professional hat day — i’m the webmaster (& convener of the web advisory group) for the australasian research management society… magicdog.com is temporarily hosting the site while the society gets a domain name & server sorted out.

some kind words from our studio audience…

Dear Doctor Robot
Your robots are good robots. I like Spikeybot and that lame weird-looking thing you did for me and Fiona.
Dave

thanks dave! anytime you need more lame weird-looking things you know who to call… <grin>

are we there yet? an interview with star trek/voyager’s robert beltran (chakotay) — via trek galaxy: star trek news…

yeesh — another busy day… website, database, reporting, website, phone calls, database, email, blah blah… getting lots done though, which is good… the last few days i’ve actually been able to see where i’ve been, even if it’s not immediately obvious where i’m going…

what we talk about when we talk about robots — here’s some pages i threw together last night that gather together some of my more successful experiments with POV-Ray…

still not convinced you should check out the robots? well, i’ve got one word for you: mechasaurus

three kings — okay, so maybe we were the only two people in the country who didn’t see it at the cinema, but we watched three kings on friday night & were very impressed by it… lots of darkly funny careering about in the desert for the cloonster! three kings certainly beat the royal flush that was face/off, which i watched on tv last night… face/off started in a blaze of inexplicability & then somehow managed to become more & more dubious as it went along… an elaborately, breathtakingly stupid movie… mind you, i watched it to the end… i can’t work out if i needed to see if it could stay sublimely bad throughout or if i’m just basically masochistic… <grin>

three robots — some progress on the toy robot front on the weekend…

what we talk about when we talk about robots — finally decided to do something about rounding up all the other pesky robots i’ve been working on as well… hopefully there’ll be some more news tomorrow (including a bit of information about the origins of those three little robots)…

daylight saving — daylight saving started yesterday (early, on account of some obscure sportographic festival that’s on next month… apparently they need more daylight so they can take more alluring photos of the participants & sell more merchandise or something…)

still, getting up in the dark is kinda nice, & i was looking forward to watching sunrise from the bus this morning… of course, it was overcast, so everything just became gradually brighter without the whole “bing! sun’s up!” type thing happening… still cloudy, although the sun’s momentarily broken through & is currently illuminating the chimneys on the brewery, almost as if to say, “woohoo, beer!”

ficto-critical toyota

police now targetting regicide &
fucked up by the ghost of anthropology
you wonder how a traffic jam on king street
stacks up against your wannabe newtown futurism,
that stammering fluorescent light suggesting
the same bus as took you to work is taking you home
& the niceties of technique line up
beside your meagre reading as it starts to rain,
wondering how much of this
will happen beneath your feeble gaze
& how much you can fill in later,
imagining the abyss where the poem feels
like an essay or the minister for education
making up numbers as what passes for debate
on what passes for policy takes place
in what passes for newspapers -
if practice isn’t over,
can that really be our final score?

yoink! — busy day yesterday, followed by… ohmigosh! another busy day today! hurrah! eep. sheesh. wukka wukka. boing. vwip vwip vwip.

awesome scooby doo. or so they claim.

runnin’ around, robbin’ banks, all whacked off of scooby snacks…

his wings were like a shield of steel…

cool, overcast — kinda gray day in sydney today… i’m off to see a demonstration of some of apple’s new hardware this morning… mmmm… don’t bother wrapping it, i’ll eat it here thanks…

linuxartist.org

later the very same day… woah! not a gray day… a graphite day! Q. how cool is the new apple stuff? A. pretty damn cool. everyone send lots & lots of money so i can surround myself with new macstuff please…

journal of electonic publishing

introductory column on javascript — this might turn out to be an interesting series… via zeldman.com…

kinda sleepy this morning on account of staying up late reading… & not reading anything good, either… anne rice’s queen of the damned in fact… sheesh… colour me queen of the damned sleepy today… nothing bites worse than a bad vampire novel…

qotd is certainly nowhere near as good (whoop! whoop! whoop!) as lizard invaders from beyond the stars arrive in the middle of world war two & hilarity ensues or whatever the first of the four volume earthshattering alternate history sci-fi fantasy holy-talking-lizards-from-space-batman blockbuster that i’m reading on the bus at the moment is called…

you see, there are these space-faring lizards, right, & they’ve got these big plans to colonise earth, but the last time their deep space probes sent back happy snaps from earth all the earth people were riding around on horseback with swords and lances & boy oh boy they didn’t count on the speed of technological development here on earth & by the time the invasion fleet arrives it’s all spitfires & messerschmidts opening up big cans of whup-ass (grosse Dosen des Whuppen-Assen) & aren’t those pesky space lizards in for a nasty shock that lasts four volumes…

attack of the flustered space lizards is all well & good, but the best sci-fi i’ve read for years is still peter hamilton’s psychic zombies from beyond time & space series… sure, there’s about a trillion-bazillion pages of it, & you need a little trolley to carry it around with you, but you know, zombies… from beyond time & space…

do the vandal — extremely sensible apres-lunch music to listen to at work… 50 faves from beyond the grave, a nancy vandal compilation of rarities & b-sides… try as i might, i just couldn’t resist an album featuring such great songs (well, such great song titles) as:

• 1-2-3 baby yeah
• space girl with bionic breasts
• hungry hungry hippo is a metaphor for our love
• 2016 - a bass odyssey
• satan is tops (death metal song)
• when i squeeze my nose i sound like axl rose
• the guitar is not a toy

& in the not too distant future my life will, i hope, be made even more complete by the arrival of Bikini High Pool Party Massacre 3… Who Invited the Undead?, which i may or may not have just ordered from shock records, along with mule variations & kitten licks…

why the uncertainty? well, the email i was promised (to confirm my order) hasn’t arrived as yet… hmmm… two hours from Melbourne to Sydney via email? uh oh… i’m not gonna send them a cheque if they ain’t gonna send me an email…

hey! postcartography — the collaborative writing project i did with ken bolton is now available on the trans|forming cultures website… it’s like, officially finished!

media.org — this is very cool… my absolute most favourite things are the tiny dogs…

ouchy fingers — cold enough at the bus stop this morning to make my fingers hurt… i guess i’ve found out why they’re called fingerless gloves… (& i always thought it was because the gloves didn’t have any fingers…)

hoefler type foundry

well, that was a hugely busy day — productive, too. now. cold. weather. energising. brain. must. go. shopping.

black star sell videos & dvds on the web… we ordered some buffy videos from them & they had them packed & sent on the same day… their prices worked out to be way cheap, & they airmailed the parcel for free… took the package just over a week to arrive from the UK… recommended if you’re in the market…

three things email has tried to teach me today

1. Viagra is for Everyone
2. Find out (ANYTHING) about (ANYONE)
3. Burn 3-15 lbs. of Fat While You Sleep! Guaranteed!

i’m almost (TEMPTED) to take advantage (OF) the second offer so that i can check if the first one has its facts right, but i think i’ll give the third one a wide berth… although i can think of several possible strategies & strangely enough none of them involve weight loss on my part… except perhaps for the one where i’m strapped into some sort of giant electric exercise machine whilst heavily sedated…

which for some reason brings me to mystery men, which i dropped back at the video store this morning… didn’t catch it at the cinema (i seem to remember being kind of put off by some lukewarm reviews) but we both really enjoyed the film… very cartoonish, obviously, but it kept its tongue firmly in its cheek throughout & i thought it did what it did pretty well… (certainly not the worst film i’ve seen on video in the last month… how, i ask you, can a movie with two t-rexes possibly be worse than a movie with only one t-rex?)

projectile vomiting! uh, no… i mean, uh, i’ve been working on lots of projects lately… the weird thing is, i’ve actually been making some progress with some of them…

hat the first — in one of my “professional capacities”, i’ve been developing the website for the recently formed australasian research management society… it’s not quite ready to launch as yet (still waiting on some content & the overall approval of the society’s executive committee) but it’s coming together quite nicely.

i’ve also set up an egroup for the project… given that my pseudo-official title is something like web development advisory group convener, webmaster, & hamster… (well, okay, not hamster) i figured i might need some help on the convening front…

so yeah, i’m sure there must be a heap of free web-based groupware offerings out there, but i’ve been pretty impressed with egroups so far…

hat the second — in my other “professional capacity” i’ve been working on a collaborative writing project with ken bolton…

interesting facts no. 1 — when added together, ted’s various “professional capacities” equate to approximately four hundred & fifty litres, or, in non-metric terms, about thirty-seven-point-five trilobites.

interesting facts no. 2 — according to my database theory textbook, the correct pronunciation of the word “gigabyte” is actually “jigabyte”, with a soft initial “g”… i don’t know if that’s right or not, but it sounds funnier, so guess which pronunciation magicdog.com has officially adopted?

tell me why (etc, etc) — personally i think the boomtown rats were idiots… gorgeous crisp morning in sydney today, with just a hint of what i like to think of (with no justification other than the way it makes me feel) as an icy wind blowing…

alice — this looks kinda interesting, a Python-based environment for scripting and prototyping 3D object behavior…

hobbyco — visited hobbyco on saturday, which is a big hobbyshop in one of the glassy shopping centres in the pitt street mall… not a lot in the way of toy robots on offer, but i did purchase a deluxe set of modellers tools so now i have absolutely no excuse for not building some of my slowly (but apparently inexorably!) expanding collection of dubious plastic mecha…

tutorial week — at least i know about this one in advance… after being ambushed by one of the tutorial weeks last semester (tutorial week being, of course, a week in which there are no tutorials) i’m better prepared for this one… & i’ve been pleased to find that the more i learn about database theory, the more i like it, even if some of the maths is borderline daunting… i’m gonna see if i can’t hit the textbook this week & get a bit better handle on some of the stuff we’ve been flirting with in class…

why can’t we teach our robots to love?

• robowar
• robot battle

old superheroes never die

seanbaby’s superfriends pages — you’ll go a long way before you find a funnier examination of everything that made the superfriends one of the most annoying cartoon experiences of my early adolescence… for example:

Aqua Man. Jesus, I don’t even know where to begin. He was the one who talked to fish, which was sometimes even less useful than you might think.

sample aquaman/finny brethren interaction
(originally by some comedian or other)

fish: “hello aquaman!”
aquaman: “have you fish seen anything suspicious lately?”
[short pause]
fish: “hello aquaman!”

pop culture junk mail is the place to look for more sites like seanbaby’s superfriends pages…

a concerned reader writes:

Not that I am in a position to criticise (www.jimbozelbub.com) but…

Jeez, yer stretchin’ for content today [i.e. yesterday], aincha? Danny Bonaduce and the Memory-fuckin’-Man?

A. Critic (Mr)

hey, wait-a-minute… A. Critic? could it be one of the original members of the Danny Bonaduce Show’s house band, The Critics?!?

vampire (but nice). fights crime. searches for evil.

see. if you had no talent & access to a scanner, you could be doing that sort of thing yourself. (”don’t say spite, don’t say spite!” “spite.” “that’s it, i’m outta here…”)

hoo doggie! it’s like spam for my paper-based in-tray… oh wait, that’d just be regular junk mail, right? still! what a great piece of junk mail it is! lemme see, what’s on offer?

hot diggity dog! can it be? yes! it can! it’s eight cassettes, a workbook, a pocket guide & a free bonus cassette’s worth of kevin trudeau’s mega memory! which boldly claims to be “as seen on TV”! which indeed it was! in fact, i saw it, as i recall, on the so dubious you’d have to have seen it to believe how dubious it really was danny bonaduce show, the show that put the taint back into infotainment…

another dog-related exclamation! dare i order the six cassettes that comprise the aladdin factor? & if i did, could i really learn the seven tasks (that’s an average of one and one sixth of a task per tape! great value!) that would allow me to “release my genie”?!? (keep rubbing the lamp, guys. hey, wait-a-minute! this ain’t no lamp! & you ain’t no genie!)

dog-dog-dog-oh-oh-oh-oh! (hey, that sounds like a good name for a cat…) & there’s lotsa stuff by that big, scary, frankenstein-looking guy! or maybe i should learn (via six cassettes, a mini poster plus yet another bonus cassette) the secrets to manifesting my destiny! (now in quick action steps.)

dog-related exclamation the last! or i could uncover my secret wealth as i build an “immense personal fortune by creating & profiting from hidden cash windfalls with no downside risk”! mine for the price of six cassettes & a 16 page workbook! or maybe i should just try to follow these six cassettes, a special journal, a workbook & my bonus psychic pendulum along my very own psychic pathway! sigh. decisions, decisions. [sound of paper being crumpled up & thrown away…]