Schinckel.net

via xkcd.

I’m always playing that game. When you see a person on TV or in a movie, and you spend the next hour trying to remember where you’ve seen them before. There was just a Qantas advertisement on TV, with the punchline “They know I like my beer in the evening, and my Newspaper in the morning”. It’s got two guys, one of which I picked straight away. He was in Frontline, the grumpy other reporter. The other guy, that had me stumped. Until I remembered where I’d seen him. He was in the short film “Twins”, where he talks about being a single dad with twins, and how it’s important to choose a favourite. I’ve got a copy of it somewhere - searching on Google was fairly useless. Google: Twins Favourite Movie only bought up pr0n, and disney. Dunno which is worse, there. Aaargh. Maybe I’ll find a link one day.

Angels with Dirty Faces • Sugababes • Angels with Dirty Faces

This post was in the Blogsome Forums tonight: No, you aren’t looking for “mail friends” - you are looking for people to click on your silly little links, and get you some linkage lovin’ - which probably somehow results in you getting money. And what’s worse? You aren’t even on Blogsome, the forums where you have posted this. Maybe, just maybe, I would have had some thoughts about the validity of this post if you had at least some relationship to Blogsome. Well, I ain’t standing for none of it. Your Spam post is gone, and if you put any more up, well, gosh darn it I’ll just delete them too. And your little dog, too.

There has been some discussion about how Blogsome doesn’t allow Email posting, and now a new service has stepped in to fill the gap.

Blogmailr is a free service that allows you to send an email to a predetermined address (like r7873hud@blogmailr.com ), and it will automagically appear as an entry on your blog.

You’ll need to visit Blogmailr first, and register.  I created a new user in my blog (be sure to promote it to a level that can post, ie > 0), so that if things go bad, I can easily remove posts, and it can’t remove anything I have posted from my proper account.

You can also add categories, and styling to the post.  Like I have to this one.

Thanks to Micah for this find.

Update: I’ve not used Blogmailr since this date, and have removed the user to which it was attached…

The latest National Interest podcast had a segment on Carboard Coffins. These are an environmentally friendly replacement for regular coffins, and interestingly both interviewees were from Adelaide. I realised, at the end of the story, that I knew the John Smith that was referrred to as having been buried/cremated (I missed this bit) in a cardboard coffin. He was a lecturer we had at Uni, who died a couple of years ago from cancer. John taught us an Energy Systems class, where we studied a heap of environmentally sensitive topics, such as sustainable housing, and other bits like that. Pete, a good friend of mine had a bit more to do with him after Uni finished. Hi Pete.

Grace Park, the stunning Korean-Canadian actress who plays Boomer in the new BattleStar Galactica also had a short role in the first episode of the second season of Dark Angel. Her line:

Copulation was unsuccessful, Ma’am. X5-698 failed to achieve minimum mission requirements, Ma’am.

At which point the bumbling idiot who couldn’t achieve minimum mission requirements was bundled off. Mind you, she’s hot, but she’s nothing next to Jessica Alba.

Successful copulation between myself and X5-452, Ma’am. [Pause] Twice.

You dog, you.

The Last Goodbye • James Morrison • Undiscovered

Sorry, no real nipple here folks.

This is not a review, but more of a series of comments about this book. I may write a view at some stage, but I haven’t yet finished it, so I’ll wait until then. The premise of this book is that instead of, as popular wisdom determined, popular culture being the basest form of thought, it’s actually making us more intelligent. Johnson (link points to his blog) puts forward a couple of cases, and then submits some evidence to support them. Firstly, there is a general thought that video games’ only redeeming feature is that it improves hand-eye coordination. In fact, modern video games provide more than this, they actually improve our ability to solve problems, by virtue of the commonality of having to ‘figure out’ the rules from within the game. Secondly, popular television also improves various skills. Whereas in days gone by television programs spoon-fed the audience, nowadays the most popular programs actually engage us more than the ‘arty’ programs used to. Watching a program like 24 (which I don’t incidentally), or even The Apprentice, forces us to be active participants. We need to think much more to continue to be aware of the connections between the different characters, and we are task-switching between the various sub-plots. Johnson provides a series of reasons why he thinks these have taken off, and I must say, so far I’ve agreed with pretty much all of what he’s said. I’m not going to just repeat what he said (I’m not sure I’d want to try - the evidence does take a bit of work to get across, and I’d rather you just buy the book, and read it yourself), but I did want to add some of my own comments. I’ve been watching two SciFi programs since starting to read the book. One of them is the new BattleStar Galactica, the other V. I’m noticing lots of similarities between the two, and I’m finding I want to re-watch them to analyse the ‘thought content’ requirements of them. Notably, both of them have a female character who is thrown into power, and one of the major plots is about her coming to grips with the role and responsibilities that ensue. Both programs also have an ‘alien’ race who is keen on wiping out humanity, although for different reasons. They are both about the human race, on the run, and it’s attempt to survive. Perhaps a better comparison would be to compare the older series of BattleStar Galactica with the new one. Perhaps that will be a new project of mine. Compare the two from a perspective of cognitive demands. After all, the plots are pretty much the same, so any differences should reflect the complexity that modern TV audiences demand.

Crazy Little Thing Called Love • Michael Bublé • Michael Bublé ★½

I remember reading somewhere about a trick to view how fast iTunes is downloading a file. Click on the Downloads source item, and then click on the time remaining text for a downloading file. It changes to display a speed: However, the savvy amongst you may realise this is pretty fast. Especially since my connection is a sloppy 256kbps (kilobits per second) - the fastest I can really download at is around 26 kilo_bytes_ per second. iTunes must really be measuring the speed in kilobits per second.

Sweater • Eskimo Joe • Triple J Hottest 100 - Volume 6 ★★½

For my daily commuting, which recently has been almost entirely on bicycle, I subscribe to a series of podcasts. These are mainly from the ABC in Australia, but thrown into the mix is the NewScientist podcast. Back when I was on dialup, I used a neato trick to download podcasts using wget, and then import them from the local machine when they were fully downloaded. This was mainly because wget is better at resuming downloads than iTunes was then, and to a certain extent still is. At least now you can pause and resume some downloads, but iTunes still times out long before wget does. I used this same trick a couple of weeks ago when the NewScientist server had some sort of an issue, and the long and the short of that was that I had some entries in the NetInfo database, and I still had a couple for the NewScientist servers. And because of that, wasn’t actually downloading the newer podcasts since then. I fixed that problem, but now I’ve come across another. Two podcasts are missing from the list - the two most recent. I know iTunes tried to download them a couple of times, but it’s like I clicked on them and pressed Delete. And then, I wasn’t able to get them to come back. I tried unsubscribing, and then resubscribing, but no joy. And then I happened across a hint on MacOSXHints.com (Re-download podcasts without subscribing again):

After that, I collapsed the podcast series by clicking the triangle, and then expanded it again while holding the option key

Bingo. This has apparently fixed it all up.