There are new photographs in the Picture Gallery now. There are some in the Cemetery collection, and also a new section in Scenery for the trip we took to Bendigo yesterday.

I'm processing photographs that I've taken recently. This, I think, is proof that aliens live among us disguised as domestic animals

It's Australia Day (and my mother-in-law's birthday). January 26 is the date that the First Fleet landed at Botany Bay (they later moved to a more congenial spot, that which became Sydney Harbour).

Many people feel that this is no cause for celebration, because it represents the colonial, imperialist European White male arriving to do awful things to the land and native people.

Others feel that it's a good day to have a barbeque or go to the beach, since it's a holiday and they don't have to go to work.

We're having a barbeque. And we may (or may not) go out later and see if we can find a fireworks show.

Happy Australia Day, no matter how you feel about it (and happy birthday, Lyn).

For some bizarre reason, today I found myself thinking about a person of my and Andrew's acquaintance from many years ago (when I figure it out it comes to between seven and eight years ago, roughly, but my timeline may be off; it was certainly before the end of 1996, though).

This person, whom I'll refer to as S, was acquainted with David, Andrew's older brother, and had apparently had a bit of a bad time with that relationship/friendship (as did many other people, but let's not go there because I've made a personal promise NOT to talk about that sort of stuff in my weblog). Anyway, she learned about Andrew (and Greg, presumably) from David, and also learned about me beng friends with Andrew.

This woman turned up at the talker where Andrew and I were administrators and introduced herself to both of us. I talked to her on several occasions, and we shared some information relating to shared areas of interest and experience, I'll put it that way. She also wanted to talk to Andrew all the time, and while I didn't especially mind (I'm honestly not the jealous sort), she only wanted to talk to him ALONE, without me present in the virtual room.

Well, she was pretty weird, to put it mildly. She got more and more possessive of Andrew and his time, and more jealous of me. When Andrew finally made it clear to her that although he was happy to talk to her and he knew she'd had a bad time of it, his priority was always going to be me. She didn't like that at ALL. She tried all sorts of manipulative things to get him to stop talking to me and talk to her, instead (not knowing, of course, that Andrew is manipulation-proof, just trust me, he can't be budged unelss he wants to be and there's NO manipulating him).

Eventually, she told him that, "There's more to life and the internet than just one Duchess," (that's the nick I used at that talker and which I still use in some circles).

Andrew and I still sometimes mention that to each other, actually, that and mention something else that was said about us, which is that our relationship was "just a net thing" (note that the only "net thing" around here is in the shower, and we use it to apply shower gel).

Well, S, just in case you're actually still out there or you ever happen to stumble on this (although I quite sincerely doubt that you will), here's news for you. We're still friends, still in love, still married.

And, well, there is more to life than just me. There are also a couple of kids these days...

I'm listening to the director's commentary for Sleepless in Seattle, and Nora Ephron (the director) commented on the computer technology they used when Annie does the search for Sam. She says, "Looking at it now, it's almost comical. In those days I don't even think there was a Yahoo or anything..."

Well, that film came out in 1993, and in 1993 there most certainly was a Yahoo. It was a manually edited directory of site links and it was in the personal homepage site of some guy at Stanford University. In those days, pretty much everyone linked to Yahoo (which is an acronym that means "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle").

This was before Google (that appeared in around 1998, as I recall, but it may have been 1997; I was using Alta Vista back then, so I didn't pay much attention, and by the way, I had one of those "Top 5% of the Web" sites, uhm, two or three of them, actually, and a Magellan Four Star Site and a couple other oh-so-prestigious "awards" from various search engines, so that says something right there, although I'm not sure what).

Ah, yeah, back in those days we were happy to have a 14.4Kbaud connection (or, if you were REALLY spiffy and slick, a 28.8Kbaud connection!) and Netscape 1.1 was the cool browser to have and you could get interviewed for the local newspaper merely by virtue of having a personal homepage (I know this because I was and I did). You kids to day with your fancy PHP websites and your broadband connections and your easy-to-use search engines, bah! You don't know how good you have it...

This Flash movie is kinda cute. I found it amusing, anyway.

Got this caught in my spam filter:

I NEED YOUR ASSISTANT!!!

Yeah, me, too! Whenever you see her, will you send her in here? Sheesh!

I posted this in a thread at an art-related forum (doesn't matter which one, so I won't post a link). It was one of those threads that keep popping up regularly (you'll work out the context from my comments). I've edited slightly for context and clarity. I just liked it well enough to post it here.

80% of EVERYthing is crap, and there's no use complaining about it or lamenting it. Just accept it and look for the stuff that's NOT crap.

I get so damned tired of this argument. Someone strolls in, bitches about how 80% of everything is crap, and a bunch of people jump up to defend their work in various ways ("I don't care if it's crap", "It's the best I can manage, even if it is crap", "One man's crap is another man's chocolate sundae," "Who are you to decide what's crap and what isn't", and on and on), and it just turns into a big old argument.

I got tired of this argument ages ago, about the time when I figured out that no matter what, 80% of everything is always going to be crap. You can't get rid of the crap, so you may as well ignore it, learn from it, or use it as a springboard to something else, IMHO.

But electronics stores have been slow to catch on. Nearly three-quarters of women surveyed by the industry group complained about being ignored, patronized or offended by sales people when shopping for electronics.
 
Forty percent of the women said they were treated better when accompanied by a man. And more than half said advertisements for electronics were confusing -- though half the men surveyed felt the same way.

These anamorphic street drawings are done by hand. Very, very cool, IMHO.

Peter Ludlow is not just a computer gaming enthusiast. He's also a philosophy professor, with an abiding interest in the relationship between the real and the virtual worlds. So when the world's most successful virtual-reality game, the Sims, launched an online version just over a year ago, he didn't just join in for fun; he also decided that he could carry out research for his next book.
 
And that was where the trouble started. Alphaville, the game's fictional city, could have gone in any number of directions, depending on the arbitrary decisions of the online game players who make up its people through their chosen "avatars", or game characters.
[...]
Officially, the reason for Professor Ludlow's expulsion was that he included links in his inside-the-game newspaper to outside websites, including one that gave players instructions on how to cheat. What Professor Ludlow and a growing band of academics and sympathisers believe, however, is that his efforts to publicise the tawdry fantasy activities of real-life teenagers were becoming simply too uncomfortable for Electronic Arts to stomach.

I've never played The SimsOnline, although I do play The Sims still now and then when I want an escape from reality). Reading this, I'm thinking I won't ever want to play The SimsOnline. I purposely avoid places that are populated with snottty teenagers with nothing better to do than make trouble and be obnoxious.

(DISCLAIMER: I know a few teenagers who are perfectly lovely people and who not only have lives, they're not the least bit obnoxious. I'm not trying to insult all teenagers. Although, of course, being people, they do suck, since people suck, but that's just the misanthropic cynic in me...)

Anyone who has read this blog for, oh, ten minutes maybe, knows I'm quite cynical. I don't do it deliberately, actually. I try to be reasonably positive about stuff (not always with success), but my natural outlook is cynical and my life experience (at least for the first 35 years or so) has just contributed to it.

Anyway, I am very aware that people are NOT always self-interested, mean, thoughtless, etc. In fact, a lot of people, as individuals, are perfectly lovely, thoughtful, kind people.

It is, of course, my tendency to think they're probably not until I get to know them, but that's another discussion...

Today someone suprised me pleasantly by offering to help 'weed out' the blogs by women ring (which has been closed to new members for a while due to lack of time, lack of enthusiasm, the fact that the ring has 900+ members, the fact that Ringsurf's automatic ring code checker isn't working, and the fact that I got tired of taking random shit from snotty girls and their obnoxious friends). She actually said that she'd send me a list of sites that are missing or which don't have the code if I'd let her join the ring.

Hey, I'd let her join the ring anyway (it's a nice blog; I do make exceptions to my "no new members" rule, hehe), but the generosity of time just blew me away. What a generous offer, and I'm grateful.

CJ, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

I found AwfulPlasticSurgery.com when I was looking for a picture of Marie Osmond's HORRIBLE facelift. I found it there. And much, much more...

I'm transferring one of our domains to our main registrar. I started the transfer process for all of them... oh, I dunno, couple years ago, I guess. Did several at once, then the rest in dribs and drabs as they came due for renewal. The one I'm transferring now is bromage.net (which redirects to bromage.org, in case you're curious).

Anyway, the current registrar informed me, in the request for transfer authorization that, "You would no longer be our customer for this domain name if completed."

Wow, REALLY?

I understand that they have to deal with an awful lot of really stupid people, but how stupid do you have to be to not understand that a "registrar transfer" means that you TRANSFER to a new REGISTRAR?

Andrew's looking at the logs for alicorna.com and I was quite amused by this (he's talking to me via ICQ at the moment because he's at work, although it's quite late in the day now and he's just killing time at this point).

Andrew: I wonder who searched on: andrew is a geek
Andrew: Someone who knows me, obviously.

Obviously.

"Daphnia blue-crested fish cattle, darkorange fountain moss, beaverwood educating, eyeblinking advancing, dulltuned amazons...."
 
This is not a failed attempt at free-form prose. It's a snippet of a spam message intended to promote a sexual stimulant, a deliberate crack at sneaking past and spoiling some of the most popular antispam filters.

"The thing about opinions is you don't have to know anything to have one." - Andre Agassi

Hundreds of years ago, monks survived by baking bread, making wine, or copying manuscripts. We survive by selling Ink and Toner Supplies online, at HUGE discounts .....and YOU benefit!

Got this subject line in my spam filter:

i don't understand darupcmxfu oeabb

What a coincidence! I don't understand darupcmxfu oeabb either! I guess I'll have to immediately read that completely and do business with the company/person who sent it!

Not.

I'm having an orgasm. Yum.

Mind you, I added milk to mine, because I just like it that way. And I don't like vodka, so it's not a screaming orgasm. But it's definitely an orgasm, and it lives up to its name, in my personal opinion.

I doubt I'll have multiple orgasms, though. I'm not that much of a drinker.

Orgasm: 1 part Bailey's Irish Cream, 1 part amaretto (I prefer DiSaronno), 1 part Kahlua. If you like, add some milk and an ice cube.

Mmmmmm. Orgasm....

You need Flash and you need sound, and then be prepared for a good giggle.

Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction looks set to dog the Bush Administration in an election year amid continued accusations it exaggerated evidence in making a case for war.
 
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a liberal-leaning US expert panel, issued a report on Thursday that compared public and declassified intelligence information with statements made by Administration officials.
 
It said the Administration made the threat from Iraq sound more dire than the underlying information. The report follows a Washington Post investigation that found no support so far for the two main fears expressed by the US and Britain before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and had built advanced programs for new ones.

Tomorrow morning tens of thousands of Victorians will return to work after their summer holiday and will spend a large portion of their day deleting the unsolicited emails - or spam - clogging their inboxes...

A 400-strong United States military team that has been searching for illicit weapons in Iraq has been withdrawn after finding nothing of substance, although a separate group looking for weapons of mass destruction still remains in the country, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
 
"They picked up everything that was worth picking up," one US official told the daily, referring to the Joint Captured Material Exploitation Group, made up of technical experts headed by an unidentified Australian brigadier.

Intelligence failures in the run-up to war with Iraq and evidence that US intelligence bowed to political pressures in assessing the threat posed by Iraq undermine a critical element of the Bush administration's national security doctrine, according to a report to be published on Thursday by a Washington think-tank.

With its rising budget deficit and ballooning trade imbalance, the United States is running up a foreign debt of such record-breaking proportions that it threatens the financial stability of the global economy, according to a report made public today bythe International Monetary Fund.

A mother's enquiry about buying Microsoft Flight Simulator for her ten-year-old son prompted a night-time visit to her home from a state trooper.

German police said Thursday they had arrested a would-be vampire robber ready to scare bank staff with his false Dracula teeth.

Miranda's two years old today!

Melbourne is famous (or infamous) for it's very changable weather. The joke is "four seasons in one day" but it applies also to patches of a different season in the middle of the one you're supposed to be having, too.

A couple weeks ago, regular readers may recall, I was bitching about the heat. Well, all this week it's been cold, and I mean COLD. Rainy, wet, grey, COLD. I've had to close all the windows and put on the heat!

I commented to Andrew on this patch of wintery weather in the middle of summer and said, "If you were to wake up from, say, a coma, and try to guess what season it was, you'd never say 'Gee, is it the middle of summer?'"

Andrew, who was born and raised in Melbourne, replied, "Nah. If you woke up from a coma in Melbourne you'd never, ever try to guess the season."

Mind you, Melburnians seem to take some level of pride in the changable weather and their ability to adapt to it. I suppose it's a bit like how upstate New Yorkers are proud of the snow and how well they cope with it, or how southern Arizonans seem not to mind the scorching desert heat and just laugh it off and find ways to deal with it.

So anyway, that's the weather report for Melbourne. Quite possibly, in a few days you'll see a posting from me complaining about how it suddenly got bloody hot... Ah, Melbourne. Gotta love it. (Well, you don't have to love it, you just have to take pride in it and act like you're oh-so-cool for being able to tolerate the weird weather patterns and adapt accordingly).

Authorities began scanning fingerprints and taking photographs of arriving foreigners Monday as part of a new program that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said will make borders "open to travelers but closed to terrorists."

"We were both like, 'Yes, yes!' on the outside, and I think we were both on the inside like, 'I don't know?'" - Britney Spears' ex-husband, on their 48 hour marriage

(I'd better provide a link, in case you think I'm making that up: We married and then 'all hell broke loose:' Britney ex)

How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech

I have a few pet peeves where grammar and spelling are concerned. Mind you, I"m not perfect in the spelling department. I used to be better, but years of relying on the "click of a button" spell checker have dulled my senses, but that's neither here nor there. Everyone spells things incorrectly sometimes (in my case, it's more often a typo, but I do still have words I just can't spell, which is why I keep an American Heritage electronic dictionary sitting on my desktop, and as for why it's the American Heritage, that just happens to be the one I have in electronic form).

ANYway, I normally don't get too worked up about misspelled words. Happens to everyone. I even caught Andrew at it the other day (a rare event, and I basked in it after correcting him). There are a couple that annoy me, such as the habit so many people have of spelling "definite" as "definate". It's got the word "finite" in the middle, it shouldn't be that hard to remember... And the way so many people spell "congratulations" as "congradulations". Where did that come from, anyway?

Spelling errors aside, there are a couple of word misused that REALLY irritate me. The first is the use of "infer" when you obviously mean "imply" and vice versa. These words are basically inverse. To "infer" is to form a conclusion from unstated facts, from evidence, from clues, etc. To "imply" is the exact opposite. I understand, more or less, how people confuse them (hey, I confuse "stalactite" and "stalagmite" and can never remember which one is from the top and which is from the bottom), but it still bugs me.

The other thing that irritates me is when people use "flaunt" when they clearly and obviously mean "flout". To "flout" is, according to my handy American Heritage dictionary, "To show contempt for; scorn." An example would be that someone "flouts" the law. "Flaunt" means, "To exhibit ostentatiously or shamelessly," or "To parade oneself ostentatiously; show oneself off." They are NOT the same thing (although it's interesting to note that the American Heritage notes the usage problem with people using "flaunt" when they mean "flout").

The worst case I saw of the flaunt/flout problem was in a professionally published magazine (okay, it was a tabloid, so "professional" may be somewhat misleading, but it is a nationally recognized publication). The magazine commented on a picture of Pamela Anderson "flouting" her breasts....

Yes, I probably need to get a life, but, hey, we all have little weird things that annoy us (I also don't like it when someone makes a sandwich and doesn't bring the condiments all the way to the edges of the bread, a quirk which Andrew, who never spreads the condiments to the edge of the bread, finds both amusing and annoying). At least I don't show contempt and/or scorn for my breasts. At least, I don't in public.

Paul Graham's editorial, What You Can't Say, is a really, really good read. Go read it.

Well, in my quest to feel better, I've taken up daily exercise (not a great deal of it, but pretty much every day, which is good), mineral and vitamin supplements (multi-vitamin with additional magnesium, calcium, and iron), and now ginkgo biloba and acidophilus (probiotics, such as you find in natural yogurt).

Yesterday was the second day I've done the ginkgo and acidophilus and I'm suprised at how good I feel today. I'm actually quite alert, with no sign of "brain fog" at all (speaking of "brain fog", I have found that keeping my blood sugar from getting too low helps with that considerably). Ginkgo is supposed to improve mental alertness and concentration, which is why I'm taking it, and so far, it seems to be helping. Yay.

How long this will work remains to be seen. I've tried a lot of things over the years that start out being really amazing (placebo effect? who knows.) and then sort of fade away. I have heard really good things about ginkgo, though, and it's a recognized herbal medicine, so let's hope it continues to do the job, and that I really do start feeling better and more normal again. I hate, hate, HATE this horrid "brain fog".

Physically, my good days come and go. The exercise helps, and I've learned that certain stretching techniques will help when I get painful flareups. And, hey, when all else fails, there's always Nurofen Plus (ibuprofen with codeine).

I read someone who said that there are those who think that weblogging will replace "old news" (i.e., traditional news sources).

Uh, yeah, right. I'm thinking most of the people saying stuff like that haven't seen the couple of thousand weblogs I've seen (yes, I've seen that many, because of the webrings I manage).

You know what? I think cake will replace bread. Whatcha think?

For New Year's Eve, we stayed in (we always do), and watched a movie we rented. It was The Abduction Club, which is basically a romantic costume film. It could have been a romance novel of a previous era (these things do go in trends; this story had two couples, and that's kind of not really done right now in the romance genre, and yes, I pay attention to things like this). If you like costume pieces and romance novels and you can rent this one, I definitely recommend it. Very fun, and they use the word "romp" in the description on the back, to boot.

I don't actually have much else to say about things at the moment. Life is pretty slow and even and calm, and I quite like that.