A Man and his Penguin

On Wednesday night, we had a blackout. Later on in the evening, we realised that it was just our street.

When I woke up on Thursday, the lights were back on, but there was a sound in the distance like a car’s engine being run. It turns out that the transformer box next door died, and Western Power has parked a generator there.

It’s Friday night and the transformer still hasn’t been fixed. The generator is still humming away; I can hear it right now. And the lights flicker every now and then. I’m just thankful that I decided to buy a surge protector for my computer, because I don’t trust the generator to give clean power and it doesn’t look like Western Power will get on to fixing the transformer any time soon.

In other news, I bought a couple of DVDs on Wednesday - Mr Methane’s "Let’s Rip", The Bridge Over The River Kwai (can you believe I’ve never seen that film?) and Hancock’s Half Hour Series 4. Hancock’s Half Hour is pretty funny; my favourite episode is The Missing Page.

Just a warning for you good folks: I bought an Avril Lavigne single the other day (yes, I’m ashamed, but I like the song) and it has that half-arsed copy protection; which means that I can’t play the CD in my CD-RW drive, but I can play and rip it in my DVD burner. What’s really ironic is that it’s got the music video on it too; so why use the copy protection that prevents you from being able to put it into your computer? You need to use the computer to access the video!

More on that single. The song is written by "Avril Lavigne / Butch Walker", which means that Butch Walker actually wrote it. But if you look closer into the credits, he also produces it, does backing vocals, plays Bass, Guitar, Keyboards, Percussion and the Synths. Butch Walker is a one-man band!

It’s funny because the opening of the song sounds a little like Mylene Farmer. But as much as I dislike Avril’s posing and her non-credible attempts to court the rock music community, she does have a distinctive voice and her ballads are pretty good.

But yeah, not much else to say. Oh, I should post my theories of why children’s groups are so popular these days; but that’s another day and another blog post.

I’m not sure if I just came across a Compiz bug or whether it’s that damn generator, but my screen just faded almost completely to white before coming back with a reddish tinge. Strange.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 4:49 am and is filed under Backstory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.