Grumgar the Orcish Jedi

Meet Grumgar, my new orcish jedi friend :D

Click for full size ;)

In between slaying mottled beasts and scorpids in the barren wastelands of the Horde, Grumgar enjoys shopping and modelling his new clothes. But when it's time to kick some arse, nothing beats his 1337 jedi robes (pictured above, rrp 13 copper available at The Den).

Thanks to Brett for letting me try WoW! :D

Kung Fu

I went to Kung Fu on Tuesday night. It was just a couple of guys and the instructor, Kot. Kot has recently come back to Rockhampton after a few years in Brisbane, and is only just restarting the club. Only a few dedicated students from before have currently rejoined, but they're in the process of trying to build it back up.
The rain, which had arrived suddenly earlier that day, held off for the couple of hours that we were in Kot's back yard, but it left the ground muddy causing kicks to be particularly messy. It was different training outdoors through the fading sunlight into the darkness held at bay by a single floodlight. Apparently they also train at a local park; that would be fun.
I didn't actually do much during the 1.5 hours Kot could be there. I got a quick overview of the art and what Kot taught. I stood in a horse stance (thus named because it's like you're riding a horse, not because you look like a horse... I think) until my quadriceps couldn't stop shaking. I did a bit of body hardening - strikes against bone, muscle, solar plexus, and abdomen - while at the same time learning some basic arm and foot movements. I was quite content to just stand back and watch when the knives and sticks came out though.
All in all I found it very interesting. I'll go back, but I don't know exactly how I'm going to fit it in. It seems to be a very real, effective martial art. I had a lot of fun doing Tae Kwon Do as a kid, but as a practical martial art I don't think it compares. One piece of advice I was given about sums it up - "What do you do if you're in a headlock? The easiest thing is to go straight for the balls." (Thankfully, testicle toughening is no longer part of most kung fu curriculums, Kot informed me with a straight face.)

Confusion

If you're reading this and you:

• Talked to me about the "milk run" flight from Rockhampton to Cairns;
• Work as, or know someone who works as, a 3d modeller for an aerospace company;
• Recommended the band "Depeche Mode"; or
  
• Saw "The Bourne Identity" with me 2 years ago

... could you please leave a comment?! There appear to be some inconsistencies in my memory of late. :)

Three Rings to Bind them All...

You can buy ring-binder CD wallets of various sizes from OfficeWorks. They're the tiniest bit bulkier than ordinary CD wallets because of the need for the click-open rings, but they're soo convenient.

• turning pages in a filled up wallet is much easier because the pages just flip over the rings
• you can take a page of CDs out for convenient access or to loan to someone
• you can rearrange the collection easily
• you can buy extra pages
• it looks cool :D

I've had one for my games for a while, and I just got one for my music cds. It makes it so much easier to find the CD you want while driving in the car.
They're relatively cheap compared to other wallets too, for some reason. I'd willingly pay more, but I'm not complaining :)

Blog Fu

I just ran into a friend who conscripted me for the Uni's Kung Fu club - all they needed was a nominal member to up their numbers and get club status with the student association.
But, curious, I took a look at their website.

Kung Fu (or Gung Fu) is a Cantonese Word which has meaning of: “a skill achieved or attained through long hard dedicated & diligent effort and study over a long period of time” or simply “ a skill achieved through time and hard effort”, in the west it has come to mean especially the Chinese Martial Arts which are more correctly termed Mo Sut (“Martial Arts”)
...
One can have “Kung Fu” in any art or discipline such as cooking or dancing. For example a Master Chef would be said to have Cooking Kung Fu.

Cool.
What kung fu do you have?

"MOE" upside-down = "WOE"

I should have listened to the people telling me not to let ITD install the Managed Operating Environment (MOE) on this computer, but I foolishly believed that it wouldn't be too bad. I was placated by promises of local administrative rights to my machine.
But I should have bailed upon hearing the first warning bells, when Conrad informed me that...
"ITD likes staff having MOE. It makes it easier to fix problems."
"Oh, how so?" I enquired.
"We blow away your machine and reinstall MOE." <- actual words

Now, just recently I've been trying to convert my paper (written in Word) to PDF. ITD have this "great" new system that lets them cut back on Adobe Acrobat licenses: instead of installing (and licencing) the software on your local machine, they've set up a network printer service that "prints" to a PDF file for you.
Unfortunately it just doesn't work for my paper, and we don't know why. Chriss Lenz was able to print the document to pdf perfectly from her computer, and since she was using Office 2003 she suggested that I try that.

MOE has other ideas. Conrad has just informed me that you simply cannot install Office 2003 with MOE. If MOE detects that you don't have Office XP installed, it will automatically uninstall whatever you do have, and leave you with nothing. It doesn't even have the grace to put Office XP back for you - you have to do that yourself.
Gah.

Now I don't know how I'm going to convert documents to PDF :|

Vote [1] Honours Room!

So there's an election this weekend. Ordinarily I'm apathetic about elections because I rarely pay attention to the news, let alone anything political. It's not that I don't care what happens to Australia - rather that I'm uninformed and don't know which parties most closely match my values.
A few days back I was bemoaning the fact that there was no easy way to compare the policies of different parties. Well, in the process of having an entirely unresolved but nevertheless entertaining political argument in the virtual Honours Room, I learnt about comparepolicies.com.au - exactly what I needed!

I'm now looking forward to Saturday's election for the for the first time in, like, ever because I know who to vote for :)
And, er, because we're having a LAN and a nothing-to-do-with-the-election celebratory dinner afterwards (birthday for Melanie, graduation for Tanya, hello for Roland - have I missed anyone?)!

As an aside, reading the policies of parties I disagree with really scares me. :|

Weekend Update

I went to Bundy on the weekend to collect my presents and see my family (note priority). I got a pen holder from my brother Carey; a cool Japanese styled set of bowls, saucers, and plates from my sister Michelle; a much wanted New Scientist subscription from mum; and two bags of pork sausages and a bag of spare ribs from mum's boyfriend Russel, who coincidentally owns a pig farm ;)
Other notable loot from the weekend included a cool magnetic arrow-rest and fast-flight string for my bow from John Hans, and my collection of Magic cards from my brother that had been on loan to one of his friends. The collection is quite a bit smaller than I remember it, but it's been years since I played with them so I can't remember what's missing. Oh well.

My mum is quite the entreprenuer now! For a while now she's had her psychology practice, which has taken off recently and she's now booked out three weeks in advance. That's excellent news, but apparently it's not enough. She and a friend have taken out just about an entire arcade in Bundaberg's CBD, and are in the process of transforming it into a health club / weight loss clinic / coffee shop. It sounds very ambitious to me, but they seem confident it will all work, and it certainly seems the market is there. The weight loss industry is huge, especially because of all the recent media attention on certain fast food chains. Furthermore, Queensland Health are apparently very interested in the project and if it works out well there could be funding/endorsement - that sort of thing - to take it state wide.
I'm not exactly sure, but I gather that the unique thing about this project is the way it combines a physical exercise programme (that's the friend, a fitness instructor cum psychologist) and cutting edge psychological counselling (that's mum! :) ) into a comprehensive package targeted at overweight to unhealthily obese clients.
Good luck to mum!

Gah, Blogger hasn't been letting me post this for the last 2 days... *fingers crossed* *clicks Publish*

Woo! Good results, finally.

Mood: happy, relieved

In the last few days, I've been running some function approximation experiments that, in a nutshell, have given me exactly the results I needed!

I wasn't happy with the paper that I submitted to Complex 2004, because I thought I had a good idea but it just didn't work. The results I got from the experiments I included in that paper were statistically inconclusive and I was left grasping at straws to justify the worth of the paper.

Well, I've done two more experiments based on what I've learned recently, and both of them have given excellent results!
I couldn't ask for more conclusive data - it shows that (for fully specified fuzzy logic rulebases) multi-dimensional representations are better than single-dimensional representations. That statement comes with an iron-clad statistical significance of 0.001 - for anyone who doesn't know stats, anything under 0.05 is acceptable and lower is better.

This comes at the perfect time, because I have the opportunity to edit my paper to include the new results, and submit the new version as the final submission. I am quite satisfied with the way things have turned out. My paper is worthwhile, and my intuition has been vindicated :D