Mid hols report.

It's somewhat sureal to be surfing 5 hrs a day whilst the kids splash in the shallows whilst dad is back home slowly dying in his bed. The chemo knocks him out for most of the day so there is no point trying to spend time with him. His marrow is 80% cancer so there is no production of new red blood cells so he has no energy to get around.
There is hope... perhaps the new 6 thousand dollars a week drugs will help... who can say. The die have been rolled this one last time. If not he can't have more than a few weeks left.
Son has recovered brilliantly from his op and is having an awsome time down here. No photos yet as I'm on a dial up connection.

Me. The 20kg I've lost through the hundres of weights sesions I've packed into the last two years have not quite been enough to get me shreeding on the short board so I took my wallet into the surf shop and committed fassion suicide by buying a minny-mal... that is a longer more boyant board. Being nearly 40 it's about time to put the short bord away. I shoyuld have done it years ago. I've caught some amazing rides. It's 7 foot 7 inches and with my strenght I can push it around like a short board cracking turns off the lip and reentering over a closeout. Great fun.

We are leaving mum and dad's house tomorrow and heading up the coast a few klicks to the house at Rosedale. I'll take plenty of photos for you.

Stay well

On hols

Back later

Good and Bad

Good:
3 year old is doing well today after his surgery having had his ears done and his tonsils and adenoids out. Having the back of your nose cut up and bits of your throat cut out is a big deal when you're three.

Bad:
Dad's not doing so well. It responded to chemo for a while but looks to have taken an aggressive turn over the last few weeks. Transfusions, drugs, therapy: not your normal Christmas cocktail.

I lol'd

What's the last thing that made you really laugh out loud.?

More fun to destroy than to create.

A few weeks ago Diego helped me remove the sauna.
It's hammer time....

Lawn

Not sure I'm cut out for it.

I now have a lawn or rather two lawns - one out the front and one out the back.
I must have missed the 'how to maintain a lawn' classes when I went to man school because I don't seem to be able to get it to grow soft, vigorously - green yet bindi free. I suspect I'm mowing too short - not sure about that but the bindis are enthusiastically in favor of whatever I'm doing.

Apparently the lawn is buffalo but I reseeded the bare patches with tall fescue. The buffalo safe weed killer is also bindi safe but evidence suggests that it's fescue unfriendly.

I need to mow at least fortnightly as the bark and leaves from the three enormous gun trees are sufficient to fill two large dumpsters once mulched!

Quote of the day

"See, the problem was [long pause] that everything I tried on - fitted so well !!"
- so that't why she spent over a grand on dresses.

Everybody needs a friend.

I used mine to hold up a tarp and keep the sun off our backs at a kids party.
Didn't want some of the cold blooded guests from getting to warm and frisky:


---------
Update: I've had several emails about the first pic - It's a bit of rock climbing hardware called a 'friend' or a cam that you use to help stop yourself hitting the ground when you fall. It's an indictment of what has become of my life that my friends are now used to hold up a tarp rather than out on a wild crag some place.

Fantasy

In D&D I usually play an elf.
Now I know why

Camping - Indian / Diamond Head

100 km of sand to ourselves (nearly)

read the last line of a file in PHP

If your not a gh33k just move along.
move along, this is not the post you are looking for.

Had a hard to track down bug today where some code that was supposed to return the last line of a log file failed - the logs had recently been rotated and the new file had no lines in it yet. I modified it to create a pointer to the beginning of the file and break out of the infinite loop if the pointer cursor ever gets back to the beginning of the file. With a few minor changes it will work in C C++ C# or Java as they all have something similar to fseek, ftell fclose etc

/**
*
* Reads the last line of a, presumably large, logfile 
* without loading the whole file into memory
* Safe to use for 0 or 1 line files
* 
*
* @param string
* @return string 
*
*/
function readlastline($fileName)
{
  
       $fp = @fopen($fileName, "r");
       $begining = fseek($fp, 0);      
       $pos = -1;
       $t = " ";
       while ($t != "\n") {
             fseek($fp, $pos, SEEK_END);
             if(ftell($fp) == $begining){
              break;
             }
             $t = fgetc($fp);
             $pos = $pos - 1;
       }
       $t = fgets($fp);
       fclose($fp);
       return $t;
}  

Rock Climbing

My mad french friend has returned from Europe so last night we met up again for a climb.
Today my fingers feel like an arthritic old mans.
It always amazes me how tenuously small the little features on a rock wall can be yet we are still able to get purchase and climb steep and run out cliff faces, in climbing parlance steep = overhung, top photo. I'm going to try and get some of the slide film I took in Thailand 20 years ago scanned digitally. Hopefully the picks will be as good to laugh at at these of my skinny arsed youth. In the case of the last three photos here you can see my skinny arse in all its out of focus harness warped glory as the picks were taken when I climbed the last pitch of the three sisters naked.

Political interest.

I used to date one of these people, unfortunately she did not look like Patricia Patersen, Hajnal Ban or "Kate Ellis".

Who do you think and who would you date?

Guess Her Muff hits 1000 posts

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Are thoes the latest edition D&D rule books?

Ethics-based Complement to Scripture - WTF????

An email crossed my path today regarding a petition to "pilot a course in ethics to serve as a complement to scripture in NSW primary schools."

I would like to draw your attention to an important petition regarding
teaching ethics in schools as another option available for scripture
class time. It promises to more productively utilise scripture class
time for non-scripture students and provide an alternative for those
seeking a non-denominational basis for ethics education. It is an
initiative of the NSW Federation of P and C Associations and the St
James Ethics Centre. The website below ... blah blah blah blah blah

.


The website in question gos on to say that "all children have the right to ethical exploration, regardless of whether it’s tied to a particular religious tradition."


WTF ?

"another option" !!! when was scripture based ethics ever an option? I take energetic difference to the position that religious scripture of any denomination has any relevance to ethics or is in any way suitable to be given airtime in a classroom as anything other than, assuming, as we are in NSW the frame of reference is the Judeo-Christian tradition - the myths and stories of an iron age Canaanite culture.

Furthermore I posit that anybody who has had long term serious exposure to christian teaching should be required to undertake secular ethics training before they take any position of authority or public office.

I would like for them, and my kids, to know that unlike the teaching in the bible, it is not OK to burn your daughter alive because you have made a promise to god (Judges 11:29-40).

It is not OK to Burn pagans, priests or otherwise (2 Kings 23:20-25 NLT), nor is it OK to burn entire pagan villages (Deuteronomy 13:13-19 NLT).

It is not OK to send your army to kill everybody in a town (except the virgins of course) and then, for want of more virgins, lay an ambush beside the road to kidnap and rape some more (Judges 21:10-24 NLT).

In the bible, it is not just OK to rape a woman, but she has to marry her rapist, (Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NLT) unless you gag and rape her in a city, in which case you have to stone her (Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB).

Rape the captives (Deuteronomy 21:10-14 NAB), yes, share them around (Judges 5:30 NAB).

The bible teaches that it is required to be intolerant, to kill witches (Exodus 22:17 NAB), gays (Leviticus 20:13 NAB, Romans 1:24-32 NLT), fortune tellers (Leviticus 20:27 NAB) fornicators (Leviticus 21:9 NAB), anyone who follows another religion (Exodus 22:19 NAB ,2 Chronicles 15:12-13 NAB, Deuteronomy 17:2-5 NLT), hell - kill the whole town, all it's animals and torch all the buildings if just one unbeliever is found (Deuteronomy 13:13-19 NLT)

I want to sign a different petition.

Paleontologist strokes his bone and changes worlds history

(image pinched from here)

Alternate title: 2 wings good, 4 wings bad.

Flipping through Septembers edition of the journal Nature - vol 461 (7264): 640–643, if you must know - I flipped straight to the paper about a fossil dinosaur that has been found with 4 wings.

A few years back a paleontologist was fondling a fossil arm bone from a small raptor like dinosaur when he noticed bumps arranged in a particular pattern and separation that suggested they were the remnants of the attachment points for feathers. Specifically flight feathers. His find led to alot of further scrutiny of existing collections and we very quickly learnt a great deal more about the origin of birds and feathers. We now know that they adorned the hides of most raptors (think small front legs, long running hind limbs and big teeth - like a t-rex).

Well preserved feathers have been identified on Gigantoraptor, a 1.5 tone 70 myo ostrich like behemoth and a Microraptor, Microraptor gui which had feathers on both it's arms and legs. But a new find in China earlier this year has clarified some of the early stages in wing development. It seams that 4 wings was the norm for these early gliders and that, to nobodies surprise, birds are derived from Troodontidae.

Not found on good shit.

This hurt my work creditcard

I'm trying to get the desktop support officer to name them all after diseases.
Can you imagine: someone trying to connect via wireless to a fellow in a room full of people -"who's got syphilis? - I'm trying to get onto syphilis".

Red Fog

Sydney is carpeted in an amber fog this morning. We've had 100k+ winds overnight. It is all very wierd.

It smells like dust

-- update --
Everything is covered in a fine talk like dust, I'm breathing Dubbo.
Here is the view from outside my office - the sun is blue - obviously the red light is being scattered.


-- update --



ppl are bust with their cameras today: http://www.flickr.com/groups/redsydneyproject/


The end is neigh

Time to get your Gh33k on

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Have a read..

.. of this

Any knowledge of you burns in the pit of my stomach. It’s not the liquor. You are my ulcer. I want nothing to do with you. I want you erased from the present. I want to pretend you are dead.

Theodora

Theodora was the wife of the 6th century emperor Justinian. A hooker and a looker who always got her man or as a contemporary detractor put it "On the field of pleasure she was never defeated". She'd take on 10 or so gentlemen in an evening and then 30 or more of their servants.. She publicly appeared naked and is reported to have mounted a couch when her guest was slow in coming forward and famously bemoaned that three orifices were not enough - "though she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid, she lamented that nature had not similarly unlocked the straits of her bosom, that she might there have contrived a further welcome to his emissaries." Not only did she have a great act appearing as Leda (complete with swan) but she became the most powerful women in the world, EVAH.

Back

Hope you had as relaxing a week as I did.

.. but I doubt it.

Holiday

Fiji

back in a week

memes, memes, memes,

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What's in the jar?

click

The Gall Boys

The Gall Boys are a family of 5? brothers from Queensland that build caravans for a living. They practiced what they preached and dragged their vans around remote corners of Australia and made some home movies of their antics to sell the vans. The Videos - now DVDs - have become an institution in themselves. I've just been checking out the latest from their youtube. Especially this one (watch it in HQ). Featuring the truck I'm currently lusting after - a bushed up 76.
I did a lot of traveling when I was working as a Geo and I can't wait to get back out there. The kids are getting old enough to camp now. Next big purchase: camper.

See you out there

Summer is coming

I can smell it

How do I tell you what that means to us Aussies??

How do I tell you how it feels to dive under a wave?

How do I tell you how it feels to hold a 4yo's hand, teaching them to avoid bluebottles as they jump through the waves at the edge of this sacred coast.

Xavier knows it.

Evolution

We always want what we don't/can't have

Guess who was driving like a moron

Just enjoying the sunset. When this lass showed up. There always has to be one.