A Collection of MiniPosts

So I have some medium-size things to say, and I wanted to put them in a post all together. I've gone back and read posts from my blog in the past in the same way one might look at photos from years gone by. It can be revealing, or cathartic, or surprising, or a number of other fancy words. Basically, it's why I'm putting these thoughts together.

Someone Is Wrong On The Internet!
I've just spent my evening writing to someone I don't know to try and convince them of something they didn't ask to be convinced about, because it's something that is important to me. Not a religious argument, btw. Just something that reflects a little on me, so I wanted to advocate on behalf of those like me. Cryptic enough? ;) Anyway... I wonder sometimes why I care so much about what random strangers think of me.

Internet Dating Is Unfun
I'm paying far too much money to make new "friends", where the inverted commas define a class of person with whom I've had a couple of coffees and conversations, whom I've parted on good terms with, but who doesn't really want to pursue things any further. It's nice that it's friendly, but it's gut-wrenchingly soul-destroying that I am clearly predisposed toward being in the "friend zone". It's like my teenage years all over again, without anywhere near the degree of opportunity. Maybe I need a wingman...

Fat People Are Less Likely To Get Married (statistical fact)
Reference: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199309303291406
I'd heard this before, but had to find the reference. I think there are other studies that find the same conclusions.
So this one is hard to come to grips with, but I've thought about it lots and it does make sense. Yes, to express it in cliché: true beauty comes from within. But when you first meet someone, that person in your mind consists of perhaps 90% how they look, and maybe 10% the conversation you've had with them. Over time, as you get to know the person more, the character attributes they possess, their interests, etc., make up more of the picture, and so someone who is physically unattractive can still be found quite attractive by a member of the opposite gender based on who they are as a whole. But if you are dating outside of your normal social circle, it's not uncommon to decide after a date or two whether or not you want to continue seeing someone. And really, how you feel about that person is based fairly heavily on their appearance. This all sounds quite shallow (and let's face it - it is), but being on the statistical downside of this particular factoid, I can see that there's not going to be any changing it. And I can see that I'm doing it as much as anyone else. It's just how it is, but interesting to consider how we behave in this context.


Unrecovery
I made the following statement to my psychologist (gasp! yes, I see a psychologist occasionally):

"From my observation, a person in my situation who doesn't find their way into a new relationship doesn't recover."

She asked me a few questions about this: What situation? Any relationship? Define "recover"? When I'd answered, she rephrased the statement slightly to pinpoint what I was talking about. Something like:

"From my observation, a person who has lost a satisfying long-term committed relationship against their desire, who does not find another committed, long-term relationship, does not return to the level of emotional satisfaction they had prior to the loss." (my rather haphazard paraphrase - I don't remember the exact words now)

After saying this, she sat there and thought for a minute, and then said:

"I'd agree with that."

This both makes perfect sense, and also flies in the face of a lot of the well-meaning advice I've got along the way. Specifically, the advice that I need to "be happy on my own" in order to be emotionally healthy enough to not be on my own. Quite obviously when you're in a long term relationship, you clear other stuff out of the way to make room for it. You compromise. Sacrifice. Change plans, and make plans. When it's removed, you're not the same person you were prior, and can't just go back to being fine on your own. Ever. You have two choices: make do, or fill the gap. People make do a lot. They throw things into the gap that hide its size for a little bit. Maybe. But ultimately, there's something not right whether they'll admit it or not, and everyone else can see it.
I find often I feel bad for wanting to get married again as more than just a casual aside. I actually really want to, and am keen to persue it as a goal. But it's almost like it's socially unacceptable to be that guy or girl. The word "desperate" comes to mind. I'm not desperate. Just tired of tripping over the gap all the time.

Internet Dating Is Unfun, Part 2
Clearly, eHarmony has decided that I'm an outdoorsy kind of person, and that I should only meet other outdoorsy people.

...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

...

forever alone

Sleep, or lack thereof

I'm finding it hard to get to bed at a decent hour. This can be traced to the following:

• My Playstation and Mass Effect 2
• Sites that deliver a random funny image every time you click a button
• General lack of motivation
• Writing blog posts

The problem is, tomorrow I will regret it. Again. Just like last time.

Also, I generated a meme:

That is all.

Audience Stats

Today, I've had 17 page views from France. I just thought that was worth sharing.

Welcome, French visitor(s). I hope you've enjoyed your stay. :)

There's a helicopter on the oval!!

So I'm at work today, and the Principal's PA walks in to let us know there's this helicopter parked on the school's oval. Apparently, there's an author who was coming to speak to a yeargroup at the school, and rather then battle the traffic to get out here, he decided to just fly his chopper out and land it on the oval! It's nice for some, I guess.

I do intend to do a "proper" proper blog post soonish. There's rants to be had, I just don't seem to get the time these days.

Dinner with Joel and Lisa

In true random form, I thought I'd post this photo I took at dinner tonight. Happy faces all around.

Massive update post

Hello readership who has waned into oblivion! This is the "I haven't blogged for so long that now I need to blog half a million things in a single post" post. So let's get to it.


Rachel's Thyroid Cancer
Following my last post re: Rachel's thyroid cancer, we had an appointment with the thyroid surgery unit at Royal North Shore Hospital. While they didn't change anything about the diagnosis or treatment ("Surprise! It's not cancer, and you need no surgery!" would have been the best possible outcome) they did reassure us quite a bit about what needs to be done, and the potential risks both of the surgery and of the cancer. Turns out this cancer is pretty non-eventful, and in someone Rachel's age is pretty much 100% cure rate. That's like having... I don't know... tonsillitis. You have to have surgery to fix it, but really, it's nothing to worry about.

Anyway - one of Rachel's biggest concerns was that her endocrinologist had indicated she'd need radioactive iodine treatment as soon as the surgery was done - or within a few weeks. Turns out he was being over reactive. The thyroid surgery people said she'd be fine to leave it as long as she needed - and that's exactly what she plans to do. The issue with this treatment was breastfeeding our 4-month old son, so she's going to finish feeding him to about a year old, and then have the treatment. Smiles and happiness all around.


Basically, this whole situation is more of an inconvenience then anything else now. Continuing prayer for complication-free surgery would be appreciated, because I think Rachel would really struggle if her voice got damaged.



The Magpie-Lark (aka Peewee)
As I type this, I have a box on my desk covered in a towel. Inside, is a very small and very frightened Peewee. The stupid bugger fell out of his nest, and can't fly. So I rang WIRES, and they told me I should make him a make-shift nest, and put it in a tree. The plan is, his parents will come and look after him and all would be well. You know what the stupid bird did? Immediately took a nose dive out of the nest, hit the ground with a thud, and casually started wandering towards the road! Anyway, I tried another time and he gracefully did the same thing, so I've now given up and someone is on their way to fix him up with a feeding cage. In the meantime, enjoy the following portrait:

Cute, isn't he? Yep - he's also a complete pain in the rear. Spent most of my morning trying to get him back to his parents at WIRES' direction, and all he was interested in doing was throwing himself in front of cars. Good times. He contributes "SKREEEEEETCH!!!" to the discussion.


Health, Weight loss and Well-being
I'm pretty unmotivated to lose weight. I've lost some, but in general, getting the kilos off is a near impossible task. A couple of people have commented recently that I look like I've lost weight, but unfortunately the scales tell a different story. Then again, maybe that's good? Who knows.


I succumb to World of Warcraft
If you're on the Dath'Remar realm, Katranda can be found wandering in Westfall at the moment. I held off on getting involved in this game for so long, and now thankfully its cheap enough that I can get a few months of play for fairly little outlay. I plan to make use of their 3 month play cards to play when I feel like it, and not when I don't. If I get half a dozen good PS3 games for Christmas, for example, I'll probably wait before cashing in the first of said cards. Priorities are important. ;)


Ok, that's it. I planned to put much more in here, but hey - when it came to it I was just unable to deliver masses of engaging content.
Merry Christmas everyone - I hope your stockings are full, and your stomachs also, but more then that I hope you remember why we celebrate Christmas at this time of year: because a bunch of pagans were having a feast, and we didn't want to miss out, so we put our own on at the same time!!! Lolz!!

In all seriousness, its nice to have a day on the calendar each year that we remember Jesus' birth, and the wondrous gift that God gave us all those years ago. Sappy as it sounds, may God bless you all this Christmas. Peace, good will, and ponies for all.

Conciousness

So I've been thinking about conciousness. What makes our experience of life work? Personally, I believe it's something external - the human soul, that is joined to our physical experience in a simular vein to how things work in The Matrix. The bit of us that makes us who we are isn't tied to the same 3 (4?) dimensional world that our bodies are. I like to think of it being like our brain is an interface that our soul is plugged into.

However, I was thinking about conciousness as a product of merely a physical brain, and I can't resolve some ideas. These all revolve around the experience of the person rather then external person looking on. For example, if conciousness was purely physical, I should be able to walk into a room, copy myself exactly (technology permitting) and have the clone walk out and go on with my life as if they were me - because from their perspective, they ARE me (with not much gramatical sense either). However, even though they feel as though their conciousness has been continuous, I know that they are a copy. To everyone looking on, I've walked into a room, and I've walked back out. So is it really me? Well, no - because I can then also walk out of the room. But while I'm in the room, doing nothing, experiencing nothing... say I'm asleep or unconcious or something... is the clone "really" me? It's the me having the experience of being concious, but my conciousness has stopped - I'm unconcious. Or if you'd like to argue that unconciousness is not really no conciousness, then say the me in the room dies. Is the clone, who wasn't the original me, now the real me?

You may note there's been movies that has explored this idea like The 6th Day, or The Island, and The Matrix does the most well-known job of exploring the idea of a reality above this one, although I'm personally rather partial to The 13th Floor. The ideas are around, but as scientific research moves forward I wonder if anyone has actually considered this to an appropriate level. Say you could deconstruct someone's matter and reconstruct it somewhere else - a common science fiction idea that is being worked on in real science. From an external viewpoint, there appears to be no adverse side-effects, as the person on the other end appears externally to be the person who was deconstructed. But who is to say that the person on the sending end didn't die - that is, their experience of conciousness stopped at the point they were deconstructed. How could you tell?

Just something I've been thinking about...

Ways I've Made Money Online

This looks like spam, I know. But I've tried several different schemes over the last I-Don't-Know-How-Many years, and I've found two of them that work. Both of them are getting paid for targeted advertising. They're by no means quick money, but considering they take about 3 minutes out of your day each day, and then eventually give you real cash, that's not such a bad deal. Here they are:

PureProfile: You fill out a profile, then go to the site each day to read messages. You can setup notificiation preferences if you want to email you when there's stuff to read.

EmailCash: This has been the most lucrative for me thus far. They email you, and you click on the link in the email to indicate you've read it. You get 5 points. 1 point = 1 cent. You can get a cheque at $30 or $100, and I've had several $30 cheques and am now well on my way to a $100 one. Just for reading emails. Not bad really.

Now my wife, on the other hand, came to me quite a while ago now and asked for some money (I think it was $65 from memory) to sign up with a crowd who would hand your name around to market research companies. She has made hundreds of dollars out of it, for very little effort.

Just thought some of you might be interested. Just btw, the links above give me bonuses if you sign up using them. ;)

Unpleasent

I'm having an unpleasent afternoon. You know those times when everything seems unpleasent? When pleasentries seem to disappear, and the notion of pleasent is nowhere to be found? Yep, just like that.

Something is wrong with the world...

The following image is a screen clip of my Facebook profile page. The application it's looking at is called Compare People, and it shows you the user picture of two of your friends, and asks you a comparison question like "Who is the most intelligent?". It then adds up the votes from all your friends and shows you what categories you got the most votes for.
Please observe the image below (highlight is mine):

This must be some new definition of the word "best" that I've yet to encounter. Either that, or we've just accidentally found a bug in the matrix. I vote bug in the matrix. That would be far more interesting. :)

UPDATE: It appears that the list only recalculates when you compare other people - so I have, and I've now lost my status as person with the best body. *sigh* That was shortlived. Oh well - Back to the diet I guess...

The case of the Phantom Chicken Drumstick

Before I get in to the subject of this post, I'd like to note that my last post was my 200th on this blog. One day, I shall print them all out and have them bound into a book. Why? I don't know. For kicks. OK, on with the post.

So I'm on my lunchbreak. When I'm working from home, my lunch break is usually 80/20 lunch and break. That is, I spend most of my time making and then eating my lunch. The remainder is usually then spent waiting for my lunchbreak to end. However, today I'd already spent most of my lunch break writing an enoumous rant on a gaming forum, only to decide it wasn't worth trying to argue with what are most likely 16 year old boys on the finer points of politics and it's implications for those whose primary use of the internet isn't trying to get around the porn filter their parents have installed. So I deleted my massive rant that took me half an hour to craft, and went to find some relatively quick food.
What I found was a box full of roast chicken portions in the fridge. Yum-mee. I'm quite the fan of anything roasted, and roast chicken sounded just about perfect. So I pick up a drumstick, and start to munch away at it.
While I'm doing this, I notice a courier van pull up out the front. As the guy gets out and starts walking toward the house I think to myselft "Hmm - I'm going to need to do something with this chicken." And here is where things get dodgy.
You see, one of the following two things happened:

1. I quickly finished off the remaining chicken, and hoiked the bone in the bin.
2. I saw a place that looked like it would temporarily be a good place to leave a half eaten chicken leg, and carefully placed it there.

The problem is, I don't know which it was. I checked the bin, but there didn't seem to be any sign of the bone (to be fair, I didn't search too hard), and I've searched the house for convinent places one might put a half-eaten chicken bone, but I can't see it anywhere. It appears, for all intents and purposes, to have completely vanished. Gone. Like a phantom. Did it ever really exist at all? We may never know.

The social networking thing...

So just last week, I've gotten into this whole myspace/facebook thing. I've had a myspace profile for a while, thanks to receiving a rather cryptic email that required me to sign up before I could find out it was meaningless porn-spam, but I never did anything with it after that. Primarily because all the myspace profiles I came across contained eye-destroyingly bad colours, animated backgrounds and generally looked like they belonged to 15 year old girls who were increadibly bored - which, in fact, most of them did. I did want to link an example of said horror, but it appears you can no longer see pages of the youngn's if you're not a young'n. At least, I don't seem to stumble across 15/16 year olds pages anymore, and one would imagine they're the largest userbase. Anyway, trust me they were ugly, meaningless and definately didn't encourage me to get into myspace.

Anyway, one of my friends signed up for myspace and set himself up with a profile and what not, and made mention of it on his blog. Because I remembered I had a profile, I thought I'd just add myself as a friend to his. Then I decided to enter some details about me, and while I was there upload a photo or two. Nothing to rope me in thus far. Then I did a search for people who were in my year at school, and I turn up 6 people who I haven't seen in 10 years. I'm a bit of a sucker for nostalgia, so I send them all messages, and over the next couple of days I got some back. So now I'm hooked. Hunting out people I know and have known and seeing how they're doing is awesome. I'm big on family, so I love seeing that people have gotten married and have families of their own. It's really nice.

Anyway - so I do myspace now. And facebook too. Feel free to stop by.

Mistake

Before I left home this morning, I thought to myself:

"Hmm, I'm feeling a little under the weather. Maybe I should bring some Panadol to work with me today."

And then, I didn't. Obviously I need an opera singer.



(You all know the whole story was just an excuse to post this video, right? Right?)

Random post

"In our real lives, there's also always the next level we're chasing after....But really, there are few blessings in life that are quite so great as to be able to spend one's days laboring creatively in the service of something that one genuinely loves. This is really the dream all game creators are living with all the time."
- Alex Rigopulos, Harmonix Music Systems

I believe this quote is from a keynote at GDC06. With E3 '07 coming up I thought it was worth posting. I've had it sitting on my desktop for a while. It just... sounds good. It's sort of the explanation of where I wish I was. And hey - yay for E3!

On a different note, I've just deleted a whole lot of long draft posts from my blogger account. Most of them were disections of topics I feel strongly about - science vs. God, family, politics, etc. Mostly they were motivated by something I'd read and felt compelled to respond. However, I deleted them because of the realisation that my posting them achieves nothing. I can have very little impact on anything that goes beyond my immediate circle of influence. So I give up. I think that's why I've stopped posting so much on here. Random life events aren't something people care about reading, and the rants I post have little affect on anything.

I'll probably post more family-related stuff once the new bubba arrives, but beyond that... I don't know.

BSOD-ing Fun.

Today is the second-last day that Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 will run on the two machines I have it installed on. At the end of tomorrow, it will expire and will only be able to boot for 2 hours at a time to enable data retrieval - something I must admit I am quite glad about. The two machines are my work PC, and my home PC. At home, I plan to install a copy of Vista RTM that I have handy, and try and purchase a license within the max 120 days you can evaluate it for. At work, I have an install of XP on a secondary partition, so my plan is to simply roll back to that. However, fate would not have it that way...

This morning, I decided to get stuck straight into rolling back my PC. The next time I'll be in the office is next Monday, and I really wanted to have this resolved prior to Vista switching into "2 hours at a time" mode. So I copied across all the relevant data I could find, cleared my desktop and got to that point where I decided that I no longer needed Vista. So I switched the boot manager to default to XP, and rebooted my machine. On launching into my old WinXP install, I discovered there was a small problem that could make the system unstable on startup. So, I did some quick clicking and found a system update I needed to resolve the issue. At this point, someone in my office asked me if I'd like a cup of coffee. This is relevant, and in a moment, you'll see why. I downloaded the update, and clicked to install. It did it's system checks and started to install, when suddenly...

*click*

The screen went blank, and the coffee which had been noisily bubbling in the background went quiet. I hurried over to our switch box, and saw that the circuit breaker had tripped. Oh bugger. I look back - there's coffee everywhere. The coffee machine had gone somewhat mental and bubbled over, tripping the circuit breaker in the process. I quickly switched the breaker back on, and hurried over to my machine. As it moved to the XP boot screen I breathed a sigh of relief - but unfortunately, too soon. The system rebooted. And then it did it again. And again. I finally woke up enough to realise something was wrong, and set Windows not to reboot on error. The next time, I was greeted by a glaring great BSOD with the message "BOOT_DISK_UNMOUNTABLE".

Oh...

Crap.

So I boot into the recovery console using a copy of XP I have lying around, but unfortunately it won't let me. I can only log on to the Vista install, and by default Vista uses a random Administrator password. Useful.So I start hunting around for NTFS-enabled boot disks so that I can do a disk repair. Can't find any, but stumble across Bart's PE. Having used Windows PE before, I know this is my saviour, so I download it and use a Win2003Srv virtual machine on my Mac to create the CD. Once I boot it up on my Windows box, I start a disc check and the errors it's fixing start to fill up the screen. About half an hour later, it finishes. I reboot... I hold my breath... and...

WOOOOHOOOO!!!! IT LIVES!!!! :D

Anyway, moral of the story is that Bart is my new hero. And could be yours too. I recommend anyone who has vague technical competence and uses Windows beyond WinME should have a PE disk lying around, and Bart's is free and easy to use. Having a functioning (while very, very limited) Windows install on a bootable CD is just awesome, and allows you to fix stuff you otherwise couldn't.

Anyway, rant done. Computer works. Back to work I guess.

Crazy, crazy drums

Randomness of the Day

I thought this image was so funny, I had to share it with you all:

My boy rocks out!!!

In the midst of completing "Bark At The Moon" on Expert difficulty, a sudden flash from a camera momentarily distracts our protagonist, but he quickly regains his composure, and completes a blistering solo without so much as breaking a sweat.

Shameless (and once only) Plug

Note to first time readers: The presence of an ad banner does not imply my blog is full of advertising. This is my one-and-only post about my newly acquired "buisness"/MLM-scheme unless it makes me craploads of money. If you're offended by advertising, then dig a hole and hide in it for the rest of your life.

Well, I've gone and done it. I've joined up with a multi-level marketing program, and now am looking to pimp my business to anyone who's interested. Kind of. I'm not really the right kind of person for these things, because I hate selling stuff, but I did want to blog about it for that reason...
I'll explain:

I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues one day at work about how money is pretty difficult for my family at the moment. Rising cost of fuel, and multiple debts with increasing interest rates makes keeping on top of things quite difficult, even though I make a decent salary. I was also lamenting the fact that the things I really love doing are completely unrelated to the job that I do. My workmate said that he might be able to offer me something, and would explain it to me sometime when I'm not at work. Straight away I suspected something Amway-ish, but this guy is so far from being Anthony Robbins that I couldn't imagine it being something where you have to sell like crazy...

So he explains this Club Freedom thing to me. Apparently, his family know the people who are starting it, and it's legit and legal and all that jazz. Not only that, but it doesn't kick off in earnest until September, so if I get involved now there's a massive advantage to be had.

So I do some reading, and sure enough, the whole concept makes sense, and the total workload for your average freeloader (like myself) is putting down a deposit on some travel of US$150, then finding two people who are interested in making some money, who think they can sign two people up as well. Payoff? US$3500 in travel, and the same in cash. The premise behind this is that you're earning your travel/cash by marketing the product to your two people. Now, there's a little more to it then that, but basically that's the gist. You wait, then the money comes in. Now if that's all the work you ever do with it (and it is all I'm planning to do), you're not going to get rich off this. As more people sign up, you'll cycle through their system slower and slower - and we don't even know how quickly it's going to go when it starts. I might not get any return before the end of the year - but hey, I decided it's about time I started taking some risks instead of just wishing someone would pay my way.

So this is my one-and-only shameless plug: I think this thing makes sense, and could make me (and you if you're interested) some money. US$150 approximately is equal to AU$213, and someone has said to me "If you get in, you'll get paid at least once this year" - they might be wrong, but it's not so much money that it's an unreasonable risk. If you're interested at all, let me know, or click the banner at the top of this post and do some reading for yourself.

I'm sorry if you're offended by the blatent advertising in this post, but to me, being involved in this thing is fun and interesting, and might make me a buck. I'm quite happy to share that with people. If you want to know more, the banner at the top of this post will take you to the site, and the "Travel Plan" button tells you all about how it works.

That's it - plug done. Go about your business, citizens.

Previousity

The comment below was left on my blog by one Mr Philip Walsh, teacher of computing-type subjects at my old workplace:

*snip*

Hi Justin, showing Yr10 blogs and thought I would show them yours. Cheers, Phil Walsh

*/snip*

In light of this, I say howdy doody to all possible St Paul's people who occasionally visit my blog. I have to comment that I can't vouch for the content being particuarly responsible or interesting, but I appreciate the thought. ;)

While I'm speaking of St Paulites, I should also appologise to "luke" who commented (off topic, I should add) on this post and asked me to contact him in regards to some IT questions he had, and then I never did. Sorry man, but seriously... It was never going to happen. In the credits of my life, you would appear as "Random student with question #1295", and I've got a job and a wife and a kid and stuff. Keeps me busy. But hey, feel honoured that I now, multiple months later, have mentioned you in the context of another blog post. And remember, most IT problems can be solved with a suitable application of excessive physical force. Or of money to my wallet. That works too.