If I didn’t have a second, currently working computer with which I could go to Zalman’s site and check out a (quite instructive) short video on how to install the CPU cooler, I would have no idea how to install the CPU cooler. I generally find poorly translated instructions easy to live with if the illustrations are sufficent, but holy crap, this one was baffling… and it’s not as if installing a CPU fan incorrectly might result in melting your whole computer into a toxic heap of polycarbons and angry silicates.

There are many, many knock-offs.

The Russell Executive Mesh Chair is supposed to be nice, and like $230 bucks.

Anyway, here’s a weird Google trap for you, because I’m obsessed with link farms and bizarre fake pages like this:

http://www.officechairalley.com/aeronknockoff/

In URL, first three words: aeron knock off

Then: generic text with that phrase inserted a couple times. Followed by a bunch of Google Ads.

Then: article of some kind, probably poached, maybe not, and a bunch of totally random unrelated news items…

You could probably auto-generate these pages, waiting for people like me to come by and (you hope) click on one of those ads and earn you $.05 or so.

While I’m whining: how can the kind of quality office chairs I want (and, as someone who spends a huge chunk of their day sitting writing, doing research, and so on) cost a thousand dollars?

Aeron: $900+ easy
Steelchase Leap: $800+

Can’t someone knock off a decent copy of these things for $400 even?

I ordered parts for a new computer off newegg over the last couple of days, only to discover to my joy that the motherboard (and possibly the motherboard chipset) may have data corruption issues and that, moreover, the hard drives, which I bought because they’re supposed to be super-quiet, have huge problems running with anything that’s not like one Intel-based chipset. Better still, they don’t work well with computers that support RAID, when part of the whole point of this upgrade was that I could set up a RAID array and stop worrying all the time that the latest version of my manuscript was going to blow up unless I backed it up that instant.

Argh.

The solution may involve half-assembling several computers, downloading drivers onto floppies (floppies!), updating the hardware repeatedly, and generally drinking beer and growing increasingly frustrated.

So at some point this week, which is goingn swimmingly already, I’m going to get a boatload of computer equipment and throw it together knowing full well that there’s a 90% chance it’s only going to give me trouble.

This is why people buy Dells. Yeah, they suck, yadda yadda yadda. But you don’t buy a Dell off the shelf and find out that when you plug the keyboard in acid squirts out of the monitor into your eyes. In fact, lemme just look…. about $500 more. That’s not bad, for no acid squirting.

I’m still amazed though that this is still where technology is: not just that hard drive firmware has to be flashed, but that the process has to be so freaking horrible. If everyone’s going to build crappy products that blow up all the time and are compatible in degrees, couldn’t they make the process to fix those inevitable problems modestly less painful?

I’m hoping the grocery store has some cheap beer on sale this weekend, because I suspect that’s the only way I’m going to get through this.

I saw this weird thing hovering in someone’s comments on another site today, and so I went through the guestbook. Instead of that person’s comment containing like

… size=0 a href=”http://www.randomspammerlink.com/” …

It wasn’t there at all. It was much further down, in a generic “your site was a good place to meet people” comment:


... p style="position:absolute;bottom:1.8px;font:normal 1.5px sans-serif;"(BR)
Best places on the Web: (br)
(spammy link) (br)
(spammy link) (br)
...
(100th spammy link) (br)


The absolute tag is a CSS element. This is the first time I’ve seen it used as a spam tag — and the comment was left last year.

What’s particularly interesting about this is that it’s the use of a largely overlooked HTML tag that might be allowed by some filters that attempt to enforce filtering on malicious HTML. Here, a tag that was supposed to free people from using tables allows a commenter to jump out of where they’re supposed to be and cuckold another commenter (so to speak).

It also makes enforcement a pain: the list of spammy links appears overlapping other, normal content, and to find what the thing is, you’ve got to figure out what one of the links is, then search the page source or query the comments.

Okay, first, this has absolutely nothing to do with my current job, which I recently quit but have not yet left. No, really.

Why do companies make large, insane decisions? If I decided that every developer at my company had to spend half their day sweeping out the parking garage, they’d all quit — and anyone could tell me that. It’d be crazy to implement that, no matter how dirty the garage was.

But a lot of executive-level decisions are like that. “We need an underserved market… Hey, let’s go give out cell phones to people in prison for cell phone fraud if they sign up for a year’s service! What could go wrong?”

I’m amazed at what gets into commercials. “The new Ford Extinction now gets even better gas milage — 15 city, 20 highway!”

My first thought was “holy crap, what did it get before, -2?”

But then, I’m probably not the target demographic for that ad.

Cairns. “It’s a place people go to to leave,” my wife said.

And it is. Cairns is a tiny tourist town, with nice hotels and hotel-casinos surrounding a waterfront walk and a couple blocks of high-end bar/restaurants that feauture live music at night and places that book tours and attractions designed to get you out of Cairns for a day or more. Those hotels are ringed by scrubbier hotels and parks that look like you wouldn’t want to cross them after dusk.

Which, closer to the equator, comes in a hurry. The sun comes up about six, sprints up the sky, hangs there for twelve hours, then drops like a stone to set at six.

We spent our only full day in Cairns river rafting on the Tully. This is way cool, but it is deceptive, because the companies advertise a full day of insanity, but because the way it’s run (safely) it’s not at all chock-full of excitement. It’s more like…

Wait for other boats to go down rapid 1.
Go down rapid 1.
Wait for all other boats to pass rapid 1.
Proceed down the river.

In fairness, there are stretches of constant excitement, hard work, and terror. But it’s not an all-day carnival of craziness.

During which, I got knocked off the boat and then, later, our boat tipped over, dunking us all. Both of which were kind of funny.

I get knocked off the boat: we head into a set of rapids. As we head down, we hit something that propels me right out. I managed to hold onto the line, which wasn’t easy, and they hauled me back in.

We all get dunked: well, you can check out the pictures.

The first sign of danger…

I’m top-left, in the white shirt, next to the guy in the blue shirt.

It gets worse (and it looks like I’ve been knocked off):

But no! Even as it’s clear what’s going to happen next, despite the dude hip-checking me into the drink, I’m holding on!

Nope.

Once everyone got out from under the boat and started laughing and whooping, our guide started to yell at us to help flip the boat because we would eventually hit another set of rapids.

Later, after we’d made it through, the guide made us do this thing where we all sat in a semi-circle on the back of the boat, not holding on to the ropes, with him. The boat dropped down a quick, steep fall, and when it hit the bottom, the guide let go of our hands… the boat rebounded and all the rafters flew off into the river (which was a huge, open section near where we beached for lunch). This was hilarious for the guides, who I believe had an informal competition over who could come in with a clean raft. After they’d go through, dropping almost all of their people, guides would push the rest off the boat and bow, or stand up and cheer… it was really funny.

After which we took this picture with Andy:

I’m the guy on the right in that fetching hat. After this picture, we threw Andy in the river.

This day was another great example of the particular Aussie sense of humor, as well: saying the horrible thing you’re thinking.

“And as you may lose valuables in the river, we ask that you store them here with your things on the bus in the overhead bins so that we can more easily go through and pilfer them while you’re on the river.”

“If you find yourself under the boat, do this or you will drown horribly, which is a horrible inconvenience to us as we then have to do a lot of paperwork or find some place along the river to hide your body, and I believe we’ve used up all of the obvious places… Dan? Yes, Dan says we’re fresh out of places to hide your body, so please don’t die on us.”

I love these guys.

On the river rafting I wear my beach sandals and burn the tops of my feet horribly. Pictures of that later. This haunts me the rest of the trip, needless to say. The less said about that, the faster I’ll forget it.

And my wife is an absolute saint for putting up with me when I get crazy ideas like going river rafting all day with a bunch of nutty Australians.

Next up: Lizard Island. Featuring some lizards.

As with the vacation itself, you have to get through the boring and sometimes painful preliminaries before you can get started with the interesting stuff. Fortunately for you, this will not last over a day, and you won’t be confined to a cramped seat bumping elbows with the unfortunates strapped in next to you.

We took Alaska from Seattle to LA. I’ve found Alaska to be the best domestic airline on the routes I fly regularly, and it’s still bad. But I’ve flown enough now that a three hour flight is a cakewalk, and it passes quickly. Then in LA, I have to find the Air New Zealand counter. This is made more difficult because LAX has several huge, entirely separate terminals, and it’s a decent hike between them, and because asking anyone in LAX where you need to go – because this is often not clear – will result in you going in entirely the wrong direction. It’s like being in a logic puzzle with the lying natives: “You must walk to one of three terminals to check in for your next flight, and only have time to ask one question. Some people will lie, while others are morons and do not know the correct answer…”

Air New Zealand is not located in the international terminal, by the way. They’re at Terminal 1. Just file that away, it might be useful sometime. At the Air New Zealand counter, a huge guy who looks eerily like former pitcher Freddy Garcia abused a ticket agent over some seating slight at length. Later, when I got into Brisbane, I looked up baseball news to see if Garcia’d disappeared from the White Sox, or otherwise headed to Auckland for some reason.

Air New Zealand is a nice enough airline. The seats are fairly roomy, but they’re still not for me. I’m tall and disproportionately torso. Most airplane headrests dig into my lower shoulderblades. Anyway, the flight is amazingly long and even though ANZ is pretty good, by the time we get to Auckland I’m in bad shape, my muscles all whacked out, I’m dehydrated, and I have the sensation that I’m still moving if I stop, so I spend my time walking around the Auckland international terminal.

Which brings me to the funny bit. In Auckland, Air New Zealand’s announcements have a touch of humor to them, like “Would passenger Jones please report to gate 3. Your flight has boarded and all other passengers are waiting on yooooouuuuuuuu.”

This would sometimes prompts passenger Jones to go tearing down the hall.

Then we flew into Brisbane for customs.

Folks, don’t dress like stoner snowboarders on international flights unless you want to be questioned and searched thoroughly. It may not be fair, or just, but it’s still not something you want to do. There were two guys who went through Australian customs with us, and the cops picked these two out almost from the time they stepped off the plane. I don’t think there was ever a point where the two guys didn’t have at least two pairs of eyes on them, and as they approached the counters for processing, they got their own suited guy standing a ways off trying to look casual. After they were let through, they got to have a second, special chat with the guy in the suit.

To Brisbane, though.

We stayed in downtown Brisbane, and it’s beautiful. There’s a river it’s built on and alongside, with parks large and small, long walking and biking paths, and downtown is filled with cafes and food courts that all seem to serve good food fairly cheap.

Brisbane is booming. Even beyond the suburbs, I counted eight of the huge super-cranes in the greater downtown area. As an informal measure of construction, that’s huge… I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many in downtown Seattle, for example.

We walked around Brisbane and went to different musuems. There’s a different perspective in Australian museums than American ones, which comes through in a couple of ways:
– displays tended to be a little gorier. A lot more real animals preserved
– that gore was often used to an end, showing animals caught up in barbed wire fences or threatened by other human activity

It was strange, too, to see museums that accepted global warming and talked about what was happening now to the Australian environment and what would happen in the future.

We immediately took to ginger beer. Ginger beer is like root beer except with ginger. It’s like ginger ale if you used twice as much ginger. When it’s good, it’s sweet and bitter, with a biting aftertaste and then it burns a little in the stomach. Brandenberg was the brand we found fairly consistently, but it was this crazy Tasmanian stuff I got all twitchy over: it seemed 50% more gingery than even the normal, super-ginger ginger beer.

Mmm.

It was also strange to see an ibis hanging out in the city, and wacky lizards fighting in the botanical gardens. There are gulls and pigeons, but also magpies and crazy Australian natural wildlife that hasn’t given up yet.

Brisbane was also great because it had so many food courts and cafes. Every time we were walking around, we’d stop in someplace randomly and we’d get a great sandwich, or salad, or fish and chips for a couple bucks. Which brings us to eating.

Pizza was far, far more rare than I’d expected. When I found it, it was almost always at a “pizza and kabobs” place. I have no idea why pizza was so frequently paired with kabobs. In general, the food was good but (as some people complain) generally not spicy. You can get spicy if you want, without much trouble. So while I understand why people might complain that it’s too bland, I’m not sympathetic.

We went to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. I geeked out over all the interesting birds and animals (koalas are cute, cure, but they sleep all the time and are boring). They have a “Birds of Prey” show with Australian owls and even a huge eagle, which are rehabbing for a return to the wild or, because of damage (hit by a car, shot by moron), who are going to hang out forever. The owls are amazing — it’s eerie to have an owl go by your head, entirely silent.

We went hiking in one of the rainforests near Brisbane (which, and don’t say this to be mean, was about as dense-with-life as your normal western Washington forest). This was disconcerting. I’ve spent a lot of my time hiking around forests, mostly here but also Oregon, California, and Alaska, and to hear all foreign birdsongs, standing in entirely alien trees, gave me the goosebumps. It’s one thing to know that figs sometimes grow down from the top layer, twisting as it descends around a host tree until the host chokes and rots, leaving a hollow center. It’s another to stare at one, fifty feet around, with a gaping hole you could crawl into… and then spotting the curling tendrils of other firs growing down around other trees.

And then there’s a wild cockatoo giving me the stink-eye while gnawing on something… Australia is like crack for a nature geek like me.

We also took the City Cat (big passenger catamaran) up and down the river. Every Australian city we were in of any size had really good public transit on the cheap, with multiple transit options (bus/train/subway/ferry/jet pack) along with special tourist buses that regularly circled the city, so people could get on and off to see things.

The language barrier comes up sometimes. Everyone understands us perfectly, in part because American TV shows air every night. But sometimes people say things in such a heavy accent that we’d look at each other to see if the other puzzled it out, and then say “I’m sorry?” Sometimes that didn’t help. A bartender told me how much a beer was three times and I had absolutely no idea what he was telling me until I saw the price he’d rung up (five forty).

Everyone in Brisbane was awesome. People were almost entirely so warm and friendly it was great. People were helpful, interested in talking — even when I’d screw up something (do I buy bus tickets here…) people would grin or laugh and I’d get a “no worries”. By the end of the week I felt for the first time I can remember that it’s possible that my almost nuclear anti-social streak might be due in part to me growing up and living in a city legendary for being polite but unfriendly. I’m still wondering.

There were a couple things I noticed reading the papers and watching the news in Brisbane that were confirmed through the rest of my time in Australia.
– Political discourse in Australia was far different. Even though this Latham guy put out his diaries while we were down there, filled with personal attacks on different people he’d come across in his political career, by and large politics were absent of the personal. We’re so used to the kind of scorched-earth politics, particularly in the rise of Rove, that not seeing it was strange.

You could be for or against something without being for or against the terrorists. Which brings me to another thing.

– Patriotism wasn’t a big deal. Not that many buildings had big Australian flags at the top. People didn’t wear Australian flag T-shirts, or in general any Australian logo-with-boastful-slogan at all.

Since getting back, I’ve talked to a lot of people at work, particularly those who’ve spent a lot of time overseas, and they agreed that the abrasive, flexing patriotism (“aggressive” one guy called it) was a particularly American phenomenon.

I think a lot of this has to do with the parlimentary system. There aren’t two sides in Australian politics: there’s a point on the specturm for reasoned discourse on almost any national topic.

Which doesn’t stop them from being a little irrational sometimes (their treatment of asylum-seekers is shocking for a civilized nation — but then, I live in the U.S., where our President said it was okay to torture people).

The other big thing that struck me, and I know this sounds perhaps petty, was that there were no Bud or Coors signs. We live and work under such immense brand pressure from constant advertising that not being under it is mentally unsettling. I didn’t see a Bud ad until the last day, when I watched a MLB game on TV and there was an in-game ad. Australia has advertisements, certainly, and in all the same forms we do. But because I didn’t know anything about them, they weren’t part of the background in the same way omnipresent brands in the US are for me.

Next up: Cairns, Lizard Island, Port Douglas, and points beyond.

From departure from Seattle to arrival back here, I read:

Fade Away, Harlan Coben
American Gods, Neal Gaiman
Neverwhere, Neal Gaiman
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Praxis, Walter Jon Williams
The Sundering, Walter Jon Williams
Doomsday Book, Connie Willis

I may be missing one or two. I’ll update this if I remember.