Splish! Splash! (Approximate onomatopoeia of my cellphone receiving a text.)

bo u in palmy? dis tawhai.

Yeah. What?

Was the headline I heard. I kinda wondered how they managed to say it without thinking gee, I’m sure there’s some irony in here somewhere…

Tube of You

• Paxilback – Gray Kid parody of Justin Timberlake’s Sexyback
• Pole Position Commercial! (Atari)
• Fortress Europa, fast and informative
• Rube Goldberg Officeplace Contraption
• The Bloggers

Insights Into Worlds You May Not Know

• Did Eskimos put their elderly on ice floes to die?, found while investigating:
• Eskimo kissing, interestingly enough very similar to the Maori hongi, which developed independently on the other side of the world. See it in action!
• 830! How a carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever.
• Nachos, anyone? – Word stories – Oxford English Dictionary
• The Outsider, the story behind the latest film from the director of π
• What’s The Worst Web Application You’ve Ever Seen? I mean, wow. I couldn’t really believe it was serious until someone in the comments noted it was screen-scraping a terminal application. Still, that has to be just about the worst possible way they could have done it.
• The Non-Expert: Defenestrate Your Résumé! Fantastic. CVs are full of so much bullshit. I love people who list things like “honest” and “reliable” on their CV – gee, really? I’ll just hire you right now then!
• The internet, summarised in three panels

Hey team, sorry about my absence there. We’ve just been wrapping up a major rebuild of our website at work, and meanwhile a month sneaked by between posts here. I actually have been writing. Writing chunks of prose is the fun bit. Editing/finishing is the hard work bit that you have to find time for. Man, those people who post to their blogs every day? Superhuman.

Big Day Out

So, they’ve just announced some of the acts for the Big Day Out, and damn, always such an impressive list. Check this out. (Key: yeah!, meh/who?, nooo!)

• Tool
• Muse (hot damn)
• Violent Femmes (I always feel like I should be a fan, though)
• The Killers
• Peaches (who?)
• My Chemical Romance (I’m sure they’ll be popular with the kids.)
• Spank Rock (who?)
• Jet (uncertain)
• Eskimo Joe
• Scribe (uncertain. Did you see Dave’s review on Newclear? He panned him.)
• Evermore (uncertain. Their new stuff kindof sucks.)
• The Veils (who?)
• Shapeshifter (who?)
• The Mint Chicks (but I don’t really know)
• The Tutts (I say this having heard one song by them)
• Minuit (woo!. Did you know they are currently touring Europe? Oh yeah, and check out their music videos on YouTube.)
• Opensouls (who?)

$110 bucks, which is pricey but come now, it represents an excellent value for money. There will be more to come, so keep an eye out.

YouTube

We all know how wicked YouTube is, especially seeing as we are not the ones paying for it. (Who is, exactly?). Well, rumours abound that Google is considering buying YouTube for $1.6 billion, which is quite a lot – did you know YouTube is less than one year old? Anyway, I hope they don’t fold it into Google Video or something. Make the most of it while you can!

• Disk Drop
• Guiness World Record for most T-Shirts worn at one time.
• singing on the beach
• Gnarls Barkley – Crazy EXCLUSIVE Slow Version LIVE!!
• Portal Demonstration from Valve’s EA Summer Media Event

Also, the secret to happiness in life is to go to YouTube Top Rated and check out all the Daily Show and Colbert Report clips there. The stuff on Foley was awesome, as was this. By the way, The Daily Show is screening in NZ on C4 @ 10pm Tuesday nights at the moment.

Folk-Comedy Duos

So, Kiwi comics net big US TV series, and indeed, Comic duo put Kiwi accent on US TV. And, I just discovered you can buy an album of theirs, too – Folk The World Tour. Incidentally, we are talking about Flight of the Conchords. You knew that, right? There will apparently be a doco about their US tour on Channel 3 on Thursday the 19th.

I also came across an article on Stuff titled Katie Holmes to star as Posh Spice. Remember when Katie Holmes and Posh Spice were hot? They should have made the movie then.

There is something wrong with this picture.

That doesn’t seem like much of a discount.

I was wandering through The Warehouse earlier this year, looking to kick off my DVD collection, and I saw the Cool Runnings DVD. Cool Runnings!, I thought. Jamaica has a bobsled team! I loved that movie in primary school. Buy buy buy! And I did.

Since then it has helped provide sufficient mass to call my DVDs a collection. The other day I had a crazy thought. Not to watch it – maybe later. But to check if my DVD player is all-region, as this one is region 2. So I put it in.

And no matter what scene I picked, or how much I fast-forwarded, it just showed some random reggae music videos. Maybe, I thought desperately, maybe they’re singing that Jamaica has a bobsled team.

Yeah, nah. There’s a word for people like me.

I’d be a rich man mother fucker

There are three basic states. Happy. Busy. And empty. The final two are equivalent and, in contemporary society, easily interchangeable, two sides of the same corroded coin. The “Hedonic Treadmill” is a concept describing the process of acquiring ever more money, consuming and consuming more, yet despite all expectation, never getting any happier. It is a popular pastime. It is Busy. (And no one wants to jump off, not into Empty.)

Despite popular opinion, happy and busy (busy as a long-term state) are mutually exclusive because happiness is both a result and cause of not needing to keep charging ahead. Its closest synonym could be “content.” Theoretically, this is the goal, but we’ve either lost our way to it, or confused it with lower-hanging fruit. Of course, that’s assuming this “true” way exists. I have witnessed no guarantees (outside of a Bible near you).

I vividly remember the bitter internal struggles I went through while I was at uni. Sure, skipping lectures and drinking at bars isn’t too hard. But it’s the assignments you can’t bring yourself to do, and the cramming for exams when loathing of the paper combines with guilt and frustration at letting a whole semester come down to this bleak stretch of hours. By about year three I had got to the point where I often didn’t even start things til past midnight of the day before it was due, and didn’t go to bed at all that night. These are not fond memories. God, I just wanted to stop. I just wanted to curl up in a ball and close my eyes and wish it all away.

So why didn’t I? I would hardly be the first to drop out of uni. (I hear that, too, is a popular pastime.) Well, I guess it was the fear. Sure, I would tell myself, just give up. Give in. Drop out. And then what?

I never had an answer. Maybe I could work at some mindless retail or desk job, lost in the world of team meetings and petty concerns, and let it all pass by in a blessedly painless sea of shapeless grey nothing. Let it wash over me.

No. But maybe I could go the other way. Run away to Japan! Meet Scarlett Johansson in the bar! Have an incredible communion with my soul mate. And ultimately get no closer to a solution. No. Where would I go? I remember one time I was in my car, accelerating to 50, and I just kept going. 60, 70. Next gear. 80, 90. Starting to get a bit scary, and very illegal. Then I stopped suppressing the voice in my head, the one saying, sure, you’re going, you’re loving it, you’re free. But you’re not going anywhere. You’re just going. And I slowly went back to 50. And went the same route I had gone a hundred times before, all the same roads, all the same corners, all the way home.

Then there was another time recently when my parents were away and I went out to get some KFC and groceries to satisfy my nutritional requirements. I was sitting alone in KFC and a car pulled up outside with a bunch of kids who were probably just cruising around. Not unlike what I would have been doing on a Saturday afternoon like this a few years ago. They were talking and laughing and at least appeared to be having more fun than me – while Mashies are indeed delicious, they make very poor conversation. But the standing around the cars, and the bullshit. I don’t want that. Busy. Just keep it up so you never have to stop and reflect, stop and realise that you don’t love it at all. Buy that Diet Coke! Send that flirtatious text! Drink that shot and dance!

A few years ago, I met one particular girl who intrigued me. She had a kind of detachment about her. Even when she was right in front of you, she seemed to be far away. Where was she?

Eventually I realised that what I wanted to ask her was, what are you searching for? But I mean, I guess I knew. I guess I’m searching for the same thing. We’re all there on The Search. It’s just that she was there so much more than anyone else – and here so much less.

I hear she’s going to China now. I’m still here. Best of luck to both of us.

I was checking out the line-up of shitty TV when this caught my eye, evoking memories of V for Vendetta:

Not nearly as good a name as “Hour of Power.”

I was also reminded of a shot I had got a few months ago of a tempting Google Ad:

I didn’t click it or anything, though. I mean, it’s an ad. No one clicks those, right?

They don’t click mine, anyway.

So I was looking for pictures of Hermione (I wonder if the equivalent counter exists?) indulging my Harry Potter addiction (cf. Harry Potter Reading Plan) actually I can’t remember why I was there, which is how it generally goes on the internet I suppose. But I was reading the Wikipedia article for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when I saw this message:

You’ve got mail!

This was kind of freaky, because I don’t edit Wikipedia or anything. Who was fucking messaging me, man?

I did what to The Man?

So… maybe it was someone else? My mind flashed back to that one time I was really drunk (ie. the previous day), and did I go to Wikipedia when I got home? Um. Shit. You’d think you would remember doing that, right? Utilising my extreme Wikipedia skillz, I did that diff thing you can do:

She has the power.

Yeah. I would definitely have remembered doing that.

Good work, though. Go the Livejournal crowd! Or is it the MySpace crowd now? I saw something worrying on C4, our music channel, earlier – something called The MySpace Song. I didn’t actually see it, it was just scrolling along the bottom. I don’t think I want to see it.

And in Trademe news: will swap for dictionary. Oh and, Crazy Apple Rumors Site reveals the name of Microsoft’s upcoming iPod Killer.

Sometimes I hate people. Maybe because they drive SUVs, or because they watch Desperate Housewives. (And let’s not forget those bastards in Marketing.) I would argue that this is not prejudice so much as a statistical model. However, the main problem with these myriad criteria is that I end up hating a lot of people, which isn’t cool. And I mean, maybe they don’t deserve it. They might have good points too.

Now, I’ve taken the occasional jab at Microsoft and its much-maligned founder on this blog. I’ve formed an opinion of him that is almost all bad, little room for grey areas in a dark, swirling black. Imagine how great the world would be if it wasn’t for bastards like that, I would think to myself.

So it was with increasing humility that I read David Pogue’s Reconsidering Bill Gates recently (in the wake of his announcement that he would step down from Microsoft to focus on his charity). This paragraph in particular:

In fact, when you step back far enough, Mr. Gates’s entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale.

Now, it’s easy enough to pick holes in this. But sometimes there is a great opportunity to tell yourself to shut the fuck up. These opportunities are golden, and I try not to miss them. What if Bill Gates is doing more to make the world a better place than I ever will? I quietly took a step down from my moral high ground.