This is my first post as a married man. So far it is most singularly excellent. I am still waiting for the bit where it feels like we’re married in any stereotypical sense. Eventually there will be a bumper Wedding round-up post with innumerable pictures and stuff, but that sounds like more work than I have time for tonight.

This morning, I pointed several workmates at Hunter S Thompson’s inimitable Song of the Sausage Creature, a work which I have blogged about before. I think I introduced it as the greatest ever expression of the peculiar madness which makes one a motorcyclist.

Walking home this evening, I marvelled at how cold it was, and how unspeakably pleasant it was to loaf along in my warmest jacket with the zip zipped up, my evil little device squirting undiluted genius into my ears. Some specific genius tonight: Escape Pod, Yoko Kanno, and Zeros and Ones from Year Zero. Very good.

As I walked, at one point I was struck by the overpowering smell of ganja in the street, and I fancied to myself a story of a great person whose final request was that they be cremated on a cold, still, night with Melbourne’s cold-air inversion well-and-truly in effect, along with a kilo of their best weed, so that all of Springvale might inhale them and feel peace and contentment.

Bye for now.

Specifically, I obsess about trivia, get angry (or frightened, or saddened, or depressed) about things so trivial as to barely exist at all, even fleetingly.

To remedy this, I have a number of strategies:

• Really angry/sad music. Pink Floyd at the peak of Roger Waters’ crushing control covers this really nicely (Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, The Final Cut). These songs talk about lives that are Worse Than Yours in a compelling way. If that fails, the right bit of Nine Inch Nails at sufficient volume can drive out any unwanted mood. I have yet to discover any state of mind that can remain intact through a full (loud) playing of The Downward Spiral. And the good part? These are someone else’s problems!
• Read the news. World news will always tell you about something bigger than you. Your problems are tiny, fleeting.
• To unwisely quote Fight Club: “Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!” Abandon your illusion of control. Closing your eyes and saying “I give up” or “I quit” can help.

Mostly though, I find that a good sense of proportion is exactly what it sounds like: considering all things in terms of scale. You are one person in twenty million Australians, a mere drop in the six-billion-odd humans infesting this tiny rock, in this undistinguished solar-system, orbiting a small unregarded yellow sun, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy…

Another way to see things is to consider the severity of Your Problems in the classic ‘things could be worse’ sense. If your a quantitative type, and you find these comparisons with national or global problems a bit meaningless, try this. The Holmes and Rahe Stress scale is something I’ve blathered about before (back when my egomaniacal rants lived in a mailing list, rather than on a blog) it helpfully categorized the severity of the stress in your life in absolute terms, then gives you a number which more -or-less tells you if you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.

It also illustrates nicely how small things can pile up…

Changing topic (and format) completely:

• Long time no post. Again. Sorry. Likely to happen again? Yes.
• Am now officially finished probation at new job. Huzzah!
• I am going to Linux Conf Au (which is not in Au…?!) next year. Are you?
• I have finally succumbed to Twitter. Behold my glorious sidebar!
• Tuesday next week I move on to the next logical step in my career: I go to work in a supermarket. (Coles Central, Melbourne Central)
• Moustache came and went. Raised some dollars. Glad it’s gone.

Babah now!

1. I have a new job! If you have seen neither hide nor … um … absence-of-hair of me in the city recently, that’s because I no longer work there. I’m still a sysadmin, but now I work for a certain Very Large Australian Supermarket Chain. This has a number of awesomenesses to offset the loss of decent coffee and plentiful company that the city provided: A five minute commute, Real work which is mostly not thrown away when complete or shortly beforehand, Innumerable systems which, while oppressive, mostly work and are (in some cases) actually documented! This is so different from my former employers as to have resulted in a fair degree of culture shock.
2. I have been variously sick… I always associated “bronchitis” with an extreme form of the-hacking-crud, but I have come to know it rather as the slight pervasive nagging illness that makes one lastingly tired and miserable and will not die.
3. …and broken. I recently attempted my first Big Motorbike Tour with my brother (Heffa) and two of his work colleagues (lets say SM and SJ). It was to be a week-long ride through some of the most beautiful parts of Victoria, pausing in such scenic places as Myrtleford and Raymond Island before joining the Barry Sheene Memorial ride from Bairnsdale to Phillip Island (it concludes with a lap of the Grand Prix circuit there). The last three days of this trip were to be spent at the 2009 Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix.
   It did not go badly, or even horribly badly.
   It went disastrously.
   Before we even began, we were forced to abandon our original route because, as we were told, the unseasonal depth and frequency of snow on mount Hotham meant the mountain was closed to motorcycles, period. We revised our route to go further east and less north, but less than an hour into the ride my elderly little bike suffered a snapped clutch cable. My noble brother, SM and SJ spent two hours seeking a replacement (the first of which failed after about 20 meters).
   That fixed, we were mostly OK for several hours, and had a rather fun ride through Healesville to Marysville. We dodged a bullet in Marysville by detouring for petrol (we had no excuse for imagining that there would be petrol for sale in Marysville this year). Around Reefton, however, it began to rain. A failure of planning contrived between me and my brother led to both of us getting soaking wet despite our rainproof gear, and I almost gave up in Warburton. Alas that I did not.
   By around 5pm, we had almost made it to the tiny town of Noojee when, in my soggy and confused state, I took a corner slightly too fast and rode into a patch of slippery leaf-mush, slid off my bike and bounced down the road a little way. Miraculously though, I was merely bruised, my riding gear and bike largely unharmed. After many enquiries of “are you sure you’re ok?”, we all remounted our bikes and rode on… for about ten more minutes.
   We were not yet outside of Noojee when the final blow was struck. SJ, spooked by my recent road-surfing attempt, was checking his mirrors at the precise moment that my brother (not far ahead of him) abruptly stopped to check the map.
   The result was a spectacular high-speed collision.
   My brother was unharmed, but SJ was not so fortunate, severely breaking his leg and largely destroying his bike.
   The rest of that wonderful week was spent recovering at home, feeling stiff, sore and systematically disheartened. SM and Heffa eventually went on to the GP, and I hear, had a whale of a time. SJ was eventually released from hospital.
   A restful recuperative sojourn  it was not.
4. A recent brush with RSI, perennial adversary of IT workers everywhere, plus my new employer’s all-too-efficient zeal for preventing ‘recreational’ computing among their employees have led to a whole new layer of dust on my home PC and most especially on this blog. I have sympathy for Pah, and am cautioned by his example: RSI is to be taken seriously.
5. For all my methodical obsessing about the latest and most innovative and forward-looking PDAs, I have finally sold out to The New Evil, and purchased an iFool. It has had its ups and downs, and I will write more about it in another post, eventually. Suffice for now to say that the availability of a WordPress app for it has not led to a revolutionary increase in my ver-blog-bosity, but it has led to a resurgence in my use of LikenessTome, and finally driven me to sign up with Blather.
6. Now that E has (we hope) finished being Examinatized (YAYZ!), our plans to be wed next year have become steadily more and more palpable. More on that later too.
7. [last-minute edit] I almost forgot: I have once again signed up for Movember, and will be sporting facially-mounted industrial abrasives again in the name of mens health, free burgers and vile humour. Please PLEASE PLEASE Sponsor Me!

That is all.

Two free games in particular have struck me recently with their sheer mind-blowing awesomeness, so much so that I am compelled to blog about them: Glum Buster and Music Catch.

Glum Buster

Justin ‘CosMind’ Leingang’s Glum Buster is random. I would not be the first to say so, if I said that the alien, unexplained sideways-scrolling nature of the beast strongly reminds me of the classic Another World. That said, this is nothing like Another World…

Glum Buster seems to revolve around the life on an anonymous little guy in what looks like a little yellow raincoat. One day this guy steps out his door and meets (spawns?) his evil doppelganger, who proceeds to suck him into a series of alternate/alien dimensions, where things are frickin’ strange!

The game is at pains to give you the minimum possible advice about how the controls work, and absolutely none about what they’re for. That part is a matter of exploration, changing anew with each little level. Occasionally, it seems as if a sequence of levels is progressing along some pattern, in terms of how each stage works, but then it will throw you again as it convolves in some previously unthinkable axis.

Beautiful and gentle, I can’t help thinking as I play that this game is what Hayao Miyazaki would have made if he were a hobbyist programmer, and not an animator.

Music Catch

Reflexive’s Music Catch 2 is a flash game with a non-free downloadable counterpart and, I gather, an iPhone port. It’s addictive, but without that arm-scratching, crack-addiction dementia that one tends to get from PopCap games.

It’s a concept alomst too simple to describe: wave your mouse pointer around. Collect as many as possible of the (numerous) blue things, and especially the yellow things, while avoiding the red things. Purple things provide a temporary ‘vacuum’ effect which only sucks up good stuff.

While complete, that description overlooks nearly everything that’s good or original about the game. In particular, it overlooks the feel, and it overlooks the music.

Music is central to the game: The things one collects or avoids are generated with a rate and distribution governed by the music. The downloadable game doesn’t have levels, it has tracks, and it will let you create your own new levels without limit… by selecting your own MP3s.

The resulting feel, with the thing-generating surface slowly revolving around the field of play, is hypnotic and serene, even when the music and the pace of the game are respectively driving and hectic.

Music Catch ably maximises the oldest heuristic for the quality of a game: It is very very easy to play, and very, very hard to master.

For example: Google Maps Real Estate.

In my youth, I spent great scads of time cycling or driving about the suburbs within a few kilometers of Monash University (Clayton) clutching a thick wad of liberally annotated rental lists which I had gathered by hand from the many faintly dodgy little real-estate agencies which cater to the student-housing market in that area.

Now, I am in Google Shock. Once again, I find that something I just accepted as a fact of life has been expertly hoovered up into the web.

The rammifications of this are only just beginning to dawn on me…

If you don’t like LoTR (or even recognise the acronym (SHAME!)) and/or you don’t roleplay, you may find this webcomic mildly (or less) amusing.

If you, like me, do these things compulsively, you will probably, like me, find that you’re in the freaking comic!

Seriously, I’m only part way through it, and it’s fantastic: I LOL helplessly at least once at nearly every strip. Not only is it chock-full of disturbingly true portrayals of roleplayers (and roleplaying games) being foolish, it also features some completely marvellous hand-picked frames from the Peter Jackson LoTR movies. Who knew that there were so many smug sh*t-eating sneers, smirks and leers to be had form the core characters in those movies? So much gurning too!

References to Star Wars, Monty Python, WoW, Lovecraft and even Nethack abound. It is gloriously nerdy. And the editorial comments! OMG!

I don’t usually post just to spruik a link, but this was simply too good to pass up.

• Serverpronto make no pretense at customer service. Don’t try to call them, and don’t expect the bills they charge to make any sense.
• Serverpronto’s policies and price mean their server farms tend to harbour trouble-makers. Some of these people don’t make good neighbours to share a LAN with.
• Serverpronto are based in Florida, which is how they make their bandwidth so cheap. I am based in Australia, conservatively some 200-odd milliseconds away.
• Finally, being in Florida, Serverpronto like their customers to pay in US dollars. Being Australian, I like to pay for things in Australian dollars. The relationship between our dollar and theirs hasn’t been so great lately, and I prefer my budget to be predictable.

So, as of last night, Trouble has moved to a new place: It is now a ‘virtual’ server sharing a big robust physical server with six other virtual servers. The physical server is managed for me by Labyrinth, a Western Australian company who have, so far, displayed completely brilliant levels of customer service.

Along with the move, I have upgraded a bunch of things, and cleaned up a lot of semi-working crap. You’ll notice for example that the gallery is gone. If you have a Trouble account, you will also notice that the available range of admin tools (click “admin” on the main page) has been expanded somewhat.

As always, if anything here is busted, please let me know.

p.s. Yes, I know about that annoying stray grey button in the side-bar. I’m working on it.

• Back in Melbourne.
• Building a New Trouble, in Australia, very slowly.
• Stressing more than is necessary about everything.
• Following Pah’s rather nifty Slow Review of Watchmen (the comic). I would dearly like to respond to every part of it, but time and anxiety continue to conspire to render me dumb.
• Presently waiting for a busted UDF DVD image to copy itself to disk on a clunky old server because it refuses to mount from the disc (if this means nothing to you, I envy you).

Thorne is not:

• Going home early, or even on time tonight, again, despite coming in early with that express intent.
• Sleeping enough.
• Making measurable headway on personal projects like making stuff or losing wieght or getting out of debt.
• Posting on this blog much. Sorry folks! I’ll be back here one day.

*sigh*

I just made that up then, sadly. But think about it, seriously, can you imagine? If anyone could provide gaslight, tentacles and madness, surely it would be these two…