Humans found to be vulnerable to viruses. Microsoft to release patch.

Blogging about blogging or the lack of blogging is seriously uncool so i'll try not to do that. Rats. Well i'll try not to do it twice.

I have been sooooooooo ill recently. I'm usually immune to most of your human virii but one seems to have got me. And it's a doozie. It's had me laid up in bed for all of my four days off. Which isn't nearly as fun as it sounds. Plus it's suprisingly evil. It woke me up 10 minutes before my alarm this morning for work and it had me believing i felt pretty ok. Right up until i got here. Now i'm sweating like a very fat person who is somewhere moderately or extremely warm (sorry, couldn't come up with an original analogy).

Anyway fingers crossed its not bird flu. Although if i were to wake up one morning with wings that would be pretty cool.

You can't kick a pigeon

It's tough to keep blogging when you have an approximate regular audience of about four. And i can't even be sure of that. But i did get a comment from Dan demanding i blog. Sure he could have just spoken to me on messenger, asked how i was, what i was up to, but nah why go to the effort when you can just sit back and demand someone blogs. Go him i say. Girl power and all that.

So anyway, i know this is supposed to be at least in some part about my life so here goes. I've been pretty lazy these past few days. I can't even claim i didn't have time to blog, because i've had plenty. I did finish a long out-standing project the other day. A website i've been making for someone for over a year, so hopefully i'll get paid now and it'll all be done and dusted. I found some great paid hosting for it (well i'm hoping it will be great anyway). It's with www.streamline.net. I'm going with their basic package, which offers unlimited bandwidth, 50mb of space (turns out the site i made is only 2mb so far despite being at least 50 files and a small DB running the guestbook), a FREE .co.uk domain name of my choice, £25 of google adwords advertising, my choice of a Unix or Windows server (Windows of course) and all the standard support a good webhost should offer, for the princely sum of £28 for two years. TWO YEARS! I find that pretty outstanding.

In other news, apparently you can't kick a pigeon. Not that i'm suggesting anyone should try it. Kicking pigeons is wrong. But while i was debating whether it was possible to kick a pigeon with my friend while walking through town behind one, he decided to prove it was impossible by running at one. Turns out they move pretty fast.

Where are they now?: Venger

You may or may not remember the 80s cartoon Dungeons and Dragons, It featured this motley crew of misfits:

As far as i remember it they'd become trapped in the mystical land of Dungeons and Dragons, and each week had a series of adventures that usually ended up in them fighting a real evil looking guy called Venger (who was probably only really annoyed because someone had stolen his other horn):

Grr. Scary. At the end of every adventure they'd have fought for a chance to walk through a magic doorway to get home, but would always have to just miss out on that chance to save something lame like the annoying baby unicorn character (which in truth was a lamb with a cone glued to it's head, but that's a side issue).

Why am i bringing all this to your attention you might wonder. And quite rightly so. Well, i was researching where the characters (read: voices) of Dungeons and Dragons the cartoon were today. And i was most amused to see that Venger is still very much in employment. He plays Eeyore in the latest series of Winnie the Pooh movies.

Ultimate evil to donkey without a tail. No wonder he's so depressed.

Don't believe me? Well i'm offended, but see for yourself: http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0191520/

Dirty flipbook animations

A good friend of mine pointed me to this website today: http://www.fabrica.it/flipbook/index.html

You can quickly and easily make your own fun dirty flipbook animations (or clean ones if you like). No msn-messenger style stuffing of pointless extra features here. Just draw, flip the page, draw, flip the page, draw..

Trust me it's more fun than it sounds. Here's my first attempt, which i knocked up in just two minutes:

http://www.fabrica.it/flipbook/flipbook_player.php?id=1125515310-213174192217

If you give it a go, post links to your animations as a comment of this post. And i'll cast my uber-artistics eye over your super creations. :p

Maybe i'm just getting old

Do you know what's more interesting than being in a club? Well lot's of things. But do you know what one of those things is? Being outside a club! (i'll get back to that in a minute). Tonight i went and played pool for a bit which was quite cool. We played a game called killer. Five people, and we took it in turns to take a shot. You get three lives, you can pot any ball, but if you miss you lose a life. If you pot the black, you get a bonus life. Simple as that. £1 each in the pot. I won the first game (woohoo £5 up!) but then lost the next seven games (d'oh £2 down).

Anyway after that malarky (and several pints of a golden liquid known as "lager") they somehow convinced me to go to a notorious local club. Now i hate clubbing, but on the way there i was pretty sure i was drunk. Upon entering, i was suddenly the most sober person. Wow it was crap. Too hot. Too crowded (maybe i'm just getting old, or MAYBE clubbing just sucks). So anyway, being the slightly old slightly boring person i am , i went and sat outside (see told you i'd get back to it). It was totally interesting! I got to see an ambulance crew help a person who was having a massive asthma attack. Then a random (very nice looking) girl who seemed to know me asked me if i knew where this other girl that i know was, because she had all her stuff. I said if she couldnt find her i'd walk her home but in the end she didnt take me up on the offer :(. Then i got to witness the bouncers drag a guy out who was going a bit mental, and one of the bouncers had to be dragged back inside by other bouncers as he yelled "I'M GONNA F***KIN' KILL YOU!!" which i thought was perhaps not appropriate conduct for a bouncer. Then i got to see a guy and girl have a massive argument and the guy start on some other random guy.

I mean come on. That's more pikey entertainment than on any TV channel! Score one for real life! And it's right there at 1am on a high street near you!!

Uber cool lighter tricks!!!1!!!1!!1!

Here's a great video that shows how totally cool you can look doing tricks with a zippo lighter. Totally cool dudes!! Check it out and you could be as uber cool as this guy!!1!1!1!!11!

http://media.putfile.com/itburns

Because the jedi don't want to get wet anymore than the next person

I'm actually pretty glad there isn't a UK store now. I think i'd become it's number one customer.

For example, what would you get if you crossed a lightsaber with an umbrella? No it's not the start of a very odd joke, it's a strange and confusing reality:

More crazy free advertising: http://www.googlestore.com/product.asp?catid=1&code=GO0105

I wonder if they have an affiliate program i could join..

Goo-gle

If you're lucky enough to live in the United States of America, you can buy Google Goo. That's right, Google Goo:

If anyone knows where you can get it in the United Kingdom, please leave a comment. Thank you!

Obligatory Link: http://www.googlestore.com/product.asp?catid=2&code=GO0096

YOU feature on google's homepage! (possibly)

Today i've been re-affirming my love affair with google, by playing with some of their tools on offer in their "labs" area. I'm going to tell you about two of them: Personalized Homepage, and Google Download accelerator.

The personalized homepage ROCKS. Mostly because you can add your own sections provided by RSS feeds. This means my homepage not only features local weather, bbc news headlines, some tech news, a quote of the day, a word of the day and my favourite bookmarks, but it also includes the last 3 posts from my friends blogs. How cool is that my friends? You feature on google's homepage! Check it out:



The second tool i played with was Google's Download Accelerator. I think it's been done in one way or another before, the idea being that while you're internet connection would usually be idle (you're reading a webpage or whatever) it could be pre-fetching pages you might click to visit next. Then having already cached them it can present them to you faster.

I had mixed results. Sometimes it was noticeably faster (although my connection is pretty fast anyway) . Other times i suspected it might have been slowing things down.

There's a downside for those of you who are internet paranoid (they really ARE watching you you know). You have to agree during the install that you don't mind Google being sent personally identifiable information such as your IP address, and other such things that are sent to the sites you visit. I'm not entirely sure on the idea behind this, other than that it perhaps communicates back and forth with google and a clever algorithm (they love their algorithms at google) works out what you might click next in order to decide what to pre-fetch. Also, you'll be inadvertently visiting sites that are linked from the page you've viewing (or at least your IP address will be) whether you actually end up choosing to or not.

There was some delicious cleverness that i observed. You can enable it to underline in grey links that it's prefetching. Having this on, you'll notice it prefetches links you hover over, in anticipation of your click.

They've officially shut the supply of the beta of the Download Accelerator, but any good googler will find it for download on countless 3rd party sites.

[your advert here, apply within]

I saw "the island" today. From this film i can tell you one very important fact. In the future, there will only be two companies: Microsoft and Puma. And their products will be advertised blatantly througout all science fiction related adventures.

Why-oh-why do they have to do it? The films make billions of dollars! Much more than the amount they cost to make, so why include blatant obnoxious marketing in the film? It distracts from what is otherwise a very interesting plot. But instead of watching the film, you're left wondering why in the future they're still advertising the (would-be ancient) xbox or why the msn and puma products haven't changed design in however many years it's supposed to be.

It's pointless money-grabbing pap. And any film-maker that allows it should be kicked to death by someone wearing the latest Puma trainers, available in a store near you for just £59.99.