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It’s amazing what small film-making houses can come up with these days. I can honestly say after finding ShortOfTheWeek I’m utterly addicted. They’re these tiny slices of amazing ideas that just drag you in and if they’re good (I haven’t seen one yet that wasn’t) they’ll leave you wanting for more. It’s almost like getting blue-balled over and over again.

I tripped into it after checking out a post on io9 about 9 Amazing Short Films That Will One Day Be Feature Films. Honestly, if you’re into any kind of science fiction and don’t spend half an hour checking out every video in that post, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

If you can correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.

Dearest creature in creation,

Study English pronunciation.

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

I will keep you, Suzy, busy,

[Read More]

Urgh, I hate our monitoring team some days. I was off sick for four days and come back to this in one of our generic accounts. I’ve got filtering set up, but for various reasons I can’t delete them permanently, just bin ’em.

17,306 Deleted Items. WHY?

To those that run monitoring systems, please listen to the people you’re sending things to - when they say they don’t need to get notified on EVERYTHING - they probably mean it.

Modified from a Salmon Risotto recipe on food.com.

Ingredients:

• 250 g salmon, skinned and cut in to 1cm cubes
• 250 g arborio/risotto rice
• 500 ml chicken stock (hot, ready to use)
• 125 ml white wine
• 1 tbsp. oil
• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 1/4 tsp. dill, finely chopped
• 3–5 sun-dried tomato pieces, finely diced
• parmesan cheese to taste, grated

Directions:

1. In a risotto pot heat the oil and butter, then add the onion and cook for 4 minutes, until soft.
2. Add the rice and stir for 2 minutes or until the rice is transparent.
3. Stir in a ladleful of the hot stock, and a little wine. When all the liquid is absorbed, add a further ladleful of stock and wine. Continue adding the stock and wine, until the rice is cooked and has a creamy consistency.
4. Add the salmon, dill, sundried tomatoes and parmesan. Stir until salmon is poached.

Season with parmesan and serve.

Fairies are a common theme in many cultures, they come in infinite shapes and sizes. They delight in bringing good will or bad times to people for many reasons - and sometimes no reason at all!

Many small children are taught to believe in the Tooth Fairy, that wonderful little pixie that trades calcium deposits for change. Invoked by leaving a tooth under your pillow or beside your bed when you sleep, you’ll wake to a gift and the removal of the bad seed that lived in your mouth.

I hope it hurts, you should burn for what you’ve done…

Hell of a thing to say to someone.

Least of which a stranger.

I’ve made some thoughtless remarks in the past, some hateful ones, and some very well thought out insults - but this one was a surprise!

I was on the receiving end, hopping from heel to heel behind my car on a ridiculously hot day while trying to put some things in the boot. Not quite hearing her at first, it took me a second; then it registered - she’d actually said that to me. It took another second or so for me to figure out my perceived crime.

I was reading an article about Obama’s new security heads and noticed an interesting comment where it mentions senator John McCain being a Vietnam POW:

Republican Senator John McCain, whose experience as a POW in Vietnam has made him a strong critic of the use of torture even while he supports all other conservative national security positions…

I wonder what will happen when the last of the American soldiers from the largely personnel-based wars - WW2, Vietnam, Korea - dies and those fears fade away?

I was watching the latest episode of the Sword and Laser book club when they did their kickoff for the January 2013 book club. I’d been meaning to see if I can follow along with it, because while I have many books to read, it’s been hard for me to get around to actually committing to reading them.

They reminded me in the show that it was in the book Humble Bundle which I took part in and promptly forgot about 🙂 So I pulled it from data storage and had a look, being instantly sucked into the story.

Workmate: How many ADSL things are broken?

Me: Only seven today!

Workmate: Hooray!

Me: It’s my achievement of the week!

Now if only I gave a f*ck about any of the rest.

Then they’d dance in glorious floods of bandwidth…

… where floods are tiny trickles meted out by us, the data Nazis.

Workmate: You so crazy

Me: I make sense to me!

Yep, I get really bored with daily reports.

Do not look up, for eye contact is the last thing you want. The possibility that you (the walker), and they (the driver) have noticed each other is be discounted at all costs. Thus the battle of courage begins - who will stop first - who indeed, will yield the hallowed stripy ground? This is played by many in the carpark, and lost by few - though invariably it’s inattention on one party’s side rather than true courage that leads to injuries.