Memory Epsilon

write
Originally uploaded by delgrosso

First duty of the Netizen is content generation...
Second duty is to improve signal-to-noise where possible...

Deadline Say What Now?
I'm within sight of realising a long standing ambition and slay a personal bugbear which is the 'I must some day write a book' thing. After four half-way serious attempts which never got finished to date, I'm fairly happy about what I've currently got - 63k rough that includes a start, middle and ending - if I caught plague tomorrow, someone could read it and get the story, inelegantly roughed out as it is.( Read more... )

Datamining
The fabulous thing about CD cases is that they're light enough for one to have just slung them into luggage without checking what exactly was in them - thus provided lots of entertainment when one finds that in fact one has things one was thinking of trying to source already in hand, acquired before they were really of interest.

Vast quantities of random data begin to have an adventuresome quality all of their own.

A Thousand Press Officers Cried Out

[Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the EU Commission] said that the current poor economic situation had emphasised the importance of the euro and the UK but added he believed a move would not take place in the immediate future.

"I know that the majority in Britain are still opposed, but there is a period of consideration under way and the people who matter in Britain are currently thinking about it", he said.

Emphasis mine - 'people who matter' - because what we really need is to reinforce the eurosceptics perception of a detached technocracy. Pro-Europe people don't care how its phrased so why not frame the sentiment in a way thats not going to make grief for the UK politicians as they deal with the anti-Europe lot.

Alas, the impression given is probably true, JMB and his colleagues don't give much of a toss about us beyond what it takes to herd us in the right direction. Quelle surprise.

Time Sink
Its amazingly time consuming trying to organise all the bits and pieces I've written - even after I've started catergorising them pretty well so I'm only mucking about in the similarly themed stuff. I've just spent an hour that ... got me a few fixes and maybe an idea. I need to get a plan. Clue, too, but a plan is doable.

Its tricky because I think I've a fingernails grasp on a cool idea, something that I'll be able to spin lots of writing out of (see Leaguefic, maybe JCQ for the last handle-cranking inspiration-fest) - but its nothing to do with the previous thread I'd been tracking down. It ... evolves from that I guess, but I need to not look at my old notes, or think about them so I don't loose this new idea.

I should write the *new* idea down. Ah, ha!

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Temple of Love - Sisters of Mercy

Disconnect
I've noticed a shift in the flavour here on LJ from emoting about 'why does X/Y/Z snub me/not love me' to 'how am I making ends meet'. Looks like a shift down the Heirarchy of Needs from Esteem or Love/Belonging to Safety which is a big flag for this recession starting to bite.( Read more... )

Listening
I read somewhere a while ago that it used to be that if anything of significance happened in the world, people would wait to see what the US president said about it - but that that had ceased during the Bush presidency.

Listening to President Elect Obama, I realise that this is the first time in five years or more that I have listened to a holder of that office and expected to hear something worth hearing. If I am any indication of the greater global population, then the times they have a'changed.

Grumble Grumble Humbug Bloody Kiss Her
After three months of constant rotation I've finally been moved to say this. Dear Katy Perry while I cannot fault even the flimsiest pretext for having lingerie clad lovelies pouting and squirming, for the love of little apples how is I Kissed A Girl news?( Read more... )

/snark

P.S. I am willing to credit Ms Perry with enough savvy to spot a niche for a gratuitous fluffcore video in the charts and squeeze it for every penny she could. I'd actually have a lot more respect for that, its somewhat craftsman-like.

Keyhole Satellites
I'm having net issues - my home connection is piggy-backed on the big corporate pipe from the office; mostly thats a fibreoptic line north to Lago but that got cut some time last week so I'm online via satellite uplink only. Its dog slow, trying to handle all the load for the rest of the village along with me.

Thus - I have degraded connectivity, don't expect much from me for the next while.

Nerve Pinch Of Awkward Unreachability
I had pins and needles for a chunk of Saturday - I'm assuming it was something to do with ... something, don't know, but it could have been that its proving so bloody difficult to verify whether I can just get any old AC adapter for my hard drive or whether it needs a special one. ( Read more... )

Many thanks to all for the feedback on Walkmans - that'd be "no, hell no, run away little girl" then. Guess a new ipod it is then...

Jujitsu Maximum Annoyance
I just discovered that the swine who stole my ipod also stole the power cable for my hard drive - thus while I have a spare ipod, I do not have access to my music to fill it. Also, last night I watched the 23rd episode of the first season of 24. Guess where the final ep is...

Man, I can only hope he's half as annoyed as I am when he realises the power unit he thieved is no use for either of the things he took.( Read more... )

Do Walkman MP3 players have any DRM or other user-unfriendly drawbacks?

The Penny Bounces
Just over a week to go, I'm up to my elbows in paperwork - mostly peripheral stuff for me, taxes, flat rental stuff. Mess. Its gone half past midnight and I still haven't packed to come home tomorrow, I want to get this stuff away because if its not tomorrow its Wednesday and thats just too damn late.

Ok, so - pack, sleep, up to work tomorrow to flip the simulation runs then back in, post office will be open, mail everything, head to the airport. Ok. ok. Thats doable.

Right. Zzzsnnow.

Easy =/= Shortcut
Oil Industry Overview 2007 - a bit out of date now but its got a cool sig thing I'm going to steal - "Decarbonise, Electrify."

Sounds like a particularly heinous super-villain hero trap...

Next Stage of Automation?
Unmanned Aerial Manhood outrage at Kasparov rally

Simply because the line "It was theorised that Kremlin-sponsored youths may have stood behind the possibly communist contrarotating copter-cock intrusion" is not an exaggeration.

Godzilla-like Carbon Footprint
And the latest wheeze - a day trip to Geneva to sign my contract. What... a well thought out thing. 6am flights, transfer through Schipol to get to Geneva for a four hour legalese chat at the end of which I sign myself over the labour laws of Switzerland and then get bundled back on a plane to pitch up back in ABZ for midnight.( Read more... )

Suitable Motivation.
I updated today and my computer BSD-ed - after I restarted in safe, virus scanned (nothing) and restarted again... my audio doesn't work. So I hacked at it until about 02:30 - because it was important. I ended up having to dig out original restart disks, deny my sound-card thrice before dawn and then reboot and reinstall.

It was important - because The Dead Flags video went live today - O MY LOVE! O MY GOD!! now available for perusin'.

And the video - thats a Leinster road house party.

Crunching details
Further to previous; UK heirarchy went 'Veto' and so the 20th stuck with no prior trip ... until it turned out that no such flights existed, it was either 19th or 21st ... and so its rolled forward a day to the 19th. I'm beginning not to care anymore. People keep asking me like I've got authority to decide things so I've just started writing passive-agressive deniable emails filled with disclaimers.( Read more... )

(28 days to departure)

If Brute Force Doesn't Solve The Problem - Use More
I'm shipping out to Nigeria in just over a month. The guy I'm replacing leaves on the Saturday 23rd, the guy I have to hand over to in ABZ comes back to the office after vacation on the 18th. I proposed to fly south on the 20th. Boss in Nigeria went 'arg, want you earlier! Need a week at least!' Boss here responded to me only "get them to send you docco, prep for questions, two days will be fine" - i.e. not helpful.

I've been gnawing on this and I've come up with the problem - everyone else copied in the email is higher pay grade than me, they should make the decision, so I'm going to propose a brute force approach; while hand-over guy in ABZ is on vacation, I fly south - route straight from Dublin on the 12th after Judes wedding - start taking on new job there, fly back up on 18th, do handover in ABZ, then fly south again on 21st. At €6000 for a return, lets see if thats the kind of money thats worth someone taking a decision over.

I give even odds its not.

This crazy-ass plan means that I have to be boxed and ready to ship by 8th August really, before I come back to Dublin that weekend. 21 days.

The Outquisition; Great Idea But A Potential Recruitment Problem?
Alex Steffen talks with Cory Dotrow about what would do good in the coming slow motion collapse. They propose the Outquisition - bringers of knowledge in a reverse of the Inquisition destroying it;

...it'd be a network of places where people were engaged in ingenious development of elegant solutions to the problems of life where living is hard and money is short might well be a vital necessity for a certain portion of the population. It's really not hard for me to imagine a certain kind of person eagerly embracing the role of being facilitators of that network, sort of like barefoot solar engineers for the forgotten parts of the developed world.

( Read more... )

Question to the floor - do people think they would and/or could participate in something like this?

State Within The State
I'm going to do a proper writeup of Nigeria on cobweb (I actually don't know how to access the admin login without the 'favourite' on Omenschilde) but what struck me this morning coming off the plane and seeing yet more of our tankers was what a bizarre insulated bubble-world the corp forms. ( Read more... )

Advertisement