[VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION: This service is not real and is only there for the lulz. I realise 99.9% of visitors understand this, but after receiving a comment from irate Eircom user unable to download his lolicon porn from the Pirate Bay using my "scam" warez above, I now have to put in this disclaimer. Here's a tip though, if you thought the above piece of shit flash was real, you probably shouldn't be on the internet in the first place.]
Irelands leading ISP, Eircom, has promised to censor torrent sites, starting with The Pirate Bay. They are bowing to pressure from the Irish Recorded Music Association, which is demanding the ban instead of taking legal action against Eircom. Eircom owns most of Irelands telecommunication infrastructure which other ISP's rent to provide broadband to their own customers, and it is not known at this stage if Eircom with be introducing the ban at level of their network topology which will affect all other ISP's.
Have no fear though! The Gamma Goblin provides! You can continue to access The Pirate Bay with my patented space age embedded proxy browser device (loosely based on my old inline browser app). I call it my "Eircom-Bypass, Pirate Bay, Proxy Search" unit. I have spent the evening, fine tuning the megabytes to make this access torrents faster than visiting The Pirate Bay directly! Heck, this browser is so loaded with techno it might even cause a mistrial with the Pirate Bays case in Sweden at the moment! I guarantee your satisfaction! And hey, you can trust me, I'm a Computer Scientist! I've got the mother fuckin' BcScIoCi's after my name! Just try it out! Go on, search for some legal Linux disk images or something... do it now!
Yeah, it was bound to happen I guess. One of the pictures that I took of Gail Trimble on University Challenge has ended up in a video on the BBC News website. Great! but are two reasons why I'm annoyed: for one thing, it's a bloody picture I took of the TV screen with my phone! I hate when people do that, especially on YouTube. I could have a thousand first-generation high resolution photographs, all shot on a Hasselblad, and they'd never get noticed! Secondly, and much more depressing, is the fact that they linked my image with a piece about the hatred towards Gail Trimble. Oooh I'm fuming here! The picture is embedded in a third-party facebook profile, that actually doesnt bother me all that much, but linking it along with my image to the hatred... thats a big dirty Grrrr @ the BBC right there.
Ah well, I guess I did say I kinda liked the picture for it's artistic merit anyway, what with all the sparkly noisey bits and all... and it was just that Facebook entry that was being mean and not my image... Fuck it sure, I'm on the BBC!
Yeah so it's all over. Corpus Christi left it to the very last moment to decide to start winning. Slumdog Millionare has nothing on the "Question & Answer" drama contained within this final episode of UC. You can follow my running commentary over thar to the right. I was sitting there stunned wondering why Corpus Christi weren't buzzing in. Things started to change though and right there at the end, Gail Trimble literally exploded with answers! It was nothing less than an intellectual slaughter.
The live blogging did result in a comment from me that can finally be quoted. When Trimble suddenly came into life it was like the closing phrases of Beethoven's Appassionata. It was amazing, totally awe inspiring. Unfortunately, my choice of simile at the time was a little bit more open to interpretation than I had intended, as has been proven by some "enthusiastic" follow-up comments by others :)
I shall be Twuttering (damn I hate that parody now). I shall be live-blogging over here on my live blogging site twutter.blogspot.com during this evenings final of University Challenge. Who knows what magic comments I'll come out with. One things for sure though, they'll probably be fraught with spelling mistakes!
I'm getting a moderate amount of traffic relating to my posts on Gail Trimble. Moderate but significant, and with spikes every time she appears on TV. I expect another blaze of hits tomorrow when she appears in the final. Good luck to her with that. I have a terrible fear when it comes things like this though, I'm always worried that a winning streak will come to a spectacular meltdown just at the most critical moment. I'll be watching anyway, on that expensive super-deluxe model TV I mentioned that I own.
Just a few moments ago I read an article written on the Guardian website, about Gail Trimble and the final tomorrow. The writer wonders if Gail Trimble is the smartest contestant on University Challenge ever, and goes on to describe the buzz she has created across blogs and the internet in general. My posts have the second highest page rank in Google search results, but do I get a mention? No. Does this blog get a mention? No. Is there even a quote lifted from here? Not even a string of similar words! I'm not surprised, I never seem to get a mention with these things. I could put up a cure for AIDS on this blog and it wouldn't even get noticed. And you know what... I wouldn't change a thing, because I'm odd like that.
Prawo Jazdy! My old friend, jag sie masz? As has been covered in Irish media, as well as across Europe (and the world actually), the Guards made the repeated blunder of mistaking "Prawo Jazdy" (the Polish for Driving Licence) for the drivers name, which is written on the top Polish driving licences. As much as you could lampoon a Guard for not realising that the biggest letters on a driving licence might indeed mean "Driving Licence" and the numbered details given below it might in fact start at "1" with their name, you have to remember that the guard will probably have only seen Irish driving licences before which are, lets face it, shitty pieces of paper.
Poland like the rest of Europe, has the standard creditcard type of driving licence, which is brilliant. It fits in your wallet, is waterproof and you can use it to open locked doors with. It's the only kind of format to go with. If you go to Britain you'll see an almost identical licence. Why here in Ireland we're still using the "Let me zee your papers, at the ol' check point charley" format I don't know... it probably has to do with that old Irish thing of "backwardness!"
So whats wrong with a paper licence? Well it's paper for one thing! The next is the size of it: theres no way to carry it around with you without turning into something like a prop from Indiana Jones and the Lost Treasure Map of Katmandu! And you have to carry it around, in case you need to drive a different vehicle every day. And don't forget if to bring it with you in case you end up doing the weekly shopping and decide to put a bottle of cough mixture in the trolly along with the rest of your goods. You'll have to present your ID (drivers licence) at the check out to prove youre not a 12 year old going a ditch drinking bender. And thats if you're lucky enough to have your drivers licence accepted as a form of ID, they sometimes demand a passport! The next time I'm asked for a passport at Tesco I'm going to fain insanity and make a big deal out of how "I can't believe it! This is the second fucking time I set out for Tesco and ended up in the airport. Mother was right, I am a cunt!"
The last time I brought up the notion of a "voluntary" national ID card, I was lambasted by Frank Prendergast. Lambasted is too kind, I was fucked over by a Frankp, who seemed very adamant that his need for anonymity outweighed my want of identity. I appricate his view point though, having your identity reduced to an ID card isn't a good world to be living in, but I think he missed my point. We all need to prove who we are sometimes, I just want a proper, convenient and dedicated way to do so i.e. something handy sized, durable, and it's primary use is for self identification (not driving or traveling... or proving the Guards think you're old enough to skull pints). And to remove all doubt, I do mean it's voluntary and no finger printing involved, FFS. I'm sick of the Irish mentality "ah sure till do" as in "Sure why dont you just get a passport to use as ID... ah sure, till do!"
A Cork woman today, was found not-guilty of the murder of her daughter in July of 2006, by reason of insanity.
"It took the jury of seven women and five men 24 minutes to reach its unanimous verdict, finding Ms Prendergast (aged 49), of Glenna Cottages, Commons Rd, Cork, not guilty by reason of insanity of murdering of Jessica Prendergast, 21, at that address on July 29, 2006."
It continues:
"Ms Prendergast told gardaà during interviews that she “didn’t sleep at all” the night of the killing.
She believed she was “getting messages from Our Lady from the water dripping into the toilet bowl”. She said that Our Lady told her to kill Jessica.
She went downstairs and got a knife from the kitchen, then returned to bed. “I said to her [Our Lady]: 'When do you want me to do it?' She said: ‘I’ll let you know, my love.’
At half past five she said: ‘You can do it now.’”Ms Prendergast went into her daughter’s room and stabbed her in the chest in what was described as a “frenzied attack”.
Jessica was struck with the knife almost 100 times."
As sad as this case is I have to use it as an example in a question I ask over and over: Why does it take the killing of an individual before someone, with a deep religious belief that God is communicating with them, is classed as insane? How is this any different than someone who "heard God telling them" not to take a doomed plane flight or seeing the face of Jesus in a piss stain on yesterdays underpants? Surely this case proves that believing is God is fucking mental!
This is the World Press Photo of the Year for 2008. It shows an armed sheriff moving through an American home after an eviction due to a mortgage foreclosure last year.
"US Economy in Crisis: Following eviction, Detective Robert Kole must ensure residents have moved out of their home, Cleveland, Ohio, 26 March"
In all the posting I did last year, I somehow missed out on a post for Valentine's Day. This upsets me because I thought I was developing a yearly anti-Valentines Day tradition. Be sure to check out the 2006 post which is in the same vein as the above pic. 2007 is just a bit cynical.
I hope you like the above pic. It was "hand" chosen from literally millions of smutographic images on my hard drive. Not really, but it's not hard to find stuff like this on the internet (not when you have the smut sleuthing skills of a dehydrated paedophile anyway). If you really like it, you can view the rest of the series here. Unless you're very innocent, you are correct in presuming that "lolly" ends up somewhere else.
Right so, on with the next. Men, do you think the size of your manhood is inadequate? Do you worry if your lady-friend is loving it as much as you? Do you sometimes wonder if bigger is always better? Then fear not! Senior citizen singing sensation, Betty White, along with her black man-companion sings her way through the truth that a lot of women don't always tell: That the little dicks fit them best!
Listen to it now! The Little Dicks Fit Me Best.mp3. Thanks to the WMFU for sharing this treasure, there are actually many more, here and here. Other noteworthy songs include: "Funky, Stinky Love", "If you open your legs (I'll hatch your eggs)" and the classic "Only 12 years old".
N.B. if it wasn't Valentines Day, the first picture would have been branded with "It haz a flavr" as I think it's funnier, but fail relates better to the day thats in it because of weird relationship breakups.
[UPDATE 26.02.09 It took Photobucket this long to decide that a man sucking a piece of plastic is offensive, and delete the image. Well At least they left it up for the VD visiting traffic]
I've bowed to pressure and come to a compromise. You can follow me here. This is me in a fairly raw state so expect to be offended by off the cuff remarks and spitting bile blabbers.
Here's a comment I left on the Unemployed Blog. Some of my best stuff is done in comments, and nobody ever gets to see them. It's about the old Recession thing thats doing the rounds at the minute... you might have heard about it?
"When times were good FF drilled it into our heads that they, and they alone, created the Celtic Tiger. Now lets not be cheap and obvious and totally correct by saying, well if they caused the ‘Tiger surely they must have killed it too. No, lets not even go there, instead let us ask FF to do one simple thing: if they generated the original Celtic Tiger, then please, why don’t they just pull another one out of the bag now!? *holds breath*… *turns blue*…. *then purple*…. *dies*… *rots*… *my long since dissolved bodily essences witness the sun expanding and engulfing the earth*… *Andromeda smashes into the milky way*… *the universe folds back onto itself and contracts into a single point of matter*… *then explodes*… *billions of years later Homosapiens begin walking around on a third rock from a sun*… *on a small island on this rock, corrupt political party gain power*… *the economy on this island suddenly grows rapidly due random global circumstances and due to an ill informed and misguided internal pyramid scheme based on the housing sector*…. *then it all fails and things become very bleak*…* a random blogger holds his breath*… *turns blue then purple*…. *then dies*… *then rots*…………. “nothing lasts, but nothing is lost”, Terence McKenna, quoting William Blake."
Bush fires are still raging across the south east of Australia. Police believe these fires were started deliberately and are following a leads to find the individual or individuals involved. One such lead comes from well known Summer Bay resident and Vietnam Vet, Alf Stewart. Mr. Stewart is convinced that the fires were deliberately started by mischievous birds native to Australia, a type of cockatoo called the Galah. He believes that these "Flaming Galah's" are responsible for fires currently burning.
Police have said that all information given to them by the public is taken seriously and investigated, but Mr. Stewarts theories are being classed by the police as "highly improbable". Bruce Fisher, a police Senior Sargent from the area was reported as saying "Well Mr. Stewarts idea's are very fancy, but it's hard to take them seriously. I mean, one minute it's the flamin' galah's, the next he's telling us to 'stone the flamin' crows!' It's hard enough to believe it's one species of birds doing this, let alone two working together!". A few years ago Mr. Stewart was admitted to a mental hospital continuing to speak to his wife even after she had passed away.
"P4CM, a.k.a Passion for Christ Movement, an organization that (duh) is all about religion and serving Jesus, just launched a new line of tees to inspire people to free themselves through God.The tees announce to the world that the wearer has rid him or herself of poor habits and choices that are frowned upon by God. Things like being a diva, being a hypocrite, and being a slave.
Or, being a masturbator?
Yeah….their latest design, the “Ex-Masturbator” t-shirt, addresses the question: Is masturbation seen as a good thing through God’s eyes? (Editor’s Note: I don’t care - it’s a great thing through my eyes!) And I think that’s great; really, I do. Everyone has a right to express themselves (and the things they do under the covers when they are alone at night) on a t-shirt, but I am just not sure people will rock this shirt with any sincerity."
I predict these to be sold out by Friday, but 99% of the sales will be regular masturbators looking for a laugh. But will I be buying one myself I hear you ask? Of course not! I'm saving my money for the "Ex-Child Rapist" one. There's a load of them actually! The "Ex-Homosexual" is a lovely novelty birthday present for your gay friends I think. An "Ex-Rebel" one for Setanta O' hAilpin. A pair of "Ex-Fornicator" t-shirts for the lucky couple on their wedding day. And lest the Atheists feel like they're missing out on the fun, there's an "Ex-Atheist" one too! Magic stuff!
Why indeed! I drew this one night but I'll be damned if I know why exactly, but that's not important, I saved it and that's all that matters. But why is the joker naked, and whats up with his right arm and left leg? Answers on a postcard please.
On the same day of the previous post about Ballincollig, I paid a visit to one of my favorite shops in Cork: "Quality & Value", which is located near the old Aldi just past the cinema. I look kooky places like this, full of old knick-knacks and half price nothings. I'm a big fan of cheap DVD's and if you're quick you can get yourself a copy of "Alien Intruder" for only €1.99! Everyone needs a copy Alien Intruder in their DVD collection.
Anyway, I was having a browse around when I came across a pile of boxes with an "Entire Camping Kit" inside. The box promised you'd fit a tent, a sleeping bag and re-hydration backpack bladder thing, all inside the rucksack that was also included in the box. Sounds magical right? Well you can see just how magical all on your own for only €19.99. I was more interested in the boxes themselves though. They were all a bit tattered and looked of dubious origin. On closer inspection I spotted the follow:
In case you're in a state of confusion, that red thing stuck to the box is Christmas wrapping paper! Now I can reasonably understand a single box having been an unwanted gift, but 20 to 30 of them!? Where did they all come from; what sordid part were they mean't to play in the Christmas act of gift giving?
Here's what I think happened: an ailing small business somewhere in the midlands was suffering some "bad economics" coming up to Christmas and decided to replace the unaffordable Christmas wage bonus with cheap and tacky camping kits. The Company folds before they could be handed out and Q&V buy these off the liquidator at a fair price. They now reside at the back of the store with a €19.99 sticker on them. I wish I was joking, but it's probably true!
I took a stroll around the Ballincollig "Centre" a few Saturdays back. It was in the afternoon, around 2pm. There wasn't a soul on the streets. The shop units were unoccupied and the apartments looked vacant. It was very eerie just walking around. Do you know that film Dawn Of The Dead? Well it was nothing like that because at least that had zombies, this had nothing. It did look very clean though, I guess given the circumstances, that's hardly surprising.
One unit was occupied by a Heatons. I saw one customer in there, possibly two. It's hard to tell if the other was a customer or member of staff though. I didn't notice anyone in Sports World beside it.
The fact that this was a Saturday afternoon is what got me. If you were heading to Mahon Point at the same time, you'd nearly need to do a Mad-Max-Beyond-Thunderdome on the car ahead of you just to get a sniff at a parking space. Empty, this place just felt so empty.
I came across Microsoft's Songsmith a few weeks back. In a nutshell, its a program that provides automatic musical accompaniment to the user singing a vocal melody into their computers microphone. Not a totally new idea, midi based song generators have been around for years, but the ability to sing into a shitty mic and provide something out the other end is kinda new I guess. Anyway, it seems to have inspired a load of people to create "Songsmith" versions of pop songs and put them up on youtube. They vary in quality and the "karaoke" versions are best avoided, but those that used the original vocal tracks do sometimes come up with "interesting" results. That's Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" vocal ran through Songsmith in the above video.
I choose Queen's "We Will Rock You" as another example. There's something sweet about it (and the accidental Microsoft "ding-dong" is cute). The pauses in the song sound great! And before you scoff at it completely, musically it's not totally off the wall. We Will Rock You is from Queen's 1977 album News Of The World. Included on that album is a John Deacon penned track "Who Needs You". There's a not too different Latin flavour to that track as well.
I posted a cryptic image, like the one above, a while back. I meant to post a solution sooner than this but hey, you're getting it now. Only one person contacted me with a right answer, nitro2k01. I thoroughly expected him to get it so that came as no surprise. To the others who attempted though, thanks for trying :)
Ok, when is a picture not a picture? When it's a video of course! This will either amaze or bore you, or annoy you that I'm making such a big deal out of something you've known for years. The image above is actually a two dimensional representation of the stream data of the video below. To keep the file size of the image down, it's fairly heavily compressed, but it's still viewable.
"It's a fake!"
It's not just a graphical reproduction of the video though, the 123.63KB PiNG file actually is the video! [N.B. because vimeo.com re-encodes video, the embedded video isn't the exact same video as the image, but you can download the original AVI file from it's vimeo page, if you want to check it out.]
Ok so, how do you do the magic then. Well to "decode" the image above (in Windows), just save a copy of it first. Load it up in your favourite image editing software. Do nothing except save it as a RAW file. Go to that file and rename the extension to "avi". Double click it, and as long as you have the Xvid codec installed, it should play away the exact same as the embedded video here.
Converting video (or any other file type!) to an image is a bit more involved. First, you change the extension of the video to "raw". Then you load it up in your image editing software. It will ask for dimensions for the image it will generate. Basically, you need to figure out a length and width which when multiplied together will equal the total size, in bits, of the original file. You can make the image slightly too big just to be sure, in case you're worried. Once that's done save it as an uncompressed "png" file and you're done.
Like I said at the start of the last paragraph, you can do this conversion to any file type! I was amazed by this procedure a few years back when I heard about it first. The technicalities behind it were interesting, but so were the prospective uses of technique. I imagined storing my files on all those free image hosting sites, that is, until I realised most have a 1MB cut off limit for image sizes. Still though, it's good for sharing things like ebooks, although the RAR concatenation technique is more favourable.
[The video clip is taken from an old Australian children's series, "The Girl From Tomorrow", one of my favorite shows as a child.]
This is a bag of real American Dollars, with an original value circa $10k. Too bad the bills are shredded though. Weighs 5lbs! I can think of a million uses for this, well, 10,000 anyway. Actually I can only think of one, and that involves hamster piss. I'm sure there must be a legit reason to want to own shredded money at $45 a bag.
I came across this image a few months ago, and I felt an urge to highlight it at some point. It's dated April 2008 (Hi-res available, click for bigger). Pictured to the left is Keith Emerson(then 63), to the right is pianist Jeffrey Biegel and in the middle is Keith Emerson's girlfriend Mari Kamaguchi [sic]. I took the liberty of Googling "Mari Kamaguchi" at the time. I found nothing, but Google did suggest "Mari Yamaguchi", which was interesting because this individual is a game music composer apparently. Upon further research I found out they wrote the music for Mega Man 5. That's interesting also because that game came out around 1992. Looking at the woman in the picture I questioned if she even existed in 1992!
Just this evening, while this post turned up that her that her name is in fact, "Mari Kawaguchi". She has a facebook and a myspace. I didn't mean to write this much about her but thats the way it goes.
A few days ago I came across this recent video of Keith Emerson performing live on Japanese television. I could barely watch it actually. His right hand is almost completely lame :( He hits so many bum notes and slurs the phrases. Just watch it, you'll see what I mean. It's a real pity that his hand has degraded so much since the mid 90's (see him on form in the early 70's). That said, it's still sounds like Keith Emerson, and thats the main thing. He's performing here with Marc Bonilla on guitar.
That leads me nicely into the fact that Emerson released a new album late last year with Marc Bonilla. I've been listening to to an pirated copy of it for a few days now (cut me some slack, I do own all of ELP's studio albums on CD you know!). All I can say is that I wish this was an ELP release! While it's got some issues (plastic sounding symphonic rock crap in places) it's the most authentic thing I've heard in ages. It took me one or two listens but now it's sitting comfortably in my ears. It has the prog, modern sounding but still ELP. Emerson's hand might be nearly falling off but he show's here that he can still play.
Obviously, something classical has to be copied for it to be a real Emerson album and Holst's "Jupiter" theme goes to good use on track 9, "Marche Train" where amazingly it actually sounds quite lovely and not corny. There are some wonderful ballads too; track 13, "A Place To Hide" is most excellent and you'll be singing along with it in no time. One of the main highlights though is their version of Alberto Ginastera's "Malambo". This 6/8 piece really sounds great from the word go. if you liked Canario from "Love Beach" you're guaranteed to love this. Then when it's all swinging along nicely just past the middle, Emerson introduces an altered version of Ginastera's Creole Dance on piano. The song is then elevated to pure sex.
Second last on the album is "Gametime", a song patently borrowed from "Tiger In A Spotlight". Normally, such a blatant copy of earlier better times would annoy you but here you just get the feeling of "if it's not broken don't fix it".
The best thing I can say about this album is that the songs aren't boring. Love them or hate them you are bound to remember what they sounded like at the very least, which is a lot more that can be said for some of ELP's later releases. The very last word on this, if all else fails to meet with your liking, and you think Emerson should just hang up the modular synth, you will nonetheless have to agree with me, that Emerson still sounds like Emerson, for better or worse.
