I realise that in the scheme of things, it’s a small sum, but I just won $20 US in my first ever real money poker tournament. Unfortunately, there was some problem with the site I was playing on, so I might’ve gone on to either win the big dollars or lose and get nothing, but ended up in fifth spot as that’s where I was ranked when the crash occured.

Still, I’m a nervy guy at the best of times…high strung, antsy, jumpy, and you can usually tell if I’m lying, coz I start tugging on things, my heart rate doubles, you know, typical behaviour for someone destined to lose at poker.  Now in the lastweek, I’ve played my first live tournament, where I got to the final table and finished fourth without giving a damn thing away, and I’m a cash money winner :D

Shutup, man…it might be trivial to you, but I’m frigging stoked.

When a talkshow cuts to a commercial break, the host says “We’ll be right back”, invoking the metaphor of a visit to the viewer’s living room by the cast and crew of the show, who wander outside for a smoke while the ads are on. When the ads are over, the same person who told you that they would be back says “welcome back to the show”. Now, I’m visiting them! How the fuck did that happen? It’s my house, dammit. I’ll welcome YOU.

There has been a fair bit of news lately from the US regarding the current craze of ’sexting’, which is taking suggestive or nude photos of yourself with a phone and sending them to a lover, friend or whoever. The main issue raised in these stories is whether it is in any way appropriate to apply child pornography legislation to children - there is a clear difference between me, a 33-year old man, sending topless photos of fifteen year old girls to my mates, and a fifteen year old grl sending a topless photo of herself to her boyfriend.  I understand that the mitigating factor is the ease with which such things find their way  into public distribution, so there’s  an issue of protecting the not-so-wise from their own foolish actions. Watit a minute, I detest any law designed to protect me from myself - this is why I favour legalization of drugs, suicide, and so on. Well, at least there’s a debate going on while police are turning dumb horny teenagers into registered sex offenders.

But this is Australia. I’m yet to actually see any stories indicating that it’s a problem here , or that any such photos have leaked (as far as I can tell, the one underage girl whose naked phone pictures have made it to the internet is Vanessa Hudgens, star of High School Musical, who simply apologized, no charges, no nothing - but that’s more a story about fame and the lack of rules or repercussions for those who have it). But regardless, the NSW state government is sending out a sexting fact sheet to every school in the state, reminding kids that despite many of them being legally sexually active, they can’t send their sex partners a photo of the dick or boobs that they were groping the night before. Tha’s right kids, fuck you. You can scre each other and get pregnant, or herpes, but god forbid your girlfriend should have a 240 x 180 pixel snap of your balls. That, young folks, is a crime.

So I don’t know about you, but I’ve been avoiding Sony like the plague ever since the rootkit scandal. Prior to that, I just avoided them in a general sort of way, as I’ve always thought their hardware was overrated and overpriced.

Now, I’ve got a pretty big data archive, about 1,500 DVDs in all, meticulously catalogued, named, stored, indexed, you name it…there’s a lot of gold on those discs, and I devote a good chunk of time and care to keeping it in order. When I re that burned DVD will generally only last a few years, my chest swells with pride, because every…single…bit of data on my 1,500 odd discs is readable. This speaks volumes about the care I take, or at least it did until today.

Fucking Sony.  I used to get my DVDs from computer joints in the city, all kinds of discs, usually whatever was the best bargain. Here inMelbourne,  good deal is usually around $13 for a 50-disc spool. Now that I live further out from the city centre, the local Safeway is really the only place to get blanks from, and the only ones they stock in 50-disc spools are Sony.So, as much as I don’t likethem, I like full hard disks even less, so I have bought maybe 3-4 spools of Sonys in the last year….for $26 a spool. Pricks.

So if I go back to the first disc in my collection, which is 4.3GB of Applications and E-books, I can still read every file, despte it being dated October 31, 2004. Ditto every other disc.  But today, after my buddy Shannon requested a couple of old James Bond films, I searched, found the relevant titles on a disc from November 2008.  A Sony disc. And lo, my first CRC-check fail in five fucking years.  So I pull out the next Sony disc.  Two of five files are corrupted. Next disc, every file corrupted.  Just tinking about how much shit will need to be acquired, sorted adn burned again is making me sad. I don’t want to write any more. Fuck you, Sony. Again.

So I’ve got a Twitter account.  If history is anything to go by, I should be disgusted enough to delete my account in about three weeks. That was about how long it took me to delete my MySpace account, and about how long I…excuse me, I’ll be right back…sorry, had to block another cretin from following me..anyway, that’s about how long I last each time I get pressured into opening my Facebook account to new people (I’m there strictly for the poker)…’scuse me, have to go block ANOTHER new follower…jesus fucking christ, how does some tart who’s never posted a goddamned thing have 720 people following their complete lack of input? Anyway, so yeah, social networks aren’t really my thing…but Twitter takes the cake. As I write this, the current #1 hot topic on Twitter is the fact that Beyonce is on Letterman tonight. WOW, really? Shit, I guess TV Guide was right! All of my Tweets are bout how much I hate everyone on Twitter and their stupid inane comments bout their stupid inane lives, and every time i post one of these hateful, venomous 140 character slurs, five new arseholes start following me. I know everyone’s saying it, but  I feel that another voice can’t hurt. Nobody cares about your bus ride home, or what’s on TV right now. You experiences are in no way unique or interesting. Except Christopher Walken….he’s the reason I’m keeping my account. Everyone else, shut the fuck up. Now.

OK, Sven, be careful now, these are treacherous waters. Last night I attended a seder, the passover meal, with my partner Keren and her family, as I do every year.  She and her siblings are Israelis, born to a Jewish Australian mother and a Jewish Israeli father.  The father, whom I’ve only met a couple of times, is fairly right-wing from what I know of him, as were her brother and sister when I first met them five or six years ago.  The siblings have softened somewhat over those years, certainly in the case of the Israel/Palestine issue, while Keren and her mother (along with David, the step-dad and another Jewish Australian) are very much on the left.

The family has a diverse range of opinions on various issues, but I know that none of them, on the left or right, believe that the killing of innocent civilians is an acceptable way to achieve equality, freedom, or anything else for that matter.  They each condemn not only Islamic terrorism, but Israel’s terrorism in Gaza, Irish terrorism in London and American terrorism in any of the myriad places you’ll find it.  Basically wherever non-combatants are getting fucked over while minding their own business, they - we object.

So what the fuck are they doing celebrating passover?

Read the rest of this entry »

A year or so I closed my MySpace and Facebook accounts out of a combination of privacy concerns, general disgust and a soul deeply divided by the obvious lack of cool that social networking flags to everyone outside the ’social’ network. Last month, with a trip to Fiji looming, I reactivated my Facebook account so I could retrieve all the photos that other people took when I got home. Tagging photos with names is fucking great. I’m glad I did it, coz now I have some pictures to go with some really nice memories. Finding old buddies is cool too, as is maintaining a communication channel with people I’d eventually lose touch with otherwise. Before I start ranting, let me be fair: Facebook has a shitload going for it. Read the rest of this entry »

I am somewhat unaccustomed to watching free-to-air TV, what with all the ads and the standard year-long wait for content to reach our shores. But until I can be arsed to buy a new CPU fan for the HTPC, I’m at the mercy of the airwaves. So today, I found myself browsing an online TV guide instead of a download site, and came across an unfamiliar program which is premiering on Channel Ten tonight called The Ex-List.

Now, the show didn’t look very good, but that in itself is no reason to condemn its airing. What blows my mind is that it’s airing despite the fact that the show has already been cancelled.

At my local supermarket, there’s a ‘discontinued items’ section, full of heavily discounted shit. In TV terms, that would translate to a 3:00AM airtime - not 9:00PM on a Monday. This is like finding ReRefried Beans on display at the entrance.

I’ve been having an interesting discussion over the past couple of days with my buddy Alex, an historian of considerable merit here in Melbourne. Alex has come to my rescue in this election period. Nobody else I know outside  the US has a decent handle on the race to the White House, but it turns out that Al has been keeping pace in his quiet fashion. Great news for me, so I thought I’d pop this video up to celebrate the fact that someone I know will now get the joke…I hope! So Al, this clip goes out to you.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

You may have heard that a new material has been produced, made of carbon nanotubes, that is blacker than anything ever, ever. It’s really, really dark. Here’s a photo of it with two other very dark things taken with a flash.

Nanotubes are so fucking sweet.