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anagathic's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, August 24th, 2009 | | 11:40 am |
| | Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 | | 7:42 am |
Dammit dammit dammit
Got woken up by cats before six, couldn't get back to sleep, so decided to go shoot sunrise. Got out to the beach, got a few shots and discovered that the battery in the camera was basically flat. Which was fine, as I had a spare with me. Which was basically flat. I nonetheless managed to get most of the shots I wanted, albeit with frequent battery changes, and turning off the camera between shots to let it rest. I then get home and discover I'd been shooting with the bloody camera set to ISO 800 the whole time (which on a current generation DSLR might not be a big deal, but on a 5ish year old one, it rather is), so many of the shots are just kinda muddy... Grrr Oh well; I'm pretty sure the sun will come up tomorrow... Current Mood: miffed | | Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | | 7:12 pm |
honeymooning in san juan
I think I understand the point behind tropical resorts now; 30 degrees... Warm breeze off the sea... Plenty of cool booze... I love it. | | Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | | 11:41 pm |
Now marrried
Mission accomplshed. Zero casualties. That is all. | | Monday, June 8th, 2009 | | 6:32 pm |
Transit lounge limbo
I'm currently in transit to South Carolina. Because of Very Cheap internet fares, my trip has been booked as two separate legs; Christchurch > San Francisco and San Fran > Charlotte (which is actually NC, but it's a short trip from there to Greenville, SC, which is where I'm actually heading). Because of the big bundle of delay-filled joy the last trip was, I wanted to make sure my transit through SF wasn't too tight. Hence, as fate would have it, the CHCH > SFO flight ran about 30minute ahead of schedule, customs and immigration were wearing their extra-specially efficient pants, and Delta let me check my luggage in ten hours before my flight leaves. All of which efficiency has left me with a big wodge of time to kill in the gate lounge. T-mobile hot-spot daypass - well worth it. Finding the power-point that actually works - also gold. icq2go - full of win Air NZ in-flight entertainment; very much with the win; ~80 movies available on-demand on a per-seat basis, the vast majority of them appearing to be the theatrical release, not a censored airline version, including things link 'taken', 'watchmen' and 'in bruges' (and 'black sheep', for the zombie animal fetishists in the audience). Plus ~200 assorted tv episodes. And in a moment of perl nerdness (since I've been reading some perl networking docs to kill time, since my brain is rebelling at any more passive entertainment); doing my $kid = fork()
if ($kid)
{
do_stuff;
}
else
{
do_other_stuff;
}As the linuxjournal 'intro to perl network programming' examples keep doing should result in the writer being stabbed in the eye by the clarity in variable naming police. Now only three more hours of waiting here, then two more flights, with an unknown layover between them. I left home ~23hrs ago. I get to Charlotte in about eight more hours. Then a ~2hr drive to Greenville. Then a nap, I think. | | Monday, June 1st, 2009 | | 11:02 am |
Ran my first marathon yesterday This morning I'm somewhat stiff and sore. Not too badly so, considering, and I loosen up as soon as I start moving (though I stiffen right back up as soon as I _stop_ moving). Conditions were better than the met service had predicted, inasmuch as it didn't snow on us. It did, however, hail on us at the start line, and then repeatedly throughout the race. I ran from about the quarter mark to about the three quarter mark with a chap by the name of Mike, who was running his 456th marathon (yes, that is not a typo). I ended up running 4:12:53, which was a bit slower than my target time of four hours, but meant that I ran sub 6 minute kms the whole way (if you don't meet the goals you set, find some others that you did meet...). I was on track to run sub 4hrs until just before the 3/4 mark, at which point I rounded a corner into a sub-zero head wind, it started hailing on us seriously, and I could almost feel the energy draining out of me. I'm happy that I finished it, and comfortable that I did as well as I could, given my prep. I'm a bit disappointed that my prep wasn't all it could have been, having strained a calf muscle the week after the city to surf, and basically not running for a month at the point when I should have been peaking, but such is life, and motivation for next year. Split times, for my future reference: 1/4 - 1:03:55 1/2 - 2:03:56 3/4 - 3:05:10 full - 4:12:53 | | Saturday, May 30th, 2009 | | 6:53 pm |
Dispatches from my world
Running marathon tomorrow Stop Metservice has severe weather warning out Stop For snow to sea-level; expected temps, with windchill of sub-zero Stop It'sa gonna be an adventure End | | Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 | | 7:50 am |
Talkin' 'bout the weather
For the first time in a week, it's raining vertically, and only a little, and the temperature, wind-chill included, is above 0C. This qualifies as 'good weather for a run'. | | Sunday, April 19th, 2009 | | 12:10 pm |
Gardenening
We're attempting to pretty up the back lawn-strip (the relatively narrow lawn between the back of the house and the back fence. Today I finished the brick mow-strip running along the inside of the fence, and laid out the bricks that'll be edging the flower/vege garden we'll be putting in on the house side of the lawn. This leaves a number of long narrow garden bays along the fence (as the fence posts are on our side of the fence. Last weekend, while the strip was still half-finished, we planted some stuff in a couple of the bays, including a fejoa tree that I'm attempting to espalier ( Bondage gardening pics )We also planted a couple of blueberry bushes, which are currently free-growing, but may also get theBDSM treatment, to keep them from encroaching onto the lawn too much | | Sunday, March 29th, 2009 | | 12:10 pm |
| | Friday, March 27th, 2009 | | 3:53 pm |
I love heatpumps
That is all. Well, not quite all; we have a kitten. As promised, her name is Entropy. She lives up to her name. But she's _extremely_ purry, so that largely makes up for it. Simon only occassionally gives us haunted looks, so that's probably as good as one can hope for, mixing a ~2 year-old cat with a 12 week old one. And marathon training continues nicely; I've been faintly afraid of mentioning it, least I jinx things, and miss my training goal of making it through summer without a hospitalisation-requiring injury... I'm running the City to Surf on Sunday, which will be an hour of pure pain. | | Friday, March 13th, 2009 | | 4:53 pm |
On the perils of being an inexperienced coder
So I'm dredging my way through other peoples perl code. I kept coming across constructs and behaviours that make no sense to me; I can see what they're doing, but there seem to be much easier and more transparent ways of doing it. Which leaves me wondering if they're doing it the right way, and there's some sort of hideous gotcha in the way that I tend to do it, or if they just made a dumb... | | Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 | | 11:33 am |
Some weeks, you shouldn't get out of bed
So, the moving compnay organising the move of Dr Girl's Stuff to NZ went out of business. That's a bit of a worry, but the container is a ship heading thisaway, so it's not like it's going to get caught up in bankruptsy proceedings on the other side of the world... What's that? The company didn't pay the shipping line for the transport, or the receiving company? Or the receiving port? And they're collectively not going to release the Stuff until they're paid the outstanding ~NZ$4k. Which has already been paid to the moving company. And so can be claimed back through the bankruptcy process. At cents on the dollar. Over the course of 6-12 months. And now, I've just broken a tooth eating lunch. Which is the tooth that I nigh-totally destroyed a few years ago, so it's not a huge surprise. But still, it means that it's probably crown-time for that tooth, which is another $1-2k of expense that we didn't really need right now... I want my teddy-bear. | | Thursday, January 15th, 2009 | | 2:49 pm |
Say
Thanks to XKCD, I now know that OSX has a 'say' commandline command that hooks into the speech synth. My work laptop is now reciting '99 bottles of beer on the wall'. It does a remarkably good job of it, getting the phrasing and timing pretty much spot on, other than the "take one down", where it's sticking a weird pause between the 'one' and 'down'. In related news, work is still coming up to speed for the new year. | | Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 | | 11:57 am |
Some delayed movie reviews
Eagle eye - Don't see this movie. It's awful, in a stereotyped 'computer goes bad and tries to kill everyone to fulfill its moral programming' kind of way. Starring yet another computer that uses enormous banks of lightbulbs to compute, and apparently has the ability to hack into anything that uses electricity, starting with electric toothbrushes and going up from there. Body of Lies - This is a pretty bleak movie about the intelligence war in the middle east. I kept waiting for the moral message, one way or the other, but it never came. I enjoyed it a lot; the lack of a framed 'take-home' felt quite weird though. Quantum of Solace - A thoroughly enjoyable bond flick, but it felt a bit flat; not as over the top as traditional bond movies, but not as down and gritty as Casino Royale; I found myself at the end of the Climatic Confrontation looking at my watch and going 'Oh, we're two hours into the movie - I guess that must have been the Climatic Confrontation. Hmmm'. In Bruges - Brilliant. See it. A very black comedy - in the same way that I loved The Matador, I _loved_ this movie. At times it felt like the writers were having competitions to see who could come up with the most bizarre line, and then find a way to have it delivered completely in context, so you barely noticed what was being said. Definitely a 'pissing yourself laughing as quietly as possible' movie. | | 9:17 am |
Yay!
Dr Girl has her work visa (well, she's been contacted by the embassy to say that the visa's been approved, and it'll be in the mail today)! I'm impressed - she submitted it last Thursday, and (after they contacted her to say they needed some more supporting info), I faxed them some supplementary information yesterday; they must have approved it almost as soon as my fax arrived. I'd been expecting it to take until some time mid-January. Yay. | | Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | | 8:43 pm |
Things I never knew about higher education
Margins are terribly, terribly important. More so, it would seem, than the squiggles between them. Dr Fiance is, as most of you know, wending her way towards the end of her Phd (sidebar; pronouncing this 'fid' is apparently Very Strange. Who knew?) - she's defended, her committee has signed off on the dissertation, now all that remains is to get it approved by the format checkers, and graduation, here she comes. The format check has, so far, taken more time than prepping for the defence and getting signoff from the committee... In a 300+ page document, having two pages with text 3mm outside the margins is apparently utterly unacceptable, and a reason to withhold a degree. In other news, I hate word processors. At least where it comes to building PDFs. | | Sunday, November 16th, 2008 | | 9:24 pm |
Learnings for great justice
A conversation where one party thinks buddhism is under discussion, and the other party thinks it's BDSM gets surreal _fast_. | | Friday, November 7th, 2008 | | 11:25 am |
| | Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 | | 1:35 pm |
Further adventures in americaland
- las vegas is a bit of a hole
- but the cirqe de soleil shows are pretty incredible (if you have the opportunity, see zumanity, even if doing so involves selling family members or less important organs)
- met miscellaneous proto-in-laws in Kansas city, which went well - I thought I sidestepped the political discussion pretty adroitly (sidenote: socialism - I don't think that word means what you think it means). Also went sailing with proto-uncle-in-law - raced in three races as crewman, and we won two (not due to anything I did, but still...)
Other notes
- cars are, by and large, newer over here (and bigger, but that's not news)
- the money here, it is like play-money
And on a completely unrelated note, I just finished Neil Stephenson's latest, Anathem. I think he's finally written a book with normal proportions, rather than his usual 90/10 split, wherein half the plot gets 90% of the pages, and the other half 10%. He does mess with language a lot, which some people have objected to, but I didn't mind. On the whole I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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