>Ahoy ship mates. A thousand apologies for the lack of posts. Given that it is a month and a day since my last one, I feel that I should make something of an effort to write something.

I am not in the most energetic of moods and this makes it somewhat more difficult to do, but here we are…

Some random thoughts:

• If you remember last time, we were debating the relative merits of MP3 players (among other things) and which one I should get. You’ll be disappointed (as I am) to hear that I haven’t got one at all yet. There is no real reason for this other than a better things to do with my money at present. Result: MP3 player – on hold.

• Great to hear that the “band” Busted are no more. Best news on the UK music front in ages. I say that, even though I never hear any of their music and am not bombarded by images and news of them in the popular media. Don’t tell me you don’t have an irrational hatred of someone! We all do it – it’s what separates us from the animals.

• This is totally repellent and enough to make anyone turn from their life of crime: A man who stole a truck in Vancouver, Washington, was arrested after he choked on the truck driver’s tobacco spit, which he mistook for a drink. The thief took a swig, choked and had to phone for medical help. Eww ew ewwww!!!!

• If I don’t get lynched by the PC (pollitically correct – not personal computer) police, I’ll be surprised but here goes – the Deaflympics (WTF??) have jsut been run in Melbourne. I assume that the main complaint of these people is they don’t hear very well. I know that is very glib and deafness is no laughing matter, but to have your own separate, international olympics meeting because you’re deaf seems to be drawing the bowstring pretty tight. I haven’t seen too much talking between the competitors in the 100m so I don’t see that hearing (good or bad) is a pre-requisite. Given that light travels significantly faster than sound, would athletes who are reacting to a non-audible signal have an advantage over the rest of us?
  

You know, it’s getting ridiculous! It is time we fat, wheezy people got our own international sporting event. To this end, it is with great pride that the Flablympics TM are officially launched [Cue the long trumpety- bugle things with the flags hanging off them]. For too long now, fat wheezy gits who spend more time on their PC than their stairmaster have been marginalised, nay, ignored by the international sporting community. It is time my flabby brothers and sisters, for us to rise up and take our place amongst the rest of the sporting world.

The Flablympics TM will celebrate mediocrity in all its myriad forms. Whether you’re a member of the celebrated, un-fit elite plowing your way through that family-sized bag of Doritos and sculling down 3L Thirst-Tankers of Coke, a spotty faced git with a pencil neck and breath so bad, you’d make a maggot gag, or you’re a train-smash of human being content to wash yourself with a rag on a stick, you deserve a chance to compete at an international level without the (additional) handicap of having to qualify and compete against hard-bodied olympic-standard athletes with white teeth and rock hard abs, who’ve trained their whole lives for the chance to represent their country at the highest level of sport.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m being sarcastic Marge! I don’t know about you, but for my money, the Deaflympics is just another example of what’s wrong with the world we live in. On the one hand, nobody wants to be classified as “disabled”, “handicapped” or “special” yet there needs to be special categories of things open only to them. I am “lucky” enough to be a healthy, ordinary person with nothing about me that would qualify me as deserving of special treatment, and I guess that is how we should all hope to be, yet special interest groups dominate our lives with their constant harping about the rights of the [insert special interest here]. The most irksome thing of all is how the campaigners are rarely a member of the special interest themselves. It is so much more noble to campaign on someone else’s behalf isn’t it.

Gotta finish now, or I’ll say something I might really regret…and wouldn’t that be something?

—End transmission—

>A couple of intrepid readers have forced me to submit to their incessant nagging and follow suit with the rest of the Blogosphere. That’s right! Here are my faves of 2004:

1. Fave Song – The Bucket by Kings of Leon. Love the jangly guitars, love the catchy tune, bit disturbed by some of the words but at 2:55 it is right on the money for a perfect pop song (3 minute) rule. Great song and good album too.
   
2. Fave Movie – Toss up between Supersize Me and Shaun of the Dead. A ‘Zom Com’ and a documentary as the best of 2004 and they’re both independent films. Way to serve up the entertainment Hollywood – you blow goats!
3. Fave TV Show – The inability to make a decision just keeps on going. I totally love The Sopranos and Scrubs is definitely the find of the year in terms of sitcom excellence. I’m not gonna pick one – watch ‘em both and see for yourself.
4. Fave Character – Bender Bending Rodriquez. This guy is the best! I love the fact that he is so flawed – he is totally human. He gets all the best lines too – “I hate the people who love me and they hate me!”
5. Fave Wishlist Item – Many are called yet few are chosen. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I NEED and MP3 player of some description. I don’t know which to get though. I love the design of the iPod but hate the locked into iTunes-edness of it. I love the price and capacity of the Creative Jukebox Zen Touch but style-wise it leaves a bit to be desired. I love the iPod Mini’s looks but it is too low on capacity (and overpriced but that’s Apple IMHO). I love the Creative Zen Micro colours but it offers 5GB for CHF369 vs 20GB for CHF299 with the Zen Touch. I can’t decide – watch this space for updates…
6. Fave Food – Here in this “overpriced hellhole” restaurants compete to be more expensive than the airport, so eating out is virtually impossible for the common man and his family (read mac clan). That means you have to cook at home and the food of the moment is Raclette . I love the cheesey, potatoey, bacony goodness. Far too close to call though is the delights of the Schweinsgrillhaxe (Grilled Pork Shank) from the man outside Walmart in Singen.
   
7. Fave Activity – For the 14th successive year, it is being persuaded by ms. mac. Stay tuned for 2005 when we’ll see if anything beats this perennial favourite.
8. Fave Serendipitous Occurrence – The Great Vectra Write-off of 2004 was destined to be a disaster at Chez Mac, but with the help of an enterprising friend (cheers John) we scored the deal and car of the century. All hail the Vintage Mercedes. Out of my way! Don’t you see I own the road? It says so on my Fahrzeugausweis and was included in the purchase price of the car.
9. Fave PC Game – Hands down, the best of the best this year was Far Cry. Needs a beast of a PC to run it though. I can hear an upgrade calling, but don’t tell ms. mac
10. Fave Download of the Year – This is a toughie to pick due to some of my shady online activities, but I am gonna have to say it is….Firefox – truly, the King of Browsers. If you aren’t using it – you belong in Hollywood (see item 2).
    
11. Fave Time Waster – Blogging – duh! Tell me another way to waste time that is so much fun. I know people who forget to eat, drink or work because of this addictive past time. You’ll see from the frequency of my posts that this is not necessarily applicable to me. Get your arse over to Blogger and get your own (if you haven’t already done so).

There it is, a list of faves to be proud of. Now I just need to start thinking about categories for next year’s list…

—End transmission—

>Being away from the homeland is not such a problem for me. I tend not to get all misty eyed when I think about home and therefore read my Mebourne newspaper out of curiosity rather than melancholy.

I was looking this morning to find this story about a techno-inspired version of our national anthem and our PM weighing in to the latest controversy. I don’t often agree with Little Johnnie, but this time he is right on the money. That is the worst version of ANY song ever!!! Not only do the listeners to the John Laws show have something to bitch about, the hipsters and cool people are going to hate it too! There was no point bothering (in my opinion).

Judge for yourself here

—End transmission—

>…don’t kill your eight months pregnant wife in California.

It’s probably curtains for this guy since the jury in the Scott Peterson case recommended the death penalty. They didn’t waste any time in coming up with a verdict or a penalty recommendation for him did they? He doesn’t get sentenced till 25th Feb next year. I guess his Xmas is gonna be pretty sucky sweating on the verdict. Better hope the judge gets some Christmas cheer from his missus…

—End transmission—

>…than meets the eye. Check out this story about the Commanding Officer of a Royal Navy Frigate. If there are no suspicions of physical, racial or sexual harassment, why was he relieved of his post? The CO is the closest thing to a king I have ever met so to remove him like this is almost unprecedented.

This one will be very interesting to watch.

—End transmission—

>An esteemed colleague of mine gave me a brilliant bit of advice after I told him I was reviewing all of the project accounts and their budgets today.

“When doing the accounts, don’t trust any figure you didn’t fabricate yourself!”

I think there is something in that for all of us, don’t you?

—End transmission—

>That’s the policy ’round here folks. I have become obsessed by the little icons that show up in your Location Bar and on your tabs (Firefox – you make the rockin’ world go ’round.) If your site isn’t running one, I am disappointed – SERIOUSLY!

I spent some time going through all my bookmarks in Firefox, even those imported from IE and Mozilla, seeing how many have favicons associated with them. My bookmarks look awesome now, but the obsession may be becoming unhealthy.

If you want to do it yourself, here are two ways:

1. Grab a free icon editing tool and create your own.
   
2. Open a pic in IrfanView, resize it to 16 x 16 pixels and convert it to an ICO file using SAVE AS.

Then you just need to upload it to your server. Paste the following line into your page source inside the tag.

<LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”favicon.ico”>

It doesn’t get any easier than that.

But if you don’t understand, this guy has a really sweet (and simple) tutorial. Mind you, my icon editor owns the web based option he recommends!

–End transmission—

>Seen whilst trawling the news, seems like Busted are sick of seeing female fans boobs. They might as well have said “Turn up your volume people. Important announcement. Today, Busted would like to officially announce the total and utter inversion of our male genitalia. Please don’t shove your tits in our faces any more. We just don’t like it, and you make us feel sick.”

Sick of tits? It boggles the mind! Sounds like the weight of fame is getting heavy for our teenage British heart throbs. Oh and BTW, is there a worse ad for British “manhood”? If your Mum and your Gran like ‘em, they must blow goats!

>Update

Well, I nearly got there. Alas, the PCB from my fried MP3 player is irrepairable. Still, I got the HDD out of it and my colleague formatted it for me in his USB HDD casing and now I’ve got my own 5GB HDD waiting for its own casing. Kewl.

Rant

Having said that, let me say this:

Why does anyone think that a PayPal Donate button on their blog is going to result in a cash infusion? Oh ho ho jetzt gibt’s Ärger! I have NEVER seen a blog that was worth giving someone money because I read it. I don’t know whether the audacity or the stupidity of the person bothers me the most. “Compelling” arguments for donations run the gamut of “I need some money to cover the Typepad charges” to “I might not be able to afford my high speed internet access becasue my tithe is sending my current accout into the red.” Get a clue, get a life and get a new fucking church! If the tithe is causing you hardship, you may need to forgo either some of your bandwidth or some of your salvation. I know which I’d be choosing; nobody touches my 2MBps cable connection!

General Musings

How does censorship affect you? I don’t mean how does it impinge on your right to enjoy what you want, when you want, because it does that to all of us. I mean how does it make you feel? I find that my immediate reaction is “For fuck’s sake MTV! It’s 2am, can’t I just hear the words to the song without having the expletives deleted?” I promise, I won’t complain. If it bothers me, I’ll change the channel. The thing is, I just hate to have decisions made for me. If you ask my wife, I can’t make a decision to save myself but that is not the point! The point is, why am I not allowed to make the choice myself.

The argument for censorship is in many ways valid. If my contention that we should be free to see / hear / read what we want was to go through, we’d have no argument against abominations like child pornography et, so I suppose that the crux of my argument is that whilst I am not in favour of being told what I can and can’t see / hear / read etc, I know that there are things that should not be seen / heard / read. I know what I think is right and I know what I think is wrong, so as an adult, I apply my own judgement of right and wrong to the situation and generally noone gets hurt.

Of course, who is to say that what I think is right? But who is to say that what the various censorship collectives say is right either? Let’s take the example that was trotted out regarding Nipplegate. Let’s leave the whole thing of “was it an accident or not?” out of it and focus on the supposed harm that was caused by its occurrence. Scores of people had the audacity to contact the TV network and the FCC to complain that they had been scarred and suffered trauma by seeing what amounts to nothing – the nipple is even covered by that little sunburst thing. FFS get over it!!! Most of us have seen a nipple (or part thereof) and most of us are spending just about every waking minute of our lives waiting to see another one! Or maybe that’s just me….

However, now that the networkresponsible for the fiasco scored a $550K fine, all the other channels are running for cover. Many network affiliates refused to show Saving Private Ryan because of fear of reprisals over the content. It just seems so hypocritical that the smallest amount of female flesh is deemed highly offensive and grossly inappropriate (Perhaps drawing a slightly longer bow than necessary methinks but, granted, the broadcast was during ‘General’ viewing time) but you can show all the cartoon violence and even real-life violence you want and nobody bats an eyelid.

Make of it what you will. In my opinion, it is ridiculous, but since I don’t have to live there, I don’t need to worry. There is a very good post about the infringement of First Amendment rights by the FCC.

Which brings me back to how censorship makes me feel: patronised and insulted. Should we live in a Nanny State where everything we do and think and feel and enjoy is regulated by some watchdog organisation? It really seems like the wowsers are back behind the wheel and they’re ruining it for the rest of us!

—End Transmission—

>My neighbour upstairs is turning into a really good friend. He is an expat here in Switzerland too (he comes from Jersey) and we have struck up a nice relationship with him. I hope that things continue this way because I like him and Ms Mac and I both enjoy his company very much.

Yesterday, we went upstairs so I could install a new hard drive in his older model Toshiba Equium. He has been surviving (albeit barely) on an 8 GB HDD and he had 115MB left. So I set him up with a new 80 GB ATA 133 Maxtor for about CHF95- and said I’d put it in for him. I took the Frau with me and we had a few drinks and I got to work. Of course, his Windows ME system and his old school 1998 BIOS couldn’t even see the new HDD. After a BIOS update (downloaded over dial-up: how did any of us ever cope???) I managed to have the PC find the disk and then I had to remember how to get it into DOS so I could FDISK and FORMAT the drive for Windows to use it. This meant another download of from Bootdisk.com over the dial-up again.

To cut a long story short, it took a bit longer than I thought but we got there in the end and now John is packing a huge new HDD for his data.

But this isn’t the point of the post. We sat around drinking loads of red wine after the PC was done and John was playing a seemingly endless supply of music. Ms Mac said “how are you playing all this music John?” and it turns out he was playing his Creative Nomad 3 MP3 player through his stereo. He had just bought a new one and his old one was mine if I wanted it. As anyone who knows me should realise by now, I am so keen for an MP3 player. So of course I just about kissed him.

Slight catch, John went on a trip recently and forgot his power adapter and used a 6V power pack at his friends house in France. Since then, the Nomad hasn’t switched on. The general supposition is that he cooked it in some way. If I could fix it, I could have it. For a geek like me, it was almost better than if he’d given me a new one.

This morning, I pulled it apart and this is what I found inside:

Looks fine on this side.

Oh dear some fried components.

I need to see if any of the guys at the company can do anything. If not, I scored a neat little 6GB HDD to put into one of those portable housings and use it as a kick-ass USB HDD. Six times better than the biggest flash memory stick and way cheaper.

So close….

—End Transmission—