Firebreather’s Blogsite

The coolest new trend in market research is called cool hunting. This refers to detecting emerging trends, or in other words, determining what is currently considered cool. On the flipside is uncool hunting which is to determine what is currently submerged and off-beat.

Go see.. wikipedia

Are a really good google search term.

While taking a break from serious topics, I was quite surprised by the amazingly well co-ordinated advertising that surrounds the google search phrase “cool bananas”. I immediately added this entry to Wikipedia: cool bananas. Hopefully it hasn’t been deleted by the time you read this.

I also found this quite amusing

People ask me what I think about the war in Iraq, whether Saddam Hussein should have been executed, about the cause and solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, about the “war on terrorism.”, about attrocities in the Sudan, about the holocaust, about America’s campaigns of world domination, about 911, about the increasing power of state to restrict the rights of individuals in the name of national security… . I have one important thing to say on these matters, or rather to quote:

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”

- I have a dream, Martin Luther King, 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

Now is the time.

When I was a kid I had a monster under the bed and a monster in the closet that kept me in bed all night. I’m sure this was a mother’s dream come true. I particularly remember that I couldn’t let my wrist dangle where the monster under the bed might grab it.

I’ve been aware that other people suffered from this syndrome when they were children, but it never occured to me before to ask anyone else what form their monster took. One of my workmates had a crocodile in the lounge between her bedroom and her parents room. The other had a human-like shadow in the doorway. On the other hand, my flatmate flatly stated he didn’t have one.
It probably all relates to the extraordinary capability of the human brain to distinguish patterns, even when there are none. But more importantly, perhaps its a good way of keeping children in bed all night.

I wonder what the ratio of monster-under-the-bed kids to non-monster -under-the-bed kids is?

its that feeling you get on the dance floor…

As long as I can remember I’ve had this tendency to come up with fantastic ideas that will “take over the world”. Of course, my progress on the world domination stage has been slower than anticipated. Consequently I’ve decided to put aside my own megalomaniac desires and start a miniblog-series that looks at anything and everything that relates to taking over the world.

I started with a quick survey of “take over the world” related things on the internet and I’m starting to wonder if there is anything out there that hasn’t taken over the world or that isn’t going to take over the world. A friend challenged me find anything to do with Krill (a name for phytoplankton among other things) taking over the world. Well, I flushed out a number of links, but the one that grabbed my attention is about an electronic game in which an alien race called the ‘Krill’ are trying to take over the world (totw) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Star_Saga.

Many exciting installments are to follow, but for now i’ll leave you with this thought:-

 ”I’m gonna take over the world one sexy step at a time”

Meuters, Longdon 

The Mystical Porcupine was today sighted in Rome, Italty. Eye witnesses said that the Mystical Porcupine was in the Pope’s knickers. However, the sighting has not been confirmed by scientists and video footage is not available.

This is the first widely reported sighting since footage of the Mystical Porcupine in the mountains of Tibet captured the imagination of the world in 1967, although rumours of its existence have persisted ever since.

The town of Maleny are expressing their new found passion for community empowerment by making a movie entitled “No Woolies In Maleny”. Narrated by presenter Robin Harper, it focuses on the sad event of the burrows of a whole lot of platypus being filled with cement by a Woolworths building development.

Local law in Maleny

On the topic of the right to freedom, I encourage you to exercise your right to freely choose to be controlled. It’s working for millions of americans.

I’m shocked and appalled that http://fuck.it/ has been wiped off the face of the planet. Not only is there nothing there anymore, it seems to have been wiped from Google’s memory.

Not that free speech has ever existed or ever will exist, but surely its my right, fuck.it

Does anyone else find it slightly ironic that the NSA (USA institute of spying) would like to enlist our help to make it easier to spy on us through our websites?

“By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons…Right now this is difficult to do because today’s web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF…”

Just substitute “W3C” for “NSA” in that paragraph and there you go. Heres the full story: http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg19025556.200.html

Apparently theres a comic called Firebreather

 And there are rumours that its being made into a movie:

http://www.hollywood.com/movies/detail/id/3464092

“I’ve never seen that one before. That looks naaasty.”

Frank is a Platypus

If you are into MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games), check out Eve. Its set in a futurist universe in which space travel is common, but dangerous. You start in a Naval training station with a cheap and nasty space ship. If you have heard of Elite, its basically online Elite with vastly updated graphics and expansive system of pilot management, ship fitting, trading and combat. For those who haven’t heard of Elite… it pretty much sparked the whole 3D graphics gaming industry. The authors are heroes. Check it out.

I started playing the game a couple of weeks ago. So far I like it. Took about 20 hours playing before I started to get to grips with everything, ditched my training ship, purchased a slightly less cheap and nasty frigate and began to really explore.

If you are starting out, do a couple of agent missions to earn enough to buy the cheapest frigate your race sells and fit it with some cheap weapons. Then head out and blow those pirates away in a 0.8 system. Much more fun and lucrative than agent missions.

Heres my first spaceship, its a Caldari Condor:

Frank has plans to take over the world. Heres Frank:

Transhumanism… its coming… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

Blogsite - My first act of website bootstrapping.

Heres a handy Windows tip:

If you want to get rid of the flipping annoying beep that windows makes even if you have no sounds enabled, go to the Control Panel > System > Hardware tab > Device Manager, select from the View menu > Show hidden devices, go to “Non-plug and Play Drivers” category, right click on “Beep” and select disable. You will then have to reboot your computer to complete the changes (or you can just wait ’til later).

Someone really went to alot of trouble to make sure that stupid beep couldn’t be disabled easily. I discovered it after I noticed that the master sound control slider on the volume control dialog beeped everytime I moved it. The person who thought that one up should be shot or at least put on the next rocket into space.