Finished a lap round Australia. No big deal. Piece of piss, they'd say in Aussie.

I heard Men at Work and "Please help me, a dingo has stolen my baby". Neither were sarcastic. I was hoping to hear, "throw another shrimp on the barbie" to complete the trifecta, but when I heard that, it was sarcasm.

Little Creatures outside of Perth sells great beer. Now to see what NZ has to offer me.

--Dave
http://nokilli.com/rtw/

I've got a 2 hour ride and I'll have completed my lap round Australia on a '65 Ducati 250cc motorcycle. My ass is sore. I almost met another slashdotter in Perth who offered me a place but never ended up catching up with him.

My bike gets shipped to New Zealand Feb. 2 and I show up in Christchurch on Feb. 18.

Head for Japan late March or early April.

http://nokilli.com/rtw/

I'm now in Australia. Still haven't seen any koalas, but several dead kangaroos and a dead wombat.

http://nokilli.com/rtw/

We're playing (and recording) for free at the Press Club on Sunday afternoon. Oct 10th at 3pm. It's at 21st & P St. in midtown Sacramento. Yup.

The Crest Theater show got cancelled, so you've got a reprieve if you haven't seen No Kill I play.

My Go Away party is Oct. 9th at Alex's house. Milhouse, the Bananas, the Nightmares, Lyme Regis, and the Royal Pains (from Seattle) are playing. That'll start at 5pm so hopefully the cops won't show up. email me for directions. There will be a raffle of sorts. My junk that no one in their right mind would like.

http://nokilli.com/

Okay, a review since I actually listened to it on Sept 23, 2004 while driving out to the monkey factory and back.

The cd isn't as bad as I'd thought. Still nothing worth paying for. Stovokor is metal and though they bitch about how awful they sound, it's not bad. NKI: Deep Space 9 were influenced by No FX and they're entertaining. NKI: The Next Generation is always entertaining. And NKI is a car wreck in action that I fastforwarded over. The filk bands (sci-fi folk) are pretty good if you like folk music. Warp 11 sounds like a prom party band in a Lifetime movie channel or, if you're old enough, an Afternoon Special. Fred Schneider of the B-52s has done way better work, but you really notice how gay lispy his voice is. Maybe it's because the best bars around my house are gay bars, so I'm more in-tune to that, but I doubt that. I'm guessing he lives in West Hollywood instead of Athens, and that lisp is persuasive. The Mercantile, by the way, serves the strongest drinks I've had from any bar I've been in.

The payment for the bands appears to be 5-8 copies of the promo cd, which is what No Kill I thought would happen. All of us (not just the whiney loudmouthed Dave Smith) figured that's what payment would be. Everyone in the band has/are in other bands: We've dealt with/been on major labels, toured the US and Japan, been on magazine covers, blah blah blah. Sure, that sounds made up, but it's not. Reports are trickling in from other bands who are upset about the payment of a fistful of promo cds, but hey, we told the other bands what to expect. So if you want a copy, look around and find a free one. You're not taking any money away from the bands.

Ooo-eeee, I got a copy of the soundtrack. Don't waste your money on that platter of crap. If you need it for some reason, knock your head into the wall until that desire flushes out of your mind carried out with on a refreshing raft of blood dripping out your ear like a freshly used tampon. "Crap" and "piece of crap" and "crap sandwich" comes to mind. "Crap cracker" as well. Christian karaoke is better. Trust me, I just spent Saturday in the Appalachian foothills hanging out with my hillbilly relatives.

We were out in Leatherwood Hollow (pronounced "holler") and Baptist hillbilly karaoke is a giant step above. The food there was great because I love fried green tomotoes. I'm not kidding about hillbillies by the way. If you've had the misfortune to meet me, I'm sure you noticed the "hillbilly" tattooed on my forehead right before I tried to mooch a beer from you. Which is to say, live albums have never been recorded live. That is a myth. Even great ones like Cheap Trick "Live at Budakon" wasn't recorded live. It's a studio trick. Sure, there's small parts that are recorded live -- usually audience and stage banter -- but "live" albums aren't really live. That is part of The Promotion as played by Label Suits. I'm guessing most people are thinking I'm making this up, but I'm not. If you ask, I can point you towards articles about this. Or spend 8 seconds googling for it.

This soundtrack is chock full of this mighty crap salad toasted over a burning manure pile. If you're some sort of super collector, which isn't possible in the Star Trek universe, don't bother opening the packaging. If you do, skip the live acts and listen to the folk stuff actually filk in the sci-fi world. Folk can be recorded live, although, for some odd reason, one of the bands, who's label put this soundtrack out, somehow has studio recordings when we were told no time for that. Go figure. I need a thesaurus so I can think of more crap food to list. Crap soup. Crap crepe. There's oh-so-many crappy things to say about this soundtrack. If you need to hear it, there's bitTorrents of it floating around clogging up the sewers of the internet.

If anyone wants one, email me. I've got 'em coming out my wazoo. Same with orkut invites.

At least now I have a message from pairnic, pair's domain register, saying the problem is on their end. Not that they've fixed it -- although they told me that they did. My site is still down.

It's causing me problems. At first it was an inconvenience, but now it's costing me money. Sponsors aren't so interested when my site isn't working. Speaking of sponsors, Pirelli tires is floating me my first set of tires, and there might be more after those. Ducati International isn't interested, but Ducati Australia might help out.

I got my Psion 5mx in the mail. I haven't had much of a chance to play with it, but so far it's been nice. It runs 30-40 hours from AA batteries, and has Opera. There's even a linux version if I get super geeky. I've never had use for a PDA, but now that I need one, this is nice. It's got a mini-keyboard, so it's more like a tiny laptop than a PDA.

I quit the monkey job at the end of September, so no more monkey stories after that. Although, once I quit, untold stories might be posted.

Luckily, thanks to pair.com being slack-jawed yokels, my server is down. I transferred my domain to them and god almighty is pair sucking out loud.

Two or three domains registered through them and none of them are working. And they won't answer my questions as to why. They told me to change my nameservers to what they're already set to. Emails sent to my domains bounces too. Aargh!

I sent a question to urgent@pair.com and support@pair.com and no answers. Hell, it's only been 12 hours since I notified them.

I need the nokilli domain to work, as I'm trying to get sponsors for my ride, and the sponsors can't look at my test site.

I need to find a good server host. servercentral really sucked, so I moved to pair. They tried to bill me for someone else's domain and when I said it wasn't mine, they said they'd just let it expire. So I notified the owner of the domain. Then they let my domain expire last week, so I moved it to pair. Argh!

I've had my sites hosted by pair for a coupla-three years, no problem, but the domain names weren't hosted by them. That's when the problems started.

I just need to be able to run movable type. Who's good?

Checking my server logs, I found this referral:

http://vegassexparty.com/cgi-bin/nph-sss.cgi?9164474528

Dang kids. I only know of one person who reads this journal. Should I screw with this or just blow it off?

Today, I cleaned out cages that monkeys died in.

People have been asking me this week, "Hey, wasn't that your watch when the monkeys died?". Sort of, but not really. The dead monkeys weren't kept at the main monkey lab, but at an off-site location that I don't visit. The Man knew they didn't have temp alarms in those rooms but just blew it off. It's a state run operation after all, and we've seen the fine job UC does with the Los Alamos Lab. The monkeys that didn't get croaked (25 or so) have been moved back to the main monkey lab. That's under my watchful eye on Friday & Saturday nights. The other days, I just hose monkey shit.

What I heard at the monkey lab today was, the thermostat broke and the room overheated croaking 6 monkeys. One was later euthanized bringing it up to 7 dead monkeys. They are, or at least did, check to see if it was an "aggressive action". The Man's words are quoted in that sentence. That's what I heard.

Then I went to back to work cleaning out the dead monkey cages. Nothing to see, just empty cages. They were hosed out at the death site, but I doubt there was any gore. Heat stroke isn't gory, is it? I saw the single survivor in the monkey hospital today. It seemed fine, but I'm not a vet and I don't play one on teevee.

And no, the death room wasn't checked Friday by one of the guys who lost the monkey in March 2003. The joke (at the monkey lab as well as elsewhere) was, hey if he killed 7 monkeys he'll get 7 promotions. That needs an explanation:

There were 2 guys working in the room where the monkey disappeared in 2003. One guy got a promotion, and the other guy allegedly brought a gun into work with a list of names of co-workers he was mad at. It's a state job, so he was given 30 days administrative leave. Probably paid, but I'm cynical.

They bump up security (hi mom!), WITHOUT telling security why they were looking for him. It's not important to know your looking for a guy with a gun, after all. Security is thankfully unarmed. I know my way around firearms, but the other guy? I have good stories about that, but that'll have to wait until I consult a lawyer.

So back to the story -- while that guy is on admin leave, he gets arrested in Wyoming, with drugs and the gun. Which has filed off serial numbers. Oh, and he's in a rental car that shouldn't have left California. Wyoming prison. And he's black -- which in a state that crucified a gay guy for being gay -- can't be good. At least that's how the story works at the monkey lab.

So 7 dead monkeys. There's the stateworker slacker attitude of hosting monkeys in an unfit room, but it seems like something that would've happened anywhere. Are they checking the alarms in the other rooms? Not that I know of. If they croak some more monkeys, everyone will be happy.

I quit in one month. I like monkeys.

Oh yeah, so I had 2 moderations rated unfair taking me to 73%. Dango. That's what I get for modding some spell checker troll as a troll.

.

I'm a 23 year old Media Informatics student from Munich

I own a Zaurus SL-C750 and a girlfriend. Both give me a lot of pleasure and waste a lot of time.

For money's (and fame's) sake I write for the German IT trade magazine IT-Administrator

An mp3 player that runs with CF Type 1 cards & AA batteries. Plus a ton of CF type 1 cards. Kicking around the idea of a small camcorder but might just use the movie part on my Canon A70 instead. Hopefully I can move movies to cds to mail back to friends in Sacramento. I'd like to do a short documentary of asking random people, "What do you think of the USA?"

I've been looking for the Psion, and found a great site that sells them: Psion Flexi. And there's even a Linux version for them if I want to be super geeky.

With the Psion 5mx, I can check email, download web sites (thanks to Opera and RSS) and save text as .txt files to upload to my travel journal. They run off AA batteries (long life with them too) and save to a CF Type 1 card.

If anyone buys one from the Psion Flexi site, please tell Paul you heard of his site from Dave Smith.

myspace -> myspace -at- nokilli -com-

orkut -> gorn -at- nokilli -com-

friendster -> gorn -at- nokilli -com-

virtualtourist -> http://www.virtualtourist.com/m/m/7c41e/

epilepsy foundation -> http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/ecommunities/heroes/index.cfm?user_id=476