The Eight Ball [8Ball]

You’re biking up a really steep hill after only cycling for about 2km’s, you’re in the lowest gear, you’re moving about 2kmph, you’re huffing like a bull, your legs are burning, sweat is pouring down every part of your body… and some 10 year old kid cruises by, biking with one hand and holding an ice cream cone with the other, licking away while he checks you out casually with no need to even look where he’s going as he overtakes you at at least 4 times your speed and smirks at you… little bastard. Might be time to make this exercise thing a habit I think?

Lookie what we have here Intels new 6 core, 12 thread processor — the 3.33GHz Core i7-980X. I can feel Nez working out the cost estimates now for his next upgrade and if he really can part with that last kidney of his  At least for the majority of us we can look forward to this and kind of ‘#’s of processor overkill’ to be in our future box/laptop in a few eons time.

About 6 weeks back in the height of summer having already laid down a brew of beer with Nez that it was time to see just how easy it was to do the same with Cider. Conversations with various people led me to the simplest recipe imaginable:

• 1.5kgs Apples
• 5.7L Purified or Boiled Water
• 1kg White Sugar
• 3 Lemons
• (I added a fresh Nectarine off the tree outside)

Tools:

• Couple of Buckets
• Muslin Cloth (had to substitute a tea towel)
• Plastic Bottles
• Time

Read more…

What a wonderful spectacle it was on Feb 28th when NZ stuck it to the Aussies and became the first team to beat them in a cricket match this summer.  However, the 2nd T20 International cricket match ended with much controversy.

Thanks to an outstanding bowling display from Tim Southee in the 48th and 50th overs, NZ kept the Australians out but could only salvage a draw as the Australians scampered for 3 runs on the last ball and Michael Clarke was run out by Nathan McCullum by a brilliant piece of fielding after only 2 runs, effectively tying the match.

As is the custom in T20 Internationals, a Super Over was scheduled 5 minutes later to decide the winner of the match.  This has only occurred twice in the short history of T20 Internationals and this was the first time the result was to be accepted as official.  The first occasion also involved NZ, when they played the West Indies on Boxing Day, 26 December 2008.  The West Indies won the match and the experiment was widely considered a success and the ICC announced that this would officially be how a tie was to be decided in a T20 International from then on.

NZ won the Super Over and ultimately the match in spectacular fashion and claimed the victory.  The following day there was a lot of stirring in Australia with disgruntled Aussies claiming that the match was tied and that the Super Over did not count and therefore Australia still remained unbeaten for their season and had won the T20 series against us!

That didn’t seem right to me at all, nor did it seem right that cricinfo.com, arguably the best Cricket resource in the world for match coverage and statistics, also has the game down as a ‘tie’ in their record books.

Should this not be recognised as a Win to New Zealand?

I wrote a curt email to Cricinfo asking them why they’d recorded the result as a tie and begged the question, what the point in the Super Over was if the result was not official? Why do we bother with it at all if it does not count?  I have still had no response.

I did some further digging today and found that the ICC, the governing body for International cricket, who set all the rules and regulations for the International game, has actually published a detailed rule book for T20 Internationals.  I found the following details interesting.

So officially, the result of the Super Over determines the winner according to the ICC

The way to decide the winner of the match should the Super Over still result in a tie and an equal number of batsmen dismissed begins to border on the ridiculous.  See below:

The fine print of how to determine the winner of a match that has resulted in a tie, and the Super Over has also resulted in a tie, a bit convoluted and unnecessary perhaps but we cannot fault them for their meticulousness

Alright guys, I see what you're doing here and I appreciate it but if a match result EVER has to be determined this way, GOD help Cricket!

When you consider that in the albeit short lifetime of T20 International cricket, this has only occurred twice, and the probability of these other tie breaking scenarios occurring are well beyond the most remote you could imagine, it’s good to know the ICC has got this contentious area of the game well documented and surely there is no refuting that based on this, NZ won the game fair and square?

Campbell Live anyone?

According to British Scientists the most repelling sound to the human ear is the sound of someone vomiting.  This is closely followed by the sound of a baby crying, a dentists drill and radio feedback.  I for one am extremely surprised that the sound of fingernails scratching a blackboard is not the most repelling sound, it’s not even in the Top 5!

Should be:

• 2-3 minutes in length
• something everyone knows
• a crowd-pleaser
• mostly vocal (no more than 8 bars of instrumental solo (no long lead-out or lead-in)

Or, this.

Other suggestions are welcome.

via Kottke

And yes yes, I know that The 8ball is merely becoming a dumping ground for any kind of online video that crops up but seriously that is some impressive green screen effects going on right there. Makes you wonder when they will reach the point where by every single thing is green screened aside from the actors (that is until we perfect that too).

UPDATED BELOW

This is something of an eye opener for what is possibly in store for us in the later part of this century. With mobile computing/Internet increasing at a lovely rate (all be it else where in the world) there are already a number of iPhone apps that allow for some form of Augmented Reality. Keiichi Matsuda explains:

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

Less a little of the extreme advertising and this system would actually help us ‘connected generation’ to keep the umbilical cord flowing with juices from our always awake, always waiting friend the Internet.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

UPDATE

Another video that came out today about bing maps, shows live video being augmented over top of a street view image. Very impressive, scroll to 3mins for the build up.

For me it’s hard to strike a good balance of challenge and responsibility.  Inevitably there will be times during the year when you really want to do something meaty and complicated, other times you’ll want to just keep it simple and work on things you’re familiar with and maybe good at.

Sometimes I feel I find work is not challenging enough so I ask for more responsibility.  Unfortunately this just ends up making you more accountable for more of the work you were doing before.  It’s not really more challenging, you just end up having more work to do!  Sometimes I’ll get to work on something I’ve never worked on before or work in an area I’ve never worked in before and it’s fresh and exciting but at the same time I’m always asking questions and learning and it can get exhausting and I can begin to long for doing the less challenging easy stuff again!

Round and round in circles it goes, back and forth, up and down.  I always come back to the same conclusion.  Life was so much easier when I was making pizzas for a living.  Lost in my little world of swirling sauce and dropping toppings and slicing and boxing my creations for my customers.  If only I could earn the same amount of money I am now I would be doing that right now no question.

Was it easy or challenging?  It was both every day, I guess that’s why I loved it.  The mornings were easy and the challenge ramped up as the day went on and we got busier and busier until it reached the evening and it was all complete choas just trying to cope with the madness.

But at the end of the day, nothing that happened mattered.  Any decision you made, good or bad, ended once you turned the lights off and locked up the store.

In the real world, my decisions have lasting ramifications and tasks span days, weeks and months and often if you make mistakes you are dealing with the fall out for a long time.

At the end of the day you don’t want your job to rule you or define you.  It should just be the means that achieve the things you need in your life when you’re not there.  If it means more to you than that I think you’ve got a serious problem.  When people ask, ‘What do you do?’ you shouldn’t be telling them your position in the organisation you work for, you should be telling them you do puzzles and water colour paintings! (or whatever it is you actually do!)

Does anyone know of any pizza making jobs that pay about $30 an hour?

Robert T. Natoli - Guiness Record Holder - Most Chin Ups in a minute

xyf recently engineered a chin up bar for us out of some firewood and simply slotting my bench bar into it, suspended from the loft in the garage ceiling, quite brilliant, gonna have backs made out of lead in no time.  Robert T. Natoli is the Guinness World Record holder for most Chin Ups in a minute, an astonishing, 53!!