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Here is the adorable and beautiful Kate Beckinsale (Van Helsing, Underworld, The Aviator) in an excellent high resolution image. Please note, due to a flurry of attention I have changed the location of this image, you can still access it by clicking on the thumbnail above
Screenshot with Menu
And here is my setup while not at uni:
I am sorry I cannot remember what theme I used, I think it was "Hawk Eye" or something similar, but I made this a long time ago so please stop asking. Thank you.
Labels: Desktop
This is a station based on my Audioscrobbler profile, i.e. the site that logs what I listen to, it plays songs from other people's profiles that are similar to mine. Not quite the library of LAUNCHcast but improved bitrate, no annoying adverts and Audioscrobbler integration make this extremely good. Not quite as advanced as LAUNCH but it has a lot more user friendly features and is more community orientated; groups, friends, musical neighbors, RDF feeds, favourite albums, artists and songs, avatars and advanced features at a fraction of the cost.
Labels: Music
My cat lottie and some spring flowers
This is really just me testing out my new Flickr account and its interaction with blogger. This is my cat in my garden during the unnaturally hot March heat wave.
Labels: Life
Title: The Unbearable Lightness of BeingDirector: Philip Kaufman
Review: A magnificent and epic tale of love, being in love and how to stay in love. Set in Prague during the era of the Soviet invasion, this tale puts an innocent and quirky young woman with a charming sex activist and sees them through freedom, marriage, invasion, abandonment and Russian dictatorship; always longing to change, to be happy and loved alone. Really an amazing movie with fine acting from all involved, particularly Juliette Binoche who is so beautiful and Daniel Day-Lewis who carries an air about himself. 8/10 and a must see.
I and my neighbor have been randomly picking out movies from my collection and watching them. It's odd that this film should echo a phrase I heard only once before a few days prior thanks to the Shining album: "In the kingdom of kitsch you will be a monster". When the film finished I decided to read up about this phrase to find it's origins. Surprisingly neither google or answers.com had any information about the particular phrase, but I did find some interesting information about the word "kitsch". Quoting wikipedia:
"Kitsch is a term that has been used to categorize art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that it is pretentious or in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass.
Because the word was brought into use as a response to a large amount of art in the 19th century where the aesthetic of art work was confused with a sense of exaggerated sentimentality or melodrama, kitsch most closely associated with art that is sentimental, mawkish, or maudlin; however, it can be used to refer to any type of art which is deficient for similar reasons whether it tries to appear sentimental, cool, glamorous, theatrical, or creative, kitsch is said to be a gesture imitative of the superficial appearances of art. It is often said that kitsch relies on merely repeating convention and formula, lacking the sense of creativity and originality displayed in genuine art."
It also mentioned that the world of pop culture is essentially entirely "kitsch", all commercially produced music, movies and art falling under this category. My interpretation of the original phrase "In the kingdom of Kitsch you will be a monster" is that the kingdom is essentially pop culture or pretentious art and the object of the phrase appears 'monster' like to those who live within the Kitsch realms. i.e. To someone that enjoys the simplified "kitsch-art", true art would seem like a disastrous horrible montrosity. Much like trying to introduce a fan of Will Smith to the poignant work of foreign language indie cinema. Also; "The term "kitsch" was selected in June 2004 by a British translation company as one of the ten English words that are hardest to translate.". My new favourite word.
Labels: Movie
An online acquaintance suggest I check out Yahoo's customizable music radio station. I was highly unenthusiastic about this, I being a loather of all Yahoo products and services, their policy of covering things with adverts, the busy pages, the firefox crashing non-compatible codes etc... . But today, a couple of weeks later, in my free time, I decided to check it out. After filling out forms, registering a yahoo account and yadda yadda, I listened to my own personal station. I chose a few of my favourite artists to include at the start, Eva Cassidy, Nick Drake, Elliott Smith. My very first song was some upcoming teen-bopper loveydovey piece of shit which made my skin crawl, I rated it 1. Some more songs followed, Portishead, Massive Attack, Moby, all fairly standard songs I could hear a lot of other places. I wasn't too impressed at this point. Rather than give up and move on, upon hearing a Nick Drake tune (from Garden State OST) I felt compelled to make this great. I scanned my Audioscrobbler and iTunes for my fave songs and artists and I rated all of them. Now I am at 300 ratings with an Enthusiast user ranking and my station has developed a firm sense of ALL my tastes. Just now it played a local band "Sunna" followed by my favourite track from the Virgin Suicides soundtrack, "Dead Bodies" by Air. It successfully covers my need for ragtime, blues, rock, indie, rap and orchestral in one harmonious place. If anyone wants to listen to my radio station, PLEASE PLEASE do, you can find it here:FofR's LAUNCHcast; click this to listen to what I listen to
Labels: Music
April 1st, 2005. First things first, read the Sin City books by Frank Miller. Appreciate the style of such a tale, the gritty black and white drawings, the highlights and images in monotone. See how perfect everything looks. Now compare this to scenes from the trailer and Comicon trailer, see how perfectly they compliment each other, see how perfectly the comic portrayals are brought to life. Now, look at who is producing and directing - firstly Frank Miller, the soul behind the whole thing is directing along side Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. At this point I am thinking, "this will be awesome". NOW look at the cast list:Jessica Alba .... Nancy Callahan
Rosario Dawson .... Gail
Elijah Wood .... Kevin
Bruce Willis .... John Hartigan
Benicio Del Toro .... Jack Rafferty
Carla Gugino .... Lucille
Josh Hartnett .... The Salesman
Michael Madsen .... Bob
Jaime King .... Goldie/Wendy
Brittany Murphy .... Shellie
Clive Owen .... Dwight
Mickey Rourke .... Marv
Nick Stahl .... Junior/Yellow Bastard
Now, on top of this each of these A-list actors looks exactly like the character they play, it's uncanny. If you've read the comics you'll know that Elijah Wood as the psychotic Kevin is an absolutely PERFECT casting. I need to see this film.
Labels: Movie
Labels: Life
Amazon (co.uk) Wishlist
Labels: Life
I am currently very bored on campus waiting for an email from
my tutor. You see, I have come in today for a Digital Design lecture, but the
lecturer didn’t turn up. That lecture was at 1pm. I also have a tutorial
that will last about 10 minutes at 4pm. This ends up being a 3 hour wait for a
10 minute talk, being very bored, hot and hungry in a computer room. Not really
my idea of fun or good time management.
So, while I am waiting I guess I will write another journal entry for my blog. You know, my life at the moment and everything. Well, it’s the last week of term and I shall soon be homeward bound for Easter and the holidays. Hoorah! This term has been a little infuriating, while the work loads have been manageable and the modules have kept me ticking, the actual content of them has bored me beyond belief. Systems and Control and Signal Processing, two modules run by the computer engineering department are equivalent to trying to sleep while propped up in an old uncomfortable wooden chair with a crazy old man rambling in your ear about something you don’t understand or care for. However, nothing compares to the atrocity that was “design of measurement systems” – not only was this boring and taught by a hard to understand (but lovely) foreigner, it was also utterly pointless. Luckily there is no exam, just lots of Easter coursework. The other modules this term have been “Electromechanical Power”, an optional module concerning induction motors and transformers – it was dull and I dropped it seven weeks in; “Digital design”, a basic surmise of how to program microcontrollers and microprocessors, background knowledge of VLSI and applications of C. It was fairly interesting to begin with, but looking back, the course only taught the basics and really could have been a 1st year module. Most of the subject areas could have been expanded upon and the basics that we know will require further learning and teaching before we can even hope to successfully apply them in real life engineering. Yes, the basics are needed, but a little project letting us use our skills wouldn’t go amiss; the extent of the course was the ability to program a functioning vending machine or burglar alarm, theoretically. Design elements were minimal. If I want to go intro the world of REAL electronics; future technology processors, etc…, I have to learn about the ‘basics’ for such a system before I can start enjoying how to realise and improve concepts such as Hyper threading. Comparing modern computer processors and a vending machine is akin to black and white photography versus HDTV digital film.
The one redeeming module I have had this term, a module that has kept me going and prevented me from losing all faith in the degree I am reading, was “ULSI”. This stands for, ‘ultra large scale integration’ and was a module on the science and engineering behind micro fabrication and nanotechnology. It gave insight into business relations between research groups, Intel, IBM and the other large chip manufacturers, it told us how they make such small devices (transistors), how much it costs to make them, how they are scaling them and making them smaller, how they are consistently improving upon previous designs and all the problems they face in the process. It is without a doubt the most interesting module so far and it is one run by the PHYSICS department. The whole module was cutting edge, the lecturer was head of a research team fronting development for the technologies of 2018 and the intricacies, subtleties and ingenuity behind the whole process was astounding. Some of the areas covered include Short Channel Effects (transistor channel lengths sub micrometer), Source/Drain extensions and problems in fabrication, Quantum Mechanical Tunneling, oxide thicknesses, material alternatives and research, raised source drains, silicon futures, silicon lasers, interconnects, epitaxy, high k dielectrics, chemical vapour deposition, chemical mechanical polishing and more. I positively loved it, despite the impossibly hard assignment questions. The level of knowledge was far greater than any of the engineering modules and rather than just being told things, we were told why things happened. Although I guess that is the difference between engineering and science, one tries to understand the other tries to apply.
In other, non course related news: My mum is getting married
soon and the date is approaching. I have been and bought my suit for the
occasion and I have designed and printed all the invites (after much
deliberation and constant editing due to dissatisfaction of the customer, I
jest). I am also going to France soon, a nice little medieval town north of
Im still sitting here bored in the computer room, I forgot to charge my iPod so I can’t even listen to music. ARGH! I might just skip the tutorial and go home. Maybe I’ll buy a can of lilt. This room is unnaturally hot, when I did a temperature sensor experiment in here it said it was 30C. Not really the optimum working temperature.
I’m still spending my time playing Halo 2 on Xbox live, despite all the assholes that swear and curse when they win or lose at the end of a match. I’m getting a little bored with all the maps now and fresh downloadable content is required soon! That and the patch to stop all the cheating, it’s a little ridiculous. American mid terms and exams have made it less fun as no one in my Something Awful clan is ever online, especially at the British times that I play. So instead I leave it on and wait for people while surfing the net in my ever so lethargic manner. It was in doing this that I noticed my firefox had stopped working correctly; several pages including the BBC football page and the Bungie.net stats page were loading wrong. I narrowed the problem down to a faulty greasemonkey extension script but the only way of removing such an error was to reinstall and rebuild my profile from scratch. Luckily I had backed up all my bookmarks, saved data, form data and the like. However it did take me into the early hours of the morning to have things back up and running so smoothly (i.e. extension installs, logging into everything again, etc… ). I still love firefox though!
Not much more I can think of to tell you. Samantha has finally finished her crazy biological essays that I had to proof read. She’s been worrying about them all term and been getting very stressed over their completion. So now she has a short gap before she can start worrying about her exams.
One final thing to note, google news has added the ability to make the front page customisable – i.e. I can include news alerts on xbox and playstation, or local news. Lovely. I love google too.
Labels: Life
I recently read an interesting SH/SC topic over at Something Awful concerning helpful programs and neat windows hacks, etc... . Incidentally, I now have some lovely and customizable programs on my desktop that I am now going to share.1. Rainlender - A program providing a fully functional, skin-able calendar on your desktop
2. Rainmeter - Made by "Rain" again, this program monitors your system and displays outputs on your desktop. E.g. HDD space, memory, cpu temperature, weather, net stats
3. CCleaner - "Crap Cleaner", cleans up mru lists, temp files and lots of unused leftovers from other programs. Lots of people were reporting deletion upwards of 4Gb, personally it only deleted 250mb on my system, mainly firefox temp files.
Additionally, something I have had for a long time and gradually added to:
I have some very cool quick search firefox bookmarks I made myself, i.e. I type "what giraffe" and it will load the page corresponding to Giraffes on www.answers.com. Similarly, "define giraffe" gives the google definition, "google giraffe" searches google, img - images, wiki - wikipedia, play - play.com product search, amg - allmusic guide, word - dictionary lookup, thes - thesaurus lookup. There are lots more but these are the ones I use most. Combine these features with my extensions: Gmail Email notifier, Adblock and extensive filter list of all major ad providers, BlogThis right click extension, Download Sort that automatically puts filetypes in specified folders without the annoying browse dialogue appearing all the time, Add Bookmark Here lets me quickly and easily organise favourites and finally Greasemonkey that lets me edit any site however I choose using javascript – i.e. allmusic.com no longer has annoying javascript links and aintitcool.com doesn't have a shitty design. Oh I also have live RSS feed bookmarks from the BBC and other news sources.
Labels: Technical
Random Something Awful Jokes: Two fish are in a tank.
One turns to the other and says 'Hey, how do you drive this thing?'
More sexist fun on International Women's day:
Three blondes were trapped on an island. During their exploration of the island, one of them stumbles across a lamp. So she rubs it and a genie pops out. "I will give you one wish each." said the genie.
So the first blonde asks to be 10% smarter so she can work out a way off the island. So the genie turns her into a redhead and she swims off the island.
The second blonde asks to be 20% smarter. So the genie turns her into brunette and she builds a raft out of logs and vines and sails off the island.
The last blonde goes all out and asks to be 100% smarter. So the genie turned her into a man and he crossed the bridge.
Click the link for more random jokes.
Labels: Random
Engadget is carrying an article concerning the latest SONY flash players. It's been a while since a Sony product has impressed me. However these look very sleak, small, handy and very useful. 1GB with FM tuner, jog dial and 50 hours battery life makes this an iPod shuffle beater. Slightly more costly though it seems. I finally see Sony getting back on track, their new stance towards their crippled music codec is refreshing. Oh and this: three-line organic electroluminescence displays!!!Engadget: "Sony finally busted out all those new flash-based Network Walkman digital audio players they accidentally (or "accidentally") leaked out last month. First up: their new 400 and 500 series. It's pretty inevitable that the 512MB NW-E505 (pictured above), 1GB NW-E507, 512MB NW-E405, and 1GB NW-E407 are going to get compared to the iPod shuffle, so we'll just get that out of the way right quick.. All four players have three-line organic electroluminescence displays, up to 50 hours of battery life (if you connect directly to your PC via USB you can score a quick hit of three hours of playback time after just three minutes of charging), jog dial navigation, and native support for playback of MP3 files, as well as ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, WMA, and WAV. The only real difference between the 400 and the 500 series is that the NW-E505 and NW-507 have built-in FM tuners. None of these'll be out for a couple more months, but the NW-E405 will sell for $130, the NW-407 for $180, the NW-E505 for $150, while the NW-E507 rounds things out at $200."
Labels: Music
Celebrate International Women's day, slap a feminist on the ass!
EFF: Deep Links: "The clear rule of law this Court announced in Sony has served the nation well for more than 20 years. Intel, which provides the digital building blocks at the heart of the information economy, and other technology innovators have relied on the Sony rule in developing and deploying digital technologies that, though designed for noninfringing uses, could be put to infringing uses. The various tests proposed by Petitioners would require an inventor to predict, at the time it creates a new product, not only how people will use a product that has yet to be designed, let alone introduced in the marketplace, but also which of the various potential uses will ultimately predominate over the other potential uses. Such predications are impossible in the real world, especially since the uses to which products are put routinely change over time.Digital technologies are by their nature copying technologies; there will always be a risk that any digital technology, however well intentioned its designer, will be put to infringing uses. Faced with impossible predictions about how as yet undeveloped technologies might be used, ambiguous tests that would be unpredictable in their application, and nearly limitless statutory damages for guessing wrong about the unknowable, innovators, such as Intel, would grow timid. It would be irrational to bring new products to market in the face of massive uncertainty; innovators, such as Intel, would have no choice but to withhold from the market socially and economically useful products. The national economy, which has grown through technological innovation over the 20 years since this Court decided Sony, would suffer. ...
The entertainment industries have repeatedly predicted that new technologies would destroy their businesses. Although their concerns are understandable, new technologies that are capable of substantial noninfringing use have, over time, benefited both the entertainment industries and the public. or example, professional baseball initially barred radio broadcasts of games out of fear that radio would reduce attendance; the film studios feared that VCRs would be the end of movie theaters (and before that, refused to license theatrical movies for television distribution); the music industry feared that free, over-the-air radio would put record distribution out of business; and the film studios initially resisted the introduction of DVD technology. Ultimately all of these innovations proved enormously profitable to entertainment companies."
Labels: External