fuckyeahbounder

disapproves ur submishinz.

picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder, lol caption: Xupa

and den, der iz:

lol caption: MysticStarLite79

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Shigatsuhana posted a photo:

I’m doing conservation cleaning in the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter this week and next. Yesterday I found some real gems like this one! Cyanide Antedote. Smith & Pepper had cyanide on the premises for gilding and plating so this was a just in case. The kicker is where it comes from. Snape & Son. So all of you Harry Potter fans will get a kick out of that!

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we decree thee “question cat”

picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder, lol caption: butchie

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Emo Cat Needs Lovez

picture: http://www.yeeta.com/_Amazing_Animal_Photo_Gallery-maxspeed017,  lol caption: Mike

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The Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit is…

“…an open source software platform for cultivating public “sound gardens” within contemporary cities. … The Toolkit enables anyone living within dense 802.11 wireless (WiFi) “hot zones” to install a “sound garden” for public use. Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, mobile phone), participants “plant” sounds within a positional audio environment.”

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I’ve been doing some research around newspaper RSS feeds again - the results of which I hope to be able to publish later this week - and during the course of it I noticed that the Daily Star was publishing RSS for the first time.

Whenever I’ve been doing studies of newspaper features and so on, I’ve generally not included the Star, as their site had remained firmly undeveloped for some years. However that appears to have changed with a recent re-design, and Daily Star content available for the first time via feeds.

Now, it is fairly standard around the web to advertise the availability of RSS feeds with images and icons - in fact over the years there have been plenty of different ones - usually quite small.

The recent trend on so-called Web 2.0 sites for larger fonts has also led to a standard image and a move towards larger icons.

However, The Daily Star approach is a new one on me.

I so wish I had been in the meeting when someone said, “You know….we could get a topless bird to hold the RSS icon…”

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The remaining members of The Who must be short of some Christmas spending money - launching an online subscription service for the band’s output.

For $50 (around £25), you get to become a ‘Wholigan’, giving you exclusive access to content, priority booking for gigs, discounted merchandise and access to blogs and message boards (which all used to be free incidentally). But on the plus side, you also get an exclusive, Wholigan-only 2-CD set of live rarities called View From A Backstage Pass and from 2008, access to every song in the Who’s back catalogue - and the option to download to an MP3 player. Oh yes - and a ‘Who’ email address of your own.

Good value? Depends how big a fan you are I guess. If you want the album, that’s about £12 worth, so an additional £13 for the rest. If you decide it’s worth the money, you can sign up from 5th November.

Find out more at The Who website

Via Modculture

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Fee says:

The Daily Telegraph reports on a bizarre case in which a man staying at a hostel was surprised by workers with a master key, having sex with a bicycle. He has been placed on the sex offenders register, despite apparently indulging in his practices in private with an inanimate object. I am wondering how this is different from using, say, a vibrator or blow-up doll? Do people in hostels have no right to privacy?

The real killer paragraph is the last one - apparently someone was jailed in 1993 for having sex with the pavement - or sidewalk in US English.

Link

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Posted by Brad Taylor, Software Engineer and “Spam Czar”

When Gmail’s spam filters are working perfectly, no one talks to us anti-spam engineers. But as soon as something goes wrong, our users, our friends, and even our Google colleagues who use Gmail for their corporate mail are sure to tell us. That’s just the way we like it. Spam is not something people should grow numb to and accept as a fact of life. We *want* people to complain. That’s the only way things get better.

Due in large part to all the great feedback we get, things are better. We’re keeping more spam out of your inbox than ever before, so more and more, you can use Gmail for things you enjoy without even realizing that the spam filter is there most of the time. It’s not too different from driving a convertible down the freeway with the top down, with the wind blowing through your hair and no traffic jams to destroy the mood. Now, I’m not saying we’re perfect, but the really good news is that it seems like spammers are finally starting to get discouraged. Attempts to spam Gmail users have been leveling off over the last year and more recently, even declining slightly. We need your help clicking on the “Report Spam” button, but through continuous improvement we are approaching the world we all want to live in.

As much as we don’t want you to even think about spam, people are naturally curious and ask questions such as “where does spam come from?”, “who buys the shoddy stuff spammers advertise?” and “how do you catch spam?” We’re engineers, though, not forensic experts or economists, so while we can only speculate about the first two questions, we can talk authoritatively about the last one — spam-catching. To that end, we’ve put together a video explaining how our spam filters work:

Now if we could only get a “Report Traffic” button in our cars …

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i r not 4 sale!!!

photo: dunno source, via our lolcat builder capped and submitted by: Chelsea K.

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There’s an ongoing debate as to the role of public money in the creation of art. Some say it’s essential and a natural continuation of the patronage system of days gone by while others question the strings attached to taking money from vested interests, especially when the government is involved.

Artist Jan Bowman is in the latter camp and has written an impassioned article on why artists shouldn’t accept state funding on Spiked.

Artists have always had to work around their patrons’ whims and political agendas. However, New Labour’s social agenda is more intrusive than the most autocratic client could ever be.

[…]

Were we living in a society where the arts were under attack and artists starved in garrets, there might be a case for artists to claw as much as they can out of the state. Today, there is no justification for it financially; even less from the viewpoint of artistic survival.

A comparison between the work of designers and artists is useful here. A designer only gets state support because the fundamental value of their work can be judged objectively. With fine artists this is impossible, since art deals with individual feelings and emotions and its direct value is unquantifiable. The state can only judge artists’ work in terms of how it fits in with government agendas. This is like trying to measure how blue something is with a ruler.

The result is a burgeoning fellowship of ‘artists’ and ‘arts practitioners’ who owe their careers entirely to the state and who survive by ticking the right boxes in return for accommodating to the government’s propaganda requirements. For all Tessa Jowell’s fine words about the unique, transcendent value of art, New Labour will accept an awful lot of rubbish from artists so long as the results send the right ‘message’ about smoking, drinking, child abuse, internet porn, recycling, or any other current government obsession - even better if the process involves sufficient members of the public, from nursery upwards.

I’m not sure where I stand on this, and admittedly as someone who isn’t a working artist my opinion isn’t all that relavent. On the one hand I think it’s useful to have a financially secure environment for artists to work in - doing compromised work is better than doing no work at all - but on the other hand most of the great artists I admire don’t work for the government. They’re too independent in vision for that.

With Jan’s thoughts in mind this piece on Digital Central was amusing.

Culture West Midlands are holding a symposium to address the lack of attention cultural agencies and organisations have given to the issue of climate change.

I’m sure the people involved with Culture West Midlands have everyone’s best interests at heart but there’s certainly something prescriptive about that sentence. Hmm.

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Ape Lad posted a photo:

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Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain Christmas Special

Thu 6 Dec 7:30pm at Town Hall
£16

Okay, maybe £16 is a little steep but you can’t really go wrong here, and thankfully there’s plenty of videos on YouTube so I don’t need to explain why.

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