Mar 13 2012
My daughter is four years old. For at least the last two years she has known how to use Youtube on the iPad. She can choose from an un-ending stream of her favourite cartoon characters whenever she wants. She can skip or replay them and they aren't interrupted by three minutes of junk food commercials. She almost never watches the television, and if a show she IS watching get interrupted by a commercial break she hits the roof. This is your future market, network television. Good luck with that, and say hi to newspaper media if you see them.
Jan 23 2012
In men, the symptoms low testosterone and of owning Skyrim are quite similar. Consult the following table:
Symptoms of low testosterone
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Symptoms of owning Skyrim
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- Mood changes (low mood and irritability)
- Poor concentration
- Low energy
- Reduced muscle strength
- Longer time to recover from exercise
- Low interest in sex (decreased libido)
- Difficulty getting and keeping erections
- Breast development
- Osteoporosis (thinning of bones)
- Low semen volume
- Reduced beard or body hair growth (less shaving)
- Easy fatigue
- Poor concentration
|
- Mood changes (low mood and irritability)
- Poor concentration
- Low energy
- Reduced muscle strength
- Longer time to recover from exercise
- Low interest in sex (decreased libido)
- Difficulty getting and keeping erections
- Breast development
- Osteoporosis (thinning of bones)
- Low semen volume
- Reduced beard or body hair growth (less shaving)
- Easy fatigue
- Poor concentration
- You own Skyrim
|
NOTE: Did you notice that "Poor concentration" was mentioned twice in each column? If not, you have just tested "positive".
Jan 05 2012
One of South Australia's most lucrative exports is uranium. "Ooh, that's horrible." you say. Just pretend you still don't know that fact and continue to live in an economy that would be flailing right now without such evil exports.
More correctly, we export yellow cake. This is uranium in its most unrefined form and is actually quite safe to be around so long as you don't start eating it. Uranium doesn't become more lethally radioactive until it is refined into plutonium rods for instance, then the radiation it gives off can be fatal if not properly shielded (you shouldn't eat plutonium either). Of course after the plutonium is used up, it can be REALLY dangerous and needs to be stored for years and years before it is no longer a threat.
So relax, South Australia just exports yellow cake, it's safe. The countries we export it to then refine it and sell it (for a massive profit) to other countries that must then dispose of it (at a massive cost).
It's like South Australia is selling Metamucil to the world, and the world then mixes it with water, drinks it and then has a massive turd to deal with.
As wealthy as yellow cake exports have made us, why stop there? We dig this crap out of the ground, why not build industries around refining it (or don't we think we can be a world leader in that?) and disposal of it? We would all be gajillionaires!
"Oh but Mike, refined and spent uranium is dangerous, we don't want that anywhere near us!"
Well, if we won't be responsible for it, what right do we have to profit from digging it out of the ground in the first place?
PS: I'm pro-nuclear as a form of power. It kills a fraction of the people that coal power generation does, even including catastrophes like Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Nov 04 2011
Getting ready for the 2012 Melbourne International Comedy Festival I prepared a form for comedians to fill out using Google Apps. SO EASY.
The tricky bit is trying to make sense of the form submissions. The spreadsheet layout of data that Google provides you is simple enough to navigate, but because some of the fields I used were paragraphs in length, a lot of the data in smaller fields wasn't easily viewable. I would have to click in a field box and then scroll to the bottom to see the smaller entry that was driven down by the large entries in other fields.
The solution was to select the entire spreadsheet and change the alignment to the top of the cell. All the information is displayed visibly at the top of the cell now and I only need to scroll down to read the longer entries.
This might be a no-brainer for most folks. It took me weeks to stop struggling with it. Probably a shame the default isn't for the alignment to be "top".
Oct 21 2011
Tweeting pictures from your iPhone or smartphone is super easy, thanks to the hard work of web services like Yfrog and TwitPic. In exchange for their hard work they make money from advertising on their website. Good for them.
Instead of sending my followers to TwitPic though, I would rather send people to my website so they can read my other crap, book me for gigs and click on my advertising links for "mesothelioma remedies".
This meant that for a while instead of TwitPic, I was using the WordPress app on my iPhone, creating a new blog post with just a picture in it, then copying and pasting the link into Twitter. It was a pain in the ass.
Then I started using "WP to Twitter" so that at least when I finished creating the blog post manually, I could have it posted from my WordPress to Twitter automatically.
Then I discovered the "Tweet Images" plugin for WordPress which sets up an API on your WordPress blog that your iPhone or smartphone's Twitter client can post pictures to instantly. In your Twitter client's settings instead of TwitPic or Yfrog etc for the image service, you select "Custom" and enter the correct details for the Tweet Images API on your WordPress blog and you're done. Now you can instantly upload your pictures and benefit from the traffic to your website.
Also useful is the "Clean URLs For Tweet Images" plugin which will create URL slugs for WordPress from the text in your tweet, making them easier to read and SEO friendly.
Pretty soon you'll be making $7.32 every year from your WordPress blog, just like me.
Oct 14 2011
After upgrading my Macbook Pro to OS X Lion I was no longer able to mount any NTFS drives, not my USB drives formatted for NTFS nor even the Macbook's own BOOTCAMP partition. I could see the drives in Disk Utility but if I tried to mount them I got the error message "The disk “BOOTCAMP” could not be mounted. Try running First Aid on the disk and then retry mounting."
I tried lots of all of the third-party extensions I could find, but they all failed. I found the solution on Paragon-Software's website. I fixed the NTFS mounting by deleting the folder /System/Library/Filesystems/ufsd.fs and rebooting.
Let me know if it works for you.
Mar 29 2011
Mar 19 2011
People talk about the wonderful smell of a newborn baby. I thought it would be something similar to the smell of a new car. Maybe not that pleasant, but a sure sign that something was brand new. Either that or I though they would smell like baby shampoo, but they actually have a far more unique smell.
A new born baby doesn't smell like nine-month-old stale urine like you might expect (isn't that what the amniotic fluid is mostly made of?). It doesn't smell bad at all. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't smell so great that you would buy a bottle of it to spray under your arms, but it is a hard to distinguish aroma.
The closest I have experienced to the smell of a newborn was one day when I was walking through a shopping mall's food court. It was the end of the day and the kitchens were all removing the warming trays for cleaning. There was a fog of steam coming from the shops that filled the food court and that's when it hit me. Newborns smell like old bain-marie water at the end of a busy day, a kind of soupy smell enriched with the scraps and spills from food that you would never tell your doctor you were eating.
They also smell a little bit like a wet ham sandwich.
Don't let that stop you from having a baby though.
Mar 03 2011
Mar 02 2011
Feb 28 2011
Feb 25 2011
Feb 23 2011
Woman, get in the kitchen and make me some apostrophes.
Feb 08 2011
To promote my Adelaide Fringe show “Creepy Guy” among my Facebook friends, I posted the status “I’m bring creepy back” as a play on the Justin Timberlake lyric.
Lots of people thought it was cute, but an old friend, Charles, totally ran with it and rewrote almost the entire song. Enjoy.
♪ ♫ ♪ Mike’s bringing creepy back,
Them other Nutz don’t know how to act,
You think your weird, with your hunchie back?
He screams FAIL! with your baggy sack!
Take ‘em to the train!
Sexy Lady, You see I’m scruffy,
I’ll do like a cartoon dog named Tuffy.
I’ll let you tip me if you misbehave,
Just wait 2 weeks sugar please don’t shave.
Take ‘em to the forest!
Come here squirrel
Go ahead, be nutz with it
Come to the track
Go ahead, just run with it C-I-P
Smell my hair, c’mon sniff it
Dank is me!
He’s bringing creepy back.
Family Guy did STAR WARS “IT’S A TRAP”.
If he did hookers he’d catch the clap.
He hates the Movie with a “Broken Back” ♫ ♪ ♫
Feb 04 2011
Most people when they start using Twitter find themselves suffering “follower envy”. They wish they had thousands of followers like everyone else does.
There are two ways to grow your followers. Artificially or organically. One of them sucks. Read more ›
