Testing IMified

Wow, this is me blogging via Gaim and IMified (www.imified.com). What a cool subversion of instant messaging…

This is Your Life, and It’s Ending One Minute at A Time

I played around with Google Calendar today. I noticed its reminder feature sends an email to my Google Inbox (I tested it a few months ago, I don’t think it did that back then). The almost natural language Quick-Add feature is also cool, though one can’t set the reminder time through it.

So I typed in a friend’s birthday (“X’s birthday $date $month repeat yearly”). “repeat yearly” does what is expected from it, and looking at it in detail I saw one can also say how many times it should repeat: a limited number of time, or infinitely.

But no one has infinite birthdays now, do they?

So that’s the story of how a small option in Google Calendar reminds me that we are all mortals…

Poet Laureate

There are two smells
One of them I’m going to miss
The other I won’t
Perfume
And cigarette

She said it was “pretty”. (Or was it, I don’t remember what she said…)

Korean Ramen Noodles are Bad, Mmmkay?

Well, I got myself some Korean Ramen noodles yesterday, why Korean? Mainly because I was riding past by the Asian store and was inspired to get some ramen noodles, and it was a Korean store.

I just took another smell of the bowl that I used to eat the noodles, and was instantly reminded of the time I lived with a Korean flatmate in Sydney, who also ate Ramen noodles. I notice the smell was similar to how our toilet used to smell after he used it. Only milder. A lot milder, actually. Oh fuck, I guess it’s the same brand of noodles he used to eat. I guess I won’t use the paste they have with the noodles, to spare my neighbors (and myself) from the chemical attack.

I don’t eat a lot of ramen, and when I do I mostly buy the world-famous Indonesian brand, Indomie. [Blasphemy, Wikipedia has no entry on Indomie!] At least it’s famous to Indonesian students and expats all over the world, the majority of whom probably have Indomie as a staple food.

Which reminds me of an ad for them I saw on TV once, back home. The scene: a car (a black Merc!) pulls into a driveway. Cut to interior. A servant says to the housewife, “Miss, your son has come back from his school overseas.”. The housewife responds “Oh, better prepare some Indomie, then”. I laughed at this ad. The kid’s probably just spent a couple of months overseas eating Indomie, he comes back home and he gets served the same crap again!

Granted the idea behind the ad was it was supposed to be Indonesian food, that people who’s been overseas pine for, even rich people who send their kids overseas and drive around in black Mercs. Too bad it’s actually available all over the world, most Indonesians over here pine for the more traditional Indonesian foods which are more tasty, complicated, and unavailable. Not generic crap.

President FUBAR

So the 8 o’clock news on TV said Bush will let more Iraqi refugees into the US. Amusing.

He’s really fucking things up over there (Iraq). At least he’s taking some responsibility for it and giving some of the people who suffered the most because of his fuck-up a chance for better lives. If you consider the USA a good place to life. Well it’s better than Iraq in any case, the chances of getting blown up while going to a mall is much lower in the US. And the chances of getting shot? Ask Michael Moore.

But so much for the argument “We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here.”. OK, that’s not fair, refugees aren’t terrorists, but try explaining that to Alabamans. And I can imagine a small percentage of the refugees (7000 refugees in the US is also just a very small percentage of the people suffering because of the war) are/will be disgruntled with his policies. Or with the US “civilization”, not all of whom – I imagine – would be welcoming these victims of circumstances caused by their unpopular president. Imagine the irony if one of those refugees end up blowing himself up, right in the middle of a US shopping mall.

Not that I’m saying the US is better off not taking any refugees (I don’t care, it’s not my country), but they having to do this is really just evidence of how badly Bush is managing the situation. A situation he created himself, foolishly thinking he would be able to handle it. I wonder if he thinks he’ll still be able to handle it. I guess so, with this “surge” that’s going to solve all the problems nonsense. No one besides him believes it’s going to work, too bad no one’s asking the question “So what if it doesn’t work? What are your plans then, sirrah?”

And now they (Bush and Cheney) are rattling the sabers against Iran. I wonder WTF their strategy is. Attack a new target so people would forget about the previous catastrophe (like Afghanisthan)? I have a feeling they’re just starting war after war to please their missiles-and-jet-fighter-manufacturing friends.

What a really, really, fucked up guy.

Song of the Moment

Stumbled upon FC Kahuna’s Hayling¹ yesterday, and damn, I’m in love with this song..

Don’t think about all those things you fear/Just be glad to be here

1: Funny how YouTube is also being used to share music on the internet.

Get Off the Internet!

Allow me to rant…

So YouTube and co. make it easy to post videos online.

So what do you get? Instructional videos on how to do things. Like how to break into 3-digit padlocks by trying 100 combinations instead of (the video claims) 64,000.

So far so good.

But since these are amateurs, you get no editing at all. You get a guy going into too much detail and wasting so much fucking time.

“So note the numbers where the lock doesn’t move. Write them down.”
“3″
“6.5″
“9.5″
“11.5″
…

, etc. He writes each of the 12 numbers down. GFD, W(ho)TF needs to watch you write numbers down, you …?

Later on…

“Write that number, and increment it by 4 until the highest limit [it happened to be 39]
“1″
“5″
“9″
…

you get the idea right?

Aaaarrrrggghhh!!!

I hope his audience isn’t supposed to be that dumb.. because that’s just horrible, stop-wasting-my-time video-editing.

Another video I remember getting pissed off about was a guy who’s demoing a new Mobile Windows version, and proceeds to the control panel to demo each and every one of the system sounds the device is able to make. For 5 or-so minutes long. No I didn’t watch it for the whole time I fast-forwarded to near the end, and that’s what he was still doing…

Who the fuck needs that? Get off the internet, you idiots!

The EU Needs to Teach Its Children Esperanto!

Yes, the EU should teach its children Esperanto.

How did I come up with this idea?

Well, I was lying in bed not feeling motivated to do my project when I noticed my collection of Euro-coins, which is basically a jar where I put all the foreign coins I happen to run into, or which happen to land in my hand.

“Hmm, I remember having a coin with a specific Schleswig-Holstein [a German federal state] motive. I wonder if it’s still on my table or if I accidentally spent it.
“I wonder what’s the rule on making your own coin motives is.
“I wonder if the Åland islands, Finland’s new sovereign province, can have its own Eurocoins.
“That place is almost its own nation, but it probably depends on Finland for things like armed forces protection.
“I think the EU should have its EU-wide armed forces anyway.
“But then there’d be language diffculties, you’d have soldiers from different nations living together but not being able to communicate properly.
“Maybe they should all speak English. But then that smacks of imperialism.
“Wasn’t there an article about the difficulty of getting enough translators to work at the Parliament in Brussels? If you had 12 official languages, you can have 144 translation-combinations. That’s a lot of documents to translate and re-translate.
“I know, why not make them speak Esperanto!”

But you know how it is to get politicians to learn anything…

So I think it’d be easier if they just start teaching Esperanto at school. The kids will grow up with the language and when they get into the EU government, they’ll be able to speak it already.

Well Google says my idea isn’t original, and that there are 23 official languages, but people think it should be introduced to the running administration, which I don’t think would work because politicians wouldn’t have time to learn a language with their busy schedule and all. If the politicians came into the EU already speaking Esperanto, it might just be the language chosen while trying to find a common language to talk to a colleague. And that way the language can enter the system, IMO.

I wondered as well if it was a European who invented Esperanto, because I think they have an “not-invented here” syndrome. Maybe they can legislate the creation of a new language, which I wouldn’t put past them, crazy bureaucrats.

Web Two Point Ohhhhh! 2.0

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Here’s a nice video that explains the “evolution” of the web from messy HTML to the nice separation of form and content with XML, RSS, and mashing and all that jazz, but watching it I get a feeling it’s just self-stroking, “Wow, look at us, we’re changing the world with all this ‘participation’.”.

As I said before, there are great things out there, but then the masses come and put dirty data all over the place.

I guess I’m just an elitist… what did they say about the intelligence of the masses?

Maybe somebody should make a Web 2.0 “Special Edition”, or “Limited Edition”. Ha.