RickyRobinson.id.au

Another day at the office. I’d say today was slightly more productive than any day last week. I sat down and actually wrote something. I’m writing something which I might be able to submit as a paper or journal article. It’s to do with complex systems and pervasive computing.

Not a single student turned up to the labs today. That means nobody has started the assignment or those that have don’t need my help.

Had another conversation with KMH. I’m beginning to enjoy these conversations to be honest. I appreciate having an alternate perspective (alternate from my own perspective and those of the usual suspects) on certain things.

My Labour Day Monday was whiled away by watching Mulholland Drive and Mickey Blue Eyes, reading a bit more of Salmon of Doubt and kicking the football around in the backyard. I was practicing the trick that Harry Kewell always seems to do when juggling the ball: when you’ve caught the ball on your foot, flick it up, circle your leg around the ball, then catch it again or start juggling it. I can do the latter, and can almost pull off the former. I’m not sure I’ve seen Kewell pull of the former either. But I can toss the ball from one foot to the other (i.e. starting with ball caught on one foot, toss it in the air and catch it with the other foot, or the same one), so with a bit more practice I should get it. All in all, it’s been a very relaxed weekend, and I’m most grateful for it.

So, Mulholland Drive. Weird. I don’t think I can say much more about it until I watch it again, but I’ll probably just get more confused if I do that. Spoiler alert. Most of the movie is a dream, and the bit that isn’t has a few flashbacks which are sort of difficult to follow. Truthfully, I don’t think the film was ever intended to be fully understood. I don’t think there is a rational explanation for many parts of the film. So what is the film about? The dream begins with a woman about to be murdered. But there’s a car accident and her murder is averted. She runs off and finds her way to a vacant house in Hollywood. Another woman, Betty, comes to Hollywood to try and start her acting career. She is a kind, larger than life, innocent and almost naive girl. The acting seems below par, until you realise that the characters are supposed to be exaggerated. The acting is actually first rate, and the quality of acting becomes clear in the real life part of the movie, but I digress. Betty moves into the home that her aunt has vacated. Here she finds the other girl taking a shower. We find out that this girl has amnesia as a result of the car accident. She calls herself Rita, a name taken from a poster. The two girls then try to piece together Rita’s life. At this rate I’m going to be here for a very long time. Suffice it to say, general weirdness creeps into the film, and in the end, the weirdness doesn’t creep, it just plain smacks you in the face. There’s a mysterious philosophical cowboy, a blue box, a hired assassin, a real ugly looking guy and many more strange characters. You’ll just have to watch it I’m afraid. I’ll probably find time to watch it again before returning it. Oh yeah, there’s also a really hot lesbian scene, but I don’t think anyone needs that as an excuse to watch the film. It’s a real mind trip.

I’m a guy (just in case it needed clarifying). But I’m a guy that appreciates Hugh Grant’s acting and the characters he plays. Although Mickey Blue Eyes is by no means his best film, it is still well worth watching in my opinion. He plays an auctioneer who’s fallen in love with the daughter of a mobster. Michael (Grant’s character) is sucked into the world of organised crime, even after promising his wife to be, Gina, that he wouldn’t allow himself to be manipulated by the gangsters. No sooner is he engaged than the mobsters start laundering money through his auction house by auctioning some very strange religious paintings (Jesus with machine gun, for instance), and buying them back. The movie ends with a hilarious wedding reception, and of course, Hugh gets the girl (I should have mentioned that Gina is played by Jeanne Tripplehorn). Roger Ebert says that Hugh Grant was the wrong actor for the part, citing his poor attempt at an Italian-New York accent. I think this made his character much more believable. For goodness sake, he played an English art auctioneer. Michael’s inability to learn the mobster’s accent highlighted the difference between his world and the mob world. Unlike Ebert, I found the scenes when he tried to talk like a gangster highly amusing. If the part required him to, I’m sure Hugh Grant could have pulled off a much better accent, but then it wouldn’t have been humorous. This point seems to have been lost on Ebert, and it’s one of the few times when I didn’t agree with his review. For instance, his review of Mulholland Drive reflects my thoughts almost to the letter. Mickey Blue Eyes is worth seeing if you like mob comedies such as Analyze This and even The Whole Nine Yards I guess.

I got to try Sylvie’s cooking today. She cooked a savoury rice and barley dish that I liked. Not too bad at all in my opinion. I also found a way to restore my nuked Galeon portal page. Galeon keeps three backups of your bookmarks in files called bookmarks.xbel.[0-2] in the .galeon directory underneath your home directory. The bookmarks.xbel.0 file is the most recent backup (a day or so old) while the bookmarks.xbel.2 file is the oldest (three or so days old).

It occurred to me that I painted a rather ugly picture of my housemates in my last blog entry. My housemates are really great, and I don’t think I’d find better ones anywhere. I’m just learning to deal with the idea of having other people live in my house, I guess.

It was Nigel’s 22^nd birthday yesterday. We also celebrated my Uncle’s 50^th birthday at my grandmother’s house. Afterwards Alex, Terry (two of my cousins), Nigel and I went out to celebrate Nigel’s birthday on our own. It’s the first time I’ve been clubbing in Redcliffe. Apparently the club we went to is the only club in Redcliffe. Alex seemed to know almost everyone that was there! It wasn’t too bad in the end. It filled right up and the place started rocking. It’s the first time in some time I did some dancing without having first drunk copious amounts of alcohol. I enjoyed it, and I think Nigel did too.

Today we watched Vanilla Sky and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. The Vanilla Sky DVD was damaged and the PS2 wouldn’t read it at all. I took it back to Blockbuster and they gave me another copy of Vanilla Sky as well as another DVD of my choice. I chose The Blair Witch Project, which I still haven’t seen.

Vanilla Sky was excellent. I hadn’t read or heard much about it beyond the trailer, and it wasn’t at all what I envisioned it to be. It turned out to be exactly the kind of movie I like. It’s a tragical love story, with a liberal sprinkling of science fiction and a happy ending. Perhaps sprinkling isn’t the right word to use, because that kind of implies that elements of science fiction are interspersed throughout the film. This is not the case at all. You don’t realise it has anything to do with science fiction until very close to the end. I won’t reveal the ending here, in case you haven’t seen it. I adored Penelope Cruz in this movie. It’s the first of her movies I have seen. I’ll have to see a few more now. So why do I say the movie is a tragedy? David Aames (played by Tom Cruise) is a guy who has everything. He has money and good looks. He can have any woman he wants; a fact that is impressed upon him by his best friend, Brian Shelby (played by Jason Lee). On the day he falls in love with Cruz’s character, Sofia Serrano, he finds himself in a horrific car accident in which his current sexual partner, a suicidal nymphomaniac played by Cameron Diaz, deliberately drives the car off a bridge and into a cement wall. She is killed and David’s face is horribly disfigured, but it also changes David as a person. However Sofia loves him the same until David murders her. Or does he? And did Sofia really take him back after the accident or is David’s mind playing tricks on him (and us, the audience)? I’ll leave it at that. I might watch this movie again before returning it to the video store.

But what can I say about Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? Not much. Silly, stupid, crazy and cheap are words that immediately come to mind. But fun nonetheless, as long as you can put up with a torrent of explitives. The movie actually boasts a star studded cast. It features Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Lee and Chris Rock. There’s are also appearances from Shannen Doherty, Mark Hammil, Carrie Fisher, Jason Biggs and James Van Der Beek. The premise of the movie is this: Jay and Silent Bob are peeved at people on the Internet saying bad things about them and they want to do something about it. Well, actually, they are saying bad things about a couple of comic strip characters who are based on Jay and Silent Bob. The comic strip is about to be turned into a movie, and so they set out to prevent the movie from being made. On their journey from Jersey to Hollywood, they get caught up in a diamond heist among other side shows. This movie is entertaining if you’re in the right mood or alternatively (I’d hazard to guess, because I really wouldn’t know for sure) ingested the right drugs.

We concluded a big day of movie watching by viewing The Runaway Bride, which screened on Channel 7 this evening. It starred Julia Roberts and Richard Gere (the same duo from Pretty Woman). Julia Roberts played a woman (maggie Carpenter) who has left her groom standing at the alter on more than one occassion, and Gere plays a newspaper columnist (Ike Graham) who reports on her exploits. Taking offence at the column, Maggie writes to the newspaper and gets Ike fired. Ike decides to pay Maggie a visit to see if the things he wrote about her are true (he wrote that she was a man-eater and so on). Being a romance, you can probably guess where the story goes from here. Not a bad movie, but not a great one either. There are much better romance movies out there.

I also managed to fit in a load of washing and I cleaned the bathroom and toilets. All in all, a very nice Sunday, thank you very much!

I’d say it’s been one of the most unproductive weeks of my Ph.D so far. I didn’t get any Ph.D stuff done (well, OK, I forced myself to write a few paragraphs of paper cum thesis chapter), and I didn’t do much in the way of tutoring either. Two students requested that I remark their assignments, but that’s about it.

But it was a great week in terms of getting to know my office colleagues a bit better. The DSTC gave Bill Segall a nice sending off, then he and another four of us went to the Royal Exchange to shoot some pool. It was a good night.

For the first time in quite a while (meaning a month or so :), Nigel and I rented out some DVDs. We rented The Royal Tenenbaums, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Vanilla Sky, Mulholland Drive and Mickey Blue Eyes. So we went and got some pizza (Sylvie was supposed to cook, but ended up going out. No matter, was craving for some Vegetarian pizza with ample covering of jalapenos) and watched The Royal Tenenbaums. A strange but enjoyable movie. I must admit, I kind of liked it in the same way that I like movies such as The Big Lebowski. On imdb.com people seemed either to love it or totally hate it. I definitely didn’t hate it, but I wouldn’t say I adored it. It certainly boasts an all star cast (Gwyneth Paltrow, Bill Murray, Gene Hackman, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller and others). But it really is the kind of movie you can’t try to explain to other people. On the surface, it’s about a once wealthy family being broken and then put back together. But underneath it’s about depression (Paltrow plays the part of a perpetually depressed adopted daughter), obsession (one of the characters is obsessed with Paltrow’s character, but to say which character would be a major spoiler) and redemption (Royal Tenenbaum, played by Hackman, spends the movie trying to reunite his family so that he can make up for what he feels is his failure as a father and husband). If films like The Big Lebowski and Magnolia don’t appeal to you, give this movie a miss. It is seriously weird in places, but that’s precisely the reason why I like it!

By definition, cat flaps are supposed to flap. The flap must be able to swing in both directions. However, if running a power extension cord through the cat flap, it loses its property of flappiness. This is not good, because the cat can no longer get in and out of the house, and she resorts to tearing up the screen door. This is something I hope my housemates catch onto sooner rather than later. I could tell them, but where’s the fun in that?

I’m letting my housemates use my computer whenever they want so that they can check their e-mail and whatnot over my broadband Internet connection. I generally try to be nice like this. The problem is when being nice kicks you in the butt. My rather large collection of web bookmarks has disappeared. Not only this, my start page, which is automatically generated by Galeon, usually displays all my bookmarks, recently visited web pages and contains a few web forms for Google searches and dictionary lookups, has been nuked. It is completely blank, except for the heading "Bookmarks". Not impressed. I’ll be seeing if either of them own up to accidentally deleting it. Upon selecting these guys as housemates, I was at great pains to show them that Nigel and I are very honest and open people, and that we would expect the same from them. So far, I’m not that impressed. One of them, who said they had quit smoking, actually hasn’t. This is kind of an issue because Mum and Dad specifically wanted non-smokers. I’m cool with, so long as the smoking is done outside and away from the house.

End of morning gripe.

Easter has come and gone for another year. The lead up to Easter was very, very busy for me. This semester I’ve been charged with creating and preparing two assignments for the fourth year distributed computing subject. On top of that comes marking and lab supervision. I also have to prepare samples for the two assignments.

We left for Caloundra and Fraser Island on Easter Sunday, and that meant I was struggling to get a sample solution finished. So I spent Good Friday and Saturday and a part of Easter Sunday coding. The students had a month to do a solution and I had two and a bit days! It got finished in the end!

Fraser Island was great, but it rained for two out of the three days that we were there. We did the Kingfisher Wilderness tour, and the ranger that took us around the island was fantastic. But next time I do Fraser it will be a proper camping trip I think. We saw a few dingos, but not too much other wildlife while we were there. I think the rain had a bit to do with this.

Ph.D work has been going slow since returning from the Easter break. I’m not feeling very motivated at the moment. Neither is Karen. As such, we’ve been having some strange conversations in the office to fill in time. Without divulging too much detail, the topics ranged from drugs and alcohol to relationships to crazy things we’ve done. Ryan also took part in these conversations. Why were they strange conversations? Well, we don’t talk about this kind of stuff very often in my office, but I hope we continue to do so, while getting some Ph.D work done at the same time. For some reason, I find it difficult to articulate myself to some people, and Karen is one of them. I don’t know why on Earth this should be the case, because I otherwise feel completely relaxed around her. But when I try to explain something to her, whether it be of an academic nature or otherwise, words tend to fail me. It’s stupid, and I often feel like an idiot. I have a feeling this used to happen with Ian at one stage a few years ago, but it doesn’t happen so much now, thankfully. This must be a psychological thing, I think.

Yesterday I participated in an experiment for some HCI students. The students gave me a number of tasks, one at a time, which involved navigating around the UQ library web site. I didn’t realise how badly the library site sucks. It really does. The main problem it suffers from is inconsistency. On some pages the link to go back to the library home page is on the left, and on others it’s at the top near the middle. It was a fun experiment. Netscape crashed midway through, which was amusing. I got two Freddo Frogs for my efforts. Thanks guys :).

Real knocked Man U out of the Champions League, but only just. Having won the first leg 3-1, Real lost the second leg 4-3. It was an absolutely brilliant game. I wish Real and Man U could play each other every week. That leaves only Real Madrid, Inter, AC Milan and Juventus in the competition. Real play Juve in one of the semi-finals and the two Milans battle it out in the other one. The Italian clubs have done well this year, but I don’t think any of them will be able to match it with Real. If they do, it will be a gross injustice. In my opinion the real final was played between Real Madrid and Manchester United, because I’m sure Manchester United would have accounted for all the Italian teams as well. But Madrid do deserve to win it again. Sometimes, it’s hard to turn a team full of stars into a star team, but Real Madrid is playing some really beautiful football, and del Bosque has got all the star players playing for each other. They could so easily have been an expensive flop. Instead they are amazing to watch and are, without doubt, the best club team in the world at the moment.

I need to start keeping a list of stuff I have to/want to read. I might also start keeping a list of stuff I have read. This should probably go on my Other Stuff page, but for now I’ll just dump a list here.

To Read

• The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (currently sitting on desk)
• The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels (currently sitting on floor next to bed)
• The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum (currently sitting on floor underneath The Communist Manifesto)
• Tao te Ching authorship attributed to Lao Tzu, translated by D. C. Lau
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

They’re the ones I can think of at the moment. Undoubtedly there are many more that I have to read, including the rest of the Discworld series.

Recently Read

• The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (currently reading but almost finished)
• Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási (My Amazon review)
• Sourcery by Terry Pratchet
• How to Make Movies by Sidney Lumet

That’s a list of stuff I’ve read since February or so. I’m sure there’s some more fiction that should’ve been included in that list. Can’t have been very good then.

I feel like watching a sappy movie tonight, so may watch Addicted to Love with Meg Ryan on Channel 9.

Nigel just pulled into the driveway after driving from Caloundra.

It appears my fears of a long street battle in Iraq are unfounded. The US has captured much of Baghdad, and most of the Iraqi civilians are celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein. All I can say is "thank goodness for this!&quot A statue of Saddam has been felled and its head dragged around the streets. Although it’s possible the war for Baghdad could be protracted, at the moment this seems unlikely. The faster Baghdad is secured, the faster the search for chemical and biological weapons can begin, afterall this was the stated reason and the trigger for this war, so they’d better find some. Now that this war has been fought against the wishes of much of the world (including my wishes), it would be disastrous if chemical or biological weapons are not found.

So far I have marked one COMP4301 assignment. Hopefully I can mark a few more today.

Tennis got rained out today, so Boggo and I went to the Pig ‘n’ Whistle instead. There was a half decent band doing covers, and quite enjoyed the music.

We’ve settled on a house mate. She will move into the room in two weeks, because she has to give two week’s notice to her current house mate/landlord. Her name is Sylvie Elsa and she’s from France. She speaks Spanish and she’s vegetarian, which is excellent for me! I’m sure I’ll get along with her, and I hope Nigel and Riko can get along with her as well.

Riko suggested we have a BBQ at South Bank last night. It was very pleasant, and we should make more use of the facilities at South Bank because it is so close. The BBQs are electric. You just push a button and let it go. However, the first BBQ we tried wasn’t heating up properly, so it took us rather longer than it should have to cook our dinner! The second BBQ we tried heated up straight away, and cooked our food in a matter of a few minutes.

The allies have started using cluster bombs against the Iraqis. It was only a matter of time before they resorted to horrible weapons like these. It is such a strange situation: the allies are using banned weapons in an illegal war that has as its objective to rid Iraq of banned weapons.

Turkey looks to have accepted $US1 billion in bribes from the US. Turkey have agreed not to get involved in northern Iraq. I suppose bribing Turkey is a outcome than the possible mess that could have eventuated if Turkey had decided to cross Iraq’s northern border. I wonder whether Saddam Hussein would have accepted $US1 billion in bribes to step down as President of Iraq. I don’t suppose so, since he lived in luxury anyway. I don’t suppose more money would have meant much to him.

I have instituted a backup system for my blog database. It consists of a cron entry that runs every Sunday and dumps all the data in the database to a gzipped file. This will protect my blogging system from my stupidity, but it won’t protect it from a crashed hard disk or a fire etc. I’ll need to backup the backup somewhere. Hmm…