Some Brisbane Guy

My grandmother would be distraught. She grumbles when researchers make a new finding and “they” change what’s recommended for your diet and your health.

They change their bloody minds all the time! Don’t eat salt, salt is fine; eggs cause high cholesterol, no they’re fine, eat all the eggs you want.

OK that’s kinda paraphrasing her, but you can see where she’s coming from. She doesn’t consider the science behind it, with some new research finding a possible correlation between eggs and high cholesterol, then the next research group debunking the last. And the way it’s reported on current affairs programs doesn’t help, they can make the latest diet research sound like a commandment from on high about what to eat or not eat.

So she will be nonplussed as well about Vitamin D lowering cancer risk, because where do you get Vitamin D from? That’s right, that cuddly warm ball of nuclear fusion in the sky, the Sun. Your skin turns the ultraviolet rays from the Sun into little packets of Vitamin D that your body spreads around and uses for tonnes of cool stuff that apparently helps to prevent all kinds of disease, including schizophrenic tendencies in fetuses.

But what a conundrum! The Sun is evil! I wish I had a clip of the stupid current affairs story I saw a few months ago at my parents’ house, with a teenage girl walking along the beach with full-length clothing on and a big floppy hat, only her pearlescent white hands and face showing. She didn’t feel the need to bow to society’s pressure to have a healthy-looking tan (that’s right, I don’t care what anyone says: a tan looks healthy), she was just fine all covered up, no sun on her ghostly white skin and no friends either, I would bet. You pay the highest price for being a pasty independent thinker when you’re a teenager.

So she won’t get skin cancer like all her more socially well-adjusted peers, but her lonely life probably won’t last particularly long with the selection of diseases that Vitamin D alledgedly helps to prevent:

• heart disease
• lung disease
• cancer
• diabetes
• rickets
• high blood pressure

Sure you can take a Vitamin D tablet and stay out of the sun, and not go outside because you might get a melanoma, or hit by a bus, or brutally murdered by some psychopath who’s watched too many of those crime shows that compete for the most gory and perverted crime scene with 12-year old girls bound to tables half naked, as their blood drips into a water container. Or you might be run off the road by some idiot going to buy gas for his barbecue, and getting impatient he exceeds the speed limit by five kilometres per hour, at which point all hell breaks loose and babies are instantly orphaned. Paying attention to the road conditions instead of talking to your annoying, moronic child would be preferable.

So now I’m going to go lie naked in the midday sun until my skin turns lobster red and I slip on smooth surfaces because of all my weeping sunburn blisters.

But really, I think we need to just take everything in moderation (including moderation), with exceptions for some things like cigarettes, asbestos and brylcreem, which you should avoid; and sex, which you should have copious quantities of.

Whooo!

iinet recently upgraded their DSLAMs to allow full ADSL2+ connection (ergh, PDF) for those on the enabled exchanges. Which I gleefully happen to be.

Modem Status Connected
DownStream Connection Speed 17153 kbps
UpStream Connection Speed 1023 kbps


That’s right, 17.1 megabits per second.

They have this little utility in the iiNet Toolbox, the online account self-administration tool, where you can select your connection speed, with warnings about possible instability the faster you go. So I set mine on maximum, and so far no dramas and I seem to have been connected for about an hour.

I’ve tried a couple of downloads from ftp.iinet.net.au, but so far the link seems slower than before! I was getting up to around 700KB/sec from that site earlier tonight before the upgrade, now it’s maybe 430KB/sec. I may have to stuff around with the connection speed. I did also have to upgrade my DSL router’s firmware. It’s unlikely the new firmware is slower than the old though, right?

Hmmm…at least the connection speed figures look hot. LAN speeds, over a pair of copper wires, to the home. How good.

So it’s a month later and I still don’t have a new phone. I’ve gone through all my options at least three times since my last post on the subject, and haven’t done anything yet. I guess I just don’t like spending money.

No, that’s wrong. I prefer wasting all my money by spending it in small amounts each day that add up to enormous totals that make me feel ill and prevent me buying stuff like new phones. And I did buy some clothes and shoes instead, so I look pretty and run fast.

But the phones I’m looking at now are SonyEricsson jobs, and they do all the cool shit like play MP3s as well as radio, and have 2-megapixel cameras. Obviously Sony is an evil multinational music and film industry giant though, and the whole rootkit thing has made some peeps quite disgruntled. But damn they make some cool hardware don’t they? And the W800i is another example. I like the K750i as well (in black), with its understated business styling instead of wacky orange and white. But then for that kind of money, it’s a new ball game, so maybe I’m being an idiot. For example the Nokia N70 has a trillion features, including two cameras, 3G compatibility and Symbian OS. But it’s massive, in comparison. I met my neighbour yesterday and he has a Siemens S65, which looked pretty good. And then there’s the old C65, which I was going to get because it’s so damn cheap and has a camera.

I tell you what I want? All I want is everything, for nothing. Zero spend, all the features please. Yesterday.

Don’t it always seem to go like that?

I sure missed the power when it was gone this weekend. We had a really brief storm on Saturday around 3:30pm but it did heaps of damage. I went for a walk afterwards and there were trees and branches down all over the place. Our street’s powerlines got twisted and wrapped around themselves, with big tree branches across the road. The Energex blokes worked from around 4pm until 7am this morning, with the power coming back on at 6:30 for us.

Crazy stuff. It was pretty bizarre coming home at 11:30 at night to a pitch-dark house, except for the flashing orange lights strobing in the front door.

I have no idea how humanity managed to get to the point where Edison could invent the light globe. Having no juice in the wires sucked ass yesterday. It was so hot and humid, but I couldn’t turn the fan on. I couldn’t watch TV, I couldn’t even iron my clothes to go out, and I had to shave by the light of my trusty torch. I went out hoping I’d remembered to cover all the required body parts, and I think I succeeded.

So thanks the Energex blokes who spent the night sorting things right out.

There’s a heap of things I want to get done, but choosing to sit in front of the computer is really hard on days like today. The weather is perfect, and it seems like such a waste to sit inside working on my programmer’s tan when I have a convertible and the weather is amazing.

I’d like to try out some of these PHP MVC frameworks; and Ruby on Rails (learning Ruby along the way) and I would be remiss not to learn more about the Establishment’s offering, ASP.NET.

But then, it’s 5:20pm and 31 degrees Celsius, 17% humidity with a 9km/h breeze (I’m not really a weather freak. Really.) So I’m going to stop blogging and do something I will be happy about when I lose my legs thanks to some Islamic fundamentalist, or something.

I recently discovered dia, a little program for drawing diagrams of a bunch of different types. I found it while trying out Ubuntu linux, but it also works on Windows.

I really like Dia, it doesn’t do as much as Visio or even SmartDraw, but I don’t even want or need the features they have. Dia is just simple, easy, small and doesn’t get in your way. It does have the slightly weird Gimp-style interface that uses separate “main” and “workspace” windows, but that doesn’t take long to get used to.

Dia supports a bunch of different diagram types at the moment, and I’m sure more will be added. You can join objects with straight or bezier curved lines, with or without arrows. The objects have those little connection points that the joining lines snap onto, so that you can move objects and the lines stay connected.

I wish this was around when I was back at uni drawing so many ER diagrams, Use Case diagrams, Data Flow diagrams — oh the pain.

Hooray, books:

Greetings from Amazon.com,

We thought you’d like to know that we shipped your items, and that this completes your order.
…etc…
The following items were included in this shipment:

Qty	Item	Price
1	Code Complete, Second Edition	$31.78
1	Peopleware : Productive Proje	$33.95
1	Rapid Development	$23.10
1	The Best Software Writing I:	$16.49
	Item Subtotal:	$105.32
	Shipping & Handling:	$26.95
	Total:	$132.27

I’m looking forward to getting these, I’ve wanted to buy them for a while but put it off because that’s what I do.

P.S. I hope you appreciate the nice table that I had to fabricate from the text-only email so that it could be presented nicely for this blog. I tried <pre></pre> tags first, but it looked horrid. Now it still doesn’t look great, but maybe it will divert your attention from the mess I’ve made of the WordPress template.