it's my blog: February 2011

Monday, February 28, 2011

spider enclosure under construction

Thursday, February 24, 2011

corner of streisand and seinfeld

the streets of japan

navigating in japan is hard because they don't have street names. read this if you don't believe me. you can't say for instance 'on the corner of streisand and seinfeld' or 'follow pikachu until you get to bulbasaur avenue, then turn right'. i find it hard to imagine giving driving directions without referring to street names. perhaps this is part of the reason they have had car sat-navs over there since the 90s or something. i bring this up in order to ask you this: is that what bono was going on about? japan?

'fixed gear bikes are OVER'

portlandia clip :)
(for carlo)

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

'wtf, are you lost' route

5.14 km. detail showing double stair climb. actually that's my first
ever visit to roma st parklands. it's nice there. ps, this run brought
to you by the wonderful 'two suns'

kate nash

red fixie, yellow fixie

Sunday, February 20, 2011

$359 reliable ramp in bridgebasher

(not my own design)

Friday, February 18, 2011

a curse on spammers

look at this effing twitter spam

the tweets from these accounts are obviously robot generated but they contain no links. the spam link is in the 'followed you using...' link (highlighted)

spammers: may you develop recurrent infected fistulas of the most unpleasant kind*

* embarrassing bodies. anybody watch that? yikes..! O_o

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

shorter new route

Monday, February 14, 2011

new route

you can see where I had a little rest (though sometimes it was waiting
at traffic lights)

milk crates

Sunday, February 13, 2011

citycats are go!

brisbane ferries return after the floods. imagine suitable theme music. i'm going with the rocky theme. or maybe eye of the tiger. no wait. the intro to lose yourself. or, to take it in a different direction, some enya.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

for allergy sufferers...

I have the last remaining Actifed IN THE WORLD.

(It's the kind they took of the market five years ago because it was
too easy to convert to amphetamines or something).

This is the only stuff that really worked for me when I had hayfever. Also if you took two of them with a glass of wine it gave you a pretty good buzz.

Friday, February 11, 2011

friday night

genki sudo: serious overachiever

have a look at this part of his wikipedia page

須藤元気（Genki Sudo）「WORLD　ORDER」の"MIND SHIFT"フルver.PV

"Success, depress, ambition. Progress, regress, recognition. I was awakened and realised what I saw and felt were all illusion. Forget and abandon the outside world, and instead seek and feel your inner world. Looking at the stars, the darkness in my heart disappears. Forget and abandon the outside world, and instead seek and feel your inner world. Continue the journey, and you will discover the world some day."

須藤元気(Genki Sudo)「WORLD　ORDER」の"WORLD ORDER"フルver.PV

Big in Japan: genki sudo is a champion mixed martial artist turned pop star. there is also a remake of this video set in new york. i like the tokyo one better.

The considerable songwriting talent of Stephin Merritt

That was tracks 5, 6 and 7 from "69 Love Songs" by The Magnetic Fields released in 1999. (Yes, it contains 69 love songs).

More about Stephin Merritt (Wikipedia).

Some background on Reno Dakota (which is sort of a repost, (apologies to any long time readers actually paying attention to my various obsessions..)):

Reno Dakota is a documentary film-maker (Stephin is gay),
Nino Rota is a composer who scored some Godfather I & II and some Fellini films, and
Pantone 292, well, duh.

(Come back later and listen if you are busy right now. Each of these songs is perfect I think).

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

$924 BridgeBasher bridge that succeeds most of the time

the bridgebasher leaderboard

the "score" on the bridgebasher leaderboard is the cost of your bridge that successfully got all the word trains across the span. the word trains get progressively heavier until the "impossibly heavy" finale. note that your bridge does not have to remain intact. as long as the words get across the span your bridge is deemed successful. it's not too hard to build a successful bridge for around $900. if you tweak and experiment you might get it down to around $700 or so. now read on...

...I woke up to find someone named Jon had submitted a score of $215. This was not possible. I was certain it was a hacker who had sniffed out my Leaderboard service. I scrambled to my iPhone and loaded the suspicious bridge and ran the Word Test. I watched in disbelief as Jon's solution did something I had never thought was possible. He had figured out a trick that nobody else had. He is not cheating. He is not a hacker. I am completely blown away by the ingeniousness of his design.

From the blog post here (read it, it's good)...

Discussions on that blog post reveal the designs that get these low scores involve an unstable structure that collapses into some kind of ramp that can launch the word trains over the ravine under their own momentum. The handful of people who have figured it out are guarding their secret and battling each other to even lower scores.

Currently the best score is $132.

Anyway what I am trying to tell you is, get this game for your iPhone. BridgeBasher. And look for SimplePhysics, the follow up game by Andrew Garrison, in the near future.