That's How It Happened

The Stunners International Halloween Bowling Ball, was an all-time great party. I went as Frank from Donnie Darko, and scared the pants off everyone; even myself when I looked in the mirror. The night had everything you could want for an awesome night of carousing: bowling, white russians, hot girl bands (The Pipettes), hot boy bands (The Cazals), hot DJs (assorted), girls dressed as dead beauty queens, girls dressed as evil clowns, plus beauty queens dressed as dead clowns. There were models, supermodels, and even the occasional ubermodel. Even better, we foxed the licensing laws, getting a whole extra drinking hour, since the clocks went back mid-party. I learned that dressing as a rabbit is deeply disinhibiting, both for you, and for girls who like to stroke your fluffy tail. Best Halloween since this blog began.

TEN REASONS WHY YOU, AUDREY TAUTOU, GAMINE FRENCH STAR OF AMÉLIE, SHOULD DATE ME, TEDDY WAYNE.: "2. I took six years of French in middle school and high school and two semesters in college, and I claim my French skill is "elementary" on my résumé. After we spend some time together, it will surely be upgraded to "adequate," as will my lovemaking ability."

Creepy sexy greeter robot video. I blogged about this robot's fine physiognomy last week. Once you see "her" move though, she sadly slips back to the wrong side of the uncanny valley.

Robot fish video that's so cool I've added a Robo-shark to my xmas list.

Tagcloud for the last week or so of posting:

The Sun exceded all my expectations with their beaver headline:
Bavarian Beavers Loose.
(link)

Wild Wet English Beaver: possible Sun headline tomorrow?

Normalmstorg and the history of Stockholm Syndrome

My source(s) at Nike informs me that the London id Design Studio is sold out until December when it will close. My dreams of a lime green alligator/merino/3M Nike Air 180 are dashed.

City the largest contemporary artwork. (via Tings)

Stunners International Halloween Bowling Ball is where it's at this weekend. Whether I can bowl straight in an awesome AT-AT costume is questionable.

How to catch mice using loo rolls.

SSgt Patrick Hegeman, MC-SOCOM implausibly claims that "This software saves lives." Sextant Virtual Warfighting actually looks like a cold, dark, VR way of ending lives.

Two years of blogging
730 days, almost 730 posts, approximately 7300 stupid links. It seems only yesterday I started this foolishness. If you are reading this today, you might well be the 200,000th unique visitor. Congratulations all round.

Join Paypal-wannabe GreenZap, get $50 "webcash", and I'll get $5 "webcash" too. I suspect "webcash" will be every bit as unsuccessful as "Beanz" were. They have the same misplaced confidence that extra z's on everything iz cool.

All your base are belong to google? GreenZap isn't going to be an eBay killer, but just maybe Google Base will. Even Bill Gates is looking stressed.

Robo-milking in the UK, and it's run on Linux.

Did New York Orchestrate the Asian Tsunami?
"I will be circumspect as to exactly how a large American thermonuclear weapon managed to arrive at the bottom of the Sumatran Trench, though all of the seismic evidence and preparedness for the resulting mission indicates strongly that this is the case."

"Few games actually change the way you feel about a platform. They take the established standard and tear it to pieces."

Ecstatic review of GTA: Liberty City Stories. This will finally be the game that makes me upgrade my firmware. (No innuendo intended). Thus begins a desperate race against time, to finish all the games uploaded onto my memorystick, as a Firmware 1.0 hack, by November 4th, when GTA comes out.

Mini-works of art in Lego.

Howto: make fake blood.

This blog is worth $12k in "AOL acquires WeblogsInc" funny money.

Does anyone have a copy of Teenage Hitchhikers, that I could borrow? It sounds awesome.

Intergalactic, always worth re-watching.

Lego iPod cases and wheeled Mac Mini Robots.

Really into one button games today: Look n Cook (Top score 874) and UFO Panic (Top score 284)

Tiny french pixel people, including all kinds of goodness.

Longish Dan Osman obituary/retrospective prompted by this awesome freeclimbing vid (Thanks, Tomsk!)

Clever time lapse/overlay SFX for skate park movie.

I'm posting this post about Flock using Flock itself. What's Flock? It's an uber-2.0 browser, that makes it easy to add your "bookmarks" (now called Favorites) to del.icio.us, and simultaneously blog stuff you like. As a secret-Safari user (never dug Firefox really), I'm loving the features. The little screen capture shows the versatility of the search box. Pretty often with new software I just think "so what" and forget about it, but so far I'm loving Flock. It's in Developer Preview, but so far it hasn't crashed on me, or done anything but work really well. Go download it.

Worn Again Shoes are the new Dunk SB. Pre-order now, or suffer insane jealousy.

How to: Dip your fingers in molten lead.

Big Trouble in Little China x Southpark = Big Trouble In Little Southpark.

World's most elusive rat dead after 18 week chase.

Trainedfleas.com and Flea-circus.com, call me naive but I had no idea real fleas were involved.

Geoff McFetridge Exhibition in London, ends Oct 30th.

The Actroid robo-greeter is undeniably hot, even for non techno-sexuals.

Google's Jagger Update has boosted this site's Pagerank back to 5. Why is it called Jagger? Because Matt Cutts is the Jagger of search.

Know any college pranks? I love the slightly surreal cerebral pig prank.

A Prisoner's Dictionary is chock full of improbable gems like "pencil whipped" and "tally ho".

Rake's predicament (6)
I fell off a bike today. Not just a little tumble, but a full-tilt over-the-handlebars flip on to the asphalt. I was riding my brother's track bike, that strangely lacks gears, or a back brake. Cruising around Oval in the pre-dawn half-light I clipped the kerb and ill-advisedly slammed on my one front brake. I was hurtling off before I'd even had time to be really afraid. A helmet saved my head, and instinct saved my scaphoids from any lasting damage. All four limbs are missing at least some dermis though. There's nothing quite like almost dying to make you feel alive.
The crossword clue above is by Paul, from yesterday's Guardian: SCRAPE.

I hate filling out forms as much as the next guy; maybe more so. This is my application pack for a clinical trial I'm hoping to get underway. The length and complexity of these forms, soliciting ethical, R&D, and MHRA approval is quite unbelievable. As it happens this trial is quite a big deal, and it deserves all this mindless form filling. However under new EU rules, even if you just wanted to investigate burpless cucumbers, you'd have to jump through the same hoops.

If this picture doesn't make you want to build your own PackBot, you lack any robo-romance in your veins.

My earlier comments about Web2.0 may have been premature: tapeitofftheinternet.com looks uber-cool, although perhaps a little too much of a target for litigation to be true.

For a NSFW version of robo-romance see this picture of naked girl-dalek love.(via)

Side Effects, a new movie about drug reps. I get deluged with free stuff from reps; I enjoy it so much that I even find it hard to feel conflicted.

Nickel from 2003 on Amazon, check the smallprint before ordering: "Actual year may vary".

As Tropical Storm Wilma gets up to speed we've run out of names for storms. The next one will have to be called Alpha.

Good round-up of giant Wireless Clouds.

Great Total Battlefield 2 revenge story. So nerdy, so vindictive, but so funny.

Goowy is the straw that broke Web 2.0's back for me. I refuse to sign up for another social/email/GTD nebulous web app.

Turn your sink into a soda faucet. Badly needs modding to make it dispense Diet Coke.

Dance Dance Revolution for calculators. How I wish I still had Maths class to attend.

I got my ass kicked by a girl
I ran the Nike "Run London" 10k around Hyde Park on Sunday. Paula Radcliffe was running in the same race. I was stuck in the crowd with 5,000 other muppets, so she got about a 2 min 30 secs headstart on me. As I trotted past the 4km marker, she came screaming by in the other direction, at about 7km into her race. She finished in 32 min 10 secs, whereas I got around in 51 min 4 secs. Despite the fact that I'm a full 66% slower than Paula, I still ranked 6,000th out of 33 thousand runners. The evidence is here. I'm the one in the red t-shirt. (No really I am, squint hard at 36.59, and see me cruise over the finish line).

Enemies of the Honey Bee
Hardy though the honey bee is, she has many enemies. I've spent the day tackling five of them:

Enemy 1: Woodpeckers Requires a giant chicken wire, beehive tea cosy, to keep them from their dastardly pecking.

Enemy 2: Mice Each hive needs a metal strip across the entrance with holes too small for mice, who otherwise can squash their skulls amazingly flat to get in.

Enemy 3: Varroa This is like the bee plague. It's a mite that thrives on bees and their larvae, destroying whole colonies. It merits all manner of expensive treatments. I picked a fairly simple technique, dropping impregnated Apistan strips into each hive.

Enemy 4: Nosema This is more like bee-flu. Each hive got a little winter sugar syrup, to build them up, and it had to have a little fumidil dissolved in it, to keep them safe.

Enemy 5: Wax Moth This is an evil moth that eats the dry combs, when they are off the hive for winter. To keep them out, I filled the empty space between the combs with sulphur dioxide (heavier than air), and then used clingfilm to seal them.

With all this cost and effort, I find it astonishing that pro-beekeepers can put honey on the shelves of Tesco for less than £2/lb. This is the end of my second season, and I'm still running at around £10 a jar.

Neologism watch: "sui f*ckin' generis", qv T-shirt du jour

How to buy nothing.

Today's top ways of GTD: (10+2)*5, Milk Rememberin', and bubble mapping.

Incredible pervo-prank: McD's Serial Strip Searcher. (via RoboWis)

9 year old escapes Alcatraz.

Pointmen invade. (Creepy x-ray image of smuggled people, looks like Futura aliens)

Research Challenge
On the episode of The Daily Show that aired last night on More 4, it was alleged that although Mohammed is the world's commonest first name, and Wong is the world's commonest surname, there are no living Mohammed Wongs. In this era of globalisation, I found that hard to believe. However my google skillz were trumped. I offer a token prize of (very brief minor) web celebrity status, to the first person who can submit a link demonstrating unequivocal evidence of an actual Mohammed Wong.

Slangwatch Episode 2
Today's slang term of the day is "latronic". I can barely find a single internet reference to this; it's even absent from Urban Dictionary. My idiom-sources suggest it is 90s Hawaiian slang for "laters":

"These superfiends are creeping me out. I'm gonna take a trip to Exitville. Latronic!"

I got a poor to middling response to last week's Slangwatch. Submissions are needed to maintain the current high standard. A little etymology would help too, because today's episode was a research nightmare.

Freebies of the day: "History of Chambers Dictionary" and "Scrabble Hints" ebooks.

WOTD: stagflation. (New to me, anyway)

Poll of the day: The Great Toilet Paper Debate.

Job of the day: Toffee Magnate (3 of them? Unbelievable!)

Gadget of the day: NokiTunes nanophone.

Club of the day: Coaster Zombies.

People in the cheap seats have been complaining that I don't post enough pictures. See also Alba the glowing bunny.

It seems I'm not alone in my contention that libraries are highly sexualised places, buzzing with repressed energy and sublimated urges: The Image of Librarians in Porn, featuring such hot titles as "Line up for the librarian!". (SFW)

Robofish schooling at the London Aquarium

34 Prius "Hacks", making me envious.

Nokia 888 bendy concept phone

Pocket Geiger Counter for escaping a dirty bomb

The Viaduc Millau is one incredibly long beautiful bridge. (Thanks, Tom!)

Slang Watch Issue 1: Fiending
I promised this as a regular feature, so here goes. "Fiending" was originally 80s drug slang, signifying strong desire for crack/heroin etc. Gradually it's been popularised to mean merely regular "wanting" or "desire". An nouveau variation on this, is the situation in which you actually get your heart's desire, be it crack, a Star-Trek marathon, or a PSP. At that stage you are reduced to a drooling, gasping, over-sated consumerist zombie, and can again be said to be "fiending". If you really overdo it with the coke/Star Trek/Ridge Racer; a veritable "fiending frenzy"; you might have attained the elevated status of Super-Fiend.

Just like Woody Allen, I like to have a "Fall Project". Something that keeps me out of trouble during the long November nights. Somehow the whole of September passed without me buying a single pair of sneakers. To remind myself why sneaker collecting is still so very essential in Autumn 05, I thought I'd post a quick Top 5 most anticipated:

1. Nike x Mita Delta Force (3 colorways)

2. Nike Air Woven (3 new colorways)

3. Nike hTM Footscape Woven

4. Nike x Mita Dunk Hi

5. Nike Dark Denim Dunk Hi (Outrageously plagiarising Meth's custom denim dunks)