Interesting, but otherwise unclassifiable

Found at Confessing Evangelical and thought I’d join in.

Do you snack while you read? If so, favourite reading snack?No I don’t, generally speaking, but I might have a coffee.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?No I don’t. Even in my Bible I don’t underline or make any marks whatsoever. I’ll write my name on the first page and usually not even that.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?I was, before I saw the light, a page-folder. Now, being more enlightened, I use a bookmark, but like the blogger at Confessing Evangelical, it tends to be a piece of scrap paper or old train ticket, rather than an actual bookmark. Does anyone actually use proper bookmarks?

Fiction, non-fiction, or both?Mostly non-fiction, simply because I prefer to read books that might actually teach me something. I occasionally read fiction. On my honeymoon a few weeks ago we stopped at a bookshop and bought about seven fiction books. So far, I’ve read none of them.

Hard copy or audiobooks?I’ve always found audiobooks to be lame, slow and boring.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?I devour whole books at a time, and can only be distracted by explosions or earthquakes.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?That happens a lot when I’m reading Russian, and yes, I do look it up straight away.

What are you currently reading?I just finished a book about the German WW1 raider ‘Wolf’, that sank ships and caused mayhem over 15 months in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Fascinating stuff. I can’t remember the author’s name, but the book’s name is probably ‘Wolf’.I bought ‘Wolf’ as a present for my dad, gave it to him, and then read it at his house over the course of two visits. He hasn’t read it yet.

What is the last book you bought?A nice Russian-English dictionary to replace the crappy ones I’ve been using up until now. It actually lists perfective verbs separately - sweet!

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time? Usually one at a time, but I’m not monogamous when it comes to books.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?Not particularly. If I’m engrossed in a book, I’ll read it anywhere, anytime.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?.Stand alone, unless it’s in a series, or vice versa.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over? I bore people by talking about my music way too much, but not so with books for some reason.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?) That question assumes that I organize my books! Which isn’t quite true. Most of them are on bookshelves - does that count?By the way, I’ve been having problems with text formatting on this blog, and I don’t know why. So if it looks funny, rest assured that I am aware of the problem, even if I’m not doing much about it.

Hi all. I’m that busy with planning my birthday party at the moment that I don’t have much time for blogging, so just imagine you are up at 3am watching Rage and this clip comes on. This is something else. I once read a band interview when they discussed making a video clip. They did a take-off of a horror film but it didn’t make it on TV because, wouldn’t you know, “you can’t kill people on video clips”.

Obviously noone told Magic Dirt. Here is their clip Shovel (RSS readers click through to the post if you can’t see the clip.)

This will be a short post.

My twenties are drawing to a close, and my 30th birthday approacheth. As I watch my youth fade away, I realise that I ought to have a 30th birthday party, but have no ideas on what to do to commemorate this occasion.

So, dear reader, it’s over to you. How should I celebrate my 30th?

In IT project management, having the right technical skills is only the start of getting the job done, and probably the most easily remedied if need be, either through training such as Cisco training, or just by hiring someone who has those skills.

More important is getting the design process done right. I once worked for an IT consultancy company, as part of a team doing a fairly complex project. The test analyst had interviewed the clients at length, and had compiled a detailed record of the current processes that we would be automating and how they worked.

However, once it came time to deliver the project, it turned out that the design spec was not complete after all. Sure, it was mostly correct, but some things had been left out.

Because development work had largely been completed, it was necessary to go back and retrofit the new requirements into the code. But retrofitting in this way is always much more time-consuming and costly than getting it right in the first place.

Donald Rumsfeld once made this quote:

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Paying special attention to the design process is the only way to avoid getting stung by unknown unknowns when running an IT project.

I’ve just found a very interesting website that sells tactical police gear.

What type of tactical police gear, you ask? For starters, bullet-proof vests, knives, industrial-strength torches and flashlights, backpacks, sunglasses, clothing of various descriptions, gun holsters and much, much more.

All the gear on the site is designed for professional use. Military personnel and cops are among the customers, so if you’ve always wanted to be part of a SWAT team this is the place to start.

The LA Police Gear site includes action photos, sent in by customers. If that page is to be believed, LA Police Gear products are very popular in the Iraqi police force.

So begins one of my favourite songs from my formative years - “Dead Eyes Opened (1993 Remix)” by Severed Heads. (Dig that band name!)

In 1993 I was a teenager and very much into grunge music. Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden were my favourite bands. I didn’t bother with any other genres, particularly not techno music. Dead Eyes Opened was one of the few exceptions to this.

The track could loosely be called dance music; I suppose nowadays it would be called house music. Perhaps Horror House, if there is such a thing. It’s a fairly eerie piece of music that builds up into a climax about midway through the song. Quite well done if you ask me.

I remember playing it to my dad; he didn’t like it.

The clip for the song didn’t get any airplay at that time due to strobing and sexual content (amusing, given that it’s about 10% as sexy as any RnB or rap clip, but I guess ratings systems have always been a tad arbitrary).

Dead Eyes Opened is hard to find anywhere nowadays, legally or otherwise; but I did find the video clip on YouTube. Hurrah for YouTube!

Imagine you are on a TV game show, asked to choose between three doors, behind which are three prizes. One of the three doors reveals a new car! The other doors, if opened, reveal goats. There is no way for you to know which is which, so you pick one at random. Without revealing what is behind the door you chose, the host (who knows which door wins the car) then opens one of the remaining doors to reveal a goat. After this, he asks if you’d like to switch your chosen door for the only other door remaining.

If you choose to switch, what are the odds that you win the car?

A one in two chance?

Nope - a two in three chance.

(If you didn’t quite follow that, the Wikipedia link above explains it much better than I did. It probably helps if you’ve actually watched that game show, too.)

It’s been a long time between blog posts around here hasn’t it? I know what you’ve been thinking – “If his opinions are so important, why doesn’t he express them?” Patience, dear reader.

I break my silence today to bring you a sordid tale of ELECTION SKULLDUGGERY!

Well, maybe not.

It being the day of the Federal Election here in Australia, I just got back from voting.

I like the way we do elections. For starters, they are so low-tech. None of these fancy-schmancy electronic voting machines or hole-punching systems – in Australia, all we need is pencils, paper and cardboard – because, you understand, everything at the polling place, including the voting booths, are made of cardboard.

But we also have a confusing preferential voting system (explained here), and that brings me to the scandal I must reveal today. Each political party has their own how-to-vote cards (such as the one pictured above) to best exploit the preferential system, that are distributed to voters as they walk through the entrance of the polling place.

Normally when entering a polling place, I take every how to vote card offered to me, and then don’t use any of them.

But not today! I was approached before I reached the entrance by a Labor Party volunteer, who gave me a how-to-vote card, and then directed me to the voting booths by a different route, so I would not receive the how-to-vote cards of the other parties!

Sneaky.

***

Melbourne Coffee Review man Peter Christo was trying to enjoy his favourite cafe in peace, but there’s an election on, and one of the political parties apparently has its own professional choir and conductor (RSS readers click here to view):

Better than the usual election campaign methods, if you ask me.

I can’t think of any posting ideas, so go and read A Biblical Guide To Dating now. It’s funny.

THERE’S NO INTEREST LIKE SELF INTEREST: Cops Writing Cops is a site by cops complaining about other cops giving them speeding tickets. Fine, but on the What cops want you to know page, they have the gall to write “Here’s how to get out of a ticket. don’t break the law.”

THERE’S NO DELUSION LIKE SELF DELUSION: the Communist Party of Australia describes the 100 million murdered under Communist regimes with the phrase: “Many mistakes were made”.

I was arguing with a friend over whether Taiwan is a province of China.

My friend said- and I quote - “Because the PRC control mainland China, they also have Taiwan; and if Taiwan doesn’t like that, they will have to declare war on China to gain their independence.”I think he’s got it backwards, don’t you?

China would like Taiwan to be their province, but at the moment it is not. I don’t see how anyone could argue otherwise.

Nor do I see why it is necessary for a travel flash game to describe Taiwan as a province of China as a sop to the mainland Chinese government:

Disgraceful.

The same friend also believes the 9/11 conspiracy theories.