February 2003 Archives

Lunch: Romanos - excellent Italian

Dinner: Garcias - excellent Mexican

Stomach: Full :-)

I was listening to NPR on the way home from work tonight. They were talking to a bloke who had done some completely pointless yet oddly interesting research about stuff. What kind of stuff? Stuff that you will never ever need to know. For instance, how much toothpaste is in each tube? How much silly string is in each can? How much area does an entire newspaper take up if all the pages are taped together? More can be found here.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I'd like to apply that thought to my saltwater tank. Last week I got all the necessary plumbling done and the new sump all hooked up and it was running like a charm. No leaks, nothing. Then we were at one of the aquarium shops at the weekend and I was talking to the bloke that owns the place, mentioning my sump and the things I had done to it.

Then in true Harry Enfield "you don't want to do it like that, you want to do it like this" fashion he proceeded to let me in on some "better" ways of doing it. Hmm, seemed like a good idea so off I went to Home Depot to buy more PVC pipes & elbow joints & a bunch of other stuff.

About an hour and a half of farting around with the pipes, disconnecting the old plumbing and installing my new pipes - I was ready to go. So I started up the "better" version of my filtration. The bugger pumped so fast that all the sodding water pumped out of the sump faster than it could be siphoned in.

After some choice swear words I had to disconnect the damn thing. Sal took pity on me and went to Home Depot today (she had the day off) and bought me some replacement parts so that I could convert it back to the old "crappy" way - you know, the way that actually *worked*.

So, I farted around with the plumbing tonight and everything appears to be working fine again. I'm sitting here on the floor with my laptop as I'm typing this and I'm glancing at the sump to make sure it's ok. Not sure when I'll feel happy enough to go to bed though...

As a side note to all these goings on, I'm now an expert with PVC pipes, hacksaws, elbow joints, and PVC primer & cement :-)

Pecan (cat) just walked up to me cocked her head to the side and meowed. If I spoke felinese I would say I just got the "what the fuck are you doing sitting on the cold tile floor you idiot?" speech :-)

I was reading Moby's blog tonight and he has an interesting entry about the Grammy awards. Apparently CBS executives don't want celebs speaking their mind about political issues in their acceptance speeches. So reading between the lines they don't want any anti-war views aired. Well, you wouldn't want people out there in TV land thinking it's ok to question the government now would you?

Moby's answer?

it would be nice if as a form of protest every musician who won an award said nothing at the podium

I've finally gotten around to upgrading MovableType to version 2.62. This is more of a test post to make sure everything worked ok. If we can all read this then I guess everything is ok :-)

Saturday Night Live was good tonight. Britney Spears and Steve Martin had cameos. Will Ferrell made an appearance (he totally cracks me up). The Foo Fighters were excellent and were joined on stage by Jim Carrey who played air-leg - you had to see it, I laughed my arse off. The whole thing was hosted by the always excellent Christopher Walken. Good show :-)

It would seem that federal prosecutors exaggerated their success convicting would-be terrorists.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found that the number of terrorism convictions reported in 2002 was inflated by 46 percent because of inaccurate and unreliable information from U.S. attorneys.

At least 132 of 288 cases the GAO examined were misclassified as terrorism-related, the agency told Congress.

So the British Government now wants kids to indulge in Oral Sex and will teach kids all about it in school. This will stop the teenage pregnancy problem. Yeah, of course it will :-)

Via ziggy

Just read an interesting article by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman. I found myself saying "amen brother" as I read this paragraph:

I am also very troubled by the way Bush officials have tried to justify this war on the grounds that Saddam is allied with Osama bin Laden or will be soon. There is simply no proof of that, and every time I hear them repeat it I think of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. You don't take a country to war on the wings of a lie.

I was having a bit of a crappy day at work today. Sal (bless her) sent me this e-mail and it cheered me right up :-)

The following short quiz consists of 4 questions, and it will tell you
whether you are qualified to be a professional. Answers appear directly
under each question - no peeking. The questions are NOT that difficult.

According to Anderson Consulting Worldwide, around 90% of the professionals
they tested got all questions wrong. But many preschoolers got several
correct answers. Anderson Consulting says this conclusively disproves the
theory that most professionals have the brains of a four year old.

Today on the ol' car stereo:

Depeche Mode - Black Celebration
Depeche Mode - Ultra
Depeche Mode - Exciter

Exciter really isn't one of their better albums but I've really tried to get into it seeing as I've loved Depeche Mode for donkeys years. There are two songs on it that I like - 'Shine' and 'When The Body Speaks'. Still don't like the rest of the album though.

Some interesting news from 'back home'. I first read about the proposed anti-war demo from Dave Cross in one of his blog entries. Looks like it was the biggest demonstration the country has ever seen. It will be interesting to see how Blair reacts to such a massive airing of disapproval regarding Britain's involvement in a possible War. If there isn't a second UN resolution and Blair joins the US in military action I think his political future will be in doubt.

And in unrelated news, looks like England beat the pants off of France today which is always a bonus :-)

Yesterday was a good day. Went into work early so that I could leave early. I got a lot accomplished so I left in quite a good mood. We went out for supper and had a good time. Ate far too much and to be honest I was struggling to finish the cheesecake but it was soooo good :-)

One of the local radio stations play 80s songs on Friday nights so we put the stereo on when we got home and listened to the radio. It's been ages since we've done that but it's really quite fun - lots of 'oh I remember that one'. Some of the songs I didn't recognize as they didn't make it 'across the pond' but they were quite good nonetheless.

A pretty good Valentines Day overall.

It absolutely pissed down today. All day long. It was some of the hardest rain I've seen since I've been here. And seeing as we're in Arizona, no-one knows how to drive in the sodding rain so the drive home from work was really quite entertaining.

This is an old trick for blocking popups that I had used in Mozilla pre 1.0. I had completely forgotten about it due to my prefs.js file getting overwritten when I had to do a clean install. Tonight I finally had enough of those damn popups so I went hunting for the forgotten code. Didn't take to long to find seeing as I knew what I was looking for. Just added this to my prefs.js file et voila - no more sodding popups.

user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000);
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

I woke up this morning and was in the mood for a bit of early 80's synth-o-rama. So the following CD's somehow made it into my car:

Alphaville - Forever Young
The Human League - Dare
The Human League - Reproduction*
Soft Cell - Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret
Yazoo - Upstairs At Erics

You know, if you're into early 80s synth-pop type stuff it really doesn't get any better than The Human League's Dare album. I'd forgotten how good it is.

*Ok ok, Reproduction was actually released in 1979 and not the 80s :-)

Arguably one of the best Props if not the best Prop in world Rugby, Jason Leonard will win his 100th cap on Saturday when England play France in the Six Nations. As a former Prop myself I can remember thinking Jason was the bees knees when I played Rugby back in the day :-)

Spent a dollar or two this weekend on some upgrades to our saltwater tank. First up, new lights. We want to convert the tank from being just a swim tank to something approaching a reef tank. Reef inhabitants (corals, anemones etc) need light - good light and lots of it. The 3 crappy fluorescent bulbs that were on the tank were not going to be good enough. So seeing as the tank is 6ft long we bought two 36" Coralife Power Compacts. What a difference that has made to the tank. It looks so much better and now we can begin our journey into reefkeeping.

Next of the agenda was an extra 20 lbs of live rock. We've probably got a good 110-120 lbs of live rock in the tank now. One end is still rather bare so we'll have to remedy that in a couple of weeks.

The other big purchase was an upgrade to the filtration system. Now that we want to get a little bit more advanced I thought it was about time to invest in a sump. We only have canister filters at the moment and I've never been happy with this setup - we should have really used a sump all along. Well, you live and learn. I'll be spending the next few days figuring out the plumbing and I'll be making a couple of trips back and forth to Home Depot to buy various pieces of PVS pipe and valves etc.

Currently playing Ratchet & Clank. Starting playing it last night and I'm hooked already. The graphics are stunning.

Watched Finding Forrester last night. Very good movie. If you haven't seen it, I think you should :-)

Downing Street document plagiarised?

According to an article by Britains' Channel4 news, the British intelligence dossier that Colin Powell heralded in front of the UN this week contained plagiarised text.

"Channel Four News has learnt that the bulk of the nineteen page document was copied from three different articles - one written by a graduate student."

It looks like there's also a follow up article that was posted today.

"Downing Street today said it made a mistake in failing to acknowledge that a large section of a dossier on Saddam Hussein was copied from a Californian postgraduate student's outdated thesis."

There's nothing like a reliable intelligence document. And that was nothing like a reliable intelligence document :-)

Blimey, Time magazine certainly doesn't beat around the bush in an article about NASA's shuttle program.

We were watching the local news last night and apparently there may have been some Space Shuttle debris fall on Phoenix. Some of it is reported to have fell quite close to where I work in fact. Not sure yet if it really is from the Shuttle, a team from NASA came to Phoenix today to investigate. I'll have to check the local news again tonight for a further update.

And in other news, I got my car back tonight. Supposedly "fixed" (again). I'll be writing a letter of complaint to Saturn and taking a look at Arizona's lemon law to see if it applies to us.

A few years back I was really into Star Trek books. Don't ask me why but I couldn't get enough of them. I almost had the entire set and read them at every opportunity. Then for no reason whatsoever I lost all interest.

Last week I started reading The Genesis Wave. It's actually quite good and seems to have sparked my interest in Star Trek books again.

Took the car to the dealer. All the bloke could say was "that's really weird". Yep, it's weird alright mate. I've got an idea, how about you find out what's actually wrong with the electrics this time. You know, just a thought :-)

They're keeping the car and will give me a ring tomorrow. In the meantime they've given me a rental car - a brand spanking new (less than 1000 miles on the clock) Nissan Sentra.

Don't you hate it when you get water in your ear? It is quite entertaining for others while you look like a complete spaz shaking your head around :-) I still haven't been able to get rid of it - grrr.

It would seem that the electical system in my car is fucked up again. Drove to work this morning with no front/back or interior lights. Nice. Good thing the sun was rising. So today I'll call the dealer and give them a mouthfull as this will be the 5th time in 13 months - double grrr.

For some reason I couldn't log onto the network when I got to work this morning. I called our desktop "support" bloke only to get his voicemail. Got a call from his manager about 20 minutes later asking me to submit a trouble ticket. I calmly asked him how I was supposed to do that if I cannot log onto the network. There was silence on the other end. I started to chuckle, so did he as he realized what he had just said. "Well I suppose you don't need to put that ticket in afterall then" was the last thing he said before hanging up. I had to laugh.

Couldn't sleep so I gave the site a bit of a makeover. I'm sure I'll think that it looks crap in the morning. Time will tell :-)

Couldn't believe what I was seeing on the news today regarding the Space Shuttle. I was really shocked.