vashti

I want to move to...

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:23:03 GMT

...the Isle of Man.

BBC News: Graffiti vandals sought by police.

Apparently the big story of the day is that some kids "tagged" a school wall with their handles.

Do you people have no crime at all?!

WoW angst: my first raid

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:29:12 GMT

Last night I went to Karazhan for the first time.

Everyone except me was epic geared and knew exactly what to do. We cleared right up to Curator in one evening. I got two epic drops and a void crystal. And I feel really terrible about it.

Before last night, I would have sworn my trapping was one of my strengths as a hunter. I still sometimes make mistakes, but on the whole I've got that mob covered, even in heroics. How wrong I was. The first trap I was given I pulled with my distracting shot macro, same as always. It didn't even *blink*. The pala tank had used Avenging Shield and the mob I was meant to be trapping went straight to him.

Okay, so next time I'll hit it with an arcane shot first. So I do arcane shot, distracting shot macro, escape to take me out of combat. It goes into the trap, and somehow I pop it. And despite the inform that pops up in my chat window, I don't notice it. Okay, mistakes happen. Then the next mob I'm given to trap doesn't come to me, again. The next one is a caster, and I don't know, and because I've dropped my trap in advance I can't pick it up. And after that they just stopped asking me to trap. I felt like I wanted to die. I feel like everyone I raided with last night has me down as "that stupid huntard who can't trap", even though I've done heroics with a few of them and I *know* they know I can trap.

On Moroes I was asked to drop a trap between our priest and his shackle. I did. Then the priest moved, and failed shackle twice, and died because my trap timeout wasn't up. And I died on Little Red Riding Hood because the wolf caught me, and on Maiden because I heard "hug the wall" and not "move up to the first step once combat begins". But all this stuff I'm willing to put down to first-time jitters.

I had the hunter bug for virtually all of it - the one where you can't use auto shot, or use the escape key, or interact with objects, or feed your pet ... my cat ended up on red health and was losing loyalty for three hours. I had to turn off the audio alert for feedomatic because of the constant screaming. I have this bug *constantly*. There's nothing I can do about it, because I have it even if I don't use any of my macros, or kill command (both things that are hypothesised to cause it). It makes me want to fly to Paris and shoot Blizzard in the face. It makes me choke up with rage every time it happens, several times an hour, because of the loss of control.

When we were done, my boyfriend turned to me and said "We really need to get you a new computer". He said it made him sick to look at my screen and he didn't know how I could play. I *have* to play like it; I have no choice. We'd been planning to get me one, because I routinely got frozen at 1fps in busy places like AV and Shattrath and the stress was getting to me. Then I did a full reinstall and turned my object distance down to near, and it got a lot better (6-15fps). But in Kara all the old problems came back - in the ballroom, with ten people all doing their thing, my framerate dropped to 3fps. I couldn't find the target, or do anything, and just ended up standing there desperately trying to find something to fling arrows at. And that happened a bunch of times while we were clearing trash. It's not okay; I wouldn't raid with someone whose system was that awful. But we can't afford a new computer for me. We can't afford to drop several hundred pounds on a toy I don't need. I know we'd find the money somehow if we really wanted to, but it doesn't feel right to do so - not that I wouldn't love a new PC.

It wasn't just the computer, either - the pace we moved at didn't give me time to catch my breath and keep track of what was going on, and I could feel myself getting increasingly lost and confused and losing my focus throughout the evening.

I'm just sitting here finishing up my Skettis quests and crying, and feeling like yet another thing I really wanted is going to slip through my fingers. I've just got exalted with the Skyguard, something I've been working towards for six weeks. I'm halfway through revered with the Aldor and should be moving on to that. And now I feel like I want to leave WoW forever.

I'm new to the guild and I don't want to bring all this up and get a reputation as an emo or a drama queen. And I don't feel like I deserved the epics I got. I feel really, really ill with all of this, like I just want to lie down and not get up again, and yet if I don't go to the followup run on Saturday I'll be letting all of them down. And I know it will get better with practice, and that I can read up on how the hell to trap with a pala who outgears you - but my PC won't magically sprout more CPU and RAM with practice.

I should leave now, but then I'm just doing the same thing I always do and running away.

Mainstream Political Post: Saddam never bluffed that he had WMD

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 05:40:17 GMT

Yes, Virginia, occasionally I still dip into the murky yet soul-destroying waters of Real Politics.

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001429.html

When it became clear in summer 2003 that Iraq had nothing, the Bush administration, the CIA and their flunkies were anxious to find ways to exculpate themselves. They came up with a bunch of different, often contradictory storylines. For instance:

• Saddam didn't have anything, but was going to restart his WMD programs the second our backs were turned
• Saddam was deceived by his underlings into thinking he had WMD
• Saddam pretended to have WMD in order to bluff regime outsiders
• Saddam pretended to have WMD because he liked everyone to look at him as leader of the Arabs

If you glance at the various government reports on Iraq, you'll see they all assert that one or more of these theories is correct. But if you actually read them carefully, you see the evidence they provide for their assertions is weak to nonexistent. In fact, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the pre-war case that Iraq had WMD.

[More]

Wikipedia rant

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 12:42:56 GMT

This is an example of why Wikipedia is terminally up its own arse:

The Llama Song has not only had its article deleted, but it's been protected so that it can't be recreated. I disagree with this; I think the Llama Song is a reasonably notable Internet meme, which was why I collated some newspaper references and put them on the talk page.

Now people have been systematically deleting the talk page as well. So the references I came up with are gone, forever. I am pissed off.

"the sum of all human knowledge"? Yeah, right.

Well, I be gumswozzled

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 13:46:27 GMT

I'm not commenting overmuch on the Bhutto assassination, but couldn't help noticing today's news that the election is being postponed by the ruling party. Gosh, who didn't see that coming? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller..?

do they know it's christmas?

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 14:30:24 GMT

Overnight, the cats have stolen two pairs of knickers from the laundry basket and piled them up beneath Matt's chair, where he found them this morning.

Happy winter thing, one and all.

"Questionnaire", by Wendell Berry

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:36:25 GMT

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

How did I miss this? Catching up on old news.

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:12:33 GMT

"The world's 1st and only anti-rape condom"

This is a device that is claimed to work a bit like YT's dentata from Snow Crash - upon penetration, the man's penis is stabbed with lots of tiny needles that have to be surgically removed.

But it's not gone unopposed: S Africa 'rape trap' condemned.

"This is a medieval instrument, based on male-hating notions and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of rape and violence against women in this society," said Charlene Smith, one of South Africa's most prominent campaigners against rape.

For "one of South Africa's most prominent campaigners against rape", she sure comes across as a woman-hating rape apologist. But then, I'm on record as thinking it would be a better world if women had the legal right and ability to kill anyone who tried to rape them - if the law won't protect us, we have to protect ourselves.

If someone tries to rape me, I don't care if they go away from it dead or mutilated, thanks very much. I do, in fact, hate them. I hate what they'd have tried to do to me and what people like them have done to all women in this culture - the looking behind you, the not going out after dark alone, the constant fear, the knowledge that if it happens to you, you'll have next to no legal redress and most people will think it was your fault.

Charlene, you live in South Africa, which has some of the highest rates of rape in the world. How can you be opposed to women having the right to defend themselves?

If she could come up with an anal variant, it'd be *perfect*. Well, "perfect" assuming that every rapist didn't meet a torturous, brutal, bloody death at the hands of his victim.

the morning after

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 08:43:00 GMT

So I was lying in bed last night listening to what sounded like a force 10 gale blowing around my tiny little block of flats, when I noticed little clouds scudding across the sky. "Hm," I said to myself, "I shouldn't be able to see that". So I had a bit more of a look and, indeed, stars were winking at me through the window.

This morning it's dry, it's clear and the sky is blue, with buttery yellow winter light. Now if only it holds out ...

From my bed

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:52:31 GMT

The wind outside is astounding.

We'll be lucky if there's a yurt left tomorrow.

Fuck, fuck, fuck: Arctic sea ice

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 03:38:12 GMT

Carbon Equity have released The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic summer of 2007.

Summary:

* The standard "safe" warming level of 2 C is much, much too high.

* We lost as much Arctic ice between 2005 and 2007 as we lost between 1979 and 2005 (20% in two years, as opposed to 7% decade on decade).. James Hansen attributes this to us "hitting a tipping point that we have been warning about for the past few years".

Oh, and with regard to the English legal system's attempted discrediting of An Inconvenient Truth, where it was claimed (amongst other things) that significant sea level rise was only going to take place over a millennium, Hansen also has this to say:

I find it almost inconceivable that "business as usual" climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in metres within a century... Because while the growth of great ice sheets takes
millennia, the disintegration of ice sheets is a wet process that can proceed rapidly.

... the primary issue is whether global warming will reach a level such that ice sheets begin to disintegrate in a rapid, non-linear fashion on West Antarctica, Greenland or both. Once well under way,
such a collapse might be impossible to stop, because there are multiple positive feedbacks. _In that event, a sea level rise of several metres at least would be expected.

As an example, let us say that ice sheet melting adds 1 centimetre to sea level for the decade 2005 to 2015 [this is less than the current rate - DS], and that this doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. This would yield a rise in sea level of more than 5 metres by 2095.

...

The IPCC's latest projection for sea level rise this century is 18 to 59 centimetres. Though it explicitly notes that it was unable to include possible dynamical responses of the ice sheets in its calculations, the provision of such specific numbers encourages a predictable public belief that the projected sea level change is moderate, and indeed smaller than in the previous IPCC report. There have been numerous media reports of "reduced" predictions of sea level rise, and commentators have denigrated suggestions that business-as-usual emissions may cause a sea level rise measured in metres. However, if these IPCC numbers are taken as predictions of actual sea level rise, as they have been by the public, they imply that the ice sheets can miraculously survive a business-as-usual climate forcing assault for a millennium or longer.

There are glaciologists who anticipate such long response times, because their ice sheet models have been designed to match past climate changes. However, work by my group shows that the typical 6000-year timescale for ice sheet disintegration in the past reflects the gradual changes in Earth's orbit that drove climate changes at the time, rather than any inherent limit for how long it takes ice sheets to disintegrate.

Indeed, the palaeoclimate record contains numerous examples of ice sheets yielding sea level rises of several metres per century when forcings were smaller than that of the business-as-usual scenario. For example, about 14,000 years ago, sea level rose approximately 20 metres in 400 years, or about 1 metre every 20 years.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS BRAINWASHING UR KIDS IN UR SCHOOLS OMG.

Bringing Up Baby

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 05:45:20 GMT

Real-time bus updates on the web

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 21:07:19 GMT

This is one of the coolest things ever. ACIS provide those little things that you see in bus stops sometimes, which are meant to tell you how close the nearest bus is.

Cardiff Council have it all linked up on their website.

Indexes for the outbound services from where we live:
49

An updated list of bus times, like on the bus shelters: 49 50

The really cool bit: a constantly updated map of Cardiff with all the buses in service marked as they move around. Watching all the little buses move around is like reality TV, but purer.

Here's the one for the City Centre, where buses are abundant.

If you want to play with this, Cardiff's buses are all knocking off now. Try in the morning.

in which I demonstrate my mad computering skillz some more

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:57:02 GMT

I love my scanner. I use it several times a week and I love it dearly. It's a big old letter-sized SCSI thing that I've had for ten years and works just as well as the day I got it (in Linux, no less). I haven't seen a modern scanner that can top it.

Well. Except that, over the past year, the glass in it has been progressively bowing downwards as the double-sided sticky tape (I shit you not) with which they stuck it to the box gives way. This has been bugging me for a while and interfering with my scanning joy, especially of late when I've had to stop at intervals to turn the case over so that the glass can weight itself back down.

This evening I sat down and started randomly unscrewing things to see if I could persuade the box apart. At first I tried the two screws underneath, the ones holding the sockets and electronics into the case. Big mistake; those don't need to come out. Hmmn. No screws in evidence.

Then I turned it over and lifted out the cover (the flap that goes up and down lifts away for easy scanning of bulky objects). Aha! Two big, easily removable screws underneath it. I undo them, then decide that, like a noob, I'm going to remove the base from the lid. Oh dear. That was a mistake. Gubbins everywhere. Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I panic a little, then notice that, behold, with a bit of a push forward the lid (containing the misbehaving glass) comes away in my hand. Woot. I rearrange the gubbins, put the lid back on and do a panicky impromptu scan to see how badly I buggered it up. Apparently not at all; it still works. Good good. Good. Ahem.

I've had superglue on my shopping list for a while to fix said glass panel. In the hardware store a couple of days ago, we went to buy some. Except that super glue bonds everything up to and not including ... glass. Arsebiscuits. Bugger. I'm forcibly reminded of my glass crystal earrings, which had a crystal prism attached to a post, and continually popped off the post despite being repaired with superglue a lot. My mother never read the labels on things, which is why she did things like decorating the kitchen with flying curry and shards from an exploding pyrex pan, went to sleep in a burning bed which she had personally set on fire, and thought that taping an electrical cable to another one, plugging it in, draping it across the floor, then mopping the floor was a really clever thing to do.

In at least three ways, I am nothing like her.

An alternative was available which would bond both plastic and glass, but that came in two tubes and needed to be mixed and applied with a spatula and I just completely lost my nerve. I fear glue. I can't help thinking that it's a really bad idea.

So I was looking at the lid and the glass, and thinking "It's a shame I don't have a metal or plastic strip that would fit in there and attach with screws. Why, look, there are even convenient attachment points for screws to bore through on the underside of the lid, a convenient and well-balanced point from the glass". And I looked, and looked some more, and thought about it. And noticed that there was a 12-inch plastic ruler in one of my jars of pens[1]. Which I never use, or certainly not as often as I use my scanner.

I pick it up. I slot it into the far end of the scanner lid. It fits perfectly. Snug against the three sides of the lid, and overlapping the glass by a centimetre or more. And even conveniently bevelled where there's a risk that it's going to foul up the scanner head. Perfect!

Well, perfect except for the ruler not having holes where I need there to be holes. I try to screw the nails through the ruler; they laugh at me. I don't think my drill will work on this. And I don't have an awl. But I am not to be defeated; I pick up my nail scissors (always handy), mark the spots I need holes, and just keep on going. It's third-year geography all over again as I mutilate the poor, innocent ruler with whatever is closest to hand.

Ten minutes later, two nice small boreholes have appeared (coff) through the ruler, right over the guideholes for whatever Umax wanted to screw in there, but didn't. I make sure that I'm not going to come into contact with the glass and then have a go at screwing the ruler to the plastic lid. CRACK. Nothing doing: the holes aren't wide enough and the plastic of the ruler won't force through; it cracks. I make the holes wider and try again. Perfect.

The screws just keep on going through the plastic scanner lid and fasten the ruler firmly, very firmly, to the lid. They sit against each other with the glass in between them, and the two screws holding it all together. Admittedly, there are two one-inch steel points poking upwards from the surface of the thing, but other than that, what's the harm?

I probably ought to get a hacksaw and take them off. Soon. Very soon. Although it isn't like the lid doesn't cover them.

[1] I have one jar of writing pens, scissors, rulers and the like, and another jar of coloured felt-tip pens on my desk. Because real women write documents in at least fifteen colours.

dhcp woe and madness

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 23:44:11 GMT

I thought I was going to need more cable and another switch, but after approximately five hours of woe involving at least five machines on the network, tcpdump, subnetting, dummy devices, shouting at the router screaming "10.1.1.0 is not an invalid address to route to, you bitch", running out of trademarked caffeinated beverages, the router and my laptop[1] deciding they like each others' IP addresses much better and randomly switching places, the network routing DHCP but not IP like a girl, turning off my Internet-facing firewall, ping, ping and more ping, working out subnet addresses in binary with notepad, watching "Brass Eye" and S4C, I have persuaded my network that it wants to serve our IP block to the wired-in machines from the wireless router and 10/8 to everyone else from the wi-fi-free Linux server. This is, of course, RIPE's fault for not giving me a /24 of my very own.

And I did it all from the comfy sofa underneath blankies.

It's almost like being me, ten years ago.

[1] I have a laptop. Did I mention that I have a laptop? I have a laptop. It is shiny and silver and has a big wide screen and wi-fi and audio and a dvd rewriter, and (after another eight or so hours of work last night) it all works in Linux. I am fab.

More Deathly Hallows musings

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:05:06 GMT

"By the end of DH, I wondered what happened to the basically decent, kind boy who stood up to Draco Malfoy and helped out Ron on their first train ride? What happened to the boy able to identify with the underdog and discomfitted by his glimpse of the bullies that were James Potter and Sirius Black? ... What we see starting with HBP is the progressive deterioration in Harry Potter's moral and ethical development."

trickofthedark tells us what happened to the baby-thing at Kings' Cross.

What professor_mum made of it all in the end.

Daniel Hemmens' long critique of book 7: [1] [2] [3] [4]. If you can only read one of these, read the last one.

Do you recycle?

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 08:55:59 GMT

If your local authority doesn't require you to separate your recyclables, you need to read this:

Campaign for Real Recycling.

butterfly

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:03:05 GMT

This week I've seen two striking butterflies flying around - they had wings edged with white semicircles and big patches of bright red on the wings. I keep coming back to the red admiral, although it doesn't feel quite right. It wasn't a peacock.

(http://www.britishbutterflies.co.uk/ is a very good website).

Read a BBC HYS on climate change. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Sketching

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:50:14 GMT

I've been doing a little bit of drawing of late. Click for the full size versions.

trees

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 11:00:27 GMT

Yesterday we found a plum-looking tree, just growing there near a rabbit warren. The fruit was ripe. We picked one to bring home, and brought a leaf to check.

Then last night I dreamed we had an apple tree in our kitchen, growing up behind the cooker, its branches spreading across the ceiling, heavy with fruit.

This morning I looked up the tree. This picture has fruit and leaves like the ones on the tree. I cut open the fruit we brought home - it looked like plum, smelled like plum. Had a plum looking stone in the middle. I tasted it. Tasted like plum. Actually, it tasted wonderful. So then I ate the whole thing and saved the stone to take back out into the fields.

Hi!

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:22:10 GMT

Thanks for friending me. :) It's really quiet over here...

On the other hand, it's been years since I've been able to track my entire friends list. Win!

A-level results clock

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:41:49 GMT

So we were searching around, desperately trying to find out what day the A-level results are released (which is a much harder piece of information to get than you might think), and we found this:

A-level Results Countdown.

Migration [posted to LiveJournal]

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:06:09 GMT

I've been thinking about changing to another journalling server for a while, because of Six Apart's utter crapheadedness, and since it seems like Semagic works under Linux now (so I can post to multiple journals easily), there's nothing holding me on LiveJournal any more. Except, of course, for all of you. *smooch*

I will, hopefully, now be found at the following places:

Blurty.

GreatestJournal.

InsaneJournal.

JournalFen.

I will also be continuing to post on LiveJournal at least until my paid account runs out.