WYRMLOG

Poisonous Fumes

Tuesday May 18th 2010

My good friend Ryan is (I hope he won't mind me saying) an environmentalist much more towards the hippie end of the spectrum than myself. Living as he does on the fringes of the rural enclave of the Swan Valley he is often moved, when visiting my home in the inner suburbs, to comment on the difference in air quality by darkly muttering things like "the very air you breath is a poisonous fume" under his breath.

I, an urban lad born and raised and hence having lungs adapted to a heady mix of carbon monoxide, ozone and soot, barely even notice the difference.

But not this morning. This morning the air in Bayswater tastes like someone's been burning tyres for fun and profit. It is indeed a poisonous fume worthy of Mordor and my head is already aching from it. Heading in to work will be a relief - if I survive the walk to the train station that is.

I suppose it's kind of appropriate. I fumigated my apartment yesterday to deal with a persistent cockroach problem. Obviously the roaches had some powerful karma to call on and are getting their revenge by gassing me from beyond the grave. Tricky little bastards.

Going to go look for an oxygen mask now...

May Day

Sunday May 2nd 2010

It's been a while hasn't it?

Well I'm not dead. I've just been busy. I took the last week off work to really get to grips with all the cleaning that my apartment needs. Or rather needed as I've actually managed to get most of it done. The place is now cleaner that it's been in probably years, and there's room to walk around freely without having to skip hop and jump around various piles of useful things. How long it'll remain like that I don't know.

I've also finished Fallout 3, which was a bit dissapointing as I didn't realise that the last quest I took on was actually the last quest - I had a whole lot of other stuff I wanted to do! I also discovered that I hadn't actually installed the add ons, and then had massive problems trying to get them to install over the top. So, in the end I uninstalled the whole thing and then reinstalled it fresh (with the add ons). Sadly this meant the loss of my character, along with my highly customised home (I had my collection of garden gnomes, chinese swords and deathclaw hands arranged just the way I wanted them!).

On the plus side I get to play it all through again, which I'm currently doing :D

Last Sunday was of course Anzac Day. As is my wont I headed down to the local dawn service, although it wasn't as good as last year's. Actually it was all a bit shambolic. One of the cadets guarding the memorial threw up halfway through (I have to say that the rest of the unit perfomed admirably, the CO leading him off and another cadet stepping forward to take his place immediately) and the speaker from the RSL's lecture on all the wars and peace keeping actions Australia has been involved in since World War One conspicuously ignored Vietnam (I like to think this was an oversight rather than an example of the RSL's historically rocky relationship with Vietnem veterans). A further surprise was in store however, as he finished off his talk by telling us all to spy on immigrants lest they bring down our democracy or something, which was really quite disconcerting.

I've also been getting stuff across to my new computer, which is now pretty much set up and ready to be used on a daily basis (apart from just as a platform for Fallout 3, which to be fair it has been used for on a daily basis). I managed this trick by buying a terrabyte external hard drive, which has made transfering stuff so much easier. Hooray for affordable USB storage!

Anyway I'd better go. I've uploaded a bunch of new photos to Flickr and they need descriptions and tags.

Watching the Memes

Wednesday April 14th 2010

Best remix of the A Current Affair crazy barking dog man I've seen all day!

Psycho Barking Dog Man EPIC REMIX

(Although this one rates highly on the stupidity scale).

That is all.

Lifehacker FTW

Thursday April 8th 2010

Lifehacker is a pretty cool site - one of the ones I check on a daily basis during my lunch break. That said, it would be nice if when they decide to illustrate an article with one of my photos they actually attributed it to me. Particularly since the Creative Commons licence I use on my photos requires it.

I've added a comment to the article - we'll see what happens.

Also on the subject of my Flickr stream, the operator of Save the Cliffe has been nice enough to upload my photos (with full permission and CC attribution) to his site. I can only hope it helps.

Later: Aha! Lifehacker have fixed the attribution. Thanks guys!