fatvegan

Tom, Martin and I watched Cars last night. It was the coolest G rated film I've ever seen for sure. Those Pixar chaps don't know how to make bad cinema. It was so exciting, and funny, and well made and good for all ages. It's definitely up there with way of the gun for my favourite recent films.

Tom said it, but I'll say it again. Last night was super cool. It was mostly thanks to Jo who cooked the vegie stacks and got the evening's ball rolling. It was one of the best dinners I've had since I moved here and we got dessert. It was this apple pie log danish thing, which we buried in whipped cream. Pretty damn good.

I got sick of all the other WordPress RSS plugins, so I wrote another one. It doesn't use Magpie, because that's been pretty buggy for me. And it doesn't let you have different cache times for different feeds on the same page. This one uses PEAR, which I like more, but it's obviously a shame to throw in the whole of PEAR when WordPress has tried to avoid it. WordPress also stays away from classes, and plugins are kind of meant to, but configuring most RSS plugins is an arse.

I think I'm hoping that this will be easier for people to fiddle with than some of the others. I suspect that writing your own function for this could be easier than configuring the ones I've tried so far.

$feed = new Feed('http://del.icio.us/rss/');
$feed->limit(5);
$feed->lifetime(3600);
$feed->simple(); // Or $feed->extended()

There's a shortcut function to make things a bit neater.

feed($url, $limit, $lifetime, $extended);

You'll need XML_RSS and Cache_Lite. It doesn't support anything except RSS either.

wp-feeds.zip

We appreciate the company, we really do.

Christopher Hill grateful that Australian soldiers are fighting in Iraq.

Tonight was my first proper Rough Edges team lead, and it went pretty well. I had a really fun time doing. I've worked there for 7 years, but I had no idea how involved the relationship politics were. I got to spend the whole evening talking to people. It felt like it was a marginally more crazy night than usual, but that's probably just because the craziness was my responsibility for the first time.

I ended up watching Laurel Canyon by myself tonight, after everyone else watched it last night. I heard all these awful stories today from folks about how pornographic it was, and how disturbing and confronting. Some thought it was terrible, and some thought it was pretty good. So of course I was really keen to watch it. And I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a nice film even. It's probably the most merry film about adultery I've ever seen actually. I usually hate adultery films. This one didn't really feel like it somehow. Maybe it was because both partners were equally adulterous, and neither of them were very adulterous. I liked all the characters in it too - even the ones driving the adultering. Sam was a bit annoying, but he made up for it by being nice to his patients and not shagging the girl he wanted to shag.

It's probably not a film you'd want to see with your mother or father, or if you get uncomfortable about sex, or if you don't think Kate Beckinsale is a spunk. But otherwise, it's definitely worth it.

I've fixed up Blogfeed to use RSS. If someone doesn't have that then it can still do it the old way. But everyone seems to have RSS already. If your site is currently working on Blogfeed, then you can remove the old comments from your blog.

I watched way of the gun last night after coming home from the theatre. I suppose I should be talking about It Just Stopped here shouldn't I.

The theatre was OK. Annoying American accents, a lot of very unsubtle points about what's wrong with the world. There was a cool jelly bean wall. Rebecca Massey and John Wood were great. Some of it was very funny.

But way of the gun, now that was art. One of the coolest films ever. So many guns, and so many gunfights. And two such happy seeming fellows so willing to kill innocent people for money. They're the best kidnappers I've ever seen in a film. And they could have been a lot better. It doesn't say much for Hollywood kidnappers. I think kidnappers are too reviled for screenwriters give them brains or guts. Ryan Phillippe has sure come a long way since Cruel Intentions.

I don't know why I like violent movies so ever much. Um..... no don't know.

Firefox 2.0 is delicious. So spelling checkery, and pretty sortable tabbery.

I got the new version of Firefox when I upgraded to Ubuntu Edgy, which I am also enjoying a lot. It's all just better, and slicker and faster. Maybe almost time to swap back to Ubuntu. Thank goodness I haven't bought any iTunes music.

My conversation with Centrelink the other day went a bit like this.

Them: This document you've provided doesn't count. It's just a print out. Anyone could have made that up and printed it out.
Me: Those are the only records my boss has. Everything is kept in MYOB.
Them: You need to provide us with more proof than this.
Me: I've got everything from them that they have. They are happy to talk with you if you need to confirm this.
Them: Oh... we don't do that. It's up to you to provide us with the information. If we wanted to talk to your employer we would have just rung them in the first place.

I can't really blame them for being confused about my job. It just shows that freelance work and Centrelink shouldn't mix.

My uni income went up by $8.50 a fortnight the other week. My Centrelink went down by $7 a fortnight. Bum.

There is nobody at home to hang out with. Oh. I know. They are at commie dinner. Never mind. Forget I said anything.

According to Growing Up, approximately 94% of Australian parents consider themselves to an average or better than average parent.

We had the funnest BBQ ever last night. Our wine-quaffing neighbours donated their old BBQ to us because they pitied us our darling little Webster. They must have watched us lose our frail vegie burgers through the holes of the grill designed for steaks. Our vegie sausages dried out, and we never even bothered trying onions.

But now we have a four-burner Jumbuck and a 9kg gas bottle so we can BBQ all night. Martin and I spent an hour or two cleaning it yesterday, and it's looking super posh. We had some folks over, and we cooked tofu and vegie sausages and onion and it was brilliant. Most of the flaking rust come off with the onions, so the sausages and tofu were perfect. And I reckon the more we use it, the less rusty it will be. We were a little doubtful about the rust at first, but I just tried to conjure up comforting images of dad dragging a rusty old BBQ hotplate out of a bush at a nice park. We used a lot of Windex and dishwashing liquid and bleach, although Haley was more worried those than the rust. I reckon we pulled a couple of kilos of rusted BBQ components out of it. I was worried structural or gas-leak-preventing parts would have rusted, but it goes great.

Our neighbours even came round with a bottle of their wine. It was so delicious. Eating a BBQed marinated tofu burger with a glass of gourment wine is as good as it gets. I look forward to many, many future BBQs this summer.

Some of us watched Scarface last night after our awesomely fun vegie BBQ. It wasn't very good. At first I liked it, but Tony was too bloody stupid to be cool, and too bloody violent to be endearing. The whole second half, all I thought about what why everyone in his life didn't leave him. There were a couple of moments in the film where you got glimpses of vaguely competent Tony, but they were few.

Maybe I was just in the wrong mood, but I sure was relieved when he finally fell into that pool.

Putin called [the Israeli Prime Minister] a "mighty guy" and said: "Raped 10 women! I would never have expected that from him. He surprised us all. We all envy him."

From SMH

Goodness me. A Kremlin spokesman confirmed the comments and said that Russian humour doesn't always travel well overseas. Bush and Blair seem to get caught making inappropriate but kind of endearing comments. Nothing endearing about that.

I often have problems with CSS floats, because I'm pretty average at all that stuff. I've never liked clearing lines or paragraphs after floated list items, because you end up with space that you don't always want. overflow:hidden often works in Firefox, but not in IE, and I never check anything in IE, so I need to completely abandon that one.

So this is my favourite option.

<style>
hr.clear { background:none; margin-top:-5px; }
</style>
<hr class="clear"/>

Works in IE and Firefox, and you can virtually get rid of the extra space altogether.

Update: This doesn't work quite as well in IE as I thought. Bugger.

Mil, Martin and I went to Blue King Brown last night. It was pretty much the best $15 concert in the history of ever. So naturally, as with most of the awesomest moments in anyone's life, it was at the RSL Club. They were supported by this leet Aboriginal chick called Mihirangi who had a loop pedal which rocked.

Blue King Brown will be famous one day.

I am such wanker. Why does it take me a whole week to write 2000 words of the sort of pretentious drivel I just handed in?

Imagine that you lived in a poor nation and you happened to be lucky enough to have some wealth to invest; you might well decide that putting it in a safe country like the United States was your best option, even if capital is less valuable there than in your home country.

From Gregory Mankiw's Macroeconomics

This is the most compassionate explanation for capital flight I've ever heard. Mostly explanations consist of something like this:

Amoral fuckheads in the government, military or business community steal a shitload of money from the poor and/or some aid organisation and then send it overseas so it won't get stolen back.