Nelson Mandela has again criticised the United States over its stance on Iraq. In his rant, Mr. Mandela tries to stretch things a little by accusing the U.S. and Great Britain of undermining the United Nations because:
“the secretary general of the United Nations [Ghanaian Kofi Annan] is now a black man… They never did that when secretary generals were white”.
Defining the issue in terms of race? Now that’s reaching. Perhaps Saddam isn’t respecting the resolutions because they weren’t instituted by ‘white’ SGs. Pfff! Apart from calling this a ‘war for oil’, he goes on to ask why Israel isn’t being forced to disarm:
“Their [United States] friend Israel has got weapons of mass destruction but because it’s their ally they won’t ask the United Nations to get rid of them.”
Last time I checked though, Israel didn’t openly support terrorist movements, or use WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) to kill thousands of people. Does he pretend that Saddam can be trusted with a stockpile of WMDs?
I agree with Reid’s comments from the first time Mandela lashed out last year. Mr. Mandela needs to put the drama act on ice and stop shooting his mouth off. The incoherence of his claims is unbecoming, and can only be described as ‘mildly amusing’. Perhaps it would also be wise to refrain from talking of holocausts, when he has thus far failed to condemned and deter the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe from carrying on with theirs.
In highschool, a greasy McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger represented the epitome of junkfood for me, then a ravenous 85kg (190lb) eating machine. Before those of you who aren’t Mickey Dee fans *cough* Kristen *cough* bite my head off, I need to set the scene.
In a developing, and poverty-stricken country - fresh out from under the fist of a Communist Tyrant to boot - health codes were not a priority. Standards of hygiene in the food-service industry here were lacking, overlooked, and just downright ignored. Conditions in the kitchens of most restaurants here were atrocious, ghastly, horrific in fact. McDonald’s International standard was frequently the expat’s only refuge.
Although it’s not on their website yet, I went through the McDrive the other day, and noticed that McDonald’s Romania has raised the bar for junkfood. There’s now a Triple Cheeseburger - 50% junkier!!! Pictures when I get ‘em.
* * *
In other news, I can indeed confirm that:
tired + food = sleep
At least that’s what my first-hand experience can be described as for the last 3 lunches in a row.
Lou Quillo has the lowdown on how to create your own Acrobat PDFs, without having to shell out your hard earned $$$ (and no, I’m not talking about Kazaa). Oddly enough, someone asked me just the other day if I could help them produce a few proposals in PDF. How convenient.
I’ve recently ‘volunteered’ to translate the Romanian evening news broadcasts for my parents. Not such a tough job, but some frustration is beginning to set in. Read more…
A fairly dreary weekend really. My own doing though, I didn’t make even the slightest attempt to get out and do something. Amazing how peaceful it can be when you turn off the ring tones on your cell phone. Of course I now have 19 missed calls on my phone that I’ll have to account for tomorrow, but what the heck.
I’ll start work on the Sanex project tomorrow. I have a window of less than a month in which to develop the site, but I don’t think time will be too much of an issue really. My creative energies have been really low lately, so I’ll have to see what I can do about inspiration. Ahh yes, I just remembered: $$$, that’ll do for inspiration!
Three hours and twenty-six minutes left to sleep, so as they here: “Somn Usor” (sleep easy).
Michael Clarke learns that the he wasn’t suppossed to be using bu shugi no kitte stamps for his regular mail. These postage stamps are reserved for sending on New Year’s greetings (negajo) when there has been a death in your family.
Maddog talks ‘UUI’ (Urinal User Interface) about the men’s room at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. What makes these urinals so special is that they incorporate a painted blue fly to act as a “Pee here!” target - intended to assist people who suffer from “I need to piss all over the place” syndrome, and so help keep the floors dry for the rest of us. Apparently this kind of thing started with the Enlgish way back in the Victorian era.
I can’t say I’ve ever noticed this when passing through Schipol, I’ve never made a trip to the restrooms there (nature doesn’t call for me more than two times a day, three at most). I suppose I’ll have to keep my eye out for it next time I pass through though. Something like this could certainly be put to good use in College Dorms.
The shuffle button on my winamp has a crush on Metallica… every third/fourth track selected over the past week has been Metallica (no matter what I do with the morph rate preferences). I have 4,782 tracks loaded - of which only 47 are Metallica. Certainly, NOFX (120 tracks), Moby (81 tracks), Rammstein (68 tracks), Paul Oakenfold (58 tracks), and others should appear more frequently, but such is not the case. So Metallica has done an ‘I Disappear’ from my playlist for the next couple of days/weeks.
I’m glad to see the recent McDonald’s law suit dismissed (free NYT reg. req.):
“If a person knows or should know that eating copious orders of supersized McDonald’s products is unhealthy and may result in weight gain, it is not the place of the law to protect them from their own excesses.”
“Nobody is forced to eat at McDonald’s. (Except, perhaps, parents of small children who desire McDonald’s food, toy promotions or playgrounds, and demand their parents’ accompaniment.)”
In other not-so-good news for the company, they posted their first ever quarterly loss - mostly due to restructuring writeoffs, and the closing of some poorly performing outlets.
Just got done watching The Two Towers - saw half yesterday, half today. Great stuff! I think having an actual battle at last really livened things up, even if it your were left feeling like it was only Aragon and five other guys who ever did any of the fighting.
Seeing the Ents in action gave me quite a chuckle… esp. the scene where one ent (thanks Kristen) picks an orc up by the legs, and swings him around like a baseball bat, knocking down other orcs… HAHA!
Things did seem quite compressed at times, but I think that’s unavoidable. I look forward to seeing the next movie on something other than my 17” monitor though.
In Brazil, surfers are attracted to the Araguari river not only for it’s twice-daily tidal waves, but for what lies beneath those waves… Piranha! Thousands of the flesh-eating fish dwell beneath the water’s surface, ready to swallow up any unsuspecting bovine that should wade in for a dip, or surfer who should lose their footing. Apparently they’re trying to market it as a tourist attraction.
A research study at Imperial College in London, UK suggests that we may be able to enhance our memories by as much as 10% using neurofeedback techniques. Neurofeedback involves teaching people to control their brainwaves, thereby stabilising brain activity. I’d give it a try, even if it’s just to help me remember where I left that $100 bill I had lying around here somewhere.
Jeremy is now backtracking his trackbacks. Confused? Yes, it may take a few seconds to work that one out, but it’s doable.
“Now that TrackBack’s enabled I can see incoming pings to posts. What I need next is a way to display outbound pings. BurningBird to the rescue (and then some)! BackTrack uses MT’s <$MTPingsSent$> to direct outbound pings to a PHP file which then not only provides links to any pinged articles but lists all the other pings those articles have received.”
Pretty nifty wouldn’t you say!?
Seems like Jamiroquai star Jay Kay has more driving experience than just the filming of the Cosmic Girl music video. TopGear, the BBC’s weekly motoring program, recently put a number of celebs in a reasonably priced Suzuki compact to see who would be the fastest around their test track. Jay Kay burned some serious rubber to obliterate everyone else’s times, and come within 2 seconds of the lap time posted by the show’s test driver, The Stig (secretly believed to be former F1 racing driver Nigel Mansell). Impressive showing.
For you newshounds out there, OnlineNewspapers links to thousands of online newspapers from around the globe. The interface isn’t beautiful, but gets the job done - allowing you to jump to a region of choice quickly and painlessly.
Against my better judgement I ended up heading out to Pub 18 with Ovidiu and Maria (his wife) last night. We arrived late, around 9pm - we were suppossed to be there at 8pm - so we got some really shitty seats. One of the band members was late coming in from the countryside, so things didn’t start until 10pm anyway. The place wasn’t too smoke-filled when we arrived, but worsened as the evening wore on: Maria’s eyes were stinging by the time the band started.
El Neagra should probably be described as reggae - not really me thing. The lead singer was pretty decent though, and the girls dancing on the tables for free shots of tequila more than made up for my lack of interest in the group’s style. Service sucked, we only managed to get one round of Cuba Libres (rum & coke) before the band started, and had to wait until the interval to order a bottle of wine.
Things finished up at midnight, kind of early for my tastes, but then it was probably better that I didn’t spend too much time in there breathing in all that smoke when my cold isn’t totally gone yet. Driving home wasn’t too bad, the streets aren’t covered with 10cm of ice as they have been every other winter I’ve spent in Romania. The mist coming off the lake near my house at around 1am was incredible - thick as pea soup - impossible to see the lights of the car in front of us on the bridge between two sections of the lake.
Jason putting his imgination to work with the this piece:
“We didn’t notice until the fifth grade that each time Leonard was upset, it would start to rain… To this day I swear I can’t help wondering where Leonard is when I read about things like that cyclone that just tore through the Solomon Islands or about how an electrical storm wiped out an entire water polo team.”
Another one of my favorites of his work.
Also looking forward to working with Textpattern, Lou Quillo offers his insight on Dean Allen’s forthcoming CMS. I like what Lou spells out on the XML front too.
I was kinda pissed when I had to hit the sack early last night (2:20am), but there was a power failure, and not much I could do. They were actually laying new cable this morning when I woke up at 6am, but the power didn’t come back on until just now. My eyes aren’t as bloodshot this morning as they were yesterday, so maybe it was a good thing.
I’m still a little blocked up from that cold last week (just about everyone I know here has gone down with it since then), so I’m having a tough time deciding if I should go and see my friend’s band play at this bar tonight. I don’t want to go and aggravate my condition, just as it seems I’m getting over it, by spending a few hours in a smoke-filled pub. On the other hand, I’d enjoy the photo opportunity. Decisions, decisions.
I just thought it was quite funny to see the first Microsoft dividends on the horizon, just after Slate had run the headline: “Why cash-rich companies like Dell and Microsoft don’t (and won’t) pay dividends.”
They’ve always said you can sue for -anything- in America, but some days it’s just ridiculous.
Relatives of two people killed in the Washington-region sniper case filed a suit today against the manufacturer of the Bushmaster XM-15 rifle used in the shootings and the store where it was bought or stolen. The suit, seeking unspecified damages, accuses the manufacturer and store of “gross negligence” that “caused injuries and death”.”
Does this mean that I can sue Sony the next time my buddy throws his playstation2 at me, or how about suing baseball manufacturers for that broken window when I was nine-years-old.
Lufthansa will now be offering Internet connection on their long-haul flights, starting with a trial program on one of their trans-atlantic routes. BA is due to start a similar program from next month, and I look forward to other airlines picking up on this. I really don’t mind dropping a few extra bonus miles on being able to use the net on my long-haul flights.
Typically DVD/movie selection is pitiful, and you either end up watching the same film 3 times, or you give up, and try to to end it all with a few bottles of red wine (I’m not talking about those teeny tiny bottles either). Now though, you can actually do something: blog, browse, catch up on correspondence, work, video-conference, chat,… anything! Of course now I’ll just have to wait unil I invest in a new notebook, and get one of those inflight power adapters.
Yesterday, Mark linked to this tip on how to keep avocados fresh. Won’t help me though, don’t need it. Avocados, or Avo’s as I like to call them, in my house have about a snowball’s chance in hell of lasting any longer than is necessary for them to ripen. I really love them. You can chop them up into a salad, serve them along with any meal - sliced in half, with a dash of pepper, and a splash of vinegar, cream them and put them on a sandwhich, use ‘em for guacamole with nachos, or even throw them on a pizza! [Drools…]
Be sure to cast your vote for the New 7 Wonders of the World. My selection includes: The Great Wall of China, The Eiffel Tower, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Empire State Building, Taj Mahal, and the Statues of Easter Island. I can’t really decide on a seventh. How about you?
Think twice about what the neighbours might think next time you get pissed at your computer, and threaten to take it’s life.
“A 32-year-old Boulder man who had opened his apartment’s patio door to enjoy Wednesday’s unusually warm weather was later overheard screaming threats and seen waving what appeared to be a handgun, prompting a maintenance worker to call police. Officers, as a precaution, evacuated the man’s apartment building and called SWAT officers to assist in defusing the situation. It turned out that the man was simply upset at his computer — which he had called a “bitch” he “wanted to kill,” police said”.
Imagine that.
# Thumbs up to Manchester United for keeping the pressure on Arsenal in the Premiership.
# Poor Anna, I sense there is an unwritten rule somewhere that says Woman’s Tennis cannot be championed by someone as sexy as her. No fears, there’s always a spot for you on my payroll dear.
# Digging their own grave again, Formula 1 sports chiefs are trying to pull the plug on drivers aids again. I’m afraid they don’t seem to realise that this is only going to spread the field further apart. The move will only separate the men from the boys, meaning talent like Schumacher, Barrichello, Montoya, Coulthard, and Raikkonen will only pull further away from the rest of the pack, not heat things up between the top dogs. In the meantime, the move may discourage constructors from investing in the sport, and thus reduce funding. F1 is a testing ground for technological advances in the motoring/aerodynamic field. When the bosses move to curb opportunities for research and advancement, they stifle investor interest, sponsorhips are lost, teams drop out, and shit happens. I swear Mosely and Ecclestone are on crack.
I was hoping that All About Hangovers would be packed with details on causes, prevention, cures, and dispell many of the myths surrounding hangovers, but it’s lacking. Still worth 30 seconds of your time though if you want a general overview of why your head is ringing.
The W3C has Mark Pilgrim all riled up with then new XHTML 2.0 working draft. So much so that he’s gone back to HTML 4.0!
“XHTML 2.0 isn’t meant to be backwardly compatible. But damn it, I’ve done everything the W3C has ever recommended… Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end… Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.”
Ughh!! Woke up yesterday with a sore throat, today it’s a head cold. That’s the end of my weekend. Hope yours is going better.
The family computer of an old friend had been acting up, and I ‘volunteered’ to take a look at it yesterday. Whenever you offer to do this kind of thing of course you need to prepare yourself for whatever you may find. I don’t have a problem with old, sluggish hardware, it’s the plethora of utterly useless system tray applications, broken shortcuts, and poor file system organization that gets my goat up.
I can live with someone having a k6-400 - after all, they only need the PC for e-mail, web browsing, excel, word, and winamp. When you browse to “c:" and find five folders, and a thousand files, instinct kicks in and you close the window immediately, and then try again - hoping that you didn’t really just see what you think you saw. When you see it again you list the partition contents over and over, dazed, staring off into space, eager to follow another instinct put the drive out of it’s memory.
It was horrifying I tell you! The c: root was littered with executables, saved game files, word files, temp files, html files, mp3s, and DOS files that I last saw when I used win 3.11. Just about the only directories present were ‘windows’, an empty ‘my documents’, ‘program files’, ‘need for speed’ - containing 3 failed installs of the game, and a ‘backup’ directory that contained backups of backups - all of which were identical.
Fixed everything in the end, but I’m slated to ‘take a look’ at another friend’s computer on Sunday: “Oh! The Joy!”
I can see this being a problem. I don’t mind paying a tax to be legally allowed to ‘copy music for personal use’, it beats the hell out of paying $15-20 for an album. Only thing is, less than 5% of what I burn is music/audio.
At $0.21 per CD, that adds $21 on top of base price of a 100-CD spindle - nearly doubling the total cost. Serious overkill for anyone who’s archiving data only. Now they’re talking about raising the levy to $0.59 and slapping it onto more than just CD-Rs:
“the Canadian Private Copying Collective, the music industry group that collects the levy, has proposed new levies to be applied to any device that can store music, such as removable hard drives, recordable DVDs, Compact Flash memory cards and — of course — MP3 players.”
Whoa whoa whoa, let’s slow down there! Taxing sales of removable drives and flash memory?? I think someone’s getting a ‘little’ greedy. Especially considering that:
“the CPCC has not yet distributed a cent of the millions it has collected in fees over the years to musicians.”
This could ruin someone’s day.
Dean Allen is getting ready to release Textpattern, a CMS that he’s been working on. Featuring Dean’s very own text generator (Textile), this promises to be a powerful, complete, and highly practical application. I look forward to its public release.
Mark Pilgrim reviews Apple’s new Safari browser, created for Mac OS X. Yes folks, yet another browser for web designers to have to deal with.
Also released at MacWorld, the new 17” Powerbook is to die for. Fibre optic backlit keys, with an ambient light sensor, and a slot loading superdrive - these guys are really on top of their game. I’m just a little disappointed that the CPU speed it still pegged at 1Ghz. Maybe a little too large to be ‘ultra-portable’, but still very nice.
Thanks to Kristen, I know now that I’m not the only one who isn’t a microwave popcorn chef. I’m not really a popcorn lover, and I usually ruin the microwave stuff, so can anyone explain to me why I have boxes of the stuff in my kitchen cupboard, or why when I get through with screwing up each and every pack, I always pick up another box at the supermarket?
Talking of microwaves and burning stuff reminds me of when I popped two philly chesse-steak subs -leftovers from the night before - into the micro, forgetting that inside the paper bag, the subs were wrapped in aluminium foil. After about ten seconds, sparks started flying in every direction, igniting the paper bag, sending flames through microwave’s air vent, it was quite a show: one of those mesmerising moments when whatever’s happening is just ‘too cool’ and you overlook the implications of action - like the dorm burning down.
Fortunately, concern for the well-being of my food kicked in, so I shut off the micro, beat down the flames consuming what was left of the paper bag, and checked on my food. Sadly it was too late, and my subs tasted more like charred paper than anything else.
Slashdot links to Fortune Magazine’s list of the 100 best companies to work for. IBM, Microsoft, and Intel are all in there, so are P&G, and Colgate-Palmolive, and FedEx beat out UPS. Sorry Mike, Sun Micro are there, but no mention of PWC.
According to an NYT article (free reg. req.), a defense research agency is pooling ideas for creating a device that can ‘detect individuals by their body odor’.
It seems a little far-fetched, but may actually be possible according to research studies in mice, and the commonly-held belief that dogs can recognize individuals by their scent. I’m doubtful of the applicability of such a technology though. Would security forces wonder through the streets of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia hoping the device registers something? Do they already have a sample of what Bin Laden smells like, or do they plan on asking him and other terrorists to donate a sample?
I have 1,410,000 lei in my pocket! That’s the equivalent of $40, and may not get you much in most places, but it can go reasonably far here in Romania. Last night, for example, three rounds of darts (3 people each round), 6 racks of 8-ball, 2x 500ml beers, an espresso, a bottle of mineral water, and a tip for the bitchy waitress added up to a measly 440,000 lei ($13)… not bad!
On a sidenote, Romania’s equivalent of the TV gameshow “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, is called “Who Wants to be a Billionare?” Don’t be fooled though, one billion lei only converts to around $30,000.
I wish everyone a very happy and prosperous 2003! May the year ahead be filled with new opportunities, friendships, and good health for you, your family and your friends. I hope you will all find success waiting for you wherever you choose to set foot.
Enjoy the rest of the day close to family and friends, whether you’ve still got a few bottles of wine to finish off, some sleep to catch up on, or even if you’re just going to mooch around the house like me.
