Fuck. Shit. Piss. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Tits.

Bad news -one of the funniest men alive no longer is.

George Carlin was arguably one of the best comedians of the 20th century and was doing quite well in the 21st to boot. I'll miss the crazy old coot.

Last night I dumped my Macbook Pro at the Apple store for keyboard repairs and now face the wonderful challenge of being without a computer once I leave the office for the weekend.

The morning welcomed me with a wonderful example of human stupidity -Somebody managed to tether his/her bike to mine rather than the bicycle rack, effectively tethering me to somebody for a rather uncertain amount of time. This had better be over soon, or crimes will ensue.

Work is suspiciously relaxed today and the BBQ is on its way. A great setting for food, drink and the unavoidable questions that might arise from my somewhat interesting whereabouts as of late.

The 90s called -they want their fad back

It's always nice to see common aspects of the demoscene trickle down into the mainstream, but the opposite can give me the occasional jolt. Assembly 2008 has decided that a revamp of the traditional Oldskool competitions was in order, and to the general positive reception of its audience, they went on and did it.

The mailing list surprised me this morning with an update on the matter. You might want to take a step back here:

Oldskool music has become Realtime Extreme Music

Oldskool graphics has become Realtime Extreme Graphics


…Extreme?! Supplanting of Oldskool music and graphics with Executable 4k Graphics and Executable 32k music competitions -two competitions and two terms proven to be successful at other demoparties, can only be made acceptable with the corniest idea in Sports marketing taped onto it? I'm lost here.

Bluetooth Mice -Oh how much fun there is to be had

The midget sibling of the Wireless Laser 8000 I graciously dubbed best for throwing at oysters, the Microsoft Wireless Laser 5000, is even more fun. It actually came without any dongle, which was promising. Maybe it actually would run out of the box! Never fear, it was not to be -it ran fine under Boot Camp but refused to do anything involving pointers moving across the screen in OS X.

I have caved in and bought the Mighty Mouse. It's a weird device and my short thumb cannot reach the squeeze buttons, but quite frankly I don't care. It works, doesn't look like a cheap transformer bootleg toy and saves me another dongle.

Think different

What a difference a different Mac store makes. After my hilarious encounters with the batshit employees of iCentre, I decided to bring my latop to a different Apple outlet in order to check out my wonky backlit keyboard.

The tech guy took it to the back (probably to reset the P-RAM), figured out it was definitely a hardware error and proceeded to process the replacement of the keyboard. No accusations of customer abuse, no 2-3 weeks of impound for my laptop while waiting for a replacement keyboard to arrive. Nada.

While browsing for the right part, we even came to the point where he ordered the much-coveted USA keyboard part -at no extra charge, which is a bizarre contrast to "that will cost you at least 130 euros, so don't bother".

Once the part arrives ("in about a week") I can just sling my machine over their counter and have the whole thing done "in two days, tops".

I wish I had the precognition to buy my laptop at this place in the first place.

Bluetooth Mice -the fun starts!

There has to be an explanation for this. The Microsoft Wireless Laser 8000, one of the few Bluetooth mice available in a non-midget size, apparently is shipped with the preposterous expectation that you only will use the supplied Bluetooth dongle.

Which is great, especially since the only reason I wanted to buy a bluetooth mouse was to get rid of the disarray of dongles in the first place! Nice one!

Some people managed some draconian ritual to get it to run, but somehow this didn't work for me. At all.

This will be great fun...

Brilliant use of technology

One of my colleagues bought one of those spiffy wireless network web cams that we have put in place at Us Media and Spang Makandra (so either party at the ocean can ogle the activities of their colleagues across the globe). What possible use could he have for such a thing? Well...



To watch his cat sleep, of course. Now I want one.