Gold Membership

This is a song an internet friend of mine - cavalcade from The Society of Gamesplaying Gentlemen and Womenfolk, the internet's premiere Victorian-themed videogame discussion forum - put together, fed up spending £35 for a year's Xbox Live just to get verbal abuse from American teenagers. He's hoping to gain internet notoriety from this, so I'm doing my part.

Warning: contains lots of profanity.

The Doyouinverts - Gold Membership (demo)

Ja wohl

Why is everything in my blogger control panel in German?

3D Projector

Realisticats

This is one man's backlash at the "lolcats" phenomenon that's taken the internets by storm recently.

Some of them are a hell of a lot funnier than some of the lolcats images, too.

Here goes...

In just over an hour, I'm heading to the airport to go to Scumdee Dundee. Flight's at 2.40, arrives at 3.30. I should be at the company apartment around 4.30 or 5.00, if everything goes smoothly. I doubt I'll have an internet connection there, and even if there's a port I won't have anything able to connect.

According to the contract, I'm supposed to start work tomorrow at 10am, so hopefully it'll be decent weather and I'll be able to walk in, just to familiarize myself with the route while I've got the time.

At this point, all I can think of are the negative things. Not even anything in particular; just general unease/nervousness and my natural pessimism. Fingers crossed it'll all go smoothly and I won't make an utter arse of myself on the first day.

Banjo Hero

My jaw is on the floor. It starts off pretty slow, but if he's really playing all that stuff (on a modded version of GH2, obviously) then my God he's awesome.

And, if other YouTube Guitar Hero videos are anything to go by, he's probably about eight.

I'm done

Just had my exit interview at my old employer, which means - more or less - that I'm free to go whenever. I'll probably hang about til the usual time anyway, though; not in any rush to get stuck in rush-hour traffic.

It's a weird feeling. I've been working in this building for four and a half years; the idea that I'm never going to be back in it after today is really quite alien.

Two weeks from now, on the 16th, I'll be flying into Dundee to start at RTW. That's a much more daunting prospect; it's been so long since I started a new job, I'm not sure what I'll have to do. I don't know what training to expect, what forms I'll have to fill in, or even how long it'll take to meet the people I'm going to be working with, hopefully for at least as long as I've been here. The fact that it's a completely new industry, with an entirely different type of product that's more complex by an order of magnitude than anything I've had to work on here, isn't too comforting either.

Still, I'm looking forward to the challenge. As busy as I've been kept where I am, it was rarely very taxing on an intellectual level - at least, not after the first few months.

Electric Unicycle

A pair of 18-year-old Canadians have designed and built an electric-powered unicycle with a top speed of 40mph, which uses similar principles to the Segway scooter to maneuver.

Dubbed the Tango (or Uno, depending who's talking), the bike is based off a Yamaha R6 and was designed and built by the high school students for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in New Mexico.

It looks dangerous as all hell, especially if you're talking about moving at 40mph, but I can see it being quite fun, so long as you're all padded up properly. The designers are hoping to get the Tango to market, with particular designs on bike-heavy areas like China and India - so long as they can get the investment to develop the thing.

This is a bit old...

...but John Oliver Olivier's Political Theatre review, of the recent Senate all-night debate over the Iraq War withdrawal, is still hilarious.

The cold, cold heart of Web 2.0

This article over at The Register is well worth the read, although I can't put my finger exactly on why.

It's an opinion piece by William Davies, a sociologist, about the application of economic theory onto the internet, specifically how the theories of a guy called Gary Becker relate to Web 2.0.

I realise that it sounds, from that description, very dry and boring, but in actuality it raises an interesting point about the flash-in-the-pan nature of internet trends and how that affects the impact of consumer-created content that's the flagship of modern internet business.

(Also, I know my post titles are getting less original - I'm resorting to stealing the title of the article I'm linking to - but it's better than having a bunch without titles.)

Copy killers

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow has a new column with Guardian Unlimited about copyright issues, which he admits is basically to discredit DRM (Digital Rights Management)-based sales models in a digital society, and promote what he calls "copy-friendly" methods.

His first column is up today, and covers the most important stuff to know about DRM: why it will never work.

The companies that sell [DRM] are, at best, bunkum peddlers and, at worst, out and out fraudsters. Their wares simply can't work - not without changing the laws of physics, maths and information science.

DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend millions. They take years. They are defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists.

Unfortunately for those selling DRM today we inhabit a networked world, where every customer is seconds away from a computer, a browser and a search engine. You don't have to be a genius hacker to get a copy of Ratatouille - you just need to plug "download ratatouille" into Google and get the copy that some more skilled person has thoughtfully made available to you.

Computers are machines for copying data. A good computer is one that copies well, quickly and cheaply. The internet is a machine for moving copies of data around. When the internet works well, it copies data quickly and cheaply.

It's hard to believe that companies still invest so much money in these systems, when even they admit that it's got little effect on anybody other than the honest consumers who wouldn't steal the movie anyway.

Flight's been cancelled

The flight to Dundee on Tuesday the 14th has apparently been cancelled - and if my previous experience with the airline in question is anything to go by, it's probably because I was the only person booked on the flight.

On the other hand, it potentially gives me a couple of extra days to get stuff together for moving; what with this weekend being spent housesitting (well, really we're looking after the cats and dogs rather than the house), and next weekend at Amecon, time's running very short.

To that end I've also booked off all of next week from work here in Belfast in an effort to get all - or at least most - of my stuff together before I have to move out of the house here. Although to be honest, I think it'll still be a little tight.

Drum mod

I'm not usually big into PC casemods, but this one looks pretty awesome.

Via Engadget

LG makes screen from water and oil

In the pursuit of a cheap flexible display, LG Philips have come up with a screen that's made with the help of oil and water.

The patent they've filed has the following, almost impenetrable, abstract:

A display is disclosed, which can be fabricated without a high-temperature process, and also realize color images, the display including a reflective electrode formed on a flexible substrate; a transparent insulation layer having a predetermined color formed on a surface of the flexible substrate including the reflective electrode; an opposite substrate formed in opposition to the flexible substrate; an opposite electrode and a black matrix formed on an inner surface of the opposite substrate; and an electrolytic layer and a nonelectrolytic layer formed between the flexible substrate and the opposite substrate, where the electrolytic layer is transparent, and the nonelectrolytic layer is nontransparent.

Thank God Engadget are on hand to translate this gibberish - their coverage manages to render that readable even to me.

Poor PS3 sales mean better profits for Sony

Another NextGen.biz story that I can't read from work, but the little blurb is quite funny regardless.

Sony’s chief financial officer has revealed that the company’s recently reported games division losses were less than expected – because of the lack of PlayStation 3 consoles sold at a loss.

So basically, the poor sales of Sony's PS3 console means that they've done better, financially, than they would have done had the machine sold out.

Meanwhile, Nintendo's running away with a machine they've made money on since day one and continues to outsell the competition (no matter how much anybody says they're not competing) by staggering amounts.