Don't call me, me phone's been stolen!

28.08.08 (category: news)
CHEEKY BASTARDS! is what I yelled at'em.
Apart from being separated from my love, my Nokia N95, I'm perfectly fine.
posted by Sigg3 @ 9:25 pm
2 comments!

Link of the day: Bureau of Public Secrets

26.08.08 (category: links)
The Bureau of Public Secrets website is 10 years old! Inaugurated 22 August 1998, the site now includes over 600 webpages in 13 languages, and has received over 5,000,000 visits from people in more than 220 countries. For this 10th anniversary, Ken Knabb has posted a brief account of the development of the site, along with a few remarks on the radical potentials and limits of the Internet.

Link of the day: BoPS: Ten Years on the Web

Writes Ken Knabb:

I continued surfing the Web, discovering and exploring countless sites of every type and quality while simultaneously noting email addresses of people or organizations I thought might be interested in my site. I began by searching for anyone who seemed to be interested in the situationists. Then I hunted up all the anarchist sites I could find; some of those sites had links to other anarchist sites, many of which in turn had their own link lists. . . . I did the same thing with various ultraleftist currents, then ventured into more eclectic areas — Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, Amnesty International, prisoner support groups, antiwar groups, radical co-ops, alternative communities, infoshops, surrealists, ecology activists, pirate radio stations, just about any halfway radical sites in East Europe or the Third World, and so on and on. Once I had accumulated a significant number of email addresses in these various categories I would send them an email announcing my new website.

A quick look at the MSI Wind Notebook U100

19.08.08 (category: computerwelt)
As I promised while having a go at the Asus EeePC 900 I would do a quick look at the MSI Wind which I ordered at the same time. Please note throughout this "preview" that this particular model had a regular SATA drive, that is a mechanical disk drive, as opposed to a Solid state drive (SSD). I ran PassMark's HDD performance test (at default settings with 1 drive) and it scored roughly 322.5 out of 400. Overall PassMark rating Performace Test 6.1: 202.6 out of 300 (full benchmarks here).
Curiously the single harddisk was formatted thus: WINRE (3.01GB FAT32), OS_Install C: (40GB NTFS) and D: (32GB NTFS).

Also of note: They call it 'the Wind Notebook' when this is clearly in the sub-notebook or netbook range of portable computers.

Specs:

CPU: Intel Atom 1.6Ghz (N270) 

WiFi: Realtek 802.11 b/g Mini card 

OS: Win XP Home version 2002 SP3 

HDD: SATA 80GB 

RAM: 1GB DDRII 

LCD: 10" WSVGA (non-glare) 

Other: Bluetooth v.2, EDR, Webcam 

3 cell battery (I guess this is optional) 

Like the EeePC the MSI Wind comes with a sexy sleeve



It's so SHINY! You can see the reflection of the lamp above it.
Extra button stickers for special chars (+2 CDs as well)

Ports:

LEFT: AC, Kensington lock hatch, 2x USB 2.0 

BACK: none 

Right: Ethernet, VGA, 1x Speaker & 1x Headphone 3.5mm jack, MMC-SD card reader, 1x USB 2.0 

ABOVE LCD: Webcam (center) Built-in mic (to the right) 

• Obama-like couple grinning in the park 
• Four middle-aged Germans dancing polka in sweaters 
• Strawberry-like rose leaves with a white paper ribbon over 'em 
• Gay boy listening to music on a skyscraper (holding the headphones with both hands like a fucking idiot) 

Boot-times (auto-login):

Measured at pressing POWER to fully usable interface: 52.85 secs

Measured from BIOS screen to usable interface: 43.54 secs

Boot-down from interface to POWER OFF: 13.45 secs

 

Please note: Windows Operative systems have poor bootup practices, allowing the user to move around and do things although many processes aren't finished booting yet. This is why Windows seems so slow in the beginning - it is still booting. 

Here's a picture of the BIOS by American Megatrends, inc.
I noted that AHCI was disabled by default.


..and the msi Wind browsing sigg3.net.. awww!

Link of the day: Add it to my wishlist

(category: links)
Behold the EYE MASSAGER from the 1920s:

Apparently it was not enough to have a gadget for massaging the body. By the 1920s, it was also deemed necessary to devise a mechanism to massage the eyeballs. This convoluted gadget was pressed to the face.
The user would then operate the small lever to compress the rubber bellows which would in turn emit cool puffs of air directly onto the eyeballs.

And back again..

(category: thoughts)
Now I'm even back at work. That's it, the summer of music is over, as is my holiday.
Next up: SEMINAR OF DEATH followed by parties.
Where they don't serve food, but small open sandwiches with fancy names.

It's drawing near to the end now, the end of the summer in its entirety, and with it comes that age of man that is dark and gloomy and kind of thin around the ankles. Autumn's what I'm talking about. And you can feel it in nature too. It's coming. The bumblebee that's having a hell of a time flying past the monitors and into the window knows it. He occasionally gets out through the open window only to return again and continue the routine. It's a buddhist bumblebee indeed and what else makes a bumblebee but its deeds? There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like a fucking idiot.

The trees know it too, but they're too arrogant to care. The leaves are still neon green, but you can see that they know. The creepers however, they know it like the inside of somebody's pocket. They're withering, true, but before that they'll turn blood red as if a giant in that time of month had had a little accident all over the building. A lot of people like autumn. Well I do too, I just don't like them.

The squirrels in the yard, well... Actually it looks like they're building some sort of missile-like structure. Seems like a primitive cargo cult in the advanced stage. Someone's been showing them too much NASA television dammit, and now they're all going to Mars! And I? I'm headed for lunch.
posted by Sigg3 @ 12:14 pm
3 comments!

On the boat again...

13.08.08 (category: news)
Bollicks to this, I'm off to Copenhagen to drink some Elephant Beer.
posted by Sigg3 @ 2:46 pm
no comments?

Bigfoot finally proved?

(category: links)
I'm an avid reader of various cryptozoology sites, that is, websites covering the news of cryptids and the cryptozoology community. A 'cryptid' is any creature unknown to science that exist or previously existed and has been described in folklore and legends. Take the dragon of the fairy tale for instance. Or the Loch Ness monster 'Nessie'. Or the abominable snowman, the yeti, sasquatch or more notoriously, the Bigfoot (all names for larger human-like hominoids).

A couple of weeks back Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, two Georgia residents, claimed that they had not only seen or videotaped bigfoot -- claims we hear and get to see on youtube at least once a month -- but that they had killed one and claimed its carcass. The two army dudes seem really interested in making money, and they've teamed up with Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. with an awful website where you can buy lots of useless material. They seem like a couple of fools, to be quite frank. But that doesn't mean what they could have found is mere fool's gold.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 12, 2008
BIGFOOT BODY FOUND
DNA evidence and photo evidence to be presented at a PRESS CONFERENCE to be held on
Date: Friday, August 15, 2008
Time: From 12Noon-1:00pm

Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. Menlo Park, California
Tom Biscardi, CEO

BIGFOOT BODY FOUND - EVIDENCE AND DNA DETAILS TO BE PRESENTED

Is it real? It certainly looks like the real deal, and with a surprising variety of features.
The hominoid (please note, not hominid) body, found in the Georgia woods, is now in a secure location, under armed guard, and set to be examined by a battery of academic scholars, skeptical scientists, Bigfoot researchers, and debunking writers.
Who is to say the discovery of Bigfoot won’t happen this way?

Truckin' August 2008, Vol. 7, Issue 8

12.08.08 (category: literature)
He did it again. Pauly forgot my piece!
This sure brings back some memories from early childhood...
You see, this was way back in the day, during the depressions (yeah, plural) and my mother had barely given birth to me before she forgot me in the bus stop outside the hospital. There were no ambulances back then either so she had to take the bus. The paramedics were too depressed to be paramedics, and all the bus drivers were alcoholics just like today. Being that the times were hard (back then the times were so hard that people didn't speak about the times, everything just took ages) my mother rushed to work one and a half hour after giving birth to me.

And there I was. Sitting in the bus stop shelter, watching the rain from the cosy warmth of my dry newspaper. Incidently, that's how I learned to read as well. Babies are very perceiptive and as a newborn having barely met my mother (she was a stranger to me then) I felt more in touch with those inviting looking letters, the nourishing ink and the funny smell. Add a few years and here I am today! Or I should have been had it not been for Dr. Pauly spending too much time with his own medicine. But I'm not bitter. Just like I learned to forgive my mother some fifteen years later, I will be able to forgive Pauly one day, given he straightens out the error of his ways and commit himself fully to the dao teachings that he spoke of so dearly so many years ago. Words about a horseman, some trees, a mountain, a midget and a bowl of fish.

FYI: all of this means that you'll have to wait until September for my third and last installment in the One Night Out trilogy. Instead you're gonna have to settle with this lot. Which seems, not much to my surprise, to be a sturdy group of fellow planet inhabitants or something. Titles look kinda interesting don't they? Let's give 'em a click. (By the way, Pauly sent me an e-mail at the last minute asking me to re-send the story but at the time I was being baptized in Guinnes at the Temple Bar in Dublin, Ireland. Sry.)



Even More Existentialist Conversations with Strippers by Paul McGuire
On the third day of Prozac? That pretty much summed up my visit to the afternoon shift. The stripper was drunk, sedated on happy pills, sloppy, and slurring her speech like Albert Finney at happy hour...

Explaining Amphetamines With Words by Sean A. Lovelace
See the thing is an injection is a lot like a bullet from a gun, or words of anger, or like kisses—you can't get it back. And that Valium was working, working its way through his body, his veins, slowing things down, slowing, his pulse, his already pretty-fucking-slow pulse, and then he was, he was, well, he was dead...

Black Hole Sun by Betty Underground
I couldn't get her face out of my head. Blank and full of jealousy. Not directed at me, but me as part of the female species. As a representative of the sex that threatened her the most...

Separate From Things We Didn't Want A Part Of by Philip D. Brown
My friend fell asleep but the girl didn't and though it was dark I could see her watching me. She didn't look capable of sleep or even rest so I told her that I could help. She told me that needles were out of the question because they were an invasion she wasn't willing to accept...

Capistrano by Brad Willis
If the doctor says I'm living, he obviously is lying or seriously misguided. If he tells me I'm living, I'm going to laugh and tell him he better get busy dying for me, because somebody fucking has to...
posted by Sigg3 @ 10:41 pm
no comments?

RIP Isaac Hayes a.k.a Chef (1942 – 2008)

(category: news)
When I was fourteen me, my brother and my mother moved to a new place, and I was lucky to have an easy transition despite the particular stage of hormonial horror I was in. That was mainly thanks to Michael Jackson, computer games and a fuck-all sentiment towards the world, which ironically made me a lot of new friends at the place during the year we lived there. Heck, I even had a girlfriend for a while.

One of my friends was a very well-built kid people used to call Cartman. He used to imitate Cartman too. It took for them to show me the glory of South Park one day for me to understand what they meant. And after they did, that guy became the closest RL Cartman lookalike I've ever seen. The next summer Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls topped the hitlists in Norway.

Then I recieved news from Pauly about Hayes' death:

On August 10, 2008, Hayes' wife found him on the floor near a treadmill at his home located just east of Memphis, Tennessee. A Shelby County, Tennessee sheriff's deputy responded to Hayes' home. He was taken to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, where he was pronounced dead at 2:08pm, at the age of 65. The cause of death was not immediately known, though the stroke he suffered in 2006 is considered a factor. At the time of his death, he was preparing his first new studio album since 1995.
Wikipedia: Isaac Hayes' stroke and death

I was sick of it before it started

10.08.08 (category: thoughts)
I was going to blog yesterday about the Tom Waits concert and our trip to Dublin but when I turned on the radio to have an afternoon nap, I was ambushed by the sounds of shelling, shooting and people in pain. The sound of a man wailing outside a bombed building with a vain hope that some of his family were still alive really put me off anything I wanted to do. I am just so disappointed in the world right now. I am talking of the declaration of war on Russia by the democracy of Georgia.






Pictures from Gori where Russia bombed apartment buildings, courtesy of NRK


Map courtesy of BBC News

Georgia is a small nation with a population the size of Norway, that were among the first to break out of the Soviet Union in the 90's. It consists of many different people and religions, and not all of them want to be a part of a nationalistic Georgian state but feel more at home in the ethnic diversity of Russia. Of course there are the strategic advantages of these areas too.

If all the different groups in North Ossetia takes part in the South Ossetia conflict it will put fire to the fuel in North as well as South Caucasus. The danger is that the conflict will spread over the Russian border into the Caucasus and Abkhazia, and all eyes go to the number one nuclear power in the world TO NOT INTERFERE DIRECTLY or else we'll have a full-scale confrontation between the largest and the 2nd largest nuclear powers in the world. Quote:

But emissaries from the US and Europe who are Nato members may not be seen as honest brokers by the Kremlin when it comes to Georgia, the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall says.
The danger now is that Russia will not only use this crisis to demonstrate its military power in the region, but argue it is time to redraw the map, she adds.

Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili has called upon his country to "mobilise" in the face of "a very blunt Russian aggression". Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had reports of "ethnic cleansing" in villages.
Russian tanks have reportedly moved towards the capital of the region, which has been under heavy bombardment from Georgian forces.

A quick look at Asus' Eee PC 900 16G Linux

07.08.08 (category: computerwelt)
I got into the office this evenong to do some audio recording. I'm still on holiday so I wasn't intending to do any work, but at my desk I found three packages I've been expecting for a long time: the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, an MSI Wind and the Asus EeePC. In my line of work I get to play with just about anything, no cost whatsoever. But since Lady C has contracted a fever and is waiting for me at home with a bukkit o' Chinese food I'm outta here real quick. Here's my first glance at the Asus Eee PC 900 (Pearl White) 8.9" with SSD hdd running Linux.


Two small giants waiting for a mission.. I'll compare them later.


I put my hand in the picture for measure. The gap beneath the lcd is where the battery fits in.
(Read more about my deformed finger in Look away! I'M HIDEOUS!)

Specs:

CPU: Intel Mobile CPU & Chipset 

WiFi: 802.11b/g 

OS: Linux (Xandros) 

HDD: 16GB SSD 

RAM: 1GB DDR2 

10/100 Mbps Ethernet 

1.3 MP Webcam 

ASUS EeePC System BIOS


Running Norwegian Xandros Linux OS using KDE (Desktop environment)


Testing the Webcam app - nice resolution/refresh

Ports:

LEFT: Headphone + mic 3.5mm audio jack, 1x USB 2.0, Ethernet 

BACK: AC 

RIGHT: VGA, 2x USB 2.0, MMC-SD card reader + Kensington lock hatch 

ABOVE LCD: Built-in mic and 1.3 Megapixel webcam 

Boot-times (normal mode, auto-login):

Measured at pressing POWER to fully usable interface: 36.57 secs 

Measured from BIOS screen to usable interfrace: 29.50 secs 

Boot-down from interface to POWER OFF: 09.87 secs 

 

Please note: Xandros Linux has the same poor practice as most Microsoft operation systems. It allows the user access to the user interface before it is finished booting all the processes. Twice during testing the mouse did not respond in about 10-15 seconds after the DE seemed to be fully booted. 

Listing available wifi networks


Checking out this page in the default Firefox browser (v2)

All my subdomains (except www) REMOVED

06.08.08 (category: computerwelt)
Just thought I'd give you a heads up. I haven't had the time, energy or willpower to make an effort to update this site for a while, but things are changing. Especially since Koew gave me so many good recommendations for reading material on design, usability, flexibility, search engine optimization, premature porn prevention and general pwnage and Michael H. Park pimpage. Yes, I will change this site. Or die tryin'.

First things first, I have bought domains, two of them hosted on my server.
Second, the subdomains had to go. It was me, not them. And they cost money.

Dead URLs:

• me.sigg3.net 
• art.sigg3.net 
• poems.sigg3.net 
• meta.sigg3.net 

• sigg3.net/myself (status: AWAKE) 
• sigg3.net/art (status: DEAD) 
• sigg3.net/art/poems.html (status: DEAD) 
• sigg3.net/meta (status: SLUMBER)