Last night: Cam’s housewarming. That house is cool (notwithstanding the tiny kitchen), and so was the party, even though the nuts playing drinking games couldn’t come up with anything exciting for Never Ever.

Today: fighting with VirtualDub. It’s the best open-source video editor I’ve seen (albeit nowhere near the awesomeness of Final Cut) … but the pre-alpha I’m using has some very bizarre bugs. I’d never before seen a program stuff up an entire filesystem by writing its data files incorrectly.

Tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night, and Monday morning: essay of doom! 8 words down, 2992 to go …

A few days ago I was excited and amazed to receive my postal voting pack for the upcoming local government elections. I mean, local government is just so amazing and exciting, that, well, I felt quite taken by the whole grassroots democratic process, shaping the future of my community, and all that.

Today I was even more amazed to receive a letter from the WAEC saying that I’d received candidate profiles which “omitted certain information”. Shocked by the apparent miscarriage of our democratic process, I took the new info sheet on the candidates for mayor, and compared it to the old one. Carefully poring over every word, I searched for signs of fradulent representations, or blatantly deleted sentences, or embarrassing typos … and found nothing. In fact, the only difference was that the new sheet included the address for one candidate’s thoroughly unexciting Web site.

There are more than forty thousand electors in the City of Cockburn. I wonder how much ratepayers’ money was wasted on this?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the boys at work quite so excited over new hardware.

That’s one of the four new Sun Fire V20Zs that roughly half my department had been eagerly awaiting. Those pink blobs in the middle are copper heatsinks, in between sixteen memory slots, and behind two Ultra320 SCSI bays — feel the dual Opteron pow-ah!

A few weeks ago I caught a quiet evening bus home, only to discover that it wasn’t so quiet, since the bus driver was playing the radio over the PA system. Impressively enough, those Mercs have decent speakers (even if the station was Mix 94.5 …), but it had me quite puzzled. I was even more puzzled when it happened again on my commute this morning.

Then I heard about Transperth’s “music on buses” trial.

Good to see that the Public Transport Authority is spending its time and money developing useful initiatives that’ll really improve the quality and effectiveness of our transit network. Oh yes.

Oh poor blog, victim
of stress of uni, of work;
neglect has bred bugs!

Ahem. So, dear reader, I shall now set about reviving this blog. Maybe. Well, at least for a while.

I might mention last Saturday, for instance. I was at Rochelle’s, for the most awesome pirate party I have been to in … well, quite a while. I even had the use of Rick’s hat (woohoo!) to make up for my costume, which was, er, somewhat lacklustre.

Also on Saturday, I bought myself a Netgear DG834G, which is not the sort of thing I’d normally do, except that I now have ADSL! (I also now have three wireless routers, but then you can never have too much brain cancer.)

I had almost given up hope of getting ADSL, until I remembered that iiNet offer ADSL2, and have their own gear at my exchange. So they don’t follow Telstra’s silly signal degradation rules, which caused every other ISP I tried to say “sorry, you’re too far from the exchange”. Yay for 1500kbps goodness!

P.S. I have fixed posting of comments, although I have re-broken what I had hoped to fix in the first place (i.e. you can’t view old comments). One of these days I’ll get around to rewriting the back end …