The game is up for 2005. It's time for the obligatory navel-gazing and to-do list for 2006. 2005 is ending much like 2004 ended for me - flying out of a strange country to spend time in a slightly more familiar location. This will be my first proper New Years in London, and coincidentally my first night out on the town in London. Being 12 last time I spent the New Year in London, I never really appreciated the party potential of the city. Maybe I should try heading down to the Forum to see Mr Scruff do his New Years magic.
I'm going to try and avoid the whole year in review thing - if I really want to review my year, I can just repost the archives from this site. Ah feck it - here's a haiku about my year.
So much change this year
Most of it was my fault
Somehow it worked out
In other news - 2006 is shaping up to be the year that the world finally ends, what with all the signs of the apocalypse that have made themselves evident over the course of 2005. I hope it doesn't end too early in 2006, because that would kind of ruin my plans for next year. These plans generally involve getting my PhD back on track, and then padding liberally with trips around Europe, watching the World Cup, and a trip back to Aussie at the end of the year. If I'm lucky, I would have also learnt a decent amount of German in that time too. That's the To-Do list done.
Next year is also shaping up to be a good geek gear year - with Apple continuing their policy of releasing digital crack. In fact, this post from 2004 about a new Powermac has almost become reality. I might pick up the new Mac Mini at the start of next year, and I will probably finally cave and buy myself a full-sized iPod, so that I can sit on the bus and chuckle away at some hilarious podcasts, or watch some time-shifted TV. It may also actually be used to play some music. On the other hand, I could just end up waiting another half-year, and see if those wireless iPods ever materialise. Always the glutton for punishment, I'm going to try and get broadband again - even if it means making a cantenna and trying to steal some interweb access.
I've actually been a bit sneaky with this post, writing it up so that Blogger will automagically deliver the post on the 26th. I'll be back and bad-arse after the break, so all the best for the New Year kids!
I know people here from a number of countries. Brazilian, Canadian, English, Austrian, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Italian and Greek. It's like I'm working at Insearch again. I also know a fair few Germans (so I am making an effort to know the locals). The reason I mention that I know the international crowd is that they are all to disappearing over Christmas. The Germans are all disappearing too. In fact, I'm getting the distinct impression that the entire city just empties out from the 25th till New Years. Although it would be nice not to need to fight the crowds at the Penny-Markt, I too am flocking to where all the crowds are, and will be spending my festive season in London. In practical terms, that means comment moderation will be a bit slower on here - which I think is only really going to inconvenience Apepoker and Butercup. I was going to try to go to Zürich to meet Ben, but the prohibitive prices of train tickets stopped me right in my tracks (Har-har). The train system here is priced in such a way as to actively discourage people from catching the train. It's cheaper for me to fly up to somewhere like Berlin rather than catching a train there.
I've been spending far too much time out at the Christmas markets here, looking at the various goods they're offering for purchase. It's like a new-age hippie paradise in the markets, with a whole bunch of "hand-made" candles, incense burners, lamps, and dangly decorative things to make your Ikea flat look that little bit less pre-packaged (not that the decor in the apartment I'm in is anything to be proud of). The Christmas markets are covered with all the traditional Christmas decorations (pine-leaf crap, red crap, silver crap, star-shaped-glittery crap), but it doesn't look as tacky as it does in Australia. It seems like the decorations belong here, whilst they look strangely alien in Australia. My perceptions may have something to do with the fact that it's dark whenever I see these decorations, and so I never can see them properly. It may also have something to do with three glasses of Glühwein that I'm drinking every time I'm at the markets (It's cold out there!). Thanks to the dynamic duo, I've got some Christmas decorations in my house. The pictures you can see accompanying this post are the two decorations that I have up in my place. They're doing pretty well at staving off the SAD (Cranking up the stereo while listening to Avalanches Breezeblock sets also works wonders). I'd put more decorations up - but chances are they'll never go down since housekeeping isn't exactly one of my strengths.
Have you ever wondered what Christmas would be like without people trying their hand at celebrity gurning? Consider the link a gift from me to you.
I've been keeping an eye on the whole riotous fun happening in Sydney over the past few days, with a whole bunch of race riots (or are they disturbances?), people getting beaten up, stabbed, and having their cars vandalised. It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Now, although I'm slightly interested in why it's happening, I'm more interested in how it's happening. The call to arms seems to have occurred via a whole bunch of text messages and emails being spread around, as well as with some cajoling by the "media" (no doubt talk-back radio and the fine commercial media stations have something to do with this). So what we have here is people promoting feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of people so as to endanger the peace of Australia (or Sydney in particular). Hmm. Why does that sound vaguely familiar?
On the other end of the scale both in terms of sensibility and it's relation to media is SBS. They really are my favourite TV station in Australia. Their journalism is top notch (especially on Dateline), and they do a fantastic job at looking at events both in their local region, and often further afield. Also, World news, and the Insight forum shows are pretty good too. SBS is also the football channel of Australia, and they've done a great job promoting and supporting the game - even through its dark days.
John Safran seems to switch between the ABC and SBS when doing his media stuff nowadays. He used to be on JJJ on Sunday afternoons, and now he's got a show on Monday evenings in Australia. The banter between Safran and Father Bob works well, and it's entertaining, occasionally thought provoking TV. John Safran's father is also really really creepy. Apart from the comedy gold value of the show, there's one other reason that I really like the show (and by extension SBS) - they're offering downloads of the show as a podcast (sized for the iPod video). Downloads of free to air TV shows aren't anything new - usually you find stations putting up clips of their shows in some format such as RealPlayer or WMV, tied up with all sorts of useless DRM. This makes the act of watching said shows painful, and I usually don't bother, and go search for other means of getting the show. This podcast of "Speaking in Tongues" actually gets the distribution medium right. It has no DRM, and is in a format which is easy to playback on a number of platforms (even Linux I'd say). The RSS feed used for notification of new episodes is icing on the cake. I'd love to find out both who pushed the idea for using the DRM free format (H.264 + AAC), and the executive who actually approved it in the end. They really need to take some credit for some sensible decisions made. I've been watching the shows since last week, and is probably the only thing keeping me from going stir-crazy indoors. Could you imagine if I had to watch Kommissar Rex throughout winter?
It's not surprising that the SBS podcast is so Apple friendly, considering the moves that Apple is making into the television distribution market. They're signing up more content providers, and getting a critical mass of content together. Admittedly, the content is both low resolution, and DRMed, but I look at it as positive steps to getting rid of these useless massive media companies (At the very least, I'd like the media companies to stop playing the middle-man). Come January, we may see more changes in the way Apple handles the media, and we might see some really cool new toys involving television content (I'm hoping for the next version of the Airport Express). It's a pity I don't have any disposable income to blow on the back catalogue of Knight Rider episodes - just hearing the theme music takes me back. Turbo-boost!
I feel like doing something a bit antisocial (You need some kind of way to keep the spirits up during winter, right?), and a perfect opportunity has presented itself to me tomorrow, when Procter and Gamble are coming to my campus to try and woo PhD students/Postdocs into working for them. I quickly browsed the web looking for P&G's numerous crimes against humanity, but was disappointed when I found out that all they do is operate in countries with bad human rights records (Which serious countries don't abuse human rights?), and do some animal testing. I can't get riled up about putting lipstick on bunny rabbits! Does anyone know any tough questions I can ask P&G? Something to do with dodgy business practices, or a coverup of some sort? I won't ever want to work with that company, but I figure that turning up and being a pest will provide a nice counterpoint to the desperate people begging for jobs. Can you have sedition against a company?
Update - I was just trawling through my Google Analytics logs, and I got a visit from the Procter and Gamble domain. Are they checking up to see their name isn't being taken in vain?
Part of my grand plan with this website is to develop a catalogue of interesting posts to make that I can just throw up here when I don't do anything interesting during the week. Given that I'm doing a PhD, that will happen more often than not. There's also a limited amount of times you can write about going out and getting fantastically drunk before my posts become a lot of me commenting on how yellow my skin is getting. So the idea is for me to do all my writing in large blocks, so that whenever I feel creative/egotistical enough to make some kind of ill informed comment on something (like how the new Mac minis will kick arse in January), I catch the textual diarrhea (or explosion at the dictionary factory) in one bucket, and then paint it - actually I'll stop that analogy. As usual, I have completely failed to have a backup plan for this week (using my backup mid-week last week). Er, so here's an anecdote.
Back in my misspent youth, I went to university. Instead of learning all the reasons why university culture is inherently incompatible with teamwork (try telling anyone to take responsibility for something in a University, or try getting someone to be responsible to someone else!), I spent my time bluffing my way through various assignments, and then collaborating to help find the best answer. The results in my degree are indicative of all the good people that I worked with - doing it on my own would have resulted in me giving the wrong answers all the time, and learning very little. Instead, I answered most of the questions incorrectly, and still learnt very little. This was O.K. because everyone else was also failing miserably, learning nothing and relying on the magic scaling to get them through from one course to the next, and so we'd all work together to bring our marks up.
The only real times when you were really left to your own devices in university were exams and the presentations. Exams were actually quite easy to get through (except for that one Electrical Engineering exam where I cried), as you could just go over the past papers, which would give you enough knowledge to get through the exam. Presentations were another matter altogether. It's not that I was bad at giving presentations, it was more related to the fact that I didn't know much outside the scope of what I had thrown together on the slides. This had two big disadvantages - the first is that you just felt a little scummy delivering a presentation on some work that a guy had spent 20 years of his life working on, and then just getting the basics completely wrong, taking very complex problems and just writing them off in a glib sentence. The second disadvantage was that when the lecturer asked you a question - you had no chance of getting it right. I was quite naive about this whole question answering thing when I first started at uni, so I'd just try answering the question. The lecturers in Biomedical Engineering must have perfected the blank stare, because I had never been so profoundly scared as when I was the recipient of a look lacking so much expression. After failing to answer the question correctly, I'd be phased, and then continue to dig myself into a hole. After 5 years, I understood the best way to answer questions like this is to shrug your shoulders, and thank them for such an excellent question. If that doesn't get them off your back, you'd possibly wax philosophical a bit about the implications of the question (if they're not satisfied with the compliment), and then in the worst case just rephrase the question so you do know the answer. That's what I'm doing with this post. Talking about something completely irrelevant. No, you can't ask questions.
I've got to say Hi to the Dutch, Colombian, Japanese and Chinese readers. Who are you - and why do you want to know so much about penguins? Sample queries - "how to say go penguins in german" or "childrens games about penguins". Did they ever land at the wrong website.
A bit more science stuff. I ran across a page about singing science on Slashdot yesterday. I particularly like the Glucose song, and Hooray for NMR Spectroscopy. Somehow I've got to get my group members to adopt these as our theme song. Admittedly, it's no MC Hawking (Entropy!), but it's really stupid music. I don't know if I can count this as J-Pop/Rock/Jazz (Japanese reader - enlighten me!), but I was also listening to the Cowboy Bebop (Film) soundtrack, and I heard a very geeky song with a little girl singing out the digits in π. It's called 3.14, and by 菅野よう子 (I have no idea what the translation is). I don't expect you to go out and buy the CD (since it's actually a bootleg CD), so you can instead go and listen to some French music instead.
You might notice some XML buttons appearing on comments pages, which allow you to subscribe to the comments for a page. I'm not sure it works 100% correctly, as the atom page is next to useless.
Update This isn't worth a brand new post, so here's an update to my broadband saga. I have finally been disconnected from the service I signed up for in July. I now have a wireless DSL router thingie, two dead splitters, and a very dodgy phone line. I haven't checked if the money has automagically appeared back in my account yet. A little piece of me dies every day I have to use dialup.