US Storm Reports

A storm hit the US... I get this, its big news, a mega huge storm... But I've also noticed a trend in the pictures.  They're pictures of the weather, or waves, or the mess caused, they're not pictures of people actually getting on with the task of cleaning up.

I don't doubt there are people cleaning up, and good on them!  But then the Earth Quake hit japan I was struck by the sight of people reported to be cleaning up, searching the rubble or helping others.

So far the only people I've seen reported helping others in this US drama are those paid to do so, the emergency services and their National Guard.

It very much feels as if its being reported back to myself, via the BBC, Fox and CNN as a woe-be-them for their miss fortune, and "let some other schmuck clean it up", not more of the rolled up sleeves lets get to this people one would expect.

Especially from New Yorkers, One always gets a vibe of Help and Share & Share alike... but the pictures so far are of the mess, or even other douché bags taking pictures of the mess... Don't take a picture people, put them iPhones away!  Take a shovel and a broom!

Jessica Frech

Good morning folks out there, I hope you all took to my experiment with crisps from my last post... I come to you again with a new experiment I've been carrying out, I've literally just (like 2 minutes ago) purchased my first ever digital song as an MP3 via Amazon.

"OMGZ Xel welcome to the new century" I hear you all cry... but wait wait... There is a reason why I've been so shy buying digital content, that's because back in the mid naughties when this digital download stuff was all new and fan-dangled I had a bad experience buying a series of South Park... and... well I never actually got to see the series, it was a right hash up... So I've waited... I've waited until I've found something good...

And, you know what I think I found it in the rather pleasing shape of Jessica Frech... She's all over YouTube, check her out, I've known of her work a long time being one of the first few thousand to watch her multi-million time viewed Walmart (that's Asda to us folks here in Britain - Jess do a British version!) song... Any-hew, she apparently did some TV commercials in the US last Christmas, so I'm sure we'll see them over here this crimbo.

But she has a new Album out "Reality", the headline song from which is why I'm here raving... I love it... And you know what, I don't know why... My musical taste is so varied, from Metallica to Mozart, from Gogol Bordello to Garage Head and pretty much everything in between... So seeing this Happy Smiling southern (I think) American lass delight my music buds is not really a surprise but a new string to my musical bow.

You can watch her Video for the song, and hence hear the song, at YouTube:

But the song itself, its less than a quid.. 89p actually... so I just bought it... and listened to it twice :)

That is all great... So I've made a digital purchase, Jess took my fear of the digital purchase away... Or did she?

For you see, I can't actually get my hands on the MP3 file, Amazon have this MP3 Downloader, but its for Windows or OSX only, I'm running Ubuntu... Grrr... Which means I can't download it until I crack out my virtual machines tomorrow... Amazon, this is very annoying.

Walks Crisp Experiments #1

I need all you guys, and gals, out there in internet land to try something for me....

Spend a day sat working at a desk, and around six in the early evening, I need you to have a custard creme, dry with no drink... followed, immediately, again dry... by a packet of Walkers Cheese & Onion Crisps.

And write in telling me whether, as if by magic, the flavour has become "Beef"?...

Google Street View Blocks and Blue Systems

With google street view they take to blocking out some signs and numbers, peoples faces and number plates, I get the reasons why.  However, I can't for the life of me figure out why this whole building is blocked out...

Beyond the building being blocked out, if we spin the camera view around and switch to the opposite carriageway on the very same street and then switch the view back we can see the building is a rather nondescript appartment building, with a shop on the ground floor...

More intriguingly for us Linux-philes is that the building to its left is the address on the website for "Blue Systems" the seemingly mysterious supporter of KDE and other KDE based applications for Linux... Huzzah for their support, but who are they?

Their squat grey building says very little, there's no Blue, nor any systems visible...

Beverly Hilly Cop... What the fuck?

The BBC have set poor old Eddie in a very different film....

Check out the screen grab I took.... What film did Tony direct?... Beverly Hilly Cop II?..

What the fuck?

That is such a different image for that film... Fucking BBC copy editors you are getting shittier by the day... You should be ashamed after Panorama put you in your place last night over Savile, now you continue with this poor ass reporting standard....

Its a Lotus

I hate the inaccuracy of this picture usage from El Reg... The white car, under water... Is a Lotus....

Captain Kirk's Nose....

I just watched this, and when it was over, I realised something, my brain had not really registered all the fans in their costumes, painted colours with whatever plastic stuff on themselves... No, I have noticed that William Shatners' nose looks really Blue at the end....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20018036

Get your circulation checked there Bill...

She Love You All In Group, for Long Time...

Do the BBC know, or are they implying something, I don't know here...?  Their second story is about group discounts, yet the picture with it is not only of a single person, but a single rather pretty girl of Asian descent...

A co-worker saw this over my shoulder and immediately said "What kind of group discount?" whilst another mentioned Ping-pong balls... and "Fifty Dollar" in a faux Vietnamese accent.

And I have to agree with their lucid follow up descriptions, what the hell has that picture got to do with the idea of websites, group discounts or singular?  Its just a lass in make up...

The rise of the frivolous Communication

In today's society with the proliferation of the mobile phone the purpose and limits of communications is being blurred.

There was a time when to communicate a message to someone quickly one had to send a telegram, or even a runner, and this was expensive stuff.  Words and meaning were eked out onto the missive and transmitted.

The postal service also played a part in the blossoming of beautiful and well thought out letters between people.  And due to the long turn around time the communicated messages were sweet and thoughtful, full of information and the spice of life.

With the birth of e-mail came a way to transmit near instantly such missives, but it slowly devolved and l33t speak became the de facto standard, along trotted SMS and the problem magnified terribly... "R U OK", the bane of any SMS, but it still has meaning.

However, with the rise of the smart phone, the multi-part SMS and contracts allowing for near unlimited, costless, communication the art of communicating is dying.  And I have an example for the day...

I have a mobile, its a very old, battered, Nokia.  I keep it because a) I hate smart phones b) I used to be the text king, sending near letter long texts and incurring HUGE phone bills and c) I only want to be disturbed at work if its important.

My importance thresholds are simple:

1. Is someone stuck/broke down?

2. Is someone Ill?

3. Is someone dead?

4. Has someone been born?

If it does not fall into these categories the rule is wait until out of office hours, or just mention it in passing...

And I established and popularised these levels with all my friends and family... They all pretty much apply them when contacting me at work.  Except for my Mother.

Now, I should explain, Mothers do get some special dispensation to contact you, but mine is taking the piss now... I'm getting messages about Eggs... and bread.... messages about the weather... and all sorts of trivial frivolous shit... Which to be frank shouldn't be a text or a mobile message... They don't warrant being delivered to me whilst I'm on the bog, let alone whilst I'm at work... They're in fact messages which would struggle to pass as small talk when face to face.

They are in short of such low magnitude of interest, I've just asked her to stop texting me at work... "Stop texting me, I'm at work".

That was the whole text reply I sent... It's short, and to the massed whom work (my parents being retired) it would make sense... But not to my Mother, oh no, she lives in this little world where everything she is doing is very very important... "We're going shopping"... "I must blog about this" sort of shit... And its pointless... Its everyday crap... I dread to think what she'd put on twitter if she ever worked it out.

But, after asking "Stop texting me, I'm at work"... you know what I get?....

"Reel your neck in, I text you because its important"....

Erm... First of all, its not important... second of all... I've asked you to stop texting and you just text'd back...

My reply was the rather generous "Get fucked, I'm at work".... emphasising my position... Did the hint get through?... Nope... Nope, I just got a seven page text... And cus she's angry, its all garbled... here's the exact text verbatim:

"Thats nr eally nice repl 2ur mum...ithink note. it'd far b appalling 2 any1 n uncalled for. but 2me is a lve 2 far"... and it goes on and on...

You can make out what's being said, but its so shite as to beggars belief... if she realised the point, that time needs to be taken, this is not urgent, eggs is not worthy of interrupting me at work, when we were kids (without mobiles) if she'd have called my Dad at work and said "pick up eggs" he'd have gone nuts, just as I'm not happy I'm being asked to sort out eggs for her... But this is all forgotten, as far as she cares the world goes into a little box and waits for her when she's not looking.

And this communication is rubbish... I'm tired of texting her, tired of texting anything but the bare essentials to people, I write letters or e-mails and I check them, and re-read them before sending them.  My previous post was decrying my hate of twitter, I blog here to pretty much get things off my chest, and that works for me... but if I had a pen pal I'd write them a nice letter...

I may call my mother out on this, I might send her a letter (large print) and make it clear that these stupid text's she sends need to be e-mails or letters, or waited on until she see's me and can talk to me... They are not worthy of the interruption they cause.

Tweet

Can you view a twitter feed without being on twitter?....

I hate the idea, of twitter... I hate it proper disgusts me.. And I blog, so that’s just fucked up.

But, there are some people who have simply stopped blogging where I knew they blogged and live vicariously through their followers on twitter, and I now seemingly have to follow them to talk to them....

I don't like being a follower, nor really like being a leader, so being a tweeter would put me in both camps, something I'm not comfortable with...

So, can I just view the spew they have?...

BBC Proof of Copy

BBC copy editors are getting sloppier and sloppier, I don't know what it is, whether they are using mobile platforms to post articles, whether they are simply not proofing their copy before publishing or what, but I really really hate to see typo's and spelling mistakes on the BBC site...

Not least in the news articles... for instance... What the heck is "physiolnoogy"?

Image included, in case they correct this later - which they often do.... gah, they corrected it before I could even post here... But I have the image... I have the proof... BBC improve your copy BEFORE you post to the public.

Apples for Adverts....

Oh yeah, one other thing... The wife and I settled down with ITV player last night, to watch Take Me Out... don't ask, we love it, its our guilty pleasure...

Anyway... The adverts came on, and the wife thought she could skip them, so clicked on the player window in the browser... and we noticed something strange... No matter when we clicked, or what was being advertised.... the ITV player took us to the Tesco web page, for Apples... Specifically Red Gala Apples... I'm sure the other advertisers are so happy that when we clicked on their paid to play advert, we were guided to Tesco and to buy our apples.

No Java IDE for Me

I have been trying to get myself an IDE for Java, I'm not a huge java programmer, I loved java upon its initial release, it was such an easy programming language to get to grips with, compared to the then very frustrating Occam I was working on in my systems operations course work.  But, since then I've not used it commercially, only used it very sparingly personally, and as such have left it alone...

Yet now I have a yearning, for a language which can furnish me with write once, run anywhere code... The reason being, I need to build some tools which I know can safely run the same on Windows, Linux and OSX... Java therefore seems the obvious and easiest to access language.

The trouble I have is the IDE to use... I've looked at Eclipse, and hate it, not least because it code completes and refactors in the K&R style, and I hate the K&R Style, I prefer and defer to the Allman (or ANSI) style... So loading Eclipse and seeing I have to change all the refactoring masks and style settings, and do this on three different platforms - because I can't do it once and then export them for use on other machines, depresses me...

I've uninstalled Eclipse, I'd rather use a text editor and command line compile the java than fuck about with K&R style, that's how much I detest its obfuscative approach.

DayZ and Mining

I played a lot of DayZ this weekend, a couple of the adventures warrant a decent story being told about them, but for now shouts go out to "FlashWard" - a life taker and a heart breaker - whom I met on Lingor, yo buddy.  And to the crew I met in Cherno... Rogan, Josh & Haw... I'm going to call this the curry gang... cus we were a bit of a Mix... and "Rogan Josh" is my favourite curry...

The other things I've done this weekend, is scratch a serious itch and take a look at minecraft, I've avoided it before, because... well it looked like a retrograde piece of trash for kids... Turns out... Its not that bad.

Some of the game-play is pretty clunky, there's a few bugs in there (like keybaord input getting stuck in repeat mode)... But there is an adventure game, there is the resource collection, construction and all important mining game in there... And you know what, as a pure gameplay experience, its not bad... It is infact, quite good... I has in fact got me thinking what wierd and wonderful things I might do next...

Last night for example, I spend sometime learning the secrets of crearting glass, and set about portioning off and draining an area of sea-floor, so that after about two hours I had a good football field area cordened off with glass walls and was clearing the water sand ane gravel out of the inside, like some perverse inverse fish bowl... And later on, I started an even bigger area, around an isle off shore, starting by potting the tree's there in giant 10 meter glass pots and then digging out all around them to form a hollow isle.

In short, I've been strip mining like crazy, and enjoying it... More later.