Sarah's Blog

I can't believe it's taken me this long to post about this! How slack of me. Aaanyway.

My lovely and amazing wife Sarah has got herself a blog - I present to you, the wonderful, the informative, the amusing, the always entertaining:

Blog Blong Sera!

Surf on over and check it out.

(In case you're wondering where the name comes from, it means "Sarah's Blog" in Bislama. Bislama is the pidgin english spoken in Vanuatu, one of our favourite places in the world.)

Welcome Tahlia!

I'd like to officially welcome Tahlia Amber Craig, born Monday February 21st, weighing 6 pounds 9 ounces (or almost 3kg for those of us who speak metric; that's almost exactly the average, apparently).

Congratulations to Alice and Rich - although I'm sure Alice did most of the work ;) Mother and Baby are both doing really well (though tired). Dad is...well, dad. If I know Rich at all, he's bouncing off the walls :)

Sarah and I visited her in hospital this morning. She's so gorgeous! The thing that gets me about babies is that they're tiny. Like, really small. They have entire hands that are significantly smaller than just your palm. It spins me out.

So, Tahlia, Welcome to this world and to our very silly family :) If you can cope with us you can cope with anything!

pwn3d by |\/|1cr050f7's m4d 5x1llz

(That's "Owned by Microsoft's mad skills", for the l337-impaired).

Er, yeah. So anyway, Microsoft have got a simply wonderful page on their site called "A parent's primer to computer slang", featuring translations from "leetspeek" to english. |\/|1cr050f7 r0x0r :)

Good on them for having a go, I say! Still, it's a bit like an old person who says "cool" all the time - it just sounds wrong.

(via arstechnica)

Goody Goody Yum Yum, part 3

I might have mentioned before that I want to go and see The Goodies performing live on stage. So you can imagine my jealousy when Jason posts this.

Although I am pretty certain that this rampant fedora wearing has got to stop, Tim Brooke-Taylor saying "Smart hat" notwithstanding. And is that a mullet I see?

As they say, jealousy is a curse :)

Lovely spam, wonderful spam

I get some very amusing spam sometimes - the recent development of adding random words and phrases to fool spam filters has provided a boost in entertainment value - but this one I got at my gmail address takes it to a whole new level:

From: Neateye 
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:39:16 -0000
Subject: Gouranga
To: 


Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!

Is he/she even trying to sell anything? Is it related to the energy drink supplement Guarana perhaps? My mind was, indeed, boggling (and I don't mean playing a word game involving dice on letters on a bit transparent plastic cube).

Then of course, google came to the rescue. It's some Hare Krishna thing, apparently; although Urban Dictionary's favourite definition is amusing:

A word that appears on moterway[sic] bridges in north west UK. It's only purpose to annoy drivers who are left with a nagging curiosity for the rest of their day until the next day when it ceases to become important ever again.

for god sake why did they have to colour it in. Now it's more noticable and more annoying

Thus ends today's journey into strange and unusual spam. Edutainment at it's finest.

Welcome back to the BBD

Well, after a fair hiatus from blogging, I'm back! (Cue tumultuous cheers from the eagerly-awaiting audience.) Lots of cool stuff has happened since my last post - I'll post some more detail soon :)

Gay bomb, Gay bomb, You're my Gay Bomb

Now this is hilarious: According to This story at the Sydney Morning Herald, the US Military were researching creating a chemical weapon that would "make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other" - i.e. a gay bomb :) Gold.

Make love not war indeed!

(Apologies to Tom Jones for the title.)

Update: Apparently it was only an idea and it was Dismissed out of hand. Suuuuuure, Mr US Military Spokesman Man, we believe you. You just want to keep all the gay soldiers to yourself!

Google Juice Redux

My quest for domination of Google continues unabated. As well as being the number one result for "Evil hax0rs", I'm now also the number one result for "da debil".

Fear my Google Juice.

More search term hilarity

Yet another search gem that has brought someone to my blog: joey tempest physics.

In the immortal words of Rove: What The?

Joey Tempest, Physics. Hair metal, Fundamental Science. Not a link I would have made.

In other news: according to my stats, yesterday I passed the 500 visit mark on my blog. It's taken me since May last year to achieve that magnificent milestone ;-) How silly.

Windows reinstall irony

I've had lots of fun the last couple of nights!

The hard drive in Sarah's computer was making noises like it was about to die¹, so I had to go out and buy a new hard drive to replace it. I managed to get all the important stuff off the dying drive before it carked itself (despite a moment of panic where it froze and then wouldn't even detect the drive on a reboot - before I'd even managed to copy the most important stuff off, i.e. Sarah's uni files). Have I mentioned that I hate computers?

So I've spent the last couple of nights setting up the drive and re-installing everything. Lucky me. There's soooo much to do to get it all running (Office XP is up to 3 service packs now!), so it's taken ages.

"Where's the irony you so tantalisingly referred to in the title of this post?" I hear you all asking.

Well, I tend to partition hard drives into 4 partitions - one for windows (NTFS²), one for Linux (usually ext3³), one for Linux Swap, and one for all the miscellaneous data (which I format as FAT32, because that's the most portable filesystem between Linux and Windows). FAT32 is a Microsoft-developed filesystem - it's what windows 9x used to use, and windows 200 & XP can still use it now.

So I figured, it being a Microsoft thing, it's a reasonable assumption that you'd be able to format a partition as FAT32 from windows. But try as I might, the only option I could find for formatting the partition in windows was NTFS - which I definitely didn't want. In the end, the only way I could find to format the drive as FAT32 was to use Linux⁴!

How ironic - a Microsoft OS won't format a partition with a Microsoft filesystem, but the main competitor that they've been fighting against will, with zero effort. Nice.

---

1. Also, the SMART parameters for the drive (as reported by smartctl) all had values with labels like "Pre-Fail" and "Old_Age". Good sign.
2. NTFS is a windows filesystem. It's most user-visible benefit is that it recovers gracefully from unexpected shutdowns; i.e. no more scandisk runs at bootup, like good old win98.
3. ext3 is a Linux file system used by many distros like Fedora Core. It's good.
4. Knoppix - so handy. Saved me from several nasty computer moments.