djm's scribble

This week is the 100th anniversary of George Orwell’s birthday. I first read 1984 when I was fourteen years old and it crushed my soul. We are still far from escaping the dark potentials that he so brutally described. Earlier in the week I discovered one of his essays on the net: Politics and the English Language. I was shocked when I started reading it - his criticism could have been aimed straight at me and my insipid writing style. Fortunately, he provides practical ways to avoid these blurred modes of word and thought.

My father-in-law and I completed our repairs to our front picket fence today. Now all I need to do is paint it white, produce 2.3 children and middle class domestic bliss will be MINE.

Wow. This is everything annoying about email all rolled into one idiotic program. I take solace in the likelihood that people who send me mail using this abomination would probably be detected as spam.

It has been only one week and already the weblog falters, I am truely bad. On the other hand, according to this very weird spam it may not matter soon.

I just released the code that I have been using to build minature OpenBSD distributions for my flash-based router/firewall. It is largely ripped from OpenBSD’s i386 distrib architecture, but it is likely to be useful to others.

I stand at the edge of my last week of unemployment. My company divison was shut down back in March and I have been blissfully lazy ever since. All this is coming to an end as next Monday I start a new job with NetStar Networks on their security team. This is somewhat of a change from the software development that I have done the last couple of years, but it should be an interesting challenge and will have me out from behind the monitor a fair bit more (woo hoo). It is just as well that I am going back to work as I have a mortgage to pay :)

A couple of weeks ago I insulated my roof. It has been a very cold and dry winter in Melbourne and without insulation our house was like a fridge. No longer. Some advice to the reader in a similar situation: whatever you do, PAY SOMEONE ELSE to do it. Stuffing insulation into a dark, dusty, spider infested roof cavity where you have to lie prone to get it into the corners is just not worth the pain. Did I mention that I am afraid of heights, slightly claustrophobic, alarmed by spiders and allergic to dust? It really is the worst job I have had to do in our renovation adventure, easily beating the digging of stump holes. The insulation has, despite my whinging, done the job and neither I nor my wife are quite so bone cold now.

Continuing the renovation theme, my wife and I weeded our front garden today. The garden grows weeds very nicely, but is not quite ready for planting much just yet. You see, my uncle was kind enough to give me a birthday present of four bags of cow shit and four bales of hay last year. Everyone thought this to be very funny, but they hay has still not completely rotted down. On the other hand, the soil underneath it is looking pretty good - which was the point. Also, having a front yard of gently rotting hay gives me a good excuse to exercise my aversion to gardening. My wife and I are both cursed with an innate ability to kill plants. She used to refer to the line of sick potplants at the front of out old apartment as “death row”.

Today was enjoyable, but tiring. We visited my wife’s aunt, uncle and several cousins. They all live 100-150km away, so we don’t see them very frequently. The uncle, who was too sick to make it to our wedding, was overjoyed to see Simone. My newfound cousins are mostly a little older, but are all very nice and hospitable. Their kids took a liking to me ( probably because I mentioned a few children’s TV shows when I arrived). I think at least one of the kids thought that I was a member of The Wiggles. We ended up at another cousin’s housewarming party where I talked about parenthood and the relative merits of co-ed vs. single sex secondary schools with yet more cousins and friends. They make parenthood sound very fun and easy, though I suspect that the hard years are behind them :)

Simone got talking to a Adelaide police officer, from the drug squad. I was moved by the internal struggle that he described - the tension between the demands of the job, long-time friends who he knows break the law and his earnest desire to be ethical and not hypocritical (”I couldn’t bust someone for a slightly unroadworthy car, because I know that I have driven without a working brakelight”). I am glad that this critical job is being done by someone who struggles with ethical questions, rather than some self-styled Nietzscherian overman who feels that he can do no wrong.

Unfortunately I was designated driver for the evening, so I had to limit my consumption of wine to a trickle, while Simone guzzled cocktails. Well, I have probably done something equivalent to her the last couple of times she has driven for me…

bwahahahaha…

Those wacky Melbourne socialists…

could be…

(posting amusing links is easier than writing at 1am, maybe tomorrow.)

Cute, but disturbing

I have decided to join the masses and begin attempts to keep a weblog (I refuse to use the term “blog”). I am forcing myself to do this for a number of reasons. I say “forcing” as I have never been able to maintain a diary and generally loathe writing. I’ll set out my reasons below, as they may be amusing to the reader or my future self and may serve as an excuse if I tire of doing this :)

When I started to use the Internet in 1992-3, pretty much all that was available was published by individuals. I recall that time with fond memories, not just because of my excitement with the medium and the technology, but also my enjoyment of the tone of the pages. That fusion of the factual and professional with personal enthusiasm is mostly absent from today’s corporate, whitewashed Internet, but personal weblogs recapture some of this spirit. I feel that this is something worth contributing to.

The most personal reason relates with a feeling that I need to begin to gather my personal history - much of the quotidian stuff simply rolls out of my life and is forgotten, unless recollection is provoked. There are so many amazing, scary, funny, weird and joyous things in the world that allowing their memories to simply decay seems a kind of violence.

Related to this is my desire attempt to capture my emotions at the time they are felt. Strong emotions, left unreinforced, fade faster than memories. By recording my impressions over a long period, I may (at some future time) be able to see how my views have changed and evolved.

I believe that weblogs are also coming to serve a societal function. As mass-media becomes increasingly concentrated and facile, the diversity and dissent recorded in individual’s weblogs become increasingly valuable. (On this, I may be deluding myself - the Internet is still largely a toy for the bourgeois, but I hope that it does not remain this way.)

The final reason is purely practical: I feel a need to write more in order to improve my written expression. By placing what I write where is is likely to receive scrutiny, I will hopefully feel compelled to write well. (I should disclose that I have no plans to subject the reader to poetry at this time.)