[Interestingly enough, complex Lego kits are basically the onlykind of product which you can buy where a man will unhesitatinglyread the instructions before he starts.]

The only thing that could make this better is if each part was numbered.

Incidentally, this springs to mind : http://www.stardestroyer.net/Mike/RantMode/GiftSuggestions.html

Suggestion #6: A giant Lego kit.

We men try to put on a good show of this meaningless concept
called "maturity" (a nice term for the adult social convention
of being polite even when you feel like punching the other guy in the
mouth). However, the fact remains that we're still just little boys
in grown-up bodies. And no matter how old we get, Lego is still
cool. Especially those huge kits, like the big Lego Man O' War kit,
or the battleship, or the tank, or the licensed Star Wars Imperial
Star Destroyer kit. These kits can set you back more money than
you'd expect, but there's something compelling about the exercise
of sitting down with 50 pounds of Lego and an instruction sheet in
order to construct something big. Preferably something with guns on
it.

Interestingly enough, complex Lego kits are basically the only
kind of product which you can buy where a man will unhesitatingly
read the instructions before he starts.

You know this to be true.

Haha, crowded house... remember the line from that song, 'on 57 mount pleasant street'? My mate from college used to live on that street

Do love crowded house....

m' bad. http://www.hudzilla.org/phpbook/read.php/1_0_0

Actually rich, it's not so bad - once you get into the rhythm of serving customers, it's more or less another case of braindead burger flipping (step 1 : greet the customer, step 2 : ask how you can assist them, step 3....) It's just when you get the 5% of nightmare customers from hell (i.e. the ones that abuse you for shiznit that isn't your fault, or the ones that will hold up a long line of others bitzing about how they should be getting $1.50 off their purchase because the Sign Says So... one learns to use the 'I'll have to ask my manager' line very quickly.

I henceforth declare that I will be nice to every retail employee I ever see, ever. Ugh.

On the upside, I got paid yesterday! $10 AUD/hour is pretty shiznitty, but it sure beats sitting around earning $0.

Mozilla is the parent organisation for a bunch of open-source software, yeah? The volunteers are all doing this because they want to write cool software for fame and glory, or because they want to write the software that suits their personal needs, etc... They need some finances to run their webservers and soforth, but you'll find that the money here comes from angel investors, donations and sales of tshirts and soforth from their store.

Open source for the win

I'm alive too, I'm just working at the moment (working in a department store at christmas time is a good way to get really, really good at customer service and using a cash register.)

a little late, but this one is worth more than a pile of diamonds : www.hudzillla.org/phpbook . Best free PHP book you will ever find, ever.

Haha, nerio Last semester I had Buddha Bar IX on repeat in my room for about a month (didn't get sick of it!) It's great stuff for studying.

Right now, I'm listening to Cat Steven's greatest hits compilation. Old stuff is awesome

Not bad, micke! Single column suits your site well. Source code was definitely generated by a dumb computer, though

fwiw, rich, there *is* a difference between aptitude and apt-get - aptitude tracks automatically installed dependencies, and apt-get doesn't. That means that if you install a package and it brings along some other packages, when you uninstall using aptitude it will remove the dependencies that were brought along (apt-get remove will not.) The catch is that you have to had used aptitude from the very start

During the closing of my time on ubuntu, i was looking at the KDE apt-get frontend, which was actually a fair bit nicer than Synaptic (which I don't like very much.) The aptitude frontend is nice if you don't want to start up a giant gui app and works nicely over ssh

One of the things i miss most from ubuntu (and look jealously at Gentoo for) is package management tools - Arch's pacman is lacking in a few areas (gentoo eix makes package searches BLAZING fast : pacman -Ss takes for-ever.) You need hacks for coloured output on the terminal, and there's no decent (usable) graphical interfaces

----

wrt 98SE : Maybe not so much terrible as ancient - for example, you can only use the FAT32 filesystem, which i can't abide. (NTFS is actually a frackin' awesome filesystem, and if it had an open spec (so we can be sure we got the linux implementations right) then i'd use it for all my partitions.)

Fwiw, linux of the 90's era was pretty nasty too in terms of providing a computing experiecne you could actually use, and let's not even talk about classic Mac OS. (the underpinnings of classic mac os are only slightly less crappy than the 9x series of windows.)

----

Finally, an epiphany : I was reading kerneltrap (a digest version of the linux kernel mailing list), and with every point release of the kernel - which happens roughly monthly by my reckoning - they're ripping bits out and replacing them and generally making things better. Put simply, it's awesome just how fast linux development moves and where it's going. Most popular linux software evolves at this rate too. (i updated my entire system before i left uni a month ago, which got me the 2.6.20 kernel. Current version us 2.6.22, and there are pages and pages of changelog.)

OSX has yearly (or so) releases with giant whacks of new features in every one, as well as speed increases (generally) and improvement of all the stuff underneath. (Spaces in OSX 10.5 will bring decent virtual desktops to OSX, which is a prerequisite for any computer i use now).

Windows has this monolithic release cycle (3 years or so) and doesn't really add much worthwhile between releases, yet upgrading between versions of windows tends to break things nearly all the time. OSX upgrades are clean, and so are incremental linux system updates...

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Colophon : i have my own website now, hosted by a real webhosting company. url : lws.nfshost.com. Watch this space.

Adiago - Barber : Philadelphia Orchestra

Classical music is nice.

Fergie - Big Girls Don't Cry

"I hope you know, I hope you know : that this has nothing to do with you - it's personal, my self and I - we got some straightening out to do;
And i'm gonna miss you, like a child misses their blanket, but I've gotta get a move on with my life - it's time to be a big girl now - and big girls don't cry"

Reminds me of a certain person and period in my life.

I would think about switching to mac, but there are a few things that keep me from doing it.

1) I can't game at all on a mac. All the good games are PC only.
2) I can't customize a mac after buying it.
3) Halo 2 for PC will be Vista only, so no way in hell that I will be able to run it on a mac.
4) Money
5) I like a 2 button mouse. (I have heard rumors of these existing for mac, but have never seen one)
6) I REALLY LOVE GAMING!!! (I think I said that already)
7) The Mac advertising campaign right now is made up of a ton of lies and over doing stuff. I don't like a company that does stuff like that. I have had a PC for all my life and NEVER made a pie chart on it. I have ALWAYS had FUN with my PC and never been bored with it. Also, I have never seen someone throw a computer off the desktop by tripping over the wires. In my opinion, if you have your wires that exposed, you deserve to have your computer fall off a table.

Rich, this is nothing against you and your mac. I have all the respect in the world for you, I just thik the mac campaign is a little janky 

Yep, i know, *Holy thread ressurection, Batman!*

1) Boot Camp / Parallels : Boot Camp allows you to dual-boot windows XP on intel processor macs (any new mac, pretty much.) This lets you play games at native speed. I'm not sure about the specifics of parallels, but I think it's something to do with paravirtualisation (run two operating systems AT THE SAME TIME )

4) Cost : You do pay a premium for mac hardware, but it's much better built. iMacs are very portable by desktop computer standards. MacBooks have all kinds of nice touches and don't feel clunky or flimsy like some other laptops I've used.

5) Mice : New macs ship with mighty-mice, which are two-button + scroll... thingy. Mighty mice are still really strange and I hate them, but i just bring my own USB mouse (i use a Microsoft Optical mouse i've had since forever ) You can BYO keyboard, too - the logitech k/b I use actually has marking for both windows  metakeys (ctrl, win, alt) as well as mac keymappings (ctrl, option, clover.) Pity it doesn't have *nix ctrl, alt, meta, super markings




---------------


Wrt linux :

Photoshop : Yes, the GIMP sucks. GIMPshop sucks just as much. Photoshop is one of the few things i actually miss from windows. Apparently you can run photoshop 7.0 or photoshop CS with WINE without too much hassle - CS2 and CS3 are apparently a little more tricky. VMWare/qemu are not good solutions, at all.

Also : customising linux is a little different to customising windows. Windows customisation usually consists of 'install software Y, muck around with it' (Y = aston|windowsblinds|stylexp...). Linux customisation, as well as the aforementioned 'install and muck around' - like most other things in linux, mainly consists of 'google for FAQs on how to do this' There's also a healty dose of stumbling across nice software while looking in the repositories for other stuff... i was looking for a word processor and i found a game that consumed my life for a month or so


-------


[micke]
>No-one understood why W95 didn't work, just as they got the bugs sorted out we were forced to have W98 on any new machine, then we were given hundreds of patches, and Win 98SE was the new "world of computing" [ to be honest it was a pretty good system... and should have been the basis for future OS's ] , then it was XP ( w98  patched ).... even that had problems!.... now we are being shunted Vista ( which all new machines in the UK are being sold with ), and it is known to be full of glitches.
>In effect M$ has always been profit based, and only someone with deviuos creditation has been the benefactor!
In this country we would have hanged the bastard for his dastardry!

Win98 was terrible! :| The win-9x/ME branch of windows was absolutely horrible, technically. It had all kinds of fun design issues. Win XP (which descends from the NT kernel line - fwiw, NT is actually descended from BSD, courtesy of the 'do anything you want' spirit of the BSD license) is actually a really good OS, just with a lot of crap on top of it and some questionable implemenation details. I still hold that windows 2000 is the best of the lot


Wrt cost of windows - "<uni student> : you can BUY windows? I thought you could only download it from mininova!"

The cost of windows in no way represents how much it's actually worth. OSX, on the other hand, is a bit more reasonably priced.
Linux has a different kind of cost - it costs you no money, but it does demand that you spend time getting it working the way you want. If your time is worth $10 an hour, say...

ty, haxer.

For what it's worth : I'm chillin' in Mount Isa, a nice lil' mining town in outback northwest Queensland. It's about 1000km from townsville (where i go to uni). The centre of the place is the xstrata mine, which pulls out copper and lead mainly. The 100m tall stack on the lead smelter is a darn impressive sight! (it's there so all the nice lead vapours are put into a different layer of atmosphere than what mount isans have to breathe - instead, Indonesia gets half of it ) My brother works there as an electrical engineer, and I'm staying at his place for a while.

You don't realise how FRICKEN HUGE australia actually is until you drive across about a quarter or so of it!!! It's a lot different out here compared to townsville - more or less desert, with the grass persuaded to be semi-green by recent rain (rarity) and sprinklers, if you're rich. Right now it's winter, so we're getting temperatures in the < 10 celcius range at night (32-50F, i believe), which for australians classes as 'fricken freezin'!' Also there's a lot more hills and rocky outcrops - townsville is pretty flat and tame compared to this place.

I'm learning how to drive, too. It's so darn complicated! Any of the actions on their own are simple, but the combination of steering and gearstickking and clutching and braking and accelerating and indicating and the other 11ty million things you have to do in order to keep your car moving, plus following the road rules... not trivial. I already pranked wes' car reversing, too (a little incident with a guide post 'streamlined' the passenger door a little...)

Also, this computer has windows vista on it. It's unbelievably frustrating! I don't want to have to fight my computer just to look at running processes, or install things, or... pretty much everything. Linux handles superuser/user privilege separation much more elegantly (i.e. without a whole-screen fade to black that hangs the computer while it's in progress, just to present a yes-no i-am-not-a-dummy dialog.) And it runs like a dog. Thank your lucky stars you're on OSX, Win XP, or Linux

That's me, out.
-lws :wq