Iain's journal

Frederik Pohl, blogger (via): So, does he write... pohlemics?

Does anyone know how to devise beautiful club tricks? I seem to have goofy invention down pat; recent examples are the jump forwards to catch a club between the legs and the one which ends up with clubs stowed in increasingly inelegant locales.

But, some nights, I think it would be nice to have some trick fall out of my head that was elegant, or beautiful, or nice, rather than... goofy.

Also: I kind of sort of got into position for a one-arm handstand today. This is a bit exciting. Maybe I'll get it within a few years!

If only every election begat this sort of genius effort, the world would be a better[1] place.

[1] w.r.t awesomeness

man boards the train smelling of cigarettes
and takes a dostoyevsky from his pocket
(the poetry writes itself)

That sounded much better in my head on the day, a month or so ago, that it occurred. Oh well.

I posted this dinosaur comic to my facebook profile a while ago, wondering vaguely if anyone would take it as a hint.

It appears not!

On a rather different subject, this piece was in the paper the other day. All I can say about it is that it's remarkable.

It's a short story by Murakami. It was not what I wanted it to be, from the title, but it charmed me none-the-less. I think that makes it win?

I just bought plane tickets to get me to tasmania and back for the circus festival. Virgin blue has this neat feature where you tick a box and they add a couple of dollars to your purchase price to offset your carbon usage (yeah, yeah, carbon offsets, sigh, I know).

But then on the booking confirmation page:

Carbon Offset Status: Unfortunately, we are unable to process your Carbon Offset purchase at this time. Please try again here

Which rather takes the shine off the business.

I am in awe - that is where kitsch meets kickarse, if anything can be said to be so.

Today, kottke talks frogs mentioning that the frog deliberately breaks it's bones "probably when it is threatened", and I certainly hope so. But then I thought, maybe it just breaks it's bones for kicks and giggles. Ridiculous? Of course.

A drummer caught out with no sticks? That's okay, a protuding ulna shard will do the trick.

Need more definition in your shadow puppets? That crisp narrow line is only a fracture away.

Or, in a special two-for-one offer, if you've lost your pen, you have an ink-and-quill package with you at all times. Just sharpen that radius up a little and you'll be golden. Actually, more red then golden.

Yuck. What was I thinking?

Like a pixar movie, but with less soul. via

If the whole project actually works, that will be neato and a half.

The nerdiest thing I've put on the internets for a long time!

For the last bit of this work project, I've been digging around in the bowels of knoppix. It's an interesting world in there. The boot partition has an gzipped file containing an ext2 filesystem; in that filesystem is a script "linux.sh" that does the first half of the magic. It's responsible for getting a ramdisk up, mounting the main knoppix filesystem, and arranging the ramdisk as a sensible root filesystem, largely by cherry picking from the main knoppix filesystem.

Then it kicks on into init, which runs a script stored in that main knoppix filesystem to do the hardware autodetect half of the magic. The whole thing's pretty neat.

Except: I wanted to make a tiny change to what that second script did; it's stored in an iso filesystem, which means you can't just mount it as loopback and edit it. You have to unpack and do remastering things¹ (and you do bad things to your knoppix version upgrading story). However: it's easy enough to unzip, mount as loopback, tweak, unmount and rezip the the little bugger. And because it sets up the filesystem that has the latter second script in it, you can effect changes there.

It all feels a little machiavellian, though. I was delighted when it actually worked.

Footnotes:
1. I didn't actually check if this was the case, I just assumed it. Maybe that was foolish.

I baked a bread-approximation last night. It went wrong.

It was always going to be a precarious attempt; I knew that the flour I was using had a gluten percentage under what I wanted, so I did a few things to try to get around that. The first one was kneading it a truly ridiculous amount, and the second was to give it plenty of rising time (the stuff I've read consistently suggests that gluten bonding is helped by kneading and time)

That worked, so far as it went; it was all hanging together and rising nicely. The problem was that I then threw it in the fridge to slow it down while I took a nap, then hit it with rather more heat then I ought to in order to get it going again once it was in the bread tin, which I think killed the yeast prematurely.

And because that wouldn't be enough to have gone wrong, I realised when I tasted it that I hadn't compensated for the increased rising time at all, so it got rather acidic/sour in a thoroughly unpleasant way.

Net result: a dense loaf, really badly overproofed. Fit for soaking up juices of currys or stews, or alternatively for throwing in the bin.

The attempt was educational, certainly, but not tasty.

I've long held that knowledge is beautiful, and learning is wonderful, and understanding is a joy. I was reading an interview with Wendell Berry, and his answer to the question "How does your identity as a writer connect to a region, a place, and a land?" pushed my notion of that beauty, wonder, and joy sideways in a fascinating and lovely way.

It's worth reading the whole thing; Wendell Berry reads like a man as wise as he is humble. I first encountered his work when the slacktivist linked to Berry's "The Mad Farmer Liberation Front"

Now I want to read some Thomas Merton.

Today, I spent about 3 hours gearing up to make a phone call (it's about some potential employment, in a contractory kind of way). Dialed the number. The phone call was about 1 minute long, the first 40 seconds of which was me reminding him of the context in which he'd asked me to call. The remaining 20 seconds was him apologising that his phone was almost out of battery and promising to call back.

Definitely anticlimactic.

A spreadsheet powered by a dream...

I went to the circus festival. It was good.
I came back from the circus festival. I had good reason, and the interruption was worthwhile.
I went back to the circus festival. It continued to be good.
I returned from the circus festival. It was over.
I had a party, just because
I went to christchurch to go to circoarts.
I started at circoarts.
I sprained my ankle.
I continued with my first week at circoarts.
I was at circoarts some more.
I did not find a house in christchurch.
I was at circoarts some more.
I did not find a house in christchurch.
I was at circoarts some more.
I did not find a house in christchurch.
I was at circoarts some more.
I did not find a house in christchurch.
I came back to australia for the holidays.
I went to tasmania for my Mum's ordination.
I got back from tasmania and took my driving test.
I am here.

And now you know.

Incidentally, I've been doing big mailouts of goings-on in my christchurch life. Holler if you'd like to be on that email list.

Notable things:

I have resolved my difficulties with both Descartes (why should these volumes be fixed, you nitwit? it's a dumb idea) and Monsieur Stone (yes, yes, I know the airplane won't get off the ground if it's too heavy. I don't care)

I discovered my nail scissors when I was emptying my bag to use for carry on. This had three aspects; the first, relief that I had discovered them; the second, guilt, because when asked today if I still carried nail scissors I said "no", and it turns out that I Am A Liar; the third, joy, that I would not be trying to take nail scissors through airport security in six hours.

Yeah, that's the other notable thing. My plane leaves in 6 and a half hours - whose stupid idea was this? - and shortly after that I will be at the circus festival and training program. I hope it will be a good week for me, and I hope everyone else has good weeks in my absence.

Back online around the 13th.

Wooo! Sleep, then circus, then repeat (then sort out last details before christchurch). Let's see how that goes. Goodnight!

the bag is now nearly packed. It also weighs 19.5 kilos, according to our scales.

My allowance for checked baggage is 20 kilos. If I'm over, they charge me $20. The question is how far I trust the scales (and what I could take out of the bag...)

Packing my bag for tasmania, I keep asking myself "what can I fit in this gap?"

The question is more absurd every time.

I made a decision. Unusual, I know, but there it is: I'm going to circoarts in christchurch this year.

The passport application is in, the flight is booked, and everything else should be easy to get done. Now all that's left is for the passport to arrive before the plane leaves (and it should, by a moderately comfortable margin), and I can go.

Now I'll go back to looking at stuff about accommodation.