I thought this was pretty funny

To be done in a Late Show Top 10 style...

"YOU MAY BE A TALIBAN IF..."

1. You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer.

2. You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can't afford shoes.

3. You have more wives than teeth.

4. You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon "unclean."

5. You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.

6. You can't think of anyone you haven't declared Jihad against.

7. You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry explosives in your clothing.

8. You were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs.

9. You have nothing against women and think every man should own at least one.

10. You've always had a crush on your neighbour's goat

Things to think about

I've been listening to / watching a few interesting things of late.

Firstly I've been listening to the audio from the various HOPE conferences. Primarily concerned with technology and hacking, there are some folks with interesting politics featured as well.

Jello Biafra for one.

Another interesting speaker is Robert Steele, who pretty much founded the concept of open source intellegence. Lots of interesting stuff on his website (if a bit difficult to navigate).

Mr Steele mentioned a group called TED, who have sponsored a fairly exclusive conference for 20-some years, with a lot of *very* interesting speakers.

The youtube channel has a couple of hundred archived talks from such folks as Stephen Hawking, Richard Branson, Nicholas Negroponte, J.J. Abrahms, Richard Dawkins and many others on topics from technology through politics, art, business and culture. The conference mission of "ideas worth spreading" is a very good one. Although I can see I'm gonna chew up a bunch of bandwidth watching everything...

Get your hack on

New Zealand is going to soon have its own hacker con.

OK, so it won't be HOPE or DEFCON, but its a start.

One downside, no drink at the venue. Oh well...

Check https://kiwicon.org/ for the skinny.

So the seminar is back on again...

A rough indication of how often I update this thing... I couldn't remember my login.

We found out last night that Rahneer is coming over next weekend for training and grading. No mention of anyone else coming with him, so we don't know if the whole Bakbakan membership thing is going to occur.

At least I'm over my flu...

This is the third reschedule for this visit. First time, Rahneer was moving His gym, second time I can't remember (I may have mixed these up), and the last time He had a death in the family and had to fly to the Philippines for the funeral. The last couple of times I organised time off to prepare, and do extra classes.

The last time was a huge mess. I took 2 weeks leave, not huge problem as I have at least 2 months worth. I planned my time brilliantly. The first part of the day, I would swim. Pools in Manukau city are free, so a great deal. During work time, I go to the pool when it opens, at 6AM. There's usually not a huge group. I can do a bunch of laps, go home, do this breakfast thing, throw the ball for, or walk, the dog, then go to work. On my holiday I decided 6AM wasn't neccessary.

So I trotted (or drove) down to the pool 'round 9ish. Whole different scene. For a start the lane ropes are removed and the main pool is divided in half. One half has some kind of aquatic aerobics thing going on. All pensioners and soccer moms. It's kinda like line dancing in the water. Not right at all. The other half of the pool is for everyone else. So, you would think, it's for swimming, eh?

Nah.

Howick/ Pakaranga has a large Chinese community. Apparently the retired portion go to sit in the pool in the morning. A few may be swimming, but on the whole most are hanging around the edges talking. One guy was sitting on the steps at the shallow end READING A NEWSPAPER !!! No shit. And it was bone dry too. He looked really unhappy as I splashed my way past.

So, back to early swimming.

For the middle portion of the day, I had a list of stuff to do from the Girlie. To quote Forrest Gump - That's all I have to say about that.

After chores, and entertaining the pets (which takes up a lot of time, as they make you feel guilty if you don't), I had some time to do bag and rope drills before heading off to whatever training was on. The first week I managed to fit in an early session with Jarred (mostly panantukan) before heading of to train at our gym, or with Clint.

All in all a good week, with lots of training done.

Until Saturday.

The flu hit me like a ton of bricks. Literally I could hardly move on sunday, and it was worse on monday. I toyed briefly with the idea of cancelling my holidays, going back to work, then taking sick leave. But then I thought even the buffoons I work for Might twig on that one...

So... I couldn't swim, as I was full of snot. Basically can't breathe - can't swim. I think the technical term is drowning. I couldn't train as I literally ached all over. The only thing I could do was work on the forms. Then we heard Rahneer's relative died and He had to go to the Philippines, so the seminars and stuff were off. Which is probably not bad thing, 'cause if I'd had to have graded in the state I was in, I would probably have died. Or everyone would have been able to beat the crap out of me...

Which is not to say they won't do it next weekend ...

Much stuff has (,or hasn't) gone on of late. I'm still a radio guy, but not for long...

Anyway - fun new toy:

I like old computers.

In terms of 8-bit machines, my preference is old Atari boxes (I would still happily maim someone for a nice PAL atari 800). I have, however, recently discovered the DTV commodore 64. Basically a very clever hacker chick created the c64 environment in an ASIC, stuck it a a joystick with some games in flash ROM, and marketed it. See this link.

I got a version 3 DTV, a Hummer game (And by Hummer I mean car, not anything else...). It's basically a steering wheel you put batteries in the base of and plug into your telly. Or you can hack a ps2 keyboard, SD/MMC card interface, or original C64 peripherials to it.

I quite like the idea of stuffing the board, some mass storage, a keyboard, batteries and a 7 inch LCD into a small pelican case.

Fiendish cat torture device!

I found this:



I don't think it would work for our cat... The Baz would get on it at 3 AM, just to piss us off.

I wonder if it would work for the dog though...

Happy St Patricks!!!!!

Slainte ya'll!

After training this morning, we headed up for a wee pint (or two) at the local Irish pub.

Here's Damian and Pete getting into the mood...



Interesting thing is, neither of these two were drinking!

Cheers!