A few Christmasses ago, when I was running and ISP called BOPJET, spammers ruined my Christmas. I couldn’t go to Christmas dinner because I was keeping my servers from falling over due to a battle with evil network terrorists.

This year, I log on to do some email, and find 50+ pieces of MT comment spam in my inbox. I’ve deleted it all, and disabled the comment function until tomorrow, when I will have the time to put it back. In the meantime, don’t click the comment button (it won’t work).

Merry Christmas to everyone, except spammers. I hope they choke on their pudding.

This is a great little story. Anyone who had one of the first PowerPC-based Macs (as I did), will remember Graphing Calculator, one of the coolest pieces of geek software around. The official story, told by the lead developer, is an epic tale of the triumph of coolness over adversity, and has a plot worthy of Office Space. Here’s a quote:

Then things got really weird. The QA manager assigned people to test our product. (I didn’t tell him that those people were already working on it.) The localization group assigned people to translate it into twenty languages. The human interface group ran a formal usability study. I was at the center of a whirlwind of activity. Nevertheless, Greg and I still had to sneak into the building. The people in charge of the PowerPC project, upon which the company’s future depended, couldn’t get us badges without a purchase order. They couldn’t get a purchase order without a signed contract. They couldn’t get a contract without approval from Legal, and if Legal heard the truth, we’d be escorted out of the building.

Graphing Calculator is still available, by the way, but it’s not shipped with every Mac anymore.

An oldie and a goodie…

Symptom: Drinking fails to give taste and satisfaction, beer is unusually pale and clear.
Fault: Glass empty.
Action required: Find someone who will buy you another beer.

Symptom: Drinking fails to give taste and satisfaction, and the front of your shirt is wet.
Fault: Mouth not open when drinking or glass applied to wrong part of face.
Action required: Buy another beer and practice in front of mirror. Drink as many as needed to perfect drinking technique.

Symptom: Feet cold and wet.
Fault: Glass being held at incorrect angle.
Action required: Turn glass other way up so that open end points toward ceiling.

Symptom: Feet warm and wet.
Fault: Improper bladder control.
Action required: Go stand next to nearest dog. After a while complain to the owner about its lack of house training and demand a beer as compensation.

Symptom: Floor blurred.
Fault: You are looking through bottom of empty glass.
Action required: Find someone who will buy you another beer.

Symptom: Floor swaying.
Fault: Excessive air turbulence, perhaps due to air-hockey game in progress.
Action required: Insert broom handle down back of jacket.

Symptom: Floor moving.
Fault: You are being carried out.
Action required: Find out if you are being taken to another bar. If not, complain loudly that you are being kidnapped.

Symptom: Opposite wall covered with ceiling tiles and florescent light strip across it.
Fault: You have fallen over backward.
Action required: If your glass is full and no one is standing on your drinking arm, stay put. If not, get someone to help you get up, lash yourself to bar.

Symptom: Everything has gone dim, mouth full of cigarette butts.
Fault: You have fallen forward.
Action required: See above.

Symptom: Everything has gone dark.The Bar is closing.Panic.Taxi suddenly takes on colorful aspect and textures.
Fault: Beer consumption has exceeded personal limitations.
Action required: Cover mouth.

Symptom: You awaken to find your bed hard, cold and wet. You cannot see your bedroom.
Fault: You have spent the night in the gutter.
Action required: Check your watch to see if bars are open yet. If not, treat yourself to a lie-in

In a bizarrely uncharacteristic move, Vancouver’s evil parking overlords, Impark, has announced they will cancel parking tickets in exchange for toy donations. That’s really decent and human of them. What a great idea! The article I linked to has a great quote too:

“We tossed around a few ideas and it came up that our violation notices aren’t all that popular.”

Around the dinner table the other night, we had a discussion of innuendo and double entendre. I had made ordinary spaghetti and meatballs, which is excellent fodder for those kinds of comments.

So today, I saw a link to a story about Amos Oz. Be warned, if you’re reading this in a library, the link uses some bad words, so be careful. (My site has been banned in the libraries of Glen Iris because, apparently, I write content unsuitable for their fine upstanding citizens.)

Debt update, gentle reader: I don’t got none no more!

As of about three hours ago, I am officially well and truly not in debt anymore. I have zero debt. Nada. As of right now (not counting Australian superannuation) I have about A$100 with absolutely no debt. I’m not exactly very far into the black, but I’m not in the red anymore. I have no credit card debt, no personal loans, no mortgages, I don’t even owe anyone a beer. As far as I can remember. The “wall of debt” I had in my bedroom, with current credit card statements and big red numbers counting down to 0, has been replaced with a bright and cheerful map of my adopted home country.

Ahhhh. This feels really good.

Paul Auster writes music, symphonies even, but he uses words. Oracle Night is not so much a story about a writer as it is a flurry of words, themes, textures and emotions. It’s a sea change, a tightly-wound knot of mirror experiences.

I like roller coasters. One of my favourite roller coasters is the original Space Mountain in Disneyland. It’s an indoor coaster, relying more on wind effects and rapid turns than anything else for its thrills – for it happens completely in the dark. I saw it once with the lights on, the Disney people were repairing it, and I managed to peek in a window. It filled every square metre of a smallish room, twisting and turning over, under, and through itself. If nothing else, one has to respect the engineering involved in that.

John Hench, one of the Disney people responsible for conceiving Space Mountain, said:

“When Space Mountain opened in 1975, I waited for the first group to get off because I wanted to see their responses. One woman kissed the carpet, and then her companions spontaneously burst into laughter. I realised at that moment that we make people feel alive.”

Oracle Night made me feel alive. Strike that. It made me feel. I wrote about music above – the book reads like a symphony. That’s more to do with feelings than the actual prose. There’s quick and slow pieces, overarching themes, even a kind of rhythm.

The narrator talks about feeling more alive than ever, as if he’s come through a dark tunnel to emerge better than ever, and that feeling is passed on to the reader. Auster is a cunning storyteller, making the ordinary seem extraordinary, building crescendos from minute details, and providing vivid background colour to scenes that could be from anyone’s life.

Researchers at the State University of New York have made some interesting findings about the effects laptop use among males. While most media has put a slightly different spin on the findings, I’m thinking this is a pretty good method of birth control. Not only does a male geek’s obsession with his laptop make him less desirable to potential mates, therefore less likely to actually have sex, laptops also nuke the make geek’s sperm, resulting in lower fertility.

Plus, as expensive as they are, they’re still cheaper than actual children.

In a year of some pretty good musical finds, new-to-me favourites and big surprises, I’ve found something that tops them all.

Rufus Wainwright is a musical genius.

I’m going to type that again, gentle reader, so as to make sure anyone skimming this site (not you, of course) will understand that I’m serious in this.

Rufus Wainwright is a musical genius.
Rufus Wainwright is a musical genius.

I picked up Want One and Want Two a few weeks ago, and not a day has gone by that I haven’t listened to them, often in their entirety, often at high volume. When I’m deaf at 50, I’ll have Rufus to blame. Although Want One was released a couple of years ago, I’ll count it in this year’s releases, because its sequel, Want Two was released this year. They fit together like lemon and jelly.

Want One starts with a chorus of humming. Really. Six notes on deep brass, then Rufus’ campy nasal voice slides in, introducing the album, and some of the themes he’ll be touching on:

Men reading fashion magazines.
Oh what a world it seems we live in – straight men!
Oh what a world we live in.
Why am I always on a plane of a fast train
Oh what a world my parents gave me
Always… travelling, but not not in love.
Still I think I’m doing fine.
Wouldn’t it be a lovely headline:
“Life is Beautiful” on the New York Times.

He’s soon joined by a few other Rufusses, providing harmony. And the brass has been joined the rest of a gypsy band, and keeps going, adding strings and an orchestra, until we get up to a grand crescendo, incorporating that rollicking overture from Ravell’s Bolero, harps, strings, then a lone French horn… and that’s just the first track.

Before it ends, Want One visits Broadway musicals with Vicious World, classic U2-style guitar rock on the second half of Go or Go Ahead, tongue-in-cheek campy love songs on Vibrate (where I got the title of this entry from)...

Rufus is also experimenting a lot with different rhythms, and new ways to make sounds, especially in Want Two, which starts quietly, with the sound of a violin bow moving very very slowly across a string, and moves into Eastern European, even Arabic-sounding violin sounds, complete with a drone in the background. It’s a much darker beginning to the CD. You’d almost expect this kind of thing to accompany the end of the world in an obscure Polish film.

As soon as I thought I had a handle on this darker CD, Rufus hits me with a relatively plain pop song with The One You Love, with only a brief nod to the Arabic-sounding previous track. The songs on Want Two don’t work together as well as Want One, but that seems to be intentional. While Want One was a complete statement, Want Two is a collection of songs that work really well just by themselves, standing alone.

His lyrical skills really shine on Want Two, especially in songs like Gay Messiah, where he makes fun of his status as a gay icon. I’m still getting more out of the CD each time I listen to it.

This is High Opera. Big music. Orchestral in scope. Rufus’ vision here seems to be music that goes down like a mediaeval feast: Grand, dark, reverent, and sometimes messy. This is brilliant stuff. Brian Wilson has some catching up to do.

I got a letter today. Hand-addressed! That, in itself, is interesting and cool. It was air-mail from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Baton Rouge! Adds a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to the whole thing. So what is it?

I opened it.

Out fell a teabag. A teabag?

In addition to the teabag, the envelope contained a small map of the world, with a few dozen red dots scattered all over it, and a letter. I read the letter. It was an invitation to take tea with 38 other people, scattered all over the world. The person who sent the letter emailed a bunch of her friends, asking for the names and addresses of “distant relatives or friends”. We each got a letter and some tea. She said that if we all follow the schedule on the back of the letter, we’ll all be drinking tea at the same time, along with everyone else on the letter. Nifty!

Hm. I just noticed: one of the the times is incorrect. Someone in New South Wales, just north of me, is drinking tea nearly 10 hours before me. They’re in the same time zone. My time is correct though: I drink tea at 4am, Saturday January 1, 2005. Very cool.