Wow, where did that go? Well for me the following three stand out for fairly obvious reasons:
All in all a pretty eventful year. I’m hoping next year won’t be quite so busy, but just as much fun :).
Merry Christmas one and all *hiccup* I’m now completely sick of turkey (and brussel sprouts, yuck!) for another year, but it were good :) Hope everyone had a cracking time.
I’ve changed the main site url to blog.pauked.com from pauked.com/blog/. At work Mr. Stott had asked which was a better way of setting up a website, subfolders or subdomains. I pontificated for several minutes on the virtues of subdomains over subfolders only to realise I’d not listened to my own advice when it came to my blog. A definite case of do as I say, not as I do.
Anyhoo, I’ve now changed it and there’s probably lots of shafted links and wotnot, but I’ll sort those out in time. The nice side affect of this, is that is fixes this annoying problem.
So this chap comes up with a novel backdoor for getting at your files if you’ve been daft enough not to activate your copy of Windows in time so that it expires, which I though was great. However the resulting comments have turned into your typical cesspit of Windows hating, Linux loving asshats.
The response is just so stereotypical. To fix Windows just install Linux. Great idea! How can an Operating System that has at least 30+ different distributions be a “fix” for Windows?
Why would your average Windows user want to use something where they can’t even decide on what the default GUI for it is? GNOME or KDE anyone? If they can’t even manage to activate Windows, how the hell are they going to install Linux? And would they get any help? No, it’d be RTFM stupid! What F**king Manual? There’s only a half written howto file?!
Linux is never going to achieve mass market usage (on the desktop) with such a twatish behaviour from it’s existing users. And to be honest, until that changes, I hope it never does.
As an aside, I do keep trying various distro’s to see how it’s progressing, but nothing has yet made me feel that I need to switch.
No really, look at the new logo for the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate.
How cool is that? It’s very subtle. They also have it on the floor at the Defence Intelligence HQ, as The Putin notices:
Found via BoingBoing / BBC.
What an utter disaster for Europe. I mean we had it within our grasp. Two shots away from winning it back after four years (and it would only have been the third time in the entire thirteen years of the tournament). But no. Mikka Immonen potted the 8 ball ok, but in doing so nudged the 9 onto the rail, meaning he couldn’t clear up. Ok, so the end result was a draw at 12–12, but that meant USA retained the cup, which is as good as losing as far as I’m concerned.
Oh, what am I rambling on about? The Mosconi Cup is a 9 ball pool tournament that pits Europe against the USA, which was on TV last weekend. It’s kind of like the Ryder Cup of pool. It’s been a few years since I last watched it, since we’ve been Skyless for a while and it has changed quite a bit. They now have a 30 second shot clock which certainly spices things up and on a couple of occasions it did cause players to rush their shots and make mistakes. There are also doubles and triples games, the latter of which seemed a bit over the top. Having three players a side round the table made it look a bit cramped!
Of course some things haven’t changed, Earl “The Pearl” Strickland (on team USA) is still a pretenious prick. In his last match he decided to have a go at the audience because they were chanting “Europe, Europe, Europe!”… well ok, more like shouting Europe whilst banging on huge drums and using air horns. But they gave as good as they got and the end result was that he lost. Ha! (Have a read of this and his Wikipedia entry for previous examples of his asshattery).
But Strickland’s loss is scant consolation for actually losing the Cup given we practically had our hands on it and it’s especially galling since Europe were in the lead for the entire four days of the tournament until the final rack!
However I can see the funny side of it since at the point we looked like we were going to win, the entire European team were stood up waiting to rush on and cheer. The presenter, Andy Goldstein, was ready too, beaming smile, obviously not biased in the slightest. When poor Andy eventually had to come on to say congratulations to the USA he was nearly in tears and kept pointing out to them that they’d drawn and not won. Hilarious stuff, which almost made up for the bad result.
Doesn’t it just make you want to vomit :) I quite like it actually. Thought it might be an idea to make the blog look vaguely Christmassy.
Gom Jabbar pointed out some bugs with the Author Listing on MPQ Archive. The listing is meant to show the author name along with the average score for all their reviewed maps but it was incorrectly working the score out and also counting maps when it shouldn’t have been. Turns out the problem was due to me including unreviewed maps in the count (Gom has a map on the “pending” list). Oops.
A slight tweak to the SQL sorted that one out. The side affect of which was it also removed authors from the list who had not yet (ha!) had their maps reviewed, which I think is the correct thing to do anyway.
So thanks Gom for spotting it.
Tara Phillips? Who’s that then? Oh, an equestrian. Yes, a real national sport that is! Pffft. I just can’t fathom the logic as to how she has been voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year when they were far more worthy candidates.
There were the likes of Joe Calzaghe (current WBO and IBF boxing World Champion, also amazingly, 42 fights with 42 wins), Phil Taylor (current 13 times World Darts Champion) and Nicole Cook (current winner of La Grande Boucle, the womens version of the Tour de France) in the short list. But what do I know, I think the result just shows the warped audience the BBC gets.
Fortunately I’m not going mad since I’m not the only one who thinks it was a weird result.
Paul
