Rants from Vas

I take a scan of the subnet where I pwned my first n00b I take a look at my life and realise it’s pretty good ’Cause I been crackin’ the world from my seat And even my girlfriend says that my skillz are l33t I ain’t never op’d a ’tard who didn’t deserve it Plus […]

When I first moved in here, I received notice of a development application for a Japanese restaurant just across the road. There are plenty of cafés in Elizabeth Bay but we could use more restaurants, and I was excited — I might actually get to go to a restaurant’s opening night! The application was approved, […]

I sincerely believe John Brumby is an idiot. How is increasing the number of lanes on the freeway supposed to help people get to Tullamarine airport? Cars trying to exit bank up hundreds of metres onto the freeway in the morning already — regularly flying to work in Sydney has made me acutely aware of […]

I don’t book taxis very often — most of my taxi rides are between Tullamarine Airport and Flemington in Melbourne, and you never have to wait long to flag down a taxi at either location. But the other week I happened to be at Werribee station on a Sunday morning, and I’d missed the bus […]

It’s the 21st century: I should have a flying car, and a videophone, and a robot housekeeper. Well, I do have a videophone – a wireless one, in fact – but 64kbps H.263 is quite underwhelming if you grew up with images from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Back to the Future. But what’s really […]

I swear I must look like a ghost or something – people seem to think they can walk right through me! This one time, I was walking up the Sussex St ramp to the bridge from the city to Pyrmont, carrying a big bag of shopping, keeping to the left, and this guy was running down […]

C++ defines a bunch of aliases for operators. These are kind of cool, and they can make code more readable at times – for example you can write things like: if ((dest bitor netmask) == bcdest and protocol == udp) But in typical C++ fashion, they chose to specify it in a completely brain-dead way. […]

As of yesterday, my Internet connection has finally started working. It’s been unbelievably frustrating, and I cannot in good conscience recommend naked ADSL Internet – I honestly thing it would be a better experience to get Telstra or Optus cable. There are too many levels of indirection between you and the people who actually get […]

Technology is definitely very good for making people lazy. I’m now too lazy too cook rice in a pot on a stove, so I need an automatic rice cooker. Now that I’m getting my Sydney pad set up, I need one to use up here. Having experienced how bad a Kambrook rice cooker is, I […]

(Just some background – at work we use DVCS with a one-branch-per-feature policy.) You know when you’ve got a few source control branches on the go, because you’ve been splitting time between a few features, but you’ve kind of been neglecting one, because it doesn’t feel like the most important thing to do? Don’t you […]