Nixta Sinks

Hot on the heels of feeding 5000 on sea-bass without Jesus, comes this kid from Alabama who found and slowly killed himself a cow-sized pig, now looking forward to 700lb of fine wild-boar sausage. If only we could hunt and slowly kill all the biggest freaks on the planet, perhaps we'd take some steps forward...

This kid is definitely standing back, but still...

Labels: boar, freak, hunt

Probably done the rounds, but who cares? I ain't seen it aboot...

Update: Apparently I'm not explicit enough in pointing out that this is a hilarious video that you should watch. You don't need to be Canadian, or arachnophilic, and it is quite safe for the arachnophobes out there too (well, perhaps all but the most afflicted).

Labels: canada, education, spiders

It's only funny because no-one gets hurt. Sheer luck, given the way that manhole nails that pickup on a waterlogged motorway. Remember who's boss, fellas...

Via Tomsk via Miha (A Pavlič Joint)

Labels: flood, traffic, video, water

I love modern life. That I'm no longer torn to shreds by my tweed underpants goes a long way to making up for the impending flooding of my basement by the swoosh of a melting iceberg some 2,000 miles away.

After a number of years of frenzied liberal-bashing, people are coming round to the outrageously crazy-assed ideas of one enormous should-be president and his bandwagon-sucking whores in Hollywood. You should have seen his smile on The Daily Show the other day - I thought Nicholson himself was about to leap out and consume the audience.

But Old Bug-Eyes mentioned on Friday something that only made it into the New York Times on Sunday: The next step is to beat the news stations to a pulp because they have, as has long been known, not been about news, but about ratings. I've said it before and I'll say it again (and it's good to see Ali Gore Gore agreeing at last) that the Daily Show is one of the few places to get real news in America.

And so we have this gem of a statement from BS herself, on the day the LL checks herself into rehab (I'm getting into the coke and rehab industry asap).

Defending her behaviour, she said: "I think it is actually normal for a young girl to go out after a huge divorce".

Get back in there with LL, you whore! Don't come out until all YOUNG GIRLS can afford HUGE DIVORCES. More tits on TV.

It's a miracle more people don't hate us.

Regardless of whether he did what he was convicted of or not, this chap's escape is like something out of the cold war.

However, the article's editing is like something out of kindergarten. If something is "barely inaccessible" wouldn't that make it really easy to get into? You know, it's only inaccessible if you're hugely obese, and even then you could probably squeeze through provided you weren't stupid or covered in glue.

The car that police believe was used in the getaway was found on a dirt road, in what the police spokesperson described as a barely inaccessible area near the border.

New glasses, sir?

Google today launched Google Street Maps. A technological advance, but little more, other than perhaps a reply to Microsoft's offering (though I haven't tried that out yet because I'm too lazy to click on some links, but then again I'm so lazy I want to have decent images of where I could otherwise walk or drive so that I can recognise where on the FDR I currently am).

It's actually a neat idea, of course. People navigate by landmarks and features, not by numbers on a street. It's a method of navigation that's scalable and applicable, and instantly recognisable. It doesn't depend on the owner of the property nailing up numbers in the same place, or trees being trimmed to see the numbers, or the numbers being painted a distinctive colour or even displayed in a readable typeface (Die, Comic Sans! Die!).

However, it does rely on the landmarks being visible, and there not being "stretch-marks". In the above image, two problems are immediately apparent. The first, a compound problem: Quality of the picture. Focus and exposure. There's no way to tell that this is Circa Now on East 6th Street. The second: In order that the photography can be collected cheaply, it's good not to have traffic. You pay for fewer hours. But sadly that means that you're driving around early morning when the shops are closed (and, incidentally, the lighting in the city is bad). As an experiment, it's of course acceptable, but as a useful navigational or reference tool, it's rendered (if you'll excuse the unintented pun) utterly useless.

At last, a drunk driving simulator.

Looking at the above image of my street in Stuyvesant Town, you can see that the shutter-speed on the camera (again, probably down to the time of day and the lighting available) is not high enough. Objectively, there's no point in that image at all. Utterly useless. Perhaps worse than useless.

Of course, it will improve.

What may be interesting would be trawling through the various images available now and building up a map of better focused, better exposed imagery. Essentially a spatial representation of where imagery is useful. Could take a long time.

Much less time though will be taken before people build hacks and mashups that overlay better imagery and advertisements on the map. Perhaps a real picture of Nicole's store...

Labels: gis, google

I mentioned yesterday in passing that I'd travelled "to a few faraway places". I was conscious at the time that this could easily be misconstrued to mean that I've travelled all over the place, but was at a loss to succinctly describe exactly how.

By coincidence, I looked today at Pete Batty's Flickr profile and noticed a nice map of where he's been (Pete has a superb new blog, by the way, although it may only be of passing interest to those not in the GIS industry).

So, I filled my Visited Countries form in (itself an embarrassingly quick exercise), and here's the map that says all that I wanted to say yesterday, but which my words failed in helping me to do.

I've been around, but now you see that I haven't really "travelled"...

Labels: gis, travel

Finally, it seems that the long-secret long-impending effect of Wallstrip's attention grabbing formula and talent can be made public. CBS appear to have bought them. When I think back on that first sushi dinner in Denver with Lindsay (and Skankmeister "Are you going to use that stamp?" Penn), I don't remember meeting her at all. Maybe I met her at her house party with KTO, just before (I think) she moved to New York, but I can't have met her then - I must have met her before that. All I remember of that is that there was a spiral staircase and I was driving so I couldn't get plastered.

But I generally don't remember much anyway. I think it's the booze and indifference.

Well done, Linsday! Well done, Mr. Lindzon!

Good girl! Now, about that yacht we discussed...

Labels: Wallstrip

I'm a Microsoft developer at heart at the moment. The major reason is partly professional, and partly principled. In my youthful hippie Risc OS Acorn Archimedes days, I sang a very different tune. But I became practical and dull and my idealism faded alongside my youth.

The easy professional part is that for some 6 years now I've been working with ESRI products. Their rich library or spatial application functionality is all COM based, hence limited architecturally, but also limited to the Win32 platform, whose primary and by far the best development environments are Microsoft based.

By the time I got to the party, things were pretty stable. Then along came C# .Net.

I'm something of a snob when it comes to object orientation (I believe that most OO programmers don't really know how to use it properly, and still think that Smallworld Magik is the best OO language I've used, although a lot of colleagues didn't understand what I was doing with it), and so I spent quite some time shying away from such half-arsed implementations as C++. Add to that my principled objection to programming languages and frameworks that preclude you actually programming (COM or UI programming in Visual C++, memory management in the year 2000), and also my interests tending more to software interaction and presentation rather than realtime applications (though we're getting into chicken-and-egg territory here, and for God's sake don't mention my current project), and I clearly must love C#. No, it's not the best OO language out there, but it's about the best compromise and meets nearly all of my criteria, except for runtime class mutation.

So when it came time to decide that I was fed up with the drone of the PCs in my living room, I didn't buy new fans for them but instead decided to turn them off and find a hosting provider.

Finding a Windows hosting provider that provided an even half-decent level of functionality hasn't been simple the last few times I've looked, but this time I found 3Essentials.com. I'm so far (fingers crossed) utterly impressed. All queries answered within 30 minutes, live chat, good knowledgebase, cheap (though not cheap enough for Skankmeister "2.5 Gigabytes, tuppence upyerarse" Penn), .Net, Perl, Python, plenty of space and bandwidth.

What it does mean is that Nixtasinks may suffer transitional problems - see the Flickr doolally at top right for an example... Hopefully not for long. I've just got to work out how to control the SQL Server DB at the host's site...

Since I started work about 11 and a half years ago, by a rough calculation, I have earnt (or rather, been salaried) about $1,000,000 USD. Give or take $100k. All pissed away. That's Gross, of course, and gross. Yet I still rent (the New York way), am in debt (sorry! not for much longer, I promise!), and right now at least am tremendously hungry.

That doesn't take into account inflation, nor lunch. Breakfast would be a start.

It's so depressing.

At various stages in that time, of course, I've travelled to a few far away places, got married to absolutely the right person, had a number of outrageously decadent and superb holidays, bought and crashed a car, supported the arts, scientific research, one widow, and Save The Children, kept a roof over my head and the tobacco and drinks cartels in business, built a library of books, music and film, part-funded a fashion-line, been screwed out of (back)pay by a startup I got involved with, and out of a bonus/payrise by a company I gave 5+ years to, lost a father, worked in London, New York, Sydney, Denver, Melbourne and Cambridge, helped a few fledgling careers, dated a woman with only one opposable thumb (the other was a mutant finger, which may have been "opposable" but certainly wasn't an "opposable thumb" - what a stoner freak she was), and made an indecent number of very intelligent, patient, succesful and remarkably solid friends who for some reason answer my calls.

I should stress less.

Right. That's over with. Who's up for a soup-run to the local shelter? Those homeless orphans aren't nearly hungry enough, and some of them seem to be putting on weight.

That's right. BA's headphones in club world are noise-cancelling. They looked so old and decrepit that I was quite astounded.

The new beds are shit though. For all you plebs that have to sit upright, don't imagine it's any more comfortable. Yes, the stewardesses are hotter, and no they don't wear underwear, and yes they will pour champagne into your mouth from a tube where the oxygen masks should be (because we get all the oxygen on the plane - you losers are breathing synthetic air imported from India). The beds rock back and forth like you're on a see-saw. At least your maggot-class seats stay where you put them. TVs flap around loosely too. They flap away so you can't see the jittery on-demand film, then when you sit up to pull it back, it flaps back and smacks you in the face. On my first flight with these new seats there was an engineer tearing them all apart trying to stop them eating the passengers. On my third, the entertainment system just didn't work. At least they comped me 10,000 miles.

Anyone know what *does* happen to all the used headsets? And who cleans up a 747 while it's sitting at LHR? More to the point, what happens to the used papers, cups, plastic bags and blankets? On top of all the carbon emissions, do they even feel the need to recycle?

There was no option on the survey for "did you find the mistake in our survey?", but then there never is, is there?

Rude, incomplete, and mistaken...

Labels: bloopers

Geniuses at work seem to make a disconnect from the world they're in. Sometimes it's a lengthy conscious disconnect, like locking yourself in a room. Mostly the presentation disregards conformity (that's why there are private clubs for them to stay safe and unmolested in). Then again if you're merely pretending (or worse still, trying) to be a genius, you end up being an arsehole without meriting anything - see successful "actors", for whom presentation is everything, but in reality nothing without artistry. Most of them fancy themselves geniuses, but really are merely lucky, hard working and then rich.

It's like trying to find love. Give it up. Get on with what you do (even if it's waving your wang around in public) and it'll happen (even if it's via pen-letters in gaol).

Mostly, people label geniuses as "weird": Lautrec, Brando, Lagerfeld, HST, Isabella Blow, Warhol, Feynmann, Bowie, Burroughs. Einstein was such a profound genius that we've taken to his oddities - perhaps because he took the time to make them enjoyable to the world with humour whereas most just don't find that important enough. People now pretend Ziggy was never weird.

Anyone who tells me Stevie Wonder isn't weird is lying. It's a disconnect that he can't be blamed for making though, so you can't reasonably label him weird without feeling bad about it. He spends this video (thanks, Tomsk) in a trance. Of course, it's not odd for Stevie Wonder. He's acclimatised us to it. It is Stevie Wonder now. It would be singularly odd if he didn't go into this trance. His only concession to those around him is being dressed and not leaking bodily fluids, but his body is clearly of no relevance, so how can his appearance be? Nice. I wish we could all just shake out like this without being banned from our favourite restaurants and shops. Then again, I wish I could play the drums with only my feet (see 5:50ish), but for that I'd need a 3 foot long schlong for balance.

5:50 - proof of a third leg...

Labels: Crazy Monkey Genius