Category: Doodles

All those megabytes add up to a whole pile of gigabytes

Even though I don’t consider myself to be a stuff-junkie, I’ve found myself in a situation where I more or less everyday walk around with a bunch of gear. The stuff itself isn’t all that interesting; An external harddrive, a USB2-stick, compact digital camera, iPod & cellphone.

It struck me that I’m a walking storage facility. Let’s calculate a bit

iPod: 40gb
HD: 80gb
USB2-stick: 2gb
Digicam: 500mb
Cellphone: 80mb (Memory Stick + built in memory)

Not accounting for the formatting, that’s 122.580GB of storage that I carry around with me more or less all the time. (Which is why sewing a really nifty backpack is quite high on my to-do list.)
Ok, so the harddrive is usually nine tenths full, as is the iPod. camera, stick & cell are say one third full.

There’s no point to this post, just that it’s all rather cool. If I could only offset my lazy monkey-brain memory with some on the hd, I’d be set!

And of course, I took a look at my desk and there’s roughly 300 cds & dvds (50% of each), a harddrive from a bricket iPod, one 4GB and one 40GB hd that I used in my bondage-iMac & a DSLR with 512mb. A lot of space.

If all the empty and unused space in the world saved data in a forest and there was no-one there to use it, would it make a wooshing sound or would only the trees shudder because someone sooner or later would try to print all that data?

Post exhibition traumatic syndrome

Yesterday, in spite of the hang-over, I could actually be seen whistling and even humming to myself. Not often that happens; I’m in a sweet spot – I’m not totally broke, I finished my two week stint at the store, the exhibition came together “well” (by “well” I mean “it’s over and no-one has hit me in the face”) and the allergies & accompanying asthma have left me for now.

Here’s the video I’m showing at monumental, followed by the text from the exhibition catalogue.

“The uncontested order of things: A slideshow curated by Google image search.” 2006

More a proof of concept than a finished work, The uncontested order of things was created by following a set of predefined rules applied to google image search.

The search query consisted of each letter of the Swedish alphabet (A-Z + Å, Ä, Ö), and the first forty resulting images were downloaded. Duplicate images were not downloaded, nor were gif animations, although they retained their position in the “top forty”, resulting in some queries resulting in less than forty downloaded images.
One random image per queried letter was then put into a slideshow in the order of the alphabet, and the resulting movie was adapted for the 90-second screen time.

The motivation for this process, of which the resulting slideshow is but one possible combination (let alone one possible way to present the combinations) is:
1) To see how many apparently random images we can fit into a narrative, and
2) Given the omnipresence of Google, how easily received/understood/accepted the images are when
3) A qualitative analysis of the images (and search results in general) shows an (apparently) unproportional US/EU presence, which in turn should
4) Kick us in the nuts for too easily accepting the perceived “freedom of the Internet”, and not reflecting enough on what our online behavior tells of ourselves, but also what actual and very manifest power we are supporting by our actions.

And of course, since Mark actually beat me in ping-pong this afternoon, T don’t command respenct around here anymore, and am thus reduced to making comments in poor taste about people who are dead:

Ad lib 101

Found this on boingboing.net this morning, and it’s making it’s rounds on the Internets. An unknown cab driver was mistaken for the guy he was driving and was interviewed live on BBC in regards to the lawsuit Apple (the old Beatles record company) had brough against Apple (the computer company). The video isn’t fun unless you know this, and now you know this.

inspired by this, i used up all of five minutes of my employers time to do this:

*Update*

Ok ok, so the guy turned out not to be a cab driver but a guy looking for work at the BBC. Still a case of mistaken identity though, and his initial reaction is golden. Doesn’t matter really, he’ll be “that BBC cab driver guy” and people will argue in bars going “nuh-uh, he wasn’t a cabdriver” “was to”, etc.

More info here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4774429.stm.

Update on the downloading hampster thing…

I don’t know if I should be surprised, but here are the search strings that have guided people to the blog…

So, two people looking for kiddie porn light ended up on my site, and one whos brain must have been rotting in another way did as well. I Googled it, and the blog shows up as number 9 if you search for the term. The tracker that started it all was on top of the list. Oh dear, how we all leave our marks…

The hazards of being a download hampster

One of my more endearing character traits is that I’m always trying to download the internets. If you’d like to learn how to program in Pascal for paper-mill machinery, I probably have the documents and compilers lying around somewhere.

Before I had a computer with a connection I would go to the library once a week and walk among the shelves and pick out whatever books caught my fancy; When it comes to dedication to books I’m quite the polybookamist – I’d end up having twenty books on different topics at any given time. The only Dewey decimals I wasn’t into were the ones between 796 & 798. (sports)

Now, every time I get my hands on a connection I end up downloading everything that either 1) interests me, or 2) I don’t know what it is but it sounds interesting.

This has of course some drawbacks. For example, I should have looked up what ephebophilia meant before downloading a 200 mb zip-file named epheb with the description “ephebophilia junk“. I end up with a couple of hundred images of some post-pubescent girl looking slightly amused. What the fuck. Although there wasn’t any porn involved (well, I only looked at five or so of the images, so I can’t tell) the sheer volume of images taken from someone who’s obviously taller than the girl is kinda twisted my head a bit; I can see this being sort of gateway-erotica to more overt kiddie porn.

Can’t fucking believe I’ve tainted my hard drive downloading it, and since it was over Bittorrent, I’ve actually helped others downloading it as well. Next time, I’m either looking up any words I don’t understand, or reading the info-page before downloading anything.

The torrent’s info-page is here: http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3457951, and actually describes what he torrent contains. For fucks sake; I honestly thought they were body-modification files. Like, gross piercings and subdermal implants.

Wiszdomteetzh

My jaw was clicketyclicking and then I dislocated the shit out of it – can’t close my mouth properly and I’m chewing (OK, not really chewing, actually just slightly mauling the food, mashing it up.) with my right side.

I feel like a whale, just siphoning the food through my teeth. And I drool a bit when I talk. Especially when I’m drunk. Which makes me look even more drunk.

Pratchett progress

I always do this.

I really have taken the Oscar Wilde saying to heart, that too much of something good is wonderful (or words to that sentiment, I can’t be bothered to look it up) and currently that means that I spend all my waking hours with headphones on, listening to Terry Pratchett audiobooks. When I was but a wee lad I used to buy the Discworld novels and read them in the same spirit that I’d read the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, but ever since I started downloading audio versions of the books, I’ve come to realise that Pratchett can have a lot to offer when it comes to plot and character development – or to put it differently, it’s all rather good. (albeit silly at times)

Since I like compiling lists I made one showing the Discworld novels in their chronological order, ticking off the ones I’ve read:

[x]The Colour of Magic
[x]The Light Fantastic
[x]Equal Rites
[x]Mort
[x]Sourcery
[x]Wyrd Sisters
[ ]Pyramids
[x]Guards! Guards!
[ ]Eric
[x]Moving Pictures
[x]Reaper Man
[x]Witches Abroad
[ ]Small Gods
[x]Lords and Ladies
[x]Men at Arms
[ ]Soul Music
[x]Interesting Times
[x]Maskerade
[x]Feet of Clay
[x]Hogfather
[x]Jingo
[x]The Last Continent
[ ]Carpe Jugulum
[x]The Fifth Elephant
[x]The Truth
[x]Thief of Time
[x]The Last Hero
[ ]The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
[x]Night Watch
[ ]The Wee Free Men
[x]Monstrous Regiment
[x]A Hat Full of Sky
[x]Going Postal
[x]Thud!

Some of the uncheked ones I’m quite sure I’ve read already, but that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far away so to speak, so I’m gonna give em a listen and see if that doesn’t jolt my memory. Currently, I’m nearing the end of Moving pictures; Not the best in the lot, there’s too much real-world-influence jokes (popcorn is called banged grains and so on) for my liking, but still. It’s part of whatever disorder I have to go through them all. I just can’t bear the thought of not gobbing it all up in one go; A behaviour that can be readily observed whenever I’m making food and subsequently eating all of it regardless if it’s three helpings or six.

——

Update: I’ve finished two more: Moving pictures and Light fantastic. I’m listening to Carpe jugulum right now, althought I know I’ve read it already – it was a while ago, so the book is sort of new with just occasional anticipation on my part.

T-shirt

I’ve always had a thing for doing t-shirts. It’s something about wearing my heart on my sleeve (of which I btw have a design), and being obtrusely juvenile. So imagine my joy when I found out about Threadless.com. Lotsa fun tshirt designs, and rather on the cheap side. (unless you order three or more, in which case you end up paying tax when it arrived within the EU)

So I submitted my first design the other week:

And to my surprise it wasn’t even allowed into the competition. What the hell I thought, they’ve had blood and gore and suicide t-shirt, and they didn’t allow this one in? I know they don’t like text-based designs, but I thought I was being rather clever.

Oh, well, I’m not one to give up to easily, so despite not being able to draw if so my life depended on it, I traced and photoshopped this one up:

Again, more clever than well executed, but whatever. If it’s get entered into the running I’ll be sure to post it up here as a minor achievement… In the meantime, y’all better get accounts there so that if it does get accepted you’ll be ready to vote for it and shower me with praise and such like.