Does this imply that someone is selling radioactive water?

And it's only August...

Well – it was when the photo was taken.
And it's only August..., originally uploaded by JamesA.

Now I feel old(er)

90’s counts as retro music?

Football Musing

So I'm up Wednesday morning at 4:30 am to watch the wonderfully entertaining Liverpool v Arsenal Champions League quarter-final.  In the lead up to the game, one of the commentators tells me the "get ready for this all-English battle".

That was funny I thought to myself.  Of the twenty-two players starting the match.  Only three were actually English.  Hardly "all-English"...

Disturbing

Every year I try to get my hands on a copy of Triple J's Hottest 100 - if for no other reason but to reinforce why I no longer bother listening to radio for it's music content.  One of the few redeeming features of these lists is the occasional wacky track it throws up.

 

From 2004's list, that jem was a tune called "Lotion" by a band called The Greenskeepers (a favourite of Adam's if I recall). 

I'd never heard of them before.  And I haven't heard from them since.

 

So now I get to this year's list and I've come across this track - "I'll Kill Her" by some bird called Soko (again - never heard of her before - probably never will again).

Just have a listen to the actual lyrics.  If nothing else, it mounts a strong argument from staying clear of French girls.

Biggest Steak Evar!

If you are game, thes can be purchased next time up at Perigian.  Beats the heck out of Hog's Breath...

Pop

"Art is what you can get away with" - Andy Warhol.

And that quote pretty much describes the current exhibit of Andy Warhol artwork, on display at the Gallery of Modern Art.  Some of it is quite striking, some of it mundane, a lot of it appears to be created by an ADHD-suffering lunatic with an extremely short attention span.

For some reason, a lot of his works appear as if he couldn't be bothered finishing them and had found something else more interesting to do instead.  I realise that this is part of the appeal of his work (and the art movement he spawned), but for some reason I still think that someone who's last name wasn't Warhol, wouldn't be able to get away with it.

Apart from all this - it is a pretty interesting look at a wide array of his works.

Changing priorities

There once was a time when the priority in a lecture theatre was to grab either the seat closest to the door or furthest from the lecturer.

These days it seems the priority are the ones closest to a power point.

It just seems funny.

F@ck you iTunes

As some may know, I have an iPod.  And while some people (cue GrantRantTM) may find them not much to write home about, I think they're a pretty damn good portable music player.

As a consequence of having an iPod, without having to resort to all kinds of technical tom-foolery, you're forced to use iTunes in order to load music of any kind onto it.  And where the iPod does a damn good job of being a music player, iTunes does the complete opposite as a media player (especially in windows).  It's dog-slow, frequently stuffs up meta-data and it's video playback often bogs down a pc so badly it sounds more like a stutterer trying to recite the lyrics to Theophilus Thistler.

Oh yes, and it also has a really annoying habit of randomly bringing itself to the front when the program is minimised or, even better, randomly restarting itself after you've closed it down. 

Why do these quirks matter you ask?

Last week, when my mouse decided to up and die on me for no apparent reason, I was forced to try and discover how to navigate a point and click interface, without the ability to point or click.  It was quite fun.

While Windows is possible (although painful) to navigate by using a keyboard, some programs which don't want to behave with the OS, don't let you use all of the features you could otherwise access with a mouse.  iTunes is one of those programs (shocking I know for a piece of software written by Apple.  Who would have thought...).  I needed to download an individual podcast to take to work (a Chaser broadcast if you must know).

iTunes won't let you tab to navigate to the pane where you can select individual items to download by using the keyboard.  The only way to download it that I could discover was by switching on the option hidden in a series of submenu's that tells iTunes to automatically download a new podcast when it was available.  So I switch that on, download the required podcast, shut down iTunes and head off to work.

So what you ask?  Where is all of this going?

Remember where I mentioned earlier that iTunes has a really annoying habit of restarting itself after you've closed it down?  Well, after I went to work, it did.  And seeing that it the option switched on to automatically download new podcasts, it proceeded to do so.  Now normally this would not be a problem, but last week I had subscribed to a HD video podcast for curiosities sake to see how well it outputted from my iPod onto my television.  So the randomly restarted iTunes proceeded to grab the latest episode.

And the one before that.

And the one before that.

And the one before that.

And the one before that.

And the..... well - I'm sure you get the drift by now.

These video's average a file size of between 350MB to 470MB.  And seeing as they're stored on an akamai server, they're being downloaded at a really fast rate.  How fast?  Well, in the time I was at work, iTunes managed to download 10GB's worth of video.  That's right - 10GB.

Not surprisingly, that exceeded my remaining quota for the month.  Itunes did this in 7 hours.  So, since last Thursday, I've been shaped at 64k until December 01.  So f@ck you iTune for doing this to me.  You and your sh!th@use Apple software can go scr@w yourselves.

I Hate...

...going to the chemist to buy some cough mixture and being treated like a bl**dy criminal just because the mixture I want to buy contains a minute trace of psuedoephedrine!!!

Feed me please

Just testing the new version of Live Writer and its Flickr integration.

A Good Bet

In 1998 a man watched his son get soundly beaten in a go-kart race by a very fast young driver. He went to the bookies and asked to put a bet on this kid winning a Formula One race before he reached the age of 23.

William Hill laughed him out of the shop, but Ladbrokes gave him odds of 200-1. After this month's Montreal Grand Prix, where 22 year-old Lewis Hamilton recorded his first victory, the chap called up Ladbrokes to claim his winnings - 40,200 pounds.

If you need to slow down to 2km/h to clear a small speedbump...

...you need to take your car off the bloody road because it's too
freaking low!!!

The problem with living in Brisbane at this time of year...

...is that our houses are designed to dissipate heat.

What is the point of learn to read English classes...

...that are advertised in English?

Does anyone really feel sorry for her?