Listening to: B.O.B. - Outkast

This morning held a couple of wonderful gems:

• US Guantanamo tribunals ‘illegal’

  The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Bush administration does not have the authority to try terrorism suspects by military tribunal. YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• Tony Robbins on TEDTalks

  I’ve never paid too much attention to this guy (except in a moment of channel surfing), but this 20 mins is fascinating - especially when he spells things out to Al Gore (who is in the audience) and when he tells the story of 9/11. He definitely makes you think. (hat-tip: Steven Kempton)

Listening to: Is It Any Wonder? - Keane

graffiti

Originally uploaded by txmx .2.

Listening to: Freefall - Pitch Black

The Missus bought these lovelies back from Mexico for me:

Odd Little Creatures

Originally uploaded by flash5.

Apparently you can get them in much larger sizes… Looks like I have got a Mexico run ahead of me

UPDATE: They are known as Alebrije.

Listening to: Flat Fish, Shallow Water - Banshee Reel

Of all the geeky jobs I hate changing CPU fans sits in the top 5. I find the whole experience utterly stressful… I am convinced I am going to break something. So you can imagine that I greeted the arrival of my new fan with mixed emotions.

When we started Provoke I was really the only person who knew his way around the guts of a PC. This meant that I got the role of PC builder in the company. The task was awful… when you’re living hand to mouth killing a computer actually meant something (opposed to later in the life of the company when I killed a Dell on the phone to a support rep - but that’s another story). I swore and cursed so much that I got the nick name ‘Tourettes’.

My alter ego nearly made bit of a come back this arvo. I am in the middle of writing a piece of software. Knowing that changing crucial pieces of hardware is a very, very dumb thing to do (but a promise is a promise) I immediately whipped the cover off “my” PC and went to town on the CPU. Bare foot (*) and cursing I replaced the existing beast of a fan with the svelte number that I purchased earlier in the week. Five minutes of cold sweating later everything looked set. Time to boot:

• Mother board beep (check)
• Post (check…Phew! So I didn’t take one of the surface mounted resistors off when the screw driver slipped)
• Hard Drive (check)
• OS Booting (waiting, sweating, thinking of excuses as to why my delivery won’t be met)
• Reboot… no luck

Hmmm may be it will work if I close the case up again …. Hey look! It does. Go figure.

God, I hate changing CPU fans.

* I wear ugg boots ’round the house - not the top combo around electronics.

Listening to: Hope - Fat Freddy’s Drop

Because of the traffic this blog is now generating I need to move from my current hosting provider to a location where traffic costs aren’t so high. The move will occur over the next month or so. I will provide details of the move as everything becomes more concrete.

Listening to: Tunnel Of Love - Bruce Springsteen

…having the woman you love hospitalized 1/2 a world away… all sorted now, but really not a phone call you want.

Listening to: Bounce - Fat Freddy’s Drop

The Missus gave me the hard word about the noise “my” PC makes. The problem is to be fixed by the time she gets back from Mexico (Sunday… Monday if you include the impact of jet lag and to be fair, if I turn on a computer on Sunday arvo then I need my head read).

Today I started checking out cooling systems for PCs…. talk about a whole new world of weird and wonderful. Looks like an engineer has been let loose in Wonka’s chocolate factory!

After a particularly geeky (even for me), but utter fruitless, conversation with some techo I settled on something with a bunch of folded fins (???) - but importantly: 22db noise output (a pen in the blades of the offending fan (sorry Craig) has shown that the other 5 fans in the box are not too offensive).

Listening to: I’m With Stupid - Pet Shop Boys

From Salon. Sidney Blumenthal uses the “same sh!t, different get up” argument. Again, he makes use of some explosive material:

Since the rise of the Iraqi insurgency, U.S. military intelligence had been directed to build up Zarqawi’s profile as its leader through a psychological warfare (”psy-op”) effort. On April 10, the Washington Post reported on internal military documents it obtained about this psy-op: “The documents explicitly list the ‘U.S. Home Audience’ as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.” According to talking points in a 2004 briefing, the goal was: “Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response.” One military intelligence officer involved stated that Zarqawi’s followers were “a very small part of the actual numbers” of insurgents, but this had little bearing on the program. Another officer concluded, “The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.”

Listening to: Lubbock Or Leave It - Dixie Chicks

The current noise about where and how iPods are made highlights one of the core characteristics of globalization and the tech industry. It leads to a bunch of questions… and a bunch of opportunities?

Listening to: BBC Radio 1

The BBC has an interesting series of photos from the latest Nokia design contest:

src: /.