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

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Monday, November 9th, 2009
9:33 pm	Tear down the wall! Weird the discussions being sparked about the fall of the Berlin wall. I mentioned that it was the (metaphorical) fall and was asked why, didn't it come down? Well, no, not even with enthusiastic use of crowbars. It was still in place 4 months later when I visited East and West Berlin. Went through Checkpoint Charlie, the whole rigmarole. Everyone was a lot friendlier at that point by all accounts - my travelling companion spoke German and chatted to all sorts of people from little old ladies to students to policemen to passersby (the last one was when we were lost and trying to get back to Checkpoint Charlie to get out again before it closed). In some respects I find it hard to believe that something so solid just isn't there at all any more. Then there's the "yeah the wall came down.. but who cares" train of thought. Which is generally from people who can't remember it to be honest. Everyone I share an office with in fact. Not to make me feel old or anything. Such a huge change across Middle Europe. Across the world in fact, as the Eastern Bloc fell away and old certainties vanished. Wars started. Governments fell. New countries emerged blinking into daylight again. And all because the Soviet Union made it clear it wouldn't invade if the Eastern Bloc moved away from communism. Amazing. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
5:39 pm	Yay! Finished! Handed in! Managed to get my references down to one page by a combination of deleting and Times New Roman pt 10! Think I'm still 300 or so words over! Hoping the lecturer can't count! Down from 1800 words over - again, judicious use of tables. I love tables, they're so helpful. And now all I have to do is enrol in subjects for next semester and hope I've passed. Yay! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
12:36 pm	heh My proposed study budget is now $6.4 million, not including the cost of the drugs. I think I may have wildly over-budgeted. Having patients spread across three states possibly didn't help. Edit: I decided I had too many staff and cut the most expensive ones by two thirds. Down to $5.57 million. Heh. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
1:28 pm	Babylon 5 I did live through the 1990s. Somehow I managed to do it while only seeing 2 episodes total (one of which was the pilot) of Babylon 5. While being heavily involved in a science fiction club. A media science fiction club. Yeah I don't know how either. ( Read more ) (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
9:56 am	totally culturally irrelevant and a day late but whatever. My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul hnpcc goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as bushranger. 17catherines tricks you! You get a block of wood. ang_grrr gives you 17 light blue tropical-flavoured gummy worms. barrington gives you 5 tan coconut-flavoured gummy bats. brisingamen tricks you! You lose 9 pieces of candy! bugshaw gives you 1 orange blueberry-flavoured pieces of bubblegum. dalmeny tricks you! You get a block of wood. davesangel gives you 17 dark blue blueberry-flavoured jawbreakers. dhd1 gives you 11 milky white spearmint-flavoured wafers. dmw gives you 19 red-orange root beer-flavoured gummy bats. hawkida gives you 10 softly glowing licorice-flavoured nuggets. hnpcc ends up with 71 pieces of candy, a block of wood, and a block of wood. Go trick-or-treating! Username: Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
3:39 pm	Linky things What the Timor Sea oil spill would look like if it were off the Queensland coast. It amazes me how little publicity this spill has gotten, it's freaking enormous. Alcohol worse than Ecstasy said UK Drugs Tsar. OK, first off the UK has a Drugs Tsar?!? Isn't that illegal? Second off, slightly more seriously - I'm not not sure ranking drugs in this way is that helpful, although I certainly think highlighting that alcohol is (a) a drug and (b) harmful in excess (and the knock on effects aren't great either). Third off - less seriously again - now I want to know whether LSD, cannabis and ecstasy are confounders for all diseases, or whether that's just smoking. ;-) Also, what exactly is his definition of 'harm'? Just curious now. Republican National Committee fan apparently doesn't understand how the internet works. Like, everyone can see you. This is a level of hate that really leaves me grasping for words. I hadn't actually heard of the miscegenation laws until a couple of years ago when I read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It shocked me then that they were still in place in the time period the book was set in (1956), let alone as late as they actually were (1967 in the US; 1984 in South Africa). It shocked me that they existed at all, actually. But not as much as the doctored picture a 'fan' put up on the RNC facebook page. That's a level of hate and fear that I really just don't get. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, October 26th, 2009
9:59 am	An assignment-free weekend. I took the weekend off, much to Dean's relief. Saturday we got up early (well, earlyish) and headed into the Last Days of Pompeii exhibition, which finished on Sunday. We'd actually tried to go two Sundays ago, but the queue at 10am (when the museum opened) was out the door, and the earliest time we could get in was 1.30pm. Which wasn't going to work because I had an early soccer game, so we had brunch on Lygon St and went home instead. ( Read more ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
9:41 am	Exclusively breastfed baby denied health insurance in US. Apparently the four month old is "obese". By the numbers, Alex is in the 99th percentile for height and weight for babies his age. Insurers don't take babies above the 95th percentile, no matter how healthy they are otherwise. At birth, Alex weighed a normal 8 1/4 pounds. On a diet of strictly breast milk, his weight has more than doubled. He weighs about 17 pounds and is about 25 inches long. "I'm not going to withhold food to get him down below that number of 95," Kelli Lange said. "I'm not going to have him screaming because he's hungry." The Langes, both slender, don't know where Alex's propensity for pounds came from. Their other child is thin. No one in their families has a weight problem. The Langes are counting on the fact that Alex will start shedding pounds when he starts crawling. He is already a kinetic bundle of arm- and leg-waving energy in a baby suit sized for a 9-month-old. They joked that when he is ready for solid food, they will start him on Slim-Fast. You know, there are things that make you seriously wonder. And that? Is one of them. Also, that last quoted sentence is unbelievably sad. Of course as Hoyden about Town points out: They don’t say on which charts: most American physicians are still using old charts based on formula fed babies, not the WHO charts which are based on physiologically normal growth in optimally fed infants. Breastfed babies on average grow faster in the first six months, and slower in the second sixth months, than formula fed babies. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
2:16 pm	More on Roman Polanski Article from Salon - Reminder: Roman Polanski raped a child. The other thing that occurred to me wonder last night was whether there would be this level of outcry about his arrest in Switzerland if the child had been male. Just, you know, curious. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
11:28 am	Big Brother This article ("Police Home In On Child Porn") left me a bit disturbed. Mostly for this sentence: The method gives police the capacity to identify the contents and images on computers without applying for court-approved search warrants and without raiding suspects. The way they're doing this is by tagging known images, and then following the tags to see where they lead. I guess the question I want answered is - what's to stop them doing this with things that aren't child pornography? Like, for example, music files? Or petitions against the government? Or exposes of corruption? As far as I can see, the answer is "nothing". You can add these tags to just about anything electronic. You don't need a court order. You don't need a search warrant. The other question I'd like answered is how likely it is some of these arrests are going to hold up in court without a court order. Just curious. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
11:12 am	post-apocalyptic daze Yesterday seemed to end up being quite post-apocalyptic. Part of this was because Amanda-from-training lent me episodes of The Colony, which is an experimental reality show (as distinct from a game reality show e.g. Survivor) in which ten volunteers are in 'post-apocalyptic' (viral outbreak) Los Angeles and trying to survive. It's been set up reasonably well - they started off sleep-depriving them and then making them walk 8 miles to where they were going to be living, a factory space near the Los Angeles river. They have 'marauders' who come and try and break in and steal their stuff, and it's interesting to watch how quickly they fall into that particular reality mindset. Which is why it's a good thing the producers didn't actually give them firearms, because even though the audience knows the marauders aren't allowed to actually harm the volunteers, the volunteers certainly don't know that and were getting into attack mode with lengths of pipe by episode two. We're still not sure that letting one of them keep his pocket knife was a good idea - the personality conflicts are just starting in, and it'll be interesting to see how it goes. Then again, a metal pipe also isn't exactly not going to harm anyone if used in anger either. What interested me initially was the ethics of doing this - I would be fascinated to see the ethics approval documents, if they had them, and also the disclaimers signed by the participants. The program does mention that the volunteers had off-screen psychological counselling, and please don't do this at home. (After watching them make wood gas in episode two, I think the please don't do this at home warnings should be underlined.) I'd be interested to know how much background noise they'd have as well - it seems like it would be very difficult to set up something like this and not have noise, not least because the river appears to be slap bang in the middle of LA. You'd have to think it'd be hard to stay in the mindset if you could hear aeroplanes, for example. Or doof-doof. That would take me right out immediately. The second post-apocalyptic thing was me reading one of Dean's trashy novels, '48, by James Herbert. It's a combination alternate history/horror/semi-zombie novel, in which the Nazis, upon realising they were about to lose, have bombed the UK with a particularly nasty germ warfare-type weapon and killed off about 80% of the population of Europe and presumably the world as well, given that germ weapons don't tend to stay put. Of the remaining 20%, 3% are immune and the rest are dying, but more slowly than the original 80% who pretty much dropped dead immediately. The novel read more like an screenplay adaptation to be honest, with lots of extreme action and blood followed by the more mellow, not particularly well written interim scenes. The hero is an American pilot, the bad guys are fascists and it's all kind of odd and very, very bloody. (Admittedly the corpses everywhere don't help.) The reason for immunity made me laugh though - seriously, if 3% (book's calculation) of the population is immune, that would give 240,000 immune people left in London alone. OK, there'd still be a lot of corpses littering the streets but the odds of people lasting 3 years without seeing another living soul are pretty minimal you'd think. Especially when you consider the not-yet-dead semi-zombies (another roughly 1.36 million) running around. Even allowing for deaths by violence and/or disease, I'd expect there to be enough people after 3 years to have found each other and started up new societies (like the Colony, only with a wider age distribution, children and less noise. And probably more experience with living under really trying conditions and growing their own food and the like.) Weird. But no, for large tracts of the book we appear to have a maximum of 20-50 people running around in the corpse-ridden tourist centres of London. Seriously. (What made me laugh was looking up the actual frequency distribution of the cause of the immunity and discovering that it's actually only 1% in the UK. Which would still leave 80,000 people immune in 1944 London, and 1.52 million dying half-zombies. Shit people, it's basic maths here! Even if the majority fled the city, you'd still expect to be tripping over quite a number who'd stayed put. Sheesh.) The other thing that amused me was the usual class prejudices - what I commonly think of as the Titanic prejudices, as they were illustrated quite nicely in that film - where toffs are teh evol and the working class are invariably salt of the earth and completely open and tolerant of all races, creeds and colours. Because working class people in pre-war London would never have been anti-Semitic or pro-fascist. *sigh* Character depth, people. (Yeah I know. In a trashy alternate history/post-apocalyptic/zombie novel. What was I thinking.) Still, the book did have some good motorcycle chases and a couple of twists I wasn't expecting. And it filled in the train rides in and out of the city quite nicely. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
9:50 am	Driving home from work last night and suddenly something in the car went 'clunk' and we lost all power. Fortunately we were able to change lanes and drift to a stop by the side of the road. I tried turning over the engine. Nothing. We rang the RACV. 30-50 minute wait. A brief argument while Dean tried to tell me what to tell the RACV call centre person while I was simultaneously listening to and answering the RACV person's questions on the mobile. I realised I was hungry. Probably not least because we had drifted to our stop just up from two Chinese and one Thai restaurants (bizarre little shopping strip that) and I could smell the food. Dean stayed with the car while I went up and got some curry puffs from the Thai restaurant. By the time I got back Dean had put the hood up and decided he was now hungry. So he headed off to get dim sims from one of the Chinese restaurants while I settled in to eat. The RACV man arrived. Had a quick look, tried turning over the engine and told me that one of the belts had snapped (I'm hopeless, forgotten which one it is. Dean tells me it's the timing belt aka cam belt. OK). We weren't going anywhere. He organised a tow truck for us ("might be a wait - I'll put you in as a high risk location because you're so close to the corner") and headed off to his next call. It was a busy night for him, not least because it had been raining so heavily, and there were accidents, floods and the usual stupid stuff happening all over the place. A fire truck parked in front of us and headed in to get their takeaway. Dean rang his brother to come and get me, as it seemed unlikely that the tow truck would be able to take both of us. He rocked up about 20 minutes later, (the firies were just coming out again) and dropped me home, for which I was very grateful. The pouring rain had stopped, but the temperature had dropped and was continuing to do so. About an hour after I got home I heard the beeps as the tow truck turned up with my poor little car and Dean. I checked our service records in the interim - the cam belt was due to be replaced at the next service, dammit!!! So now we are kind of stuck. We're waiting for a mobile repair service to come and hopefully fix the cam belt, which would have to work out cheaper than towing it to a garage, and certainly cheaper than towing it to our normal garage. On the other hand - this is basically why I have RACV membership. That's twice this week (the other was a flat tyre - yes, I can change a tyre, but am uncomfortable doing it when the car's parked on a steep slope. Or by the side of the Hume Freeway, but that's a different story) that we've called them. Twice more than last year. It's like the ambulance membership - you have it because you really hope you'll never have to use it, but it's better to have it handy if you do suddenly need it. Edit: mobile repair guy here. Good, maybe I will make it to pick up my glasses today. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
5:10 pm	Yesterday was mostly a beautiful, semi-cloudy but mostly sunny day. I was playing netball at 9pm. At 7pm I checked BOM. There was a very large blue mass looming in the north-west corner. At 8pm it started raining. At 8.20pm I left for netball. Still raining. At 8.40pm I had made it to netball. The BOM site was open on one of the computers. The large blue mass (with yellow and red bits) was centred over Melbourne. That made sense, because it was raining. Lots. At 8.45pm the player with the healing hip abductor injury texted to say there was no way she was playing in the rain, because she really didn't want to re-injure herself. I couldn't really blame her. At 8.47 I asked if the game was going ahead. "Oh yeah, no problems." At 8.53pm the first of the rest of my team arrived. Which was comforting, because I was starting to think it was just me. It was still raining. At 8.58pm we had 5 people, so could take the court. Still pelting down. At 9pm we started the game. In the rain. 9.05pm our missing 6th player arrived, and hovered by the side of the court waiting for someone to score a goal so she could come on. Oh and wrapping her head in a scarf to try and protect her hair extensions from the rain. 9.10pm the quarter ended with a score of 0-0. At least our player could take the court! Still raining. 9.20pm we got to half time. The score was 4-0, not our way. I have played soccer games with higher scores than this. 9.21pm they decided to abandon the game because "it was too wet". I'm not sure what pissed me off more - that I could look at the computer at 7.30pm and know we were going to be washed out but apparently the organisers couldn't, that they decided to go ahead with the game and let us get all wet (not as badly as Thursday, granted) even though blind Freddie could see that it was... wet or that my sneakers had only dried out the day before from Thursday's effort. To be honest I don't necessarily mind playing in the rain, when it's fairly light. But this was reasonably heavy, and realistically it was stupid to go ahead. Meh. The scorelines were amusing at least - the first half was characterised by the ball sliding rapidly out of everyone's hands and out of the court. Because surprisingly enough it's actually quite difficult to catch a completely saturated, and very slippery ball when you're sloshing around the court (more so if you wear glasses and can't see a damn thing because they're covered in water.) It's also bloody annoying to come home at 9.45pm soaking wet, just incidentally. At least at 6pm I had time to have a shower, wash my hair, get dry etc. Last night I was just running around trying to get everything ready for the morning and get warm again. Still the (in)consistent umpiring continues as normal. Seriously, the day I work out what the hell they're basing 'replayed ball' calls on will be the day Hell freezes over. Or the competition learns to read BOM properly. In the interim we'll just have to keep on guessing. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
10:19 am	Today's writer's block If a magic genie told you your calories wouldn't count for 24 hours, would it change what and how much you ate that day? You're kidding me here, right?! I'd probably eat half a cake. Shop. OK, more seriously - yeah I'd probably pig out on all the stuff I avoid usually. And then feel really, really guilty for weeks. Just because a genie told you stuff doesn't make it true... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 18th, 2009
10:29 pm	Glee I have had this on the brain all day. And I really, really like this show. OK, partly for the Journey song, but also for this happy, joyful and very bouncy version of "Rehab". Seriously, those kids need rehab. Heh. Cute happy series. Definitely keeping on watching. :-) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
4:00 pm	dozy I am not concentrating well at the moment. The main reason for this is the phone going off at 1.30am last night. Both of us woke, Dean got up to answer it (he's closer). The conversation from our end went: "Hello?" ... "Who is this?" ... "Do you know what time it is?" ... "Yes, 1.30 IN THE MORNING." *phone slam* Apparently international call centres can't work out time zones. *sigh* On the positive side, it wasn't Dean's father having a heart attack again. Or anything else of that nature. Of course this random phone call came after Tuesday night's smoke alarm running out of batteries and scaring the life out of us at 3am. Really, the last thing you want is to be woken by the smoke alarm going off... unless there's an actual fire, in which case that would be the first thing you want. It has new batteries now. Damn ones didn't even make it to daylight savings, which is when they're supposed to be changed! (Comment on this)
3:37 pm	So I can find it again: Article about Ayn Rand and her effect on American conservatism. I'd actually never heard of her until recently (and only just found out she was a she.) Anyway, one of the bits I wanted to keep: The sum total of these taxes levies a slightly higher rate on the rich. The bottom 99 percent of taxpayers pay 29.4 percent of their income in local, state, and federal taxes. The top 1 percent pay an average total tax rate of 30.9 percent--slightly higher, but hardly the sort of punishment that ought to prompt thoughts of withdrawing from society to create a secret realm of capitalistic übermenschen. These numbers tend to bounce back and forth, depending upon which party controls the government at any given time. If Obama succeeds in enacting his tax policies, the tax burden on the rich will bump up slightly, just as it bumped down under George W. Bush. I've been wondering what the total federal, state, local taxes add up to for the average American. Thank you helpful reviewer! (And holy crap I pay more than the top 1% of Americans in terms of cents in the dollar. On the other hand, I have health care. *shrug*) In a similar vein: Most US doctors support some form of public option. As the article points out, what the definition of 'public option' is is currently undefined, but either way, only 27% support private options only. Mind you, if getting beaten up by your domestic partner can be described as a "pre-existing condition" and you can be denied insurance over it in some US states, I'm amazed that anyone supports the current system. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
8:46 am	Last night we played netball. In the rain. The teeming rain (wasn't quite pouring.) ( Rain is really wet. ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
9:13 am	Operation Find Don. Eight years ago Sarah D. Bunting met a guy named Don as they were both sheltering from the WTC collapse. She knew him for an hour, and would like to reconnect. I know no one in NY, or NJ, but hey if you think you know Don - Sarah would like to buy him a beer, and probably at least know he got home OK. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
4:13 pm	So Kyle Sandiland's has been suspended again. This time it's because he managed to suggest that Magda Szubanski could lose more weight if she were in a concentration camp. Sandilands joked on Tuesday that Szubanski's work with the weight-loss campaign was not finished. "Magda could have another run out of it," he said on 2Day FM. "She could get another season out of them, easy ... she's not skinny." Jackie O suggested Szubanski might not be able to lose any more weight due to her build. "That's what all fat people say," Sandilands replied. "You put her in a concentration camp and you watch the weight fall, like she could be skinny." He apologised late Tuesday, using the 'it was only a joke' defence. She replied: "I couldn't give two hoots about what Kyle says about me, but to trivialise what happened to people in concentration camps is abhorrent," she said in a statement. And yeah, that kind of is the point. God he's an insensitive dickhead. Which we all knew. *sigh* I can only hope the suspension sticks this time. Then again, as long as he's bringing in free publicity who am I kidding? Disclaimer: I've had my own issues with the way Szubanski's weight loss has been reported. I think it's great that she's lost 36kg - but there's no way in hell she's size 14, at least not in any brand that I've found. I'd prefer they focused on how she lost weight and how much she's lost, not what dress size she allegedly is. Or at least reveal which brand has a size 14 which will fit me. (3 Comments |Comment on this)