Next fad please

I've over Facebook, yawn! okay, next fad.
Facebook was fun when I started. but the novelty quickly wears off and its now just annoying. The two biggest problems is clutter and privacy.
My facebook is weighed down by clutter due to all the add-ons. Its just like spam. its off putting. You get so many requests to install this add-on, install that add-on. I hate how the default for most of the add on programs is to notify all your friends to install it. A lot of the programs are just crap and some are almost impossible to remove. I've started deleting unwanted add-ons but it still get spammed. ARGH!
Then there's privacy. it was cool at first, you have your core group of friends, some you don't see that often because they're overseas and its easy to communicate with them, everythings cool and fun. Then fringe friends and acquaintances infiltrate your facebook. guys you didn't really like back at school. I'm the kind of guy who thinks its rude to decline a friend request. even worse to accept and only give a limited view profile. that's like confirming yeah I know you but I don't really like you. Hence I've got all these fringe dwellers in my friends list that are ruining it for me. first you have to answer their messages, reciprocate drinks and gifts etc... but more annoying is that you don't really want them to know what you are up to. I'm comfortable with the core group knowing what I'm doing, but the fringe dwellers, its kinda creepy.

whoo! we men might still useful

Back in high school I had a militant lesbian / female supremist biology teacher who single-handedly put me off a career in medicine. She was relentless in trying to prove female superiority. She had the schools science classes segregated on gender and then proceeded to deduct marks off the male class for mucking around with our dissection lab subjects. Yes she had found our gender's great weakness. A gender biologically conditioned to hunting can't possibly resist the urge to celebrate a kill by throwing its internal organs at one another.
Her dream future was one in which the human race had perfected itself to a super-species of assexually cloned Amazons and men had become *gulp* extinct.
No good for me. like couldn't we just hang around to be sex slaves, 'breeders'?... NO ... in her vision of the world men had to become extinct. it was the only way to achieve world peace and amazonian utopia.
but all is not lost. recent research has shown that stem cells can be harvested from testes. (cue our favourite pic again) So? that doesn't help the Amazonian super-race I hear you say. well, yes it does.
So if my high school biology teacher ever assumes control over the world I can have this scenario to present to her on behalf of MAN-kind ... you can use to stem cells to grow organs. Men can be kept around as testicle farms in battery cages so our organs can be harvested. so Ms ********* HA! you can't kill us all off just yet!

Walking the wheelie bin

last week my green waste wheelie bin filled up due to all the weeding I've been doing in the back yard (no not THAT kind of weed). There still another weeks wait to have it emptied and I've still got half the block to do. I had this brilliant brainstorm to sneak over to my mother-in-law's place and 'swap' bins without anyone being any the wiser. It's only a 1km walk. easy. so easy that I decided to take alonger scenic route to get in some more exercise. It's a pretty good work out, towing 100kg of garbage for 1.5kms.
The problem is all the strange looks from the neighbours, while I was dragging the big green bin around the neighbourhood. you'd think i was hauling body parts around or something. I'm sure one of the old farts has tried to dob me in to the police, neighbourhood watch, Today Tonight and ASIO. Yeah they're pretty alert, alarmed and senile in my part of the woods.
I'm starting to think that this wheelie bin thing can catch on. like its a great way to intensify your workout, you don't have to pay for expensive designer weights, everyone has a wheelie bin.A wheelie bin is much better behaved than a dog and you don't have to pick up after it. Its also the perfect way to discard any unwanted evidence(dead bodies, tax evasion documents, old boy band posters) by swapping your bin with someone else's. Just keep mum when ASIO comes and drags away your neighbours.

Rotten lawsuits

Two currently running lawsuits are annoying me today.
Firstly the Patent Trolls at NTP are at it again. Secondly a small company from Queensland is trying to set a precedent in shutting up critism of a product.
1. Die Patent Trolls!
now the patent system is broken in a very bad way. the system that was designed to promote innovation and protect inventors is instead doing the exact opposite. It thwarts innovation and has turned the Tech sector into a Casino of frivolous lawsuits. Companies are set up that don't create new research, don't produce anything, they just buy up patents on the cheap, usually from failed companies/inventors and then try to extort others when they successfully commercialise a product with a loosely matching description.
You can get just about anything patented, regardless of quality of your claim. Some things are just plain obvious and others just plain stupid. Example, the famous patent for the bald dude comb-over. The reason being a lack of resources at the patent department and political pressure leading to the default position being to approve new patents without full investigation by qualified experts.
NTP after successfully extorting Blackberry for patent infringement is at it again. this time they may have bitten off more than they can chew (well one lives in hope). NTP are taking on AT&T and Verizon and anyone that delivers email wirelessly.
Now a wireless network is really just a regular IP network delivered through a different medium (okay give or take a few extra protocols but essentially the same). So isn't it obvious that any application that is deliverable via a wired network will be eventually delivered in wireless? So NTP's patent is rubbish because it is too obvious and should be scrapped.
hopefully the lobbyists at the big Telcos will be able to push for some long needed patent reform.

2. My 2Cents on 2Clix
Little known (until now) Australian accounting software company 2Clix is suing popular Australian tech forum whirlpool for 'injurious falsehood' for user comments posted on 2 forum threads. if 2Clix wins it will set a dangerous new precedent on web use. we all will have to think twice about criticising products online. which is a shame because I personally find frank first person reviews from the online community valuable in making purchase decisions.
Having read the threads out of curiosity, I find it difficult to see how 2Clix has a case. The users were either expressing an opinion or telling their personal experiences of the 2Clix product. sometimes with additional colourful language but hey they felt strongly negative about their experience. I can't see how they could prove that the statements constituted 'injurious falsehoods'. take one of the offending statements in 2Clix claims

"I was put onto this forum recently after discussion with peers, about how frustrated, dissatisfied and ultimately ripped off I feel after purchasing 2clix earlier this year"

thats a statement of their opinion and its most likely fact the individual who posted it is frustrated, dissatisfied and feel ripped off. Now if they claimed your product turned their workstations into a botnet propagating kiddie porn, then that's 'injurious falsehood'. you'd think that the prerequisite for an injurious falsehood is that the statement is indeed false! but hey I'm not a lawyer.
You can't build a bad product and expect unhappy customers not to complain. The old saying in marketing goes 'A happy customer tells 5 friends, an unhappy customer tells 20'. Sooner of later feedback from unhappy customers will catch up with you. Whirlpool just provided a more efficient medium for those unhappy customers to warn the public. You can't blame whirlpool for accelerating what was going to happen through word of mouth anyway. Now if you have evidence that the postings on whirlpool were a smear campaign initiated by a competitor then I take my words back. If not then 2Clix should fix its software and stop blaming others for its problems.
The greater danger is that if 2Clix succeeds, this will only encourage the big bully boys to exploit it to shut up critics. Imagine Microsoft closing down every 'My Vista won't work and it sucks' thread. yes folks you can bet on it!

new music. its all noise

No, I don't hate the current crop of chart toppers. I'm feeling old but I'm not quite yet a geriatric complaining about "what young people listen to these days!".

I'm talking about the current trend by record labels to artificially compress music to make it "louder". Ever get really tired or headaches while listening to music? the culprit is the over-compression that makes the music "louder", but it also doesn't allow your ears to relax during the song. hence after a few songs your ears are too stressed leading to tireness and/or headaches.

Its yet another reason why live music is so much better than any recorded music experience (unless you're watching Britney), but thats rant for another time. For a good explanation on how it all works check out this article.

There are 2 main reasons for the current loudness war.

1. To get noticed.
   
2. Our listening environments have changed. most people enjoy their music in their cars these days. The inside of a moving car is typically a very noisy environment. Music in cars has to overcome other noises ie engine, road/tyre and wind noise. thus the louder the music, the easier it is to hear over the other sources of noise.

Now I can agree with the 2nd reason for digitally remastering tunes to sound better for where you listen to them. but with the current digital formats it isn't difficult for this to be done at a hardware level instead of in the music format.
The 1st reason won't work and will lead to catastrophe. the reason being it disregards the fallacy of composition. That is if one person does something its good. If everyone does it then its usually bad. This is exactly what's happening in the music industry at the moment. There's a loudness war, everyone is compressing the bejesus out of music to gain loudness.
The end result? nada! no one gets an advantage out of something that everyone is doing! What the current loudness war will give us is a generation of iPod users who are destined for deafness. (maybe a good time to invest in Cochlear shares). perhaps this is a window for someone to forgo the loudness and compression and dazzle us with unadulterated music with some dynamic range!

Rocky Mountain "Oysters"

Whilst we're on the topic....all this talk of cooking testies has made me remember my all time favourite (and most cringe worthy) episode of Fear Factor. The episode where the contestants had to eat bull testicles after biting through the membrane.....take a look at the picture....read the article.....look at the picture again....enough said!




Article and picture from http://www.nbc.com/Fear_Factor/gross/stunt_buffalotesticles.shtml

Eating animal testicles is not as unusual as you might think. In some ancient cultures, it was believed that eating them could increase sexual vigor. And, depending on where you live in the U.S. today, you might not think twice about popping an animal testicle in your mouth.

Anyone who has spent some time in Colorado or certain other western states has probably heard of Rocky Mountain Oysters.

For the uninitiated, that's the name typically given to bull testicles that have been thinly sliced, breaded and fried. They're also known as Barnyard Jewels, Montana Tendergroin and Cowboy Caviar. They're so popular in Colorado, in fact, that I'm told you can even buy them at Mile High Stadium.

For our purposes, the trick was finding animal testicles so unappetizing that even a Colorado native might think twice about chomping down on the suckers. My first stop was checking in with Rod A. Lincoln who organizes the annual Testicle Festival at the Rock Creek Lodge in Clinton, Montana (yep, that's the real name of the town).

Rod explained to me the rich history of bull testicles. Each spring, cowboys round up and castrate their beef cattle to help fatten them up and tenderize their beef. It's part of the cowboy ethic of not wasting any part of the animal, he said. Rod estimates he has served up tons of Rocky Mountain oysters over the years at the annual festival, a 5-day event complete with dancing, a motorcycle parade and a wet T-shirt contest.

Unfortunately, the type of testicles Rod served sounded a bit too tasty. So I decided to call a mail order company that specialized in exotic meats and order some animal testicles of our own. He told me he could send me some buffalo testicles, each about the size of a baseball, three to a pack (seemed like an odd number to us, too). I asked him what would happen if we boiled them. Well, they would probably expand, he said. I placed a rush order.

The buffalo testicles arrived at our office in a box with some dry ice. They were shrink-wrapped and looked kind of like chicken breasts. We thawed them, boiled them, and found a willing participant in the office to test one. Well, if the truth were told, I found the tester with the help of a $20 bill from my wallet. The testicles had been boiled about 10 minutes and shrank to the size of eggs by the time they came out of the pot. Our tester didn't care for it; especially the spongy texture, but he did manage to swallow it down.

I still couldn't help wondering if there were some way to make eating a buffalo testicle more challenging. I called a supplier in South Dakota that had just the thing; buffalo testicles that were still in their membranes. It was pretty shocking when they arrived in the mail and we saw what they actually looked like. They were like giant horrible Easter eggs, covered in swirly purple and blue veins and shrink-wrapped in blood-filled plastic. Now we knew we were onto something.

We tried boiling one for 10 minutes and were pleased to see that they didn't shrink. But would the contestants be able to break through the membrane and get to the meat inside? Only one way to find out. I chomped down on the freshly boiled jewel. Yeccchh. Milky, warm water squirted out. And, man, was that membrane rubbery. There was no way we could have the contestants eat that membrane in a short period of time.

We decided that each contestant would have to bite into the testicle, peel away the membrane, and eat the boiled, spongy meat inside within four minutes. I honestly thought they'd all do it, especially given the prize money at stake. But they did smell really horrible, kind of like boiled sheep eyes (these are the kinds of things you learn on a job like this).

We ordered plenty of extra testicles. And it's a good thing we did. Some of the testicles had little tears in the membrane and when we went to boil them they popped open in the pot like frozen crescent roll containers. We also needed some extras for display purposes because we realized it would be extra tough for the contestants to eat them once they saw them raw.

The day of the shoot, we had plenty of testicles ready for action. When the contestants first walked in and saw the tray of raw testicles, they made it clear this was not going to be easy for them. Mission accomplished. On to the next stunt.

Gordon Ramsay's right testicle

news today that potty mouthed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has accidentally scorched his nuts at his restaurant.

Hillarious! well also it gives me a chance to recycle an old favourite photo. see left.

Apparently, in true scottish style, he was going commando in the kitchen and accidentally placed his nads on a hot hob. like eeeewwww! i don't like to imagine a kitchen full of commandos. apart from the agonising thought of seared testicles, the thought of accidentally getting one of Gordon's short and curlies as a free side is highly disturbing. Ramsay's comments were

"I burnt my right bollock and I'm in absolute agony. You wouldn't believe how much this hurts."

like ywah I'd believe it hurts like hell. pain and bollocks are two things that I personally don't like to mix.

now I've had the pleasure of experiencing Ramsay's cuisine and it is indeed exquisite. All his short-comings as a total asshole can be forgiven after tasting his food. seriously its that good. The whole story would make a great chapter for Anthony Bourdain's next book or TV series.

Westpac outage. pretty p*ss poor

Westpac's 'online' banking has been offline since yesterday. Today at least they're displaying a holding/redirection page (see left). Yesterday, you just got an error. As it stands this morning its still not properly fixed.

Now this is the second time in the last three months. the last outage was because a cleaning contractor pulled out the wrong plug??? like WTF!!!

now there's certain services which you expect guaranteed uptime. Banking is definitely one of them. to have a major problem unfixed for so long is unacceptable and inexcusable for a major bank.

millions of businesses (mine included) and individuals rely on your service and you charge hefty fees for it. Stuff like a cleaner pulling out a plug should not bring down a system. At this level, their system should be designed fault tolerant and robust enough to handle such a situation. its not difficult as these systems and techniques have been around for decades, ie remote mirror sites, rollback procedures etc ... Looks like they're either not investing enough in their IT budget to ensure uptime or hiring unqualified staff or both. either way its very bad.

Now I've got anxious staff bugging me on when their pay is going in. To the folk at Westpac sure one or two days delay to someones pay is nothing, but to many workers this could be the difference in getting charged hefty credit card and loan/mortgage fees. oh hang on, who does that benefit??? you guessed it, the folk at Westpac.