Ryan & Laurence are girls, originally uploaded by Nutloaf.

Laurence & I went to the housewarming at the Lumpery the other night. It was a carnival sideshow theme, but we ended up pretty much dressing girly. I think I might have been some sort of ringmaster gypsy psychic.

Ryan & Laurence are girls
Originally uploaded by Nutloaf

Laurence & I went to the housewarming at the Lumpery the other night. It was a carnival sideshow theme, but we ended up pretty much dressing girly. I think I might have been some sort of ringmaster gypsy psychic.

I have finished university. And finished it for good.

Oddly enough, my university degree and my university job both finished on the same day. I am very glad. Both were very good and edifying in so many ways. But also often pretty exhausting.

My old friend from Rough Edges was having a bad night tonight. She was pretty crazy on rum and drugs. She was shouting and hitting stuff and smashing the phone receiver on the phone box as hard as she could. Her friends were worried about her. I haven't seen her that upset before, and she often gets upset. It wasn't nice to see her like that and it wasn't nice to be around. I was sitting there listening to her shout thinking about how ugly it all was and how awful alcohol can be. But then some rich young things sitting in the cafe across the road started heckling her. And I realised that yelling and hitting the phone box with the phone receiver doesn't even approach the levels of ugliness humans are capable of. Not even close.

Rich people are obviously at a huge disadvantage because their lives are so pretty, that when they start acting ugly (which is kind of always for a lot of them) it's desperately ugly. Like tonight. I almost walked over to them to ask them to have some dignity.

iTunes has some wacky album ordering which can screw up coverflow pretty badly. You have to set your "Album Artist" for each album. You'll probably have to do this manually for your compilation-type albums, but there won't be many of those. The bigger problem is setting the field for all your other albums.

There are AppleScript's to copy the "Artist" field to an empty "Album Artist" field namely Doug Adam's one, but that only works on Macs. I started writing myself a iTunes Windows scripting thing, but I'm too lazy to figure it out.

I found Mp3tag through Yahoo! Answers and it's very good.

To copy the field with Mp3tag:

1. Create an action group called "Album to Album Artist"
2. Add a new "Guess values" action to that and set the "Source format" value to %artist% and the "Guessing pattern" value to %band%
3. Run that action group for all your albums with an empty "Album Artist" field
4. You'll probably have to clear iTunes cache (use "Get Info" on all your tracks, don't change anything but press "OK")
5. You are done

I think this is the table in our backyard. And I think the dark splotch on the table is our peg bucket.

This photo makes me happy.

I'm trying to find a green energy supplier, because Origin Energy is slightly ridiculous. So I ended up reading the fine print of the Green Electricity Watch website. I wanted to know why some companies were getting much higher ratings than others, even though they were all "100% Green".

I found this...

9.Why isn't any renewable energy good? Why does it need to be new and accredited?

When someone buys GreenPower, they usually want to make a difference to their greenhouse emissions. If their purchase has no effect on the amount of renewable energy that goes into our electricity system, it has no effect on greenhouse emissions. Green Electricity Watch considers the non-accredited part does not increase the amount of renewable energy. Accredited GreenPower is certified to come from new renewable generators - additional since when the scheme started – and continuing sales increase the size of the market so more renewable energy generation is built.

...which strikes me as pretty dumb. They're suggesting that we should build new renewable energy plants instead of using existing renewable power plants. Not only are they suggesting that, but they're including it in their evaluation of green energy providers. I can understand wanting to encourage further investment in renewable energy, but it seems to be creating some perverse incentives to build new plants when there are perfectly good ones sitting there already.

So I think that instead of trying to change to Origin because it has a slightly higher rating, I'll just stick with Energy Australia....

Except I just rang Energy Australia and they only do fixed price deals. So we'll be paying $108 extra per quarter for only $49 worth of green energy. Stupid capitalism. I want my own farm with a wind generator on it.

Wally from The Basics (and Gotye) is kind of a web geek I reckon. He manages all their CD ordering and mailing himself it seems. He even hand-wrote the addresses on my Gotye CDs when I ordered them. Ordering CDs online seems like a slight waste of postage, but I also reckon the musicians must get a fair chunk more. Especially if they reckon it's worth the effort of building CD ordering applications and posting people the CDs themselves.

I've been a software developer of some description for a fair while, and I've authored at least my fair share of bugs. But my new worst bug I discovered yesterday. It was in code for a published economic paper.

This is the original code:

gen w01ceil = w11ceil + (1-mrw_alpha) * pr * (1-coerc_pi01) + (1-pr)*coerc_pi10

This is the correct code:

gen w01ceil = w11ceil + (1-coerc_alpha) * pr * (1-coerc_pi01) + (1-pr)*coerc_pi10

I'm sure I originally had it right and changed it at some later point for testing. I just didn't change it back. Luckily, although the correct¹ results are fairly different, they still support the point we're trying to make.

1. "Correct" as of 22nd May 2008.

It seems that the carbon trading market in Australia finally kicked off today. Prices started at $19/tonne, but that's not really based on anything in particular.

The first trade was between AGL and Westpac for 1 unit of carbon (which is 10,000 tonnes). Australia emits 603 million tonnes a year according to SMH, so those traders were really just doing it for the fun of it. I interested in working out how much more my life would cost if my carbon was offset, or if I chose to buy some share of a fixed amount that we decided was OK for the plant. AGL reckons the price could rise to $50/tonne by 2020, which is a much more interesting number to me. The price will rise because it will get harder and harder to reduce emissions as we take advantage of the cheap technologies and have to start using more expensive ones.

Last year I took two short flights and two long flights. AGL reckons that emitted 4.5 tonnes of carbon, but GreenFleet reckons that total impact on the atmosphere is more like emitting 12 tonnes. Those flights cost about $1200. If I added the cost of buying the rights to emit the carbon I produce it would cost $50 * 12 tonnes = $600. Which is a fair whack. So I'm inclined to conclude that I should probably stop flying. Or perhaps only fly for funerals of nuclear family members perhaps. I think I should commit to offsetting my flight emissions if I do decide to fly.

I'm also happy I ride a bike.

And green power is the bomb. It is so easy and so cheap, and you can reduce your emissions by a heap. If we didn't have green power, the Enmore house's carbon emissions from energy would have walloped my flight emissions. So everyone should get green power.

I did the AGL carbon calculator based on my emissions last year. The road trip would add a lot to that this year. Driving the diesel 4WD around Australia created almost 5 tonnes of carbon.

But flying is the real problem. I should stop.

I am pretty tired. I rode 37km. I suppose it isn't so far, but you have to remember that I'm kind of a pansy.

Rough Edges tonight was a bit of a challenge. The normal team wasn't there so it was just Michelle and myself. The Shore boys were there too and they are pretty cool and work hard. But we can't ask them to solve our problems and break up fights.

So we had to close early, which meant we couldn't get Govindas. So everyone was sad that they were going to go to bed hungry. There also was hardly any Oz Harvest food, so everyone was even sadder. Late in the night, about 15 minutes before we were closing, Oz Harvest did bring more food. It was very popular. Everyone was well hungry.

I love Oz Harvest. And Govindas. Good people.

There were also no blankets. So other people were sad about being cold.

Despite the tricks, the night went reasonably smoothly until right near the end. A few people got involved in a fight. A very big chap, taller and wider than me. And a tough lass, wider but rather shorter than me. In general people tend to trade words for a while, before getting physical. But these guys cut to the chase. The girl tried to use a broom as a staff which which to do battle. The fellow's weapon of choice was a bread crate. I had to jump in and distract them from one another. I politely asked the girl to give me her broom/staff. She reluctantly did, but quickly traded it for a chair. A much better weapon with which to combat a bread crate.

So these two had their weapons raised above their head, ready for a good throw or a good swing. The chap was in the corner, and the girl was covering his escape pretty convincingly. Spontaneously, I decided to tackle the girl and drag her away. She got a bit upset because she thought I was trying to protect her and she certainly didn't need protecting. I assured her that the last thing I was trying to do was protect her. That calmed her down. That is, until she processed the implications and decided that I must be trying to protect the other chap. That would mean I was taking sides, and that he needed protecting from her. Which might imply that she was somehow a threat or unreasonable. I insisted I wasn't protecting him either. Which was actually also true.

I asked her to commit to not hitting the fellow until I'd talked to him and asked him to leave. She said that was OK. So I went and asked the fellow to leave. He didn't want to leave until she left. We had a bit of a stand off. Thankfully, he didn't punch me. I negotiated for them both to leave at the same time in opposite directions. Which I thought was very clever, until I realised they were both wanting to go the same way and walking off the other way would be fairly silly. Fortunately the fellow was gracious and walked off, even though the lass sat down at Rough Edges and waited for him to go. His grace came with a lot of shouting and swearing and threats, but it was grace nonetheless.

I handled the whole thing rather poorly. Partly because it happened suddenly. Partly because I wasn't properly team leader and wasn't expecting to be jumping into fights. Partly because I didn't know the people. Partly because I was so scared that I didn't think about anything I was doing and just said the first thing that occurred to me. Quite a few of those things didn't make sense. And a few of them made things worse.

Rough Edges is a wonderful place. The lass apologised profusely for causing such a ruckus. I apologised to her for tackling her. And we made friends. I don't think I am friends with the chap who walked away though. I made him pretty cross.

We signed our lease at Woodcourt St and have handed over a lot of money. There are a few people interested in staying there as well, so hopefully it will all work out. I went to visit it for the first time on Saturday and I think it is brilliant. Giant and light and practical. I took a few photos of the place.

We are planning to move to Woodcourt St, Marrickville.

This morning I woke up clutching a fluorescent light bulb in my hand. I don't remember how it happened. This is less weird than you might think, because I can reach the light fitting from my bed and I am rather forgetful. But it's still fairly weird.

Please tell me your level of agreement with the following statement: If it keeps him from getting ahead in his job, a father is being too involved with his children.

Only 19% of Americans sampled by the PSID in 2002 "strongly disagreed" with this statement. A very high proportion "disagreed" (66%), but golly gosh. I would have thought 95% would strongly disagree with that. What is the point of getting ahead in your job if not to provide for your kids? I didn't know there were people out there ignoring their kids on principle.

This morning a rather exciting, although not necessarily good, event occurred. While I was having a shower, we ran out of cold hot water. This never happens. All I can figure is that it means we're finally becoming a grown up house with proper jobs that all start at the same time.

So we're off to paddle down the Jane River. It's going to be pretty fun.

This is cool. I didn't know Inuits were proper eskimos.

There is no point in saving the planet if we ruin the economy doing it.

Morris Iemma

I forgot to buy my train ticket today. There were police at Hornsby station you wrote down all the information on my driver's licence. They said they wouldn't give me a ticket if I didn't have a record. I said I didn't and asked if I could go and buy a ticket now. They told me it was a waste of time. I said that I should buy a ticket because I had ridden on a train. They really couldn't see my point.

If police really think the only reason people buy train tickets is because we might get fined it's no wonder they decided to become police.

These are based on reasonably informed estimates of the wattages of various stuff in our house. The great thing about these prices is that they're pretty much the true cost of supplying the power because they are for pure solar. So you don't need to worry about how much you use. You just need to decide how much of these things you're willing to have at this price.

Electricity Usages.xls

The government has a good website about standby power. If you register, you can download a spreadsheet that has the standby consumption of 5420 electrical appliances. Pretty handy for standby power geeks.

Laurie asked me to team lead last night because he was too tired. There were a couple of new guys on team. At the end of the night one of them asked me how long I'd been team leading for. I told him it had been a year. He thought I was joking. So I told him I seriously had been doing it for a year. I still don't think he believed me. That is the kind of bewilderment my leadership inspires. Even the people who I'm normally busting have told me I need to be more pro-active.

I was woken up this morning by a sparrow flying in my window and falling into a bundle of clothes by my head. He flew around, struggling to find his way back to the window before settling on my NI poster for a rest. After a bit more searching, a little time hiding on the floor behind the desk and another break sitting on my Amelie poster, I managed to pick him up and find him the window.

ANZ is considering providing finance for a controversial pulp mill, the same one that is making everyone abandon their indulgence of Peter Garrett.

I don't know enough about this pulp mill to actually offer an opinion. But people who I like know stuff and sometimes that's enough. Plus, with old-growth pulping particularly I really think the burden of evidence should be on the pulpers.

There's a petition at www.tellmrsmith.org. ANZ seems be fairly sensitive to social input at this time, so maybe it is worth signing. So tell Mrs Mith what you think of pulp mills and where those working class Tasmanians can shove their pulping jobs.