Cybersquatting pisses me off

Something that really bugs me about the web. These generic wanky search portal style websites that sit there on good domain names. You either find them through search terms in Google, or you think of a great domain, visit to see if its free, and it’s like a holding page, that directs you to “similar links” or some shit. I place it in the same category as spam. There’s nothing useful about these sites. As soon as I see one, it gets Apple W’d. Now I have to put my brain back in gear to come up with that quality domain name for my next venture.

I earn more than the President of Bolivia

Honestly!

Imagelists in VS2005

Amongst the multitude of annoyances that I’m putting up with in Visual Studio 2005, one small thing is they’ve removed the ability to assign an imagelist to the new toolstrip, via the designer. So you can do it; but only in the code (i.e., in the form designer generated code that you’re not supposed to touch).

What made me chuckle though was a discussion about it on the MSDN forums, and why you should use the image property and not the imagelist anymore…

Hmm, interesting. What do you miss about ImageList? ToolStrip supports it, but mainly for compat for folks porting over from toolbar – it is not exposed in the designer. ToolStrip supports having images of different sizes, color depths, etc – as well as animated images (animated gifs). It also has advanced calculations for making your images look disabled

(here)

So to the image it adds a wheelchair, a slight look of consternation and bewilderment, and makes them run about shouting “TIMMMY!!!” ?

TBH, since upgrading to VS2005 from VS2003, I’ve never heard the expression “you f*cking piece of sh1t” shouted so many times in one day.

January round-up

I’ve been so busy recently that I’ve not had much time to post. So here’s a quick round-up of my thoughts over the last few weeks…

1. Snooker

The Higgins – O’Sullivan Masters snooker final was an absolute pleasure, and Higgins was the deserved winner. Whilst the majority would have liked to see O’Sullivan retain the title, Higgins did play the better snooker (or conversely, O’Sullivan made too many unforced errors/mistakes) so it probably worked out alright. Besides, Ronnie whinges too much.

2. Celebrity Big Brother

As most people will know, I am an active and vociferous hater of the Big Brother franchise. It’s such a complete and utter waste of time. As most, if not all, of my ex-girlfriends will testify to. Frankly, I’d rather stick a fork in my eye, than watch it. But somehow, I’ve been sucked into the latest edition of Celebrity Big Brother – it’s almost certainly the celebrity factor to it – since watching total random strangers sleep and talk bollocks is of little interest, but of course when they’re a (so-called) celebrity, it becomes interesting. Um.

Anyway, a few comments:
i) Pete Burns is the most hideous and irritating excuse for a human I’ve ever seen. Of course I say human ‘cos it’s clear to no-one which gender he is. It is somewhere in between, not between male and female, but monkey and a wild pig. Perhaps, he should be skinned alive so that some other twat could have a fancy new coat? The levels of hipocrisy that spout from its malformed plastic mouth are astonishing. Yeuuuch.
ii) Barrymore. Cock.
iii) George Galloway – has a gentle giant sort of charm to him, but he’s clearly an egotistical, arrogant, self-obsessed little chimp, who loves the sound of his own voice. He should never have entered the house in the first place. It can only harm his career. Phrases such as “I won’t waste my time on you, you’re not worth it” are hardly what you want to hear from a politician. Somehow who’s supposedly an MP to get things done for people.
iv) Dennis Rodman – clearly as thick as pigshit, and all he ever thinks about is sex. He’s blissfully unaware of any sense of logic, thinks only with his trousers, which, quite frankly, sounds like a nice way to live.
v) I’d let Traci Bingham and/or Chantelle give me a blowjob.
vi) The rest of them are fairly uninteresting, and I couldn’t care less who wins. Probably Maggot, purely for the comedy value of his nickname.

3. Environmental Disaster

Television’s and other gadgets left on standby uses 7Twh hours of energy a year. So not watching television is actually destroying the earth. I never expected that. The argument on which energy sources to use rages on, and I wish everyone would stop banging on about these bloody windfarms, and just accept that the only viable option is nuclear. A couple new powerstations would save all this cocking about with massive windfarms and we’d be able to leave our tellies and computers and whatever else for as long as we want (and sales in thick overcoats go down, due to the 3 degree temperature increase).

4. No smoking chaos

Guernsey is forging ahead with a smoking ban in all pubs as of 1st April. Maybe it’s an April fool, but I fear not. This discrimination is sickening – being told what we can and can’t do in this manner. I’m doing my best to help the economy by buying overpriced tobacco products, keeping people in jobs, and I get labelled as disgusting, smelly and unhealthy? Think of all the people who will be affected by this. Ashtray manufacturers, cotton wool manufacturers (or whatever it is in the end of filter tips), conspiracy theorists who like to think that if you fold a pack of Marlboro lights in the right way you can prove their allegiance with the KKK, all the doctor’s and nurses who treat all the sick people, the roadsweepers who clean up the ciggie butts, all those arseholes who work in advertising and came up with those adverts trying to persuade me to quit… I’m just doing my part. Incidentally, on the note of those adverts, you know the ones, the ones which show the state of your lungs, or other people around you inhaling the smoke, and how 87 gillion people a second die of tobacco related illnesses: NEWSFLASH: after seeing that fucking advert, the first thing I need is a cigarette. Those adverts have the exact opposite effect on me. Tell me it’s brilliant, lower the price and make them smell nice, and I’d probably lose all interest in smoking.

5. Tax is a real bastard

I got my first full-time well-earned paycheque. And whilst I’m earning more money than I’ve ever really known in my life, the fact that almost a quarter of it goes to the tax man is really hard to get over.

That’ll do. Ciao for now.

Poo in the sea

Guernsey is just about to have a debate about sewage treatment (Guernsey currently discharges raw sewage into the water).

SAS (Surfers Against Sewage) are trying to persuade the States to take their responsibility seriously and to implement full sewage treatment in the island.

It’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it, that Guernsey has been pumping out millions of gallons of sewage each year (about 1.5 billion gallons will be discharged into the water over the next 12 months according to SAS) while Jersey has had full UV treatment for years?

Please take 2 minutes to sign the on-line petition at:

http://www.sas.org.uk/pr/guernsey_action_2005.asp

Spank you.

Weird words: Mattoid

3. Weird Words: Mattoid
——————————————————————-
Semi-insane.

That’s the definition given by its inventor, the nineteenth-century
Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. He believed that criminality
was inherited and that a criminal was born with physical defects
identifying him as a degenerate human being, an atavism. He created
“mattoid” from the Italian “matto”, insane, plus the ending “-oid”
for some likeness or resemblance (from Greek “eidos”, form). He
used it for what psychiatrists call “borderline dwellers”, those
who exist on the margins between reason and madness – in everyday
speech we might call them cranks, eccentrics, or misfits.

The word came into English in 1891 through a translation of his
work Man of Genius and became popular for a while. H G Wells used
it in several of his books, most notably in Mankind in the Making
of 1903, in which he derides the theories of Lombroso and the
Victorian phrenologists: “Among such theorists none at present are
in quite such urgent need of polemical suppression as those who
would persuade the heedless general reader that every social
failure is necessarily a ‘degenerate’, and who claim boldly that
they can trace a distinctly evil and mischievous strain in that
unfortunate miscellany which constitutes ‘the criminal class’…
These mattoid scientists make a direct and disastrous attack upon
the latent self-respect of criminals.”

from: World Wide Worlds. Thanks Al.

The 4 female miracles

There are 4 miracles a woman can perform:

1. Get wet without water
2. Bleed without getting injured
3. Make milk without eating grass
4. Turn meat from soft to hard

:p