Me on Tony Andrew Meyer

Top Five Film Trilogies

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:27:27 +1200

I’ve been catching up on Filmspotting over the last few weeks (more alone driving - it actually works out well to be a bit behind, because it takes longer for many films to be released here, and many films I only get around to seeing once they hit DVD (and Fatso) anyway). In #324 the top 5 list was trilogies, and I found I could come up with a list myself. I have more stringent rules than Adam/Matty: the trilogy must tell a continuous story in all three films - it’s ideal if each film can stand alone as well, but there must be an overarching storyline that connects the three. This means that a pair of sequels doesn’t count (e.g. Toy Story, Die Hard (before #4), Mission Impossible (before #4)), and it can’t be a ’triple-feature’ (i.e. three films that are just connected in some way). Like Filmspotting, all three films had to be good (e.g. no Matrix or Back to the Future). This actually narrows it down a lot (most sets of three are movie+sequel+sequel or triple-features). My top five:

Possible gmail break-in

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:09:49 +1200

When I logged into gmail this morning, I saw the message that I dread the most - detection of an unusual access. There was a connection (two days ago) from a server in Malaysia, although it’s actually an AWS server (Amazon web services). There are two possibilities: the good one is that this is something that I’ve previously given access to my account, accessing it via an alternate method (e.g. Backupify can access my mail to back it up, and they use AWS) so that it showed up an unusual. The bad one is that someone was using AWS to bulk-attack accounts and got in. In favour of the good one, as far as I can tell, no email was sent - I can’t see anything amiss at all. The email account is the central lockbox for everything, of course, so it’s possible that it was just used to break into other things, or the email content was retrieved. My password (changed now, of course) was a random 8-character string of lower-case alphanumeric characters, so not particularly simple to break (although not difficult either, given sufficient resources). I never give out the password to anything that I do not completely trust, and nor do I give out access via other methods (e.g. oauth, openid) unless I trust those services too. I had intended to turn on two-factor identification, but hadn’t got to it yet. I’ve done that now, for the main account at least. My password is now over 30 characters long, including upper and lower case and punctuation - I probably should have changed this a while ago too. For now, I’m leaning towards the good possibility, so I won’t be completely resetting everything that can send a password reminder to my gmail account. I’ll be keeping an eye on things as closely as I can in the next week or so, though. If you see anything suspicious come from me, please let me know.

An odd message

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:34:01 +1200

I received this rather odd message the other day (Facebook is a truly strange system). I’m not really sure what to make of it. There are quite a few oddities:

The message comes from a “Jason Reeves”, who I do not recall (but my memory isn’t great, and it was 14 years ago). A quick Google only turns up a Jason Reeves who works for a radio station in NZ (and wikipedia indicates that isn’t the same one).
The Facebook account is under the name “Jason Smith” (this name is also unfamiliar, although I think I would be more likely to remember the name “Reeves” than the name “Smith”).
I can’t find anything about the “NZER” organisation mentioned twice via Google. It’s pretty odd for a modern company to be nowhere in the first few pages of Google results. “NZER” is a bad name (because it clashes with “NZer”, as in “I am a NZer”), but even still it ought to have some sort of pagerank. (nzer.co.nz and nzer.org.nz and nzer.com do not seem relevant here).
I was indeed a Kamo High School student in 1996, and knew both Andrew and Simon (IIRC Andrew was only at KHS for a year or two). I haven’t heard from/about either since.
What possible use could my opinion of people I knew 14 years ago be? Even if there wasn’t such a gap in time, why would I as a peer be an appropriate person to make an academic evaluation? Surely a teacher would be a more appropriate choice.

I replied - basically just asking for more information - so we’ll see what happens now.

What happened to the 2009 IPy Notes?

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:51:13 +1200

Around this time last year, I started posting weekly reports on the IronPython classes I was teaching at Northtec, including copies of the material that I was giving the students. These stopped abruptly around the middle of the course. The course did complete (and was fairly successful - I think the change to IronPython was definitely for the better), and I did continue making notes as I taught. However, I didn’t manage to get them online. On the 10th of October 2009, my father passed away (very unexpectedly, of a heart attack the day before). As a result, I didn’t have as much extra time as I had anticipated, and I didn’t really have the energy/motivation to post the notes. (The classes continued, except the week of the funeral, where the hours were halved). The course began again last week (21st July 2010), and I’m going to try this again. As I go, I’ll complete the 2009 notes as well (some/all of the links in the 2009 ones are broken, which I’ll fix, and when I get to where the notes stopped, I’ll post the notes that I took last year, although these will be less exhaustive than if I had done them at the time). No promises, but I expect that I’ll be able to post throughout the entire course this year, and I’ll again make the material that I use available (you may use it under a Creative Commons license if you wish, although much of the material is references to IronPython in Action). I had planned to present a short summary of the experience of using IronPython in this way at PyCon NZ, but I’m again unable to make it this year (for happier reasons - a close friend is getting married that day); perhaps next year! I’m still interested in hearing from anyone else that’s using IronPython in the classroom.

Dr? No.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:10:21 +1200

I finally withdrew from my PhD today (probably many people thought that this had happened some time ago).

In the beginning…

The story really starts in 1999. I started working consistently while studying, and also got rather bored with the study that I was doing. I also got involved in the Students’ Association - first lightly, then pretty heavily. As a result, at the end of 2000, I was about 1.5 papers short of finishing my BSc and BBS. I needed to do half a semester of work, and so I decided to go those at the same time as a Postgraduate Diploma in Science (these went along with running for ASA President). The ASA job didn’t work out, but I did finish the last undergrad stuff I needed to do, and rather unexpectedly found that I really enjoyed the postgrad study. I was able to do all the papers for the postgrad diploma along with the undergrad work, except for the double-paper research project, in that year. That meant that the next year started off with finishing off the research project - normally half of a semester’s load, but since I didn’t have anything else to be doing, I poured in a whole semester’s effort into it. That left me at the middle of the year with everything complete.

Massey Weirdness

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:11:31 +1200

While looking through links for my previous post, I found this one - which caught my eye in particular because it has my old postal address (also weird - Google maps used to show the house, but now I can’t see it, even though the neighbours are there, and so is the lake. Has the imagery got older?!). I’m not sure why I’m listed here (pretty much everything else seems to be a business, although I didn’t look thoroughly) - maybe from when I was providing theatrical services to Massey, although I did that under “Underground Services” (the theatre was named the Underground Theatre). The information at the top seems to always be about veterinary products, but maybe that has something to do with the flashing (good grief!) “test site” at the top of the page. I would think that Massey would have the skills available, somewhere, to make test sites (and, really, the purchasing system in general) hidden from the public and from Google.

Collective Knowledge

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:50:58 +1200

Dad asked me today who my teachers were at Pukepoto Primary School, which I could partially answer, with help (I think: Mrs Travers in J1 and J2, Mr Jones in Standard 1, Mrs Bellingham in Standard 2, and Mr Wilkins in Standard 3 and 4, and apparently someone else as a new-entrant). This is an example of knowledge that Google simply can’t give you, of course. Except now it can - or at least will be able to when this page is indexed. When I remember, I’ll try this query again (161 hits at the moment, none of them with the required information, although in eight of the pages the “Tony Meyer” is me) and see if it works. We wondered if Wikipedia would have an entry for Pukepoto School, and while it doesn’t, there is a mention in the entry on Pukepoto (a stub - if I had more knowledge I’d expand it, but I don’t really know what substance I could add).

Christmas Present

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:42:33 +1200

Liv & I got this game (under the name Mancala) from Si & Jo & Adam for Christmas. I remember playing this game (under the name Kalah) on the Sega SC3000 (on a tape, if I remember rightly) when I was a kid.

technorati tags:kalah, mancala, game, sega, sc3000, christmas, present

I'm a dad!

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:06:11 +1200

See my family page for more.