Review of the year

Stunning Hotel Medea (my blog), crook of the year goes to Ali the bent cop (my blog), Farewell to Gordon and delusional thinking (my blog).

Sco lost yet again – but the shareholders at Microsoft are now calling Steve Balmers leadership into question since both he and they are linked this will eventually come to a head and keeping obstructing Novell (who since rolled over and died under the incompetent leadershio of a man called Ron Hovsepian.) means Steve has done a great job with his ‘partner’. Plus with  Bilski dodged the question (my blog) but gave advice that using a telephone in a process is not progress – some hope for the retarded us patent lawyers and patent trolls and sco still.

rapist Ivan Payne of Aderdare, South Wales

Interesting books included rape/buggery in the catholic church (my blog), Jasper Fforde, and Scarlett Thomas was a discovery worth the effort, Superfreakonomics 2 (my blog) was fun.

Television wise – being human series two was very good (bbc), caprica sucked, Kings, and Boardwalk empire was amazing – however true blood deviates too much from the books for my liking.  Mongrels (bbc) had some interesting moments and i agreed with Stephen Fry about mainstream tv (my blog).

Kings - impressive

Documentary wise (factual tv) not much i saw however a surprise entry was this welsh as in foreigners [my blog] that  held my interest.

German cinema

A bad year for films, 3d is a waste of time (my blog) but then my boycott of american products because of ‘British Petroleum’ did not help here*.  I would recommend a see of metropolis on dvd (my blog) which is German.  Not being able to see American films has not been a problem, and the films i have seen have been fun and intelligent.

Brian Maupin deserves cred for taking the piss out of apple owners.  The best bad new product name goes to a mouthwash called ‘retardex’ which proves that not all global copyright names work in all countries – bit like the vauxhall no go car although it sounds good in most languages  a no go and car -  go figure it out.

Politics a good year as things i hated such as id cards died with the coalition.  It seems that politics was become slightly reasonable rather than the simple veer from left to right.   Probably a bit too idealistic but i will take it.

Girish Kumar deserves a note too and wins the award for being best idiot of 2010, such genius is rarely seen – Thank you ! Disappointment for 2010 was my inability to see  or even book tickets for  a certain teenage ‘singer’ perform in North Korea.  Perhaps that was for the best after all.

Ngurah Alit deserves a note here for his brief marriage to a cow, although im sure the viral spread of the story left a few embarrassed  folk in its wake I hope he had fun with his wife before becoming bbq.

Person of the year must be Julian Assange who despite recycling a lot of known stuff like the chinese intercepting microsoft operating systems at source code and well as the unknown stuff who has made the msm look like junkies who only print pr exclusives.

I have to like John Goerzen a debian developer and his tales, i suspect you will too. Congratulations should go to Muck and Brass (my blog) for finally getting an arrest over corrupt dealings in a council.

* if you are going to bash the ‘british’ for american mistakes when ‘bp’ employs a large percentage of americans and hires more us firms where the issue happened then an american boycott works for me too.

The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebbeca Skloot

isbn: 9780230748699 deals with the many issues that abound from Henrietta Lacks, who for some reason or other has effected most of us through a 1951 cancer biopsy sample.

Theres naturally a boatload of ethics issues first of all, which comes down to trust and small mindedness on others but surely going into space is apparently cool along with all the other things.

The books writing varies from simple science to slang and best be described as  mixed at the best of times.  The pure misunderstanding and the outright hostility to science is shocking at times and is depressing.

5/5 bananas, this was before patents too.

Tron Legacy and the Tron Guy

Jay Maynard is a hero here in the monkey house because of his uber cool costume.  Having read a number of reviews of the new film i have decided not to see it on account of those and that tron guy was refused admission to the film in his getup.

Maybe i see it when it hits dvd, after all as a part 3d film means its got to suck.  If Jay cant see it then i wont either.

Dr Who finally did a decent christmas special.

Dr Who christmas special usually fills me with dread.  I have a few problems with the concept but since being rescued from kiddy tv shows that the bbc can do decent stuff when it desires it instead of the usual stuff in a pub when the childrens tv audience is not being pandered to.

This normally fail episode of Dr Who usually suffers from VERY LOUD Orchestra Music, some odd stories and a meh from me.   2010 was different – stealing from that author i hate (my blog)

Its music was tamed, had a decent story despite a ship in peril syndrome that has been copied before and had a ending which had a positive outcome and a negative one.

Strange without having to do my ‘meh’.

Nativity (bbc) and the problem with bigots

The Nativity as a story offers many outcomes.  For humans it has lost it nuisances and can be presented as this just happened.  Stuff like science or even as a statement on current affairs is lost on your average 5 year old and there simple interpretation of religious propaganda.

A bbc/canada co-production tried to square some of these issues in a professional manner in the run up to christmas.  Its certainly not Kings (my blog) and it certainly raises the bar and has good production compared with most of the uk’s religious tv offerings which can be dismissed as idolization.

If … for  a moment take Iraq (even now with soldiers) and the Babylonian science which Christianity since has tried to repress after all the world is flat isn’t it. Then you have the issue of virgin birth and the issues of Joseph.

It does not ask the difficult questions but indicates that your average bible thumper has no real comprehension of the issues as say too many of them believe in intelligent design and all that other rubbish.

A brave attempt at educating the thicko’s of christianity* who need the help being subnormal as they are. Religion has a problem of hate and intolerance in America a donation to a religious charity might be buying an African politician to make law to kill deviants and might also be accused of being right wing extremist.

* dumb people are more likely to  believe than educated humans.

Fashions small problem

Andrej Pejic and fashion trying to dump a few rules of dressing sterotypes.

Being an lady hairy ape means we monkeys here in the zoo don’t usually hit the fashion pages of newspapers.  After all humans have expectations.

Andrej Pejic (google it) distinctly indicates a problem fashion has with the male gender which is many colours and styles are a no. Yes there ok for females but not for men.

Fashion got a lot of stick for anorexic of the week models. Many people think fashion is silly and not applicable to them.

Andrej is a man model not a lady and although paid to do this indicates the rules of fashion have become an barier that designers are struggling to overcome.

Theres going to be much debate, and too many small minded shop keepers and established thinking that will probably stop this from happening in mass.  However Andrej Pejic is stunning in his getup.

Yes It’s not a style that will suit many men but it does illustrate the problem that while women can wear anything from the male styled suit (with tailoring) men are left with a smaller and smaller range of clothes – not that men don’t wear suits,

It will be interesting to see how fashion and its gender constrained distribution resolves this issue (if) they do at all.  However i think it wont be the last time we see this from the fashion setters.

Consider….

timber

Christmas trees and lights can go all kind of fail and last years tree was fine until the alpha found yet another set of lights which then pulled the tree down in the monkey house.

Being that i was out i picked up on this next morning when the tribe wondered why i was not at the premere of the comedic performance.

I was soon called away from the monkey swings next morning and told to hold the felled tree while the alpha did his business below.  Alphas huh.

Is ubuntu getting the ‘microsoft factor’ ?

I hate ubuntu for i was a happy 8.10 user in a virtual machine, then it played up and then the updates stopped which was going to happen at some point.   Somehow those patches broke it along the way

So  – It was working fine, then it started to take 30 minutes to connect, and yes my dns and internet at workstation vm where fine.

So i decide to update 9. I clear space with apt-get (in the command line not from a gui) and leave it be for ten hours later it is done but then stupidly i decide to clean up and mistakenly remove (yes i admit it) manual packages and that only leaves me with memcheck.

This is a play box and not serious work so nothing was lost at all but why does an ubuntu upgrade mark gdm as a user installed package ? unlike like say dropbox – indeed dropbox is not in the main repo of ubuntu but gdm is.

So i start again, ten hours pass and this time i don’t clean up.

What is the point of packages in ubuntu if they are mislabel-ed.   Glad I use debian for real work, than this weird stuff.

Files i apparently installed manually

No i did not install firefox by hand

Julian Comstock

is isbn: 9780765359230 by robert charles wilson and has a setup like Shades of Grey (my blog, but a book 1 of x) It is based on a short story which can account for its plodding nature as a novel.  However an interesting future is explored with america with a family dictatorship, serfs and steam trains.

The book has bad timing throughout, it goes from slow to fast in the noble aim of making charles darwin hip again in an age of retarded americans but it feels uneven.

I lost patience with it being rushed in the last 150 pages – 0/5 bananas.

Printers with the unused ethernet connection

Bananas was looking at yet another usb printer that proudly advertised it as a Ethernet printer but it was only used as a usb printer.  Why do people  waste money on stuff they dont need?

Humans