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Showing posts from April 3, 2005

Charles marries his horse.

So it's done. Prince Charles The Adulterer married his horse today. May they live the rest of their lives in guilt and shame.

Basil. It's basil dammit!

Just saw an ad on TV for some new burger, apparently made with bayz'l. Dammit America - it's basil. BASIL. Not bayz'l! Yep it's that time of year. Time to wig out watching late night hotel TV whilst on site, this time in Dallas for a trade show. Things went very well today - setup everything easily despite a 5am start. I'm still in awe of the PSP - watched 90 minutes of video and listened to 30 minutes of music on the flight and the battery meter still reads full.

PSP Video

Nearly two weeks with the PSP and I've finally cracked the video compression and image size thing. I managed to get a good compression of one of the Dr. Who episodes last night so it fills the whole PSP screen and only uses 218Mb of space on the memory stick. Suh-weet.

Shuttle Discovery being rolled out.

We're getting close to that sphincter-factor 10 moment when the next Shuttle launches. Discovery is on its way to the launch pad today. The rollout was delayed for a little more than two hours when a crack in the fuel tank's insulation was found. NASA concluded the crack, near a non-cryogenic area, was a minor imperfection and did not need repair. NASA spokeswoman Tracy Young said the engineering staff decided Discovery can safely fly "as is," because of the small size and the location of the crack. Wait. A crack in the external fuel tank? Remember the Shuttle is an oxygen-nitrogen bomb with two roman candles strapped on to it. Surely a crack in the fuel tank is cause for alarm?

The End Of The World

Make your preparations, people. According to extremist lunatic Warren Jeffs, today is the End Of The World. He's taken 100 of his disciples to his FLDS "temple" that looks like a barn somewhere in Texas and is making preparations for the end of days. He's going to be terribly upset tonight when he's still alive. Waco, anyone?

Classic, classic British efficiency.

So I read today that Blair has called a general election for May 5th. I found a couple of contact numbers in England and phoned the aboutmyvote 1-800 number. The woman there was very helpful and told me that we could vote by proxy as we live in America, and gave me the number for the council offices for our last address in the UK. I Called them, and it became obvious to me again within a couple of minutes why we left the UK. The guy said yes, we could vote by proxy, and yes, the election was on May 5th. He even confirmed our old address. Then he said that unless we'd registered to vote by March 18th, we actually weren't able to vote at all. The conversation went something like this: Me : "Oh. But we only found out today that the election is May 5th - how was I supposed to know about the March 18th date?" Him : "We notified everyone by mail in February that overseas voters had to be registered by March 18th." Me : "Wait. You notified everyone in Brackne

Is the Pope's funeral such a good idea?

The Pope's funeral will be on friday, with a lot of heads of state attending, along with millions of civilians. All in one place. With little or no chance of any security measures.

The Pope has snuffed it.

After days if not weeks of inevitable deterioration in health, the Pope finally made his final journey last night. Rome is bracing itself for the biggest influx of pilgrims in living history. Not that I'm big into any organised religion (its insidious), but John Paul II is the only Pope I've ever known. Since he came to my attention during a trip to Holland when I was really young, right up to this day. The TV stations have all rushed out their retrospectives, life-ofs, histories and documentaries of course. That must be a morbid job, re-editting those things and keeping them on the back burner for the day they're needed. To quote Max Headroom from The Art Of Noise's 'Paranoimia' : "On drums - the Pope!" For the curious, here's Max's lines from the remix. Is it me or is the band getting bigger? Ok. On trumpet, Peter Bartell (don't I ever get a rest between bars?) On Drums.... The Pope! On baselines, Martina Navra, narv, naver.....er....Go