Harold's Home

Starts with a Bang asks "If you took all the people on Earth, and you spread every one of us -- men, women, and children -- out as sparsely as possible over the entire land area of Earth, including land like Antarctica, Greenland, and Siberia, how much land would everyone get? How far away would your neighbors be?"

Think about it for a minute and then look up the answer. I was way way wrong. Scary stuff, which proves that what Malthus wrote more than 200 years ago still applies today even though birthrates are dropping in the western world, the areas where food is actually scarce do not seem to benefit from modern knowledge about contraception.

Comedian Sarah Silverman has a novel approach to food shortages though: sell the vatican, build a nice house for yourself with pools and whatnot, use what's left over to feed the world.



Of course the above clip is comedy, give a man a fish and he will be fed for a day, teach a man how to fish and he will feed himself for life, as the saying goes. Problem is being able to fish means little if there's simply too many people around you going hungry, pretty soon you'll have emptied the lakes and oceans. Which is where we are heading now.
On the other hand maybe birth control will finally be accepted in the poorest countries when the delusional dictator in the Vatican is gone.

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:28:29 +0200
To: virtualpetrockhelp@virtualpetrock.nl
Subject: VPR feedback - featurerequest
From: webmaster@virtualpetrock.nl
Reply-To: le4jc062l.@gmail.com

BadGirl30 [VPR name: BadGirl30, VPR age: oLKGMrJNrZSksKV] wrote on 13-10-2009, 10:28:29 about "featurerequest":

I'm not the least bit impressed by celebrities. ,


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remote ip: 188.2.67.46
user agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
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Neither am I weird spammer person. Neither am I.

Interesting article on Apple's environmental policies in BusinessWeek.

I'm reminded of the famous story about getting Mac OS ready for the introduction of the mac: "Real artists ship".

Hehe, our internet is down at work and all PCs in the library are occupied by students doing actual work. Loads of spreadsheets, pie charts, reports etc. are being worked on. Normally about half the screens show MSN windiws, social networking sites and that kind of thing.
Maybe we should have this as standard once a week, if only for a morning.

I'm taking the time to catch up on my library journals and posting this from my iPhone.
I am getting a bit shakey though. Is the rest of the world still out there?

Goddammit, today is International Blasphemy Day and I am one pissed off atheist. I had some minor surgery to excise an infection from my back yesterday and it hurts like hell. It's also virtually impossible to reach to clean the bandages so this morning I was forced to become a contortionist. Hey, maybe I can make a new career out of this. Or I can just go home a bit early and snuggle up on the couch with a nice glass of wine to dull the pain while watching Lost or reading a book.

Hmm, that sounds like quite a good plan actually. Certainly better than insulting the mindless drones of the Lord.

If you're a religious person you can rejoice in my discomfort today and think your god has inflicted this upon me, if that makes you happy.

A jolly pirate day to all. I hope you all took the opportunity to dress like a pirate today so that we may be fighting the evil global warmings!

I took the opportunity to see how life is affected in the virtual world.
I first took the seaturtle to the southern seas.

As the day would be long I quickly grabbed some fish.

I then happened on a flock of penguins, who told me (at least I think they did) that this is one of the hottest years in recent memory (their memory isn't that good to be honest).

After this I headed west and saw a clear sign of global warming, here you see a musk fighting to the death with a wild beast, crazy with hunger as the normal glacier wildlife has been driven away by more temperate species.


Saddened I left this area, but not after a good friend invited me for some old fashioned pirating to lift my spirits.


Remember to dress like a pirate often and to honor his noodly appendage.

Gaaaaaaah, I'm going completely crazy.

Got word yesterday that the site of the institution I work at would be switching to a new CMS today. None of the sites I maintain and manage are going over till december (or at all, in case of marginal, low-volume, sites).
This transition has been announced before for various dates and times but this time it looked to be really definite. And so it was.

Mailed colleagues yesterday not to report problems to me or anyone else as they were expected and should be fixed asap once the ramifications were known, yet today I've been fielding many many phonecalls, emails and walk-ins from people who somehow seem to think that this mail doesn't apply to them, which leads to lots of frustration on my side, hence the Gaaaaaaah.

If you'll excuse me I'll go lie down in a corner and scream some more.

I should be done in a minute and then it's time for a beer!

I like my job, I really do, but not all the time.



I do like beer though. Hmmmmmmmm......

Upgraded to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) this weekend and so far all seems to be going smoothly, in fact the entire upgrade operation seems to be much smoother than any previous upgrade.

Only problems I encountered so far are MySQL not working (haven't had time to look into that yet, could be a very simple fix) and PHP throwing up a warning notice about timezone support. Seems like the new PHP wants you to explicitly set a default timezone when calculating stuff using the date() function. No biggy, look in /etc and find php.ini.default, open it up in your favorite editor (BBEdit work great, but sudo pico /etc/php.ini.default works as well) and look for the line that says date.timezone = .
Add your preferred timezone, like so: date.timezone = "Europe/Berlin", see the manual for supported zones/cities.

After you're done with that rename the file using sudo mv php.ini.default php.ini and restart your computer.

Eternal Earth-Bound Pets - the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World

Only available in the US of A at this point and it looks like our 8-legged friends aren't included but maybe they'll branch out soon. If you think you're likely to be raptured soon put your affairs in order now!

Imagine, if you will, the moment you were born. Perhaps there was a window open next to your birth bed. The sun struck your ugly purple wrinkled face (most babies are ugly except to their parents, a fact many parents aren't willing to admit to) and your crooked grin with bubbly saliva reflected some photons back into space. Now imagine those photons zooming through space on an angle, who knows what alien civilisations might pick up a stray photon of you and who knows what they make of it. Perhaps Earth's atmosphere has left clues in the spectrum of the presence of methane or oxygen, perhaps bug-eyed, tentacled monsters are calculating the possibilities of life on that utterly insignificant little blue-green planet far away, near a small unregarded yellow sun. Perhaps they are itching for an excuse to build a interstellar super highway and wreck some lives? Or perhaps they want to be penpals!


Get your own RSS feed with your lightcone, my photons have had a busy few weeks and more is coming.