human bits

nearly awake.

mike — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:42:11 +0000

Sunlight on curtain.
Early morning, nearly spring.
My love will wake soon.

How hacking is like sex

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:37:35 +0000

To assume someone is a criminal when he brags that he is a hacker is like assuming someone is a rapist if he tells you he has had sex.

In both cases he may just be a wanker.

come

mike — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:42:59 +0000

as midnight bell sounds
a single wave washes clean
scent of further shore

WMDs

mike — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:31:38 +0000

At this time of year it is not safe to ride without at least one WMD – or ‘Weapon of Magpie Distraction’ for the uninitiated. I find magpies particularly distracting while I’m riding, so I’d really like to return the favour by making a few of them feel really distracted. On many days lately when I have been distracted by magpies I have felt very very strongly that my magpie distractor of choice would be a bazooka. A bazooka is probably not the ideal choice however – and I haven’t used one so far – for at least the following reasons:

While the actual blast can be quite distracting – particularly if well targeted – a bazooka may take a while to reload. I read somewhere that a recent survey showed that at least 98% of magpies don’t actually know what a bazooka looks like. This probably means that during the reload time a magpie is not likely to be distracted by the mere presence of a bazooka.
There is also a good chance that the recoil from the bazooka blast will knock your bike over. This is probably more distracting for you than it is for the magpie, unless of course you are being closely followed by an inattentive car or truck driver (who may have been distracted by the magpie.) In that case the subsequent sirens and flashing lights and traffic chaos might be quite distracting for the magpie.

I have heard of at least one case of a tennis racket being used as a very effective WMD. I usually don’t have a tennis racket with me when I am riding so I haven’t tried that distraction yet. On a couple of occasions I have picked up a small tree from the roadside and carried that with me for the rest of my ride. That kind of works, but for me it has never had the impact I imagine a tennis racket would, and small trees don’t make good riding companions.

So lately I’ve settled on the less satisfying but mostly effective distractor of looking just plain silly.

There are of course many many ways of looking silly. If some other nameless cyclist had not come to my rescue I may have had many years of trial and error ahead of me in the search for exactly the right kind of silliness to effectively distract magpies. Fortunately there are many other cyclists doing their best to look silly (that is why lycra bike pants were invented after all) and somewhere along the line some one of them decided to look silly by wearing a hedgehog on his head. Lo and behold he discovered – by chance – that this was an effective magpie distractor. Of course we don’t have hedgehogs in Australia – and the echidna is a protected species – so I’ve had to make do by adding spiky bits to my helmet. So far it seems to be working. There is one magpie about 1km down the road from our place who likes to swoop at least a dozen times each time I ride by him, and I’d say he definitely looks distracted every single time he swoops.

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

mike — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:01:57 +0000

This time 40 years ago I was nine years old, discovering Jazz at night on the old valve radio my parents had given me (and yet to discover or have any particular interest in popular music) and breakfast cereal boxes had charts and pictures and cards and models of rockets and lunar modules. I remember Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’ playing on TV so many times during – or in between bits of – broadcasts of moon mission stuff. We all had the day off school. That is my Monday morning recollection of my part in that slice of history.

Much closer to the actual events is this – http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html – an amazing resource – a real treasure.

From the foreward:

Hour upon hour of the astronauts’ conversations with each other and with Mission Control in Houston, as well as television scenes taken during their lunar expeditions, were recorded as they occurred from July 1969 to December 1972. For all the years since then, these recordings were available but, for the most part, remained “on the shelf” to collect dust. Now, through the dedication and hard work of historian Eric Jones and the lunar astronauts, the aural and visual history of the Apollo lunar expeditions is being taken off the shelf, dusted off, and presented in a way which everyone can understand and enjoy. Besides cleaning up the voice transcripts, Eric is conducting exhaustive interviews with the lunar astronauts and inserting their recollections of the events which took place more than twenty years ago.

the digital divide

mike — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:03:49 +0000

There were two surprises to come out of the announcement of the national broadband network this week. The first was that the government got it right. I’d been hoping and praying for the last few months that they would have the balls and the vision and they have exceeded my expectations on both counts. Real leadership – who’d have thought! The second surprise has been the petty mindedness and utter lack of vision on the part of the opposition and some ‘analysts’. This also has exceeded my expectations. The implications of affordable high speed internet access across Australia are enormous. This is not about downloading movies – it is about what will be produced. It is about what will be possible. It is about unlocking potential. If there is a digital divide it is between those who can only see what now is and those who are ready to make what will be.

(writing this as we drive into Canberra for the weekend.)

maybe facebook is finally becoming interesting

mike — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 04:29:33 +0000

People who mainly talk about themselves are hard to be around. Anything that tries to exist just for its own benefit gets to be pretty pointless after a while. It is one of the basic facts of the universe that things are most useful, most significant, most themselves when they point outside of themselves.

It is true of people and it is true on the web. The more you give the more you get. The more you send people away the more they come back. Imagine if google had links only to google. The more facebook points outside of facebook – the more it makes other things useful to me – the more likely I am to use facebook.

In Swan Hill for a couple of days

mike — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:19:19 +0000

Me and Mrs Jo
We’ve got a thing going on
I’ll miss her so bad.

She shows me our God.
A light before the sunrise
To have and to hold.

oh deer

mike — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:43:40 +0000

As I was just starting to drift into sleep last night I had a sort of dream about following / hunting some deer at the edge of a forest at dusk. It was like we were cavemen or something – but with hi-tech tracking devices – or very good noses – I’m not sure which – so that we could tell that the deer were staying a constant 2km in front of us. Which is really silly because who ever heard of cavemen using metric.

the big picture

mike — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:38:02 +0000

Last week we had a bunch of lovely interesting people come and visit for our open week. Its a great opportunity for some to take a step back from ‘normal’ life and into an experience of living breathing practical Christian community. Visitors sample our everyday life of learning together, working together, living together and worshipping together. By the end of the week many find that ‘the big picture’ has become much clearer.

On the subject of the big picture – recently I discovered hugin – part of a ‘toolchain to create panoramic images.’ I put it to the test with some shots I took last week and I’m impressed! It is very easy to use and I like the results.

Here are three shots taken around our little community. It’s not much to look at but a lot of very good things happen here. I know that I will remember some of the conversations from last week every time I look at these pictures.