Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Well the conference video in which I torture a small bunny by altering its key-rotors is finished. There exists a full PAL-resolution one and I’m sure people can work out the URL themselves. If nothing else it will let me use XinePlayer at the conference and fool myself into thinking it can be justified academically.

The video itself was generated partly though mencoder and mostly with Kino. A very nice little editing program if all you want to do is chop and change a few bits of video plus adding a few titles.

Last minute arrangements for a conference (warning, worst webpage in the world) in Toulouse have been done today. This mostly involved not meeting my supervisor and working out how we are getting to the airport (grr), getting some Euros and attempting to form a set of hardcopies of useful web-pages which lead me to realise that Firefox randomly crashes or generates invalid postscript with the above-mentioned webpage. At least flights and accomodation should be sorted now (although I have little faith that the accomodation has been sorted correctly).

From today’s Mirror:

KELLY Osbourne is turning her back on Los Angeles and moving to London full-time.

“I’m moving back at the end of the year,” says the 20-year-old singer. “I’ve rented a house and we’ll buy it soon.”

The showbiz spat-loving star, who has lived in LA since she was 13, added: “LA’s a fantasy dream world. It’s so fake, though.

“People think the streets are paved with gold but they’re actually paved with s*** and with s***ty people.”

After those remarks, it’s just as well Kelly says she’s more interested in trapping a British bloke than a US fella. “There is so much drama with American men. If you kiss them once they think you’re in a relationship,” she moans.

“It’s not like how you pull someone here. Americans are all very high drama.”

Brace yourselves, lads.

*grin*. Watch out , there is hope for me yet…

I saw Ep III last night and, contrary to almost everyone else on the Internet, I thought it was middling as opposed to the best film ever made or the worst film ever made. This is probably due to the way it was simultaneously good and bad for the same reasons. For example, it was very much ‘join the dots’ which made it predicatable (bad) but also stopped Lucas veering off the plot and reduced the amount of romantic dialogue (good). There were lots of light sabre fights (cool) but, at the same time, there were lots of ‘here is another light sabre fight’ (bad).

All in all, a strange experience. There was an annoying lot of ‘movie physics’ around however. The typical movie convention that lava doesn’t burn unless you physically touch it was annoying (just standing one foot above lava would be enough to incinerate you) but forgivable until Anakin caught fire for precisely that reason.

In other news I have just ‘transcoded’ a movie file that someone couldn’t play using a technique that really shouldn’t work:

sed -e 's/FMP4/DIVX/g' <original.avi >new.avi

What a 48 hours. Yesterday I did a massive blitz over the living room in order to get is clean and ready for the carpet cleaners this weekend. After a day’s work the room is now clean and tidy and nice to live in.

Good pubbage last night but I woke up at about 2am when Jennie got back from watching Star Wars and suddenly felt particularly sick. Cue getting up every 2-hours until 6am to dry retch and you understan dhow I feel this morning :(. Unfortnately I can’t even claim it was due to last night since this is now general malaise rather than hangover. I suspect that it is a cold that has been chasing me all week.

Never-mind Saturday night should hopefully be quite realxing…

Why have I suddently started getting loads (as in 3 or 4 an hour) of spam that seems to consist of just a couple of links to a German news site?

Update: I just answered my own question.

I was wondering today about getting some sort of data-only or data-majority mobile phone deal so a bit of Googling later and I’m in possession of a set of interesting tarif tables. I idly wonder to myself how much data I would need if I were to buy such a phone. “I would only use it for IRC + email,” says I, “so it can’t be that much”. Intrigued I setup some traffic stats on our home connection with a view top convincing myself I wouldn’t use more than ~5Mb of traffic. I, unfortunately, seem to have used 3Mb just writing the traffic stats webpage over SSH however! I think I should wait until one can get unmetered 3G data access in this little 3rd world country we call the UK.

The new weather forecasts on the BBC are crap. That is all.

Update: Even the website images are crap. Look at

isobars with no labels! Oh BBC what has become of you!

I’m just watching a programme on Channel 4 called ‘Whatever’. The concept is that a large number of ill-educated yobs sit in a room and come up with silly ideas for a programme which are then performed by the comedian presenting the programme. This, although a good idea in principle, is actually not as funny as it could be. The best bit so far has been the aforementioned yobs sitting in a room taking the piss out of chavs blissfully unaware that they were the butt of their own jokes. Bizarre.

This morning two things have annoyed me:

1) The complete suckiness of Firefox on OS X.
2) The complete opaqueness of the code to anyone trying to dive in and profile it.

That is all. Good grief, I’m starting to sound like .