Прекрасное Далеко....

The floor debacle, alas, drags on. And I had a slow work week last week, so I actually made some phone calls and sent out some resumes. And now I have 2 days off for the rest of March, and promises of a solid April. So I think dinner club will be postponed.

But I do now have a clean oven!

So I know I'm trying to get rid of stuff, and especially trying not to accumulate more stuff before we can actually unpack the stuff we have. But one thing I'd like is a guitar. This time, I think I'd like a steelstring, So if anyone has one lying around, do please let me know. Because when I grow up, I want to be Eugene Hutz. Actually, I still want to be Lemmy, so if anyone has a bass and amp they want to get rid of, that would also be nifty.

I think I'm sensing a theme here, though.... Got the mo'. Just need the axe.

But now I'm nearly ready to do it, and the hardware changes so fast.

I'm building a mythbox to capture the few TV shows we actually bother watching. What HD TV Capture cards work well with linux these days?

I'm not placing blame here. I'm not sure where it lies. But here's the thing:

Pricing "I Shall Wear Midnight" by Terry Pratchett, in hardcover.

Local bookstores: AU$50-55. Fifty *dollars*, when the Australian dollar is roughly at parity with the US, no less.

Amazon, normal shipping (call it 3 weeks): AU$22.39
Amazon, expedited shipping (2 weeks): AU$28.70
Amazon, priority international courier (4 days): AU$43.42

I can have it individually express shipped, to arrive at my house in 72 hours, for less than the local price.

For 2 books? Let's add Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks, even though I own it already (thanks Neef!)

Local bookstores: I haven't looked. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and call it $45 for the hardback (haha. I think not, but what the hell). So for both books, AU$95.

Amazon, normal: AU$45
Amazon, expedited: AU$53
Amazon, priority: AU$69.86

$35 *per book*, express shipped to my door. Instead of $45 per book for the trade-off of having it now, but having to go and get it.

Paperbacks get a little closer to parity for a single shipped book (AU$25 will buy you a local paperback or an expedited shipped one), but I suspect the per-book cost on large orders drops pretty sharply.

So, dear Australians. Do you still buy books from local booksellers? If so, is that because you're eating the extra cost to keep an independent alive?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/android-gingerbread-to-support-near-field-communication-including-tap-and-pay/

Plus

http://tyggerjai.dreamwidth.org/14646.html
(scroll down to part 2, "Stupid People)

Equals:

http://xkcd.com/827/

Next time, make me implement and sell it, ok?

So, remember that little conversation about "giving up", in the context of getting to Berlin, registering as a resident, having an EU passport and the right to work ... and then deciding to come back to Melbourne?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/forecast/50

Suck it up, sweetheart. Wednesday's forecast *high*: -9 degrees.

Still, you'll have a nice white Christmas.

So I'm playing this TLE game. And one of the things is sifting ore to find glyphs. And you can level up in sifting. Your base chance is 1% per 10K units of ore. That increases at 1% per level. Intuitively, it seems to me, that if I level to 10, I then have a 10% chance per run. If I make ten runs, I have a 100% chance of finding at least one glyph.

But someone has suggested that actually it's 81%, and waved something called Binomial Probability at me. So rather than looking it up, I'm asking the interwebs!

No, I did look it up briefly, but is this true? That actually there's some factorial thing going on here where my chances are reduced on each run?

And where do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come into this? Aren't they dead!?

So I'm back on the coding bandwagon, fairly hard - TLE is eating all my spare time, and mostly writing bots, rather than actually playing. I have been wrestling with perl utf-8 and Cyrillic names, and pounding my head against the desk, and, y'know, loving it.

And now, what I really want is to have a little webpage to extend the UI a bit. It's a browser game anyway, but the default UI is very focussed on micro-management. Sometimes I want an overview without moving in the client.

Aaaanyway. Ajax, of course, is my friend here. And, y'know, Jquery. And Json.

And apparently, at the end of that path, lies Javascript. *sigh*

Never thought I'd see the day.

Anyone know where to get a couple of these paper-bonded-with-fabric things for printing on in Melbourne?

Craft shops, they reckon. Maybe I'll look in Berlin before we go too.

Currently sucking my time away, because WoW is just too painful on a laptop with no mouse, is The Lacuna Expanse. If you liked K240 , give it a try.

[ETA: It's basically "open Beta" at the moment, but get in on the ground floor and start making feature requests :)]