Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Lena's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, September 17th, 2011
2:02 am	Epic Quest Update: progress on making the game Two updates in one post today, since we didn't actually make an update about starting this playtest! ( Update 1 ) ( Update 2 ) (Comment on this)
Monday, September 5th, 2011
7:43 pm	My Epic Quest: Get my PhD! Starting my first real-life Epic Quest on epicquestgame! (If you're interested in helping us to playtest the Epic Quest! Game, please join the epicquestgame community and create your own Epic Quest :-)) What is your Epic Quest? Get my PhD! What are the first few mini-steps along the way to your Epic Quest? The next steps I want to accomplish are: - Make Mixed Integer Programming models for my problem, with sequence variables and Benders Decomposition to test how well these techniques work for solving my problem. - Run lots of calculations with varying input parameters, using all of the above techniques. - Write a paper comparing the effectiveness of these techniques and all the other ones I've tested in the past few weeks. What would be the end-point of this quest? Writing and submitting my PhD thesis! A long way off yet, but this is an EPIC quest! Is your Epic Quest time-sensitive, if so what is the deadline? There's a paper submission deadline on the 30th of September. (And another one in late October if I miss that.) The actual PhD deadline is still at least a year and a half away. Let me know if you can help in my Epic Quest, eg. by providing encouragement/ideas/group writing sessions! No idea what the Epic Quest! Game is about? Check out epicquestgame for more information on how to best your Demons of Procrastination. Current Mood: cheerful (4 Comments |Comment on this)
4:42 am	We're making a game! Hi everyone, neo_leviathan, cumbernotathome, A-who-does-not-have-an-LJ and I are making a game! We're planning to make a web-based game aimed at helping people achieve any Epic Quests they have in their real lives - goals that take years or months to accomplish, such as: get your dream job, write a novel, overcome your fear of public speaking. Many of us are afraid of asking for help with our biggest goals, or even of talking about them at all, which makes it harder to make progress. And yet, when we play games, our characters in Dragon Age or Mass Effect have no problem coming up to complete strangers and saying "I'm on an Epic Quest to save the world! Come with me and help!" So we decided to create The Epic Quest! Game, to make it easier to talk about and ask for help with your biggest goals by making this into a game. The Epic Quest! Game will be a web-based game which you can sign in to using your Twitter or Facebook account, and write about any big goal you have. This is your Epic Quest; you can have more than one. (For the initial playtest, we'll be using the epicquestgame Livejournal community.) You can view your friends' Epic Quests and comment on them with encouragement/ideas/offers of help. And you can ask people on your friends list (including those who don't play the game yet!) to help with your quest. You can give your friends the titles of "Sage Advisor", "Stalwart Companion" or "Helpful Stranger", along with awarding them Helpfulness points, to thank and recognise people who have helped you on your quest. You can give yourself levelups every time you complete a step along the way to your quest, such as writing a few pages of your novel, or sending out a job application. And finally, the game will ask you to post updates about your quest progress every week, and provide minigames that help you get unstuck if you select an option such as "Battling the Demon of Procrastination!" If you're interested in helping with our own Epic Quest of creating the Epic Quest! Game, please sign up for the playtest by joining the epicquestgame community, looking at our own Epic Quests as examples, and posting your first Epic Quest! (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010
12:20 am	Ingrid's Haven I found out recently that Ingrid's Haven, a no-kill cat shelter for abandoned cats, is being evicted. All the cats have to find a new place to live by Christmas. So if anyone is thinking of adopting a cat, now would be a very good time! If you can't adopt a cat, but want to do something to help, there is a donation page here. I've already donated. For anyone who was considering getting me a Christmas present - I'd really appreciate it if you made a donation to the Haven for me instead. I don't really need anything for Christmas, but the cats urgently need a home. Thanks, Lena (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 25th, 2010
12:14 am	Furniture to give away altheas and I are moving house soon, so we're getting rid of some of our stuff. If anyone wants a single loft bed or a small computer desk (pictures under cut) they're yours for free if you come by and take them away. If no-one claims them by Friday, we'll post them up on Freecycle or Ebay. They're both from Ikea, so should be possible to disassemble. ( Furniture pictures ) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
11:59 pm	Tea Tasting Tour This afternoon I went to a birthday party at the Oriental Tea Room on Little Collins St. It's a yum cha restaurant, and also a tea shop. They had about 8 different varieties of tea available for tasting, and dozens of different varieties for sale. Realising that there are places in Melbourne other than T2 that have free tea samples makes me want to organise a tea tasting tour of every tea shop in Melbourne which offers free samples, as well as some cafes/restaurants with a strong tea focus. Would anyone else be interested in a tea tasting tour? Do you know of other places to get free samples of tea? What are your favourite tea-themed cafes/restaurants? City locations would be best, for easy walking between places, but other suburbs could be included if we can't find enough in the city. This might take me a while to organise, depending on how easy it is to find enough suitable places, but if you'd like an invitation, please comment here. Current Mood: cheerful (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
4:25 pm	Unicon For anyone who is thinking of going to Unicon - don't forget to sign up soon, registration will close the week before the con! (You can still register on the day, but it will save you time if you've preregistered.) (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
3:58 pm	Social Events aurellia and I were talking this evening about ways to bring people together in a social context, without using games as an excuse. Some ideas we came up with were: 1) Pot luck dinners - everyone brings a dish to share. I've organised two of these in the past, borrowing the idea from work. At the last one, someone also suggested bringing along the recipes to share. EDIT: elleuba also suggested a themed pot luck. aslan suggested a Death by Chocolate day - a pot luck with chocolate-based food. 2) Origami folding session - we'd need to organise origami paper, and a few patterns of varying difficulty. 3) Shopping trip - shopping for what would be very dependent on the people involved. 4) Wine and cheese night. 5) Philosophy discussion - decide on a topic ahead of time, give people a few days to think about it, and then meet up to discuss that topic. 6) Pancake day - everyone sits around and talks, and takes turns to go up to the stove and make themselves a pancake. When you're cooking pancakes one at a time, it takes a couple of hours for everyone to feel full, so that results in lots of conversation. 7) D&M day. 8) Writing a story in a group - we tried this earlier by email, but it didn't get very far. Perhaps it would work better with people sitting around a table, passing the story on every 15 minutes. Or longer than 15 minutes, but in that case we'd need something to amuse the people who aren't writing. Possibly multiple stories? EDIT: more ideas that people have suggested: 9) Waffle day (suggested by harkon) 10) High tea (suggested by elleuba) 11) Cocktail night. 12) Stitch and Bitch (suggested by sylver_spiders) 13) Miniature painting (sylver_spiders) 14) Random themed discussions, eg. people's most meaningful songs, or favourite youtube clips. (sols_light) 15) Movie night (might be difficult to get this to meet the criterion of encouraging conversation, but it could be done). (sols_light) 16) Book club (parakleta) This post is just to throw the ideas out there and gauge interest. If you'd be interested in any of the above, please comment to say which ones. Also, if you have suggestions for the above events, or other ideas for social events, with an emphasis on meaningful conversation rather than games, we'd love to hear them! (40 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
1:11 am	SitePoint is offering 5 PDF books for the price of 1, with all proceeds going to the Red Cross Bushfire Appeal. This offer is open until Friday 13th of February. (Comment on this)
Friday, December 12th, 2008
1:06 am	Bokashi Group I know some of the people on my friends list use bokashi bins - you might be interested in the bokashi_au community that pfctdayelise has just started. (For those who don't know, a bokashi bin is a kind of compost alternative for people who don't have garden space for a real compost bin.) (Comment on this)
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
1:03 pm	Australians Against Internet Censorship This post will be brief, since I have been extremely busy lately. To summarise: on Saturday I went to a protest against the government's proposed internet censorship scheme (see www.nocleanfeed.com if you haven't heard about this). After the protest, myself and a group of others started a group called Australians Against Internet Censorship, to organise future nationwide protests and other campaigns against this proposal. We have been using this forum to organise our activities, anyone who is interested in helping out in any way is very welcome to join! In particular, we are looking for anyone who has media contacts, or knows politicians or IT industry representatives who may be willing to speak at a protest. If you know people who are difficult to contact and may be able to get us media coverage or speak at a protest, please get in touch. We're likely to get much better results if we email someone's private email address saying "hi, I'm a friend of so-and-so" than if we just contact people out of the blue. Thanks! Lena (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
10:43 am	Australian Internet Censorship The Australian Government is planning to introduce mandatory internet filtering for all Australian ISPs. The government's own studies show that such a filter would slow down internet access by 30-80%1. Also, even the best of the trialled filters would incorrectly block 1 in 100 legitimate websites2. Even more importantly, the future free speech implications of internet filtering are huge, and impossible to predict. There is no way to tell what "illegal" content this government, or future governments, will choose to block. Government MPs have already mentioned euthanasia and anorexia as subjects that may potentially be filtered3. What other discussions of controversial issues will end up being blocked? Finally, this filter will be completely ineffective in blocking illegal content, since it would only block access to websites, ignoring peer-to-peer traffic. Also, the filter could be easily bypassed by anyone - including children - determined to access blocked content2. The 2007 Australian Broadband Survey found that 74% of people were against mandatory internet filtering, with only 13% in favour. Yet the government is still planning to go ahead with this idea. If you, like myself and 74% of other Australians, are against mandatory internet filtering, please sign this petition. You can also write to Senator Conroy and your local MP, or join this protest, on Saturday 1st of November, at 12:00, outside Parliament House, in every capital city in Australia. -------------------- 1. http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/why-the-tasmanian-filtering-trial-is-a-failure/ 2. http://www.nocleanfeed.com/learn.html 3. http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,24569656-5014239,00.html Note: I do not usually get involved in political issues. This will be the first protest I have gone to in my life. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 9th, 2007
2:55 am	Word Game For anyone who wants something to procrastinate with, whether it be from exams, or NaNo, or work, this is an interesting (and vaguely educational) site: http://www.freerice.com/index.php The difficulty of the questions gets adjusted based on your results, so after you've answered a few questions, the game should adjust itself to a level that's challenging but not too difficult for you (there are 50 levels altogether). And for each word you get right, 10 grains of rice will be donated to the UN World Food Program. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 15th, 2007
11:52 am	"FBI tries to fight zombie hordes" Best BBC headline ever for zombie day? Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, March 5th, 2007
11:20 pm	Computer Woot! My computer is now fixed! (Also, I think I'll build my next computer from parts. That wasn't nearly as complicated as I'd thought it would be.) Current Mood: cheerful (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
5:03 pm	Computer My computer has stopped working completely - when I turn it on it just sits there making a noise like a chainsaw, and I don't dare leave it on for too long just in case it explodes or something. So I've just spent an hour printing out all my notes at uni. I probably won't be online much for the next week, since I won't have time to get my computer fixed until after exams. *sigh* At least this didn't happen while I was still writing my thesis... Current Mood: annoyed (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 27th, 2006
12:02 pm	Thesis And it's finally done! All 61 pages and 13000-odd words of it... Now I just have to get it printed, bound and handed in. Current Mood: tired (23 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 9th, 2006
3:59 pm	neo_leviathan's D&D game Today's D&D session was... amusing, insane, really fun in an "Oh God, oh god, we're all going to die" kind of way. ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 10th, 2006
1:39 am	Interview from ages back Interview from sylver_spiders from the last interview meme. Took me a while to get around to answering the questions... 1. Is there anywhere in the world you would really *not* want to visit? Anywhere where there is currently a war going on, or significant political unrest, etc. I have an aversion to being killed or kidnapped. 2. What movie would you most recommend I see? Hmm.. Do you like really weird, insane foreign sci-fi/comedy movies? If so, I'd have to say Kin-Dza-Dza, partly because I translated most of the subtitles for it. It's the story of two guys from 1980s Moscow who accidentally get teleported to an alien planet, and then try to find a way to get home. altheas described it as "the Russian version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", just because of its sheer randomness. 3. I know you usually like looking young and innocent. But are there times when you hate it? No, but there are times when I hate the fact that I usually like it. Because that means that when I want to do something that breaks the image too much, I usually choose not to, since I know I'll want it back eventually. It desn't mean I dislike the image itself - it's too useful, and convenient, and fun, most of the time. I just dislike the fact that my actions are at times constrained by wanting to keep that image. 4. What is your most satisfying accomplishment to date? I was going to post something entirely non-serious. But decided against it - see Question 3 for the reasons. Of the serious accomplishments: actually managing to get 90% for the Project of Doom subject last semester, despite not being able to really start work until week 11. I'm still somewhat amazed I managed to do so much work in such a short time... 5. What is your favourite type of tea? When I went home over the winter holidays, my Mum made me some Moroccan mint tea, according to the "traditional recipe" which she got from a friend who lived in Morocco for a while, or was married to a Moroccan, I can't remember exactly. That was the nicest tea I've ever tried, I'll have to get the exact method for making it from her... Current Mood: cheerful (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
12:04 am	Night Watch The translation of Night Watch, by Sergei Lukyanenko has just been released in Britain. This book is awesome, definitely better than the movie in my opinion. I don't know how good the translation is, but this review seems promising. Buy it, love it and then go out and complain that more of his stuff hasn't been translated. - I totally agree. I've ordered a copy on Amazon, and it should arrive in a few weeks :-) Current Mood: bouncy (Comment on this)