tape

My Hobby:
Diminishing double-glue-sided scotch tape by forming it into a Moebius strip.

olives

I like olives very much. Do you know those olives that come in squareish plastic boxes with a thermally-sealed plastic film cover? I think I've gone through three or four brands and all of them have the same flaw. The plastic film is thermally sealed around the box edges, but on one or two corners the seal is moved inwards to allow you to pull the film upwards and open the box. I couldn't open a single box using this suggested method. All of them had their cover cut with a sharp knife. This is stupid. Why the hell do they provide opening tabs on the corners if the film is so tightly sealed it simply won't come off? One time I used a set of lineman's pliers to pull on the tab and it still didn't break the seal, it did however tear the tab. Piss-poor design.

so?

Italian expert is skeptical of cave supposedely linked to Romulus and Remus, the guys who founded Rome in some famous legend. Well. After a boring read of the article, I can only say: So? So fucking what! Rome sucks anyway and I hate the Roman Empire being so praised and overrated.
Porno-prof teacher suspended, also in Italy. What does porn have to do with being a good teacher, if one maintains a proper attitude in the school, which seems to be the case here? I mean it's not like the woman was an exhibitionist or a pedophile, like that guy in dot-berlin who was let to teach in kiddiegarden. So why did they suspend her? Don't ask me. I don't know. I'd rather die than go to Italy.

the list

I have a theory regarding the latest South Park episode. I'm terribly said because it's also the last in the season and I won't be seeing any more South Park till spring :| But still, I have a theory regarding "The List" and it goes like this:
Haven't you noticed that Abraham Lincoln's ghost has a striking resemblance, in its looks, voice and behaviour, to the Ghost of Human Kindness that abducts children? :D Well, I guess thousands of people saw that too, but I din't care to google so as not to skew my description.
So I was laying down comfortably watching Kyle plot to burn down the school, and the ghost of Abraham Lincon shows up and I'm like: Ohhh shit! :D He's going to abduct him now! :D Come on! Come on! Abduct him! :D But he did not abduct him, and I think I found the reason why: you see, unlike Butters, who ageed with the Ghost of Human Kindness after his instructive lecture, Kyle did not. He just went on to be a "fucking asshole".

misc

miscellaneous shit.
1) i didn't have time until now to rant about how much halloween sucks. first of all, that's not even a name, it sounds too stupid and awkward to be a name. it sounds more like a kid's joke. a deranged, physically abused kid. second, treat-or-tricking is stupid. it encourages begging and property damage. it presents them in such a light as to make them seem acceptable. they're not. third, what's with all the ghost-vampire-werewolf-whatever costumes? if i were to wear black and white paint on my face, that would freak the fuck out of people. but on halloween it's somehow acceptable. there was some kid in some disco on tv: "i'm the cute blood-sucking vampire, excuse me, i have to hit on some more girls and suck their blood". i have only one thing to say about that: "do you like to eat red carpet?! do you like to eat red carpet?!" oh yeah :) fourth, fuck halloween, just another opportunity to spend money on shit. well, at least you're not being emotionally blackmailed to do so like on valentine's pay.
2) some misguided kids broke a world record in bucharest some weeks ago. care to take a wild guess? yes, they built the world's longest condom chain, allegedly to raise awarness towards aids. well, you could raise awarness towards aids by DISTRIBUTING condoms for free, rather than ruining them by tying them up and laying them down on the fucking asphalt! you should distribute condoms and informative flyers, not ruin perfectly good products worth at least as much as a truckload of beer. damn, condoms are too expensive! no wonder people prefer to drink one more beer and then go home and have unprotected sex, rather than use a condom and drink a beer less. and these kids ruined a shopful of condoms just to get some media attention. shame.
3) lack of toilets is fatal to approx. 2 million people each year. i knew that. i respect the modern toilet. it's humanity's greatest invention ever by far.
4) oppressed indian in malaysia sues britain for... 4 trillion u.s. bucks. good luck.
5) chestnut from anne frank's tree auctioned. at first i thought: who the fuck is anne frank, what an ugly name. then i googled and man, is this whole thing ugly. sad. ugly. sad. ugly. horrible. what if fascists in italy and nazis in dot-berlin were to rise to power again? heck.
6) as low as 4% of "charity xmas cards" earnings actually goes to charity. well, what did you expect. why the hell would i buy "charity cards" anyway? go see "filantropica". and while you're there, go see "the company" too. and yeah, just as the article says, read the goddamned fine print. "4% of earnings goes to charity". "drink our juice, it has natural ingredients, bla-bla. contains 0.2% fruit juice". true, legal, fair.
7) whatever, i forgot.

offensive

This early morning I'm feeling very dark, cynical, uncaring, self-centered, rightfully judgemental and rightfully offensive. Again :)
To start, fuck Italy again. Don't buy Italian products and don't go to Italy. If you're Italian, consider doing whatever it takes to clean up your people's attitude towards the immigrants who support a good part of your goddamned economy. Or at least obey the damn fucking law.
Further, fuck dot-berlin again. Watch this: pedophile allowed to work in kiddiegarden. Way cool, keep it up. At least he didn't fuck the kids, but what if he had.
Fuck Japanese culture. Why the hell would you ban pictures of genitals? Is it like they're not part of the human body or something? Is it like they don't have as right a function as other body parts? Is it like I can drink through my mouth, but it's somehow dirty to urinate through my dick? Is it like I can play idiotic Japanese video games with my hands and feel some idiotic pleasure in my brain, but I can't somehow masturbate or have sex without feeling guilty? Furthermore, fuck their work culture. Remember the guy who derailed the train he was driving, killing a lot of people, because he was like 1 minute late? Oooh, the dishonor! Oooh, the shame! One full fucking minute, dude! Well, a former co-worker of his actually commited harakiri when his train was late some 40 seconds, so it figures. Also, fuck their writing. They have 2 different alphabets for writing words as syllables, and they sometimes do that on signs, next to the main text. However, they still choose to use ideographs, which is a plain stupid idea because of objective reasons: they're fairly complex to display, they're hard to alphabetize and sort, there's too many of the goddamned symbols, and it's a primitive, retarded system. In my exceedingly unhumble opinion. This also applies to Chinese. I was reading an article a long time ago, also on Oddly Enough, about some Chinese politicians having names that are spelled with some ancient arcane characters that nobody knwos how to draw or pronounce. Well. 26 letters is an idea too simple or elegant for you idiots to adopt.
Next on the list, Singapore bans video game for sexy scene. Well. Singapore rules in many ways, for example they employ corporal punishment on criminals. Bamboo sticks to the ass. That fucking rocks. Law and order, by reason and by fear. Unfortunately this philosophy has the side effect of reducing some personal freedoms, especially when it comes to sex, but so be it. Nobody's forcing you to live in Singapore. And being such a small country that has it so well, no wonder their politicians spend time banning video games for just one questionable scene, albeit a very sexy and exciting one - I mean, having not seen the actual game, just the mental picture I get from reading the neutral description in the article is very hot. And here I am, shamelessly praising a Microsoft product.
Finally, some tropical fishes can live out of water for months. Well. Nature sure is cool. Evolution wins again, Ha-Ha!
But wait. Now I'm also finding out that yesterday some Japanese welcomed the year's first shipment of Beaujolais nouveau by... bathing in it. Apparently the wine needed to be poured in the pool by a sommelier. Well. Sometimes French does have a certain liquid quality to its sound.

discrimination

Once I read some label/advertisment/whatever that had an intersting notice: "Foobzbar is an affirmative action / equal opportunity employer." At the time, I viewed that as a very positive thing and discussed it with people: look, this is civilized. Foobzbar is (at least in writing) a modern company. They specifically state they don't discriminate. Bla-bla. Then I learned what affirmative action really means :) When I first read the notice, I thought it had something to do with you getting promoted based on your merits. Man, was I fucking wrong. As can be read in the Wikipedia article, it's nothing but positive discrimination, and in many countries it's unlawful. Yes. Illegal. Like all kinds of discrimination should be. I don't even find any merit in commenting any further.
I will however comment on the current events in Romania and Italy. It seems some Romanian guy went to Italy (a lot go there to work an pay taxes, and a few go there to steal or beg). The guy allegedly robbed a woman, beat her up and raped her. She later died. Of course the press, being the shitpresser that it is, erupted in anger towards all Romanians, as if some guy committing a crime makes me a criminal too. Then it seems the woman wasn't actually raped, just violently robbed. So all the posters put up by extremists with emotional crap like "how can you look a raped woman in the eyes" and bloody crying faces were left without merit. Whatever. Discussions, talk shows, prime ministers meeting, shit for the press to feed on. I don't even care. I went to Italy once, and well, big deal. I'm never stepping there again. I mean, I heard some guys speaking Italian in the subway. Should I have started yelling "Booo, mafiozzi! Pizza spaghetti! Francesco Pazzi!" ? No. But Romanians are now genuinely afraid to speak Romanian in Italy for fear of being assaulted.
This being said, here is my short essay on why I don't like France but France is OK, but Italy sucks.
There's a flash film that shows why. I've last seen it some good years ago, so I had to google for the link. I wanted to search for "italy eu flash". Oddly enough, after typing f I got a suggestion for just that, and the first hit had the film I was looking for :D
But I have to add some stuff.
1) I visited some famous museums there, and most of the statues had their penises chopped off. Ouch. How very Latin, I should say.
2) The Pope lives there. The Pope is anti-progress, anti-freedom, anti-sex-ed, anti-everything and they should put a rabbit in his holy place. Italy gave the Pope his seat back (a whole state!) in the early 20th century (fuck Roman numerals), plus some money, when they could have chosen not to do that. They should have told him to respect their authority and shut up. What? You want a state? Ha-ha. No. What do you mean you had it before? So? The Dacians had their state untill we conquered them in the 1st century when we were called Romans. And now that the Roman Empire has fallen apart they're called Romanians, otherwise they'd still be under out authority. No. You don't get your state, beat it.
3) The Roman Inquisition
4) The Roman Empire
5) Electricity plugs :)
Look. Look at this map. Do you see? Do you SEE? :)
Roughly above the equator is the civiliz-pardon me, relevant world. Well, count Australia in too. So, what do you see? You see America in purple and Europe + Russia in green. Those are the two main standards for electricity plugs. Let's analyse. I belong to the green majority, so I can safely say I have "normal" plugs :) Like the one currently on top-left of the Wikipedia article. America is America, they have their own standard, it's OK. Who's gonna argue :) Japan uses the same type apparently, so that makes it even more OK. Of course, one can always use two stripped wires, two matches and a 100-250V AC/DC-to-DC universal supply and plug into every plug in the world, but that's dangerous and maybe illegal. There are all sorts of adapters, but I'll intentionally ignore that due to the fact that man, I forgot it at home! So this discussion is perfectly warranted :) So there's the American plug, and the "normal" Russian plug. Then there's the British plug which is well, British. That's also OK. I mean, they have the pound instead of the euro, they have a queen, they're British :) They have every right to be particular about their heritage, language, lifestyle, weather, and electrical plugs. It's perfectly acceptable, because they're British and London, unlike Rome, is a really cool city. And then there's Italy, where plugs have three pins and don't fit in the rest of European sockets. However, some European plugs do fit into Italian sockets ha-ha :) So when you, the fascist Italian, travel abroad, your plugs won't fit. They won't fit anywhere else in the world. That's because they're Italian. Ha-haa! That's what you get for being Italian, loser. Think twice before discriminating against my people, asshole.
Peace brothers.

news

I usually read Oddly Enough just for the sake of irrelevant stuff that happens around the world.
The first article I will point you towards is, of course, about death. It seems that some Canadians have the correct attitude towards death, their tombstones engraved with witty last words. This caused me a lot of trouble. Usually when I think of some stuff that's "so cool, man!" I can't wait to have it done. So now I can't wait to die and have "Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish." written to my tombstone. That's so fucking twisted. No! And usually when I can't wait for something, time starts going faster. No. I want to live! I've got stuff to do here, God damn it!

The second one is really nice. Pure urban poetry.

And finally, it's official: you don't have to live in France! :D
___
*) I don't like France. I don't like words having genders (especially when those genders are different from my own language -- like, is this a gay fork or what?). I don't like using the plural of "you" as a mark of respect, even though yes, I'm forced to do that here also. (What's with some people here addressing their parents with the polite plural form of "you"? Is that your idea of teaching kids about family ties, parents?) I travelled on both Boeings and Airbuses and only the latter gave me an allergy from whatever they were freshening the air with. I don't like the French calling computers "ordinateurs" when "computer" is a word of Latin origin. I don't like the French Wikipedia page saying that ordinators interface the environment through peripherals such as keyboards, screens and modems. That sounds straight out of an eighties textbook. I agree it's true, but sincerely, a network card or mouse would be more widespread than a modem as of 2007. I don't like the same page describing a computer's insides in a style reminiscent of a seventies textbook. For instance, a modern bus isn't made up of address, data and control lines anymore. Hasn't been this way for at least 15 years. Oops. Let me check the real page to see if that's also written there. Nope :) And it's also more fun and informative. People don't read Wikipedia to learn that computers have a CPU and a modem. They read Wikipedia to learn about interesting aspects in the history of computing, about various contemporary achievements, to see a picture of a computer inside a watch, to see a punched card or an ISA slot and understand that's history, stuff like that. I don't like the French Wikipedia, just as I dislike all its other local variants. I don't like the French being so fanatical about their language, though the dot-berliners get first place for this. For example, the article mentioned above is about ordinateurs, but they contain cache memory, not cachée as would be appropriate French. Screw this. I also think the French Revolution is a bit overrated. I like France for using nuclear power and for having nukes and the balls needed to keep them, I don't like France for anything else. And all the new Peugeots or however they're spelled seem to be laughing at you with a dumb grin. In fact, some other new cars seem to be doing that as well. So to be fair, I should point out that bad taste is in the eye of the beer holder, and irrespective of nationality.

podding

How seriously can you take a university that teaches classes on iPods? Really! :D I mean, ... listen to this: "... for the first time allows you to create your own auditory world bla bla" What? I mean doh. This is what you're teaching university students? I mean, I would feel intelectually insulted if someone attempted to lecture something like that to me. Well, actually I did a couple of times, but that's another story. Dude! What kind of university students are those who can't figure out for themselves that a music player coupled with a digital music library/store allows you to create your own auditory world? It's silly to have a course about that, and it's discrediting to the university, at least in my view. But then again, I guess they have a lot of courses on even more trivial subjects. So it's no wonder that a lot of people who claim to be experts in some field actually have little idea of what they're doing. Take the music "industry" for instance. When Steve Jobs launched the iPod and iTunes, he had to work hard to convince them to allow music to be bought off the Internet. Then he had to work even harder to convince them to allow the purchase of individual songs rather than full albums. The man knew what he was doing, and the enormous commercial success of his idea is proof of that. But people who counted and who should have really known better didn't initially approve of his idea, and that was plain stupid. I mean, here is this huge economy ruled by people who we're supposed to credit for its functioning, right? We should trust that they know what they're doing, that they do everything to ensure that everything goes well. Hell, this is so stupid. One day a man comes and states the plain obvious -- you're doing it all wrong! This is how it should be done! And it works, and the numbers speak for themselves. But it took someone like Jobs to actually implement such an idea, not because it hadn't been thought of before, but because he had the necessary charisma and influence. And one might think that "artists" (I somehow hate that word in its modern meaning) should be, well, you know, smart people. They should feel the world around them, they should be aware of their fans' opinions and feelings. But no, you had big names saying that no, albums are "thematic" and shit, and they should be sold as a whole, not broken up into songs. Why? Probably because the record house said so, and that's degrading to an artist's status. Everybody knows that people like to select the songs they listen to and build playlists and shit. It's been done that way for a long, long time, ages before the iPod, with MP3s. But some are unwilling to acknowledge that. I mean, people buy CDs, the companies get their money, then they vocally bash illegal downloads (which probably got the buyer to buy the CD in the first place), and it kind of works, so why actually encourage legal downloads? Why offer a service that actually fits like a glove over what the users actually want? I mean, if the billions are pouring in, then fuck the consumers, as long as they consume. Right.

computing

Homebrew computers. Some people like to build their own computers as a hobby. I don't mean buying subassemblies from computer stores and sticking them together in a case, I'm talking about building the actual boards, and designing and building CPUs from discrete chips. You can see dozens of CPUs and computers built out of TTL chips on the 'net. They have varying degrees of performance, but none can match a modern computer, of course. That's not the point. The point is building your own computer for fun and for learning stuff. One of these discrete TTL chip computers (designed and built by a guy who also did 'real' integrated CPUs as a job) runs Minix and is comparable in performance to an early 8086 PC. Others are notably less powerful, but as I said, that's not the point. The point is, it's a computer built from cheap, very low tech, off-the-shelf parts that have been widely available since the 1970s. I mean, in case of apocalypse, maybe ultra-high-tech semiconductor fabrication facilities may not be available anymore, but simple TTL chips can literally be fabricated in someone's basement with some little investment. Sure, they're slow, but who cares. We don't need luxury in order to survive. We need food, a roof and maybe a toilet. A flushing toilet would be a rare and highly prized item in such a scenario. Similarly, computers need not output high-definition DRM'ed video streams on wide screen monitors. Postapocalypse, we'd be OK with a command line on a mechanical teletype. Low-resolution graphics on some old rugged TV would again be considered luxury. And that would allow us to quickly redesign the old technology, if resources and politics allowed.
But even if this postapocalypse scenario is kind of stretched, there's still the cool factor, the DIY factor and the learning-all-by-yourself factor. So any criticism of this kind of endeavors is pointless. However, I mighs have some suggestions.
1. Why use 74LS chips? They're slow as hell. I mean sure, it works with 74LS but it also works with 74S which are much faster. Sure, they burn more gas, but who cares, it's a hobby not a mass-produced consumer item. Sure, they have to be laid out a little bit more carefully, but it can be done. Well, there are many reasons. First, as stated before, raw speed is not the ultimate goal, because you don't use these for actual 'work'. So yeah, one could say "I built it with 74LS because those are cheaper and more widely available, it works, it can theoretically be done with 74S but hell." and that's correct.
2. Why not PLDs? CPLDs? FPGAs? Because, that eliminates the physical work of making/wiring a lot of boards and soldering in the chips/sockets. Sure, it's faster to design, it runs much faster because it's all integrated in one chip, and that's why it's done this way in the industry. But this is hobby! :) Then, it's also harder to debug because you can't just put an oscilloscope or voltmeter anywhere in the circuit, it's integrated! There are ways to work around that, but it's less 'hands-on'. This being said, there are lots FPGA-based computers built by both amateurs and professionals. There are free soft-processors and peripherals that you can compile and download into FPGAs or even make into hard chips, on opencores.org.
3. Why not transistors? I mean, if you really want to DIY, and do it hands-on, so not inside an FPGA, why use TTL chips and not discrete transistors? That's cheating! :) Transistors are much easier to fabricate even than TTL chips, and there isn't any hardware that's lower-level. Sure, you can build a computer with relays, and for that you only need iron and wood, but that's to big to DIY in your house. Transistor boards would of course be much bigger and take much longer to build than equivalent TTL chip boards. So there's a point. But there's still no better way to wipe off the aura of 'black magic' that surrounds computer internals other than building one out of simple transistors. They have just two main terminals and a control terminal - no chips, no mysterious black boxes. And you could attach LEDs and see the bits flow.

So I'm officially launching a contest. Whoever can design a Brainfuck processor with the least number of transistors wins the respect of hardware hackers worldwide. Nobody cares about speed, area, or cost, it just needs to be Turing-complete. This is hobby. Also, nobody cares on how many bits you encode the instructions. They don't need to be ASCII, just have a 1-1 mapping to Brainfuck. Oh, and no scientific papers can be officially published on it, because it contains the word fuck. Thankfully.

laughable

Stuff that's laughable.
1. dot-berlin. So not only do Germans hate speaking English (well, many of them at least), not only do they oppose reforms by the EU, but now they want a new TLD for their capital city =))
So, what if, London wanted .london, and Paris wanted .paris, and New York wanted .new-york, and then some other special-interest-group from New York wanted .newyork because it's shorter, and what if then someone from Bucharest where I live wanted .bucharest? Then what if we would require .baneasa, .berceni, .militari, .muncii - areas of Bucharest. Do that with every major city in the world, and we would have tens of thousands of top-level domains, just because .berlin.de isn't enough. And we would have to do that, because we can't discriminate against other major capitals or cities just because Berlin speaks Deutsch and has some Communist wall. On a related note, now that .cat has been approved and some other significant linguistic groups are requesting their own TLDs, maybe they can also assign one to each of those decrepit languages that are spoken by 20 to 50 people and were once heavily advertised on the Discoveries during breaks. So maybe they'll get contempt with having like, between 0 and 3 sites and advertise their decaying culture there, and stop trying to take over my mind 3 minutes at a time. Like I should somehow get impressed and maybe donate half a penny so they could further raise their children to spear-hunt animals and sing 3-note songs when there's microelectronics, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, macroeconomics and western music to study, among lots of others. That's fucking annoying, and pointless. So fuck .berlin, fuck .mobi, .museum and other dots, fuck trying to save endangered species consisting of 0 to 5 individuals, and fuck daylight savings.
2. Fuck PPPoE.
3. Fuck wisdom teeth
4. Fuck neckties (the most useless object ever invented)
5. Fuck daylight savings
6. Fuck outdated medicine
7. Fuck leaded gasoline
8. Fuck fuckedee fuck fuck fuck
9. Fuck daylight savings
10. for sale: Cat-5 Ethernet cable, 20m, IPv6-compatible
11. that's all.