Sorddin

Work on my OpenGL screen saver pro­gress­es slow­ly, most­ly due to lack of expe­ri­ence with pro­gram­ming Objec­tive C and OpenGL (steep learn­ing curve).
The above pic­ture is just a proof of con­cept shoot, and the code needs huge amounts of work. Due to a stu­pid mis­take the cur­rent build crash­es the screen saver pro­gram… back to the draw­ing board.
Any­one want­i­ng to help out is more than wel­come to offer.

Back in the late 80’s there was this idea to send all the peo­ple that had AIDS to an island so they could live togeth­er in per­fect har­mo­ny (can we say “Lep­er Colony”?). I remem­ber think­ing that it was­n’t such a bad idea at the time, remem­ber think­ing that all the infect­ed peo­ple would have a good time and not wor­ry the rest of the world. I’m glad my feel­ings on this have changed.
It is clear to me that I had nev­er real­ly thought what such seg­re­ga­tion and iso­la­tion might mean, and had some­one roma­tisied the idea of an island par­adise on which to die. It seems that I’m not the only one to have changed, some­where along the way the idea was sim­ply dropped, nev­er to be men­tioned again. Kind of a glob­al social faux pas. Best for­got­ten.
Strange that I should think about this now, there is no obvi­ous rea­son for these thought to sur­face. Some­where over the years my thoughts and feel­ings changed in a big way, but there was no big cat­a­clysmic event to cause the change, its a sub­tle process.
The fear and uncer­tain­ty that was the publics ini­tial reac­tion to the AIDS threat has gone, replaced not with under­stand­ing and accep­tance but instead replaced with ambiva­lence and uncar­ing. This is a bad thing. The knee-jerk reac­tion of “It could nev­er hap­pen to me because I’m not gay!” has been replaced with the sim­pler yet more insid­i­ous “It could nev­er hap­pen to me!”.
Peo­ple have grown too accus­tomed to this dan­ger, and have dropped their guard.
Per­haps we have a need for extreme right-wing rhetoric after all?

Last night as I arrived home I looked sky­ward and noticed The Sour­th­ern Cross promi­nat­ly on dis­play.
When­ev­er I look upon it I’m remind­ed of a great many things, a strange sort of mix of the impor­tance of life and yet how small and mean­ing­less it all is. Makes me feel hap­py.

I think that schools should teach the local abo­rig­i­nal lan­guage of the area, and not just a light treat­ment like they do with Ital­ian and French, but rather to a flu­ent lev­el.

I sug­gest you use a ver­sion 5 or bet­ter brows­er.

I sit here tonight, play­ing with my com­put­er with noth­ing much to do.
The fam­i­ly iMac is cur­rent­ly run­ning some seri­ous diag­nos­tic and repair soft­ware and its cur­rent task (a direc­to­ry rebuild) will prob­a­bly take the next hour, I need to be here when its done to be sure it worked.
Hav­ing just changed every set­ting in my Router I’m also hang­ing around to make sure it will work as expect­ed in the morn­ing when my mum gets up and wants to check her email.
I am vexed by some to the things Richard said today con­cern­ing Mac OS X and why it isn’t what the press are claim­ing it will be. Even though I agree with some of his con­clu­sions, the work­ing dif­fers too great­ly for me to actu­al­ly agree with him. And why exact­ly do his unin­formed ram­bles pro­voke me so? There was­n’t much today that were saw eye to eye on.
I also feel I’m going to have to sub­stan­ti­ate my ‘cliffhang­er’ claim about Buffy, and hav­ing watched “The Gift” again tonight I still feel there are some valid points to be made, they need to be organ­ised before they can be post­ed.
And last­ly I’m try­ing to fig­ure out why it is that I have a keen under­stand­ing of gram­mar and word mean­ings, but have large amounts of trou­ble with spelling? I could go into lengthy dis­cus­sion about an intran­si­tive verb, or why split infini­tives are not gram­mat­i­cal errors, yet I am forced to check the spelling of a word like gram­mar to be sure I’ve got­ten it right. Maybe it has some­thing to do with being taught to spell at school, but not taught gram­mar.

I’m still buzzing from hav­ing seen the final episode of sea­son 5 of Buffy. After the build up it is final­ly good to get to the end, there is a love­ly feel­ing of com­plete­ness too it all (even if there was a big fat cliff hang­er).
Some­time tomor­row I’ll prob­a­bly come down off this high and be hit hard by the fact that next Tues­day will be a void in my hec­tic tele­vi­sion watch­ing sched­ule.

Why is the gay male always wait­ing for some­one bet­ter to come along? What is it that makes him con­stant­ly search­ing even when he is actu­al­ly with some­one decent? Is it a fear of com­mit­ment, or the lack of legal recog­ni­tion of any such com­mit­ment. Or is it just “the grass is always green­er”?
Okay, sure, maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe its just the boys that I meet that are like this, maybe I just tell myself this so that I don’t have to deal with the alter­na­tive that I’m not good enough for any­one to like.
The more impor­tant ques­tion is: am I one of these guys thats always look­ing for some­one bet­ter? No answers, only more ques­tions.

The need for a new title for this lit­tle site has had me look­ing for strange words, things I like the sound of, or mean­ings that are vague­ly rude, or words that just don’t get used enough any more.
Aid­ing me in my search is my trusty copy of “The Deep­er Mean­ing of Liff” by Dou­glas Adams & John Lloyd, from the depths of this amaz­ing vol­ume I’ve pulled a list of words.
My list so far:
Ain­der­by Quern­how
Albu­querque
Bal­ly­cum­ber
Beld­ing
Chal­ing
Clack­avoid
Coodardy
Cran­leigh
Dal­low
Droitwich
Glen­whilly
Gro­bis­ter
Kent
Pud­sey
Willi­mat­ic

You might think that hav­ing cheat­ed death twice now I’d have some sort of deep­er under­stand­ing of the world, or life or some­thing. But I don’t. I have realised the impor­tance of life. But there has been no epiphany. Non of those ‘Hol­ly­wood’ style moments of true rev­e­la­tion. Most like­ly these things don’t hap­pen as often as the movies would have us believe.
A lit­tle over 27 years ago I was born. Just. Very almost dead. There is a scale out of ten, things like pulse, ten fin­ger and ten toes, breath­ing score a point each. I think I scored 2. How­ev­er thanks to the improve­ments in med­ical tech­nol­o­gy over the past 100 years or so I was fine.
The sec­ond inci­dent was in late March this year. A sud­den infec­tion of unknown ori­gin result­ed in the nec­es­sary remove of the two upper lobes of my right lung. A hun­dred years ago I would sim­ply have died of “con­sump­tion”.
Has my expe­ri­ence ear­li­er this year changed the fun­da­men­tal way I look at thing? No. And while it is easy to fall into the cliche of ask­ing the big ques­tions (the “what does life all mean any­way?” ones) I don’t think there’s much point. We are here. Best make the most of it.