pontefract

fleetfootmike @ 4:33pm: For any Show of Hands fans near London....
...or folks planning to be in the UK the week before Van der Filk:

Show of Hands, Live, 100 Club, Oxford Street - Tues 2nd Feb
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/68229

jwz @ 9:50pm: dnalounge update

DNA Lounge update, wherein the holiday cheer continues apace.

jwz @ 8:47pm: "Little things hitting each other! That is what I like!" -- Napoleon

jwz @ 12:27pm: Oceansize

suitandtieguy @ 4:50am: RIP Brittany Murphy
coke. it's gotta be coke. or anorexia.

i remember liking her in that made-for-tv movie about an abusive married cop boyfriend who winds up killing her at the end. and Clueless.

fleetfootmike @ 6:58am: Support your local guitar tech...
...is a thing you'll find me saying a lot.

Mine is Jon Haire, handily halfway between me and bardling on the way into Peterborough. He's being doing it for nearly two decades, and IIRC the first repair/setup he actually did for me or friends was the neck repair on demomeyes' classical after it fell over and broke.

Since then he's been my first port of call with any problem, as well as any new guitar - I pretty much budget an extra 50-80 quid on the price (depending on what it needs) for any instrument I buy.

Last week, he got my new (to me) 12 string. Very nice Fender smallish-bodied cutaway electro-acoustic, but I broke the first bridge pin trying to restring it, so I figured I may as well let Jon have it. Got it back on Saturday and... wow.

I didn't think a £210 12-string could HAVE an action that low and playable, or sound so rich (it's got a set of Elixir 12's on it, tuned down to D, and through Jon's (really rather tiny) rig in the workshop it just sounds IMMENSE. He's put well more than I paid him (£86 for full setup, fret dress, and some quite serious work on the bridge and saddle) on the value of the guitar to me - in fact, it plays and sounds better than the £600 Breedlove I tried a few months ago.

The man is amazing :D The things I particularly like - he's an engineer as well as a guitarist, so your problems are dealt with without bull and hearsay, but with common sense. He's always willing to natter (which is why he won't deal with customers Mon-Wed so he can get work done!), and he's a thoroughly nice guy who enjoys his work. It's been a pleasure watching him /improve/ too - he was never bad to start with, but lately the stuff he hands back to me is just masterful.

My Gazuki and the_magician's electric 'zouk are in with him now, and I can't wait till Jan 5th when I get 'em back :D I'm seriously tempted to blow another £200 quid on getting him to do my three LAG six string acoustics as well.

[As an aside, I have to say I'm rather spoilt, since if I lived nearer Northampton, I'd just take stuff into Paul Creedy instead :D]

jwz @ 5:08pm: A Day in the Life of a Turret

jwz @ 1:58pm: fixed with.

suitandtieguy @ 1:48am: cabinet painting status

jwz @ 3:10pm: Today in Bug Sodomy news

Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises

Male bedbugs will schtup anything, and when they do, their stabby little penises can do great damage to one another. Female bedbugs have some "down there" armor that absorbs the punishing blows of the bedbug's love-spear, but males lack this protection. A pheromone discovered by a Swedish researcher can cause male bedbugs to kill each other with their penises through uncontrolled shagging.

Previous torture phalluses.

jwz @ 3:05pm: Today in Sodomy news

Eighth Graders In Oral Plea

A pair of Georgia eighth graders this week copped to public indecency charges after they engaged in oral sex while a substitute teacher was helping other students at the front of the classroom. [...] As part of the plea, sodomy charges against both students were dropped, and a probation violation count leveled against the boy was dismissed. After being held at a youth detention facility, the girl was released to her parents's custody. The boy, however, remains locked up, according to a law enforcement official.

jwz @ 6:41pm: Playstation and Facebook: unclear on the concept.

I saw that in the latest PS3 OS update, they added Facebook integration. Now, there's one and exactly one thing that could possibly be useful for, right? You've already thought of it in the time it took you to read that sentence. The one useful thing would be to unify your friends lists, so that your PS3 can automatically know which of your Facebook friends are online without you having to search for and then manually enter all of their Playstaion Network IDs.

Guess what, it doesn't do that. All it does is make it so that the PS3 can spam your Facebook Status every time you buy a game, and every time you upload a trophy. Who would ever, ever want it to do either of these things?

I'll bet a "Social Media Consultant" was involved.

jwz @ 6:14pm: tap

suitandtieguy @ 4:18pm: from the same kind of thinking that brought us the Syphilis Network
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/star-trek-keeps-women-computer-science/

yes, what we need to make life truly fair is bland conformity. thanks, assholes.

the irony of this conjecture is overpowering.

jwz @ 2:00pm: I hate it when that happens.

Fortunately the utility belt that was provided for him contained shark repellant.

A civilian passenger in an air force display plane accidentally activated the ejector seat while reaching for something to steady himself during a mid-air manoeuvre. It is thought he activated the ejector seat after lurching forward during an aerobatic manoeuvre and accidentally pulling on the black and yellow emergency handle between his legs.

jwz @ 1:48am: Your tax dollars at work.

Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Today, the Air Force is buying hundreds of Reaper drones, a newer model, whose video feeds could be intercepted in much the same way as with the Predators, according to people familiar with the matter. A Reaper costs between $10 million and $12 million each and is faster and better armed than the Predator. General Atomics expects the Air Force to buy as many as 375 Reapers.

marta, posting in paidmembers @ 3:01pm: Statistics for Paid Accounts
Statistics are here!

You can now see the number of people who have visited your journal, your individual entries, a chart of comments, readers of the RSS feed of your journal, and the last 100 logged-in users who have visited your journal directly (if you've enabled My Guests).

Things you should know:
-Stats are completely anonymous (only My Guests is tied to username); only numbers are recorded, not any other information
-The times and dates in the graph are based on server time, which is UTC/GMT
-The light grey number at the top left corner of the graph is the statistical outlier
-While the graph may go back in time to this summer, the stats-gathering server was not on constantly, so previous stats may be missing. Today, and going forward, full stats are collected and displayed.
-If you opt out of My Guests (meaning that your username will not show up on other people's reports and you will not be able to view your My Guests tab), it does not affect your use of the rest of the Stats - if you're a Paid or Permanent user, you'll still be able to see all the rest of the information on this feature

( Page-by-page walkthrough )

marta, posting in paidmembers @ 2:59pm: $10 coupon for your friends!
If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now send 10 of your non-Paid friends a $10 coupon. Your friend will be able to purchase a Paid Account for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25).

• All Paid and Permanent accounts can send out the coupons by clicking here (it's also under Friends -> Holiday promotion in the site header)
• You can also send to people not on your Friends list by manually entering the username in the field provided
• If your friend declines the invitation, it will be returned to your available invitation pool and you'll be able to send to someone else
• You can send the invitations until January 15th

jwz @ 12:33pm: Repository of All Human Knowledge - In Anime.

Our work here will not be complete until every Wikipedia page contains an "In Anime" sub-section.

• Crucifixion - In Anime.
  
• Asperger syndrome - In Anime.
  
• Previously, previously.
  

Is there a blog that highlights the stupidest Wikipedia events? I subscribe to the RSS feed of the Lamest edit wars article, but I find that insufficient.

jwz @ 1:32am: LANDMARK TOMATO Replaced by FESTIVE TOPIARY.

jwz @ 5:26pm: Strandbeest papercraft

jwz @ 5:21pm: Wicket of Love!

Hellfire holidays: Round 2 of the Pervert's Grand Tour.

A creative leap of imagination is needed to picture Covent Garden, now given over to flower markets and Body Shops, as the city's most sordid red light district, where, in the seedy Shakespeare's Head, waiter-pimps would set gentlemen up with ladies like Oyster Moll, who would "open the wicket of love's bear garden to any bold sportsman who has a venturesome mind to give a run to his puppy."

jwz @ 5:18pm: Pixie Dust Junkie

jwz @ 5:12pm: Zoho mechanical cheesecake

jwz @ 4:39pm: SFPD hates bicyclists

Remember two months ago when netik was hit-and-run on his bicycle by a car? You know, then incident where we provided SFPD with a photograph of the license plate, several witnesses, and a report from the responding paramedics?

You might be wondering what they did about that.

The answer is absolutely nothing.

John called SFPD, went down to the police station in person and filed a report (case 091-062-114), and after several followup phone calls over the next few weeks was told:

"No action has been taken on your case, but you can call the DMV and get the person's plate if you want to file a civil suit."

Apparently prosecuting hit-and-run drivers is beneath the notice of our police department, and the piece of shit driver who almost killed us both gets off scott free.

Which brings us to this story I came across yesterday:

Streetsblog: A Troubling Story of SFPD Bias Against Bicycle Riders

And now to the very disconcerting part about the police. As I tried to get information from three SFPD police officers on the scene of the crash, two of them showered me with unadulterated disdain for bicyclists and pedestrians. One officer said she thought bicyclists and pedestrians are always at fault in crashes and that they are stupid for not watching out for drivers. She was very upset with cyclists running red lights. She told me the bicyclist was at fault in this crash without any knowledge that a witness was saying the opposite.

Another officer complained that bicyclists should be ticketed a lot more, then he said that he thought San Francisco bicyclists should all be moved to Treasure Island, where presumably they wouldn't be in the way. [...] When it dawned on him that his bigotry might make it into my story, given the bright pink SFPD press badge dangling around my neck, he made a slightly menacing reference to memorizing the information on my pass.

In a follow-up interview today, Corujo said that when he was being interviewed by the officers they seemed to have a preconceived idea of what happened, and were fixated on confirming whether the woman had lights on her bike.

"It seems like they were trying to bias the story to even out the score or something," said Corujo. "I don't know if they were even listening to the idea that [the driver] had made an illegal turn."