Bullet Holed Messenger

I got my results back the other day. They’re all as good as I expected them to be, given how much work I put into them. I can only hope that I do so well in the coming semester:

• Analogue Systems 2 - 90% (High Distinction)
• Programming 3 - 92% (High Distinction)
• Work Performance Module - Competent (this is a pass/fail subject)
• Power & Electronic Systems 2 - 70% (Credit)
• Alternative Energy Systems - 86% (High Distinction)
• Simulation & PCB Development - 95% (High Distinction)
• Embedded Controllers 2 - Credit (percentage mark not given for some reason)

I would have liked to have done better at the power systems subject, but I find that sort of thing rather difficult and abstract. Truth be told, almost all power system stuff is bought off the shelf anyway because it’s cheaper and safer that way. (Since that’s the part that kills people and sets fire to things)

I also would have liked to have done better at the embedded controllers subject but that seemed to be more about the architecture of the actual microcontroller we were using than how to program in C. Far too much of the actual programming part was the sort of “copy someone else’s code and ramdomly hack away at it till it sorta works” school of cargo-cult teaching which I utterly despise. Needless to say my final submission was a horrible thing stitched together from 2 or 3 other people’s code, which had more commented-out duct tape than actual working code and which only worked at all due to frantic last minute assistance from the teacher.

I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and go through the exercises in my copy of K&R v 2.0 on my own at some point if I want to be a good C programmer. I think it is probably best for me to do this on the command line on my EeePC, since K&R is so Unix oriented and because the security settings on my Windows laptop make programming on the actual computer itself very awkward. They don’t affect programming for external embedded devices, which is fine because that is what I normally do.

One thing I love about Melbourne is it’s a city where something is always happening. Anti-communist demonstrations from Falun Gong are pretty routine but today they were held in Federation Square because the watermelons had booked the Bourke Street Mall location that Falun Gong normally uses. It was gratifying to hear from work that motorists responded in an extremely hostile fashion when these blowhards decided to raise environmental awareness by unnecessarily blocking traffic. Waiting for traffic signals like a plebian was simply out of the question because they were saving the world by being scruffy, unnecessary and pig-ignorant in the same place at the same time. According to the obviously rehashed press release they were expecting a turnout of 5 thousand. I’d say they were off by an order of magnitude, but what they lacked in numbers they made up for in being really annoying.

It amuses me that a recently formed group of random internet geeks are more savvy about positive protest strategies than the dreadlock brigade. It should come as no surprise that their protests are more positively received by the general public than the usual suspects.

In their wake were left posters that were a high water mark of hypocrisy even by envircommie standards: Posters whinging about the world food crisis (and probably blaming it on capitalism). Never mind that it was the agitation of environmental groups for mandatory biofuels targets, despite everyone who knew what they were talking about saying it was an economically and environmentally disastrous idea. The fun part about being a willfully ignorant idealist is never having to bear responsibility for the consequences of their ill thought out policies. As usual, the adults of this world will need to clean out the mess.

But even after the traditional lunchtime protest period there was a pro-Tamil rally in federation square. Can’t say too much about it since it was conducted in Tamil with the only English thing being a printed out powerpoint that was handed out to anyone vaguely white looking. I could summarise it best as “The British fucked us over when they turned a bi-cultural territory into a unified nation called Ceylon”. The British empire left plenty of messes during its tenure as a world superpower, get in line, pal.

A friend of mine is leaving for a holiday in Europe for a couple of weeks and in the process of attending the farewell party I learned a few things that I didn’t think I would learn.

You can get rather maggoted on a cosmopolitan if you drink it on an empty stomach. I had rather the wrong impression of the place we would be drinking at, thinking it was an intimate, classy establishment where I could order something to eat in addition to cocktails.

Unfortunately, this friend of mine has something of a talent for picking places to hold parties that freak me out. This place pushed pretty much all my buttons in this regard - Loud, crowded, cramped and hot. Fortunately I seemed to be keeping things under my hat because everyone said I was being surprisingly smooth and dapper. That was probably in part attributable to me downing a daiquiri and a cosmopolitan (I ordered “something strong and pink” and that’s what I got) in order to make the place seem a bit more hospitable.

I guess some of the mates I was chatting to were impressed by how nubile young women were coming up to me and asking to borrow my hat and take pictures. I must admit, I’m pretty used to that sort of thing when I go out in a “melbourne dandies” outfit. But I reckon they’re just being nice and flirty because they’re after the hat, but then admittedly I’ve never asked a number from anyone who borrowed the hat, so far they haven’t really been my type. For all I know there might be a number in it for me if I bothered.

When I was in the bar, I felt pretty normal to be honest. But that’s another thing I learned. You always feel less drunk than you actually are when you’re in a bar.

Once outside, Melbourne at night, which I already find pretty surreal, becomes a whole order of magnitude more surreal and scary when alone and drunk. I have a hell of a time finding my bearings, Jeeves isn’t able to get a decent fix on a sattelite signal so I’m left wandering around looking at things googly eyed, muttering at my GPS and people are generally laughing at me. So I’m pretty obviously drunk, although part of that could be that I’m looking like a total tripper in a suit and bowler hat (technically a homburg) with a pink paisley tie.

Eventually I get my bearings and soon after, a GPS signal. Now that I know how to get to the train station, my attention turns to the natural priority of the hungry drunk person: How do I get a hold of some greasy food? My salvation comes in the form typical to most people in my state - the Golden Tower. This is pretty much the first place which hasn’t regarded me as something unusual and potentially worrisome. The purveyance of greasy food to the inebriated is their stock in trade.

Perhaps I should have gone to KFC instead, because a Souvlaki turns out to be the only suitable thing without cheese but later on the garlic sauce takes its revenge against my brand new pink paisley tie.

On the way home I engage in conversation with a fellow geek (who is probably anon because he knows the memes) and a bunch of coreycats, one of whom likes using reptilian contact lenses as a party piece and talks in rather graphic detail about how much he needs to take a piss. They are quite impressed by my EeePC and wanted to know if I played World of Warcraft.

I seem to be quite good at buying things that turn into conversation pieces.

I had to make a changeover to get to the station I normally get off at. Another bunch of kids but this sort weren’t OK like the last ones. They were younger, just young enough to be let out of the house on a Friday night by their parents and were letting it go to their heads. One of the girls lit up a smoke in a train carriage. As it started clouding around her head I thought “Is she really fucking doing that? Is anyone going to have to say anything? Nope, looks like it’s going to have to be me again” so I went up and did my Bavarian Fire Drill routine and told her to put it out.

She babbled something in return, to be frank I didn’t listen because I couldn’t give a fuck what she had to say because she and I both know that you do not smoke in a train carriage, period. So another thing I learnt tonight is that the secret to appearing like an authority figure when you’re not is to talk as if you’re very important and to be vague. One of my classmates (who is short and skinny) would add that it doesn’t hurt that I’m a big guy. I said what she was doing was against health and safety regulations. She promptly put the cigarette out. Such is the awesome power of invoking health and safety.

One of the younger male kids came out and wanted to shake my hand and talk with me. I don’t like shaking hands with strangers at the best of times but I looked down and his hand was filthy, I said I’d rather not. He asked me if I played World of Warcraft, seriously what is the deal with random dudes under 20 asking me if I play that game?

The funny thing about shopping is it almost always gives me something to write about. Usually just random bitching about annoying dicklike behaviour, but at least that’s something.

One thing that is increasingly shitting me is drunks leaving their fucking beer bottles everywhere. As I was leaving Safeway to go to the car, I see about 4 beer bottles have been placed on the concrete median strip thingy. Now admittedly this is a little more courteous than most “I simply must drink immediately after leaving the liquor store” drunks, who just tend to simply let go of the bottles once they’ve drained them. But already a couple are on their side as they’ve just been knocked out of the way by random people walking around.

Maybe it’s just because my Mum is mobility disabled, used to be an OH&S auditor and rants almost daily about unsafe shit people do, but I see the bottles, especially the ones on their sides and think “Eventually, someone’s going to be walking along and is not going to notice those bottles are there for some reason and then they’re going to trip on them and fall and hurt themselves”. And that’s presuming they don’t just get kicked out of the way, shatter and fuck up someone’s car tyres. In any case, someone’s life is probably going to suck in some way if these beer bottles remain where they are. So I decide to move them, which is really annoying because my hands get all wet and icky with God knows what.

Still, I’d rather do that than know someone else could be hurt because I’m too lazy.

But seriously, this shit seems to happen all the fucking time. It’s like I can’t walk around anywhere without beer bottles being somewhere, usually in jagged little pieces all over the ground. It’s scary enough knowing that at my size I’ll end up in hospital if I fall over, without thinking that I might have nasty bits of glass stuck into me as well.

And although I fucking hate nanny state laws, it’s getting to the point where I’d seriously consider supporting a law requiring all beer to be served in plastic bottles. Yes, I know it would probably utterly fuck up the taste of the beer but frankly I don’t care anymore. There’s too many fucking drunks going around these days drinking in public who literally can’t hold their liquor. The only other thing I can think of that might deal with the problem without fucking it up for other people is giving police more of an incentive to book people for drinking in public. I don’t really care what drugs people do, so long as it’s understood that public areas are for sober people.

That would do way more good than the stupid tax on pre-mixed drinks, but it’s understood by everyone who isn’t a hopeless Kevin Rudd groupie that it was a naked revenue grab. Not even the religious wowsers at Family First got suckered in by that gambit.

Another thing that gives me the shits is the 40 kph speed limit thing around schools. It’s a stupid law and I hate it because cars aren’t built to cruise at that speed. But I’ll be booked regardless of whether I agree or disagree with it so I have to obey the stupid law already. But it’s hard enough for me to concentrate on holding the car at 40 kph (when it’s naturally inclined to cruise at 45 kph) at the best of times, let alone when I have some hooligan in a Falcodore 2 feet from my rear bumper.

Seriously, why does nobody seem to know or care about this law? There’s signs clearly marking what times you have to obey it and since I don’t have children I don’t really know what days are school days or not. But since I saw plenty of cars parked at the school I figure it was pretty safe to assume it was a school day. So why the hell was there some guy in a hot Falcon flashing his lights at me when I was driving home today? I’m certainly not going to eat a $150 fine and 3 demerit points just because of his need for speed.

Then just to make it even stranger than normal, he eventually overtakes me and then deliberately slows down to 30 kph, presumably as revenge. I’m just LMAO at the whole irony of the situation as well as the sheer stupidity of what he’s doing. He seems to think I was driving slowly just to annoy him. But now he’s forgoing the opportunity to drive at the speed he wanted to in order to try to punish me for…obeying the (stupid) law. After failing to get the reaction he wanted from me (tailgating, flipping the bird?) he finally hit the gas and left me behind…

Only for me to catch up with him at the next set of lights. I swear that never gets old, so I gave him a wave (Hi! It’s me again!) and laughed some more. Probably pissed him right off.

Another thing that’s interesting to do when shopping is have a look at other people’s trolleys and what they’re buying. Also noting who tends to hang out at what sections of the supermarket. For instance, I spend a fair bit of time in the fresh produce section. I am very out of place there. Almost everyone in the produce section is over 40 and female. Sometimes there’s the occasional old grumbling husband or young mother, but absolutely no other young men.

Admittedly, when Mum wasn’t able to cook so often any more due to her disability I resorted a great deal to canned soup and things of that nature. However, it wasn’t long before that started getting rather boring and I began experimenting with things and making my own additions. Now about the only major hurdles I have ahead of me are how to cut my own raw meat and how to prepare a roast. And I do intend to tackle those ones eventually. It’s got to the point now where I’ll buy stuff because it looks interesting to cook and Mum’s decided she wants to cook it too and asking me how I think she should cook it and what herbs to use. I seem to have a good instinct for coming up with interesting ways to tweak recipes.

So perhaps there is something to the common complaint of older people that youngsters just don’t know how to cook any more. Looking into young people’s trolleys it certainly seems that way. There was a bloke behind me whose dedication to baked beans was truly astounding. And there’s some people’s trolleys, where I look into them and think “they must be buying supplies for a community centre”. They’re probably not, but I feel better giving them the benefit of the doubt than thinking there are families out there that eat that badly.

I sometimes wonder what the hell my shopping looks like to other people. I reckon I probably look some sort of leftie yuppie douche with my green bags, unbleached toilet paper, soy milk and RSPCA certified eggs. But to be honest, I just grew up with that sort of stuff and was used to doing it before it became cool amongst people who felt guilty about being in a well paid job.

Bill Gates ranting about usability fuckups sounds almost exactly the same as me ranting about usability fuckups.

Only without the Gordon Ramseyesque levels of swearing.

I’m feeling good.

I finally got my exams and other associated shite over and done with. Admittedly I started feeling somewhat less lousy after I boarded the CBF boat after wednesday, although by that point all the really hard stuff was effectively over.

Anyhow, yesterday I decided to reward myself for getting through all this by watching ‘Speed Racer’ and you know what? It didn’t suck.

People are pretty surprised I went to go see that one, exclaiming “But that’s a kid’s film!”. So what? I find that kids films tend to be more consistently good than adult films anyway and the really lousy ones can often by spotted a mile off from their trailers.

So why did I like Speed Racer? Because it was exactly what it said on the tin. Seriously, if you saw the trailer and thought “that looks fun” you should go watch it because this film is almost exactly like the trailer. That almost never happens these days.

The funny thing is that I like it pretty much for the reasons why most of the critics hated it. Ever since ‘The Matrix’ the W Brothers have been constructing this monumental albatross of psudeointellectual wankery around their necks. The trouble is that all their pretense of intellectual sophistication only holds together in a medium without a pause button. Poke at it a little bit and you’ll see that all the high concepts they talk about are a load of bollocks and really it’s just a stupid movie with lots of explosions in a frilly skirt.

In Speed Racer, they no longer bother with the skirt and it so much better for it. Without any expectations for anything clever to happen I wasn’t disappointed, it was really just like a 1950s cartoon adapted to the big screen. About half of the movie was like that awesome car chase scene from ‘Matrix Reloaded’ and best of all no damn non-plot-related sillolquies.

My favourite scene by a long way has to be the one with the ninjas. I love it because it involves a great deal of the W Brothers taking the piss out of their earlier work. Some ninjas sneak in, seeking to assassinate Speed Racer and his team members. And they look super skilled and stealthy…until Speed’s little brother spots them. At which point they attempt to use martial arts and it’s revealed they’re utterly useless at actual fighting while Pops Racer is a Greco-Roman Wresting champion. Every single “ninja kicking the ass of much bigger guy” stereotype is turned on its head as he throws them around like rag dolls. Yes, the W Brothers can do slapstick!

So basically the film was loads of fun and never got boring. And to be frank, I’m kinda worried about it being a critical and commercial failure because it just means that the W Brothers are going to go back to pretty people with guns talking complete bollocks again. I want to see them make more movies like Speed Racer because it was a whole lot more enjoyable than pretty much anything they’ve ever done.

Romantic love scares me. I think it is because it works so contrary to my idea of how the world works and in particular to my idea of how human affairs (to use a word I hate seeing others use) should work.

You see, I love the hell out of meritocracy. But love does not.
Romantic love is profoundly anti-meritocratic. It is not earned. Saints and scoundrels are equally likely to be affected and afflicted by it.

How is it that some powerful force, which appears to work almost entirely at random and could at its inexorable whim make you the devoted servant of the most horrible man you encounter, be widely considered a wonderful thing?

There were two elections of particular interest lately.

The first was the general election in Zimbabwe, which the opposition to Robert Mugabe (Africa’s answer to Pol Pot) won handily, despite thuggery from the ZANU-PF. He then proceeded to declare that the election didn’t count because the people didn’t “vote the right way”. Yes, he actually did say that.

The second was the plebiscite for the Lisbon treaty in Ireland, which was essentially the EU constitution in a frilly skirt. This was lost by a narrow margin, despite a big government publicity campaign urging people to vote Yes.

The second was unusual because Ireland was the only country which, against the wishes of the EU, actually deigned to put the question of “Should we hand over a significant part of our national sovereignty over to an unelected and all but unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels?” to the people.

And the result was pretty much what you would expect. The weird thing is that now the EU is trying to find some loophole by which to invalidate this result and many people are complaining that Ireland didn’t “vote the right way”. Indeed, some are even busting out those old “Irish are stupid” ethnic stereotypes in their frustration.

I feel a bit odd that nobody else has noticed that the EU and its advocates, in their desire to centralise power and distance themselves from accountability from those they desire power over, have started to speak just like the megacidal head of an African Junta.

One thing that is commonly stressed is how important it is to love yourself in order to have a healthy relationship. Although I am starting to think that it’s not for the reason commonly stated.

The conventional wisdom is that nobody can love you unless you love yourself first. Now, upon even a cursory inspection, this should be revealed to be obvious nonsense. After all, if it were true, heterosexual relationships would be almost impossible due to the epic levels of self-loathing typical in straight women.

I think there’s another reason why it’s important to love who you are in order to have a healthy relationship. If someone falls in love with who you are, but you don’t like who that is, the relationship is built on a fundamentally unstable foundation.

Because generally one of two things happens.

1. You change who you are, and although you like who you are more, in the process you lose some important quality that your partner loved you for. It’s a mixed blessing, because at least there’s the possibility that you’ll find someone new. But you might lose someone wonderful in the process.
2. Aware of the first possibility, your relationship ends up becoming a barrier to progress in your self improvement. And slowly, but surely you end up resenting your partner from holding you back from becoming who you wanted to be, even though they never had any conscious intent of (or possibly even any awareness they were) doing this to you.
3. You are simply unable to comprehend in your mind why someone would love you for being someone you don’t actually like being. And, in order to overcome the dissonance caused by the relationship and your insecurity and self-loathing, you end up sabotaging the relationship.

So, at best, being in a relationship when you don’t like who you are is going to turn the relationship into what a friend of mine calls a “timebomb” (a relationship doomed to eventual failure because of irreconcilable differences) or at worst is going to cause it to break down in an extremely messy fashion that will hurt all involved.

So, if a long-term relationship is a very important thing to you, but you don’t yet love who you are, then it should absolutely be your first priority to wholeheartedly pursue your self-improvement so you can be the person you want to be, or to learn to love who you are.

So, I got through this week. I got all the projects handed in and did all the exams. And then, after this, we’re told we’re going to have a ‘revision class’ for the subject there’s an exam on, on Monday.

By this point, we’re all exhausted. And this is why IT’S A REALLY BAD FRIGGIN’ IDEA TO SUDDENLY WHOMP US WITH 3 HOURS WORTH OF NEW STUFF WE’RE MEANT TO KNOW FOR THE EXAM ON MONDAY. WTF kind of revision session is this? And then we’re told we should study for 5 hours each day over the next 3 days for this test. Fuck that noise. I’m tired of all this bullshit where we’re told we have to do OVER NINE THOUSAND hours of study for shit that’s nowhere near as difficult as it’s being hyped to be. Let’s face it, the only way to fail this stuff if you’ve turned up to all the classes is to take the teacher’s advice on study preparation literally and drive yourself to a nervous breakdown in the process.

To top it off, I left my laptop power supply behind again. So I’m going to have to waste at least 2 hours tomorrow schlepping in to go get it. I really could do without this bullshit.

Well, that’s another project submitted and another exam done.

The only good thing about this insane level of workload is I’ve been sleeping better than I can ever remember. I started feeling exhausted of my own accord at about 10PM and took the hint to go to bed, and was pretty much out like a light until about 6 when I catnapped till 8AM. That pretty much never happens without chemical intervention normally.

I’ve got another project submitted and exam done today, so that’s two more subjects I’ve passed.

The project was particularly frustrating. I had something nearly functional hacked up just before I went to bed last night, but it had a couple of bugs remaining that I couldn’t diagnose due to insufficient knowledge of C and cryptically worded errors from the compiler.

I was expecting to get it running within a few minutes of bringing it past the teacher and then spending the rest of the lesson making it more elegant and functional. Instead, we spent pretty much the entire lesson on what turned out to be a wild goose chase because the Atmel AVR Tools was outright lying to us. By the time we discovered that we had a perfectly functional program pretty much the whole time, but the compiler’s watch function didn’t work properly, there was barely enough time to make it work at all. So I had to submit a barely functional mess strung together with the software equivalent of miles of duct tape.

It’ll still pass, but I get no satisfaction from an outcome where my performance had little to do with my own ability and more to do with the incompetence of others, who shall remain (as those who make my life difficult inevitably are) free from accountability for their own failings. I can deal with poor marks that are the result of my own screwups, but to do badly because some other schmuck screwed up leaves a bad taste in my mouth and a bitter feeling in my heart. It would be easier if I stopped caring about justice and I only wish I could actually be as cynical as I generally appear to be.

The exam later today was fortunately not too difficult. Unlike previously in my academic career, I have been keeping copious notes which was really useful in this rather wide ranging open-book test. I was able to just reference earlier notes and that which I hadn’t written down I seemed to have successfully ass-pulled to the extent where I got over 90%. Now that’s the sort of result that could give me some satisfaction (shame I don’t actually care about that particular subject very much).

Apart from allowing myself the indulgence of blogging to have a bit of a whinge, there’s barely time to breathe between finishing one exam and then getting started on getting the project ready that’s due for submission the very next day. Not to mention studying for the exam that’s also due in the class before the one that has the project for submission. Not sure how to prioritise those as the class with the project has been extremely difficult and squashed into too little time (for which we are then blamed for being too slow despite not being taught project-critical theory) and another class which is generally so dull and abstract (albeit very useful) that the material taught in it tends to slip through my mind like a sieve.

Right now I find myself in a rather grim place where there is only the task and no possibility of enjoyment until it is completed. To a great extent this is the creation of my own mind and my fetishisation of diligence and perfectionism. That I cannot allow myself to feel like I’m doing anything fun until the threat of failure (which looms closely now) is averted.

If I can keep this up for a couple more days, I can afford myself some sort of relaxation. After that, there’s just an exam for the stupid alternative energy subject on Monday, but that doesn’t frighten me because it’s mathematically based and even though I’ve forgotten a lot in those areas, I’m still more than strong enough in that area to lick it without breaking a sweat.

In my excitement of getting my new EeePC on the weekend (and getting Ubuntu running on it) there was something else I forgot to mention.

My brother is getting engaged!

While all of us in the family have seen this one coming a mile off, it is still quite happy and exciting to hear about. I believe both my mother and the bride to be have an attitude of “about time” because my brother has been telegraphing his intentions to do so for quite some time.

I am personally greatly amused because this whole thing started when my brother had returned from his service with the army. He was single and horny and he gets quite annoying when he is like that. In particular, he wants to talk to me about chicks and considering my unusual taste in women I’m loathe to discuss that even with most of my friends, let alone my brother.

So I introduced him to Myspace in the hope that he’d hook up with someone and get out of my hair. And he did.

I wonder what he’s going to be willing to bribe me to make sure I don’t tell that story of how they ended up meeting at their wedding. I already know that my brother’s fiancee doesn’t like me mentioning it (not appropriately romantic enough, I imagine).

This week promises to be an excessively busy one for me. 2 exams today (I kicked their arse, though). A major project and another exam tomorrow, same the day after that and another major project due on Thursday. I still have a fair bit to do to get tomorrow’s project working, but I need to dig up some of my old notes about arrays in C in order to get it functional (teacher chucked that requirement in at the last minute just to be a bastard, but I can see how it would make the program easier to debug.)

UPDATE: I ended up fixing this problem a few hours after writing the entry, but it appears to have butthurt some Ubuntu people. The problem was this: When Ubuntu boots up, the progress bar suddenly sticks and stays there for a minute or two on a computer as slow as the EeePC, giving the false impression that the computer has hung on bootup. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MENTION THIS PROMINENTLY IN YOUR DOCUMENTATION, PEOPLE! If the Ubuntu team is going to insist upon shipping a pretty looking bootup screen with a major UI bug that gives the impression of a computer crashing when it’s working just fine, at the very least mention this. Or do I have to hunt every one of you fuckers down in your sleep and beat you to death with a hardcover copy of The Design of Everyday Things before you take it upon yourselves to follow minimum acceptable usability standards? If you don’t think UI design is “hardcore” enough and people who require computers to give sensible feedback to users are “noobs” then you’re defending the wrong distro, get the fuck off any Ubuntu related project and go back to Gentoo and Slackware where you damn well belong. Those who want to actually modernise computing will not miss you.

I FINALLY got my EeePC in the mail today and like a good geek I find the standard OS insultingly limiting. Ubuntu sounds like a nifty thing to put on it, so the plan was to do just that. This plan worked out exactly the same way as any plan I ever make that involves a computer somehow.

The only reason I’m even bothering with Linux again is because the EeePC has a solid state drive, which sounds like a fantastic idea until you realise that the many logging functions in Windows would kill it within a few months. Thus Linux is required.

However, I see that Linux usability still manages to fall woefully short of even the low expectations I’ve come to have of it after repeatedly trying it a total of 6 times since 1999 and each time giving it up in disgust.

In particular, installing Ubuntu on an EeePC. Such an intersection of geek fads should be now be so well-worn that even people like me should be able to do it without any trouble.

The problem is that the EeePC hacking community have created a multitude of methods for booting off a USB flash drive - NONE OF WHICH FUCKING WORK.

This is why I hate opensource development so much. It seems the problem it was intended to solve was “Why make 1 good solution when you can make 100 bad ones?”.

So I’m throwing down the gauntlet to any butthurt Ubuntu/EeePC nerds. What’s a method of installing Ubuntu from a flash drive, from Windows that actually fucking works. By the love of all that is holy do NOT direct me to the tutorials which require you to load an Ubuntu liveCD and do a bunch of shit in the terminal.

A - I tried that already. Every single one of these tutorials, I never get the response from the terminal command the tutorial says I should. I’m fucking tired of reading linux tutorials based in a reality different from the one I inhabit.

B - This is the 21st fucking century. Civilised people automate and script mundane shit like this.

I already tried the syslinux CLI method which was completely and utterly useless (some bullshit about how setting boot flag on doesn’t work with a loop partition WHICH WAS NEVER MENTIONED IN THE TUTORIAL*).

I also tried the Unetbootin method. That actually managed to boot, but it freezes about 10 seconds after boot no matter what distro I put in it.

As a final note, if any Microsoft hacking wizards can show me how to kill swapfiles, logging and all the other shit that results in excessive file writes, now is a really good time to tell me, that I may run my EeePC as God and Microsoft intended without it dying prematurely.

*Every single fucking Linux tutorial I ever see assumes that everything works perfectly. this is not how you write a tutorial. You assume that everything that can possibly fuck up, will. Because it will. Branches for failure modes are easy to do in a HTML document and easier still in a wiki. And yet nobody ever does them. This one simple documentation improvement would significantly reduce my hostility towards Linux and yet nobody every implements it anywhere.

Well, thanks to the Queen’s birthday, I got a long weekend in which to catch up with all the projects and shit I’ve got due.

And, typically, I spent it arsing around playing video games. Oh well, I’d been going so many weeks so damn busy I had no time to do anything fun and it was driving me crazy. So hopefully this downtime is a good investment in my mental health which will allow me to be much more productive in the coming couple of weeks.

I did actually get some stuff done admittedly but then, if I’d tried much harder I’d probably have got nothing but frustration for my efforts. I still don’t really know how to do a lot of the stuff we’re meant to do (neither do most of my classmates, to be honest) and that which I know how to do, is plagued by obscure technical problems in the APIs I’m using.

In particular, the Atmel AVR tools has got in a tiff with the programmer and refuses to speak with it anymore. Likewise, the Xilinx FPGA API throws up a bunch of errors where it will compile all the objects I’ve coded and then say the syntax check failed because it didn’t compile. Yes, that’s right, it’s telling bare-faced lies at me.

I am loving the hell out of Neverwinter Nights, though. I picked it up a couple of weeks ago becaus I wanted a game that would run well on a laptop and based on what I told them I like to play, the guys at Gametraders recommended it to me. I liked it so much I ended up buying the ‘Legends’ version, which had both the expansions and the quite useless (to me) Neverwinter Nights sequel.

It’s awesome, because I love Dungeons & Dragons but I hate all the bullshit drama involved in trying to get a bunch of drama-prone geeks (usually on another continent) to hold a regular gaming group. Now I can just load it up and engage in a glorious dungeon hack in 3D whenever the hell I want to. Needless to say, I shall be getting the infinite dungeons expansion some time in future, just to maximise the “glorious dungeon hack on tap” factor to OVER 9000.

Of course, my usual addiction to “restart the game again because I thought of a new character concept that would be more awesome” plagues me. I started a sorcerer, that sucked. It is only now that I have come to appreciate what a sucky class for noobs they truly are. Then I made a halfling druid. That was OK at first until I realised that I made her so utterly useless at combat my strategy consisted of “Get my familiar and summoned animals to kick their arses and occasionally blast the tougher foes with lightning”.

It’s no wonder that video games (particularly MMORPGs) have taken the place of pen & paper RPGs amongst most of Gen Y. They’re so much more convenient. It is true that in a good gaming group, a good D&D campaign is AWESOME, but for every one of those, there’s about 5 that are yawnfests that die out after a few sessions and 2 that are just absolute clusterfucks. So even though the video games aren’t as good as the tabletop sessions can be, they’re still often better on average.

Mind you, I think I’m getting a bit burnt out on multiplayer gaming again. But it could just be that I don’t get much time to do it right now so it’s not very fun (log in, update market orders, log out. OH WHAT FUN!)

Well, I had an interesting experience when out grocery shopping today.

There was this new thing with all these super-high resolution LCD screens displaying advertisements for local businesses. I found it quite fascinating and chatted to one of the ladies who was showing off this new system.

Apparently it’s a prototype made by a new company and they’re interested in expanding it into shopping centres all over Victoria and eventually Australia (and then, THE WORLD, HAHAHAHAHA!).

I was quite impressed by it, as it represented an intersection between my interests of embedded systems development and marketing, so after a while I started turning the conversation towards “So, are you guys hiring anyone?” and managed to get an email. It looks like the lady I spoke to was one of the directors of the company, so I might have bumped into the right person at the right time.

I just updated my resume and sent it to her and to be frank, for a man of my age and experience I think it kicks a whole bunch of ass.

Even if I don’t end up getting a job with them, this has proved to be a really positive experience. For the first time, looking for work wasn’t a terrifying experience in being judged. It was just chatting to people about what they were doing and asking them lots of questions, I really enjoyed it.

I think the maturity and perspective I’ve gained over the past 3 years is even more important than the skills. I now understand what I was doing so wrong earlier and now I know how to play to my strengths. Reading job ads and talking to companies I barely know from a bar of soap (or worse, a recruitment agency who knows even less) is NEVER going to get someone like me a job. I’m a networker, I enjoy finding out about companies for the sake of finding out about them and talking to people from the companies on that level feels much more fun and less stressful to me.

Plus, I have another idea for how I can use these guys if they don’t end up hiring me. It doesn’t cost too much to advertise with them. So I put up an ad saying that I’m looking for work, with a blurb about my skills, and throwaway Gmail address and a disposable prepaid mobile phone number for prospective employers (and the inevitable pranking douchebags) to contact me. I figure in the 10 weeks or so it’ll be up that some business owner will see it and think “Hey, that’s unusual! I like his proactive attitude and lateral thinking” and offer me a kick-ass job.

The Rudd government has finally done something I agree with.

That is, it’s introduced a means test on the rebate for solar panels, putting the kibosh on families earning over $100,000 a year from getting the rebate. In my opinion, this is a good decision, both for the economy and for the environment.

As part of my studies in electrical engineering, I’ve had to learn about renewable energy, in particular photovoltaic panels. There’s a lot about them that most people don’t know, and they aren’t good. Most people think they’re these wonderful things where you just point them in the general direction of the sun and this marvelous gush of “free” electricity comes out in a perfectly useable form.

The truth about them is they take a significant amount of energy to make, are very fragile, high maintenance and inefficient. Plus they produce constant current DC power, which is pretty much the most useless kind of electrical power known to mankind. So it’s necessary to have a whole lot of other equipment like large battery arrays and inverters, all of which is expensive, requires constant maintenance is full of toxic materials and has rubbish efficiency on a household scale.

That said, in remote locations where the only feasible alternative is a diesel generator, they can be the more economic and environmentally friendly solution. But to people in the suburbs, with access to the grid, even coal fired power has less environmental impact than solar panels in all but the most exceptional of cases.

In the typical case, most domestic solar panel installations are nothing more than a lifestyle accessory, made so that yuppies can brag about “going green” at their next dinner party. If people want to spend their disposable income on such things, they’re quite free to do so. But I don’t see why such vanity should be publicly subsidised.

Solar energy is still a very immature technology and there is a very good possibility that with future advancements in semiconductor fabrication and nanotechnology it can become much more widely useful and efficient. But until that technology arrives, I think that solar installations should only be subsidised in contexts where they are genuinely useful. People who want to buy them for non-utilitarian reasons should pay for them themselves.

I’m sure some people will complain about how the solar industry needs support in order for technology to develop. To a certain extent, this is true. But there is already a perfectly good means by which to support R&D for solar panels - it’s called the stockmarket. Find a broker who is savvy on green tech companies or do some research yourself and find some solar research companies who have some promising product opportunities. And then buy some stock in them. At worst, you’ll have achieved what a subsidy would have, at best, you’ll make a whole bunch of money which you can either re-invest or buy yourself something nice.

If you don’t have the money, then find a green-obsessed moneybags and give the information to that guy.

Part of being a good citizen is being proactive about moving society in the direction you want it to go. The technology of our information age gives great opportunity for finding out the information necessary to make effective change happen. But it can only happen if people can be bothered to do the research before they act. Saying “someone else should pay for it!” or “someone else should do the thinking!” isn’t going to help anyone. And that’s exactly what supporting solar subsidies for the sake of supporting solar subsidies does.

So I’m glad Rudd’s decided to put a stop to that.

Those of you who feel you don’t see enough of me online these days, I can tell you it’s only going to get worse.

In an unusual move, I’ve received the syllabus for next semester before it’s begun and presuming this isn’t some sort of joke I’m going to have an average of 34 contact hours a week. With 8:30AM starts every day. Those aware of how much a morning person I am not are also aware that I’m probably going to have to start sucking dick for Tamazepam in order to keep this sort of schedule. That or I’ll be recognisable by the trail of mutilated corpses I leave in my wake.

So, between that, the homework they’ll inevitably load up on us in the free time they haven’t given us, commuting, working part time, making a valiant attempt at ‘networking’ in the hope of securing some sort of employment after all this madness is over and doing the household chores my Mum can’t do anymore because of her disability, I’m not really going to have very much time left over for socialising.

Indeed, the final insult to all of this is that they are in fact still having taught classes, but it’s in useless, industry-irrelevant mickey mouse bullshit like optics and labview. Whoever created the state syllabus for this course had an unfathomable hard-on for optics, despite it being entirely unnecessary in electronics unless you’re designing CCTV systems. And, since I don’t live in England, that’s rather a niche industry.

Labview we’re only learning because we’re obligated to learn some faddish nonsense computer programming language. Ordinarily, it would be Java (which would be worse) but in this case the last course engineer bought a metric arseload of equipment from National Instruments and thus it was deemed prudent to learn the stupid, gimmicky programming language they created as well. While less aggravating than Java, it is even more useless on account of being graphical, so it’s a case of being easy to learn but productivity and efficiency plateaus really early. So I get to look forward to yet more classes of taking several hours to do what could be accomplished in 5 lines of well written C code.

The only reasoon I could sucessfully mask my contempt for the course material in the optics and labview classes was the belief that it was the last semester I’d have to feign interest in it. Now, if I feel my time’s being wasted, I’m going to have absolutely no qualms about busting out PEDro and doing another subject’s homework in full view of the teacher. I call this advanced time management.

It’s no wonder that there’s such a shortage of qualified electronics technicians. Considering that the course is structured in such a way as to leech any enthusiasm they have by woefully underpreparing them on critical fundamentals while wasting scores of hours with irrelevant trendy bullshit. Thus ensuring they don’t even have the time to catch up autodidactically.

I was at least looking forward to the last semester being relatively hands-off, so that even though I was dropped in the deep end, I could make up for the shortcomings of the syllabus. But it appears they’ve snatched defeat from the jaws of victory once more by coming up with yet another semester of worse-than-useless course material.

One of the hot political issues locally at the moment is the “Binge Drinking Problem”.

I will admit, there is a problem. One of the reasons I avoid nightclubs these days is because there’s too many idiots who think drinking way too much and then kicking the shit out of someone is a top night out.

However, government responses to this have been like something right out of ‘Yes Minister’.

They include taxes on pre-mixed drinks. This is despite numerous studies confirming that binge drinkers do not drink pre-mixed drinks, but the cheapest beer they can possibly get a hold on.

The latest however is the proposed “2AM lockout”, forbidding anyone from entering or re-entering a venue that serves alcohol after 2AM.

It’s stupid and arbitrary and won’t do anything to solve the problem. The Herald Sun, is presently going apeshit after dramatic photos were taken last night of an unnecessarily brutal bouncer kicking the shit out of an ejected patron.

However, it inadvertently shows how stupid and ineffective the ban will be in the article:

Police were forced to use capsicum spray on a patron causing problems at The Lounge nightclub at 12.15am.

As other revellers watched near the Swanston St venue, the drinker’s eyes were rinsed to dilute the spray’s effects.

The Camberwell man, 33, was locked up for four hours and charged with being drunk in a public place.

On Friday, a Tasmanian man suffered stab wounds after he and a mate were confronted by two men at 10.50pm in King St. The victim remains in hospital.

These incidents occurred before 2AM. Most of these incidents probably occur before 2AM.

This bouncer attack did indeed occur after 2AM (4:30AM, according to reports). But another article makes this salient point:

Police Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe described the photograph as “very disturbing”, and said that police are continuing to investigate the incident.

“The photograph on the front page of the Herald Sun depicts what appears to be a licenced crowd controller. If that is the case, that’s not the behaviour that we expect from crowd controllers,” Mr Walshe told a press conference this morning.

“Crowd controllers are licenced and employed to provide security and safety around venues, not for getting involved in physical altercations with patrons.

So the problem was the sober crowd control officer allegedly going far beyond his job description and getting all Judge Dredd on someone’s ass.

So, unless there’s some sort of secret switch on the inside of crowd control officers heads that causes them to go psycho after 2AM, this lockout law isn’t going to do anything but fuck up Melbourne’s nightlife.

I believe Australia’s drinking problem is primarily cultural. Alcohol abuse has long been considered an acceptable form of self-medication in Australian culture. I also believe that many people work too hard and then overdo it in what little free time they have.

I do hereby predict that the next bubble is going to be an oil bubble.

See, the housing bubble and its associated credit bubble happened because all sorts of people had this naive notion that housing prices were always going to go up, no matter what, so it was a 100% safe investment to stake your entire fortune in.

And this all went lovely for a while, until that whole subprime credit crisis thing.

Well, if there’s one thing about the market, it’s that, as a representation of the collective consciousness of humanity, it NEVER learns from its previous mistakes. Even if that mistake happens a few years ago, people will insist that NO, IT’S COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THIS TIME!

So, I already see the beginnings of people madly rushing to cash in on the rise in oil prices and driving the price up for no good reason other than because they can and figure it’ll make them richer. Now, this will work out fine, until some point a few years later when the bubble burst either due to overvaluation, dips in demand (possibly due to economic recession caused by high oil prices), new exploration increasing supply, new technology increasing supply and most likely all of the above at the same freakin’ time.

I’m writing this, so that in a few years time when this happens, after several years of everyone telling me I’m a kook I can go NEENER NEENER! I TOTALLY SAW THIS ONE COMING! I PWNZOR YOU AT ECONOMICS!

Clothes shopping is something I am generally loathe to do, due to the sheer depressing difficulty in finding anything in my size that isn’t utterly ghastly.

At first, being the cheap bastard that I am, I went to K-mart in the hope of finding something relatively inexpensive. Admittedly, they have improved somewhat and there was cotton shirts available in a size that fit me. It’s just that they all had these stupendously ghastly patterns on them.

I do not look good in patterns. I am generally loathe to wear them because patterned shirts are very much a skinny man thing. If you’re not skinny they just make you look even more fat.

Despite this, and despite the general trend towards increased huskiness, cotton shirts in plain colours simply cannot be found anywhere. Especially not in larger sizes. This bothers me incredibly and I wish I knew who I could write to, to suggest that they make them. Although I’m guessing I’d probably have to order them, size unseen, from America or something.

Speaking of which, after checking several clothes stores and finding nothing in my size except utterly horrid polyester numbers, I was feeling pretty damn angry and dejected. As E says “I like my clothes natural and my music synthetic”. Also, cotton shirts are something of a necessity for me because I work with electronics so much. Synthetic clothes build up too much static which can ruin a whole days (or even several weeks) work in one zap.

Also, I’ve been wanting to get more proper shirts. With buttons.
I’m tired of t-shirts. While they’re nice and convenient, wearing them every day makes me feel slobby and immature. I want classier shirts.

However, it occurred to me that there was at least one clothing store in Eastland which had clothes which were American designed - Jeep.
And all I can say is “God Bless America!” because finally I was able to find some shirts which fit comfortably and looked good. I also managed to find some good stuff in Gazman - they are less reliable than Jeep, but their clothes are more classy. Clearly those stores should be my first point of call in future when I’m looking for new clothes.

I’ve been hearing on Joy FM some rumors from those involved in the rag trade that there’s been some people playing funny buggers with regards to sizing. Namely, fashion companies have been trying to rip off Chines textile factories and they hit right back by making the sizes slightly smaller in order to shave a few percentage points off the cost of material. As a result, sizes that used to fit are now too small.

Of course, this will probably come off to some people as the pathetic excuses of an expanding lardball in denial. But frankly, I haven’t got that fat. Also, when XL shirts in Jeep can fit me lovely but anything smaller than 4XL in K-Mart is unacceptable, I think it’s quite clear that any sort of standardisation in sizing has gone right out the window and serves as nothing more than an index of how well the parent company treats its foreign textile workers.

Mind you, none of this was cheap. I had to drop about $300 in order to get 5 good shirts. But at least they’re well made and should last me quite a long time. Soon, I think I’m going to have to address the matter of getting some new jeans.

Also, I think I’m going to have to add “much easier to find clothes that will fit” to my list of reasons to emigrate to the USA.