fox_uk

Subvertising

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:07:43 GMT

With many thanks to andygates for finding the page that makes them, I present my addition to the world of subvertising...

A bit of puerile humour never harmed anyone after all...

Movie Quiz Revisited

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:13:24 GMT

8 months ago I posted up the movie quiz thing Esran found. Well, i don;t think you guys tried hard enough with finding the answers so here it is again! Only the easy ones have gone already so good luck on that. I'll be a bit more helpful in giving clues this time, though.

Meme rules:
1. Pick 15 of your favourite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Fill in the film title once it's guessed.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search functions. Totally cheating, you dirty cheaters.

1) S R Hadden - "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" - Contact - - Esran

2) "They are all freaks! Not one of them under five foot six. What kind of theater is this?"

3) "You're the first woman I've seen in one of these things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman."

4) Agent Myers - "Did you ever lose track of him?"
   Hellboy - "Well let's see - there was that moment, when I had the train on top of my head..." - Hellboy - ShaunOTD

5) Character 1 - "She's in love."
     Character 2 - "Wouldn't she rather be dead?"

6) Leon - "Wake up! Time to die!" - Blade Runner - Spike

7) "Don't say anything. Your words would be useless, maybe even insulting. Just fly the damn plane."

8) Eliza Doolittle - "I ain't dirty! I washed my face and hands before I come, I did!" - My Fair Lady - Skean

9) "Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun."

10) Dr Ray stantz - "I think we'd better split up."
     Dr Egon Spengler - "Good idea."
     Dr Peter Venkman - "Yeah... we can do more damage that way." - Ghostbusters - esran

11)  Vesper Lynd - "It doesn't bother you? Killing all those people?"
    James Bond - "Well, I wouldn't be very good at my job if it did." - Casino Royale - ShaunOTD

12) Ted - "Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K!" - Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure - Esran

13) "Can we keep this... between us? I'd hate to lose my teaching job..."

14) Jim - "Then one day I hear "Reach for it, mister." I spun around, and there I was standing face to face with a six year old kid. Well, I just laid down my guns and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass. So I limped to the nearest saloon, crawled inside a whiskey bottle, and I've been there ever since" - Blazing Saddles - esran

15) Mother - "O.K., boss, this LTX-27 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo moon landings. Yeah, the astronauts broadcast around the world from a soundstage at Norton Airforce Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems." - Sneakers - esran

And it looks like some clues are needed. So here are some costars from each one although they did not utter the line in question...

2 - Sean Connery
3 - Sigourney Weaver
5 - Jack Lemon
7 - Nigel Hawthorne (!)
9 - Ted Raimi
13 - Bill Paxton

Movie Quotes Quiz

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:39:30 GMT

Stolen from esranwho stolled it from other people so it's not really stolling, is it? Anyway, I need a post to show I am actually alive until I get WordPress working properly again.

Meme rules:
1. Pick 15 of your favourite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Fill in the film title once it's guessed.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search functions. Totally cheating, you dirty cheaters.

1) S R Hadden - "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" - Contact - - Esran

2) "They are all freaks! Not one of them under five foot six. What kind of theater is this?"

3) "You're the first woman I've seen in one of these things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman."

4) Character 1 - "Did you ever lose track of him?"
   Character 2 - "Well let's see - there was that moment, when I had the train on top of my head..."

5) Character 1 - "She's in love."
     Character 2 - "Wouldn't she rather be dead?"

6) Leon - "Wake up! Time to die!" - Blade Runner - Spike

7) "Don't say anything. Your words would be useless, maybe even insulting. Just fly the damn plane."

8) "I ain't dirty! I washed my face and hands before I come, I did!"

9) "Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun."

10) Dr Ray stantz - "I think we'd better split up."
     Dr Egon Spengler - "Good idea."
     Dr Peter Venkman - "Yeah... we can do more damage that way." - Ghostbusters - esran

11) Character 1 - "It doesn't bother you? Killing all those people?"
    Character 2 - "Well, I wouldn't be very good at my job if it did."

12) Ted - "Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K!" - Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure - Esran

13) "Can we keep this... between us? I'd hate to lose my teaching job..."

14) Jim - "Then one day I hear "Reach for it, mister." I spun around, and there I was standing face to face with a six year old kid. Well, I just laid down my guns and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass. So I limped to the nearest saloon, crawled inside a whiskey bottle, and I've been there ever since" - Blazing Saddles - esran

15) Mother - "O.K., boss, this LTX-27 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo moon landings. Yeah, the astronauts broadcast around the world from a soundstage at Norton Airforce Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems." - Sneakers - esran

Putting a New Site together

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:46:07 GMT

Finally started some serious work on Nat and my personal web site. It's been sat there for a few months now and I've never got around to making the damned thing work. The closest I've come is to go through one of the automated site builder scripts and then leave it stagnating while I head of for some industrial thumb twiddling. Of course, this would explain why, upon examining the output a few months down the line, the site had been located, targeted and shitspammed by a hell of a lot of porn site ranking engines.

Unfortunately, the first I knew about this was when I asked Nat to look at my funky integration of gallery into the front pages at which point she headded straight for the blog and asked me why I was advertising naked Brazillian teen whores nine hundred times. Ho hum.

Today I'll get Wordpress installed and then, hopefully, we'll be able to migrate off of Livejournal once and for all.

Pixying

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 14:02:53 GMT

Pixying (v) - The act of sabotaging large-scale industrial construction equipment and then insisting that the faeries did it.

Just over a decade ago I was working out of Marshfield as a comms engineer for Dopra. My project at the time was lead engineer for the installation of a new telephone command switch for the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service. Don't worry, I think the equipment is obsolete now but for a long time if you lived in Berkshire and had a chip-pan fire your kitchen's survivability was directly linked to how much beer I'd had the night before designing the cross-connections in the switch.

One blustery late-autumn evening, with the rain coming down in sheets, I had to drive to Reading for a meeting the following morning. By the side of the road, just before the M32 began, stood a rather forlorn and bedraggled figure holding a sodden itinerary sheet. At the time nevboo and shaunotd were doing a fair old amount of hitching and coming back with unhappy tails of roadside abandonment and irate anti-hitcher police officers. The guy looked a bit crusty, but about my age and relatively harmless and so, feeling a tad sorry for him, I pulled over and offered him a ride.

He thankfully dropped into the passenger seat, rivulets of rain-water running down his scalp and dripping onto the upholstery. But that's what rental cars are for. I asked him where he was going and received a mumble in response. So I tried again and eventually prized from him his destination. He was returning to the Newbury bypass protest camp after a visit to another protest somewhere near Southampton. And that was about all I could get from him. He was a sullen individual, to say the least, and all my questions were answered with mumbled, terse responses which were so quiet as to be barely audible over the rumble of the car wheels on the tarmac. I was tempted to dump him at a service station and carry on with my journey but curiosity got the better of me and we eventually arrived at the camp site.

The major offensive by the security forces had already occurred a few months earlier - the tunnels had been stormed and the trees cut down from under the protesters - and the remaining contingent were a hardcore group of ardent believers in their cause. We drove up to a lonely twenty-four hour petrol station and my passenger indicated the direction of the camp site and invited me to visit. The rain had abated and the light levels increased to a point where I could see the devastation surrounding the area. Through what must have once been a heavily wooded section of countryside there now lay a gash in the landscape where all vegetation had been stripped away. A two hundred foot wide strip of stark, brown earth which, through the twilight, seemed to lead into the horizon in both directions lay between the us and the lights of the camp. We trudged over and were met by the cliched rag-tag group of protesters. All the standards were there. The middle-class kids wanting to make a stand for something. The dreadlocked hippy types appalled at the devastation being visited upon the countryside. The dedicated eco-warriors, part anarchist, part agit-prop expert, all pissed off. All of them were charming and thanked me profusely for returning to them one of their own. Around a camp fire beneath a hole in a large tarpaulin which offered some protection from the disgusting weather we traded comestibles - a cup of tea in their case, a packet of cigs in mine - and stories. They told me about the mother duck who had just hatched her eggs underneath one of the felled trees right next to where the construction machines were due to be heading the next day. It was then that they introduced me to the term pixying, defined above. In return, I explained all about nanotechnology (way before the current media hype, this was 1996 remember) and scared the living crap out of them by telling them exactly what an ethno-specific virus could do.

We wandered back to the petrol station where I bought another couple of packets of cigs "for the cause" and bid them all good luck. The funny thing is that, when I look back, I find myself wondering more about what happened to the duck and her chicks than to the protesters. No doubt a lot of them have rejoined society properly but I bet there are still a few of them chained to trees, somewhere.

No WSOP for me :(

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:45:12 GMT

Oh well, I tried and failed. The last chance I had for qualifying in what is bound to be the largest Hold-'Em poker tournament in history ended in a heads-up (one-on-one game) last night with my K9 being pummelled by an AQ hitting a straight. Denied!

Still, I can blame my Nottingham landlord for promising to get broadband piped into the flat I am staying at midweek and then utterly failing to do so, resulting in three weeks without a chance to play. Still, I am coming out of this with half a grand more than I went in, and a hell of a lot more experience playing these sorts of games, so mustn't grumble too much.

Sopranos Finale

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:12:43 GMT

Loads of people up in arms about the Sopranos Finale right now. I, for one, thought it was rather clever.

The fade to black before a conclusive ending has been done before, sure, but I'll have to agree with the creator, David Chase, in that everything that needed to be said had been said. People spend too much time looking for finality, answers, and closure but in real life you rarely get those things. And so it was in the Sopranos. We were left with a view of the family but will Tony be finally nabbed by the feds? Is that a hitman about to emerge from the bathroom? Will Sil recover? It doesn't really matter. The big questions have been answered but we're left wanting more.

And that was always going to be the case. So get over it and recognise that you've just watched eight years of superb entertainment.

Delia Smith's a Bitch

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 13:58:27 GMT

We had my parents come visit us on the Bank Holiday weekend and so it was time to put on the apron and do some cooking. I'd decided the food for the day had to be MEAT, spelled with a capital MEAT, and so I hit Borough Market on the search for some short ribs for a bit of braising.

Could I find any? Could I buggery. Nobody had any, with the main butchers saying they'd been hit by a huge number of restaurant orders and were having trouble getting their stock together. So instead I settled for a rack of beef ribs and wandered back home.

A quick google search for likely recipes came up with Deliah Smith's recipe for a roast. I guess I should have spent longer looking for my copy of Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall's bumper book of MEAT (which is an absolutely fantastic book, by the way, if you are even slightly interested in cooking) but it's been buried somewhere in the growing pile of boxes and so Delia had to suffice.

A bit of an explanation as to the guests who would be eating. As well as my folks, Nat's parents, her brother and her sister-in-law, Ana, were also coming for a nosh. Nat's mother, Michelle, and Ana are continental types (French and Spanish respectively) and so as far as they're concerned if they don't get spat in the eye with a gush of blood when they put their forks into their animal-based food product, they're not happy. "Rare" doesn't begin to suffice as an adjective in describing their preferred level of cooking. "Mooing" is probably mopre accurate. This meant that to make everyone happy I was aiming for a medium rare finish so that those more English amongst us could at least nibble on the crusty outside layer whilst the more primal carnivores could get down and dirty with a barely cooked piece of MEAT.

Anyway, Delia's ideas as to correct cooking temperatures and times are... how can I put it... utterly shite. Following her recipe to the letter, using an oven thermometer to make sure the temperature was correct, weighing the ribs on a digital scale etc left me with a scientifically exact notion as to how long I should leave the oven going in order to create the perfect roast. What I ended up with was something so brown it could have won a best newcomer award in the MOBOs. Oh well, at least the celeriac mash came out well enough, even though by the time I'd finished the kitchen looked like someone had tossed a grenade in and slammed the door shut just before it went off.

Ana ended up trying her best to push the food around on her plate and then made excuses about having a big lunch. At least Michelle admitted that, although she hated the thought of the damn thing, the food itself was rather nice, which it was. Finding a premium piece of beef which had been hung for five weeks definitely paid off and the roast was lovely. My parents couldn't give a monkey's and being proud Manchester folk polished the lot off and had seconds, all the while bemoaning how the rest of Europe didn't know how to use fire properly anyway.

So the moral of the story is always test your recipes before you make them in a live environment. Either that, or never trust an inebriated cow with an unhealthy interest in extremely bad football clubs. One of the above, for sure.

New 2012 Olympic Shiruken

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:08:19 GMT

Ladies and gentlemen. Without further ado, we are pleased to present the new, 2012 London Olympics Logo...

So far the best description seen has been "The Swastika for the 21st Century"

As you may well imagine, quite a lot of people are rather dischuffed with the whole thing. A quick search and you can find a number of petitions asking for the logo to be retired, then shot, then burned, then shot again, along with the team who designed it.

Who can blame them?

Offensive Humour

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:14:29 GMT

Whilst standing stark-bollock naked in the changing rooms at the gym yesterday I got to thinking.

I don't think gay men be allowed to get use the men's changing areas.

Unless the rest of the men have the option of heading into the women's dressing rooms.

I may have been overdoing it on the eliptical, of course...

POTC 3

Wed, 30 May 2007 15:37:19 GMT

Well, I liked it so nyeah!

Some advice if you want to go see this movie. First off, make sure you have watched POTC 2 no more than 48 hours before going to the cinema. If you do not do this you will miss about seven hundred and fifty eight minute details which are referenced in the third film and which are vital to understand what the hell is going on.

Secondly, listen to Hans Zimmer's excellent soundtrack during the remainder of the forty eight hours. That way you can listen to the music if you get bored during the film.

And finally, remember to stay until after the credits have finished rolling because, as per the previous two films, there's a teensy bit extra at the end.

No Life but Lots Of Films Meme

Wed, 30 May 2007 15:30:06 GMT

Oh, this is going to be brutal. Mercilessly stolen from esran.

SUPPOSEDLY if you've seen over 85 films, you have no life. Mark the ones you've seen. There are 239 films on this list. Copy this list, paste this as a note. ...

(x) Rocky Horror Picture Show
() Grease
(x) Pirates of the Caribbean
(x) Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest
() Boondock Saints
(x) Fight Club
() Starsky and Hutch
() Neverending Story
(x) Blazing Saddles
(x) Airplane

Total: 6

(x) The Princess Bride
(>) AnchorMan (half, as I couldn't make myself watch ththe whole thing)
() Napoleon Dynamite
(x) Labyrinth
() Saw
() Saw II
() White Noise
() White Oleander
(x) Anger Management
(x) 50 First Dates
(x) The Princess Diaries
(x) The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement

Total so far: 12.5

(x) Scream
() Scream 2
() Scream 3
() Scary Movie
() Scary Movie 2
() Scary Movie 3
() Scary Movie 4
() American Pie
() American Pie 2
() American Wedding
() American Pie Band Camp

Total so far: 13.5

() Harry Potter 1
() Harry Potter 2
() Harry Potter 3
() Harry Potter 4
(x) Resident Evil 1
(x) Resident Evil 2
(x) The Wedding Singer
(x) Little Black Book
() The Village
() Lilo & Stitch

Total so far: 17.5

() Finding Nemo
(x) Finding Neverland
(x) Signs
(x) The Grinch
() Texas Chainsaw Massacre
() Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
() White Chicks
() Butterfly Effect
(x) 13 Going on 30
(x) I, Robot
(x) Robots

Total so far: 23.5

(x) Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
(x) Universal Soldier
() Lemony Snicket: A Series Of Unfortunate Events
(x) Along Came Polly
(x) Deep Impact
(x) KingPin
(x) Never Been Kissed
(x) Meet The Parents
(x) Meet the Fockers
() Eight Crazy Nights
() Joe Dirt
(x) KING KONG - only the original

Total so far: 32.5. You can blame Nat for all the awful chick-flick X's. Oh gawd, there's more!

(x) A Cinderella Story
() The Terminal
() The Lizzie McGuire Movie
() Passport to Paris
(x) Dumb & Dumber
() Dumber & Dumberer
() Final Destination
() Final Destination 2
() Final Destination 3
() Halloween
() The Ring
() The Ring 2
() Surviving X-MAS
(x) Flubber

Total so far: 35.5

() Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
() Practical Magic
() Chicago
() Ghost Ship
(x) From Hell
(x) Hellboy
() Secret Window
() I Am Sam
(x) The Whole Nine Yards
(x) The Whole Ten Yards (AVOID! Bloody awful movie)

Total so far: 39.5

() The Day After Tomorrow
() Child's Play
() Seed of Chucky
() Bride of Chucky
(x) Ten Things I Hate About You
() Just Married
() Gothika
() Nightmare on Elm Street
() Sixteen Candles
() Remember the Titans
() Coach Carter
() The Grudge
() The Grudge 2
(x) The Mask
(x) Son Of The Mask

Total so far: 42.5

() Bad Boys
() Bad Boys 2
() Joy Ride
() Lucky Number Slevin
() Ocean's Eleven
() Ocean's Twelve
(x) Bourne Identity
(x) Bourne Supremecy
() Lone Star
() Bedazzled
(x) Predator I
(x) Predator II
(x) The Fog
() Ice Age
() Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
() Curious George

Total so far: 47.5

(x) Independence Day
(x) Cujo
(x) A Bronx Tale
() Darkness Falls
(x) Christine
(x) ET
(x) Children of the Corn
() My Bosses Daughter
(x) Maid in Manhattan
() War of the Worlds
(x) Rush Hour
(x) Rush Hour 2

Total so far: 56.5

() Best Bet
(x) How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
(x) She's All That
() Calendar Girls
() Sideways
(x) Mars Attacks
(x) Event Horizon
(x) Ever After
(x) Wizard of Oz
(x) Forrest Gump
(x) Big Trouble in Little China
(x) The Terminator
(x) The Terminator 2
() The Terminator 3

Total so far: 66.5

(x) X-Men
(x) X-2
(x) X-3
(x) Spider-Man
(x) Spider-Man 2
() Sky High
() Jeepers Creepers
() Jeepers Creepers 2
() Catch Me If You Can
() The Little Mermaid
(x) Freaky Friday - (Both versions! :( )
() Reign of Fire
() The Skulls
() Cruel Intentions
() Cruel Intentions 2
(x) The Hot Chick
(x) Shrek
(x) Shrek 2

Total so far: 75.5

() Swimfan
(x) Miracle on 34th street - only the original
() Old School
(x) The Notebook
(x) K-Pax - the worst film ever!
() Krippendorf's Tribe
() A Walk to Remember
() Ice Castles
() Boogeyman
(x) The 40-year-old Virgin

Total so far: 79.5

(x) Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring
(x) Lord of the Rings The Two Towers
(x) Lord of the Rings Return Of the King
(x) Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
(x) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(x) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Total so far: 85.5

(x) Baseketball - (Double-plus good)
() Hostel
() Waiting for Guffman
() House of 1000 Corpses
() Devils Rejects
() Elf
(x) Highlander
() Mothman Prophecies
() American History X
() Three

Total so Far: 87.5

(x) The Jacket
(x) Kung Fu Hustle
() Shaolin Soccer
() Night Watch
() Monsters Inc.
(x) Titanic
(x) Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(x) Shaun Of the Dead
() Willard

Total so far: 92.5

() High Tension
() Club Dread
() Hulk
(x) Dawn Of the Dead
(x) Hook
(x) Chronicles Of Narnia The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
() 28 days later
() Orgazmo
() Phantasm
(x) Waterworld

Total so far: 96.5

() Kill Bill vol 1
() Kill Bill vol 2
(x) Mortal Kombat
() Wolf Creek
() Kingdom of Heaven
() the Hills Have Eyes
() I Spit on Your Grave aka the Day of the Woman
() The Last House on the Left
(x) Re-Animator
(x) Army of Darkness

Total so far: 99.5

(x) Star Wars Ep. I The Phantom Menace
(x) Star Wars Ep. II Attack of the Clones
(x) Star Wars Ep. III Revenge of the Sith
(x) Star Wars Ep. IV A New Hope
(x) Star Wars Ep. V The Empire Strikes Back
(x) Star Wars Ep. VI Return of the Jedi
() Ewoks Caravan Of Courage
() Ewoks The Battle For Endor

Total so far: 105.5

(x) The Matrix
(x) The Matrix Reloaded
(x) The Matrix Revolutions
(x) Animatrix
(x) Evil Dead
(x) Evil Dead 2
(x) Team America: World Police
(x) Red Dragon
(x) Silence of the Lambs
() Hannibal

Total: 114.5 - Officially lifeless

Thu, 24 May 2007 15:08:18 GMT

Due to catastrophic laptop failure I was feeling bored and trapped in Nottingham last night, so off I trundled to the local Cinemax. the only thing on which a) I hadn't seen and b) didn;t look as if it would make me want to murder puppies was Nicholas Cage's "Next", based on the Philip K Dick short story "The Golden Man"

Now, I really liked "The Golden Man" when I first read it. Generally, I like a well constructed probability-generated universe yarn and PKD was pretty damned good at making up stories about them. Definitely ranked top of the list along with Frederick Pohl and possibly Greg Egan simply for his excellent "Quarrantine". But anyway, "The Golden Man" was a fine example. The story is about an agency that hunts down and neuters or otherwise renders inactive mutant humans which threaten to make homo sapiens obsolete by outcompeting them. They meet their match when a golden-skinned "man" appears with only the most basic animal instincts but with the ability to see into his own future. Try as they might they can not neutralise him as he always knows exactly which possible future universe to choose in order to preserve his own existence. Driven only by the desire for self preservation and procreation, the agency quickly realises that this creature is the biggest threat they have ever encountered but are pretty much powerless to stop him.

So that's the original story. And how did Hollywood "redefine" this into a motion picture?

Nick Cage is a Vegas magician who can see exactly two minutes into his own future and must help the FBI track down a terrorist group about to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of California.

Riiiiiight.

So here is the review bit.

Story : A- - Actually, they did a pretty good job of coming up with a plot which holds true to the original idea of what would happen if a man could see into his own future. Suspend your disbelief for a moment to imagine that the FBI is suddenly all-powerful and can order the rest of the US's agencies to do anything they like at any time and you'll get along with the plot a little more easily. And I must admit I did like the way they ended it.

Special Effects : B+ - If you actually understand what is going on, I think they way they portrayed the different choices he could make was executed extremely well. Unfortunately, the BIG external scenes looked pretty bad. Not entirely sure what happened but some of the matting looked just plain artificial which, given the current state of CGI is inexcusable

Script : D- - Bloody horrible. Take along your cliche helmet because you're going to be hammered over the head with some of the most leaden lines you've heard in a long time. But hey, if you want a fantastic script go and read Shakespear, doofus! This is an ACTION movie.

Acting : D - The script doesn't help but it's patently obvious that the actors don't believe a wortd of it either. Julianne Moore almost seemed to cringe whilst delivering some of the worst clangers in her career. Poor girl

Overall : C-ish. Worth a butchers, if only so you can argue as to whether or not they should make a sequel.

It takes off its jumper...

Tue, 22 May 2007 15:06:32 GMT

I'm all in favour of stupid wastes of time which relieve the monotony of the wait for the 5 o'clock exodus. According the the Beeb, Google have just created a fine one. Google Trends shows the top 100 searches for the day, so now you can have fun trying to work out what bit of media has triggered a rush to googlise some mad-arsed phrase.

Your starter for ten, why on earth is today's fourth most popular search "How Does A Kangaroo Keep Cool?"

More web comics

Tue, 22 May 2007 10:52:18 GMT

Another fun web comic, found through a cross reference between I Can Has Cheezburger and Bunny.

www.xkcd.com should appeal to anyone who has a maths degree (?!). Can someone fill me in as to why it's called XKCD though?

Free cinema tickets available in London for this Sunday

Mon, 21 May 2007 14:36:30 GMT

Good news and bad. The good news is I won a couple of tickets to go and see Dead Man's Shoes at the NFT this Sunday. The bad news is I forgot that my parents are coming over for the weekend. So does anyone want two free tickets to go and see this rather excellent film?

Outs with a bang

Wed, 16 May 2007 08:58:17 GMT

Has anyone else noticed that poker is deceptively hard. I mean, seriously hard. I thought it was a fun game where you took a bit of a punt on whether your hand could beat your opponents' given a few extra cards hitting the table. But nooooo! It's about quantifying probability of success versus the expected mean value of your rate of return based upon the aggressive/passive nature of your opponents when counterballanced with their chip stack size at the relevant stage of the tournament whilst taking into account the blinds, the tournament pace, the average number of chips, the flight of geese overhead, the specks of dust on a ping pong ball yadda yadda yadda OH MY BRAIN HURTS!

This WSOP is murderous. Somehow, I am staying afloat. Quite well, all things considered. Currently I am up around $2,300 but I am really getting no closer to actually GOING to the World Series. Every night, PokerStars has a $160 buy-in tourney where the first place finisher wins a slot in the big one. So every nigh I have been nestling down with my laptop and failing to win that place. Came pretty close last week with a third place finish, knocked out by the eighth highest earner on PokerStars this year ($200k profit since January). At least I won back my entry fee but it's not been a good run. All other times I have scored no higher than 40th place out of ten attempts. Which is rather pathetic.

Dan Harrington's three books on Tournament Hold'Em have been a great help. Seriously good books, those. If anyone here plays poker and would like to read the bible of tournament play then you can not go far wrong buying these tomes.

Meanwhile, I'm just grinding away and try to beat this damn thing. Grindy grind grind.

The Riches

Thu, 10 May 2007 11:22:23 GMT

There was an article in the Sunday Times a few weeks ago about a new series which started recently in America. The Riches stars Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as a pair of American-Irish travellers/gypsies who, together with their three children, take over the identity of an affluent couple they accidentally killed in a car crash.

And it's good. Really good. Izzard plays it straight and is very memorable but Driver is fantastic as a freaked out, drug addicted woman completely out of her element but trying to blag her way through it all.

Wait for this one to hit the UK or go search for it on your favourite torrent site. Highly recommended.

PS In other news, came third last night in a tourney for a WSOP entry. Deserved to lose on the hand I went out on but I'm getting closer!

These are not the cutesy cartoon characters you are looking for...

Wed, 09 May 2007 08:40:45 GMT

Whilst prepping for our wedding, Nat and I fell victim to one of the multitude of Chinese fakery producing outfits that now populate the web. We were trying to find gifts for the people who helped out and ended up being sold a load of cheap, fake branded tat instead. We were able to sort it all out in the end and got a refund for the goods but it's still annoying when it happens.

But even so, copying a few items of jewelry is one thing. Copying Disneyland, the whole damn park...well, for that we're talking about a whole different size of cohones altogether.

WSOP or bust!

Fri, 04 May 2007 09:48:09 GMT

Around the turn of the year I discovered the super-satelite system on Pokerstars and decided I'd like a bit of that. Very simply, you play in a low stake tournament (around a tenner a go) to win an entry into a larger stake tournament (anything from £200 to £400 an entry) and from there you win an expensive seat to a live event which can normally cost anything up to £10,000 to enter. I started by trying to get into the European Poker Tour in Monte Carlo and missed out by a whisker. Now, Pokerstars is revving up for the World Series of Poker and I intend to catch the train into the big one.

So two months ago I set myself a goal. Get into the WSOP or bust out trying. This was made considerably easier by my winning the first satelite I entered, resulting in my cash pot rising from $200 to $850 (if you win a satelite you can withdraw an equivalent amount of tournament entry tokens called W$ and use them to enter more tourneys). After yoinking out my original deposit I've been hitting the card rooms trying to build up my pot, entering super sats like crazy, trying to win the larger sats without much joy, and generally been wasting many an evening whilst trapped in Nottingham playing poker.

So right now my pot is up to $1,200, I've won and subsequently spent an additional $5,000 on entries (which sounds worse than it is as my total cash in hand has never been higher than $1,500) and so so far it's not going too badly. The prize is the $10,000 entry plus $1,000 spending cash and a $1,000 hotel booking in Las Vegas for the ultimate event of the year, the WSOP 6 day Main Event. Actually, that's not the main prize. The real prize, the one that thousands upon thousands of people will be playing in the WSOP Main Event to win, will be the first place purse of, most likely, $15 million dollars plus change.

Hey, I can dream. :D

The most EVIL number in the world!

Wed, 02 May 2007 13:29:31 GMT

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Now if someone could only tell me how to easily convert H.264 to H.263 I would be happy.

I'm Buringing!

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:08:10 GMT

The vast majority of online comics are complete crap. Here is one that isn't.

Gone With The Blastwave is updated every couple of weeks and should be familiar to anyone who likes online shoot 'em ups. Sort of like Red vs Blue but with fewer puns.

More pixels than god!

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:13:25 GMT

The local damaged goods/returned items/Inland Revenue siezed stuff auction house has won a contract to sell a buttload of items returned to "A major online retailer". Not sure who that retailer is, but I have a feeling it may be Amazon. Anyway, the net result is that, for the last couple of weeks, they have been selling a huge number of PC components. As a result, two weeks ago I bid for and won six (6!) Nvidia GTX 8800 graphics cards of various brands.

Three were faulty and, although the auction house usually runs a caveat emptor policy I managed to get a refund for them. Two of them will be EBayed (one gone, the other going) which should result in the third card being free!

So, for the last two weeks I have been playing with the world's fastest stock graphics card in my system. And it is for this reason that I currently have no eyebrows. They've been blown off my face due to the huge number of pixels that have been spat out at me by this ravening beast!

This thing is just obscene. I have been cranking up all my games to Ludicrous Resolution and max AA and the damn thing is just sitting there and looking a bit bored. Supreme Commander at a medium resolution used to murder my old 7800. Now I have the game running in split screen mode at 1920x1200 without so much as a flicker.

And Far Cry? Oh my god! That's what it looks like!

It almost makes me want to upgrade to Vista right now just to try out the DX10 demos.

Then again, maybe not.

So roll on Crysis, Unreal Tournament 2007 et al. I'm ready for you all!

Yank TV

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:06:48 GMT

The internet is a wonderful thing. It gives us so much. Wikipedia. CounterStrike. More porn than Trekkie Monster can handle. But it also makes you care about the little things you never really thought about.

For instance, why the hell do American television schedules keep leaving huge, month-long gaps in the middle of their series?

Before BitTorrent I wouldn't have given a rat's arse what the yanks do with their television, but now I am watching their proggies a scant few days after they get broadcast in the US I find myself getting rather annoyed at having to wait a month for the next episode of Heroes, Boston Legal, Scrubs or whatever to be broadcast when there are only four or five episodes left in the series.

So if anyone is of an American bent, what the heck is the deal?

Sunshine

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:10:47 GMT

So off we toddled to the local Vue cinema to see the Sunday Times preview of Sunshine. Ho hum.

Nutshell review :- Not bad, but not that good either

A lot of people have said that it's a modern day mix of 2001 coupled with Event Horizon, but that doesn't really go into enough depth. Quite simply, it's a pastiche of almost every seventies and eighties space based sci-fi flick you can imagine with the lucky exception of star wars. There are elements of Alien, Silent Running, Contact and even Dark star, all hammered together, and with the unwelcome addition of a so-so and very predictable script, and a bunch of really bad actors.

The one feature that almost (but doesn't quite) redeem it is the special effects, but there is only so much yellow you can take in one viewing. The camera tried to give the impression of claustrophobia with gratuitous use of close ups but it's all a bit obvious and has been done far more adeptly before. And whoever was in charge of sound and music needs to be shot, reminded that in space nobody can hear you decompress, and then shot again for good measure.

Sunshine is a film I desperately wanted to like but the more I think about it the more it annoys me. Oh well, May is the month for films this year I guess.