Beautiful

At first, this is just a beautiful thing to look at and listen to.

And then you realise: you can actually control it.

Oh my.

You're going to tell me I'm a really bad person...

...for finding this so funny.

But I just can't help myself.

If you've ever worked in or with a tech support environment, I'm sure Owny Woo will resonate.

Like a Moby tune - can't get that thing outta my head...

Blinkin flip

Can't believe I've never thought of this before. Duh.

Just registered michaelocc.com. Next step - I'll get it set to redirect to here. Make it a lot easier to reach the site than trying to figure out how to spell "Blogger All" backwards...

*sigh*

UPDATE

On second thoughts...

Stuff 'em. Stuff 'em in their stupid arses, the sleazy money-grabbing sons of bitches.

Who? Register dot poxy praetorian bastard com, that's who.

They gleefully accept your hard earned shekels, enticing you with the promise of "free URL forwarding". Nowhere in the small print does it tell you that "free" equates to "we're free to fuck with your site and splash our ugly cheesy ad across it any way we want."

Compare and contrast:

This is your blog
This is your blog on Register.com

Sod it. Whoever decided this was a valid thing to do to their unsuspecting customers deserves to be held down and violently buggered with the complete works of Peppers and Rogers.

Oh why the hell didn't I check first? How do I keep making the same mistake? I'm not a complete Pollyanna - but I just keep blindly trusting in tech companies and service providers to deliver the goods, and nothing but the goods, without spamming my balls off or polluting my space one way or another.

Crap. Caught in the old TANSTAAFL trap once again. Must be some way I can turn this frigger off (without forking over even more dough). Hmmm....let me see....

UPDATE TWO

Bollocks. I guess they DO include it in the small print after all:

"This version of URL Forwarding functions in a similar manner to Platinum URL Forwarding, but inserts a register.com navigation bar in a frame on the bottom of the screen at the destination web site."

Cost of this "Platinum" service - 49 US bucks a year. On top of the $25/year I just handed over.

OK - I know it's not a lot of money. But that's COMPLETELY NOT THE POINT.

Ooooooo it makes me seethe. Grrrrrrr.

'Course - I'm only seething at myself really *bangs head against desk*. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb...

Not that I’m a particular fan of the Borg, or anything...

...as numerous earlier rants and screeds will attest.

But I still think this (warning - large file, requires QuickTime plugin) is just a lot funnier than all the recent teeth gnashing over Microsoft’s rather sad little attempt to pretend they have some friends.

Candidly, I think they need some help. This whole imaginary customers thing is surely symptomatic of a much deeper psychological disturbance. Maybe something to do with their relationship with their mothers...?

The Machine *Doesn't* Stop

Powerful Internet attack thwarted -- AP

"Washington — An unusually powerful electronic attack briefly crippled nine of the 13 computer servers that manage global Internet traffic this week, officials disclosed Tuesday. But most Internet users didn't notice because the attack only lasted one hour."

Yikes.

Yer

Reviewing a draft document for a sometime client earlier today, my righteous fussy meter was peaking like crazy every time I corrected their misuse of “your”, when what they meant was “you’re”.

Grrrrrrr...

Still – at least it reminded me of one of my all time favourite jokes:

So this bloke walks into a psychiatrist's office, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts made out of Saran Wrap.

Shrink says: "Well, I can clearly see your nuts."

***

Oh, and then there's also, this.

Something scarily bizarre just happened to my machine....

Everything went tits up in the nastiest possible way about 10 mins ago – full BSOD and I hadn’t even touched the keyboard in ten minutes, honest.

I was just watching some terrific Quicktime movies on Apple.com – then bloooiee!

After I rebooted, scandisk did it's usual job of salvaging any of the useful content that was scattered to the 4 corners of my hard drive and screwing it up even further.

One data shred survived relatively intact, however. It appears to be some kind of code fragment, saved by scandisk as FILE0098.CHK.

What do you make of this:

/* Copyright Microsoft Inc., Redmond, USA.
*/

#include "win311.h"
#include "win95.h"
#include "evenmore.h"
#include "oldstuff.h"
#include "billrulz.h"
#include "implants.h"
#include "monopoly.h"

char make_prog_look_big[1600000];
void main(){
display_copyright_message();
display_bill_rules_message();
do_nothing_loop();

if (first_time_installation) {
make_500_megabyte_swapfile(); do_nothing_loop();
totally_screw_up_HPFS_file_system();
search_and_destroy_networked_UNIX(); search_and_destroy_networked_LINUX();
install_XP_on_all_machines_found(); disable_Netscape();
disable_RealPlayer(); disable_Corel_Products(); hang_system();
}

write_something(anything);
display_copyright_message();
display_buymoreXboxshit_message();
do_nothing_loop();
do_some_stuff();

if (still_not_crashed) {
display_copyright_message(); do_nothing_loop();
basically_run_windows_3.1_fool_as_XP(); do_nothing_loop();
do_nothing_loop();
}

if (detect_cache()) disable_cache();
if (fast_cpu()) {
set_wait_states(lots); set_mouse(speed, very_slow); set_mouse(action,
jumpy); set_mouse(reaction, sometimes); set_intelli_mouse(NO_INTELLI);
}

/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.11"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 95"); */
printf("Welcome to Windows XP");
if (system_ok())
crash(to_dos_prompt);
else
system_memory = open("a:\swp0001.swp", O_CREATE, 0666);
while(SATAN) {
sleep(5); get_user_input(); sleep(5); act_on_user_input(); sleep(15)
illegal_operation_performed();
}
create_general_protection_fault();
printf("Smash head on Keyboard\n");
make_user_reboot_machine();
}

Yeah, I know it's a really old gag - but I found it gathering dust in the corner of a disused email account and thought it deserved a little fresh air...

About bloomin time

Someone had to come along and kick the pompous stuffing out of all this “Web Services Save the Planet and Do Dishes” bollockio.

Thank God for editor “Wilfred Seymour Davis-Larson” for bringing us Webservile.com

(er...hmmmm. “Wilfred Seymour Davis-Larson” -- WSDL? Right...) Well whoever it is, they’re my hero(es) of the month.

Sample headlines so far:

Acronym Shortage Threatens Web Services Community

Web Services Unable to Connect Legacy System with Spork

And my personal favourite:

.NET Saves Boy Down Well

“In the early hours of the morning, .NET, Microsoft's platform for XML Web services, saved a five-year-old boy who fell down a well in Ottumwa, Iowa...”

Snort-inducingly hilarious. Joe Bob says: check it out.

Unfathomable Business Models. No. 232 in an occasional series

So I’m coming back in from a client meeting earlier today and I catch a hint of the latest news about the sniper flashed up as a headline on the Elevator News Network.

Like most people in North America, I guess, this thing has me transfixed. Reaching my desk and anxious to learn more, I bring up CNN.com.

Curses.

Don’t know when they started doing this, but it appears that you can’t just watch CNN streaming at your desk any more.

You can catch it for free in lobbies, on street corners, at the local Future Shop – but online? Nope. Now they want you to subscribe.

Er...OK. Let’s just see now....

To come close to what you can catch on TV, CNN offers the “RealOne SuperPass”, which lets you watch streams from CNN, CNN/Sports Illustrated, CNN/Money, plus a bunch of “Premium Programming from ABCNEWS, Wall Street Journal, NBA, NASCAR.com, FOXSports.com and much more!”

All for the bargain price of US$9.95/month

The local Canadian Tire store, meanwhile, carries a perfectly acceptable little 13” colour TV – capable of receiving all of the above channels and, indeed, “much more!”. Measly hunnerd forty Canadian. Stick one of these in the corner of your office or den.

Option A: slow, choppy, pixelated, fuzzy CNN stream through your computer screen for US$119 per year – all nicely wrapped up in CNN-branded ad-spam and other bandwidth devouring clottage.

Option B: exact same CNN content, without all the fuzziness and other bollocks – with a picture you can actually see and audio that works. Plus a whole bunch of other TV channels and no “targeted”, “permission-based” ad-spam to wade through. $139 + tax (in Canadian dollars – so about 90 bucks US).

Ahem.

Pre-emptive patent opportunity

What’s going on inside me cup of tea?

Ever noticed how the tea bag swells up like that when you pour the boiling water onto it? If you use the funky round teabags, in particular, the flippin things bloat up like they’re going to burst. You can see the water going mental -- fizzing and roiling around inside the leafy innards of the thing.

Looks like there’s so much superhot steam in there that the water is almost bouncing off the mesh surface of the bag without penetrating.

Wonder what physical phenomenon is at work here - and are there any practical applications for this peculiar behaviour? Can I patent it?

Oh - and why do ginger biccies taste so much better when dunked in yer tea?

Lots to ponder, sitting here right now with a mighty large mug of orange pekoe and a short stack of “President’s Choice English Style Ginger Snaps”. Yum.

Pinged my brothers with this conundrum couple of days ago. Haven’t heard back, but I figure they’re all too busy celebrating Mom’s birthday. 65 today (the 21st). Crikey.

Happy birthday, Mum.

Wish to heck I was back there right now, raising a glass with all the rest of you. Guess I’ll raise me cuppa instead.

M&D just got back from a weekend in Bude, Cornwall.

Ah, the cheesy British seaside experience at its best. On the phone earlier we figured out that the last time we were there, as a family, was probably back around 1974. I was ten. Mum would have been about 36/37 – younger than I am now.

Crikey squared. There’s something that’ll make you feel all growed up, for sure.

Many, many happy returns, Mum. I love you.

“Reality may be simultaneous, but expository prose is linear”
from The Philosophy of Punctuation by Paul Robinson, author of Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters

A hard copy of this essay has been hanging around my desk for ages.

I’ve no idea how I first stumbled across it, but I remember that the title and first paragraph caught my attention somewhere and I pulled down a copy, meaning to read it on the subway or something.

Finally got around to reading it the other night and it certainly didn’t disappoint.

Robinson could be considered by some to have purist or intransigent leanings. I think he’s well aware of his own foibles and this candid self-knowledge is indeed part of the appeal of this piece.

His philosophy appeals to me as I recognize so many of my own weak uses in his catalogue of punctuation crimes. One of my favourite sections is the diatribe on semicolons:

“Periods and commas are lovely because they are simple.... if the undergraduate essays I see are representative, we are in the midst of an epidemic of semicolons. I suspect that the semicolon is so popular because it is the first fancy punctuation mark students learn of, and they assume that its frequent appearance will lend their writing a properly scholarly cast. Alas, they are only too right.

I was hoping Robinson would also pass comment of one of the laziest of punctuation marks, of which I confess to be a serial abuser: the ellipsis.

In email messages in particular, I frequently find myself tacking this sloppy cliff-hanger onto the end of even the longest sentences.

It’s as if I’m implying, with arch coolness, that my correspondent can easily fill in the remainder of the thought for themselves. The truth is that most of the time, of course, the ellipsis is dropped in there to save me the bother of constructing a fully-formed sentence.

Ellipses mirror my life. Deep-rooted procrastination aided and abetted by that certain frustrating inability to complete things. Takes me forever to get around to stuff, and I always seem to be leaving a loose end dangling somewhere. My epitaph should read: “Hang on, I’m nearly finished...”

I’m too good to you

In my tireless and never-ending quest for the funniest sites on the entire Internet, I am proud to bring you, at last, the:



Featuring, amongst other fine attractions: More crappy children's art work

Even better – forget about my feeble little LOTR list below, check out Maddox’s Five things that sucked about Lord of the Rings

Quality.

At the costume store



"Right, if I can just get one of those stick on lightning scars to go with the hat and specs, I'll be all ready for Halloween, thanks..."

Happy Birthday

David Rees's superb "Get Your War On" series is one year old today!

From David's front page:

"I made the first page of "Get Your War On" on October 9, 2001 because I was depressed about the newly launched bombing campaign in Afghanistan. At the time, it seemed like mass starvation and increased land mine-related deaths were just around the corner. (The latter did increase dramatically last fall.)

I found myself searching American pop culture for some reflection of my feelings. I couldn't find anything dark enough, so I made "Get Your War On" and sent the link to a handful of friends.

In the past year, "Get Your War On" has received 24 million hits from around the world.

More important, however, in the past four months we've been able to raise $17,000 for Mine Dog and Detection Center Team #5.

MDC Team #5 remove land mines and unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan."

Outstanding work and still the funniest thing on the Net.

If you agree, follow the link on David's site to make a tax-deductible contribution to Adopt-A-Minefield.

Two questions

1. Just finished making one of a pair of these bought at the weekend:



Pleasingly solid bit of kit. Step one in getting the kids' rooms sorted out in preparation for the arrival of "Opus" (womb-name of soon-to-be fifth member of family).

So: if you say a piece of IKEA furniture is well made, are you being immodest?

2. Were Sausage and I completely tripping on Friday night, or did anybody else in Toronto see the most spectacular, short-lived aurora borealis display at about 10:45 p.m.?

So far, no one we've asked seems to have noticed it. Starting to wonder what was in that teriyaki we were eating...

Grim, stormy night - very high winds and extraordinarily low base of altostratus cloud covering the entire sky. All of a sudden the whole north-eastern sky lit up with the characteristic livid green of the Northern Lights.

Stepped outside onto the back deck. Awe-struck: garden as bright as day.

It came in three short bursts, each only about 5 - 15 seconds long. The cloud was so low you could almost lick it.

Thirty minutes after the last short burst, all the cloud had cleared to reveal one of the darkest, clearest nights we've ever seen from this close to the city. We live in eastern Toronto - in the Beach. Still close enough to the downtown core to have the sky bleached out most nights by the appalling sodium glare.

Mighty winds Friday night (side-effect of Hurricane Lily, no doubt) swept the firmament clean of the last shreds of wispy cloud, giving us Joyce's "heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit..."

Beautiful. Only the second time we've ever seen the Lights. Powerfully moving & eerie experience.

Blake: "When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?"

Where can I buy tickets for this?

'Bush and Saddam should fight a duel'

Baghdad, Iraq - United States President George Bush should fight a duel with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein instead of going to war and making all of Iraq suffer, Saddam's vice-president said in an interview on Thursday.

"Bush wants to attack the whole Iraq, the army and the infrastructure," Taha Yassin Ramadan said.

Bush says he wants Saddam toppled and accuses him of stockpiling nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and harboring terrorists.

Ramadan suggested instead that Bush face Saddam in a formal duel - with their vice-presidents as their seconds and the weapon of their choice.

Hmmm: Sabres? Pistols? Rhetoric at 20 paces? Ready wit and biting repartee at dawn?

Ah - perhaps not. Best Dubya stick to the big honking guns, I guess.

Not that I'm wild at the thought of him winning, but I'm also not keen on the idea that he might lose...

Now with added feedback

Finally got round to adding a comments feature thingie - so you can cuss right back at me, even when I'm not listening (like now).

A list I've been meaning to compile

Before seeing the movie of The Fellowship of the Ring, I was, like most people, I guess, really worried that it was going to suck.

In fact, I'd pretty much convinced myself that no matter how good it turned out to be, it was just about guaranteed to suck moderate ass in some particulars. No way, I thought, could any movie realisation possibly match the richly layered mental images of Tolkien's world I'd been carrying with me since I was 9 years old.

As it turns out, I thought the movie was actually as close to flawless as I could possibly have wished it. Gob-smacked on leaving the theatre, I quickly exhausted my supply of superlatives.

But now the release of the Two Towers approaches. Much darker, more difficult book - even more layering of plotlines and power struggles. Will they manage to pull it off again?

Pondering this, I've started pulling together a mental list of:

The Top Ten Things I'm Most Worried Jackson/New Line Will Screw Up.

#1 Has to be - the Ents.
Pete was smart enough to cut all that superfluous and irritating Tom Bombadil bollocks out of the first film - but the Ents are kind of integral to the plot of the Two Towers - especially the downfall of Isengard and the last minute rescue at Helm's Deep. Yet if anything has the potential to be well and truly Jar Jar Binks-ed, it's those bloomin' Ents. Imagine Treebeard with the voice of ALF from the TV series. This one really troubles me.

#2 Orc dialogue. The Orcs don't get much script in the Fellowship. In 2T, though, we've got the whole Ugluk vs. Grishnakh thing going on. Potential for low, inappropriate comedy - v. high. Pitched wrong, this could easily end up a really bad "Gremlins" kind of thing. Just one of you breathe the words "Jim Henson" and I'll punch you on the nose.

#3 Return of Gandalf. New Line have already kind of blown this by having the spoiler in the trailer. Please, don't let them blow it any worse.

#4 The battle of Helm's Deep. Pivotal, crucially important, intense stuff. As my brother has pointed out, pretty much the whole of the second book is one lengthy extended ruck played out in various locales. Makes for good blood and glory big screen stuff. Can Jackson deliver the same level of quality realisation in massive scale rocky-fu kickbutt battle scenes as he's demonstrated so far in the smaller but still intense melee sequences of Fellowship?

#5 Er...still only half way through re-reading Two Towers, so that's all I can think of for now. Sure you can come up with more...

Flotsam & Jetsam

Happens to be the title of the chapter I’m currently re-re-re-re-reading of The Two Towers. Also happens to describe the contents of a certain parking lot in my “Favorites” (sic) folder in IE.

See – during my extended summer bloggatical (about 12 weeks without a single new blog entry), I collected lots of interesting-at-the-time links, lint and other shtuff.

Quite a store of tasty morsels, set aside like a pile of nuts (er...ahem) – fully intending to blog them all in fullness at some future point. I even named the folder in which I lovingly stored them “2b Blogd”. Yeah, right...

Figure I’m never going to get through all this crud now, so this post will serve as a roundup and general clear out – kind of raking up the blogleaves and getting the blog ready for winter thing.

Here then, complete with a feeble attempt at categorization, is a small selection from a full summer’s worth of linky love. Knock yersleves out:

1. Latest in a long series of entertaining 404 messages

2. Casey Marshall’s picture of weblogs – cool hyperbolic tree sixdegrees of blogs wotsit

3. Aiiieee!!! Discover Magazine is fucking with my mind!!

4. Absolute proof, at last, that all Conservatives are villains at heart. (God bless the Irish, as ever, for showing us true meaning).

5. This: “At Foyles, the book-lover's bookshop, I approach the counter with a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. "I bought this book the other day," I say, "and I want my money back. It's full of typing errors and there's no punctuation." The assistant is pale and wears glasses. He takes the book and turns, at my bidding, to the 100-page monologue at the end...”

6. “FACT: A 1987 survey found that Canadians have the worst handwriting in the whole world. They also frequently misspell the word sauce.”

7. Useful and accurate metric conversion chart (sample: 8 nickels = 2 paradigms)

8. Unhappy Monday (what is the sound of one faux pas-ing?)

/nuff