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After reading about and enjoying the Firefox 3.0 about:robots “feature,” Mr 5’s $8 plastic gift for accompanying me to the markets today might have been a subliminally-suggested choice. We acquired a fashivhably coloured, double-luffing, go-ahead homage to a silly software release mascot.

For fans of robots, this model screams “Fire. Fire. Get down!” deafeningly and something else we can’t make out. Non! Stop! All the while swivelling its randomly illuminated plastic torso and waggling its arms up and down. He falls over due to being newly hatched from a Styrofoam incubator — and he’s obviously not yet accustomed to his roller skates.

“Could sound a beautiful music” (which we assume is a rough translation for “emits loud screaming and gunfire”) led to Dobo Arigato Mr Beat Magnum having a nasty run-in with J.

Mr 5 couldn’t hear his mother screaming at him to make the bad robot stop. He’s is missing an arm now (Mr Beat Magnum, not Mr 5), complete with dangling wires. This makes him look much cooler and we have a war story about the time he sacrificed an arm to save Mr 5 from harm.

Fafblog is stirring.

If I go back to using Bloglines from Reader and pretend Billmon is still around I’ll be blog-partying on teh Internets like it’s 2004.

…but almost that boring.

I Am A: True Neutral Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-12
Dexterity-15
Constitution-12
Intelligence-14
Wisdom-14
Charisma-15

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

I wonder what D&D life would be like if I had agreed to assassinate the president in the survey? Oh wait. The back button is my friend.

Obviously I would be among the most odious of chaotic, sonofabitches…

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Lee-Harvey Oswald was true neutral before he shot JFK and neutral good after? Tell that to Jack Ruby.

I guess the survey is aware of who’s currently President of the US. Maybe it’s geo-located me and knows that my country doesn’t have a president. If I would assassinate some dictator who masquerades as president in Australia’s freedom-tolerating system of constitutional monarchy, then there is good in me!

Via Jeff Freeman

What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?

www.omfg.com should have much funnier content.

This game looks like an end-run around WoW’s strengths: storyline depth, spelling, grammar, good localization quality and intentional humour.

From the Elf Online newbie quest database:

Quest name: Meng San’s worries
Quest level: 6~99
Rewarded goods: Fatal Wrath Kerchief 7J?21001?
Procedure: 1.Go to Uncle Lin in Sunset Prairie to buy a bottle of Injure Curer for Iron Arm Meng San in West Carefree Village.
[...]
Quest name: Beat elf
Quest level: 1~99
Procedure: 1.Go to HaiLiGe in North Wulong Village after killed 10 Snot Elf in Tranquil Seacoast 1.

And having agreed to join up, this is displayed after the “congratulations!” message:

Play Elf Online, Earn Cash.
Rare Items for Your Choose.
Cashes Points Rare Pets.

And, err, the download instructions look pretty frightening for Vista users:

1.Client latest version 2.0.2.496, about 890 M;
2.You can use either BT or HTTP to download. BT is recommended;
3.If you use the Vista O/S, please don’t install the game in disk C;
4. If you can’t login the game after downloaded and installed the client, please download manual update patch.

Even now I feel strangely drawn to play.

h/t Broken Toys

Update: Caution… you can’t delete or cancel your account details so be sure to use a pseudonym and a disposable email address during registration. And I can’t figure out how to… err… get an ID for this free game. Impenetrable grammar has its downsides too…

Just reporting that I got to use this as a sentence today and nobody blinked.

You know you are a genius. The whole world needs to read your writing. There are so many words waiting inside you to get out that they tumble over each other and melt into your keyboard to decorate the screen. You don’t know why you bother writing because nobody seems to understand you — but write you must! You know that if only someone, anyone, would make it all the way to the end of your writing they would achieve enlightenment. Then you would have a soul-mate! A co-conspirator! A light in the darkness! A reason for writing more stuff! Oh boy, what a world it would be if only someone would read your words and think (just think!) about what you have to say. Maybe if you used MORE CAPS it would sink in?!?! And your previous writing? To recap is weakness, to revise is surrender, yet to refer to your previous work is divine. They must try harder to keep up! Don’t they understand the power of narrative? Fools! You’ve watched them before, reading your sentences, face turning blue as they search for a full-stop. You see them yearning for a comma. They panic as they hunt for the end of a paragraph. They flinch when you redefine a term. They can’t handle your intellect. They don’t deserve punctuation. Weaklings.

Tandem running in ants is a form of recruitment in which a single well-informed worker guides a naive nestmate to a goal [...references elided...]. The ant Temnothorax albipennis recently satisfied a strict set of predefined criteria for teaching in nonhuman animals [...references elided...]. These criteria do not include evaluation as a prerequisite for teaching [...references elided...]. However, some authors claim that true teaching is always evaluative, i.e., sensitive to the competence or quality of the pupil [...references elided...]. They then assume, on the premise that only humans are capable of making such necessarily complex cognitive evaluations, that teaching must be unique to humans. We conducted experiments to test whether evaluation occurs during tandem running, in which a knowledgeable ant physically guides a naive follower to a goal. In each experiment, we interrupted the tandem run by removing the tandem follower. The response of the leader was to stand still at the point where the tandem run was interrupted. We then measured how long the leader waited for the missing follower before giving up. Our results demonstrate T. albipennis performs three different kinds of evaluation. First, the longer the tandem has proceeded the longer the leader will wait for the follower to re-establish contact. Second, ant teachers modulate their giving-up time depending on the value of the goal. Finally, leaders have shorter giving-up times after unusually slow tandem runs.

From Current Biology. 

I wonder sometimes in the supermarket, while shopping with and losing children, if I’m just a giant ant.  Then I count my limbs and think “naah!” Ants wouldn’t sigh out loud like I do before trudging off to search for lost tandem followers.

(This post an excuse to experiment with Adobe Contribute)

One of my current personal favourite kids stories is a library book one of the kids borrowed recently: “Yellow Bird Black Spider”

It’s only a 5 minute read, and might be a bit young, but it’s a nice story with a very satisfying conclusion.

The synopsis:

Yellow bird is a quirky and idiosyncratic individual. Yellow bird enjoys strumming guitar on the beach (with an amplifier that goes up to eleven), sailing, and having baths with his stripy socks on. Black spider suggests a way for yellow bird to act more like a bird on every second page .

Anyway, I don’t think I’m giving anything away if I say they all live happily ever after.

Except for spider.

Australian media outlets routinely convert from US dollars, British pounds and Euro euros into local Australian equivalent currency to make unqualified statements about the amount of money involved in a story. “Hilton to sell itself to Blackstone for $30b” is one example where the headline uses a figure expressed in local currency to help people who don’t track global exchange rates on a daily basis. This news story goes on to disclose the US and Australian dollar figures, but Australian radio stories and newspapers with tighter space constraints often drop any mention of the native currency value anywhere.

My beef is about time conversions. Surely the average Australian would be able to relate to foreign news stories and historic events better if dates and times were converted to local equivalents. July 4th would become July 5th. 9/11 would become 11/9 in local parlance with a footnote about how half of the attack did not occur until early morning 12/9. Anzac day would remain April 25th, but Christmas might have to be moved back a day.

Happy 5th of July.

I recently purchased a whole bunch of computer parts to assemble into a new Vista-capable PC. Yes - I am a sucker for punishment.

Examining the boxes, I was amused by computer parts manufacturers who put strange, and positive-sounding mottos on their boxes, labels or documentation. Alastair suggested that we create a game of “match the part to the motto.”

So here it is. See if you can match the PC part to the motto.

Motto

1. “Burn. Flip. Burn.”
2. “The Wow starts now”
3. “Get more”
4. “Cooling your live”
5. “Leap ahead. Leap ahead. Leap ahead.”
6. “Rock solid. Heart touching.”

Part

1. iCute Computer Case
2. Mushkin DDR2 RAM
3. Intel E6600 Core2Duo CPU
4. Asus P5B-Plus Motherboard
5. Windows Vista Home Premium
6. Asus LightScribe DVD Burner

Note that the motto could be for the manufacturer, the part, or just a spontaneous expression of joy for being part of colourful packaging.

Answers below…
Read the rest of this entry »

There must be a Liberal Party guide to campaigning that has an entry on what to do when you’re behind in the polls. The gist of that entry seems to be that you should preface your “I need to work harder” rhetoric with a certain phrase…