Black Dog Blog

Archive for August, 2007

I can't remember if any of my friends is a fan of George Herriman's vintage cartoon animal Krazy Kat, but she was on Radio 4.

Krazy Kat (RealMedia audio, will disappear next Thursday lunchtimeish)

Bloggers battered by viral storm

Incidentally, that reminds me – does anyone reading use WordPress? There's talk of major attacks in the offing – PHP injection of some sort. My blog has already been targeted; the logs are slightly worrying. You see, I'm alpha'ing a new security system, and the maker's now happy for me to share it – so give me the word and I'll send you the plugin file. (There are still kinks, but I'll give you more info privately.)

In pictures: New pictorial smoking warnings. These are good. Strong stuff.

'Flying saucer' nears US take-off. (Thou'rt eight years tardy, Science!)

Your views: Turkey's new president

So did they interview anyone who actually voted for him? Yes, my fears about church and state are being nicely stoked and I'm happy to accept these viewpoints that luckily agree with my own, but still – some large proportion voted him in, no?

US judge approves gay weddings. Whoa. *stunned*

MusicLens is fun.

Based on my current mood (set by playing with sliders), guess what this thing recommended? Read the rest of this entry »

You wouldn't want to make this up. Experts tell Radio 4 that certain wind farms are underperforming because they are located in areas without any wind.

*shudder* SFW, but warning for THE HORROR THE HORROR OH MY EYES.

Lucky dog inherits $12m fortune

Which is as sensible as anything else. I hope the bequest included a bodyguard and financial advisor.

You won't like this picture if you don't like dead fish. Beautiful animal, nevertheless.

'Extinct' dolphin sighted?

World facing 'arsenic timebomb'

Coupla horse stories for those who are interested:

Equine flu hits Sydney racehorses

Serbia to return Croatian Lipizzaners

'Furious' horseman given caution at Lammas fair

Man claims new luge speed record

No hyperbole or anything, then?

What a very strange pose to choose. Sort of… I dunno, The Godfathery?

Oh yes, here's a good one – the wrong sort of trains.

Dog fight stuff is blowing up in the UK too.

There's a video, but be cautious if animal abuse upsets you.

Major grants for English museums

What's it like to be a zookeeper?

Bullet-proof fabric makes impact

Finally, this link via my favourite Cerhn: China regulates Tibetan reincarnation. (MSNBC story)

Words cannot express the lulz. Until you get to the usual "gullible Americans" statistics, that is, 'cause those are just worrying.

(This makes me want to write a story in which this happens, and it just so happens that I already have the perfect setting…
I think I'd take a different tack from Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan — which I've just read and can recommend, with warning for explicit sex scenes and torture. The violence, AIs and hard-boiledness make up for that, though.)

Aw what! Deplorable bits of dotty lion cub!

What should you do if money mysteriously turns up in your bank account?

Eagle and microlight fly together

Stuffed with a pack of lies. Advertisers should get the stiffest penalties, those deceptive parasites.

Sticky 'Spider-man' suit technology

Tar and feather attack 'barbaric'

I dunno. I find it a bit hard to fault, if the guy actually was a drug dealer. Anyway, ye gods, the delicate flower'll get over it.

What's it like to be a hairdresser? I've never wondered and now I know. Yawn.

Britons 'have cosmetic surgery for their partners'. (Or blame their partners, anyway.)

Merlin 'from Glasgow not Camelot'

Awesome, awesome picture.

Israeli anger over holy site work

(You can talk, matey!)

*eyes Turkey warily*

The trams are open again, with their new tracks, and quieter; admittedly I had earphones in and forgot to listen properly, but it was noticeably closer to a scrapy whoosh than a gouging rattle now. This is good, because it will cut my travel time down and let me sleep longer so I will no longer be as the title implies. (Or if I am, we'll know it's my own fault.)

This bank holiday weekend just disappeared. No, really, I think I lost Saturday. As in, Saturday is missing from my memory and throughout Sunday I thought there were two days to go. So, er. Whoever used those 26 or 28 hours, hope you had fun and thanks for returning my chassis in reasonably good nick, I suppose. I also note that my antibiotics did get taken during that time, so yay.

Damn I look good in my orange shades and evil coat. I actually scared a small child at the shops. Anyway, on with the news…

Bio-batteries. To the writer/worldbuilder of Mews, this sort of thing is (curd-)meat and drink.

Stone and Parker – props. They're fun dudes.

Hippo for Sarina, plus cute big cats et cetera.

Hey, Muslims? STFU.

It's a toy ball, for sanity's sake, with a bunch of countries' flags on it; it was obviously an honest and, let's face it, completely understandable mistake; nobody's trying to insult Islam; you are obviously just looking for something to protest about. Well, stop it.

Someone buy me this. I have designs on the site. Mwahahahaha.

Every time you think space is empty, they find a way for it to be emptier.

That was the biggest load of shite I have ever seen.

All along Slen's been telling me I'll love this, but —

I can't believe I identified more with the token humans than with the giant robots, ok? That is never a possibility with me. But I didn't have a choice. It never managed to make me care one whit about the tin cans and their GameCube. I wanted Prime to die. He was boring, personalityless and annoying. The only one that showed a hint of personality beyond 'being black' or 'being evil' was the friggin' comedy relief boombox.

When that Token Black Bot opened his mouth for the first time, I was close to walking out.

Maybe I should have. I sat through 21 Grams, for hellsake, a film of which I can remember nothing but the single quotation that was used on the trailer, but this CGI blockbuster, which should've contained nothing more controversial than a systematic reaming of the laws of physics, for that single moment honestly offended me.

Oh man don't get me started on the physics. I was prepared to suspend my disbelief there. Cartoon, after all.

The transforming jets dogfight? Fragging awesome. (Because for once the shot stayed long enough on the action to let my eyes interpret what was going on.) Final duke-out between Goodie and Baddie? Snore. I wanted the cube shoved up Prime's arse. Hell, for a split second I thought that was going to happen. That would have redeemed this pile.

I can't believe I preferred The Bourne Ultimatum, a film that would have been better titled The Bourne Lots of Random Explosions, to this truckload of dreck.

Which one was Starscream, again?

edit: Slightly less ranty summary, as I said in LJ comments: "the film couldn't decide whether it was an origin story or a Big Epic(yawn) Battle, whether it was a human story with incidental robots or a robot story with incidental humans, and whether it was action (in which lack of characterisation would be understandable, viz Bourne which I'd enjoyed earlier the same day) or character-driven (in which case they needed far far far far fewer characters)."

Over the last two evenings and much of today, I've been cataloguing my 1960s music, in preparation for burning it to DVD (because my skin turns at the thought of having a permanent-ish library containing missing composer names or incorrect years, doesn't yours?).

I've developed an even greater respect for Del Shannon. Look at his output. The man's a machine.

Oh, and Phil Spector is still a creep. He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) (The Crystals, 1962)… nyeeeeah. Nice one, Goffin and King. (Listen)

*eyes music collection* I was born in the wrong decade. Either 30 years too late or many decades too early, anyway.

I now have antibiotics, so should last the weekend with no problems at all. Nice dentist. Somewhat free with the affectionate diminuitives, but I didn't retaliate in kind.

Driving my disorganised self towards getting these gorram books sent out, I've just realised what one of my mental stumbling blocks has been throughout. And now, in all seriousness and with impeccable methodicalness, I am inventing a signature for myself.

Whaaat? It is an entirely new (pen)name, after all. Seeing as my current signature's just my name written messily, different each time, and seeing as I'm going to Be Somebody Big Some Day, I should have a distinctive, reproducible scrawl.

Ah, the backup's finally finished and I can go home.

When one bottle of shower gel went missing from my desk drawer at work, I thought I was crazy or absent-minded.

When the second bottle went missing from my drawer, I realised mistake and accident were both unlikely, sent a stern, witty email around the department warning of clean, selective thieves and began keeping my desk locked at all times.

Now the third bottle has gone missing…

I stare at the single key in my hand.

The Profusion redesign discussion is unfolding interestingly. Anyone with opinions, even if they're only the "I know what I hate when I see it" variety, please chime in.

As a whole different topic, the other night I started talking with Ree about what exactly I'd include if I were laying specs for a scalable writing-roleplay community sort of thing (à la SFV) to build from the ground up. The current plan is to stick with Discus because it's far better than any other forum software I've ever used. Indeed, if they ever release version 5 I'm prepared to pay for it (gasp). I'm only witholding my money now because they keep promising 5 then ducking questions about when it's due, and I don't like that.

Still, thinking along the lines of scratch-cobbled software is entertaining, if nothing more. I have half a site structure in mind. You can see where some webby2.0 and/or semantic elements could creep in (some variant of XFN among the characters! Generate your fecund elven prince's family tree! I'm buzzing at the mouth just thinking about all the fun) – and, by contrast, where you'd need to stamp down hard on arbitrary HTML and impose hard-coded limits on things like graphics. (People with more experience than me in horrid Sue-ridden huge-signature-graphic-using communities would have even more idea of What Not to Allow, I'm sure.)

Some flavours: the distinction between Pro and Twine (our encyclopaedia) would be much reduced, with background information a lot more closely integrated with the actual storyboards. Character personal 'blogs'. In-character discussion areas, with the IC/OOC line truly understood and reinforced and supported at a software level. Statistics (character last seen on #; click here to see all characters of this species; this character is currently in # active stories; # characters list 'sex' as their occupation). Oh, and an absolute ban on using copyrighted photos as PBs. So we'd need a supporting artist community – or an avatar generator…

Of course… actual members. Yah. Think small, Mutt. Think content, think customer service.

I saw an interesting plot idea on BRPS, of all places. I might introduce a storyboard like that, if I can find the interest for it…

Woot, I have an NHS dentist! How awesome! And it's close to my work, too.

Their first available checkup appointment, though, isn't until the 11th September (oh, auspicious) so I will have to find someone to canal my root in the meantime. Which probably means privately. I think the abcess has returned, proving that only pain is a strong enough motivator to make me overcome my latent fear of organisation, so it'll have to be antibiotics first.

My teeth are fairly bad. Got some mercury fillings in some, because I was too young to understand and my mother forgot to specify otherwise. If only I'd known how to understand physical actions like toothbrushing¹ at a younger age, I'd have taken better care of them, but tough cheese. *shrugs* This one with the abcess is completely cracked, though, which was simple bad luck. I think it broke on something stupid like a piece of bread. Before I even started my diet, that was.

(From here on I wander off into trying to explain some wacky autistic traits.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Now this is all kinds of awesome. 'Seam carving' digital image resizing method

Unlike many such new shinies, there are immediately obvious practical applications—certainly for designers, anyway.

With special guests Toby Sammet, Anila Mirza and Amir El-Falaki. Ya rly.

Owners 'must defend dogs' rights'

…I have nothing to say about this reprehensible image.

UK dog undergoes first knee swap

Stonehenge: A wizard did it.

(Alternative headline: "Nailed, nailed to the wheel…" \m/)

'Pampered' cows? Pampered? So making them lie on concrete floors was as much as they deserved? Idiotic headline.

Google Earth given celestial view

We once looked up Area 51 in Google Earth for a laugh. It's listed! But boring. Have you ever found any Easter eggs in Google Earth?

Camera scans into deepest space

Agatha Christie comic strips. Hmmm. I guess you'd have to restructure the story a lot to do the same level of clue-laying when using pictures. Then again, there are already TV adaptations, the most enjoyable of those being the David Suchet Poirot series.

I find it amusing to think of Miss Marple sharing a shelf with Miss Marvel, but why not? Christie's celeb sleuths are pretty much superheroes, albeit not in the "costume and powers" sense.

Ahem.

(Edguy video WTF, but I'm all about that gramophone section. Mmm.)

YouTube introduces video adverts

Yeah, they have to pay the bills, whatever. It's just this line that annoyed me; ads do NOT provide "value to the end user". What insulting tripe.

CIA 'launches Facebook for spies'

You can just guess the quality of most of the contributions.

Watchdog alarm at 'exam' earpiece

Worst name ever. Cute fish, though.

Is assault lawful when protecting someone? This article answers the question if you live in the UK.

OK, so T. rex could outrun the average footballer. But could it score?

(Cue crowd singing "There's only one compsognathus, one compsognathus…")

As soon as we have the technology, I propose we try this theory out on David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and… well, that's all the footballers I've heard of apart from Matt Busby, if he played, but let's just keep going until we run out of overpaid racist louts to use as test subjects.

Aw, what! Reprehensible cuteness!

Seaplaaaaaane!

Lyre thingy!

The psychology of pink.

Darker fruits could fight cancer

Mmmm blueberries. Food fads are boring, but it's nice to know that what you're eating already is supposedly super-great.

Shit, there's my degree at #2! XD

What makes it worse is that I flunked out in my second year! (Depression and stuff, not incapability.) I do wish I'd finished it, even though it's a slightly embarrassing qualification to admit to.

Golf management is stupid not because it's necessarily easy but because it's too specialised. You should learn general business skills and then work in the real world for a year or so to learn the applications. Otherwise what happens if you decide you hate golf, or the game ceases to exist?

Unusual neutron star.

'My breasts were so uncomfortable'

(Warning: contains possibly-NSFW photos, though no nipples visible.)

I feel dreadfully sorry for people in that sort of situation. It's not nice when bits of your body are out to get you, especially so when nobody takes it seriously.

So now she has a Compact Rack! Hahaha!

Teens 'cannot function in work' thanks to a lack of basic literacy and numeracy.

A-level pupils are getting record results.

CONFLICT PLEASE RESOLVE???

Chupacabra for the absolute win. Is that not the most beautiful thing you've seen today?

Plover, mallard, swan and geese: birdies' UK visits cease.

Also, baby robin.

Student guitar video game. I'd buy this on the strength of the name alone.

Pet camel kills Australian woman WITH LUV. (What. A way. To go. Gyaagh.)

Neolithic Wrigleys.

Clowns for Christ, now dipping children in a Big Top near you.

Jeremy Vine recommends: when faced with thugs in public places, say something and trust the mob to back you up.

Heads up, Pro members; I'm soliciting opinions on our tired, raggedy-looking banner image. (Non-members are welcome to comment too!)

Yes, this is in preparation for possibly drumming up a few more new members.