Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Who's Deid

Published on June 26, 2009 in Mortality and Music. 1 Comment

“Deid”

My Butt Is Toast
Gonna TellYou Right
Just Haunt Your Face
In Broad Daylight
I’m Telling You
On How I Feel
Gonna Hurt Your Mind
You Shot To Kill
Come On, Come On,
Lay It On Me All Right…

I’m Giving You
On Count Of Three
To Show Your Stuff
Or Let It Be . . .
I’m Telling You
Just Watch Your Mouth
I Know Your Game
What You’re About

Well They Say The Sky’s
The Limit
And To Me That’s Really True
But My Friend You Have
Seen Nothing
Just Wait ‘Til I Get Through . . .

Because I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On, You Know
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
Just To Tell You Once Again,
Who’s Deid . . .

The Word Is Out
You’re Doin’ Wrong
Gonna Lock You Up
Before Too Long,
Your Lyin’ Eyes
Gonna Take You Right
So Listen Up
Don’t Make A Fight,
Your Talk Is Cheap
You’re Not A Man
You’re Throwin’ Stones
To Hide Your Hands

But They Say The Sky’s
The Limit
And To Me That’s Really True
And My Friends You Have
Seen Nothin’
Just Wait ‘Til I Get Through . . .

Because I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It, You Know
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now)
Just To Tell You Once Again,
(Just To Tell You Once Again)
Who’s Deid . . .

We Can Change The World
Tomorrow
This Could Be A Better Place
If You Don’t Like What I’m
Sayin’
Then Won’t You Slap My
Face . . .

Because I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It, You Know
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)

Woo! Woo! Woo!
(And The Whole World Has
To Answer Right Now
Just To Tell You Once
Again . . .)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It-You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know, You Know, You
Know, Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now)
Just To Tell You
(Just To Tell You Once Again)

You Know I’m Smooth, I’m
Deid, You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m
Deid Baby
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know, You Know, You
Know It, Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now)
Woo!
(Just To Tell You Once Again)

You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid-You
Know-Hoo!
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid-I’m Deid-
You Know It, You Know
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now)
Just To Tell You Once Again . . .
(Just To Tell You Once
Again . . .)
Who’s Deid?

Well Micheal Jackson apparently…

Who’s Deid

Published on June 26, 2009 in Mortality and Music. 1 Comment

“Deid”

My Butt Is Toast
Gonna TellYou Right
Just Haunt Your Face
In Broad Daylight
I’m Telling You
On How I Feel
Gonna Hurt Your Mind
You Shot To Kill
Come On, Come On,
Lay It On Me All Right…

I’m Giving You
On Count Of Three
To Show Your Stuff
Or Let It Be . . .
I’m Telling You
Just Watch Your Mouth
I Know Your Game
What You’re About

Well They Say The Sky’s
The Limit
And To Me That’s Really True
But My Friend You Have
Seen Nothing
Just Wait ‘Til I Get Through . . .

Because I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On, You Know
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
Just To Tell You Once Again,
Who’s Deid . . .

The Word Is Out
You’re Doin’ Wrong
Gonna Lock You Up
Before Too Long,
Your Lyin’ Eyes
Gonna Take You Right
So Listen Up
Don’t Make A Fight,
Your Talk Is Cheap
You’re Not A Man
You’re Throwin’ Stones
To Hide Your Hands

But They Say The Sky’s
The Limit
And To Me That’s Really True
And My Friends You Have
Seen Nothin’
Just Wait ‘Til I Get Through . . .

Because I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It, You Know
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now)
Just To Tell You Once Again,
(Just To Tell You Once Again)
Who’s Deid . . .

We Can Change The World
Tomorrow
This Could Be A Better Place
If You Don’t Like What I’m
Sayin’
Then Won’t You Slap My
Face . . .

Because I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It, You Know
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)

Woo! Woo! Woo!
(And The Whole World Has
To Answer Right Now
Just To Tell You Once
Again . . .)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It-You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know, You Know, You
Know, Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now)
Just To Tell You
(Just To Tell You Once Again)

You Know I’m Smooth, I’m
Deid, You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid, I’m
Deid Baby
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know, You Know, You
Know It, Come On
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now)
Woo!
(Just To Tell You Once Again)

You Know I’m Deid, I’m Deid-
You Know It
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid-You
Know-Hoo!
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
You Know I’m Deid-I’m Deid-
You Know It, You Know
(Deid Deid-Really, Really Deid)
And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now
(And The Whole World Has To
Answer Right Now)
Just To Tell You Once Again . . .
(Just To Tell You Once
Again . . .)
Who’s Deid?

Well Micheal Jackson apparently…

Rubberduckzilla

Published on June 25, 2009 in Advertising, Humour, Videos and Youtube. 0 Comments

El Kat has just sent me a link to what might be one of the funniest videos that I’ve seen in ages:

Calendar Connundrums Ya Bass!

Published on June 24, 2009 in History, Ranting and Scotland. 0 Comments

On my desk at THE WORK I’ve got one of those tear off calendars that’s much beloved by Hollywood movies who want to show the passage of time. It’s one of those low cost things that contracts give out at New Year to remind you to think about them when organising work. The thing itself is a self standing triangular thing made of cardboard coated with PVC and emblazoned with the contractor’s logo and contact details. It’s fairly generic as corporate souvenirs go, but it saves me buying my own calendar. Each day is printed on a separate sheet of paper and you tear off the days as they go by. The only thing that piques my interest for this particular bit of otherwise generic tat is the fact that every day has an “on this day in history” factual snippet, and a Chinese fortune cookie-esque platitude. I’d post a picture up, but I don’t have one to hand at the moment and I don’t want to give them any free advertising.

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all of this. Well this morning, like any other morning, I arrived at work and booted up my soviet era laptop, and while I waited for it to wake up I reached over and tore off yesterday’s sheet to see what words of wisdom the calendar might regale me with this time. I was shocked and amazed to find out that:

1497 – Englishman John Cabot discovers and claims Newfoundland for King Henry VII.

Now before I explain my shock and amazement I’d like to point out a few important factual inaccuracies in the calendar’s factoid.  Firstly John Cabot was an Italian, not an Englishman. He was like so many Italian merchants and explorers of the late middle ages, sought foreign sponsorship for voyages of discovery. In this case his trip was sponsored by Henry VII of England to discover and chart a northern passage to the East Indies. He failed spectacularly of course, but he did manage to stumble across Newfoundland and possibly Canada which were subsequently claimed and colonised by England so it didn’t turn out as bad as it could have for poor old Cabot.

Secondly, and more importantly, we don’t know where the hell he actually discovered, and it’s unlikely that Cabot did either. In fact he was such an outstanding navigator and admiral that after his discovery he returned to England, fitted out another expedition with five ships and sailed off never to be seen again.

So anyway, I was shocked and amazed, and you’re probably wondering why. Well it’s a well known fact that I like my dad, granddad etc, am a Nationalist. You may have picked up the odd hint here and there across my posts. It’s through my deep interest in Scotland, and most importantly its history, that I’m well aware of the historical importance of the 24th of June in our nation’s history.

To those of you reaching for the history books or typing 24th of June into Wikipedia right now I’ll save you the bother and tell you that on the 24th of June 1314 a small Scottish army under Robert the Bruce defeated a large and far better equipped English army at the Battle of Bannockburn. An event that would secure Scottish independence for nearly three centuries and that would echo down through history even to this day in the words of Bruce’s Scots Wha Hae and the Corrie’s Flower of Scotland.

Now admittedly a lot of stuff has happened on the 24th of June throughout history, including the start of the Battle of the Somme. The arrival of a Italian explorer in Newfoundland hardly seems particularly important in comparison. Especially since the Native Americans and even the Norse had beaten him there by nearly a millennia.

I don’t know how much the contractor will sympathise with me though. All they really want to do is lay asphalt on the roads…

A Question Answered…

Published on June 15, 2009 in Pictures and Teh Madness. 3 Comments

So how would you suggest the government tackle the rising crime statistics?

cannon

Tippety Tappety Typin’

Published on June 15, 2009 in Screenwriting and Writing. 1 Comment

It’s odd to think about, but I’ve just realised that I’ve been trying to squeeze the same story out of my imagination for more than two years. What’s surprising isn’t’ the amount of time spent trying to craft the story, it’s the sheer amount of revision and refinement that’s gone on since I first put pen to paper. (or fingertips to keyboard if you like).

The core of the story has remained remarkably consistent over the years: two Glasgow students discover an alien spacecraft and have a series of misadventures with it that help them to grown and develop as people.

Originally I suppose the story was a political fable about how Scotland might become an independent and internationally important nation with the right catalyst. The two heroes discover a large mining ship that is abandoned after an infectious and deadly disease kills the crew. They commandeer it and learn to control its systems eventually growing rich by mining raw materials and selling them back on the open market. Eventually the ship is reverse engineered by scientists and used as the basis of a fleet of similar ships. Eventually humanity spreads to the stars and yaddah yaddah yaddah so much so standard sci-fi fair.

Not too bad a premise I suppose, but after I started to write it in prose form it started to mutate.

First of all I changed the two students into tramps so that I could explore the cultural differences that might occur when pair of homeless Glaswegian nutters are swept into a Star Wars-esque universe.  That didn’t go much further than a few test pages after I quickly grew annoyed at my choice to write the whole thing in the vernacular to highlight their humble origins.

Next I changed them back to being students and had the ship touch down in the middle of Glasgow Green. The protagonists ended up there through a series of increasingly unlucky and fairly unbelievable events/chase scenes where they encountered the dying alien pilot. He accidentally gave one of them the biological key to operate the ship before dropping dead. The hide in the ship to escape a gang of neds that are out to get them and end up in orbit. The rest of the thing more or less follows the original premise from there on.

After a lot of though I decided that hiding from neds wasn’t a decent motivation for the characters. They needed some kind of motivation to drag them into the story. Something had to set them in motion and drive them forward. In the end I decided that one character, Dougie, is motivated by a desire to be the greatest DJ in the world and Neil is, well he’s a mystery…

Finally I abandoned writing a prose version and decided to make a screenplay out of the idea. I started out to write it in a serious vein, but have ultimately decided to go down the route of writing a sort of sci-fi dark comedy. Much of the humour will derive from the odd couple pairing of the two protagonists and their conflicting ideas of what to do with the spaceship once they get it. It will also focus on the odd and unusual characters that help or hinder them on their personal quests. I suppose in that respect it’s sort of influenced by watching too many of the Cohen Brothers’ films, but if you have to take inspiration it’s best to use the best isn’t it?

Surprisingly it took many weeks of deliberation to decide how they found the spaceship in the first place. I’ve hidden it with cloaking fields, had it hidden somewhere else on the planet and accessed by teleporters and I’ve even had it sitting under camouflage in the highlands. None of these ideas really seemed particularly sound however and it took a lot of time to come up with the version I finally settled on.

Naturally this was compounded by my desire to make the ship a large machine of 200 metres or more in length. It’s very, very difficult to hide something of that size in a country the size of Scotland. Not impossible, but difficult. In the end I shrank it down to about 30 metres in length instead. Still big enough for the purposes of the plot, but not big enough to cause serious problems if you want to hide it.

At last the script is progressing nicely, and even though it’s only half done, I’m confident that I’ll have it done before the end of the summer this time.

In fact I’ve set myself the goal of having the first draft done by the end of August.

Help Polis Goijira Theft Auto!

Published on June 15, 2009 in Glasgow, People Be Fools, Pictures, WTF!? and Whiiiit!?. 2 Comments

Normally the all pervading litter around Glasgow is fairly humdrum, but sometimes, just sometimes, you find some strange out of place nugget that makes you go WHAT THE F….?

Today while taking a shortcut on the bike I spotted this lying amongst the dying strip of trees that separates the car parks of the Crown Plaza and the SECC.

2009-06-15-007

It’s fairly curious that  an eighty quid security device to prevent car theft should be lying abandoned in at the back of a fairly secluded bit of car park. Stranger still is what I noticed with a closer inspection: the whole thing looks as though it has been chewed in half by Godzilla.

2009-06-15-005

2009-06-15-006

Now I’m not a professional car thief, but it seems unlikely that it was attached to a car when this damage was done to it. The amount of twisting and sheering done to it would probably have destroyed the steering wheel at the same time as the damage was done. I’d also hazard a guess that there was probably a lot of noise and highly visible effort involved in this destruction.  It also seems fairly intelligent to realise that the device is probably weakest at either the hinges that keep the two halves together or the locking mechanism that keeps it secure.

There are no saw marks that I could see, and the damage doesn’t seem consistent with it being attacked with a pickaxe or a hammer, but it does vaguely resemble the aftermath of when a set of hydraulic rescue tools are used. Still that seems a bit overkill when you’ve lost your keys.

All in all a very curious piece of litter, and an interesting conundrum to boot.

The Computer Death Rattle

Published on June 9, 2009 in Breakdowns, Computers, Technology, Technowhiiit and Upgrades. 1 Comment

When you’ve invested a lot of time, effort and money into a piece of machinery such as a custom built PC there’s a certain amount of pride you feel in a job well done. You feel good about yourself and your abilities knowing that you’ve taken a pile of disparate parts that have rarely, if ever, been combined before and made them into a functioning machine.

Equally when it starts to make some horrific, unidentified noise that’s fit to raise the dead you display a certain degree of concern. (Especially when you’ve spent ages not following the first rule of computing.) On Monday night I turned my machine on and was instantly confronted with this very scenario as a rattling, scraping sound burst out of the machine like an angle grinder cutting through a metal pole.

I cracked the case open to see if I could figure out the source of the unholy row. It definitely seemed to be fan related as it started off fairly soft and increased in volume to a fairly constant (and loud) rattling/scraping sound. I shone my torch around the insides looking for any obvious source of noise but there was nothing obvious going on inside. Maybe it was just some of the dust that had built up on the components rubbing against something?

I cleaned some of the gunk and dust out of the way in the hopes that that would fix the problem and turned the machine back on. The fans started up fine, but then the devil’s orchestra started up again with a WHIRR CHUKKAK CHUKKAK CHUKKAK WHIRR and a WHIRR BIZZTZ WHIRR CHUKKA BIZZTZ.

I pulled the machine out from under the desk and turned the case on it’s side to get a better look at proceedings, but I still couldn’t see any obvious source of noise or any specific piece of physical damage. Scratching my proverbial head I started the machine up again and this time all the internal fans hummed along fairly normally without even the slightest sign of a rattle. I tipped the case up and when it reached an angle of 45 degrees of the floor the noise started up again getting louder and louder. Through a process of elemination I managed to narrow the problem down to the 120mm fan in my shiney new(ish) power supply.

Resisting the urge to take a screwdriver and open up the power supply due to a deeply ingrained respect for the magical power of electricity I instead braved the crescendo of noise once more and searched google for information about noisy Coolermaster power supplies. The results weren’t exactly encouraging: 147,000 hits for the phrase “coolermaster cpu noise”, and there was me convinced to buy the thing because of how trusted Coolermaster were on hardware forums and in reviews.

Most of the sites disgnosed the same general problem: the power supply’s cooling fan was on the verge of giving up the ghost. Either the bearings had worn out or the fan was just a poorly made one that had slipped through the quality control. Either way the general prognosis was either replace the whole unit, or open it up and replace the fan itself. Neither option really appealed to me, one is too expensive and one could end up with me making the whole unit useless.

I took the power supply out of the case and took a closer look, poked it a bit with my fingers and shook it to see if anything was loose inside. Oddly it rattled just a little bit and on closer examination I finally discovered the source of the racket. The fan itself had come loose from the clips that secured it onto its sleeve bearings and was rattling against the metal grill that protects it from damage. A quick upwards push with the tip of a screwdriver clicked the whole assembly back in place. The machine started up as quiet and calm as ever and there hasn’t been a rogue peep out of it since.

Bish bosh job done!