Author: davekeeshan

Interesting Life?

I have been going through the xkcd site, I have been surprised by some of them, particularly cutting for code monkeys. I think I should have saved this for a Friday, however this can also be as effective for a Monday morning.

I own a TV

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Mesmerize, originally uploaded by *Berto.

I love TV. Love it, love it, love it! Anyone who knows me thinks I watch way too much and maybe they are right. If I may quote Homer Simpson, “Teacher, Mother, Secret Lover”, I feel that sums it up nicely (particularly the teacher part). However I seem to find myself running into people in my daily life who don’t watch TV and don’t own a TV. Unsurprisingly they can be extremely boring but they also keep working the fact into conversation. I bring it up because my life is perilously close to a Onion article from all the way back in 2000:

Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own A Television

Which reports on Area resident Jonathan Green who does not own a television, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkers. While the article is meant to be satire, I find myself living the reality.

Some TV may be dross, I work a regular 9-5 job so I miss the insipid daytime programming of morning shows and soap operas. I can’t say I’m a big fan of the reality TV boom that crowds out the afternoon programming either. However some of the dramas coming out of the US is amazing and giving the movies a run for their money, Lost and Battlestar Galatica are awesome and every second year of 24. Also you can’t go wrong with some top class documentaries, particularly local history. As an expat it takes along time to catch up with what the locals know and those docos (as they say in Oz) are a life saver.

I have to admit though growing up I used to feel so left out when shows that aired in America took years to be shown in Ireland or the UK. It was only when I lived there for a few years and saw the amount of crap that would start a season and get canceled early I realised that the multi year delay was a necessary and welcome filter to remove all the crap and at least guarantee some quality. Lets hope the WGA strike in the US is over and those dudes can get back to producing some decent shows.

Dustin the turkey refuses to pull Out of Eurosong contest

While living overseas usually a day doesn’t go by when you aren’t asked something about where you are from. Most of the time the questions are easy, for example why is Ireland so green? Easy, it rains all the time. Other times the questions can be hard like why did Ireland rejected the Treaty of Nice the first time around, eh… Slavery?

However this one is going to be real hard. What! Has Ireland entered a puppet turkey into the Eurovision Song contest? Eh … I believe to understand this, one must first consider the socio-political situation that led to World War I…

Well not yet, but Ireland’s own, Dustin the Turkey, has gotten down to the final six and on February 23rd it will go to the nation to pick who they feel should represent Ireland in Serbia. The other final five competitors are up in arms, because there is a very real chance that they could lose.

Three of the country’s top music men, songwriter Phil Coulter, Frank McNamara and Eurovision veteran Shay Healy, all criticised the decision by an RTE committee to select the popular bird as one of the six finalists for Ireland’s entry.

However it may not be the end of the world. Dustin has been an ambassador for Ireland before, in my travels I have seen him on American TV (I believe he was running for president) and more recently on aussie TV. I still remember the first time Dustin appeared on the Den, who would have thought he was last this long?

GNU emacs!?!

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real_prog2, originally uploaded by Douglas Kastle.

I don’t use emacs, nano, vi, ed or cat, but I have still found my self stuck in a conversation like this.

Banality of Beauty

This is from a recent Wife Swap episode which featured 15 year old, Alicia Guastaferro. It’s only two minutes long but details a spoiled rotten, only child, princess that believes it’s only what is on the outside that counts. It’s at times like this I’m disappointed that Kevin Spacey’s charater John Doe from Se7en is fictional. I wonder would she survive the Pride test, unlikely! Alas, at least from the supplied video, it looks like the parents have a lot to answer for.

However watching the video I am reminded of two things. One, when Jason Alexander was a guest on Dennis Miller Live :

I once went to speak at a school, and there was a 16-year-old girl…And the girl says to me, “You know what? I don’t care what I do, I just want to be famous.” And I thought, you know, I should really just shoot her in the head because it would serve two things: It would make her famous as the girl that Jason Alexander shot in the head, and it would, you know, spare the world of the banality of the rest of her life.

The other is from Bill Hicks discussing people who work in advertising or marketing, I would like to add teen aged beauty queens :

“By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. No, this is not a joke: kill yourself . . . I know what the marketing people are thinking now too: ‘Oh. He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market.’ Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags.”

Nano-Explosion

This image is the winner of the “Science as art” competition. It is called nano-explosion and this is the spiel about it:

Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of an overflowed electrodeposited magnetic nanowire array (CoFeB), where the template has been subsequently completely etched. It’s a reminder that nanoscale research can have unpredicted consequences at a high level.

It reminds me of the Futurama episode, Godfellas, when Bender has a Lilliput race of people set up shop on his body and think he’s God. It all comes to an end when they all blow each other up in a mini nuclear war, looking not unlike the above image.

(from MAKE) Link

Don’t…

Yesterday I had to buy a new DVD player as the old one croaked it. While reading the manual one of the warnings I found was, “Do not use near TV or monitor”, what! What genius came up with that.

However some warnings like keep away from water did make sense. I had a good laugh this morning when I found this image over on Graham Linehan’s blog under the title Surely the people in this photograph are dead now. I like the thought that went into the getting the power board to float.