Please, let’s not get all outraged and offended. Michael Jackson is dead. He ain’t gonna care. He lived an incredibly rich and successful life, and a couple of silly jokes on a web page seems like a tiny price to pay.
And holy shit, is that a terribly designed website. They stick billions of ads in there, with the exact same font and decorations as the jokes, so you think you’re reading a joke and then you discover it’s an ad. It’s also pointless reading the back pages, as people keep making the same couple of jokes over and over. Yeah, thanks, we get the point, Michael Jackson died in the chldren’s ward having a stroke. Okay, whatever, Michael Jackson was melted down into plastic toys so children could play with him. Still, the one about Jackson 5 concerts being 20% off cracked me up.
The presenter has an annoying voice, looks like a gay Nikki Sixx, and pronounces “frustrated” without an r. But man, he really knows his stuff.
What a mind-blowing video. Can you imagine living in a house with that many cockroaches? When I lived in Sydney we had tons (although nowhere near as many as that family), and the damage they can do is nuts. We live on the Central Coast now, and you can easily tell which books we bought up here and which books we brought up from Sydney, because the Sydney books have roach-nibbled pages.
I say we irradiate them all and see what happens.
We’ve long had a problem with rats in our garage. They’re cut little bush rats, but they chew holes in things, make lots of noise, and are generally a nuisance.
Today, my family had a look through the garage and found that our problem had resolved itself. You see, when we moved here, we brought a packet of rat poison. We put it on ground level, and forgot that it was even there. But now, this forgotten packet of rat poison was lying ripped apart on the ground, the poison itself (it resembles blue Play-Doh) lying in clumps over the garage floor. The rats had stumbled upon it, and had begun eating it over the course of a few weeks. Needless to say, their meal was never completed.
Our pristine garage has become a Dachau. There were two dead rats side by side, and one was teeming with maggots. We found another dead rat inside a gardening pot. A fourth dead rat was found in another location, but we don’t think he was killed by the poison since he is heavily decomposed. Old age, probably.
There’s guaranteed to be more dead rats. This week, I intend to play a grisly, rat-based version of Where’s Waldo in our garage. Except instead of finding an amusing fellow with a red, stripey hat, I will get the opportunity to ponder my own mortality.
Or Australia at least. Why are things so expensive here?
It’s like this. I use eBay a lot (you know, the site where you buy something because it’s $50 cheaper than retail and then pay $70 for shipping and handling) and most of the time it’s cheaper to buy from America! This is particularly true for high end electronic equipment.
It’s becoming ridiculous. I recently bought a multi-unit power pack from America, ate shipping and handling, ate the currency exchange rate (the Australian dollar is worth roughly 79 US cents), and ate the $13.95 or so it cost me to buy a transformer so I can run the thing on 240v…and it still worked out cheaper than buying from Australia!
I don’t pretend to know much about economics, but it’s like anywhere from 20% to 60% gets added to the price as soon as something enters the country. A $600 Ibanez guitar becomes a $900 Ibanez guitar. A $2000 generator becomes a $3000 generator. Sometimes the prices are ludicrously, insanely out of line. I own a Marshall amp that cost $1000 Australian, and I just talked to a guy in the UK who bought the same amp for 200 pounds. Yay. Great stuff to hear.
I don’t fully understand why this is, although I’d expect it to have something to do with us being a vast country in a remote location of the globe with a small population. That’s what common sense suggests, anyway.
We live in a time where words like “world wide web” seem tacky and old, where they once indicated the cutting edge. The internet is getting long in the tooth, and good domain names are increasingly hard to come by. Oh, we’ll never run out, but if you want a five digit domain name now you’re not going to get much better than kfgdf.com
It almost seems like there’s a certain kudos for websites with a short domain name, because it indicates they were registered a long time ago. I suppose I should be proud of http://ben-ts.net, which is pretty short and somewhat coherent (it was registered in 2005).
I’m not convinced it matters that much. Short domain names aren’t necessarily more memorable than long ones, you’d only get accidental “I-typed-this-into-my-web-browser” traffic if your domain name is widely recognised (like coke.com).
Ultimately, I think it’s the kudos thing, like how real absinth costs much more than imitation absinth even though they taste the same.
Beeth: Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
honx: well, you can stil get one from a strange country 
– Bash.org quote
Tonight I took a personality test you can find here. I won’t post the results, since it would not be helpful to man or beast. Actually, I just went through it clicking the craziest, weirdest, most contradictory options possible, in the hopes that the test would diagnose me with a crippling mental disorder.
Somewhere through that exhausting 120 question waste of time, it occurred to me that no-one answers these tests honestly. It’s an advantage of the internet that you can exaggerate your abilities by as much as you want. Try it. Go to whatever message board your visit, start a “What’s your chest measurement” thread, and watch as the community of D&D geeks you thought you knew transforms into a community of bodybuilders, Navy SEALS, and Mr Universe contenders.
If you’re wondering “but why would people lie to a personality test program?” then you have to realise that people are so used to lying about their skills and abilities that they can’t turn it off. They even lie to anonymous php scripts on the internet.
Uh, well, I forget where I was going with this and it seems to have run out of steam, so I’ll finish by urging you to take the test, which is by far the best test to pay me $10 to say something nice about it.
In my ongoing quest to make my website not look like total ass, I made a new skin in Xara Web Builder and converted it to Wordpress over the course of several days. So far I’m fairly happy with the results, although I need to fix the fonts and some other things.
Wordpress is an amazing blog, and can be modified into an amazing CMS as well. I would definitely recommend that others use it. The only small drawback is that you need to have a passable grasp of PHP to fully turn it into a CMS. Create an account at the Wordpress support forum and the folks there will step you through it.
So what’s next for the Empty World site, which, by the way, gets the traffic of a good-sized country (assuming said country has been depopulated by a moderate to severe holocaust/plague)? Well, I have a few ideas. I’ll break promises left right and center, not update for six months, piss off what few readers I have left, then maybe I’ll take the whole site down for just for fun and redirect viewers to a Rick Astley music video. Stay tuned!
Every now and then I see things on Youtube that blow my mind, and then I forget about them. But here’s one I bookmarked.
It’s a channel called Edarem, run by a 76 year old man called Edward Muscari. He was a semi-famous TV personality at one point (famous enough to have a Wikipedia and IMDb page), and he is also in the Florida Sex Offender Registry for molesting a 14 year old boy. But enough about his background. Let’s talk about the man.
Imagine the weirdest, creepiest old person you know, and multiply it by ten. You’re still not close to Edarem, although you are starting to get a blurry image. Here’s a video of him lip-synching a Roy Orbison song.
The average person is 75% water. Edarem is 75% creepiness. His every gesture makes my skin crawl. Why he wasn’t tapped to act in that Lemony Snicket movie is beyond me. He’s exactly the way I imagined Count Olaf in the books.
You can check out his channel here. Warning, there is a video of him topless.
This morning, my family went to a dawn service on Anzac day, which is an event commemorating the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who served at Gallipolli in the first world war. It’s a significant event for us since many, many, Sheffields have fought in wars, and my great-grandfather died in a Japanese internment camp. If I had been born in the early 20th century I would have fought there too.
It was a dawn service at five thirty am, which meant we got up at, er, four am (I didn’t keep track of the time), which was fun. We got into the car and drove to the Entrance Park, where they held the service. It was funny, when we left the house there were no cars on the road, but as we got further and further down the Entrance highway, the roads were clogged with cars. And the Entrance wasn’t even the only service held in the area.
It was dark and mysterious. We were at the far back (there must have been 3000 people there), but we could hear what was happening over the PA system. There were some technical hitches. They were going to play tapes of the Australian and NZ national anthem, but they slipped up and we only heard the Australian anthem. Otherwise we had a prayer, a short speech by the president of the local RSL club, a minute’s silence, and, for anyone wearing a military decoration or uniform, a breakfast ticket at said RSL club (they made a point of mentioning that alcohol wouldn’t be served).
The function could have been handled a lot better, but it doesn’t matter, since the point was that we all gathered together to pay respect to our nation’s heroes. There were plenty of veterens there (none from Gallipoli, obviously, the last one died in 2002, though there were probably a couple from WW2 and certainly some from Vietnam and Korea).
After that I met up with some friends and watched the sun come up over the lake. We also saw a water rat, and I feel ashamed that the rat sticks in my memory more than the entire event.
Sometimes wireless is good (like you don’t want cables trailing everywhere). And sometimes wireless is the only way to go (like when want to network two computers at opposite ends of the house). But wireless seriously licks wang. You plug something in and it works. You connect something wirelessly and hope it works.
My dad has fallen in love with wireless mice and now we spend huge amounts of time repairing Bluetooth connections and recharging batteries. I personally use a mouse with a cord (although the mouse itself is optical) and have never had any issues with it.
My family uses wireless networks, too. We’ve never installed one and had no problems, or not had to modify it afterwards. In fact, the less said about them the better.
Seriously though, cables rule. If Star Trek’s transporters are ever made, they should definitely use them.
In these troubled times I’m sure we all have lots of questions, from whether to sell our kids to NAMBLA to pay the bills to exactly how camels digest cardboard. Here are some random questions I thought of that have one thing in common: the question is far more interesting than the answer.
1. A lawyer bills $200 an hour. On his way to work, he drops a 10c coin on the ground. Is it worth his while to pick it up?
2. Why do Youtube users complain about you wasting your time, but if you called your video “A Waste of Time” they probably would have clicked on it anyway?
3. Why is “homelesssexual” such a fascinating word, even though, technically, it doesn’t mean anything?
4. Why do people ask questions like “if you could take 1 movie with you on a desert island…” when they could just have asked “what’s your favorite movie”?
5. Isn’t it ironic how movies like Grindhouse spend large amounts of money making themselves look low-budget?
The best job: being a child entertainer, like the Wiggles or Gay Waldo or whatever they have now. Think about it…it’s perfect! You can tell the same jokes over and over and your audience never clues in. Your audience has ridiculously low expectations, and most of them have no choice but to listen to you (as a kid, I was forever being force-marched off to these things). Sure, soon your fans will grow up and forget about you, but there are always more where they came from!
The worst job: being an entertainer who is a child. There’s a lot of media attention given to “child prodigies”, so you’ll be sitting pretty for a few years. But what happens when you start growing hair on your chin? Suddenly you go from being a child genius, to an adult who happens to be moderately good at something. Let’s take acting: you have Macaulay Culkin, who garnered rave reviews for his performance as the kid in Home Alone. But fast forward however many years, and where is he now? It’s one thing to be typecast: it’s another thing to be typecast into a role you won’t be able to play in a few more years.
What do you think? Let me know with a comment. Yes, I know this site doesn’t have a comments, just use the power of positive thinking. My mother says you can do anything with positive thinking.
Politics is treated like a football match these days. If you support one side, you can’t support the other. But what’s wrong with picking and choosing the best policies from each side as your political identity? Do you have to “choose” a party and then stick with them, even if there are things that attract you about another party?
I’m politically in the middle, though closer to the right than the left. An ideal government is lean and efficient, and does not interfere with the lives of its citizens any more than it has to. Citizens should be self-sufficient, and the private sector should always be developed ahead of the public sector. Charity is to be encouraged, but those who work should not have to bear the brunt of feeding those who don’t.
Does that sound like a good (albeit incomplete) description of conservatism? A smaller government and an emphasis on the individual? Well, it sounds great, but there’s another side to conservatism that doesn’t mesh with the above at all.
Why is conservative politics usually associated with harsh laws? Take the death penalty, which is usually associated with the right. How can a government be unobtrusive and passive while at the same time being able to kill people? Why were things like segregation, anti-suffragetism always the domain of the right, while the left took the side of the individual (which the right claims as its own)?
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense…which is why I don’t feel bad about mixing liberalism with conservatism. Sometimes, that’s the only way to go.
I love the hell out of Snopes.com. You can spend hours there. It skewers all the popular folk myths of the 20th century from front to back, determining what is true and what is false. There’s another website called Cracked.com who endlessly ride these guys’ nuts, copying their facts and rewriting them into funny “Top 10 Celebrity Goofs”-style articles.
Take a look at their Disney page. What the hell?! I was watching all this stuff, and didn’t even notice. Sure, I know movies like Shrek have some well-hidden double-entendres (”Lord Farquaad”), but I never knew there was full frontal nudity in “The Rescuers”. If I ever met the man responsible, I wouldn’t know whether to kick his ass or shake his hand.
As a rule, before I buy a software program I check to see if there’s a free alternative available. I might have to sacrifice some features and customer support, but otherwise there’s no reason to drop $500 on Microsoft Office when I could use OpenOffice.
Did you know it’s possible to do this in real life? People in rural areas of Australia buy very little, and make do with trading and borrowing. My brother is 40 years old, lives in Campbell, and hasn’t bought a car the entire time I’ve known him.
Like on the internet, the imprimature of big business is something you can avoid if you know your way around. Want a guitar? I guarantee you that somewhere in the world there is a person who would give you a guitar for free, just to get it out of his house. Maybe there’s a mechanic somewhere whose house is being forclosed and is selling his collection of rebuilt cars for $600 each. Earlier last year we threw out a perfectly good computer monitor, because we didn’t have enough space in the garage.
Places like Craigslist are an imperfect way to distribute unwanted goods because everyone wants a profit. But it would be a real kick in the ass to businesses if some sort of communal dumping pool was started.
The trouble with living in a remote area is that the local council tends not to care about you. We’ve had several days with no power and no phones because lines were broken. When they said they’d have power off all day while they did maintenance work, with only a few hours notice, it was the last straw, and we took matters into our own hands. My dad ordered a diesel powered, 15hp, 140v, single-phase generator that can power the entire house. Yesterday, it arrived.
The delivery was a story in itself. We bought the generator over the internet (you can see where this is going…) with no clue as to how big it was or how much it weighed. On second thought, that may have been an oversight. Anyway, on the morning of the delivery a truck pulls up, and a confused-looking Lebanese fellow steps out and explains that he doesn’t have our generator, and that it’s coming in a “beeeg truck” with a forklift to get it out. A forklift? Just how big is this thing? Furthermore, he explained that the truck likely would not fit in our driveway (which is a fairly big driveway!), and that we would have to unload the generator in the street and wheel it in. Huh? We ordered a nice, mid-sized generator to power the house during outages, not a freaking apartment block.
An hour later, a tiny truck pulls up (our mailman’s van is seriously bigger), and what do you know, it has our generator. So much for huge trucks and forklifts. We got the generator out, and although it’s a decent size (about as big as a small fridge) it was far smaller than the Lebanese guy had made out. This was a relief to us, as we have about 1 meter of free space in our garage and it was nice to have somewhere to store it.
We’re really happy with the thing so far. It’s quite similar to a car engine, in that it has a battery and you can start it by turning a key (no yanking on a pullstring) and since it runs on diesel it will save us money too.
I was just reading about how Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s plane broke down in Queensland, and several of his staff were stranded while the PM was transported on another plane, and it got me thinking about politics.
At the moment, Australia is divided between the Coalition (roughly comparable to the American Republican Party) and Labor (roughly comparable to the American Democratic Party), who won the 2008 election in a monster landslide. I watched the whole thing on TV, and it was like watching the most horrific MMA fight you can imagine, where instead of kicks and punches the damage was being done by ballots.
The 2008 election wasn’t about issues but about appearance, and Kevin Rudd couldn’t have lost. He was hip and young, and savagely popular with younger voters. In the debate, he repeatedly name-dropped Myspace and Youtube. Coalition leader John Howard looked old and out of touch. Add to this the fact that Howard planned to step down soon anyway (so voters would face a new, untested leader soon no matter who’s name was on the ballot) and it was a lost cause for Howard…you sort of wonder why he even bothered to show up.
I voted for Howard because, well, I liked the man. He got things done. Kevin Rudd specialises in paper politics. He’s good at smiling and waving at the camera, but isn’t an effective leader. He signed Kyoto, which is a meaningless gesture since he will be out of office long before any meaningful deadlines are underway. He apologised to the stolen generation, but doesn’t seem interested in making financial restitution. His promise to pull Australia out of the Iraq war was a bait and switch, as it only applies to a third of our soldiers and no-one knows when the rest will come home.
What’s John Howard doing now? Nobody knows. He’s vanished. Maybe we’ll get some memoirs or something out of him in the future, his legacy nearly demands it after all.
Yesterday I was with Quadra, today I’m with HostGator. My old host was great, but it cost a lot of money, and with this new one I save about $100 p/a, which is a big deal. On the downside it’s in the US, so my FTP speeds aren’t quite as snappy. Also, it introduced me to the dark side of CMS software, like having to back up all of my tables and transfer it to a new database, not to mention messing around endlessly with permissions and config files, which was kind of a drag…
But on the bright side, it gave me an excuse to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. Wordpress isn’t one of those programs that stays the same from version to version aside from a few irrelevant details, it actually packs a lot of changes into its upgrades, and it’s great having the latest version.
The old site was difficult to update, so I killed it and rebuilt it using Wordpress. This was a relatively steep learning curve for me, as I had to code a template from scratch and I don’t know PHP. Nevertheless, I finally got it working through my own sweat and tears. Plus copying other people’s code. That helped.
I’ll let this function as an “About” page. My name is Ben Sheffield. Yo. This site is for my writing.