Video crooks come in from the cold | Top stories | Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au (28-12-2005): The Federal Government will next year legalise the video recording of television shows for personal use, and the transfer of songs from CDs to MP3 players, in a bid to overturn a ban which has made criminals of much of the population.
Whew, survived another Christmas. In pretty random order:
Smite. Dedicated to all the people who dealt with shopping centre carparks today... :)
Not photoshopped, btw. I rearranged an old keyboard.
Labels: photo
Happy Everything! ;)
The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.The student was later interviewed, saying "holy shit they take their hands-on coursework seriously here! Here's me thinking I was just going to study totalitarianism and here it is literally knocking on my door! Dude, I'm totally going to get, like, an A after this!"
On Sunday, September 11, 2005 an accident occurred on the San Mateo Bridge near San Francisco, California involving a courier transporting payments to an IRS Payment Processing Site. A truck carrying tax payments overturned, causing approximately 30,000 Form 1040ES quarterly estimated tax payments to be ejected into the San Francisco Bay.
SHE'S been derided as anti-feminist, denounced for causing eating disorders and dismissed as old-fashioned, but now Barbie is facing a new threat - children who love to torture, maim and decapitate her.Why this is being billed as 'new' is beyond me. Barbie has always been a viable target.
John Mills, Himself. Building facade in Brisbane City. Snapped this on the way to an 8:30am exam on a saturday morning, the horror - nobody should be forced to be awake at that hour for an exam!
Also posted to lj:bestshot and lj:aussie_photos.
Labels: photo
'Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia,' reported Nature. 'But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.'
I've been informed that something (probably Blogger/Blog*Spot ) is inserting some evil popup shit into this blog. I hadn't noticed since Opera defeats it; but Firefox and IE users are getting bombarded with crap. Sorry about this, will confirm the source then work out where to go from there.
Update: looks like it was the hit counter PLUS blogspot/blogger. So the hit counter is gone now. Will investigate more later.
Update - what the fuck happened?
OK. Thanks to some help from relapse, plus some experimentation, I have a reasonable idea about what happened.
Background: for many many years I have been using a free stat service, Nedstat/Nedstat Basic. When I say many years... I'm pretty sure I started using them back when I was at college (1997-98). A long time in net years. A couple of months ago, I got an email telling me that Nedstat Basic was now Webstats4U. The name should have given me a clue about the impending doom; but it didn't.
The email included this: Webstats4U is a 100% FREE version for all webmasters. In order to finance the new developments and to continue providing you with the world?s best FREE web analytics tool in the market, Webstats4U will accept advertising sponsorships on its reporting site and will from time to time accept other types of advertising sponsorships. These advertising sponsorships will not be implemented directly into your website. If you do not wish to continue using our FREE Webstats4U service in exchange for advertising you can of course change anytime to Nedstat?s paid web analytics solutions NedstatPro or Sitestat.
(my emphasis).
Nice wording, eh. There was a link to the full terms and conditions; which I skimmed but didn't have time to read. Well, now I have read them properly. In the "Products and Services" section, they don't just define their products and services.
With the installation of Webstats4U on the site it is accepted that WMS has the right to place advertisements on the site in any format or through any channel, including but not limited to e-mail, layer ads, pops, banners and other usual formats without any forewarning and it is furthermore accepted that WMS takes no responsibility for the advertising content and that WMS shall not be liable for any losses incurred regarding this advertising.
With the installation of Webstats4U on the site it is accepted that WMS has the right to use the collected data for commercial purposes in line with WMS's privacy policy.
Personally I don't think that's "Products and Services" information. That's "Advertising" and "Privacy". But still, I didn't read it - my bad. I went by the original email, which only said they'd have ads on their reporting site (the one you click through to get the data). Nothing was being implemented directly on my website, right? So no dramas.
The evil just keeps going in their FAQ:
These advertising sponsorships can appear as a pop-up or pop-under advertisement or slide-in flash format, and will at no point be implemented directly into your website as banners, buttons, links or similar.
(http://www.webstats4u.com/service/?id=1566044#misc14)
Then today's debacle. Holy crap. Popups, alerts, cookies... the whole nine yards. I don't know why, but only this site hosted on Blogspot was hit. I have several other pages hosted on my own server which don't appear to have been generating popups. I can only speculate on why Blogspot was targetted - maybe the Blogger bar creates a vulnerability? Maybe they have an agreement? Maybe they're specifically targetted by Webstats4U?
Nothing impelemented directly on my site of course. Sure, they'll just appear on my site and piss off my site's readers... but I can rest easy knowing that they were launched from.... well, anywhere they feel like it really. Today it was sel.as-eu.falkag.net.
So now I'm going through and removing Nedstats/WebstatsUpYours code from my pages. It was good while it lasted - the stats are actually good) - and hell, Nedstat made it through the heyday of popups without ever using popups. But now all of a sudden they've decided to cut loose with some of the most aggressive popups I've seen in a long time.
Fuck you too, Webstats4U.
I just got a Gmail invite from a stranger.... sent to my Gmail account.
Pinched from webheadau. No star = haven't seen it, * = seen it, ** = seen it and own it/want to own it.
Labels: meme
At work, people are pretty serious about Christmas. Offensively so, in fact. So this year we decided to get into the spirit of things, in our own way of course. Note that the office was already full of jolly rogers, we just added a seasonal layer over the top. All the decorations came from The Christmas Cave, so they all count as Christmas-y.
Merry Christm-ARRRR-s! Big black wreath with a few baubles added. The jolly roger just happened to fit nicely, not that I had this effect in mind when I found the wreath or anything.
No black tinsel! The slack bastards! I couldn't ascertain whether they originally had black tinsel or not; the poor girl we were talking to appeared to be in some stage of heat stroke. The place was basically a tin shed, with no real aircon (a couple of portable units were making a valiant effort, but Brisbane summer wins). It was 33° outside at the time. So anyway, we got a big long string of black beads instead.
They'd sold out of medium size black trees; so here is a small desktop sized black christmas tree! :)
After the initial reaction, most people observe that.... well, actually, it's colour coordinated and actually aesthetically pleasing. As opposed to random coloured tinsel and lights bunged up with no particular theme or order in mind. We've just been pointing out that ours is an entirely accessible Christmas - no problems with red/green colourblindness, for example.
Next mission is to get to the lolly warehouse for a really big jar of red/white boiled lollies. Which, you guessed it, will be my Bah Humbugs.
Victorian Department of Primary Industries researcher Dr Amanda Kobelt set up spy cameras to watch 55 labradors in their gardens over 48-hour periods. The cameras revealed that 65 per cent of the time labradors were either sleeping or just lazing about.
So violence and mob behaviour has well and truly kicked off in Cronulla. Cronulla mob attacks beachgoers. 11/12/2005. ABC News Online, Gangs rampage in Sydney streets. 13/12/2005. ABC News Online, etc. You know what's happening.
I just don't know where to start; but I'll go out on a limb here and say this has not happened overnight. Tensions will have been building for months, probably years; and what we are seeing is the situation reaching flash point.
There's a strong temptation to blame one side or the other. Well here's a fucking news flash: nobody is "right". The people who beat up the lifeguards were wrong. The people who attacked the ambulance and the ambos within were wrong (but I'll bet you anything those same people would still have the hide to call 000 if they were hurt). The people who formed mobs were all wrong. The people who attacked people and property were wrong.
The government is wrong for ignoring the problem. White Australians™ are wrong for making very little attempt to genuinely mix with Other Cultural Groups™. Said Other Cultural Groups™ are wrong for making very little attempt to geniunely mix with White Australians™. Politically correct or not, we have to face the fact that ghettoism is a reality - there is no multicultural society, there is no fucking "melting pot". That was all feel good bullshit.
The Political Correctness movement has only made it harder to talk openly about cultural problems. Racism can be easily masked with PC terms, genuine concerns are trivialised and left to fester. People know there is tension, but it's left in the Too Hard basket. It was so much easier to quibble about what the problem was called than it would have been to work on the problem itself.
So everyone is wrong. Everyone needs to be honest with themselves - a bit more tolerance would be good, both for and from minorities. If people truly can't stand another group, they should just learn to leave each other alone - pure and simple. People have to be able say "enough" and let the situation calm down. Everyone needs to go home, have a quiet night in. Otherwise things will just follow the pattern of endless escalation so prevalent in the world's hotspots.
The Christmas Resistance Movement!: Together, we boycott Christmas Shopping, Christmas decorations, Christmas cards, and every variety of Christmas Crap. We refuse to support the Holiday Industry. We show our love for friends and family by giving our time and care, not by purchasing consumer goods. We maintain the integrity of giving by giving spontaneously and from our hearts, rather than during a specified season. You are not alone. Together, we can RESIST CHRISTMAS!
AmericanEdit.org: Dean Gray Tuesday.
For anyone who hasn't caught this issue; some people got together and did some really very impressive mashups of Green Day's album American Idiot. They put up a site with free downloads and the statement that if you like the mashups, donate money to charities supported by Green Day themselves. No profit, just music.
Not surprisingly, the site was promptly shut down. On Tuesday 13th December 2005, a coordinated protest event will be held. American Edit will be made available everywhere possible and played on as many radio stations as possible. With a bit of luck, the record companies might get the message that people are sick of music being taken away from them.
The thing about these mashups is that whenever I hear them I get about ten songs in my head. I start thinking about these great songs and - genuinely - this makes me more likely to buy them next time I'm in a record shop.
American Edit was never making money, nobody was losing money. In fact, it was more likely that the record companies would make money. It's not like people are downloading American Idiot, they were downloading a sincere creative effort based on the album. What's next? Stopping DJs mixing two tracks together?
Music fans understand: music is a core of our lives, it lives within us and feeds our souls. Record companies do not understand. They are soulless, morally bereft shells, with no appreciation for music. To the record companies the artists, fans and music itself are nothing but opportunities to screw some more dollars into their profit margins. If they ever knew, they've forgotten the roar of the crowd when the first note sounds and the sincerity of the encore shouts.
So on Dean Gray Tuesday, people are protesting. The people who buy albums and go to gigs are going to fight for a mashup album; but really it's just another symptom of the divide between music fans and the money-grubbing bastards who control the industry.
ABC wings it | TV | Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au (09-12-2005): The ABC has also purchased The West Wing from Nine. 'We will ... air it in the same spot every week, guaranteed,' [Managing director Russell Balding] said.
Awesome!
Southeast Coast Forecast Header : Brisbane Maximum ... 32
.... my arse! It was 33 by the time I got to work, according to the car's readout. It definitely feels hotter now and like clockwork our air-con is steadily giving up at work. Archerfield observations (which is near work) only shows the temperature at 32.9, they must have some form of breeze over there.
This will probably last until March. Fuck.
On this of all days, the Christmas decorations invaded my workplace. Merry Friggin' Christmas.
December 5 - Day of the Ninja!
Including french ninja. "Eeeh, fuckYOU! *disappear, but in a superior french way*"
I got a seven for my first postgrad subject! Woo! :)
I never got a seven during undergrad and I always sort of wished I'd worked a bit harder at least one time. So now I can tick that box :)
Attention everyone, including those in Sydney and Melbourne. That 1 Guy is playing in your town and you should go. His show is absolutely incredible, can't recommend it highly enough! Don't think there's anyone on my list living in Tassie/Byron/Katoomba/other places on the tour schedule, but hey if so, pay attention too. For those of you who do the Woodford Folk Festival, he's booked there too.
What can I say... we're talking about a guy who has created his own musical instrument - a stonking big pipe with strings. He also plays a saw, a shoe and rocks out with a credit card. It's an unusual act to say the least, but last night he held the entire crowd at The Troubadour utterly spellbound from the first song to the encore.
colinmo has posted about the show too.
T1G returns to Brisbane early next year, I expect to drag as many of you beotches as I can get hold of along to the show :)
Labels: gig, that 1 guy, the troubadour
L33T Tiles: L33T Tiles are a replacement tile set for Scrabble™ and other word games, based on internet slang known as leetspeak. The letter distribution has been modified and extensively tested for optimal play using leet words in the add-on dictionary.
Awesome :)
RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:
LOS ANGELES?The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. 'We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material,' a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. 'We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating 'buzz' about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves.' RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of-mouth 'favorites-sharing' sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.
heheheheh funny.
