Tuesday, May 23, 2006

World Cup Songs

I've just heard the Tony Christie Is This the way to the World Cup and my god is it bad. I really do enjoy a good cheesy footy song but that is just pap. And I quite like amarillo!

I don't understand why every one hit wonder insists on changing the title of said hit and making it football related. What people want is something new!

That said the remake of Sham '69's Hurry up Harry - creativly titled Hurry Up England is somewhat amusing.

I quite like Justin Hawkins song England though it may not be to some tastes. Not really a chant along classic but its jolly and tuneful.

The Embrace effort is so pitiful I'm not even going to bother with a link to it.

Bring Back 3 Lions!


Google

I read a blog yesterday, though I can't remember where, suggesting google's homepage is poorly designed.

My first thought is this person is moaning about the number of new items on the homepage compared to its more sparse original style. Not so - they were pointing out that google doesn't make it easy to find their "portal" features like GMail.

I have to agree with them. Unless you are a regular visitor to google labs you would struggle to find out things like GMail exist, at least without someone telling you.

I don't think it would hurt google at all to include a selection of links at the top of the page (or the bottom) to things like gmail. It would boost their performance massivly I would expect.

I decided to post this after spotting that Yahoo! portal features are doing much better than their google competitors despite being inferior products with horrible picture adverts everywhere.

To get rid of the adverts in Firefox just use the Adblock extension. It speeds up many sites and makes viewing more appealing.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Sheila's Wheels

Have you been annoyed by the Sheila's Wheels advert? I'm assuming you have since its played far too often and the lyrics are just plain sexist.

So here is a version of the song that turns the tables.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

How the Da Vinci Code Doesn't Work

I've just read an interesting if not annoying article How Stuff Works.com and it shows someone really did their homework. It makes it clear the book is a work of fiction and is not accurate in many respects.

The article makes me feel sorry for Dan Brown. His first three books sold poorly (despite being very good) so I doubt he could have ever imagined the unprecidented success of the DVC. There was no way he could be expected to research everything to the standards the author of this piece expects and still make the story fit together well. I wish people would just leave a good story alone and stop pointing out the really small flaws that were probably deliberate to make things flow better.

The funniest part was that an Albino Man actually wrote a book on the flaws in the books treatment of the monk with albinoism. Thats just sad.  

Girlfriend 6.0 vs. Wife 1.0

Been around for a while I know but just been brought to me attention again and its really funny.


Also a really funny star wars parody David sent me, will amuse and fan of the films.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

9/11 Video Tape

I have just watched the newly released video tape of the "plane" hitting the pentagon on 9/11. It is supposed to stop any more conspiracy theories but i really doubt that it will. All you can see is something fly into the building, it looks more like a missile than a plane but either way the tape could easily have been doctored by the C.I.A. etc.

I'm not sure what to believe because there are some very credible theories and points from both camps. I doubt if it is a conspiracy we will ever find out though.

2nd Exam Over

Well I've finished my second exam. Touched up two people, hopefully appropriatly. Now I'm just catching up on blogs. Its so addictive. I never imagined I would care as much what other people thought.

I'm also in a very quick back and forth e-mail conversation with Kyle because for no apparant reason my MSN won't connect. I've also lost the proxy server in the states that was working well for me, which means waiting longer for lost. Only a day more but its painful.

I saw a classic video on the net of a person interviews on News24 who was not the person the newsreader expected them to be, they were in fact there for a low level interview and sent to the wrong place. Classic comedy, showing how little it matters what the interviewee says in a TV interview, the presenter went on regardless of their answers.

I also got myself a nice new semi-acoustic guitar off e-bay setting me back £60 inc delivery which I have to say was quite a bargin given they are normally £175 at the cheapest.

New Search

I discovered a cool search engine yesterday from a blog. Its called Snap and it displays a snapshot of the page alongside the results. Then you browse the page from inside the search engine. I really like it since it makes use of my large moniter really well and its got a very slick and fast design.

Only time will tell if I move away from google though.  

Exam Time

My first exam is now done thankfully with only 3 to go. I really can't wait for them to be over.

Going home at the weekend until Thursday to help my brother with his GCSE revision then returning to Uni once everyone else has had their exams to celebrate properly. The medics are going to celebrate by themselves this week with a wild west theme party on friday. Drinking commences at 1pm, I will be lucky to be concious at 9pm. Got my cowboy hat and toy gun at the ready.

I'm currently posting from inside firefox using a cool extension saving me the hassel of logging into blogger or moving browser. Should be a lot more posts now its so much less effort!  

Monday, May 08, 2006

Mixed Post

First off:

A professor of mathematics sent a fax to his wife. It read:

“Dear Wife: You must realize that you are 54 years old, and I have certain needs which you are no longer able to satisfy. I am otherwise happy with you as wife, and I sincerely hope you will not be hurt or offended to learn that by the time you receive this letter, I will be at the Grand Hotel with my 18-year-old teaching assistant. I’ll be home before midnight.
-Your Husband”

When he arrived at the hotel, there was a faxed letter waiting for him that read as follows:

“Dear Husband: You, too, are 54 years old, and by the time you receive this letter, I will be at the Breakwater Hotel with the 18- year-old pool boy. Being the brilliant mathematician that you are, you can easily appreciate the fact that 18 goes into 54 a lot more times than 54 goes into 18. Don’t wait up.”

Thats just brilliant.

Back to the rest of the world.

I just watched the most recent episode of lost and my heart felt like it stopped at the end. It was amazing. Never would have guessed that was about to happen. Glad to see who died though. They had been annoying me quite a lot.

I'm really into my revision at the moment I only wish I had better concentration.

I was duly elected to the position of Chairman of the Stephenson College JCR (Student Union) which I was quite pleased with. I'm a fan of democracy and being in a position to get things done.

Anyway back to work or blog reading for me.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

ABC Proxy Problem

After seeing Kyle's recent post about getting lost to play in your browser thanks to ABC's new AD Supported viewer I decided to give it a whirl. So I type in my usual US proxy server into my config but nothing happens. This server is pretty reliable so im quite surprised. So I try another, same problem.

After a minute it clicked that it was because I was behind a proxy. So to get passed it I had to set up a proxy tunnel (something I had to learn how to do since I had only heard about it before today) using "HTTPort 3SNFM" a nifty bit of freeware. So that allowed my to bypass my local proxy to get at the remote one. It all feels a bit hackeresque but the way I see it if ABC won't let me watch it for no good reason I'm entitled find a way.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Napster Redux

It seems Napster have come up with a new product for the market. According to USA Today
we are now able to listen to a song for free up to five times before we have to buy it. They are paying for this by ad-support. Sounds like a good idea to me but I dont think they will ever compete with itunes until they scrap the DRM model and start trusting the consumer.