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The kitchen is dead! Long live the kitchen!

We got off our arses this morning and actually did some of the stuff on our eternal To Do list, if you can believe it. While I cleaned up the kitchen and washed up, the BatPup (slightly) and the Beloved (mostly) cleaned the family/dining room. Then we wheeled the fridge out of the way, popped down to Kennards for a wallpaper steamer, and proceeded to consign the pig ugly floral wallpaper to the very same pit of hell wherein will someday burn the tasteless government bureaucrat who selected it, thirty years ago. The Elder Daughter of DOOOOM was magnificent: she looked after the Boy Wonder, then she got in with the steamer and the scraper and did all the bits we couldn't get to because they were too high from the floor or the chair but we couldn't fit if we stood on the bench. So now the walls look utterly appalling, because they were never painted, so I still need to sand, patch and apply undercoat... but it's on its way.

Meanwhile, I forgot to mention the BatPup's Riboflavin moment yesterday. To explain: I learned to read around age three or four, more or less without much input from my parents who simply weren't expecting me to be much interested until I hit primary school. They discovered my progress one morning at the breakfast table when I randomly asked them "what's Riboflavin?". They asked where I'd heard of it, and I pointed to the Corn Flakes packet. They were suitably gobsmacked. Well, yesterday was something similar, though earlier on the path: the Batpup asked me how to spell "dogs", so I told her, and a little later I heard cries of irritation. I went to where she was sitting, and she was cursing her mummy's laptop for not giving her what she wanted: she had opened Google and typed in "funnycatsanddogs" and it wasn't coming up with any interesting videos. I explained about the space bar, and she spend the rest of her time hunting for entertainment on YouTube...

Thus ends the week from hell. In the immortal words of that old Betelgeusian death anthem, "after this, things can only get better". This weekend and this coming week I shall, in no particular order:

• Viciously, forcibly and with great globs of malice aforethought dispose of the paisley wallpaper in the kitchen, making use of a wallpaper steamer from my favourite psychopath's supply store, Kennards, hirer-outer of nailguns to disgruntled JavaScript/ASP/XSLT programmers throughout the multiverse.
• Make, bake and eat a Lemming Meringoo Pie.
• Try to make some headway with the bit of programming for my brother's gaming convention, so he can pay me,  because money is nice.
• Try to find suitable Drupal plugins so I can do a new version of the Politarchopolis website and hive it off to some other poor wally, thus reducing my workload by approximately one poofteenth of nothing much.
• Trudge laboriously through the process of installing Mono and MonoDevelop on my laptop, so I can play around with C# and maybe learn some skills that aren't nailgunbait.
• Finish the beading on the kitchen floor.
• Cuddle my babies.
• Cuddle my Beloved.
• Get some sleep.

In the words of Huw Evans: your time starts... now.

I got 99% of the horribly overdue stuff done at work, and then ran into a bug caused by incompatibilities in the version of MS SQL our customers use. So tomorrow I need to rummage around and find an alternative method, which is a pain in the arse. But at least it's close enough that people at work are no longer panicking, so that's good. It'd be nice to occasionally have something Just Work, but when does that ever happen?

Speaking of things not Just Working, I got interested in getting Mono and MonoDevelop working on my Kubuntu Hardy system, but I'm hamstrung by the eternal Ubuntu problem: that there's a small group of overworked geeks vetting all the software in the system. That means that packages that have been out for months or years are unavailable for Ubuntu because nobody's gotten around to making them official: so I'm using Firefox 3.0.11 when 3.5 has been out for weeks, Open Office 2.4 when 3.0 is already there, Mono 1.x when 2.6 has been released, and so on. The alternative is to override the package manager and install from source, but in the case of Mono that leads to pain, because apparently I'm the first person in history to think of doing it so there are no instructions other than vague hints on mailing lists and a couple of untested blog posts. Sigh.

(The irony of the above is that I can't upgrade to the latest Kubuntu because it uses KDE 4, which is in no way ready for public use and is in general a total disaster. So I'm stuck with a version that's more than a year old because I actually use my computer for more than just Frozen Bubble and vim. Bleagh.)

I had a dummy spit yesterday at work, after a cow-orker made some ill-timed comments (read: patronising bullshit) in an email. I've been working hard on a new feature, and it's running late, and yesterday I discovered -- with the help of two other non-gittish cow-orkers -- that I've been barking up the wrong sewage pipe for the last two weeks. Today I got back on track and finished the major functionality (modifications to an A4 chart) and then as an afterthought finished the second piece (modifications to another A4 chart). Sadly those two charts and the as-yet unmodified A3 chart are all done in different ways, and the only thing they have in common is the complete lack of comments, sensible variable names or non-Lovecraftian structure, so it will take a little more fiddling to get the last one done. But I got a lot working, and I hate my life a lot less as a result.

Now I just need a holiday...

Via a guy at work -- Perpetuum Jazille, a Slovenian choir:

Do I still have any readers who believe the world was created in seven days (for some value of "days") by some sort of God? And that evolution is "just a theory"? I wouldn't think so, but feel free to comment here if so, because I'd love to hear your response to this simple and unambiguous explanation of the flaw in the previous sentence.

Via a link on the Bad Astronomer's page, I was inspired to check some details, and the news is not good.

Babylon Five's pilot episode, The Gathering originally aired in 1993. The five seasons followed; the fifth season finished in November 1998.

The Babylon Five space station itself was in orbit around the third planet of Epsilon Eridani.

Epsilon Eridani is 10.5 light years from Earth.

That means that, from a non-relativistic point of view, any natives of planets in the Epsilon Eridani system saw the final episode of B5 a month ago.

They are likely to be extremely annoyed. Not quite Battlestar Galactica-level annoyed, but pretty close. Captain Lochley. Byron the telepath. Lennier's murder attempt. If they have faster-than-light travel, we can expect a thousand beweaponed battledrones in orbit any day now.

Fortunately, I have a plan. Before Bill Mumy played Lennier, but well after he played another role on TV, he had a band. They produced a song, which may just be the single greatest piece of music and music video ever created on this godsforsaken dirtball. Our only hope to stave off imminent extinction might be to broadcast this song in the general direction of Epsilon Eridani and hope that the justly wrathful inhabitants will see it for what it is: evidence that the planet Earth deserves to live.


Oh, and we should probably send them the corpses of the executives of the TNT network, just to be on the safe side.

Give up any hope of achieving anything else for the next half an hour or so; you've got some cartoons to watch. Via Tegan at Bloggity-Blog-Blog: The Ten Best Uses of Classical Music In Classic Cartoons. Go to it!

With the assistance of the Bad Astronomer, I can help!



Oh, and... homeopaths? You're useless quacks and you kill people. Drop dead, mm-kay?

I was too knackered to mention yesterday, but I finished the kitchen floor!!! Well, finished laying the boards, anyhow; there's still the beading to do, but never mind that. And it looks good! The gasfitter came yesterday to remove the oven so I could do the last of the ripping up of evil ugly slate tiles -- I worked from home again, which is a habit I really need to get out of because I rarely get a full day's work done -- and then I went ahead and finished the floor. Unfortunately, that means we now have no oven or stove, and with the microwave choosing this week to die, we are somewhat handicapped in the not-starving-to-death department. So we're off to Fyshwick tomorrow to get a new stove and a microwave, though they'll have to wait until Monday to be delivered due to me being too much of a twit to transfer the money out of our account in time, meaning we won't be able to pay for them. D'oh! Ah well, we'll manage. We had toasted sandwiches, made in our lovely huge sandwich toaster, and they were scrummy and disturbingly filling (can't... move... limbs... too... full...).

Umm... I think that's all. Going to bed now.

Another blast from the past via my backups directory: a song about how not to deal with teh intarwobs, to the tune of Tom Lehrer's ode to the Boy Scouts, Be Prepared.

Feed The Troll!

Feed the troll! That's the way to have some fun,
Feed the troll! Share the love with everyone
Feed the egos of the flamers on your list
Don't be timid, don't be silent, don't resist!

Feed the troll! When he tells you you're to blame
For the way no one wants to play his game --
"When the Nazis took the Jews away to turn them into glue,
"When Mohammed crashed those aeroplanes, they acted just like you,"
That's the sort of thing he'll say, he's on a roll -- feed the troll!

Feed the troll! Answer every little dig --
Feed the troll! Let your paragraphs grow big.
When he mutters that your mama was a ho',
Tell him "loser" only has a single "O".

Feed the troll! And be careful not to stay
Calm and sane, you won't make your point that way.
If you're looking for a pastime that will eat away the hours,
And you fancy brushing up on all your literary powers,
There is nothing quite as challenging or droll - feed the troll!

Rummaging through old backup files, I found this: the report I wrote after the Canberra Intervarsity Choral Festival in 2003, which began six years ago this Sunday. I figure enough time has passed that I can post this (and save having to think of something else to write, since I have a kitchen floor to assemble before bedtime). I hope future masochistic looniesIV committee members will read and learn, because there are some good points in here.

( Cue the wavy lines indicating a flashback to the heady days of 2003, when men were men and altos were scary... )

Here I sit in a very messy house, all by myself. My Beloved, the BatPup and the Boy Wonder have swanned off to the coast to spend a couple of days with a friend, and the Elder Daughter of DOOOOOM is off at Nanny's farm riding her new horse (well, Nanny's new horse, but to-may-to, to-mah-to). I've found sufficient clothes to wash so I won't be required to attend work in my PJs, and now I have to dig my way to the sink so I can wash a frying pan for dinner. Then it's back to ripping up the kitchen floor and possibly (gasp!) putting new flooring in! All while listening to the Goons on a streaming intarwobsite. What could be more fun?

Of course, the lack of cuddles is a downside, but getting a couple of nights of uninterrupted sleep may serve as compensation...

Many years ago I originated the name "Pookism" to refer to what Douglas Adams was talking about when he wrote:


As I said, I originated the name, but the concept is older than both Dom Pook and Douglas Adams: in particular, the Goons were fond of throwing assorted pookisms into their blather, the greatest of which was needle nardle noo. (Moriarty's sapristi! deserves mention too, though it's more of an exclamation.)

So the other day I randomly invented a game with the BatPup. I said "needle nardle noo", and she said "beedle bardle boo". I countered with "feedle fardle foo" and she gave me "geedle gardle goo". I answered "preedle prardle proo" and she said "teedle tardle too". "You win!" I said, and she was suitably mystified. We did it again a bit later, and after a while I said "You win again!" She was still bamboozled, but clearly she knows her Daddy's mind, because shortly after that she tried a third time: "keedle kardle koo". I said "veedle vardle voo" and she said "You win, Daddy!"

That's my girl.

And of course now, any time I say "needle nardle noo" within earshot of the Boy Wonder, there's a little voice that replies, "noonoo noonoo noo!" with an enormous grin attached. That's my boy!

Or, as Bloodnok would say: Great Squirts of Gringe!

I do like being a Daddy.

I had fun with a rubber mallet today!

We had been thinking for ages about ripping up the godawful slate tiles in the kitchen and putting in the same Jarrah floating flooring I installed so successfully in the family/dining and living rooms, but we were daunted by the possibility that the tiles were cemented irremovably to the MDF flooring. Today, I decided to take a look. If I ripped up a single tile, the worst that could happen is we'd have a hole in the floor until we got someone professional in to remove the lot for us and possibly re-lay new MDF. We could cope with that! So I got a chisel and a rubber mallet and tried removing the tile and the cement underneath.

It came away like sunburnt skin: easily but somewhat painfully. Although sunburn usually involves less icky tar-like substance, which is a shame because the icky tar-like substance, being the only thing between the cement and the MDF, made removing the tiles much easier.

I popped into Bunnings, bought a cold chisel (this, not this) and proceeded to get my revenge on the Kitchen Floor Of Unimaginable Fugliness. Still to do: the bit under the fridge (involves moving fridge) and the bit under the stove (involves having gasfitter in to remove stove and take it away), then putting in the Jarrah flooring and buying and installing a new stove.

The best bit, apart from the sense of accomplishment, was definitely the hammering. To remove the tiles I had to whack the chisel underneath one edge then WHAM!!! the fuckers until they snapped, shattered and pulverised. Very satisfying! I imagined each one was a different thousand-line, uncommented, stupidly-named XSLT file, and the time just flew...

In lieu of anything interesting, and because I've been doing this a fair bit lately, here's an instruction on how to set up multiple Drupal "virtual websites" without copying the entire four-megabytes-plus-extras and then having to maintain each copy separately.

( Read on if you care about that sort of thing )

Picture if you will: a Bat and a Batpup walking, and a Boy Wonder in a pram. After wandering about Civic for a couple of hours in an effort to (a) tire out the smaller two of the trio and (b) give the Mummy some time off, they hop into a lift on the ground floor of the Canberra Centre, to go down to the car parked on level B1. When they get in, the lift is crowded, and the destination board has lights on level B1 and B2. (In case you're not aware of how we do things in the Antipodes, floors are numbered thus, starting from the lowermost level: B2, B1, G, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Yes, our G is your 1, and our 1 is your 2, if you're from the US or other places. Deal with it. At least we don't have Walmart, so we still win.) So we get in at G, and the lift proceeds to bypass B1 and go straight to B2, where all the other people get out. "Weird," thinks the Bat. "I guess it's because people pressed the B2 button but the B1 light was only on because someone is waiting for a lift on that level, going up." That makes a kind of sense: since we didn't bother pressing B1, on the assumption that the lift would get there anyway, it's logical that the lift didn't "know" anyone wanted it to stop there until it was heading in the right direction, so it didn't. Obviously that would mean the next stop is B1, and sure enough a second later the doors opened again and out we got.

The car was nowhere to be seen. I searched for a good ten minutes, all the while the Batpup and the Boy were getting less and less gruntled.

Finally, I went back to the lift. There are no signs to say what level you're on, so I checked the lift itself. It said we were on level... 2.

WTF?

Somehow, the lift had teleported from B2 to 2 in less time than it took to go from G to B2, without stopping at B1, even though the light indicated it had been called at that level.

Anyhow, we got home eventually. But I think I'll avoid that carpark in future; it's haunted. Also, a Civic is a depopulated wasteland of mobile phone shops and For Lease signs. Might stick with my local shops from now on.

First, a link for my fellow heralds, via stellar_muddle: a certain high-ranking heraldic official in her secret identity as the favourite talking head on the topic of astronomy for radio and TV stations in at least two countries: Our Changing World: Radio Astronomy In New Zealand.

I went to a physiotherapist this evening and came away with a much less crunchy neck, a considerably less tennisy elbow, and a head like a marshmallow that had been bombarded with Marvel Comics cosmic rays until it started to float free of its moorings. Ah, endorphins -- not happy ones, exactly, and not really pain-caused ones either; merely vague, spine-has-been-fiddled-with ones. I've got some stretches to do, and I'll go back again in a week.

Meanwhile, the Boy Wonder has been a pain unto ye arse for the last long while, demanding entirely more booby than his Mummy was happy to give (ie approximately 604,800 seconds per week, give or take 3,600 around the start and end of daylight savings) so I went out on a limb and tried something new: I bought him a baby bottle. I wasn't sure if he'd be willing to take it as an alternative to his Mummy's cafeteria, but a clue to the future came when I was lying down with him, singing him to sleep, and he started demanding "boggy! boggy!" until I gave him the bottle. So gods willing, we may have found a solution...

A shame no such solution exists in the matter of recent f-locked angst. The full policy was promulgated today, and nobody in charge seems to understand that the issue isn't convenience or freedom but respect. There's a scene in one of the Illuminati books where somebody puts up a sign at a workplace: No Spitting -- The Mgt. I recall the effect on morale of this was about the same, and it's been interesting to see how many other people are affected. I suspect this will not be a Good Thing. Let's see.

Cribbed from boojumlol , who is indirectly to blame for reminding me of the third item on this list:

Don’t take too long to think about it.
Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you.
First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.
Copy the instructions into your own post.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas AdamsThough that last one is mainly because I just don't have any time to read...

(That title will only make sense to people who know print magazine jargon, I suspect. Ah well.)

The Facefic website appears to have done its dash. Remember the competition I mentioned, attempting to drum up some more entries? I got a grand total of one entry. I shall discuss with my fellow judges whether she wins by default, but I think we can probably consider this to be one fad that's faded. Hey ho.