April 2003 Archives

And proving that he really IS his father's son, Jack Osbourne is in rehab for marijuana and alcohol addiction. Nice to know he's keeping the Osbourne family addiction traditions alive isn't it. Ozzy must be so proud.

Hmm, I wonder if he'll be joining Gazza in Wickenburg??

As a lifetime dog lover, I don't understand why people leave their dogs outside 24 hours a day. I have owned a dog ever since I was a kid, I currently have two of them. I would never even consider keeping them outside. They're part of the family. When they go outside to play by themselves I keep an eye on them. If they start to bark I go and get them as I know how bloody annoying barking dogs can be.

Yesterday afternoon when I got home from work I went outside to mow the lawn & water the trees/plants/flowers. The two dogs next door barked the ENTIRE time I was outside. Not only was that extremely annoying it's also a tad cruel. Keeping dogs outside when you live in Arizona can't be a smart thing. They were still barking at 9:00pm last night.

I dunno, it must be a different mindset I suppose. Perhaps they don't have the time or patience to pay attention to or train their dogs. But that begs the question of why did you get them in the first place?

Cool, I've got a dog.
Oh, you mean I have to DO something with it?

Sigh.

It was 92° yesterday and we finally broke down and turned the A/C on. Seems like most of our neighbours did the same thing. I did my usual grumbling, along the lines of '...but it's only April' and '...it's not even Summer yet' and '...our electric bill is going to be outrageous'. I do this grumbling every year but I must say that I don't remember turning the A/C on this early in the year. I probably say THAT every year as well :-)

Actually my grumbling about turning the A/C on & the electric bill reminds me of my Dad when I was a kid. He'd always grumble about lights being left on in empty rooms. 'It's like Blackpool bloody illuminations in here' was one particular fave of his. I actually laughed out loud as the air came on yesterday because the thought of my Dad saying that entered my head.

Bloody hell, I sound like a total cheapskate don't I? I'm not, honest :-)

And nothing starts a Monday morning better than Ministry's 'Land Of Rape & Honey'. Unless of course you happen to be Skinny Puppy's 'Bites' in which case you also do a fine job of making the morning commute bearable. I've come to the conclusion that 'Assimilate' might actually be the finest industrial song ever created.

So Sinead O'Connor is leaving the music business.

I seek no longer to be a 'famous' person, and instead I wish to live a 'normal' life.

Yep, it's 1:45am and I'm wide a frigging wake. I seem to wake up around 10:30pm. It's like I've just drank 14 cups of coffee or something. Watched Scooby Doo again. I still like it. Matthew Lillard is SO good as Shaggy.

Been catching up on the old blog or two, you know, like you do in the middle of the night. Moby reminds the American public of a couple of things they should be thinking about when it's time to vote in the next Presidential election by asking the question "how would the republican leadership deal with a democratic president who:

a-had been a cheerleader in school.
b-was a documented draft dodger.
c-had been arrested for public drunkenness.
d-had lost the election by 600,000 votes, but was president after being installed by his fathers friends in the supreme court.
e-had been best friends with the ceo of the corporation involved with the biggest instance of corporate fraud EVER.
f-had invited the perpetrators of the aforementioned fraud to the white house to set policy.
g-had long standing family ties with saudi arabia and the bin laden family.
h-allowed a private jet to fly around the united states after september 11 to pick up members of the bin laden family and return them to saudi arabia without being questioned by the fbi.
i-had presided over the steepest drop in the stock market and the greatest rise in unemployment figures of any president in the last 60 years.
j-bombed afghanistan looking for osama bin laden and never found him.
k-bombed iraq looking for saddam hussein and weapons of mass destruction and found neither.
l-proposed a 700 billion $ tax break for the wealthiest americans and planned on paying for it by cutting money to the police, fire departments, education, etc.
m-had members of his administration who had long standing ties to racist and white-supremacist organizations.
n-had a vice president who had been in business with the bin laden family.

Last night we watched Red Dragon on DVD. It was good. Far better than the big pile of steaming dog turd that was Hannibal. Still not as good as Silence Of The Lambs which to this day remains one of my all time favorite films.

Here's one thing that I didn't know, a movie has already been made based on the 'Red Dragon' book - 1986's Manhunter. It stars William Peterson (of CSI fame) as Wil Graham. I'll have to remember to find that.

Then we watched Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on Satellite. A slow starter but got better once you got into it. As usual Kevin Spacey was really good. Is there a movie that he hasn't been good in?

Courtesy of jjohn comes Jump The Shark:

It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it jumping the shark

Possibly one of the most frustrating series to be a fan of. Two or three times each season, Mulder and Scully come this close to cracking open the vast government/UFO conspiracy at the center of the show, and then the next week they've forgotten all about it and are investigating a swamp monster in Bumfuck, Arkansas.

From the 'thank fuck for that' department comes a little gem from Nicole. Twisted Sister are getting back together to do a tour. So how cool is that?

And just proving my theory that you can sue anyone for anything here in the US, Creed are being sued by some concert-goers for putting on a crap show. They allege that "the band's singer was too drug-addled to remember his own songs". There is one surprising thing about this though - they only want their money back. What? You mean you didn't suffer intense emotional distress? C'mon this is the US of A, sue 'em for a couple of million at least :-)

The Johnny Cash version of the Nine Inch Nails classic 'hurt' is making the rounds on MTV/VH1 at the moment. I heard it the other day and I have to say that I'm not sure whether I prefer his version or the Trent Reznor original. Either way it seems to have sparked an interest in all things NIN once again.

Tonight I dug out 'The Downward Spiral'. It's a good (if rather disturbing) album if you're into the whole electronic/industrial thing. I think I'll be keeping it in my car for the next day or so. I was lucky enough to see NIN at the London Astoria back when Trent was touring the 'Pretty Hate Machine' album which must have been 1990 or 1991 ish.

Bloody hell, where does the time go?

When I remember, I like to watch The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Jon Stewart just cracks me up. I'm glad I remembered to watch tonight as it was really quite funny. As a nice bonus Patrick Stewart was the guest. He was promoting the new X-Men movie. I must say he was a really good sport and actually has a good sense of humor :-)

Ever wonder how big that Star Destroyer really is? Is it bigger than the Enterprise model E? Is the mothership from V bigger than the mothership in Independence Day? Well, thanks the Starship Dimensions site you can see for yourself. The site has some excellent to-scale illustrations of everyones favorite starships - it's really quite cool actually.

Link courtesy of jwz

So you're a Perl hacker and you can't wait for Perl6? Want to use the dot operator to call methods like you do in Java? Well, have no fear Simon's Acme::Dot is here.

In your module:

package Foo;
use Acme::Dot;
sub new { bless {}, shift }
sub hello { print "Hi there! (@_)\n" }

Then in your code:

my $x = new Foo;
$x.hello(1,2,3);

Nice :-)

One of the things I like about living in Arizona at this time of the year is the weather. I just came in from playing with the dogs in the back garden. Foster loves playing fetch with a tennis ball. Murphy doesn't really give a shit about the tennis ball but loves running around all by herself. After about 15 minutes I'm totally knackered, Foster is knackered, Murphy is knackered. We've all got some exercise and everyone is happy :-)

Watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets last night. I'm a big fan of the books and I was not disappointed with the movie. Kenneth Branagh was excellent as Gilderoy Lockhart. The only thing that was a little offputting at first was the fact that the main character's voices had broken in the year since Sorcerer's Stone. It took a while but you finally got used to their voices being a couple of octaves lower than you remembered them being :-)

Tony Blair has his eyes on becoming the President Of Europe I see. And there I was thinking that his political career would be damaged by his subservience to, er I mean backing of, George Bush in the war in Iraq :-)

Ok I don't get it. It's a cooking programme. A bloke (Emeril) who is apparently quite famous (who knew?) in a studio with an audience. He cooks stuff. Ok, not exactly the most original idea on the planet. What is different about THIS particular cooking programme is the audience. They are nutters. They get so excited about even the stupid little stuff.

For example, Emeril could be making some form of sauce. He takes the saucepan and says something like "ok, now I'm going to pour the sauce onto the mushrooms" - which he does. The audience goes nuts, they cheer and clap. Perhaps he did something else and I just missed it I think to myself so I watch for a bit longer.

"Ok, now that the mushrooms have been soaking in the sauce, I'm going to put them in the oven" - which he does. Again, the audience goes wild, they cheer and whistle. By this time I'm actually quite tickled by this and I get totally sucked into watching the rest of the programme - not because I give a shit about with Emeril is making, I just like to see how worked up the audience gets :-)

Yep, it's amazing what you'll sit through late at night when you can't sleep :-)

Yep, Rafe does a good job of summing up my feelings for Donald Rumsfeld. Words cannot express how much I dislike that man. (er, Rumsfeld that is - not Rafe)

Last night I finally watched the bloody England vs Ireland 6 Nations game. One of the best performances I've ever seen from England. Very impressive. Of course I stayed up until 1:00am to watch the bloody thing so I was relying on the old coffee machine at work this morning - it was worth staying up for though :-)

To a big fanfare & celebration (I kid you not) my company had its name changing ceremony today. We all got an official box of goodies (shirts, hats etc) and had the pleasure (grin) of sitting through a 2 hour webcast in the conference room. There were balloons & food & streamers. I must say they at least made an effort.

The big name change was supposed to be soooper seeekrit but it was all over the internet at the end of last week. Oh, that and the fact that they were covering all the old building signs over the weekend may have given it away too :-)

Oh and because of one thing and another I ended up being late to work this morning so I looked a bit of a wanker walking into the conference room late with everyone staring :-)

Blimey, I've been blogging here for over a year now (I'd spent the six months prior to that blogging over at use Perl;). So I thought it was about time to pony up the $20 for Ben & Mena's super MovableType. Not only MT, but Ben Trott has also helped me out at work thanks to his rather spiffy Net::SSH::Perl.

Blimey, the Concorde might not be dead afterall. Looks like Richard Branson might be interested in rescuing it from the ol' plane graveyard. Why doesn't that surprise me :-)

Blimey, this is a first. Looks like a new version of the SETI@home client has come out to fix a security issue. The flaw was found by Berend-Jan Wever, here's his explanation:

THE VULNERABILITIES

3) Exploitation of the bug in the server has offcourse not been tested. Do understand that successfull exploitation of the bug in the server would offer a platform from which ALL seti@home clients can be exploited.

After working with MySQL for so long it was rather entertaining to have to switch back to Oracle today. After making some tweaks to our PL/SQL code I needed to make an update to a couple of tables.

So this is my tip of the day, if you're wondering why none of your updates have worked, try using commit. Kev, in Oracle this is your friend:

SQL>commit;


Well considering there's only 7 days left before the deadline we thought it might be a good idea to do our taxes tonight. Oh and because we're sick, we did it by hand as well :-) We're getting a smaller refund than last year but any year in which you don't owe is always a bonus in my book.

Oh, and when I say *we*, I mean Sally. Well to be fair, I do sit at the same table and I'm there with my calculator and pencil and I read the instructions and...

...I'm still CLUELESS. Well, I'm learning a little more each year. At least I know more about the American tax process than I did when we first got married. But why does it have to be this complicated?

It's funny the things that you'll watch when cursed with a wee bit of insomnia. Take last night for instance, Sal and I watched the Food channel. It was rather entertaining and I got totally hooked.

Who knew that the annual Jack Daniels Invitational BBQ Cook-off would be so addicting? It was like a mini festival, everyone drove their caravans down to a field in Lynchburg, TN and camped out for the weekend. Teams cooked everything from chicken to pork and were judged by a panel of experts. Everyone was taking it quite seriously as you win some decent cash for first place.

Next up and the highlight of the night had to be the King of Iron Chefs Tournament. It's in Japanese and features some of the worst dubbing this side of Godzilla. Apparently each week two chefs "battle it out" to see who progresses to the next round. They have special 'guest' commentators who give you minute by minute explanations of what the chefs are doing. "Yes, he appears to be, yes thats it, he's draining the saucepan" - well no shit I can see that mate! It's absolutely hilarious and I recommend watching it if you ever get the chance. Of course I'll be watching next week to see if Iron Chef Chen Kenich can progress any further. Come on Chen!

Looks like Steve Buscemi will be joining The Sopranos next season. I quite like him and I think he'll make a good addition to the show. He was really good in Reservoir Dogs which incidently was Quentin Tarantino's finest hour. Actually I take that back, Pulp Fiction was Tarantino's finest hour. I don't think Tarantino made a decent movie after Pulp Fiction though did he?

and the weirdest letter combo in english has to be -ough.
through.
trough.
enough.
plough.
are there enough ploughs to trough through?

He does have a point actually :-)

The water filter under our kitchen sink developed a tiny leak from the plastic casing. You could barely see it but it was there. We put a bucket underneath it temporarily until we bought a new case this weekend. Last night before I went to bed, I heard one of our cats (Boots) meowing rather loudly in the kitchen so I went to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out the tiny leak had turned into a fine spray that was jetting out from the side of the filter case. Boots was sitting on the floor staring at the mist as it sprayed into the kitchen. Bless his cottons, I can't speak catese but I bet he was saying "quick, quick, I don't think the sink should be doing this!".

Cats are cool :-)

Oh and to change the subject completely, 'Times Like These' by the Foo Fighters is one of the best songs I've heard in quite some time in fact. So now you know.

Well it's about 11:15pm and my brain is about to switch off for the night so I'm giving up on studying for today. There's only so much Mutual Exclusion that I can take at this time of night - especially seeing as I didn't sleep well last night.

Had a good day at work though, figured out the socket problem we were having with one of our vendors. Unfortunately English was not the mother tongue of their programmer so I had to resort to the diplomatic "why don't you just send me an email to explain what you're attempting". He ended up sending me the source code (which I was rather surprised at) and together we found a teeny bug. Now we can do some more testing tomorrow. Oh and while I"m thinking about work, today's handy module of the day - DBIx::Simple - I had just started writing something similar when I found it. Nice one Juerd.