rikan_feral

I passed my motorcycle handling course yesterday. It was hard. Specifically, operating a clutch is hard. I never knew.

Will be buying safety gear in the next couple of weeks, all going well. Will be buying a motorcycle within a few months.

So we put in an application at this house.

*Now* does anyone want to join us?

The internet. It is quite good. It has raving lunacy.

Also, apparently vizbybis2 is state-of-the-art, advanced data visualization software that enables organizations to truly understand, analyze and act upon the ever-increasing mountains of business data with unprecedented dimensional capacity.

Buh?

In slightly shocking news, I appear to have closed *every* issue assigned to me out of the issue tracker at work.

What's a boy to do all day?

Edit: This is not an invitation for people to give me data-entry work. Seriously. I could be contributing to open-source webapps or something.

Fuckers.

For fuck's sake.

I don't even *take* drugs and this pisses me off.

Just for the record, I've never worn a nurse's uniform.

I just spent six hours diagnosing and fixing this bug.

I am not impressed.

Note. This CMS is the most god-awful piece of software I have ever had the misfortune to have been forced to work with.

Their home-page fails validation with 152 errors! Wtf?

Edit: Wow. I am such a bitch.

Writing within the Wordpress framework is one of the most pleasant and easy programming experiences I have ever had.

That will be all.

Dear iTunes:

30% of my CPU and a gig of RAM is *not* acceptable, thank you.

Fuck you, Apple

So I bought myself one of these:



Edit: By which I mean the coat, not the boy.

A group has been assembled. At present it comprises Thomas, Kim and Joel.

As seen here, we are still in need of one more person to round out numbers. Preferably a woman, but we're not overly worried about your reproductive organs.

Fly my minions! Fly!

Today, I have this thing going on where I'm Really Fucking Awesome.

Tasks coming in at one quarter of budgeted time is a joyous thing.

My workplace has decided they are unwilling to cover the section of my cellphone bill spawned by charges they failed to inform me of.

Bah.

The trouble with being me is that I don't look dissimilar to Gary Numan in eyeliner.

Hypothetically, if someone were to redevelop the Consumer.org.nz website to provide modern tools, calculators and sundry Useful Features, what would *you* like to see implemented?

This could be quite relevant in the next couple of weeks.

Just sayin'.

During my sojourn in London, I made a point of visiting the Tate, which gave me some interesting insights into art and art history: most specifically, that while I can meaningfully assess and sometimes appreciate art from about 1920 and before, the majority of modern art (with a multitude of exceptions, most notably Francis Bacon) looks to me like a child's scribbling.

I suppose a related observation is that the labels on modern art have a knack for saying simple things in complex language - sentences that when decoded outline the trite or obvious. They also had a prevalence of neo-psychological language and concepts that failed to give an impression of legitimacy.

Of course, this is not to say that all modern artists suck, or that all old artists are good (after all, the Pre-Raphaelites are hardly modern), but the discrepancies in applied finesse and technical prowess is are quite obvious.

My art history is non-existent, which makes it rather difficult for me to work out exactly why this change has happened. Either art has become so rarified and abstract that is not understandable to the layman (me), or it disappeared up its own arse sometime last century. I shall have to find out.

I am looking for flatmates to set up a house with. I'm interested in finding two or three others to live with, pooling resources and getting a fairly upmarket home somewhere either within reasonable walking distance of town or with good public transport: Newtown, Island Bay, Kelburn, Thorndon, etc. The idea is to find a place that will cost around $175-$225 per-person, which with three or four will pay for something attractive.

I've found a number of five bedroom houses in good areas for ~$600-650, which between three people would be affordable, have spare rooms and/or studies, plenty of space, multiple bathrooms and so on. There are also four to six bedroom houses for $800-$900, which are affordable for four, and exceedingly flash.

For example, Brooklyn, four bedrooms, $800 per week.

I tend to value cleanliness, warmth, good people, good food and comfort. Ideally this household could function as a community hub, be configured to have guests and host events and the other fun things you can do with a comfortable and attractive home. My ideal flatmates are reasonably tidy, open-minded and enthusiastic.

If you or anyone you know is looking for a place roughly along these lines at the moment or in the near future, drop me an email at willrj.marshall@gmail.com

I'm back.


This article is interesting, and pertains more or less directly to my annoyance with roaming charges on phones.

The most notable (and funny) part of the entire article is the counter-argument offered by the telecommunications people: “In our view, these markets are healthy, competitive and functioning well”



I would make a long post detailing all the exciting things I've been up to, but I'm sleepy. Maybe later.

I have uploaded most of the photos of my trip thus far. I have not filtered or edited these, so the quality is likely to be variant. That said, there are some good images.

(Also, because of a long-running and somewhat mystifying family joke, there may be the dog turd in there).

Photos!



Also, I'm in love.

The following entry is terse because I am in a hurry.

Back from Provence, where I spent four days. I stayed in a camping ground about twenty minutes outside Avignon, spent the days travelling around the area (Camarg, Orange, Nimes, etc).

I had a great deal of fun, have kept notes, will write the thing up (with pictures) when I get a reasonable stretch of downtime.

I got to go see the older of the two family castes at Castelnau, and learn a lot about the history of my family during the reign of Louis XIV. It was fairly fucking awesome.

Etc.