| Date: | 2007-02-08 14:29 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
Woot
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A restaurant is being sued in federal court by a group representing songwriters for playing tunes written by Van Morrison, Dwight Yoakam and others without a license.
B-M-I says damages could reach 750 dollars per song.
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Cy, short for Cyclopes, a kitten born with only one eye and no nose, is shown in this photo provided by its owner in Redmond, Oregon, on Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005.
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O'Grady sounds off about a special Apple announcement to be made on Tuesday's Macworld Expo keynote address in San Francisco. In a humorously analogized editorial piece, he is first to reveal the details about how Apple is about to rock the consumer electronics world again with an entirely new product ... HDTV Plasmas.
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Movie, excellent, well done for an esemble cast. Go see it.
People in roles opinion follows.
Cyclops - terrible. Keanu Reeves school of acting
Rogue - good (i have to say that, I'm a kiwi)
Wolverine - excellent
Mystique - good, though the camera seemed to be trying to not show and show her bits simultaneously which was distracting.
Nightcrawler. - best, just beautiful. Stole every scene he could get his little blue hands on.
Storm - well, Halle berry. Not a fan.
Jean - ok
Prof. X - solid, make it so.
Magneto - excellent, complex rendition
Lady Deathstrike - wooden.
Stryker(sp?) - looks too much like my Dad to be threatening, ok tho
Pyro - good - nicely unhinged
Whattya all think?
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I live around bricklane which has a lot of stores which sell bollywood movies.
On th way to the tube in the mornings I often look in the windows at the posters for no real reason than they are occasionally quite funny.
This one stopped me dead.
Man with a gun, beautiful scantily clad girl sprawled at his feet (think asian James Bond poster and you are there).
Strapline
Jism: The darker side of love.
I dont know what that means in the orginal language, but I stood there in the rain and laughed my arse off.
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As per usual I don't like the questions
The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test
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I can't express how very very wrong this is.
Basically, after you blow yourself to bits trying to get your cattle across to the pasture years after the war has ended, the frigging minefield rebuilds itself behind you.
Presumably they want to be sure they get any survivors on the way back.
Think about this - You cannot clear the minefield - there is no way to create a safe path without killing every mine.
A flash demonstration can be seen here.
The original article is on the register.
Oh you sick sadistic bastards.
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| Date: | 2003-04-12 22:19 |
| Subject: | Some creative |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: | artistic |
This is a prelude to a book I'm starting to play with.
Originally I was going to rework it to be hp fanfic (Voldemorts takeover of Quirrel) but on reflection it's too different.
If you like it, let me know, if you don't let me know (be constructive ;-).
If enough people like it, perhaps I'll finish the first chapter and post that too.
Are there any spirits in the ether? Sound off.
( Read more... )
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| Date: | 2003-04-10 17:36 |
| Subject: | Johnny come lately |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  guilty | | Music: | Eagles greatest hits from gregs PC |
Listening to the Eagles greatest hits all day in the background.
Not only do I find I know all the lyrics, I even sing along - I feel I should find this disturbing.
I feel I should be edgy, obscure, and tormented.
Whats next, Mistletoe and Wine by Cliff Richard?
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to have a pint at lunchtime.
Now I have to ring a client and appear to be coherent.
This will be bad.
Client: babble babble burble
Me: mmmph
Client: burble burble burble
Me: uh huh
Client: grumble grumble grumble
Me: hmmmmm
Client: ok, so what have we agreed
Me: *click*
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| Date: | 2003-04-09 15:27 |
| Subject: | A nice night had by all |
| Security: | Public |
| Mood: |  blank | | Music: | some elevator music from gregs PC |
Caught up with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alasdair last night for a few drinks.
A good time - hell of a nice guy is Alasdair.
Shared some old war stories from when we worked together and generally had a convivial evening.
marysiak could have come to, but I guess since they live together (no not like that) she gets her Alasdair quotient anyhow.
In case you are wondering, this post is going nowhere, I just found a good lj client, so I'm trying it out.
I am recycling old posts and writings at the moment, so I'll put something interesting up later, so go and do some work and check back then.
Oh, and when someones on a conference call, dont walk past and exclaim loudly 'Its fucking cold out there'.
Especially when its the MD :)
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Googlemancy- a method of divination for the technopagans amongst us.
Stichomancy - A form of divination by randomly chosing a word or verse and interpreting an oracular meaning from it to answer an inquirer's question usually concerning a course for future action.
Bibliomancy is common form of stichomancy in which you hold a question in your mind and open the bible to an arbitrary page and choose a phrase at random which is then (supposed) to contain the answer to your question.
People have used other texts as well ranging from poetry to the works of Shakespeare.
It seems to be that you need three elements in order to use stichomancy, a question to be answered (obviously), a source of knowledge preferably split into small phrases or sections, and a method of selecting which phrase or section is the answer to your question.
The method that you use to select the phrase from the source should be or appear to be random in order to allow the "unknown" the gap it needs to influence the outcome of the stichomancy,
The source of content from which the answer is selected needs to be large enough in order to provide enough "result space" to allow the unknown to select an appropriate response.
So Googlemancy is the new oracle.
Googlemancy uses the internet as the source text for the stichomancy and google as the mechanism for selecting an appropriate phrase.
Heres a definition then
googlemancy - a form of stichomancy in which the user enters randomly selected words into google and takes the first result summary to be the anwer to their question
As an example of googlemancy I fed the following three words into google - increased, bustle, withdrawl. These words were selected by randomly opening three books and putting my finger on the middle of the page.
Googlemancy returned this
Neuroscience for Kids - Barbiturate
... The hustle and bustle of everyday life creates stress ... Withdrawal symptoms that occur
when people try to ... The increased chloride ion flow reduces the chance that ...
It makes sense to me - try it out :)
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Creativity is a funny thing.
When I first started to write ( and before I stopped for a long time) I was using an ancient PC.
It was an Amstrad PC512 with dual 5 3/4 floppies (no hard drive here). The thing was made of plastic and was an all round piece of shite.
I ran a copy of wordstar off one disk and saved my work on another ( a good friend had only 1 drive - lamer).
Wordstar was a Dos based word processor and it did the basics.
The basics meant write, print, save. Thats it. One font.
But.
But there was a mystical element to that old machine.
Sometimes the grey letters would float onto the screen and they seemed to be typing themselves.
The screen was black and the letters light grey. With no windows, titles, icons, colours to distract me the monitor screen was a deep reflectionless black.
Literally the creative void.
Didn't the mystics use black mirrors as a means of seeing the future?
Now I use a Powerbook running OS X and it has all the eye candy you can shake a retina at. I can multitask up the whoosit, write websites and databases in MySQL, Postgres, PHP, perl. I can write truly lickable applications in Cocoa.
But.
I couldn't seem to be creative in a literary way on this machine.
So I took my text editor and set the background to black. I set the font to an old dos font and changed the colour to grey.
Set the background color of the desktop to black and hide all the icons.
Ohhhh yeah - now we're cooking. Now Im back in DOS. Now I'm home.
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Now to sharpen it and find marysiak
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Actually I just added awatson, hope he don't mind.
He didna refuse last time I bought him a drink, and I can't afford to be picky...
Anyhow, he used to work for me, so he has to be nice in case anyone calls to check his references :)
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It was fun when it started, what with the sneezing and tickling and all.
Now its just plain nasty, like having your nasal cavities sandpapered by a sadistic smurf.
And I'm being pressured to go to the pub.
Oh, and dont sneeze while drinking coffee.
In front of you keyboard.
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Who knew?
Marysia - thanks for the pointer.
War is bad, cider is good, shaving is bad, fanfic is odd, i like jello.
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| Date: | 2003-01-09 22:06 |
| Subject: | zen mole |
| Security: | Public |
There is a little mole on my neck.
Its not a brown mole - its a pink one.
It grew after I shaved one day and the doctor couldn't figure out what it was so he sent me to the skin clinic.
I spent some time in the waiting room, watching the people, wondering where they were hiding their rashes, or what strange diseases they were hiding under their clothes.
My mole is visible, it peers through a fleshy monocle at the world from midway up my neck. It is not shy.
I saw the skin specialist.
She poked my small protuberance, and tugged it gently.
Does that hurt? - No
Does it bleed? - No
Is it getting bigger? - No
Is it getting smaller? - No
It appears that my growth is the zen master of small skin buds. No worldly temptation can cause it to change, it is perfect in its serenity. Impervious to outside influence it squats on my neck, contemplating the universe and its lack of navel.
She calls in a senior consultant and they argue gently in Latin medi-speak about what it might be.
Eventually they agree that they have never seen one before, but it probably is not dangerous.
Thats good, but if they don't know what it is how can they tell?
Even if you can't assign a Latin name to a angry dog it can still bite you.
They decide to freeze the mole to death with liquid nitrogen.
I imagine that this will hurt.
I am right.
My mole is still on my neck. It is no longer pink and serene.
It is red and angry and dying of frostbite.
I am told that in a few weeks it will likely fall off. Hopefully not in a coffee shop into my cappucino.
I'm sorry that this had to be my first weblog entry.
On a plus side Alasdair has purchased a fine fishermans jacket in order to carry around all his assorted electronica. Its techie/goth black but has 13 (yes we counted them) pockets.
Whilst he was down stairs we took the opportunity to 'gift' him with the following small items that we considered might be useful for his journey home.
A ribbon cable from a broken computer
a driver disk for an ethernet card we don't have
some 'Happy Birthday' glitter
some paper clips
some other little bits I forget
I look forward to tomorrow.
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On this journal thing. Now I should be able to get a decent style going and move some older content across.
Whoo ho.
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amused
groggy