Blogwise

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.

Got Milk?

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? 🙂

Great Site

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!

Stay Away, I’m Contageous

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?

Thinking Hurts

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.

NetGeo

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).

Sven’s Signs Review

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.

Sven’s xXx Review

So, I went and watched XXX last night with a couple of mates. All in all I enjoyed it. A great movie to watch – if not for the dazzling display of ridiculous stunt action, then for the suprisingly good acting by Vin Diesel and quite good scenery.

Bits of it were dubious. My physics studying friend, Chris, helpfully pointing out that tesla coils in a nightclub are probably unlikely to be safe, and I also noticed that a snowboarder is probably not likely to be able to travel at the same speed, or faster than an avalanche and be able to stay standing up.

Then again, the unrealistic stunts and death-defying activities are what makes James Bond very good and exciting. You definitely got that feeling with XXX – an Americanised (-ized?) version of James Bond. Lots of gadgets, ladehs, and miscellaneous exploding vehicles and buildings. Vin Diesel played the part well and I look forward to XXX2.

Sven gives this 8/10

xXx

xXx – the new movie with Vin Diesel about a guy who loses a packet of extra strong mints (that joke’s been brewing for a while, sorry), is in cinemas from tomorrow and I’m going to watch it at the Odeon in Southampton, so expect some kind of review. I haven’t had particularly high expectations because I’m not a massive fan of action movies – but still it seems to be a popular format. So much so that xXx2 is down already for a late 2004 release.