javascript:window.location=”http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=”+swfArgs.video_id+”&t=”+swfArgs.t+”&fmt=18″;

When I can’t find it… YouTube youtube bookmarklet download video download mp4. That oughta locate it for me. 🙂

For the sake of reference, if HD is available, it’s fmt=35.

Fuck you, Conky. All I want is the weather, properly displayed. I don’t care where you get it, or really what it looks like–you can make the fucking font sky-blue-pink for all I care–just display it properly formatted. Use NWS, use Yahoo!, use Wunderground…I don’t care. Update every hour, every half hour or every two fucking minutes…I don’t care. Display in Fahrenheit, or Celsius, or fucking Kelvin…I don’t care. Use Perl, use Python, use Visual-bleeding-jesus-Basic…doesn’t matter. I have installed necessary fonts and a few that might not have been necessary. I have created necessary directories, checked permissions and edited paths. I’d edit the XML if there was anything in it that looked even remotely like what I need to do. I now know the weather code for my town by heart. We were getting on so well; you didn’t mind when I added all of those mount points, or when I figured out how to get you to display the GPU temperature as well as CPU. I thought you loved me…why can’t you just do one more little thing for me? The information is being downloaded and displayed, so all you have to do is format it correctly. We’re almost there. Why are you doing this to me?

P.S. sudo apt-get remove –purge damned-annoying-cat-1.0

Yay for progress…NOAA changed their domain name, so I did, too, and we have current conditions now. I’ve spent too much time on this (considering it’s not exactly mission-critical), so forecast will have to wait for now, I think.

Seriously, I do ’cause Sir David is awesome, but I didn’t know until today that he’s actually constructed of awesome. His parents taught him exactly what mine taught me–no religious belief system, but no anti-religious belief system, either–and the first time I went with a friend to see what the Sunday School thing was all about, I felt exactly the same way. It never made sense to me to believe it, but I didn’t think much about people who did until the looniest of them began to gain enough power to affect my life. Now, I’d say I’m not anti-religious (because it’s everyone’s right to believe or not believe any goddamned thing they want), but I am anti-religious nutbags who tell one of the world’s coolest dudes that he’s going to burn in hell. Jesus…don’t they have something else to do? Go beg Invisible Sky Daddy for a guardian angel or something.

Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week’s Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: “They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance.”

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give “credit” to God, Attenborough added: “They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”

Attenborough went further in his opposition to creationism, saying it was “terrible” when it was taught alongside evolution as an alternative perspective. “It’s like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five … Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066.”

Attenborough, who attended the Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester in the 1930s, said he was astonished at manifestations of Christian faith.

“It never really occurred to me to believe in God – and I had nothing to rebel against, my parents told me nothing whatsoever. But I do remember looking at my headmaster delivering a sermon, a classicist, extremely clever … and thinking, he can’t really believe all that, can he? How incredible!”

In 2002, Attenborough joined an effort by clerics and scientists to oppose the inclusion of creationism in the curriculum of state-funded independent schools receiving private sponsorship, such as the Emmanuel Schools Foundation.

Have I been under a rock or something? I went looking for a source for multicoloured Swedish Fish, since the only kind I can get here are all red. Actually, I don’t think I’ve seen the multicoloured ones since I left Canada, but I thought there must be something available online…somewhere I could order them. Hell, if ol’ Myra could find them to get them for me by the box, then surely I can with the power of teh Google. Anyway, I stumbled across a site called “A friend you can eat,” and I thought it must be something some Swedish Fish fan (yes, those tasty little fuckers have fans and I know ’cause I am one) had set up. It looks legitimate, though, and apparently, I’ve missed out entirely on the videos and the print ads. I can understand missing print ads, but even though I hate commercials, someone always seems to give me links to funny ones. Not this time, though. 🙁

Swedish Fish Barbeque:

Swedish Fish Survivor:

(That one cracked me right up!)

Print ads–I think the kitten is my favourite. 😆

My Swedish Fish. OM NOM NOM! 😀

Why should one never walk around my house in the dark? It’s because one never knows where large-ish, potentially toe-damaging objects such as disc golf bags may have come to rest at any given time. I am not certain that he actually measured the available kitchen floor area to ensure that the bag was precisely in the middle, but it is very definitely in the approximate centre of the most heavily trafficked area of the most heavily trafficked room in the house. Why is it there instead of in the spare room (preferably not, but unfortunately often) in the middle of the floor? Your guess is as good as mine, but at least there was enough light this morning that I didn’t actually trip over it! 🙂

Found a good copy of the spiders on drugs. God, anyone who grew up in Canada anywhere near the same time I did will never, ever forget the Hinterland Who’s Who music. I don’t recall the videos being quite like this, though. 🙂

All I wanted to do was make short recordings. Sometimes, it’s the cat, so that P. can share in the joy that is his needy, scream-y, pathetic, attention-starved kitteh when kitteh decides it’s high time for deh-day to be home. Sometimes, it’s to force P. to actually listen to the reason I’m up all night, making him complain because my (7w) bedside lamp is on…his remarkable impression of Fred-bleeding-jesus-Flintstone (with bonus teeth-grinding, kicking, cover-stealing and whacking me in the fucking back with his literally stainless steel left elbow). I’ll also use it in spring, when the summer birds come back and I hear (but cannot see) a little fevvered someone whose pretty song I don’t recognise.

I used to have a little free thingie from the App Store…called i-something. It was fine, even if I did have to download some beta software and use Windows in order to take recordings off the phone, but last night, when I was trying to record the Snore Sonata before finally giving up, grabbing the mangy old pillow I’ve had since I was five (seriously…I brought it with me because I’ve never slept without it) and going out to crash on Cat Dander Street in Asthmaville (AKA chesterfield in our living room), the app crashed. It started, went to the record screen and crashed. I tried a couple of times, then gave up because I was too tired to care. I tried it again this morning…same thing. I rebooted the phone…same thing. I reinstalled the app…still crashed. The “free” version is ad-supported, so I’m going to guess it has something to do with the ad-blocking hosts file I just put on the phone. “Fine,” says I, “I’ll just get something else. It’s a goddamned recorder…there must be more than one.”

There are indeed a couple of recorders in the App Store. None in Cydia, and the only other one in the App Store that was free allows you to record and save, but if you want to transfer the recordings to a computer, you have to buy their software, which I believe costs $14. Not a lot, but that buys a fair number of iPhone apps, so I thought there had to be a better way. If the files were saved on the phone, then that meant all I had to do was get to them.

Thanks to my own iPhone Guru (he rules…*MWAH*), mine is an iFreedomPhone, and I have access not only to the bits of the phone’s file system that Apple thought I should have, but to the whole thing. I also have SSH, and an FTP client with a GUI to make it easier to find stuff when I’m just poking about blindly. It didn’t take me more than a few minutes to hunt down the test files I’d made, and then all I had to do was copy them to the computer. The file format was .caf, and Gnome didn’t have an icon to display, but I looked at the file properties and it at least appeared to know it was an audio file. First, I tried VLC because that will usually play anything you throw at it, but it couldn’t. Then, just for the hell of it, I decided to try Audacity. Ugly as sin, but it’s meant to be a sound editor, so logically, it would recognise any formats for which I had a codec (and if I don’t have ’em all, I’m close). A quick check revealed .caf to be Apple’s “Core Audio File,” but I thought, “Meh…I’ll try.” I opened it up and browsed to the .caf file, thinking Audacity would give me some error message that might be helpful, but nope…it opened the file right up, and it played just fine. Better yet, since Audacity is an actual editor, it allowed me to boost the volume and export it to the file format of my choice (I chose mp3 because it was there). My first test recording has a few rude words in it because I was bemoaning the $14 app to P., but the second one is G-rated.

So…yay. Yay for ever-patient iPhone gurus, nerdy hackers and Thin Lizzy if you’re my guru, and AC/DC if you’re me. No crashes, no “ad-supported” (or worse, having to unblock ad hosts), no buying $14 worth of software that I don’t really want and wouldn’t use more than a few times, to install on an OS I actively try to avoid using. It’s not spring yet, but the days are getting longer and longer, and pretty soon, those little birdies will come back…and I’ll be ready to ID them even when I can’t see them. I may not always have my Canon with me to record footage of a “singing tree”, but unless I’m in the shower, my iPhone is never far from my hand (I even try to charge it whilst I’m asleep so I don’t have to be tethered or away from it for long. God, I’m pathetic). 🙂

I created a bookmark in gFTP, but that was to the root, so if I forget before the next time I have a chance to make a bookmark right to the correct directory, the path is thus:

/private/var/mobile/Applications/DCBD861F-1C7E-48EB-9941-6E84437AE869/Documents

The spam filters on my ISP mail account are so strict that they’re only slightly short of a whitelist and everything else straight to the trash. I never give out that address, but other morons do, plus the sonsawhores at Charter sold our addresses, and then there’s the drooling mouth-breather who accidentally gave my address out to his idiot friends instead of his own. I hate sorting through crap, so I generally use my Gmail, which has excellent built-in spam filters, and I put strict filters on my ISP account. Once in a while, if I’m expecting a message at that address, and get one, but it goes straight to the trash, I check to make sure that it really is some crap I don’t want and not the message I was expecting, accidentally sent there (since Trash is automatically emptied on exit, I check lest the message be gone forever).

This morning’s message was indeed spam, and although all images in email are blocked unless I have specifically instructed to show images from that sender, the subject alone was enough. Flush my…what? Jesus Christ, are there any people capable of hitting a computer power button who are actually stupid enough to click on shit like this? Enlarge your penis…okay, some guy with microdick might be that desperate. Herbal Viagra…yeah, I guess if the reader was really gullible. Gorgeous Russian women want to meet you! Hm…well, that one is technically true, they just leave out the bit where they want to meet you, but are even more interested in your bank account and a green card. Flush your colon, though? Come on! Fatties desperate enough to think that might actually work can’t possibly be bright enough to know what a “colon” might be, can they? God, have we really sunk this low?

Grammar Nazi, bonus edition:

I had to stop reading at the point where, “My brother peaked into the room…” Who the fuck is your brother…Everest? Or did you mean, “My brother, peaked, (some verb) into the room,” because he wasn’t feeling well? Pick one, because if you meant he looked into the room in the manner of a shy child, then he peeked, you dumbass.

“I was feeling rather peaked and really didn’t have the energy to get up, but my curiosity was piqued, so I got out of bed and peeked into the box.”

There. Was that so fucking difficult? Only the last two even sound alike; for “peaked”, you pronounce the “-ed” as a second syllable. Your blog appears to have a significant number of readers, and if you were actually literate, you might have even more. There are some times that spellcheck can’t help you and you do need to know the correct word. Goddamned illiterate morons. I hate people, and especially people who think that because they can manage Blogspot registration and find the letters on the keyboard, they can write. No, you cannot write until you have command of the language. English, motherfucker. 😉

I shouldn’t get too upset about these because there is a sort of logic to the error, but it still makes me cringe to read them, especially first thing in the morning, and if people would look a little closer, it would make sense and they’d get it correct.

Good old apostrophe “s”, the simple possessive noun.

– The dog’s bark is particularly irritating before my second cup of coffee.
– The cat’s toy upon which I trod in the dark nearly tripped me.
– The man’s socks are always left on the floor.
– Denise’s jeans are so tight that she has a muffin top hanging over the waistband.

(Exception, name that ends with the letter “s”)
– Jess’ cellphone reception is poor, so she stands on the porch and shouts into it.

This is never “Jess’s”, or $deity forbid, “Jes’s”. A single apostrophe after the final “s” in the name regardless of whether there is one “s” or two, and do not add extra letters…ever.

I think the little signs that people have on their houses look…well, stupid, but they’re relatively common, and so are errors! The intent of the sign is to announce the surname (or at least one surname) of the home’s inhabitants, not to indicate possession of the house. Since these date from the time when families with the same surname lived in the homes, the sign needs the plural form of the surname, not the possessive. Even if the intent were to show ownership, then they’d still need the plural possessive, not the singular, and in any event, to be accurate, the signs would all have names like, “Regions Bank’s”, “Bank of America’s” and “First National Mortgage’s”.

The Harveys. Not The Harvey’s.
The Browns. Not The Brown’s.
The Norrises. That’s a sneaky one; add “es” if the name ends in “s”.

Possessive pronouns are different; the word itself indicates possession.

– Yours (NOT your’s…that makes the Grammar Nazi cry)
– His (most people get this one correct)
– Hers (NOT her’s…that makes the Grammar Nazi nauseous)
– Ours (most people get this one correct, too)
– Theirs (For the love of all that is good; theirs, theirs, THEIRS! NO form of there or they’re; never, ever...GOT THAT?)

This group has two exceptions, and so many people get these wrong that the Grammar Nazi wants to poke forks into her eyes and bemoan the future of literate humanity.

– The possessive form for “who” is “whose”. Remember Robert Frost and his snowy evening, “Whose woods these are, I think I know…” The word “who’s” is a contraction for “who is” and never, ever indicates possession. If you read the sentence and it doesn’t make sense to substitute “who is” for the “who’s”, then you did it wrong; change it to “whose”.

– The possessive form for “it” is “its”. Note the absence of an apostrophe, even though the word indicates possession. That is because “it’s” is the contraction of “it is”, not the possessive form. Again, if you cannot substitute “it is” for the “it’s” in your sentence, then you did it wrong.

There. I feel better. Not even 0800h and I’m already bitching about grammar because of something I read on some random web site. Yes, it’s going to be a good day–I can feel it!

P. used to say it drove him crazy when people would send him stuff from the Internet because he’d seen it all a thousand times before, but that’s no longer true. He spends so much time with Matt Drudge and mAnn Coulter now that he’s lost touch with pop culture, and especially Internet memes (which, to be fair, are often stupid, but occasionally amusing). I knew when I heard the audio that he was watching Star Wars Kid a week or so ago, but he’d never seen it before. Next was Gary Brolsma, doing the “Numa Numa”, and he’d never seen that before, either. In fact, until Friday night, when I said the words to him (just a joke) and they didn’t seem to register as more than the words themselves, he didn’t know about this, either, though it did amuse him greatly.

Come to think of it, I had to tell him several months ago what a “LOLcat” was. Interesting. Maybe I should send him dramatic prairie dog? 😉