文字馬鹿: A fool of words

Went to see Race tonight. It's actually not marked on the Hoyts site, but it's Hindi/English blend with English/nonsense blend subtitles. It's mentioned on the IMDB front page, but I missed it looking for the comments on the plot. The front page comment was satisfyingly spoiler free, and very positive. Had I noticed that the commenter was Indian, I might have clicked. Ah, hindsight. >_<

As an aside, the Hindi/English mix was interesting. I haven't seen enough Bollywood films to know if it's particular to this film or is part of the style (a friend suggested it was the latter) although I noticed while researching this post that one of the actresses doesn't speak Hindi. I need to learn more languages, at least reaching the point where I can watch movies in Japanese, Cantonese and now Hindi. And of course I wonder if I can possibly swing a research project into a Hindi/English pidgin. A university-funded Bollywood movie collection would be a thing of beauty...

So I took a few friends, all of us completely unprepared. I really should have clicked to it being Bollywood, given I'd noted the Indian director, actors, etc...

On the plus side it's really good. Turns out that the best way to improve a twisty, turny, windy plot, double-plot, cross and recross fest (ala Wild Things, which I've raved about here before) is to have the actors stop to sing and dance about what they're feeling every so often.

Also, attractive people are important. ^_^ I now have a new secretarial hiring policy, and a new fashion model hiring policy.

These policies remain subserviant to my existing Neve Campbell hiring policy and Mew Azama hiring policy. But not by much. I'm an equal opportunity employer.

If you haven't seen Wild Things or Race, go do so.

Now Playing: Wild Things. My housemate hadn't seen it! This is a revelation akin to discovering another friend of mine hadn't seen The Princess Bride. There's also a Princess Bride Game coming, although I'm a little concerned, after seeing the trailer.

And just in case you didn't twig, this post's title is of course related to revelations. I'm not harbingering the end of Bollywood...

For reasons which I suspect are more due to the purchase of のだめカンタービレ 特典 のだめの鍵盤ポーチ付き than DS陰山メソッド 電脳反復 正しい漢字かきとりくん and 漢字そのまま DS楽引辞典, Amazon has emailed me to recommend this:

Now, my Japanese is not exactly spectacular, and rikaichan proved unhelpful as well, but this appears to be to be a 3-month exercise cartridge for women to increase their 女ヂカラ. As the joke goes, you fuck just one goat...

(Japanese is my best non-native language, too. My knowledge of Modern Standard Chinese currently extends only to 你有好乳房 "You have excellent breasts" and 你的妹妹有十六歲嗎 "Is your sister 16?", although if pressed occasional other words, interspersed with Japanese and the occasional mumble will emerge. ^_^)

Now of course I need to go assert my masculinity by buying something like this:
(The infamous witch touching game)

Granted, I'd have bought this game whether Amazon was trying to make me buy girly things or not and I realise that my other purchases (Kakitorikun, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon DVDs, for example) may have given Amazon the impression that I was a female Japanese primary-school student, but seriously, who gives a credit card to an eight-year-old girl named Paul?

Of course, my last AmazonJP shipment went to a female friend who was in Japan, maybe they assume I've been pretending to be a foreigner all this time to avoid sales tax? (Which is the opposite of online games, where I usually claim to be from very very south Okinawa, on the grounds that they don't actually ask what country you're from, just which prefecture of Japan.... This isn't a problem, both because I am roughly south of Okinawa, and because Japanese MMOs lost their appeal to me once I realised that the Japanese seem to produce nothing but grinding MMOs.)

On that topic, I was disappointed to see that the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms MMO, at least from the two gameplay videos posted on YouTube, looks like another grinder. A translation of a beta test announcement however suggests that some level of facitonality will enter into it. Shame, really. ROTK would have been an excellent setting for the MMO I've been dreaming of creating. And sadly, the link to Dynasty Warriors Wave on the Wii is still not actually a link, at the Koei site. They showed this at the Tokyo Games show in 2005. And after the wonder experience The Godfather turned out to be, I was so looking forward to uniting China under the kingdom of Wu with nought but a pair of chakrams, a Wiimote, and the sweat of my brow (and other body parts). I guess I'll just have to grab Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle when it ships somewhere in English.

I just now finished watching Dexter, (Warning, Wikipedia article contains unmarked spoilers) which I enjoyed quite a lot. I have to say though, I'd have been frustrated to be watching it week by week. And the second half of the season involved me yelling at him a lot for being an idiot.

Oh, and I joined Mensa the other day. I've spent all week telling people I'm a card-carrying genius, which is a bit of an exaggeration, as I don't know if I get a card (I've been too busy to check my post office box.)

Just to reinforce my genius status, I tonight completed all the character writing and drills for the grade 1 of Kakitorikun. That's 80 kanji, and technically I've got an academic transcript that says I know several hundred, but... yeah. That's not as impressive when I write it down, it turns out my level of Japanese approaches that of an particularly uncommunicative six-year-old. But I have gotten a stamp for every day this month so far. ^_^

I get proud about completely the wrong things, sometimes.

In somewhat more age-appropriate educational news, I'm finally getting back to uni this coming semester, taking Morphology part-time. Work's pretty good about flexible hours and stuff, so this will hopefully only consume time from my life, rather than life from my veins, as per my previous attempts at part-time study. It helps that this time I'm not travelling interstate to work and further again to study. However, I think I'm going to have to withdraw from the ANUAS comittee, as I'm going to be even more pressed for time than I am now.

If anyone from the ANUAS exec is reading this, sorry. I'll prolly make an official announcement this week, although given the way things are going, that's about as reliable as everything else I've promised I'd do for the exec.

At least this won't crimp my social life. My social life couldn't be crimped by an angry hairdresser with an AK-47 crimping iron, since it's basically completely absent.

If only I could find an amazonian smart Japanese chick who digs me... Although frankly, I'm flexible on nearly all those details.

Assuming 8 equals 6, it takes the Milky way most of a day to travel as far as light does in a minute.

Just in case you were wondering...

Oh, and server upgrades mean the blog's back online and working. ^_^

I've recently become quite entertained by Nodame Cantabile, having been flicking through a donated volume of English-language manga and then quite co-incidentally seen the first episode of the anime at an ANUAS executive show-selection screening.

So I was quite surprised to see that the recently-released NDS game... existed. I was subsequently surprised to see it at number four in the weekly Japanese video game charts.

At this point unsurprisingly, but still very pleasingly, there turns out to be a live-action series too (predating the anime) which I'll be looking long and hard at including in next semester's ANUAS drama screenings.

I also bought SSX Blur for the Wii on the weekend, as well as borrowing the work copy of Need For Speed: Carbon. Both games are by EA, and both suffered the same control problem, namely that the nunchuck-rolling movement only registers properly if you hold the nunchuck with your wrist fully extended on top. (ie stick your thumb out as far as you can, and then make it parallel to your forearm, palm facing inwards. That sort of wrst position.) This of course works fine when you think about it, but it's not the natural position for the nunchuck, nor is it particularly comfortable.

That of course was not the only problem I hit. NFS: Carbon I found very very very frustrating to play, as the cars would tend to get stuck to a wall, and then come off only to hit the other side at an even sharper angle. Shifting into reverse with an auto gearbox also seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, leading to the situation where if I hit any wall on the course, I couldn't win. Granted, I'm not that good at driving games, so I wasn't exactly expecting the gaming experience of a lifetime, but even so I enjoyed NFS: Underground 2 on the Xbox a lot more.

SSX Blur, on the other hand, was a sharp disappointment. As well as the nunchuck issue, the other problem was that the Ubertricks seemed to be unwarrantedly difficult to pull off. I only managed to get the movement recognised in-game twice, and only once was I far enough off the ground by that point to actually be able to hit the button to end the trick and land. Seriously, this game element could have been saved by simply dimming the screen the button was held down, slowing time, and showing the player the movement the Wii was reporting, rather than continuing to hurtle downhill at breakneck pace while trying to draw Zs and love-hearts in the air.

However, the biggest gameplay disappointment in SSX Blur (Compared to the last one I played, SSX Tricky, against on the Xbox) is the loss of the character chat. It was a great gaping hole in the game that I could no longer enjoy the continuous mutterings of the character (Kaori, in my case, who used to chatter away in Japanese) and was in fact hearing nothing but the sound of board on snow and the inane pseudo-surfer sound of the DJ.

Also, the DJ was very annoying. >_<

The other major loss in SSX Blur was the rider customisation options. In SSX Tricky, I worked repeatedly over the various competitions and challenges, trying to save up enough money to buy the many many many neat, cool and downright weird rider outfit components available. There was something about unlocking peaks and whatnot, but seriously, I don't care that much about snowboarding that I'd take the game as its own reward.

Fast-forward to SSX Blur, and after winning three races and one 1 on 1 challenge, I was first on the leaderboard, and had unlocked the second of 25 sets of skis/boards and 0 extra outfits. That's 0 extra, I still had the one I started with. Out of four! Seriously. Four outfits? And they were whole outfits, not the mix-and-match fun of SSX Tricky.

I will concede that snowballs were an interesting new feature in SSX Blur. But there's only so many snowballs you can throw at your opponents before you miss the ability to board into the shop and buy a cuter and fluffier backpack.

I'll be trading in SSX Blur tomorrow for The Godfather: Blackhand Edition, since I believe I'm less than six hours away from finishing The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess and The Godfather got good reviews on the Wii. I'm a little apprehensive though, as it is another EA game... If they turn out to have fizzled the controls in this one too, Wing Island is an option. If I keep swapping games around, I'll either find something good, or one of the holy trinity (Super Smash Bros Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy or Metroid Prime 3: Corruption) will ship.

Speaking of video games, a friend of mine will be in Japan next month, so I'll be taking the opportunity to score some NDS games to help with my Japanese.

I've attached AmazonJP links to the DS games I'm considering... I'd love to hear some thoughts and feedback on these or other suggestions... I'm particularly keen on some kind of fairly simple kanji learning/memorisation game, and something I can scribble kanji into and get dictionary lookups from.

I'll be modchipping my Wii soon, so any suggestions on Japanese-released Wii games that'll be playable with my remarkably poor command of the language would be appreicated too. ^_^

Well, it's nearly LCA time again. This is just a quick post mainly to see if my syndication at Planet Linux.conf.au 2007 is working yet.

I've been working at MF (Milestones just seem to come at you faster than the calender would otherwise suggest) and particularly in the last couple of weeks getting a good vector-math workout.

I've also been working at picking off RC bugs to try and help Etch along a bit, since kind of hoped to be upgrading to it in the half of January that's just passed.

I've also been looking for a CMS for the ANU Anime Society to try and resolve the fact that our web admins never seem to last as long as we'd like. At the moment, Joomla! is top of my list for trialling, as I'm familiar with PHP and looks to have the relevant modules (forum, calendar, eventing system that'll need modification to work for screening scheduling). However, I'm open to other suggestions, and will see if anyone at LCA has any useful suggestions.

And of course, by adding Planet LCA 2007, I've had to read it. And I came across ThreatNet, which is a distributed compromised computer identification system. It's actually really simple, you do something to identify a certain IP as a threat (the sample code scans postfix logs for "REJECT: noqueue" which usually comes from "no such user" although I noticed it also comes from greylister at CBIT) and sends that IP address to a nominated IRC channel. I dunno what's next, actually. Presumably, sites can block that IP address as they see fit, and if the responsible parties for the machine become aware of it, they can take action. I'll be adding this to my ever-growing list of things I need to consider implementation of at CBIT.

On the plus side, I recently installed Debian on a Slug with a 512MB USB flash stick, and I'm going to see how Nagios performs on it. If it's up to scratch, I'll prolly shoehorn in a wireless card and see if I can monitor two disparate networks effectively.

Just a quick note, in the aftermath of the vote to decide where Anthony Towns, Debian Project Leader did something good for Debian, bad for Debian or indifferent to Debian with the Dunc-Tank.

I, Paul Hampson, hereby confess that I too earnt money for doing Debian work, specifically packaging FreeRADIUS and getting it sponsored into the archive in time for Sarge to ship.

Mind you, I didn't earn much money, since Bandwidth Unlimited (for it was they) went bust without paying me much, but they did pay me. And you might argue that I'd been looking for a package to help out with in Debian for nearly three years at that point, and I would have worked on it for free, and that when I was being paid serious money to administer an ISP, I didn't do much FreeRADIUS work at all.

To which I'd say that I'd never have picked FreeRADIUS were I not running an ISP, and I would not have been running an ISP had I not planned to become rich and buy the world's largest chocolate bar from the experience. And I didn't get a lot of my job functions done when I was running an ISP, so lower-priority things (like FreeRADIUS, cleaning my desk, a full night's sleep) were often pushed aside.

I have to say that until I recently became a professional, regularly paid, programmer, I was highly envious of people who get paid to work on Open Source stuff, let alone Debian stuff. Now I'm just envious, although that'll prolly upgrade back to highly envious after linux.conf.au 2007 (or as I like to think of it now, clitoris.conf.au)

This whole thing puts me in mind of my experience at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I was one of the IT volunteers, and we basically picked up the less-interesting jobs the IBM-paid staffers gave us. At the time I felt a bit put out that I was there volunteering, and these guys were being paid to be there doing nothing that I couldn't have handled. Obviously that was decidedly unfair, and from my days of "I'm as good as or better than anyone else at computers" phase. But the unfairness of my attitude isn't actually the issue, the issue was that I really wanted to be paid to do that sort of thing, and didn't see why others should get paid but me not be.

Now of course I want two things: To get paid, and to do the things I love. I've finally reached the point where I can combine them, and I no longer begrudge those who, through luck, skill or otherwise, get paid more to do the same things, or get access to cooler toys to do them on. I'm envious, obviously. How do you not envy someone who gets to bring up Linux on a 128-way Power5 machine on the quiet? But that doesn't make me unhappy, it just makes me want to strive more, and work harder. One day I'll be the one submitting a paper to Linux.conf.au on some stupendously cool thing I've done. ^_^

Anyway, my short-medium term goal is to leverage the experience of the current MicroForté work, plus finishing my Japanese studies, to go work for a games company in Japan, combining my two favorite pipe-dreams into one, and making it reachable in a little as two years. Maybe I'll be lucky and MicroForté will open a Japanese office or something, or I'll luck out and end up working on a Japanese MMORPG with a Linux client and a measurable dose of serious cool. Or somehow end up programming at Nintendo.... Oh, sparkley eyes! *_*

And a by-the-by, it's two and a half months in, and I'm still totally thrilled to be working at a video games company. I mean, seriously, I'm like all, wow. I thought it was cool when I was working at TransACT, and my testing procedure involved firing up a video stream, and watching it on a TV. I had a TV on my desk, for work purposes, and that was the high-point of my career. Now I don't have a TV on my desk, but when I'm hacking on combat-handling code, part of my procedure involves firing up a game server, and playing.

I'm learning to take my time with things a bit more. I'm now much less worried that I won't speak six asian languages, play the piano, have my name someone in the Linux kernel that doesn't share a sentence with "blame", have invented an entirely new way of interacting with computers, master four different styles of martial art, earn my first dan in three different Japanese weapon styles, hold two masters degrees in disparate subject areas, earn infamy in the Debian community or even the admiration of my peers by 30. Or 40. I'll be pushing it to get there by 50. But the advantage of youth is that you get it when you're young, and only lose it if you let it go.

I guess on reflection, my goal has become to be a polymath ronin... For those familiar with anime, I think I want to be Kintaro Oe when I grow up...

Side-note: I'm now the secretary of the ANU Anime Society. Two days before the AGM, I wrote in an email to the then-executive committee that secretary was the one position I'd never take. Time makes fools of us all. ^_^ Congratulations to Cathy Ring on stepping up to the presidency, and to the other executives, old and new, for stepping up to what I expect (knowing Cathy) to be a hard-driven and successful year coming.

Oh, and someone asked this week about getting the GTO Live Action box set. So here's my AmazonJP links...

・埼玉の親戚の家に行きました☆産まれたばかりのはとこがいるんです!もうスッゴク可愛くて可愛くてしょうがない*^_^*早く私も結婚して子供が欲しいです♪♪(笑)

・I went to relatives at Saitama's home.☆ My second cousin was just born! Already inevitably really really cute.*^_^* I hope I too soon get married and have a child.♪♪(smile)

This is actually not the regular weekly update, hence no date in Mew's post... Also, the rest of the site needs updating... The Schedule and Works pages don't list Gachi Baka! nor the 2006 calendar.

CAPS LOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY FANGIRLY JOY

Yes, I know I used it less than an hour ago regarding Web 2.0. Seriously, it's true again. Not only did Mew's new TV series start last Thursday (I reckon they posted it late to her site. I'm sure I visited it last Saturday!), but a fansub of the first episode is already doing the rounds, with episode two not even available as a RAW yet.

「ガチバカ！」's official website is of course in Japanese, but JDorama.com have of course launched their own reference page for Gachi Baka!. JDorama's cast list looks kinda short, compared to both the cast and character lists on the official website.

Mew's character is named 牛島理恵, and there's an interview and some character background there, again in Japanese. I'll add it to my pile of Mew-related stuff that needs translating. ^_^

So to all those naysayers who said Mew wouldn't do any more acting (this includes Mew herself, as I recall)... Yay Mew!

Edit: How could I forget to include a picture?

Edit: And then the alt tag?? My fangirly joy must have flooded my HTML neurons.

Overnight interlude: Talked to rene, he didn't seem enthused about a dscape package, so I'll do it myself (based on his code. ^_^). Also, halfway through S.O.S. I really just want to hit Irie-san with something... Gah!

LCA2006 conference opening this morning. As I'd gleaned from the Rough Guide to New Zealand, it is unexpectedly hot. This place looks more and more tempting, although the Internet link (NZ - Spiritual home of IP over Carrier Pigeon according to one wag) scares me.

QT4 tutorial this morning. Not a lot to say, lots of concentrating on slides. However, I did observe a serious problem that I was not expecting... They've not supplied a single power board, and the powerpoints in Castle 1 are even more dearth than at the ANU. Castle 2 (where the Debian miniconf was) is excellently appointed for powerpoints, on the other hand. On the gripping hand, this was my main contribution to the pre-LCA network survery they undertook... Oh well, I'll see if I can go make noise on IRC or something...

Well, maybe I'll say something about QT4. I've not done any GUI programming before, so it's both interesting, and looks like a lot of work. Much as I can read and understand C++, I think I'd be more comfortable doing it in perl or similar. Also, the presenter moved quite quickly, so I suspect this was aimed slightly over my head (although I could follow what was going on, I certainly couldn't be aping him as we went. I guess I was spoilt by Rusty and Robert's kernel module tutorial last year... Maybe it's like The Princess Bride in that it's a beloved movie, but for many people watching it years later pales in comparison to their fond memories... Although neither the kernel module tutorial nor The Princess Bride have paled in my memory yet.

Oh yeah. And I had to keep stopping to apt-get install things during the tutorial. We were told we'd need qt4 w/sqlite support (qt4-dev and qt4-sql), nothing was mentioned of the Assistant (qt4-doc qt4-dev-tools) Designer (qt4-designer) nor the SQLite client (sqlite3) and admittedly the first and last are optional. I guess the presenter assumed we'd be fetching qt4.1 from source and installing it...

Morning tea: Rene's online, and _is_ working on a dscape packageset. ^_^ And in completely unrelated seen-on-IRC news: OpenJazz Jazz Jackrabbit 1 reimplementation (uses original tilesets etc)...Someone's started porting it to the Nintendo DS. More on this after I find cookies or something.

Also during morning tea, I was roped into coming to the Perl BOF on Thursday afternoon. Although there's several BOFs on I'm interested in, the perl6 talk from Monday has me all Perl-enthused right now. Especially if it means I can sensibly resurrect my SOAP server for CBIT, and send out my auto-emails without the evils of perl5's format code. (This modules implements Exegesis 7, although I think what Damian described on Monday was slightly different. There's no Synopsis 7 yet either. -_-

More QT4. I18n support's there and easy to use programatically, although they apparently expect literals in UTF-16... The suggestion is to work in latin1 and just provide a translation for the target language to start with. This is prolly a quite sensible idea in general, as it allows your documentation writers to rewrite the text in the interface as needed, and lets the programming team leave the messages in the untranslated version in a format and phrasing useful to them, which as everybody knows is rather different from the way users work. Who is General Protection and why did his mistake crash my program?

This reminds me of a neat thing an IRC friend of mine once showed me that she was working on for a games company. She'd managed to independently re-implement po (in fact, it looked more like the QT4 i18n does, now I've seen it) for Visual Studio programs, while extending it to not just text, but all kinds of resources, drop-in-able with DLLs. So graphics with embedded text, video, audio and country-specific non-language things were all trivially handleable by their l10n teams. I bet it was doing encryption too, from my experience with Japanese games' text resources.

Wow, haven't seen or heard from her since the fall of #pgsm to TVNihon... One of the sadly few IRC friends I have who get my programming stuff, my linux stuff, my anime stuff, my random Japanese stuff, and was still genki in the morning. ^_^

News flash! Trolltech has announced that US spelling is indeed wrong... In some cases internationalization is simple, for example, making a US application accessible to Australian or British users may require little more than a few spelling corrections. ^_^

Lunch: Seen on Planet linux.conf.au 2006: Splashpower, an induction-charger for mobile devices. According to Arjen Lentz they're in discussions with distributors. Amusingly, each submenu on their site has a picture at the top of someone who stuck the little metal strip to their foot and then walked across the pad. Possibly this could supplant firewalking as a harmless but dangerous-looking power-activity (or would that be extreme walking?) of the future.

Also lunch: I finally understand why the power-point cable on my PowerBook's adaptor comes off. You can replace it with a plug, which is almost as neat a solution as the retractable version I was talking to Jez about last week. I wonder if that's something I need to poke my boss about, or if it's an optional extra...

Wow, linux.conf.au 06... Wow. ^_^

My first international trip started inauspiciously, as I came down with Tonsilitis on Thursday night. On reflection, going to see Underworld Evolution instead of finiding a late-night medical clinic was a poor choice, but happily Queanbeyan Hospital's emergency department was not busy. So I left Canberra at 2am with a prescription for a week's penicilin and some throat lozenges.

Got to Julia's place by 6am, and left her with my car. Met up with nearly a dozen LCA people on the same flight in the departure lounge, and had more time together than I expected because the plane was 20 minutes late taking off. I managed to sleep through most of the flight, and in fact only realised we were on the east coast of New Zealand when I realised there was ocean in front of us.

Dunedin's nice. I stayed at the Kiwi's Nest on Friday and Saturday nights, basically bummed about and was social with some of the other people staying there. This is probably the biggest improvement over last year, where my socialisation was largely limited to IRC since I was driving in and out from home, so wasn't really getting involved in the extra-curricular bits.

On the downside, I've been largely off the Internet since Thursday night. I did go to an Internet cafe for an hour on Saturday, which was enough time to check my email. Nothing seemed to have horribly caught fire at work, so I'm relaxed. ^_^ Also, the girl on the desk was _very_ cute.

Dunedin is frankly the sort of place I'd love to flee to if Australia's legal situation goes much further evilright. It's pleasantly cool (ie. a fan in summer would be sufficient), sufficiently focused (ie. One long main drag of shops) and has a cute girl at the desk of the Internet cafe. What more could I ask for? (Also, a large and apparently quite successful university, and lots of pubs.)

Anyway, on Sunday I moved onto campus, into "Unicol". It's nice, but the network wasn't working last night, so I still managed to not be on the Internet until now. Registration went well, and after a Subway dinner I spent the evening in a pub with some people who're here hanging around with a friend who's come to linux.conf.au, discussing politics, sport, comics and animation, Japanese culture, and whatever else seemed appropriate. I stayed sober the whole time due to the aforementioned penicilin. ^_^

I've also started watching Stawberry on the shortcake, at long last. It's been on my hard disk for two or three months, and I suspected it would be a heavy-going drama. Instead it turns out to be a hilarious at times, sad as hell at times (I think it's going to end sadly, if I've guessed the ending correctly. Only seen to episode 3) but both excellent and fascinating drama. It's really interfering with my LPIC reading... ^_^

Anyway, time to head over to the Debian Miniconf where someone's suggested to me that we don't have wireless, so I'll sign off here.

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, my student card is current this time. ^_^

Wow. I sneeze, a few months pass, and life turns upside down...

Firstly, obviously no The Other Day's Mews posted. I've got backlogs ahoihoi (although I'm missing about a month from October 3rd through November 11th) which I might have to start cherry-picking just to get them up.

Still, I got my 2006 Mew Calendar from AmazonJP. It was too expensive to ship by itself (shipping was significantly more than the calendar. >_<) but then I decided to buy myself an LPIC I book, and found a friend who wanted some stuff, so it came out quite cheaply. (Pictures and links at bottom of post)

I need the LPIC I book because I'm going to linux.conf.au 2006 in New Zealand later this month, and will be sitting two LPI level 1 exams there. I'm really looking forward to it, I had soo much fun last year. And I've never been overseas before (over strait, technically), so I've now got my first ever passport.

The passport was surprisingly quick to get. I had most of the paperwork already, and put the application in on the 23rd of December, and when I got back from Queensland, it came by registered mail on the 6th of January. And my mother was worried that I'd be hard-pressed to get it before I left for New Zealand if I put it in in December. There's an online tracking system, but I never got to try it, because I was in Queensland, as I mentioned.

I was in Queensland from the 30th of December until the 5th of January. I went up with my mum, step-father and sister for my youngest uncle's wedding. It was a nice wedding (outdoors, on a jetty-type thing the name of which escapes me) at a golf resort near the Gold Coast. And I use "near" loosely. For Queenslanders, it's near. For a Canberran like me, it was half-way to Sydney. It was also very hot, and very humid. I basically did two things in Queensland apart from the wedding, play video games and sweat. I also saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (good!) and Fun With Dick and Jane (also good!). Many of our family members (now numbering 33 in Lyall the clan) had t-shirts and such made up with "I got Lyalled at the Wedding of the Century" and "Lyallfest 05/06" on them. They were very cool, and slightly silly. Which seems appropriate somehow. It was an idea that came up after a little too much booze at the Lyall Christmas Party.

Christmas was fun, visited cousin's new place on Christmas Eve, spent night at Mum's place, visited Dad and grandparents in the morning, backto Mum's for lunch. Roast, of course. ^_^ A nice relaxing time after the hectic chaos of the preceeding two months, and my new job.

Yup, I've gained another new job. I also got rid of two, so I'm actually not doing too badly for a change. At the end of October, Bandwidth Unlimited folded, much to my shock, despair and disappointment. CBIT (note the new category!) bought the customers and equipment, and while I was there getting all the systems transferred over, they offered me the job of Internet Operations Manager for CBIT Internet. From then until now (and onwards into the future) I've been working flat-out with my old BU job, Richard's BU job, and all the jobs we both weren't doing. (Which possibly explains why BU folded...) If that sounds too much, it is. Luckily, CBIT's already been doing Internet (reselling BU since May) so a lot of the sales and management infrastructure is in place, so it's not like I'm doing it myself. And it's a chance for me to reshape all the things that were wrong with BU because I didn't have the time to fix them. The main worry I have with CBIT is what happens if I get into the JET program and leave in July

I applied for JET in December, haven't yet heard if I got an interview. I did spend a hectic morning photocopying and getting signed various documents. The ANU Union's JP was away that day, so it was more hectic than I expected. Happily, the ANU Student Admin had a JP on the front desk who could sign things during quiet periods. So I've applied, and have references from Steve Thiele of TransACT and Ikeda-sensei of the ANU Japan Centre. I think I'm in with a good chance, but then again I always think that. ^_^

My Debian NM application was finally processed to the policy and procedures stage (which is to say, I got a AM assigned to me) in the first week of November. This of course was the week I started at CBIT, so I had to place it on hold while I got things organised there. It's still on hold. I was hoping to have it done before linuxconf, but such is life. I'd still like to submit my next _stage_ by linuxconf, but part of the task is rereading policy. That's a thick thick document, and I'm still working on my LPI ExamCram book. If I get the stuff in, I think I'm in with a good chance there too, although the FreeRADIUS package has been suffering a bit of neglect. Luckily, it hasn't needed a lot of attention, although 1.1.0 is going to be released this week so I'll need to get that uploaded.

I think that's all I've done in the last couple of months. It seemed more at the time. Anyway, I'm back on IRC at nights after nearly two months absense, and I'm now hanging around the Whirlpool Forums particularly TransACT (professionally) and Linux/BSD (lifestyle). ^_^

For Christmas, I scored Red Dward VI, Red Dwarf VII, and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie.. AmazonJP doesn't list the latter two yet.

Hmm, time for my daily update... O_O

OK. What happened in the last three months?

I've left ActewAGL now. The projects have been handed over more or less, and therefore hopefully no longer my problem. I hope that doesn't mean they become no one's problem, but I guess I'll not know. Now my only remaining work is for BU.

I've spent the last couple of weeks doing some work at cbit, getting the web interface for the SOAP stuff I talked about below (months ago ^_^) going. They'd started one, but the guy doing the work has now been deployed somewhere else And when I say some work, I mean that took me about a week, and so far this week (it's been short, public holiday on Monday) I've just slacked off in the office, waiting for the web interface to break. Lots of time on IRC and email and it's been a good chance to do some reading. I've been reading up on integrating Linux into a Win2K AD Domain, preparing for my return to TransACT, subcontracting via BU.

I did a couple of months at TransACT, and am currently waiting on approval to do more time there. Working on an interesting project, and a less-than-interesting project. Happily, TransACT's standardised on Debian GNU/Linux as their Linux platform. I like to think I helped that by spreading as many Redhat scare stories as possible in my time there. ^_^ I was originally doing two-and-a-half days a week due to university commitments, but am now available full time...

I enrolled, started, and pulled out again from the ANU. I've finally bitten the bullet, and decided I'm not going to get through my final Japanese studies without spending some time there. I've applied for an eighteen-month deferment so I can do JET from August 2006, and be back roughly in time for semester two, 2007. I'm disappointed, I made a good run of it for the first four or five weeks, and that segues neatly into my next topic:

I had a four-week bout of depression. I basically only left the house every couple of days to buy more food, and when ActewAGL called me up to come in and do the handover. This was two weeks of uni, and then the two weeks of the lecture break, so a lot of lost work-time. Turns out that I'd neatly finished the TransACT pre-approved work, although I didn't discover this until three weeks in. I'm seeing the ANU Counselling Centre, which has been helping, as well as making what changes I can myself, including divesting responsibilities. I knew I had too many responsibilities, and it was highlighted by how good I felt when I went to Melbourne and put everything else on hold for the weekend I was there, during these four weeks.

I went to Melbourne for a weekend, to visit friends -- Anna and Naoko. Phil and Emma were unfortunately out of town at Phil's mother's wedding (Congrats to her) -- as well as visit my sister and see her in the MedRevue. It was really really really funny. I laughed so hard. ^_^
I had a good time in Melbourne, it was nice to be out and about without any particular responsibilities. I saw Sin City -- Yes, I went to Melbourne and went to the cinema, by myself -- ate all kinds of bad for me but very tasty foods, and took mobile phone photos of the places I ate. I need to post them somewhere. I really think that weekend without commitments was a really helpful guide as to how I could break out of the depression cycle I'd gotten into. The only downsides of the weekend were the bus ride from the train station at Cootamunda to Canberra (I enjoyed the train ride from Melbourne to Cootamundra, mind you, prolly more than I enjoy even flying) and the fact that I was out of town for the chibi.au.august05 convention.

Despite my best efforts to avoid responsibility in the anime.au conventions, after my poor performance as Events Co-ordinator for anime.au.05, I became Sponsorship and Vendors Co-ordinator for chibi.au.august05, although I was going to be out of town on the day. I did a pretty pitiful job of that, and probably will go down as the only Sponsorship Co-ordinator who ever managed to get nothing out of Madman for an anime convention. The convention itself went quite well, by all reports, and I'm currently Events Co-ordinator ("in charge") of chibi.au.summer05, in November (No one noticed this discrepancy for about a month. I originally coined the moniker because we were not sure if we were going to be November or December, kept it because it has a nice seasonal sound to it, and overlooked the fact that November is actually in Spring.) This convention's been a lot better organised, in large part because we've given ourselves a month longer to prepare, and because we've picked up a couple of enthusiastic people to look after promotions, volunteers and the website, which were noticably absent from chibi.au.august05 until the week before it was actually happening. Hmm. Now I think about it, the first day I skipped any classes at the start of my depression was the day I met with the just-mentioned enthusiastic people to bring them up to speed on what they'd let themselves in for... Prolly a co-incidence. The meeting was after my skipped class after all. These same people look like stepping up to doing stuff on the ANUAS exec at this year's AGM, too.

The ANUAS has of course been running along like the large locomotive of anime viewing that it is. I've managed to not derail it with a stance of "do as little as possible" which really should have been my presidential election platform. One new thing I've introduced is "Saturday Afternoon Drama", where we hold a marathon screening of a live-action series, one series a month. So far we (and by we I mean I) did Great Teach Onizuka in September (with the movie and OV on October 1st due to a scheduling error on my part) and will be running Gokusen over October 8th and 22nd. I do wish I'd thought of this six months ago, but I was actually inspired during and by the chibi.au.august05 preperation process. The ANUAS AGM was supposed to be tomorrow, but I have been browbeaten into moving it back to the 21st, largely because I completely forgot to check with anyone before calling it. In fact, that's pretty much the entire root cause of the move. Once the ANUAS AGM is out of the way, I suspect my only official ANUAS executive position will be Video Ad Creator.

I've spent a little bit of time knock up video ads, two for chibi.au.august05 and one for the GTO live action screenings. All done on Linux, with command line tools and The Gimp, except the picture-editing for the first "Recruit" video which was done using irfanview. The hardest part was getting them Internet-distributable, which meant finding either Creative-Commons non-NC or Gnu GFDL licensed-content (and you can't mix these two!), although I fudged the music on the first version of the second ad, because it just seemed to fit the pictures so scarily well. Kinda like the whole "Dark Side Of The Moon is a co-incidental soundtrack to The Wizard Of Oz" thing. The GTO one on the other hand was done just out of Google images one night, so I haven't put it up on the web for download. My current project involves teaching myself Blender3D, so I can produce a cooler ad. I've always wanted to get into 3D programming, and I finally completed the first step (putting Debian onto a 3d-enabled machine of decent speed).

I'm now running Debian when I can on my desktop box. The only things I use windows for now are Quickbooks (I've gotta get Quickbooks going in wine, I just haven't bothered yet) and video games. I've got the machine using libpam-mount (with a couple of patches which I submitted to the Debian BTS) to mount directories from Keitarou. I migrated my email from Outlook onto my fileserver with IMAP, and now use mutt-ng for all my email, which is a big improvement. This also means I revoked my old @Pobox.Com PGP key and added the email address to my newer GPG key. I can sync my phone against Evolution, although I never fire up Evolution, and I can print using CUPs happily to my HP LaserJet 1200. The only other thing I can't do on my desktop machine from Linux is wireless multiboot my Nintendo DS, and I'm working on that.

I decided it was time to spend some money, and I was intrigued by a talk at linux.conf.05 about GameBoy Advance programming, and had heard about recent developments letting people launch homebrew software wirelessly on the new Nintendo DS. So I gave in, and bought one. I played Mario64DS for a bit, and bought Another Code while in Melbourne, all the while getting involved in the DS Homebrew community. I played with my Prism54 wireless cards to get wireless multiboot going, and could get the DS to see my machine, but not boot from it. Eventually I got a hold of the rt2500-based card neccessary to use the only existing publically available wireless multiboot software (includes a custom driver for Windows) and found I could get further in the process, but not by much. I had some spare credit at Lik-Sang, so I got a GBA Movie Player v2, and with a bit of futzing about (which I'll document here later) I can now load a homebrew rom onto the CF card I borrowed from Shane and the DS will run it. ^_^ So time to start actually programming again. I've still gotta get some more work done on the WMB process, but I'm waiting on driver developments in the Linux rt2x00 driver project, since right now they can't transmit packets, at least in monitor mode, but progress is ongoing. I've been documenting the WMB stuff in my wiki.

One of the things that made this blog go quiet was the addition of a wiki to my site. Semi-static stuff (like the SOAP stuff below) is now going in the wiki, and I plan to migrate all the stuff from www.tbble.net into the wiki. It's just such a good platform for publishing stuff categorised, without having to code the HTML. I'm now over HTML coding the same way I'm over compiling my OS from scratch -- I did this in 1998, before I'd discovered Gentoo or Debian and got as far as upgrading to the latest libc, gcc and whatever else was in the base Slackware '96 install, when I discovered Debian, found a use for having a linux machine, and wiped it out in an afternoon in 2000.

Now that I'm back updating the blog, I'm going to have to see if I can make time to update all the old old old The Other Day's Mew entries. (Mew's got a new calendar coming, which I need someone to batch into an AmazonJP order for me at some point...) I was actually loading the Japanese text into my blog, but not publishing it because I was having trouble with the translations. This obviously is not a winning strategy. ^_^ Now I think about it, the other challenge to The Other Day's Mew was I was updating from ActewAGL, where I didn't have a dictionary handy, nor Japanese input support to use an online dictionary, and then they changed their firewall to block sites with 'blog' in the domain.

Which brings me full circle in this long rambling story. ^_^

Well, anime.au.05 succeeded, but we could have used more volunteers. I could expound on this, but this post is really only an excuse to post my new method of attracting volunteers for next year.

Wow, what a weekend.

anime.au.05 is over. I had a rough weekend, since I'd been flat out at work all week. Here's my schedule for the weekend:

Friday 7am

Get up, go to work (Tuggeranong)

Friday 6pm

Leave work, collect truck, trailer and fridge from mum and Pete's place, and couch from my step-cousin Anthony's

Friday 7:30pm

Final pre-convention meeting at the ANU (Civic)

Saturday 12:00am

Meeting finished, go to Iori to make onigiri

Saturday 5:30am

Finish making onigiri

Saturday 6am

Get home (Queanbeyan), collect microwave and toaster

Saturday 7am

Arrive at Gerard's place, leave trailer in his year, fill up truck with stuff for convention

Saturday 8am

Arrive at dad's place to collect projector and screen. Turns out my dad didn't click to what I meant by "morning". ^_^

Saturday 8:30am

Arrive at ANU, planning to have 90 minute nap on couch. Instead spend 90 minutes unpacking truck, sticking up signs, and preparing for registration to open

Saturday 10am

Convention opens, with me at the registration desk.

Saturday 1pm

Leave seat, toilet break, and start selling pocky in the hopes that the oil for the BBQ will arrive soon.

Saturday 1:30pm

BBQ oil arrives. Rush off to cook sausages, despite having only disposable wooden chopsticks and a plastic knife and fork to work with.

Saturday 2pm

Leave BBQ in hands of others, rush off to run auction

Saturday 3pm

Scheduled auction finishing time

Saturday 4pm

Actual auction finishing time. Move to information desk to sort out successful sellers.

Saturday 4:30pm

Eat my bento. This is technically Saturday's breakfast, unless you count four or five boxes of Pocky. ^_^

Saturday 7:30pm

Convention ended.

Saturday 10:00pm

Area cleaned up, quick chat with the guys, during which Gerard has refilled the truck

Saturday 11:00pm

Arrive at Gerard's place, empty truck, connect trailer.

Sunday 12:00am

Back at Uni, put fridge and couch on trailer.

Sunday 1am

Arrive home. Started losing ability to focus on Canberra Avenue.

Sunday 1:40am

Having unloaded trailer, remove onigiri-making-stained clothing and showered, collapse into bed.

Yes, that was a 43 hour day.

Sunday was much less hectic, simply because I slept through the important stuff, and by the time I got to the event, it was almost all over but the cleaning. So I got home Sunday at about 11pm, those who had transport and time (except Vic) didn't realise how much was left to clean up at uni, and those who knew had to leave for work.

Anyway, big shouts go out to the various warm bodies we used to stem the flow of things to do out in the registrations area: Luke, David Trang, Kaz, Vic, Emma, Kimberly, Ros, Steve and the two volunteers who's names I didn't get who took over the registration desk, right after having worked on the cosplay, when I ran off for the BBQ and auction. Also a big well done to Alana for managing to do sufficiently clear paperwork for the auction that we were able to run the auction successfully despite her falling sick before she had a chance to actually let me know what was what.. And big big thanks to Michael Cross, for doing my scheduling job better than I could have. ^_^ There are probably also other people I've missed there, but... Technically, I'm at work, and should be doing work stuff.

Now, on to anime.au.06! ^_^

TODA'S MEW(5/11)★みなさんGWは何して過ごしましたかぁ(^_^)??私は…特に何処にも行きませんでした(^_^;)友達と遊んだり、友達と遊んだり、友達と遊んだり・・・と言った感じです(y^^y)笑　でもスゴク充実したGWでしたっ☆普段は学校と仕事で友達になかなか会えなかったので、いっぱい遊べて嬉しかったです♪♪

★What did everyone overdo in their Golden Week(^_^)?? For me... I didn't go anywhere special.(^_^;) Playing with friends, playing with friends, playing with friends... sort of feeling (y^^y)(smile) but was really fufilled Golden Week☆. Frequently I haven't been able to meet with school and work friends so I played very happily.♪♪

Man, I spent so long trying to work out what GW was. My first thought was "Graduation Week" but that was too long ago. Thanks to SailorV for being present on #solarmiracle when I figured it out. He didn't actually _help_, but he was there. ^_^.

< SailorV> hey she's cute
< SailorV> what's she do?

Yes, #solarmiracle is a Sailor Moon-related IRC channel...

TODAY'S　MEW(4/27)★みなさんの好きなテレビ番組はなんですかぁ??私は★あいのり★にハマリ中です(y^^y)ずっと前にも見てたんですけど、1回見なくなったらそれ以来見るコトがなくなっちゃってたんですけど、また見出したらハマっちゃいました(*^^*)

★What is everyone's favourite TV program??For me it's Ainori during Hamari.(y^^y) I always watched it in sequence before, but I was unable to watch one so since then I haven't watched it but again I started watching it and then Hamari had finished.(*^^*)

FujiTV also has an English page for Ainori. I can't believe I've been so careful to check for updates, and the moment I move home and get busy with work and anime.au.05 Mew posts not one, but two entries. Gah! Anyway, it looks like Mew just consumed every 'けど' I had in stock, and possibly some she'd snuck in earlier in her purse.

・TODAY'S MEW(4/18)★みなさんは外に出て音楽をきこうとしたら電池が入ってなかったor電池すぐなくなったってコトありませんか!?私は最近そればっかです(>_<)そんな時ってスッゴイショックでスッゴイブルーになりますよね…(++)ほんと1日のやる気が失われます…(笑)

Hasn't everyone had the experience of going outside, listening to music and then there's not batteries in or the batteries immediately become empty!?Recently I'm that sort of fool.(>_<)At that time the strong shock makes you very blue... (++)Really one day I'll lose my mind...(*laugh*)

She must have posted this one in the evening, since I'm sure it wasn't there when I checked about 5pm yesterday. One of these days, it'll be Today's Mew!

・TODAY'S MEW(4/12)★桜とうとう散ってしまいました↓みなさんはお花見しましたか!?私はスッゴクしたかったんですけど、結局出来ず落ち込んでいます (>_<)でも来年こそは絶対にやります!満開の時に♪もう友達と約束してるので(y^^y)(笑)

★The Sakura finally finished falling.↓Did you go blossom-viewing!? I really wanted to but I'm sad that in the end I couldn't. (>_<) but next year I will go for sure! I've already promised with a friend to go at full bloom time♪.(y^^y)(smile)

(Sorry this is late... I got busy. ^_^)

・TODAY'S MEW(4/4)★スキー&スノボーに続いて、温泉も初体験してきました☆沖縄にはないからなかなか行く機会がなくて(^_^;)でも今回行けてスゴク嬉しかったです♪♪

Continuted skiing and snowboarding, also my first experience with an onsen came. In Okinawa there aren't any, so by no means do I have a chance to go(^_^;) but now I went and I was really happy.

(Thanks to Snowflake for stopping me from translating that as "I'm not in Okinawa". I couldn't explain how a nice Okinawan girl like Mew could not have been to Okinawa.)

・TODAY'S MEW(3/29)★初めてスキー&スノボーを体験しました★一応ドキドキしながらもリフトに乗って上から滑るコトが出来ました(y^^y)

I had my first experience with skiing and snow boarding. At first my heart was beating hard when I rode the "Forest Foot" up, so it turns out I can do sliding-type things.(y^^y)

(Yeah, I know. You get the idea. ^_^)

Quick updates: Shane got a dog, and I'm seeing Machine Gun Fellatio tomorrow night. (Now tonight)

PGSM Act.ZERO arrived. Pretty box, haven't watched it yet.

Dropped my uni units, and gave ActewAGL notice I had to be out by July.

And in unrelated news, the government of Robert Mugabe has demonstrated that they are holding fair and transparent elections by using clear perspex ballot boxes. ^_^