The Ultimate House

Recently I was talking with a few friends, and mentioned a few of the things that my ultimate house was going to have, when I was rich and famous and got around to building it. They suggested a few more ideas, and we came up with the following list:

  • It’s a castle, with two moats. The outer one has a crocodile (to feed Hollywood A-list celebrities to) and the inner one has a wave machine for surfing.
  • Instead of a front-door key, you get a remote control. The remote control has a button on it for launching a fireworks display whenever you want.
  • There’s an entire game park out the back. Animals in the park included cassowaries, lions, tigers, and bears. All of whom are capable of eating various A-list celebrities.
  • The castle is on a cliff, and going down from the castle to the seas requires the use of a network of secret caves.
  • There’s a maze and a labyrinth.
  • A medieval banquet hall in the middle of the castle, complete with 3 or 4 long tables. I imagine this room will look a lot like the great hall in the Harry Potter films.
  • There’s a leaking dungeon with lots of chains and prison cells, for keeping A-list celebrities in.
  • A full recording studio.
  • A full restaurant kitchen, with three pantries. One for tea, one for chilli, and one for everything else.
  • There’s a room specifically for listening to Pink Floyd music, buried deep in the castle. It’s completely black with no windows. The only furniture is a La-Z-Boy recliner and two speakers, with everything set up for perfect reproduction of sound.
  • A yacht is moored off the coast.
  • So is a submarine, which is used to travel between the coast and the lighthouse on an island offshore.
  • There’s a runway long enough to be capable of landing a Space Shuttle.
  • Stored at the end of the runway is my private Boeing 747 and home-built RV-4 land capable float plane.
  • There’s a 3-storey library. It’s got the wooden rails around the side with the ladders that zoom around the walls. At the top level there are two doors at either end, and connecting the doors is a suspension bridge covered in vines.
  • A super-fast Internet connection, of course. We’re talking multiple gigabits per second fibre backbone straight to the AARNET and PIPE networks.
  • A cinema complex with 4 theatres. One is constantly playing Star Wars movies, one is constantly playing Star Trek, and one is constantly playing French films. The two playing Star Trek and Star Wars are defended against humans entering them by a team of skutters (from the Red Dwarf TV series).

Hacking Work – or how to write a book about nothing at all

"Hacking Work" CoverI recently travelled on an aeroplane to the Boxing Day cricket match in Melbourne. Before the flight home I was killing some time in the Borders in the terminal, when a book caught my eye. It’s name? Hacking Work, by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein.

After reading the back cover, I bought the book immediately. Who wouldn’t want to work smarter and get more done with less effort? It’s me in a nutshell. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed.

For most non-fiction books, the back cover is a very rough summation of the goal of the book, along with a few of the more interesting little titbits. For this book however, the blurb is the entire contents of the book. The other 200 odd pages are just fluff.

Section 1 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.

Section 2 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.

Section 3 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that managers will get in the way of everything.

Section 4 of the book tells the reader that they are special, are born to “hack” work, and that their employees will try to hack work too.

Unfortunately, nowhere in this book are there actual instructions for any methods of actually getting more done in less time. There are occasional snippets detailing what people have done before, usually followed by “we don’t recommend actually doing this”.

I personally consider myself somewhat of a life hacker, and this is a travesty of a book about “hacking”. The severe degradation of the meaning of the word “hack” is beyond annoying, it’s almost insulting.

Zero stars. I wouldn’t read it if it was free.

The Boxing Day Test 2010

I'm on my phone during a rain break.

This summer I managed to make it to the holy grail of cricket in Australia: Day 1 of the Boxing Day Test at the MCG in Melbourne.

Along with my good friend Chris Neugebauer, I sat through a morning of threatening weather and Australian wickets being taken. Not pleasant. In the afternoon (after lunch and a sizeable rain delay) the English continued to pummel the Australian team, this time with the bat.

Without a doubt the highlights of the day all involved the 84 000+ strong crowd in attendance that day. Cricket matches (and sporting events of all manner in Australia, really) are just an excuse to get drunk, and the crowd in Melbourne that day did not disappoint.

Although I didn’t drink, others did, and the resulting beer cup snakes were very impressive. One was sighted at 6 rows long, which some maths tells me must be at least 1200 cups, which represents around 500 litres of mid-strength beer. Which is a lot for the couple of hundred people who contributed to that particular snake.

Being at the MCG is an awe-inspiring thing. When you first enter the ground and are completely surrounded by the stands, which tower over you, I doubt it’s possible to say anything other than “wow”.

Being an avid enthusiast of public transport (read: train freak), I had a great day in Melbourne, which has a very impressive system, with trams, trains, and buses galore. Although I only caught a couple of buses, it’s great to see that a city can actually get public transport right!

All up, a fantastic day. Even if it did mean getting up at six o’clock in the morning.

The Beer Snake
The Beer Snake

30 Days of Geek #16: First computer you’ve ever owned & your favourite ever.

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

The first computer I co-owned (with my brother):

  • MSI MS-6161 Motherboard
  • Intel Celeron 366MHz CPU
  • 64MB 100Mhz SD-RAM
  • 4GB IDE Hard Drive
  • Floppy drive
  • CD drive
  • RTL8139B network card
  • And my first hardware modification ever: adding in a Creative Soundblaster (some 16-bit ISA model).

And my favourite combination ever:

  • MSI MS-6198 Motherboard
  • Intel Pentium III Coppermine 933MHz CPU
  • 1GB 133MHz SD-RAM (2x 512MB sticks)
  • 40GB IDE drive + 250GB SATA drive (which is still going strong as a backup drive)
  • Floppy drive
  • CD+RW drive
  • RTL8139D network card
  • This motherboard, as far as I can recall, had onboard sound

Note that these computers really are one and the same, since there’s a direct ancestry between them. I’ve never ever built a computer that hasn’t shared at least one major component with a previous computer (excluding laptop purchases).

30 Days of Geek #15: Earliest geek experience

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

This is a tricky one indeed. I’ve previously written about how I became a geek and pretty much everything I could say there has been covered here. So, um… yeah. Here are a couple more anecdotes, off the top of my head:

  • My uncle gave me an old broken 286 motherboard, back when 486s were all the rage. I took it to pieces and observed every part, even though I had no idea what any of them did. I was probably only 6 or 7 years old.
  • I found an old Commodore 64 in my grandparent’s backyard shed (probably belonging to that same uncle). Unfortunately it was broken… so I took it to pieces!
  • Really, just lots of ‘Obtain geeky object XYZ, disassemble into component pieces X, Y and Z. Put back together again, building an XZY.’