Technology fetishism
The party made their way slowly down the corridor. Leading was Raftor the Brave, followed closely by Roder the dwarf. Bringing up the rear were the wizard Pyhus and Felonius, the group’s thief. They came to a door, which marked the end of the corridor. Raftor tried the door; it was locked. Felonius got out ... [More]
OMG. Why did nobody tell me about this before? The King of Kong. I know, I know… I didn’t actually list the original Donkey Kong in my top ten games… I don’t know what I was thinking of — it’s definitely one of my favourites. My own high score is around the 31,000 mark. It’s ... [More]
Yay. My cluster headaches have gone away, for now, even after having gone off the medication. Something to watch out for next spring, as I suspect they’ll re-appear then. Funny thing is I had suspected the medication would impede my ability to donate blood. I rang the blood bank and they said no, it’s fine, ... [More]
Damn. Superparma.com is no more. And they built the site in such a way that it seems to be impossible to get at anything except the splash page via archive.org, so the ratings they compiled may be lost forever. Groan. WarGames 2: The Dead Code now in pre-production, and aimed at direct-to-DVD. OK. I was ... [More]
1. It was what I needed. I’ve been surviving on a (slightly rickety) old mono laser printer for some time now. I decided to upgrade to a colour copier/scanner/printer, to get back colour printing, to clear out the aging scanner that is only just compatible with Windows XP, and to avoid having to go to ... [More]
Unexpectedly this morning our ADSL at home got shaped — that is, slowed down to more-or-less dialup speed because we’d used all our bandwidth for the month. Fortunately it’s not the calendar month — it’s the month up until the 21st. I could blame the excessive use of YouTube in the house, but ultimately it’s ... [More]
“Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.” — Douglas Adams, 1999 — Cited by Stephen Fry I was recently remarking ... [More]
I’ve seen Google and Yahoo put out reports on the top search terms of the year, and we’re only a week into December. (Happy Hannukah by the way.) Seems a bit odd to do that before the actual end of the year, but what the hell, I’ll jump on that bandwagon. Here are some stats ... [More]
<geekyPost> A couple of years ago I wrote a post encouraging people with blogs to make sure their RSS feeds were turned on. I thought I might just repeat it now. RSS helps people like me who have little time to go to one place to catch up on all the blogs we like to ... [More]
My friend Greg is on a quest to become an evil genius. He spotted an abandoned missile base for sale on ebay, and is trying to raise the money to buy it. He writes: “People have donated to help some ditz pay off her credit cards, some kid go to college, some stripper get breast ... [More]
Cameron Reilly’s done a podcast followup to his Age article encouraging people to “get off the bench”. Listening to it reminded me of something I once wrote: “Every person has the potential to create a great work of art; to work for the benefit of humanity; to become a spokesman or a great leader; to ... [More]
I used to be such a fast typist. From memory, in uni I could top 80 wpm. I seem to be slowing down, or at least, my accuracy has dropped. I’m not sure if it’s due to a. getting old b. the crap keyboard I have at work, which periodically seems to ignore what I ... [More]
From the Daniel’s been playing around with web stuff in his copious spare time and trying to learn PHP and here’s a blatant plug department: You know how sometimes you go to the cinema and you can’t remember which membership card you need to show to get the discount? Is it the RACV card? Or ... [More]
Ah, it’s the long weekend… perfect for sleeping in, reading the paper, lazing around the house and… updating your blog. I’m doing some tweaks, to upgrade the software (to get anti-spam filters working properly; you should see the amount of comment spam I get), fiddle with the template etc. So if you notice it looking ... [More]
Yesterday afternoon, reminiscing at ACMI’s Hits of the 80s video game exhibit — free at Melbourne’s Federation Square until May. While most of the games were running on Spectrum or C64 emulators, this copy of Way Of The Exploding Fist was running on a genuine machine. And just as it was back then, one of ... [More]
In Christmassy terms, I had a very successful couple of days — on Friday I managed to get my Christmas cards (and annual letter) to UK relatives into the mail. I’ve gradually reduced the number of cards I send every year as more people get email. I’ll do some kind of email card in the ... [More]