Excellent. Just sent out ten emails asking blog editors (blogmasters?) to add their site to www.blogwise.com and had two responses within ten minutes. I’ve decided to send a small number of emails out at a time so I can test the field and see what the reaction is. So far, so good.

Update…. literally thirty seconds after posting this I had another submission. I love the fact that I’m not the only sad bastard up at 1am on weekdays.

This is what I love about small-town America. Will do anything for a buck.

http://news1.iwon.com/odd/article/id/16154…24;reuters.html

“Biggs — a community of some 1,793 people … would hold a public hearing on Nov. 18 to consider an offer by the California Milk Processors Board to change its name officially to “Got Milk?” to mark the 10th anniversary of the well-known milk advertising campaign”

Technically I should link to www.svenlat.com but then, what’s the point?

I saw the new Kylie video on Box the other day (albeit from the other side of a bar). I was told it was good for multiple reasons (pun intended) and soon found out why. The video is of Kylie walking around a French street, in a large circle. When she gets back to where she started another Kylie pops out of a shop, and they walk together. By the end there are five of them walking.

It’s a bloody good video, partly because of Kylie and partly because everytime I see it I notice something new. Other things dupe as well. Traffic wardens multiply; poster guys clone, etc. It’s all very cool.

I have a vague interest in sfx for video and things like that - I sometimes get challenged to “prove how a video’s fake” by my mate who finds odd videos on the net (guy getting run over by bus, etc.) - so I just spent the past half hour or so looking at this and how they did it.  It’s all bloody clever and when you watch it, fairly seamless. Although you can see some oddities, like the perspective’s all mucked up where some people should technically have just walked through a car, etc. Still - effective video!

Sorry, am boring you already

There was a “storm” this weekend. Saturday night ended up at Lee-on-Solent. In the time it took to get from Gosport Wetherspoons to Lee it had gone from clear, dry and a light breeze to pissing it down, and very strong winds. There was also a mni tornado in Portchester (a few miles thataway) Friday afternoon. All very miserable.

This was the highlight of my weekend. We haven’t had a proper thunderstorm for years. Where’d they all go? I remember seeing fork lightning at least once every year, and some really loud storms but in the past five years or so it’s been quiet. I suspect a conspiracy.

I made an impulse buy Saturday afternoon and picked up some ProPlan tablets from the counter at Asda. I suffer from drowsiness most of the day regardless of whether I’ve had 4,8 or 14 hours sleep. I have done for a year or more now. They seem to work okay, although I’m still quite tired

Oh yes. Gratuitous link to new site. If you have a blog, *please* submit your site. That way it’ll grow. Even if you submit your site now it can only get bigger, right?

This is so silly it’s got to be true. Found on plasticbag.org

http://www.smalltime.com/dictator.html

This is excellent! You think of a dictator or a sitcom character, answer a load of questions and the website figures out who you’re talking about. It’s very good. So far it’s gotten Gunther from Friends; Kochanski from Red Dwarf; Winchester and Hawkeye from M*A*S*H and Peter, Stewie and even the evil monkey in Chris’s closet from Family Guy!

I have a cold.

I seem to be really lucky - I only get a cold once a year, if that, and it usually passes within 48 hours. I remember somebody telling me that you can’t “catch a cold” from one person. I’m not sure how much truth there is but it all makes sense. They said that in fact what we know of as a cold is around 150 seperate virii all bundled together, and your body just gets overwhelmed; and since you might only transmit, say, 20 virii in a sneeze it follows that to catch a cold you have to be exposed to several people with seperate infections within a limited period of time. It would also explain why scientists haven’t yet developed an all-round cure.

The short solution is - become an introvert. Live in your room, and never talk to anybody. Never kiss. Never snuggle. Never share a can of coke. I wonder if these kids ever got a cold?

I have a cold.

I seem to be really lucky - I only get a cold once a year, if that, and it usually passes within 48 hours. I remember somebody telling me that you can’t “catch a cold” from one person. I’m not sure how much truth there is but it all makes sense. They said that in fact what we know of as a cold is around 150 seperate virii all bundled together, and your body just gets overwhelmed; and since you might only transmit, say, 20 virii in a sneeze it follows that to catch a cold you have to be exposed to several people with seperate infections within a limited period of time. It would also explain why scientists haven’t yet developed an all-round cure.

The short solution is - become an introvert. Live in your room, and never talk to anybody. Never kiss. Never snuggle. Never share a can of coke. I wonder if these kids ever got a cold?

It amazes me that one person can have 700 CDs. That’s a hell of a value in there. If you reckon that each CD was bought for a fiver, that’s £3,500 worth of CDs (what’s that? About $/€5,200?). And a fiver is optimistic - at least in this country if they’re brand new.

Apparantly one of the main things people steal from student digs are CDs. Because they hold quite a lot of value in a fairly small space. All the more reason to convert everything to MP3!

I just had a quick look around my room. I reckon I have about 250 CDs. I also have a stock of old CDs that I won’t throw away, from old PC cover disks to AOL & Compserve “A billion free hours” offers. I think it’s a real waste to ditch them. So I usually hoard them in a corner and use them for novelty coasters.

This is a useful page that lets you find the physical location of any IP address in the world, only it couldn’t find mine, and it reckoned 192.168.0.1 (one of many IPs reserved for local networks) was based in California. Still, it’s the best I’ve seen so far that appears to offer services to regular Joes for free (I think).

I went to see Signs t’other night. Great movie with quite a few “jump in your seat” bits - although the ending was (as everybody kept telling me) an anti-climax. Basically aliens invade the planet, and they leave signs for themselves to co-ordinate their attacks, in the form of - you guessed it - crop circles. Unfortunately the movie is flaky in several places.

Here’s one bit I don’t get: in the movie they say that all the past crop circles were fake, made by big men with large wooden boards and way too much free time. If that’s true it’s a bit of a coincidence that aliens use *exactly the same* sort of patterns in crops themselves when they come to invade. I mean, it’s not as if the fakers thought “ooh, aliens definitely use this technique - let’s fake them” because there were no previous aliens attack (that I remember) - so what? The fakers pre-empted the crop circles that aliens would use when they eventually come down to earth?

Nah.

Also, there was not enough of stuff being blown up for my liking. If I watch an alien invasion movie I at least expect to see one spaceship shooting a building into rubble. It’s almost a given. Even War of the Worlds had it.

In my view, if you want to see a mediocre movie with some tense moments and good acting, see this movie. If not, go do some knitting or something.

Sven gives this 5/10.