party-type-thing and general post filling

Today is the occasion of my 16.07th birthday. I am having a party-type-thing. YAY. Anyway, we shall be watching movies, eating food, and having general merriment. Unfortunately some people couldn’t come, so they get -100 score. This is basically a filler post so that Hatkirby doesn’t complain about me going missing, but I shall update this here blog, saying how wonderful it all is. Tamasys, AtlanticSlamon, Ozzycaiphas, I expect to see pingbacks by the morrow detailing just how wonderful the party was! ps: Yay for links!

UPDATE: Tamasys took line honours with the first post, followed later by Ozzyfrog’s post, which went into a bit more depth. Caiphas and Atlanticslamon are slack and are yet to post.

Crazy Japanese Stationery

With several years of experience hosting Japanese homestay exchange students, I know for sure that Japanese people have the most innovative, creative, useful, and just plain weird stationery. The stimulus to this post was a recent parcel I got from one of our previous guests, containing, among other things, some erasable highlighters. WOW. Sure, everyone knows you can erase pencils, and erasable pens are fairly common if you look (especially in Japan). Erasable highlighters are an extra step in the progression of awesome.

Now, I haven’t even started on origami yet. Needless to say, origami is extremely amazing, wondrous, awe-inspiring, and many other benevolent adjectives. Now, one would normally consider a paper crane to be a decent effort in origami construction. Needless to say, making 1000 cranes is a tremendous achievement; so good in fact, that you are granted a wish for completing it. A famous story is that of Sadako Sasaki, who suffered radiation poisoning after the Hiroshima bombing in 1945. Extremely sick and nearing death, she decided to fold 1000 paper cranes, so that she might be visited by a crane and have her leukaemia cured. She worked day and night folding paper cranes. She only folded 644 cranes, before she became too weak to fold one more crane, and died soon after. Her friends completed the senbarazu (1000 paper cranes), in her memory. The paper crane, especially senbarazu, is a symbol of world peace.

On a lighter note, there are many other amazing origami constructions. Recently, I found out how to construct polyhedrons with origami. Starting with a modular component, I built disks, cubes, triangular hexahedrons, and stellated octahedrons. The crowning glory was a stellated icosahedron, which used well over 30 pieces of paper to construct. Here is proof that I have too much time on my hands.

The next wave

Ok, I will start by admitting that this blog has fallen into negligence. To rectify this, I have decided to start posting more often. I have a wealth of new ideas waiting to be blogged about (Ok, that was a bluff, but I will quickly figure something out, I hope!), so expect some new, hopefully interesting new material here. I think I will start with some easy topics, and might move into some more complex ideas. I want to deliver you, the reader, something more carefully considered than most blog posts.

Oh, and hopefully they are higher quality than this one.

shrinking in the wash

well, not that many of you care, but I have changed the theme used for my blog. Admittedly, the theme is pretty boring, but it means that I can pass off huge long rants more easily as there are more words per line. I noticed with the previous layout that a couple of my posts ended up over a screen high! So, although the content hasn’t shrunk or anything, perhaps I can fool you into reading the whole post, because it doesn’t look quite as long. I can only hope.

An even better technique would, of course,involve learning how to write shorter posts, but that sounds too much like effort and not enough like fun. So, while you may groan about this, don’t expect the lengthy… lengthiness of the posts to die easily. They just look better (or something like that).

Well, I spent a while thinking up a witty name for this post (well, actually only about 2 seconds…) and it reminded me of another thing that I don’t quite understand: why do some clothes shrink in the wash? I don’t actually understand the physics involved here, but understand that there is some, so I guess I can’t just pass it off as evil gremlins inhabiting the laundry. Surely, after umpteen-thousand years of mankind wearing clothing, and even a few washing them, some crazy boffin could solve the problem? Oh well, it is one of those things that will just have to stay unsolved (what with global warming, recession, and the unprecedented price of screwdrivers, we have enough to worry about).

This post was fairly boring, and not even that short, so a suitably amusing witticism would probably cheer people up and drag them out of the near-suicidal boredom that often accompanies perusal of my blog. It would be funny if there was something to laugh about.

MS Office 2007

Well I know a lot of people have an irrational hatred of Microsoft, or at least their newer products, such as Office 2007 and Vista. Well, here I am, preparing myself to launch into the defence of Office 2007.

I have used Office 2007 ever since it came out, as I got it in a free upgrade from 2003 edition (ok, it wasn’t quite free, it was $27, but that’s near enough to free…). Personally, I love everything about it. The first thing you notice is that it all has pretty colourful new icons. Then once you have opened up, you notice the major change in 2007: the “Fluent User Interface”, including the ribbon. While it takes a little bit of getting used to (not too much fortunately), you will soon be working faster and more efficiently than ever. It makes it a lot easier to apply formatting, layout, etc. all changes, and it allows you to discover new commands and features that were previously buried away in menus. Admittedly it isn’t quite perfect, it would be nice to have some form of customisation in the ribbon, but it usually shows the most relevant commands. Now if you have any interest in Office 2007, you have undoubtedly already read a lot of detailed information, so I will not go about it in too much depth.

Although most ‘new’ features are actually just undiscovered features from older versions, there are some features that are genuinely new. I can’t remember all of them, but two really useful features that I use a lot is the ability to write blog posts directly in Word, and Outlook RSS reading. So basically instead of using a clunky web-based interface, I can write blog posts in word at superspeed, and then publish them in one click, no stress. In Outlook, I can subscribe to blogs, news, and other info and have it automatically deliver these straight to my computer- no manual checking required. Very useful, both of them.

I must wrap it up there, not just because it’s getting long again, but because I am about to go out. Anyway, enjoy, and look into Office 2007. It is very good.

How to hang computer!

Heard of something called a googol? No, I don’t mean the massive search engine, Google, but the absolutely massive number 10^100: a googol. In layman’s terms, it is a one, followed by 100 zeroes. For those not impressed by this number, what about a googolplex? This takes the stupendously large number game and shatters it. A googolplex could be written as 10^10^100. In other words, it is 1 with a googol zeroes after it. This number is simply immensely huge! For those who want to have some fun, open up a word processing program and try to write it out (hint: ctrl-C, ctrl-V, select ‘0’s, ctrl-C, ctrl-V, …). I only managed to get 1,000,000 zeroes before my computer started seriously hanging and I gave up waiting. This is over 200 pages of zeroes, which I thought was a fair effort. A neat trick for counting the number of zeroes: open up the word count statistics and find where it displays the number of characters in the document. This number, subtract 1 (remember there is a 1 at the start!), is your zero-count. So go ahead, get cut-pasting! Post your high scores in the comments section of the blog.

 

Disclaimer: Bluemonkey will not be held responsible for any damages, loss of data or property resulting from these practices. Users proceed entirely at own risk.

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets

Wtf moment:    http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

Abstract

“Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified.

These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC).

Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.”

…?

iPods (and iPhones while I’m at it)

Ok, so we all know what an iPod is right? Those portable media player that everybody and their dog own. Obviously, they have a very dominant share, but is there actually anything particularly good about them? Just as some background information, Apple recently announced their new range of iPod media players. So, I’ll have my rant about what I see, and point the finger at sheep who buy the products. (Nice introduction here, methinks)

Well, anyone expecting something new and exciting in the latest releases will be extremely disappointed; the new iPods are the same as before. It’s interesting that to see the new Nano: Apple have finally realised that the 3^rd generation iPod shape is absolutely shocking. The 4^th generation Nanos are pretty much clones of the 2^nd gen ones, but come in “chromatic colours”, meaning that you will be even more disappointed when shops don’t stock the colour that will match your outfit. They also supposedly have an “oval cross-section”. Um… why? Anyway, I can’t be too critical as the shape is definitely better than the very unfriendly shape of the 3^rd generation iPod.

Now, the iPod touch falls into its own category of iPod/apple hatred. First off, it’s just a clone of an iPhone, without a phone. Now, iPhone is probably my 2^nd-most hated thing in the world (coming a close second to Ford Territorys). It’s just SO gimmicky and useless. Sure, you will pull a lot of gormless girls, but as a product, it’s terrible. Now, the iPod touch is both better and worse than the iPhone because it doesn’t have a phone. Obviously, you just lost the phone, which is uncool, but think of all the phone bills you got yourself out of! The iPhone is designed for use in America, where the carrier network, AT&T, provides unlimited data. Port the phone over to Australia, where you pay $1 per MB of data you download, and a problem quickly becomes evident. Needless to say, people are getting nasty shocks when they get their phone bill. Now, I’m definitely getting off track here, but the “superfast 3G iPod” is only fully supported on 1 network out of the 4 selling it in Australia- Telstra. As soon as you move out of a city area, the other networks switch to a different frequency of 3G- a frequency not supported by the iPhone. Congratulations, your iPhone now works at dialup speed. (This is probably a good thing, considering the data you would otherwise chew through.) Anyway, the iPhone has hijacked this paragraph, so I’ll just start a new one.

I think last paragraph was supposed to be about how annoying the touch interface is, so I’ll make that assumption and go from there. So, while everyone (not a literal measurement, just a broad random sample of the community at large (especially the dumb ones (…oops did I say that out loud? (Wow, maximum bracket nesting!)))) who hasn’t used an iPhone worships this cool touch screen and thinks it’s the best thing since… well… iPods. But seriously, is it actually a good idea to have a touch screen on a portable media player? “Oh, I want to change song, I will just smear my finger all over the screen and find it!” So, if you have a hand-washing OCD, or you live in a bubble, you might have hands clean enough to use it without eventually leaving smudges everywhere, but for the rest of us, it’s inevitable. And even for those bubble-dwellers out there, how are you supposed to see anything when you are covering the screen with your hand? In the end, what advantage does it have? Ok, so the iPod click-wheel isn’t very ergonomic either, but a touch screen is just impractical.

Overall, iPod’s market dominance is obvious, yet disturbing. The success of iPod boils down to one thing: marketing. We all know that marketing is Apple’s forte; they don’t actually need to make good products, just as long as they make good ads. There was once a time when iPods were genuinely better than everything else in the market, but this is most certainly no longer true. There are so many alternatives just as good as, or better than the iPod. Yet these players just can’t topple the iPod monopoly. This is due to the social marketing made by Apple. I’ll say it again, there are so many good alternatives these days that there is no reason to buy an iPod. People who buy iPods are sheep. Unfortunately, the iPod phenomenon means that it is harder to buy any other brand. Shops will sell “IPOD! IPOD! IPOD! (oh, and a couple of other random brands)”. Arguably the best players are also the rarest: No major electrical stores sell Archos, only a few sell creatives, sandisks or irivers. My personal favourite, the Zune (http://www.zune.net/en-US/), isn’t even available in Australia! How can any company expect to do business when they only sell in US&Canada?

This article is already WAY too long, so I won’t clutter it any further. Congratulations on the read, and hope it was mildly interesting.

A rant on spelling, grammar, syntax, and other such oddities

Upon reading the title of this blog, you may become disheartened and scrabbling around looking for something else to do, but bear with me. Now it always strikes me as odd that none of my English teachers are actually good at spelling. Spelling is a cornerstone of a language, particularly English, isn’t it? Apparently it isn’t. It seems that these days, the purpose of a language is not to make sense or be correct, but merely to communicate an idea. Isn’t this what languages have always done? Yes and no. Go back to the Middle Ages, few people could read, and language was as much a symbol of prowess and importance as it was useful for communicating. These days, it is essentially the opposite.

This post has reasonably good spelling, grammar, syntax etc. However most of my posts do not look anything like this. Yet the other posts are still completely understandable (I hope). Society no longer needs complex systems in place to make sense of text. We are brought up with various forms of slang, and we can cope with it. Taking to further extremes, the abbreviated language spoken in SMS, and to a lesser extent, IM, is arguably not the same language. You need to understand English to understand this language, but it has become so abbreviated that the outsider would be clueless. Here, the function of the language (communicating as quickly and efficiently as possible) has been emphasised over everything else. This means that text messages can be much shorter, which is no bad thing.

This is a good evolution of language. I’m not endorsing it for widespread use, as there is still a place for neat, correct language, but in its own niche, it is excellent. An interesting occurrence is the cultivation of language when it crosses mediums. Applying SMS language to IM, where the conditions are different, creates a different language. The user has a big screen, highly readable text, a fast input device (keyboard), and more time. The brief language of SMS quickly becomes embellished and modified to be more visually pleasing, and amusing. The language is used in a conversational context, which also changes it. SMS and English merge together, making a hybrid format with which we are now familiar.

This seems to be a suitable place to end this post, even though I have not covered all that I set out to do. The rant provides an opportunity to peruse a topic in as much detail as you wish, and then continue where you left off the next time. Here I go again, ranting about ranting. Anyway, I would like to hear your opinion on this matter. Post a comment, or pingback to this, and give your own personal rant.

Upgrade System For Australian Broadband.

It’s simple really, just upgrade all the phone cable into Ethernet.

Thanks to http://xkcd.com for this comic. Which, in a roundabout way, is another topic. XKCD is a really good web comic. If you are reading my posts, then you probably already know about XKCD, but for those who don’t, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it. It updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every week. Go, read it.