Now who is surprised by the indications that the beheading of that american was staged and likely not committed by the all-encompassing "terrorists" but by fatso murkins? Inquiring minds want to know...

Link to the story

Recently read K.W. Jeter's "Noir" - apart from his views about IP and copyright a very interesting book.

Baen makes a lot of their SF books available as ebooks for free, and they occasionally do anthology/theme CDs. Thanks, Baen! (I'm not buying their webscription stuff, because the free material is good enough for my palm pilot and otherwise I mostly prefer dead-tree books, so I'm still a supporting customer.)

This guy here offers most Baen CDs via Bittorrent, and the stuff works great :-)

no net: the dial up @ work has finally been scrapped; i can only hope that the guys at telstra/dart get my adsl connection setup RSN....

been sick all day long, slept until 15:30, fewerish and gifted with a great headache.

"And now the weather: Gold Coast 23° with a low of 6°."

Winter's here, indeed. And together with the Gold Coasters' preference for glorified shacks^W^Wbungalows the next some weeks are going to be chilly. I've pulled the space heater from the cupboard this evening.

But since 1.5. I've got no net (almost; dialup works intermittent and unreliably) because I'm switching adsl providers. Grrrrrrrr, doesn't exactly make me want to update things. Anyway.

The weekend before this (ie. 1.-3.5.) we spent at Killarney, cutting a new launch site into the forest. Saturday and sunday was chainsaw-time, with the wind being strong and westerly anyway. lesson learned: work up, not down the slope. Crawling across fallen trees to get to the ones that are still to cut was Not Fun. Next time we know.

Monday was a public holiday (worker's day or somesuch) and we flew from the new launch. It was quite cold, so I landed a bit earlier than necessary; only Ivan got "away" - he landed just beyond town.

The hardware gremlins are still around: two pairs of shoes are about dead, and I hate buying clothes. The stupid cows at Killarney licked all my car (bonnet, windows, everything - now it's really dirty) and they also broke the antenna. So I wedged the broken antenna rod back in for the drive home, but then a flock of birds hit the car @90km/h: the flock scores 1, antenna 0, but they've got one player out dead. Since then I've replaced the antenna with a mangled indoor tv rod, works. Ah yes, and I've cleaned some windows; not the whole car as it's not worth my time.

That was the weekend, the week was soso with some work getting done but me getting more and more cold and sickish. Yes, winter is here: nights go down to +16°. Saturday I bought a couple of SF books, a toaster and triggered the cold, finally. Sunday and monday I spent in bed, feverish and feeling lousy.

Somewhere in the privacy news, a couple of days ago:

The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI's methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now. The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid violating secrecy rules contained in the USA Patriot Act, the ACLU said. The group was allowed to release a redacted version of the lawsuit after weeks of negotiations with the government. "It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court," Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director, said in a statement. "President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it."

Disgusting.
Link to the news article

The rest is german, cause that's the langugage this message pretends to use.
click here for the rest of the story...

Yesterday evening I decided to install Civilization: Call To Power again, and 6 hours later it was 01:00 and I was sleepy and wide awake at the same time. Today I spent 11 hours on the bloody game. Horrible, just like 15(?) years ago when I sacrificed whole nights to the original Civilization game...

The hardware gremlins are still at work, the Ultra 1 I ebayed recently and got delivered today has a dead PSU. Great! Tomorrow I'm off to Killarney again, for the extended weekend: monday is one of the communist public holidays (workers' day or so, the Aussies moved the holiday from 1 May to 3 May cause the 1st is a saturday, and nobody needs publich holidays on the weekend. Makes sense, doesn't it?) and I'll spend the weekend either working on the launch sites (chainsaw, brushcutter etc.) or flying, depending on the weather.

Y-que sells t-shirts. Almost-PC t-shirts. Nasty Y-que, bad dog! Cower! Squirm! That's it, good boy...says Big Brother G.

"The following merchandise found on your website constitutes a list of items that must be removed from your site, ads and keywords in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:

Link to the y-que shop
the whole story
boingboing's coverage

Last weekend was extended because of the ANZAC day public holiday, and the flying was quite good.

Friday we wasted sitting on the wrong hill, hoping for the right kind of wind. Just another case of parawaiting, like in the pic below.

But Saturday and Sunday were quite good for ridge-soaring Tambo, not exactly a common occurrence. A frightening site, low saves guaranteed with "landing" in trees always possible to likely. Had four nice flights, could have toplanded but didn't know we were allowed to again. Anyway, it was quite good - despite sinking out on Sunday when others went over the back or to Canungra.

Me airborne in front of Tambo, one of the very few relaxed moments at that site:

Mark said once about the difference between rock climbing and paragliding:

In rock climbing you spend most of your time in a very safe situation feeling shit-scared whilst in paragliding you spend most of your time in a very dangerous situation feeling quite safe.

We're insane/addicted enough to take to the air in our oversized shopping bags with a couple of strings attached like this:

and then we regularly bunch up parts of our wings while flying to reduce lift. As long as things are bunched up symmetrically on both sides results are benign. However, for my upcoming intermediate license practical I'll have to show that I can deal with asymmetric collapses, too, so I played around a bit with inducing such collapses (you reef in hard on the front riser lines on one side, that half of the wing goes slack and floppy like a real shopping bag and you brace for the more-or-less violent turn and loss of lift). Interesting.

One of the hangies nicknamed "T-Bone" because of his initials has recently switched to paragliders - which immediately got him rechristened "TeaBag", as that's what the other hangies think of what he is flying now :-)

The weather on Monday wasn't too flash so I slept in, but the addiction got the better of me and I drove up the hill, and It was Good. Two nice arvo ridge soaring flights, both with good face landings at the end.

Other People had more interesting landings, as per the picture below: look for the glider in the middle of the road. Its pilot had misjudged his final, bounced off a car's hood (bumping it) and landed on the road. Another reason why only fools park in this particular spot.

After that a few pilots had...interesting launches, too, but I myself had a perfect record for the day.

I thought so. In Europe you'd find these things only in nursery homes for pre-zombies but lots of Aussies (and assorted fools^Wfashionistas elsewhere) find these abominations good enough for public display.

Not all Aussies, though; at least one couple among my friends is split over uggs by gender: he wears them in public, she can't stand them.

Australians have a proper sense of humour and don't take themselves too seriously, so wearing uggs is understandable - they're warm, they do the job. But how the fashion fools would deal with the fact that "uggs" stands for "ugly boots", I wonder.

not much work for me, but easier to read for some people in aggregated form. blosxom does support RSS/RDF pretty much out of the box; in fact, every category and every single posting are available as rss thingies: just use bla.rss instead of bla.html. still todo: setting things up so that all html pages display links to the RSS counterparts..

played around with rss to make robert happy. rss aggregators/viewers? not many, but the small mozilla-firebird extension (38kb xpi) works pretty nicely.

spent today being bored silly on the hills, as the wind wasn't right but the weather itself was great.

Driving back from Killarney monday evening I saw:

• one echidna. It walked slowly across the road and I braked and waited until it had finished passing.
• some rabbits
• lots of frogs
• a small roo or wallaby
• and some kind of owl-like bird sitting in the middle of the road. I managed not to hit it.

Backcountry roads here (and about everything 50+k out of Brisbane is backcountry) commonly consist of one single lane of asphalt/bitumen, and a bit of dirt, grass, rocks and/or potholes on both sides. When there is some oncoming traffic, both have to pull aside into the dirt (and hope that there's nothing hidden in the grass that your car can't take at 80+km/h). There's bonus points for doing this during the night.

"Highways" on the other hand, consist of two lanes of bitumen. Often there's a middle line, but not necessarily - and there are some "highways" that have single lane areas as well.

(I love this place. Really. But I'll have to get me a 4WD soon.)

The Easter weekend Andrew ran the Easter Bunnies WE comp at Killarney, 160k west from here. And I got to second place!
click here for the rest of the story...

Not that I care a whit about religion but the public holidays come handy. The semester is almost over, the next one already casts its dark shadow but I don't care on this weekend: I'm going flying and camping at Killarney. Hope the weather stays ok and the wind turns a bit...

Ants are fairly annoying creatures; even more than cats they take your place as their place. But I'm striking back.

The silly proxy at work made me miss the end of an ebay auction for a nice ultra 1 with creator 3d card by about 3 seconds; of course that one was the first and only one of a batch of 3 that went at a reasonable price. arrrgh. But then somebody is offering a fully populated E3000 and an SSA112 with 30x4G for AU$ 500 alltogether. Ah, the temptation...

Now off preparing my flying and camping gear.

the upcoming broadcast flag treaty is being discussed; the future looks even worse than usual. those greedy fascists behind the WIPO.
Here's Ed Felten on the insidious thing, and Ed Miller's very good coverage of the poison pills therein.

Fscking spamassassin cost me hours today; it wouldn't expire an overfull Bayes database but happily waste CPU hours trying it over and over again...

At least my car has 4 working shocks again. But the laundry is unhung, the floors not vaccuumed and I've still got to complete marking of a lab assignment before tomorrow morning. It rains. Lovely.

Yesterday I asked myself "What's next?". Now I know, dammit.
click here for the rest of the story...

Hardware appreciation week was followed very soon by Transportation Appreciation weekend.
click here for the rest of the story...

monday: evening lectures, DNF. friends told me it was great.
tuesday: spent the arvo sitting on the hill with too little wind, DNF.
wednesday: late lectures, DNF.
thursday: spent the arvo sitting on the hill with too little wind, DNF.
friday: weather looks lousy, rain all around the ridge. DNF. of course a friend had to call me right now, saying that they just flew an hour, between rain.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

sunday i ripped off my car's front bumper partially; got it hooked on a log at the carpark. couldn't find out how that bloody thing actually should be attached, so currently it's fixed with a bit of string. didn't find the time yet to fix it, as today arvo was wasted on the hill waiting for some wind to come up.

mark, darryl, nigel and i spent the waiting exchanging stories. but of course those hours i'm missing now, so i'm fixing tomorrow's lab stuff just now...yawn.

user-mode-linux rocks, but not when started from init. gah, that took hours to debug but eventually i found it...

click here for the rest of the story...

Austria's minister of the interior is a dimwit (and should stay in the interior where he's less embarrassing): while visiting Iceland he said in a press conference that Reykjavik has 400 surveillance cams which could be monitored live on TV. His source: a TV documentary. However, all he had seen was a Icelandic fiction film named "Citizen Cam".

(The story made it on page 2 of Iceland's largest newspaper - but they mixed up their pictures of the minister...by chance?)

...must have been Hardware Appreciation Week.
click here for the rest of the story...

i got my new harness today. new, shiny (well a bit dusty in fact; it's three weeks used), comfortable, cool. can't wait to fly it.

(german only)
click here for the rest of the story...

...Fourtou mit dem Vorstandsvorsitzenden von Vivendi-Universal verheiratet ist, einem der grössten Nutzniesser dieser Richtlinie. Hier wird ein grosses Demokratie-Defizit offensichtlich, das Assoziationen an einen Bananen-Staat weckt.", so Markus Beckedahl für das Netzwerk Neue Medien.

Aber jetzt wander' ich aus! manisches gelächter
Link zur quintessenz depesche

Yes, that's a thing I'd like to have: a cheap surveillance camera zapper based on a laser pointer and a scope.
Link

...I wouldn't have internet access right now.
click here for the rest of the story...