Helicobacter

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Update XXII: Point Form

• I'm back in the city of lions!
• Figuratively. I mean, we've never actually had lions and-
• I saw WALL-E on the plane. It was fantastic. Fluffy, but not in the utterly clichéd way most family movies seem to steer towards. And the underlying serious message elevated this movie from family fun to something truly great.
• Seven-hour flights suck. I woke up this morning feeling as if I had been rolling in gravel the previous night, instead of sitting in a cushioned chair for an extended period of time as was the case.
• I came back and found my room entirely cleaned up, the doing of my hardworking mother. I think I'll leave it that way. I'm not going to be here for long anyway.
• I managed to find a copy of the 2007 Transformers movie on DVD at half price before leaving Australian soil. I think Kmart was just trying to get rid of them.
• The trailer for the ambitious Black Mesa mod of Half-Life came out recently. Watch it on fullscreen mode, it feels like playing the game.
• So there's this one sculptor who uses Lego bricks for art. Magnificent.
• I love Auditorium. It's like being some sort of composer, in colour as well as sound.
• I ate large amounts of fish today.
• That is all.

Update XXI: These Titles are Getting Longer

Okay, so the most of the crunch is over. One more piece of Honours business to settle, and then it'll all be up to other people. Which means relaxation until graduation day, drawing comics, that sort of thing. Oh, and eating M&Ms peanuts. Lots of them.

I found a moth in my mug the other day. It didn't even have the decency to be dead.
...I hate moths.

I don't know what these flowers are, but they have a gorgeous scent.



I've decided that Copperpot is the greatest food company since PepsiCo - they manufacture dips with awesome-sounding names like hummus, tzatziki and guacamole. In spite of hailing from various countries, all of these dips taste fantastic. Even on their own. Yes, I've tried. It may be that the sauces themselves are inherently delicious in their own right, but I'm letting Copperpot have the credit for now.

The brilliant mind behind Concerned has a - well, not new, but newly-discovered by me - blog chronicling the exploits of an NPC and his attempts to lead a life completely lacking in eventfulness. Start reading it from here. While the adventure - or lack thereof - is set in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you don't have to have played to game to get the humour. It's funny that the exploits of a nobody, especially one so hideous, can be so riveting, but there you are.

Colour IQ test! I managed to get a score of 0 (perfect), which is great news both for my eyes and my laptop's colour calibration. Maybe now I'll stop second-guessing my colour choices when illustrating something... Anyway, give it a go!

Dalek Workout - turns out even those evil guys need to exercise from time to time. I agree with one of the comments, the corny music absolutely makes it.

DE_dust2 - CounterStrike humour! The funny thing is that I actually have a friend who refers to himself as "SWAT". And we all know a Camper or a Newbie.
Take note, since this is about CounterStrike, practically everyone dies in the end, even the awesome characters.

I'm linking to this purely because I never thought Movie!Megatron could be so goshdarned adorable.
Also, Thumper, you horrible creature. How could you.

Anyway, that's all for now. More photographs and things later.

You Know You've Been Using the Computer Too Much When...

...you read a page of a book and then search for a link to get to the next one.

...you write a sentence with a word you're not sure you spelt correctly, but that's okay because Autocorrect can take care of it.

...you glance down at the corner of the paper to check the time.

...the sun is shining in your face so you fumble around for the brightness/contrast controls.

...you wonder in passing why your photo-albums don't have thumbnails on the cover.

...you don't feel like writing out your full name and address on every single one of your application forms, so you attempt to select and copy it instead.

...you hesitate to buy a new item for your room because you're not sure if you have the disk-space.

...there's a word in blue text in your lecture notes and you don't know what it means, so you attempt to click on it.

...while reading the newspaper, you attempt to close the advertisements interposed between the news articles.

...you're in an obstacle course and you decide to save your progress right before that difficult rope-swing there.

...you have the urge to pull stunts while driving, as this will gain you more points.

...some of your things are missing, and you wonder if you should scan for a virus.

...you attempt to right-click on the trash bin in order to empty it.

...you're stuck in a long queue at the bank, so you decide to play Minesweeper to pass the time.

...the introduction to your essay is terrible, so you try to close the foolscap without saving.

...your textbook states something that is clearly wrong, so you search for the Edit button.

...you form compulsive computer-related habits which carry over into real life.

And then you realise where you are, feel like an idiot and hopefully vow to spend more time out of the house.

We Waited Seven Years For This

A member on BZP got hold of the first official images of Mata Nui. As a Great Spirit that is, as opposed to a stone statue.

Check it out here or in the news article here.

I feel honoured and privileged to finally set eyes on the most important being in my favourite fictitious universe. Even if he is, you know, fictious. I feel that all the time I spent patiently waiting, watching new Toa arrive and new enemies stop them, every year slowly inching towards that great revelation, has finally paid off.

As for those who keep saying that he looks like a Transformer - if Hasbro came up with a Transformer which looked like that, their fans would complain about its resemblance to "a Bionicle." So pipe down and let me gaze upon his greatness in peace.

Update XX: Cool, Useful or Plain Funny

So, one of my friends recently picked up a 1 terabyte hard drive for about $200. That's 20 cents per gigabyte, people. And to think that a few years ago, a 1GB hard drive would have cost $100. Meanwhile, Seagate promises over thirty thousand times that capacity in a mere two years.
Computers are moving altogether too fast these days.

I've been trying to figure out for some time what makes things funny...It's sometimes incomprehensible, how some things make us go "ha-ha" while others get nothing more than a bored stare...
Anyway, today's xkcd was undeniably funny, though if it was because of the entirely everyday manner in which the character failed to escape, or because of the subversion of what I expected would happen, I cannot say.

Something which does seem to be almost universally funny are mistakes. Other people's mistakes. CakeWrecks is dedicated to the professionally-made cakes which follow instructions too closely, are incredibly creepy, do not look remotely edible, or are simply... beyond words.
I spent a few days browsing the archives. I don't think I've laughed so many times in my life.

This amused me. Not the vehicles themselves - they are clearly M3G mobile bridges - but rather the various suggestions concerning Decepticons (that one navy gunboat was getting lonely, apparently), Allied Troop Carriers, Universal Soldiers, aliens...

It's been a while since I found a nice time-waster... Cursor10 is a neat little game. You have 650... well, they're clearly not seconds, so I'll call them "units of time." You have 650 time-units to reach the sixteenth floor, and ten cursors to help you accomplish this. If you run out of time, you control the next cursor out of your ten while the previous one simultaneously copies every single action you made it do when you had control of it. In essence, you have to "programme" the ten cursors to reach the end. A very original idea for a game, and fun to play too.

Trapped 5 is a vastly superior puzzle game to its predecessors, and well-crafted. The best part is that it is not possible to get a Game Over, which removes a lot of potential frustration. Other puzzle-game creators, take note.

And finally, something useful. If you've never checked that your desktop clock was synchronising correctly with an Internet time server, it may not actually have been doing so... Recently, I checked mine and found, to my utter horror, that it was four minutes slow. To think I had considered it accurate.
Anyway, I was unable to fix the synchronisation by changing the server or opening a port through my firewall, so I got hold of this nifty piece of software. It's a very small program, and can be set to automatically synchronise the desktop clock with any Internet time server. Worth the minuscule bandwidth cost required to download it.

And now, have a pretty picture. Ta and later.

(Edited on 21 October 2008 for a broken link.)

The Forgiveness Interval

Or, the duration of time between someone violating your personal rights and you deciding not to get angry. One of the great advantages of the internet is that you can always wait out this period before choosing to respond to an annoyance, and so never appear to lose your temper. In real life, this is less of an option for obvious reasons.

Two of my housemates have the habit of taking various items out of the house and/or consuming them, without asking the permission of their owners or so much as leaving a note of explanation. My immediate reaction upon discovering the infractions is fury, which usually fades away to a more objective indignation by the time I corner them. Thus I've so far been able to deal with them without breaking anything or raising my voice.

However they've never learnt, not after repeated confrontations. And one of these days, I'll catch them before the forgiveness interval has passed.

It will be ugly.