September 2005

Following on with WhiteBoyBobs theme of food, here is my ultimate sandwich:

• Thick sliced crusty white bread (fresh)
• Peanut butter (Crunchy)
• Raisins
• A light dribble of honey
• Cheese and Onion Crisps (chips for the yanks)

And a big mug of sugary English Breakfast tea to wash it all down with.
You can’t beat a Subway, but this comes close.

Phew!

Glad Nick tagged me with this meme as I could’nt really think of anything to blog about at the moment. I have just taken a little (well earned) break from work (with iPod assistance) to bring you my Septets of Stuffs:

7 Things I Plan To Do Before I Die:
1. Write a childrens story (future colaborative blog - watch this space)
2. Travel a bit more
3. Not work so hard
4. Stop using a computer all day every day!
5. Spend more time doing things I want to do
6. Paint/draw/chill
7. Consumate the marriage to my second wife…

7 Things I Can Do:
1. Play the guitar.. Pink Floyd/Oasis anyone?
2. Play the Digeridoo.. anyone?
3. Juggle
4. Fix computers (and then some)
5. Survive on 4 hours sleep a night
6. Watch endless UK soaps and not get addicted
7. Fear death

7 Things I Can’t Do:
1. Fix cars
2. Cut in (painting walls)
3. Those little sliding puzzle things..
4. Last longer than 30 seconds
5. Understand why people fancy Kiera Knightly!
6. Paperwork
7. Care less about anything

7 Things That Attract Me To The Opposite Sex:
1. Bottoms
2. Asses
3. Behinds
4. Women in shirts n ties..?
5. Arses
6. Butts
7. Baby got back!

7 Things That I Say Most Often:
1. Have you seen that new iPod?
2. It’s on the torrents…for free!
3. Chanks (a mumbled mix of cheers and thanks)
4. Love you
5. Smell Ya Laterz
6. How comes i never got invited to the pub - again?
7. w00t!

7 Celebrity Crushes:
1. I refuse to do Celebs
2. cos’ they are all just
3. odd looking, skinny, stupid
4. airbrushed fakes who are so up
5. their own arses they all
6. look like their own shit anyway!
7. Jude Law

I had the misfortune to watch Troy last night on Sky Movies. It was one of those movies where I couldn’t wait for it to end. After around 30 minutes I was already thinking “Jesus! still two hours to go!….. where’s the bleach”.

Brad “Shaven Simian” Pitt rippled muscle and hammed it up in his “dumb but deep” role as Achillies who did nothing but fight and sleep with women. I really cannot see what women see in Brad. Not that I am “gods gift” or anything…. but that man is ugly and stupid!

The only thing more wooden than Pitts acting was the fabled “Horse Of Troy” which was impressively built from parts of sea faring vessels, broken down and re-assembled in a perfect horse shape. Quite how unskilled soldiers managed to assemble such an impresive device miles from home on a beach though, we will never know. The Wooden Rabbit from Monty Python was much better!

Simpering oily fop, Orlando Bloom completed the poor cast with his gibbering wimps impression of a young Prince who stole the wife of his adversary only to bring upon himself an army of a thousand ships. What she saw in a wet, fish-like person like him we shall only guess. Lets hope they make a film of The Silamarillion soon…

Taoski rating: Toss

Since my son’s sixth birthday earlier this year he has decided that he is no longer a fussy eater. Years of coaxing, tears (from us all) and shouting have gone and now he is happy to eat things like Pizza, pasta, mashed potato and most importantly fruit and vegetables, which at one time would have made him gag at the thought. My wife always insisted that this was passed to him genetically, as I am - i confess - a fussy eater.

Brought up as a vegetarian, I was never exposed to any meats other than the “Three B’s”: Bacon, Burgers and Bangers. At home I seemed to exist solely on Baked Beans on toast or other odd combinations of salad, cheese and dried fruit all mashed together in Pitta bread (which I still enjoy - as does my six year old!). We had our main food groups sorted. We were a happy, well nourished and content, wholemeal bread family.

However, apart from other neurosies too many to mention here, this lead me to develop my theory about the food I had never tried. It goes something like this:

“I have never eaten dog shit… but I know I would’nt like it!”

It makes perfect sense to me. I have never eaten Chicken or Lamb but I know I would not like it if i did. Not just because we used to keep Chickens in the back garden when I was young or anything like that - I just know I would’nt like the taste!

I am better than I used to be. My wife also insists that when we met and I was living on my own I was fuelled on Peanut Butter sandwiches. This is not true, as I was mostly fuelled on overtime pay, sexual urges, cheap beer and cigarettes.

I suppose the moral of this posting is this: If you do have a child who is a fussy eater, unless you want to bind them to a chair and force food down them there is’nt a great deal you can do. Just be calm, patient, understanding and it’ll all come good in the end. They ain’t gonna let themselves starve.

Then again, there was that story about the child who just ate Rice Krispies four times a day for seven years - and lived! What were his parents thinking?

Todays meaningless fact is…..

A Bum is a homeless person who does not work and does not travel.

A Tramp is a homeless person who does not work but does travel.

A Hobo is a homeless person who does work and does travel.

Just thought i would clear that one up for you all.

Those tefal heads over at Apple have done it again! Delivering us two new products on the same day!

The new iPod Nano is the replacement for the Ipod Mini and comes in the usual flavours of 2 and 4gb. With a color screen and physical dimensions that resemble some sort of a scifi nano chip thing it looks amazing!

They also announced a new iTunes mobile phone in association with Motorola. It can only hold 100 songs at a time (1GB) but I expect this is too little too late for them in the mobile market.

What amazes me most is that there have been no internet leaks about the iPod Nano at all when there are usually plenty of sites crawling up Apples butt to get the latest information!

Me Want one!
And i bet BigFootCookie does too!

EDIT: iTunes version 5 is out too! Must do a clean up on my music folders before i download it!
EDIT2: Looks like every fecker is getting iTunes5… i’m on a 2 meg line and am getting 11kb a sec! What the freaks that all about?

I work in iT and must therefore suffer the slings and arrows of the continual use of Acronyms such as MCP, TCP, UDP etc etc…

However, a common mistake regarding use of such language is that the monicker applied to these annoying terms, “TLA” is in fact not an Acronym for “Three Letter Acronym”.

It is in fact an Initialism.

An Acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a name and must be pronouncable as a word. An example of this would be FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) and another widely used in my line of work - PEBSAD (Problem Exists Between Seat And Desk).

Others like RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual) or STFO (Switch The Fucker Off) are correctly known as Initialisms, which are abbreivations consisting of the initials of a name or phrase.

After the death of Napster back in the days of leaving your dialup modem on all night to get a whole album, it fell to a company called Sharman Networks to release their program called Kazaa before P2P file sharing really kicked back off. Pedants will know there were other variants of this application before Kazaa became mainstream (Morpheus etc) but Kazaa was the one people jumped on to fill the gap that Napster left behind.

Today in Australia a “landmark case ruling” was served against Sharman Networks saying that their software was facilitating the use and distribution of illegal and copyrighted information on the internet. They have two months to ammend their software to not allow copyrighted information to be transmitted or face further heavy legal fines.

Potentially this means that the ruling will be brought to other countries and used as precendent to ensure that the Kazaa network is either shut down or as I expect, will be turned to some Pay to P2P type service.

I bet Apple and iTunes are shitting themselves!

Besides the fact that a whole host of P2P networks and applications come and go in a matter of months I am not sure that the MPAA and RIAA are concentrating their efforts in the right places. Serving a court action against an application provider that takes up less than 10% of the P2P network traffic in Australia does seem to be a little misguided - but for the court to also allow them to “change their business model” also seems a little odd too.

I suggest that they file a lawsuit against Microsoft who allow you to choose if you want to rip CDs using their “Windows Media Player” software either using or not using DRM encryption. Only the foolish numpty PC users would check this option! Surely this also facilitates the swapping of copyrighted information. Or sue the maker of the first mass-market “tape to tape” stereo system - that makes more sense! Maybe the inventor of ADSL should also be banged to rights as he/she also allows the copyrighted information to be sent and received quicker.

As the sticker on the back of my iPod said when i opened the box: “Don’t steal music”.

“Duh! What the fuck did I buy one for then?”

I know that Damon Albarn is widely viewed as Jamie Oliver of the pop world but I quite like the new Gorillaz album.

The new single, Dare, featuring Mr Potatohead (Potatobody?) Shaun Ryder is very good and the music video is also cool. Even my Steps loving Son likes it too. It also gives comic artist Jamie Hewlett something to do after 2000AD and Tank Girl died a death.

Although not all the Gorillaz tracks are good I have repspect for Mr Albarn for not succumbimg to “sticking with the old formula” and churning out more Blur tracks that have clearly lost their 90s feel.

Not at all like Oasis do…..