1278 lines
70 KiB
Plaintext
1278 lines
70 KiB
Plaintext
I stashed an unfinished copy of this file in the directory where you find this
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file now. Go read it all again. Much has been added.
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File: losing_it.txt
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Content: off we go into the first months of the rest of my life.
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Life's going on. Fuck, january is nearly over.
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Randwick seems to be a place I return to a lot, and when I go there I see
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a lot of people I know, generally by accident. I dropped in and saw old
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Mary again, but she didn't have much time to talk since she was off to
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dinner in the retirement hole (l and m are close on the keyboard but
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that's not a typo). I bumped into my old protein biochemistry lecturer
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Gary King on the footpath, and we had a bit of a yack about information
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theory, he's heard of Stormo's work but Schneider is much better, I said.
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I hadda chat to Graham so I know what I'll be doing for work this Feb, but
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it's sub-optimally configured, there's a 3hour hole in the middle of the
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daily schedule, for which I don't get paid. He's been trying to get me
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interested in a phd for aaages and I told him a while ago about my uh,
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foreshortening but he's still trying to get me interested in an
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immunological approach to fraud detection. I read someone's hons thesis
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about this, and although it was interesting of itself the error count
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(from the biologist's perspective), and the crude nature of the project
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when generally compared to what is actually implemented in living
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organisms made it a somewhat annoying read. Anyway, fuck it, other things
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interest me. How much information does a molecule contain? Quantify that
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for the general case, and suddenly you know what's the *real*
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computational load required to run life. It's all a computer, implemented
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chemically, but saying that's silly until there's math to support it.
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I went to see Dave Goldstein, the staff specialist out at Prince of Wales,
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recommended to me by Paul. His office waiting room is populated by people
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who look like they're dying, either exhibiting that grey pallor of the
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metabolically broken, or are totally devoid of hair... eyelashes,
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eyebrows, the works. There are posters on the wall about a wig library
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for these people whose hair has fallen out entirely. I asked him why he
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got into oncology and he mentioned it was 'cos his dad was killed by brain
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cancer. Um. Yeah. I asked for that. I guess if he has any baggage it's the
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right sort. He reckons chemokines such as he is able to administer
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(interleukin, interferon, inter-galactic-hyperdrive, inter-yer-arm) apart
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from being as expensive as hell are gonna make me very, very sick, for
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very likely bugger-all benefit, and if I do decide to take 'em it should
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be when I'm full of lumps. If I'm slugged out in bed for six months,
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that's very likely to be a total loss unless I'm full of something
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aggressive which would wipe me out in less than six months. It cures about
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three percent of people.
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There's some vaccine stuff going on in Brissie and Melbourne, which might
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make use of the chunk o' kidney tumor I kept on ice, but I'd have to go
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down there and check it out. There's also some experimental (read: failure
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prone) vaccine stuff going on with POW in July, and I've volunteered to be
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a guinea pig for that. It's a vaccine which works by provoking an immune
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reaction to your own angiogenesis signalling proteins, which I imagine
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might prove something of a problem since I can see it inhibiting healing
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and regrowth which requires microvascularisation to work properly. Trust
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your mechanic? Uh, no.
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Bill The Lump was still palpable. I asked if someone'd suck some of Bill
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out and slap it on a slide and he said he could arrange it in a few
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seconds. Cool. Finally. I went upstairs to the lab services level.
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The FNAB (fine needle aspirate biopsy) happened in a small room just up
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the corridor from where I'd spent a year doing honours in pathology in
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Bill Rawlinson's virus research student torture chamberrrr, uh, yeah,
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laboratory.
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A chap with more k's and z's in his surname than is normal for anyone of
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non-Polish origin gently aimed a 25 gague needle at Bill and sunk it into
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my neck, which didn't feel pleasant but didn't feel too bad either.
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Withdrawing the plunger to create a vacuum, and moving the tip around to
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grab as many cells as possible, he used the syringe to suck some of the
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guts out of the node. He removed the needle, slapped the contents of the
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syringe barrel on a slide, stained it, took it to the next room and gawked
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at it through a binocular stereomicroscope, and came back to tell me it
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had abnormal cells in it. Well, duh. He wanted more tissue so went in
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again with a 23 gague needle (fine, but noticable, like a REALLY BIG
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mozzie) and sucked out some more of the lymph node's guts. It'll take 'em
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a couple of days to get it characterised properly. He's encouraged that
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it's smaller. I'm not fooled.
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I feel sort of ashamed to say I was shanghaid on the Newtown footpath by a
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bunch of very smooth (what did Joss call 'em? Chuggers?) spruikers,
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looking for donations for the World Wildlife Fund. Fuck, signing up was a
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painful process, but by the time I'd filled in the form I'd come to the
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conclusion that I'd been had - I was prepared to cough 'em bux for a year,
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but there was no `end date' on the form. Anywhere. I felt like a prick
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when i walked into the bank the next day and closed the bank account to
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which they had monthly auto withdrawl authority, and started another one,
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but fuck 'em, if enviro charities are gonna be greedy, they can fuck off.
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I notice you *can* tell these people you're not gonna live long enough to
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see any benefit to the environment from your donation and they won't care.
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Maybe my susceptibility to these people is some sort of diagnostic clue
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that I am not really convinced I'm dying, but maybe not. Rather like the
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paired facts that I'm a pill-popping freak but I just don't have any
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resistance left against the gustatory attractions of the humble tim-tam.
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Next day I did most of the fiddly renov bits in the sibling's kitchen and
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it's starting to look fit for human habitation again. Amazingly, before I
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did the second coat of paint under the benchtop, there was already
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something-or-other splattered on the freshly painted wall, 'cos she
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doesn't aim at anything, like, say, the garbage bag, when disposing of her
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garbage. The new pine (I choose the knotty plank because it has more
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character) shelves are cut and mounted, the oven top has a new circuit
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breaker, we're ready for the next coat. The usual filth is already piling
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up in the sink.
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I also fixed her bedroom light, which she broke while trying to change the
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bulb, which is diagnostic of (why is there no character on keyboards for
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biting one's tongue?) ... well, a certain level of mechanical ineptitude.
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I replaced it with something made entirely of metal so she'll have a
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harder time trying to destroy it.
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In the arvo I was trawling the 'Clan list. Lots of people are bitchin'
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about how the Port Kembla copper smelter is suddenly submerged in a thick
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soup of security dweebs (driving teensy little security cars and
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pretending they're V8's) after last week's mass expedition. I thought that
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I should go check out a storm drain near Guildford, discovered by Stray,
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and mentioned enthusiastically by someone-or-other who had explored it. Of
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course it pissed rain just before I left.
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It's off Duck River. Fuck River is the cognomen a tedious drain which Melb
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clan found on their first northern foray into Sydney, and the poor
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reputation of the drain so named has discouraged any exploration on the
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banks of the homophonic Duck River of which it is a minor tributary. We
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did not, by the way, see any ducks.
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It had rained heavily in the late arvo, everything was damp, the flow was
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up. Siolo and Stray arrived. Access was via the outlet, which is a massive
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concrete-walled sediment pond, in the middle of the only remnant of clay
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plains paperbark swamp forest anywhere in the entire Sydney basin - the
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rest has been flattened over the last two centuries so people can have
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sports fields for important stuff like soccer training. Getting in was a
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little bit hard core; after walking through the reeds which were all blown
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flat by the flood surge, we had to pass through a sump and while walking
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in we were all submerged up to our nipples in fresh, clean, cold rainwater
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- exhilarating after a hot sticky day. We climbed out dripping with drain
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juice into an unusually huge pipe, about three metres diam, with almost no
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graffiti on it (the local bomber crews and tag artists are presumably
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dissuaded by the swim). It has a couple of funky rooms, some shape
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changes, and comes out at a mega-security fence with air-tube vibration
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sensors tied to it, in the other end of the tiny little remnant of
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paperbark forest for which this drain is the hydraulic linkage. So we went
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back down the drain and came out where we got in. I think Siolo got some
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shots of me with my shirt off up to my armpits in drain outlet pondwater.
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He tells me Fishie's had the Cave Clan logo tattooed on his arm. Wow.
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Fortunately for you, reading this rant, some of my days disappear in a
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haze of mundanity so trivial it isn't worth the effort of recording. The
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'net's full of enough crap as it is. So you miss a tedious thursday. I
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think I got up a tree with a circular saw and discovered I preferred my
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machete anyway. Whoopee.
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Leakage. Arr. Dontcha hate it when the oncologist sends a report to yer
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referring doctor, which happens to be yer dad, and it contains details
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you'd prefer yer dad didn't know, like, how when you admit frankly to yer
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oncologist that you `have a regular partner' and it ends up in the summary
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notes sent to yer dad in the post later on? I've gone to some effort to
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keep my carnal involvements right the hell off their radar. The phrasing
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is awkward.... there _is_ a person to whom I am known carnally on an
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semi-frequent basis, but I don't `have' them, I don't own or control them
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or anything like that, and she's happily shagging other people too with my
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blessing - this is hardly a regular partner, in that sense. But a small
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slice of my private life is revealed to dad nevertheless, that I'd prefer
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he didn't know. The amusing irony of this is that he knows who this person
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is in rather greater detail than I do, in some respects. Dad's her
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gynaecologist.
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Friday night was kind of amusing. Spectacular lightning crackled over
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Sydney, feral megajoules crash-burning their own electricity grid into the
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black sky with miles of galvanotactic varicosities, pissing short photons
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which lingered momentarily on our scotopic retinas like evaporating
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graffiti. I watched it from the windowsill as it flash-froze the passing
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cars to the road in its random blue strobelight. To the backdrop of this
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lightshow I discovered my load of cannabis cookies have passed their
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get-stoned-by date, but this didn't matter especially since the atmosphere
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was quite pleasant anyway. Willow said it was gonna be a non-clan
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gathering and most of the Sydney Clan turned up (including Fishie and his
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VERY BIG tattoo). People ripped .mp3s off the Kazaa peer network, drank
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wine, bitched about their lives in mundane, non-drain space. We staggered
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out into the drizzle at about 3am. Two small, poorly vented rooms, and
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arrrr shit why must people smoke? It makes my eyes hurt, and makes me
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smell bad.
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Here's a three layer headfuck. See if you figure it out before I reveal
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it.
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I slept on the couch at Wolfie's new place, where I discovered an
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identical copy of the hi-fi I hauled out of the dumpster. Maybe there's a
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manual for the hi-fi somewhere in the place, I am still fucked if I can
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drive that equaliser thingo without some instructions. Just at the mo, I
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dunno if the people who live there quite trust me. They had chained their
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two bicycles together, to the building's plumbing, by some steel cable and
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a combination lock to which they'd forgotten the combination. They asked
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me to break the lock to free their bicycles. After a few minutes trying to
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do so with their inadeqate tools (eg, screwdriver with easily breakable
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end) I looked at the lock and remembered my first childhood encounter with
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one of these things which would have been when I was oh, six. I wonder if
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... I thought to myself. I remember its combination, too. 2136.
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Confident in what I remembered of the lock design, I straightened my arms,
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gripped the opposite ends of the lock in each hand, tightened my fingers
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hard, stiffened my wrists, and parted my elbows which flexed the device
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hard enough to snap its spindle. Pretty good for a limp-wristed computer
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geek. I'm not superman, by any means. I exploited a classic design
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stupidity where by adding more theoretical security, the system is made
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physically weaker. This is more common than one thinks. In engineering,
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it is the use of a beam so heavy that it can't hold up its own weight. In
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cyptography, it is the use of a cyptographic algorithm which by its very
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complexity renders the machine on which it is executed subtly broken. In
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locksmithing, it's usually a tradeoff in convenience for security. Having
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to carry keys is the price you pay for the inability to remember numbers.
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These combination locks come in two kinds: four digit (10000 combinations)
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and five digit (100000 combinations). Although by adding one more rotor
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(ring with ten digits on it), they've increased the time it'd take someone
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to go through the combinations by a factor of ten, it was the additional
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length of the lock body with the additional rotor on it which made it long
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enough for me to have enough lock to manually grab in order to exert a
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torque sufficient to snap it. And yeah, like anyone's gonna try and pick
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through 10e5 combinations let alone 10e6. Worse, if you look at the
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combination mechanism from the outside it looks heavier and tougher than
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the cable to which it is swaged, but the combination mechanism exacts a
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toll in cross-sectional integrity greater than the benefit gained by
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having a combination lock at all. A cylinder lock is not dependant on the
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physical toughness of its decoding mechanism, whereas a combination lock
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is.
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End headfuck.
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Are you getting an idea how my head works? The explanatory paragraphs I
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write, like those above, are the very convincing, logically espoused,
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cover-up for the truth, which is in this case, : if they'd gone to the
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effort of building the lock out of something other than a pisspoor
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subspecies of metalliferous Taiwanese dogshit I'da had no chance busting
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it with my bare hands.
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How can I rely on what I think in a mind which only occasionally catches
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itself pulling the wool over its own eyes?
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I can't, but I've spotted it this time. The whole lock paragraph is a
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diversion, to the quiet thought that while I lay on the couch at Wolfie's
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place completely aware that I'd much rather be curled up on her mattress
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enveloped in her waste heat, I wouldn't let myself feel bad for not being
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there. But I wanted to be there and wanted to feel bad for not being
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there. I was sorta just frozen in the neutral zone. What's going on...
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what planet am I on at the moment?
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It's worse. The logic, the vocab, are a veneer of rationality over what I
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suspect is a lot more churning than I'm ready to let escape into my
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keyboard. I should be writing out of the other side of my animal, the side
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which laughs and gets cranky and everything else from depressed to horny
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to elated. But they don't write well. Or I don't write them well, or
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something like that. Or they want to say things I don't want to hear.
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Wolfie's got a lot of stuff on her plate at the moment from her last
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relationship anyway, and I'm sort of torn between further involvement with
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her, and staying outta there, and its partly 'cos I don't think she needs
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the baggage I'm starting to sling around with me about being on the brink
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of carking it. It's an unfair card to play on people, but it's an unfair
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card to be holding, too. I'm bored of this irksome mortality. I don't want
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to be dead until I'm actually dead.
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Speaking of bringing that about it turns out I can save the azide for
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another task. There's a great patch of ricinis communis on the railway
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siding not four km from here. The seeds are full of a 70kDa two-part
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albumin protein notorious for its ability to bind irreversibly to
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ribosomes and thence block peptide synthesis. The dosages are tiny, ng's
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per kilo, much better than electron transport chain inhibitors. I just
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don't know how fast it acts. Big proteins take a while to diffuse, I
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suspect.
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Sat 24
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I was on King St, and I bumped into Lini, a woman with whom I was in a
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relationship for about five months a couple of years ago. Her hair had
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changed. Her *eyes* had changed (on closer inspection this was due to some
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wierdo contact lenses she's wearing... yeah, like someone half Japanese
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and half Chinese is gonna have green eyes). I haven't seen her since she
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left the country to go to France ostensibly to study but she ended up
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wandering around most of Eastern Europe. It turns out she's been back
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since October but never looked me up. She got engaged to someone she met
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in September 2002 while she was in the loop with me. She said I hadn't
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changed a bit. I'm wondering, is there something about my personality
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which means I'm finding myself to be frequently a last-shag before
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marriage, or is it demographic, or statistical? I'm glad she's out there
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doing whatever she's doing.
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------
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Why, you might be asking yourself, was this file called losing_it.txt ?
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I think it's 'cos I'm letting go, which might be another way of saying I
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think I'm losin' my grip. I can't decide if, in the light of my
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carb-hungry tumor load, my chowing into a bowl of pasta is diagnostic that
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I haven't quite accepted my mortality, or that I have accepted it and, a
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metabolic kamikai pilot, I am pushing the throttle forward, diving
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downwards faster, waiting to be claimed by the ascending angry plumbous
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rain or the indifferent, frozen hydrous wastes stretching in every
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direction. Provoke it or not, it'll kill me.
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My immanent eschaton is distracting me, eating my brain. It follows me
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into the shower, into women's bedrooms, out onto the highway, it goes with
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me to dinner and I swallow it with breakfast. Broken bits of poetic stuff
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are falling into my stream of awareness, and I'm not even motivated to
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flesh out any sort of rhyming structure or metre or even polish 'em up
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like I used to.
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if i seem diverted
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it's not quite knowing why
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that i persist in living
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now i'm condemned to die
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i don't know why you hold me
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nor why i'm holding you;
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seek a place to hide
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from blank despair is what i do.
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grasp me, clench me, anchor me,
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convince me that you know;
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hold me gently if i come,
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and tightly when i go.
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But... whooah. Weepy emotionality aside, it really does focus one's
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attention on how cool it is to be alive when the alternative is just
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around the corner.
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It's saturday
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I just did something rude. Dad mentioned that Frank and Trev, who invited
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me out to dinner with them on the 30th, rang up and at some point in the
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conversation they had, Dad decided he'd come along. I mentioned if this
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was the case, I would not go. The deal was, Frank, Trev, Me, chat. I am
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not gonna sit there and politely spectate as these three guys, dear as
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they are to me in various ways, chat about the same stuff they've talked
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about in my absence for the last thirty years and anyway dad will not be
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able to not tell me to mind my language when talking to his workmates of
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the last three decades, which he couldn't help doing if he was there. No
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bait'n'switch, thanks. So I told dad, who said ok, he won't go. I love the
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guy dearly but not when he's in a setting which makes him behave overly
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parentally in public.
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Sun 25th. I saw the final Lord of the Rings flick today, which aside from
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everything else blew my head off simply by being so cinematographically
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vast and varied as to exceed my understanding of how they could possibly
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make such a work and do it so well. Dad liked it but he didn't see the 2nd
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one in the series, so he didn't understand it.
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I notice on the 'Clan list people are talking about how 10 people did the
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Big Crawl In to the Big Day Out through the drainage in Homebush, and saw
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the show for the nth year in a row without paying a cent. Aphex Twin was
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muddy but apparently Peaches was OK. Cool 8-)
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I have cleaned out the back work shed, as a consequence of my recognition
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that many of the things in it were things I had acquired for use in my
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forseeable lifespan, a parameter which has now changed, so I've flung a
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lot of stuff. This has the happy upshot that there's more room in the tiny
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outbuilding. Some of the stuff has now been installed as I had intended to
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do for ages but never got around to it - an aluminium vent grille in the
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door and a half-horsepower (about 370 watts) centrifigal blower I
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scavenged from a roadside in Arncliffe in 1997 are gonna stop the place
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from being so damned hot and stuffy in summer, and will have the handy
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additional property of pulling solder fumes, oversprayed paint, solvent
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vapours and such away from me as I work. The blower is quiet but moves
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some serious air. Red jarrah sawdust and aluminium shavings made an
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interesting mix of colours on the cement floor. I put a new power cord on
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the 1967 10MHz valve-driven Tektronics storage CRO I own, since the old
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cord had *depolymerised* And I found some interesting jars I thought I'd
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lost, which were interesting for their chemical contents rather than their
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actual pattern. Now, what betanitrostyrene was this, exactly?
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Monday. Austrafuckinalia day.
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Yeah, hooray. Why we don't call this Dependance Day and reschedule it to
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July 4th in recognition of our current status as an economic fiefdom of
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the United States eludes me. Every indigenous fuckin' culture which ever
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appeared here, be it derived from rockchoppin' pom convicts or the brown
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people who they took the country from a couple of centuries ago is now
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mostly supplanted by mass-produced asinine crap which either arrives in
|
|
shipping containers or is electromagnetically sprayed upon us by various
|
|
geostationary satellites around the clock. I was going through my top
|
|
drawer a couple of days ago to get sufficient ID for this new bank account
|
|
I wanted to create, and found my passport. It's gonna expire ten days
|
|
before I turn 33. I wondered momentarily if I should burn it. I am ashamed
|
|
to be a citizen of this soulless, vapid, excuse for a nation, and would
|
|
similarly be ashamed to present evidence of same anywhere else in the
|
|
world. I don't think I'll be fucked renewing it. Looks like I'm staying
|
|
home to die.
|
|
|
|
I decided to free myself from the ridiculous circumstance of being in a
|
|
monogamous relationship with someone who won't shag me. She invited me
|
|
around today, on the day she was moving house, and I knew it was gonna
|
|
involve a bit of hefting furniture, and I did it, 'cos it's just a
|
|
friendly thing to do - moving's a stress. The expected pattern has
|
|
remained the same. No, she's not going to Newcastle or Brissie yet, maybe
|
|
she's staying in Sydney (read, maybe she'll still get around to shagging
|
|
me) for a few weeks yet. Arrr, no girl, you go where you like, it's just
|
|
not fair to offer me something you're not prepared to share with me and
|
|
then deny me the right to seek it elsewhere... and she knew other women
|
|
were keen for a go at me, since when I told her this was the case (it
|
|
sounds like a bold, egotistical and possibly even false claim but I'm just
|
|
giving you the facts ma'am) she kind of tossed it back at me later as a
|
|
justification for her not offering to shag me.
|
|
|
|
Lets get down to some meaty technicalities: after about the fifth time
|
|
we'd been naked in the sack and we still hadn't shagged, I mentioned to
|
|
her quietly that I had no idea what the hell I was doing there at all,
|
|
given the predicate under which I was even in the building, and mentioned
|
|
my frustration about the whole situation. She asked me not to leave, and
|
|
yeah we did subsequently, technically, fuck. Technically is the right
|
|
word, too. But her fellating me until I'm hard, jumping on for a while
|
|
then jumping off without anyone even getting off was a dispiriting,
|
|
loveless, perfunctory waste of an opportunity to actually share our carnal
|
|
talents (and everybody has them) - I've had more uplifting moments with my
|
|
left hand. I'm faintly annoyed with myself for submitting to this leash
|
|
for so long (Hmm, Jan 02-27). Non-shagging aside, I can't say I'm gonna
|
|
miss someone who wouldn't really reveal themselves to me to _begin_ with,
|
|
but I do feel like I've missed an opportunity to get to know her... I
|
|
asked her a couple of years ago `What's your story?' and she answered `You
|
|
don't want to know.' Oh-kay. She filled me in with some of that background
|
|
stuff she said I didn't want to know, and I shook my head, wondering why
|
|
she didn't tell me earlier, it would have helped me understand her, a LOT.
|
|
|
|
As is, I can see she's just living a busy life and isn't gonna have time
|
|
for a bloke, but why didn't she know that? If she keeps this up a lot of
|
|
blokes are gonna be pissed off at her. She said she'd invite me to her
|
|
going-away party and I don't think I'll bother going. I'll be workin' in
|
|
Feb anyway. As I was about to leave she asked me if I wanted to see the
|
|
Lord of the Rings. She was a bit stroppy when I told her I saw it
|
|
yesterday with my dad. We had a date, she said. We had never set a date,
|
|
and I didn't feel especially inclined to tell her I wasn't gonna wait till
|
|
the flick was no longer being screened for us to actually get around to
|
|
point our eyeballs at it, so this somewhat bitter comment didn't make it
|
|
out of my gob. Thankfully. I'm not _that_ cut up about it. She's got her
|
|
reasons and I'm sure they're good ones from where she sits. I deleted her
|
|
SMSs which had accumulated in my fone, including such false advertising
|
|
as:
|
|
|
|
Eat my food,
|
|
lick my dog
|
|
see you soon and
|
|
we'll fuck like hogs.
|
|
|
|
So I don't even have her number now. This is the nanosecond emotional
|
|
brutality of the digital age.
|
|
|
|
And I can't email her anything by way of an explanation.
|
|
|
|
I think this decision fell today because of two other things. The person
|
|
with whom I have shared shags for most of last year returns tomorrow and
|
|
someone else has asked to shag me the following night. Goodie good. Would
|
|
it be fair to phrase it this way - I'm dying for a root?
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tues 27th. STUCCO's server's shat itself, grr. Wonder why? One of the
|
|
residents was logged into it and it died while he was foolin' with it. I
|
|
checked it out later, I think it has acquired a dodgy network card (MAC
|
|
addresses are never FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF and they have to be plugged into a
|
|
cable before they can drop a few thousand packets a second). I initially
|
|
brought around a standby machine prepared long ago for speedy replacement
|
|
in the event of precisely this eventuality, dropped it there for install
|
|
later. I caught up with the recently-returned-from-Amerikkka cookie
|
|
manufacturer at the Fish Cafe. I came back later and discovered somethin'
|
|
else happened in the STUCCO server, and although I swapped out the mobo,
|
|
the previous drive wouldn't completely boot, if froze somewhere after
|
|
freeing kernel memory. So I went back to the Ice Cream factory and, while
|
|
the two replacement machines I'd set up were installing themselves on the
|
|
geek desk, danced a carnal welcome-back dance with the Cookie Manufacturer
|
|
as rain fell on the colourbond roof. I stagggered back to STUCCO with
|
|
pre-installed hardware, a grin of contentment and hair which obviously
|
|
looked like I'd fucked in it, and had their router/gateway running again
|
|
by 2am. I slept on He-Pad's futon, woke up, drove down to a coffee shop on
|
|
Abercrombie street with Adam Smith, and en-route was lane-changed into by
|
|
a 4wd who didn't give a fuck as I thumped my gloved fist on their rear
|
|
left window. Sydney's getting insane. I think it's time to carry a hammer
|
|
in the handlebar cabling.
|
|
|
|
I scored a nice pair of steel-capped boots, some aluminium chequerplate
|
|
and a (suspect) pentium-II mobo from the Mekanarchy garbage pile, and in
|
|
the evening went off with the mysterious South American of previous rants,
|
|
for dinner and what turned into a shag with a lot of
|
|
leather-against-leather noises in the front seat of her car. Beforehand,
|
|
as we strode through Newtown looking for a place to eat we bumped into
|
|
she-who-refused-to-shag-me and had a short chat. I think she-who-refused
|
|
knew more than enough to put one and one together. I might be a slut but
|
|
I'm not a liar. The South American sent me a rather complementary SMS
|
|
later but maybe this just means she needs to get out more.
|
|
|
|
|
|
---------
|
|
|
|
|
|
THurs 29. Degs.
|
|
|
|
I finally got around to screwing some wood to the side of dad's gynae
|
|
table, but it turns out it needs more offset to mount the examination
|
|
light, so I'll have to come back later. With that out of my hair I did the
|
|
long drive north to Normanhurst. It's been a couple of years since I
|
|
annoyed Dave and Leoni. Leoni's amidst a phd and is also turning around
|
|
the direction of a centuries-old girls educational institution of which
|
|
she has been headmistress for ten years. Dave's been a sick boy again, he
|
|
and I would have compared hernia scars but his is looking too ugly, he
|
|
said. He had made his usual excellent loaf of bread, and cooked great nosh
|
|
(I mashed up some olives, anchovies, garlic, and other stuff in a heavy
|
|
mortar-and-pestle prior to his sticking it in the chook which we all ate
|
|
together later). I also heard momentarily over the 'phone from Lou, who's
|
|
in some teeny island somewhere, as far as I can tell, metamorphosising
|
|
into a WarOnDwugz footsoldier for the UN. I am wondering what to say to
|
|
her these days, operating in a framework where she knows half the
|
|
neurotransmitters in her own head are illegal under various drug synthesis
|
|
analogues laws, and she uses those same neurotransmitters to know this
|
|
fact.
|
|
|
|
"The rich kid becomes a junkie. The poor kid an advertiser.
|
|
What a tragic waste of potential - bein' a junkie's not so good either."
|
|
TISM - `Greg! The stop sign!'
|
|
|
|
I find it irksome that dear old Dave's now officially living in a house a
|
|
couple of hundred miles down the coast, because in order to dodge some
|
|
ludicrous land tax bill he technically has to be a resident there. What of
|
|
a tax system which treats its fair citizens so poorly? Michael Egan, NSW
|
|
tax commissioner, you are a low prick.
|
|
|
|
Blah blah, so what have you been doing... they asked. I'm tired of
|
|
delivering the news, hearing a strange silence and looking at the pained
|
|
expression on yet another face.
|
|
|
|
I think it's the first time we didn't say grace. Either they've woken up
|
|
to my atheism, or more likely they've dropped the custom just 'cos they've
|
|
figured out it doesn't matter.
|
|
|
|
It's been a strange conversation I've had with Leoni over the years. She's
|
|
another deeply spiritual person and we've been chipping away at the
|
|
epistemological edges at the rate of about one hour of conversation per
|
|
annum which leaves a lot of time to think about it inbetweentimes. I had
|
|
to think about it a bit when she asked the question, `So how are you going
|
|
to come to terms with this?' and I said `Um.........' with a long pause
|
|
before I said anything. As usual I didn't come out with the truth and say
|
|
that This is cancer, There are no terms, There is no negotiation; it's
|
|
blunt and the truth, but arr, fuckin' needlessly melodramatic. I think the
|
|
pause happened because I was looking for terms she'd understand. I can't
|
|
even remember what sort of dribble I mumbled, something about the direct
|
|
jump to the acceptance stage, the tendancy I have to occasionally
|
|
experience depression for a little while then go back to acceptance.
|
|
Probably some other stuff. She and Dave appear to be convinced that they
|
|
don't go away when they die. I explained to them that there just isn't the
|
|
bandwidth to get a the information contained in a human personality out of
|
|
its braincase... we speak at what, a few tens of bits per seconds? The
|
|
real allocation of data carrying capacity hangs off the front of the male
|
|
pelve, say, 5ml, with 300x10e6 wrigglers each bearing 1.6x10e9 base pairs,
|
|
at two bits per base pair on average, is about 9x10^17 bits transferred
|
|
from one human to another in the carnal act. Nature provides MASSIVE
|
|
bandwidth for reproduction, and doesn't allocate even a squirt worth of
|
|
bandwidth to provide an escape hatch for the personality that appears in
|
|
yer brain after a few years of life. Don't they get it? Ya die, ya rot.
|
|
That's it.
|
|
|
|
She does know, though, that I won't go bitching to some god about it. I
|
|
was more straight-up with Dave about how I'm gonna come to terms with it.
|
|
I reminded him of a cartoon I like, where there's this huge oaken desk,
|
|
strewn with sheets of A4 paper. The walls, the floor, everywhere is
|
|
covered with sheets of A4 paper. At the desk sits an old guy with a big
|
|
rubber stamp, and he's stamping everything in arm's reach with a sort of
|
|
uncaring grim determination. The stamp has already stamped all the visible
|
|
sheets of paper in the room. In big red capital letters, the stamp says
|
|
|
|
FUCK
|
|
IT
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Intriguing that she's as interested in The Matrix as I am. I've always
|
|
thought about it in a computation/emulation sense... peel everything back
|
|
and there's just mathematics and physics, the data transformation language
|
|
and its implementation which the universe runs on, respectively. She'd
|
|
never heard of the CellTicks in Hans Moravec's book. Has never read Go"del
|
|
Escher Bach (though they have it in their house). And has no idea about
|
|
the investigations which have gone into wether or not there's anything to
|
|
the anthropic cosmological principle as a diagnostic indicator that the
|
|
universe we know, configured as it is, exhibits any kind of design.
|
|
|
|
Dave's discovered the hilarious hillbilly AC/DC cover band Hayseed Dixie
|
|
and is sending me a copy of their cd. Reciprocally I've cooked two copies
|
|
of AC/DC's Back In Black, probably accadacca's thumpinest album.... one
|
|
for Dave and one for Dad who is sick of listening to other surgeon's poncy
|
|
classical stuff being played in the theatre while he operates. I'm not
|
|
sure I'd like my uterus chopped out to the strains of `You Shook Me All
|
|
Night Long' but I guess that's why anaesthetic was developed. I tested the
|
|
burnt copies
|
|
|
|
(generated thusly:
|
|
cdparanoia -B /dev/cdrom
|
|
cdrecord -audio -v dev=0,6,0 speed=4 track*
|
|
eject )
|
|
|
|
on the dumpster-dived stereo, and yeaah, rockin', I think I might have
|
|
driven it harder than it really wanted, since at 0dB, clipping indicator
|
|
lit, internal-organ damage volume, the cooling fan vent holes emit air
|
|
with the distinctly burnt smell of charring printed circuit boards.
|
|
|
|
"How long till it blows?" -Hicks to Ripley, Aliens
|
|
|
|
It was never a hit but "Shake A Leg" is a driving, ballsy piece of music,
|
|
well suited as background to say, a poll tax riot spread across several
|
|
blocks, and is not to be trifled with under heavy amplification. I
|
|
recommend listening to it with earplugs, so you don't hurt your ears with
|
|
blistering treble hiss but still get the required internal organ jiggling
|
|
from the drum and bass. It also helps if the actual cd player is in
|
|
another room since the vibes mess up the laser tracking.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Yeah, fuck the record companies. Like Sony needs another twenty bucks. But
|
|
they're gonna get 'em... dad's lost his copy of High Voltage.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fri. Feb 30.
|
|
|
|
It rained in the arvo, and I eventually made it down to Sans Souci, which
|
|
is largely un-navigable now. Is there something about people south of the
|
|
Georges River which means they can't negotiate T intersections
|
|
intelligently? Nope, it's the signage doesn't let 'em. No Right Turn, No
|
|
Left Turn, No Stopping, No Standing, All Lanes Must Turn Left, signs like
|
|
this stood everywhere I looked, arrr, why doesn't the RTA print a generic
|
|
All Right, Fuck Off sign and save a shitload of sheet aluminium? Maybe
|
|
nobody here drives cars or they abandoned them all on the roadside when
|
|
they realised that obeying the signage to get drive anywhere entailed road
|
|
infringement fines greater than the nett value of the vehicles they owned.
|
|
I met Trev, and he drove in his merc (which he doesn't much care for if
|
|
his driving's anything to go by) down to Cronulla to a restaurant called
|
|
the Naked Grape. Frank showed up a bit late but did indeed show up. Good
|
|
nosh, good chatting to the old guys, who as a result of being gynos for
|
|
longer than I've been alive are full of good stories, most of them only
|
|
peripherally related to their job. They split my bill, bless 'em. Trev
|
|
went for a piss before we left and a guy standing at the urinal next to
|
|
him asked him if he was a doctor; when Trev said yes, the fellow mentioned
|
|
that Trev had delivered him 20 years previously.
|
|
|
|
I went back to Trev's for additional chat and to peruse the antiques he
|
|
has accumulated over a lifetime. He's a man of rare depth and many
|
|
dimensions. He's been quite astute in what he acquires... there's working
|
|
clocks 300 years old, ceramics from the Ming Dynasty, furniture so old the
|
|
insects which have bored into it are long extinct, watches hand-made with
|
|
components so small the women who made them ruined their eyesight after a
|
|
few years, rah rah. We had a good yack about these things, and he's _very_
|
|
knowledgable about this stuff. I think he considers himself temporary
|
|
custodian of these very old things, but also accumulates them as tax
|
|
dodges - and good luck to him. I wonder if his success in accumulating
|
|
these beautiful, and incidentally monetarily valuable things gnaws at him,
|
|
or that some people envy his success in so doing. He laughed a
|
|
delightfully satisfied and contented laugh when I told him the best tax
|
|
dodge is to not waste hours earning anything taxable in the first place,
|
|
which is why I've spent so many hours in unpaid employ for my own
|
|
amusement.
|
|
|
|
He is nonetheless not clued into some important things. He reckons we
|
|
don't know the atomic structures of things like Coenzyme A (it was deduced
|
|
in 1950) and has no idea about a lot of important biochem and cellular
|
|
metabolism. Never heard of G-coupled protein receptors (which are what
|
|
make hormones act so powerfully). He's convinced that the bible's
|
|
completely accurate and believable and plausible since it happens to
|
|
include some anatomical correct descriptions of say, why Goliath (a
|
|
pituitary giant) copped a stone in the side of the head : the big dude
|
|
used his peripheral vision to see since his pituitary tumor buggered the
|
|
nerves which made his central vision work. Hence the side of his head was
|
|
exposed and copped the projectile. Great... a wave of accuracy in an ocean
|
|
of lies does not a sea of truth make. Did it never occur to him that the
|
|
boring bits which would act as controls for this sort of story got left
|
|
out of this book? Does it never occur to him that nobody from his very own
|
|
trade was there to certify wether Mary was really a virgin - and how, post
|
|
partum, could you ever tell anyway? I had to clue him into some serious
|
|
fuckups in genetic engineering before he got a clue about why it might not
|
|
be a good idea to mess with the stability of the genomes of the plants
|
|
underpinning say, the entirety of western agriculture. We chatted about
|
|
everything, ranging from epistemology to the geological processes which
|
|
led to the formation of the phenocrysts in his granite tabletop.
|
|
|
|
I stayed so long chatting about stuff with Trev that it was nearly
|
|
midnight by the time I left. Natch it pissed rain. So I didn't ride to
|
|
Newtown so who knows what R's got up to. I hope she wasn't abandoned to
|
|
the uncaring smoky winds of Zanzibar. Her blog suggests not.
|
|
|
|
The weekend was sort of boring. Both the mobos I scavenged were
|
|
deadie-dead-dead (well, a non-fixable CMOS checksum error on one, the
|
|
others are totally silent). The flautist is not, I think, quite ready to
|
|
let me go, by which I mean, I'm gone and she doesn't realise it yet...
|
|
she's dropped off her broken cd stacker to see if I can fix it. I'm gonna
|
|
do it 'cos I've never had a chance to play with one before, but I think
|
|
she thinks it's just another possibly handy service to extract from pred.
|
|
Well, it is, but I'm not feeling used. Yet.
|
|
|
|
Joe Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex Civilisations" which I have
|
|
finally got into heavily, is a bloody good book. Confirms many things I
|
|
suspected (like, why there's a neverending proliferation of roadsigns and
|
|
the ratio of bureaucrats to people who *do* stuff continually increases)
|
|
and suggests several things I didn't. I'm glad I'm dying. Don't read it if
|
|
you're not.
|
|
|
|
Arr shit, work tomorrow, enrolment insanity. Today, Feb 1, I lubed the
|
|
bike chain, chopped some tree bits around the place (dad's massacred the
|
|
ironbark suckers again but it fortunately refuses to die) and Andy
|
|
mentioned conway's / was full. Amongst other things I went to chop some
|
|
spam out of
|
|
|
|
/home/predator/Maildir/spam/new
|
|
|
|
and discovered a prolonged, churlish spew from diode, from an address
|
|
other than his normal one which I blacklisted... the spam detection
|
|
heuristics caught it anyway. Don'tcha hate must-have-the-last-wordists? I
|
|
think my spamfilter might be better than I realise.... he mentions several
|
|
times in the email that he thinks maybe my telling him to fuck off is a
|
|
result of a brain tumor changing my thinking. Maybe he can't cop the fact
|
|
that it isn't a pile of feral kidney cells which wrote the both-barrels
|
|
email I sent him, and I was in full control of my faculties when I
|
|
decided, despite my having known him for ten years, to garn geffugged. If
|
|
I was inclined to change my decision before I read this stuff, I'm not
|
|
much inclined to now. For a dude in his late 40s he's capable of some
|
|
remarkably childish sniping. Sad. Oh well.
|
|
|
|
Is it chutzpah to ask him to return to me my (purchased hardcover) copy of
|
|
"Free Software, Free Society" by Stallman? The book is published under the
|
|
GNU general documentation license... so technically, nobody *can* own it.
|
|
|
|
------------
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Back to the grind.
|
|
|
|
|
|
It's Feb 4. Work sux not because it's work but because of all the stupid
|
|
risky wasteful overhead associated with doing it, like being stuck in
|
|
traffic for an hour, on a motorbike, in the rain on the way to work. The
|
|
schedule is stupid, almost not worth doing.. there's a 2.5hr hole in the
|
|
middle of it, and say an hour each way travel time, I'm spending about as
|
|
much time on the road as I am doing the work. The enrollment system has
|
|
been broken for oh, eight years, and will never be fixed because it's a
|
|
creeping horror of code mish-mash which nobody wants to attempt to repair
|
|
for fear of making it worse and it interoperates with other systems which
|
|
would also have to be adapted to changes made to it if it were fixed.
|
|
Because of this brokenness there is generated a time-wasteful paper trail
|
|
roughly three times the size it needs to be, which assumes one needs to do
|
|
it on paper at all, which one does not.
|
|
|
|
The aircon's fucked up, again, so in a room with 25 students (all
|
|
dissipating about 100 watts of metabolic waste heat) and 25 computers say,
|
|
all dissipating about 250 watts for monitors and 100 watts for the actual
|
|
machines themselves, we have 2500 watts of human and 8750 watts of machine
|
|
waste heat, there's about 10kWatt keeping the place a-swelter. It's
|
|
February and not cold at all yet, and humid 'cos of the rain. So every
|
|
morning I come in and unscrew the screws from the only two windows in the
|
|
room to get something resembling breathable air into the place, and every
|
|
night after I leave, a 'droid from Security screws 'em shut again. With
|
|
new screws, since I deliberately keep the ones they added the night
|
|
before. And I teach in my old purple SJC Rowing singlet.
|
|
|
|
There's some good infrastructure, tho, the overhead VGA projector means I
|
|
don't have to write on the whiteboard. Much better when I tie the
|
|
projector screen to a heavy object, however, since it prefers to scroll up
|
|
into its tube when let go. When the machine in front of me (which I use to
|
|
feed screens full of code fresh off my fingertips onto the projector
|
|
screen) crashes since it's running WinXP, I really get the shits. I hadda
|
|
revert to the never-crashes whiteboard technology after I'd slapped in a
|
|
load of weirdo hypertext link code which nobody had ever seen used before,
|
|
to call things like news feeds and so on. What year was this again?
|
|
|
|
Actually in the later half of the week I've reverted to using Knoppix3.2
|
|
GNU/Linux which doesn't crash, ever. So I've burnt some Knoppix3.2 (a
|
|
bootable, runs in RAM, German gnu/Linux distribution) cdroms which I will
|
|
give to the students tomorrow (students cannot resist free stuff) so they
|
|
have a really good distro' to get acclimatised to as an alternative to
|
|
GatesEmpireSoft. It's kind of fun watching people's eyes open when I show
|
|
'em how to write code. Most if not all of these people have never coded
|
|
anything in their life so some of the concepts are pretty alien and the
|
|
persnicketty, error-intolerant nature of the 'pootas scares 'em. In my
|
|
morning class I am the only blonde in the room and some of the kids (they
|
|
*are*, some barely into their twenties, reeking of the innocence which
|
|
comes from sheltered upbringings) have unpronouncable names from places in
|
|
Asia I'm only aware of dimly. Bright young things all, just 'poota
|
|
illiterate. The students approach these semiconductor wonders unaware that
|
|
they, themselves, are fundamentally alike as far as thermodynamics is
|
|
concerned, except the meat of which they are made, in which they live and
|
|
think and feel, is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than the
|
|
silicon in front of them, and has a development lifecycle measured in the
|
|
aeons.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Stacks
|
|
|
|
The days are full (I mark the roll and tell anyone they can leave any time
|
|
they like, I'm not a gaoler!) and at night I've been working on the Sansui
|
|
CD stacker belonging to The Flautist. Here's the deal: it's jammed, not
|
|
working, not ejecting the 10 CDs trapped inside it either. The rig cost
|
|
about three hundred bux. It contains ten CDs, which are priced at $30 x 10
|
|
plus the time/effort of locating the replacements if you lose your
|
|
existing copies, so it's about $600 worth of exposure she has entrusted to
|
|
my hands... plus the emotional loss if you lose your *music*. It is a
|
|
fascinating bit of engineering but I had to unscrew, unbolt, desolder,
|
|
prise apart, unfold, unhook several layers of stuff to get the cartridge
|
|
out (rescuing 9 cds) and peel off several other layers of metalwork and
|
|
circuitboard logic to rescue the last CD - a job that also required a
|
|
certain amount of fuckin'about with alligator clips and hookup wires and
|
|
DC power supplies to momentarily brute-force the motors which operated the
|
|
transport gearing, enough to get the freakin' thing to relinquish its grip
|
|
on the last disc.
|
|
|
|
It took about three hours to strip it down. I rebuilt it in about two
|
|
hours (no parts lost, broken, etc either) and returned it all to her and
|
|
she reckons it works but I told her not to trust it: use copies of the CDs
|
|
that are important to you, don't leave 10 CDs in it all the time, minimise
|
|
your exposure I sent in an SMS to a new SMS she sent me. I do this stuff
|
|
well and I taught myself. Would I charge the usual $70 an hour to do this
|
|
stuff? Hmmmm. Maybe. I don't want to see the insides of it again if it
|
|
breaks after I warned her not to trust it.
|
|
|
|
Dark Izzy was updating the ink job on the Flautist's leg when I went to
|
|
fix Mekanarchy's router after they changed DSL providers - a task made
|
|
much harder since David the mega-body piercer deconfigured a lot of the
|
|
DHCP and rc.local settings, and TPG as usual were not forthcoming about
|
|
the system settings in an unambiguous manner.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Plotting
|
|
|
|
I more closely observed the devastation where dad had done a sly, brutal
|
|
prune on the suckers coming up from the stump of the termite-stricken
|
|
hardwood tree in the front yard. He can be a bastard at times, it was such
|
|
a nice bushy regrowth. He's legally compelled to have it, too, since he
|
|
planted nothing to replace the original tree.
|
|
|
|
Later, dad and the dog were in bed so I jumped on. The dog likes to roll
|
|
over, legs akimbo, guts skyward, so I can scratch its stomach, but I can
|
|
get it to lick dad on command, which he hates. I was about to do this when
|
|
mum walked in and sat on the end of the bed, and mentioned that we ought
|
|
to buy a family plot down at the cemetary at Woronora - real estate in
|
|
Sydney is shitfully costly and I'm all for minimising the rent on a patch
|
|
with no water, electricity or net connection. I told 'em I didn't much
|
|
give a shit if they buried me as an atheist in the catholic section - I
|
|
reckon all corpses are atheists anyway, despite what the signs say (and I
|
|
bet people of every denomination claim membership of all the corpses in
|
|
the entire paddock) - but I figure if they could tolerate being in their
|
|
place while I was alive I'll tolerate being dead with 'em. Weird... I'll
|
|
decompose with a family biologically unrelated to me, a godless heathen
|
|
interred in hallowed earth.
|
|
|
|
This'd sort of fuck up the no-cost, suicide-in-the-bush, animals scatter
|
|
my nutrients scenario, and waste additional resources digging a big hole,
|
|
carving a stupid chunk of rock (I'd prefer 316 stainless steel anyway)
|
|
with my name followed by a meaninglessly pretentious epitaph, putting me
|
|
in a box, all that crap I really don't want. And I'll need some cash to
|
|
help pay for the hole... so... where's that?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Stuporannuation
|
|
|
|
Some years ago the federal government made superannuation compulsory. Ever
|
|
wonder why? 'Cos people knew they were being rorted by the superannuation
|
|
companies, the tax system and inflation. Cash, in your hand, now, is much
|
|
more valuable than an entry in a database which says someone owes you the
|
|
same money in thirty years. The super companies profit on the value
|
|
differential between the money you pay them and the same quantity of less
|
|
valuable money they pay you back in forty years, plus and the difference
|
|
in the interest they are paid on the investments they make with your
|
|
money, and the slice of that which they pass on to you. As if interest is
|
|
gonna cover tax and inflation... naaaah. Ask any pensioner living on a
|
|
daily tin of Chicken and Liver Chumpy in fifty bux a week worth of
|
|
boarding house.
|
|
|
|
Dream on. And by the time you, dear reader, want to get yours out in say,
|
|
2030, there's not gonna be a functional civilisation left to spend it in
|
|
since cheap hydrocarbon fuels will be long gone by then, along with the
|
|
agricultural system we built to run on them. Long term, the laws of
|
|
thermodynamics and the quirks of terran kerogenesis dictates what
|
|
economists call a bear market, by which I take them to mean, Ursus
|
|
middendorffi, as in gutted, hung up to cure in the smokehouse, and
|
|
stuffed by a professional taxidermist.
|
|
|
|
|
|
During the considerable hole in my schedule today I went up to the
|
|
Chancellery to talk to whoever it is who runs the UNSW superannuation
|
|
scheme to which I have been an unwilling contributor for as long as I've
|
|
been a tutor at the uni. It turns out I have a couple of grand in there.
|
|
It also turns out to be nearly impossible to extract, as you might expect.
|
|
|
|
UniSuper is one tiny portion of an industry which is a systematic racket.
|
|
I used to work in a bicycle shop in the city and when I got the shits with
|
|
the crappy returns delivered by the Retail Employees Superannuation Trust
|
|
several years ago I was sacked for venturing the opinion that one would be
|
|
better putting it in a regular savings account. Nothing's changed.
|
|
|
|
How is it that I chuck in a couple of hundred bucks on 15/10/2001 and by
|
|
29/03/2002 three quarters of that is gone? Or that between May 1, 2002 and
|
|
18 September the same year, the fund has actually lost fifty bucks, so the
|
|
previous contribution is totally gone?
|
|
|
|
According to www.apra.gov.au, to obtain my cash, I have to either prove
|
|
financial hardship by being on social security for 26 weeks before I can
|
|
get it (I'm dying but I am not incapacitated so that'd rule me out even if
|
|
I wanted social security payments, which I don't), or I can get at it on
|
|
compassionate grounds, which aren't (this is why they call them
|
|
compassionate) - you can only get it out if two doctors (one a specialist)
|
|
are prepared to independantly sign off on pieces of paper saying that I
|
|
need expensive treatment not covered by the public health system. So I can
|
|
only get the bux out to spend them on an attempt to prolong my misery,
|
|
instead of getting 'em out to actually enjoy 'em before I die. And the
|
|
claim form asks me to quantify all my other assets... vehicle, shares,
|
|
bank accounts, houses, rah rah.. presumably to help them decide if I
|
|
should sell all these things and become completely depauperate first
|
|
before they'll let me raid my super.
|
|
|
|
As you'd expect, the fact that I'm *dying* doesn't matter half a rodent's
|
|
fuck to APRA. And they have a damn lot of cheek to place, on the bottom of
|
|
a form which demands to know your financial situation in Orwellian detail,
|
|
the following question and follow it with six blank lines:
|
|
|
|
|
|
Please give a brief reason why you satisfy the grounds for early release
|
|
of your superannuation benefits
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I wonder what I should write here for perusal by uncaring, bored
|
|
clock-punching 'droids in a Canberran office tower. Several candidates:
|
|
|
|
1) I'm dying, it's my money, I wanna spend it before I am dead. Fuckhead.
|
|
|
|
2) See the "your superannuation benefits" in the question? This
|
|
implies correctly that they're my dollars. If they are my dollars, I
|
|
should not need to show you any reason why I want them. If they are
|
|
in fact not my dollars, I should not fill in this form.
|
|
|
|
3) My superannuation fund throws my money in the toilet and it is silly to
|
|
let them continue this. See attached.
|
|
|
|
4) By the time these sequestered funds of mine are nominally released in
|
|
about 2030, they won't be worth the cost of the postage required to
|
|
send me a check for them in the post. Collapse in energy supply causes
|
|
massive hyperinflation. See Germany, 1933, and others, for
|
|
expectable financial sequelae.
|
|
|
|
5) It is incalculably unwise to make angry by pointlessly withholding from
|
|
him what is his, a dying but able-bodied man with field experience in
|
|
locksmithing, electronic security systems, and the application of
|
|
explosives to buildings and safes for demolition purposes. Do you feel lucky?
|
|
|
|
|
|
But since I don't think these would get me anywhere, I'm gonna leave it
|
|
blank. This question does not deserve the dignity of response intrinsic to
|
|
even a well-sculpted string of profanities.
|
|
|
|
It is noticable that the government (did I mention parliamentarians get
|
|
all their super paid in from the public purse and it's not taxed?) taxes
|
|
the sum at 21.5% on the way out even if the rest of my income is below the
|
|
tax free threshold. At that rate I might as well just not ever show up on
|
|
Mondays. Or if I was to go to work for forty years, not show up for eight
|
|
of them at all. Do the math. The magnitude of this rort beggars my
|
|
imagination, and I'm capable of some pretty heavy imagination: in
|
|
Australia alone there's about $540 billion (that is, $540,000,000,000) in
|
|
managed superannuation funds. Assuming the tax rate stays the same (yeah
|
|
right - it never gets *smaller* does it?) they govt gets about oh, $115
|
|
billion in tax when all of that gets withdrawn.
|
|
|
|
An annual one percent inflation robs the public of approximately five
|
|
gigabucks of purchasing power per annum. As such the 'super companies are
|
|
therefore paying off their retiring/retired superannuants out of the
|
|
contributions of those people who are still working. These people who are
|
|
still working are gonna get reamed in the long term and they won't even
|
|
know why. What an absolute scam!
|
|
|
|
Mine's not a huge pile, but, fuck it, it's *MY* money. I earned it _so_ I
|
|
could spend it on stuff, not die leaving it in the care of bunch o'
|
|
corporate shareholders and no-life fucks in the insurance industry. Who
|
|
the fuck do they think they are, keeping it from me when I'm dying?
|
|
Arseholes. I could get really cranky about this... only the extremely
|
|
stupid stand between the dying and their cash. If someone swiped half a
|
|
grand off you in the hotel carpark they'd get a couple of years in the
|
|
slam for robbery. In comparison, it appears it has been legislated that by
|
|
superannuation, not only we are robbed but also that we pay the robbers to
|
|
rob us. Crime pays, and pays very well.
|
|
|
|
Copious whinging aside, looking at it another way: my strategy has turned
|
|
out to be correct: minimise my exposure to the greedy shits at the ATO by
|
|
earning as little taxable income as possible. Most people'd piss their
|
|
pants in visceral ecstasy if they were only losing a few hundred bux to
|
|
superannuation tax. Most lose tens if not hundreds of k$, which for most
|
|
people slaving away their whole lives earning normal incomes is roughly
|
|
equivalent to financial arse-rape with a Saturn V rocket. So
|
|
strategically, even if they refuse to relinquish any of it to me (because,
|
|
say, they decide I'm not really dead), it'll turn out to be only a small
|
|
fistful of hours from my life down flung the toilet earning the money of
|
|
mine which they have. I win by recognising the parasitisation and refusing
|
|
to feed it. You only own what nobody knows you have.
|
|
|
|
|
|
It's the night of Thursday Feb 5 and as I absently feel my neck I think,
|
|
in a somewhat paranoid manner, that perhaps Bill is stirring again. Yes,
|
|
indeed he is. I'd estimate he's about 10mm on his largest axis. Arrr,
|
|
shit. The problem with having a convenient diagnostic metastasis is that
|
|
my emotional state goes up and down as it grows and recedes.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
---------
|
|
|
|
Feb 7th
|
|
|
|
I've been working on a kilowatt-hour meter setup for catalyst since we
|
|
never know how much juice we use running the servers (we make an estimate
|
|
- not a measurement). I scavenged most of it from the squats I used to
|
|
live in at Broadway in 2001 after the South Sydney Council cut our
|
|
electrickery off. Stutterin' Jus' Hewitson scored a hundred dollars worth
|
|
of residual current cutout device in a power point he scavenged from a
|
|
dumpster, so that's gonna be incorporated to prevent people getting zapped
|
|
working on live equipment, plus two other power sockets and a circuit
|
|
breaker. It's nearly done, but there's a lot of metalwork to finish yet.
|
|
There's already LC noise filtering on the active rail. I'll solder in some
|
|
spike-suppression MOVs later.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The novocastrian purple death faerie didn't show up on saturday arvo but
|
|
melburnian R did... albiet the best part of an hour late. It was good
|
|
chatting to her. We went for a stroll around the Newtown cemetary (which
|
|
has the highest concentration of empty alcoholic beverage cans, used
|
|
condom packaging, nitrous oxide bulbs and abandoned bongs of any cemetary
|
|
I have visited - and the locals fuck on the tombstones) and thought about
|
|
epitaphs (she thought of a good one - `so that's what's under here').
|
|
|
|
Cluckiness has her. She's making some waffly arguments about doing
|
|
everything that a body can do, in much the same way as one might argue
|
|
that one should do all the things one's really good tool could do, with
|
|
the tool in question, being preggers is something she wants to experience.
|
|
I think deep down she's rationalising. I mean, I can theoretically do
|
|
ballet dancing with my body but I don't think it's a good idea.
|
|
|
|
So she's on the hunt for some DNA (and associated encapsulation/delivery
|
|
system) to start a rugrat and I clued into the fact that she was asking me
|
|
about it, in part because she'd be interested in *mine*.
|
|
|
|
But I am a sample of one - with no pedigree and no history I cannot know
|
|
what genetic damage I harbour. Anyway I (and 90% of the populus in cities)
|
|
carry a teratogenic virus, CMV-3, to which I think the rugrat-in-process
|
|
better not exposed if possible. I'm declining for a number of reasons. In
|
|
no particular order, the world's crawling with about six billion excess
|
|
humans already.
|
|
|
|
Neonates born now will grow up (or not) amidst the Hydrocarbon Depletion
|
|
Collapse which is not gonna be fun to live in, I suspect to the extent
|
|
that they will curse us for ever conceiving them. Being dead would make
|
|
me the kind of absent father a kid would grow up to hate, I suspect. And,
|
|
this is the age of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and RFLP (restriction
|
|
fragment length polymorphism) paternity testing, and the legal system
|
|
tends to suck child support out of biological fathers of children
|
|
regardless of the contractual circumstances of their conception. She wants
|
|
anonymous code but cannot get it by asking the donors, and the donors with
|
|
worthwhile quality of code live in bodies with brains of sufficient depth
|
|
and calibre to know it they walk on dangerous ground and will not donate.
|
|
|
|
This discussion reactivated an old thought process: that the GNU GPL
|
|
should apply to the genomes of organisms. A neonate has to be considered
|
|
in the light of what it actually is, which happens to be a collaborative
|
|
biological software development project. With no known living relatives,
|
|
I'm freeware, pretty much, but I cannot donate my code under the GNU
|
|
copyleft, since hers would have to be copylefted too, on account of it
|
|
occurring consequently in the diploid rugrat which the GPL would also
|
|
cover. How would the Ashkenazi tribe to which she belongs take to the
|
|
discovery that their precious genetic material (with its unfortunate
|
|
tendancy for Guillaine-Barr and Tay-Sachs disease) was suddenly GPL'd ?
|
|
And of *course* I cannot guarantee my genetic material's fitness for
|
|
merchantability or any particular purpose - who knows what nucleotidyl
|
|
errors lurk in my Sertoli's cells?
|
|
|
|
In any case, there'd not even be any fun from the point of view of the
|
|
code transmission event since R, so she sez, isn't into penetrative
|
|
shagging any more, and she's trying to find partners who are spontaneously
|
|
into bondage and domination, but her search is not helped by telling
|
|
people that she's into bondage and domination and pain, which ruins the
|
|
spontaneity - they have to know it in advance, and cannot learn it just to
|
|
get her off as if she's some kind of technical problem in need of a
|
|
solution. Now, I'm into occasional, tactically applied mains electricity
|
|
(stepped down, of course) and can tie knots well enough that I can and do
|
|
entrust my life to them, and have a shed full o' tools capable of
|
|
inflicting anything from mild irritation up to mortal injury. She asked me
|
|
some months ago at Nomes' if I was up for a shag, and I was (for a while).
|
|
But the offer has ended. I'm getting the feeling that I'm being jerked
|
|
around again, or maybe it's that my head has changed, and my perception of
|
|
women has altered. There's no rule that says that they have to shag me, or
|
|
even live up to their offers to shag me, just 'cos I'm dying. But much is
|
|
going on in R's head at the mo... it's
|
|
like her Fallopian tubes have reached up through her peritoneum, grabbed
|
|
her by the carotids and threatened her with death if they're not somehow
|
|
filled with a pile of foreign nuclear material (and I don't mean soviet
|
|
plutonium). The clock is ticking, she knows. So it is for all of us.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
----------
|
|
|
|
Sunday 8 Feb.
|
|
|
|
Time of the signs.
|
|
|
|
On the outside of the buildings where dad has his offices were attached
|
|
two large (2m x 1m... they make a great BWONNNNG noise when they flex)
|
|
sheet aluminium signs, which advertised to the world that his partner
|
|
practised there (the other two advertised that dad has his practise
|
|
there). Since Frank has retired now there's no point having the signs any
|
|
more so Frank wanted 'em removed. So I removed 'em, and had to abseil off
|
|
the roof and down the side of the building to do it, in stinking heat and
|
|
searing glare, with dad directing pedestrians away from the footpath under
|
|
my work area. The signwriters painted the screws in, so I had to hammer
|
|
them off with a chisel, which took a long time. Once the things were
|
|
detached I belayed 'em down clamped hard in vise grips, which were tied to
|
|
slings tied to me with a harness and figure-8. For two hours of work I
|
|
pull $300. Cookin' cashflow. And Frank will love me for gouging him that
|
|
hard, since he paid nearly six times that much for the hire of a cherry
|
|
picker to install the signs but a short year ago. Frank's a mate, so he
|
|
gets Mates Rates. If he pays cash. Michael Carmody's retirement fund
|
|
deserves none of my cash.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Fuck, i'm busy, packing in a LOT while I'm on the way out.
|
|
|
|
|
|
--------
|
|
|
|
|
|
Monday 9th was a good day but the evening was better. The day was stinking
|
|
hot, I went home, got out of my sweatty dweeb clothes and into my usual
|
|
utilitarian rags, then went to Cinque where the Purple Death Faerie did
|
|
indeed show up. She's six foot of piercings, hair extensions and 2nd year
|
|
architecture student cool. She was not especially worried about Kev, which
|
|
was good to know.
|
|
|
|
By the time we'd finished chatting it was raining, a hot, steaming mist
|
|
floated up off the King St bitumen. We walked to the graveyard at St Lukes
|
|
and sat up the back of the dark cemetary and chatted some more. Screams of
|
|
DIE, DIE, DIE came from a woman (we found out later her name was Lockie)
|
|
sitting on the back door of the church. We walked over and enquired why
|
|
she was yelling this out and she said "Anger Management". We freaked out
|
|
a couple of normals (we all yelled "DIE, DIE, DIE" at them and they looked
|
|
oddly at us and walked hurriedly away). Then in accordance with local
|
|
custom the Purple Death Faerie and I went back to the rear of the cemetary
|
|
and after decorating each other with various bitemarks, shagged
|
|
enthusiastically on a worn sandstone slab as the rain fell upon us in the
|
|
spooky shadows, to the accompanyment of fruit bats fighting in the trees
|
|
and the sound of several of the beads in her hair falling off and
|
|
scattering across the slab. If there is a god, I am going to hell, and I
|
|
am looking forward to meeting all the other people who have shagged on
|
|
this rock. We rode back to her student accom in the light drizzle, and to
|
|
my amazement she fitted ALL THAT HAIR into my spare 'cycle helmet.
|
|
|
|
--------------
|
|
Feb 13.
|
|
|
|
A week of tutoring and driving, lemming-like, my motorcycle back and
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|
forth, but a tiny drop in the hydrocarbon-powered, daily metallic tide
|
|
which rushes into the CBD before 9am and rushes out again at 4:30. The
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|
roads are jammed with cars, almost all of them 75% empty of passengers.
|
|
And why do I suffer this idiocy instead of driving in an hour late (30km
|
|
in is a fair drive, I'm not gonna ride that on the treadly). Oh, I dunno.
|
|
The money, partly. But I think the students enjoy my ranting about the
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|
evils of governments, censorship and that corporations are trying to turn
|
|
the internet into television, like they've never heard anyone lecturing at
|
|
uni express an opinion before. One of my students has a 'blog (I deduced
|
|
it from the content of her first assignment) and she (almost an
|
|
optometrist, we hadda long chat about optic nerve bandwidth, rhodopsin
|
|
alleles, UV absorption in lens crystallin, Nepali myopia epidemiology, and
|
|
a few other things, hence I spent a couple of minutes looking at it) wrote
|
|
that she enjoyed the chat and liked that I knew a lot about a lot of
|
|
stuff. Wow. I'm not gonna own up to having read it.
|
|
|
|
---------
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|
From predator@cat.org.au Sat Feb 14 00:06:38 2004
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|
Date: Fri 13 Feb 2004 00:12:04 +1100 (EST)
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|
From: predator@cat.org.au
|
|
To: predator@cat.org.au
|
|
Subject: MS has perfected the art of the fucking annoying error message.
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|
|
|
I was forced to use Puke XP today to mark 50 HTML files from the students,
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|
and I have seen the following error message at least two hundred times, 6
|
|
times whilst quoting the message. I do not have the Windows Explorer
|
|
browser open.... maybe that's that they call their OS now, tho. Just
|
|
Mozilla open, and it works.
|
|
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
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|
Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are
|
|
sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something the
|
|
information you were working on might be lost. PLEASE TELL MICROSOFT ABOUT
|
|
THIS PROBLEM. We have created an error report that you can send to help us
|
|
improve Windows Explorer. We will treat this report as confidential and
|
|
anonymous. To see what data this error report contains CLICK HERE
|
|
|
|
[Send error report] [Dont send]
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|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
Natch this comes up right in the middle of the fucking screen right on top
|
|
of whatever you're trying to do. It wont go away unless you click one of
|
|
the buttons. If you click the SEND ERROR REPORT button another window
|
|
comes up which also asks you to click it. This cycle repeats about twice a
|
|
minute.
|
|
|
|
ARRR! FUCK! FUCK! BLOODY BLOODY FUCKING FUCK!!! BILL GATES DIE, DIE, DIIIE
|
|
- how is it that fuckhead is still walking around alive? Make an OS which,
|
|
if it must have errors, doesn't annoy the shit out of me in the process of
|
|
reporting them! FUUUCKWIT! This is NOT EASE OF USE. And like you'd trust
|
|
MS to treat anything as confidential or anonymous. Ha. Ha Ha HAHAH!
|
|
<megalomaniacal laugh> Suuuure.
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|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
There's also a spunky woman in her mid-20's, with an amazing grin and a
|
|
much better tan than I have (she is Indian... brown hair, brown eyes,
|
|
brown-flecked corneas, even brown *gingivae* - does she have *any* pink
|
|
bits?). She's in one of the tutorials which i don't run, which is good,
|
|
because I'd compromise my academic impartiality if we got involved, which
|
|
I'd like to, since we've chatted a bit and I think we find each other
|
|
interesting. She gives me _those_ furtive glances. And she has a very
|
|
suggestive name. Her first name is homophonic with Zyn. Meaningless to an
|
|
atheist, but most inviting, I think. Her second name is Amurthalingam. I
|
|
dunno what Amurtha stands for but I know what a lingam is. She *gives* me
|
|
one. We've decided to go guzzle some burnt arabica nut juice somewhere
|
|
this weekend and blab about stuff.
|
|
|
|
I dropped in at Harrigans on the way home from Uni. Christine hasnt aged a
|
|
day, her youngest daughter'd be 21, and is becoming like her older sis
|
|
Tash. Their kitchen is different, they've remodelled the living
|
|
room. Greg's still cycling. Nick's startin' a PhD. Wow. Model citizens,
|
|
for certain kinds of citizenries, I think.
|
|
|
|
Diode dropped in my copy of Free Software, Free Society. Good.
|
|
|
|
I've finished the CAT power meter / circuit breaker / noise filter / spike
|
|
suppressor / residual current device mains feed board, but am yet to test
|
|
it cos I don't wanna trip the house out (and still have to solder the MOVs
|
|
in but that'll take two minutes, it's a no-thinker). I put it aside and
|
|
configured my long black pants with several pieces of stainless braided
|
|
hose, for tomorrow night at Vortex. I want to convince myself that I look
|
|
as if the Borg have assimilated my leg, and after I dance around in this
|
|
crap for a few hours it will certainly feel like they have. Ow!
|
|
|
|
Sitting in front of a uni poota for two weeks let me read about carbonic
|
|
anhydrase IX as a prognostic marker for tumor survival. It's expressed a
|
|
lot in most of the tumors which kill the people who host 'em. I wonder...
|
|
does it express this stuff in reaction to local pH? Which is something
|
|
HCO3+ would buffer, you stick on a proton using this enzyme and create CO2
|
|
and H2O.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Ok, this file is far too fuckin' long. I'm gonna freeze this one and start
|
|
the next. It'll be at conway.cat.org.au/~predator/ides.txt cos it's
|
|
Fri 13th. WHo gives a shit what the filename is so long as you
|
|
can find what you're looking for?
|
|
|
|
I know it sucks to copy'n'paste. The HTML for a link to the next file is
|
|
|
|
<A HREF="http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/ides.txt"> ides.txt </a>
|
|
|
|
Click away.
|
|
|
|
<predator>
|
|
|
|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|