Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Jack in a Bottle
okay so right now, I am - inside.
There is sunshine - outside.
Divide by 0 error. internal stack overflow.
No, wait there is a REASON I am IN as opposed to OUT side.
Namely that I'm doing battle with the monsters within T's computer.
Having identified the bug - "the NDIS bug" I am utterly flummoxed at how to squash it. I am also incredibly frustrated at the propensity for microsoft to turn out "new" operating systems with ingeniously insiduous new bugs in them. Why the f**k can't they just perfect ONE operating system and make the world happy?!?!
The NDIS bug is apparently irreparable according to some of the literature i've been perusing, so now I'm in the process of battling with her computer to allow me to transfer all her documents (a paltry 256 mb) over to my computer prior to the mind wipe with windows XP. The ethernet cable is in place. Home networking checks out both ends. It's just...
fume.
anyway, while we await the mysterious and unseen connections to meld between Windows XP and Windows ME (mental images of tentacles melting into each other through the ethernet cable) I've been dozing, and thinking random thoughts.
I'm sure we've all heard the anecdotes of letters in bottles cast out to sea, only to arrive at the True Love's feet on some sandy shore twenty years later.
What keeps these one-in-a-million bottles on course, one wonders. Is it something to do with the law of averages? Or just blind faith? Or a celestial guiding hand? Or sheer coincidence.
Me, I've never done anything like that.
For one there's no bloody sea in London.
And for another, I'm far too cynical to believe in romantic claptrap like this. cough.
*****
Much ado about sparkly things
Well, a brief post-parade perusal of the celebrity National Day blogs has shown up that the fireworks must have been pretty spectacular this year. Each and every one of them wrote pretty effusively about 'em. The other fact which didn't escape attention was the average number of approximately four posts each, over the past month (discounting photographs). This probably exceeded the organiser's wildest expectations......
Funny, that. Even local hero Mr Brown blogs more often than them, but do we see him cough. 'nuff said.
I remember being wowed when I was a kiddy by the fireworks, too. Big sparkly things in sky. My gran used to live in east coast, and we could make out the fireworks over the lawn (yes, she had a lawn). I did my fair share of goggling when I attended NDP err... eons ago now.
A decade later, I'm pretty dispassionate about fireworks. Fireworks in the UK are legal and any Tom, Dick and Harry can buy them from the supermarket and blow their arms off if they're that way inclined.
Guy Fawke's day is an exercise in acoustic tolerance. Sometimes the combined whizz whees and bangs are enough to drive a guy barmy, especially if he's trying to catch some sleep in preparation for work the next day.
Not that I didn't play with any myself. cough. They wuz fun. boom.
Frown. Kicks Y chromosome back into submission. Where were we. Ah yes. I remember eating dinner once, in the cafeteria of a distant district general hospital and looking out over a large swathe of park land. (except it was night time, so it just looked like a big patch of black)
Which suddenly transformed into the largest curtain of cascading lights I've ever seen. We're talking a stretch of about two or three miles here. There must have been hundreds of people in there setting off their fireworks. And almost the entire horizon flared intermittently after that spectacular first flareup. And I remember the food catching in my throat as I thought - God. That was spontaneous. No military personnel carefully co-ordinating the precise moment of firing.
I also remember waiting for the trees to catch fire and feeling slightly disappointed when they didn't. :)
Possibly not the brightest thing for an on-shift A&E doctor to be thinking...
I also remember fireworks on Valentine's Day over Sydney Harbour, as I walked along the quayside at night.
Sydneysiders certainly know how to party. I think the government is probably made up of a lot of potheads with nothing better to do than come up with inspirational ideas.
Over in Sydney they don't fire their fireworks off to be best seen from a particular vantage point in a particular stadium. They strategically place them in the sky so that nearly the whole city, or at least the whole waterfront (circular quay is HUGE) catches it. They fire 'em off from not one, but two vantage points on either side of the city, simultaneously - just so's nobody will miss the show I guess. I'm told that if you live on a certain peninsula, you can catch both displays on your left and right simultaneously and it's pretty awesome.
Well I only caught half of the show then, but I've never seen fireworks like that. In heart shapes, arrows lancing the hearts, etc. And the barrage went on for a good thirty minutes. Reds, blues, greens, yellows, pinks - you name it. The sky was a massive mural of lights and patterns.
That was something. Tourists from the world around (including them damn yanks) stopped to gape with their jaws slack. And it was only Valentine's day, mind.
Cough. So I guess at the end of the day, fireworks is fireworks, is fireworks. Pretty candy-floss in the sky to makesheep people happy. I do wish I coulda caught this year's though. dunno why. baa.
*****
The UnGifted
In other news, I haven't quite decided whether this bloke is a genius or a moron. He certainly has a way with words.
In this piece, he slags off the GEP in no uncertain terms that would have geriatric aunties whose kids didn't make the cut in throes of orgasmic ecstacy - if they read, or for that matter, could understand him.
It's also pretty obvious that he's a product of the system himself. There's something about the way they write. That hard-nosed all-pervasive cynicism and the subtle bias introduced rather persuasively into every statement, served up on a background of subliminal depression / moroseness.
Funny thing is I reckon most GEPpers themselves would agree with the bulk of what he writes. After all, it's incontrovertible, innit? They're all rejects and weirdos who gradually learn to re-integrate ourselves into society after the initial cultureshock of JC. Yup.
Actually, no.
Let's take three steps back and looking at the whole picture again.
Let's play God for a moment. We're watching from our celestial ivory tower high in the heavens, looking down on the World that We, in our infinite wisdom, have created.
(sue me. I'm a doctor. I like playing God.)
Focus. Focus... zoom in on that tiny dot off the malaysian peninsula. Dammit. Can't quite make... out... where's them bifocal lenses (Emporio Domini, made in Heaven) ah. much better.
Tiny dot, bigger. Bigger.
Okay let's reach down and swipe an average citizen off the street, and hurl him at random over in... lessee. America. Splat.
Oops. Bit too hard. Okay we'll try again, but put him down gently this time. That's the ticket.
(Anyone who's feeling a bit lost at the moment, go buy yourself a copy of "Black and White" the computer game.)
So poor ah seng wanders around the street, an instant outcast with linguistic discapabilities, severely socially handic... uh, challenged (must be PC.), a fish away from his bowl and gasping for breath for survival in this strange new environment of sexual and moral depravity. (It happens with tourists from China too. They tend to gape and take photos of the strangest things, like the Boots ad for a foot moisturiser that features tastefully nude women (taken from behind, lying down tanning themselves) clad only in boots, with the caption "Ashamed of your feet?")
Now chances are if you took a Gepper and chucked him somewhere vaguely English-speaking, he'd integrate (eventually). Geppers are, to some degree at least, adaptable.
I'm not saying they're particularly smart or brilliant or anything. If anything, they're probably fairly ordinary, as mr eatme points out in his tirade above.
But they're fairly malleable - they have to be, after spending well on three quarters of their lives cloistered in an environment that gives them free reign over their thoughts, their words and their personal appearances. (which is probably why they look so strange when they first emerge from their closed ranks during JC.)
I'd argue that really the whole damn country is socially inept, and that the Geppers do have their fair share of "fucking weirdos" (cough. I certainly remember a few) but on the flip side, do admirably well on emerging into a country of the blind to put their own solitary eyes out, and fit right in. After all, There Can be only One one-eyed man in this socialist republic. :)
And you know what? As the years pass us by - certainly my experience abroad has been such - it matters less and less. Over here, public school girls get pulled by labourers. Posh boys date (ie, shag) slappers after preliminary preambles at the dinner table. Generally conversation runs more upon the lines of "you look like the kind of girl I could fall madly into bed with." (I really like that line by the way. hee.)
Questions like "so what school / stream did you come from?" become increasingly peurile and trite as we senesce. Or at least, that's how it is for me. Dunno about back home.
Shut down the GEP? Why bother. The great equaliser of life - not NS, not menopause, not death even - but daily humdrum, mundane salacious gossip and unsubtle rejection work admirably well. At the end of the day, even Weird GEP Al becomes assimilated into nice compliant little Ah Seng. Baaa.
There is sunshine - outside.
Divide by 0 error. internal stack overflow.
No, wait there is a REASON I am IN as opposed to OUT side.
Namely that I'm doing battle with the monsters within T's computer.
Having identified the bug - "the NDIS bug" I am utterly flummoxed at how to squash it. I am also incredibly frustrated at the propensity for microsoft to turn out "new" operating systems with ingeniously insiduous new bugs in them. Why the f**k can't they just perfect ONE operating system and make the world happy?!?!
The NDIS bug is apparently irreparable according to some of the literature i've been perusing, so now I'm in the process of battling with her computer to allow me to transfer all her documents (a paltry 256 mb) over to my computer prior to the mind wipe with windows XP. The ethernet cable is in place. Home networking checks out both ends. It's just...
fume.
anyway, while we await the mysterious and unseen connections to meld between Windows XP and Windows ME (mental images of tentacles melting into each other through the ethernet cable) I've been dozing, and thinking random thoughts.
I'm sure we've all heard the anecdotes of letters in bottles cast out to sea, only to arrive at the True Love's feet on some sandy shore twenty years later.
What keeps these one-in-a-million bottles on course, one wonders. Is it something to do with the law of averages? Or just blind faith? Or a celestial guiding hand? Or sheer coincidence.
Me, I've never done anything like that.
For one there's no bloody sea in London.
And for another, I'm far too cynical to believe in romantic claptrap like this. cough.
*****
Much ado about sparkly things
Well, a brief post-parade perusal of the celebrity National Day blogs has shown up that the fireworks must have been pretty spectacular this year. Each and every one of them wrote pretty effusively about 'em. The other fact which didn't escape attention was the average number of approximately four posts each, over the past month (discounting photographs). This probably exceeded the organiser's wildest expectations......
Funny, that. Even local hero Mr Brown blogs more often than them, but do we see him cough. 'nuff said.
I remember being wowed when I was a kiddy by the fireworks, too. Big sparkly things in sky. My gran used to live in east coast, and we could make out the fireworks over the lawn (yes, she had a lawn). I did my fair share of goggling when I attended NDP err... eons ago now.
A decade later, I'm pretty dispassionate about fireworks. Fireworks in the UK are legal and any Tom, Dick and Harry can buy them from the supermarket and blow their arms off if they're that way inclined.
Guy Fawke's day is an exercise in acoustic tolerance. Sometimes the combined whizz whees and bangs are enough to drive a guy barmy, especially if he's trying to catch some sleep in preparation for work the next day.
Not that I didn't play with any myself. cough. They wuz fun. boom.
Frown. Kicks Y chromosome back into submission. Where were we. Ah yes. I remember eating dinner once, in the cafeteria of a distant district general hospital and looking out over a large swathe of park land. (except it was night time, so it just looked like a big patch of black)
Which suddenly transformed into the largest curtain of cascading lights I've ever seen. We're talking a stretch of about two or three miles here. There must have been hundreds of people in there setting off their fireworks. And almost the entire horizon flared intermittently after that spectacular first flareup. And I remember the food catching in my throat as I thought - God. That was spontaneous. No military personnel carefully co-ordinating the precise moment of firing.
I also remember waiting for the trees to catch fire and feeling slightly disappointed when they didn't. :)
Possibly not the brightest thing for an on-shift A&E doctor to be thinking...
I also remember fireworks on Valentine's Day over Sydney Harbour, as I walked along the quayside at night.
Sydneysiders certainly know how to party. I think the government is probably made up of a lot of potheads with nothing better to do than come up with inspirational ideas.
Over in Sydney they don't fire their fireworks off to be best seen from a particular vantage point in a particular stadium. They strategically place them in the sky so that nearly the whole city, or at least the whole waterfront (circular quay is HUGE) catches it. They fire 'em off from not one, but two vantage points on either side of the city, simultaneously - just so's nobody will miss the show I guess. I'm told that if you live on a certain peninsula, you can catch both displays on your left and right simultaneously and it's pretty awesome.
Well I only caught half of the show then, but I've never seen fireworks like that. In heart shapes, arrows lancing the hearts, etc. And the barrage went on for a good thirty minutes. Reds, blues, greens, yellows, pinks - you name it. The sky was a massive mural of lights and patterns.
That was something. Tourists from the world around (including them damn yanks) stopped to gape with their jaws slack. And it was only Valentine's day, mind.
Cough. So I guess at the end of the day, fireworks is fireworks, is fireworks. Pretty candy-floss in the sky to make
*****
The UnGifted
In other news, I haven't quite decided whether this bloke is a genius or a moron. He certainly has a way with words.
In this piece, he slags off the GEP in no uncertain terms that would have geriatric aunties whose kids didn't make the cut in throes of orgasmic ecstacy - if they read, or for that matter, could understand him.
It's also pretty obvious that he's a product of the system himself. There's something about the way they write. That hard-nosed all-pervasive cynicism and the subtle bias introduced rather persuasively into every statement, served up on a background of subliminal depression / moroseness.
Funny thing is I reckon most GEPpers themselves would agree with the bulk of what he writes. After all, it's incontrovertible, innit? They're all rejects and weirdos who gradually learn to re-integrate ourselves into society after the initial cultureshock of JC. Yup.
Actually, no.
Let's take three steps back and looking at the whole picture again.
Let's play God for a moment. We're watching from our celestial ivory tower high in the heavens, looking down on the World that We, in our infinite wisdom, have created.
(sue me. I'm a doctor. I like playing God.)
Focus. Focus... zoom in on that tiny dot off the malaysian peninsula. Dammit. Can't quite make... out... where's them bifocal lenses (Emporio Domini, made in Heaven) ah. much better.
Tiny dot, bigger. Bigger.
Okay let's reach down and swipe an average citizen off the street, and hurl him at random over in... lessee. America. Splat.
Oops. Bit too hard. Okay we'll try again, but put him down gently this time. That's the ticket.
(Anyone who's feeling a bit lost at the moment, go buy yourself a copy of "Black and White" the computer game.)
So poor ah seng wanders around the street, an instant outcast with linguistic discapabilities, severely socially handic... uh, challenged (must be PC.), a fish away from his bowl and gasping for breath for survival in this strange new environment of sexual and moral depravity. (It happens with tourists from China too. They tend to gape and take photos of the strangest things, like the Boots ad for a foot moisturiser that features tastefully nude women (taken from behind, lying down tanning themselves) clad only in boots, with the caption "Ashamed of your feet?")
Now chances are if you took a Gepper and chucked him somewhere vaguely English-speaking, he'd integrate (eventually). Geppers are, to some degree at least, adaptable.
I'm not saying they're particularly smart or brilliant or anything. If anything, they're probably fairly ordinary, as mr eatme points out in his tirade above.
But they're fairly malleable - they have to be, after spending well on three quarters of their lives cloistered in an environment that gives them free reign over their thoughts, their words and their personal appearances. (which is probably why they look so strange when they first emerge from their closed ranks during JC.)
I'd argue that really the whole damn country is socially inept, and that the Geppers do have their fair share of "fucking weirdos" (cough. I certainly remember a few) but on the flip side, do admirably well on emerging into a country of the blind to put their own solitary eyes out, and fit right in. After all, There Can be only One one-eyed man in this socialist republic. :)
And you know what? As the years pass us by - certainly my experience abroad has been such - it matters less and less. Over here, public school girls get pulled by labourers. Posh boys date (ie, shag) slappers after preliminary preambles at the dinner table. Generally conversation runs more upon the lines of "you look like the kind of girl I could fall madly into bed with." (I really like that line by the way. hee.)
Questions like "so what school / stream did you come from?" become increasingly peurile and trite as we senesce. Or at least, that's how it is for me. Dunno about back home.
Shut down the GEP? Why bother. The great equaliser of life - not NS, not menopause, not death even - but daily humdrum, mundane salacious gossip and unsubtle rejection work admirably well. At the end of the day, even Weird GEP Al becomes assimilated into nice compliant little Ah Seng. Baaa.
