Propping up a dodgy memory

This evening I was wildly overjoyed that I managed to go to an Australian Computer Society (ACS) branch meeting. It's been a very long time since I've managed it, and have missed some really great topics/lectures. But tonight's "The Art and Science of Diagramming: Communicating Effectively Using Diagrams" was a subject very close to my heart, so I poured on the painkillers and caffeine to get myself there.

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Today Yesterday I had the kind of day that pretty much demands a blog post, if only for the purposes of propping up my indeed quite dodgy memory. There were thrills and spills, new toys, broken toys, technical trickery, rather too much time on the phone to all the wrong people, and something else that escapes me, but may yet return in the process of writing this post. In which case I'll probably come back and edit that last bit and you'll never know about the lapse.

Or not.

ETA: Now I remember. I discovered that one of the cats had vomited on one of my favourite books. A paperback.

And now it's the next day and I'm lost and rambling. This is a bit long.

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I've written about Klout several times before, namely re its bizarre claim that I was influential about the New York Jets. I played the game for a while which bumped up my score, but then I grew weary of it and stopped bothering. Thanks to everyone who helped. This post describes the current state of play.

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Just home now from Mum's place where today she held another garage sale for Dad's radio gear.

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Seraphinite is beautiful stuff. It was discovered relatively recently so it's not all that common in shops, but it makes beautifully patterned polished stones for jewellry. The reason it's called Seraphinite is because the patterns resemble wings, in gloriously gleaming shades of green and silver. Yes, like recent features pietersite and chaoite it's another chatoyant rock, and a complete bitch. Satan was a fallen angel; I think this is his favourite stone.

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I'm in the mood for a process post so I thought I'd string together a few related pictures showing how I go from a slice of rock to something I'm proud to claim is Art. We'll follow the journey of a piece of East Java plume agate.

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In this post I'd like to deconstruct (and thus ruin) a joke, and as a bonus briefly (ha!) analyse a lesson learned about shamelessly exploiting harnessing social media for fun and you've got to be kidding profit.

UPDATE 2 Feb 2012: Vlad made the Very Demotivational home page! http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2012/02/02/demotivational-posters-vlad-the-impala/?utm_source=trans&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=transglobal

UPDATE 11 Feb 2012: Followup report.

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We all know that Klout (an online influence measurment "service") is evil, right? Allegedly.

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