Rodeohead and Troy in 15 minutes

It's quite hard to describe what a bluegrass medley of Radiohead songs would sound like. You're probably better off right-clicking on this link and hitting "save target as". Trust me...you won't regret it. Includes Nice Dream, Fake Plastic Trees, Karma Police, Planet Telex, 2+2=5 and a truly incredible Paranoid Android. All in 4.5 minutes.

While you're waiting for it to download, have a quick read of "Troy in 15 mins". This is funny, even if you have seen the film. Quote:

"HELEN [weepy]: I can’t wear this because I’m sort of already married to that other guy but we’ve been doing the royal nasty for a week already anyway and you’re going to leave tomorrow and WAHHHHH.

PARIS: You could stow away and come with me and start a war that will end up killing 90% of the cast and totally be the downfall of my people and my kingdom!

HELEN: *sniff* I think… that’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me."

Meeting is finished - woo-hoo!

I hereby declare the INDeT 24 Month Management meeting, hosted in the University of Limerick - to be closed. I will now sleep for 3 days and try not to dream about Life-Cycle Monitoring.

In the unlikely event of any of them reading this...I'd like to thank Anne Murphy, Ed, Nick, Liam, Mikael, Trevor Young, my agent, the writers, the producers, Bhudda, Krishna, Ganesh, Allah, Abba and Glen Hansard. The meeting room would have been a lot less crowded without you.

There's photographic evidence that none of the attendees were hunted down and killed.

Protect your site from thiefs!

"Your images, your text, your design, your PayPal links are all at risk."

twits

archaeology

Man, the web sucks. For the second time in my life, I've wasted almost an hour looking for a copy of the omicron quake bot.

What remains of the once glorious world of quake websites is truly pathetic. Strangely enough, a lot of pages with download links for the bot are still up, but (almost) without exception their links point to:

• Pages that have disappeared off the face of the earth, replacing the entire site with a big 404 or whose domains have expired (as indicated by a "helpful" "search engine" page ("search for books about obots102.zip")).
  
• Sites that have been bought up and turned into portals dedicated to maximising the number of flash-loaded popups and "free registration"s per second, and whose owners have no interest in keeping a file archive for, or acknowledging the existence of, any game older than six months.
  
• FTP servers that have reorganised their directory structure twenty times since the link was written, and that dropped all the games content when somebody in charge noticed what the techies had been putting on their server that was supposed to be generating revenue dammit.
  
• Occasional tragi-comic efforts like this
  

Even the wayback machine is no use, as they don't seem to archive zip files.

Anyway, eventually found the sumbitch here and mirrored it there. And so, another piece of priceless cultural heritage is preserved. All in a day's work.

Music to hunt Europeans to...

...and as I hunt down my meeting attendees, I will need an appropriate soundtrack.

Tempting as Morricone's symphony for screaming Mexicans might be (or perhaps Blur's No Distance Left to Run), it'll probably the same stuff I've been listening to for the last few weeks...Endtroducing.

Hey Hannes, remember that really annoying DJ Shadow album I used to listen to in the kitchen? Well, the first one's even more annoying.

It's a lot more like that Nightmares On Wax stuff, only less repetitive. Check out the track "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt" and see what you think.

Fruit Configuration...

Just uploaded the latest (and hopefully last) draft of my epic presentation on all things related to Life-Cycle Monitoring to the server in college in readiness for the upcoming (tomorrow) 2-day smorgasbord of INDeT. I hope OpenOffice is as compatible with MS-Office as everyone claims it is.

I will personally hunt down and kill any attendee who does not find his/her hotel and meeting room - given that I sent them about a half a dozen maps and step-by-step guides to navigation within the University.

Hunting EU project delegates is not something to be taken lightly. To be sporting, one must provide maps and descriptions of possible escape routes. Brightly coloured PowerPoint presentations can be used as lures. However, the true master uses nothing but free coffee and the promise of expensive food...

Here's hoping that the whole venture doesn't come out looking something like this.

Go find a real job!

Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore's new film has won the Palme D'Or in Cannes. Which was inevitable really...it being France and all.

Judging from some of the initial reactions, it's gonna be a helluva lot better than "Bowling". I'm sure it won't be long until some right-wing websites have picked it over and found 1 or 2 small mistakes, but luckily this time, Moore seems to have had the sense to leave himself mostly off camera and just let the footage do the talking. Like GWB telling him to go get a real job.

Apparently, the movie documents the last 4 years of American politics (before and after 11/9/01), concentrating on the Bush family's ties with the Bin Ladens. It has a go at the Patriot act as well as footage of prisoner mistreatment from Moore's own embedded reporters.

Sounds great...now, if only Disney would let us watch the fucking thing.

Oh, great.

There follows a direct translation of the carefully printed note (in german and spanish) I found under my door when I got home today:

New suggestions for flat-maintenance tasks Berlin, 22.5.04

D has taken care of many tasks relating to the flat (carefully cleaning kitchen and bathroom, washing, decorating of the flat), without complaining or asking money for doing so.

She has now arrived at a point where this no longer feels right for her.

D therefore suggests that those who do not wish to partake in cleaning activities of common rooms (hall, kitchen, bath, closets) pay 5 euro into a fund made available to those who do partake in the work.

Those who do wish to take part in the shared cleaning, have the following options

Possibilities for the realisation of D's suggestion

a) weekly hoovering of all common rooms (hall, kitchen, bath)

b) weekly mopping of kitchen floor

c) weekly thorough cleaning of the bathroom (mirror, sink, toilet, bath, floor)

Come back bollocks, all is forgiven.

Fennell added

...as admin.

Web comics

For thorough-going time sinkage...nothing beats webcomics. There's a comic out there for every lifestyle, hobby or fetish. Here are some of the ones I tend to flick through...

• The venerable Penny Arcade: for people who know far more about video games than is good for them.



• Piled Higher, and Deeper: for those who are currently winding their way through the guts of higher education like a slothful, malevolent tapeworm (extra points if you spot the reference).



• Something Positive: role-playing games, porn, dead-end jobs, two homicidal japanese women and a boneless cat. Say no more.



• Elf Only Inn: chatroom based role-playing games and the saddoes who frequent them. Not that great to be honest, but worth it for the Lord W00t character.



• The Least I Could Do: kinda like a web comic version of Friends...only funny. And two dimensional rather than one-dimensional.



• User Friendly: I don't read this, but a lot of people do. Aimed at geeks.



• Electric Sheep: All the other comics listed here are simply traditional comics posted on the web. E-Sheep is like an entirely new art-form.

Hacker Librarians from Green Hell

libraryjournal.com: "There is a subculture of librarians that could make a significant impact on the profession. They are women and men, youthful and experienced alike, who all share one thing: a passion for solving problems by creating software. They are hacker librarians."

I tells ya, they're right amongst us! Hiding out in the library, pretending they couldn't use a barcode reader to save their lives.

L1st3n up, L4m3R!! j00 g0t5 4 5h0r7 L04Nz 0verd00 4 l1k3 4ev3r! r3trn d4 b00kz or w3 h4x0r f1n3z on j00 acc0un7!! w3 h4v l33t t4l1sw3b t00lz so d0nt fuX0r w1th u5!!!

Monsanto Win Case Against Canadian Farmer

In the wake of the EU decision allowing GM sweetcorn into Europe, comes the news that Monsanto have a final appeal in their case against Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser.

Monsanto own a patent on GM modified "Roundup Ready" canola...which has been engineered for resistance to Monsanto's Roundup pesticide.

A farmer who plants RR Canola must sign a license agreement with Monsanto that he/she will not "save" the seeds from one year's crop to plant again the next year. Instead, a new batch of seed must be purchased from Monsanto. The company sends inspectors to carry out checks on fields to make sure that their intellectual property is not being "pirated" by "unscrupulous" farmers. Rather like TV license inspectors...

Percy Schmeiser, a farmer and local politician, never purchased or grew Monsanto seed - not being a great fan of GM crops. In 1998 a Monsanto inspector (trespassing on Schmeiser's land) discovered a small patch of RR canola growing on Schmeiser's farm and informed him that he could either pay damages to Monsanto or have his entire canola crop destroyed.

Schmeiser claimed that the seeds had blown in from a neighbour's farm and ventured the opinion that it was lucky he wasn't taking Monsanto to court for contaminating his crops. He also wasn't particularly happy about the trespassing.

Monsanto sued him, saying that it was immaterial whether the canola had been planted by Schmeiser illegally or it had blown in...it was still their property and they wanted blood.

Now, it seems to me that this is an open and shut case. All the evidence I've seen points to the fact that Schmeiser was blameless in all this - and had in fact every reason to be annoyed at the fact that his crop had been contaminated. This is aside from the fact that it is ridiculous to grant anyone a patent on a living organism.

Unfortunately, after many years of legal wrangling, the Canadian Supreme Court yesterday rendered a judgment in favour of Monsanto.

While seemingly agreeing with Schmeiser that he had done nothing illegal, the court nonetheless found that:

"By cultivating a plant containing the patented gene and composed of the patented cells without license, [the Schmeisers] thus deprived Monsanto of the full enjoyment of its monopoly."

Monsanto welcomed the decision as "setting a new standard in intellectual property protection".

Who Let the Fields Out?

I can hear drunken students returning from the Lodge and vomiting in the bushes while singing "Who Let the Dogs Out" to the tune of "The Fields of Athenry". Some of us are still living in the before-time...

Time to sleeeeeeep.

check out the competition

So as to ensure maximum work-avoidancy, I decided to equip myself with a secondary blog as a redundant standby: meet B 612.

All kinds of funky stuff is going to happen to it, no doubt, as I learn JavaScript and CSS over the next week or so for work.

Huh, that thing just happened - where I stop typing for a second and suddenly I can hear birds singing outside. Reminds me of olden times... I keep expecting some shaven-headed creature to stick its head round the door looking for coke and a game of quake.

I'm going to bed. Really.

Oh, the injustice of it all

And here I was, with this BEAUTIFUL post all written. Full of the most amazing shafts of stuff it was, a terror to behold. And I had to go press the "save as draft" button, just to see what it does. DNS error, that's what. Byebye post. The hell I'm going to type all that muck again.

I oughta take that wireless router and... anyway. What I really oughta is get the hell to bed. It's even later here than it is there, and there it's way too late to be early enough for this kind of shit.

Repent! The End is Nigh!

...Hannes has admin access.

Run children! Run for your lives!

Evility

Even though this is a free service (and powered by Google, the source of all good in the universe), I removed the banner ad at the top of the blog cos it just looked wrong. I'll add it back somewhere less conspicuous (honest!).

Dreamcatcher

I have a backlog of things to be annoyed about. First up is this (literally) excerable movie. I should have known better than to rent a movie based on a Stephen King book that wasn't called the Shining - but I never in my wildest dreams (or worst nightmares) imagined that it was possible to make movies this bad.

The "plot" is about a bunch of middle-aged American guys (one of whom has a Canadian accent for no adequately explained reason) who were given magical powers as kids by a retarded orphan (I swear, I'm not making this up). Anyway, they're having a reunion in a cabin in the woods during a snowstorm, when a violently ill fat guy shows up. They take him in and to their very great surprise, a massive alien eel bursts out of the fat guy's ass and eats one of them (honestly, this actually happened in the movie).

Meanwhile Morgan Freeman (who's practically wearing a t-shirt that says "Doing it for the money") shows up as an insane, cigar-chomping army general. Apparently aliens have been invading for the last 20 years and bursting out of people's asses and Freeman and his crack (sorry) band of commandoes are the only ones who know about it.

After this, the film gets a bit stupid...

I'll spare you the rest of the plot, but it's almost worth watching for the last scene where the retarded kid saves the world by battling with super-ass-eel in a reservoir.

Don't watch this movie, unless you wanna wind up looking like this guy for days afterwards:

Corsairs, Syphiliptics, Barbary Pirates and Galley Slaves

...I've finally gotten around to starting the sequel to Quicksilver, the Confusion.

It's hopelessly addictive. It's so good, it makes up for having to slog through expository dialogue and long digressions on the origin of money, the Royal Society and the English Civil War, which made up so much of Quicksilver. Not that they weren't entertaining, but it felt more like a history book than a novel. It also cut between 4 or 5 different plot strands in 3 different time periods - which made it a tad confusing for the first 300 pages or so.

Luckily, the Confusion limits itself to 2 simultaneous plot strands (which occur concurrently and at the same time), so it's much more grokable. I'm only 200 pages in, but I highly recommend it (even if you have to slog through Quicksilver first).

The obvious solution...

...to my chronic inability to e-mail people, is to create a weblog. Wibble is dead, long live Wibble!