Nixta Sinks

It's the end of a wearisome three days of work, and at 11:30pm, I've just got home. Thankfully I head to a wedding tomorrow in the south of France. The union of Amoral.org and Coolnina97.com is undergoing consecration at long last. This poor couple had the gross misfortune to find me residing in their spare room for a full 8 months in 2004 as I worked on the same project that is now wearing me down minute-by-minute. They did make up for it by grossing everyone out for the first 6 or 24 months of their relationship employing a combination of vociferous indulgent exclamations of devotion. And tongues. But that's now kept private as far as I can tell.

But I exceed my self-declared position as on-line best-man speech-maker (I trust they'll forgive my cheeky little digression). Here's what I wrote about him back in 1997 on the classic, nearly-forgotten, original nixta.com from 1997, if only to demonstrate that my opinions have not changed:

Robert St-John Smithson, better known as Robertson Smythe (or Nobber) is a top lad. He's unfortunately ginger though, and a stock analyst or something like that at Goldman Sucks. Witness his truly sad web page. Or simply see him in the photo to the right. You can see from his smile that you wouldn't trust this man as far as you could throw him. His inability to drive, or to get around to visiting Denver are on a par with his dedication to work at college between 1992 and 1995.

In the end, he actually came to visit me in Denver even more perhaps than old Simon Barber, and I like to think that my public name-and-shame campaign had something to do with it (not to mention his shaving his head and adopting sunglasses 24 hours a day). Also, his truly sad webpage has been allowed to expire, thank goodness.

Back to France. Mater is already there, at a rather wonderful hotel on the south coast, and I go tomorrow to join her for a cup of tea before we both head over to Monaco and stay with Doc Jonky Cat himself (whose webpage has fortunately not been allowed to expire).

I had a load of stuff to post here today, but it's all slipped my mind. I had enough trouble coming up with the word "digression" above, and I'm pretty sure it's not the one I wanted, so feel fortunate that I wrote anything at all.

Ah yes, that's it. Welcome to the fold to my old chum Aaron Bueller. And thanks to a fine post he has on Flickr geolocation (or geotagging) of photographs, I've been having fun playing with it all day. It's a great interface, as you'd expect from Flickr, though sadly because Flickr is now owned by Yahoo, it uses my less-favoured mapping provider, Yahoo Maps. Would that it would use Google Maps, and we could all be happy.

Update:
I've played a little more and here are some photos in map format. Be sure to click the arrow at the top-left of the map to view page 2 of my mapped photos.

I seem to stand alone in not enjoying one of HBO's most successful (if not their most successful) creation. For me it was the Rolling Stone cover of 2001 that put me off.

Pastichio, Tony and Uncle Guido

You can't see it in all its fold-out glory, but from the above image you might get the gist of it. It's cheese. Pastiche. Stereotype. Perhaps I should enjoy those qualities of the image. I know Italians as friends, and I've met some who may or may not be in the mob (it's not for me to say), and this is caricature at best. At worst it's insulting. But I'm not Italian American so what do I know? Anyway, I love jumping to conclusions and so I couldn't watch the show for a few years. Having watched a good few episodes now, no doubt my reaction was a little excessive, but I still stick by my original opinion that the show is pretty much worthless and irksome.

Then yesterday I saw this on E4, a Channel 4 "Entertainment" channel specialising in reality TV, recycled American sitcoms, crap old British soaps, and the odd gem. There are references to many British comedy shows and soaps, even to Channel 4's excellent self-promo shorts (whatever they're called). Little Britain's grotesque. England's wasteland. Multiple Monty Python shots. I thought it was some Sopranos rip-off advertising some college-student review desperately translated to TV for the sake of resecuring budget...

British Sopranos

If there's one thing that calms my angry spleen, it's self-parody where I thought it unlikely. Not gratuitously of course, Hasselhoff style, but just gently and with context. I don't like a great deal of the Ad. It's too depressingly gritty and reminds me of why I try not to leave my square mile of central London, but then again I don't like New Jersey either. I think some of the humour is heavy-handed and old, and some decidedly immature (for example, I find Little Britain nauseatingly overrated and childish). Despite all that, I applaud the balls in doing this.

Hollywood killer

It's reassuring that the best parodies and commentary on the US criminal system come from the inside. The country is in so many ways so very insular that it's very easy to understand the highly miscontrued accusations that one has to on occasion try to counter. I'm not talking Middle-Eastern extremists, or German hippies or Australian self-righteous wombats hit once-too-often by their own boomerangs. I'm thinking more of the friends and relatives with whom my wife and I have had to entertain one-sided debates in Slovenia. They are, after all, Slovenian and consequently very quick to appreciate their own side of an argument and to theorise without practical input (imagine a world where everyone is your mechanic). Those of them that have lived and travelled abroad extensively have a much more centered opinion, thank goodness, otherwise I'd have myself checked out in case I had too much Slovo in me.

I've often pointed out the tendency of America as a whole to be represented by its component parts right down to the individual. Concentrating on the self-centeredness of the country you could draw parallels all over the place, but it's probably best to use Tom Cruise as an example. It's probably even fair to comment that America won't come out of the closet, but though I'm sure that's true, I'm not quite sure what it might mean. But that's a different point to the one I want to make. The Jon-Benet Ramsey police have taken a beating over time for their incompetence and bias. Traits that scale rather well. The whole country isn't like that of course, but it's no fun picking on the good and running with that now, is it? Monkeymeat and Schadenfreude, that's what's easiest to run with.

Undercover reporting

I moved to Denver just before the Jon Benet murder (I assume it wasn't an accident, or suicide, given the cracked skull and garotting) and boy was it big news then. It has featured in the three main critical appraisers of American evolution, The Simpsons, Southpark, and The Daily Show (who just last week, of course, created a segment on the insanity of the media coverage of John Karr's extradition to the US). The poor Ramsey police must feel like confused children right now: "Can't we do anything right? I hate you! I wish I'd never been born!".

I'm inclined to ask the same question: Can't you do anything right?

For Christ's sake, this freeloader loon doesn't even look like a real crook - he's obviously perfected that evil face from too many shit hollywood films.

Did you realise that the only entry for "todgeslap" on google once pointed to Skankmeister Flash's inimitable Frosties? I'll dig out the screenshot and post it later.

I've spent the last couple of days playing with the Adobe Lightroom beta. Photoshop is fantastic for a) breaking the brains of anyone who doesn't do graphical editing professionally and (perhaps more importantly) b) providing some pretty solid editing tools on a photo-by-photo basis.

In CS (as best as I can tell), Adobe introduced the FileBrowser, which performed all the tasks that Windows Explorer or Mac OS Finder ought to do with photographs (and video, and pdf, and actually, anything). That is, provide an easily modifiable interface for viewing visual files in groups, and providing meta-data on them. The two bits of functionality it provides for that are variable-sized thumbnails and a panel to show the EXIF data, also rotating images according to the EXIF information.

But that's about it. In terms of organising and display, Flickr is probably as good a tool as any for the layman, and a great example of what a web-application ought to be, by the way. In the three days I've been using Lightroom, I've become as dependent upon it as on YouTube for entertainment or indeed my cellphone for communication (which for so long never seemed such an urgent task). So far I've used it for organising photographs. It of course does a great deal more, but here's a list of things it does remarkably well:

• Demonstrate intuitive responsive user interface
• Provide side-by-side comparison of similar photographs
• Allow easy and quick organisation of photo libraries
• Allow real-time application of graphical processing tools to an un-touched library of original raw photographs
• Allow full organisation and filtering based on EXIF information and supplemental attribution

Come on. Be honest. What more could you want from a piece of image-organising software?

My dilemma is two-fold (is that four lemmas?) and runs like this: When the final version is released, will it be bundled with Adobe Creative Suite, and should I buy a MacBook on which to run it?

I heartily recommend watching the occasionally patronising Adobe videos that accompany Lightroom to get a feel for how it works.

In contrast, as an example of how software should not be written, read here and weep about how terribly Microsoft Word's outline-numbering system has been destroyed in the name of progress.

Oh, and as promised, more photos from the holiday (and a Bonushoff or two):

• Part 1 (Slovenia, Florence, Rome, Sicily)
• Part 2 (Italy Cave Town, Croatia)
• Part 3 (Croatia and Slovenia)
• Part 4 (Florence, Rome, Ravello)
• Knight Industries Two Thousand
• Marylebone On Fire

And I've just found yet another set of holiday photos to put up. Now, what I really want is to take a Lightroom set and post that to Flickr. I give it 6 months post-Lightroom release (if Adobe provide a plug-in API, I give it 2 months).

In searching for mashups that have gone wrong, I came across this video under the search term of goat-dog.

Resident Emule

There's something distinctly nightmarish about this. Is it two torso-less human legs grafted onto a metal frame? Is the constant buzzing sound the sound of hell that disembodied legs make? And where does that constant pace come from, regardless of terrain? You expect the legs to enter a battle of wills as to which direction the thing is to move in. But then, when it's kicked, it suddenly takes on the vulnerability of a newborn calf. So disarming is the sudden change that perhaps that even compounds the nightmare. Seems that people generally agree (according to the few comments). Yeah yeah, UV.

Here though we see that artificial or not, dogs learn quickly.

Disrobotsguise

From that came a short demonstration of a real-life transformer. Impressive. Quite amazing. But I accidentally watched it with the Citroen commercial playing in another invisible tab which music kicked in just as the real-life transformer began... er... transforming. Actually, I think it's better that way. Does that make it a mashup in itself? How exciting! My own accidental mashup!

Oh, I'm sure it's so post-meme, but the internet is for porn (some NSFW). Sorry, but it has to be said, Dell.

Her lawyer said Ms Mayo, 59, described by her son as a peace activist, had "serious mental health problems".

BBC News on the United Airlines Face-creamer

However, the Supreme Court said dalliance with dwarves would gradually erode the public's acceptance of the judiciary as the guardian of the law, if not make it an object of ridicule.

BBC News on the Philipino Dwarf Court

The Philippino Supreme Court seems to me to be overlooking the very real and valuable judicial benefit that dwarves have provided to courts over the years, such as intermission acrobatics, table-service, surveillance, and of course Oompa-Loompa style intimidation and disposal of the guilty. What they must have meant to say (and perhaps this was lost in translation) is that dalliance with imaginary dwarves would immediately erode the public's acceptance of anything.

Moniker Fool

Sometimes the fools fall close to the tree, or the fold, or something like that. In this case, pissing on my shoe, Skankmeister out-egos even me with the following statement in his Google Chat moniker:

see msn im 4 moniker, i'm not updating them both. uluse, google.

I'm sure Google is crying its little heart out, you Frosted (homo) flake. What a fucking cunt!

In case anyone missed it on YBNBY, see the Ricky Gervais Microsoft videos. Thanks Scaramouch.

And I'll say it again. If you don't read The Sherman Foundation, you're dumber than I thought. Concept Asterix + Slovenian Butcher + Croatian Party = this.

Before you get to see and read about the Cast'n'Blast (of which my best model still has to be the B'n'T elephant-gun and fake Louis-Vuitton bag for blasting yapping Jersey girls out of my way), a quick word for the day, taken from the aforementioned Microsoft vids, and which I'd quite forgotten about: Scrumping. Though I much prefer the Kopparberg Pear Cider of the Harcourt.



I should also like to point out that I don't have alcoholic tendencies. Alcoholics just like to ape me. It's what alcoholics do. And I haven't had a bar call me up and ask me to visit them for at least... oh... 14 months. At least.

Just the other day I was going to write a post about how YouTube.com could single-handedly bring music videos back to life, having spent the morning watching them on the site and wondering why the usually restrictive music industry hadn't pulled them all. Indeed, why hadn't Comedy Central pulled all the Daily Show clips? Common sense. Simple common sense.

I haven't read the article that beat me to the punch of course, but here it is.

Update:
Anyway, as I was saying...

I was very sceptical of YouTube at first (as I am, unreasonably, of most things). It seemed something else that Dr. R could spend two minutes extracting 5 hours worth of entertainment from, watching ducks drive cars, Hungarian Hamster Hamlet, a claymation interpretation of Derek And Clive's Joan Crawford sketch (naval fleets and all) or the real-life sewing of the very first DQM Bacon, whereas I would spend 5 frustrating hours looking for tits on a bicycle and end up seeing public school-boys throwing themselves off Devil's Dyke and a man playing Queen on spokes and somehow end up in gaol for accidentally downloading 5 shaky and wind-noisy seconds of an eight-year-old girl learning to ride her brand-new tricycle on her birthday to mum and dad's enormous glee.

In fact, I found that there was little worth viewing that I could get my mitts on. I'd sit back and calmly watch the clock on the mantlepiece to determine if I could actually make out the minute-hand moving while The Doc found the next great thing and posted it for us all to see. I'd pull the pipe from my mouth and catch up via the Rufilter.

Then I left the internet behind and went to Italy for a month, taking my wife and myself on a wonderful month-long tour of Italy, Sicily, Croatia and Slovenia. In the arse-end of Italy (that's the South, which I never believed could be as bad as Italians said, but which surpassed (or souspassed, or underpassed) their most acerbic declamanation) we watched music videos as much as a novelty as a means of distracting ourselves from suicide, but I've already written about that.

And this brings me (in my usual long-winder roundabout manner) to my point. I couldn't have written about that rather fantastic Yuki video without YouTube. I'd say it was an epiphany, but that would make me puke. It opened my eyes to my ageing misery and old fartness. As usual, 10 years too late, and for the wrong reasons, but once more I'd jumped on a bandwagon just as the wheels were being replaced with bricks and everyone was sitting around sipping coffee and reminiscing. I found that selfish urge which YouTube satisfied, and that finally gave me a reason to be grateful for its existence. I can't see beyond the end of my own nose. It's big, but not that big, I'm merely grossly egotistical and simple-minded. I feel 80 years old, but without a reason to deserve it.

JOY

Whatever. The important thing is that it led me to search for more Yuki videos. Nothing special. Nice and catchy. Good for a soundtrack. Hard to pin down, and perhaps part-way through a re-invention of forced-videos as she distances herself from Judy and Mary. What do you know though? It won best video. Anycrap, I finally got to see all the Gorillaz videos I'd never seen. These are things that you simply cannot get to see in America, and which I consequently missed out on. They talk about the demise of the music video, but really they've brought it about themselves and it makes me sick. Sick to my commie core. Which led me to watch hours of Back In Black. Do it.

And I realised that something interesting was going on. Where ABC and NBC were pulling YouTube clips of their current-affairs shows and so forth, Comedy Central and others were turning a blind-eye and allowing these clips to air. And suddenly it struck me. Why not? There's no reason not to. These are small clips at best aired three times and once for a highlight show at the end of the year if they're very lucky. No, JB, it's not like a full-length movie that cost millions to make and in the keeping-unfree of which the creators have a very real interest in.

And for that, thank you YouTube, but make sure you stay alive. Even today, in the comments section of a Gizmodo post on a treadmill-bike, buried in the dimwittery was notice that nerds failed to function if YouTube passed away even temporarily, a discussion I had in brief a couple of weeks ago with old Hedgey. I doubt if anything has become so important (indispensable perhaps) to so many in such a short space of time. Other sites share in the internet video-on-demand phenomenon, but I'm going to focus on YouTube. No reason. No excuse. I just don't know enough about the others, but the position YouTube finds itself in is precarious, yet at the same time doubtless entirely safe. It cannot fail. There is simply too much demand for it, and so whether anyone can afford to buy it out or not to keep it afloat when its VC has been spent (has that happened yet?), it will be bought and will be kept aloft at great expense.

Quite interesting market dynamics, I think. Who will it be? And what effect will it have on the distribution of bandwidth demand, and so what effect will it have on the physical and pricing architecture of the internet? Possibly none. Possibly the consumer will pay more. Or maybe YouTubes bills will just keep climbing, but surely that can't be sustained.

I'm throwing a party!

I was informed a week ago, by evite.com, that I'm invited to a party in Greenwood Village, Colorado (a horrifically homogenised effort to place residential buildings in a derelict business district of Denver). Then I noticed that it was *MY* party. Also, that my phone number had changed, and that I apparently lived with a fellow named Michael Schultz.

OK, so I used to live and work in Greenwood Village, but never near here, which seems decidedly non-residential from the satellite-imagery, except that maybe that lump of grey is one of Greenwood's soul-destroying condo complexes. I shudder as repressed memories come flooding back. Oh! The carpeting! The beige! The Chiuauaua and its Skeletan robo-surgery owner! Medic!

Is this some new phishing scam that I'm unaware of? Or are these people severely confused about who they live with and where? Slightly disturbingly, I feel like I recognize the name of Mike Schultz. I suppose I should telephone him and wake him up.

Has anyone else had something like this happen to them, or can anyone remember who Mike Schultz is?

And why did it take me a week to post this?

But more importantly, if you're in Denver on August 19th, feel free to pop along! Details here. It should be a corker, as all my parties are, and I expect the police to turn up by 1am, so get there early!

Collect zem all!

As a vulnerable scrawny wheezing gangly child I developed a very real fear of the word "criticism". Until I was already closely approaching my twenties, I had no concept of positive criticism. It has since been remarkably difficult to accept criticism of any kind, even potentially constructive.

I don't suppose that it helped growing up in a country where sarcasm is mastered by the age of five, nor perhaps being part of a shool-system that punishes a dull wit with public flogging and a sharp wit with buggery.

At the same time as I was suffering through all this, a group of people much older than myself had already met up at university. Caution of criticism thrown to the wind, they'd worked their way through stage and the small screen to feature-length films almost, but not quite, culminating in the donning of helmets and false moustaches and the adoption of a daft French accent to invent a character millions of pathetic children and nerds the world over would adopt as their own for otherwise normal conversation. I was one of those adopters, but I gave it up a long long time ago, unlike this person. Here is what they had to say about a couple of my holiday snaps:

Did Oh my God, puff out you an ass bites or what? _ Nothing with foutre! you way Z etes really too bitch!

...and...

Go draws there a little on my finger.... PROUT!!! Species of disgusting person. Do not have you shame to release scuds like Ca!

They weren't good photos, granted, but nonetheless this raises two questions:

• Is Babelfish accurate enough when it comes to the streets of France?
• What was actually said would no-doubt be flagged as inappropriate had it been written in English: Are the French building a secret-underground of crass abuse behind the internet's Anglocentric facade?

It's been well-known for some time that the French rule the world when it comes to nonsensical and untranslatable insults, if nothing else (as well as a couple of very recognisable ones - in an accidental episode of Star Trek Next Wossname the other day, Professor Charles Xavier actually said "merde"). The Greeks and Turks both lay claim to leading the race to develop the most fantastical inflammatory putdowns (Dr. R. can confirm this, but I believe the translation he was given was approximately "I fill your mother's c*&t with cement and fashion a parking a lot") [There are some who read this at work. Pulp fans with headphones witness here how the Brits are able to enjoy America's least-favourite word - Ed.].

Is this random commentary on two crappy holiday photos I took (1 2), by someone I've never heard of before, merely the drunken rambling of a sun-baked French surfer, the professional outrage of a cheese-eating surrender-photographer, or merely a small part of a patient revolution on the part of the froggy internet community? If it weren't the French doing it, clearly the first theory would put an end to it, but those French live to revolt and they love sneaking around and they certainly like to look down their noses. I wonder...

But at least I've now learnt to take criticism and will pay more attention to my composition, lighting, colour-balance, focusing, exposure and subjects. Thank you, pička materna, you've taught me well.