January 2006 Archives
[Moozik: Joy Division - Dead Souls]
Frank Caliendo's Dubya routine is absolutely spot on and bloody funny.
[Moozik: The Sisters Of Mercy - Body Electric]
Because, you know, you're just not British enough if you don't fly the Union Jack at every opportunity.
Gordon Brown will call on the British people today to celebrate their patriotism and embrace the Union flag with pride as he embarks on a personal mission to reposition Labour as the party of strong national identity.It's about bloody time British ideas and values had a special day that we could all look forward to. I was just saying to Sally the other day, "what we need is a special day where I can celebrate my Britishness".The Chancellor will say that Britain can only respond effectively and confidently to globalisation if its people have "a clear view of what being British means and how you define national identity for the modern world".
In a speech that is bound to anger some on the Labour Left, he will suggest that homeowners imitate the Americans by planting "a (Union) flag in every garden" and will float the idea of a "British day" on which uniquely British ideas and values can be celebrated.
Ahem.
[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - One Time One Place]
I've had the latest copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly laying around the house for the past few weeks but only just got around to reading it. This month they list the 200 games that were, in their opinion, the greatest games of their time. They limited the list to arcade & consoles only so no Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, or PC games made it on the list unfortunately.
It appears I've played 79 of the 200 in my gaming lifetime and because you're just dying to know which ones, here they are. (And no, playing them on my PC with an emulator doesn't count - I played these on the platforms indicated)
199 - Super Castlevania IV - Super NES - 1991
192 - Shadow of the Colossus - PS2 - 2005
185 - Dragon's Lair - Arcade - 1983
183 - Gorf - Arcade - 1981
180 - Super Off Road - Arcade - 1989
173 - The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening - Gameboy - 1994
172 - Katamari Damacy - PS2 - 2004
166 - Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time - PS2 - 2003
159 - Ecco the Dolphin - Megadrive/Genesis - 1992
157 - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Walker - Gamecube - 2003
155 - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - N64 - 2000
154 - Moon Patrol - Arcade - 1982
149 - Ghosts 'N Goblins - Arcade - 1985
144 - International Superstar Soccer - Super NES - 1995
137 - Dig Dug - Arcade - 1982
134 - Yar's Revenge - Atari 2600 - 1982
133 - Final Fantasy X - PS2 - 2001
131 - Sinistar - Arcade - 1982
127 - Zaxxon - Arcade - 1982
124 - Pole Position - Arcade - 1982
123 - Battlezone - Arcade - 1980
120 - OutRun - Arcade - 1986
115 - Star Fox - Super NES - 1993
112 - God of War - PS2 - 2005
110 - Street Figher Alpha 2 - Arcade - 1996
109 - Gradius - Arcade - 1985
108 - Super Mario Bros 2 - NES - 1988
107 - Ms. Pac-Man - Arcade - 1981
106 - Donkey Kong - Gameboy - 1994
105 - Karate Champ - Arcade - 1984
103 - Super Mario RPG - Super NES - 1996
99 - Final Fight - Arcade - 1989
96 - Marble Madness - Arcade - 1984
94 - Centipede - Arcade - 1980
93 - Track & Field - Arcade - 1983
91 - Afterburner - Arcade - 1987
89 - Golden Axe - Arcade - 1989
88 - Super Mario World - Super NES - 1991
87 - Missle Command - Arcade - 1980
83 - Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island - Super NES - 1995
81 - Ikari Warriors - Arcade - 1986
79 - Contra - Arcade - 1987
78 - Daytona USA - Arcade - 1994
74 - Chrono Trigger - Super NES - 1995
73 - Gauntlet - Arcade - 1985
72 - Spy Hunter - Arcade - 1983
71 - Tempest - Arcade - 1980
70 - Mortal Kombat II - Arcade - 1993
62 - Frogger - Arcade - 1981
59 - Super Bomberman - Super NES - 1993
57 - Virtua Racing - Arcade - 1992
56 - Sonic The Hedgehog - Megadrive/Genesis - 1991
54 - Defender - Arcade - 1980
52 - Metroid Prime - Gamecube - 2002
50 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Super NES - 1992
47 - Joust - Arcade - 1982
46 - Resident Evil 4 - Gamecube - 2005
43 - Tron - Arcade - 1982
42 - R-Type - Arcade - 1987
41 - Double Dragon - Arcade - 1987
38 - Asteroids - Arcade - 1979
36 - Final Fantasy III - Super NES - 1994
32 - Robotron: 2084 - Arcade - 1982
31 - Star Wars - Arcade - 1983
28 - Galaga - Arcade - 1981
27 - Final Fantasy VII - PS1 - 1997
23 - Super Metroid - Super NES - 1994
19 - Super Mario Kart - Super NES - 1992
18 - Pitfall! - Atari 2600 - 1982
15 - Donkey Kong - Arcade - 1981
8 - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - N64 - 1998
7 - Space Invaders - Arcade - 1978
6 - Super Mario 64 - N64 - 1996
4 - Tetris - Gameboy - 1988
3 - Street Fighter II - Arcade - 1991
2 - Pac-Man - Arcade - 1980
1 - Super Mario Bros. - NES - 1985
[Moozik:Curve - Crystal]
Being quite the fan of M. Night Shyamalan, it's no surprise that I'm really quite looking forward to Lady In The Water.
[Moozik: Gene Loves Jezebel - Shaving My Neck]
Via Les, comes the 50 most loathsome people in America. I found myself nodding my head on the majority of them. Two of them were particularly amusing.
44. George Lucas...and at number 13:Charges: It needs to be said: George Lucas is an awful writer and a shitty, shitty director. His second Star Wars trilogy absolutely sucked from beginning to end, and was in fact the least brave creative endeavor he could possibly have chosen, a guaranteed grand slam. Lucas has grown so accustomed to massive commercial success that he has no idea he’s putting out the worst work of his career, and no one dares to tell him. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because an army of sexless, sedentary thirty-something dweebs with an unhealthy fixation on Princess Leia will insist that his schlock is brilliant as if their lives depend on it, and an absurdly disproportionate media blitz always brings the kids in. But everything that was great about the first trilogy—reasonably decent acting, an engaging storyline and cool model-based special effects—is gone, replaced by detestably unsympathetic characters reciting torturously bad dialogue in a manner so wooden that coaching from Keanu Reeves would have helped, and CGI effects that, while painstakingly crafted down to the nanopixel, somehow looked less real than plastic spaceships and Muppets.
Exhibit A: Already revising the new trilogy for DVD releases.
Sentence: Cast into the gaping maw of Tatooine’s all-powerful Sarlacc and digested alive for a thousand years, along with a talkative Jar Jar Binks.
13. GodCharges: If your answer to the age-old question of God’s existence is "yes," your next question should be, "Why is he such a dick?" After three major natural disasters, not to mention the eternal constants of famine, war and disease, to believe in God is to believe either that He enjoys fucking with us, or at best has totally lost interest in the whole "people" thing. Never calls anymore.
Exhibit A: Mosquitoes, Ralph Reed.
Sentence: Forever listening to an unending stream of idiotic, mundane prayers uttered by the dumbest, most inarticulate people in His creation.
[Moozik: Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart]
Over the past few years I've installed my fair share of Firefox extensions. Most of them can be filed under "seemed like a good idea at the time" and once the novelty had worn off they were never used again.
So, after a teeny purge, I'm left with extensions I actually use.
Adblock
Adblock Filterset.G Updater
BugMeNot
CookieCuller
del.icio.us
Foxylicious
FoxyTunes
StumbleUpon
User Agent Switcher
[Moozik: Cud - Oh No Won't Do]
With all the utter shite on TV it's always sad to see something decent get cancelled. So, I wave goodbye to my old friend, The West Wing.
PASADENA, Calif. - The new president on "The West Wing" will be a real short-timer: NBC announced Sunday it was pulling the plug on the Emmy-winning political drama in May after seven seasons.I'll be the first to admit that the last two seasons have not been on par with their early counterparts. Still, an off-form West Wing was better than 90% of everything else on TV so it's a shame really."The West Wing" announcement wasn't much of a surprise. Although this season's story line with a presidential campaign involving a Democrat played by Jimmy Smits and Republican portrayed by Alan Alda has been strong critically, ratings have sunk with its move to Sunday nights.
The decision to cancel it was made before actor John Spencer, who played former presidential chief of staff Leo McGarry, died of a heart attack Dec. 16, said Kevin Reilly, NBC entertainment president.
[Moozik: The Jesus & Mary Chain - Come On]
Hmm, it would appear that Six Apart's Movable Type Plugin Search is a little hit & miss today. Search for any of the following:
ad
ant
blog
cat
plugin
reb
rebuild
rebuilding
side
Results in the following nice little error:
An error occurred:
Can't call method "id" on an undefined value at /var/www/vhosts/sixapart.com/htdocs/mt-plugins/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 2563.
I sent them a quick email about it. We'll see if I get a reply.
Update: I did get a reply. They've opened a ticket for it although they seem to think it's limited to the search phrase 'build' which based on my limited usage, is not quite the case :-)
[Moozik: Curve - Coast Is Clear]
I'd been meaning to pickup the DVD release of Depeche Mode's 1988 concert/documentary 101 for the past couple of years but never quite got around to it. My 16 year old VHS copy has certainly seen better days :-) Not to worry, my Sister was kind enough to get it for me for Christmas. Woohoo.
So yeah, it was back down nostalgia lane last night as I popped it in the DVD player. For those unfamiliar with 101, it was a odd hybrid film. Part concert footage, part behind the scenes, part early reality TV. The reality TV consisted of a bunch of teenagers who won a contest to follow DM around the US in a bus for DM's 1988 'Music For The Masses' tour.
The 101 pack consists of two DVDs, the first containing the original film and the second containing some pleasantly surprising bonus footage. The bonus footage contains new interviews with Dave, Martin, and Andy and also some interviews with 3 of the original kids from the bus. It was actually quite entertaining to see the bus kids [0] again as a kind of "where are they now?".
Along with the interviews, the second disc also contains 12 songs from the Rose Bowl concert. I was a little disappointed here because the actual concert was over 20 songs so why not put all the songs on the DVD? Also, some of the songs are edited - we only get Everything Counts faded in and not from the beginning. Huh?
In short, I enjoyed watching this last night just as much as I did way back in the day.
[0] Yes, 17 years later, they're clearly not kids anymore but you know what I mean.
[Moozik: Ride - Unfamiliar]
So after a nice little break over Christmas, the new University semester ensured I came back down to earth with a bang today. A bloody Saturday class from 8:00am to 1:00pm of all things. Yuck. Getting up at an ungodly hour on a Saturday morning for the next eight weeks is going to suck.
And 2006 marks the great year of Maths. Sigh. Five semesters of nothing but Maths. Four semesters of Calculus followed by a course entitled 'Discrete Math' which (fortunately) is actually a programming class but (unfortunately) is based on Math theory :-(
Oh yes. Fun times. But this is my final year. I can see light at the end of the tunnel. I may yet see that Bachelor's in Computer Science :-)
It seems that I'll have the same Professor for all the Calculus classes and based on what I saw today, that might be a good thing. So far he seems like a good teacher and has a very good sense of humour. He's from Transylvania and his accent is rather strong so you really have to pay attention. As we went around the room introducing ourselves, he seemed to like the fact that he wasn't the only non-American in the room. On one of the breaks we started chatting about Football and he seems like a really nice bloke. Let's hope I still have the same opinion after the eighth week :)
[Moozik: The Jesus And Mary Chain - Darklands]
There are days where I like Perl and there are days when I bloody love it. Today was one of those days. The Perl hackers who make it possible for others to do magic quite simply rock.
Andy Lester's rather spiffy WWW::Mechanize made it quite trivial to hack up some proof of concept code to send SMS messages via Yahoo's sendsms tool. 10 lines of Perl code and I was sending messages to some of my coworkers on their cell phones. NICE[0]. The only bummer is that I can't open source it hence the lack of code :-(
[0] It wasn't all fun and games; this did have a practical purpose that we will be using in production at some point.
[Moozik: Curve - Superblaster]
While watching an old X-Files re-run tonight I made the mistake of sitting through the commercials. I know, silly me. I saw one that was so ridiculous it made me laugh.
Tired of your kids using "time thief" devices such as computers or video games? Then worry no more because you can buy the power cop. The idea of a 'power cop' is amusing for a couple of reasons.
First of all, if your kids refuse to come down for dinner because they're playing games (as the commercial implied), then bloody well make them. Don't just limit their electricity. Sigh.
Secondly, do you really think kids are this stupid? They pull out the power cord and get another one from their mates. Problem solved no?
[Moozik: Hole - My Beautiful Son]
Good thing the new Kodak Logo helps the company forge a new image as a cutting-edge, 21st century innovator.
Ahem.
Who are these logo changes aimed at anyway? Does anyone really want to go out and buy more Kodak products because they now have a new "cutting edge" logo?
[Moozik: Siouxsie & The Banshees - This Wheel's On Fire]
This is a brain dump in no particular order and possibly has no relevance to anyone or anything...
I got visited by the insomnia fairy last night at around 4:15am. She's good like that. Things that you realize while trying to convince yourself to go back to sleep: (1) you're not going back to sleep (2) alarm clocks sure do give off a lot of light don't they? (3) my dogs not only snore but make interesting whining noises while dreaming (4) aquariums make rather amusing gurgling noises.
Tonight, the mighty Battlestar Galactica returns. Just hope I can stay awake long enough to watch it.
You can download episodes of BG via iTunes. NICE.
I appear to be a Verizon employee as of today.
[Moozik: Kraftwerk - Neon Lights (live)]
So, on Sunday I did my part to ensure the NSA computers were keeping themselves amused. I rang my Mum & Dad in England to wish them a Happy New Year. Well, technically they were in the Canary Islands soaking up the Christmas sun but they had their home phone set to automatically redirect to my Dad's cell phone. Which meant I spoke to them in their hotel room. Modern technology. How convenient eh?
Anyhoo, the call was crystal clear. It was like they were in the next room on a landline. In downtown Phoenix with max signal strength I can make a call and the sound quality, quite frankly, sucks. But make an international call to a cell phone on an island off the coast of Africa - crystal bloody clear.
WTF?
[Moozik: The Cure - Push]
So it would appear that the after Christmas gaming addiction is in full swing. For the past few nights I've been playing Ratchet: Deadlocked. If I'm not mistaken, this year marks the fourth year in a row that Insomniac has released a Ratchet game and as a huge fan of the series, I'm certainly not complaining.
Instead of being the platformer/shooter/adventure hybrid game that has made the Ratchet series famous[0], the focus has been shifted somewhat to a primarily shooter based game. While Ratchet fans everywhere shuddered at the prospect, including yours truly, I must say that I'm pleasantly surprised. In this latest installment, Ratchet finds himself fighting without Clank in a Running Man type TV show.
With weapon upgrades-a-plenty, Ratchet's trusty wrench, and bolt collection for purchasing new weapons, the whole game still retains a lot of what made the previous Ratchet games so fun. There's some hilarious faux commentary from the Phil Hartman like announcer and a couple of times I actually caught myself laughing out loud.
So, in short, I like it. I like it a lot.
[0] Ok so the series is only famous if you (a) play video games (b) own a PS2 (c) read gaming magazines and (d) have not lived in a cave for the past four years :-)