Friday, June 29, 2007

The things we do...

I joined a couple of groups on Tuesday and now I'm fearing the worst. I met a couple of decent people and had words with one of the admin before we 'parted' on good terms but I also started something there that already looks like it's more than I can handle.

I'd like to do it but I feel too strongly for the friends I have already to even give the appearance of looking at moving on. Anton, Oli, Mel, Seth, Chris, Marc and all the rest mean a great deal to me and this new thing I did on Tuesday would not only demand more time than I am inclined to give it, it would be pretty much in competition with what the crew and I are still hopeful of achieving.

That's about all I feel like making publicly available right now.

Fuck timezone differences.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Uh oh.

I'm getting seriously twitchy about Vanessa Amorosi.

There are some voices that are pure, smooth, bell-like, have a great range etc...

Well, I'm not making any observations about the first three, but range? My GOD!

2000 Olympics rings in my ears, this 19 year old as was performing to an audience of billions and she carried it off just perfectly. Perfectly.

The song of choice, Heroes, could not have been better and I couldn't think of any other artist who could even have performed that song, let alone done it with such emphasis and heart as did Vanessa.

I remember back in the early 80s not thinking anything at all of Madonna. She was, to me anyway, just a slaggy popstar who sang trashy pop songs that I didn't especially like. Then, listening to the radio on my way home one afternoon, I heard the song "Live to Tell" and my mind was blown. That woman has been an idol of mine ever since. I haven't gone ga-ga about all her songs, but even JS Bach did stuff I don't like. But I still respected the woman.

I didn't pay a great deal of attention to the Olympic Games opening ceremony in 2000 either. I did arc up when they announced an obscure artist was going to sing - because I wanted to see who the obscure artist was. (Nicki whatsernamie floating above the arena was just way too creepy for me and I don't like her strangled canary voice either) I was hoping it wasn't going to be her.

Then came the trumpet fanfare, the arena went quiet and this song of enormous pathos filled that space and charged it. The echo, the atmosphere and the aura of anticipation as the subtle beat behind the flow of the lyrics generated the sort of electricity it is impossible to ignore.

Then at the climax, the beat takes over and the lyrics sound out like a clarion call to the essence of humanity. Heroes live forever. And don't they?

What a way to open the biggest competition Earth has to offer. Mindblowing.

And that final burst of Heroes Live Forever - how long is that last note? How many beats? I can only just hold my breath for that long and she's belting out that note like her lungs were about to explode out of her chest and there's not a hint of fade in it.

Just incredible.

And to think, she was just 19. If what she did 7 years ago isn't deserving of admiration and respect, nothing ever was or will be.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

In this message, you laugh, you lose.

http://www.netauthority.org/offenders/1863.shtml

I lawled big time.

Netauthority is a byword for racism and aids on the internet. The subtly filthy designs of their website and their IAUP are more hateful than anything I read in Mein Kampf or Machiavelli. The arseholes behind netauthority are the cancer that is killing society. I hope they all fuck off and die today.

They have banned the Wiggles for "hateful content". Yes, The Wiggles. How demented are these people? They also say there were no dinosaurs, God put the fossils there to test man's faith in him. Bitter irony, eh.


Also Bags, since you'd been vanished for 2 years or so, I've lost your contact details. If you wants to catch up, you is going to have to give them to me again. My details are all still the same.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Moar wtf!?

The New York Times is messing with my head.

They're having another crack at Google which makes me seriously doubt the sanity of the people who write these articles.

Where to begin?

  1. Google is bigger than its two closest rivals Yahoo and Microsoft - by a longshot.
  2. Googling is part of the language now, which I noted previously in this blog.
  3. The article talks about search engine startups with alternatives to Google's hyper-secret search algorithm and the nature and content of the returns provided by those alternatives.
  4. One of these start ups is boasting a return of 5000 relevant returns for the search term "Paris Hilton". Google returns 59,700,000. Clicking Google's News results returns a further 21,310 results.
  5. The article talks about little search engines snaffling tiny percentages of users from Google and it crunches some numbers which add up to (potentially) billions of dollars in returns for relatively small capital outlays - making search an attractive business proposition.
I suppose the aspect of this article that has set me off is the headline:

The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip

Pardon me, but BOLLOCKS.

The one line in the entire article with a solid footing in reality didn't appear until the 6th paragraph, towit: "Even gathering the crumbs of business left behind by Google could generate a lofty market capitalization."

Which does not in any way equate with the headline. What Google leaves behind, Google obviously doesn't want.

The article also skirts nimbly around the search terms that might prick the collective conscience of NYTimes readers, namely porn.

Some people, like myself, like to go through the back pages of search results to find off topic returns for a particular search. I wouldn't have found seedsofdoubt.com if I'd just gone looking for what someone else deemed as 'relevant' to my search query which was bush+hitler.

This leads me to feel that whatever you can't get from a Google search, you really oughtn't to be searching for anyway. So where does that leave these potential rivals to Google's superiority?

Either with piss-poor search returns, probably all of which Google would return anyway, or a database full of cp, links for terrorists and goatse. Oh, and 5,000 'relevant' links for Paris Hilton.

Back to the relevance aspect, the article (on page 2) goes on to talk about search engine optimisation.

To those in the trade, outsmarting the algorithm is called “search engine optimization.” For the rest of us, it produces Web pages littered with spam.

Don't include me in your "rest of us", buddy. It doesn't take long to work out which sites are crap and which are going to provide good information. That sort of navigational information also travels like wildfire around the net. Who hasn't heard of The Onion? (Here, have a laugh.)

It also doesn't take much effort to hit the back button or the little red x (top right of the window) to return to the results page and go find another link.

And speaking of being "littered with spam", would it hurt if I mentioned that reading NYTimes articles online is made awkward because of the massive advertisement taking up the right side of the page and the links to 'relevant searches' intruding into the article from the left?

Ok, so at the end of the day, little search start ups might make for themselves some nice tidy profits and set an example or two of what can be achieved if one looks at alternatives. They're incorporating a site ranking by user-vote system, which is nice, but it isn't going to affect the dominance in the market place by the one big search company that is so big because it gives the people what the people want.

All this leaves me wondering why such an esteemed news service is repeatedly waffling garbage when it comes to Google.

Lots of goodies in the news this week...

Top of the list has to go to a zdnet report on the US Homeland Security department with the trojan ridden computers.

The man in charge of IT security for the US Homeland Security department may lose his job after the revelations that his department’s IT systems have misconfigured firewalls, suspicious botnet activity, trojans and virus infections.

In response to reports of persistent cybersecurity flaws at the Department of Homeland Security, a top congressional Democrat on Wednesday questioned whether the agency's chief information officer deserves to keep his job.


Nah, they'll promote the incompetent swat. That's what they do in the public service. Kick them upstairs to get them out of harm's way without provoking the union to a revolt.

Some poor old Aussie spreader of good cheer will serve 15 months in chokey in the U.S. after having been extradited from Oz to LaLaLand for his leading role in the interweb piracy website drinkordie, which was shut down by U.S. Customs and Interference. Poor bastard. Total sentence - 51 months, time already served means he'll be out in time for next year's Melbourne Cup. The silly prat boasted he'd never get caught. PROTIP: Hew; in order not to get caught, you might consider not doing crime.

Finally, the one that is closest to my heart:

This from Reuters:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Putting feelings into words makes sadness and anger less intense, U.S. brain researchers said on Wednesday, in a finding that explains why talking to a therapist -- or even a sympathetic bartender -- often makes people feel better.

I have a massive bent against the destruction of our language at the hands of people either too inept, too lazy or just too uneducated to be considered responsible users of words.

The reason being; if you deprive a person of language, the means to communicate, you remove from them the very essence of what it is to be human.

Misusing the language to the extent it reduces one's own ability to express thoughts and feelings has exactly the same effect. It increases frustration, accentuates isolation and reduces one's efficacy for life in a society which functions because of its use of language.

This cold hard fact is borne out even the Bible! At the fabled Tower of Babel. To thwart the plans of the fabled people to build a tower to an even more fabled Heaven, the fabled god "confused their language."

By not having and appreciating an adequate grasp of language and how fundamental it is on every aspect of our lives, we reduce our understanding of ourselves and each other.

The report goes on...

They said talking about negative feelings activates a part of the brain responsible for impulse control.

"This region of the brain seems to be involved in putting on the brakes," said University of Southern California Los Angeles researcher Matthew Lieberman, whose study appears in the journal Psychological Science.


Putting this into the context of the Virginia Tech shootings and the fact we have since discovered that Cho Seung Hui was an isolate - according to reports quoting people who knew the guy - one might start to realise that communication is fundamental to a healthy society. And that means not just watching tv or getting news from the internet, it means communicating - expressing oneself.

The better a person can communicate their thoughts and feelings to people around them, the better that person will be able to function both as an individual and as part of a broader group.

Erode the means of interaction and you diminish the person. See "1984" for an up to date list of un-words. It's double plus good.

"I think we all believe that by talking about our feelings, we reach deep new insights, and that understanding is what transforms us,"

"It's not just the deep thoughts," (Lieberman) said. "It's something about the way we are built."

Amen!

Now, this report was not specifically about humans and language, how language helps us identify our own thoughts and feelings as well as those of the people around us, it was a report on the findings of a study conducted on 18 women and 12 men.

What they found is that when people attached a word like angry to an angry-looking face, the response in the amygdala portion of the brain that handles fear, panic and other strong emotions decreased.

I've been trying to explain this to a number of my younger friends that emotions do respond to intellect, rather than the other way around, and thinking improves with practice. Thinking, as distinct from feeling, is generally done in our minds using words. Continual improvement in skill at using language facilitates better understanding, comprehension and communication. It makes us more "human".

Friday, June 22, 2007

Announcement!

I'm not usually given to devoting much time to politics except to rant about some particularly offensive bit of bullshit, and I certainly don't give much of an airing to matters of a political nature in this blog. Having said that, I was poking around the interweb tonight in pursuit of enlarging my substantial knowledge of all things Nazi Germany when I chanced upon letters addressed to Hitler emanating from the Watchtower and Bible Tract Society, Magdeburg.

Cutting to the chase, I arrived at the blog of one Mr Doug Ross.

So impressed was I that I've added a link over there on the right.

Ok, announcement over. For those of you who want to see what else I found whilst lurking about the wires, here's one for all of you who think there is any difference in politicians just because of the date or the skill of their speechwriters.

I lol'd.

The imdb mini-bio of Hitler contains more than its fair share of misinformation and doesn't cite any of its sources.

And here's a picture I found at this url...

http://www.seedsofdoubt.com/images/monkeys-new-ag.jpg (I love the pic title.)

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Google maps

I find it slightly peculiar that sections of Baghdad are unavailable for viewing at higher resolutions and the map mode has no roads, town names or names on any other geographical features.

You have to go to Turkey before they start putting labels on things.

You can look at the refinery in high res mode, you can look at Baghdad suburbs and the government buildings bits, but you can't look at the market areas in high res.

Fallujah - forget it. It's like looking at a jigsaw puzzle with two thirds of the pieces missing.

Coincidence?

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Oh dear...

Reuters has added to the long long list of U.S. foreign relations disasters breaking the news about the Bush administration's funding of the Fatah Party in Palestine.

If this link doesn't work, and this one also doesn't work, then someone is trying to bury this story. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to get a link, the better not to bother with copypasta, but when I went back for it less than a minute later, it had vanished and I had to dive into archives to get it back again.

Here's the first paragraph anyway...

By Jonathan Saul

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said on Tuesday Washington's support for the Palestinian Fatah group and the blocking of aid to Gaza were part of a mistaken policy aimed at dividing Palestinians.


Ok, so Jimmy Carter wasn't the best ever President, but is there anyone who's going to disagree that Bush is the worst ever - and by a country mile?

In other news, two weeks old now, but who cares about that anyway, the L.A. Times (from New York to L.A. - reminds me of a song I heard once when I was a kid...) had this to say in support of my aversion to porn and music download websites...

Whatever threat online pornography might pose to society's morals, online music might pose a bigger threat to society's computers.

A study scheduled to be released today found that about 9% of adult sites that turned up high in search-engine rankings had such PC-damaging problems or annoyances as spyware, adware and spam associated with them.

Yet searching for digital music was twice as risky — more than 19% of the sites produced by such queries were risky for computer users, according to the study by McAfee Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company that makes computer-security software.

Actually, that report reminds me of the replies I get from PayPal, Bank of America, Chase Bank and iwf.org when I send them notifications of interweb nastiness. I did get a bit of a grin after reading the first sentence, though.

We can see newsreel footage of all manner of carnage and killing, but the world caves in on itself if someone sees a pair of tits or some full on rumpy pumpy. What is the matter with some people?

Did Salman Rushdie come out of hiding and risk a drubbing to get his dubbing?

Eighteen years after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill him, a government minister in Pakistan (Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz ul-Haq) said yesterday that Rushdie's recent knighthood justified suicide bombing.

Suicide bombing of whom, where and, above all, WHY?

Oh, of course; ul-Haq is RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS MINISTER. These fucking imbeciles make me cringe for the 99% of muslims who wouldn't hurt anyone. Speaking of religious nutbags, I tripped over this little number yesterday.

Their address?

Museum and Research Center
10946 Woodside Ave. North
Santee, CA 92071 <---------<--------<---- California. Could there have been any doubt? (619) 448-0900 (General Office) (800) 628-7640 (Customer Service) info@icr.org


Why am I doing this at 5 in the fucking morning???

Monday, June 18, 2007

WTF?

Just reading the New York Times Technology supplement today, and I had to wonder almost aloud, whether or not there's anything unusual in the water coolers up there.

Click here to read it for yourselves; I can't bring myself to do the copypaste thing because it's a great big page of absolutely nothing.

I clicked a couple of the links away from the page, most notably, this blog, which also left me completely underwhelmed.

The Times has really gone downhill lately.

Something of an anomaly for editorial staff who produce snippets of this sort of calibre to allow the above headscratcher to appear in the same paper on the same day.

Ok, I also plundered the Boston Globe and grinned persistently at two items therein.

Firstly, there is no excuse needed for this sort of behaviour

Secondly, there is no excuse possible for this.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Reqwests plz



can u get a folder of your longcat pictures and send them too me please

There are 369 of the bloody things on my machine. Was there anything else you wanted me to do over the next fkn week while I'm there?

At least you said "please".

Monday, June 11, 2007

Sorry, but we censor after all.

Shucks, did the home of free speech on the internet get forced to remove pr0ns from their messageboard again?

Gee... too bad.

btw, what was the ip banning thing all about? Wasn't I supposed to be in there or something?

Google vs Microsoft

This is a battle that verges on the absurd.

Here's a quote from today's edition of the New York Times...

Google has accused Microsoft of designing its latest operating system, Vista, to discourage the use of Google’s desktop search program, lawyers involved in the case said.

Is anyone surprised? Has Microsoft done anything right since it replaced Windows 98? A little further on, we read...

Google complained to federal and state prosecutors that consumers who try to use its search tool for computer hard drives on Vista were frustrated because Vista has a competing desktop search program that cannot be turned off. When the Google and Vista search programs are run simultaneously on a computer, their indexing programs slow the operating system considerably, Google contended. As a result, Google said that Vista violated Microsoft’s 2002 antitrust settlement, which prohibits Microsoft from designing operating systems that limit the choices of consumers.

And therein lies the absurdity.

Google has its own entry in Webster's dictionary of the English language. It's viewed with such favour and positive sentiment, the company name has become part of our collective social psyche. Google is the new "sliced bread". On the other hand, all things Microsoft are regarded with such scorn and derision that unless they embark on something radically different from their current path, it'll go the same way as IBM. It'll become a shadow.

Microsoft and Windows will become by-words for shit. They already are to those in the know. MSN search will never be regarded as anything but second rate and nobody is ever going to say "MSN it." I mean, we're going to Google stuff on Altavista! Google means search.

Google taking Microsoft to court for anti-trust violations is just ridiculous. It looks like money-grubbing. It's the sort of thing we'd expect from Fox News. Windows doesn't work, Vista is the worst system they've produced in years. Your shit doesn't work on Windows - nobody's shit works on Windows. Windows is a dog's breakfast.

However, the Google toolbar is useful, it's unobtrusive, convenient - and best of all, it doesn't need Windows or Microsoft to run. If the Google toolbar doesn't run on Windows Vista, as appears to be the case, it's just another certain step Microsoft is taking towards its own demise brought about by corporate arrogance. If they were smart, they'd just tweak the damn package and let it run the Google Toolbar - even use it as a selling point.

Oh yes yes I know they want to make money with their own search crap as well but as I've already said, we're never going to MSN it, we're always going to Google it. If they were smart, they'd charge Google a fee for having their toolbar pre-installed on Microsoft's products.

Google, for its part, should forget about Microsoft and just have some quiet whispers in the ears of the boffins at Apple. 1 virus in 30 years compared to 300,000 + in the history of the p.c.?

The judge in the case seems to agree, the case was thrown out.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

How's yer arse, Dwight?

Do not provoke the Anonymous Army, Mr Silverman.

http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/

Too late!

Must keep an eye on this for the next couple of days as well whilst the hoards of Caturday Lovers descend upon the Houston Chronicle website in all their fury at the exposing of one of their treasured private haunts.

The complaint - everything you love, everything you hold dear and sacred, will be appropriated, mishandeled, repackaged, and sold to the people you hate - is a valid complaint too.

Anonymous does as Anonymous pleases and that's not always to the benefit of pussywhipped socially conditioned robots who do as their lord and master Rupert Murdoch commands. What they like most is to be left alone and anonymous, not have battalions of curious Christian missionaries complaining everytime someone posts porn or says horrible things about... well, everything really... and then trying to have the site shut down.

Anonymous hates desperate housewives and Kathy Sierra types who prefer their interwebs to be full of flowers and niceness and aren't-you-so-sweets kind of puke.

Unfortunately for Dwight Silverman, he's blundered into a nest of bullants and left a trail of breadcrumbs to Anon H.Q. and there's already talk of a raid.

I bet that's one full up inbox he's dealing with this morning.

In true Tony Hart style?

Yes, that's what she said.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W_gInR3gXs#s_X2IS_KMTM

There is a short series of other hopeful submissions for the logo of the 2012 Olympic Games being held in London, and the backing music for it is taken from the old kids' tv art show, Take Hart - which I used to watch when I got home from school. (It's where I first heard Cavatina, for those who delight in useless bits of social clutter.)

Anyway, the first alternative picture they trot out is a showstopper.

The comments beneath the video itself are even funnier than the video. I will return to this tomorrow and see how many more people have left evidence of their extreme amusement. As I watch though, the related links section just grows and grows and Goatse is going to be as famous as YouTube by the end of the week, it would seem.

Would the real Sean Scayte please stand up!

Friday, June 01, 2007

Jumpin Jack Cruise

Werd in da hood is that Elron "Jackboots" Hubbard's loony master race has taken exception to stuff that has been said about the increasingly weird cult known as The Church of Scientology.

Well, as it happens, I know what pisses the cultists off more than anything else and it's pictures of Big L's handwriting being bandied about by people like me who think... correction ... who KNOW that Xenu is the biggest acid-tripping wankfest that ever was or will be.

The Wikipedia entry on it is hysterical.

Let's go clear about this: Hubbard was a con-artist. His followers are ALL fools. Level 9 in the hierarchical maelstrom is nothing short of deranged paranoia brought on by drug induced psychosis.

Are all you Scientologists wigging out yet?

Just wait! There's moar!

Someone in your organisation has been fighting tooth and nail to shut down any website that exposes the truth about Scientology. The number one taboo is putting up images of Elron Bastard's handwriting. Wonder why...



Come and get me, Tom. (just for the lulz, you understand.)

As soon as your fuck knuckle buddies see what I've done here, as no doubt they will because the P&A Liars Team will doubtless point it out - Trevor's the creepiest freak yet to be incarcerated - they'll appeal to blogger to have me cease and desist for whatever mongy reason the CoS legal department deems fit. Just like they did with codebot.org last year. http://theunfunnysequel.ytmnd.com/

So here's some moar of the same scribble from the same bent page as the one above...




It says:

Data (1) (1)
The head of the Galactic
Confederation (76 planets around
larger stars visible from here)
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
solved overpopulation (250 billion
or so per planet) -- 178 billion
average) by mass implanting.
He caused people to be brought to
Teegeeack (Earth) and put an H Bomb
on the principal volcanoes (Incident 2)
and then the Pacific area ones
were taken in boxes to Hawaii
and the Atlantic Area ones to
Las Palmas and there "packaged."
His name was Xenu. He used
renegades. Various misleading
data by means of circuits etc.
were placed in the implants.
When through with his crime Loyal Officers
(to the people) captured him
after 6 years of battle
and put him in an electronic
mountain trap where he still
is. "They" are gone. The place (Confed.)
has since been a desert.


Good God almighty! How could any sane person take this shit seriously?

Oh, they don't. They deny this shit until you're deemed insane enough to believe it and you prove your insanity by giving them millions of dollars to take the anti mental health training. (Or jumping on furniture on television, right Tom?)

Lermanet has been fighting the evil Choich for quite a while and apparently it was all over the public display of snippets of Hubbard's barely legible scrawl. Praps it's because it's amazingly similar in scrawlage quality to that of Adolf Hitler - although his signature is somewhat more elegant - almost gay. Have a look at it at the bottom of this begging letter he posted in 1947.

He wasn't well. As this shopping list of complaints will illustrate.

Speaking of not well, click here to see "a day in the life of an Operating Thetan at level 7." I imagine this is how Trevor spends most days too.

So why am I bringing this up all of a sudden?

Well, as I mentioned right at the start, The CoS has taken exception to stuff being said about it on the interwebs and they've apparently had websites shut down and without going through the legal and proper channels to do so.

They've upset Anonymous.

Anonymous is rounding up his mates.

That means it's party time!

*edit* It has begun! As requested by comment:

http://www.theargus.co.uk/display.var.1422841.0.0.php


There are of course shitloads more links exposing the Choich of Scientonomy for what it really is but you can find those for yourself by googling them.