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How to draw an owl

pjm — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:40:26 +0000

How to draw an owl

The Rock 1000 2010

pjm — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:56:13 +0000

So, my current favourite radio station of all time, EVAR (part 1) has just finished its yearly 100 greatest Rock songs of all time…

Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name
Metallica – One
Foo Fighters – Everlong
Tool – Sober
Metallica – Enter Sandman
Shihad – Home Again
AC/DC – Back ‘n’ Black
Guns ‘N’ Roses – November Rain
Pearl Jam – Black
Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird (Fixed spelling… you can’t trust anyone in this copy/paste world…)

So, how many surprises do we have in there…?

Well, Rage is currently loved more than usual (even in NZ) following the shafting of Cowell last Christmas. With the exception of Shihad and Tool (neither of whom I’m heard of before) it’s all pretty much as expected. In fact, Freebird is the only one of those tracks that wasn’t in the top 20 for last year’s chart.

How many new entries were there in the top 100? It’s a depressingly short list…

I Am Giant – City Limits
Slash – By The Sword (incredibly forgettable, IMHO)
I am Giant – Neon Sunrise(which I think is a better song than City Limits)
Rise Against – Saviour (another great song)
Disturbed – Inside the Fire (urgh…)
Slipknot – Snuff (It’s slipknot…. that’s all you need to know)
War Machine – AC/DC

Wait… what? War Machine was released 2 years ago. How did the fans of AC/DC take two whole years to get that into the top 1000?

Strangely, one of my favourite tracks on The Rock (American Slang by The Gaslight Anthem) didn’t make it onto the list at all.

Most depressing of all is that U2 managed to get 21 tracks in the top 1000. Still, at least they didn’t manage to get higher than 93…

When net suddenly meets real life…

pjm — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:01:57 +0000

Do any of you remember this wonderful video from the icy bit last year…?

I saw it back then and made disparaging comments about the driver.

Then I realised who the driver is.

Hi Stuart… *waves*

Dreaming of an old friend

pjm — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:14:45 +0000

So, for the second time in a row, falling asleep thinking about dreams has lead to me waking up with a dream still (mostly) full formed in my head. Of course, I requested a dream about naked redheads roaming free across the planet, but instead I got a fantastically odd dream about an old friend.

And by odd, I mean… well… strangely bloody believable. I thought dreams were supposed to be where the subconscious took us on wild rides full of speaking dragons and cars that turned into pocket watches, where giant chickens turned out to be your father?

Many years ago, I knew a kid called David. Sadly, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box. Slightly mongoloid in appearance, I now appreciate that he probably had some serious medical issues (like Downs Syndrome maybe) but at the time he was just the thick kid we could take the piss out of. Kids are bastards.

Anyway, last night he had this big bag of rubies he wanted to sell. He refused to let anyone look inside the frankly huge velvet bag that he was carrying, so I took him and his bag off to a jeweller – unsurprising, the one I saw on Wednesday.

The Jeweller takes the bag and upturns it on the counter…

Out tips a single ruby the size of a small pea, carried on a tidal wave of red lego bricks, bits of red glass and various types of red boiled sweets. It’s like a kid has stolen the “big pot of jewels” from a school play, and hidden a single gem in it.

And there the internally self consistent fragment ends.

I tell you, if I don’t get some weird dreams soon, I’m cancelling my subscription.

No seriously, just give me your house number and postcode…

pjm — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:31:08 +0000

XKCD original alt text : "Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you."

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had this conversation. I don’t care where the entrance to your street is, or if there’s this tricky little junction by the pub – if I don’t know how to get somewhere, I use a satnav which knows where you are.

The only two exceptions are if you live at number 23, which is hidden between number 3 and number 81, round the back of number 42, or if you happen to live in a house that was built in the last 12 months.

Besides, the satnav is less likely to miss out a junction and inadvertently put me onto the one way system from hell. Or tell me to turn left at the Rose and Crown, forgetting that the bloody thing burnt down in 1981 and it’s now a scrap yard.

An Odd Start

pjm — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:50:08 +0000

It was last night that I asked AskMefi about how to dream. I didn’t stay awake to find out their answers.

One of the Mefites was proved strangely right at the first turn – if you go to bed thinking about dreaming, you are more likely to recall your dreams.

So, for the first time in at least 20 years, I remember a dream from last night.

I have the feeling this was the tag end of the dream… I, my wife (played by Alexa Alemanni, aka Don Draper’s secretary Allison) and my children (confusingly, played by my brother and my wife, GB) are sitting down to dinner. For reasons that presumably made sense in the dream, we were eating whilst sat naked in the bathtub.

Allison decided that climbing into the bath naked would mean that the ‘children’ would see between her legs, so she took my phone and used it to shield her crotch from view as she climbed in.

Amusingly, the only part of this that struck me as odd, was that my phone still worked after being submerged. I even remember taking the phone apart to drain it, and discovered that the insides were still dry.

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure that I knew that it was a dream while I was dreaming it…

The joys of being a dirty old man…

pjm — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:34:03 +0000

A while back, someone on FormSpring asked me who would be on my list of the 10 sexiest women in the world.

Recently I got bored enough to actually think about it. There are some who will complain that it treats women as objects (it doesn’t) or that it’s disrespectful (it isn’t). But the list did surprise me a little…

In no particular order (because a ranking does seem rather wrong)…

Olivia Wilde

Olivia Wilde plays the stunning Remy ‘13′ Hadley in House MD, where she is the partial replacement for Jennifer Morrison’s Cameron. If I’m honest, a couple of years ago it would have been Morrison here, but I don’t like what her character became in S4 and S5. Which emphasises early on that this list is possibly as much about TV characters as it is about the actresses who play them. In case the role of Doctor hasn’t triggered enough cool nerd points, she is due to appear wrapped in electroluminescent wire for the upcoming movie, TRON Legacy. (wiki)

Sarah Wayne Callies

Dr Sara Tancredi in Prison Break. Yeah, the character was annoying, and yes the writers dealt with her real-life pregnancy is a particularly shitty way, but there’s something fantastic about her eyes and posture. And no prizes for pointing out the myriad similarities between 13/Olivia and Sara/Sarah. Stop it.

Salma Hayek

There are times when Salma Hayek’s roles look about as stereotyped as those of generic Mexican thug Danny Treho or generic Middle Eastern swindler Omid Djalili, but she’s looked significantly better than Danny or Omid in all of her roles.

Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Dogma, Frida, even 30Rock, did she ever look bad?

By the way, it’s incredibly difficult to find photos of Salma that aren’t either screen grabs or showing a huge amount of cleavage…

Christina Hendricks

Sticking with impressive cleavage for a moment, we have Christina Hendricks. While I have no doubt that there is a large part of the Internet that would love to call Ms Hendricks ‘fat’ rather than ‘curvy’, I’d like to hope that her success much push us a little away from the hideously thin fascination we currently have.

She’s also been around for a lot longer than I thought. Since I’ve been watching Mad Men, I’ve seen here all over the place, with FireFly and ER being the most surprising appearances.

Jewel Staite

Without meaning for this to look like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, well go from one Friefly cast member to another – Jewel Staite, aka ship’s Engineer Kaylee Frye.

She’s been in all manner of TV programs, normally in relatively minor roles, so Firefly is actually the only place I remember seeing her.

Again, she’s a wonderful mix of cute and nerd.

Parminder Nagra

Oh, I loved ER for many years. Then, one day, they added an English accent to the cast – a beautiful redhead called Elizabeth Corday. The fantastic Alex Kingston would probably be on this list if I’d seen her in anything recently, but other than ER I can only think of the films Essex Boys and The Croupier.

Thankfully, a couple of years later they added a second English accent – the beautiful and talented Ms Parminder Nagra. Of course, the fact that she’s the same age as me and came from the city I went to Uni in has nothing to do with it.

Ginnifer Goodwin

There’s not much I can say other than that I think Ginnifer is incredibly cute. In Mona Lisa Smile she plays a cute 1950s lass. In Walk the Line she played a 1950s Vivian Cash. She’s got that look.

Then she turned up as sweet, cute and naive Margene in Big Love.

Alyson Hannigan

So, no-one who has met me will be surprised by this. I’m two years younger than Ms Hannigan, and grew up with the delights of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I like redheads. I like geeky and nerdy girls. It was pretty much inevitable, wasn’t it?

Lets ignore the god awful ‘humor’ in “How I Met Your Mother” and stick with the beautiful young lady who stars in it.

While we’re ignoring something, can we ignore the time she spent with blonde hair? The red hair was beautiful. The dark hair she seems to favour at the moment is really rather pretty. The blonde hair was… indescribably horrible.

I’ve just realised that Alyson is the third lass on this list to have come from a Joss Whedon project. God I’m a nerd…

Shakira

Shakira is a beautiful lady. If I’m honest, I’ve only just realised this. My interest in this lady is less than honourable.

The prosecution (hang on a sec…) offers just three bits of evidence. I’ve genuinely got no idea how a woman can move like that (Hips Don’t Lie especially) nor how a woman can get away with dance moves that frankly bizarre (the recurring “zombie doing the robot” move is a case in point…)

Dishonourable Mentions

Finally, two names I couldn’t bring myself to add to the list.

First is Lindsey Lohan. When she starred in Herbie Restarts a Franchise, there wasn’t a man alive who didn’t think she looked stunning. Rumours that Disney had used post-production CGI to try and keep her chest under control didn’t harm things either. Sadly, she went down the party route and lecherous males the planet over lost a promising actress.

The second name is Alicia Witt. Unlike Lindsey, she’s done nothing wrong… she’s just done nothing at all. She always seemed to have small parts in things, but she’s pretty much vanished. She did one episode of Sopranos in 2000 and she was in Vanilla Sky in 2001, but since then she’s done a film a year (on average) with nothing I’ve heard of, let alone seen.

Conclusion

I’ve never had a ‘type’ of woman. People have accused me of being a ‘tit man’, which I strenuously deny. I’ve been told I’m an ‘arse man’, which I agree with in as much as skinny women with no behind make me want to go buy people sandwiches.

GB claims the women here fit two types… “curvy and/or redheaded” and “skinny elves”. Again, I’m not convinced…

Maybe I’m just a dirty old man…

Another part done autobiog

pjm — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Amongst my father’s stuff I found the beginnings of an autobiography. It’s disjointed as hell, and probably of no interest to anyone who isn’t in the family. For them, I may end up copying it out.

But the thing that caught my eye was the list of topics yet to cover…

dog
cuffley
hardware
nursery mopeds
- cucumbers
- tomatoes
college
school
- knee
- acheivements
bikes
her
kids etc
wormley
- horse
cars
racing cars
france
swiss border
- car window
st trop
toes
gpr
aei
calder
meyer
kingsmoor
boats
- canals
- hooligans
- students
- gas
- booze
geoff welsh happ
- stone
- lee
- martin steering
- black pig
  - dustbins
- Crash
  - wrist cut
- landyatch
- tree towing
- operations
- y c
- badgers, deer
- orwell
- aerial
- radio

More photos from Kiwiland, part 2

pjm — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:05:10 +0000

The next batch of photos, this time from Taupo towards Tauranga…

Taupo, Craters of the Moon

Huka Falls

Huka Falls is where the entire of Lake Taupo drains through a 15 meter wide channel at up to a 220,000 litres a second. I was told (but I can’t find evidence for it) that they back the flow down at night when the water isn’t needed by the various hydro and geothermal power plants down-stream.

The main falls. It's a 6m drop but there's 5m of water on top of it. 11m total drop.

They wouldn't let me drive the jet boat. I didn't need to ask...

The Wai-O-Tapu Geothermal Wonderland

Like half of New Zealand, Wai-O-Tapu used to be a sacred Maori spot. Now it’s a commercial ‘Wonderland’. Oh yes…

Yellow = Sulphur. Red = Iron. Purple = Manganese.

God, this is a view that bodes. I'm just not sure what it bodes...

Can you guess why this is called the Artist's Palette...?

Water shouldn't look like it's on fire. That's the Champagne Pool. Constant 73-75c and rich in CO2.

An unmolested photo - the pool really is that colour. The water's hot, but the bubbles are CO2.

Remember what I said about the pool temperature? She's sat pretty much were the last photo was taken.

The Oyster Pool, seen from above.

Another photo I swear I haven't manipulated. That thing has a /lot/ of sulphur in it...

Tauranga

I’m not going to say much about Tauranga. But I will mention Za Pizzeria on The Strand. They serve good pizza and they didn’t treat me like a complete lunatic when I tried to convince them to add sliced olives (from their bar garnishes selection) to the top of a garlic and ham pizza…

More photos from Kiwiland

pjm — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 02:13:02 +0000

You know what…? I got bored with writing about NZ. Don’t get me wrong, I love the country and love going through the photos. The problem is that I loved it too much and there’s not enough people interested in what happened to spend time moping about how I want to go back out there. So I’m going to image dump…

Napier Aquarium

Lobster man, lobster man, does whatever a scuba diver can...

Did I ever tell you that I like blue fishies...?

Want!

That window is 5 foot tall...

Bluff Hill, Napier

Napier Port. No post production - the water was really that colour.

Fishing boat heading out of Hastings

What happens when I rant about a cliche

Road to Taupo

Panorama somewhere near Te Haroto. Click for 6000 * 2000 hugeness.

Waterfall near Pohokura

Balistic Knickers

pjm — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:22:58 +0000

This is what happens when I don’t drink coffee in the mornings…

I was listening to Tom Jones chatting with Chris Moyles this morning. As is slightly predictable, the subject turned to the appearance of underwear appearing on stage.

The thing is, I know from my personal experience of throwing things at (and missing) the laundry bin, that clothing doesn’t fly very well. So, for every pair of knickers (panties to you for’n types) that land on stage, another dozen or so land on the heads of the people in the first few rows.

That’s not a result for anyone.

So, here is my shot at making millions and millions out of that still fresh phenomenon of throwing underwear at ageing singers…

Ultra whispy lightweight g-string or thong knickers, with mesh replacing the remaining fabric, and with industrial strength elastic in the waistband. With a little bit of practice, I think that you should be able to ping them – rubber band style – ten times as far as you could throw normal underwear.

And as a humourous bonus, the larger the underwear, the further the range. Although you might want to think again if it takes to people to aim them…

A Study in Sherlock

pjm — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:16:18 +0000

So, with the mighty power of iPlayer, I watched part one of BBC’s new Sherlock mini-series last night. And, all in all, I was pretty impressed…

Spoilers ahoy!

The attempts to bring this up to date were nice (and the SMS on screen ‘trick’ was useful without being overdone) and the characters were nicely believable. The plot was pretty good too. But… I did have a two issues with it…

1) How the hell was Sherlock so slow about the profession of the murderer? The moment he announced that the murderer was “someone who is trusted and invisible” I knew who the killer would be. Okay, I thought that the Taxi would be bright pink, but I was close. I like the idea of a pink taxi, because I liked the idea of the lady in pink stumbling to her fate because of her love of the colour. I also loved the idea of this man who was sick of being invisible still being invisible in a bright pink car. But then, all the taxis in Sherlock were black, so maybe the BBC were worried the foreign markets wouldn’t accept the idea of London cabs in other colours.

2) I really hated the way that the murderer killed people. Don’t get me wrong, the single pill of unknown poison was a nice way to go, but it really was just a game of chance. Does that sound particularly cool and clever for the murderer? Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that he gives his victims the concept of a game, a route out of the problem, but does a 50-50 chance of your own demise controlled by your ‘victim’ sound like the way to do things? The guy is going to die, so why not make his method of murder something that is part of his treatment, but which would kill his victims? The obvious (but insufficiently lethal) option would be insulin. You have your diabetic taxi driver who loads himself with sugar before the killing. The victim chooses from one of two identical needles – one of which they are assured is safe. The thing is, to a diabetic who is sugar loaded, it’s safe. To Joe Public… *throat slitting gesture*

But, that said, I loved it – it was laugh out loud funny, tense and involving. I’ll be there expectantly next Sunday…

Some random 1920s adverts…

pjm — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 22:59:47 +0000

So… I realised that the ancient travel guides have some fantastically odd adverts…

I know that South Africa has Biltong and America has Jerky, but nothing says “tasty food products” like “MEAT LOZENGES”.

Oh god…

I’ve read this advert three times and only just realised that these aren’t bath salts…

If these lamps are so good, why are they being lit from behind by a magical lamp that lights the surfaces that can’t be seen by the light that’s lighting them? Why the fuck do I care? Oh, whatever… next advert…

I was going to ask what the hell a ‘fruit salt’ was, and how come none of us know about this ‘world famed’ product. Then I looked at Wiki. Apparently ENO brand Fruit Salts are sodium citrate, that well known acidity regulator and anti-clotting agent.

Good job I didn’t do that then. That would have been embarrassing…

What products can we sell to maids with strangely located facial features? Why, cloths that you can use for cleaning Brass, Aluminium, Silver and Glass, but also for giving you a manicures.

By the way, why was everything in the 1920s sold by chemists?

Can’t afford a driver and a tour guide? Buy a load of tour guide books and make it look like a technical innovation, by jove.

We should use the words ‘By Jove’ more frequently…

There’s a reason you don’t get adverts like this any more. It’s not an advert for Vaseline… it’s an advert for a booklet that Vaseline’s manufacturers have made to tell you what the hell you can do with this huge tub of prototype napalm that you’ve now got in your bathroom cabinet.

And, from one horrific use of a fuel by-product to another…

I… erm… what?!

No, apparently, the sticky residue left over when you turn coal into coke (no, this kind of coke) has medicinal properties. Yes, it’s highly flammable, but it’s perfectly safe. That’s why you’re not allowed to put it in anything any more…

I don’t know what’s worse… the fact that we were apparently shipping the stuff for the rest of Europe, of the fact that it’s “tar soap recommended by the” someone or other.

One last one…

Yes, after driving down the road and coating yourself in bits of vaporised rubber and partially burnt hydrocarbons, why not wash yourself in refreshing… oh hang on…

1920s travel guide – Chilterns to Fens

pjm — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:18:21 +0000

One of the things my grandfather gave me before he died, was a fantastic book called “Through the Chilterns to the Fens”.

The premise of the book is a simple one – to give a guide to the towns in the corridor from the Chilterns to the Wash near Lincoln, inexplicably including a chunk of modern London and Hertfordshire.

The problem is that the book really isn’t a big book – A6 size, and barely 160 pages – and there isn’t a lot of space to give detailed descriptions of all the locations the author wanted to cover.

In a stroke of genius, instead of leaving towns out, he just gave fantastically brief descriptions. Others get incredibly involved, but are humourously out of date.

These are a few of my favourites…

Rickmansworth. Here the old village has grown somewhat in recent years, but it is still picturesque with time-warn houses on either side of the old streets. It has many advantages as a place from which to begin or bring to an end an exploration of the Chilterns.

No, really, that’s everything the book has to say about the town he suggests you start your tour from. My wife, who went to school in Ricky, may have laughed. Loudly.

In South Herts, lets take a quick trip to a couple of places from my childhood – the towns of Broxbourne and Hoddesdon. Their 35,000 inhabitants cluster round the old A10, trapped between the new A10 and the River Lea. They made their money from beer, and Hoddesdon was famous for its beer and its hop market…

Hoddesdon has a broad street, and still retains something of the atmosphere of coaching days; but Izaak Walton’s old “Thatched House” has disappeared, and the church is a Georgian one, built in 1732.

Broxbourne. In the church one may see the monument to Sir Henry Cock, bearing a fine alabaster effigy of the king’s host. The building contains other features of interest, including a Norman font, while it’s position near a lock of the New River is singularly pleasing.

I know that you’re itching to know who Izaak Walton is, so I found out. According to Google, he wrote a book called The Compleat Angler. In 1653. Yeah… a 300 year old J R Hartley…

Next, we go up the A10 towards Buntingford – what our guide calls “The Margins of the Fens”. The only thing I’ll say is that Buntingford is at least 25 miles from the Fens – not bad considering the entire range of the book is just under 100 miles…

Buntingford has a terminal station of the branch-line which comes up the valley of the Rib. It has many picturesque cottages, and has an air of antiquity greater than many places with roots that go far deeper into history. Not mentioned in Domesday, it appears to have come into existance at some later period, and its church only dates back to the time of James I

After living there for 10 years, there’s only two things I know about Buntingford: that the railway line was killed by Dr Beeching; and that the church was built by the Victorians…

Lets go West down the A507 to Baldock, Letchworth and Hitchin.

Baldock is famous for its Tesco store (which was built as a film factory), its Bread Riots, and its huge number of pubs. Letchworth was the world’s first Garden City, a Quaker town which only had two pubs when I started drinking. Hitchin, which is probably famous for something. The only noteworthy thing I can think of is that the swimming pool has an overflow carpark…

Hitchin. The little town covers a considerable area on ground sloping towards the river Hiz. In the XVIth century the place was famed for the vast quantities of malt which is produced, and brewing still remains an important industry. It is an old town, perhaps very old indeed, for not only have Roman objects been discovered, but the neighbourhood has also produced implements of the Palaeolithic period.

Baldock. The old town of Baldock is on the Icknield Way, which here runs at the foot of the Hertfordshire hills in a north-easterly direction. In between it and Hitchin is the garden city estate of Letchworth, which begins to show signs of becoming a very pleasant combination of ideal factories, with well-designed cottages and small houses, each with ample garden space.

Our guide talks a little more about the church in Baldock, but that’s just so that he can tell us about Samuel Pepys.

Lets leap past a collection of informative (and therefore boring) entries about Cambridge, Newmarket and Godmanchester, and head towards St Ives, where our guide gets strangely lyrical…

St Ives. This half-forgotten little town is charmingly placed at a bend of the Ouse, and its church with a tall tower and spire, rises gracefully above a group or poplars, beautifully placed by the riverside, in whose surface the picture is reversed.

On calm Sunday evening, when the hour of the services in the surrounding village churches is approaching, the sound of the bells is graded away into the distance so that one almost realises a perspective of sound with the bells of St Ives in the foreground. Listened to in this manner there is a sweetness and a mellowness about these old bells of Huntingdonshire which is particularly pleasing. There are, indeed, a few places in England where so many carillons can be heard pealing at the same time as here in the great stretch of Fenland.

St Ives has preserved four of the six arches of the XVth-century bridge, in the centre of which stands the chapel, now supporting a plain super-structure of brick, added shortly after the fire which destroyed the upper part of the house in 1689, when a great part of the town was also consumed. The place is not on that account without picturesque in its streets, quaint corners meeting one here and there, especially near the market house. One of the inns bears that most curious of names, “The Spare Rib”.

One of the most quaint bequests to be found in England is that of Dr Robert Wild who, at his death in 1678, bequeathed a sum of money, from the interest on which six Bibles were to be purchased annually, and six boys and six girls of the town were to cast dice for the possession of these Bibles every Whit Tuesday on the alter of the church.

This is a town, you’ll note, with a river which is not only reflective, but which created reflections which are mirror images. And it’s picturesque too. I think we can assume that the author got laid in St Ives…

This book was printed in the early 1920s, and I’m assuming that the book is now out of copyright. If you are the copyright holder and can prove otherwise, please tell me.

Venn Diagram of Nerdishness

pjm — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:28:05 +0000

You may well know that there is something of a disagreement between my wife and I about the difference between a geek and a nerd.

The case for the defence recently presented a Venn diagram that showed ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’ with an intersection ‘people who argue about the difference between geeks and nerds’.

The prosecution would now like to offer this Venn diagram which has been floating around the internet for about a year…

The first person to comment on the geekery or nerdishness of arguing with Venn diagrams will be sacrificed to the school bully.

Oh what a childish nerd I am…

pjm — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:25:16 +0000

This here amuses me no end…

QWxsIHlvdXIgYmFzZSBhcmUgYmVsb25nIHRvIHVz

What amuses me significantly more is that none of the 6 Google results currently showing this string are in the same deeply retro-nerd context that I’m using it in…

Answers (if you give a shit) on a postcard to the usual comment box…

EDIT : 7/7/10
I suppose the string should really be one of these two

QUxMIFlPVVIgQkFTRSBBUkUgQkVMT05HIFRPIFVTLg==
QUxMIFlPVVIgQkFTRSBBUkUgQkVMT05HIFRPIFVT

but I don’t like all-caps (even if they are technically correct) and there are no results at all for those two…

Fixes and features

pjm — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 19:05:24 +0000

So, I’ve been bug fixing…

1) How come nobody told me that the input fields on the comment form had no text to tell you what each one did…? Oh… Nevermind…

2) There’s now a ’subscribe’ link under the comment box so that you can have it tell you if anyone else comments on a post. At the moment it insists that you approve every time you subscribe. I’ll see if I can fix that one.

3) I’ve added a tracker that adds any post marked ‘hoot’ to my twitter feed. I doubt many of you will care, but I thought it would explain the new (and odd) tag.

Wedding + camera = no photos?

pjm — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:27:38 +0000

As anyone who reads my twitter may have realised, I was at a wedding this weekend.

Well, technically, someone (possibly the groom) told me, it either wasn’t a wedding or wasn’t a marriage, since both the grooms were male and they are now civil partners, but to everyone there, it was a wedding. And a damned fine one too.

At the risk of offending others, I think I have to say it was the most relaxed group of friends and family I’ve ever seen at a wedding – everyone dancing, singing, shouting, and laughing like the greatest of lifelong friends.

Yet, somehow, none of the photos I took of people were to my liking. Every one of them was blurry or oddly posed. I know that I prefer going macro or landscape to going portrait, but still…

2570 x 1770 version

How the internet is communist and advertisers are wankers

pjm — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:28:38 +0000

If you’ve ever been in an Internet argument about the spelling of the word humour, or tried to explain that something vaguely coincidental isn’t “ironic”, you have probably have been told that the Internet is an American invention. (Presumably we’re ignoring the fact that the Web is an Anglo-Swiss one).

So, it’s always surprised me that there’s something decidedly (and I fear to say the word) communist about the modern Internet.

No, there’s no repression of religion, and no, we’re not being sent off to fight the Germans with a broken AK-47 and a tonne of beetroot, but there is something, well, odd, going on.

How, exactly, did America – the land where the dollar rules and capitalism is king – create a system where everything has to be free? Where there is no such thing as paid content? Where nothing belongs to anyone any more?

There are websites galore out there, dedicated to republishing other people’s work. Sometimes the content is licensed under Creative Commons, or constitutes fair use under US law, but all to often it’s just a picture stolen from another website, without attribution or (worse) with the copyright-holder’s watermark overwritten with the name of the new host. There’s sites dedicated to this kind of bollocks.

Then there’s the joys of thepiratebay.org , a wonderful repository of all things. And, yes, I’ve downloaded stuff from there (normally when I can’t find my original disks or some arsehole music label has copy protected their music, to prevent my fair use of the product), but the thing also houses links to every TV show, film or audio CD you’ve ever heard of. I’m not here to argue the legal or moral positioning of this, but it’s an obvious blow to the glories of capitalism.

How has this happened?

The obvious thing happening right now is the paywalling of The Times and The Sunday Times websites. Now, I actually quite like the Sunday Times… I hate the news, but I hate the news from all sources. What I like is the blogs and features. It’s my ‘Playboy’, if you will. Yes, I know it’s famous for its news, but I read it for the features…

The problem is that The Times and Sunday Times paywall will fail. It will fail because there are a lot of other newspapers out there giving it away for free, and because the average Internet user (me included) won’t damned well pay for anything. Every newspaper in the world could go behind a paywall charging a penny a day, and the users of the Internet will ignore the sites until some little blogger sets up a site where he screen scrapes content and republishes it.

And the reason it has come to this is the advertisers that I mentioned all the way back up there in the title.

The newspapers need to had paywalls because there’s no money in advertising. And why is there no money in advertising? Because everyone is so sick of the constant stream of shite that flows from these arseholes that they actively block advertising.

Depending on who you ask, Firefox is either the greatest or second greatest web browser out there in terms of pageviews. On Firefox, the most popular add-on right now is “Adblock Plus”, with 3/4 million downloads every day, a full 50% more than the next nearest add-on.

As the title may have given away, that little add-on blocks adverts. All adverts. By blocking requests to the machines that serve adverts. The all-mighty American Internet is trying so desperately to operate without any paywalls and without any advertising. Everything needs to be provided by some mythical power because we deserve it, and no reasonable request should be ignored. And we’re reasonable. We must be, because we’re us. And while 50 years of soviet leaders would send me to Siberia for making the comparison, that’s sounding really quite close to many communist theories to me right now.

And why do people feel the need for these adblockers? Well, because of those wankers in advertising.

The first advert was banner ad was for Coors Zima (I believe) on the long dead HotWired website. It got a fantastically high click through rate (in the 20%s). So banner adverts appeared everywhere and their clickthrough rates went down.

This was 1994 and the Internet was ruled by the Animated Gif. The next step for advertisers was to make everything flash or move or jump. Suddenly everything had flashing red borders.

And advertising revenues went down.

As is the way, no-one thought “hang on… maybe instead of pissing off out customers, we should reign this circle jerk of web wankery”.

Before long Adobe released the horror that is Flash. I could rant for a long long time about graphics designers, Apple users and Adobe, but this is already long enough and sweary enough, so I’ll save that for another day.

Suddenly adverts had the ability to not only move and interact and flash, but also the ability to annoy the fuck out of people even more. Then some bastard decided that what we really, really needed was flash adverts that autoplayed music or sound effects, or which suddenly expanded to kidnap the entire of your screen.

At this point, it’s really not surprising that people grabbed at any tool offering a hint of sanity… Ad blockers.

The thing is, this blocks all adverts. It blocks the discrete, relevant adverts as much as it blocks the full screen attention stealer that screams special effects from the next horror movie.

Now, before I say this next bit, I need to make something clear – I don’t have any advertising on this site. On a good day I get a couple of hundred hits, most of whom are looking for alloy wheels on a BMW (I have no idea). I pay for it myself because the bandwidth is so low that I don’t pay any extra at my hosting company. And I don’t really want to have people selling a weird tip to making your teeth thin.

Instead I use a flash blocker to block all those deeply annoying screen stealers, and let the rest wash over me. When something really hideous gets past, I add it to my hosts file, which kills is stone dead. The rest of the time, I’m a small part in the minuscule trickle of money heading to the company that provides that which I’m reading.

Which, in a way brings me to what started this rant… A banner advert trying to sell me a coffee roasting machine. Nothing too nasty about that. Until you realise that it was an advert for the site that I went looking for coffee machines on a couple of days ago. And the advert was on boingboing.

Like I said, all advertisers are wankers…

I don’t think that means what you think, art woman

pjm — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:48:28 +0000

There was a woman on Radio4 last night talking about the wonders of modern art and it’s value as an investment…

Artists like Picasso, Monet and Manet always have an appeal to investors because they are popular the world over, from Tokyo to Los Angeles.

I don’t think that nugget conjured up the image you wanted it to…

View stupid radio 4 woman in a larger map

Common (Trekkie) People

pjm — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:15:11 +0000

Before you watch this, you need to know three things…

There is a surprisingly large slab of the fan fiction culture who believe that Capt Kirk and Mr Spock have a secret romantic relationship that is barely hinted at in the series
There is a thriving community of people bolting together TV show clips to make music videos.
Someone once told William Shatner he could sing, and he’s (intentionally, I think) taking the joke further than the rest of us are.

That said…. comedy gold…

Ceiling pr()n

pjm — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:59:00 +0000

I’ve embarrassed myself in public many many times now by referring to things of much coolness as “XYZ porn”. Normally I end up looking at kitchen porn (entirely SFW). This is probably the first time I’ve found ceiling porn…

The Senedd in Cardiff, for those as uneducated as myself…

YourOpenBook searches – I’m not racist but

pjm — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:33:32 +0000

I’ve told you about the wonders of yourOpenBook before, but it really is the gift that just keeps on giving. Today, we’ll be searching for the phrase “not racist, but“.

First up, the simple fuckwits…

Wasn’t that fun? What about those people who we’re not entirely sure about…?

Clueless fool, or a trolling genius?

Sorry, what?

There’s something wrong about laughing at someone trying to write is what is (presumably) not their first language, but someone has to tell her that a 360 degree change is… nothing…

The penultimate entry is this masterpiece.

How fucking fantastic is that? Not only is it a classic “not racist but”, but the phrase is, in itself, the only fucking thing that makes it racist. No, really.

Lets pretend it said this : “If I go into a shop and ask for the ‘England’ cowboy hat that’s in the window, I don’t expect to be shown the car window sun screen you bloody idiot!”

Yeah, okay, I corrected the illiterate twattishness, but other than that I’ve just got rid of that fantastic phrase, and suddenly the racism’s gone. Magic!

Finally, I couldn’t resist…

Marcus Brigstocke when he’s not on Radio4

pjm — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:55:16 +0000

Facebook security & bad jokes…

pjm — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:31:41 +0000

I think that everyone now knows that I think Facebook is a bad idea.

I’ve never been a fan of people being able to tag you in their photos. I’ve never been a fan of their security and privacy policies and records. I’ve certainly never been a fan of how much data they share with advertisers (like the infamous Facebook Beacon system) and it’s getting worse.

So, I thought you might find this little tool amusing. It lets you search people’s facebook status message for incriminating information.

For a quick example, lets try searching for ‘anal sex‘.

Right now, we have lots of variations on the fact that “oral sex makes your day, anal sex makes your whole week”. We have several variations of the “when I was a kid my dad gave me good advice about anal sex – brace yourself, this is going to hurt”. But we also have lots of people now eternally on record stating that they love the anal sex. Or that they now have piles from anal sex. Or that their good friend is enjoying anal sex.

Listen kids, the internet DOES NOT FORGET.

What I did on my Holidays (pt 8) – Greystone to Napier

pjm — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:39:57 +0000

Here’s a quick question for you: How do you turn a three and a half hour journey into a seven and a half hour journey?

Go to New Zealand and make a ‘minor detour’ to visit a beach…

View Day 8 – Greytown to Napier in a larger map

This bit was supposed to take 45 minutes. That ‘little detour’ to the coast made it closer to 4 hours.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The lower point on the coast is Riversdale. It’s a beautiful little coastal village, with no water, no sewerage and only one shop. And it’s nearly an hour to the nearest town of any worth. It’s also where I managed to put my camera into manual mode with a slow shutter speed and a wide aperture. I have thirty photos of the fabled Tippex factory explosion of nineteen dickety two. It’s not a pretty sight. Thankfully, GB had her camera with her…

This is the busy end of Riversdale Beach. That's probably a third of the houses in the town.

GB does arty shots too. By dropping her camera on the sand.

Winding back a couple of hours, I suppose I should tell you about the journey from Greytown to the beach.

Well, the stretch from Greytown to Masterton was the sort of wonderful drive that we were already getting blasé about. Gently rolling land with mountains off to our left. The same mountains that had driven me to swearing on the journey from Palmerston North to Wellington a few days before. Again, it was rather special seeing a landscape studded with wind turbines.

The road from Masterton to Riversdale Beach, however, was fantastic. Long, fast, twisty roads through wooded mountains occasionally breaking into open sweeps of grazing land…

Somewhere between Masterton and Riversdale. I think I'm in love...

What I didn’t understand about New Zealand (and still don’t) is how come every single one of our photos has grey skies or big brooding clouds when we spent every day sheltering from the burning sun and glare. If anyone knows the answer, please tell me.

That photo, by the way, is taken from one of the many, many little roadside picnic areas on the side of the road. Every day that we took to the road, we stopped at half a dozen of these spots. Every one of them was had a rubbish bin, a couple of picnic tables and not one bit of vandalism…

In this lay-by the bench was already occupied…

Covered in beeeeees

I’d love to tell you what they were swarming over but I’m afraid that I’m not a fucking idiot. If it bothers you that much, go fly out there and poke ‘em with a stick yourself.

After Riversdale Beach (and an ice-cream at the lean-to that constitutes the entire commercial operation of the metropolis) we headed up the coast to Castlepoint. I can’t for the life of me remember why, but I’d decided I wanted to visit Castlepoint when we were planning the holiday, and the little matter of it already being lunchtime wasn’t going to get in my way…

Yes, that pun is as bad as you think.

Castle Point is another one of these towns that would be wall to wall Nissan Bluebirds and caravans in the UK. Instead, it has just 1,600 inhabitants.

The reef. Click for full 6000 x 1000 hugeness.

We spent nearly an hour here, just wandering around this bay in the blazing sun, getting hideously burnt in the process. This here is the top end of the reef – a kilometre long chunk of rock that protects the sandy bay. Beautifully serene on this side, the other water on the other side is 15 metres deep and being constantly battered by waves even when the sea is calm.

The lighthouse up there was built in 1913 and only got electricity in the sixties.

The boats here made even my land loving carcass want to get in the water. Boats with power caming from jetboat-style outlets about two foot across. Boats big enough that the trailer tyres were taller than me…

One of the smaller boats

The lighthouse. That's 260 steps there, allegedly. Lucky they didn't put it on the top, really.

Fishing off the reef

Gentle pool in the right. 15 metres of scary watery depth to the left.

The reef is solid rock. Big, chunky, indestructible rock. You know, they kind that never moves underfoot. Safe as houses…

Erm... did you know there was a hairline crack in your country...?

Time to move on.

Thankfully, our slightly nutty SatNav Karen was on form. This is a girl who manages to turn a 4.5h journey into a 4 hour cross country hack, avoiding towns by diving down fantastic back roads, and then ignoring all the street signs to charge down the old road. Speeding is naughty. On no account take the back road, catch the locals and engage in a three car chase across the wine lands.

Ahem.

Still, it was good to get to Napier before dark. Walking down a shingle beach is a great way to work up an appetite…

Reflected light from the sunset behind us - by GB

Napier beach just after sunset - by GB

What would be the perfect end to a fantastic day? Why, huge hunks of barely cooked meat!

Pretty much by chance, we stumbled into the Steak Out restaurant on Marine Parade. The entire of New Zealand seems to be a gourmand’s delight, with meat of a quality I’ve never experienced in the UK. This place, however, gets a special place in my memories.

After a pub in Watford made me sign a waiver before they would serve me a steak cooked ‘blue’, I’ve got into the habit of asking for my steak cooked “blue, if you can do it – otherwise as rare as you’re allowed to go”. Not only did I get a reassuringly bemused look, the guy serving us asked if I wanted my steak “hot blue” or “cold blue”.

Once again, our meal was sprinkled in superlatives…

Aussie Satire

pjm — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:25:47 +0000

It’s not quite at Bremner, Bird & Fortune standards, but it’s bloody close…

Sweet, sweet irony…

pjm — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:06:49 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you’re a blogger with a fun and exciting website. ( Don’t feel bad about fantasizing – most of us do it. )

Being the conscientious type that you are, you want to check that all the links on your website work correctly.

Lets check with google to see if anyone trustworthy has a validator we can use…

I don’t think I need to say any more, do I?

No… didn’t think so…

[ screenshots taken at 23.55 on 22 May 2010 ]

UPDATE Sadly, W3C have now fixed their site. Ah well… – 24 May

Sexy little lens

pjm — Fri, 21 May 2010 20:32:52 +0000

Did I tell you that I’ve bought a new lens for my camera?

Despite all my lustings for thousand pound lenses, I’ve gone and bought the cheapest lens Canon sell – a 50mm prime…

I'm sure the post is supposed to hold the rails up...

The last remains of an ivy runner up our wall

(the punchline is OO.o)

pjm — Fri, 21 May 2010 08:12:09 +0000

No comment. None at all...

SodiumLightsTheHorizon.co.uk

How to draw an owl

The Rock 1000 2010

When net suddenly meets real life…

Dreaming of an old friend

No seriously, just give me your house number and postcode…

An Odd Start

The joys of being a dirty old man…

Olivia Wilde

Sarah Wayne Callies

Salma Hayek

Christina Hendricks

Jewel Staite

Parminder Nagra

Ginnifer Goodwin

Alyson Hannigan

Shakira

Dishonourable Mentions

Conclusion

Another part done autobiog

More photos from Kiwiland, part 2

Taupo, Craters of the Moon

Huka Falls

The Wai-O-Tapu Geothermal Wonderland

Tauranga

More photos from Kiwiland

Napier Aquarium

Lobster man, lobster man, does whatever a scuba diver can... Did I ever tell you that I like blue fishies...? Want! That window is 5 foot tall...

Bluff Hill, Napier

Road to Taupo

Balistic Knickers

A Study in Sherlock

Some random 1920s adverts…

1920s travel guide – Chilterns to Fens

Venn Diagram of Nerdishness

Oh what a childish nerd I am…

Fixes and features

Wedding + camera = no photos?

How the internet is communist and advertisers are wankers

I don’t think that means what you think, art woman

Common (Trekkie) People

Ceiling pr()n

YourOpenBook searches – I’m not racist but

Marcus Brigstocke when he’s not on Radio4

Facebook security & bad jokes…

What I did on my Holidays (pt 8) – Greystone to Napier

Aussie Satire

Sweet, sweet irony…

Sexy little lens

(the punchline is OO.o)

Lobster man, lobster man, does whatever a scuba diver can...

Did I ever tell you that I like blue fishies...?

Want!

That window is 5 foot tall...