Using: the Lazy Bloggers Post generator

Crikey! I just returned from my daily swim on the beautiful Fijian beach and realised I have not updated this since Hammertime was in the charts... You would not believe that my hands were chopped off and I was waiting for bionic ones. I prostrate myself in sorrow and beg thy forgiveness..

I am totally exhausted with setting fire to people wearing Crocs, learning to fart the theme to neighbours, just generally being the life of the party to anyone unfortunate to cross my path, my day starts with the dawn patrol from the second I am woken by murderous Teletubbies to whenever. I am secretly pregnant. it will be fun fun fun till they take my TBird away.

I won't promise anything to you but if one more person emails me to ask why I haven't posted today I will start posting pictures of toe fungus, or fecal murals. Fully! Assuming I don't get distracted by counting my chest hairs..


Courtesy of The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator - http://www.aussiebloggers.com.au/blogpost.html

Playing: Sounds of Sunset

I Was Hoping You'd Say That    Paul Kelly    A to Z - I    2:25
99 Luftballons    Nena    Best of Nena   3:51
Rockit    Herbie Hancock    Rockit    5:22
Kiss of Fire (Allen/Hill)    Monsieur Camembert    Absynthe    5:44
Nobody's Baby    Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings    100 Days, 100 Nights    2:28
Jukebox Junkie    Rocket Science    Different Like You    2:34
Horny As A Dandy - Original Version    Mousse T. Vs. The Dandy Warhols    Horny As A Dandy (Mashed By Loo & Placido)    3:17
Business Time    Flight Of The Conchords    Flight Of The Conchords    4:05
Wicked And Weird    Buck 65    Talkin' Honky Blues    3:43
Yoshimi battles the pink robots pt.1    The Flaming Lips    Yoshimi battles the pink robots    4:46
Dans le tempo    Constance Amiot    So Frenchy So Chic: 2008    2:47
Home is Where The Hatred Is    Gil Scott-Heron    Best of    3:24
Kool thing    Sonic Youth    Goo    4:06
Karma Police    Easy Star All Stars    Radiodread    4:48
The Great Gig In The Sky    Kirsty Rock    Dub Side Of The Moon    4:25
over and over    Hot Chip    The Warning    5:46
Pop Star Girl    Tom Woodward    32-20 Blues    3:53
Teenage Kicks    Nouvelle Vague    Nouvelle Vague    2:14
Fuzzy    Grant Lee Buffalo    Fuzzy    4:59
My Pal    God    Tales From The Australian Underground - Singles 1976-1989 (Disc 2)    3:21
Sheela-Na-Gig    PJ Harvey    The Peel Sessions (1991-2004)    3:24
VLB Disco    Vanlustbäder    The People Versus Vanlustbader    3:42
Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)    Neil Young    Rust Never Sleeps (Live)    5:14
Idea of Fun    The Stooges    The Weirdness    3:18
Bird    The Knife    The Knife    4:34
Mondays    TZU    Computer Love    4:33

Playing: Songs for Breakfast

What If    Lucinda Williams    West    5:41
You're Gonna Miss Me    13th Floor Elevators    High Fidelity    2:29
Lick The Bacon    Osterberg    Osterberg    2:09
Common People (Vocoda Mix)    Pulp    Different Class (Remixed 2006)    6:18
My Boyfriend's Back    Spazzys    Aloha! Go Bananas    2:40
Wasted life    Tall tales and true    Tales from the Australian underground Vol.2 1977-1990    4:32
Open Book    The Rakes    Capture/Release    2:17
I will survive    Cake    Fashion Nugget    5:11
Business Time    Flight Of The Conchords    Flight Of The Conchords    4:05
Find Me A Home    The Detroit Cobras    Life, Love & Leaving    1:32
Wicked And Weird    Buck 65    Talkin' Honky Blues    3:43
Yoshimi battles the pink robots pt.1    The Flaming Lips    Yoshimi battles the pink robots    4:46
99 Luftballons    Nena    GTA VC Wave 103    3:51
Home is Where The Hatred Is    Gil Scott-Heron    GTA IV IFF 99 Funk    3:24
Kool thing    Sonic Youth    Goo    4:06
Karma Police    Easy Star All Stars    Radiodread    4:48
Teenage Kicks    Nouvelle Vague    Nouvelle Vague    2:14
Horny As A Dandy - Original Version    Mousse T. Vs. The Dandy Warhols    Horny As A Dandy (Mashed By Loo & Placido)    3:17
over and over    Hot Chip    The Warning    5:46
Pop Star Girl    Tom Woodward    32-20 Blues    3:53
Fuzzy    Grant Lee Buffalo    Fuzzy    4:59
My Pal    God    Tales From The Australian Underground - Singles 1976-1989 (Disc 2)    3:21
Sheela-Na-Gig    PJ Harvey    The Peel Sessions (1991-2004)    3:24

LOLing: the Google Chrome comic remixes

Google's big marketing to-do used to promote and explain their shiny new Chrome browser came in the form of a 39 page comic book put together by Scott McCloud.

I'll talk more about Scott McCloud one day as he has written/drawn two really fantastic comic books which talk about how comics work (Understanding Comics) and how they might be reinvented (Reinventing Comics).Suffice to say, the guy has an amazing ability to explain some reasonable dense concepts in comic book form.

I enjoyed what I understood of his Google Chrome comic - it did explain a few things for me but seemed to get a little bit bogged down in developer-speak at points, which could just have easily have been simplified.

The Internetz being what they are, it hasn't taken long for some remixes of this comic to start appearing online.

These ones come from a site called Yahooray apparently - though my network appears to be blocking the site for some reason. I found them re-posted on 4chan - these are my favourites.

.

Uninstalling: Google Chrome

As you might expect from one of the monoliths of the knowledge era, the launch of a new web browser from Google, Chrome, has attracted a lot of attention in the last few days.

In the space of a day it has already grabbed something like a 3% share of the browser market.

It's meant to be one of the fastest and smartest browsers around, making effective use of a lot of the open source research which has come before it. (And remaining admirably open source as well, feeding back innovation into the community).

I tried it out yesterday and did find it quite nimble at loading pages and featuring a clean & simple Google interface that we've come to know so well.

But ultimately I've decided to uninstall it and maybe come back for a look in a little while. 

I have no problem with Google - they have produced (or bought up, rebranded and released) a raft of great web based applications over the years - including Blogger of course. I'll generally go to YouTube first for videos, mainly use Gmail and Google talk for communication, track traffic to this blog with Analytics and have had some fun with Sketchup.

But Chrome, so far, doesn't really give me what I want in a browser.

It is streamlined to the point of oversimplification for me - something like a point and click disposable camera. It does what it's meant to do but I just want a whole lot more control. The menu options give you virtually nothing to fiddle around with and there are at least a dozen add-on features that I have in Firefox 3 (including Ubiquity, which I mentioned the other day) that I'd really prefer to keep using.

These include mouse gestures (browser control by right-clicking and making shapes with your mouse - faster than going to the buttons all day), Ad-block plus, foxytunes (a music player control bar in the browser),  fireftp (an ftp client), colorzilla (for identifying colours on screen), measure-it (a click and drag onscreen measuring tool) and my gmail notifier. Not to mention the array of themes that Firefox community members have produced to brighten up the browser - hard to imagine life without Pimpzilla and its gold-bling buttons and leopard skin tabs background.

Not to mention the fact that Chrome simultaneously installed something called Google Updater, which constantly runs in the background, chewing up processing power and which I haven't yet figured out how to remove.

On a more pragmatic level, you can do all of the lab testing that you like with a new piece of software but it's only when it hits the real world that a lot of the flaws in it really become apparent - particularly security problems (which have already been found apparently). It just makes sense to let the dust settle and see what else comes up in the next few weeks or months. After all, it's not like it's some exclusive club that you have to join from day one.

On a more emotional level, I think that Firefox still deserves our support. It has consistently raised the bar in browser development and, as I've already mentioned, still has a number of features that aren't found elsewhere.

And is it just me or does the Chrome logo look just a bit like a Poke ball - the thing that Pokemon creatures come out of. Gotta catch 'em all indeed.

Pondering: the telemegaphone

The telemegaphone is an unusual arts project put up by Unsworn, a "design and innovations studio" in Sweden.
They develop "products for beautiful and surprising telecommunications".

Essentially, they have installed these wind-powered 7 metre high giant high speaker/statue things in remote areas around Sweden which you can leave a message for which is then blared out around the immediate area.

Nifty idea - though I have to wonder how much these things have been griefed so far - I must confess that some of my first thoughts as to the kind of message that I would send would be generally obnoxious/offensive remarks (though obviously humorous) and the second was to send through the sound of an air raid warning siren.

But then, I can be kind of juvenile at times :)

Thanks to Shane for pointing this baby out.

Watching: Taken Out

I enjoy good trash culture - not everything in life needs to be insightful or meaningful, sometimes a bit of froth and bubble (or shlocky exploitation) is just what it takes to help the mind wind down a little.

The world we live in isn't populated by rocket scientists and brain surgeons, it's almost entirely just average people going about their business and trying to get by. It's easy to mock or feel superior to some of the people we see on tv - particularly reality tv - for being kind of simple/dumb or having priorities in life that seem shallow or materialistic or whatever but I think this is ultimately unkind and generally a sign of our own failings. Don't they say that the things we hate in others are the things we hate in ourselves?

Which is why I'm having a hard time working out how I feel about Channel Ten's new show, Taken Out.

It's a new format for dating shows (rather than a "safe/proven" recycled show from overseas so points for effort) which takes 30 women and puts them in a big semicircle around one man. (Apparently this shifts later in the series to 30 men and 1 woman). The women have a light panel behind them and a button in front which they can use to turn their light off. They use the light panel to indicate whether they are still interested in the man currently on display based on a series of drip fed information. Once they have turned the light off, it stays off for the round.

Between the decision sessions, the host randomly picks women to ask why they have chosen for or against the guy. Decision points occur as soon as the guy enters the studio, after a short biographical filmclip package, after the guy has had a chance to chat about themselves and finally after a short videoclip of the guy's best mate talking about them. From here, the remaining women come down in front of the guy and he gets to ask them one question to determine which of them he takes out on a date.

Ok, so structurally, it's something a little different - the pacing was a tiny bit slow but you could put this down to pilot jitters and it's fair to allow the host and editor/director etc time to get the feel for the show. The decision making time is around 10 seconds which seemed longer but is reasonable but the host/girls banter really needs some work - partly because the host didn't seem to have a lot to work with in terms of bright sparks amongst the women but also because he seemed unsure of how to play it. (Tip - patronising and slightly sleazy probably isn't the best approach)

All in all - and again, I'm trying to accept that it's froth tv, not the 7.30 report - pretty well everyone on the show came across as either kind of dumb, highly superficial, vapid, slutty (male and female) or famewhores. I'm not saying that this is all there is to these people, given the context they were in and the no-doubt selective editing that was going on but there were at least a few of these people who seemed to positively revel in this identity. Interestingly, the woman who seemed less like this came across as so bland and devoid of personality that I was personally hoping that the other type got the date. So it's not really a win-win situation.

I haven't been able to find much online in the way of clips yet - just a handful of Channel Ten promos using the male and female contestants from the show - you can check these out here if you like 

I'd say that the response on the Channel 10 forums about the show offers perhaps the most illuminating response to the show so far - and it's not great. There are a fair few people who are a little pissed off that repeats of repeats of Friends have been taken off air but even leaving those aside, just look at some of the topic headings.

Choice comments include:

Geez, this new program is honestly WOEFUL!

I never post on these forums, but strangely felt moved to do so in this case. What a train wreck! Never seen anything like it. A lacklustre premise for a show, with a mediocre host and lukewarm guests, all delivered at an mind-numbing pace. Truly miss-able viewing.

Do us all a favour and axe it tonight. Let's see "Friends" repeats tomorrow instead.

Sleaze discussions of sex in public places in a 7pm timeslot, women with their **** hanging out. Desperados wanting 10 minutes of fame. I guess this is where they end up when they axe Big Brother.

Looks like it is another season of the 7pm timeslot that 10 wants to lose. 

FRIENDS is the best taken out is gay take taken out of channel ten and put Friends back on and supernatural use take out all the best shows and replace them with the gayest shows

HeraScie: Wombat;
Do you really think it's a good idea to put someone on national TV and have members of the opposite sex scrutinize them over purely superficial things? Women have fought for years to not be torn apart over their appearance and now it is being done to men? (And women later, I understand).

On the other hand, it's not without support :

HeraScie....you've got issues! Leave the psycho analytical stuff within your 4 walls. You are now starting to sound drab!

And all the rest of you, Friends?? You honestly give a toot about Friends, the show thats been around since 1957!?

So what if it's on. Calm down about how appalling it is and just see it for what it really is. Just mindless entertainment with a bunch of female and male contestants having a laugh, having fun. Everyone gets a shot at saying something cheeky, something rude, something flirty, something cute. It doesnt have to be this mind altering experience. Its just a dating show for gods sake....and clearly not dated. The format is completely different from "Perfect Match". And you might actually find one of the contestants funny in the eps to come. Now wouldnt that be a treat. Some laughter in your life.......sounds like you all need it.

But seriously, I'll ask again...Friends?? Can you get over it already. How completely freaky can you Friends fans be out there?? Thats whats scary.

As a contestant and experiencing this first hand I assure you that things will get better when you get the first panel of guys on....

Will you all just shut up and give the show a chance....

(Incidentally, that last comment is repeated by the same guy  four or five times in different posts)

All of this said and done, there is a compelling car crash quality to this show that will probably bring me back a few more times - I'd suggest taking a look at least once for giggles.

Playing: songs on the radio

You know the drill - 4 to 6pm Mondays, 2XXfm (98.3) in Canberra

Who Is He And What Is He To You    Bill Withers    4:20
Starlight    The Wailin' Jennys    4:36
Winterlong    Pixies    3:11
(Straight Down To The) Bitter End    Yo La Tengo    3:59
I Won't Be Your Dog    Paul Kelly    5:10
Dancing With Myself    Nouvelle Vague    3:09
Girl and the Sea    Presets    4:46
Mutha'uckas    Flight Of The Conchords    2:27
Yadnus (Still Going to the Roadhouse mix)    !!!    5:45
Arm in Arm (Shy Child Mix)    The Boggs    3:13
On My Way    Cocoon    2:47
Black Ice    The Devastations    5:37
100 Days, 100 Nights    Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings    3:46
The Poontango    Mojo Nixon    2:37
Unguarded Moment    The Church    3:36
Bring That Beat Back (Back To The Breakbeats Mixx)    Public Enemy    5:17
Ghostbusters come inside [SMC]    Chemical Brothers vs The Ghostbusters    4:32
Im still Fresh    Elton John Featuring the Fresh prince    3:23
Master And Slave    Beasts Of Bourbon    4:51
Royal Gregory    Holy Fuck    3:52
Air batucada    Thievery Corporation    4:46
Modern Guilt    Beck    3:15

Thinking about: MMORPGs and why fantasy bores me

(Photo from programwitch)

To this point, I've steered clear of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), even though I like gaming, I like the idea of playing collaboratively and these kinds of games (notably World of Warcraft) are immensely popular.

So why? Largely I think because they are almost all heavily centred in the Fantasy genre and this generally does very little for me. I enjoyed the whole golden era of fantasy/warrior movies in the early to mid 80s (Conan, BeastMaster, etc) but it just doesn't do much for me now.

(There is also the dork factor, which I have referred to previously in my Lightning Bolt post) 

Perhaps this is because when I play games, I enjoy doing things that I'm not normally able to do - but which it is conceivable that I might. This is why GTA IV appeals so much I guess - it's a very contemporary city and makes use of a lot of the things about modern life that I think are kind of cool - modern music, cars, the internez and blowing things up. You might have some primitive explosives in WoW but I just don't really care.

I don't think it's an imagination thing either - I'm currently playing Psychonauts (more on this later) which is one of the more out-there games I've every played conceptually (and one of the most awesome).

I've heard some good things about City of Heroes, which is a superhero themed MMORPG, but not enough to excite me and this seems to be about the limit of what's currently going.

There have also been murmurings of a modern day spy themed MMORPG for a while, which will be console based but I'm a little unsure now, watching this video which (while rather cool) does seem more like a shmup (shoot-em-up) than anything. (I do like the console angle as my PC only has a wireless connection to the network and I'm sure this is slower than direct cabling)

Playing: with Ubiquity edit-page function

I'm not entirely sure why but there is a function in Ubiquity that allows you to edit the content of any webpage that you are currently accessing. Obviously this is only stored on your machine but there is some potential for fun and pranks to be had with it. (Be wary though, it has made the page a little buggy).

Whooooahing:Mozilla's Ubiquity plugin for Firefox

I've been checking out a new plug-in for Firefox this morning which is seriously blowing my mind. It's called Ubiquity and you can find it here. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial

In essence, it allows you to open a small window in your browser window like this and type in a few words to perform a whole range of functions.

So far I've been able to:

• get instant translations of selected text
• search websites like Flickr, wikipedia, youtube, googlemaps and more
• send emails
• perform calculations
• edit the text on webpages
• convert a webpage to a pdf file
• check email addresses in my contact list by typing a persons name
• highlight text on a page
• add maps to email (though not yet to this blog post)
• send a message to my twitter account
• get a word-count of text selected on a page (148 words up to this point)
• check the weather
• zoom in and out of the page

All by just pressing ctrl-space and entering a few logical words

I already feel like my computer use has changed forever.

I will say this, it's not yet a perfect system - it's only in alpha (a step or so before beta) and a few of the things that I've tried haven't quite worked as they should. A meeting I tried to add to google calender didn't appear and some of the emails I sent had a little bit of html code in them - but seriously, everything else has worked astoundingly well.

This video showcases some of it - it's about 6 minutes.

Considering: A Wii

I'll spare you the toilet humour, particularly considering that I missed the boat on that one by a few years.

Even though a number of friends have told me that the Nintendo Wii is quite the fun games system, I've been a little meh about it - none of the games that I've seen for it have leapt out at me yet and with a growing list of PS3 and 360 games to get through (as well as doing real world things), it's not a must have.

Mad World might just change this though - it's a highly stylised (think Sin City) mostly black and white fighting game from Japan that looks utterly, gratuitously over the top with the violence and therefore potentially quite entertaining. (For how long is another question though)

Watching: Rome

Sucker as I am for an HBO series (think Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm), I'm not really sure why it took me so long to get around to watching their show about the days of Julius Caesar, Rome.



By the time I got to the final disc in Season 1, I was a little gutted to realise that it wasn't two more episodes but a "special features" dvd. It wasn't that I was unhappy with where the story had left off (and there is a season 2 pack coming out soon) - just that I didn't want it to end.

Rome takes a number of perspectives in telling the tale of city around the period from 52BC to 44BC - that of the major players - Pompey, Caesar, Brutus, Marc Anthony - but where it comes to life is in the everyday characters - a couple of soldiers (who form the heart of the show), their wives/girlfriends/slaves and some of the patrician/plebians of the city.

As we've come to expect from the quality adult content that HBO is known for, there's the requisite sex, drugs, violence, swearing and rock'n'roll uh lute playing. Given that they pretty well just have swords to work with, the violence has its graphic moments but looks oh so cool.

But the show is more than these thrills and spills - it has fine writing and direction, some stellar performances and a fantastic look and sound. Mercifully it seems to be a largely British production as well (though filmed in Italy as far as I can tell) meaning that the accents just seemed slightly less incongruous than the New Jersey drawls we might have had.

Well worth checking out. 

Missing: a day

Oops - sorry about that. Was a bit sick yesterday and still not feeling super-great.

Regular service will resume shortly.

Changing: my plans for the weekend

(Click on image for full sized view)

Who would have thought that innocently cleaning a lawnmower in your bedroom while smoking a cigarette could possibly be dangerous. They should really put a label on those things.

Enjoying: Grand Theft Awesome Four

Pretty well sums up the experience - although I think I enjoy the game more than this guy does - and I don't cheat.

Loving: Chainsaw Maid

I'm not sure if I will ever understand the Japanese mind if their pop culture is anything to go by.
I'm just happy that it is so consistently, mind-blowingly awesome.

This claymation by a 22 year old college student called takena is one of the most violent ones I have ever seen - but it's funny because it's claymation.

Watching: the dog cloning, Mormon missionary abducting woman story get stranger

In the beginning there was a woman called Bernann McKinney who was the first person to pay to have her dead dog cloned. It was a Pit-Bull named Booger and she paid nearly $50000 (Australian) for the privilege to a lab in Korea, who in turn gave her 5 puppies.

Ok, a little odd but it's a brave new world we live in so I thought, huh - what an odd name for a dog, lets move on.

Being the silly season in the Northern Hemisphere, this story quickly spread and once a few people had seen her picture, the question was soon asked - is this the Joyce Bernann McKinney who in the U.K in 1977 was charged with abducting a 21 year old Mormon missionary and securing him to a bed with mink handcuffs to have sex with him? The same woman who skipped bail with her alledged co-conspirator and left the country posing as a pair of deaf-mute mime artists?

While she initially denied this, before long she fessed up that it was her but claimed to be innocent of the charges, claiming that it was all consensual. (They had apparently been having an affair in the U.S some time beforehand)

Riiiiiight - so you would think perhaps that this was weird enough right?

Almost.

Now stories are emerging, just to ice that oh so fruity fruit cake that in 2004 she may also have instructed a 15 year old boy in Tennessee to burgle a house so that she could raise money to buy a wooden leg for a favourite pet horse.

Really.

All things considered though, this is someone who probably deserves their moment in the media sun - unlike the rich girl fame-whores that we're used to seeing. At least this woman is interesting.

Did I mention she was also Miss Wyoming in her youth?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1042506/A-cloned-dog-Mormon-mink-lined-handcuffs-tantalising-mystery.html

Preparing: Music for Monday

These are some of the tracks I have lined up for the show this afternoon - 4 - 6pm 98.3fm Canberra

1150 Closer To The Boxer.mp3 The Kleptones 24 Hours (Disc 1) 4:55
Anarchy In The UK Sex Pistols Rage - The Songs Most Chosen By Rage Guest Programmers 3:32
Bananas And Blow Ween White Pepper 3:35
Theme From Shaft Isaac Hayes The Best Of Blaxploitation (Disc 1) 4:37
Do Your Thing Isaac Hayes Greatest Hit Singles 3:18
Life On Mars David Bowie Best Of David Bowie 69-74 3:52
I believe in a thing called love The Darkness Permission to land 3:36
She bangs the drums The Stone Roses The Very Best Of 3:50
Descent Into The Maelstrom Radio Birdman The Essential Radio Birdman (74-78) 4:24
England 2 Colombia 0 Kirsty MacColl Tropical Brainstorm 3:46
Bohemian Like You The Dandy Warhols Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia 3:32
Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again [The Angels] Rob Craw Used And Recovered By 4:25
Running One Tykwer/Klimek/Heil Run Lola Run 5:32
Loaded Primal Scream Screamadelica 7:03
You Never Had It The Magic Numbers Those The Brokes 2:58
Fashion Death Trends Frausdots Couture, Couture, Couture 2:51
Bird The Knife The Knife 4:34
This Land Is Your Land Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings Naturally 4:31

Blogging: about the blog feedback buttons

It's kind of hackneyed (but so very meta) to blog about your blog (you know that a song-writer is uninspired when you start hearing songs about life in a band on tour) but I thought I'd just mention the new You Say: feedback buttons that will hopefully appear at the bottom of each post now.

If you have a response to a post but can't be bothered putting a full fledged comment together (and face it, we're all busy people here clearly) then you should now just be able to take your pick between funny, interesting or meh but just clicking on the button. (Yes, it is skewed in my favour - that's the power of the media I guess)

So please, let me know what you think (assuming that this has worked) - it's always nice to know you're not just spouting off to the ether. (Or because of it)