Google Docs Autofill

I forgot I made this video, and it's probably not interesting now, but here it is anyway. If you write two items in two separate cells in a Google Spreadsheet, it will auto-generate other relevant data in cells, if you hold down the "control" button when highlighting other cells.

More info [support.google.com]

Earth Hour - 2013

I had no idea Earth Hour [wiki] was upon us today, not that I care about it or anything, it's just that I remember how much hype surrounded it in years previous, and I saw zero about it today. It's very surprising actually, not even one Irish Tweet about it. I only found out about it from Russian Tweeters, hence the webm animation above, of the lights being turned off in Красная площадь (Red Square). As it turned out, I was in a voluntary blackout when it happened in Ireland (save for computer monitor light) so in a round about way, I guess I supported it by accident.

Video source [youtube] via [twitter] 

Darcey Bussell Nose Job

If you start typing "Darcey Bussell" into Google, one of the suggested search terms is "Darcey Bussell nose". If you then start to type nose you get "Darcey Bussell nose job" (and "Darcey Bussell nose surgery"). I found this an interesting inclusion, so I clicked on it.



The results included quite a few links where people were not only questioning if she had a nose job, but some even traded insults over how obvious it was. A sample of Daily Mail comments below:

- She is beautiful but THAT NOSE!! Oh my why did she ever ruin her beautiful nose?
- Darcey is beautiful but she really didn't need that nose job.....!
- Good to see that Michael Jackson had a donor card. Clearly Darcy was the recipient of his nose. 

- I think she has the same surgeon as Michael Jackson!!!
- She has admitted having a nose job its no secret - and anyone - who thinks thats her God-given conk needs their eyes testing! I hope she sued the surgeon - its terrible, nostrils like dustbin lids!
- You are clearly deluded if you think that nose is natural..its a well known fact shes had a nose job which evidently went wrong! who on earth would be pleased with that result..oink oink! Pig Nose

And similar comments appeared on Twitter too...


Did Darcey Bussell have a nose job that went wrong? Her nose is so wrong-looking! 

Darcey Bussell...you're dancing skills are second to none...but why did you have a rhinoplasty? Wasn't necessary. #nosejob



I wondered where these people were getting their conclusive knowledge from. Surely there must be something concrete on the story, and then I found it. This is perhaps my favorite link that I came across when researching this...



There you have it, case closed. You can all go to sleep happy now. Definitive proof, and the internet never lies! But let's have a look at a few things first...



On the left is a photo of Bussell, taken in Novemeber 2012 [flickr], on the right is a still from her performance in the 1991 Royal Ballet production of La Bayadere [amazon], and in the middle is a photo by Arthur Elgort, taken in 1989 when Bussell was 20 years old.

So this "nose job" she allegedly had, it must have happened when she was very young. How young? Well let's look at the stills from a video [youtube] where she is reported as being around 15 years old.



So from these images we can conclude that she must have taken valuable time out of her formative years, to have, and recover from, a rhinoplasty operation, just to get a "Michael Jackson" nose.

I laboured this post just to make a point of it. It's all utter, fucking, nonsense. This is what happens when you go on these mainstream television shows, designed for the unthinking majority. Every moron suddenly becomes an expert about everything. Only those viewers are the ones who concerned themselves with her nose. Proof of this comes from a forum post by the owner of "Ballet News" website [balletnews.co.uk], who noticed a trend in visitor referals.



And proof also comes from Google Trends, which show the search term "Darcey Bussell nose job" only appeared during the period when "Dancing on ice to the stars" (or whatever that shite is called) was broadcast.

Iraq War: 10 Years Later

I see lots of people speaking of "10 years after the start of the Iraq war!" They make it sound so definite, as if there was only one Iraqi war ever. It's a good excuse to include the video above though, which is an internet classic at this stage. My favourite part still, is Bush's reaction to Blair, when Blair out-warmongers him with talk of a nuclear war.

John Travolta: Hair Poetry

..: UPDATE :.. Audio version below. Recitation by Wrim [ wrim.se ]

"Make it short!"
Came voice from barbers chair.
"I want it short, brave soldier style,
Still shook from repelling the hun."
"Very good sir, buzz cut it shall I."

"Wait! Long too. What good is short if not long.
Long for a wind swept scape,
A twilight beach grazed by gentle breeze.
And long. Yes long, for a lovers hand
To fondle the follicles, pre coitus."
"I'll see what I can do."
Said the barber odd.

Snip and snap, with nervous chop,
Cold steel blades against hot sweat brow.
Trembling hands run o'er desert scalp,
Barren as bald eagle's dare.

"It is done" the barber sighed.
"My god! What is this!
What madness have you conjured.
Say it hast[e] and
Trick me not, barber!"
"It's your hair, Mr Travolta.
Nothing less. Nothing more."


Context [twitter]


Mirror [John Travolta's Hair.mp3]

The End of Google Reader

A glimpse into my Google Reader...

There were lots of emotional people on the Internet earlier in the week. People almost in tears over news that Google are to cease operation of Reader, their "cloud-based" RSS feed reading service. Angry mobs, lashing out at everyone, including Dave Winer, creator of RSS. For me the news was a mixed bag. Yes it's annoying that Reader will be going away. It was nice having all my feeds with me wherever I went, but on the other hand, using Reader mean't that I totally ignored desktop feed readers and the features they offer. I am currently testing out a barrage of  cross-platform programs and applications, and thoroughly enjoying it.

I don't know why Google are retiring Reader, to be honest. Obviously, it must be a large drain on resources, keeping track of everyone's "read/unread" feed states, but surely a persons choice of RSS feeds is valuable information to Google/advertising/CIA etc. RSS feeds have one clear advantage over social media data: it's anonymous. You follow RSS feeds of people and things that you wouldn't when you are being watched, like with your "Following" list in Twitter. RSS delves deeper into your psyche than social media. I'm still not sure why Google don't want that aspect of you anymore.*

The most damaging aspect to the discontinuation of Reader, for Google, comes not from the disgruntlement of ex-Reader devotes, but from the waning confidence of Google users in general. People are afraid to invest time and money in Google solutions because they don't know what's going to get the chop next. How would we feel if Gmail went away? Worse than the fallout for Google is the fallout for RSS. Not only is this a clear indication that an internet giant like Google wants to kill the format, it also makes it harder for the regular Joe to make use of it. RSS just became a hundred times more obscure.


Sergey Brin's vision? Don't consume content; become content.

Google is tightening up it's ship, but no-one really has a clear vision of Google's future, not even Google employees. Youtube goes through a interface change every 6 months, for no apparent reason. Google+ keeps changing too but that can be put down to Google constantly trying to keep it vibrant, they don't need to do that with Youtube. Or perhaps they do. Perhaps change is what keeps people interested. It keeps people talking about it, certainly.



The most rapid change in design and purpose pivoting, that I've ever seen in an Internet service came with Russian social media entity, Футубру (Futubra). Initially it started off as a Twitter clone, but they quickly turned into something more like Tumblr. Finally it went to something even the creators found hard to explain. With each iteration it disgusted more and more users until finally the owners (mail.ru) called it a day and shut down the website, not even a year after creation. Change in that case wasn't good, but it was a new service, Google is [relatively] old, and it's services are [relatively] old. A lot of people rely on their services and are prepared to adapt to whatever Google decides, even if part of that is termination.

I'm not afraid of obliteration.  My blog is hosted by Google, through their Blogger service. With the way things are heading, it seems probable that Google will smash Blogger into Google+ and no-one can really be certain about the consequences of such a merger. If Google were to just shut it down completely, I think it would be regrettable but not life shattering, not for me anyway. With Yahoo destroying much of early Internet history with the shutting down of Geocities, it was a lesson for us all. Nothing is forever, not even on the Internet. Eventually, all pictures of Goatse will vanish.

* Perhaps another example of Google moving away from delivering what you like, towards what they want you to like.

Hmmm... GMod skills?

[ Backup GIF ]

I had this great idea for a HL2/GMod video, and then I got lazy; real lazy.

Garry's Mod [wiki].

The Stance of Models

There's this certain kind of stance models do when they're modeling. It's a weird standing slouch thing. They're all at it. I'm not sure what it's mean't to portray but to me it always looks like: "good lord, my spine just collapsed from a thunderous fart."

CAPTCHA Gotcha.

I genuinely appreciate it when companies create a captcha that doesn't involve deciphering wobbly text, but I was left scratching my head with the one above. First, the question had me guessing "diamond" before I even looked at the options, but instead I was greeted with a list of woolly, and objective, activities, all of which could be "most difficult" depending on the person. We can assume they wanted "writing a best selling novel" (don't even get me started on how inane and questionable that is) but we may never know because by the time I got around to answering it, it had timed out.

HTML5 Video Tags as an Alternative to GIFs, for In-line Novelty Animations

RSS readers might need to click-through to see the animation. Compatibility: barebone HTML5 tags working in Chrome 25 + IE 10

GIF animations have made a real comeback over the last few years. I say comeback, but that's a bit of an understatement. They have been made into a culture of their own, with people defining themselves as "GIF artists". Regular readers will be aware that I often create and post GIFs here. It may come as a bit of a surprise then to say that I absolutely fucking loathe GIFs. Maybe it's because I'm a conservative old bastard, who still grimaces at the memories of ringing a phone number to get an internet connection, but I just can't stop feeling that there is no need to be wasting megabytes of bandwidth on a 5 second animation of a kitten falling off a table.

Even though "broadband" is very common now, often it is still charged by the megabyte, so it costs money to watch those looping pr0n GIFs. Then there's browser resources to be worried about. There you are, happily browsing along when suddenly your browser grinds to a halt, all because some arsehole has embedded 3TBs of GIF files into a webpage. When you do go to the effort of compressing the GIFs, to make the file sizes manageable, the result often looks like the animation is in the final stages of terminal cancer.

I thought Flash might have dispatched GIF long ago, but thanks to Adobe thinking Flash should be the next big operating system, and integrating more and more crap into it, Flash became less about animating and more about crashing your browser. With the advent of HTML5 we may finally see the end of the wicked GIF.

HTML5 has made the process of embedding video almost as simple as embedding an image. The "video" tag also includes the handy (but potentially disastrous)  "autoplay" and "loop" attributes, and it is these that make the animation above possible. Adding video transport control elements for it is trivial, thus making a mockery of that recent phenomenon of "holy shit scrubbable gifs!1!!" [gifctrl.com].

What's needed now is a standard to be agreed upon and providers to appear, like we already have for images. There is some movement in this regard, with services like Vine [vine.co], but things are moving slowly. Creating the video content is the easy part. All you need is some free software like Handbrake [handbrake.fr] and off you go. Then you're back to the same old problem that faced Flash swf files. The video above is hosted in my public Dropbox.



Here is the GIF version of the MP4 video above. The video is 300kb and to get the GIF to roughly the same (308KB) I have to halve the resolution, decimate the frames by a factor of two, and reduce the colours down to a pallete of 12. I admit, there is a certain appeal to the effects garnered from GIF's limitations, but limitations they still are.

Video footage taken from [ wildbirdvideos.com ] "Bohemian Waxwings Eating Apples in Maine" [ youtube ]

Angela Merkel has a New Mobile Phone

Angela isn't sure if she'll like her new "high security" Blackberry/Samsung [focus.de] but it sure is better than her old mobile phone...

Taylor Swift

[ original ]

Röyksopp - Screaming Goat

These "screaming goat" mashup videos are really coming thick and fast now, but long before it started, I always thought there was a striking similarity to a sample in Röyksopp's 2005 song, "49 Percent". I still can't decided if it's human or not. Have a listen.

UPDATE - video now "improved" for "better playback" around the world. I don't think it has the same impact as the original but shit is life.

Röyksopp [wikipedia]

What Would Happen if North Korea Launched an Attack Against America

So much talk about the DPRK nuking America recently. One does wonder what it's all about. Obviously, Western media is all about sensationalism, and that can be seen with the dramatic headlines not matching the little blurbs near the end, which mention how the nuke-talk is all hot-air and rhetoric by the Korean leadership. There is no country currently in the world that could attack America and win, not without a "sucker punch" at least. One miserable nuclear warhead on a rinkydink rocket is not sucker-punch material. Given the zeal with which America likes to flex it's might in retaliation, launching a nuclear rustbucket at America would be tantamount to suicide. It's sometimes hard to fathom what North Korea gets out of all this war talk. Perhaps they really do have a death wish, after all, isn't contemplating suicide a natural thought process, for any entity being relentlessly bullied.

Try not to laugh....

Related Searches

The Soup, It has Gone Cold

On the anniversary of the death of იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი (Stalin) [wiki], I announce that the soup.io experiment is over. It is hereby stripped of rank and will exist only as an ever corroding archive of meandering perversion and venereal nonsense [soup.io]. I'm left with no other option but let tumblr take it's place.

http://ygoblin.tumblr.com/

Soup had to go. As I tweeted: "while it was nice feeling like a hipster, soup.io just failed too often." [twitter]. It was always a little flaky but for the last few months it's offline more than on. It has a few features over tumblr, that will be missed, but reliability was never one of them. It's been recently announced that someone will be taking over soup.io to inject resources to boost performance [twitter]. Well, I wish them all the best with that, but I am gone.

Due to the magic of RSS (and Feedburner's continuing existence), those already subscribed to the RSS feed will have noticed nothing during the changeover process.

James Reilly: Oppan Liftdoor Style

Context [thejournal.ie]

Jon Lord: The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady

The intro, with theme music composed by Jon Lord [wiki], to an 1984 television series based on a nature book by British artist, Edith Holden [wiki]. While I was aware of it's existence I hadn't actually heard it until now.

It's unmistakably Lord, with that chord progression into a swell, fifteen seconds in. Very reminiscent of his works in later years, particularly To Notice Such Things (2010).

The episodes of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady [imdb] have been uploaded to Youtube, by the user who uploaded the video above. I have been informed that it's quite well made, but I wouldn't have the stomach for it, I don't think.

If you would rather examine the purview of the book it was based on, you can see some scans of the watercolours here [morning-earth.org].

Two Things

Trafalgar Square, London - 2011 [dailymail]


City 17, Half-Life 2 - 2004 [wiki]

Sellotape for Your Boobs

A multimedia extravaganza of music, filth  and Youtube poops. Devoid of sense, dare not attach but a modicum of social and political commentary.

Video sources are available on the Youtube page, except for those in my private collection. Editing, music and "Sellotape poetry" by me.

Strap up your jigglers,
Sellotape for your boobs.
Don't tempt me now,
To Sellotape up my balls.
They're far too hairy,
And have too many wrinkles.
No, let's stick the tape
To just your boobs.