Saturday, January 13, 2001
Oh. My. God. It's going to be 43 degrees in Melbourne tomorrow. Forty-three. Celcius. About 110 Fahrenheit. The Weather Bureau isn't ruling out 46. And this uninsulated 1950s house gets about five degrees hotter inside than it does outside.
Pfeh.
Yesterday the whole city was covered in a blanket of smoke from bushfires in Western Victoria and on King Island. Not a good omen.
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The Open Mind Commonsense project is an attempt to teach computers 'the stuff we all know' [via Caterina]:
Computers today are worse than stupid: they are completely mindless. They know nothing about the world and how it works. Our goal, with your help, is to try to change that!
Why do I have this overwhelming urge to type in 'Don't go after that guy called Neo' and 'Sarah Connor is harmless—harmless, I tell you!'?
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Friday, January 12, 2001
My brother-in-law Kim reads this weblog, so is aware of my fascination with clockwork electrical goods. Now he's raised the stakes with an excellent Christmas gift: the Forever Flashlight, made in Russia, an 'emergency flashlight' which 'works wihtout batteries' (sic). Not only that, it's also a grip-muscle exerciser, as the quaint instruction leaflet demonstrates. The sound when you pump the handle reminds me of those flashing-light laser-rifles every boy used to have. I'm not sure if I'll be carrying it everywhere at night in case of emergencies (although the noise might scare off six-year-old muggers), but it's another fine example of faintly-ridiculous yet ecologically-sound battery-free technology for the new Millennium—hurrah! Thanks, Kim.
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By the way: thanks for the tip of the hat, James. Consider this a return-hat-tip. I fully expect a tip-of-the-hat-for-return-hat-tip in return. And a free toaster, while you're at it.
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David Chess [via Sylloge] says much more about irony than I could be bothered to the other day (see also his follow-up post), and gives the lie to my line about Americans having no sense of irony (which I really did mean to be ironic, because I know quite a few Americans with perfectly good senses of irony; but you'd be amazed how many Aussies and Brits trot out that line).
My example of the plane crash turns out to be 'situational irony'. How ironic. Or something. Not. (Is this weblog an example of dramatic irony?)
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Say what you will about the new Australian $5 bill, but how many countries can boast a banknote with a picture of Santa Claus?
At least it's better than the old one with the Tooth Fairy.
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Thursday, January 11, 2001
Owen has noticed a tone forming in my 'Madagasikara' series, as if I was surprised to go to a difficult place and find things were difficult. It's a fair point. Although Jane and I certainly expected difficulties, the overall effect of confronting such a poor and strange country was far greater than we had anticipated—especially given that Madagascar wasn't the first third-world country I'd visited, it was about the fourth.
Still, he's made me realise that in my attempt to show what 'difficult' really means—which is one of the themes of the book I'm turning over in my head—I've neglected to balance it with some of the joys of the place. I had actually been intending to, starting with my next post (about music), so I might get that up sooner rather than later. (Read: I'll write it sooner rather than later.)
The trouble is I've got an entire book taking shape in my head, and it's hard to give the flavour of the whole in a few brief excerpts. Books aren't really fractal.
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After three aborted attempts, I've finally managed to download and install Netscape 6 properly. (And if you're on a 56k modem, you'll know just how annoying those three attempts were.) After years of 4.x frustration, it's refreshing to have a Netscape browser that finally renders CSS properly. Just like, um, IE 5 for Mac, which I'll probably keep using. But for those using that other OS with ten percent market share—and for those of us who try to write compliant XHTML—the arrival of NS 6 is a godsend.
But as always, there's a snag. For me, it was seeing unexpected horizontal breaks between the carefully aligned graphics on some of my pages—including this one. It was a problem I noticed way back in May on my first weblog, which has a large sliced-up graphic as its header, and it hasn't changed since the NS 6 previews.
Evolt.org has some suggested fixes that show just how involved the new world of strict and transitional DTDs can be. The final solution (adding 'img { display: block; }' to the relevant style-sheets) fixes the problem for NS 6, and seems not to break IE or NS 4.x—but only on Seven Weeks; when I apply it to this page, it makes the horizontal gap even bigger. It's also created problems with NS 4.x for other people. So clearly there's more work to be done—yet another reminder of the joys of cross-browser web-design.
Still, when 4.x browsers of any stripe are a distant memory, things will be looking pretty good.
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Tuesday, January 09, 2001
Madagasikara No. 3: R.E. Phone Home
If globalisation means anything, it means chip-based phone cards in a desperately poor country (click for enlargements):
They're imported from France, obviously, and will never be seen by most of the Malagasy population; the cheapest costs an average week's income. I bought 190,000 FMg worth (about A$50/US$30) to make a grand total of ten minutes worth of calls to my travel insurance company in Australia. They would always manage to cut out just before the vital last point from the other end of the line, so I'd have to go back into the Fort Dauphin post office, queue up again, and buy another card. Then I'd wait my turn once more for the public phone: a satellite-dish phone that only worked in daylight, because it was solar-powered. (Click the thumbnail for a full view.)
I'd hoped not to have to go through all of this. The insurance company had a toll-free number, but it didn't work. I tried making a reverse charges call, but couldn't get a line without a phone-card. I asked the manager of the post office if it was possible to make a reverse-charges call through their operators, but our French phrase-book figured that reverse-charge calls were not something the typical traveller would ever encounter; and the French for 'reverse-charges' or 'collect call' must involve something other than a literal translation of 'reverse', 'collect', 'call', and 'telephone'. When my attempt to draw maps with arrows between Madagascar and Australia drew a blank, I gave up and bought the phone cards.
It took all morning—about three hours—to make ten minutes' worth of calls. Which is par for the course by Madagascar standards. Calling into the country is practically impossible.
Certainly puts DSL and cable-modem complaints into perspective.
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An update that means little to most of you, but $684.29 to me: the travel insurance company finally coughed up the difference between what they paid on my initial claim and what I figured they owed me. So there you go: writing long, carefully-argued letters does make a difference. Sometimes.
That amount is temptingly close to the A$700 it would cost for a FireWire CD-RW burner. Unfortunately, it's also temptingly close to what my dental bills will come to. I wonder if you can use CD-RW lasers for DIY dentistry.
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Besides turning 33 (wheee!), I spent last week in the dentist's chair. A decade of uneventful dental checkups (apart from a couple of wisdom teeth removals), and suddenly I need a bunch of fillings all at once. I blame that Mochalatta Chill I had in August.
There's something about the sound of a drill echoing through your skull that's timeless in its unpleasantness. Still, it could be worse, as my Dad pointed out: when he was a kid 'they gave injections ONLY for extractions, and since they used a pedal-drill still in Suva, one liked early appointments before the dentist's leg got tired. A slowly-rotating drill on a raw nerve is a joy that has to be experienced to be understood!'
Even thinking about that makes me feel ill. Especially with a third and final appointment this afternoon still to come.
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He could have made a pile of money: Peter de Jager, Y2K guru (via Slashdot and LMG).
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Monday, January 08, 2001
Sarcasm may be the 'lowest form of wit' (according to some long-forgotten victim of sarcastic jibes who went on to write one-liners for quote-a-day desk calendars), but it can also be very, very funny. Many people forget, though, that sarcasm simply means 'heavy irony', and that to be 'ironic' is to say the opposite of what you really mean. This is because Many People are Idiots, and learn their vocabulary from television reporters who believe that it's 'ironic' when someone dies in a plane crash on their way to a conference on airline safety. ('It is ironic... um... they didn't mean to die!')
The problem with being ironic is that you risk your comments being taken literally by people without any sense of irony. We call such people Americans. Ha! Ha! Oh, the cruelty. I was being ironic, of course. Actually, my favourite line about irony comes from an American, the comedian Mort Sahl. On his arrival in Australia one year he was asked by a journalist what he thought the difference was between the American and Australian senses of humour. Sahl said, 'The problem with you Australians is that you have no sense of irony;' and the confused journo responded, 'Eh? That's Americans, isn't it?'
Sarcasm tends not to be misread as often as irony, because it's painted with such a heavy brush. But sometimes you come across something that makes you genuinely wonder 'is this sarcastic, or is it for real?'
I Hate Music, which 'details, week on week, the failings and infinite wretchedness of the stuff, building into an encyclopaedia of musical badness,' is a masterpiece of sarcastic writing—if it's sarcastic. Otherwise, it's just deliciously cruel. Either way, I agree with hardly any of it. I suspect that Tanya Headon, its author, does too, because for someone who hates music so passionately she knows an awful lot about it; but then it would be hard to keep the pretence up for as long as she has if you didn't truly loathe the Beatles, Radiohead, the Stone Roses, Pulp, the Prodigy, and a pile of other bands whose albums I own and admire.
It's comprehensive, it's merciless, it's very funny, and it's the best music-criticism weblog I've read. And I'm not being sarcastic.
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Sunday, January 07, 2001
The Australian Republican Movement has launched a petition drive for a plebiscite on whether or not we should have a republic, which is what we should have had all along. Non-Australians may be thinking at this point 'Didn't they have a referendum on this a year ago?', to which the answer is, as Australians know, no. We had a referendum on whether to adopt one specific republican model, a model that had only partial support among Australian republicans. This effectively split the republican vote—which the cynical among us would suggest was what Prime Minister John Howard intended by framing the referendum in this way. The result was that a country where only 30 percent of the electorate wants to keep the Queen as head of state voted 'against a republic' (in the eyes of most foreigners, uninformed Australians, and monarchists), when actually we did nothing of the sort.
Howard argued, perhaps disingenuously, that holding an initial plebiscite to determine whether or not we want a republic would leave us in constitutional limbo until the form of that republic was finalised. But we're in limbo anyway as a result of the divided referendum vote, and will be until we go about this properly.
All of which is my way of saying that if you're an Aussie republican, download the ARM's petitions, collect some signatures, and mail them in. And if you're not, then sit back and enjoy the relaxing sounds of 'God Save the Queen'.
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I've been looking forward to seeing Vincent Giarrusso's first movie Mallboy ever since hearing that the Underground Lovers singer was branching out into film. And it's almost here. Even better, the soundtrack (by the Undies themselves) is out next week.
The site of the movie is promising, and even comes with a handy 'guide to Melbourne's malls' written in the voice of the lead character, a 15-year old played by that kid from SeaChange. I'm staying at a place not far from his top pick, Northland, and all I can say is that malls lose their shine when you're long past 15.
The Underground Lovers have long been one of my favourite bands, but fate has kept me from ever seeing them live. One year I actually had free tickets to see them play at ANU in Canberra, but I came down with a spectacular dose of the flu and couldn't drag myself along even to see my favourite Aussie band. Then a couple of years later they were in town again, and I made sure I went along. First up was the support act, the Perth band Header, who were just starting to gain some national attention. They were pretty good, too, with a catchy mid-90s indie sound.
Just as they were really starting to get into the swing of it, get the crowd swaying along to the music, and get me thinking I might check out their album, some nutter climbed up onto the stage and started kicking over the speakers and amps. A brief scuffle with the band ensued, until said nutter was dragged away by security.
Half an hour followed with everyone standing around wondering if and when the Undies would come on. Finally, Vince Giarrusso came onstage and apologised that they wouldn't be able to play because the nutter had broken the amp. Thanks, nutter.
I still haven't seen the Underground Lovers live. Bah.
A couple of years later Rolling Stone ran a story on Header which opened with an anecdote about their most memorable gig—at the ANU Union in Canberra, when some nutter got into a fight with them onstage...
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A new week, a new photo: this time of a typically dishevelled Citroen 2CV in the streets of Ambalavao, Madagascar, in July 2000. (The next one will be from another country, I promise.)
The new photo goes with some other changes behind the scenes, which should mean that Walking West will finally start reappearing in Blogger's 'updated' pages (I've gone back to using my original Blogger blog, for those who give a toss about the technical details)... but they also mean that the last few days' posts have dropped off the end of the page earlier than they otherwise would have. To keep you busy until I start posting new (non-technical-details-related) thoughts, head along to last week's archive.
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