I’ve always wanted to be in a band, and since I can’t sing or play an instrument, it’s gotta be a punk band. One of those endless email forwards ended up in my inbox today, and it details exactly how t make your own band, and release your first album. Very cool, and much quicker to read than The Manual.

1. Random Wikipedia page The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. Random quotations page The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. Interesting photos on Flickr The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Therefore, my band is called Sződliget (I can’t even pronounce that!), our first album is called Is to enjoy it, and here’s our cover art:

Polar Bear

www.flickr.com

By the sounds of it, we’re some kind of Nordic heavy metal outfit. Keep an eye out, we’ll be opening for Lordi soon.

What’s your band name?

XKCD Big sea

imgs.xkcd.com

Ha!

(And this marks the first post on jurgen dot ca where I’m using the sni.ps content attribution service. Hope it works!)

That robot we sent to Mars is sending back some very interesting information, primarily on the agricultural fronts. We all know about the shortage of good soil in which to grow asparagus on Earth – Victoria’s recent good fortune is due to the favourable soil conditions in which to grow this rare and highly sought-after vegetable. All that will be coming to an end soon, as the Mars Robot has discovered soil on Mars that is capable of supporting asparagus cultivation and harvesting.

Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, explained that “it is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. ... It is very exciting for us.”

No more asparagus shortages on Earth! All hail the Mars Robot, discoverer of an entire planet suitable for growing asparagus! The “red planet” shall henceforth be known as the “green planet”. Onwards!

[Edit: Image courtesy of Michael Wood, esq.]

I’ve had the same basic email address for about 15 years now, and in my misspent youth, I was doing some fairly unsafe things with it (the Internet wasn’t evil then!). Upshot is, I get a lot of spam. This past month, I got over 42,000 pieces of spam. Apple Mail does a fairly good job of figuring out what is spam and what isn’t, but some still gets through the cracks. My favourites are the Nigerian scam emails, mostly due to their laughably bad English and overall implausibility.

The one I’m about to share with you now, gentle reader, is particularly good – mostly due to its refreshingly blunt honesty. I won’t republish the entire thing, but here’s some good bits:

We are the Comptroller of Fund movement Terminal and Director of Statutory Department of Inter Banks Credit Commission. My Department is affiliated to FSA, UN, WORLD BANK, W.A.F.

Imagine this guy’s business card! How big would it have to be to fit all that on?

Fortunately, our Terminal in New York has been monitoring the routing of your fund for seizure’s became sympathetic to you for such attempt to carry on.

I’m glad there’s some terminal in New York that is sympathetic to seizures. Perhaps the Epilepsy Foundation ought to be notified?

For this reason, you must not inform anybody about this letter or my contact with you. You must keep my relationship with you to be topped secret and highly confidential.

Oops.

But here’s the best part – the only actually honest part of this whole email (emphasis mine):

Therefore, further details will be furnished to you and my identity will be forwarded to you as soon as I deceive your reply.

Freudian slip there, Mr Nigerian Scammer? Or a wave of subconscious guilt, forcing at least your fingers to do the right thing? We will never know.

Now if you’ll excuse me, gentle reader, I must go send my credit card number to this Russian doctor selling penis-enlargement pills from a 100% real Canadian pharmacy…

This review of Ubuntu Gimpy Goanna, Jolly Jacaranda (or whatever they call it) is quite surprising.

Is it surprising that the author’s girlfriend has trouble installing the (closed-source and obviously evil) Flash plugin? No, not a surprise there.

How about when she had trouble when the screen resolution changed, making the screen too small to display the “change resolution” dialogue box? Nope. I can understand why an operating system changes resolutions without first asking the user if they’re sure it’s a good idea (even Windows NT does this!).

Any surprises that she had trouble with Linux’s filesystem and unhelpfully-named folders? Not really.

I wasn’t even surprised that she wasn’t tasked with installing the operating system by herself. I mean, isn’t Linux ready for mainstream desktop use? Isn’t it easy to install and upgrade?

No, for me the surprising bit was that an advocate of using Linux on the desktop has a girlfriend. Blow me down!

(Yeah, I know, total cheap shot…)

Australia has its own search engine. Did you know that? It’s called Sensis and it was launched a little over a year ago, to great fanfare. At the time, one of their people said something like “In a year’s time, we’ll have caught up to and beaten Google in Australia”.

Pause. Silence. In the distance, a cricket chirps. People realise he’s serious and start laughing.

Right, so that was a year ago, and I was trying to find the exact quote to do the usual point and laugh thing, but I couldn’t find it (although I wasn’t looking terribly hard). I did find something even better though:

click make big

When you do a Google search for sensis beating google one of the results, from the Sensis page, is all about panic attacks.

Also, please note the far cleaner syntax of the Google search link as compared to the Sensis one. I wonder how much playing around one can do with that URL? Hmm.

This video closed out Spicks & Specks last night, so I just had to find it and share it with you, gentle reader.

Anyone who lives with a teenager ought to find this hilarious.

Oh those nutty funsters at the Herald-Sun. Publishing a page that shouldn’t be published

Thanks to The Daily WTF for this gem.

(I can’t take credit for this, but I forget who did it. If it’s you, gentle reader, I apologise).

I find Garfield relentlessly unfunny. Barely gets a grin out of me. It’s no surprise that it’s basically written by a focus group to achieve the widest possible audience – much like commercial pop music.

Anyway, there’s now Garfield minus Garfield, which is simply Garfield comics edited to remove the title character. They’re brilliant works of social commentary, wacky and insightful in an absurd kind of way.

Tanks to Gruber for the link.