So I’m going to be doing three types of posts over the next few days/weeks/months in an effort to catch-up with everything (not that I expect it will work-out as planned) but this is what I have in mind…

• Current posts discussing the most recent stuff I’ve been up to
• Catch-up posts discussing what’s happened no-so recently
• Random links and other interesting stuff I’ve compiled but haven’t gotten around to posting

Let’s start-off with some of the most recent stuff – it’s been school holidays and Kristy took some time off work to do some holiday stuff with Caleb. One of the things they did was went on a road trip to the Dubbo Zoo and to see The Dish at Parkes.

Due to work commitments (and to be honest, a general lack of interest in driving 1000Km’s to go to a zoo) I opted to give this trip a miss, but after hearing some of the stories, it actually sounded like they had an awesome time.

Me on the other-hand, spent 3 nights working late, eating take-out, playing PS3 and drinking a little more red wine than I probably should mid-week. Also, in some random flicking through YouTube channels I stumbled across a funny little online show called The Guild which follows the lives of a group of people addicted to playing MMO RPGs. I won’t go into explaining it any further, but if you don’t know what MMO or RPG is an acronym for, you probably won’t like the show.

Over the weekend we caught-up with Skye and Scotty (which is becoming a much more regular occurrence now they live around the corner) for a few drinks and some DVDs. Went to a football break-up for one of Kristy’s step-brothers and then went to Janine’s post-wedding get-together.

Janine had her wedding somewhere in the Whitsundays and due to poor timing, planning, conflicts with other weddings and costs, we opted not to go up north for the celebration. As this also applied to a bunch of other people, Janine decided to have a celebration a week later for all those that didn’t attend.

Although Janine and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship (she shits me to tears sometimes… as do a lot of the dancing mums that she associates with as part of her Dancing Studio), it was actually a pretty good night.

On Sunday I offered to help Trish and her daughter Mariah with her laptop which had recently been infected by a virus and in the process, I figured I’d upgrade my laptop to Windows 7. So far (and I’ve only been using it for the last 48 hours), it seems pretty good – quicker than Vista, the install went reasonably smoothly and so far everything has just ‘worked’ which is rare for a Microsoft product.

Unfortunately the virus repair didn’t go quite so smoothly and I had to re-install Windows due to bluescreens and failed boot attempts.

While waiting for virus scans to complete and software to install, I finally got around to watching the loooong video talking about a new-ish project Google is rolling-out called Google Wave. To explain it in it’s most simple form – imagine if a company tried to take the concept of email, instant messaging, social media, cloud computing, online/offline group document collaboration and mash it all into one open-source tool – you’d have Wave.

Email technology has been broken for decades simply because the technology originally created to handle email was never designed to be used to the magnitude that it is today. MacGyver would be in awe of all the bubblegum, paperclips and band-aides that exist behind the scenes in order to fight spam, route emails through poorly configured servers, travel halfway around the world and magically allow messages to appear in the inbox of the person sitting two-feet away from your desk.

So the notion that Google are doing something about this to fundamentally change the way people view online communication and potentially create a whole new way of ‘emailing’ is very exciting for a geek like me. Given the money, brain-power and reputation that Google have, they might just be able to pull this off. Only time will tell and even when the product is officially launched, it’ll still probably spend the next 5 years in ‘beta’ and be invite only like Gmail was.

Well, that’s all I’ve got time for at the moment – I’ll try and squeeze-out another post or two soon with hopefully some more interesting stuff.

It obviously works to some extent (or at least enough to keep doing it) yet I’ve never met anyone who admits to positively responding to, or making a purchase as a result of spam.

You’ll also be hard-pressed to find another industry that has whole departments of people employed at ISPs, Hosting Providers, Government Agencies and Specialised Private Corporations with the sole purpose of stopping you from doing what you’re paid to do.

Meaning that if you’re a spammer, you need to constantly be at the top of your game, be particularly sneaky and/or have an unlimited pool of resources that you can afford to have blacklisted to keep yourself employed.

So while I wouldn’t want to be a spammer for any amount of money, I can appreciate and respect their craft – as annoying as it might be.

And when I receive spam with the subject:

“The Most Deadly Oral sex Combination You Have Never Heard Of”

(which came through this-morning when I hit send/receive), I admire their craft even more. The email itself was crap, but I decided not to delete it based purely on how much the subject line made me laugh.

Have you ever received giggle-worthy spam like this?

In this case, Vicky tagged me in an iTunes meme. So, here’s the rules…

1. Put Your iTunes (or other generic MP3 program) on Shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write down the name of the song no matter how silly it sounds!
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name.
5. Go tag at least 10 friends – the one who tagged you, plus 9 others (although I’m going to bypass this step since I’m blogging my answers… but if you want to play, feel free to add your response in the comments).

Let’s see how we go:

WHAT DO YOU FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
“That’s how good your love is” – Il Padrinos Featuring Jocelyn Brown

IF SOMEONE SAYS ‘ARE YOU OKAY’ YOU SAY?
“Think harder” – Sneaker Pimps

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
“Come inside” – Chemical Brothers

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
“Nightminds [Dave Higgins Remix]” – Missy Higgins

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
“Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” – The Beatles

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
“Liberation” – Ferry Corsten

WHAT’S YOUR MOTTO?
“Tequila Sunrise” – The Eagles

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
“Tired of sex” – Weezer

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
“Anthem (part 2)” – Blink 182

WHAT IS 2 + 2?
“Echo and bounce” – Propellerheads

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
“If everybody looked the same” – Groove Armada

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
“This is pressure” – Eskimo Joe

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
“My Life (Haji and Emanuel Vocal Mix)” – Chanel

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
“Smack my bitch up” – Prodigy

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
“Born slippy” – Underworld

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
“Check your head” – Beastie Boys

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
“Foux Du Fafa” – Flight Of The Conchords

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?
“Joan Of Arc (Ft Thailand)” – David Guetta

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
“Mass destruction” – Faithless

WHAT DO YOU WANT RIGHT NOW?
“Babys” – Bon Iver

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
“Glory Box” – Portishead

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
“Why does my heart feel so bad” – Moby

For those of you with a penchant for old English literature and a fascination with zombies, I’ve got just the book for you: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That’s right – I’m not joking, they’ve really re-written the book of Pride and Prejudice, but given it a zombie twist.

On the topic of literature, the website WordCount.org have put together a listing of 86,800 most frequently used words in the English language and ranked them in order of use. I can’t help but feel bad for the word ‘conquistador’ as it comes-in last place.

And last, but certainly not least, the following vid had me literally in tears, although due to it containing more swear words than a dinner with Gordon Ramsey, make sure you have headphones if you listen to this at work. And if you don’t like rude words, then you probably shouldn’t watch. I must admit, I haven’t heard that many F-bombs dropped since someone walked through Christian Bale’s scene.

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

This company has been around for a very long time, so some might expect their online offering to be a little primitive, and in some respects, you’d be right as you cannot order via their site.

So why have an online store if you cannot make any purchases? Well, just have a look at the site yourself… wait a few seconds for it to load and see what happens. You don’t need to click on any products, and since the page is in Dutch, you probably won’t be able to read much of it… just make sure you have your volume turned-on, then sit back and enjoy:

http://producten.hema.nl/

Such a simple, yet entertaining and enjoyable concept. Despite not actually selling anything online, they’ve managed to make a viral website which is something that most other e-commerce stores lack.

Brilliant work HEMA!

To give you some examples, here are a few of my favorites I read today:

Today, I received an email from my boss telling me how appreciated I was and how valuable I am to the company. I wish I hadn’t scrolled down to read the included conversation where he asked his boss whether to lie to me about how good I was or not. FML

Today, I tried buying a video game that was rated “M – for mature”. The Cashier told me “you have to be 17 to buy this game”. I didn’t have any ID on me. I’m 25. FML

Today, I was looking at this site when my wife called to ask what I was doing, I told her I was looking at a website called F*** My Life and she hung up. I called her back and got yelled at because she thought I was using a website called F*** My Wife. FML

There were a lot of other funny ones and as I was reading through the list (and remembering how I arrived there in the first place), I came-up with a FML of my own:

“My friend forwarded me a link to fmylife.com… Is this her polite way of trying to tell me my life is f*cked? Then I started reading through some of the entries and found 2 on the FIRST page that applied directly to me. Perhaps she’s right. FML”

All I can say is – Thank God I’m a Man

This is a guy named Alexey Titarenko and his photography is both eerie but still quite cool at the same time: http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/portfolio.html

This German guy (not only has a cool name… Peter Fox) but also has a really interesting musical sound – it has a thick classical (almost baroque) feel backed by some great percussion and finished off with a touch of pop.  Since it’s all in German, I have no idea what he’s singing about, but my ears like it.  Have a listen to a few sample tracks on his site: http://www.peterfox.de

Inundated with elephant poo and just don’t know what to do with it? Why not turn it into paper or souvenirs… oh, wait, these guys already beat you to it: http://poopoopaper.com

Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet, it’s my bread-and-butter and normally I wouldn’t dare call it shit, but after reading through this site, I have to say they do make some good points: http://www.internetisshit.org

And finally, the stamp that I think every office should have: