web-goddess

The interview went really well! Thanks for all the supportive messages, and apologies for my random stress postings. As Hello Kitty points out, I “easily feel stressful”. Luckily she has advice too: “Only with a little bit of additional work plus controlling your temper, you would then lose energy. Not only you would accumulate your stress, you are weak to release it. For this type exercise and Karaoke will be the best way.” Huh. I don’t know about karaoke, but I am going to the Sydney Slashdot Meetup tonight. What better way to unwind than sharing some much needed alcohol with several fellow nerds? 🙂

Now that I’ve got my CompactFlash card reader working, getting pictures off my digital camera is a million times easier. That makes me want to take a million more pictures. Tonight I was somehow compelled to snap the front of our refrigerator. I think you can tell a lot about a person by their fridge. (The coolest one I ever saw was my friend Kel’s, which was completely papered in beer bottle labels.) Going clockwise from the upper-left, on ours is: a calendar/menu from Trisha’s, a local Indian restaurant; a “Smile!” sticker from the Newtown Hari Krishnas, over which I have added a note reading “TAKE BUGS SNOOKUMS!” to remind him to take his probiotics; a Notre Dame postcard my Grandma sent me; a Kenner Star Wars Ewok Village postcard Max sent me; a postcard from the Bad Ass Café in Dublin, Ireland; the aerobics timetable for my gym (it’s there for the guilt factor, more than anything); a Star Wars: Attack of the Clones postcard; a Guinness magnet; a Big Ben magnet (a going away present from our London housemates); a postcard of an orangutan mother and baby that I got at London’s Natural History Museum; and a “SODOMITE” postcard that I picked up free at my gym (it’s a parody of the “Vegemite” label). Now wasn’t that interesting? What’s on your fridge?

(Yeah, I’m just blathering and navel-gazing. But it’s ten hours before my interview and I’m a little nervous.)

Good news! Firstly, I’m approaching the end of my first two weeks doing Atkins and I’ve lost approximately thirteen pounds! (That’s about six kilos for you metric types.) I’m definitely going to stick with this for a while longer. And secondly… I have two job interviews lined up! One tomorrow, and one next week. Wish me luck!

Remember I told you about EyeTV yesterday? Well, I e-mailed the company asking if/when they were going to release an international version. They replied today saying, “We are working on bringing EyeTV to countries with the PAL broadcast television format. Watch http://www.elgato.com for announcements in this area later this year.” Of course, that doesn’t address the issue of whether they’ll make program guides available for every country (especially as they don’t charge any subscriptions and thus make no money off them). I hope they do, though, as otherwise it’s pretty useless.

Okay, folks, you’ve got one more day to throw out suggestions for our first book. It’s odd; we’ve had a lot of contemporary fiction listed, but not much older stuff. Huh. Anyway, check out what’s there and see if anything strikes your fancy. You can even read introductory chapters for most of them via their Amazon links. In a day or so I’ll put up a poll and we’ll have all weekend to pick one. Sound good?

I feel pretty bad looking at all the unsuccessful searches that led people to my site. All those disappointed people! I mean, I don’t know if Anna Kournikova is ovulating. Nor do I know a website hack for Weight Watchers. But I can answer one question: Where’s Russell Crowe’s farm located? It’s in Lowana, near Coffs Harbour in New South Wales. See? I’m all about helping you folks out whenever possible.

This completely blew my mind. Okay, pretend you’ve turned to the financial section of the newspaper and you’re looking at all the stock prices. Now imagine that we took the first digit of each number and fed them into a computer and counted how many times each digit (1-9) appeared. You’d expect there to be a pretty random yet equal distribution, right? Wrong. The digit “1” will appear 30% of the time, and each of the subsequent digits in decreasing percentages. “9” only occurs 5% of the time. This works for stock prices, baseball statistics, and just about any other random collection of data you can dig up. Isn’t that nuts? Apparently it also works on accounting books, which is how the IRS can tell if you’ve been fudging the numbers. Craziness. How do I know this? The Snook randomly brought it up in dinner conversation the other night and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. Here’s a page of more information about the phenomenon. Now see if you can sleep at night.

Cecil answers the age-old question: “Where does belly button lint come from?” Of course, this still doesn’t solve the mystery of how the Snook’s navel generates more lint than any other human being in history. (We’re talkin’ alien lint babies here, folks.)

I just found out that at least one person has received a copy of the Klez virus with my address in the “From:” field. Rest assured, I’m not infected. (I have a Mac, remember?) This particular virus just has the ability to fake its “From:” address based on the infected computer’s address book and web cache. This probably means that whoever has it is someone that’s visited my site or sent me an e-mail in the past. If you think it might be you, there are tools to disinfect yourself here. And if any of you others get mail from my address that you weren’t expecting, don’t open it. I’m a horrible pen pal and I hardly ever e-mail anyway. 🙂

More Mac news: EyeTV has been released! It’s basically Tivo for your Mac. It does everything Tivo does, PLUS it allows you to burn shows directly onto VCD (as long as you have Toast). Unfortunately they don’t offer international support right now. I’ve written to the company begging them to add it. Seriously, this is the software I’ve been waiting for.