The Fishbowl Diaries

cmiller@pastiche.org — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:15:48 GMT

Hello, world.

When life approximates xkcd

cmiller@pastiche.org — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:50:27 GMT

Charles and Donna, lazy Sunday morning, trying to avoid getting up and facing the day:

Donna: Still love me?
Charles: Of course. I’m never going to give you up.
Charles: I’m never going to let you down.
Charles: Never…
Donna: …
Donna: …
Donna: You did not just Rickroll me.

Trivia

cmiller@pastiche.org — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:05:54 GMT

The top 20 most listened to theme songs in the last week, as tracked by last.fm:

On a similar note: my new favouritest Wikipedia page ever, List of problems solved by MacGyver:

MacGyver uses his pocket knife to disarm the self-destruct device of a downed military satellite. He then uses parts of the satellite’s retrieval system - namely metal tubing and large sheets of flexible plastic - to fashion a makeshift hang glider.

…which narrowly beats the List of Scientology Security Checks:

This long Sec Check, consisting of hundreds of questions, takes stock of the subject’s entire time track, including all their past lives. It includes questions such as:
Did you come to Earth for evil purposes?

Have you ever smothered a baby?

Have you ever enslaved a population?

Have you ever destroyed a culture?

Have you ever torn out someone’s tongue?

Have you ever zapped anyone?

Have you ever eaten a human body?

Have you ever made a planet, or nation, radioactive?

Music suggestions anyone?

cmiller@pastiche.org — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:01:19 GMT

Over the last five years or so, my consumption of new music has dropped pretty dramatically. I blame the iPod, which has led me to spend most of my time with my own music collection when I used to listen to the radio and hear new stuff.

So I want to know what CDs were released in the last year that you think would make my aural world a better place. Tell me why if you can.

Thanks in advance.

Intra-office email

cmiller@pastiche.org — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:47:25 GMT

From: Charles Miller
To: atlassian-sydney

On 14/02/2008, at 6:26 PM, Mandy Farquhar wrote:

Can people please check the bathrooms and showers before turning off the downstairs light? I really don’t appreciate people turning off the light and leaving me in a pitch black bathroom.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> shout “Hey, could somebody turn the lights back on?”

Your shout echoes through the dark lavatory. You hear some shuffling and sniggering outside, but the lights remain off.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> shout “You have no idea how dead you guys are…”

You hear the sound of somebody walking up a flight of stairs in the distance. The lights remain off.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

> shout “Seriously, guys, this isn’t funny any more.”

You have been eaten by a grue. Be thankful we don’t tell you where it was hiding.

****YOU HAVE DIED****
Your score is 10 points out of a possible 600, in 3 moves
This gives you the rank of Bathroom Amateur
Restart/Reload/Quit?

Album Art Meme

cmiller@pastiche.org — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:47:34 GMT

How to create your album cover:

Your band name is the title of your first hit on Wikipedia's random page
Your album name is taken from the end of the last quote on this random quotes page
Your album cover must be made from the fourth picture on Flickr's interesting photos page

I swear, I didn't fudge this at all:

(larger image, title, quote, cover art)

Addendum. Using shrijani's formula to create the back cover:

Reload Flickr's interesting photos page twice. Take the seventh picture, desaturate it.
Reload the random quotes page. Take the last few words of each quote to make song titles. Use them all.

(larger image, cover art)

cmiller@pastiche.org — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 05:07:08 GMT

It's one thing to drive your truck under a bridge and forget to lower the crane...

... but hitting the bridge right on the clearance sign takes skill.

An Interview with the CEO of SixApart, on the occasion of the sale of Livejournal

cmiller@pastiche.org — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:42:25 GMT

An Interview with the CEO of SixApart, on the occasion of the sale of Livejournal

Let’s start with the tough question. A lot people are saying that your sale of Livejournal is a final admission that SixApart simply couldn’t manage the site properly. What do you say to that?

Oh, I completely agree. When we bought Livejournal we had a lot of great plans for the site, and we’ve pretty much failed to deliver on any of them.

Really? It’s not often we hear this kind of candor from a CEO. What happened?

I think we failed to grasp the complex, social aspects of the site.

Oh, who am I kidding? There are currently about one and a half million “active” users of Livejournal. Ninety-nine percent of them really don’t care what’s going on so long as the site stays up most of the time. Which it did, we're pretty proud of that.

The remaining one percent care. I mean they really care, even when they have only the slightest clue what they're caring about. And because Livejournal is supposedly a community site, every one of them feels that they hold some kind of magical part-ownership. Now one percent doesn’t sound like a big deal, but you try getting anything done while fifteen thousand people shout at you all at once.

It can’t have been that bad….

Don’t get me started. You know that embarrassing friend you have, the one who whenever anything happens they find some way to interpret it as a personal slight, as if the universe woke up this morning and thought “How am I going to completely screw Sharon over today?”

That’s Livejournal.

But…

Seriously. 98% of them were freeloaders who never gave us a cent. Every time we tried to get some kind of money back from our investment they were up in arms about how we were the worst kind of money-grabbing capitalist scum, defecating all over the supposed legacy of the Brad in Shining Armour. The other two percent, whenever we did anything that might benefit the free accounts, would scream even louder that they were sick of subsidising the freeloaders!

There was a lot of talk that SixApart was always more interested in its own social blogging platform, Vox, than Livejournal.

Guilty as charged. Do you blame us? Vox is just more fun. We can move stuff around, add features to it without running into a whining wall of stop energy. We can experiment! When we announce something new, people are actually excited about it. Can you believe that?

You must admit, though, you made some pretty big PR mistakes. The breast-feeding thing, for one, could have been handled much better

Oh Jesus. I thought that was a joke at first. I mean, they call themselves “lactivists” for fuck’s sake. Lactivists! How comfortable, complacent and privileged does your life have to be before the only thing you can think of to protest about is some guy looking at you weird when you get your tits out on a bus?

The whole lot of them go from site to site, posting pictures and waiting for some well-meaning prude to complain so they can unleash the hounds of hell. And they don’t even realise that the only reason they get any attention is because norks sell newspapers, and it gives some editor an excuse to put a big honking boob somewhere other than page three.

No, the only thing I regret about that mess was that we didn’t go with my first suggestion…

…your first suggestion?

Yeah. It was perfect. The next software update for Livejournal had a “bug” that would randomly crosspost items between the breast-feeding and child-free communities. It would have been marvellous. Unfortunately, we calculated that the total gravitational suck of all that concentrated self-righteousness might just cause the planet to collapse into a black hole.

Joking aside…

I was joking?

…joking aside, censorship on the Internet is an important issue.

Yes it is. And the best way to waste any goodwill your side of the argument may have is to spend a month turning your website black to protest against the unfair treatment of underage-sex fan-fiction. Don’t start with that Pastor Martin Niemöller “first they came for the lolita-fetishists” crap. You’ve got to choose your battles, and boy was that not the one to stick your neck out on.

I guess that'll teach the free speech folks...

What do you mean?

You don’t think it’s a coincidence we sold Livejournal to the Russians, do you? The same country that just put Kasparov in jail for daring to suggest the election might have been rigged? Read the press-release. Livejournal is the blogosphere in Russia, and now every bit of data, every single private post is stuck halfway between Putin and the Russian Mob.

Any final comments?

Я люблю сыр.

(Disclaimer: the author is in no way associated with Livejournal or SixApart. I don't even know anyone who works there in more than an "I might have met them on IRC once or twice" way.)

Absolutely Fabulous

cmiller@pastiche.org — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:41:13 GMT

Things I learned in the last 24 hours:

It’s Diwali
Portal is a really cool game.
The weather in Sydney is likely to continue to suck for another week
The Thursday crossword in the Sydney Morning Herald is probably the easiest of the week
When a girl says “It’ll be really funny and don’t worry, I’ve got nail polish remover” she’s lying about at least one thing.

Sham: adj. bogus; false

cmiller@pastiche.org — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 09:56:30 GMT

I ran out of shampoo last week. No big deal, I thought, I’ll just run down to the supermarket and grab another bottle. Unfortunately, the trickster gods of consumerism had something else in mind.

There must have been fifty different varieties on display, arrayed across both sides of the aisle. And like most cosmetics, they were all marketed to those people convinced there is something desperately wrong with them that can only be solved through the application of some tincture of stone-fruit pulp, rare herbs and technobabble.

I'm happy to say that my hair doesn't feature amongst my physical insecurities. The only problem that springs to mind is that I really think it’s time I got it cut, and my girlfriend doesn’t.

My hair is not dry, damaged, chemically treated or coloured. Thanks to my mother’s DNA it doesn’t seem in any danger of falling out. I do not habitually flick my head around like those poor semi-tourettes-sufferers in the commercials. I am not looking to add vitality, body, shine or bounce. In an ideal world, after I washed my hair, it would simply be cleaner.

Now where’s my shampoo?

I can only imagine that of all the dozens of brands and varieties of shampoo my local supermarket orders, there’s one that is packaged in a plain, non-pastel-coloured bottle and labeled only “Shampoo. For normal hair.”

And whenever they get a shipment in, it sells out in five minutes.

Public Service Announcement

cmiller@pastiche.org — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:40:26 GMT

In recent times there has been a subtle change to the quality of debate about Livejournal.

Before:

The abuse team are incompetent, nobody answers my questions, and you introduced some new feature that doesn't work exactly the way I think it should work/isn't available to free users/isn't exclusive to paid users! Brad sucks!

After:

The abuse team are incompetent, nobody answers my questions and you introduced some new feature that doesn't work exactly the way I think it should work/isn't available to free users/isn't exclusive to paid users! SixApart Sucks!

Hope this helps.

Police State

cmiller@pastiche.org — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:15:28 GMT

This sign is just down the road from my apartment. Dear Asia-Pacific. You can have your world leaders back now, we don’t want them.

Big Brother, Uncoordinated

cmiller@pastiche.org — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:08:26 GMT

I watched precisely four episodes of Australian Big Brother this year, including tonight’s finale.

The general plan for the finale of Big Brother is as follows: with two people left in the house, they run a long recap of the entire season, while host Gretel Killeen stands in front of a live audience and exhorts viewers to keep dialing those numbers, sending in those votes and donating some proportion of their phone bill to Southen Star Endemol.

After the recap they close the voting lines, throw to an advertisement break, play one more video package, throw to another ad break, then announce the final evictee (runner-up), leaving only the winner in the house.

The runner-up does half an hour or so of post-eviction interview, after which they pull out the winner into some big procession between the house and the stage, interview the winner, give out the cash prize, and usually finish the show about half an hour over-time.

This year it didn’t go to plan.

The official line was that the final vote was so close (a few hundred votes out of hundreds of thousands of entries) that they had to take extra-long to make the final tally. Given that last year the show embarrassingly evicted the wrong person and had to send them back in, I can’t see any reason to doubt they needed to take time to be sure. I certainly don’t think it was deliberate.

It was too funny to be deliberate.

You know how the English version of The Office was funny, the way it made you cringe so much that it was stomach-churningly painful even while you were laughing your ass off? That’s how it felt watching Gretel more and more desperately trying to find ways to vamp out that last hour, her already artificial smile getting thinner and thinner as she played for time interviewing whoever stood closest to her, as they successively showed all the video packages they had prepared for the night, while the show fell apart around her.

It was frustrating. It was comical. It was an exercise in just how wrong live TV can go if you’re performing without a net. The least-watched series in the show’s history was capped by an unwatchable finale. Bravo.

Next year, I say, take another hour. Take two. Have the DJ do a whole set. Interview all the housemates again, plus every past-season housemate you can get on a last-minute hospital pass satellite hook-up. Replay every single highlight you can find in the archives. Announce who won UK Big Brother, and see if anyone notices the difference. Make the audience form conga-lines to spell out their favourite house-mates. Hold an impromptu game of charades. Interview everyone again but make the entire cast and crew do a tequila shot every time someone says it was “just a great experience”, or that it “changed their life”. Show a montage of Gretel’s less fortunate wardrobe choices over Green Day’s Time of your life. Bus strippers up from the Gold Coast. Dancing bears. Contortionists. Elephants.

Bring on the farce!

Where I Work

cmiller@pastiche.org — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:18:51 GMT

Recently took a couple of photos of the office for the company blog, may as well post them here.

My desk is under the window by the arrow. The arrow is pointing to the screen that tells us just how broken Confluence is right now.

Circling the desks like that might be breeding a siege mentality.

It's only a matter of time before we pick up some bones and attack the Bamboo team.

Interlude...

cmiller@pastiche.org — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 21:58:40 GMT

This blast from the past showed up on my iPod's random play last night. For some reason I couldn't just let it pass, so to speak.

Take it away, William Burroughs.

‘Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard.
This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called The Better ’Ole that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”
“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”
After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and start eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him Its you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat AND shit.
After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpoles tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous - except for the EYES you dig.
Thats one thing the asshole COULDN’T do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldnt give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes WENT OUT, and there was no more feeling in them than a crabs eyes on the end of a stalk.

Lazyweb: good compact digital camera?

cmiller@pastiche.org — Sun, 27 May 2007 00:19:52 GMT

Last time I was shopping for a compact digital camera, I took Ang’s advice and got a Canon PowerShot A610. The A610 turned out to be an absolute corker: you just point it at things, press the button and it bangs out one great photo after another. I don’t think it’s possible to take a bad shot with it.

Anyway, the time has come to sell the PowerShot and get a new model. The only complaint I have with the A610 is its size. It’s just a little too big to stick in your pocket when you’re going out drinking, for example. Is it possible to get a more compact camera without sacrificing the just-takes-good-photos-ness of the A610? If so, where’s best to look?

I'm expecting a visit from the CIA any moment...

cmiller@pastiche.org — Sat, 26 May 2007 01:47:37 GMT

I normally run a mile from net.memes like this, but I couldn’t resist posting this one for obvious reasons.

(via MyHeritage.com)

Going Knuts

cmiller@pastiche.org — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:59:12 GMT

So a couple of weeks ago, everybody was up in arms over Knut, the baby polar bear who apparently, "animal rights activists" wanted put down.

At the time, I expressed my opinion that the whole thing was a media beat-up, the facts were probably a lot less sensational, and the whole thing was part of a pattern in the media to vilify progressive viewpoints (environmentalism, feminism, animal rights) by over-representing their most crackpot fringe.

Lo and behold, it was even worse than that. The guy being demonised for wanting poor Knut dead was being totally misrepresented. He had previously taken legal action against a different zoo to try to stop them killing a sloth that had been rejected by his mother. After losing that case, he made the mistake of trying to bring attention to the fact that the law was being applied inconsistently. Hey presto, he's a bear-killer!

Three cheers for our sensationalist, uncritical, increasingly centralised media.

The Sandwich Provider Protocol

cmiller@pastiche.org — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 05:54:38 GMT

Ordering a sandwich is a flow control problem.

If you provide too much information at once, you’ll overflow the buffer of the person serving you. This will cause an unknown amount of information to be dropped on the floor, and for safety you’ll have to start again from scratch to ensure no ingredients are missed.

You can just treat the whole thing as a challenge-response protocol. In fact, this is the best thing to do when approaching a new sandwich server, as there are subtle variations in the order of serving. (Are they going to ask for butter? When are they going to ask about salt and pepper?). But challenge-response wastes time, as you pay double the cost of the latency between you and the person behind the counter.

Once you know the order in which the data is required, though, the trick is to keep the pipeline full without (a) overflowing the buffer, or (b) emptying the buffer and dropping back to challenge-response.

Estimating the buffer capacity of someone serving you your sandwich, however, can be tricky.

(also)

Electrical Storm

cmiller@pastiche.org — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 12:34:23 GMT

The is-dumb of the crowd

cmiller@pastiche.org — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:39:41 GMT

I’m not sure what I find funniest about Conservapedia.

Perhaps it’s the claim that British spellings are a sign of liberal bias on Wikipedia. Or the fact that all the entries read like high-school book reports. Or that the original article for “United States of America” defined it as: “The United States of America, or just “America”, is the country we live in.” Or wacky stuff like redefining “faith” to mean “Christian faith”, and then using that definition to prove that, Q.E.D., no other religion can be based on faith.

I’d like to think the whole thing is a troll, but there seems to be far too much work gone into the site just for the sake of a joke.

Maybe it’s just further proof that, as Stephen Colbert said, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

(Tip of the hat to Danny Ayers)

Memeage.

cmiller@pastiche.org — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 04:01:59 GMT

Stolen from what seems to be two thirds of my friends list...

Please leave a 14 word comment on this post that you think best describes me.

Just 14 words, no more, no less (with one exception, see below).

The 14 words in question should be: "Charles is fucking awesome, and I wish everyone in the world was like him." Women are allowed an extra six words in their comment, to add "I want to bear his children".

When you are done, copy and paste into your journal just how intensely cool I am.

Thankyou.

Amusing Myself

cmiller@pastiche.org — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 11:22:58 GMT

We're spending tomorrow at a management training course of some kind. I decided I would entertain myself by attending clad in my brand new "Now Cluster-Fucked" Confluence 2.3 shirt, and amusing facial hair.

cmiller@pastiche.org — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 06:33:49 GMT

From today's Crikey:

Only through Eau Rouge do a Grand Prix driver's eyes roll over white. Only at Imola's Acque Minerali does a lone Ferrari flag wave from the scarlet roof of a private nearby house. Only on the exit of the Beckett's complex in rural England has a racer pulled 12G in less than four seconds. Only at Suzuka does a driver actually prefer to round "the spoon" than order another room service fruit juice from the calm of the circuit hotel.
Warn your heart to stop racing, however, because the Formula 1 of the very near future is a lot different.
Already, Imola has been replaced by a purpose-built circuit in an emerging market designed by German architect Hermann Tilke. Gone, too, is Austria, replaced by a purpose-built circuit in an emerging market designed by German architect Hermann Tilke.
Ditto Suzuka. Ditto Nurburgring and Hockenheim, who now share because they can't afford the annual race fees. Ditto France and Britain, because billionaire Bernie Ecclestone always gets his way. Ditto Belgium, whose organisers know the feel of the F1 supremo's axe all too well.
...
So a heads-up Bernie, we don't know the difference between Tilke's Turn 8/China and Tilke's Turn 5/Malaysia, but we do know the difference between Acque Minerali and Eau Rouge.
There's something uninspiring about knowing that the crests in Turkey were concocted with computer-aided-design software, but we love the fact that Spa-Francorchamps turned left before Blanchimont because racers in the 1920s had to jink to avoid a tree.
We don't care if the hospitality suites at Toyota-owned Fuji are better suited for the high-rolling Japanese guests, but we do care that the dated and awesome Suzuka is no longer on the calendar.
Bernie -- we do care.

The Coathanger

cmiller@pastiche.org — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 13:56:54 GMT

They're testing the New Years light-show tonight.