Fungii.com

Magibon

This chick's videos seem to consist entirely of her silently smiling at the camera. She has big eyes. Fascinating.

Kimmel is fucking Ben Affleck!

If you haven't seen the first video, you really need to see that one first. Hilarious, a lot of celebrities. They need to put out a full resolution, uncensored version of this.

So who's in this video? These are the people I saw, I think:

Jimmy Kimmel
Ben Affleck {duh!}
Brad Pitt
Robin Williams
Cameron Diaz
Huey Lewis
Harrison Ford
Josh Groban
Macy Gray
Justin Timberlake?
(Pat Benatar) <- wrong! It's Joan Jett! Doh! I always get those two mixed up...
Meatloaf

I'm sure there's more, but it's hard see to everybody when the video is that fuzzy.

Craig Ferguson is Tom Cruise

Jerry O'Connell is Tom Cruise

You Tube: You Suck

I have had an account on You Tube for awhile, but I've never really used it. I've only uploaded a couple clips in the whole time I've had it. Today I got an email saying my clip was pulled for "copyright infringement". What a joke! It was a very short [5 seconds or less] clip from Law and Order: CI pointing out a continuity error. At the end of one scene a door is shown opening one way and in the next scene the same door is shown opening from the opposite direction. Obviously they filmed the scenes in different rooms not realizing the layouts weren't the same.

Anyway, from what I understand, this kind of thing falls under "fair dealing" in Canada and is perfectly legal. I can understand You Tube pulling uploads of complete TV shows or movies, but to pull such a small clip? Ridiculous. If they are pulling everything that infringes copyright in such a way, they will have to delete a lot, if not most, of their content.

Oh well, it's not that I use it that much to begin with. Still, it irks me. I notice continuity errors in TV shows quite often and it would be nice to illustrate it by uploading a clip to You Tube. Maybe NBC Universal can't handle any kind of criticism of their programs, the whiny little fuckers.

Dangerous Number

Posts that contain a bad number per day for the last 30 days.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

This has replaced 666 as the number of the beast, apparently.

It's funny that Digg has banned a bunch of submitters [and commenters] that dare speak of that which must not be spoken, and yet Wired has an article up from February 13, 2007 that contains the aforementioned number and what it's all about.

In reference to the Digg brouhaha, here's the rundown.

Now there is a song. Catchy.

"Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann

Google Maps - Old?

I was playing around with Google Maps and of course I checked out my apartment from the satellite view. I thought I saw my car [circled in red] in the parking lot, but then I realized it was in the wrong parking stall so it can't be mine. [Cause I always use my own stall!]

So I then checked out a construction site in downtown Calgary. [the blue square] The Google Maps view showed it as a parking lot, even though right now it is a big hole in the ground and it hasn't been a parking lot since summer. I wonder if all Google maps are this old or if it's just the Canadian ones?

I also checked out Yahoo! Maps for comparison. They don't seem to zoom in as far as Google Maps so I couldn't really tell if that's my car in the parking lot. They use different satellite maps though, cause the pictures do look different. I checked out the construction site downtown and they show the parking lot as well.

I also mapped out a trip with each service. From my place to Sylvan Lake, Alberta:
Yahoo! says it will be 100.4 miles [about 150 kilometers, Yahoo! is not aware of Canadians using the metric system apparently] and travel time is 1 hour 55 minutes.
Google says it will be 173 kilometers and take about 1 hour and 48 minutes.
Google sticks to the main highway while Yahoo! takes a more direct approach using back roads. Google's route is longer, yet takes a shorter [estimated] amount of time.

Flickr

I started uploading pictures to my Flickr account if you want to check it out...

Verizon fails math test

I've been following this Verizon math story all weekend, it's hilarious how Verizon has let this thing snowball way out of proportion just because none of their customer support people will admit that they misquoted their rates and adjust this guy's bill. It's been posted on YouTube, the customer's blog, Metafilter, Slashdot and Digg, as well as many other sites I'm sure. The funniest thing yet is this mashup between the call's recording and Pink Floyd's Money.

Thor rolls a joint

Photo series on flickr. LOL

Bash.org

It was freezing cold at work today and I forgot to bring my gloves! Sucked. It was slow too, so I spent most of my day on this site. Mostly lame but the odd good one. People must think I'm insane when I burst out laughing from outta nowhere. Speaking of laughing out loud, I had some free time after making a delivery at the Petro Can tower so I sat down in the chairs by the revolving doors. Next thing I know, I hear a crunching sound and then screaming. Apparently some kid stuck his head in the revolving door while it was turning, with obvious results. Everybody was just standing there, staring at him, but what can you do? I'm sure he'll think twice about trying that again.

In another building, as I was leaving, there was an old lady just standing there inside the revolving door. The side door was locked so I had to use the revolving door. She freaked out when it started moving. So I walked out and as I was unlocking my bike, I look back and sure enough, there she is, back inside the door, just standing there. Fuck, people are stupid.

mage what should I give sister for unzipping?
Kevyn Um. Ten bucks?
mage no I mean like, WinZip?

Upgraded my modem

Rode down to the Shaw offices yesterday and exchanged my old modem for a new one [Motorola Surfboard SB5100]. It's kind of a mixed bag - web surfing seems a bit faster but usenet is slower. I was getting 800KB/s+ using my old modem on usenet, the new one maxes out at 600KB/s. Normal http stuff seems a bit faster and stabler, or maybe I'm trying to justify me getting this thing. ;) It didn't cost anything, so I didn't lose any money on it. The new modem is much smaller, which is nice, but it has this light that's constantly flashing [PC/Activity] so I've hidden it behind my monitor.

Happy Birfday Leonardo!

Shaw Speed Upgrade

Shaw upgraded their "basic" highspeed cable internet to 5 Mb/s this week [up from 3 Mb/s]. I have one of their old Motorola Cybersurfer Wave modems so I wasn't sure if I would get the faster speeds, as people in the BBR forum said it would only be for people with the newer modems. Shaw's speed test seem to give me close to the 5 Mb/s promised, as well as at least one "outside" speed test [Speakeasy Seattle]. I don't really want to switch modems as I bought this one from Shaw, and it would be a pain to go down there and get a new one. Plus I would probably lose my current IP, which would mean I would have to set up my webserver all over again, not fun. Anyway, it would seem that I'm getting the new speeds as advertised, although it's pretty rare that I actually run into a website that sends data anywhere near that fast.

Google Answers

Slashdot had this posting on Google's new "factual answers" integrated into its search engine results. If you ask the obvious question "What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?", it actually gives you the correct result! Amazing! I tried messing around with this on the Canadian google site, but it wasn't implemented there yet. While I was there, I thought I'd look into this page rank thing that I've heard so much about. My site ranks a 4. Not that good, I guess I should post more often and try to promote it more so I get more inbound links. Or maybe not.

Worst Logo Evar

Shouldn't that be Arlington Pedophilia Center?
via boing boing

A Coder in Courierland

Hey, a Toronto bike courier made the front page on the Kuro5hin website. Cool. Although I would disagree with this assessment: the stress is almost non-existent. Ha, I wish.

IE New Window Size

My Internet Explorer browser was bugging me because every time it opened a new window, the window would open very small and I would have to manually "expand" it to see the web page. I found you could fix this by opening a new window, dragging the corners to the size you want, then hold down the CONTROL key as you choose File » Close. The next time IE opens a new window, the window will be opened at that size. :)

ISP's not liable

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled 9-0 that ISPs do not have to collect royalties on behalf of media publishers for possible infringement that may occur over their networks. Yea for the Supremes, they got this one right.

Download.Ject

A new virus is worming it's way through the internet and installs a keylogger apparently. Not good. Here's how to fix it. It only affects Windows machines running IE and uses javascript to do its dirty work. Nasty, I checked my machine and it seems ok. I did the update thing to be sure. I think it uses the exploit in Windows where javascript opens a help file and then somehow the help file is used to circumvent any security measures you might have in place on your machine.

Google

Google looks funny today. Father's Day I guess?

The British Library

Wow, this site seems to have a lot of cool stuff. ;)

Shaw speed test

Just did a speed test at Shaw's [my isp] web page. Not bad, and I'm not even paying the extra $10 for their 5 meg service. Although I would get 1 meg upload speeds and more consistent speeds with that package. Oh well, this ain't so bad for now. I just bought my modem a few months ago. It would be kind of a drag to have to get a new one and dump this one right away.

Virtual Worlds and Economies

Pretty interesting article on online worlds, like Everquest, and their economies. I especially like the homeless person passionately building her virtual mansion. She kept her dreams alive, if only virtually.

Brutal

I got around to checking out these brutally honest personals this morning. Funny, more variety than the usual personals where everybody is beautiful, rich and martial arts experts.

Movable Type 3.0: It's the New Coke baby!!!

I just had to contribute to the trackback floodage concerning MT 3.0's new pay model and licensing terms. The reaction has been overwhelmingly negative, to say the least. I'm a little irked, but the whole spectacle of a company making such ass of themselves has provided endless hours of entertainment. From hero to zero in one post. Not that I don't think they should be paid for their all their hard work on MT, it's just that their pricing and restrictions are totally out to lunch. I won't repeat all that's been said, just check out all the trackbacks for the sordid details.

Smile

It's Monday and I don't want to smile. [It's a Flash movie. I had to right click on it and choose 'play' to get it to work.]

Another reason to hate MS

It's bad enough Outlook Express sends messages in HTML by default, causing endless embarrassment [yes, I tracked down how to turn that feature off], but they also have text wrapping turned on by default. So if you're typing along, doing the text wrapping yourself, the damn POS will totally mangle your nicely formatted text when you actually send it. You won't even realize your message looked like shit when you sent it unless you open the sent message in your 'sent items' folder. Et le coup de gras, you can't turn it off! There is no option to turn text wrapping off. I tried setting text wrapping to '0', thinking that might work, but no, it rejects that number saying 'text wrapping must be between 32 to 132' or some such shite. [totally unrelated, but somebody said 'shite' on a major US network the other night, sorry can't remember which one, but don't they realize 'shite' is just another way of saying 'shit'? or am I wrong?] Anyway, I'm hoping I can find a registry hack to turn it off. I know, I should just not wrap text myself and let the program do it, but it's a hard habit to break. And it should be up to me, not BFG.

Email Viruses

There's a lot of email viruses being spread around the internet right now. Check out this thread on the Digital Home Canada forums. I just got an email, supposedly from staff at Rogers, telling me my email account would be terminated if I didn't respond by opening the attachment. Thing is, it was my Blackberry account, and I can't open attachments with my BB 950! Dumbasses. The sender address spoofing can be really tricky, some emails appear to be email sent from my account being bounced, when in fact they aren't at all. I just used this and this, everything came out clean.

Spammerz

And then I get Viagra whores comment spamming me! Fuckerz!

Cable screwing up now...

My internet connection was out for most of the day, and then when I get back online, Google News is all in French! Sacrebleu!

Julia Google

Google looks funny again today, in honour of Gaston Maurice Julia's birthday. [Feb. 3, 1893 - March 19, 1978] He's a famous mathematician who wrote a paper concerning the iteration of a rational function. I'm not sure how this is connected to fractals, but the Julia Set fractal is named after him. He lost his nose in the first World War and had to wear a leather mask over his face for the rest of his life.

Mydoom Virus

I've received about 20 of these damn messages. Never opened any of them though. I use Outlook Express but I have the preview pane turned off. If I receive a suspicious email, I usually just look at the message source. You can look at a message's source with OE by right clicking on the email, choose 'properties', click on the 'details' tab and click on the 'message source' button. You get all the headers plus the message in a text format so no insidious html or javascript will be triggered. You can block future emails from these spammeisters by choosing from the menubar 'message->Block sender' but this doesn't seem to be that effective as spammers are constantly changing their email addresses.

Mydoom, which first appeared on Monday afternoon, infects computers using the Microsoft Corporation's Windows operating systems and is spread as an attachment to seemingly harmless e-mail messages that may carry innocuous subject lines like "Hello," and "Mail Transaction Failed." The body of the messages carry one of several plausible-sounding texts, often falling just outside the technical comprehension of the ordinary computer user, including, "The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment."

Here's the Symantec page for this virus.

Resistance is futile

Microsoft wants Mike Rowe to give up his web domain MikeRoweSoft.com because it infringes their copyright. A hit squad will be dispatched later because they don't want their multi-billion dollar company confused with a seventeen year old school kid. Be careful what you name your kids.

Cool Pictures

An interesting collection of images from Edward Burtynsky. Oil fields, container ports, quarries, tailings, you know, the good stuff. I wish they were a little larger, but I guess that would suck a lot of bandwidth.

via boingboing

Windows 98 life-support extended

Microsoft has decided to extend support for Windows 98 to June 30, 2006. Cool, I'm still running this OS. Or should I say POS. Ha. It's not that I think it's such a great OS, it's just that I'm lazy. I'll switch in 2006. Maybe.

We're not Americans, dammit

This news item in an Australian newspaper shows the cover of the Calgary Sun [I think!] and refers to it as a 'US newspaper'. Hello? The cover's headline says 'U.S. border ban stays'. Do you really think they would need to specify a US ban in an American newspaper? Or that they would refer to themselves as 'Yanks'? [Yanks won't lift mad cow blocade]

Flash Fun

The end of the world! Thanks Lorri!

Crimson Lies

Today's Penny Arcade strip is a funny one, check it out!

Speed Test

My computer was running really sluggish, so I re-booted and ran a speed test. Check it out:

2003-10-07 23:13:50 EST: 3384 / 500
Your download speed : 3384946 bps, or 3384 kbps.
A 413.2 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 500000 bps, or 500 kbps.
Seems like broadband .. above the 1mbit barrier!

Wow, I think that's the highest upload speed I've ever clocked! Probably an error, I would think. At least I know my net connection is healthy. Oops, I guess the upload speed is in kilobits, not kilobytes. Nevermind.

Comcast raises broadband speed bar

Comcast raises broadband speed bar.

The Philadelphia-based cable company said on Thursday it will boost its maximum download speed of its Comcast Online service from 1.5 megabits per second (mbps) to 3mbps, at no additional charge to customers.

Mmmm, I wonder how my speed compares to that? I use Shaw cable. Lemme check.

2003-10-03 21:44:08 EST: 1211 / 327
Your download speed : 1211253 bps, or 1211 kbps.
A 147.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 327868 bps, or 327 kbps.
Seems like broadband .. above the 1mbit barrier!

Yuck, shitty. I usually get better speeds than that. That was Speakeasy, here's LA.

2003-10-03 21:54:29 EST: 2126 / 265
Your download speed : 2126482 bps, or 2126 kbps.
A 259.5 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 265604 bps, or 265 kbps.
Seems like broadband .. above the 1mbit barrier!

A bit better, kinda.

2003-10-03 22:02:03 EST: 3354 / 179
Your download speed : 3354406 bps, or 3354 kbps.
A 409.4 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 179775 bps, or 179 kbps.
Seems like broadband .. above the 1mbit barrier!

Cogeco test, woohoo!

VeriSign's Wildcard

Looks like ICANN has given Verisign notice to stop their wildcard scam. Or else. Good, I hope they finish this BS once and for all.

Oh yeah, and Verisign sucks.

For all these reasons, ICANN has today insisted that VeriSign suspend the SiteFinder service, and restore the .com and .net top-level domains to the way they were operated prior to 15 September 2003. If VeriSign does not comply with this demand by 6:00 PM PDT on 4 October 2003, ICANN will be forced to take the steps necessary to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations.

Messenger Install Error 1603

I seem to be getting a lot of people looking for the solution to the dreaded "1603" error while trying to [re]install MSN Messenger. You could try the solutions suggested in this forum, but I tried them all and I still got the error. YMMV

So I installed Trillian this morning to use in the mean time. After screwing around with MSN's horrid stupid passport system [I seem to have lost the password to my last account and you are pretty well f*cked when this happens] I got everything set up and it seems to be working fine. I'm fungii871 on MSN. I'm also fungii4705 but the bastards don't seem to believe me. I also have another fungii address and something like kajsd;lfkjdsla;ajf when I got really pissed off and frustrated. Trillian might get shut out of their network on October 15 so this might only be a temporary solution. The free, basic Trillian does not currently work on the Yahoo system, but they are testing a patch with their full-price version. Trillian also connects to the AIM and ICQ systems.

Trillian looks much nicer with this skin.

My IM nicks:
MSN - fungii871
AIM - Parkhurstcourier
ICQ - 151807490

VeriSign thinks they own the Internet or what?

I can't believe how arrogant VeriSign is being in regards to their wildcard redirects. Seems like a clear abuse of their position of trust. If you mistype a web address, you want an error message, not spam. I think they should have to pay for every domain they end up using for redirects. Only seems fair, everybody else has to pay for them.

I'm seeing a bunch of sitefinder links in my referrer logs all of a sudden. This really strikes me as unfair business practices.

MSN Messenger 6

Tried to get messenger installed today, kept getting an error during installation. [1603] Trolled the internet for solutions, nothing worked. Guess I won't be able to install the damn POS. I wonder if this has something to do with Microsoft locking out third party vendors from their network? Whatever, fuck 'em.