Random Ramblings

A job ad in The Economist this week reads, in part:

Development Economist
St Helena

A self-governing overseas territory of the United Kingdom, St Helena is an island of 47 square miles and around 4000 people in the South Atlantic. Cape Town in South Africa is some 1700 miles distant, and the island has no airfield and a small economy mainly based around offshore employment, agriculture, fishing and tourism, with heavy reliance on UK aid.

Enjoying a quality of life almost impossible to find elsewhere in the world...

Indeed...

There's nothing like an aerial image of Sydney to remind one just why all the random driving is needed to get around. I live on the bottom blob of land, just off-screen. Maybe I should sell my car and buy a boat...

Impartial commentry is fantastic. Soundbite during SA vs Fiji:

"One way to ruin a game of rugby is to put a whistle in the hands of a northern hemisphere referee"

I think that, in general, the northern refs are a lot better than they were 10 years ago, but they could have had a southern ref in at least one of the quarter finals...

If you are travelling around Sydney or rural New South Wales, then Live Traffic is a neat site with regularly updated traffic details and even regularly updated camera images of major Sydney bottlenecks such as Anzac Bridge.

I just bought a whole fridge full of fruit and veges. While packing some mushrooms into a paper bag at the grocer, I had a little giggle at the back of the bag:



VEGETARIANS
Mushrooms are an ideal substitute for meat.
They are fat free, contain no cholestoral,
provide dietary fibre and an excellent
source of vitamin B12,
a vitamin often lacking in vegetarian diets.

TRY THESE RECIPES

Ham and rice stuffed mushrooms

...

I just downloaded Camino and it seems great. I have found Safari a little flaky at times. Camino looks great and runs very slickly. Best of all, it has an advertisement blocker, not just a popup blocker. This is particularly great when viewing online news articles, which are usually riddled with ads. Checkout the screenshot I took below. On the left is Camino and on the right is Safari. By not displaying the advertisement, Camino is able to render the page in a much more sensible way.

While walking along, I discovered that Utopia records has opened up on Broadway street, opposite victoria park and sydney uni. I was rather impressed with their collection and snapped up a copy of Doom Saloon, which has been rather hard to track down.

The Ebay listing says it all. Bid! Bid now!

This time, our ebaying has netted us a dining set. Still on the agenda: couches, bookshelves and a coffee table.

Some people live each day in hope (found while looking through internet classifieds) :-)

Experienced male masseur (Aussie, late 30's) is offering TOTALLY FREE sensual full body massage to girls 18-40s. 1 to 3 hour sessions. DON'T pay hundreds of dollars for this service, like you would elsewhere. Try it for FREE. Be pampered like a goddess. Have portable equipment and will travel to you. Sydney, Illawarra, Southern Highlands, Goulburn & Canberra. Do yourself a massive favour and spoil yourself now. Apply with pic, if possible. No cost, no strings.

Just picked up this snazzy bed on ebay (click on the pic to be whisked away to the ebay page):



It's my first ever ebay purchase and the auction went down to the wire. Now to find a dining set!

Oh yes, we also got an apartment in the northern bit of Ashfield, just next to Croydon.

I proposed, and ANU accepted, that I change to external student status in order to pester the category theorists in Sydney for another year. Thanks to the running, cycling and training around of anya_1984, I now have a deposit on what seems to be a nice 2 bedroom apartment in the inner west - I'll check it out and (hopefully) sign the lease on my return to Sydney.

I'll be back in Canberra around Sept 16 to go to a concert with elfishski and (probably) give at least one talk on my current research. On the flip side, Canberrans (or other non-Sydneysiders) who want to come up to Sydney to see a concert or such, will soon have a sleeper couch on which to rest their tired heads.

The week after that is the AustMS conference, conveniently located this year at Macquarie. This will be my third year in a row going to this conference - it's fast becoming one of the events I look forward to each year. Anyone else going?

I have also started trying to learn Russian. anya_1984 eventually managed to convince me that there is a difference in the way you pronounce ш and щ. I think that I can even vaguely pronounce them correctly. I guess this is a start at least...

( Update: abstract for my AustMS talk )

Well, I have settled into Melbourne now. I am living roughly across the street from melbourne uni, about a one minute walk to the philosophy department, where I am able to hang out in the very comfortable postgraduate room. There's lots of fun stuff happening in the philosophy department and even some combinatorics talks in the maths department. I've also gotten to hang out with my sister a bit, venturing into belgian chocolate shops and the like. All in all, it's shaping up to be a fun month.

Well, my apartment is now packed up and I am ready to fly off to Melbourne tomorrow. This is my third move of the year and I have at least one more to go. *sigh* In the process of offloading some stuff at a relative, I completed the Sydney Harbour Modes of Transport. That is, I have travelled across the harbour in the following ways:

1. Driving a car across the bridge
2. Riding in a train across the bridge
3. Riding in a bus across the bridge
4. Taking a ferry across the river
5. Driving under the river (in a tunnel, of course :)

( Click here for some more nifty sydney graffiti )

I have been playing around with my new phone and snapped some pictures of strange sights in Sydney. For instance, this poster in Martin Place baffled me:



( Click here for a closeup of the text and other whacky Sydney things )

It seems that everywhere you go these days, every metalhead is playing doom or death or "progressive melodic neoclassical gothic death doom"... Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of much of this style of metal, but it is rather annoying when every band under the sun is trying to sound like Opeth. And so, these days I seem to dig deeper into my metal collection. Not so deep that I hit Judas Priest, but deep enough to hit the leather lunged lyricists. Deep enough to get to the point where it just wasn't a guitar solo if it wasn't at least tapping 64'ths. Deep enough to reach a time when "Nu Metal" did not exist, when hair was big and songs were meant to make you feel good. I speak, of course, of the 80's. Sure, bands' names were meant to sound scary and tough but the songs were still rather happy. For instance, one might imagine a band called "Helloween" to advocate doing naughty things to cats at the next full moon, but instead their lyrics say things like:

"One day you'll live in happiness
With a heart that's full of joy
...
You'll say you love your life
and you'll know why"

Yes, I can see why today's angsty metalheads may not like those lyrics. It's just too hard to maintain a cool enough level of depression when listening to such things. Let's fast forward to more recent times. "Children of Bodom" may not sound all that scary until you realise that it is named after a brutal multiple homicide. Ok, we're already a bit meaner it seems, after progressing from bad puns to bad deeds. Digging slightly into their lyrics, instead of cheerful wishes for a happier world, we instead find:

"I was born in ashes of molten hatred
Raised by demons in abodes of the end
The reaper's scythe I fall upon to light my path
Wrecked by mangled wounds of life"

Yipes! Of course, the lyrics are hidden behind a wall of catchy keyboard riffs, cookie monster vocals and, let's face it, a brutalisation of the English language rarely seen outside of the Sunday paper. All of this makes the song good fun to bang your head to, but may leave the happier metalheads amongst us longing for more. And so I say step out from In Flames, toss aside your Soilwork and take your Cradle of Filth to the cleaners. Dare to be different. Dare to see past the big hair. Dare to fly the flag of 80's metal!

Looks like somebody has syndicated my logic blog, so LJ users can add it to their friends list. Don't all rush at once :)

(via Obscure and Confused Ideas)

Next time you are bored in a colloquium talk, why not play this fun little bingo game?

While most of that card is univerally applicable, some of it seems more geared towards philosophy. Anyone got some good maths and/or computer science ones? Or, heck, some other subject? I'll have a bash at this:

Computer Science:

* Speaker reads slides to audience
* Audience member checks email on wireless connection
* Speaker flashes 20 slides of graphs with no discussion of the experiment design
* Speaker discusses the one case where their algorithm is superior but neglects to mention that it is slaughtered in every other case
* Audience member suggests that their pet theory would provide a better solution, citing jargon and chanting letters like HMM, FPGA and CSP

Maths:

* Speaker writes in tiny illegible handwriting
* Audience member proof reads their latest paper
* Audience member states that the problem has already been solved but neglects to mention that the solution uses different hypotheses, a different construction and came on the back of a cereal box

A very easy modification yields a fun drinking game...