Pat’s Point of View

You know Mark Hurst’s Good Experience (if you don’t I recommend you subscribe), well I was going over some old editions and at the end of one, where the funny stuff is listed, I came cross this link: www.zefrank.com/psbi/

At least some Americans have a sense of humour.

Ahh memories. The definitive shit list was one of the first things I ever published to the web (on my very first website, at the Programmer’s Society of UTS). Still makes me laugh. My favourite is the Spinal Tap.

The tribes which George Lackoff described as having a category of words for fire, women and dangerous things (in his book by the same name) were surely mistaken.

Women are the dangerous things!

Case in point, my wife, who in a temporary state of hormone-driven perplexity, thought she had the ability to bend the space-time continuum. Whilst I did not report this terrifying incident to the police, had I done so, their report would have read as follows (refer to diagram):

1. 5:15pm Suspect and victim driving along quite happily, along usual route taken to the city (indicated on map by green line). This route is used several times a week.
2. 5:16pm Suspect suddenly demands that the victim proceed straight ahead because it’s quicker!. The red line on the map indicates the route taken. Victim attempts to explain this route is longer but his actions are met with stedfast denial and not a little vicious hostility.
3. 5:19pm Victim pleads with suspect as to why they’re going this way. Suspect goes apeshit (it’s a psychological term). Tirade continues for several minutes.
4. 5:23pm Suspect realises this is the wrong way. The long, wrong way.
5. 5:28pm Victim and suspect re-join usual route. Suspect apologises, citing emotional instability.

Gotta watch out for those volatile emotions.

It’s taken a while but I have finally played around with some of the new bits in iLife’06, specifically Photo Booth. That’s some weird ass shit! They should have a parental guidance warning on that, just look at the scary stuff it can produce!

It’s so scary my wife refuses to look at this photo.

See what people are blogging about: iLife, Photo Booth

I was recently reading a post regarding typewriter art, the grand-daddy of ASCII art. If you thought it was arduous in a word processor, imagine the patience you’d need to do that on a typewriter? That’s monk level dedication, either that or you’d die from liquid paper fumes.

This reminded me of my previous post on chalk art and some other unconventional media for art. Perhaps my most favourite is ‘fantasy art’: the hallmark or cheesy fantasy/action movies, heavy metal album covers and Sandman panel vans.

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I don’t know why, but there always seems to be a bunch of clothes outside the fire escape exit for the building I work in. It’s quicker than taking the lift, so I walk down the stairs, and outside the door, in the alleyway, there are some clothes…with plenty of undies (for you Brits I mean pants!).

Does someone keep losing their stuff? Has some local thief got the worst luck at picking the bag to snatch? Is it some vagrant’s wardrobe? It’s perplexing.

And I bet you’re wondering if I considered, even for a split second, if they would fit me. Despite the abundant selection I think I would have been disappointed. It’s a pity too, since for a while now there’s been a fetching pair of those Pat Rafter type grundies.

Anyway…

I was recently in the unfortunate position of having to work through the night to complete a project for the next morning. In this case, the work involved writing a fairly long report critiquing a client’s website.

The next day, looking back on what I had written, I formulated the ’3am writing’ axiom "at 3:00am sentences often sound really, really good—but they’re not".

I found several instances of 3am writing, but my favourite is:

The site is like a novel but what you want is a fortune cookie.

Man sells faulty laptop on eBay. Buyer tries to get refund. Seller refuses. Buyer discovers hard disk in laptop contains buyer’s personal information. Buyer creates website exposing the weird and scary information. Seller attempts to debunk buyer with a series of ridiculous false personas. Seller becomes the butt of one humongous joke, not to mention the subject of a media storm (Daily Mail to name but one). Buyer receives so much attention he ceases action and calls a truce. Other interested parties continue the campaign against Seller.

And so it goes to show you can’t get away with anything these days. This whole saga is quite amusing, and altogether justified. The half-wit who sold the laptop in the first place should be named and shamed, but I can understand the buyer’s reluctance to continue as it blew out of proportion. The seller seems pretty dodgey and I wouldn’t be surprised if he did something even worse in retaliation. Scumbags like this wouldn’t think twice about trashing your house or getting their friends to give you a good beating. I mean he’s already made some pretty serious [false] accusations against the buyer.

And to think all this because the idiot doesn’t know how to format a hard disk.

See what people are blogging about: laptopguy

My mid-year’s resolution is to use the response shown in the middle frame below.

Shouldn’t be that hard :)

Was just reading a recent article in New Scientist, an extract from Daniel Wilson’s “How to survive a robot uprising”. Here’s his advice for spotting a would-be human impersonator:

Humans unconsciously acquire a vast amount of social knowledge, such as how to stand in line, the concept of personal space and why men should wear pants to work. If the guy standing on your porch doesn’t follow these rules, don’t let him inside – whether he’s a robot or not.

Good advice :)