Ever seen something interesting or amusing or clever that someone made and you found on the internet, or wherever?  And you say “That person must have too much time on their hands”?

I say no!  Such arrogance, to dismiss someone’s creative efforts as the product of an idle mind!  That person more likely has plenty to keep them occupied and keep their mind active, they just have better time management skills than you, and got their boring mundaneries out of the way so they could do something interesting with their lives. They probably made time for this hobby or creative pursuit.  They did something cool, and they have the respect of other clever people for it.

Meanwhile, you who want to imply that you too could be that clever and creative if you only had the time, how many hours of TV did you watch this week? The average in Australia is 22 hours. Even if you only watched half that, it’s 11 hours a week where you’ve done nothing with your life. Imagine what you could have done with an extra 572 hours in your year?  And you watched television?  Tell me who has too much time on their hands!

How much playstation/x-box/wii/whatever did you play? Surfing the internet randomly? Reading news that you won’t remember tomorrow. Mowing your lawn? You might look at someone building cheesechucking trebuchets on their weekend and say “that person has too much time on his hands”, but nobody says “Look at that guy at number 7, his lawns are perfectly mown and edged, he must have too much time on his hands”.  Why not? It’s just as useless!

So admit it!  You have the time, you’re just squandering it! Do something with yourself. Turn off the TV, write, build, learn, create, do.  Then maybe one day, you too will do something so awesome that the empty headed couch slugs will say “that person must have too much time on their hands.”

Bookmarklets are timesaving snippets you drag to your bookmarks toolbar to save time. Here’s an IMDB bookmarklet that I got from I can’t remember where, and I can’t find it anywhere so here it is. :

IMDB Bookmarklet

Drag that to the bookmarks toolbar in your favourite browser, and you can either click on it, and it will pop up a box for you to type the actor or movie name you want to search on IMDB, or you can highlight some text in a web page and click the bookmarklet, and it will automagically search IMDB for you.

It’s a point we often make at our house, that the spread of public holidays throughout the year is somewhat uneven. In Victoria, there’s a particular dearth in the late Winter/early Spring period, when surely you are most in need of the odd day to recharge the batteries. The calendar for my work came out in Excel format the other day, making it fairly easy to graph this disparity :

Clearly, in quarter 3, the time of ‘Winter Blues’ or ‘Seasonal affective disorder‘ , when you most need a holiday, there’s nothing. To make matters worse, as you can see from the graph, the number of school holidays by quarter is inversely proportional to work holidays, so just when you’re at your most burned out, your kids are full of holiday energy.

On average, the other quarters have three public holidays each. It would be impossible to redistribute 9 days evenly across four quarters, so the only rational solution to this disparity is to declare three new public holidays in the third quarter of the year. Looking at the distribution across months, it seems fair to say that one each in July, August and September would properly redress the situation.

My suggestion is that we instate the following holidays to commemorate these important days in history:

July 16 – Midwinter Day. Not actually solstice which is around June 22, but it’s the calendar middle of Winter, so that’ll do. Dancing around a hilltop is not required.
15 August – Stadium Rock Day, marking the birth of stadium rock in 1965 when the Beatles played to 60,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York City. It could be celebrated with rock festivals and concerts around the country, which could also help a similar imbalance, where all the good concerts are in Summer and there’s nothing in Winter.
14 September – Calendar Day, celebrating the British Empire’s Adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. May not seem worthy of note but consider how important our calendar is to our lives and I think you’ll agree to a day off in memory.

Adding these dates to our calendar serves both to shine a light on these important times of the year, and help redress the imbalance in public holidays. I’m asking you to join me in petitioning your State and Federal members to take a stand on this issue, and give the people of Australia the holidays they need at the time they need them most!

INFP - “Questor”. High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

I like the red squiggly line to tell me when I’ve misspelled a word in Word, it might be another perfectionist thing but I need to fix it right away rather than getting to the end and running a spellcheck the old fashioned way.  The grammar checker on the other hand, I usually turn that off, I’m a control freak with excellent English skills (at least, when I feel like using them). I didn’t get my poetic license off the back of a cornflakes packet, so when I break a grammar rule it is with intent, and I don’t need my computer nagging me about it.

So when it objected to my use of the phrase “These staff are generally eager…”  I actually wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong, so I checked what the grammar checker had to say :

I'm glad I let microsoft check my grammar...

None the wiser from that!

For the record, apparently you can’t use staff as a plural when you mean staff members.  You can talk about all of the staff singular, or the staffs of multiple schools, but you can’t talk about ‘these staff’ who are a subset of the entire school staff.  If you know what I mean!

Living in a house full of gifted people, and working in IT as well, you forget that not everybody has these little things they have to do.  It’s not a debilitating case of OCD or anything, it’s not perfectionism, although it could be related to that too.  It’s just a certain discomfort when certain things aren’t in a particular state of order, or done in a certain way. Call them quirks if you like.

People who don’t have these things don’t get them and may make fun of you in a gentle way, which is OK as we make fun of ourselves too. Story : There was a bunch of identical pens on the table in the staffroom - click pens with the clip that goes over the pocket, and a nice fat hand grip. I decided to set a perfectionist trap, by lining all the pens up identically and then flipping one of them so the pocket clip was on the other side, and skewing it slightly.  I wasn’t even finished straightening all the other pens when one of the science teachers came past, saw the skewed pen and literally said “Oh no, that’s not right” and fixed the pen.  Haha funny. Except the joke was also on me - the reason I was still straightening the other pens was because the fat handgrips made them fan in a circle, and I wanted them straight, but when they were straight there was a big gap and they weren’t lining up properly.  I would have been there for an hour if the science teacher hadn’t  come along.  I was caught in my own trap!!!

It could be that most people have them and geeky people are just more aware and notice them.  I think possibly it’s a pressure release for anxiety and OCD and stuff - you make little places where you can have control and it helps you to cope with all the places where you don’t.  This post on Rands in Repose explains it well -

This right shoe behavior started during ice hockey. The team was bad… like 0-10 bad…. I decided to become zen about situation… deliberate. Rather than stressing about the size of the beating, I considered the small parts of manageable reality sitting immediately in front of me.

“In what order shall I put my gear on? What is practical? What feels right? You know, I like putting my right skate on first. I can’t tell you why, but the order feels important. Right skate, then left.”

We killed them. 9-3….I credit the skates. No, I credit the skate application process.

That’s a very conscious application of it, and he knows why and where it came from.  There is a list of other people’s quirks on that page too.  There’s an  even better list of quirks in the comments of the MentalFloss post about it.

People with these gifted/OCD tendencies appear to have a lot of trouble with M&Ms, where the desire for order and structure is vexed by the chaos of colour in the packet.  Lots of people said they need to balance the M&Ms equally on each side of their mouth, and some people had special colour rules.  One person found they could only be satisfied if they ate them until there were three of each colour left.

A surprising number of people had issues with the digital volume control on their stereo - they have to leave the volume on a multiple of 5, or an even number, and so on. Quite a few people needed to have their money in value order and all facing the same way.  It’s pretty funny to read through all these, it’s like a list of Stephen Wright one liners, until you start to hit things you do and realise they are not perfectly sane after all. Some of them you just know aren’t right.  I’ll search through the cutlery drawer at work looking for a fork or spoon that is just right for the meal I’m eating.  I can’t quantify, I’ll just know when I see it.  If I sleep at someone’s house and the spoons are the wrong size, I won’t eat cereal, I’ll have toast.  Others we can make justifications for, and rationalise them to ourselves, but at the end they are still a bit bizarre. I’m talking about the toilet paper, Mon.

I’m talking about things like what we used to call the KWP check - keys wallet phone must be confirmed before leaving the office.  There’s good reasons for checking all these things, but it’s the need to consciously check that is quirky.  Eating food in a certain order.  In most circumstances I have to have only one thing on my fork - I can’t have a piece of meat and a bit of carrot at the same time.  Also have to be eaten in order of least favourite to most favourite.  This is a problem if it’s steak and cheesy potatoes, I like both, I flounder.  Sure you can say things like ‘I want to enjoy the flavour of each thing’, and that ‘the last thing I eat will be the taste that stays in my mouth’  and these things are true, but it’s the fact that they are also important to you that turn them into real quirks.

I was also forced to concede one that I sort of knew about, but hadn’t admitted.  Someone posted :

If a dishwasher has been loaded by anyone other than myself, I will unload the contents and then reload methodically, so as to ensure maximum capacity has been reached. (This happens regardless of whether I am in my own home or someone else’s.

OK I may not go so far as to restack someone else’s, but it drives me nuts when someone else packs my dishwasher.  They always do it wrong.  I will wait till they are in the other room and reshuffle everything.  It may be true that I am achieving maximum efficiency as well, but mostly it’s because the big plates go on the right, but you have to intersperse a small plate between each one or they kind of stick together and don’t wash.  The soup plates have to go at the front to the left of the cutlery holder. And so on.  It’s as if the dishwasher couldn’t possibly get them clean unless they were in those positions.

So if you’ve been to my house and I’ve done this to you, don’t take offense.  It’s not you, it’s me. Although you know, the dishes really are cleaner my way!

CG doesn’t impress me anymore.  Pixar were the forefront, (videolink) did awesome things with computers.  The first Shrek film broke amazing ground in hair animation and skin tones and  stuff. I heard a talk from Weta digital on the CG work that went into Lord of the Rings that was fascinating on so many levels, especially the development on Massive and Grunt, the software packages that rendered the hordes of orcs and soldiers so seamlessly.

BUT : the real magic at Pixar is in the stories and the imagination, the characters.  Shrek is a franchise now. CG in movies is so commonplace that I no longer know what Weta have done.  It’s both reached it’s peak where you can basically do anything, and yet still never gonna be quite as good.

Stunts are bad. Give me shoddy wirework over the best of CG anyday, it has a fluidity of motion that a person with a computer just can’t seem to give. It must be something like the uncanny valley - when the brain is forced to actively suspend disbelief, eg with wirework and other ‘organic’ effects, the effort is succesful and you enjoy the show.  With CG however you aren’t making an effort to believe, and the slightest thing unnatural looking jars you out of the moment.

CG bits in movies can stick out as being hyperreal, too detailed for reality.  CG in cartoons is even worse.

I don’t mean full CG animations like Shrek or the Incredibles.  It works there, it;s just not amazing in it’s own right anymore.  I mean kids cartoons in the afternoon, where traditional cel animation is mixed with CG, either interspersed or overlaid. Intimate hand-drawn characters are suddenly replaced by too-perfect action scenes.  Sure it makes for some beautiful fluid movement, but the styles don’t match and your eyes object.

They lack style and texture. More videos here - have a look at  Avatar - The Last Airbender - I like the stories and characters of the half dozen episodes I’ve seen, but the switch between the hand animated and CG parts is so painfully obvious.  But compare that with someone who adores hand drawn animation the way John Kricfalusi does - he’s the Ren and Stimpy guy.  Get a load of the life and energy in these Ren and Stimpy clips.

You coveteth my ice cream bar!!! Ahem.

Sure there’s plenty of hand animation that is astonishingly atrocious, like He Man. Plenty that was good about He Man - simple story, cheesy but cool characters, a Gen X icon - but terrible no good lazy animation.

But overall, I think animation that is great because it is a labour of love is far better top to bottom than animation that simply has the greatest processing power behind it.  That’s why Pixar films are so good, and why anime films have been so beautiful and unique for so long.  And that’s why Hayao Miyazake, head of Studio Ghibli and maker of films like Porco Rosso, My Neighbour Totoro and Academy Award winning Spirited Away, refuses to hand over his pencil.

I think animation is something that needs the pencil, needs man’s drawing hand, and that is why I decided to do this work in this way. Currently computer graphics are of course used a great deal and, as I’ve said before, this use can at times be excessive. I will continue to use my pencil as long as I can.

This is terrifying, Comcast in America are limiting all their internet users to 250MB per month!  I get more email than that, no wonder there’s a massive outcry against them.  250 meg is like, one windows update, or a few albums on iTunes.  How can they provide a service that only allows….what?  Gig?  huh?  They are limiting their users to 250Gig?  Yerwha?

Oh boohoo, I can only download 4 entire series of TV shows in HD before I run out of bandwidth.  Yeah that’s right, torrent users, in one month you can only download 18*3 44 minute TV shows.  When are you going to watch that much TV?  Does this mean the unemployed and destitute in America who have nothing to do but watch Internet TV all day have unlimited bandwidth?

Apparently Merikans are used to having unlimited high speed broadband.  And they are complaining because they are being limited to 250G a month?  This says a lot about the state of western culture and the ‘It’s my right to have everything I want’ mentality that sees us sucking the Earth dry.

We aren’t raving anti-immunisation loonies. Clearly, nobody is getting polio anymore, and deaths from smallpox or german measles are pretty rare in the western world. Sure, there are very very rare allergic reactions, but the number of deaths due to that versus the number of deaths and disablements due to the actual diseases is pretty tiny.

Likewise, perhaps there are unknown side effects of common vaccines, and maybe someone who isn’t vaccinated gets a tiny health improvement on someone who has been, but again, you know, beats dying though.

There comes a point though at which you start to think the vaccination becomes unnecessary. There’s a vaccine for chicken pox now, which is marketed not as a lifesaving drug, but as preventing discomfort and saving parents from having to take time off work.  The article itself says “Chickenpox is generally a mild, self-limiting disease” while advocating vaccination.  Suddenly, the possible side effects and unknown long-term effects become more significant, when weighed against having to take a week of sick leave, rather than the possible death of your child.

Governments in many countries quickly add these less necessary vaccines to subsidised medication lists, and sometimes to mandatory vaccination lists as well. This is driven not by popular choice as a democracy should be, but at the insistence of pharmaceutical company dollars…as a democracy generally is.

So when the Gardasil injection came out, we declined on our daughter’s behalf. This may seem harsh - “OMG do you want her to die of cervical cancer?”.  The reality is, HPV is only one of the causes of cervical cancer, and the Gardasil vaccine only protects against four of the known strains of HPV. To be fair though, two of those strains cause 7 out of 10 cervical cancers. The other two types cause 9 out of 10 cases of genital warts. Nonetheless, it’s not the 100% solution that other vaccines can be.

So let’s balance - vaccines that have existed for decades and protect completely against direct causes of death or extreme illness, versus a new vaccine, unknown long term effects and not even a complete protection against the disease it advertises against…hmm.  Doesn’t seem so callous now.

Other concerning social side effects of Gardasil could be complacency in terms of pap smears, which have proven to be an effective reducer of cervical cancer rates.

Like anything, you have to make your own mind up.  Nonetheless, a report quoted by the LA Times has listed similar and deeper concerns about gardasil, including serious complications in over 8000 girls immunised in the USA since 2006, including “10 miscarriages, 78 severe outbreaks of genital warts and six cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that can result in paralysis. There were also 18 reported deaths.”

The article has been taken offline, you can read it after the jump : Read more »