I read, with interest, Tom COSM's account of a lucid dreaming experience that he had last night. Lucid dreaming is something I always had an interest in... I even investigated building a lucid dreaming machine at one point, but I'm not sure how effective it would be as I very rarely remember dreams now. It still annoys me but for some reason, around 2000/2001, I gradually lost the ability to remember dreams like I used to. Before that my dreams were always very vivid but now I'm lucky if I can even remember a segment in a kind of fuzzy cloudy "low-definition" memory.
What gives me hope though is something that happened to me just over a year ago. I was doing some experiments on my mind (as you do). I have always had quite a hyperactive imagination before falling asleep. It's not quite hypnagogia as I don't hallucinate, but I do get a lot of random imagery in my mind. They just pop into my head by their own, like hyperactive bunnies. It's a bit like my brain is flipping through tv channels. Anyway, I decided I'd just try take account of what I was "seeing", just to mentally make a comment on everything that was going on. Then I got the thought, would it be possible to catch myself falling asleep. It didn't work the first night, but the second proved quite interesting.
All I did the following night, was to repeatedly question myself, "Am I awake?". It went on for a few minutes, and then... then came "the great red cliff". A menacing blade of a crimson diviing the blackness above from the blackness below. The image only lasted a second, I watched myself leaping from it into the blackness, and that was it, I was gone; asleep, but aware of what had just had happened. Anyway, that's the closest I've ever gotten to lucid dreaming. I guess it means I could easily lucid dream if I tried but I really have to start sleeping properly first. I pretty much stay awake until exhaustion every night so I rarely get time to think between sleeping and the time my head hits the pillow.
Oh I almost forgot, I've had great success with achieving hallucinations and profound thoughts, from my experimenting with left hand path mastrubation magick, but I'll save that for another post :)
I'm reintroducing picture of the week, well just for the above pic anyway. It's by Australian blogger, Coastal Aussie, a good friend of mine. She has taken up photography only relatively recently but she continues to astound me by how quickly she is developing her technical abilities as well as gaining an eye for great shots.
She's not only a photographer but also a keen knitter person. She has sent me many woolen treasures in the past. In fact, today I was wearing a pair of wrist gloves that she sent over at Christmas, because it was rather chilly.
Anyway, I love this pic, irrespective of who took it, friend or not. It's working on a lot of levels.
I was routing through stuff in the attic when I found this. It's from a circa 1989 Commodore PC-40, with a 286 CPU :) It was buried under stuff so I just left it there. Curly cables were so cool!
Briefly for those who don't know. Two paintings of our government leader, Brian Cowen, were placed anonymously on the walls of two public art galleries one day this month. Both paintings were of Cowen in the nude and one depicted him taking a shit [more or less]. Our national broadcaster, RTE, covered the story in their news slot this week. The following day, under orders from the government, they were forced to issue an apology and the offending video removed from their website. Following this, there was an absolute storm created on the internet and the whole thing has gotten much more coverage than it otherwise would have had if no apology was sought.
I saw the news piece, didn't think much of it, then I saw all the outraged posts popping up on Irish blogs the following day. Not having the greatest internet connection I didnt bother watching any of the videos embedded. With the way people were going on, I thought Anne Doyle (news host) had taken off all her clothes herself, bent over and told Cowen that he could ride her live on TV to show how sorry RTE were. I expected to be totally offended by the apology, I was lead to believe it was horrendous.
When I watched the videos the next day I was completely disappointed: "RTE wish to apologise for any hurt caused to Brian Cowen and his family". Come on, isn't that fair enough? People were screaming on blogs "RTE ARE APOLOGISING FOR REPORTING NEWS!!!!". Yeah ok, it's news, but so was Katy French's autopsy. Would you also expect to see Katy French's pasty dead body up on a slab in the morgue with her chest cracked open with her tits pulled off (Ed. Hey, I would!).
That was my initial reaction to the apology. Then I continued to listen, there was a second part to it you see. "and for disrespect shown to Office of Taoiseach". Now that piece of bullshit changed my mind. It smacks of kissing the bishops ring (he fucked a load of altered boys) at mass on a Sunday morning. "Oh yes sir, no I wont ever do that again master, no not at all master, I love having your penis over my head like the Sword of Damocles". And no one make the mistake that RTE wanted to apologise, this was a complete ram-job done from the governement down. I even heard Joe Duffy take a sly swipe at the governments forceful rule over RTE policies, on his radio show today.
I'd love to say "Fuck Cowen and his ugly fucking rubbery lips" I'd love to, but I'd feel bad because we all know that its Bertie Ahern that should have been in the paintings. That cunt got away scott free. There is one thing I would like to ask Cowen though.......
Mr. Cowen, if you were so offended by RTE news report, that you forced RTE to issue an apology the following day, how come you did fuck all when Dr. Ian Paisley not only insulted you but your mother also when he came out with this comment in 2003, when you were the minister in charge of affairs with Northern Ireland:
"Somebody told me the other day the reason his [Cowen] lips were so thick was that when his mother was bringing him up he was a very disobedient young boy, so she used to put glue on his lips and put him to the floor and keep him there. That has been recorded in his physical make-up"
This was Brian 'brave' Cowen's reply to what was said:
"It wasn't very sensible, was it? I don't know what the purpose of it was. Look, I have said a few things myself in my time maybe I shouldn't have said, so let's forgive and forget. It is not a big deal."
Forgive and forget!??! Not a big deal?!?!?!?!? Oh Brian, I really respected you for that reply of yours back then, I thought it was a sign of your dignity, now I see that you were just a cowardly maggot. But things are different now aren't they, now you've got the power, now you wont let the school yard bullies bully you like they used to... You're a fucking disgrace Cowen, you fucking slug!
This [was] the poster campaign by An Garda Síochána (Irish Police Force) who are protesting against the pension levy being introduced for all civil servants. Ignoring the actual levy issue, and instead focusing on the poster itself, it seems to suggest that these injuries are worth suffering if the 7% pension levy wasn't charged to members of the Gardai. Can a price be put on horrific injuries suffered? Is a vicious attack on a civil servant relevant to a levy on their wages? Brutality against police is nothing new, it's getting worse alright, but I doubt Johnny Scumbag is going to stop kicking you in the head whether you've paid your levy or not.
I can see nurses having a similar poster next week, with a picture of woman on a bed all pale and gaunt with a title "This nurse got AIDS from dealing with an infected patient... she does not deserve a pay cut". That sounds ridiculous doesn't it, how could 7% of ones wages compare to being infected with AIDS. That's my point, it's not about how right or wrong a levy is, it's the skewed manner in which it's being argued.
Look, the biggest problem I [had] with the poster is this: there are two people displayed with beaten and bloody faces, and neither of them is Bertie Ahern. That really pisses me off!
I don't know much about this but I just wanted to make a note of it now (starring items in my Feed Reader is irrelevant as I star nearly everything these days). It sounds like it could create some very interesting results.
"One of the new features to make it into Flash 10 is the ability to generate software-based audio. There's essentially an event callback that will trigger during audio playback that lets you fill an input buffer full of wavelength samples.."
Some quick edits I made to nitro2k01's artwork for his future EP release. I was thinking along the lines of data loss so I added in some pseudo-data corruption.
Ok, I've learned my lesson from the whole Katy French thing. Don't ask who the fuck someone is after they die, even if you really don't know who the fuck they are. I can't do that with Jade Goody though, as I knew of her. And isn't it awfully sad that she's dead, and ooooh the children, think of the children.... so yes indeed, sad that she's gone but look, its a recession so it's time to think about money. I got myself some Jade Goody DVD's a few years back. Absolute bargains! Two were £0.75 and one was £0.50! All were new and still sealed when bought. My question is, now that Jade's dead is it reasonable to expect these to be worth an awful lot more? You know, like when an artist dies or something? Shares in banks are fucked, but who knows, maybe I've got the real "Goodys" right here under my nose.
NB You might be asking what the hell I bought 3 Jade Goody DVD's for (especially considering that I knew fuck all about her at the time). What can I say, the Gamma Goblin is a complex individual (with a penchant for cheap DVD's).
Right so I was browsing around the built-in Reason effects this evening (in truth I didn't know half of them existed) and I was totally excited at the stuff that I found. All kinds of glitchy shit! Then my heart sank a little. There's quite a few that slice&dice sounds in a temporal manner like the way my new Combinator patch meaning that what I've done is kinda obsolete. I say kinda because while they are similar (and probably easier to use) mine still takes a slight different approach. Plus I didn't find anything that can produces a kind of "granular slur" in real time. Plus, plus, getting your hands dirty with DIY effects is never in vein :)
Right so here's a sample of mine like I promised ages back. This is one of the first things I did with it and it's not all that exciting. It's been deliberately processed dryly to highlight the rhythmic effect. It's just an 8 bar phrase looped over and over. The first 8 bars are as is, then the rest (12 second mark) is processed through the Combinator patch. I'm twiddling with a few of the knobs (steady!) as it plays out; Mainly the filter on the bass, then messing around with the rhythm pattern, and finally bringing up the pad chords (which are also going through the Combinator). You can hear the granular effects throughout but I've marked one in case you're lost.
I got an email of a "cancer woman" recently who wanted to kindly give me part of her late husbands estate consisting of "$14.500 Million". The image above was attached to the email. Not going to bore you with the whole lot but the use of English in the email was beautiful:
"How are you and your family? Hope Fine. I am Mrs. Cynthia VandeBerg from united states of America.And i am a Deaf and cancer woman. I was married to Late Chief VandeBerg William of a French speaking colony Ivory Coast who was a contractor with the government of Cote D'Ivoire before he died after few months now in the hospital over a family witch craft attack for the acts of jealousy of his wealth."
Do you like the new look? Yep and right on Paddy's Day too. "Paddys Day", thats an interesting expression isn't it? How come blacks don't have Niggers Day?
[UPDATE] I really wanted to leave this blog the way it was for a few days but I decided to replace the photobucket images now while I had some time today.
Japanese "person" playing the guitar part to Metallica's "Enter Sandman". This person currently has 18 videos of themselves playing guitar covers, all with their head out of frame. The playing is quite good and I wouldn't dare say a woman couldn't play that well, but it's all a bit suspicious.
There are a lot of calls on both sides in the comments of the videos... "great playing from a sexy chick"... "jeez come on, thats a man".... "japanese chicks playin metal are hot"... "Japanese girls don't have hands as big as yours"... "guys that could play like that wouldnt hide it!!!!!!!! thats a chic totally ... those are small hands.. with long nails, chic on floor?> long mirror?> guys never have long mirrors.. and no more tears has chic lotion as a slide? totally chic.. that plays better than most guys .. yeah it hurts doesnt it".... "So he is standing in his sisters room wearing her skirt..."
I'm a total skeptic when it comes to these things and I always er on the side of caution. I have to say though, the start of the video above, the bit where the guitar is chugging along, I could swear it sounds like "tarp-tarp-tarp-tarp-tarp-tarp-tarp-tarp"... that's enough for me anyway! Oh well, I guess it could be PJ Harvey (pictured) playing in the videos, but I really fucking doubt it!
I've subbed to their channel cos I really want to see how this one turns out. If they up' a video of themselves playing "Dude (Looks Like Lady)" we'll know the gigue is up! :)
Fianna Fail want ideas on how to kick start the economy, so heres mine. In one quick step Ireland could become the richest country in the world. All they have to do is legalise heroin, and build airports for the influx of tourists.
Digressing...
They could never do this of course, legalising something like heroin suddenly overnight would be madness. It's actually the same reason they will never ban nicotine, a chemical just as "destructive" as heroin. If nicotine was given the same status as heroin in the morning, Ireland would fall into chaos. Murder rates would sky rocket as would nicotine related deaths. Addicts would drop like flies as they ingested all kinds of illicit materials cut with substances far worse to ones health than tobacco. Criminal gangs would gain immense power and wealth as they controlled all supplies of the "goodies". Crime in general would touch every section of the Irish public. Because of the wide reaching grip nicotine already has over people in Ireland, a ban really would be catastrophic.
And, people wouldn't give up smoking just because it was made illegal; not just because of their addiction to the chemical but also because they would be definite in their opinion that they are only breaking an unjust law. Nevertheless, those who continued to smoke would be classed as "evil, "scumbagish", "outcasts", "good for nothings" and "them folk over there".
While I have no personal interest in consuming substances containing either Diacetylmorphine or Nicotine, I am nevertheless fascinated by the dichotomy created with the laws surrounding both chemicals.
Apparently this is an old picture, but it's new to me, and I think it's pure whack! A big ass mushroom being held by a guy wearing a "The Doors [Of Preception]" t-shirt. It all seems too good to be true! The shpores....
Magma perform two segments from their album KA, on France 2 in 2005. Magma were going to be another act to be included in my "The Voice As An Instrument" post, as the "invented" lyrics used convey emotion first rather than semantic meaning. I original decided to create this vid back in 2006 when I came across the clips and wondered how the two sequential clips would sound joined together.
I had a version this up before, but like a fool I deleted it from Google Video. Then I decided to upload it again later on but couldn't find the video so I had to re-create it again but I couldn't find the original files. I had to make do with two youtube videos as source files so the quality isn't that great. I've altered the white balance to create an artificial white light (the original videos had an orange cast from the lights used). I did it just to make it a bit different looking.
In all the videos I've seen of Magma, this is still my favourite.
Apple are at it again, inventing "new" stuff. This time its their new iWiiMote.
"AppleInsider reports that Apple filed a patent for a remote control unit for Apple TV that works like the controller for the Nintendo Wii. Called the "remote wand," the controller enables TV viewers to move and control a mouse pointer on-screen."
Just something I threw together today, and it's entirely for fun. It's not really a cowbell sound as such, well maybe a tiny cowbell, it sounds a bit too "glassy". I came across the sound last week messing around with effects. Basically you've got two Dr:REX units playing the same loop. One is fed straight into the mix and the other has it's amplitude envelope down to a minimum and is fed into a RV-7 reverb unit where the resultant "bell" sound is then fed into the mix. This setup provides the best sound, but for completeness I decided to quickly add the ability for it work with just one Dr:REX unit or external sound source. I did this by splitting the source, feeding one into another reverb unit and EQ'ing the result to remove the unwanted lower frequencies. The sound isn't great but it's acceptable in certain situations. The video below will give you an idea of what it can and can't do. N.B. in my haste to get it done I never upped the BMP from 120 to 150, like I had planned to do, halfway through the demo. Ah well.
A short video taken from a four part Youtube extravaganza of Tim Exile demonstrating his live setup for The London College of Music & Media in 2007. In this clip that I've edited, Exile demonstrates how he uses a strap-on joystick to control effects on his voice. I love the part near the end where he runs amuck through the audience whacking his controller much to the mortification of the onlookers. "Piggy time! Love Pigs!"
As you've probably noticed, there's a lot of Tim Exile love going on with this blog, a big part of that has to do with Tim's use of voice in his compositions. Voice to me is the ultimate instrument. Lyrics are largely irrelevant, but the timbre of a vocal track can make even the simplest of tune come alive. Another thing that I like about Exile (there are many) is the fact that he's not a hardware snob. There are so many others with less talent who bang on about how shit Alesis, M-Audio, Mackie and Behringer are, and how a "real" musician wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot joystick. Throughout Tim's career he has constantly proven that these snobs to be nothing more than arrogant cunts, who wouldn't know music if an F sharp major got rammed up their hole! These are the same people who rave about Liam Howlett and yet are totally ignorant to the fact that all the The Prodigy's early albums were mixed on a Mackie mixer.
I was planning on using this video in a post titled "The Voice As An Instrument" where I included a few other videos and musicians that impressed me with their unique use of their voice. I've not gotten around to finishing off those yet, so I'll just do them one at a time in future posts.
Theres some major jungle going on in part 3 and part 4 is fucking massive!
[UPDATE]
For completeness... I mentioned lots of Tim Exile love going on in the body of the post which relates to the now missing little advertising badge I had up for months before his album "Listening Tree" came out. It must say a lot about an album when someone puts up advertising for it for free :)
Yesterday was International Day of the Book, or something, and Sunday is the start of Irish Book Week (according to someone on the radio anyway), so I thought it nice to post about some books on my book shelf. There's a lot of buzz about the books people pretend to have read because of yesterday. Well I certainly don't pretend to have read these, but they do look nice, all seven volumes sitting proud on a eye level shelf.
The books, "A History of our Own Times", were authored by Cork man, Justin McCarthy (1830-1912). Wikipedia defines McCarthy as "an Irish nationalist historian, novelist politician and MP. in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, from 1879 as a Liberal Home Ruler. He represented County Longford in Parliament as a Liberal and home ruler from 1879 to 1885; North Longford, 1885-1886; Londonderry City, 1886-1892; and North Longford from 1892 to 1900 as an Anti-Parnellite member." By the way, that's not him in the picture :) They aren't first editions, but the are first "Illustrated" editions.
Here are five other random books from my book shelves:
"The Archaic Revival" by Terence McKenna [hallucinogenic mushrooms, DMT, and so on]
"Delivering Push" by Ethan Cerami [PUSH will be the end of Internet browsers! (written in 1998)]
"Demonic Males" by Wrangham & Peterson [a study of apes to discover the origins of human violence]
"An Illustraited Guide to Erotica" by Various [3 volumes of high class art-porn!]
"Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler [he had some good ideas, he had some bad ideas]
Ok so I'm being a bit facetious with the title of this post. Using Microsoft's Picture & Fax viewer to rotate images that you've just taken with a digital camera will probably not hurt the image quality to a noticeable amount, for a few reasons. If the image is in the lossy format of Jpeg, it's quite possible that the "lossless" attribute was included and therefore rotating the image shouldn't degrade the image. If not, the sheer size and low compression ratio of the original should absorb all possible degradation for a single rotation of the original image (I show an example of this later on). Finally, if you're the kind of person who'd use Image & Fax viewer to rotate your images to begin with, chances are you're not going to be obsessed with immaculate image detail anyway. Ok, enough with the preamble (Actually this whole post is probably a preamble).
Emillee Cox is a girl that sends over 30,000 text messages from her phone every month. I thought it only fair to rotate her image the same amount of times, but as you can see from the results, she didn't even last for a thousand.
As often happens, I got this notion in my head and I became curious as to exactly how much damage Windows Fax & Image viewer did to a image once it was rotated and then saved again. I tried rotating the image a few times manually, to satisfy my curiosity. I was shocked to see how quickly an image with even a moderate resolution degraded within only a few rotations. On examining the results however, I noticed certain noise patterns emerging. This made me wonder what kind of patterns would emerge if the image was rotated a few hundred or even thousands of times. I decided to write a little program that would automate the process for me.
Unlike Emille in the previous example, Bill Gates was a tough cookie to crack. Even after 30,000 rotations he was still going strong, allbeit looking a bit like a zombie version of Oscar Wilde. I tried few different files, and there were varying types of image degradation. The two main types however, are the blocky chroma and luminance threshold'ing as seen in the first example, and the other is a type of chaotic noise pattern, where pixel entropy increases until the whole frame is filled with random noise. I find the latter most interesting, as the noise patterns seem to continue indefinitely. As you can see I also included the relative file sizes of each version. It's interesting to note how sometimes the files actually increase in size the more times its compressed (this has to do with the extra fine details created by the noise).
The effect doesn't have to just necessarily "destroy" the image though. With lower rotation amounts, you can create some interesting digital distressed effects, like for example, the bleeding out of the yellow in the loops of the gas pipe in this picture by Donncha O'Caoimh.
And as I mentioned in the opening paragraph, images with large resolutions aren't as affected by the repeated rotation and saving. This image of Irish Green Party member Eamon Ryan lasted very well even at 10,000 rotations.
About the program
I've been getting to grips with VBScript for the last few weeks and as it involved a Windows application using VBScript seemed to be the right language to work with. I could have written a little macro in image editor but this would defeat the novelty of using the Image and Fax viewer plus I'm not immediately sure how I could keep selecting the right file to rotate and compress on the fly.
After a bit of investigating around the internet, I managed to sketch out a little VBscript that could launch the Image Viewer. I was hoping that I could pass it some arguments to make it rotate the image one way or the other but unfortunately, the only argument I could find which it could be passed was the location to an image or group of images. To achieve interaction with the program I had to resort to sending keystrokes to the Windows Shell, which annoyed me as it's quite an inelegant solution. It means that the process can't run in the background as the keystrokes only interact with the window in focus (this means it can be a bit risky if you bring another window into focus while the script is running because god only knows what all the sendkey commands will end up doing).
This is fairly hack&slash code, it's not totally ghetto but it's exception handling isn't the best, so don't try to hard to break it :) When you execute the script, it will allow you to pick a file to use (I've included the extensions .gif and .png as a control). It will then ask you for how many rotations you wish the image to go through. After that it will ask you for a direction choice for the rotations. Once all these have been selected the Image & Fax viewer will pop up with your chosen image. A subdirectory will be created in the same folder as the image. It will be named with the title of image plus "-Project Files". Once running you'll see the image rotated automatically. With each forth rotation, a copy of the current state of the image will be written to the newly created folder. It's every forth rotation simply to keep all the resultant image files "upright" (I've also taken care of only saving upright images in the random mode). If you find any of these files in a rotated orientation afterwards, its probably because your machine wasn't fast enough to keep up with the script. I'll show you how to fix that after I give the links:
You can simply copy and paste the code, from the "pastie.org" page above, into a text file and save it as "something.vbs". Just double click the resultant file and it should hopefully work. To fix the timing issue I mentioned, open the file in a text editor and locate the two words "startUp" and "runningPause". You'll see a number after an "=" beside them. Experiment with increasing these values. Note the values are in milliseconds, eg 1500 equals 1.5 seconds. There are comments in the code to help anyway.
Animating The Results
Outputting the upright versions of the image allows you to see more easily the degradation of the consecutive rotations, but it also allows you to watch them as a series of frames in an animation to see exactly how the image . If you're used to making your own videos you probably already know how to do this. If you don't however or you couldn't be bothered, there are still a few options open to you. If the images are small, you might be able to open up the first image "1.jpg" in the Picture & Fax viewer and by simply keeping the right arrow key pressed you can watch the images in series fast enough to perceive it as animated. If it begins to flicker however, you'll need to slow it down by repeatedly pressing the key. That becomes painful after a while. So I again wrote a little script to automate this process. It works pretty much like the image rotator vbscript only that there are no files outputted. You can use this for any series of images in a folder so it could turn out to be handy for lots of other situations when speed viewing is needed.
I used the Obama pic above to give you an example of what to expect, in the video below. I chose this picture because I like how the noise spreads out vertically, it makes it look a bit like the Matrix :) Note: There is some jumping and "blocking" in the frames with this video which has to do with the way the video is keyframed and compressed on Google. The actual source video is very smooth. I gave up on the vimeo version as after multiple uploads of different formats, it still plays worse than Google.
Why did I do all this? I like messing about with stuff like this, images and programming and stuff. Information loss and image degradation in analogue mediums, such as photostatic imaging and VHS cassette tape recording is well known and studied but by their nature, digital reproductions don't degrade with each reproduction (at least they're not meant to) so finding new ways in which they do degrade is interesting. Plus I like chaos. I like it some much in fact that I believe the entire universe is modelled on non-random chaos at the sub quantum level, but that's for another day :)
What now: Personally there a few tweaks I'd like to add to script, dynamic sleep lengths based on the size of the image, more details in the log file, tighter code overall and better error handling. I'd love to dedicate a machine to rotating a hi-res image for a couple of hundreds of thousands of times and see what the resulting hi-res image looks like.
If anyone does anything with this, either extending the code or creating interesting effects I'd love to hear back from them and see what they've come up with ?:-)
N.B. It is the repeated compression of the image that causes the image to degrade, rotation only an added variable.
Important! There's no easy way to terminate the process when it's running. Closing the Image viewer will not stop the script! If you want to stop the process before it's natural end, you'll have to kill the wscript process in Windows Task Manager (CTRL+ALT+DEL). While I can't envisage anything drastic happening to ones machine, the script does send key strokes to the Windows shell so unpredictable things will happen if the Picture & Fax viewer is closed, or looses focus. Use it at your own risk!
Oh I know it's probably been done, but fuck it, it just dawned on me the other day (possibly due to an ancient Metallica song memory) and I felt like lashing a picture together. Some might argue that a picture of Jesus impaled on a cross with the four letters "PWND" over his head would be much funnier, and I agree, this would bring major lulz, but to less people, and as Jesus said "spread the fail... I mean, word". Either would make an excellent t-shirt.
Most think it's "INRI" that was actually written above Jesus, but even the Fab Four can't agree on it. It then led me on to doing another image with a classic line that Metallica missed out on using.
"The healing hand held back by the deepened nail. Finger my wounds of FAIL!"
I really can't believe this, it just keeps going! I didn't think this was what was meant by "Keep It Looping". What started out as a photograph of a TV set has now mushroomed into a full blown scandal! Gail Trimble and her team have been stripped of their University Challenge 2009 Winners title because one of them wasn't a student! Sam Kay(pictured) had left college and become a graduate accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers by the time the final was filmed in November, therefore breaking the main rule of the TV program. So what do you think of that then!
I had heard that the BBC where investigating the situation yesterday, on Christina's blog, where I casually stated that I thought disqualification would be the fairest option rather than a rematch. Little did I know that thats what they'd do! Thanks to The Shape for the heads-up. I think it's all very sad really, for both teams. Corpus Christi for obvious reasons will feel gutted but I can't see Manchester' feeling too good about winning by default either.
While fair is fair and the rules are the rules, I believe that this only came to light directly because of the negative interest surrounding Gail Trimble. If no such interest was there I highly doubt anyone would have went to the effort of checking out everyones back story. The fact that the final was filmed in November and it was not highlighted until now is very interesting. If it were known before now, the fairest thing would have been to disqualify them then and re-shoot an alternative final.
Sad really; no winners; and worst of all, Trimble haters will now feel vindicated.
Did you know that you can get the internet over the phone now? Oh I don't mean ADSL or ever 3G, I mean that you can actually "ring it up!". Or so say the Cork County Council anyway. I recently got a notice to tax my car for the year. Along with the form to be filled out I also received the above flyer. I highlight the text that caught my attention, below:
I think what they meant to say was something like "people who wish to avail of the same convenience as the Motor Taxation on-line service should ring this number".
"The BBC says it is investigating claims that a member of University Challenge's winning team broke the rules because he was no longer a student.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, led by Gail Trimble, stormed to victory over the University of Manchester on the BBC TV quiz last week. Price Waterhouse Coopers has confirmed it employed team member Sam Kay as a graduate accountant last year. In a statement the Manchester team said they had "no desire" for a rematch."
I came across this great lecture given by Jeri Ellsworth, the original developer of the "C-One" Commodore64 clone, and the designer of the C64DTV games joystick manufactured produced by Mammoth Toys. The lecture is date Jan 30, 2006 and runs for 79 minutes.
The lecture is quite interesting as she starts by giving a small biography of her life and how she got into electronics. For a short period she built and raced dirt-track race cars, before setting up a chain of PC manufacturing centers. She then sold these off and starting teaching herself about chip design and developed the C-One as a demo project. She was asked by a few company's to design a board for a games joystick clone of the C64 (much like the one for Atari games already available at the time). She finally struck a deal with Mammoth Toys and agreed to taking a cut from each unit sold rather than a lump sum. So far over a quarter of a million units have sold.
She also goes into detail of the design and building of both the joystick and C-One. A lot of the electronics stuff went over my head but I could appreciate what she was explaining. Most who already know about this C64 joystick will probably know that it's hacker&modder friendly. That is to say, you can break the unit open and solder a PS/2 keyboard and CF flash drive onto the board. This allows you to easily escape out of the predefined menu system and games and load your own stuff on or even program. When she was explaining this I was so taken with the idea that I decided to buy one. Well I soon found out that they don't make them anymore (even though in the video she promises more will continue to be made). In this scenario, ebay is your friend!
The C-One is what initially struck my interest though. I was searching around the net for "Commodore" related info. I saw that the current owner of the Commodore name has released a series of mini notebooks and I pondered if they were worth a buy just to get a computer with a C badge. I then came across the C-One. I became interested when I read that it wasn't an emulator and was based on modern chips. You can actually buy one but it's not a fully fledged unit as such, it's more of a kit thing, and it's not exactly cheap at €333.
I read, with interest, Tom COSM's account of a lucid dreaming experience that he had last night. Lucid dreaming is something I always had an interest in... I even investigated building a lucid dreaming machine at one point, but I'm not sure how effective it would be as I very rarely remember dreams now. It still annoys me but for some reason, around 2000/2001, I gradually lost the ability to remember dreams like I used to. Before that my dreams were always very vivid but now I'm lucky if I can even remember a segment in a kind of fuzzy cloudy "low-definition" memory. 
