Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in RavenBlack's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
6:17 pm	A couple of days ago we discovered an exciting new crazy food section in the oriental grocery shop, containing such items as veggie mouth breeder fish, veggie grilled eel, veggie mutton, veggie spare ribs, and veggie shrimp (on the list but not actually on the shelf). Most of these were, it turns out, products of a company called Su Wei Siang, whose website tells me there are even crazier vegetarian delicacies such as pulled pork, emu meat, emu fillet and emu paste. All of them seem to be vegan, even. So, we bought several items including the fish, and when we got home I was looking forward to trying the fake fish, but then we discovered there were no cooking directions on the package, and I have no idea how to cook a real fish let alone a fake one. So I asked the internet, which had only three mentions of the product at all, and no instructions there either. So I emailed the company, which replied commendably politely and swiftly; I will quote it here so that anyone else in the same position can learn to cook their fish from Google without bothering the nice foodnical support people. Dear Raven, Thank you for your continued interest in SWS Vegetarian Products. Depending on your available cooking supplies and taste preference there are many delicious ways to prepare the veggie fish. For example: If you prefer an all natural flavor, use a boiling pot Use running water to quickly rinse the outside packaging Since the packaging is specially designed to be steamed or boiled directly without removing the content, simply place the entire package into a pot of boiling water Cook for approximately 5 minutes Carefully remove the item from the pot Use a kitchen knife or kitchen scissors to open the packaging Remove the veggie fish and place on cutting board Cut to desired proportions If you prefer a stronger flavor, use a frying pan Allow at least two hours (or more) for product to fully defrost Use a kitchen knife or kitchen scissors to open the packaging Remove the veggie fish and place on cutting board Cut to desired proportions Add cooking oil (your preference of oil) to hot frying pan Cook one side until lightly brown (approximately 2 minutes) and flip to other side You may choose to eat the veggie fish by itself to enjoy its natural flavor or add seasoning/sauces and other mix vegetables to enhance the overall dish. Please also refer to our website for some sample recipes (in Chinese only; English versions will be available soon) for your consideration. Again, thank you for your purchase and we look forward to hearing from yousoon! Thank you for your interest in SWS. Sincerely, SWS Customer Service Team (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
12:59 pm	I just accidentally discovered a feature in Windows Vista. If you run an administrator command prompt (right-clicking the command-prompt thing and select run as administrator and click OK on the permission request), then kill explorer with task manager, then re-run explorer from that administrative command prompt, you get special administrative explorer in which everything you do has administrator privileges. I noticed this when selecting 'run' to type 'cmd' as I usually do, it gave me a command prompt marked administrator, as it usually doesn't. Then I noticed that the 'run' dialog box says "this task will be created with administrative privileges", which it also usually doesn't. So if you're someone who is annoyed by all those security confirmation dialogs (or if you're reinstalling everything on your computer so you're going to be getting one every 3 seconds), this is a way to get around them. Nothing asks for confirmation in this state. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
11:20 am	Last night I got 100 identical Rolex spams that should obviously have been caught by my spam filter. Some investigation revealed that SpamAssassin running in daemon mode simply ignores any message bigger than 50K. More and more spam is having giant image attachments, which puts them over that boundary, which SpamAssassin has been blindly delivering. Large messages being delivered regardless of their spammity is obviously not appropriate behaviour. I asked the internet about it, to no avail. The script 'ifspamh' that links qmail and spamc is partly responsible for the behaviour, so I modified it - I didn't want my spam folder filling up with a million giant files either, so I rewrote the script to just silently drop large messages identified (by their first 50 lines) as spam. A small risk - I've not ever missed a message I was expecting, so the spam filter seems pretty safe. I rarely even look at contents of the spam folder, I just empty it. Mostly I'm just blogging this so that if someone else has the same annoyance, they can use my ifspamh to fix it. I think I've used all the words I was googling for, so anyone with the same issue should find this. I also recommend spamdyke if your server, like mine, is trying to receive a spam every 2 to 5 seconds. Spamdyke drops about 95% of my spam before the server even finishes receiving it, which reduces the load on resource-hungry SpamAssassin. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
2:48 pm	Recently I have been snorkelling, waterskiing, travelling 45mph on an inflated tube-thing, driving a monstery truck, and adventurously changing the adventurously exploded tyre on said monstery truck (Jessica was driving when it exploded so I didn't get a driving trial-by-fire.) Changing the tyre involved purchasing a jack, finding that jack couldn't possibly lift the truck enough, researching a lot, and finding a tractor jack that does the job wonderfully and is what I expect a jack to be instead of being a stupid hydraulic bottle thing which wouldn't fit under a short car and can't lift high enough for a truck with monstery wheels. Also hitting a cross-shaped lug-wrench repeatedly with a brick. In other news, comically unpleasant spam: Subject: Energy to tear her ham wallet For carnal victories! (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
8:22 am	For the first time ever, I have had to reinstall an operating system in order to get a machine to work. How did this come about? Windows update being awful where .NET is involved. (Failing after 10 minutes 'installing', with "an unknown error occurred".) After internet-based solutions failed, foolishly asking MS tech support. At the direction of tech support person, running the recommended 'cleanup' program which promptly made all my programming environment unusable (as in "wouldn't start up") and also didn't fix the problem. Running another Microsoft fix tool, which put the machine into an infinite loop of rebooting before letting me do anything. Trying to use a system restore point, to no avail, "there are no system restore points" (then what were you doing every time you told me you were creating a system restore point?) Using a system recovery thing "automatically make a back up of your data and restore the operating system to factory defaults". Discover that "make a back up of your data" means "make a back up of your user directories that you have never used for anything, and totally wipe all your actual data without warning". Also the system still doesn't work anyway. Go with "format and reinstall to factory defaults" since it already destroyed all my data anyway. PROBLEM SOLVED! Be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, because all my preferred email clients and things that I've been transferring from machine to machine since about 1996 or so no longer exist, new Trillian sucks, configuring older compilers to work with new DirectX was a nightmare anyway, etc. Hate it, because all the newer stuff is a bag of shit with a horrible user interface that eg. lets spam emails do HTML formatting and has a stupid preview window and asks me to confirm every time I delete an email even though it's only going to move it to a deleted folder so it's not like I couldn't undo it if I made a mistake. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO AN EASILY UNDONE ACTION? ARE YOU SURE YOU WANTED TO CLICK YES? REALLY? GRAGHAGHRGHH. Also I lost recent bits and pieces of my programming that weren't added to the backup storage, and all my graphical stuff, and all my music. Thanks tech support. I didn't even want the .NET update, I just wanted it to stop bothering me.</ul> (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 27th, 2009
5:47 pm	If you have a laptop computer, and it tends to get leg-burningly hot or keeps your hands so warm the tops of the keys start to melt, I recommend vacuuming the air inlets, which are probably on the base of the machine, while the machine is switched off. I knew this laptop didn't get as hot as it was getting recently, when I first got it. It had reached the point where the fans were constantly on full and it was still getting hot while idle and in a well ventilated location on a smooth surface (so the air inlets weren't covered). Vacuuming it has returned it to its original fan-sometimes-switches-off and no-more-than-warm-to-the-touch state. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
5:14 pm	The series of unfortunate events didn't continue on the day of car-collection - I managed to drive out of Miami (which involved driving in Miami - I was glad of automatic gears for what is apparently stressful driving at the best of times) and for a couple of hours afterwards with no major incidents. We also went snorkelling since we were there again anyway, which was fairly nice despite the currents being a bit much (high tide on a choppy day). I was quickly reminded why you don't breathe all the way out while snorkelling (if water comes in at the wrong moment you can't blow it out), but apart from that it was all good. The driving probably doesn't sound like a big deal at all to Americans, nor much to most people, but there are several reasons it was fairly major - ie. I'd previously driven for a grand total of about 3 minutes since my driving test, and none of my driving lessons covered driving on the wrong side of the road or any of the weird American driving rules. British drivers would, I suspect, all be horrified by four-way stop signs, crossroads at which people take it in turns to go based on who got there first. It just looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Also the traffic lights rules (which aren't even consistent between states) - a green light when you're turning left doesn't mean go here, it means "check for people coming from your right, then go if there aren't any". A red light when you're turning right also means go if there's nobody coming. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 17th, 2009
9:29 pm	Best day ever, or A Series of Unfortunate Events. Jessica and I woke up early to go snorkeling off the Florida Keys. After an hour or so of driving, (1) the gear lever started refusing to go into random gears. No third gear for you! No third or fifth! Now you can have third and fifth but no second! Nor fourth! Hope you like having no first gear when you try to start again! This had happened before, and eventually resolved itself just from being left alone, so we stopped for a while at the side of the road, then set off again, but it was no better. Then (2) the gear lever jammed in third and wouldn't come out at all. We coasted into the entrance of a gas station with some lucky timing of passing through a red light only for a right turn, which was I think a legal manouver at that particular junction. After calling a towing company several times ((3) they went to the wrong place first, even given an exact address), a towtruck eventually arrived about two hours later. Snorkeling was thus cancelled. We were towed to a car dealership that deals in the appropriate type of car, where there were a short series of fortunate events! The problem was 'just' a snapped cable and a worn cable, not a melted transmission, so it would cost 'only' $800 to repair. But wait, fortunate event 2, there is a sale on labour at the moment! So it is 'only' $85 an hour, making it $530 or so to repair. But back to unfortunate events, (4) they don't have the parts so can't do it 'til the next day. We were intending to visit Jessica's niece in hospital nearby, and the dealership people said "oh, we'll have our driver take you." After about half an hour of trying to find the person who'd okayed that, it turned out that (5) the driver was out carting someone else around and after that would be having a lunch break. So Jessica called family who would be at the hospital to see if someone could pick us up. (While we waited we had a delightful car-dealership-courtyard-picnic.) Someone could indeed pick us up, but! He didn't realise I was there too. Jessica got into the car, he didn't notice me despite us both having come from right in front of the vehicle, so he promptly (6) ran over my foot with the rear tyre of the SUV as I was about to get in. Completing the series, (7) Jessica was unable to get anyone to cover for her at work, so a car was borrowed to return home, and another two hour drive each way must now be had to collect her car (and I'll have to drive one of the two cars back, which carries a not insignificant risk of added events what with having driven a grand total of about 3 minutes in the US and already screwing up the whole "driving on the wrong side" thing once. Though I believe it's obligatory to do that once, so at least I got it out of the way while I had a copilot.) My foot's okay, thanks for asking. Barely even bruised. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
5:56 am	I went into my bank (Barclays) the other day, to ask about making an international wire transfer while I'm in the other country. Can't do it, they say, have to fill in a form in the branch to make wire transfers, unless you have a premier account then your manager can do it for you. Okay, I said, then I shall see about having a premier account. So they rambled at me about what benefits a premier account provides, how you can phone them up at any hour of the night and they'll, eg. buy your mother flowers for you, or find you a deal on a flight when you can't be bothered, and get you preferential treatment at airports. Then they went to ask one of the premier managers about the specific thing I wanted, the ability to do wire transfers while away, and it turns out they can't actually do that any more. Just to reiterate: Bank. Will blow your nose for you. Will not facilitate the transfer of your money. The nose-blowing features did sound quite nice, but not £25 a month of nice when they're still not even letting me have access to my money. So now I'm looking at HSBC, who tell me that with them I can do a wire transfer using internet banking. That is all I need from a bank. Sure, I would like them to deal with the snake-charmer agencies for my snake-charming parties on my behalf, but I'd rather they do their job. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
7:58 am	Games! If you have fond memories of Elite, play it again only not quite as good, with Oolite. And then you'll remember how tedious Elite often was. Or play Elite crossed with Asteroids and Nethack that is much better, with Transcendence. Or play one even Nethackier, with ascii graphics and Nethack-like ground battles but real-time ascii space battles, with Privateer: Ascii Sector. A curious thing, that games such as these and Spelunky and Nethack, and most roguelikes for that matter, whose play-lifespan is indefinitely long, tend to be free, while games which entertain you for about 12 hours and then are finished tend to cost 40+ currency units. Perhaps there is a division by zero error in figuring out the pricetag of an indefinite-length game. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
3:13 pm	I managed to find old-school cheap single-bladed razors the other day, and was delighted. I just shaved with one, and I was right to be delighted, it is much better than shaving with the wobbly-headed double-bladed razors that are all I've been able to find for a while. Does anyone actually prefer the crazy polybladed wire-guarded ultrarazors? I find that with multiblades they just get hair caught in them on the first stroke and are annoying thereafter, and the wobbly head means the razor deliberately avoids shaving me closely. The control and easy-clean-ness of a single blade are much better. But one day I should go back to shaving with a straight razor. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
10:12 am	Recently I've been made aware of, from multiple sources, Real life superheroes - the best article about them was this one from Rolling Stone, while the article about the best one of them was this BBC article about angle-grinder man. Two fun questions arise - first, if you were to for some reason decide to dress up in a silly costume and fight for justice, what would your costume be like, what would your name be, and what other gimmicks would you have? Second, not necessarily connected to the first question, what would you focus on fighting? My answers in comments - think of your answer first so I don't distract you. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
8:10 am	Here is a game, a game called Spelunky! It is approximately a cross between Mario and Nethack. I endorse this game. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
10:58 am	New Year's Encouragements. Instead of making pressurey resolutions for yourself, make positive uplifting recommendations for other people. No negativity allowed, and try not to even imply something negative (eg. "eat better" implies you were eating poorly, but "make delicious home-cooked meals at least once a week" is pretty cleanly positive, and "make more delicious home-cooked meals because your cooking is great" is better still.) Could this be memetic? Give me a New Year's Encouragement, then post something like this in your own blog asking for Encouragements of your own. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
11:50 pm	I am particularly enjoying the current breed of spam. Subject: The happy friend in your pants will start moving again. Your monstrous power won't keep any women indifferent. Subject: Your nose is hung because you are not hung? Women never push aside men with big and bulgy pride. Subject: Love the new size that you and your lover are gonna discover. The touch of your big penis will be like the touch of an angel for women. Yeah. Happy new year. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, December 29th, 2008
6:59 pm	Here is an interesting thing of cognitive dissonance - some time ago, when I briefly had a job, before I left over a contractual dispute, one of the issues I had with it was that I had been led to believe the hours were half an hour shorter than they actually were going to be according to the contract. When I said that I was not happy about this, but it could be remedied with money, they immediately offered a pro-rata amount. So if, say, the error was an increase from 8 hours to 8 and a half, they would have offered a 6.25% increase in pay to compensate for that. Consider that for a moment, without reading any further - would you accept it? I would not. I wanted quite a lot more than that, which they thought was really weird and unreasonable of me. But now think about it more - if, say, you were working 8 hours a day for $30000 a year, would you really be willing to work 16 hours a day for $60000 a year? If you're totally crazy, and answer that yes, how about working 24 hours a day for $90000? Now you're definitely not answering that one with a yes unless you work in some sort of sleep-research field. So where is the line? At what point does a proportional increase become obviously nonsensical? I think for most people it is well before a 16 hour work day - if all you do is work and sleep then what use have you for money? But I also think that most people wouldn't notice the wrongness of increasing the work day by half an hour and offering merely pro-rata. (Certainly people at that job didn't follow my objection at all without the 16 hour day analogy.) For me, the hourly rate has to go up significantly at the point at which the work starts making me unhappy in a way that extends outside of the work hours. There are amounts of money that can offset it, but the further you impede my happiness the more money I want in exchange (for me to exchange for future happiness). (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 19th, 2008
1:39 pm	There was a thing on Q.I. a while back about "how many senses do we have?" They were saying many, citing, eg. hunger, where-your-limbs-are, and balance. Today I have been pondering what there is that actually are distinct senses. Balance is really just touch in the ear-tubes, where-your-limbs-are might not even be a sense so much as an expectation that they'd be wherever you last tried to put them (combined with touch for correction). Hunger could just be internal touch things, though that seems unlikely. One fairly unambiguous one is that 'touch' should be at least two senses, 'temperature' and 'pressure'. I think the key to determining if something should definitely count as a sense is that there should be no way the same thing could be detected using the senses already listed. I think carbon-dioxide-sense is a strong candidate - if you hold your breath there is no movement or pressure to inform you that you need to breathe, but you pick up on it nevertheless. (This makes me favour hunger as a sense too because it seems similar.) I wondered about the feeling of caffeine-buzz, but consideration suggests that's a tingling (touch sense), a withdrawal headache (touch?), and not feeling tired (which you don't really feel), so caffeine-buzz is detected purely with other senses. However, that does bring up sense of tiredness as another chemical-based sense. Then I was thinking endorphins, as from having eaten really spicy food - there's a different feeling there, that isn't just surface, and has no identifiable symptoms - I call that one sense of well-being. What else do you think qualifies as a distinct sense? And are there some of mine that you think don't? (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
5:50 pm	A personal ad spotted in the paper in the curry-house: "Eclectic, 40 year old football, loving book reader..." There must be a collection of amusing personal-ad mispunctuations somewhere. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
8:45 pm	Since I first saw the title, I have been vaguely irked by Quantum of Solace, because it seemed a nonsensical title. Today I realised it's because I was reading it in the common title structure, like "Sword of Damocles", but that it does make sense when read the other way, like "Smidgeon of Salt". I had to ask the internet "I bet you'll make it 20 miles before you consider drinking that" (the dialogue), to figure out what it was that the guy might not consider drinking while dying of thirst. The obvious candidate was urine, but that made no sense with there having been no "urinating in a brightly coloured container" scene. Then looking at it from the observation side rather than what would fit, the container looked to me like a Starbucks coffee cup, which would almost make sense. (Idea: product non-placement, where you get companies to pay you to not feature their product in your movie in a context of horribleness?) It turned out, more boringly, to be motor oil. The movie as a whole was full of things like this - car-chases where the cars looked the same to me so I couldn't tell who was shooting at who, people with the same hair doing parkour-fights so I can't tell which is which, camera not pointing at the person who's talking, whose voice is the same as someone else's. It's not a bad movie, but it's not a good movie either, and this sort of lousy attention-directing made it lean badwards for me, like uncontrollable awkward cameras in Tomb Raider style games. The movie "Chocolate", from Thailand, is a fun Ong-Bak-style movie, whose main character is an autistic martial arts prodigy. Doesn't really need more description than that, does it? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 15th, 2008
5:29 am	Fantastic - a lengthy survey about burglar alarm products ("no my house is not very secure"), which opened with an indirect question of "what expensive electronic devices do you own?" and concluded with the question "and finally, can you please confirm your full postcode?" Convenient that it asked it that way rather than "what is your postcode?" so the answer "no" is actually a valid answer to the question. Though in hindsight "hell no" might have been more accurate. (Comment on this)