Author: Rory

In the absense of any ability of my own to create something worth your time, I’m going to point those of you who haven’t seen this yet to the Flash animation of a human being drawn from skeleton up to fully clothed person.

Other bloggers, do you ever feel like you’re just wasting your time composing something and then throwing it into a hole? In all of the time I’ve been blogging (coming up to three years soon), my posting frequency has dropped many times while my participation in other online fora (newsgroups, Slashdot, even commenting on other people’s blogs) hasn’t really faltered. I think that’s because it’s a lot easier to respond to someone else than to start something yourself. Anyone agree?

It’s no secret that when I got my Powerbook there were a lot of people telling me it would break. Well it did. And now it’s fixed. In about five minutes, most of which involved me not being aware that it was broken.

For a few minutes there my old LappyG4 was refusing to boot, giving me the message that I needed to reboot or power off (in several languages). So I did. And it continued to refuse to boot. A short Web search later I discovered that that particular message is associated with a kernel panic, which you would be right to assume is not a good thing for a kernel to do.

This is the bit of the story which, if I was using Windows or Linux, would take up a good chunk of the rest of the page to tell. The bit where I describe how I fixed it. As it happens, it’s quite easy to describe. I held the shift key down for a moment during the boot process. This sent OSX into safe mode, wherein it automatically ran a disk repair utility. Then I rebooted.

From kernel panic to perfect working order in a single keystroke. That’s why they cost a little more than a Dell.

A few quick notes that all happen to be related to cartoons.

• The Simpsons quiz went well. We were trailing one of the other teams by a single point half of the way through. One of the memebrs of that team was clearly involved in the organisation of the quiz; he even sold us our raffle tickets. Predictably this led to accusations of cheating.

  By the end of the last round we had caught that team (despite their cheating) and were tied on 57 points out of 64. The tie-break round was six questions on Groundskeeper Willie, all of which we got right. I have to say I was quite impressed by the prizes. We got a copy of season six on DVD each, leading me to wonder what I’m going to do with the one I already ordered from CD-Wow. We also took two of the raffle prizes. I just missed out on the Simpsons scrabble, so I chose instead The Yellow Album.

• South Park is now in a regular slot on MTV on Sunday at 10pm. This is the first time in years that I’ve known when that show is on. I usually just stumble onto it in the middle of the night at some random time. It started on MTV last week. It really is worth watching.

• Family Guy started on BBC TWO yesterday, but for some reason they decided it would be a good idea to show season three, which everyone already has on DVD, instead of the new season four, for which they have the rights. Apparently they intend to show season four next year.

• Immediately after Family Guy is American Dad, made by the same people. Dad hasn’t been shown on UK terestrial television before. It’s quite good; the characters aren’t as immediately likeable as Guy‘s, but it’s such a similar style that it’s pretty much guaranteed to be good.

L. Ron Hubtard: (n) a Scientologist.

I can’t help but think I may have made a mistake somewhere:

* 10-fold cross-validated error of comp4030.rparle.NaiveBayesClassifier on moredata/agaricus-lepiota.data is 1.0
* 10-fold cross-validated error of comp4030.rparle.NaiveBayesClassifier on moredata/house-votes-84.data is 1.0
* 10-fold cross-validated error of comp4030.rparle.NaiveBayesClassifier on moredata/solar-flare.data is 1.0

There’s a Simpsons-themed table quiz in Messrs. McGuire tomorrow (Thursday) at 7:30. Be there and be square. As I would have expected I have managed to over-fill my team with enthusiastic Simpsonites. This is a crisitunity see how our record holds up in front of what will be my fourth Simpsons quiz. So far the various teams of which I have formed a part have managed first place once and second place twice, including one that ended with a tie-breaking question between our team of two and a team of eight. I guess it would be reasonable for me to go home and renerdulate.

Bushy

The wind sits fair for news to go to Ireland,
But none returns. For us to levy power
Proportionable to the enemy
Is all unpossible.

That’s from Richard II by William Shakespeare. Emphasis is mine.

Spread Firefox, the community marketing site for the Mozilla Firefox browser, had been down for a while after the server on which it lives was cracked. It’s back up today, and I notice that the Firefox download counter is nearing 100,000,000. It’s at 99,644,132 as I write this, which means it will hit the big 10⁸ by the end of the week I guess. Quite impressive.

This weekend involved:

• Street Fighter, Tekken, and Micro Machines, leaving me with very sore thumbs but also a wonderful aura of victory (which smells like napalm). In years past people would have gone there entire lives never having clawed back from the edge of defeat with one of Zangief’s double-360 spinning piledrivers.
• A big meal with smoked salmon, prawns, mussels, steak, garlic and cheese potatoe, and three desserts.
• Most of a litre of Jameson whiskey.
• A long night.
• An early morning.
• Consequently, very little sleep.
• A day of playing The Settlers II.
• New South Park (now with ninjas 2006/08/23: Link removed due to Google’s image search being annoyingly broken)
• A missed lecture on Monday morning.

The non-videogame parts of this list, apart from the late night, are mostly related to my parents’ 25^th anniversary. I’m immensely proud of them for having stayed together this long; I’ve never done anything for 25 years.

As a result of this weekend I’m possibly not in the best condition to launch into a week of study (as evidenced that I’m launching into it at 5:15 on Monday evening) but I regret nothing.