Over the falls

If people with perfect pitch can tell what note they just farted...If every generalization comes from people's lack of ability or desire to see the fine details...If Apple put podcasting into iTunes 4.9 because of the name...If America is a real place, or just something invented for TV... Why modern cars seem to be designed from the headlights out...Why it is that software projects always cram more stuff into the schedule than reality will actually allow...Why matter attracts matter...Why it is water lilies have more genes than anything else...what to strive for next...If skill is just persistence plus luck...What disasters befell the testers of Preparations A through G ...If people love celebrities because they don't have enough friends...Why I can't have references at the solution level in Visual Studio 2003...If Google can make any money when they're giving away things as amazing as this for free...If people who understand Kanji sometimes see words written in their ...

Have your ever noticed that Nerds generally don't like sport much? (and I use the term to refer to fellow nerds with nothing but affection. Go buy the T-Shirt ) For instance, it's diabolically easy to beat Stilly at ping pong. (To be fair, the guy just learnt to ride a bike. ) Me, I care a little about sport. I can appreciate a great sporting moment - as an example, I fell out of my chair during the Rugby World Cup Final last year. I'll follow the Cricket, but only with a mild level of curiosity. I can remember enough about weekend footy to hold my own in one of those tea-room conversations. But if all the rules for all the sports in the world just spontaneously fell out of everybody's brain tomorrow, I wouldn't cry. Let's face it - Life is really complicated. There are seemingly endless traps and pitfalls of responsibility and obligation, crazy people and weird unforseen, inexplicable events. There are thousands of different goals anyone could strive for, many ...

How cool is this: a single human brain cell can recognise a person . In studies, it turned out that a single neuron fired in test subjects when they were asked to recognise famous people. Each time the test guys were shown various pictures of Halle Berry, the same neuron fired. The same neuron also fired when viewing the sequence of letters 'H-A-L-L-E-B-E-R-R-Y' or when viewing drawings of the star. It turns out that the brain uses a whole lot less neurons than was previously thought to store information - not like bits in an array but more like individual computers in a network. Now, I've done absolutely no study into this at all, and have no qualifications in the field (or any field, for that matter) but here's my half-arsed hypothesis. Perhaps the brain's awesome power to store and recall things is tied directly to it's ability to imagine and create. Maybe when I'm recalling a picture of Halle Berry in a catwoman costume, I'm actually just triggering ...

Spent the day playing with Ruby on Rails . It's my first venture into Ruby, and the first bunch of serious programming I've done in ages. The Ruby syntax is really confusing me though. Everything's an object. No intrinsic types. Weird. I have to say, the flexibility and innate power in the rails framework is pretty scary. I managed to get a database driven web app designed, built and connected and making AJAX style xmlhttp requests in about two hours. The scaffold feature means that you can get automatic generated templates derived from your data design, so your app just always works, even when you haven't written that bit of code yet. Without really knowing it, I've always been a fan of the Model View Controller design pattern - it seems like a sensible approach to take. It's cool that the pattern was invented in 1979! I was five.

Outlook 2003 notified me today that "The universe was a figment of it's own imagination." ( SpamBayes does a great job of removing spam, but the little outlook pop-up toast thingy still displays it) "That looks weird", I thought, as the blue notifier faded away. But when I got to my inbox, there was nothing more than an ad for "ch3ap pharm3cut1cal's". Probing a little further, I found the following text at white 2 pt font on a white background. It looks to me like it's been randomly cropped and computer re-assembled from "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy. I thought it was kind of pretty. So I cleaned it up and added some punctuation and link words. Here's today's Spam Poem: Street Theatre Grant, and went away. Universe was only a figment of its own imagination we were eventually given. That is, he would insult everybody in it. His life --- simply because some pedantic adjudicating official noticed Improbabil...

If you ever wanted to have a go at surgically replacing somebody else's knee, well, hurrah! Now you can...

Ever since I can remember, I've been late for everything. Not overly late by much , but chronically, persistently late. As my friends and family will tell you, if you actually want me to turn up at your house at two o'clock, you should tell me to turn up at one. As a junior retail loser when working for Target , I was always being given thorough dressing downs by spotty 23 year old retail managers for my tardiness. The closest I ever came to getting fired was during one of those "Serious talks". Now, it seems to me that people who've chosen a career in retail management are generally fairly strange people. My boss, who was a big, footy playing fellah called Peter was absolutely reveling in the fact that he could give me a "serious talk". It's fairly common among retail management to truly delight in their positions of power, and to take every opportunity to flex them. Anyway, this one talk, I was doing the right thing, and nodding at all the appropri...

Head down and busy trying to make the next deadline, I forgot how much everyone loves screenshots. I said a lot of bad words about screenshots today, because we've spent so much time building the framework for our latest project, and not as much time (yet!) refining the interface. The main reason we've done this is because web interfaces are comparatively easy to build, once all the hard stuff is done. There are a bunch of well defined standards, like CSS and HTML and script that aid the process. Oh, it will look great when it's finished, no doubt. We've hired some excellent people specifically to make it look great. But then, marketing and sales guys only want to see screenshots. Not the reams of boring technical documentation. And you know what, I totally understand why. Screenshots are like the men's magazines of software (only without the articles.) There it is, in all it's naked glory, for you to peruse. Captured in a perfect moment of solving somebody...

Walking past the shopping list, I noticed that the word 'COFFEE' was a valid RGB hex triplet (if you substituted the '0' for an 'o'). Colours in HTML are specifed in three hexidecimal values, each representing the amount of red, blue and green. By adding the '5' as an 'S',and the '1' as an 'l', I was able to make the following colour words: (Those viewing this post through an aggregator may be missing out on the colours) COFFEE FABLES SCALED DECALS LOAFED DECODE DEFACE COOLED FOOLED BLEEDS What have I learned from this excercise? well, that randomly picking colours tends to generate fairly disgusting ones. Perhaps that's why strange banana makes such horrible designs most of the time...

Like Rory , I grew up with a lame arse PC. I too was bitterly jealous of those amiga owners. With their fancy fandanlged-hand-holding-a-floppy-disk bios, and versions of Marble Madness that looked just like the arcade, they had no idea how lucky they were. But, I'm not so sure that the grey box which evaporated my childhood, (while I'm very fond of it) was actually the height of eighties cool. In fact, the computer I owned was far, far worse than the virtual boy of PCs - something that made those poor betamax owners laugh themselves into hysterical coniptions as to what a loser of a product this thing actually was, and they paid 450 dollars for a flashing digital clock. My dad bought us a genuine, IBM PC-JX. The IBM PC-Jr is widely regarded as one of IBM's dumbest decisions. What very few know, is that after the IBM PC-Jr flopped dismally in the US, IBM was left with a bunch of leftover hardware that nobody wanted. I can hear the meetings now: shimmery dissolve in "Jo...

Metascope , by Krazydad , might just be the coolest windows screensaver ever. At your command, it crawls image search engines, and combines the results into amazing kaleidoscopic visions. If you've got a permanent connection, you really should go get this. So far, my favourite searches are "Teahupoo","Invader Zim", "Vincent Van Gogh" and "The Simpsons".

A little Asian boy, who must've been barely 1, determined to try out his new-found walking skills, but who obstinately refused to take his mother's constantly outstretched, flickering hand. A hardtop Suzuki Jiminy from about 1982, with a yellowed 'Free Tibet' sticker on the back, and the back seat chock full of bags of bean bag beans, making a wayward right turn towards the university residences in Turner, blowing lots of blue smoke on each gear change. Two sisters, standing on their front lawn in shiny new pink plastic raincoats and gumboots, while their mother sprayed them with the garden hose. ( It hasn't rained in Canberra for over 2 months now) My son Reuben, trying (unsuccessfully) to use the game of Simon Says as a sinister ruse to get his Dad and sister to jump into the swimming pool at the AIS with their clothes on.

No, it's not another obscure effort to win google fu, I just consumed the tastiest fish dinner, which I cooked in my Vulcan Dishlex Dishwasher. I remember reading an article about it on Salon ages ago (you can find it here ) and by some freak co-incidence the dishwasher was empty, so I just put it in there instead of the oven. Very satisfying results. If you're inclined to try it, here's my recipe: Gord's Dishwasher Trout Ingredients 4 Rainbow Trout Fillets 2 handfuls Fresh Basil 1 handfuls Cherry Tomatoes,halved 1 Clove finely cut garlic, Unsalted Butter Lemon Juice Olive Oil Salt and Pepper aluminum Foil Method Mix everything that isn't fish or butter together in a bowl, so you end up with a salad of basil and tomatoes and garlic all coated with olive oil and salt and pepper and lemon juice. Take a big sheet of aluminum foil, and lay out a fish fillet in the middle. Put a knob of butter on the top , and add a bunch of the salad stuff. Roll eve...

We had an ISO 9000 quality audit at work yesterday. ISO is a quality standard for business processes. I never quite understood the actual value of the accreditation, but I guess the theory goes that ISO certified companies are more efficient and reliable than non certified ones. Anyway, the auditor looks at our software development process, and basically looks for evidence that we're following it. They'll read specs and test cases, but mainly they look for evidence that we've followed our plans and the outcomes are clearly visible, to make sure that we have a method behind the madness. Yep, Looking for evidence is what it's all about. When I sat through my first audit, our development process was, well, (how to put this tactfully...) ..hard to find. I spent ages preparing stories and justifications to demonstrate that everything was fine. Nowadays, our process is well refined, followed and documented, and so a visit from the auditor is not scary at all. So after I'd...

I thought that Stilly's post that pointed to Michael's post (gotta love these blogversations...) wasn't at all that different from mine. Which I think was what Mikal was trying to get across, but hey, he had a headache... And I really liked the wellbeing manifesto . So I signed up. You should also consider signing up. Go on. You get a free iPod if you read all the way to the bottom....

Sometimes I feel terribly guilty about living in the first world. Over 64 per cent of Australians say that they can't afford to buy what they need. To me, that says that at least 50 per cent of Australians are suffering from a weird delusion where they tie their happiness to their material things. People seem to gain this future perception that their lives will be content if they earn another 10,000 dollars, or buy a new outdoors setting, or an investment property, or whatever - that then, they'll be happy. It seems like the richer we get, the more stuff we want. And it's always in the future. Hardly anybody seems to be happy "right now". Personally, I blame the marketers. By presenting a clear right/wrong view, and by telling emotional stories to us which capture our hearts, rather than encouraging us to think rationally about our desires, they keep us all on this consumer roundabout. And the stories aren't few and far between - they come thick and fast throu...