As you can see, the tablet is pretty much the same as it was at 3 months old. There are legends about how hard-wearing ThinkPads are. After lugging it back and forth from work, and on vacations, for three years it’s looking like a role model for laptop longevity.

The screen is a bit blotchy with grease now, I haven’t found a good cleaner that I trust to not melt or damage the surface, so I put up with a dirty screen. The screen is also pulled away at the bottom exposing some glue that picks up dust and won’t let it go, but the problem is just aesthetic.

The pen is still held together by sticky tape.

The hard disk is now a 500GB Seagate 7200rpm drive, and I have added 4GB of RAM. The battery is now a non-Lenovo battery that works fine except that the Lenovo power management software courteously questions my commitment to safety and morality every time I log in. The original battery went stone cold dead with error messages from the power management system along the lines of “Get this battery thing outta me NOW! Stat!” when it was just over 2 years old.

None of the keys have come off the keyboard. The marvellous screen-rotating and reversing hinge feels as firm as the day it came out of the box.

The biggest problem is still Vista and the load of Lenovo crapware required to keep it alive. It has always taken a long while to boot and get settled (5-10 minutes), so I’m tempted to start from scratch with Windows 7, but haven’t made the investment in time yet.

While moving I found a couple of things of interest.

1. That the Freshy2 theme I use has been bequeathed to the open source community by its creator, so I will move to a newer theme when I find one and modify it to taste. (Ignore the WordPress 2.9 incompatibilities for now, ok?)
2. That exporting MySQL defaults to latin character encoding, and phpMyAdmin defaults to utf8 for import.
3. That TPG has one of the slowest to update DNS servers in the world:
   

   sh-3.2$ nslookup brainsnorkel.com 203.12.160.35
Non-authoritative answer:
Server: dns1.tpgi.com.au
Address: 203.12.160.35
Name: brainsnorkel.com
Address: 64.79.220.169
sh-3.2$ nslookup brainsnorkel.com 203.12.160.36
Non-authoritative answer:
Server: dns2.tpgi.com.au
Address: 203.12.160.36
Name: brainsnorkel.com
Address: 97.74.215.189

The few very hasty blog posts in the last year is a clear indication to y’all that Brainsnorkel is barely registering in my consciousness. I don’t blog about work, and work is hard at the moment.

Actually, home is hard too.  To make our house bigger, we have to squeeze into one end of it for a while. Hopefully all of this squeezing will be a thing of the past soon. We’ll move back into our proper places and the sardines can move back in to where we’re living.

Enough excuses! Brainsnorkel doesn’t need excuses.

Brainsnorkel needs the dust blown off it.

Given how consuming work is, maybe meta-work is fair game now. It has been in the past.

Tonio sums up all that was good and bad about the series finale (beware, here be spoilers):
Battlestar Galactica Ends

Here’s my take on the end of the best Science Fiction TV series in history: it hit the right emotional notes, and it was reasonably satisfying, but it was not a worthy ending to the series, and I suspect that as we all go back and watch the whole thing through we’ll find a lot of threads left dangling or essentially forgotten by the writers.

Notable occurrences:

1. Though the Chris of 2000 was an INFJ, the Chris of 2009 is an ESTP. Abracadabra!
2. The 2×2 leadership analysis grid keeps reminding me of this…

How to fold a T-shirt in 5 seconds:

Orange teeth:

This calls for five minutes of reminiscing.

I turned up for my first day of work as a trainee systems programmer at a big Australian bank’s EDP department. I recall being more than a little shocked at having to be at work before 8:06am each day. I was introduced to everyone I’d be working with shortly before being sent off to North Sydney to do MVS and IBM System/360 Assembler training for a few weeks.

At training I learned that the most powerful instruction in Assembly language was the no-op. The coding standard dictated that you sprinkle them throughout your code so that smarter programmers than you could patch your code, in memory, while running by overwriting your no-ops with useful code and then adding a statement to branch to the patch code over the defective instructions.

The bank had some great people. Some were consummate professionals and some were real cowboys.

Towards the end of my time at the bank I was introduced to the pointy-end of the economics of software development and process improvement.

A colleague returned from a long liquid lunch and let me in on the “big secret.”

He said only fools write good code. Code has to break for you to get called in. Being called in gives you overtime and visibility. Overtime is extra money. Being called in is heroism. Develop skill in writing bugs that are serious enough to call you in about, yet easy enough to fix soon after you get into the office. Overtime was paid for in four hour minimum units. Nobody notices people who write reliable code because they never get to perform heroic acts. Notice that the people who get promoted are those that handle high stress situations. Notice that the people handling these high stress situations are generally responsible for creating the high stress situation in the first place.

It was good motivation to find a new job.

Yes, we’re early. But we did let a month go by after Myer put out their decorations.

We hadn’t noticed anything particularly odd. A Moses colouring activity came home with a light saber once. At age 5 everything looks better with a light saber.

I decided to check out what Mr 5 thought about his scripture classes.

I don’t have this captured perfectly, but you’ll get the gist:

They’re always talking about God and Jesus. Mostly Jesus. They really like Jesus.

Jesus is really powerful. She has some big dogs who can cure blindness by licking people.

Really big dogs.

He hasn’t heard the joke about the dyslexic insomniac agnostic.

I’ve seen pretty much all of the versions of Blade Runner multiple times — even the versions with reluctant Harrison Ford voice-overs. I didn’t expect much more than to be washed over by very leisurely-paced science fiction film noir nostalgia and marvel at how Admiral William Adama has grown.

I was struck by just how much nostalgia there was to be had.

Ridley Scott was prescient in his ability to select 1982-contemporary brands for prominent display that would encounter some serious trouble by the time history caught up with the movie. Each of the brands I recognised seems to have experienced a pre-2019 hiccup or two:

• RCA: Purchased by GE in 1986 and gutted.
• TDK: Not dead, but owned by Imation since 2007.
• Atari: A brand being revived post-1980s as the adopted name of Hasbro Interactive and Infogrames.
• Pan Am: Does not require explanation.

Apart from Atari, these brands don’t look terribly likely to method act their way to a triumphant resurgence in 2019.

From the outset, they adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy, gaining notoriety for various anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and unusual performances on Top of the Pops. Their most notorious performance was at the February 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance announced The KLF’s departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue.

Esoteric novels? They were the finest of their indescribable genre.

Rather than kick off a del.icio.us linkspam bot, I’ll just refer you over to the rightleft. My Google Reader shared items change far more frequently than this blog.

That widget is powered by the wake of my leveraged synergy drive.