Is Charlie Stross's Saturn's Children the first Hugo-nominated remix^* of a Hugo-nominated novel?

Inquiring minds and all that.

^*Not quite the right term, but mix in thematic reworking and parody and homage and mash-up and reworking and, well, whatever Charlie wants to call it...

Edit: And of course: deconstruction

It's all Apple's fault.

Its slick packaging and the care (and flare) the One Infinite Loop designers put into that real first experience with any piece of hardware has turned opening a box into a ritual on a par with a Japanese tea ceremony. HP hands you a remote on a sprung hand, HTC uses magnets to turn cardboard boxes into ceremonial caskets for its phones, and even Logitech has made getting at a mouse as intricate as unfolding an origami wrapper.

It's turned into an art form, something that people video and share with the rest of the world.

They even call it "unboxing". It's not opening the box, it's not unpacking the hardware.

Now it's gone too far. Look at this YouTube video of a Samsung phone being unboxed...



Too far, I say, far too far.

...perhaps it's time to reconsider things...

From a BBC piece on flat earthers:

Mr Davis says he is currently creating an "online information repository" to help to bring together local Flat Earth communities into a "global community".

"If you will forgive my use of the term 'global'", he says.

Err, surely it'd be a "planual community"?

After all, as "global" comes from the Latin, "globus", we'll need a similar word derived from "planus". If that's not good enough, perhaps deriving "tabulal" from "tabula" would work?

Spam header of the day: "Jesus Christ To Star In Next Series Of Big Brother".

What'll the voice of Big Brother do? Call Jesus into the Bible Room? Perhaps it would just provide three loaves and five small fishes as the rations for the whole series. Whatever it is, the ratings certainly need a miracle!

Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House? is a real book. We've got two copies to prove it.

It turns out that you can actually buy it from Amazon, for a relatively meagre $5.95. Which also means that there are reviews on the site, and a handful suggest other titles that you might find interesting.

My kids loved this book so much that they insisted that I buy them others in the same series including "Rover the dog says "SYN/ACK!", "How to be the Best at Firewall Configuration (The Boy's Book)", "Big, Bad Bill And The Blue Screen of Death" and their all time favorite "Everybody Poops".

This brings to mind other beloved children's IT favorites, such as:

The Little Server that Occasionally Couldn't
Grim Server Tales
The Pokey Little Server
Blue Screen and Spam
1000100111001010100101 and Other Favorites
How the Hacker Disrupted Online Christmas Shopping
Oh, The Porn Sites You'll Visit!

Just not up to the usual quality of the entire series! Whatever happened to "Sydney Sims Likes to Run Bob Desktop" and "When FlightSim Does Not Work"? They are classics!

Now, which of those shall I buy?

...another of the Canal+ movie channel adverts. This time it's for Brokeback Mountain.



Sheep on a rollercoaster!

...seeing as he pretty much ended his Budget speech with "One more thing" in his income tax cut.

Well, it was "One further announcement", but there's not that much difference!

Following a link from supergee, I came across this rather lovely Flickr pool: HTML jokes.



Enjoy!

Enjoy the fun of a Torchwood/Under Milk Wood pastiche courtesy of the one and only Verity Stob.

Come close now. Zoom in, chopper-shot to crane-shot, down over Roald Dahl-As-We-Expected Plass and its mobile phone mast fountain and, deep, deep below, in his secret underground headquarters,

SECOND VOICE Captain Jack,

CAPTAIN JACK
Hi. I'm Captain Jack Harkness.

SECOND VOICE the insomniac bicon; snug as a hobbit, pretty as a choirboy, immortal as carbon dioxide, wooden as a horse. He is passing the small hours sweeping up pterodactyl droppings,

CAPTAIN JACK
They get everywhere.

SECOND VOICE and cataloguing his prize collection of alien artefacts,

CAPTAIN JACK
One off gadget for choosing the quickest queue at Tesco, check. And one off purple wig for a girlie going to the moon, check. And one off bottle of stuff for getting pterodactyl pturds off greatcoats, check.

It says it all, really, it does...

Twenty scenes from famous films, put together using common pieces of office equipment.

Can you guess them all?

I'm stuck on number 8 and number 9. They don't seem to be "Jaws IV" or "Convoy"...

[link via By The Way...]

Today I got spam from "Terry Gilliam".

I guess it beats making movies for the Hollywood machine. Or perhaps he's raising money to finish "Don Quixote"...

For your Friday afternoon delectations:

A rather delightful (if somewhat violent) little Flash animation showing just what goes on on your PC's screen when you're away.

The moral? Be careful just what games you install...

...and we have a winner, in what has to be the best magazine headline ever:



"Ferrets - More Fun Than A PlayStation." I think that's a verdict we can all live with.

I never knew Country Life had a sense of humour...

Just how long is a parking metre?^*

"Using a dollar coin is more convenient in parking metres, it's more convenient at the subway kiosk, it's more convenient in vending machines," he said.

The inspirational typo was spotted in this BBC news article on the return of the dollar coin.

^*I suspect not very long when parallel parking in my street...

...just the same.

Welcome, my friends, to Area 404.

A radio advert this morning advertised a new book about Beethoven, which comes with an accompanying "Beethoven mood chart".

My first thought was the obvious: a list of the form "beethoven current mood: crotchety, beethoven current mood: busy", and so on and so forth.

But then I realised there was only one thing it could say (which would also make it a lot cheaper to print):

beethoven current mood: decomposing.

It always comes back to the old jokes, doesn't it...

Why are pirates called pirates?

No one knows. They just ARRRR!

spotted on a mailing list

...and so he blew the Time Trumpet.

Do you remember petrol? The 2012 Olympic hoax? Look back at the good old years 2005-2025

Nostalgia from the future...

(Cips from Armando Iannucci's new TV series. Real Player required...)
My favourite is the rolling news on the day there's no news...

A snippet from a Microsoft Vista Beta chat...

Q: Will Vista have any special file system?

A: Vista has NTFS, which is special in its own way :-)

So very very special...

I need to wipe my mind of that line as interpreted by Gabe and Tycho.

No marketroids in the room when that was typed, methinks...

This little movie is wonderful...

...if a tad on the silly side.

I had to laugh at this Slashdot headline:

The Backhoe, The Internet's Natural Enemy.

It reminded so much of the Onion's classic (for wide definitions of classic) "War On String May Be Unwinnable, Says Cat General".

Rumours are that Google will be buying 5% of AOL for one beeelion dollars...

(Will the Googleplex soon be full of jump-suited minions? Only Austin "Yahoo!" Powers can save us now...)

In an alternate world C.Hi.P.S. were all sysadmins...

You've been bad. And we know it.

So here's a ticket. Think of it as clue in action.

( A Network Traffic Violation Ticket )

Reckless cluelessness? Clueless Recklessness? Nah - both!

Found by the folk in another place that dare not speak its name...