magnet without it getting crunched when the door rolls up, and we’re back in business.

Click for larger view

So now we have our little light flashing again to tell us when we’ve left the garage door open.

Click for larger view

YouTube, Adobe Air or Flash has no audio on Linux? You might need to stop your pulse.

2009-06-14T00:00:00+10:00

Found after a recent update that I wasn’t getting audio anymore when viewing Flash content under linux (openSUSE 11.1 in this case). I’ve also been having a love/hate relationship with sound working with Adobe Air.

After a bit of a hunt around I found comment that it appears PulseAudio was the culprit. Updated the respawn setting in /etc/pulse/client.conf to the following:

autospawn = no

Then killed any running pulseaudio processes, restarted my browser and that seems to have done the trick.

Haven’t had to reboot yet, so we’ll see if that proves to be the final solution or a bit more tweaking will be called for…

Yoganox

2009-06-14T00:00:00+10:00

Brilliant frame from a fan made music video by Andrea Crain to the Jonathon Coulton song, “I Feel Fantastic”

(For the visually impared, the picture depicts a woman performing yoga, with a poster for the drug "Yoganox" with the warning, "If spiritual oneness with the universe lasts more than 4 hours, see your doctor.")

See the whole thing below:

Jonathon Coulton

2009-06-12T00:00:00+10:00

Gotta love Jonathon Coulton. Who else would write songs about a giant octopus, sci-fi teenage angst, Mandelbrot and zombies?