Amazing piano playing

This is the talented Paddy Milner (who, unfortunately, insists on writing lots of songs with average singing instead of going for pure instrumental stuff like the above) playing Dave Brubeck's 7/4 masterpiece, Unsquare Dance. You can stop watching once the playing stops, there's nothing good after that. Absolutely brilliant, though I don't really recommend the album, solely because all the singing ruins it.

Google hates me

Fortunately, I haven't found anyone else with this problem, else I'd be forced to take my blog offline forever. However, I'm still contemplating pipe-bombing Google HQ for this atrocity, which shows up whether I'm logged into my Google account or not. And yes, I am sure I've got my language settings right.

Rhyming Dictionary

So, whilst composing a poem for the new bathroom door sign (I actually decided not to use the poem, bathroom door now reads "Smile! You're on hidden bathroom camera!" instead), I came across this great Rhyming Dictionary.

It can come up with some pretty hilarious stuff. Looking for something to rhyme with 'blue'?
Try: analytical review, n92762, or new caledonian yew.

Something to rhyme with 'hello'?
Try: menstrual flow, american crow, cumberland plateau, a. f. l. c. i. o., anisette de bordeaux, henry david thoreau.

And on, and on. Hours of endless fun. That poem by the way? Well, if you insist. But you won't like it:

Roses are dead,
Violence is you,
If she's knocked up,
You know what to do.

Close...but no guitar

Another Guitar Hero II competition at Subculture last night - only managed to come second, but I'm not too disappointed - the guy who beat me was definitely better, and I had a good time too. What I was a bit miffed about was that I'd been expecting the competition to be up on the main stage - or at least the final to be there, but instead the whole thing was tucked around behind the bar instead.

Got another GHII t-shirt, along with some temporary tattoos (one of which is still on my head), and a couple of other odd bits of merchandise - nothing as cool as the plastic guitars from the competition in Cardiff though. The prize wasn't quite as cool either - it was a copy of Guitar Hero II for the XBox (because, of course, the winner's bound to need a copy of the game...great thinking guys).

One of the girls running the event got more and more...friendly...towards me as the night wore on, but unfortunately for her, her chances ran out around the time she said "Well I don't like the sort of music you like, but I really love all the values and things". She was under the impression I lived in a field somewhere in 1968, bless her, nothing like judging a book by its cover eh? If only she knew what a fascist bastard I was at heart...

The competition itself was a bit different too - the 'first round', as it were, was just a competition to see who could get the highest score. As I was the first one to go for it I just picked a fairly high scoring song, Madhouse, and got 240k on it - which seemed pretty good to me. Checked back a while later and someone had gotten 290k! Evil. Naturally I had to text home and find out what my highest scoring song was on career mode, Monkey Wrench, which I then got a very nice 365k on.

Unfortunately, when I came back an hour or so later, Mr. Lee Harris was just polishing off a rather nice 495k run through of X-Stream, one of the bonus tracks I hadn't played much. I had a couple of goes at it, and got chatting to him, but I think my best was only around 420k on it - I got 99% (as did he) but didn't know where to use the star powers, and broke my combo once too often.

Still though, he and I ended in the final, playing Six (another bonus track, which according to career mode I haven't yet completed!), where he fairly trounced me, and walked away the deserved winner. We even got to go up on stage and wave, great fun - bring on the next competition!

Masterpiece

I've just discovered a classical piece that I can't help but rank up there with my favourite pieces of all time. Like pretty much all of my favourites, it's for solo piano, but surprisingly it's by Beethoven, as opposed to Bach or Liszt. Apparently it's a fairly famous sonata though I've never heard it before, or even of it, which is a tad confusing.

If you've got half an hour to spare, then I highly recommend putting on your best headphones, or your fancy speaker system, closing your eyes and just listening to this (or, if you're a pianist, you may want to watch the spectacular playing too).

Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Opus 53 (Waldstein sonata).

First movement - based around a recurring theme in the right hand, with wonderful dynamics in the left hand rhythm. I especially love the question/answer style of the melody about halfway through this too. I was particularly touched by the subject group that starts with the anti-climax ending around 3:43, which ends around 4:18, listen closely to that.


The drama in the second movement is breathtaking, as the music reaches a frenzied state right at the higher register around 1:30 in, and then swiftly descends with crashing bass notes. The pianist, Claudio Arrau does an amazing job at conveying the drama of the music to us, you can see and hear the passion in everything he plays.


Third movement - unbelievable rhythms in the left hand, this must be murderous to play. Watch his left hand around 4:36 - you'll see what I mean. This movement also features some dischordant phrases, unusual for Beethoven but spectacularly pulled off. Fantastic playing around 7:00 too, pulling off a right hand melody whilst maintaining a fast trill there too - pretty difficult non? Fantastic piece, wonderfully played. Enjoy.

..with a little help from my friends

Beginning to believe we can actually get something decent handed in for this Group Project now. We've all been working hard on it and the thing, whilst not too pretty, is starting to fulfill all of the specification at last. Ashamed to say that there's a fair bit of hacking going on though, our wonderfully abstracted design hasn't been...strictly adhered to towards the end.

Those of you working on those last pieces of coursework, or even worse - your dissertations, will know how strong the urge to do anything but work is by this sort of time into the thing, but fortunately I've had people looking after me which has put me a bit more in the mood to work.

Julie-oh cooked me an awesome fish pie, of sorts tonight, bacon mixed with haddock anyone? Delicious. Terra gave me a pair of jeans too, which was a bit impromptu and unexpected but they fit quite nice, so that one's a plus too.

Hasn't all been hard work though, I played Guitar Hero today, and managed to up three songs on expert from 3* to 4* - Misirlou, Rock This Town and Crazy On You. Only got Psychobilly Freakout (OUCH) and Carry Me Home (very do-able) left on 3*, then it's time to get everything up to 5*, which will take a bunch more work.

Speaking of which, back to work I go. Xx

Bleh

Spent a good portion of today working on this Group Coursework and I've managed to accomplish very little, and the entire thing's in on Monday and is worth a fair portion of this year. It'll all be over except the exams soon enough though, which aren't for a couple of weeks yet.

Webcomic's coming along nicely, Chinny's doing a sweet web design for the whole thing, so it'll all be nicely database driven and dynamically created, and the first few comics are looking pretty nice too.

Pokémon Pearl for the DS is amazing and addictive, soon as this coursework's I can see that being my number one distraction from revision - and it's got some strong competition, including the mighty Guitar Hero and the multiple series of Jericho, Lost and Prison Break I've got to watch.

More news later, coding now.
Xx

I have a deram!

Recently, some black students campaigned for acceptance into top US Universities, believing they are being unfairly discriminated against.

Married to a goat

..quite literally.

Sudanese man forced to marry goat

I was particularly amused by "We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together,"

WebComic!

I went to bed a little late last night, which wasn't too much of a problem as I don't have to be in Uni till 12 today. Problem was, when I went to bed around 1, I had an idea. It was a really good idea that would make a great comic.

This led me to thinking about an idea I'd had a couple of days ago, that would also make a good comic. I idly thought to myself 'should make a webcomic', and settled down to sleep and forget the ideas. However, disaster, in the form of a third, equally superb idea struck me, and I couldn't be so negligent as to not write that one down.

Long story short I managed to avoid sleep through having 76 ideas worthy of writing down (well, more than that, but I scrapped the worst ones this morning). As a result, I'm more than a bit tired, and I'll be starting a lovely webcomic soon enough for your viewing delight.

A webcomic about what you ask? Well, I'm not really sure. I categorized the strips I've written down and they fall into: Romantic, Amusing, Amusing (Confusion), Satirical, Sardonic, and then two other special categories that won't mean much to you yet.

I've recruited the talented drawing skills of Mr. Kieran Hawkes (aka Gib) and Ms. Lucie Bradley, because I, quite frankly, can't draw a damn thing - I attempted to do one of the comics at around 3am, and the resulting drawing in front of me is just embarrassing.

More news for you when I've got it - can anyone suggest a good web host though? 1&1Internet seem the best so far...

Well, obviously I'm not advocating sexual acts with juvenile trees

So I've just found one of the most amusing forum threads I've seen in a long time. If you're not on Facebook I imagine you won't be able to read it, but if you are then it can be found here.

Basically the debate (as it were) centres around the fact that some members of Facebook aren't happy with the changes that have been made to the site. They would in fact, like some extra options added to 'Gender', 'Relationship status' and 'Interested in' to incorporate their twisted lives.

Watching these people defend themselves against some brilliant sarcasm, and just seeing the unbelievable stuff they come up with is an exquisite exercise in amusement, highly worth a read if you've got the time.

Here's a few choice quotes from the discussion:
"Um, will someone please enlighten me as to why "male" and "female" is not sufficient for gender? WHat else can you be?"
"Androgyne, genderqueer, third, fourth, fluid, agender, bigender."

"Furthermore, hermaphrodite is considered an offensive word, and it's not even an accurate description. The correct term (not necessarily politically, but by definition) is intersex."

"The fact of the matter is, your gender is determined by what's between your legs. If you're not content with that, select the opposite gender. There are only 2 genders."

"Androgyne is in-between male and female. It combines elements of both. Fluid is the ability to change one's gender to a certain extent, which some people can do."
"I think by "change," she just means "dress like." That's the only response I've got."

"wait, the 'interested in' category doesn't allow for dendrophilia. What about people who get turned on by trees, has anyone considered their feelings?"
"Trees are not consenting adults."
"Well, obviously I'm not advocating sexual acts with juvenile trees. That would be wrong, and probably illegal in all states. (except Vermont, obviously). But if it's an *adult* tree, like the mighty redwood... i don't see a problem with it being a Facebook option."

And on, and on, and on. Brilliant.

What?

Anyone else noticed this odd little bit at the bottom of XKCD pages recently?:

We did not invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves.
The algorithm is banned in China. The algorithm is from Jersey. The algorithm constantly finds Jesus.
This is not the algorithm. This is close.

Oh, and as I'm talking about XKCD, I guess I'm allowed to post up the latest comic..



So, so very true.

Supanet Customer Care

Dear Sir,

We are writing in response to the note you sent us entitled 'Die in hell you incompetent bastards' on 13/2/07. We apologise for the delay in responding, but here at Supanet we pride ourselves on only employing retarded chimpanzees to deal with any important customer-related business.

We regret to inform you that before we can comply with your request to smother our genitalia in napalm, a £50 napalm surcharge will be added to your account. Upon payment of this surcharge, we shall credit the appropriate amount to someone else's account, and ask you for the money again. At this point, please call our call centre, handily located in one the less populated regions of the Congo - we're not sure which, our departments don't actually speak to one another.

You asked us; "Why does my connection cut out every couple of hours and stay down for a seemingly random amount of time". In order to respond to your query we will need some additional information from yourself. Firstly, what is this 'internet' of which you speak? Secondly, what size shoe do you wear on your left foot?¹

You have mentioned that you expect better from an ISP. It took us a while to work out what ISP actually meant², and as such you have incurred a £75 experts fee. If you do not pay this fee by March 2007, a further £50 fee will be incurred. If you do not pay the further £50 fee by February 2007 we will shut down your internet service³.

We thank you for your time, and hope to hear from your soon.
Yours,
Supanet.

--

If you wish to respond to this letter, please either:
* Mail us at the above address⁴
* Call us at on the usual number⁵. Calls cost 2p per minute from any UK land line.⁶
* Email us using our online support feature.^{7, 8}
* Throw another brick through our windows with a note attached.



1. Note: This is Not want your shoe size.
2. ISP stands for Internet Service Provider, according to Wikipedia.
3. Without noting this on your account, so when you call us up, we'll have no idea what's going on.
4. So we can pretend we never got your letter.
5. The usual number actually won't work, so use an obscure phone number to be found behind the skirting boards of a house in Shropshire.
6. Typographical error. Calls actually cost £2 per minute.
7. Which will only work in Internet Explorer 3.1.1
8. Please note that the online response will bear no relation to your original question, and will be made up of standardised sentences as our support staff are incapable of typing or thinking.

Allen Collins is not dead

As I might have mentioned, I happen to love Free Bird. I'm also quite a big fan of most of the other stuff that Lynyrd Skynyrd have done, and of their lead lead guitarist, Allen Collins. I'm also a big fan of 80's rock 'n' roll (AC/DC, Jackyl, Styx, Kix etc) and therefore, a big fan of The Darkness.

Previously, I'd never have admitted to liking The Darkness in public (after all, prospective employers might read this), but recently I've been struck by a conclusion. Justin Hawkins is Allen Collins. Think about it, Allen 'died' in 1990 and we certainly didn't hear much from Justin before then, they both love silly guitar solos and jumping about on stage in a rather amusing fashion.

And of course, the final proof...

Mona Lisa in MS Paint

Thanks to Emma for linky :)

Pound for pound

Went shopping with Julie-oh yesterday - ostensibly for shoes (as though that somehow makes it less girly...), though we ended up just wandering through a bunch of places buying shiny things.

Can't tell you guys everything we got I'm afraid, though here's my pretty new khaftan, and I got some nice new sandals too, which should last me through the summer, even if I wear them every day as with last year's pair.



As we looked around the various shops, trying to find clothes that were gorgeous and small enough to fit our slender and shapely figures we ended up discussing, as I'm sure certain among you have before, the unfairness of clothes pricing. We both wear about a size 8 (unless, by some magical happenstance, I'm shopping in the 'men's' section of a shop) and were looking at a lovely top of the right size, priced at £20. Directly behind this lovely, £20 size 8 top was an identical £20, size 20 top.

This epic, vast sheet of fabric, containing enough material to clothe a small elephant, was being sold at the same price as the delicate piece I had in my hands. I know that some of the cost is in getting a designer and a pattern, but once that one off cost's been had, surely the fact that in order to make a larger size you need:

• More material


• More man hours/machine time


• More shipping space


• More warehousing space


• More shop floor space and last but not least


• Bigger aisles in the shop, and stronger floorboards to accommodate these women

..should result in an increased price for them and a lowered price for me.

I'm sure there'd be an outcry if any store tried to implement this though, with fat women everywhere crying that they were being picked on yet again. There's also the business issue to consider; Given the large proportion of income a size 20 woman needs to devote to her food bill, the raised price of larger clothes would surely render her unable to buy from anywhere but Primark, and George at Asda (where the sizes seem to start at 16 and end at 18, on the majority of ranges, bastards).

As such, I've come up with a solution that means no store needs to take that initial risk and be in danger of losing custom - communism. Now I'm not normally a fan of communism, as you may be aware. In fact, it ranks right up there with 'being French' in my famous List of things I'll stab you for (now available in paperback for only £4.99). However, I feel that a new, communist based scheme, would help to even out the unfairness proliferate throughout the retail world - after all, it's not just clothes, buying food in bulk is cheaper too.

Pound For Pound
Every tax year, in April, each over 18 in the country is to be weighed. For every pound of weight on their naked body, they are taxed an extra pound sterling on top of their regular tax. No benefits or special circumstances will be taken into account. Once this sum has been collected from every adult in the country, the total is then split evenly between everyone who contributed. Under this system, I would expect to pay around £125 each year, and to receive approximately £220 (based on arbitrary figures I pulled out of my left nostril). As that's clearly not enough to make up the difference, I've also decided to start mugging people who are too large to be able to chase me for more than a minute at a time.

How to make friends and influence people

Ina says (21:21):
My mug's at the top of the stairs

Ina says (21:21):
Come get it then make me tea

Amy says (21:21):
wot's it worth

Ina says (21:21):
I won't cut you whilst you sleep.

Amy says (21:22):
deal

I love Free Bird

There's better YouTube videos of live Free Bird, but having watched a few of them, this one surprised me quite a bit. You see, halfway through the guitar solo, the bassist and one of the guitarists disappear, and two new people (one of whom very closely resembles Jesus) seem to take over their instruments, whilst the legendary lead guitarist - Allen Collins - continues to rock out.

Also worth noting is the fact that the crowd is comprised nearly entirely of hot women - when I'm a rock star I'm going to make that an entrance requirement at gigs.

Streaming/Recursion

Many years ago, back when webcams were just coming out and everyone was playing with the new tech, I used to run a webcam feed on a website, as messenger at that time couldn't support more than one video conversation, and I did most of my chatting on IRC anyway.

This was pretty good fun, and since I've got a fancy-pants webcam nowadays, with super resolutions and night vision, and lots of other fun things, I've decided to do so again. Fortunately there's lots of hosts more than willing to stream, from which I've selected CamStreams - which looks to be a nice, small portal that's managed by a dedicated yet personable team, and isn't stuffed with a bunch of morons. Just waiting for some activation stuff from them, and then I'll get the stream running, and hopefully incorporate it here.

This got me playing with my webcam again, and I turned it on, without night-vision, in my otherwise dark room, and saw myself illuminated only in the light of my screen. Upon maximising the picture, so that all that was showing was a webcam feed of a room lit by only the webcam feed.

Stop and consider this for a second - I was originally lit only because the feed took up a mere 25% of the screen, the rest of the screen was displaying the white background of notepad++, this was my only source of illumination. I maximised the feed, which should have removed all illumination from the room, leaving me with a dark picture. However, because the feed has a microscopic lag, it still showed brightness. This brightness illuminated me, which the feed picked up on, and therefore displayed a bright image. This brightness illuminated me, which the feed picked up on, and therefore displayed a bright..and on.

This perverted method of recursion has to be useful in finding an infinitely renewable energy source, I just need more time, and more webcams.

I'm richer!

Got back to Brum today to find a bunch of post waiting for me. In amongst the junk and the various bits from Microsoft, I found three cheques! Score - although two are just expenses from MS repaid and one is the salary for some work I did ages ago.

Just had a kickass curry along with a preposterous episode of Dr. Who - going to finish off Monday's coursework now. Nice to be back and see everyone though :)

I'm rich!

Whoop! Student loan just came through. Someone find me a large tub of hookers and install it in Starbucks. :D

Edit: Actually that's probably not a very practical idea. Starbucks isn't open 24/7. However, it's still an awesome feeling to get so much money for absolutely nothing, God bless the government.

How to use Facebook

Written by Chris Lush, reposted in full here because the entire article is win-win (by which I mean, it contains double the amount of win that a simply win article contains).

--

When creating your Facebook profile, you might have noticed hyperlinks dotted around your page. This is pretty handy because once clicked Facebook will match whatever you clicked on to other people's profiles, and displays the results.

So why on earth are people writing 50 character sentences?

You're just ruining your chances of someone stumbling upon your profile by doing that. Check out the advanced search page to see what I mean. What are the chances of someone searching for "I like to play football"? If you stick to simple keywords/phrases then you'd appear with alot more people in searches and get discovered easier by great people who share your interests/favourite TV show/whatever.

The point is that everyone is networked more. This isn't MySpace, where the competition is to see how much embedded flash/java you can cram into a clashing colour schemed profile while promoting each and every indie band that exists on there, this place is sophisticated in comparison.

The "Favourite Quotes" and "About Me" sections are there to show your personality, using sentences anywhere else just hinders Facebook at what it does best.

I have a new suit!

I don't have any pictures of it, and I don't have it with me yet, as I got the train home, so my brother's bringing it back in his car. I just wanted to paste the picture above so you could have an idea of what it looks absolutely nothing like.

Now that you've seen what it doesn't look like, might as well tell you some other things about it. It's a gorgeous, very flash Pierre Cardin number, I can't really describe the colour...but it's not very dark or very light. Should leave me looking very professional for when I give presentations for Microsoft to big business types next year though ;)

T'was a bit difficult finding a suit I liked actually, as I've got a 34" chest, and the first couple of places we looked at didn't even go below 38" on the chest, and 32" on the waist - I ended up with trousers that are 28" waist which is a tiny bit big for me, but I can happily wear them without a belt.

Also got a couple of very swish shirts and silk ties to go with it, and a nice new pair of shoes too, so I'm all kitted out for next year now (even though I'll be wearing jeans and t-shirt most of the time I'm in work).

And the best thing of all? My dad paid for the lot ;) Photos when I get it home, promise.

Xx

Update

I noted in Getting Popular... that 79 unique visitors had been here this week, just thought I'd let you know the (presumably) final total is 96, though I suppose there's always hope that 4 new ones will come in by midnight eh? :)

Anyhow, hi to all near-hundred of you, and thanks for reading. Send me a mail sometime if I don't know you, especially whoever it is that visits week after week from an IP in Australia :)

Yum

Mmm, just finished eating the lovely Easter Sunday dinner I cooked for everyone, and it was delicious, if I do say so myself (and I most certainly do).

Had a lovely joint of pork - rubbed some butter into that to make it nice and moist, and then coated it with some herbs to give it a nice texture & flavour. Rubbed pepper into the fat to bring out the crackling - no salt though, I don't do adding salt to food whilst cooking, just makes it unhealthy with no real gain.

To accompany I roasted, spiced and honey-glazed some potatoes and parsnip and cooked various other bits of veg alongside some gorgeous carrot & parsnip mash. Also did some cabbage, which isn't normally the most exciting of things, but is divine if you boil it in a mixture of sugar, butter and just enough water to cover it up.

Bit of stuffing and some gravy to top everything off and voila, one superb meal - and despite the sugar and honey etc, it wasn't too sweet or sickly once it was all put together, everything just blended in nicely. Of course, it was served in style too, as you'd expect from me - I even managed to make the angel delight with bits of chocolate look good ;)

Man I'm awesome ^^

Merry Easter!

Or should that be 'Happy Easter'? Either way, hope you're having a good time.

I've been spoilt (sic) like a little kid today, which has been absolutely brilliant. I got five Easter eggs (coupled with chocolate bars) from my mother, one with a cup from my brother, some money from my father and some champagne eggs and brilliant new headbands from my mamgu. I'll probably be sick by the end of the day, but it'll be totally worth it.

Went to visit each of my grandmothers today too, which was really nice - heard some lovely new stories and got lots of praise for my wondrous placement ;) Cooking dinner for everyone now, which should hopefully go down nicely too - a good day all round. Forgot to mention - I got The Karate Kid on DVD from my brother too, legendary.

--

Oh, and before any of you start mailing me again, euphoric at having found an error in my writing, 'sic' isn't an abbreviation, it's Latin and means 'meant like that' - I'm using it in this case to denote the fact that although 'spoiled' is officially the past participle of all forms of 'to spoil', I prefer to make the following distinction:

* Spoil (to damage, diminish or impair the quality of) | Spoiled.
* Spoil (to do harm to the character, nature, or attitude of by oversolicitude, overindulgence, or excessive praise.) | Spoilt

and that my usage of the word 'spoilt' should not be construed as incorrect English.

I love Wikipedia

Correction

Actually, the song from Titanic is apparently My Heart Will Go On.

Man I suck at life.

It's not me, I swear

Just found this line, from when I returned some hardware, in the quote archives of #astoncompsoc:

Quote 373 of 658: (+Sol|Food) The guy at the Pub said he was impressed Jesus brought his switch back XD

I'm staying away from anyone Jewish tomorrow, in case there's another case of mistaken identity..

I'm totally going two Burning Man next year

Just got linked to this idea by Smigs - CAPTCHAs to stop idiots from even getting on The Internet in the first place - brilliant. The man's even referred to The Internet using caps, as should always be the case. They wouldn't even be able to look up the correct answer on Wikipedia first...

Kingdom Of Loathing - a hilarious, stimulating and generally brilliant online game (well, for the first month or so anyway) already implements a little feature like this, which I'd love to see embedded into IM clients worldwide. It's called the Altar Of Literacy, at which you must first prove yourself before being allowed into the in-game chat - it's even a bit harder than the above link, though, not too bad if you're not American or French.

Getting popular...

79 unique hits here this week so far (a weekly record) - and we're only halfway through. I've not posted anything particularly great and original this week, as far as I know, so maybe it's just the Easter holiday boredom that's got you clicking.

Still hasn't affected the average number of comments people leave (it rounds down to about 0), and I'm feeling the urge to stab the next person who comments on a blogpost imported to Facebook as a Note using Facebook's own comment system...

Practical joke of the day

Note - if you get arrested for this, please send me a text message so I can delete this post, leaving you completely screwed.

Requirements:

1 x Digital Camera
1 x Printer

Plan:

Go to the house of a friend (or enemy), get up close without being seen, and take a photo of their front door (with enough of the house showing to make it clear what the photo is of). It's fairly essential that there's a number showing on the front door.

Go to the house of a stranger, get up close without being seen, and take a photo of their front door too - same rules apply.

Go home, and find out the postcode of each address.

Print out two copies of each of the pictures of your friend/enemy's house, and write their postcode on the back of one.

Print out two copies of each of the pictures of the strangers's house, and write their postcode on the back of one.

Take the copy of the photo of the friend's door, with writing on it, and pair it with the copy of the stranger's door without - then stick both of these on the front door of the stranger's house.

Do the same with the remaining two photos on the front door of your friend's house.

Wait.

Made-up word of the day

Google (v): To search for information on the Internet, esp. using the Google search engine.

+

Ogle (v): To look at amorously, flirtatiously, or impertinently.

=

Oogle (v): To look up someone online for whom you harbour amorous intent.

--

In other pointless IRC related fun:

This looks ace.

[18:29:12] <Eena> Damnit
[18:29:15] <Eena> His keyboard's broken again
[18:29:23] <Eena> GIB
[18:29:28] <Eena> TAP YOUR MONITOR TWO TIMES IF YOU CAN HEAR ME
[18:29:31] <Eena> REALLY HARD

Things we've searched for on google recently:

[18:35:50] <Eena> "A Conjunction of Drones Simulating the Way in Which Sufjan"
[18:36:36] <smigs> "10-year rule" navy
[18:37:00] <smigs> "AND FUCK PLATO AND MICHEALANGELO AND OSCAR"
[18:38:30] <gibb3h> condom sutra

I believed I could fly

Thought I'd post up this picture for the amusement of those of you not on Facebook - where it's suddenly become rather popular. I wasn't getting a head start on the Passion, I was just really, really drunk.

"I Believe I Can Fly" came on inbetween singers at karaoke one night, and, for some reason, it got into my head that this particular song was in fact the music from Titanic, when Kate Winslet stood at the prow of that boat. So, naturally, I got up on a chair, outstretched my arms and expected someone to catch me (as they did, thanks Forx), I stood there for awhile, and was then carried about the room doing my lovely little pose.

Then two hours later I was informed that the actual song from Titanic is "I Will Always Love You". Good job on saving me from looking stupid guys, good job.

Xx

Alanis Morrissette Covers 'My Humps'

This is absolutely awesome. I especially love the headbutt.(Thanks to Dean for the link)

Avoid a social faux-pas on your lap

That's from XKCD, which has been my favourite webcomic for awhile now, it's brilliant. According to the header it's; "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math[s], and language." which pretty much perfectly sums it up - although there's quite a few science-based jokes in there too.

If you've got some time to spare, I'd recommend reading your way through the entire archive - and don't forget that each comic has its own mouseover too, which is sometimes even funnier than the comic itself. Some of the comics are beautiful, some are wonderfully satirical observations on life, others are obscure (yet hilarious, if you get them) mathematical or physical jokes) and yet others, like above, are just good old-fashioned geekery.

I have the best cup of tea ever.

This is the sort of cup of tea I'd expect on a Saturday afternoon in heaven.

This is a cup of tea that you could actually enjoy whilst watching Top Gear.

This is the sort of tea served in secret ninja training school to the English trainees.

This cup contains so much tea I was tempted to add a second teabag, but fortunately the first one was made of awesome.

This cup of tea could drown several small kittens without even flinching.

This cup of tea couldn't be absorbed by an entire packet of hobnobs.

This is the best cup of tea ever - observe how it mightily dwarfs the puny dairy milk it sits alongside.



I don't think I've ever been this happy in my life.

Re: Linux on Dell

I'm sure most of you that are interested in such things have already heard the big news - Dell's going to start shipping its mainstream systems with the option to have a Linux distro pre-installed (most likely Ubuntu, from the latest set of rumours flying about).

Personally, I'm in favour of this - one of the biggest sellers of OEM systems is going to be offering the average dumb user an open source OS, and they're going to be making it as simple and friendly as possible.

The implied competition here could be huge, and the incentive for OS coders to tidy up any bugs, and get new features polished and shipped will of course be massive. Anyone with a GCSE in Business Studies will be able to tell you that increased competition leads to better quality products for lower prices - and I'm all in favour of anything that drives the techie world forwards.

I found a very well-written (though, conversely, very poor written) talkback post on ZDNet, posted yesterday, which brings up the whole issue of basic users and peripheral software.

The responses to it are pretty hilarious too, this flame and the response made me giggle, and this post and this one were pretty good too.

There's also one final caveat that I think could well ring true, and pretty much outlines the top three reasons why Dell's latest venture is unlikely to pay off - games, networking and cost.

April Fools Sites

I love the Internet on April 1st. You get tons of webmasters all putting in a ton of effort to making something amusing and interesting just for one single 24-hour stretch, often to then take it down forever straight afterwards.

You also get a bunch of Americans taking them seriously, leading to some hilarious forum posts/messages/comments.

Here's some amusing site's I've found or been shown today (note, I imagine the links will probably be broken by tomorrow, or less funny, so leave a message if you notice a duff one):

MMORPG.com goes girly

Google TISP

Vilcus - Electric Suicide Adaptor

You snooze, you lose - by ThinkGeek

XKCD.com taken over by newspaper company (Page taken down)

Gmail Paper

Three from facebook in my 'recent news':

Introducing LivePoke™! 12:00pm
Facebook will dispatch a real live person today to poke a friend of your choice.*
*offer good for only the first 100 pokers in each network.

Harry and Voldemort have set their relationship status to "Mortal Enemies." 10:24am

You are on Facebook, reading your News Feed. 7:27am

Near Miss

I stayed over Lu's last night - we watched Coupling, had some snacks, etc, and then went to sleep. Around about 10am I half-woke to notice her getting out of bed, and smiled to myself at the thought of the wonderful breakfast-in-bed I was soon to receive.

As the hours passed, I at first got more and more thrilled at the thought of a breakfast that had taken so long to prepare – it was bound to be amazing. Unfortunately though, nothing came and I was forced to conclude that she’d been eaten by some form of giant bear or velociraptor.

Bravely, I got myself out of bed and wandered downstairs to get myself some toast. Wearing only my boxers. Around about the time I strolled into the living room I noticed three key facts;

1. It wasn’t Monday, it was Sunday.
2. Lucie’s parents weren’t in work.
3. Lucie’s grandmother was sitting on the settee in the living room.

Fortunately for me, neither of her parents were looking anywhere near the door I’d entered by, but her grandmother certainly was, I’m really hoping she’s blind though - she didn’t mention anything anyhow.

Oh, and I still haven’t had breakfast :(

April Fool!

April Fool. Hehehe :)