Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category



« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Two Girls, One Cup – A fan’s critique

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Not since Weebl.com’s Badger, Badger, Lions and Tigers (only in Kenya) or the excellent dub of All your Base are Belong to us have I seen an internet phenomenon sweep as far, or as wide so quickly as Two Girls, One Cup (2Girls1Cup). Unfortunately for reasons beyond my control, I’m unable to link to the actual spectacle as it goes against the extremely high mora standard that HD911 has tried to stick to since its inception, however a quick google search will yeild results in seconds. I must say, it is most definitely NSFW (Not Safe for Work), and NSFSC (Not safe for Stomach Contents), nor is it in anyway cool, but its worth seeing none the less.. Neither I, nor the other managers (and there are hundreds of them) here at HD911 endorse or take any responsibilty by damage (mostly vomit) caused during the watching of this fantastic clip.

But this isn’t my point, the video in question is old news, it came, shocked and left endless destruction, similar to the Asian Tsunamis of December 2005. Well sort of anyway, but I know better to suggest on a world scale they’re anywhere near as important for that would be a sensationilst, unfathomed and utterly false statement, but it was great none the less.

This school report (faked or not, I don’t know) came to my attention recently, and even days after reading it for the first time I’m still in fits of laughter. It’s not gross or disturbing in anyway, just a critical review (in a true film review style). I challenge everyone to read it, and if you don’t find it as funny as I did, then I owe you a Mars Bar or something. I’ve linked straight from Halogrid forums for these partly because they also provide a great insight into this wonderous beast, and mostly because I’m just plain lazy.

news_funnyessaycx9.jpg

11943193181964fba946ak1.jpg

Update: I’ll host them myself, damn forums.

Tags:
Posted in Online, Other | View Comments

Armin fans unite and vote for your favourite tracks of 2007

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

Armin

Yes, its that time of year again, not Thanksgiving, or Christmas, but then time when Armin Van Buuren fans from accross the globe make their vote heard, for the final show down. ArminVanBuuren.net is once again hosting the voting poll for the best tracks of 2007, in the lead up to the XXL end of year mix that is sure to once again bring joy to the new year.

All you have to do is jump on the website and pick the five tracks that you liked the most from this years A State of Trance radio mixes and then Armin plays a mega mix of the favourites.I won’t spill my vote (apart form the obvious – Das Berlin - Til’ the Sky Falls Down), but its always good to get a good mix of the best songs, and not the annoying favourites that are stuck in everyones head as of the last two months or so, so jump on and vote.

Voting closes sometime mid December so be (relatively) quick. And I might see someone, anyone?! at Turnmills in London on December 21st when the man himself plays.

Update (28/11): I was thinking today I should provide some suggestions to the undecided, so here they are:

  • Ronski Speed (feat Julie Scott) – Love all the Pain Away
  • Solar Stone – Seven Cities
  • John O’Callaghan featuring Audrey Gallagher – Big Sky (Agnelli & Nelson Remix)
  • Jose Amnesia feat. Jennifer Rene – Wouldn’t change a thing (Original mix)
  • Cerf, Mitiska and Jaren – Saved Again (3rd Moon remix)
  • Armin van Buuren pres. Perpetuous Dreamer – The Sound of Goodbye (Simon & Shaker remix)
  • 4 Strings – Catch a Fall
  • Agnelli & Nelson – Sleeping at Airports
  • Forerunners – Lifecycle

…. To name a few!

Tags: ,
Posted in Music, Online | View Comments

Dieing laptop, but Cleartype relief

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

My laptop has been shitting me to tears recently which is a little annoying as for the most part its (a Dell Latitude D820) been my pride and joy.  It’s not even very old yet, just over 15 months now, but slowly bits appear to be degrading or dieing completely over time.   Obviously when its used day in, day out like this one things are bound to go wrong, but I would have liked a little more life out of it.  Since buying it:

  • the original hard drive started clicking and was running slowly, so I replaced it (£50);
  • at 13 months of age (just over the 12 month warranty for consumables), the battery went from full power (4-5hr life) to less than 30 mins (+£80 for replacement); and
  • the TruLife™ just doesn’t have that same true to life brightness and vibrance it once did. (+£x00?!?)

Dell XPSMacbookPro

So, I’ll be on the hunt for a new one in the next few months, and am considering a trip to the U.S in March to take advantage of this U.S Dollar slump, which is currently trading at less than 50p.  At the moment the Dell XPS M1730 (fr $2500USD), or a new Apple Macbook Pro (fr $1999USD).  I’m sure everyone will agree with me that the Macbook would have to be cooler (and more practical, as you can actually fit it in a backpack), but the XPS is just full of such power goodness, and should be a good resolution to my lack of computer since moving to the ‘K.

On a more embarrassing note, along with my frustration at the ailing laptop, I was trying to work out why I was straining my eyes so much, as the screen was difficult to read.  Much to my embarrassment, for the last couple of months I’ve been surviving struggling with an LCD monitor without cleartype mode on (how to turn it on), which is a font smoothing  mode for LCD screens and an absolutely positively must have for laptop and LCD owners alike.  Thanks Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror for re-aquanting me with the obvious whilst reading through an older one of this posts.

Eye Strain

It seems, at least for the moment eye strain has improved slightly.

Tags: ,
Posted in Development | View Comments

A fork in the road, an HD911 expansion?

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

A fork in the road

Just a quick one tonight, but I’ve been considering expanding on my blogging at HD911 by starting a new blog with just work, career and tech stuff to go along with my recent push toward doing more personal work to try and build a name for myself. Obviously, I can’t let anything happen to Curious Perversions in the UK, what with the rave reviews from the BBC’s Mashed, Independant reader reviews at wordpress.com and the recent surge in activity and traffic from Digg, so I’ll endeavour to keep this level of brain fart up and possibly improve on both the quality and frequency of future posts.

Obviously, the idea with this is to seperate the serious content from the joke/satire/bulls**t, we’ll see how it turns out eventually anyway..

Posted in .NET, Development, Online, Work | View Comments

Full Steam Ahead

Friday, November 16th, 2007

Motivation

Or should I say, Full Steam Ahead at Home, Two Mighty Steps Back, at Work….

On one hand I’m happy as hell, I’m making huge progress on one of my home projects which is great for a few reasons.  Firstly, I’m actually getting some personal work done, which is good as I’m creating a hobby, as opposed to the endless nights spent downloading new TV shows to watch while drowning myself in wine (and cognac).  Secondly, I can just feel already, this last week or so of doing approximately two hours work a night has already started in the process, improving my self motivation to do these things that I really want to do, but never get around to it.

Building on from my previous post where I spoke about doing extra work at home (both personal, and freelance), I’m hoping to eventually establish myself, and in doing so, get my name out, make some more money and hopefully generate some passive income on the side.  That’s the plan anyway, now I just need to put these thoughts into fruition and get it out to a point where I can provide a service for others.

Unfortunately, the workload at the office has dried up slightly for a week or so, so I’ve taken (what I consider) a step back and am working on a PHP application.  This is marginally annoying, as I haven’t done any PHP work for what must be approximately five years now, and also because I didn’t particularly like it in the first place.  But like all things, I’ll use it as a bit of good experience, and may even enjoy myself too.  A chance to branch out slightly, perhaps, and should definitely kill the inevitable boredom of doing the same work day in, day out.

Tags:
Posted in .NET, Development, Work | View Comments

Watching (web) traffic, waiting for the perfect storm

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

I’m not a trainspotter by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a weird admiration of trains and all things transport. Same goes for cars, buses, boats and planes, its something that I find interesting whether reading about transport history, or about the newest fastest plane, train or mag-lev, or simply watching Top Gear or Fifth Gear on the televisision. But recently I’ve been watching a different kind of traffic. Something far more boring, and about as eventful as a small country town, and that’s the web traffic graph for this site.

You may remember a week or so ago I wrote a few thoughts about the release of the new version of Ubuntu, due to which I was riding a tidal wave of visits (in comparison to the previous time this blog has been open) for a number of days totalling over 400 page hits in 5 days (almost half the total hits since I moved the site to this new domain). Don’t laugh! This is good for HD911, any self respecting site probably gets this figure within an hour, or the likes of google whom I imagine hits this figure every nth of a nanosecond.

 Dismal Beginnings

Since the Ubuntu boom of late October things have dwindled completely, to a point where I’m averaging less than 20 hits a day now. Yes, like the impending recession after the mining boom, or the transport slump in the U.S since September 11 (why I can even attempt to compare this, I don’t know), my webgraph looks a lot like the recent stock performance of Northern Rock bank after their recent credit/lending crisis.

There’s only one reason for this too, I’ve got to pull my finger out and post some interesting content.  Time will tell, but I’ve got forces working against me, like my mediocre writing ability, these random darting thoughts in my head,  these bats in the sky, (Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?) or the damn snakes on this plane.  But let it be known, the vision of HD911 is to grow from its meagre beginnings to become something, and do this it will.  Someday anyway.

But its been interesting none the less.  We’ve recently launched three sites at work and its been interesting seeing the different interest in each due to product knowledge, advertising and type of the site.  For instance, our company site, new revamp, which has always been a solid performer has been on the increase ever since the launch.  No boom, just rising steadily.  Another, which has had a heap of marketing and a push in the past is dwindling now where as another with short term (I won’t say viral, but similar) marketing has gone from being a no name to having a huge influx of users on a daily basis.  I’ve also realised this Search Enging Optimisation (SEO) stuff is not for me, least not as a full time job anyway! I’m a doing man, and working in a position where you carefully lay the ground work for possible future gain is a little to unexciting for me.  It’s vitally important though.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Development, Life, Online | View Comments

I must think of new ideas – Retooling my mind

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Damn it man, why can’t I think of something to increase exposure to my name, or even a tiny bit of passive income on the side.  I’ve laid in bed for the past fortnight or so trying to think of something that I could do for money on the side, from creating/selling something, to eBay seller (ech) or maybe just doing out of hours freelance work.  I just need an idea, something that I can get off the ground and get started, then let it run from there.

Ah, the classic line, I just need an idea, from the dodgy con artist to the pre 1950′s American Novel/Movie of the inventor/travelling salesman yearning for the American Dream.  I want my own peice of american dream, white picket fence and all, or maybe not the fence, but you get the idea.

Irrelavent, but I liked the title.

I need to do a little retooling myself I think, just really sit down with a glass of Single Malt and think.  But this mind doesn’t think, it darts all over the place at a 100 miles an hour, just whilst completing this sentence I’ve already considered watching House, some porn, playing Counterstrike or living like a normal person and go and get some sleep.  However, I’m hoping that by writing these words down, I’m actively thinking, brainstorming and retooling this amazing head of mine, so that I can put this wild imagination to some good use.

Sometimes I think you’ve gotta grab an idea, however stupid it may seem and run with it, I can only imagine that’s how the likes of YouTube, Facebook and similar started.  Not that I think I could think or create anything as simple yet so perfect, but who could complain with YouTube being sold off for $1.62billion, or the Microsoft purchase of x% of advertising rights on Facebook this week making the proposed net worth of the company over $15billion.

There are some ingenious people and ideas out there (even if they’re not generating a profit):

  •  The Sandwich Guide - However many 100′s or 1000′s of ready-made sandwhiches there are at any of the UK’s 100+ supermarket, coffee shop and corner store chains, this guy strives to review and rate all of them.  Pointless… maybe?  But I know I’ve checked there for tasty lunch ideas a few times already, and with a big reader base, and others writing content for you, its no work, and possibly a steady (albeit small) revenue from advertising coming in.
  • Web2Msg – Again, another simple idea, which has been done many times before I’m sure.  Allow kids, cheap people and people without mobile phones to send free SMS’s, and relying on ad revenue.
  • Digg, DotNetKicks, Reddit, Delicious, Slash Dot – The perfect idea, digg especially.  I’d say no other site on the web has as much influence over what users will see, based completely on users that have seen it before and have rated it.  The world famous slashdot effect, garunteed to bring all but the most mighty web servers too their knee’s.
  • CAPTCHA Beater – Nobody likes spammers, they are the scorn of all delivered content ranging from snail mail, email, forums, this blog (thanks akismet, over 200 messages caught already).  You’ve got to hand it to these guys though, they’ve embedded the jumbled images (CAPTCHA’s) that you have to decipher from all over the net into a porn game, where to see more and continue with the game you have to enter the code.  The second the code is submitted the automated bot running the game can then get past the spam check and the cycle continues.

There are thousandsmillions of ideas out there, and this list could go on endlessly, so I’ll stop, but this is just an example.

Now, back to thinking.  Think Shannon.  Think.

Tags:
Posted in Life, Online, Work | View Comments

The Best Song ever

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Through much thought and deliberation, I’ve finally decided on the best song ever created. It’s a big call, and no one man should be allowed to make it, or mutter the words for that matter, but I’ll do it anyway. The fact of the matter is, its impossible to make such a call, as noone has exactly the same tastes, and those who do will most probably not like exactly the same thing anyway. But this is a blog, my blog, works streamed from my head, so I call the shots.

Disclaimer: I must say, if you don’t agree with me, and have another suggestion then I’m all ears so please comment.

I’m not an ageist, my criteria for the choice of song means it didn’t have to be brand new. This one has been floating around for a while, and it really gets my Juices flowing.

Scan to 2:11 for the best bit

It’s Dash Berlin – Til the Sky Falls Down. I most recently heard this in Leon Boiler – Intuition Recordings @ Amsterdam Dance Event 18/10/2007.

It forms an elite group (of what must be about a thousand songs) which all rate in my BTMOAT listings, featuring such classics as:

  • Bedrock – Heaven Scent
  • Sarah McLachlan – Fear
  • Sarah McLachlan – Fallen
  • Karen Overton – Your Loving Arms
  • Gustavo Santaolalla – The Wings
  • Holden & Thompson – Come to Me
  • 4 Strings – Sunrise
  • John O’Callaghan – Big Sky

What’s your favourite song ever? Cut me down..

Tags: , ,
Posted in Music, Online | View Comments

My BeerBelly™

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Writings been a little slow this last three or so days, I haven’t felt the creative juices flow, and quite frankly I couldn’t think of anything to write. This lack of imagination, creativity and motivation toward the cause has left me in despair, a serious need to speak my mind, which contains nothing. In the immortal words of Peter (yes, that one), “Wait! Wait! (I’m just thinking up another story)”

To cure the drought, and appease my ever increasing Google guests I shall fill in this gap. Shock horror, I’m now at almost 50 hits a day, and my pagerank is about as high as Michael Jackson is beautiful, Google, MSN, and BBC.com watch out, because HD911′s coming right at ya. Now if only I had a pull, or witty attraction like I can has Cheezburgers cats.

 

 

The Camelbak , bush survival, or just convenient beer?

Anyway, I introduce to you the beer belly. The greatest invention since the Camelbak, perhaps even better as it serves two purposes, two allow rehydration with no hands required, neither to drink, or carry it, and it show’s off one of mans greatest acheivements. The BeerBelly. And for the similiar minded female (or weirdly perverse male), there’s the WineRack, a drink holder that when full will turn your flat chest into C Cups, or your D’s into G’s. The beauty about the whole idea of course? You’re replacing two fatty organs, with a fat-inducing liquid of your choice, though it should be beer. If not beer, then Tucker Max Death Mix (great site, the mans a comedian), consisting of “750 ml Everclear® alcohol, 32 oz Gatorade® energy drink and 2 cans Red Bull® energy drink“.

This otherwise petite lady is packing so much punch, she’s bursting at the seams. “Thanks WineRack”, shouts one reader

Whilst suprisingly unflattering in the flesh, under a shirt or wife beater, you’ll be guaranteed to look the goods.

Now, considering how narky airlines are about the 100ml rule, and about packages strapped to chests and stomach, I will give £100 to the first person who can prove they wore one, filled with the liquid of their choice, through customs. Just for trying, your more then welcome to reap the benefits of your crime on the plane ride over.

Tags:
Posted in Online | View Comments

Freelance – A new journey through DotNet Hell (Possibly)

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

I’ve recently got my foot in with a London based photography firm who need a few error fixes done to their web site and the application behind it.  I’ve always wanted to start getting a little bit of work on the side, and this might be a good oppurtunity to knuckle down and start doing it.  At the moment its only twenty or so hours work, but it should help with rent and bills moving into the new house and Christmas coming up as well.

Having started on the work tonight and getting a good look at the inner workings of the site, I was shocked to see that I’d possibly just landed work which suffered from the same few issues that I’ve been battling for the last six months at my job.  It’s much, make that loads, better than the original state of the work at the office, and I’m thankful for that, but the spaghetti mess (albeit a neat mess) is not my best idea of a good code base to work around, and build upon.  I’ve got to get involved in a big enterprisey application at some stage and really learn something, that would be a good move toward improving my work/career.

Baby steps Shannon, baby steps.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in .NET, Development, Online, Work | View Comments

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »