Every student, freelancer or small business owner has probably faced the worst part of working from home – the dreaded

Once upon a time there was a magnificent first person shooter – Duke Nukem. Many of us were a little bit young when this game was popular and were only involved with it as some sort of retro gamers and … what was I saying? Someone just shouted balls of steel in my head. Stupid bastard.

Anyhow, to be honest I don’t exactly know jus twhat it was about Duke Nukem that made him such an epitome of ultimate coolness in gaming. Maybe it was that in one of the versions you could kick with your foot. And the other foot. And both feet at the same time … hilarity ensued. Oh and there were aliens! Aliens that went splat and killed you because let’s face it, you’re not Duke Nukem, you’re just pretending to be him, but will never be as cool as he was, even as cool as he was when he became nothing more than vaporware!

The first time Duke Nukem Forever – greatest game the world has ever seen, was announced it was still the year 1997 and I was around 10 years old. Of course at that time I’d never even heard of Duke Nukem because I only came in contact with him, in a completely platonic way of course, around the age of 14. So yes, when I started playing the greatest and the baddest was already a few years “old” and I played something oooold.

This old thing was extremely awesome even then. And that’s saying something, how many old games do you know that several years after their release still captivate a fresh audience already used to the improvements made since? None? Thought so. It is because of this unadulterated level of awesome that we kept waiting and waiting for Duke Nukem Forever.

But alas, today news broke that Duke Nukem Forever is in effect Duke Nukem For Never (title blatantly stolen from slashdot). Of course there are very few idiots left out there who were still actually waiting for this thing to be done. But I happened to be one of them, deep down somewhere, I hoped some day, some moon in t he future, some happy morning, I would get to play DNF. It is not to be, because 3D Realms is shutting down and with its demise all hope for a new Duke Nukem goes down the drain with them even though there were valid rumours last year of a playable demo finally having been produced.

Duke Nukem where aaaareeee youuuuuu?

There once was a boy, whom you wouldn’t be far from wrong by calling Swizec, who liked racing games. He was once good at such games, completing numerous different rally simulations and need for speed games and all manner of weirdos. There was one, however, that eluded his skillful grasp – Rally Trophy. That he never did get the hang of.

But soon he stopped gameing altogether and the unfortunate game faded from memory and drowned in a long series of sleepless coding nights. Then, one day, as if out of nowhere, the old love rang at the door. It was the only game he could think of that worked on the dazzling sparkle that was his new Mac. And he played, he played a lot and then some.

And he won. Quite much. Except on hard, that was too hard and he only got to 70% before it became too insane.

Then one lonely night, with his girlfriend far away and his code old and boring he decided it was time to play some games again. And he searched and he danced a bollywood dance and he found Richard Burns Rally. A game that surprisingly worked near perfect on wine.

Ah but Richard Burns Rally wasn’t just any old rally simulation, oh no, this was a realistic rally simulation. So realistic in fact, it comes with its own set of driving tutorials. And the boy sucked, the boy sucked so very much he needed to resort to input controls tweaking just to be able to play even passably lousy on his keyboard. The driving wheel, sadly, unfortunately, woefully, did not play very nicely with wine and the boy does fear this game of games can only be played … with a racing wheel controller.

But anyhow, to see the boy suck, please point your eyes at the following shiny pictures of strangely fast motion that the screen recording device sped up for some inexplicable reason.

There I was, smack in the middle of the most lavishly decorated palace I’ve ever been to! The king was giddily showing me around and nearly popped his eyes out with happines when he was about to show me all the secret passageways and corridors that he oh so secretly uses to get to the maids quarters. Wonder why. Calmly though I refused, I said Oh no dear king, I’d already seen all this last year as a tourist. Paid extra for the special tourguide.

But Swizec! I want to show you all of this before it’s yours, I cannot give away just the palace and not its secrets, I cannot!

Alright kingy show me.

To be honest, like with many people I regularly chat to, I had no idea whether I knew him from somewhere or not. He was acting like we were friends, so I acted like we were friends. How should I know better? Maybe we’ve seen each other on twitter or something …

Then to celebrate the king’s giving away his palace and my receiving the palace, don’t know where the gf was in all this, we went to a Marilyn Manson, let’s call him Empty Suit and I’ll tell you why later, concert with Empty Suit and some of my old classmates from primary school. Guess the king knew them too or something.

There we were, going to a concert, calmly shrugging away the usher who wanted trouble and went into our special lodge. Best, and worst, thing about this lodge was that you couldn’t see the stage at all because of how it was cooped up in the corner of a ceiling.

Empty Suit seemed really distressed and sad about being at his concert, he felt depressed that he was the only adult person left to like his music and was afraid we’d make fun of him if she admited to it. To make him feel better I grabbed him by the shoulders – and it felt like grabbing an empty suit ’cause he’s so skinny – and said Let’s go drinking!

We did. But somehow he managed to get drunk the moment we left our lodge and decided he didn’t care one bit whether we make fun of him or not. Empty Suit started dancing and flailing his skinny limbs in odd configurations, his platform boots making him look like a spider on drugs. The young bastards all around him started mimicking his moves and soon enough everyone was looking rather much like an idiot.

Then I woke up and had a shower.

Today is the very first of April, which by some strange and odd tradition means we should make fun of every fool we can find. Stranger still, it means every tech guy, company and anyone who thinks they know technology is mandated to prepare a prank for someone.

And I did. I spent well over an hour last night preparing my prank.

And it didn’t work. Failed so miserably I could almost say the joke was on me!

What I tried to do was reroute all traffic on the company’s webserver so that when an image is requested it doesn’t come from where it usually comes from, but rather go through an intermediary, which would twist and turn and colorise and grayscale and whatnot the image until it became something odd and strange. The plan was that people in the company would notice this and make a huge hissy panic.

But instead … nothing happened. One page failed to display images, the others barely even reacted due to caching in browsers.

*sigh*

Last night while I was watching this lovely music video that someone has decided to call Summer Wine by Ville Valo and Natalia Avelon a striking change in Ville’s appeareance hit the retina of my optical receptors. Suddenly, as if from the moustache and the beard, he stopped looking like a dashing woman that I used to know him as. Let me find a photograph to offer as evidence …

Ville Valo looking like a woman

But since he’s grown a dead rat or two on his face and somehow convinced the bloody bastard to remain stuck there he looks different, he looks …

Ville Depp

He looks like he’s turned into a Johnny Depp clone, so I’ve decided to henceforth talk of Ville as Ville Depp and because the original likewise looks strikingly similar to the fake I have decided to refer to mister Johnny as a Johnny Valo, but you know what, let me give you anexamples of the striking new similarity.

Johnny Valo

Now I understand that none of this could be any sort of reference to reality anymore since that song is from 2007, but fuck it, it’s all news to me and those other poor sobs who don’t get out of their basements much.

For the female reader, here is some more Johnny:

Sexy Johnny for the female reader

Disclaimer: no celebrities were harmed in the making of this post, please do not harass me for making fun of your precious sexy idols and darling little known voiceboxes.

Some recent morning, let’s call him Monday, I woke up with an odd feeling in my throat. Upon swallowing … anything … the feeling was somewhat weird, as if there was something obstructing the passageway and making the activity more difficult than it was ever meant to be.

Upon further inspection I discovered an odd shaped lump on the side of my neck. So I thought to myself, “what the flying fuck is this!?” even though the answer had already been crystal clear to me; sometime during the night an angry raccoon, we’ll call him Jose, crawled into my mouth to find warmth and moisture not unlike a hug so he could calm down a little bit before getting back to his wife, with which he was having a row.

But Jose never did execute his plan unto completion. Oh no, he suffocated. Jose died in my mouth because of the horrible night breath we humans have, yes we all do, not just me, you have it too and please don’t ask me to test this fact for you. Ask your wife, girlfriend or boyfriend, whichever you like. Just not me.

Yesterday, or was it the day before?, I went to a lovely  pharmacist, we’ll call her Anna Maria Jose Elisabetha The Third And A Half, and asked if she had some herb or medicine, powder or potion, that could help with the dead raccoon lodged in my throat. To this Anna Maria Jose Elisabetha The Third And A Half rolled her eyes and said cautiously “Alas, kind sir, you usually need a doctor’s prescription for thos things, there is naught that I could give you just over the counter like this” and what else was I to do than merely ask Anna Maria Jose Elisabetha The Third And A Half for somethingthat would soothe the pain and whatnot?

So she gave me a licky pill of antiseptic for me to suck upon and … in general make naughty with inside my mouth. And I did, I was naughty with that pill good!

In fact, being naughty with the pills was so efficient that after two days, that is to say today, there is only a tiny dead squirrel now lodged  in my throat. Yay!

After coming home from class I immediately checked the mailbox to confirm arrival of a package I’d been expecting except, lo and behold!, not only was there a note to come pick up something awesomer than boobs, but my new The Dresden Dolls necktie. The delight was so great I took a few photos even though I don’t usually like photographing myself.

And now we get to the part where I figure out that having a car is great, but only until you have some serious transporting to do.

So I get to the post office, wait in line, talk to the friendly clerk blahblah. She brings forth an extremely small package and when I go “Wtf? O.o” she smiles and says “Oh there’s something much bigger waiting for you in the backroom”. At this point I get scared, since I don’t think I ever actually thought about having to move the bloody whiteboard. I just imagined it on the wall, nothing aobut how it might get there.

Naturally there was no way of getting the damned thing into mum’s car. Sure it might potentially be able to sit inside and take a ride, but getting it in there was beyond a Herculean task, it was downright impossible. Cars simply don’t have big enough orifices for these things. Darn.

Off we go, whiteboard, all 18 kilo of it, resting dodgilly on my head with arms for balance and walking through town center … at least it was late enough so I didn’t get stared at too much. Although I did notice a kid driving by me at least four times on a bicycle, wonder why.

Anyhow, I got home without incident, went back for the car and small package, then had to lug everything up into fourth storey without a lift. That’s right, no lift, just narrow crooked steps. Yay. But it was all worth it, I now have a whiteboard covering most of the available wall space opposite the computer and that’s really the best configuration I could ask for.

For the record, I have yet to play with the damned thing. Sure it was fun installing it. Sure it was fun lugging it around. Sure it was somewhat interesting making several useless holes in the wall. But god damn it I want to play with this thing so much I might just go do my maths homework.

Apparently the gist of the matter is going into your albums collection and upload the sixth image from the sixth album … why they didn’t work-in another six in there to make it the number of the beast alludes my right now, but I’m sure it was for a good cause. So, since I don’t really have an album collection per se I’m gonna fire up iPhoto and see what comes up in hopes it’s nothing bad. Worse case scenario is you get to see a bit too much of my girlfriend.

I have no idea why anyone would want to look at this photo, but I guess it’s a little bit funny.

Ok enough looking, she’s mine … I was supposed to tag more people, but I’ll just tag the girlfriend, because none of my contacts are cool enough to have personal blogs, just a bunch of stupid niche bloggers and nonbloggers.

So, in year 2009 I will …

… do my best to achieve the target weight I’ve set for myself quite some time ago and haven’t managed to achieve. Despite what you might be thinking this isn’t about losing weight, I would like to put on ten more kilograms, but of muscle rather than fat. Fat is too easy.

… do everything in my power to make the next few steps to becoming filthy rich. No silly “oooh rich people be dumb because they take our money durr” from me, no, I will be rich. Rather sooner than later.

… do everything I can to make Twitulater the next best thing since sliced bread and at the very least as popular as TweetDeck. So far it’s looking promising, mustn’t fuck up now.

… buy a beemer because I’ve promised mum I’d save up for a vehicle and buy one instead of paying rent at home. But I’d also promised myself my first bought car would be a beemer. Saving up looking promising so far.

… become even more cynical and convoluted than I was so far. Why? Because I love fucking with people and there is no better way to fuck with them than not caring about most of the things you say and being completely reliant on your ability to repair any damage your words do.

… buy a cane because I’ve wanted one for ages.

… finish first year of uni. I have to, I must stop being so stupid about this whole thing and even though I don’t believe in formal education, the rest of the world does and if I ever want to have a backup plan in case all my become-filthy-rich schemes fail I need to have some sort of formal degree.

… try my best to screw with my girlfriend and learn as much as I can about the female psyche from her.

… not push my mental experiments on the girlfriend so far as to damager her or our relationship.

That’s it for now I think, have a lot of work to do next year, best get cracking right away.

But iFart changed things. It is a perfectly admirable piece of technology that enables your telephone to fart whenever you want. You can make iFart fart right away or perhaps you want to do it with a timer – this could be used to time tea brewing in a somewhat disgusting manner. And the piece de la resistance – security iFart! Just set your iPhone down somewhere, leave it alone, and the moment somebody moves it the damn thing starts farting at full blast, leaving you with an easy way to catch somebody red handed with their fat sticky fingers all over that shiny touch-screen of yours.

Let the video tell you more.

What’s most interesting to note here is that women seem to like a lot of different underwear as along as it’s on the right body. They like small and loose, like sparkica, or not so small and tight, because it supposedly makes balls look better, not sure, some even like small and tight. But the majority, like a classmate I recently asked, seem to like regular old boxers best.

This means of course that if you’re a real man you already have what it takes in your trousers – boxers. Sure your body might not quite make the cut or anything, but at least you can’t go too wrong with regular boxers, most of them will like it. Strangely enough it’s a completely different situation with men. We like thongs and other tight, revealing underwear, whereas girls don’t really like wearing such all that much. Most prefer nice comfortable granny pants, at least when they’re not in a social situation.

But most of all we must notice that women talk about men’s underwear not what’s in it. This tells us that they want you to keep it on, so no matter what you’re wearing, just remember to keep it on. Nobody likes those pesky one-eyed trouser snakes.

phantomfive:

Seriously. I like the idea of doing research for the sake of research, and I would probably respect this more, except Microsoft keeps representing it as
The coolest thing they have ever come up with.
The future of computing.

and it is neither, it is just cool research. It’s so cute the way Microsoft has gotten all senile and out of touch in its old age.

OK, off to do laundry now. When will they make a robot that does my laundry for me? Now THAT will be progress.

swizec:

It’s called a washing machine.

snowraver1:

He’s talking about a folding machine, and it would truly be a great invention. Just dump in the laundry and out comes a folded pile. Bonus if it sorts socks!

swizec:

It’s called a wife.

See when something becomes riddled with quick dirty hacks it may work, at the moment and it might even work in the next moment, but as soon as you start to make adjustments to change, try scaling the darn thing, or making any kind of modification it all just starts breaking apart. To an average human being this is most easily explained via real life dirty hacks we like to use every day.

For example, you come home and find that you need to put something down but have no proper place to put it. So you look at the nearest semi-available flat surface – usually a chair of some sort. You put the thing there. Then you neatly forget about having to put it away and just leave it there; hey, it works, don’t change it right? Then somebody comes over and you need the chair. Your solution must scale.

So you put the thing that was occupying on the chair somewhere else, also usually an impromptu solution. Over time, with these kind of incrementally quick solutions you achieve something horrible. There is a flat surface somewhere in your home, or even just a floor corner, where a large pile of crap has built up over the week/month/year that is so high in fact you don’t even know what’s in it anymore … and now you suddenly absolutely need that surface for something!

Regardless of all this, I used a dirty hack last night when I wanted to read on my bed and still have tea available nice and easy. So I wedged it between the wall and the bed. By some strange coincidence I spilt not a drop.

I'll find a blog for it later

Well no, apparently it depends greatly on whom said love affair it's with. We can probably postulate that a girlfriend would get quite greatly upset if you were to fall in love with, say, her best friend or someone of similar ilk. We probably would not be far from the truth even if we were to say that she'd be upset over your falling in love with pretty much any woman other than herself. Girls have this weird notion implanted in their brains that it's impossible to love more than one person at once … or simply put … us regular human males just aren't great enough to be shared and so the whole man is needed to support the desires of a single female.

But it does seem to make it all alright if Merrick happens to be a computer rather than an actual person. Sure, call me a geekity geek for naming my computers and abiding by use of their proper given names but what the hell. I spend more time with them than with actual humans anyway, so why not personify them? Writers do it all the time, hell, we oft do it in regular speech as well!

So scree you all! My laptop is called Merrick and my desktop computer is called Lestat and I don't care what you say think or do.

After the computer died I decided the problem wasin the mother board and a hunt began to find a mother board that supports all of my other antique hardware of three or four years ago. It's crazy, but there are absolutely no stores that are readily able to provide youw ith a mother board that still has an AGP port and IDE disk connectors.

This is just silly! Do they expect me to swap everything from my RAM to my CPU and even disks just so I can buy a new mother board. Damn rabit capitalism and Moore's law of electronics and it's all getting quite out of hand if you ask me. Especially for us unrich people, especially for us. Why if anything ever breaks on my computer again I'll be left with only one option to chuck it out and cast it away like a broken plate nobody wants to look at again.

Now here's the real kicker, I somehow managed to flip the pwoer supply upside-down and point the large 12 centimeter fan at a wall instead of into the computer where it can get air. How? I don't know.

Then some time later when the lights were on I came upon an interesting sight and suddenly realised what the cause of scary sounds in the night was … a brave kitty hunting down spinning blades on my Heat Deterrant System.

Haha, youtube made it darker … too bad.

The grizzly truth became apparent all too quickly though. The power supply of my computer had been choked by dust and was beyond help. As soon as I got to work I ordered a new one, but had to wait until today to receive it and promptly install it.

This is what my box looks like without a power supply:

This is what the old power supply looks like, quite dead I'm afraid:

The new power supply with a huge fan:

And the nicely wired, newly powered box:

Anyway, an interview was filmed with me yesterday and even though it was the first such thing to happen to me, I had quite some fun doing it. It was nothing of the professional sort as was apparent by the whole lack of preparation of both parties and that I somehow wasn't allowed to go into long rambles, which I'd like, but maybe they just weren't eloquent enough. I should really work on my speaking eloquency … When I get it the interview goes up on youtube of course.

Because I feel like it here is also a panoramic shot of my favourite tea house that feeds me tea nigh on every day.

1. Each player shall furnish his own equipment for play, normally one club and two balls.

2. Play on course must be approved by the owner of the hole.

3. Unlike outdoor golf, the object is to get the club in the hole and keep the balls out.

4.For most effective play, the club should have a firm shaft. Course owners are permitted to check shaft stiffness before play begins.

5. Course owners reserve the right to restrict club length to avoid damage to the hole.

6.Object of the game is to take as many strokes as necessary until the owner is satisfied play is complete. Failure to do so may result in being denied permission to play again.

7.It is considered bad form to begin playing the hole immediately upon arrival. Experienced players will normally take time to admire the entire course, paying special attention to well formed mounds and bunkers.

8.Players are cautioned not to mention other courses they have played or are currently playing to the owner of the course being played. Upset owners have been known to damage a players equipment for this reason.

9. Players are encouraged to have proper rain gear, just in case.

10.Players should not assume that the course is in shape to play at all times. Players may be embarrassed if they find the course temporarily under repair. Players are advised to be extremely tactful in this situation. More advanced players will find alternate means of play when this is the case.

11. Players should assume their match has been properly scheduled particularly when playing a new course for the 1st time. Previous players have been known to become irate if they discover someone else is playing what they considered a private course.

12.The owner of the course is responsible for the pruning of any bushes, which may reduce the visibility of the hole.

13.Players are strongly advised to get the owners permission before attempting to play the backside.

14. Slow play is encouraged, however, players should be prepared to proceed at a quicker pace at the owners request.

15. It is considered an outstanding performance, time permitting, to play the same hole several times in one match.

Is the answer no? Well now you can! And it's really funny and amusing at that. Have to say I quite enjoyed this little flash game even though it's really a one shot deal and not something you could just keep playing over and over. It's still worth giving a go.

I don't know what is wrong with Weird Al but he won't stop polkaing good music. The embedded video is of a collage of things he polkad in one of his songs matched synchronised perfectly with the originals. It's something you have to love, just have to.