Blag

Hmmm. Been a while since I posted. Been an even longer time since I posted something personal, not an acid laced article on whatever got my goat at the time.

*Yawn* Exams are over, and now I have buttloads of free time until uni starts next year in February/March/whenever it is.

Things to do:

• Finish off that never ending amplifier project
• Finish ripping the 1m high stack of CDs to iTunes
• Repairing, tagging and sorting 40GB of MP3s
• Finally get a much delayed driver’s license -.-
• And also get a boat, gun and heavy machinery license, sometime in the next 2-3 years
• Proper part time job, not yet another under the table, cash-in-hand contract job
• Work on small business
• Rebuild the cupboards and closets
• Renovate the garage

Speaking of garage renovations, gotta start that today. To do list:

1. Set rodent and cockroach baits
2. Fumigate the garage with 1-3 insect control bombs
3. Throw out half the content of the garage
4. Bag/box remaining junk
5. Wearing a respirator, goggles and gloves, sweep out the garage
6. Vacuum up any remaining dust or dirt
7. Spray all surfaces with mould destroyer and clean with sugar soap
8. Re-bomb the garage
9. Air out for 2-3 days
10. Rip out old rotting shelves, and remove collapsed cupboard
11. Trip to Bunnings to buy a new lock, sealant and timber to patch the holes up
12. Rewire the garage with new mains cable, fusebox, fluoro batten, powerpoints and switches.
13. DONE!

And that will take the best part of 2-4 weeks, given the derelict state the garage is currently in. The building framework is structurally sound – the previous owner of our house (20 years ago) just happened to be an incompetent, lazy, un-intelligent handyman with about the same amount of common sense as a lump of dog shit, who consequently decided that he’d try his hand at internal furnishing and managed to make an arse of it.

Anyone else got their holidays planned out? The only other things I have planned is several 18ths/21s, a movie or two and a reunion.

Somehow or other, this blog (blag) has somehow made it into the indexes of over 15 search engines including Google, Yahoo, Live/Bing, Ask, Alexa & Netcraft. Amazing, considering there weren’t any inbound links to theparanoidtroll.com in the beginning yet somehow Google caught on within days of the domain being registered, and all the other followed suit.

Stats make for interesting reading -

• Average of 6-7 unique visitors per day (excludes RSS feeds, and returning visitors)
• 72.8% of visitors use Internet Explorer, 15.2% use Safari, 8% use Firefox, 0.9% use Chrome and the remainder are all random browsers/feed readers
• 95.9% of visitors are Windows users, Macintosh accoutns for 1.2% and <0.1% use Linux. I have no idea what the remainder is.
• Top 5 keywords were  – “cheap”, “discount”, “billion”, “KFC” and ”pointless”
• Top 10 countries are – Australia, US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Russia and Germany

I actually received 3 offers via e-mail from various dodgy SEO companies offering to ‘promote’ my site to make it to the front page of Google. It already does, thank you very much -.- No thanks to you, J. Walker, H. Ellis, and K. Lampton. All you succeeded in doing is wasting 15 kilobytes of space in my inbox.

In other news, more server changes to come

I’ll wait until I’ve moved all my websites and domains away from host “X”, before I tear into them, lambast their shitty service and name them publicly. The server load of 70.34 and memory usage of 88.20% is atrocious, let alone the support staff who ignore support tickets, or take 4-5 days before replying to those marked as ‘crtical’, or the high packet loss and latency. And that’s before I start complaining about corrupted SSL data, terrible PHP/SQL performance and the intermittent FTP service. -.- *rage*

For those not in the know, a typical server packed with hundreds of websites only has a load of 1 to 4, and memory usage around the 40-60% usage mark under normal conditions.

So, time to shift all my domain names to Layered Networks, and move my other sites to IGXHosting. (Free plug for Layered Networks here actually, they have very cheap domain names which come with free WHOIS privacy, which still beat Australian registrars for price, despite the AUD to USD exchange rate and conversion). This blog shouldn’t be affected as it’s already hosted by Layered Networks and the domain is already pointed towards their nameservers. Still, if something does bugger up, max downtime should be 24-48 hours, while your ISP re-caches DNS lookups.

*yawn*

Yet another post with no discernible topic – perhaps it’s like a mini twitter? Ginormic pile of random comments, tid bits and news…

Begin early morning 1:37AM ramble:

(Actually, am testing something at the moment, but decided I may as well make an effort to fill this post with something remotely amusing… better than all the RSS readers getting a bunch of white space).

I hate being throttled. -.-

Especially midway through working on a website update, and the back end is so packed with AJAX and PHP it’s not funny.  I think he who pays the internet bill would be very annoyed if I purchased a 2GB data block (2GB being the lowest denomination available for $5) at 1AM, given the rollover time is 2AM…

I must say, I am disgusted yet curiously attracted to the movie Bruno… can’t wait for the DVD to come out. Did I say DVD? I meant torrent. Not that I would do something as dastardly as pirate a movie.

And yes, I’ll finish off the finding the perfect browser series soon. Opera and Google seem to be pushing out updates for their browsers on a bi-weekly basis now. That’s a good thing I suppose, but annoying as I constantly have to re-evaluate each browser in light of the updates.

End ramble.

Random news:

The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg has announced that they’ve discovered two previously unknown compositions by Mozart. Yay! I can’t wait to hear more classical music… http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25827706-401,00.html

MSN Messenger turns 10! Now in its latest re-incarnation as Windows Live Messenger, latest stats have active users at 330 million, and 10 billion messages sent per day. 10 years on, and MSN still has 80% market share, followed by Skype and Yahoo! (NB: Stats are buoyed up somewhat, as MSN and Yahoo signed an agreement back in 2005 to consolidate their chat networks).

Windows 7 is RTM. Can’t wait for the official launch on October 22nd – no more crappy 32-bit limitations of XP (namely max 4GB of RAM, and 2GB RAM allocated max to each application). Anyone wanna buy 4GB of DDR2 4-4-4-12 overclocking ram incidentally?

Aside: WOO! Unthrottled right at this very moment, as I’m typing this now

Queensland cops plan to go war driving around the state, looking for people with unsecured wireless networks, handing out informational leaflets and holding demonstrations to teach people how to secure their home networks. Props to them I suppose…

Yet another aside: Why do I keep running out of hard disk capacity? I’ve already got 3x 250GB, 1x 750GB and 2x 1TB in my main computer.

Bleurgh. Bored and hungry. Would be asleep now, if I wasn’t staying awake to take a final dose of meds.

Hmm, so I overhauled the main website, fixed the 101 bugs and it’s now reasonably professional looking. Now to integrate this blog into the main website, instead of having it as a separate mini-site. Don’t want to think of the damage it would to to my existing SEO efforts or Google Page Rank.

*yawn #2*

Off to play flash games.

Ta.

…because none of these items are worthy of individual posts

1. Apparently Steve Jobs got a liver transplant two months ago for his “hormonal imbalance.” Perhaps it would be good for Apple if he retired from the company. New directions, innovations, marketing strategies? I will rant more about why I hate Apple as a company later…
2. http://blogs.news.com.au/bossy/index.php/news/comments/im_a_clean_freak_and_my_boyfriend_is_doing_something_dirty/ is mildly amusing.
3. And Swine Flu has claimed its 2nd victim, a man in Victoria. I have a theory that by not catching the bus for a year (and thus being cramped among 40 Year 7s busy expelling the contents of their nostrils over everyone), I shall extend my life span by 5 years. So the more free lifts I can mooch off people, the better off I will be… hmm…
4. The Greens are whinging again – by their logic, the raised dam levels and relaxed water restrictions means that we can stop construction on the desalination plant, dismantle it and sell the would be useless plant machinery off to China or something. Because a weeks worth of rain and a few percent rise in dam levels means we will never have a drought in Australia again. Right.
5. Lindsay Lohans starring in a new reality TV show, where people get given a second chance. Yeh, she’ll be the perfect host for that show, being able to relate and all, given that her entire existence is possible due to a small group of suckers that give her too much leeway.
6. They’re about to start fluoridating water in Geelong, Victoria, and people are outraged at the poison the government is injecting into their water supply. DoHS minister Lisa Neville has been receiving death threats, bottles left on her doorstep with the message “We’re going to kill you, Bitch” and anti-fluoridation propaganda websites are popping up everywhere. What’s the big deal? Fluoride is added to water supplies in many countries around the world, approved by the WHO, reduces teeth decay, it gets shoved in your mouth at the dentist and it’s in toothpaste. Down in Tasmania, they have a day dedicated to celebrating the anniversary of water Fluoridation, for the health improvements it’s brought to the population there.
7. WTF pictures of the week – Mona Lisa… porn? Click here and here.
8. From “Dating, It’s Complicated #5″:

My sophomore year of high school I was dating my boyfriend for a few months. One day I told him I had something to show him in my room upstairs. This was the first time my boyfriend was allowed into my room; we were alone together. He goes straight to my computer and tells me I need more RAM.
-No Longer Dating A Nerd, CT

OMG. KFC is ditching the use of palm oil and switching to a canola-sunflower blend.

Ripped shamelessly from the Sydney Morning Herald’s website:

The following March, Yum! told the Herald it had been using palm oil “for many years” and had no intention of converting to a healthier cooking oil, despite a directive by the then assistant health minister, Christopher Pyne, that the fast food industry draw up plans to phase out ingredients such as palm oil and report back in six months.

Yesterday, Yum!’s managing director, Albert Baladi said any delay in changing to a healthier oil was due to difficulty in overcoming a number of problems.

“The most important thing we had to do was ensure continuous supply [of an alternative oil], then that the oil delivered the same taste our customers expected. These are not things you can turn on or off with a switch,” he said.

Along with the switch to a canola-sunflower blend for cooking, KFC has now also made a commitment to reduce the salt content in its food across the board by 10 per cent.

The company will reportedly spend $35 million introducing the menu changes, including a $10 million campaign to market the new grilled chicken products.

Fair enough, I guess, but if the chicken taste any different 3 months from now, I will (as with other KFC lovers across the nation) have an immediate hernia. I want the security of knowing that when I rip into a piece of KFC chicken, that I’m swallowing oily, unhealthy, artery clogging fatty food. :@

Guess that’s just me though, as healthy eating junkies are celebrating at the news, just like they did when Mars Confectionery reduced the size of all of their products (without a corresponding reduction in price) by 11% a few weeks ago, hence the retarded 42.5gm sized packs of M&M’s.

Seeing as none of these snippets really warrant their own separate post, and partially because I’m lazy, here is a conglomerate of several random issues… thing… news items or whatever…

1) Remember that little ass Alfie Patten? The backwards little midget who claims he is the father of his knocked up 15 year old girlfriend?

As it turns out after DNS testing, he’s isn’t the father but he plans to stick around with his loose “girlfriend”. For what? Perhaps he has a hidden fetish for adopting babies. Either that or he worships Madonna.

The British pollies are all up in arms as usual, going on about the declining morals of modern society, unruly kids, “back in my day…” old douchebaggery comments. It’s not like anyone in the UK gives a f*** (well they do ), but it’ll take a lot of work to change the fact that Britain is the most promiscuous Western culture.

In any case, this picture made a lot of people feel like beating him upside the head.

2) There needs to be a clause put into the UN charter of Human Rights forbidding Lady Gaga from wearing bikinis and one-pieces, especially in her music videos. I’m surprised she hasn’t already been sued by parents worldwide for psychological damage done to their kids.

3) Speaking of unflattering people, Trinny and Susannah are back at it again – http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,28383,25245028-5007192,00.html Anyone else wish these two try hards would just give up?

4) I do feel kinda sorry for Nick D’Arcy. He got kicked out of the Beijing Olympics team after his bar brawl with Cowley (who provoked him intentionally, BTW). Now after making the team for the World Swimming Championships, he was dumped by Swimming Australia as he had a criminal record because of some obscure rule in their charter.

His team mates are kinda pissed at SA for it, and the major sponsors are annoyed to say the least. While it’s nice to see the law applied equally to both citizens AND sports stars (eh, rugby and football?), 4-8 years of work has been ruined for Nick, and he’ll probably never have a swimming career at all unless he moves to the US/UK and competes for them.

Part 2 coming soon… and by that I mean within the next 24 hours.

After 15 years, the cultural icon “Jane Doe” has finally been identified as a 75 year old schizophrenic woman Elba Leonor Diaz Soccarras from Mexico.

More here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090324/ap_on_re_us/naming_jane_doe and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Doe

Don’t know who she is? Boy… have you been missing out

Mate of mine sent me this photo he took back at World Youth Day 2008. Photo was taken at a school, which had been turned into temporary accommodation for the pilgrims.

I’m guessing no firefighters came across this…

OH&S inspectors anyone?

Woooooah! Long time no post…

Ever wanted to re-experience the magic of having your ears blasted out by the renowned THX deep note? Or perhaps you wanted to be kept on the edge of your seat with yet another Dolby surround sound fly through? Fear no more, for in all its glory and goodness:

THX Trailers – http://www.thx.com/cinema/trailers.html

Dolby explaining why you can’t freely download their trailers – http://www.dolby.com/professional/logos-trailers-trademarks/getting-trailers/index.html

Dolby Digital trailers for download in .vob format – http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/trailers.html

Another trailer fan site, but with a much more extensive collection covering DTS, QT, RM, 007, FullHD1080 etc etc etc… – http://www.demo-world.eu/trailers/

*Side note – uTorrent has a built in Easter egg – Go to Help, About uTorrent and click on the uTorrent logo when the About windows appears

Yay! This blag is PCI certified…

PCI Certified by Scanless PCI

WTF, is probably what you are thinking? More on this to come later…

I do like fancy meaningless certificates, they make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. All I have to do now is slap it on every php and static html page I can find and surely, my e-peen will grow in size – much more quickly and cheaper than using the snake oil sold by the charlatans over at AMI, with their nasal spray technology bullshit.

Edit: So what is PCI DSS? It is a set of requirements for a certification given to a website to guarantee that it has made attempts to enhance payment/transaction data security, or simply – there’s no blindingly obvious security holes that allow the website to be hacked and your particulars accessed. You can read about all this waffle and the requirements at https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_dss.shtml . (Was it really necessary to use https 256-bit AES encryption for a public website? I’m detecting more e-peen wagging here.)

PCI DSS certification services range from $1.95US (Nate McFeters promises not to hack your website), to McAfee’s HackerSafe service for $250USD  to Qualys for $1000USD. They’re supposed to verify the integrity of your website and show visitors that it has not been compromised, but in practice, they are about as effective as placing smiley stickers on your server to ward off script kiddies.

Well, I wanted to get in on some of this uber certification action but can’t afford to pay some corporation for the privilege for having their logo plastered on my website. Enter Scanless PCI – http://www.scanlesspci.com/. PCI DSS certification for free! How could I resist…

Bleh, no point creating 4 separate posts for 4 small issues so here they are amalgamated into one:

1) As is the inevitable fate of all blogs, Russian spammers have found Blag Akismet has been installed to filter out SPAM comments… (Those Russians really need to try harder – “nice blog ————- (url to mp3 website) – by default, most blogs should block their comments anyway, without the need to install anti-spam plugins but no harm done beefing up security)

2) Coles, the supermarket chain owned by Wesfarmers which supports terrorism has stopped selling “Pacific” branded 50-pack made in China ultra unhealthy packed with MSG spring rolls

3) Looks like the 301 redirect worked! Google, MSN/Live, Yahoo, Netcraft and Alexa have started crawling this new URL

4) Wiki’s are so freaking annoying to set up and maintain!!! Especially mediawiki (what Wikipedia uses), being one of the most un-user friendly pieces of software ever created by man.

Disclaimer: In this current climate of media hype, political correctness, and hysteria on the part of bored housewives with nothing better to do than whinge and annoy the f*** out of everyone, I shall hereby state that the title of this blag post makes reference to no particular religious god and if the reader feels compelled to, he/she can drink cyanide and die.

But myes, quite a good stash so far.

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure

as they say

Found a set of 3-way Marantz speakers lying by the side of the road – fine specimens, albeit with a thin coating of grime and sawdust, but restorable otherwise. Ok, so they weighed about 16KG each, it was 38*C and I had to make 2 return trips over a hill to carry them back to my house (perhaps I worked off the fat gained from guzzling the can of coke afterwards?)

Brief listing of acquired good over the past 2-3 eyars -

• 12 sets of speakers
• 300 nails (strip mounted, for nail gun)
• But-load of radiata pine
• 40m of water pipe
• Storage cupboard
• 10m PVC conduit
• Hi-Fi
• Vinyl Turntable
• Boomboxes
• Circuit breakers
• Shelving bracket
• Sheet metal

Speaking of cheap shit, our neighbour’s couch has visited every median strip on the street to date. Scavengers keep taking it, finding out it’s a useless piece of crap, and forget which strip they picked it up from so they dump it on anyone’s doorstep.

Funnily enough, some poor person saw my old school bags lying there and thought that they could recycle/re-use them. Poor person is now the owner of 5 fungal colonies, and about 4KG of rotting biological matter.