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  • Chat Roulette: Eye Vagina

    March 10th, 2010

    Chat Roulette is a web site that hooks you up to a random person. It streams their webcam video and audio to you, and your’s to them.  When you’re done, you click next and get another random person. That’s the whole thing.  It’s fun, for a short period of time.

    Anyway, whilst holding my webcam to different parts of my body (if you ever use my webcam, wash your hands) I discovered that my eye, on its side, with the right lighting, and right shadows, and bad focus, through a webcam… looks kinda, possibly, a bit like girl bits.

    It’s probably fair to say that, for a large proportion of the random strangers on Chat Roulette, the “Next” button is usually clicked in the hope of seeing a girl flashing some part of her body.

    Combine these two seemingly unconnected facts together, and you get some of the reactions you see in my Eye Vagina video!  The music is “My Vagina” by NOFX. I edited out roughly 300 people jerking off.  The vid has had more than half a million hits on you tube. I’m expecting my share of their fat advertising profits any day now.

    I recorded it using recordmydesktop and edited it using Pitivi (which actually had some very annoying audo sync problems I had to jump through hoops to avoid, which was a shame).

    Tags: chat roulette, chatroulette, eye, flash, prank, vagina

    Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

  • Song In Code: Ramones, I wanna be sedated

    August 21st, 2009

    Just the first verse:

    go = Proc.new { sleep 24.hours }
    self.wants :sedatation
    begin ; nil ; end
    case go ; where "no" ; nil ; end
    self.wants :sedatation
    self.get '/airport'
    self.put '/airport/plane'
    before self.insane? do
    3.times { hurry! }
    end
    return if self.can_control? :fingers
    return if self.can_control? :brain
    5.times { "no" }

    I recorded me singing it, which is kinda stupid tbh.

    I used mencoder to convert this to something Youtube found tasty. Like this:

    mencoder -ss 15 -endpos 1:18 -vf pp=al:f,scale=480:360 -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=libx264:mbd=1:vbitrate=2000 MOV01362.MPG -o MOV01362.x264

    Also, pimp for another Geek/Ukelele project: Ukepedia, all 3 million Wikipedia articles one song at a time

    Tags: code, Music, ramones, ruby, sing, song, songsincode, ukelele

    Posted in Music, Tech | 5 Comments »

  • My Ukepedia Talk at Barcamp Leeds 2009

    June 5th, 2009

    Tim Dobson very kindly recorded and uploaded my talk on the Ukepedia at Barcamp Leeds last Saturday.

    For those of your with short attention spans, I finally get started with the talk at about 2mins 30, and start singing the first article, Otitis Media, at about 7mins.

    Tags: barcamp, bcleeds09, leeds, microsoft, otitis media, performance, sing, song, ukelele, ukepedia, wikipedia

    Posted in Personal | No Comments »

  • Live this Saturday at the Packhorse in Leeds, The Gillroyd Parade

    May 12th, 2009

    My band, The Gillroyd Parade, are hosting an evening of acoustic music at the Packhorse Pub this Saturday (7pm to 11pm, 16th May). Supported by Ukelele Bitch Slap. Do come along, it’d be just dandy to see you.  Full poster here.

    The Gillroyd Parade

    Tags: folk, gospel, guitar, harmonica, sci-fi, theremin, ukelele

    Posted in Music, Personal | No Comments »

  • Women in Technology

    March 16th, 2009

    Dom kicked up a women in technology debate again recently.  I’ve seen a few responses, from one chap who thinks women have achieved equality already to a woman who doesn’t think girl’s brains are generally good for “programming” – and someone else who thinks there isn’t a problem as long as you’re thick skinned enough to put up with a sexually hostile workplace.

    The main gripe appears to be with “women only” conferences, such as the Women on the Web conference, organised by a group called Forward Ladies, or the Geek Girl dinners.

    I think a fair summary of his, and some other commenters, opinion is that these “women-only” events don’t help the effort to get more women involved in technology. Comparing it to positive discrimination in many ways.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Tags: conference, event, forward-ladies, geek-girl, geeks, geekup, leeds, social, Tech, women, women on the web

    Posted in Personal, Tech | 13 Comments »

  • Techietubbies live video podcast

    February 16th, 2009

    I’m joining Dom and Rahoul tonight on a live video broadcast of their Techietubbies podcast thing.

    From the site:

    “Techietubbies is a weekly podcast covering a multitude of subjects, from a round up of the week’s tech news, live callers, competitions, questions and answers… and beer :)”

    Though I’m driving, so no tech news for me. I think it’s recorded if you can’t see the live thing.  It’ll be broadcast live here via ustream.tv

    Tags:

    Posted in Personal, Tech | 2 Comments »

  • My native language

    February 16th, 2009

    Severed head I’m currently reading Nudge, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. It says many psychologists and neuroscientists agree that we humans have two general types of thinking, intuitive and rational. Also known as automatic and reflective.  When dodging a ball thrown at you, getting nervous when your aeroplane hits turbulence or smiling when you see a cute cat the automatic system is working.  When doing some mathematics, or writing a blog post, you (mostly) use reflective.  Speaking native, or “first” languages uses the automatic.  Speaking a second language usually uses reflective.

    I realised that having tinkered with computers heavily almost my entire life, a lot of my “computer skills” have shifted into the intuitive, automatic systems.  I obviously (hopefully) use the rational systems a great deal, but underlying it is definitly intuition – the gut feeling of where to go next to solve the problem.  I regularly come up seemingly random avenues of investigation that lead to gold and I couldn’t say with any certainty why I thought of it.  I’m assuming this is the same for most computer geeks (and chess geeks, cooking geeks, music geeks etc. :).  It’s become a native language for us.

    I don’t think the average rational system can easily deal with very complex problems.  It’s great for some more-linear concentrated work or planning, but for big stuff with lots of parts – hard work.  I think I usually research and “pre-process” a bunch of material around a problem using my rational system, then my automatic system gets to work mulling over the bigger picture.  Then when I’m making rational decisions about it, I’m heavily informed by the intuition. Or sometimes just when I’m showering.

    Anyway, not sure where I was going with this other than a “aren’t I great” blog post. The summary would be, don’t rely on your rational systems so much. Give the intuitive some good mulling time. And shower regularly.

    Tags: brains, concious, geek, intuition, neuroscience, programming, psychology, subconcious., thinking

    Posted in Personal, Tech | No Comments »

  • Gravedigg: What will die next?

    February 14th, 2009

    Gravedigg is like Digg, but rather than voting for pictures of cute cats or top ten lists of stuff, you vote on what you think will die or fail next.  Companies, celebrities, technologies… whatever.  So maybe you think the Perl programming language is on it’s way out very soon, or that Iceland is on its last legs or that Steve Jobs is boned.

    Louisa and I put this together in just a few days, me coding and Louisa designing. Was a fun little project to do.

    Tags: bust, death, digg, failing, vote, web

    Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »

  • SAS and the R Programming Language

    January 8th, 2009

    This New York Times article about the R programming language is pretty good, though there is a hilarious quote in it from proprietary software company that apparently make a similar product. Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS says:

    “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

    That’s pretty funny. She’s basically saying

    “It’s better to build important things with tools you can’t examine for yourself.”

    SAS claim to have over 40,000 customer sites worldwide.  The news article claim 250,000 people use R regularly.  The difference here isn’t in the numbers of users, it’s that, with R, every user is a potential developer.  SAS can’t possibly compete with that.

    Tags: free software, nytimes, R, sas

    Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

  • Halloween Pumpkin Carving

    October 31st, 2008

    Small pumpkin I carved today, with a carrot for a nose. It seems that I missed all the trick or treaters though. More chocolate for me and Louisa then.

    Louisa is cooking a lovely smelling soup with the innards from him. A couple more photos here.

    Tags: candle, carving, halloween, lantern, pumpkin, soup

    Posted in Personal | No Comments »

  • Ukepedia: Wikipedia on the Ukelele

    August 16th, 2008

    Ukepedia is a new project by me and Louisa. Long story short: Ukepedia is Wikipedia articles performed on the Ukelele (or Ukulele if you prefer). The long story isn’t actually much longer than that.

    Here is a video of me performing the Wikipedia article “Otitis Media” (which I also performed live at The Chemic Tavern on Thursday and at Bar Camp Leeds just today).

    Record your own, upload them to You Tube and submit them to us!

    Tags: Music, songs, ukelele, ukepedia, ukulele, ukupedia, wikipedia

    Posted in Music, Personal | 1 Comment »

  • Speaking at the Manchester Free Software Meeting

    April 8th, 2008

    I’m speaking next Tuesday (15th April 2008) at the Manchester Free Software about my geeky web comic, Everybody Loves Eric Raymond. Apparently people are still interested in it even though it hasn’t been updated since December! Hooray!

    It’ll be a bit of a mix of the two talks I’ve done before on ELER, so some stuff about the history of the comic and how I make it, plus some ranting about free software, free markets and leaders.

    I was asked by the then organiser (and my friend) Matt Lee who was then extraordinarily renditioned to North America with his new wife, leaving the new organisers to pick up the pieces. Luckily most of the pieces were found and it’s all go, though I do now appear to be talking about my new Rails hosting company too and my name is spelt differently. If there is time, I’ll talk about some of the stuff we’re doing at Brightbox with Free Software.

    Talk starts at 7pm at the Manchester DDA. More details on the Manchester Free Software website.

    Tags: brightbox, comic, eler, free software, manchester, talk

    Posted in Personal, Tech | No Comments »

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