Ready, Aye, Ready

I've had an adoration for Barry Adamson's music since I first encountered his "Split" on a Mercury Prize compilation CD back in 1992 in the UK. It was unlike anything else I'd heard before.

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Link: http://www.cracked.com/article_15753_8-celebrities-you-didnt-know-were-geeks.html

Ok, I did know about Vin Diesel but that's about it.

Link: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/11196

So, how about some utterly ridiculous dishes from the US to make you feel quite nauseous...

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=friS4OOcdgQ

The infamous Hitler video repurposed once again...

(Via BoingBoing)

Link: http://gizmodo.com/345406/apple-introduces-manila-casethe-worlds-thinnest-notebook-case

Gizmodo pulls a funny. It probably makes more sense if you saw video of Steve Jobs' keynote from Macworld.

(Via Midtoad)

Link: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/13/ford-car-owners-are.html

I perfectly understand copyrighting an image. I can't understand claiming trademark infringement on the subject of an image.

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Link: http://mark-icefaces-reflections.blogspot.com/

I'd just like to welcome Mark Collette to the wonderful world of blogging. Mark's currently a programmer at ICESoft writing Java-based tools. He's also a pretty darn smart guy so I'm sure will have something of interest to say.

Enjoy! :)

Link: http://damncoolpics.blogspot.com/2008/01/sleevefaces.html

Ah, the internets. Home of the imaginative, wonderful and bizarre.

Today, we have people using old LP cover art as a replacement for parts of their bodies...

(Via Cogitamus)

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEilPR1PXko

"To Morrow" as sung by muppets in the shape of the muppet creators, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and Jerry Nelson. It's darn witty song.

(Via Nodwick)

Link: http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html

I didn't even know there was a high-def version of LOTR available. The samples on the link make me want to get it (and all the other peripherals required to actually watch it on...)

(Via Kottke)

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/jan/07/personalfinancenews.scamsandfraud

Jeremy Clarkson of "Top Gear" fame felt that the outcry about data privacy was so overblown that he wrote an editorial about it and included his bank details.

Yeah, it was pilfered shortly afterwards (with a donation to the British Diabetic Association!) To his credit, Clarkson admitted to being wrong.

(Via BoingBoing)

Link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/08.html

Another good suggestion from the fertile mind of Joel Spolsky: make programming a degree level course in its own right by pulling it out of the computer science domain.

Despite saying I wouldn't move off XP, I recently migrated to Vista 64 Bit. It's actually been rather less painful than expected. I've actually lost the use of no pieces of hardware, albeit with some serious kludging for some. For the most part I was starting off with new hardware (new processor, graphics card, motherboard and so forth) so really wasn't expecting any issues of that type.

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Link: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/pl_music

Wired has an interesting article on a British band ("Red Sauce") that specializes in cover versions of popular songs. The interesting thing is that they're remarkably close to the originals. While sometimes you can hear the difference in the vocalist ("Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" has a remarkably weak Eric Idle impression), the actual music is spot on.

Link: http://www.morningstar.nildram.co.uk/A_New_Sith.html

Link is to a revisionist reading of the "Star Wars" series starring R2D2 as a rather subtle spy. What's interesting is that this actually ties into an earlier (i.e. pre-prequel) theory that the films were actually about the androids...

(Via Kottke; lots of other good links from that one too!)