Fotoshop by Adobé

Some of you might have seen this already, but if not enjoy what is probably one of the best parody adverts ever: Jesse Rosten's Fotoshop by Adobé.

Breeds of Chicken

We had planned this summer to start keeping chickens. Unfortunately things didn't quite go to plan. Firstly we haven't got as far with the garden as we would have liked, which means that there isn't yet anywhere to put a hen house. Secondly we had the unexpected expense of having to replace the car after it failed it's MOT so badly that it wasn't worth having it fixed. This does mean that we have had a lot of time to read up on keeping chickens and to spend time trying to figure out which breeds we would like to keep. Bryony has been doing most of the reading while I've settled on at least three varieties of hen I'm happy keeping: golden, speckled and crafty!

On the serious side, we are looking at having four chickens of different breeds which lay different coloured eggs. Not only will both the chickens and their eggs like nice and varied but it seems a really good way, especially as we get used to things, of keeping track of the health of each bird. If we suddenly don't have white eggs we will know which bird is sick.

Drinking From The Bottle

Apparently drinking beer straight from the bottle is considered a little uncouth! But like me "Fred likes to glug his beer from the bottle, but Mrs. Fred is appalled. So Fred went out and did something about it -- he created this bottle-in-a-glass as an homage to real men like him." Fred you are my hero!

If you also aren't allowed to drink straight from the bottle then you could buy your very own glass.

Ha Pea Christmas!

You Built A Time Machine... Out Of A DeLorean?

In his weekly blog Ian mentioned the funny t-shirts available from Snorg. Having a browse through I came across these three designs.

Now I've mentioned before that the Back to the Future films are some of my all time favourite movies from when I was younger. Fortunately they have also stood the test of time quite well and so I still enjoy watching them -- hence I quite like the t-shirt designs. This isn't, however, a blog about t-shirts.

A long time ago (on a web page far back in my browser history) I read an article about how good a spaceship the time machine in the films would have to be just to cope with the distance travelled ignoring the time displacement. Because the Earth rotates on it's axis and moves around the sun, time travel at a fixed location (i.e. the Twin Pine Mall car park) involves not just figuring out how to travel through time but also how to move very fast to stay in the same place.

I won't go into all the maths (the article is a fun read so go read it) suffice to say that it would have to travel a lot faster than the heap of junk car that John DeLorean actually tried to sell!

More Comics

As I haven't been slacking off this week (lots of work and house sorting stuff) I haven't had the time to think about doing long interesting blog posts. So to keep things ticking over I thought you might like a couple more comics.

Firstly in relation to a previous post on the combination of a knife and fork we have...

And for completeness here is the other Dilbert strip that I have framed on my study wall

Normal service will hopefully resume soon!

Slacking Off

Whilst I would never readily admit to slacking off, both of the following cartoons have applied to me in the past -- and for most scientists you can easily replace compiling with running experiment.

I'm not sure if one is funnier than the other although I do have a framed copy of the Dilbert strip on my study wall.

Realising the Semantic Web

It has often been said that the lofty goals of the semantic web community, embodied in the well known layer cake diagram, will never be fully realised. Well I have proof to the contrary. Here is a copy of the diagram and photographic proof that it can be successfully baked.

I'd love to be able to tell you that it tasted great as well, but unfortunately the colouring was marzipan and Nutella had been used to stick the layers together.

Variance is Intolerable

Most evil sci-fi villains have as their main goal the conquering of the known universe. For some reason the part human part machine villains usually have some form of repetitive mantra that they just can't help repeating over and over again. For example, Doctor Who's nemesis the Daleks go around screaming Exterminate, Exterminate while Star Trek's Borg will tell you that Resistance is Futile whilst trying to assimilate you into the collective.

If a group of evil engineers ever decide to try and conquer the known universe then I think they should go with a phrase I saw in an overview video at work the other day (the video isn't public yet so I can't post it) -- Variance is Intolerable. I can just imagine a crazed engineer slashing away at some defenceless human with a protractor and set square yelling Variance is Intolerable over and over again!

Contes d'un buveur français de café

Thanks to Rob for spotting this -- pure genius! Hopefully I got the French title right (it should mean Tales from a French Coffee Drinker) but blame Babel Fish if I didn't as my French only extends as far as hello and thank you.

Warning: May Contain Nuts

In preparation for going on honeymoon we bought quite a few new clothes. Among the t-shirts I bought was the following:

Of course you may find the t-shirt even funnier if you happen to know that I am highly allergic to nuts!

Bomberman == Sore Thumb

My thumb is still tender!

As you may have gathered from previous posts I own a Wii games console and had friends and family staying at the weekend. The combination of the two is quite a lot of game playing. Now you might think that with a new console it would be the newest most uptodate games that would get the most play. You would however be wrong. We must have spent at least six hours playing Bomberman '93 and hence my thumb is still sore from using the D-pad (apparently this is short for directional controller, who knew) on the controller.

Although the game is now 14 years old it is still highly addictive and when played with three or four people gets highly competitive. If you've never played it before then I suggest you go find one of the many freeware versions available (this one seems a relatively good version) and have a go, or better yet if you already have a Wii download it for 600 points from the Wii Shop Channel, you won't regret it, although your thumb might never forgive you!