Luke ‘n’ Kim

sport > everything

hmm, the olympics…

i kinda have a problem with the money it all seems to cost, all these countries spending hundreds of millions if not billions on training athletes… for what? then NBC reportedly spends 1 billion dollars obtaining sole broadcast rights in the USA… and then the incessant sponsorship and advertising, can someone tell me whether or not the IOC are a “not for profit” organisation, and if not, why not?

it was explained to me today that from an economics point of view, the olympics are necessary for moral.  as if the country needs distraction from all the war, famine, devastation etc… oh wait… can you imagine if that money was put towards something with more of a longview?

i can see the appeal for an international sporting meet, but why not show some of the olympic spirit i keep hearing about… oh btw, is it similar to christmas spirit?

how about;

• absolutely no exclusivity with tv broadcasting and online streaming, or
• one manufacturer of sporting equipment per sport, decided two years in advance so everyone has time to “get used to” the feel… including shoes, unitards, bicycles, kayaks… even those weird fencing thingys…

this would completely level the playing field for both competitors and spectators…

i dunno, maybe the communism is rubbing off on me?

…and yes, you could probably point at the football world cup or motogp world championship and say “why bother?” or “what a waste!” like i am here, but neither parade around like the olympics insisting that they unite the world and transcend all barriers.

Posted in generica | 2 Comments »

no waking, only sleeping

i’ve been putting off this post for a while, saving a choice rant for when i could articulate it properly… unfortunately i doubt that’ll ever be possible, so;

what is the worst alarm clock noise you’ve ever had?

“worst” is an interesting word, because it may translate to “most effective”

insert invader zim quote here

i’m yet to find an alarm that has me springing out of bed happy to be alive, further, my first thought in the morning used to be “what time is it” but now it’s “no waking, only sleeping”…

did you ever use that old school “beep beep beep beep” on your clock radio? i have in the past, just so i would get up to watch motorbike racing when we didn’t have a VCR (hardcore huh) , but otherwise i’ve used my mobile or the radio… which is fine… and then I started having to be “oncall” for work… it’s like having an alarm clock that could ring at any time, sounds FUN huh.

answering the oncall blackberry isn’t optional, it is, for all intents and purposes, a wake up call. so it needs to have a ringtone that is so loud and obnoxious you cannot sleep through it… with all this in mind, the default blackberry ringtones are abysmal.

the loudest, most likely to wake a person up ringtone is the default “old timey bell telephone” ringtone.

…but this is where we run into problems, this ringtone is the default for incoming voice calls for every blackberry on the planet.

imagine for a moment, every “manager level” desk jockey having your alarm clock noise, as their ringtone.

**shudder** is an understatement…

“so why don’t you just change the oncall phone ringtone?”

yeah, i know, next time i have the oncall phone i will, but the noise is so ingrained now, it’s a little bit late.

the fact that they don’t change it, feeds into another theory i have about middle-management, but i’ll save that for another time…

Posted in generica, tech | 2 Comments »

making me kinda sad

as an australian, can you still support vale rossi, while casey stoner is racing?

i can’t link to any videos and show you any footage (or even interviews) of the laguna seca round because dorna is so tight with the licensing… but anyway… after the race, casey voiced some concerns about rossi’s lines; apparently he was coasting mid to late corner and pushing casey wide intentionally, and then there’s that pass on the corkscrew, crazy, but again, i can’t link to it… and the way rossi behaved post-race… not cool.

so now, to me, the rossi camp has lost a bit of sheen, i guess he never was a gentleman, but none of them are, are they?

then again, casey had a pretty wild temper when he was in 250’s, racing against dani pedrosa… he has to beat rossi on the track, he’s certainly quick enough, just stay rubber side down for the most part.

weird, i used to be neutral about it, not any more.

Posted in bike racing, generica, tech, youtube | No Comments »

bribery by sultanas!

guess i haven’t given you an update on how liam is going in a while, he’s a couple of quick vids we took this afternoon…

part 2…

Posted in family, generica, youtube | 1 Comment »

little niggles, finally!

i’m surprised there haven’t been cries for some football commentary seeing as the olyroos have been playing and the new EPL and A-League seasons are so close… i did watch both the australia vs serbia and the vs argentina matches…

we should’ve beaten serbia, even though we didn’t deserve to… the boys just switched off and were trying to defend for the last twenty instead of playing positively and at the very least keeping possession. against argentina was a different story, all of a sudden the olyroos looked a million times better, playing on the ground, in little triangles in mid-field, not nearly as many long balls…

something i’ve noticed, and i’ve said it before, not only is carney is an excellent player, but he has an element of cleverness that seems to elude most australian national players… he is mentally strong, and has this ability to niggle at the opposing players in a very european way… things like… he re-places the football for free kicks, just a little further forward from where the ref put it… he seemed to unsettle the serbs… just what the socceroos need if we ever come up against a less-than-spotless team in the round of 16 in a world cup for instance?

…but anyway, back to argentina, here we were, holding out the gold medal winners from 4 years ago and we didn’t even look to stressed about it, then they came out after the half time break and were determined to break us down… and did… but it was only one-nil in the end, and there were points in the first half when we could’ve actually stolen it…

i look forward to seeing the match against the ivory coast tonight, but haven’t looked at the table to see if we have a chance of qualifying… oh archie can’t play? big deal. he’s like the new mark viduka, always seems to be a target man, he even had a one-on-one with the argie keeper and shanked it completely… joel griffiths would have been a MUCH better pick… wake up arnie.

Posted in football, generica | No Comments »

oh that reminds of the time i…

i’ve officially decided, it takes more effort to post here because of twitter and tumblr .

as said previously, i was on a course last week… and as usual, it was interesting for all sorts of reasons… it was a class of 3 + the instructor for 5 full days, one of the other students worked at in the IT section for a state library, and honestly, i’d completely forgotten what the public servant world is like.

during the week, i was treated to a couple of sterling anecdotes about how work days start at 0930 and finish at 1530, and how the IT department was made of at least 20 people, around 60% of which are “managers”… gold.

…so while i was trying to give all these stories the attention they deserved, my mind wandered into the realm of oversharing… normally (according to urban dictionary) the term is used for things of an intimate nature, but i disagree… sometimes, i just don’t need to know how something i mentioned earlier relates to another one of your hilarious/amazing/noteworthy 10 minute stories, especially when i’m actually trying to learn about something completely different.

you probably think this is pretty hypocritical coming from someone who uses twitter… but if i’m your only exposure it, you probably should be made aware, in varying degrees, it is chock full of what the internet loves to call “attention whores“… and it is these people that are doing the oversharing.

i know twitter is pretty much a vehicle for it, and you think the followers/following ratio would remove the “issue”… but that would only happen if the majority of users weren’t so similar…

so, i’ll say it again;

• good morning
• good night
• need coffee/sugar
• too much coffee/sugar
• i can has foodstuff, nom nom nom…
• the weather is cold
• the weather is hot

**groan**

so yeah, after the week i had, i unfollowed about 25 people… so now my feed is nice and quiet, i may miss the odd inside joke, but meh, it’s not worth fighting through the noise for…

Posted in generica, tech, twitter | 3 Comments »

sweet sweet soy

the weekend gone was pretty good, i didn’t have to work for a start, woohoo!

umm, we watched the golden compass on friday night, i really enjoyed it but am surprised at what passes for a kids movie these days; it was pretty scary and dark in parts…

on saturday liam was back at swimming lessons, it’s weird, he just won’t lie still, he always wants to be on his tummy thrashing around and dunking his face in… one of the other onlooking mums told kim he is going to be a great swimmer, hopefully not seriously, i don’t want to be dropping him off at a pool at 4am for the rest of my life…

saturday night kim made some sort of asian bbq chicken dish for dinner… i LOVE the sweet soy sauce we got from the chinese grocer the other week.. and sunday we caught up with some friends in yarraville for brunch… liam behaved really well, we just stretched his out lunch for an hour and he didn’t get too restless… he even did a few of his tricks for the applauding masses!

ok well, this week should be interesting, i’ll be doing classroom training this week instead of going into work… and hopefully there’ll be an exam at the end of it… we’ll have to wait and see… talk to you later.

Posted in family, food and drink, generica, melbourne, tech | No Comments »

realtime scrobbling on ipod touch!

the way i use my ipod touch is probably fairly unique in the grand scheme of things…

i use the winamp media library in conjuction with mliPod to fill it with music, but as a user of last.fm this method has a major drawback; the offline scrobbling and playlist sync’ing doesn’t work with the iPod touch… so i’ve been listening to a stack of music on it and last.fm is none the wiser…

until now…

the other day i heard tom meritt mention the reason why he wasn’t super keen to get the 3G iphone was because it wasn’t jailbroken yet, and that would mean he wouldn’t be able to use the mobilescrobbler application…

which gave me the idea that i could use that application and not have to wait until the genius’ at the winamp forums fix it!

so, after a few bodgy attempts at downgrading to firmware 1.1.1 and the resultant bricking, i found and used the ziphone software, which unlocked the device and added the installer application! …then it was as easy as finding the mobilescrobbler application in the list and installing it (twice for some unknown reason)… but hey, i’ve tested it, and it works!

aren’t you glad?

Posted in generica, music, tech | No Comments »

xml -to- php -to- wordpress

brace yourself, this is going to get nerdy.

ever since i started using last.fm i’ve been frustrated at the lack of RSS feeds for user profile data, being able to pull out reports of scrobbled data is, what i would call key in using their service… so yesterday i finally got motivated and decided to have a go at fudging someone elses code… a quick google brought me to a blog post at i.ndustrio.us where the guy outlines a how-to for pretty close to what i need…

below is the code i ended up using in my side bar to display my “last.fm weekly top albums”;

<?php
$user = “_luke__”;
$url = “http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/”;
$url .=”2.0/user/$user/weeklyalbumchart.xml”;
$xml = simplexml_load_file(”$url”);

print “<table align=’centre’ border=’0′>”;
$columns=1;
$i=0;
foreach($xml->album as $album)

{
$i++;
$artist = $album->artist;
$album_name = $album->name;
$album_url = $album->url;
$album_image = $album->image->medium;

if($i==0)

print “<tr>”;

print ”
<td align=’left’>
<a href=’$album_url’>$artist - $album_name</a>
</td>
“;
if($i==$columns)
{
$i=0;
print “</tr>”;
}
}
print “</table>”;
?>

feel free to steal and fudge this as you see fit.

if i cared more, i would include a loop so that it only showed the top ten, if you implement this, let me know, cheers.

Posted in generica, music, tech | No Comments »

i forgot about motogp

you know you haven’t posted for a while, when you start considering writing about how hard it is to write… or you start revisiting the well worn road of discussing what’s really relevant…

but i know what’s relevant, things like; family, melbourne, football, music, tech, twitter, food… so i don’t need to go there do i… i just need to write more… easy.

now that that is out of the way, you know what’s been annoying me lately? a couple of people have been trying to finish my sentences for me, in an effort to prove they understand what i’m talking about… even when either of them ask me the question… it just proves they don’t, and most of the time it doubles the length of the conversation… **sigh**

ok, in other news, liam took his first real steps yesterday, i was absolutely gobsmacked… he’s becoming a real person! i’ve uploaded some news pics to prove it, hehehe…

hey! why don’t i make this an uber-post and try to cover ALL the categories above… hmm…

1. melbourne is cold atm, it’s winter and getting out of bed in the morning is extremely difficult. i still love it though. in the evenings we have the heater on in our living room and often, because i’ve done the wii-fit thing, i stay in t-shirt and shorts until we go to bed, AND THEN, i wonder why i’m so cold…
2. football? well, apparently duff scored a hat-trick in nufc’s win against hartlepool(?), i guess that’s good news (better than losing, duh) but you know, i honestly didn’t expect us to keep m.owen into next season, but seeing as liverpool just bought robbie keane, i think he might be safe! this also is the time of the year when i decide whether to join or start a tipping competition… hmm, i think i might skip the telegraph one this year, i get the impression guys do that one as a full-time job!
3. music. hmm, i’ve discovered a new blog broken record that is really interesting, and my latest tumblr post is pretty depressing if you’re into it…
4. the laptop i’ve been aiming for isn’t going to be released in australia! damn, against kim’s advice i think i’ll settle and if i feel like it later, i’ll buy a solid state disk for it separately.
5. twitter is still there, and probably generally unheathy for my writing in this thing. my random thoughts that would used to have been full posts get reduced down to 140 characters or less… otherwise meh.
6. and food. what can i say, i’m definitely eating less than i used to and am trying to shun the evil food i love… that said, we had fish and chips with emma and scott last night, and it was awesome but strangely unfulfilling… like the awesomeness didn’t make up for how kinda unwell i felt afterwards?

ok well, that seemed to work pretty well, amazing how much crap i can come out with.

or maybe not.

Posted in family, food and drink, football, generica, melbourne, music, tech, twitter | No Comments »

see you in 6 months!

having the tv pack it in really halted my wii fit progress, it still isn’t fixed… so i setup our projector again and now everything we watch is MASSIVE.

we went up to visit some family this weekend at kyabram, which was really great, until we got home on sunday night when i started to feel a bit sick… so went to bed at 1830, and then spent the rest of the night getting up to throw up… till about 0130… nasty.

apart from that, not much is happening… liam is growing like a machine, my work is super busy… umm, i finally went to the dentist for the first time in 2 and a half years, and guess what?! no work needed, just another check up in 6 months! that never happens. awesome.

ok, i’ve gotta try to give this thing more attention… he says signing off.

Posted in family, food and drink, generica, melbourne, tech | 1 Comment »

no tv and no beer make me something something

the weekend just gone was pretty cool, i was oncall, so we didn’t really do much, just grocery shopping, spent most of the time at home, liam is clapping a lot now, it’s his new thing… along with the yelling, crawling, squealing, and yelling some more… we took him to an indoor play centre down the road, and he loved it, he’s so social, other kids seem to really interest him…

we just got our tv back from the repair place, and it’s having the same problem again! damn.

no tv is good and bad, we don’t watch much anyway, it’s just nice to have the choice… and my hard-drive media player thingy failed… i managed to get a backup of the majority and the disk is under warranty, but c’mon… that’s annoying.

Posted in family, generica, melbourne, tech | No Comments »