cold, wet & windy — yikes! the weather’s turned positively freeze-licious today. there’s some kind of wuthering heights howling wind thing happening outside my window. (& yes, that would obviously be a much stronger allusion had wuthering heights been set halfway up the side of a particularly ugly office building…)

less dead, more line — no, i dunno what that means either… but the good news (as far as i’m concerned, at least) is that we’re gonna make the deadline! woohoo!

well, really, what do you expect in twenty minutes over lunch?

now lemme see what my yahoo’s horoscope wants to tell me…

If redundant and looking for work or thinking about a job change then Jupiter’s ingress into Gemini is the start of a fine progressive phase. The next nine months is a superb gestation period to make lifetime decisions to give you all you wish for to find a satisfying and stimulating line of employment.

uh oh! ingress? nine month gestation period?? stimulating??? aaaarrggghhh!!!

’twas the day before deadline, & all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, because IF ANY OF YOU FUCKING MICE MOVE, I’LL EXECUTE EVERY MUTHERFUCKING LAST ONE OF YOU! (a christmas carol, by quentin tarantino.)

deep breaths, deep breaths…

morning coffee — mmmm…

canberra highlights — so was the highlight of the trip:

1. catching up with simon & jimbo & dave & fiona again?
2. finally finding “fear of music” & “more songs about buildings & food” on CD?
3. watching 4,223 episodes of buffy the vampire slayer?
4. attending the conference on monday? or
5. trying not to drool (too much) on dave’s new tangerine iBook?

hmmm. depends who’s asking, really… but no, seriously, they were ALL highlights…<grin>

apple insider — sure, these products may never ship, but i want them anyway… especially the G4-powered iMac with the 17″ display… mmmm…

late afternoon bonus linkage
absolutely free! no obligation! no salesbot will visit your home!

the challenges of integrating the unix & macOS environments — here’s an interesting (albeit moderately techy) paper describing some of the problems faced in the development of macOS X… via cafe au lait…

animation & digital arts at the university of southern california…

subverse 2000 — the queensland poetry festival is warming up for its fourth year. heap big poetic fun up the wazoo in brisvegas from 26-30 july uh huh uh huh oh yeah…

holy mac, batman!

as the apple turns — it’s a bit like sands through the hourglass of the windows busy cursor… we used to read this a couple of years ago, but i just rediscovered the joys of as the apple turns, the apple watching site that proudly disclaims: “This is not a news site, any more than ‘Hard Copy’ is a news show.”

the horror! the horoscope! — quoth yahoo:

You won’t want to sound mean but if someone who shares a hold of your purse-strings is spending without counting the cost or is careless about settling bills, you must take action to safeguard your savings. Be sure you don’t suffer as a result of someone else’s cash shortcomings.

which is all well & good except i’m traditionally the one who spends without counting the cost & (not or) is careless about settling bills… & then there’s the whole “safeguard the savings” schtick. savings? ’tis to laugh… anyway, why wouldn’t i want to sound mean? oh, right, they mean mean mean, they don’t mean mean mean…<grin>

railway square, dawn — a gorgeous morning in sydney… the chimneys at the brewery are in full sun now… so, how cold was it in canberra over the weekend? (a little.) our favorite thing was the ice on the cars in the mornings. <grin> & lots of excellent fog on the tuggeranong parkway yesterday…

thanks for putting us up, putting up with us, & driving us around all weekend guys… (& it’s lucky you did, too, otherwise i would’ve been forced to release the crabulator! what? what d’ya mean, it’s only a picture? damn…)

unfortunately, my office doesn’t appear to have burnt to the ground while i was away, so it looks like there’s no ethical way to avoid the rest of the week… sigh.

woohoo! mid- (mid? who am i kidding?) nigh-to-the-end-of-the-project hysteria has kicked in & i’m floatin’… go adrenalin, go! <grin>

C# — via C|Net News…

project wacom — magicdog.com is today very proud to be able to announce the launch of project wacom, an initiative (no, not The Initiative) designed to bring a wacom graphire graphics table to the desk of a magicdog near me. donations may be sent to:

project wacom
c/- ted nielsen
p.o. box 473
dulwich hill nsw 2203

alternatively, you can send pledges via email to ted@magicdog.com. (if it was me, i’d be sending pledges… much cheaper than actually sending money.)

now, sit back & get ready to follow project wacom’s running totals (updated at least fortnightly)!

canberrying about — where better to spend a winter weekend than the nation’s capital? (& if you have an answer, why didn’t you let me know before?) in any case, we’re off to canberra tomorrow morning with jimbo & ian, lured by the promise of beer (& the conference i’m attending on monday)…

bookishness — & for anyone who was just about to rush to amazon to buy me David M. Beazley’s Python: Essential Reference you’ll no doubt be pleased to know that you can save yourselves the trip… au revoir, my little oven ready pastry treats!

squirelma — gosh. thanks chris. no, really. <grin>

busy day — gotta busy day coming up (& my schedule hasn’t been helped by the thirty minute delay caused by the bus having some kind of pneumatic failure & offloading everybody in enmore…) but before i get started, please allow me to introduce…

afternoon update

i signed up for an account on yahoo the other day (i mean, you can never have too many email addresses, right?) & that means i’m now in a position to bring you…

horoscope vs horoscope! let’s get ready to rrrrrrrruummmmble!!! in this corner, wearing a mauve & gray table & weighing in at an impressive fifty words… today’s My Yahoo horoscope for capricorn!

Because there’s so much to do and think about if you haven’t planned for all eventualities, you could feel overwhelmed by it all. However if you were half-expecting a melee of mix-ups and misunderstandings that do occur then you’ll sail through them all unlike those who failed to think ahead.

yeah! just watch me sail! say, uh, that’s not an iceberg by any chance, is it?

& in this corner, wearing a very stylish navy blue pop-up window & weighing in at a trim thirty-three words… yesterday’s AnyDay.Com horoscope for capricorn!

You go a little bit off course, but that only reveals scenery that you might otherwise have missed. Summer’s here, and you’re ready for a change. Accept the obvious, and consider the likely.

uh oh… the sailing metaphor continues… but i’m off course! oops! & i think my hemisphere’s showing! i guess i’d better get back to considering the likely…

blue skies over sydney — a day of fog, a day of rain, but nary a cloud this morning. one of those stunning winter days that make you wanna jump on your mountain bike & go riding all day (or until the end of the block, where you may well stop, spend twenty minutes trying to get your breath back, & then start a nice, slow walk back home…)

musical link

tmbg.org — wrong ideas that appeal to you…

python links

python — he is our hero.

python — get rid of…

python — step on python!

python — we love you python.

i promise not to kill you.

python looks way cool… i’ve been reading the tutorial on the bus the last couple of days… i also found gadfly, which looks kinda interesting…

post-lunch linkage

an introduction to unix (at ohio state university) — via freebsd.org…

metascene — lotsa interesting links, including a pointer to the new sonic youth site…

no more (bzzzz!) coffee for (bzzzz!) you, mister — so i’m sittin’ there at lunchtime, slumped over my fourth large coffee for the day, tryin’ to stop my eyes from crossing long enough to make the trip back to my office (where the omnipresent terror of looming deadlines is quite sufficient to keep me focussed, thanks), & i’m tryin’ to figure out if i do like my job after all, & today i’m thinking i kinda don’t. i mean, i like bits of it, but the bits i like are kinda peripheral to a lot of the other things that i don’t like so much but which i hafta do every day. [hey, can anybody else hear something making some kind of whining noise in here?]

so i think i may be in the very early stages of starting to think about looking for a new job. (yeesh. how tentative do i wanna be? uh, & the obvious thing to say now is, like, uh, i’m not sure, right?) so yeah, maybe i want a new job but maybe not for another twelve months or so… (cause i got a couple of long-term projects that i wanna finish, & then there’s My Stupid Course to consider… plus, getting a lycra bodysuit & those mechanical webslinging devices organised is gonna take some time, right?) uh oh, my spidey sense is tingling! another tedious afternoon of masked vigilantism… (i can’t wait until i’m a bone fide costumed superhero… how much more of this radioactive spider venom am i gonna hafta drink!?!)

rain last night — & this morning in dulwich hill, another late sunrise, everything gorgeous in soft, deep grays & browns… clearing by the time we reached railway square, the clouds lifting & just a hint of blue sky…

our informative brochure — above the rear door of most of the sydney buses i’ve travelled in over the last few months is a great big sticker that includes: a no smoking logo, a no drinking logo, & a no food logo, followed by the messages “video surveillance may be in use” & “plain clothes police officers patrol this bus”. underneath all that it cheerfully suggests, “for more information, ask for a free copy of our ‘welcome aboard’ brochure.” welcome aboard? maybe someone else had already trademarked “sit down & shut up”?

poetry reading, 25 june — Pam Brown, poetry editor for overland magazine, will be reading from her forthcoming collections Drifting Topoi and Text thing on sunday 25 june at 2pm at the Brett Whiteley Studio, 2 Raper Street, Surry Hills, hosted by the Poets’ Union. [this will be great! but i’m gonna be in cannnbbbrrraaa… bwoar!]

poetry reading, 16 july — the launch of five islands press new poets series 7 is happening upstairs at the Balmain Town Hall at 2pm. this year’s new poets are Sarah Attfield, Jen Crawford, Brett Dionysius, Brendan Ryan, Lucy Williams & Annemaree Adams. this will also be great! (hmmm. although i guess that makes me an old poet now… or maybe i can pass myself off as second-hand — low mileage, one owner, only wrote on sundays…) <grin>

fogbound — excellent, thick fog in sydney this morning. i had a couple of false starts (note to self: don’t forget your bus pass. note to self: no, really, don’t forget your bus pass.) but eventually made it onto a 428 just before seven. at least, i think it was a 428. it loomed out of the fog at me & i got on board in any case.

i’m still remarkably enthusiastic about fog. this morning, for instance, i saw a panda unloading a truck. admittedly, on closer inspection, it turned out to be a panda disguised as a man wearing a white t-shirt & a black parka with a heap of plastic pallet-wrap draped over his left shoulder, but still…

staggering down memory lane, part one — visiting zeldman.com the other day i couldn’t help but notice his splash page announcing that zeldman.com was five years old. which kinda got me wondering how long i’ve been mucking around with html… well, it turns out that i started playing with html in early 1996, working on some pages for the english department at james cook university…

as far as i can tell from the bits & pieces that have survived on my current hard drive, the site didn’t make it to the jcu server until 12 july 1996, so i figure that’ll have to do as an anniversary… (i didn’t realise until a few days ago that i needed an anniversary, but there you go…) although, just to complicate matters, it seems to have taken me until 4 march 1997 before i managed to post any pages i could call my own… i might have to make up a table or something for the webjunk page… i’ve been meaning to build an archive for a while now… as far as i can tell, magicdog.com has been on the air since about this time last year…

staggering down memory lane, part two — the things you find on your hard disk… all the way from 1993… late news from academia…

design tricks with the w3c dom — via a list apart…

i’ve been using internet explorer a little bit lately, &, much as i hate to admit it, it’s just a lot nicer than navigator 4.x… sigh… i’m kinda tempted to switch to it full time… i’m not sure why i haven’t… apart from the “but i’ve always used netscape, it’s part of who i am” argument… in actual fact i used ie3 for a few months somewhere back there in the late ’90s before switching back… can i hold out until mozilla’s finished?

12.10pm, the day after the exam — i spent a bit more time yesterday afternoon worrying about the exam, but i figure i can’t do anything about it now… mind you, i was so wound up about it that i did a simple spreadsheet in excel that calculated possible returns based on my marks so far… now, if i maintained my average results from my assignments over the first two exam questions, then even if i scored no marks for the third question (worst case scenario) then… carry the two… uh… where do i switch on autocalculate again? oh right… uh… i dunno. i think i did enough to get through. but who really knows…

so i figured that i probably should update my page on bigpond… i mean, 27 september 1998? well, i’ve been busy, you know? anyway, there’s a page with some music links (& that’s about it) at the moment… will it feature the adventures of magicdogbot & friends in the near future? the smart money’s not holding its breath, but it might happen…

7.03am, exam day — up at 6.00, on the bus at 6.30, sitting at my desk a couple of minutes ago… well, i didn’t wanna be late… you know, until the semester started there were large slabs of me (hmmm. i guess there are still large slabs of me, who am i trying to kid? uh, what was i talking about? oh yeah…) large slabs of me that were looking forward to studying again… sigh. have i actually learned anything this semester? i guess i’ll find out in a couple of hours, right? <grin>

domainnamebuyersguide.com — via webmonkey…

oh well, time for one last glazed look over my lecture notes i guess…

8.34am, exam day — must… stay… awake… try… to focus… zzzz…

8.35am, exam day — you think this is dull from where you’re sitting? i’m well & truly into the good old pre-exam jitters now… hurrah. i’m not sure why i’m so jittery. apart from the whole “not feeling all that well prepared” thing of course… i mean, it’s an open book exam, it’s not exactly rocket science, the group i was in did okay on both the assignments, & i only need to scrape together 40% of the available exam marks to pass the course… gosh! i’d better get really anxious! sigh…

8.44am, exam day — hmmm. where was that room again? uh… that building’s on this campus, right? [sound of web browser being frantically launched]

8.46am, exam day — why yes, yes it is. downstairs & to the left. lucky they hadn’t shifted it since i last checked on thursday… it looks like a nice day outside. it was still dark when i caught the bus this morning, & the sun was just about up by the time i reached railway square… hmmm. there’s a great big crane set up in the brewery across the road… i wonder what they’re planning to lift? okay, well, i guess i should go & see which one of the five possible rooms i’m in…

12.51pm, exam day — ummm… well, who knows? three questions worth thirty-five, thirty-five & thirty marks respectively… i tried to allocate the time accordingly, but spent longer than i should have on the first question. the second question went pretty much to plan, but that still left me a little short for question three… not that it mattered much, because i was really struggling with it. apart from the time issue i was quite happy with my attempts at the first two questions, so hopefully i did well enough on those to carry me over the line… hmmm. did someone say beer?

powerful metafors & analogees — i spent yesterday at a seminar on project management that was quite interesting & potentially useful for my 9 to 5… (well, okay, 8 to 7, but who’s counting?) one of the many things i learnt was the power of analogy in the work place! allow me to demonstrate…

on any given day we can probably break down our tasks into three categories: major, minor, & trivial or mundane. sometimes an analogy can help us visualise how we can best apply ourselves. now, major tasks are obviously quite like ferrets, so the first thing we need to do is to arrange our ferrets neatly on the tundra (our desks). then we should assemble the coffee tables (minor tasks) into orderly rows & place them on the tilt-a-whirl (pending tray). we can largely ignore the pixies (trivial or mundane tasks), because they’ll generally take care of themselves. the final thing to remember is that the motorcycle (telephone) & banjo (email) will be competing for our attention throughout the game (work day).

so, assuming the tundra is now covered in ferrets, & the tilt-a-whirl hasn’t caught on fire, we just need to make sure that the pixies aren’t roaring around playing banjo on the motorcycle. because once we allow the cartoon villians (procrastination, depression & lack of focus) to beat the justice league of america (spiderman) it’s clear that only a stampede of elephants (elephants) will convince your supervisor that the game’s over & we can all go home.

calling officer bar brady — how disturbing is eudora 4.3 when it’s running in sponsored mode? well, for the last few minutes it’s been trying to convince me to buy a copy of atlas shrugged…

political correspondence — dave in cannnnbbbrrraaa sends the following message:

Can I just say how impressed I am with the gloriously hip, millenial audacity* of the amazon.com wishlist? Goddam, but what a brave new world that has such whatsits
in’t…

* or should that be ‘mendacity’? Whatever.

right on, dave! & now, at the risk of missing your point entirely, let me just say “buy buy buy!” call me crazy, but i’m already looking out for a parcel in the post! think how happy i’ll be! (unless, of course, said parcel contains an ayn rand book, in which case there’ll be such trouble…)

sundry (oops, i meant thursdry) linkage

design your own shoes — via megnut…

the comic reader: don’t miss scott mccloud’s “i can’t stop thinking” columns — via camworld via peterme…

captain cursor discusses mccloud’s new book, reinventing comics — also via camworld…

rebel weezer alliance — via saturn.org…

the golden age of steam — excellent winter weather all over the place this morning making it very easy to keep yourself amused by blowing steam & making robot noises on the way to the bus stop (if you’re so inclined). sydney’s supposed to have showers & a maximum of 16 today… c’mon, bring it on!

swan swan h — ellen & linda & andrew & i met up at the scg on sunday afternoon to watch the swans play essendon. it was cold, it was windy, it rained, & the swans lost, but we still had a good time listening to the crowd, sections of which were much more entertaining than their rugby league counterparts had been on wednesday night. my favourite crowdism:

getitgetitgetitlovelyOHYOUDICKHEAD!!!

fickle, these afl supporters i tells ya, fickle…

sympathy for the plug-in — flash, that is… via a list apart…

the return of yesterday’s horoscope — it’s been a while, but hey, it’s friday, & i spent twenty minutes on the way to work this morning with one of the staff members in the bookshop, trying to figure out what’d happened to a book i’d ordered… which, now that i think about it, really doesn’t have anything to do with anything (dubious/spurious causality)… ahem.

Bring in outside help to get you through a difficult time. Confusing signals throw off
anyone who isn’t a specialist. Expect complaints from upper management — you know
how to handle them.

gosh! platitude allusion witchdoctor! empowered aphorism general spectacular! uh…

poetry early warning system — an early (very) announcement of an upcoming book launch… rebecca edwards (hi bec!) will be launching her second collection of poems, Scar Country, at gleebooks at 6.00pm on 2 august.

& now… deeply thrilling ant-related links!

buzzin’ clickin’ antbots — why they didn’t just name them mini-killdozers & be done with it i’ll never know…

antboy’s ant page — no, really.

ant knowledge is important — a bold claim… more antsy goodness…

ant farm security check — it’s a metaphor, innit?

& now… a shocking but true non-ant-related link!

don’t worry about the government — talkingheads.net (”i’m mad… & that’s a fact / i found out… animals don’t help / animals think… they’re pretty smart / shit on the ground. see in the dark.”)

a. antelope
b. watermelon
c. personal digital assistant
d. orchestra