The Blarg of Fosnez

Do not confuse: With this: The latter will keep you up all night if you do not have a high tolerance level for caffeine, and I do mean ALL night. One bottle has 1.5 times the amount of caffine than a can of Red Bull (123mg vs 80mg)

You all know my opinion of Earth Hour , so reading this got me thinking. Wouldn't it be fitting if this prat is caught that he be electrocuted for a while. Nothing serious, just an electric fence type deal. It would have been interesting if he had been trespassing on my property instead of this old lady's. I'm all for effective environmental action, but this type of econazi extremism is as bad as any other extremism - you have no right to impose your view one anyone else - especially an older lady.

Typical Geek that I am, I get a kick out of The IT Crowd . Watch the clip below: Now of course, you could not fit the entire Internet in a little box like that (Well not with today's technology, but you probably could with DNA storage, but I digress, often...). However, you can store it in one single shipping container. As Sun puts it: The Internet in a box. via Gizmodo

Grab your double pluggers, throw a pair of shorts on and lets go down the the pub! It would appear someone has just been wingeing to daddy . A former state treasurer (now cast to the liberal backbench) Rob Lucas has asked: Are young men wearing "fashionable shorts" being discriminated against by hotels and clubs in Adelaide? I can only guess that his son has been recently turned away from a pub and he went bitching strait to daddy. But honestly, it does annoy me that it is socially acceptable for girls to wear sandles and "strapie" shoes to work and pubs/clubs, but boys are not... Not that I have any need for high heals.

Well I liked Last.FM . "Liked"? Why is he using the past tense you may ask? It would appear that the record companies have gotten to them finally. I wondered how long they would last without being interfered with, and it would appear that time is now . All other countries except "United States, United Kingdom and Germany" will have to start paying a fee for the radio stream from last fm. They say that everyone will still be able to use "scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc" - But I don't understand how recommendations will be any use if you cannot listen to them? Goodby Last.FM, it was nice to have you for so long. Time to switch to Mufin Player methinks. Or possibly Spotify (when it comes out of beta).

It contains Carebears, Pedobear and guns - lots of guns, what more could you ask for?. My favourite is the flower infused gauntlet. More info (in french) available here . source

Some of it is good, some of it is bad. The bad news it that you're dead. There are few details on how it happened, shy of it involving a spoon and 3cc of mouse blood. This is a pity. It is a pity because if there were more infomation, it would be easier to tell you how you died and inform your loved ones of it. However you don't really care, as you are dead. Unfortunatly for a lot of your online "friends" (and I use the term lightly) they will probably not know of your death for a while. After all, who is going to know your msn/facebook/myspace login details after you have passed on? Enter LegacyLocker . Legacy Locker is "a safe, secure repository for your digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends and loved ones in the event of death or disability." In other words, it contains all your various usernames and passwords to be used in the event of your unfortunate demise. With all the important information online, such as pictures,...

What's this? The government is becoming more transparent? Say it isn't so! Well according to this news article , there are changes afoot for the Freedom of Information Act - Good Changes! These include forcing governments to release information, even if it "embarrass governments, cause a loss of confidence, could lead to misunderstanding or confusion, or cause unnecessary debate". Let the games begin. Lets see if we can get some info on the National Broadband Network tender shall we?

Don't look up people. The Feces is about to hit the rotating ceiling appliance. (for those of you requiring monosyllabic prose, this means the shit is about to hit the fan) It would appear that the almighty ACMA ( Australian Censorship Management Authority ) blacklist of websites has been leaked online. It had to happen, and it is better it happens now. The saviour of free speech , WikiLeaks (Not to be confused with Wikipedia), has posted it online. Interestingly, I cannot access WikiLeaks at the moment, this could be due to a crap internet connection, or perhaps it is a little more clandestine than that (do I hear black helicopters?). According to the Sydney Morning Herald , who have apparently seen the list, the below are some of the more interesting things on the blacklist: A Queensland dentist (Not illegal) A tour operator (Not illegal) Several Christian sites (Not illegal) Fetish sites (Not illegal) Fringe religion sites, such as satanism (Not illegal) Euthanasia how-to sites...

Having just returned from a weekend in Japan (Thanks for the cheap flights JetStar ) I can say I really miss good public transport when I am in Cairns. From my time in London, I can tell you jumping on a train and reading a book for half an hour before work can be a great time to relax. Sure peak hour can be a bit packed, but you deal with it one way or another. Why do I bring this up now? There is a public meeting scheduled to discuss Trains/Trams in Cairns. Info is here and there is a flyer here . Wed, 18th March, 6:45PM Rydges Tradewinds 137 The Esplanade, Trinity Function Room It will be attended by the Mayor, and some of the local candidates. To be sure there will be a lot of "We can't do it because it is not in the Cairns Plan" or some woffle about it not being in the "regional strategic plan". Thats nice. Here's a little tip: If the plans for transport in Cairns revolves around Cars and Buses that are late; Scrap the plans. See how easy that was?

I'm not happy, not happy at all. Things like Earth Hour really annoy me. For the uninitiated, Earth Hour is where everyone in the world turns off their lights for an hour and stands around in circles singing Kumbaya . While I am sure everyone feels really good about themselves for about 10 minutes afterwards, and it is always fun to huddle around a candle like they did "in the old days" (without the threat of a cyclone looming), it really means nothing. It is as bad as people that ride to work on ride-to-work day and think they are actually helping the enviroment. Hypocrisy at it's finest. Instead of doing something for the enviroment once a year, and only for an hour - here's a thought, change your *daily* impact on the enviroment. Do you really need to turn the light on when you brush your teeth in the morning? How about turning your TV off at the wall so that it doesn't suck power when in standby mode? Invest in a solar pannel or three for your roof. Drive...

Well, Dear Blarg Readers, changes are afoot at Cairns Central. No I am not talking the good kind. It would appear that someone in Central's management team thinks it would be a great idea to introduce a ticketed parking system. You know, boom gates, ques, the whole shebang! What a fantastic idea, because I don't know about you, but I just love queuing up at those ticking machine, only to have the person infront of me maneuver their tank car so that they don't have to get out of it to get the ticket. What has bought this on? Well I can only assume that it is people (like me) that park my car there when we are at work. Before you shout "Sinner!" give me a viable alternative. Parking metres in the city are there to "encourage" staff of businesses to use alternative parking, now that central is getting the "lockdown" procedure, what alternative do we have? Public transport - Please, pull the other one it has bells on it. I have tried taking the bu...

This was taken near Cairns Central today. They are supposed to say "Danger Men Working Above". However, some good-humored soul has blacked out the "Above" so now all they say is "Danger, Men Working".

I detest propaganda, especially of the american variety. "Patriot Act", "Enemy Combatant" and my personal favourite " Freedom Tower ", as pictured below. The best thing about propaganda, is turning it on its head and I just heard a great idea. Instead of "Freedom Tower", lets start calling it "Narwhal Tower" or "The Narwhal" Mouseover the image above to see what I mean.

The Freeview parody ad "Watch more of the same thing" is causing a bit of strife for its creators . It has been removed from youtube for "terms of use violation". From what I can tell, especially for us lucky people in the sticks, freeview will be exactly what the ad says, the same thing on 3 different channels. As well as a program guide telling us what show Channel Nine will be delaying by 20 minutes tonight. The movie embedded above probably won't last long on youtube. There is a 50mb Hi-Def quicktime version, it can be downloaded here .

Make sure you are *always* wearing clean underwear. You never know when the police may come into your home, and it would hardly be proper to be caught in dirty underwear now would it? In a move that has surprised no-one, but has anyone-with-half-a-brain concerned, NSW police can now covertly plant evidence search a person's house , without that person's knowledge. This is of course set up under "Anti-Terrorism" legislation. Takes the meaning of a State Premier to a whole new level. Long live The Party comrades.

A great Book by Cory Doctorow , if you havn't read it and are too lazy too, then go here and download the audiobook, it is (legally) free! It explores what happens in the future when death is a minor inconvience, money and manual labour are things of the past, and the world operates on " Whuffie " (a form of karma currancy). Jules is a young man, barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World. Disney World! The greatest achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches. Now, though, the "ad-hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new...

The hands down best way to scare children: Animatronic Dinosaurs I do like the guy saying "Go on, eat one, just one" at the end...

I have a decent music collection, and it is from a smattering of all genres. Classical, rap, pop "alternative" (whatever that means), punk, rock etc. All too often, I find myself saying, that was a great song, what else have I got like it. There are some semi-useful tools from last.fm to try to match other music in your collection to the current song, based on other people's music listening habits. This rarely works well Enter Mufin Player . Rather than using croudsourcing to find a better match for the current song, it uses the power of algorithms. It takes a while to analyse all your music, because it quite literally has to "listen" to the songs. It only listens to the first 30 seconds by default, and this seems to work just fine, but you can make it listen to the entire song, at a faster than normal speed obviously. Enter the shock of the evening: It works! Once you tell it a song to find similar music to, it actually finds music in your collection that sou...

I friend of the blarg who is in the know about these kinds of things has written to me concerning a recent article on CairnsBlog . There has been a lot of Not in my back yard (NIMBY) about the proposed (approved?) youth facility at Stoney Creek. Here is the text of their message: Just to clarify - this facility will NOT be residential! The Kamerunga site will be a home base for the service to train and store their extensive equipment in order to run a profession, evidence based, best practice service. Currently the service is located in the inner city area with no complaints from the surrounding houses or businesses - could it be there is nothing to complain about? Its a real pity seeing political grandstanding stopping Cairns from engaging an innovative, exciting adventure based service that SUPPORTS and TRAINS the youth workers from our region. It's all about trying new things and getting out of your comfort zone to work with young people - something the public should have a go ...