Archive for January, 2007

Letter from the heart

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Back in 1912 Captain Robert Falcon Scott wrote this last letter to his wife, I found it very moving:

To my widow

Dearest Darling — we are in a very tight corner and I have doubts of pulling through–In our short lunch hours I take advantage of a very small measure of warmth to write letters preparatory to a possible end — the first is naturally to you on whom my thoughts mostly dwell waking or sleeping — if anything happens to me I shall like you to know how much you have meant to me and that pleasant recollections are with me as I depart –

(more…)

Day of the Triffids…

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

As we were driving home last night, every street corner on the way up the hill had people on it, looking out towards comet McNaught. I had visions of “Day of the Triffids”, everyone going out to watch the celestial fireworks, only to wake up blind in the morning to then get subsequently eaten by triffids.

The comet was quite visible, although not for long as it slipped below the horizon. Others photos here. Harbinger of change (or is that doom?) I sort of think of them as timepieces. Where were we when it was last here? Who will still be here when it comes back? What might have boiled off it to eventually wind up in our atmosphere on the way past?

Anybody seen any Apollo 11 tapes?

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

Just in case anyone out there has seen any tapes from the Apollo 11 mission lying around (in the UCC, for example :), NASA are looking for them. Apparently some lunar telemetry data was recently uncovered at Curtin Uni.

Google Video comes to Australia

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

Now there’s a localised version of Google Video for Australia. Time to upload those most dangerous home videos or Glasshouse episodes :)

Someone’s worried…

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

I got an incoming search request for “BankWest down” (amongst many other similar queries recently :). The IP resolved to someone at UniSys West, who are a joint venture between Unisys and BankWest and run BankWest’s outsourced computing operations. Maybe they didn’t reduce the right staff numbers when they automated their data centre?

I guess that’s what you get for US$16 million these days.

Penguin buys virtual Second Life real estate for Snowcrash

Monday, January 15th, 2007

Penguin UK has bought space in the virtual world Second Life to help plug Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash.

Random Wikipediage

Monday, January 15th, 2007

Things I’ve looked up in the Wikipedia in the not too distant past:

Let no-one else’s work evade your eyes…

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

If you can’t find it on Student Of Fortune, perhaps you could use Example Essays instead. I note that their Terms of Use make no guarantees about the contents of the essays so presumably you could submit something that was massively factually inaccurate and they’d resell it to some unsuspecting schmuck. Although their terms of use do point out that you should not turn in someone else’s essay as your own :)

Adults only puppets in Melbourne

Saturday, January 13th, 2007

If you’re in Melbourne from 4th-15th of April (or Sydney from March 23-31), the Jim Henson Company of puppeteers are putting on an Adults only show, Puppet Up!Melbourne International Comedy Festival tickets here.

Thanks to Andrew for the pointer.

Left to my own devices…

Friday, January 12th, 2007

… fortunately I have many and varied devices.

Thought some people might be interested in random geek babes “Dedicated to beautiful women that are geeks or enjoy hanging out with geeks”. For costume ideas, if nothing else. Just ignore the ones with maxed out flickr bandwidth :)

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