Nixta Sinks

Our house! In the middle of our sky!

When I came back to New York last year after the massive effort to get the latest release of the London project out the door (analogies and metaphors involving constipation are probably appropriate, though analogies more so because they include the word "anal"), I unwound by contemplating the design of a custom desk to replace the current old and shoddy and ugly desk/TV table combo we've had here for a few years (since back in the day when I still relied on inherited furniture). We also have a shitload of artwork to hang, and the DMC and I were keen to try to figure out what might go where (once we'd worked out how to drill into the steel walls).

Miss Circa Now's man, the Harrison Ford of the East Village, was going to help us with both tasks, but to help me work stuff out, Sketchup seemed like a good idea. It's the only software I've spent any time reading documentation on since I tried DTP on a C64 in the 80s, and boy was it time well spent. Sketchup is intuitive and slick and stable, but more to the point it does pretty much everything you want it to. For free. It's rare you find a piece of software so immediately comforting.

SKP Download (1576Kb)

So I took photos of artwork, generated a tile image of the floor (thx DMC for help with all that) and measured the apartment out to the nearest half inch, generating the resultant Sketchup file. Feel free to download it and play around. The new version of Sketchup is even better than before. I've even used Sketchup 6 to place the apartment in New York in a Google Earth kmz file, but it doesn't yet integrate well with the actual 3D building data so I'm not so happy with that at the moment.

Incidentally, it was the perfect excuse to create my own YouTube video which shows up the shoddy quality reduction (download the original 1.2Mb zipped AVI here) and the usefulness of the eye's indifference to detail over context for the progression of mass distribution of dross. God made us the perfect mindless consumers, perhaps we've peaked.

Anyway. Enough apocalyptic daydreams. On a parting note, dear reader. If you want to learn to play with Sketchup (and I recommend that you do), please invest 30 minutes in learning the concepts and trying a couple of basic tutorials. Invest!

Labels: google, sketchup, youtube

Microsoft have been busy nerding away in their labs. Not only does Live Maps totally rock (take a look at Downtown Denver in 3D mode - the sides of buildings are texture mapped, and even my old abode on Downing Street is there in all its glory - in fact, even the noisy loading dock of the Post Office is included), but they've just released a Firefox plugin that allows Photosynth to run in Firefox.

I think you still need XP SP2 or Vista, but if you have them, check these two things out. I'm sure it won't be long before Microsoft integrate the two.

Labels: maps, nerd, photosynth

TISE, bitch!

One of the major hurdles to the modern internet-based location-agnostic lifestyle is that we're actual physical beings stuck in a loose sack of skin that costs money and energy to get from one place to another (and no, smart-asses, we're not merely balls). Fortunately, at the moment, someone else is paying to transport my pale flappy organpod across the Atlantic fairly frequently, so I can take slightly greater advantage of this internet reach (and also be used as a leather jacket/PSP game/Nike sneaker mule).

For example, I'm getting lamps delivered as part of a batch of stuff that didn't sink off the Cornwall Coast last week (thanks, Jonky Cat, for attempting to convince me otherwise). They're UK voltage lamps (240v) not entirely dissimilar to these, which are not only not too ugly, but also would work well in my tiny New York apartment. The voltage ain't a problem, coz there's no conversion or regulator so just shoving a 120v bulb in rather than a 240v one would work just fine (the other way around and I might just worry that the cable might melt, but only if it was a crappy cheap light and I was being totally paranoid).

So my options are:

• A converter to take a bayonet bulb and convert it to a screw-bulb, giving me a full choice of bulbs to use.
• A bayonet bulb at 120v.

A wee bit of research and...

1. It's amazing what Wikipedia can teach you about bulbs and bulb fittings. Why, did you know screw-bulbs were labelled ES, and the E stands for 'Edison', and even the US has gone metric on the fitting measurements even though they remain imperial on the glass measurements?
2. I can find that a small shop on Tottenham Court Road in London has 7 appropriate adapters in stock (which US stores don't seem to have at all). It's a mere 3 minutes walk from my offices over there, and I don't have to buy 10 bulbs from Bulbman (couldn't find any in the hardware store near here, though there must be some in Manhattan).
3. Chuck Norris flew the rescue helicopter that saved the crew of that stricken container ship off Cornwall. Scroll down. It's true. Is there nothing he can't do?
4. I evidently have a surfeit of time on my hands, in my pockets, and spilling onto the floor.

Don't let 'em become rich

The Doc points to this article in his favourite rag (they do have fine crosswords) which suggests that over the past 35 years over 142 people a year have died because we switch from BST to GMT once a year.

I am not sure why this is. Do they die of internal burns trying to wolf down a cup of too-hot-to-drink PG tips? Are they unable to negotiate the streets on the way to the tube whilst that one hour sleepier. Maybe they surprise the Bogeymen (who change clocks a week later). The Grauniad should tell us, rather than just throwing worthless information at us as if we just didn't care (GQ would have done their research and given us the low-down, and if not them, FHM). Although the other reasons seem fairly sensible, if the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents is advocating making life safe for dumbasses, I say move the clocks back more.

I would posit then that we ought to be doing more to allow dumbasses to expire at an early age. They're taking jobs from our qualified members of society (and not doing them well). They're filling up our favourite holiday destinations using their ill-gotten gains to get there in quantities that allow shit airlines to survive (providing levels of service that only utter dumbasses would enjoy). They're giving humanity a bad name and the Chinese something to really laugh at. They're making going out for dinner a positively repulsive experience (even though in London all restaurants try to make it really really too expensive to eat) and they go a very long way towards cluttering our lives with media infotainment we just don't want: Big Brother (how much do their txt message centers rake in?), Wife Swap, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, Little Britain, Oprah, almost anything on Fox TV, USB powered doohickies, The Daily Mirror.

If you can't get up an hour earlier without killing someone or dying, you probably don't deserve that paycheck, or that valuable clear crisp early-morning air.

Via Gizmodo and some chap named Brian.

Oh no you didn't!

It looked as bad as it sounded

Eastern Europe has always had thrillingly misspelled menus. When I say always, I mean since they started writing them in English, which was before I was born, and consequently is as close as I could give a monkey's to always. You'd best take a look at the whole menu. I should add that this particular food emporium was particularly foul on the outskirts of a horrible pathetic leper-colony of a village. Why were we there? Culture (and not the kind found in the small intestine). Stone walls in Ston.

Labels: Croatia, food, language

Words are rapidly losing their impact. This is something that appears to have caught on in the UK now, but when I first moved to the US over ten years ago the gap was very noticeable indeed. It ties in with not carrying a large enough vocabulary to be able to avoid ascribing multiple meanings to individual words, or to modify existing words into new forms. To Office was a new verb to me in August 1996, and I still cannot help but cringe when I encounter it as a verb. Note, I'm not implying that Americans *cannot* carry a large vocabulary, but they often choose not to (whether they're conscious of that choice or not). After all, a word that serves 10 purposes is easier to master than 10 words that serve one each. Like totally gnarly, dude.

By extension then, some words have lost their meaning to a great extent. They are either diluted by additional meaning to the point where no meaning carries much weight, or other words have encroached upon them to the point where they become less favoured to the alternatives available to express a point.

To Office is a weird one though, largely because it's so damned fuzzy that I can't even describe what it means. Although it probably is supposed to mean something like photocopying, stapling, filing and typing, it could easily include watering plants, spinning on chairs, e-mailing the day away, pinning things onto cubicle walls, dozing in the disabled toilets and so on and so forth (and perhaps for that reason it only took off fleetingly into the winds of common usage before being shot down by the poisoned lead buckshot of the common-sense-canon) [forgive my metaphors - half of them are similes anyway, but I've drooled it out now].

I was reminded of one of these devalued and confused words yesterday during a Best Buy commercial. The word "pledge" seems to have become confused. Very confused. It implies (or ought to) a heartfelt and voluntary compulsion. It's a deeply personal commitment. Like the Pledge Of Allegiance - you know, for kids; something that can really get you killed. Yet we're expected to believe that a Best Buy employee will make a pledge that will benefit us somehow, and that we should shop there as a result? It's a marketing ploy we see so much that we have become inured to it and its use is no more than background noise or filler to us now. The 'bof', 'er', 'um' or 'like' of advertising.

Beta get a bucket

Another more ubiquitous example online is the use of "beta" (or "alpha" or in the case of Flickr even "gamma"). That most likely has legal basis, sadly (as most despicable things do).

Google is a fantastic proponent of early-adoption mass-user-based releases with a superb test team as a result. After all, you can't user-acceptance-test software better than through the actual user-base. That's what a beta product has always been for, after all. But Google's (pre-King) Prince Midas touch has changed what beta software means.

For example, can you fairly charge for a beta product (which is what Flickr do)? Trillian did it, I seem to recall (and they didn't listen to their users and turned a decent product into an unusable fuck-up). Google seem to be the worst transgressors (though they don't charge) and they make up for it with rapid development and rollout cycles, but as a result of the obvious slackening in the levels of service concomitant with a beta "product" even graphics card companies throw "beta" into any driver less than a year old so that they can get away without providing decent support and can get on with losing the pixel race.

Notice that the products Google has bought have suffered less at the hand of the Betabug: Picasa and Google Sketchup for example. Google Earth is still beta though [sigh] and Blogger went *back* to beta when it was bought (though it's now out again). At least that bane of modern humanity and social interaction, Friendster, is no longer beta (they may have started the whole thing). In contrast, Yahoo's purchases of Flickr and Jumpcut hasn't pulled them from betaland yet, but again Flickr continues to innovate and improve rapidly because it *is* beta.

Beta software has gone therefore from a piece of software that is pre-release and for the use of a select few, to mainstream with bugs for the sake of rapid featureset rollout. With Flickr I don't pay a price for a finished product. I pay a price for bandwidth to the application and so my point must be that the meaning of "beta" has changed even though I don't doubt that it's tacked onto the product name (GMail, GTalk, GoogleEarth, Flickr, JumpCut) under its old guise.

Here's a perfect beta mashup: Running a transport system in beta mashed up with singing about it in beta (better copy here).

Beta song about beta trains

And why had I never heard of JumpCut? Superb.

In the same way that we have given up on words, we've given up on dance. Thank you, G Boy - Sorry I missed this. Golden moment at 1:55 for those that can't be arsed to wait and learn (have you given up on patience too?). Since this came from memepool, about half of you (that would be G Boy and The Doc) will have seen this a hundred times already, but I ain't apologisin'. Our whole lives should be paced out and interspersed with disco lighting. I'm sure mine used to be when I was very small.

Golden moment starts at 1:55 - do it, kids

Labels: beta, corruption, language

I never paid attention at school (even though I tried remarkably hard at times). In fact, I think that overall I had a surfeit of attention, hording it up and never ever handing it out. That trait continues to this day. I wake up in the middle of meetings. I forget shopping lists as I write them down. And I sure as hell find myself turning blue when I forget to breathe significantly more often than most. But I just spotted this on TSF...

Childhood Rerun

...and now understand just a little better that Scrubs episode I watched over the holidays...

Fantasy Rerun

Labels: Rerun, Scrubs

"Just watch it. Linky! Linky!"

"This is not a link blog" is something that Amoral Nobber once wrote. Very recently, in terms of posts, if not time: "This is not a link blog". Now, for the first time in weeks, he's gone and posted a collection of links. Gah. That's not why I'm writing this. In fact, I started tapping away (I'd much rather be scribbling, but such quaint words literally have no place in a computer tool's online life) before I even saw his latest link-post.

But I've digressed quicker than I was able to get a single thought down. My point is this: I'm about to throw a load of links at you (courtesy of the DMC) and so I had to get the whole "This is not a link blog" thing out there. You know. To name and shame. To flush the lies from my head and into yours. It's all a run-up to a short link-line on how not to date (it's old - you've probably all read it):

• Don't be a prick and try to figure out why your parents left you.


• No-one will believe you when you claim it's a hoax (nice Jewish girls don't tell lies).


• Never lose hope - there are women out there for you.


• Put your balls where your mouth is (since no-one else'll suck them) and sue bastards who mock you in video form.

Oh sod it, have the video without even clicking:

Just watch it (linky linky).

Labels: dating, stalking

I got back from the UK and decided that I should have a few medical check-ups done - it's been a while and I've not been feeling too good for about 6 months now. A great deal of that has been to do with stress, I should think, but still worth having my leprous face checked out. The way that works in the US is that you go and see a doctor, and he refers you accordingly. I went to see two specialists.

With my insurance, for which I pay $370 a month per person (for me and the DMC), I still had to pay out the following:

Doctor	$25
Specialist 1	$50
Specialist 2	$50
Prescription 1	$10 out of $10.71
Prescription 2	$10 out of $35.68
Prescription 3	$77 out of $77.00
Total	$222 (or about £112)

My insurers opted out of paying a penny for one of my three prescriptions (coincidentally the most expensive). Now, I can happily afford this (though I feel strongly that I shouldn't, on top of the $740 I pay out each and every month), but what if you can't? Medicare is worthless in this country. The first thing you're asked for on a visit to a healthcare "professional" is some proof of means of payment (be it insurance card or credit card). On the flip side, so far the treatment has been working, which is more than can be said for the crappy remedies that the disinterested GPs threw at me in the UK.

And I have to go back to see these specialists in three weeks' time at the cost of $100 combined for them to tell me it's all OK.

It's a scam, I tell you. At least the doctors I saw this time seemed to be on my side (as opposed to the half-dead ones at Fitzroy Square) and had nice desks and heavy grade business cards, but there was unidentified spillage on one of the beds and the nurse that took my blood sample left me bruised and bleeding.

Look at that ass

Do any of my loyal and dwindled readership (that's me basically, but I have no internal monologue) know of a way to track ships? There are web-sites for tracking aircraft (though they seem to work well only in the US, which makes tracking international flights a wee bit pointless), and you can follow your kids around these days thanks to the GPS units you surreptitiously attach to their skulls (or in the case of residents of Orange County, Aspen, and Westchester, to their fleet of cars).

But how about international cargo ships? Specifically the California Luna? I'm very shortly getting delivered to me my collection of belongings that I pack-ratted together and which The Doc didn't take off my hands, and apparently it's on the California Luna arriving soon in New York (that photo wasn't taken this morning, though it's a similar day and that's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for). A quick search doesn't indicate any obvious way to track Atlantic shipping, though there appear to be plenty of web-sites dedicated to ship-spotters. I'd call them the Anoraks of the sea, but an Anorak is singularly sensible at or near large water, so I'll refer to them as boat-perverts. These funnel-fuckers seem to have a good many sightings of my precious California Lunar in various states of undress. There are Dutch sites, American sites, Latvian sites (albeit without pictures, but those cut-off dates give me the horn - oh baaaaby), oh and even my shippers.

Don't confuse it with the 78-year-old grandmother's tribute site. I suppose with a family name of Luna you are more likely than most to name your daughter California, but why she died at a Cemetery is beyond me, the old freak.

Now, if we could take something like Microsoft Photosynth (thanks Pete) - you'll need Win XP SP2 or Vista, but it's worth taking a look. If we could combine that with GPS based tracking (all ships have GPS and charts and such - even my uncles barnacled runaround has all that jazz), web-cam video, and Google Earth or Microsoft Live Maps (again, XPSP2), we might be onto something. Imagine the freak-out power of calling your kids up to describe to them their view as they're knocking back another buttload of crack on the waterfront.

Labels: boats, gis, perverts, tracking

But we don't shit brooms

Slovenia is the new Switzerland (via). Who knew? But we're far too drunk most of the time to be quite so anal about our tidiness. We still have cow shit on the roads, man!

I woke up this morning to an enthusiastic argument between an agitated crow and a slow-witted car horn. It went back and forth, on and on, from about 7:45 to 7:50. That doesn't seem like a great deal of time, but in terms of the attention-span of a car horn, it's pretty fucking monumental. Crows... They're evil motherfuckers. Not only do they, as everyone knows, fashion hooks out of wire to get stuff out of tubes, they also drop nuts into the paths of cars to crack them open. Not just anywhere, mind, but at Pedestrian Crossings, so that they can have a safe moment or two to peck at the pickings.

New World Order

So, no, it's probably within the attention-span of a crow, and with that in mind it was a foregone conclusion that the car horn would give up and go and pick on a pedestrian at 14th and C.

That crow had friends. And they had a lot to talk about, it seems, after the car drove off. About 2 hours later, they were still going at it, and not single break for a glass of water between them. Arseholes. I took a look outside and found that they had migrated to another tree, closer to my window, and were haranguing a large hawk. I don't know if it was Palemale or Lola in that tree, but whoever it was sure as hell didn't seem phased. Before we could get a photo though, the bastard had flown off (hopefully to find another rat-dog to abduct).

Tunbridge Wells has its own form of intelligent life, it seems.

I've worked with worse

I was put on to the megalithic brainpower wondering the streets of Royal Tunbridge Wells by Three Beautiful Things, a blog of singular ordinariness whose one purpose appears to be to take completely pointless banalities and present them in a positive light. Since this is not the way I think (in fact, I believe I'm almost the opposite), I thought I'd give it a quick go. After all, it seems like a very healthy positive approach to life. Let me think. Hmmmmm.

1. Toilet paper didn't break today, so my hand wasn't covered in shit as usual.
2. I didn't catch the pervert living in the flat across from me masturbating over his online swimsuit catalogue.
3. It's not horribly hot or cold in the apartment.

That doesn't seem too difficult. I'll try another:

1. The contents of the dishwasher are clean.
2. My scalp doesn't hurt (apparently I don't have psoriasis, I have something else).
3. The dry-cleaning is done.

Perhaps a little too much into the whole cleanliness theme there. But it's definitely getting more and more difficult:

1. That fucking ambulance whoot-whoot-whooting at the junction has pissed off.
2. The truck reversing is less irritating than the ambulance was.
3. It snowed last night and everything looked really nice although it turned to shit and mud the moment the sun got anywhere worthwhile in the sky.

Yeah, I don't think the right way. The glass is never half full. It's not even half empty. In fact, some fucker's usually drunk most of my beer and left me with some backwash, if I'm lucky. You can keep your poor, abused and mocked, mentally deficient "joys", Royal Tunbridge Wells, or perhaps try to help them rather than treat them like a tourist attraction. I imagine a typical little pleasure of RTW to be wandering into Dixons and pointing at the improbably-employed retard using the video-camera on its side, pretend to be interested in buying something, and then running out leaving the door wide open. This is what happens south of the river of a sunny afternoon... At least there's no mention of celebrity.

When I was growing up in Cambridge there was a rather odd woman who used to goose-step everywhere. We called her Marching Mary. And I was terrified of ever crossing her path on the way to school.

Labels: crows, mental health, noise pollution, ridicule

Some people say I'm hard on the lads. Not I. They've been posting good shit for months now, and have really pulled their act together. But this one takes the biscuit. Turns out they're just a load of old murky hairy-footed marsh-wanderers after all.

Gizmodo win Typo of the Year awards

Gizmodo Baggins, this award is yours...

Update: They've fixed it already, but it's preserved for posterity in the URL: http://www.gizmodo.com/.../2007-boggies-nominate-us-226480.php

With this in my spam folder, I wonder. I have no idea what the purpose of this is other than either a) denial of service on my SMTP service or b) a way to test for active e-mail addresses, but why such a large amount of text? I mean, Exchange figured out that this was junk and canned it, so it's not beating my junk mail filter in any way.

Hippies and conspiracists (not always a distinct pair of entities) may conjecture that it's an undercover operation in effect, either Russian Mafia or the CIA. Or that it's some means of taking control of our minds and we need to start wearing our tin-foil contact lenses. Yet others will claim that it's a way to control a network of surreptitiously installed software on machines that don't ordinarily have SMTP servers on them, but that's just a load of old tosh - there are much better ways to do that. Or it could be Aliens (extra-terrestrial, or just not from Montana) learning English.

Or it could simply be AOL clogging up mail and mail-relay servers around the world to better justify charging for spam-free e-mail.

If I have to be a racist, I want to be a conspiracist.

I can't wait for the next installment:

only one dollar was needed, and the day mrs. jo paid him for fourand then she begged my pardon, or i don't think i ever should havejack beautiful and brave she looked, so full of strength and yet of meek his clothesbrush, glance at jo's retiring face, and then sink into the hearth the cosiest place in the house, and we shall all miss the
next morning, instead of the usual call,

More...

'i won't pry into any more"where are youa somewhat trying habit of regarding a man and his wound as separatethat the bewilderment of miss bat would be a constant inspiration i have had my eye on her for some time, and when i met her father by everyone, just for a bit of a frolic. i was sorry about meg, and begged it with the note in her hand.
he met, smile when the floating ends of the gray veil blew against his

he met, smile when the floating ends of the gray veil blew against hisbut gave it a new interest by his style of delivery; for his gestures wereand, at his special desire, set up a modelling-stand in his parlour andthinking, as he did so, - i am inclined to think." but it is her hobby to believe that everyone is tottering on the brink usually satisfied their young appetites. there was much pleasant talk while
f: peter met a lot of friends yesterday.

present to quelala, and it is said to have cost the princess half her kingdom.our turn and try to do as well. you own this; i see it in your faces: thenthe last touch of absurdity to her appearance.be able to drive cows to pasture, perhaps?"
tantalizing remark, "don't you wish you had some?" "i think it is rather hard to be loved whether i like it adding, as she pointed to the sofa in pathetic silence, "is he hurt? ill?
us a little house in the orchard," proposed betty, who firmly believed
you sleep well?""beg pardon,his wig off to his great dismay, the boy lay back and laughed tillto see them some time, but i do dread it so." and rose gave a shudder, of surprise to regret and respect, for earnestness is always effective vacation; and plumfield and parnassus did their best to make these and said, in his outspoken way, "to tell the honest truth, polly,
was off like a humming-bird, followed by robby, dribbling huckleberry charlie! how could you do it! how could you when you promised?"is a merciful provision, my dears; for it takes three or four women the bank, and i did. he may not like to come to me for that,stop fibbing. gravy, and all kinds of nice vegytubbles." daisy never could say
for husbands, they would live longer and write more. perhaps that gone one way, archie another, the echo of sweet words seemed to f: the
was quite irresistible. he brought a pretty bracelet for rose andalong, and i am sure conscience, instinct, and experience will keep letters from paris and rome, and you'd have so much to tell it would
is absent templatealmost relieved, and after a minute silence, said, soberly, "that to may's great delight, "that looks as if he was of the best bed. the open windows drove them wild because they could stop fibbing. the boys, quick to acknowledge courage even in one of the had won, for the gray legs came in just half a yard ahead
with them. as they passed over the hill the hammer-heads yelledbegan to quiver, and he put up his arms, saying with a penitent "no, she won't, steve, if you do yourmost; and, to my great surprise, he glanced at john:

Labels: mystery, spam, trends

They don't need a license

We have troublesome squirrels here in Stuyvesant Town, which I've blogged about before. They're some sort of super-smart squirrels which must have been trained by the army. They outflank, they lie in wait, they send out advanced parties and post one-another on point duty, not to mention dig trenches. There's a strange old balding man with a hooked translucent nose and a limping stoop that feeds them walnuts from a large plastic bag. He has a knife (with which to prize open the walnut casings), and I'm always afraid to approach him. The squirrels seem to idolise him. I believe he masterminds the whole terror operation. They will lay siege to you if you have any form of shopping, though products which may contain nuts tend to elicit more daring behaviour than others. I have recently noticed an increased interest in red meat products, which worries me a little.

Bernie Goetz (best known for his self-defense shooting of four alleged would-be muggers on the New York subway in 1984) also feeds the squirrels here in Stuyvesant Town. He's not the aforementioned knife-wielder, but he does train squirrels to be armed. Whether his squirrels form a vigilante protection force or are allied with knife-man's squirrels is unclear.

Incidentally, there's also crazy multi-coloured octogenarian roller-blader who seems to be stuck in Stuyvesant Town, unable to leave since the 80s, but he doesn't seem to feed the squirrels. He does have a large pet rabbit that he rubs against his face as he skates around and I did at first mistake that for a squirrel.

And today, on my way out of Stuyvesant Town, a Volvo estate pulled up at the curb and the driver got out, leaving his wife in the front passenger seat. He crossed the road and from the other side of the car to him four squirrels careened across the grass and pavement towards the rear of the car. Two of them stationed themselves on the sidewalk whilst the other two launched themselves through the air and onto the back right tyre. One disappeared into the wheel-well and the other flattened itself against the side of the tyre and watched around. I felt distinctly uncomfortable as I walked past them, and they eyed me with a mixture of hunger and contempt with not a little suspicion, as if I shouldn't have been there doing what I was doing. The nutfaced cheek of it.

Then I read that New York now has rabid animals (I've long suspected rabid humans), and it all sort of makes sense. I'm not leaving the house though, and I'm closing the windows. I may be 9 floors up, but these squirrels' rapid and organised development disturbs me.