29 Jul 2000

Sat, 29 Jul 2000 21:40:28 GMT

Hmm. Just had breakfast. Cornflakes and milk. Funny how similar and yet different things in the USA are. Corflakes are just the same. The milk is much the same (seems cows are a world standard). The bread is um... interestingly different. I have yet had a loaf of bread grow mould or go very stale. Perhaps I'm just not that fussy.

I get the feeling that after our civilisation has disappeared, and Earth is a blasted husk orbiting a cold star, there will be the occasional slices of fresh, unmouldy bread to show the past existence of the USA. How do they do that anyway? I wonder whats in it... Formaldehyde? Plutonium?

I get a bit bleak about the local media sometimes. I really need to find an american source of news that doesn't suck. Its seems like the media here are on a mission to seperate people. Every tragic event requires a scapegoat. Every controversial topic will only have the most inflammatory comments presented, and usually by members of a stereotyped community. Of course, only stereotyped opinions matching the community are presented too. Yech. What a joke. Everyone squished into little boxes to be kept hungry and let out into the arena every once and a while for a 30 second bite on TV.

I have come to the conclusion that the average fridge's contents provides enough information to do most imperial to metric conversions. My housemate and I spent a quarter of an hour (at least we use the same time) the other night figuring out how things converted by reading the labels of things in the fridge. Hmm. Maybe we should get more exercise. Staying up late with your head in the fridge probably is indicative of some sort of problem.

Have you ever noticed that a lot of stuff comes in weird amounts? You look at it and think 43.7g, ok.. must be a round number in ounces or something. Nooope. I wonder if there is some sort of conspiracy out there? A clique using prime numbers divided by PI as the basic unit of measurement or something...

I think for everyday use it doesn't matter what system you use. For real physics and engineering work there is no contest though. Try doing classical thermodynamics in imperial units. :-P

Hmm. I really feel the urge to play with some code, but I need a Linux box. Win98 isn't going to be on this machine for long. I need a decent development environment. And a DSL line. A table for this computer would be good to. Typing on the floor is icky.

Oh well... back to power web-surfing

27 Jul 2000

Thu, 27 Jul 2000 18:16:24 GMT

Well, a little intro to synch things up.

I'm a geek with an interest and background in software and hardware design and implementation. I like sailing, aikido, scuba diving, reading and chess, amongst other things.

I have had a small level of involvement with some software stuff. Look at the URL I gave if you're interested. I'm fairly despondent about that project though. I tried to set up a bazaar-like place to gets bugs fixed in the Linux version of FBB... The author doesn't seem to be all that interested in that version.

He initially mailed me and seemed to be interested, and bug reports are forwarded to him etc. I think the only way out of this is for me to implement some very cool stuff and attract people to it that way. I modified the code to sit on top of a garbage collector. It showed up one or two bugs and the patched version is really stable. I need to add features though.

I have just recently moved from South Africa to Seattle, USA, so it'll be a while before I get up to speed again.

US West are taking ages to install my DSL line. *sigh* Oh well.

Advogato blog for Nurf

29 Jul 2000

27 Jul 2000