sleepy weekend — had a weird, half-sick half-sleepy weekend. after saturday morning’s trip along the bikepath (during which we noted with some interest the return of winter) andrew & i are once again seriously contemplating buying full fingered gloves…

personal local elegies — commended by one of the judges in the recent arts queensland award for unpublished poetry 2000!

launching wednesday — rebecca edwards (hi bec!), who won last year’s arts queensland award, will be launching her second collection of poems, Scar Country, at gleebooks this wednesday (2 august), 6.00pm for 6.30…

launching sunday — the latest releases from Vagabond Press’s Rare Object Series (new poetry by Peter Boyle, Pam Brown and MTC Cronin) are being launched on sunday (6 august) at 4.00pm at the rose hotel, 54 cleveland street, surrey hills (or thereabouts). readings, drinks and guaranteed conviviality are promised.

only 12.5 minutes left — hey, so i’m reading applesurf last night when all of i sudden i see this sidebar heading called quid pro quos which is saying thanks for the link to some site called dogPORTAL2000 & i’m sitting there going, wow, that sounds really familiar, where do i know that name from…? i mean, hello? so yes, dogPORTAL2000, as mentioned fleetingly (& for all i know by some kind of script or something) on applesurf… & here’s a picture (warning: it’s kinda big…)

my cartoon reactions — had a bit of a sleep-in this morning & caught the 8.09 bus instead of the 6.55 or 7.09… the more leisurely start to the day meant i had much less chance of getting a seat than on the earlier buses, & i was surprised to see how much busier the city is between 8.00 & 8.30 than 7.00 to 7.30… not sure why that’s surprising, but there you are…

so anyway, i had to stand up all the way, which wasn’t too bad… i got to hang on to one of the poles near the rear doors & kind of swung around a fair bit when the bus went round corners… & i was still a bit sleepy, so whenever the bus stopped i kind of rested my eyes for a bit & leant my head against the pole for some quiet time… mmm, quiet time… the only drawback was that whenever the bus started again, i tended to bump my head a little, which caused me to say, quietly, “ow,” a situation that seemed to amuse the two women who were sitting in the closest seats…

my comedy job — not sure why work has been sucking so much recently, but i’ve been thinking that a good thing to do might be to hire some kind of giant rat costume & then lock myself in my office with the paper shredder & shred all my files & then make a great big nest kinda thing under my desk & then crawl into that & go to sleep, waking only to squeak viciously at anyone who tried to coax me out… of course, it could be that as a plan this needs a little more thought. where, for instance, would i find a giant rat costume?

news flash — extensive testing by magicdog.com’s fearless team of intrepid stunt riders has revealed the dirt on the kuranda range tastes different to the dirt near tineroo dam which has an altogether different taste to the dirt in townsville!

el faceplanto
intrepid stunt rider

train in vain — big training day today, a ms-excel course for most of it & then the joys of database design tonight… huzzah!

ooh, shiny! bought ourselves a vcr yesterday… i was gonna try to watch the lost world last night (just on the off chance it had suddenly decided to make any sense at all) but i couldn’t bring myself to do it & finished up watching the last three episodes of walking with dinosaurs instead…

dunno if these will help, si…

• pocket linux
• linux on a floppy (loaf)
• tomsrtbt

kitties! — lotsa stuff about kitties (subtext: buy our catfood!) & informative (buy) articles (our) too (catfood!)… my favourite moment thus far (buy-our-catfood!) happened while i was browsing the emotional section of the cat care library… under the heading (buy our catfood!) “depression”, is an article entitled “Can Cats Become Depressed?” which is followed immediately by “How to Help a Depressed Cat.” guess i don’t hafta read that there first article after all… (hey, with the time i’ve saved, why don’t i rush to the store & buy some of their catfood?)

still too much to do — but given that i managed to get more done yesterday than i would’ve thought likely, let alone possible, i guess things are looking up. & in a good way, not in the usual lying on the floor of the office gasping for breath & blinking back tears way… (hmmm. who wants to play Spot the Over-Dramatisation? i’m thinking about writing a film script based on my exciting working life. [aside to andrew: no, i’m not. no, really, i’m not.] i’m hoping i’ll be played by lisa mcclune. or val kilmer. obviously i’m thinking in terms of one of those No Recognisable Connection to Reality hollywood kinda films…) <grin>

lou reed is playing the state theatre on 12 october… tickets go on sale on 3 august…

new headphones all round — bought ourselves some new headphones yesterday afternoon & then i spent quite a bit of last night listening to my new tmbg CD… the CD’s great, & the headphones are surprisingly good. much better than any of our old headphones, all of which had succumbed to the whole intermittent music/loud crackling noises syndrome… the new ‘phones generate a surprising amount of bass, too… (which is to say, they generate some bass… which is also a nice change…)

closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds — via andrew…

dom design tricks, part 2 — via a list apart…

cycling with andrew on saturday morning. picked up new CD (ordered on-line) from post office box. paid rent. watched some videos. went to sleep. woke up. did chores. andrew visited. andrew left. read part of textbook for My Stupid Course. listened to new CD. andrew brought some food over. played board game with linda & andrew. went to bed. woke up. came to work. the weekend. woo.

& now work. where i have too much to do. & where metal fabrication proceeds apace, scant feet from my desk. gosh. it really is a perfect life.

you got the hot wax residue / you never lose in your razorblade shoes / stealing pesos outta my brain / hazard signs down the alamos lanes…

diamond dogs — went back to bowienet a little while ago to see if the sitemap might be cajoled into making an appearance today… nope. bad dog, no biscuit. now i’m thinking bowienet is an on-line analogue of bowie’s career, with my first impressions of the site being kind of like the interesting albums he made (say, “ziggy” through to “scary monsters”) & then the wait for the sitemap being like pretty much every album since “let’s dance”…

noisy CD-ROM drive — my DELL’s CD-ROM drive is the noisiest mo-fo drive in the entire world. drop an audio CD into it & it spins up to 40x speed or whatever it is with a huge whooshing noise… the weird thing is, after the CD’s been playing for half an hour or so, the whooshing noise stops, as if the drive has suddenly figured out it’s just playing audio & doesn’t need to be making itself so dizzy… the only solution i’ve been able to come up with so far involves hitting the computer with my office chair, so i’m kinda holding off on that for the moment in the hope that i can figure out something else…

a lunchtime question — who or what spent the best part of the last two & a half hours going “WWWAAAAAAAAAAAA-RRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZ-RRRRRRRRRWWWWWAAAAAAA CLANG HAMMER HAMMER CLANG RRRRRR-WWWWWWAAAAAAAAARRRRRR-ZZZZZZZZZZZZ-WWWWAAAAAAA?”

if you said, “the guy with the extensive array of power tools & hammers who’s working on the other side of the flimsy interior wall that separates ted’s office from the plant room on level seven of the luxuriously appointed UTS tower” then give yourself five points & take the rest of the afternoon off. go on, you deserve it.

attempting to think happy thoughts — heh. at least i can’t hear my stupid CD-ROM drive doing the 40x WHOOOOOSH thing while the guy next door has his metal saw cranked up…

woah! new from apple! — dual processor G4 (want one), the G4 cube (want one), updated iMacs (want one of each), plus a new mouse & keyboard (want want want!)…

electric sheep - via andrew…

CDz ahoy — ground control to major tom… remembered to bring some CDz in this morning, now i’m floating (uh, that is, working) in a most peculiar way… uh oh! planet earth is blue, & there’s nothing i can do!

ummm — have a look at the new “snow” coloured (why they didn’t just call it risotto coloured is beyond me) iMac on this page… is it just me or does the “snow” coloured iMac look maybe not exactly like sex but certainly almost exactly like something you might find lying about the place just after sex?

duh — downloaded & installed winamp, & then grabbed a way-funky skin for it, but like, uh, i dunno how it works & i ain’t got no mp3s or CDs to play… hyuck…

My Stupid Course (reprise) — hurrah! nights of trying to stay awake while someone points vaguely towards an overhead projector & mumbles something about whatever it was maybe being somewhere in the textbook maybe in chapter three no in chapter four oh wait on that’s not it either well it’s there somewhere are back! now repeat after me kids: it’s fun to learn!

so where were the spiders? — heh. i know it’s kind of like superannuation for aging popstars, but i just couldn’t stop myself from paying the small fee & joining bowienet… the site’s very pretty, but it’s flashed up the wazoo & some of the pages take forever to arrive… i’m still waiting for the sitemap to appear… & where’s all the downloadable bloody music i was promised then, eh davey? sigh. oh well, at least i’ve got a bit of a project for lunchtime now… who knows, maybe the sitemap will have arrived by then? scary monsters / supercreeps / keep me running / running scared…

fuelfonts type foundry — via keri…

lunchtime update — would you believe the bowienet sitemap still hasn’t deigned to make an appearance? i never found good things / i never found bad things / i never found anything flashed up the wazoo / woah woah…

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

training today — i’m off to a training course on powerplay today… powerplay is kind of business-nerdy, but also (strangely) way-cool. hmmm. uh… hey! look over there!

dogPORTAL2000 — hey, what this site needs is a page-o-links…

webzine2000

headachey — low level ouchiness abounds, yay… lunchtime equals coffee & paracetamol, yum yum. been trying to put together a report all morning, but haven’t been able to track down half of the data i need. grrr.

return of My Stupid Course — as it turns out, my subject this semester will be database design. hurrah. i like databases. dog knows (given my experiences with them over the past few years) i probably shouldn’t, but i can’t seem to help myself… mmmm, databases… i especially like the crunchy ones, although sometimes a couple of soft-centred databases can really hit the spot… uh oh. did i take the paracetamol or the other tablets?

maybe tomorrow — dogPORTAL2000… warning: it’s not even as exciting as it sounds.

great moments in cross-marketing — flicking through tv channels this morning & i discover to my delight? chagrin? bemusement? horror? (cross out any that don’t seem to fit) video hits has chosen to play will smith’s “men in black”… & i’m thinking, now there’s a coincidence, given that channel 10 have been advertising men in black as the sunday night movie all week & here’s their sunday morning video show playing the song from the film… but then, even as my finger was looming over the “no more will smith please” button, something truly special happened…

great moments in caption writing — scrolling across the bottom of the screen (just as big willie was gettin’ partic’ly jiggy wit it… oh, hang on, that’s a different song) came the immortal words: “si-fi fans get the popcorn…” si-fi fans? tidy work there channel 10.

the bong in this reggae song — the breeders‘ last splash as greatest album ever? i’m not sure any band anywhere any time has even been playing the same fucking sport, you know? i mean, let’s see… ya got your “cannonball” (ah-oooga, ah-oooga), ya got your “saints” (i like all the different people / i like sticky everywhere), ya got your “no aloha” (no bye, no aloha / gone with a rock promoter), ya got your “i just wanna get along” (we were rich once / before your head exploded)… ya got kim & kelley deal doing the guitar/vocals thing, josephine wiggs beating up on the bass, & jim mcpherson hammering a drumkit to within inches of its life… everyone in the world should be made to buy this album & play it whenever i’m around. it’s not selfish, it just makes sense. you know it does. now shut up & get to a record store. i’m waiting. but i won’t wait for long. well, okay, i will. but i won’t be happy about it.

web in slo-mo — yawn. the net’s deathly slow today… i’ve been trying to track down some information on installing a second IDE HDD under windows98-SE… andrew had a spare 8Gb drive lying about, & we’ve added it to speedpig, but it doesn’t wanna play… we’ve reformatted it a couple of times, & everything seems fine, but as soon as we restart the PC, we get these “the drive is not properly formatted” messages & the drive becomes inaccessible again… sigh. we don’t think the drive itself is faulty, & i figure the answer must be somewhere on the web, but all the other websites seem to have been shifted to a data haven on pluto…

no sleep ’til strathfield — andrew & i went riding again this morning & made it to the strathfield golf course before deciding it was time to turn for home. the tide was in today, which made the river much more pleasant… heaps of water birds about the place — ducks, cormorants & at least one heron — which just goes to show that birds really aren’t that fussy… also saw some galahs & a handful of white cockatoos along the sides of the bike track. (hmmm. a handful of white cockatoos? i’m pretty sure the handful is not the internationally recognised unit of cockatoo measurement. i think that’s actually the decibel. or possibly the megabel. as demonstrated by: “how many cockatoos is that?” “what? i can’t hear you for these bloody cockatoos!”)

we realised this morning the cycle path’s quite amusing in it’s own way… in marrickville, where we join it, it’s made of asphalt, & in a reasonable state of repair. but, as you get closer to homebush, the path changes, first to new asphalt, & then to pebble-crete, & then to new pebble-crete in landscaped surrounds… we figure by the time the bike path reaches homebush it’ll either be paved in gold or made from some kind of rich, red carpet, & there’ll be people standing by the side of the path offering drinks, & complimentary bike washes… or (& this is more likely) turning us away, because our kind of riff-raff really isn’t wanted in the vicinity of the olympic venues… <grin>

php tutorial — at builder.com

olipop — i licked a robot first, naturally! (& william shatner about third, i think…) via evhead…

extra bitmap + ROTORtype — via signal vs noise…

too much with myself — so why does ROTORtype look so cool this morning with the whole half in capital letters thing? magicDOG, anyone? hmmm… the great thing about waiting for other people to come up with ideas is that their ideas are usually so much better than any i’d come up with by myself… this works in almost any situation: writing poems, doing web design, ordering in restaurants, wondering when to cross the street…

book launch & reading — the launch of five islands press new poets series 7 (this year featuring Sarah Attfield, Jen Crawford, Brett Dionysius, Brendan Ryan, Lucy Williams & Annemaree Adams) is happening upstairs at the Balmain Town Hall this sunday (16 july) at 2pm.

& now for something elizabethan

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet

one of them there sites (i can’t remember right now exactly which one) links to an archive of shakespeare’s complete works… about 5.09Mb of ascii text, forsooth! gosh. now that’s a whole big mess of eternal verities for the nonce…

travelling linda news — linda broke radio silence this afternoon to say, “muffler artichoke fandango whatzit, over,” which i think roughly translates as meaning she’s had enough of the ultra-cold canberra weather for the moment & is on her way back to sydney with a bag full of buffy tapes…

& now i’m off to the shops! (perchance to buy something warm to wear while i’m stooging around at central station, waiting for linda’s train to arrive…) au revoir, thursday! it’s been real…