Author: Rory

I’m assuming that you’ve seen at least one, maybe more, of Falling Down, Fight Club, American Beauty and One Hour Photo. There are surely other movies of their ilk, but these are the ones that spring most immediately to my mind. My question – which you may choose to answer by email, or simply by shouting and hoping I’m near, or perhaps by mentioning it to everyone you meet, thereby creating a new social meme that will spread through the social ether to me – is this: How closely is one meant to identify with the protagonists? Are you meant to feel, as my viewing company generally does, that these movies are ‘warnings’ that such socially skewed people exist, or are you meant to think "Yeah. Society is crap. Why play by those rules?" I don’t think I’ll be shooting up a burger joint in the near future, or creating an anarchist regime – the anarchist magazines I see in college are too contemptibly stupid for that – but I always seem to relate more to the freaks then the norms. I’ve never felt that kind of imprisoned feeling that seems to motivate the characters, but it’s very easy to imagine. So are you a William Foster, Tyler Durden, Lester Burnham or Sey Parrish? Could you be?

From Stephen (via email):

i can’t be bothered to trawl through slashdot etc for geeky news that is on my level, so get your act together and update the site! you could at least regale us with more reminiscences from our schooldays?

Good point. Exams aren’t that important. So, as a sister story to this humorous anecdote, here’s the legend of the Toilet Incident (the one with the shoes).

When Stephen was in school he didn’t feel content. He felt imprisoned, a view shared by many confined between those ten-foot high steel fences. The best any of us could hope for was a good view of the sunny day passing outside. Where best to gain this covetted view? The toilet of course. Alone and unattended, you could really get into the summer mood, without Teacher breathing down your neck. But the windows in the toilets were high, too high for a third-class student to see out of unaided. The solution jumped readily into Stephen’s mind: stand on the edge of the toilet. So obvious; so easy; so disastrous.

Stephen’s genius to this point had been hidden from me. He kept his plan to himself, and no-one else would have ever know about it, but for one fatal flaw. Toilet seats are slippy, and if you stand on one there are only two reasonable ways off. Slip out, or slip in. This story writes itself from here. Stephen went home wearing one sock and his PE runners that day, and to my knowledge he avoided standing on toilets to the end of his school days.

Take one link to Doom9.org (which confusingly refers to itself as doom9.net, which itself redirects to doom9.org – this is just the beginning of my confusion), several DVDs, two days of spare time, and a pinch of divine inspiration, and you might just get close to being able to rip video from a DVD. It’s very very complicted. And I still can’t do it right.

The process of ripping audio is significantly easier, involving only four programs, each full of esoteric settings that need to be modified every time, and a single batch file that I had to write myself to get one of these programs to work the way it’s meant to. Yes I did say this was easier. It goes like this: Use the DVD player that came with the system to find the correct chapter. This isn’t always straightforward. With South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, the movie chapter numbers matched the chapter numbers on the disc, with the menus coming afterwards. However with Family Guy, the order of chapters on the disc seemed unrelated to the episode numbers, so I had to go on trial and error. When I’ve found the chapter I want, I decode the whole chapter and save it on the hard disk with one program. Then I extract the right audio stream (English language stream, French translation, Director’s commentary…) from that file with another program. This saves it in a format that no program understands, so I use a third program, controlled by my home-made batch script, to convert it to mp3. To get the clip I want, I edit this mp3 with Audacity and output to OGG format. Figuring this out took a day. Doing it takes about a minute. Yay!

Video is a diferent story, and the best I can do is a badly compressed AVI weighing it at about a gigabyte/minute with no sound. If anyone knows some reasonably good, free video editing software that can output decent quality MPEG, let me know.

I’ve been perusing the pages of netsoc’s members, hoping to find some good home-grown webby goodness. I saw that there are now more listed personal pages than in any of my previous years of membership, despite membership falling to about a quarter of its glorious high point of 00/01 in the same time. My hopes were quickly dashed.

A short but almost complete summary of what I found: crap

I’ll admit that that last summary wasn’t entirely fair or accurate, so for the sake of completeness:

• "This is my great site. Isn’t it great? I’m cool. Click here for some mindless crap."
• "Here’s a picture of me drunk. Here’s another."
• "Welcome to my cool site. It’s not done yet. But it’ll be great." – Last updated last century.
• "This is the official site of…" – WTF? This is free hosting from a college society. Can’t your hospital afford €200 a year for comercial hosting and a domain?
• Some random plaintext – I’m looking at you Gary

But in this haystack I found a single needle, from paul’s ‘about me’:

My dream is to become a freelance mercenary ninja.

I think we can all agree with that sentiment.

Today is one of those all too commmon days that has a name other than, say, Tuesday, specifically, for the culturally impaired out there, April Fools’ Day, and as such I feel required to take a dislike to it. Luckily this is something that comes quite easily to me. So without trying to convince you that I’ve taken to carrying ads or closed the source of an OSS project, may I just simply call you a fool and move on?

Since Slashdot decided not to post any real news at all today, I spent some time making it even harder for myself to screw up when posting here. It’s all aboput text filters and related interesting… thingies. There’s still no obvious advantage to you, the reader, but screw it; I spend longer here than you do. 🙂 Seriously, though, I am building up to a comment system. Maybe in May or June. Exams are such a nuisance.

It seems I’ve forgotten to mention the addition of stevenberlinjohnson.com to my link list (to the right, if you’re using a graphical browser; below for a text browser.) Mr Johnson first earned my attention with Emergence (link to amazon.com for illustrative purposes, you can find it cheaper elsewhere), which introduces the idea of complexity emerging from simple systems, like the simple behaviour of ants and neurons causing higher phenomena like ant-hill behaviour and consciousness. I read this a year or two ago, but didn’t know he had a website until last week. He recently wrote an article on Fear and its relationship to memory for Discover. An interesting read; it’s about the educational level of a BBC documentary, except that BBC documentaries are crap these days so I get my documentaries online now.

Me

Hello?

Female Voice

Hello, this Margaret from Eircom. Can I ask who I’m speaking to?

Me

Rory

Margaret

Hello Rory. Do you use the internet?

Me

Yup

Margaret

Okay, ley me just see how much you spend…

At this point, Margaret goes silent for several seconds as she checks my phone bill for last month. This is despite the fact that she works, as I will find out, for Eircom.net not Eircom proper, and therefore shouldn’t have access to my phone bill. I know she’s checking the phone records not the ISP records because I don’t use Eircom.net. I use IOL.

Margaret

Ooh! You spend a lot. Rory we recommend that our customers [“I ain’t one of your customers Maggie,” I think] upgrade to high speed internet access.

She gives a very general description of Eircom.net’s new service. So basic that she neglects to name the service. I think it’s DSL. She also neglects the price. I think it’s €45/month-ish.

Me

Go on…

Margaret

Can I send you out some information on this new service?

Me

Sure [At least written information might actually tell me something other than “It’s fast”].

Margaret

And would you like us to tell you about some of our other offers when they become available?

Me

I’d rather you didn’t.

Margaret

Can I ask why not?

At this point I’m expected to cave. Saying “oh, go ahaid and ring me whenever you want” is easier than saying “I don’t like getting phone calls from marketing people”.

Me

I don’t like getting phone calls from marketing people.

Margaret

Oh… [long pause] … thank you for your time.

So Eircom are abusing their telephone monopoly to steal internet customers from Esat. Shame on them.

Homer Simpson says to push the anger deep inside until it finally bursts out in a terrible rage like "when Daddy hit the refferee with a whisky bottle" (this may have been a whiskey bottle; he doesn’t specify). Well thanks for the advice Homer but in this case I’d rather just rant. It’s therapeutic (fun too).

Here I was trying to get my user stylesheet to work in Mozilla and nothing I did would persuade it to consider my ‘suggestions’. So after many attempts during which time I fell on my virtual ass many times (and my real ass once), I decided to create a new profile, on the basis that all of my screwing around (that being of course the technical title for my research) had broken something. Before I altered all of my settings for this new profile I checked that the rules set out in userContent.css were being obeyed. They were applied with all the giddy satisfaction that Mozilla always seems to feel when it completes a task successfully. So I began the Herculean, or perhaps Xenan, task of altering my settings. Disable popups; Don’t loop GIFs; Open tabs in the background; Change theme… Damn! My theme was ‘orbit’, which isn’t available by default. No problem, I’ve got it on this computer somewhere, I just need to install it. And with this simple thought I fell, once more, on my virtual behind. Mozilla does not, in fact, have such a feature that can install a theme that lives on the local machine. My journey of discovery had begun.

Of the succeeding minutes there is little to tell. I visited themes.mozdev.org, the home of orbit, and discovered that it weighs in at a considerable 1.6Mb. No way will I download that if I can help it. The solution that I chose, and there may exist others, was to copy the ‘javascript:’ link from the site, paste it into my address bar, change the target URL to one at localhost, fire up my own server locally and let the magic work. This, it should go without saying, was more effort than clicking a button would have been.

Just as I get into the right frame of mind to make some progress on Phry (another update today added the preview function I was after), not to mention the right frame of mind to use unimaginative idioms like ‘frame of mind’, I have to go back to college tomorrow. This will also interfere with my ability to watch the Oscars tonight. Actually, on second thought, that doesn’t make sense. Staying up to watch the Oscars will most certainly interfere with my ability to go to college though. Either way, I’m not pleased.

Along with this displeasure is something that the late, and, although it’s a cliché, great, Douglas Adams called Farnham. This is the feeling you get at four o’clock when you haven’t done enough. Multiply this by three-hundred or so, and you arrive at the feeling that it’s five weeks to your (or worse, my) exams and you haven’t done a thing. Actually, not doing a thing is fine. You can convince yourself that there’s not much to do. I’ve done just enough to know that I haven’t done enough. I am suffering from Farnham.