Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category

I just tried Omegle (chatting with strangers) for the first time.  I don’t think I’m the target audience.  This is the transcript of my first (and probably last) conversation on Omegle:

Your conversational partner has disconnected.

I think I now get what Omegle is really for.

It probably only works for people my age or older, but this YouTube video of the opening credits for Star Wars done in the style of the TV series Dallas made me smile.  I particularly like the way the creator used a shot of Tarkin turning around for his credit – Old School!  The whole thing was inspired by this Star Trek one.

If this is real, I for one think it’s extremely impressive. It’s the Hawaii Five-O Theme, played on the hands (manualism) via Google Video. He squeezes his hands to gether to make… um… farty sounds that form recognizable tunes. It looks like the most fun that can be had with your hands without sending you blind…

Here’s a cute idea from one of the boffins at MIT – hold a time travel convention! After all, you only need to hold one convention as time travellers from all ages could attend the one event, as long as they found out about it. So now everyone is supposedly spreading the word so that one day in the future, time travellers will see the invitation and decide to pop back to 2005 to attend. I found the link via Instapundit.

Here’s an idea – anyone with an identical twin sibling could have some fun. One of you show up ot the time travel convention looking normal and sane, but complaining about how few people there are attending. Then your twin rushes in wearing a futuristic suit and tells there other self “You fool, the convention is in another parallel universe, not this one, they are waiting for me… us!”, and then rush out.

I like playing with online chatbots now and then, but although they are starting to look a lot better, they seem to me to be getting no smarter at all. Read the rest of this entry »

I like The Onion, it’s a funny site. But when I read this short article entitled “Nerd Has Most Obscure Crush Ever” it caught my eye. The article starts:

JACKSONVILLE, FL—The unrequited nature of area nerd June Manzo’s crush on actor Peter Tuddenham, who provides the voice of piloting computer Slave on Blake’s 7, is only slightly more agonizing than the process of explanation she must put herself through every time her media obsession is discussed.

And at this point I thought to myself, “Surely, if she had a crush on Peter Tuddenham, it wouldn’t have been for his Slave voice in particular, as that was only one of the characters he gave voice to, a character that only existed in the final fourth season. Surely she would have developed her crush because Tuddenham also, and more famously, did the voices for the original ship’s computer, Zen, in the earlier seasons, as well as the voice for the portable super-computer Orac throughout the whole series (well, except for Orac’s first episode, where the actor who played Orac’s creator did the voice).”

Then I started to wonder if the author of the piece knew of this error and only put it there to entice B7 fans out into the light. At this point I realised that thinking all this, even knowing this information, meant that I was a bigger sadder nerd than the fictional Ms Manzo, so I went to bed.

Another political survey, another dodgy result (though this one is about right). I got a 22, which is pretty much what I thought I’d get. Though some of the questions are pretty arbitrary.

I just visited a web site called presidentmatch.com that asks you a series of policy questions, then presents you with a list of US Presidential candidates ranked in their order of compatibility with your opinions. The results were almost exactly opposite who I would actually vote for – so I suspect the quiz is flawed (or I’m woefully misinformed on some candidates’ policies). Here are my results:
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I’m going to die in 46.4 years, according to this quiz, since it estimates I will only live to 81.4 years of age. I wonder if it takes into consideration the likely advances in medicine over the next forty years? Surely not.

Maybe I should lower my caloric intake in order to live longer. Hmmm, 46.4 years to go. Pshuh, I’ve got plenty of time to finish that sprinkler system I’ve been promising to build for Kareena. Plenty of time. No rush.

I’ve just watched my first, and hopefully last, full episode of Cheaters on Fox TV. I’d seen bits of the show before, ages ago, but never actually sat through a whole episode. Wow. I had my hand over my mouth through most of it, I was so shocked at how bad and yet how compelling it was. If there really are aliens out there tuning in to our television broadcasts to find out more about our species, Cheaters is one of those shows I pray they don’t see or else we’re doomed to be shunned by the rest of the cosmos.
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Me Think…
I found a link to an IQ test here. Sure, I bet it’s way too short to be a reliable test of anyone’s IQ, but I couldn’t resist, so I filled it in. The results:

See? SEE? I’m not just bright, I’m an insightful linguist! Whatever the heck THAT means!

And for anyone that notices that this IQ test seems to be part of a dating website – no, I didn’t notice that till after I had done the test. Honest honey, I wasn’t looking for a date, I swear! THWACK! Ow!

I’ve been online for a while, so I’ve seen a lot of what the net has to offer. I’ve come to accept that somewhere on the net there is a website for every interest, obsession, or fetish. But just when you think you’ve seen everything, along comes this specialised fetish site. Wow. There really is something for everyone online.

Which is not to say that I find the images there unnattractive, it’s just that, I mean… of all the technology devices to be turned on by, why this one? Maybe I don’t get it because I use these devices myself almost every day…

I’ve seen a lot of web filters over the years. You know, those programs that take a web page and convert it
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Today I downloaded Microsoft’s Speech SDK v5.1. All 68 MegaBytes of it. I wanted to see how accurate it’s voice recognition could be. After all, talking into my script-writing program would surely be faster than my fairly hopeless typing.
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Some people collect autographs as a passion. Others casually get autographs from famous people they meet (athletes leaving the field, an actor in a coffee shop, that kind of thing), keep them for a while, then throw them away. From a fairly early age I realised that autographs meant nothing to me. I just didn’t “get” it – and I still don’t. What’s the big deal about getting someone famous to sign a piece of paper? Perhaps my contempt of autographs was just part of my contempt for fame. I’ve rarely been “awed” by seeing a famous person. But there is an exception. One day I did ask someone for their autograph: Spike Milligan.
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If you thought spammers and scammers would use anything as an excuse to spam you or try to trick you, you were right. The events of 11 September are no exception. What I want to know is – if it’s OK for governments to over react to the New York and Washngton attacks by passing over-the-top security laws, why can’t the internet standards bodies pass anti-spam/scam recommendations to stop this stuff at an ISP or higher level? Or perhaps now it’s me who’s over reacting.
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I’m a John Lennon fan. Well, I like a lot of his music. I never met the man himself, and by his own admission he had his flaws. But I also think his tragically short life was interesting.
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Wow. Every now and then you find something on the net, an image, an audio file, a video, that you know you shouldn’t have access to, but it’s out there and you can’t resist watching/listening to it. You know the stuff – the recording of that poor guy panicing about his missing hard drive, that footage of a guy bashing his computer in frustration, etc etc.
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I have a guilty secret. I like to watch and listen to Parliament. Especially question time. I tell people I like to watch it because my partner is a Ministerial Adviser, but the truth is I’ve been listening to Parliamentary debates and Question Time on the radio since my school days.
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