Thanks to all of you who made it to the gig on Friday, it seems most of you thought it was “less s##t” than you’d expected. We aim to please.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, you lazy bastards! no hard feelings – hopefully there’ll be another time.

We took a few shots with my camera, but most of them aren’t much good (it was a bit dark) although there’s a few decent ones.

Thankfully Hugh was there to save the day, and spent most of the gig putting me off by poking his freakin’ huge lens in my face! But I guess that’s the price you pay for being a rock star.

It turns out it was worth it though, he took some awesome shots, which he’s put up here. I’ve collected a few here for the impatient.

As Robert Plant would say, see you next tiiiiiiiMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Photos which are in focus are © Hugh Blemings

View the photos »

Jess sent me some amazing pictures, which are supposedly not of Hurricane Katrina. Although they’re still fairly amazing, see below.

Update: Thanks to Jess, Tom and Pange for the correction!

Thanks to Mikey, this incredible shot of the eye from above (yes it is Hurricane Katrina) via Wikipedia.

In other news, hard evidence just in that proves Hurricane Katrina was caused by the Japanese Yakuza Mafia.

More pics below.

View the photos »

Martin mentions one way to avoid getting distracted while waiting for jobs to finish. Working in an office I can’t hear sounds unless I happen to have my headphones on, and even then it might get drowned out by the music.

Instead I have this little script …

#!/bin/bash

eval $@
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    kdialog --msgbox "Command '$@' in $PWD completed." 2> /dev/null
else
    kdialog --error "Command '$@' in $PWD failed!" 2> /dev/null
fi

Which you use like so …

concordia ~/src/work/kexec$ mn make

And when it’s finished it pops up a dialog on your current virtual desktop, which is pretty hard to ignore. Back to work!

Via bje, via the less than impressed Frank Ch. Eigler, some nice sentiments from the city of Toronto:

“If only”

.. sit around and wait ’til some local entrepreneur does the job for you:

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… to a little house on the prarie, where we’ll sing you some country rock ballads and comb your hair.

Be there or be spared!

I hate to be an elitist snob, but can someone explain to me how not buying petrol on one particular day is going to bring the petrol companies to their knees?

I mean, if everyone actually does “boycott the bowsers” on the “national day of action”, then all the service station attendants and petrol company folks can just take the day off. Gee, they must be pissed at that prospect.

Perhaps we can do some maths:

Cost of petrol = Cost of petrol per litre x Litres purchased

There’s two factors involved here, the amount of petrol you buy, and the cost of each litre. If we reduce either, the total cost will go down.

So what are the things we can do to reduce the cost of petrol per litre?

• Break up OPEC.
• Invade a country with large oil stockpiles.
• Convince the government to lower the taxes on petrol.
• Boycott the petrol majors into lowering the price.
• Stop all these evil people selling oil at market value, and make them sell it to us cheaper!

And any things that might reduce the amount of petrol we have to buy?

• Drive less?
• Walk somewhere.
• Ride a bike.
• Buy a smaller car.
• Drive a bit slower.