Was at the Bell Ringers dinner this evening, great company, excellent food, our own private vicar at the table (usually the whole town has to share a vicar). And on top of that this place has some *hot* staff. I dont think any of them are single, so I hadn't made too much time thus far, might hang out there more in the future. Nice high toned place, so I'm not going to have a punchup with a chav over some girl I'm sarging, or have to AMOG a tattooed gorilla called Knuckles. Probably be the only male customer under 40 :-) Need to bear places like this in mind in future. Hmmm...

place card

I like the word 'tartlets' being next to my name on that card. Anyhoo, I just got home to an email from one Joseph Matthews that contains a really interesting idea:

Mystery talked about how on an evolutionary scale, humans are meant
to do two things, and they are: Survive and Replicate.

Men are driven to replicate because they have the survival part
down. They're strong enough to live, and therefore seek out women
to propagate their genes.

Women, however, are driven to survive, because they're the weaker
of the species. So they look for men who can protect them to
replicate with.

Primus521: hey dude the funniest thing happened to me today
Primus521: im at walmart and this chick is buying a box of tampons and they are missing the upc and wont ring up
Primus521: so the cashier tells his buddy to get a price check on tampax
Primus521: the dude looks at him and says, ''the kind u push in, or the kind you hammer in?''
Primus521: lol
Primus521: turns out he misheard him
Primus521: he thought he said thumbtacs
Primus521: you should have seen the look on the chicks face

Logogle.com is a site which allows users to customise the google logo, like so:

Its freaking genius. The ability to change the logo is so-so as far as cool things go, technically easy, not amazing. As a business idea its totally awesome, here we have a way to take advantage a neat little meme to harvest money from google, simply by putting ads in the same place google does, and charging them for their own adsense :-) or yahoo ads! And its hella good viral marketing, because it takes advantage of poeple's exhibitionism and hubris, they're going to work hard to drive people to your site to see 'their' logo. I absolutely love this site, for sheer chutzpah and business sense. Its technically boring but psychologically brilliant as a get-rich-quick scheme. I need to come up with some ideas like this.

via

Notice: This post is superceded by this one.

If you've ever been to the iFriends 'adult entertainment' section you may have been disappointed that the pictures you most wanted to see were covered up by little cockblock 'censor' wrappers, like so:

And then, Hey!, iFriends comes to the rescue, they'll let you see the pictures if you sign up for a months free trial. Well not quite. I cancelled mine before the first month was up and got a nastyass �60.00 bill for my 'free' trial. I was ticked. *real ticked*

So I resolved to solve the problem of the little wrappers. By combining Firefox (1 or 1.5) and Greasemonkey they can be defeated with Javascript. If you dont have Firefox then I recommend it. Ditto Gresemonkey.

The result of my tinkering is iFriends Monkey v0.1 BETA (not affiliated with iFriends in any way), which takes the previous page and makes it look more like this:

Now what kind of sick internet pervert would want to see that, guess those censor things were there for a reason. What terrible sinner would watch pretty little teenage girls kissing on each other and getting their pink lipstick all smeary.. eww.. that's so degrading to... anyways,

To install the script, right click on this: iFriends Monkey v0.1 Beta (nothing to do with Web Power Inc)

And select 'Install User Script'. Next Check in your 'Manage User Scripts' console (it's under 'Tools') to see that it's there, like so:

userscripts

The script is realeased un GNU licence, do whatever the heck you like with it, so long as that does not involve money.

NewNova.org has a huge listing of fresh documentaries. This is like finding bittorrent gold :-) Not that any of you good people would download an illegal BBC documentary of course... You'd buy a television, an then buy an ariel and a freeview box, and then pay a licence fee, which is used for god knows what. You wouldn't use the internet to get hold of something your tax money payed for...

*grin*

~~link~~

UPDATE: May 2007, newnova is no more, however there is now a huge array of downloadable BBC and Channel4 documentaries available on Google Video.

If that doesn't suit you Torrentz.com list over 600 files for the phrase 'BBC Documentary'.

First came across this place on flickr, somewhere I must definitely visit before I'm 50. I am so going windsurfing here.

A google image search brings up a bunch more pictures.

found at

This company called Unica Home makes flip flops that you press out of a printed sheet of foam. Nothing new about the product, but the designs are beautiful, check out this print made from chinese newspaper ads...

UnicaHome.com Link

via

9137 messages and not one of them spam. Looks like I have some reading to do...

9137 new messages

9136...9135..bottles of beer on the wall...9134..bottles of beer...

Strix.org.uk will be participating in Dean Gray Tuesday, an event to protest the censoring of mash-up albums (an excellent and worthy form of art) by music labels, and to flip the bird at all those persons and organisations who would use the law to restrict creativity, art or science. So, to artists, musicians and my fellow man: you kick ass! great to share the world with you. To the RIAA, MPAA, Warner Bros, Sony, et al, suck on this:

link

Tracks will be available for download for one day only. It truly blows my mind that that original and authentic art can be illegal due to quirks in copyright law. There are whole genres of music created by the skillful re-editing and mixing together of sounds from various sources, including maintream tracks. People make this stuf for the love of doing it and release the albums for free on the 'net, and it's illegal just because the big studios dont like it and start harrumphing about licences and uncleared samples and garbage. I call bullshit on that.

link to gray.alt.fm

I haven't blogged in ages, or updated my site. In fact, I haven't done a single thing with it since the Yahoo! showdown that saw the most popular section of this website shut down. So to those of you who came for the the Launch scripts: they're gone, sorry. They're no longer available and I'm not giving the source out, I dont have the resurces to take on a big corporation in court.

So I've been wondering what I should do with this blog. People read it, but what's it for? I might say that personal blogs are a way to share your thoughts with others, to participate in online culture, to connect - whatever that means. Isn't it more like putting up a little shrine to yourself? I dunno. Seems kinda egotistical, maybe thats not a bad thing.

I came across an old conversation in an internet archive, me as a young teenager trying to score some ketamine. A naive and stupid thing to do, but hey. Of course I had no idea I wasn't anonymous, even back then I'd taken some basic steps to protect my identity, and I didn't know that internet chats are logged and kept. I got over the experimenting-with-substances phase pretty quickly, and I never did try Vitamin K - also known as cat tranqiliser, 'coz thats what vets use it for - but there it is. Permanent, indelible evidence of yours truly trying to set up an international drug deal. Bugger.

So what about this blog? Anyone who knows me in the real world can probably find it. My employer, family, girls I might want to meet. And future employers? In a world where everything you write is stored forever my opinions on hacking, pornography, politics and any number of shady areas are only a background check away. What happens in 30 years when my nices and nephews can read this? Will I be as embarrassed as I was when I found that old chat transcript?

Ah screw it, I dont have that many secrets anyway. So welcome back to the new strix.org.uk, I think I'm going to up the content, add pictures and cut back on the introspection. Let the bullshit begin...

The empty cardboard box has been added to New York's National Toy Hall of Fame. I think this is excellent, not only is an empty cardboard box (next to lego, and a length of rope) the ultimate toy, its cool to see it up alongside the manufactured marketed things like Barbie Dolls. Something else I like about this collection is that most of these toys work on the imagination, they're not an entertainment system like a TV or GameBoy, they're something you must be creative to use, which can only be good for kids. Much better than doping them up on junk food and sugar and then sitting them in fornt of an XBox IMO. Well, for kids under 11 anyhoo.

National Toy Hall of Fame

via UNEASYsilence

Something that's always bugged me a little are the censorship functions on search engines, those righteous little options with names like 'Family Filter' or 'Safe Search'. Little munchkin hats for search engines to tip at puritans. I dont think it's good to blinker people so that they can maintain a fantasy of living in some 1950s white picket fence world, better to expose people to the real world so they can love life for what it really is.

Anyhoo, so I wrote a script to search both with and without the family filtering, and then return only those results that are 'potentially offensive'. I was amazed. Google's SafeSearch(tm) is one wacky piece of kit. Offensive inappropriate pages it's protecting people from include The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, The UN International Court of Justice and this Wikipedia article about kittens. There were also a few consipracy kook sites about secret government censorship, happy crazy irony there, slightly more profound, the Feminists Against Censorship was taken out of the 'safe' results. Hmmm...

Of course, the script has practical uses as well, it produces near perfect adult searches, uncluttered by irrelvant vanilla stuff. Just the thing when you're googling for... um... treasure. Porntastic!

script here. go play...

The lights went out tonight. 10:30, the whole island blacked out. I put on some shoes and went outside. It was perfect. In that moment, moving silently between the shadows I felt completely centred. I could wish it was the end of civilisation and the lights would never come on. Everything was right. I knew in some primitive way how to act, how to move. Unseen, alert, aware. I also knew how I could have felt, running, leaping between uncertain footholds in the dark, hard ragged breath, tired, bruised muscles. Scratched and dirty. Half starving. Bare feet and hands, propelling myself through the bush. Eyes straining at dark shapes as I run. Somewhere deep inside my mammalian brain, below the noise of my inner voice and the complex, self referential thoughts of ego and identity, is an animal that wants to hunt.

Summer is here! It's wet and rainy and awesome. Surfing, beach parties, topless sunbathing. Of course, none of there things are happening at my house so I'm moving down the camp site until further notice. So call me on my cell phone, not my land line. Bye.

Yeah! Whooo! There is this most kickass electrical storm going on outside. It's out in the sea to the southwest, clear, dark night with a big cumulus clouds rolling in towards the island, kicking off sheet lightning up and down the front, disappearing in and out of the thunderheads, lighting them up. It was a perfect moment, standing ot in a field at the top of the cliffs, grass up to my knees whipped up by this warm dry wind the storm was pulling into it, drinking a warm can of Bav NA (a Dutch non-alcoholic beer, I'm about the only person I know who likes it), dark sky overhead, lighthouses behind me and to my left, and these amazing shapes lit up in the clouds. Awesome.

Wa-Hey! Another beautiful Saturday on Alderney. Sunshine and fog, was just out taking photos of trees in the wierd light. And I met a new girl today, always a nice surprise. All the pick-up artists I've studied are adament about the three second rule, that is, if you see an attractive girl, you have a three seconds in which to start your approach, he who hesitates being lost. Altogether I must have taken about 20 to esablish that they weren't day trippers, clear my head and snap into character. She was with an older woman, probably her mom, and they were carrying groceries, enough for a fair long while. I took the tack of 'Hey! Welcome to the Island!', body language, tonality and eye contact were more or less where I wanted them, invited them to a party later on. I doubt they'll show, but that's fine, I'm happy with how my technique and inner game are progressing. I've been working on first impressions for the past fornight or so and it's good to have opportunities to practice, I have met *lots* of tourists this past few weeks.

Guernsey was an eye opener, I went there on Wednesday to get my arm sorted out. I'd barely stepped off the plane and there were are half dozen girls in the the arrivals hall, cute girls, who I'd never seen before, more new faces than I'd met in the past six months. I tried a couple test approaches, mostly on principle and for practice, it didn't go down very well. I hadn't slept and my arm still hurt like crap, so my congruence wasn't there and I wasn't at a good place in my head, still a good experience, noting negtive body langue and watching assumed rapport fail. Valuable lessons. Also good to prove to myself that I can take a few failed approaches and go straight into another unaffected, something I wouldn't have been able to do six months ago.

I took some time out at the hospital to check myself out in the mirror, body language, a couple facial expressions, and they looked fine to me, but they weren't working like they normally do, wich I guess proves that at some unconcious level girls are very astute to false body language, and faking it as much as I was causes some subtle inconsistency that freaks them out. On the way there I met this girl and got about five lines into conversation, but she was just being polite, so I raised the gambit of telling her I was going in for a vasectomy (which should usually be a good hook) and made a couple of jokes about it. Nothing, completely wooden expression. No smile, no giggling, no shift in posture, didn't even move her feet. Which I guess goes to show that you cannot fake that naughty-happy-confident state girls are attacted to. I was back on form by the next afternoon with my arm fixed, lesson learnt.

All considered, it was very liberating to hit on these girls in Guernsey and fail with absolutley no consequence. It was completely win-win, I'd succeed and learn something, or I'd fail and learn something, and never see them again. It was fun. On Alderney everyone knows everything everyone else does, so if I did something stupid and screwed up with an island girl, not only have I burned a bridge, but all the other chicks will know about it, so I can't repeat the experiment, or try anything too often. From the air, Alderney looks tiny small :-)

Hey, welcome to the new server. This website is now powered by Debian Linux. In other news I'd like to say ''OW! SWEET (cat juggling) OLSEN TWINS! DAMMIT, FOR THE LOVE OF BENJI THAT HURTS!'' I got up just now at 3am to do... 3am stuff. Anyways I fell over and put my shoulder out. So now I can't sleep and it's like 5 hours before the quack shop opens and I can get it fixed. Oh well, at least I fixed the music videos. Time for an all-night Futurama marathon methinks.

Looks like the ad remover's broken again. This is about the fourth time in a month, Yahoo must be up to something to keep rearranging their systems like this. The first couple lockdowns shut out my stream ripper :-(, now they've got another new layout for their ASX files. Oh well. For those of you who don't care, here's some pictures of a squirrel on water-skis.

Everyone else: The original ASX were pretty cool, standard mms: streams together with comments that could be used to figure out what the streams were, then they went and replaced them with HTTP streams that have these big long cryptic querystrings, presumably to keep track of users and resources and to tip off the FBI that you're spanking it to JoJo, who's only 15.

In either case the ads were served as separate streams and were easily taken out. Now it looks like they might be combining the ads into the same stream as the content, but I'm not sure yet. I've tried to take the new setup apart a little, but I grow bored with fixing this over and over.

I think the answer may be to quit using their own playlists, which are full of ads and Jennifer Lopez, and make my own playlist generator that feeds off the 'simmilar artists' feature. Be good practice for the new generation of spiders and scrapers I'm designing, the interact an absolute minimum with other sites, for less disruption and a smaller footprint in the logs. But not today. It's a beautiful afternoon and I'm going outside for awhile. Bye.

Whee! I fixed it! My very retro vintage washing machine is now working again, four months after I decided to take it to small pieces, in the name of science (it had exploded in a carpet-soaking puddle of dirty, foamy water). I'm not sure exactly when it was built, I'm pretty sure it predates the transistor and I'm guessing early sixties. Inside it is dirt, clockwork and neatly machined parts. Its cycle is controlled by grooves and lumps in a wheel which hit little levers, opening and closing circuits. This wheel is connected by more clockwork to the main axle of the thing, so timing is measured by revolutions of the drum.

I think it's kinda cool, an artefact of the twentieth century. From before cars and washing machines and toasters became computerised. It has no electronics whatsoever, it's an electrical machine. Yet it's perfectly functional. Works exactly the same now as when people were crapping themselves about the cold war while they did their laundry. Odds are this thing was making it's thumping whirring noises at the same time as Kennedy was having sex with Marylin Monroe. How amazing is that?