Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Filed under: Midweek Movie — Malcolm Owen @ 11:36 pm
Ok, I admit, I didn’t have too much hope for this film when I first heard about it. I thought that being the second film for the team behind Shaun of the Dead, they would have to live up to the standard their previous film had set, and that would be extremely difficult to do. I also thought that the genre of “Funny Cop Films with Action Bits” wasn’t a good area to be working in, given that the genre covers such wonders as the Police Academy series.
Cue me buying the DVD of Hot Fuzz…
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Filed under: Japan, Video — Malcolm Owen @ 8:20 pm
Imagine, if you will, that you have to run along a conveyer-belt rolling towards you to a finish line a short distance away. But you must eat cookies at various parts along the way. And the belt speeds up after each cookie is eaten. And you have only 30 seconds to do it in.
Oh, and if you fail, you end up in some hot water (literally, not figuratively speaking here). Fail to keep up with the conveyer, fall over or anything like that? Fall into the hot water near the start line. Stay on the conveyer for 30 seconds without completing all tasks and crossing the finishing line? The conveyer abruptly stops, making you fall over, a big banner unfurls, and the conveyer starts again at full speed, throwing you into the aforementioned hot water.
Yes, it’s probably painful and humiliating to the contestants. Yes, only the Japanese could think of this sort of competition. And yes, it is fun to watch.
[Via TV In Japan]
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Filed under: Other — Malcolm Owen @ 1:10 pm
Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m worried as to how things are going with the legal systems of today. Many miscarriages of justice, where the guilty go free or severely under-punished whilst the innocent get put away and abused by some truck driver called Bubba who’s in for murder and hasn’t felt the touch of a woman in years, sicken me. How can systems put in place to help society as a whole do so much wrong too?
That said, there is one case that I think the US legal system has done right.
Roy “Judge in Administrative Law” Pearson took the company “Custom Cleaners” to court, because he took the interpretation of the “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign to the extreme. That’s $54 Million extreme.
Judge Pearson had taken his pants to the cleaners, only for 2 days later for them to be missing. Days later, the cleaners found the pants and tried returning them to the Judge, only for him to say they aren’t his. Cue him suing for various reasons, including keeping the sign up each day, and the cost of getting a cab to go to another dry cleaners every week.
Now, I’m not too sure about these things, but if a dry cleaning business was worth $54 Million, these people would have a chain of stores, instead of just a single location. Also, the cleaners offered to replace the pants too, but the Judge wouldn’t accept that courtesy. He just wanted the big money.
Judge Pearson lost. Thankfully. He may still appeal, but it’s doubtful that he will succeed.
[Via BBC News]
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Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Filed under: Apple, Internet, PC, Software — Malcolm Owen @ 9:28 am
So, I’m watching the latest episode of Diggnation, and halfway through they talk about the Safari browser for Windows. More specifically, this button…
…Guh? It’s an option that when activated does not add anything to the history, cache or anything, keeping whatever happens in that session from that point onwards “Private”. “Off The Record Browsing” if you will. Great for online banking and other applications where you don’t want your loved ones to see where you’ve been online.
And yes, it’s practically tailor-made for “adult” material viewing.
Via Diggnation and Apple
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Monday, June 18, 2007
Filed under: Apple, Internet, PC, Software — Malcolm Owen @ 9:38 am
So. You’re writing away on the perfect blog post in your friendly neighborhood browser window, and suddenly the internet connection dies on you just before you hit submit. You get the Page Can’t Be Displayed error, and so you quickly hit the Back icon to revive your work. Sadly, in quite a few cases, it isn’t there. What could you have done to prevent such a tragedy.
On my Mac, I use something called “ecto“, which is a bit of blogging software that allows you to lay out the post, to put pictures where you want them, and generally prepare the post offline before posting it on the big wide internet world. Sure, you could edit the blog posts in Microsoft Word or Open Office, and quite frankly for the whole “writing” bit they would be better, but ecto does more than that.
Within ecto, aside from allowing you to write posts, it gives you all the options you need that are in your Wordpress control panel. Tagging, Categories, Time Delayed Posts and so on. You can even see a list of the most recent blog posts on the site, edit them within ecto, and then republish them with minor edits.
And as for you multiple blog managing people, you would probably like it for it’s ability to switch between blogs and blog systems with ease. For example, I can very easily edit Blatantly Random and then switch to the Stick of Wrong Dev-Blog, then switch back to BR, with no problems at all.
If you do a lot of blogging, I would highly recommend ecto. It works on both the Mac and the PC, and there’s even a 50% discount on a copy if you buy both versions at the same time. At the moment it’s in version 2, but soon enough there will be version 3, which promises some big changes if this one doesn’t quite tick all your boxes.
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Monday, June 11, 2007
Filed under: Gaming, Other — Malcolm Owen @ 7:47 pm
So, yesterday the housemates told me of a new gambling machine at the local arcade, themed with Pac-Man. My gaming sense started tingling, and it wasn’t long before I could see what they meant by “Cool”. It was a coin pusher game, but if you could get the coins to get through specific gates before it reached the top shelf of the moving stairs, it played a Puzzle Bobble game in the centre screen, from which more coins can spit out. Yes, it was Pac-Man Ball, and it’s explained better here.
So, using my winnings from the newest coin pushing machine, I went to the ticket games, and won a stupid amount thanks to some bouncing ball game. What did I do with these tickets? Why, I bought a tin of poker chips, and with the change got some sweets and 2 bouncy balls. Hurrah!
These chips look exactly like the ones I bought from Tesco, meaning that I now have a stupidly large amount of poker chips. When laid out on a table, it makes me feel really quite rich. Seriously, if you were in Vegas with this many chips, you’d be feeling rich too…
Yes! I’m Rich! Rich I tells ye! John Chow ain’t got nothing on me, damnit!
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
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Filed under: Internet, Must See Blogs — Malcolm Owen @ 7:35 pm
Boy, is the Spellcheck going to love this one…
Have you been on the internet? You have? Good. You must have therefore seen a picture of a cat or kitten doing something, with a caption either making a badly spelt statement or describing something that isn’t really happening but could. A popular one would follow the formula “I’m in your (Blank), (Blank)ing your (Blank)s”. Trust me on that one.
These wonderful images are called LOLcats. Really. And one of the biggest lists of LOLcat images is the wonderfully named I Can Has Cheezburger?, which among it’s collection consists my favorite variety: Invisibles. Observe:
Invisible Tightrope
Invisible Onion and Knife
Invisible Dining Chair
Invisible Pommel Horse
Invisible Everything
Invisible Motorcross
Other tasty nuggets of LOLcats include this one that just confuses me, and also this evil and brooding image…
Why am I suddenly reminded of the DVD for Cats & Dogs?
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Monday, June 4, 2007
Filed under: Internet, Japan, Must See Blogs — Malcolm Owen @ 9:41 am
Many people yearn to travel to far off lands, in search of something new, something different to their own hum-drum surroundings that they were brought up in. This leads a few people to teach english in another country, in an attempt to make people there speak english better. An example of this sort of thing is Gaijin Smash.
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Friday, June 1, 2007
Filed under: Internet, Tech — Malcolm Owen @ 5:51 pm
As we all know, when Google launched Google Maps and Google Earth, the next few weeks then became filled by eagle eyed people finding random bits of joy, just by chance. Google launches Street View, and there’s no exception to the rule.
Laudon Tech has already compiled a long list of random yet wonderful things to look at, but here’s my current top picks from that list:
The Mystery Machine
Woman in Bikini
A Man “Boning Up” on Reading…
Old Lady on Tram staring into your Soul
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