If I keep unwinding long enough, one day I'll be straight, I said.

 
I haven't been anywhere near here for ages it would seem. You'd think with a premium domain name like this I'd take care of it or something but posting blog entries has been very much in the too hard basket for a long time.
 
I have this vague memory of a missing post: I staggered to bed very drunk one night, woke up the next morning to find a screen full of stuff I typed but never posted. I remember thinking, shit, I'm glad I never posted that. I haven't posted since though so the question is, why did I blog to begin with? Same reason I do pretty much everything else I guess. To see what will happen. What will happen?
 
A couple of people who should know better have asked me if I was gay this year. I wonder if it was because of the blurb in the top left? Heheheh, suckers. I had a feeling that might happen.
 
Nothing else has happened though, surprise. Frankly everything I wrote on here before is, what's the word... tepid? What the fuck kind of name is the daily unwind anyway? Anything else would have been better. Is Strictly Sideways taken? How about Hammer and Thongs? I need to think of a Very Clever Name. Expect a total delete and remake soon.

posted by Simon at 11:00 AM

 

Dis connection is da blurst connection

It seemed to me that no one really understood what anyone else was saying. It still does. We are locked up in our heads with our ideas: memories, longings, aspirations, disappointments, dreams. We try to explain. We fail. This disconnect is so dependable it has become our closest bond.
posted by Simon at 11:48 AM

 

Ugliest. Plane. Ever.
posted by Simon at 7:47 PM

 
Jesus, was it really the first of june when I blogged last? There are no excuses for that, but it does give me an idea how crazy work/(I) has been for the last seven weeks.

Now I'm in Bendigo and frankly there is fuck all to do here but blog. I can't even get email. Why? Glad you asked.

Half an hour before I left Adelaide I decided I'd need a copy of the application I'm working on on my laptop. Only a couple of hundred meg free on the windows partition so of course the logical thing to do was delete the linux partitions and put the thing on there. Wonderful, there it all is.

Got a cab to the airport, got on the $80 virgin blue flight which was great except for the landing that stretched those big shock absorbers to their limit. Got off the plane in Melbourne knowing I was staying only a minute's walk from Spencer St station. No cash so I went looking for an ATM. No card. Say again? No card in my wallet. Check the pocket, check the bag, check the shirt, sorry, no dice. No card and no cash could spell trouble.

Hmm.

OK, still got the business visa. All is not lost, catch a cab to the hotel, airport to city $43. Plus the toll mate, $47.50. No worries, 11pm and still got work to do so I get out the comp and hit the button.

Booting... booting...

GRUB

No more booting.

Ah, yes, all the boot information was on the Linux partition I deleted wasn't it? Then it got crappy....
posted by Simon at 3:05 AM

 
Googling

You'll see a lot of bloggers obsessing about how highly they rank in various aggregators and search engines, especially google. This is perfectly understandable given that a web site needs hits, and google probably generates more hits for most sites than the rest of the web put together.

It's not uncommon to see excited hollering along the lines of, "I'm the no. 4 Gregory and the no. 8 Legendary! Long live the legacy of the Legendary Gregory!!!!"

I doubt I will ever experience this joy.

Go and do a google seach on Simon Lake. You'll see millions of results, almost none of which have anything to do with me. You see, it turns out that a certain other Simon Lake invented the goddamn submarine! The man has streets named after him. Schools. Theatres. For fuck's sake, there is a navy destroyer called the USS Simon Lake.

I will never be no 1 on google.
posted by Simon at 12:31 PM

 
Amongst the veterans of this here Internet, guys like me are called 'lurkers'. You know how sometimes you join a mailing list or a chat room and it says there are 200 registered users but you only see 20 people talking? Those 180 missing souls are the lurkers. They hang by in the digital shadows and have a good look at what everyone else has to say but for whatever reason they don't deem it necessary or useful to post their own views. Sometimes it's probably a good thing, but we'll never know.

Until this week I was, in the blog world, a lurker. I've read so many brilliant things in the last year or two but I've hardly ever left so much as a 'lol' let alone a carefully considered comment worthy of the original post. Leave comments, people. Not here I mean (wait till I get round to getting a comments section up :) ), but every time you read anything that was worth the pixels it was written on. This is what will increasingly create the momentum that makes the world go round.

I know I promised something about the P800 but that will have to wait. I'm too tired. I just watched England snatch defeat from the jaws of victory after having the Aussies on the ropes at 8-135 with 70 to get. With a world record winning streak and national pride at stake Michael Bevan stepped up once again to steer us home, hitting the winning runs with two balls to spare. Man of the moment Andy Bichel followed up his insane bowling display of 7-20 with a classic tail-end knock of 34 desperate runs. Look out Dizzy, you're odds on to be carrying drinks for the rest of the tour after that one buddy!
posted by Simon at 12:31 PM

 

Getting it all wrong...

... at 300km/h. Jensen looks to be ok despite getting banged around a bit and spending the night in hospital, but with any luck he'll be OK for today's racing in the world's sexiest city. I'm going to have to get myself to a Monaco Grand Prix before I get too old, but tonight I'm going to be content watching it on the telly.
posted by Simon at 12:28 AM

 
One awesome thing about owning a turbocharged car is you drive it around all summer smirking quietly to yourself about how satisfyingly quick it is, then it's winter and the air gets all nice and cold and suddenly one night you put your foot down and you have about 30% more grunt than you had a month ago. Just in the last week I've found myself raising my eyebrows several times due to catapaulting forwards and/or sideways a touch quicker than I was expecting. That's a good thing, however, and leaves me wanting for more.

On the subject of cars, if you haven't seen it the new ad (ok it's old now) for the Honda Accord is something very special. A couple of hundred takes went into making it but it was worth it.
posted by Simon at 2:25 PM

 
The last week has been a blur. I got me some free time tonight and what did I do? I watched [i]Armageddon[/i]. What kind of dreck was that? After I watched it I had to take a shower it was so filthy. The only thing that prevented it from being the worst two hours of my life was Liv Tyler.

Speaking of filthy movies, I met Dirty Larry this week. Dirty Larry drives a van full of porn. I've never seen a van full of porn before, nor have I bought porn before, but I was so impressed I bought this DVD porn and brought it home expecting to be able to fire it up on the PS2, but no. All I got was a flickering mess. What is that, region locking? Is that how it works? Disappointing, I had to watch it on the computer. All I can say is there is some really terrible porn in the world.

Also today, just to completely change the subject again, slashdot has an interview up with Fyodor, the maker of nmap, which is most definitely worth a read. If you're not a 1337 |-|4x0r you may not know of nmap, but it's basically the world's most popular network scanner. Millions of security geeks around the world lost their shit in the last few weeks when they noticed that Trinity used nmap to find an exploit in the power grid computer during [i]The Matrix Reloaded[/i].

God, did I write this two days ago and leave it in my browser unposted? It looks like it.
posted by Simon at 2:00 PM