Wednesday Zeitgeist

Half-way through the week. Not that I count the working days or nothing, just preparing for the Very Big Party on Friday. It will be wicked.

This week I mostly saw Pan's Labyrinth and highly recommend it.

Big news today is that Dear John has reshuffled the cabinet, an all new line-up of head kickers, assholes and pigs. Good on you, John. With any luck, by the end of the year this will be your legacy:



And in honour of Vandstone, unceremoniously dumped to a plum diplomatic role, preferebly in some hot country filled with the relatives of the poor bastards whose detention she presided over, I present a Two-Faced Pig:

Did you like what I did there?

Whenever I get sad I think about this:


Fuck that would be a FORCEful band.

While I am thinking Star Wars:
Interior Map of the Millenium Falcon


And this guy has thought about Star Wars WAAAAAY too much: A New Sith, Revenge of the Hope

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

And for good measure:


I would love to pimp my bike to look like that. wonder how hard it would be?

The Douce Card, for handing to people. This would be wickedly useful at Trivia for those moments when certain teams attempt to trash talk us.


Ricky Gervais on Spinal Tap and The Office

Incredible images of the world in 2100

US Navy develops railgun. Force compared to hitting a target with a Ford Taurus at 380 mph ... with a 200 to 250 nautical-mile range.

Alan Smitheee Presents...



Fermi: Why Aliens haven't found us yet .

Only 50 years of fish left

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers.

Dawkin's The God Delusion:
Part I
Part II

Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a single photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.

Animated Soviet Propaganda. Ironically, this movie appears to be American propanganda about Soviet propaganda. This may, of course, not actuall be irony. I get so confused.

Tetris Vandalism:


The other big news, of course is that Ruby on Rails 1.2 has been released.

Good news! Someone has developed InfiDisk for EC2 ... allows you to mount your S3 account as a filesystem, caches the data in the local instance memory and storage and streams data to S3. Now I just need to work out what to use it for and I am rocking.

Oh, I am still seeking a quorum for the first Nomic Adventure. We'll do it on Game On, Gnolls. We need at least 3 people.

And for good measure, Google Maps hacking:

Keep Left

Keep Left. Ah... LOVE! To think that only a little while ago I would barely have known what that meant.

We got our wedding photos, they're very cool, thanks to the photographic genius of young Ruby.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

Hot. So very hot. So hot that I had to ask Mrs Android this question to complete the Zeitgeist:

hey, what's the name of that game where it's a mechanical table with silver balls? and flippers ...

The answer is of course PinBall ...

Now I have to attempt to be all brainy and stuff and code up some ... stuff.


TechStars - start-up incubator. Now if only there was a local one. I proposed moving to Boulder, Colorado for 3 months, but not really convenient this year.

Weasel Words of War. Why use torture when an "extreme rendition" would do the job?

The MacGuffin

How a hanging is supposed to work ... apparently, not that fun.

Daniel Libeskind’s design for Gazprom City, the future St. Petersburg headquarters for Russian energy giant Gazprom:



“Zimbabwe, the land of dying children” by RW Johnson in the Sunday Times.

World Health Organisation figures show that life expectancy in Zimbabwe, which was 62 in 1990, had by 2004 plummeted to 37 for men and 34 for women. These are by far the worst such figures in the world.

Battle of Helms Deep. In Candy

Giant Rabbits to feed the poor

The Nazi Raccoons that Ate Germany. Not even a joke. Nazi. Raccoons.

Buy Sealand! Donate and get citizenship. I think I might pitch in some cash ...

The Heff. Sad, sad old man.

Greatest Martial Arts Moments. I like the one with the Pinball sound effects and the raining bodies.

The future ... it ... lives

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. . . This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking." - Isaac Asimov

Sentient Developments: Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual: Redux. Particularly like: "Information Theoretic Death" and "Bayesian Rationality".

Loops of highly charged particles burst from the sun's surface:



Fermi Paradox
"The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence of contact with such civilizations."

Bizarre New Form of Life Found in Arctic Ocean, Scientists Announce

When you're young you get sad

... then you get high

Apparently.

You know it's love when you're quoting Ryan bloody Adams lyrics on your blog.

Oh one day when you're looking back
You were young and man you were sad
When you're young you get sad
When you're young you get sad then you get high

Woke early and weirdly sad for a bit this morning. Just ... nostalgia? ... 12 months ago to the day I was working frentically on a business project with someone who's not quite a friend anymore ... we took time off work, cloistered with our computers and coded away ... and then ... it just stopped, really. Idea was to gain escape velocity from our jobs and get control. Still my dream, but ... things change so much.

For the better, as it turns out. GirlWife, house, small dog. These things are such joy.

Happy New Year. PS: We got married.

Crush My wife and I would like to wish everyone a happy new year, and etc. In our extended absence from the blogoverse, we may have tied the knot in a top-secret ceremony.

What was the house warming can now be revealed as the wedding party.

2007 is the best year ever.

I am happy happy happy and everything is incredible.

So much more to say ...