Monkeys on the knees

The 'Australian Vaccination Network' are a bizarre cult.

2010-08-06T12:40:00.006+10:00

Last year I had a delightful case of pertussis, thanks to the continual erosion of herd immunity interacting with the natural reduction in immunity for this disease that occurs in most humans.

This can be directly attributable to the work of the Australian Vaccination Network, a bunch of paranoid cultist nutbags who believe that immunisation is a plot to corrupt and pollute precious bodily fluids.

Pertussis, or whooping cough, was not a mild disease for me. I had not only the paralysing cough, but also the full-blown whoop, or stridor. Imagine coughing until you have completely expelled all air, and then as you try to breathe in, being strangled by an invisible maniac. Also, I'm not exactly certain that I did not crack a rib.

The 3AM hospital visit was Not Fun.

Meryl Dorey and her minions are howling loons. Pay them no mind.

Ho ho ho tee hee

2009-02-19T21:03:00.002+10:00

ksh 93!

ksh 93

Bloody hellfire.

If you don't fix things, they break

A decade is a longish time

2009-02-13T20:23:00.001+10:00

Deary me. The X-Files have not aged well.

Jolly good!

2008-09-03T17:32:00.003+10:00

Stephen Fry likes Linux, and tells you why. Good on him. I recommend the Fedora Project myself.

You'd think this wheel would've been invented again by now

2008-04-04T13:56:00.004+10:00

It is unfeasibly difficult to get a modern version of RPM for Solaris 10, either built from scratch or as a package of some sort. This Should Not Be. I refuse to use native Solaris packaging as it's awful beyond comprehension, and besides, I want to use my leet RPM skillz0rs. Also - why, yes, it has been over a year since I last posted here. Wheee! Job good!

Great Googly Moogle

2007-02-24T10:06:00.000+10:00

Signed a shiny new contract for a shiny new job yesterday. Go me.

Went out for a few drinks and a meal with some BookCrossing people last night, now my other toe is sore. Damn you, genetics. Damn you, purines. Too much beer/meat I guess, but uigar cuisine is very me-ish indeed. I regret nothing.

Start next Thursday. Really looking forward to it.

The Weekly Me

2007-02-12T15:44:00.000+10:00

In this week's headlines

I discovered what Gout is like. Not recommended.
Moved my domains over to Google Apps for Domains. If you'd love the CIA to read your mail, send me some.
Pulling beers as a volunteer for the National Folk Festival is to be my doom
Had my fifth and hopefully last (in a good way) job interview for Prestigious Company Foo

Bookcrossing this week, and I've barely touch my new stack. Oh noes!

I'm skint, so click on a link. After a year or so, I'm up to US$Bugger-all.

Colliding geekery - Linux guitar project

2007-02-05T20:48:00.000+10:00

I used to be a bit of a guitar geek, you could say - regular trips to the various guitar shops in Brisbane to see what was new, who was hanging out, and so forth. I'm kind of a Busy Professional sort-of-thing these days, and I got into choraldom as well, so haven't devoted much time to the old axe.

This project might get me playing around again. What a nice idea. Of course, it's only a short step from there to ax84.com, the co-operative guitar amp project.

How will I ever find the time to buy a C38 and build a model railway?

It's a shame all the really cheap hobbies suck. I guess there's always beer.

Feitlebaum

2007-02-04T23:32:00.000+10:00

Don't know why I thought of this today. Feeling a little insomiaish, so a quick branedump might be theraputic.

So, I'm four interviews done, with another one possible. Then there's the background check, to ensure that I'm not actually a thieving liar. Seems like a good gig, so here's hoping.

Been playing with livejournal a bit - I like the community features, and certainly it seems everyone I've ever met, ever, seems to have some kind of presence there, but so far I'm still happy enough with Blogger, mainly because of it's Googleness (I can use it as an embedded blog for other domains, like, for example, BIV 2007).

Tried the BookCrossing thing (yay pub!), and only realised I'd actually met Trainman a couple of days later.

And now, Sleep, the Sleepening.

Pluggin'

2007-01-25T11:32:00.000+10:00

Blatant plug for a mate time.

Need some plastic crafted? How about some nice new polyeurethane engine mounts? Why not try the skilled artisans at Plasticcraft (note, two Cs). Plasticcraft, for all your polyeurethane moulding needs.

In other news, I'm short-short-listed. Only the Final Probing remains. Crivens!

It's funnier without pants

2007-01-23T19:42:00.000+10:00

So, I suppose it's that time again. Check it out.

The last Australian Intervarsity Choral Festival in Brisbane was in 2000, and I was on committee. Interesting Times. This one is looking pretty good, so please lend your support.

Iron helps us play!

2006-12-01T19:56:00.000+10:00

Wow, so much under the bridge since the last post. "Stay tuned" indeed. Really need to do something about that.

Lesse. Went to Dublin for an interview with Company Foo. Despite the jetlag (which I always underestimate) I think I did as well as could be expected. We shall see.

Google Apps for Domains is fun to play with. Finally able to get some mal etc for my rambling collection of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time domains

Oh yeah, thanks Dave.

Sidderknee

2006-09-10T15:57:00.000+10:00

Heere we are. Furniture is arriving. Stay tuned.

Zoom, away

2006-09-08T08:59:00.000+10:00

So, I'm sitting in Mum's kitchen, eating scrambled eggs on toast, and I'm about to drive off to Sydney with Feebz and a box o'cat. We're staying overnight in Armidale with the Amazing Julez, then arriving on Saturday to fix up the lease. Pusscat is staying overnight in the house whilst we do the Hotel Thing, this needed because the furniture etc isn't arriving until Sunday.

Aieee, out of my comfort zone. Scary!

Drift racers ~= Furries

2006-09-04T11:33:00.000+10:00

Drift racers are the Furries of motorsport.

That is all.

It's 2006, do you know what your perl modules are doing?

2006-08-03T19:50:00.000+10:00

Plenty of things still seem to need File::Lock, despite it being ten years old and apparently predating Perl 5. The FreeBSD ports collection builds it OK, because they've had POLLUTE=1 in their configure-config for ages, but I had to build it for an app on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Here's how I did it using cpan2rpm, as I couldn't work out if cpanflute2 could pass an argument to MakeMaker or similar:

cpan2rpm File-Lock-0.9.tar.gz --make-maker POLLUTE=1 --author=robk --make-no-test

Drol is visiting, and seems to be enjoying himself gathering GPS data for it's own sake.

I'm a teapot!

2006-07-26T11:12:00.000+10:00

It never rains, but it bloody pours.

You know, a lesser man would panic.

Edit: corrected the links

So, yeah, moving on

2006-07-22T19:19:00.000+10:00

I suppose I should mention the new job.

I also suppose I should mention that I'm moving to Sydney in a couple of months.

aieeeeee!

I'm basically going to be The Red Hat Linux Guy, it seems. It'll be nice to ge back into some real sysadminish work again, and my new colleagues seem like stand-up fellows. Excitement abounds!

Vale, ex-RH-BNE hifi thingy

2006-07-12T16:24:00.000+10:00

Our stereo died. All it does now is make feeble mumbly noises out of the right main speaker. The absurd flashing light display still works fine.

I bought this from RH BNE when they sold off some stuff prior to moving from Fortitude Valley to Milton, along with a leather office chair. The office chair's castors are falling off, and now this. Might be time to actually Buy Something Decent ...

Large-Male-Sibling needs cockpunching

2006-07-01T22:42:00.000+10:00

I look forward to the iminent demise of Big Brother as a cultural phenomenon. Opiate for the masses, indeed. I hate RATM, but I fell like listening to them OUT OF PURE SPITE.

In other news, Kris-with-a-K plugged Canticum on Starslip Crisis today. Thanks Kris!

Needed, needed, needed ...

2006-06-20T07:59:00.000+10:00

It's nice to feel wanted.

Not a fan of qmail. No, not a fan at all

2006-06-13T08:43:00.000+10:00

Managed to get the Saturday night concert done.

and then ... qmail came, and the land was made ash and salt, and the skies blackened, and there was a wailing and a gnashing of gnashing things and the killing and the robots and the horror maven glaven!

Got it yet?

2006-06-10T14:13:00.000+10:00

Here's a hint.

See me, LIVE, in concert

2006-06-08T17:53:00.000+10:00

I've made a tiny leap into the big scary grown-up world of web advertising. See if you can find it.

Also, buy CD's and see me wiggle the air.

By the way, I mean 'live' as in 'live music', not as in 'not-dead'. I thought I should clear that up.

A splendid evening's music

2006-06-05T15:53:00.000+10:00

Congratulations QUMS on a fine performance on Saturday night. You did very well indeed. Special commendation to David Webster, QUMS' musical director, president (and also a fellow Canticum bass) on his conductorial debut. I really, truly enjoyed it. Sorry I couldn't make the PCP!

And Peter, you're still pretty good for someone who sucks so much.

A New Heaven - Canticum's next concert

2006-05-26T17:19:00.000+10:00

My choir's next concert is a DOUBLE FEATURE! On June 10 and 11, we're presenting a pair of concerts entitled A New Heaven, featuring works by Arvo Pärt, Sven-David Sandström, and J.S. Bach.

It's sounding great - come and see it!

And if you can't make it this time, why not consider buying a CD?

Serendipitous incompetence

2006-05-26T17:11:00.000+10:00

Heeey Laaaadies!

Just for mp, a gratuitous cat photo in a vanity blog.

So, whilst searching through my chaotic collection of digital photographs (in myriad folders and tarballs) I managed to discover the photos of my trip to the US a couple of years ago. I had hitherto thought them lost forever in a hideous rm -rf . accident, but happily my sloppy filing saved them from destruction.

Yay chaos!

I'll get them online when I sort them out - I know my Brazillian chum wanted a copy and I coul dnever find them.

I know I promised a juicy blog entry last time (with added leeches!) but, um, I didn't get around to it, what with Work and all that. I'll do so on the weekend. I might have to do some kind of drawing of a leech though.

I'm a sleepy bear

2006-05-18T19:39:00.000+10:00

Been a tiring couple of weeks, what with working and all. I've got a bit of updating to do for the blog, including my Wonderful Camping Report with Added Leeches and Screaming Kid.

Wait agog for more!

Go Me!

2006-04-26T06:43:00.000+10:00

... erm, I mean Canticum!

You are feeling sleepy. You are under my power. You wish to buy CDs.

Really, they're very good. Buying a CD from Canticum will give your a warm inner glow as a bonus.

Zoom

2006-04-25T11:28:00.000+10:00

Since I left That Company, I don't fly much. In fact, the last flight I did was to Japan and back for the World Choral Symposium in Kyoto, upon which I might later reflect further.

After the Symposium, and our tour around Kytoto/Nagoya ("if this is Tuesday, this must be Gifu") we took the Shinkansen to Tokyo from Nagoya. I like trains, hence there's an unnatural proportion of trainish pictures from that trip. One of them you see above.

Vale Australian Airlines Mk II.

Tweaking my funnel

2006-04-23T12:17:00.000+10:00

Playing with Google Analytics is curiously compelling. I thought I didn't care about the exit-analysis of my websites, but I was wrong!

Must drive visitors to site! Make pretty graph go up! Shiny, pretty graphs! Drive visitors to site! Nnngggg! How to drive visitors to site!

Revelation!

BOOBS!

Ooh, fat controller

2006-04-21T09:30:00.000+10:00

< Holocaine> Someone hit my quote file ages ago looking for homoerotic James Bond fan fic.
< Holocaine> Probably because it had the words "homoerotic" and "James Bond" in there.

Ooh, yeah, I want me some of those hits.

Homoerotic Smurf diesels! Thomas the Tank Engine the Gimp!

Pimpin'

2006-04-20T15:57:00.000+10:00

Atlassian Jira 3.6 is out, and has some nice new features. I'm liking the speed improvements due to cache tweaks, and especially the ability to ignore incoming mail with Precedence: Bulk headers. Given the hideous mail-loops we've endured, that'd be handy.

Confluence 2.2 will be out soon, the Personal Space gadget will be a good way to organise my personal cribsheet.

The weather continues clement. The pen of my aunt is in the garden. Support my disgraceful beer addiction by clicking an ad. I'm Milton, your brand new sooooonnn!

Blargh.

2006-04-19T20:58:00.000+10:00

Argle Wargle Bargle. Meetings and reports and ninety-day plans.

I don't presume to tell other departments how to do their job. It's always surprising to hear that they think they can do mine better than I. Well, fair enough, but they break it, they can keep the pieces.

That went well

2006-04-15T11:44:00.000+10:00

The concert went very well - looked liked a near sell-out to me. There were people openly weeping during the performance; I didn't think we were that bad (fnarr! yuck yuck! etc).

Apparently the state Governor was there too, along with the various grand potentates of the Anglican church. I hope I didn't pick my nose or anything.

Yes, it's sentence-fragment Saturday!

About time.

2006-04-14T08:19:00.000+10:00

This is an interesting (and overdue and not unexpected) development. Nearly there.

It's about time for a Subaru turbodiesel. To be honest, I still don't know why they've gone to the trouble and expense of designing a modular flat six, but are sill using the older EJ series of engines elsewhere. They're good, solid engines, but they seem to be at the limit of their development now.

Please don't laugh, but the VW Caddy DSG TDi Caddy Camper seems eerily attractive, given our like of ambling driving holidays and non-hairshirt-style camping.

Panelvan

2006-04-13T22:11:00.000+10:00

Interesting phone call, that one. I am reminded that traceroute is not ping, but who can blame me when ping is only of any real use in the local intranet these days? Sneaky ambiguous trick questions.

Tentative plans were to go sailing upon the briney bay and crink bold dreer on Saturday, but I'm kind of knackered and there are other things that must be attended to. Hanging out with the better half is looking like the go.

I reckon a turbodiesel AWD Impreza panelvan would be really groovy.

Wurble Wurble Sclup

2006-04-13T01:06:00.000+10:00

Well, this is fun.

Main nameserver goes down. Secondary nameserver ... oh dear, it's the same as the primary nameserver. Therefore, all our websites gradually fall off air as DNS records fall out of caches. I get my first page at midnight or so, when I'm at home. Tucked in bed, a long way away from my password files in the folder in the cupboard at work, and also a long way away from my RoboForm USB key. Also at work.

Ring service provider in the US (Hooray for NodePhone!). Can't do nothing, sir, without you lodging a trouble ticket. OK, let's try to log in then - whoops, no login info here. How about the handy reset password button? Success! Except ... with no nameservers reachable, there's no MX record, so the password-reset mail is probably still sitting in the mail queue of the service provider in question. Can they reset my password manually? Sure! All I need is the last four digits of the boss' credit card number. The big, big, boss.

I've got that joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart.

La!

2006-04-12T09:57:00.000+10:00

So as I mentioned below, I'm singin' again on Friday night. While I'm not a religious person, I can't help but appreciate sincerity of expression, and perception of art is mutable - you can create an internal discourse which maps expressive art to your personal experience.

Ahem.

Anyway, here's the description from the Canticum website.

Good Friday Musical Meditation

Friday, 14th April 6pm

St John's Anglican Cathedral, Ann Street, Brisbane

Seven Last Words from the Cross by acclaimed Scottish composer James Macmillan will be the focus of Canticum's 2006 Good Friday Musical Meditation. It is a compelling and deeply spiritual work marked by contrasting moods – anguish, tenderness, unrest, peace, to name a few. Composed in 1993 and scored for choir and string orchestra, Seven Last Words from the Cross has been dubbed by critics to be Macmillan's finest, most inspired choral writing. The text utilizes words from all four Gospels to create a sequence of contrasting and powerful movements leading to Christ's death on the cross.

It's sounding pretty good. Go see it!

Ah, drat

2006-04-11T17:58:00.000+10:00

Well, lighttpd + fcgi + php5 works very nicely indeed. A definite subjective improvement, and the Firefox Page Load Timer extension agrees with me by around half a second for my basic pages. The big catch is that mod_security is not available for lighttpd, and mod_security is really a Killer App for me, and running Apache as a proxy for lighttpd seems ... silly.

Tinkering with incidentalia

2006-04-10T20:37:00.000+10:00

lighttpd looks like it might be worth a run on a 512MB BSD 6.x box - it's not like I'm doing anything exciting with apache 2.2 as it is, and I've never gotten mod_proxy_ajp even close to working anyway. Might as well save the ram for a bigger java heap for Confluence. Atlassian was kind enough to grant my choir a non-profit license, and I have Plans. The FreeBSD Tomcat doesn't come with Apache Portable Runtime finagled in, but I found a fix. Seems a bit snappier to start and stop, and there's less nagging in the logs.

Woops+Meh

2006-04-09T20:51:00.000+10:00

... and it seems my high school's 20th anniversary reunion was on a couple of weeks ago, and I completely forgot about it. I wasn't particularly keen on going, not being a fan of the whole wargle-high-school-was-the-best-time-of-my-life! revisionary mindset that these things tend to accrete around themselves, but I didn't intend to blow it off as such. Still, guilt level is low - I have a life to live now that's fun enough as it is.

What, no gravy?

2006-04-09T20:31:00.000+10:00

Hrm. Blogger doesn't seem to have a native categories functionality, except via some round-about hacks. Oh well. In other news, Canticum, the choir I perform with in Brisbane, Australia, is having our annual Easter Concert this Friday at St John's Cathedral at 8PM. If you get in now there may be some A reserve seats left.

Yeah, well

2006-04-09T19:25:00.000+10:00

OK, so until I can work out a nice way of using a Confluence space as a traditional blog, I'll probably move back to that. Until then let's try Google's Blogger service. Seems OK from a brief look-over.