Something
Emporium

Remember Vector's plans to lay 38km of new fibre on the North Shore? Remember laughing at my hope of getting super-duper 1Gb/s synchronous fibre delivered to my house?

Vector Communications working with North Shore City Council proposes to build a 38 km extension to their existing fibre network that will connect directly to schools, libraries and council offices in the North Shore region. Universities, hospitals, businesses and Dom's house will also have access to the network. The network is intended to be a pilot for similar proposals in the Auckland Region.

Well, get this. From the existing fibre, which runs up East Coast Road, an extension will go down Forrest Hill Road, turn down Manutara, then run the entire length of Catalina Crescent, briefly head onto Blakeborough Drive, then Grenada Avenue, Becroft Drive, and it'll finally terminate at Wairau Intermediate. That means I'll have awesome fibre running ten steps from my front door. And I probably still won't be able to connect to it.

Although, they do mention businesses will have access. And DoubleMu Limited has its registered office at 1 Catalina: I could totally set up a home datacentre. Otherwise, anyone know anything about splicing fibre?

This is the way it always happens:

I'm having record uptime on my home server. 60 days! Then my other computer's video card breaks and I realise the only replacement I have for it is sitting in the server.

My home server now has a broken GeForce 6600GT. Yay :-(

Many of the lyrics on the new Modest Mouse album are very hard to hear. Nobody has their hands on the official lyrics yet  - I'm not sure if the album has printed lyrics in the jacket, and the official website doesn't have them. Lyrics sites are crap; most of them will just copy the lyrics (automatically) from one of their competitors. There's not usually an easy way to submit corrections either.

I've mentioned songmeanings.net before. I find it amusing to read people's theories on the meaning of a song when their lyrical transcription is utterly flawed. For example, 'MrSamurai' says, of Little Hotel:

"we fold and we had made a wish
that we wouldn't be missed
If one another just did not exist"

This part seems like its saying that they are going to miss each other, so they wish that they had never existed together.

Uhh what?! I believe the lyrics to that (bridge) go:

The remains of a shooting star
Landed directly on our broke-down little car.
Before then we had made a wish
That we would be missed
If one another just did not exist.

This transcription removes the non sequitur "we fold" - which causes an ugly, ugly unsignalled change from present to past tense (perfect aspect in both?) halfway through the line. The new version also has the advantage of showing a little bit of delayed meaning. There's a gap before that last line, see, so until it arrives the word "missed" reads as referring to the shooting star hitting the car. I'm sure there's a proper name for this technique - the R of the trivium (screw the three Rs) lets me down.

For another little lyrical insight, check out this line from the same song:

I hope that the suite sleeps and suits you well

There's the obvious suite/sweet pun in there, and the super-obvious alliteration, but you only really notice the suite/suit word play when you see it written down (I didn't notice, anyway - think you did/would?).

Edit: See the comments for the corrected lyrics.

Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Just...don't.

The statistics are now working, updated hourly. They turn up all sorts of interesting things.

Like a domain squatter advertising for 'HotSpyware'. I think they're a little confused. See, you have to go for either the porn theme or the spyware theme. You just can't have both. Spyware I can understand. Hot grits, I can understand - even nekkid hot grits, my droog. But HotSpyware? That's sodding goopy, thou shoot.

Vermes, the Liero and Gusanos clone I'm working on, now has a website. Mostly it just goes over what was in the README file, but this should mean search engines pick it up now. I haven't had much time to work on the code, so Vermes really needs someone to help out.