A Drunken Madman

Stingray leaps on boat, stabs man in chest.

Face it. It doesn't get more obvious than this. The invasion has begun, with Stingrays at its vanguard. We've been fucking about in their realm for too long. Sea creatures have seen one too many fat bastard human picking the cozzie out of his ass-cheeks, and now they're out for revenge. They're coming!

Keep out of the water. Mark my words.

On a lighter note, I dig the headline. Can't help but visualise a stingray clutching a flickknife, with a bandana on, shouting “Gimme the money man, gimme the fucking money!!”

It seems the bolt that crashed through a Five Dock resident's roof earlier this week came from a Singapore Airlines 747-400. Logically, it was an outbound flight - how unlikely would it be for a loose bolt to make it all the way over from Singapore before dropping off a few miles from the airport?

In other news, Climbfit can take a running jump, and my internet connectivity is pissing me off royally, dropping out every few minutes.

OK, so having moved into my new place over a month ago, I'm still finding moving-related fuckups. Case in point, last night I plugged in my exercise bike for the first time in a while (yay, first gym session at new house). Unfortunately, during the move the power adapter for the magnetic resistance and metering stuff would appear to have been mixed up during the move. Result: about two minutes into the circuit program I'd selected, the resistance started to grow, and grow, and then suddenly got really, really tough, accompanied by a smell of burning electrical wires. I've essentially killed my several-hundred dollar exercise bike.

This may be a blessing in disguise as now I'll be forced to go use the real one, but it also brings me to this moving tip:

Clearly mark all power adapters and electrical gear before moving them. Don't rely on it being moved in a particular box; it will go missing and you'll plug the wrong bastard in.

... and shower down your blessings in Content-Type: text/html.

So it seems an organisation with its roots still firmly trapped in the Bronze Age is gittin' jiggy wid “new media” and “blogging” and “online communities” in order to avoid “becoming an anachronism.”. Newsflash, jeezuz freakz0rs! Your entire philosophy is thousands of years out of date, and a thin veneer of silicon is not going to help in the long run. Anyway, you're not the first.

Seriously, though, the Anglicans may see some gains by embracing technology, but as with all religious endeavours, they're ultimately beating an empty drum. My hope is that by embracing teh interwebs the church will expose more of its members to actual information. They're not going to be creating a walled garden, and unless they actively discourage people already in the cult* from looking at non-christian (i.e. factual) information, they're probably going to lose members in the long run. Or so it is to be hoped.

* The difference between religion and cult appears to be little more than a matter of size. I personally think that's bunk - they're all a bunch of cults.

Being a homeowner in Sydney's Inner West, right under THE FLIGHTPATH, this story in today's SMH is kinda, well, interesting. Ever see the appalling Michael Caine movie Blue Ice? Well, as that film amply demonstrates, things do occasionally fall from planes and often those things aren't soft and cuddly. In this case, though SMH is hedging its bets, the object appears to be an 11cm aviation-class metal bolt, which would have fallen pretty damn fast from a plane overflying Five Dock. I'm not sure how likely the papers will be to follow-up on this, but I'd be intrigued to see whether it is in fact a genuine aviation incident or whether it's a prank or liability insurance scam. Time will no doubt tell, but the SMH story notes that in the past ten years, three similar incidents have been reported, and none turned out to be aeroplane droppings.

Now assuming it is Boeing-shit, of course it could be worse. It could have been the plane itself, but hey, it makes you think. Not worry though. Anyone with a grasp of statistics knows this couldn't possibly happen twice. In sorta the same way that no-one would have been caught smuggling drugs into Bali after the Schapelle affair, would they? Oh yeah, right. Oops.

Side note on this category; This morning, my mental neighbour (who thinks the disabled park in our street is reserved solely for him and who attacks anyone else parking there even if they're also disabled badge holders), was seen weeding his front path with a tenon saw. And not just nudging stuff with it, literally hacking away at the ground and muttering like some geriatric would-be axe-murderer. I was quite baffled. More on local eccentricities may follow.

further to my previous post, it appears much of my ISP's IP range has been under some sustained pressure/attack from somewhere. Yesterday morning this website, and all others hosted on its server, went south. It appears (for the moment) that something has killed off TCP access to one of my IP addresses, though UDP seems to work. Luckily I have multiple IPs and could shift to a secondary, though some sites hosted on the box may still have issues.

On examining the security logs for the period, I have something like 50,000 failed login attempts from an 0wned machine (or machines) somewhere, and my ISP's datacenter honchos have also mentioned massive traffic pressure from what are likely to be bots.

Not fun. not fun at all.