Well I didn’t watch the entire finale episode of Australian Big Brother 2006, but I did catch a few moments of it and it sounded like a bunch of annoying hyperbole.  Maybe that’s just the way it has to be if they’re going to maximise the premium SMS revenue (can you believe Camilla and Jamie had exactly 50% of the audience’s favour until the last minute?? Vote to save your fave only 55c!) and draw out the viewers for a good two hours to show them plenty of ads, to cover about ten minutes of evicting the last two housemates and announcing a winner.

So Jamie, the sensitive, self admiring personal trainer from Taree (OK I don’t really know where he’s from but Taree sounds good in that sentence) has won it and crushed his closing competitor, Camilla.

I was a tiny bit disappointed with the result, I felt as though Camilla was going to win and I kinda felt like she deserved it for some reason. Maybe it’s because of the tough times she endured in the house being nominated a bunch of times and still making it through to run second. I wonder if she’s spewing that she braved the leap of faith from 6 storeys up last Friday night and now she doesn’t even get the cash? I’m sure Jamie will spend it wisely at least.

It will be interesting to see who from this year’s BB ends up in the media and on TV, I hope there’s room for more ex-reality show stars alongside Hotdogs at Channel Ten, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Claire around the traps

So that’s it then for another year huh. I’ll miss the Up Late shows but otherwise this post is petering out towards the end because I don’t have anything else interesting to say about Big Brother.

Ask any red blooded Aussie and he’ll tell you. Poms are wankers. It looks like they’re finally coming to grips with themselves (hah) and celebrating their national pastime with a week long masturbate-a-thon, to be televised on Channel 4, whatever that is. Australians don’t even bother with channels below 7, except for the old public broadcaster ABC on trusty channel 2, but that’s taxpayer funded so what do you expect.

A mysterious, anonymous friend, co-worker or miscellaneous associate generously extended me the warmth of sharing with me a Larvatus Prodeo blog post about an upcoming British TV event dubbed “Wank Week”, involving hundreds of Poms gathering in a hall in London to wack off apparently to aid some charity.

They can do whatever they need to so that they feel justified about rubbing one out, I say. Who am I to judge?

To me, the most disturbing issue in this whole matter is that “Kim” of Larvatus Prodeo (what is that anyway?) managed to start her blog post about a large number of people masturbating and a lot of people having a “debate” without writing “mass debate”. Truly a sad story, Kim has really let herself and the Australian blogging community down here by not taking this most blindingly obvious of opportunities to indulge in high-school humour.

Christian inspired me with his That’s Gold emoticon that he created for MSN to post up one of my own MSN experiences.  It actually is also related to something being “gold” but I went for something a bit more generic and literal.
I’ve made a bunch of stupid, useless MSN emoticons to amuse myself and my friends, but by far the most often used is the emoticon to use instead of saying “that’s gold!” or just “gold!” or even just “lol”, or sometimes to supplement lol when you really want to show your appreciation for a comment someone has made and “lol” just doesn’t cut it yet you don’t want to go with “alol” (actual laugh out loud) or add an extra “hahaha” or something else onto the end.

This emoticon’s story is also quite interesting because it went through several stages of evolution, as seen in Fig. 1 above.

Here you can see the emoticon graduated from its first inception as a static emoticon which MSN displays very small and boring in the chat window. Clearly, this is not the effect we were after with this emoticon so more work was needed. In the unlikely case that you want to download the boring version, it is provided for you as a normal static GIF file below. It does look the same enlarged size as the other emoticons but don’t be fooled — MSN will shrink it once you convert it to an emoticon.

The next version was the first animated one but it also failed to impress us with its predictable, even keeled and slow wagging side to side. If this emoticon was a dog, you wouldn’t assume that it was particularly happy to see you, would you? It is more of a dog that is begging for a biscuit at the side of the table but doesn’t really believe it will get a biscuit, yet it can’t leave the table lest it misses out. Thus this emoticon failed in its task of conveying the “Gold!” emotion successfully as well.

Finally, we struck gold (hah!) with the next iteration. This version was named “Goldy” because of either a mistyped filename or for some equally inane reason. Nevertheless what it lacks in name it makes up for in spirit, because you can’t deny what this emoticon conveys — wacky comedy gold! And that’s what it represents. So next time your friend says something hilarious you don’t need to just say “oh that was gold my friend, yes indeed you certainly have a sense of humour don’t you”…you can just slap this emoticon into his window and show your gratitude for his comic genius.

I started using Windows Live Messenger in the last few days, and I like it. At first I was disdainful of people I saw upgrading just because it was a shiny new version and they just want to have the latest thing. But then I found out about two new features it has, and I was forced to upgrade:

1. you can appear offline and still talk to people (this was a feature of ICQ about 8 years ago I think), which is cool if you’re trying to get something done but you still want to be able to talk to one or two people on your list.
2. you can click a single button on the conversation window to hide the display pictures, and it remembers this when you open a new window! Finally this has been added, the big waste of display picture space was annoying to me before; you really don’t want to look at a person’s display picture the entire time you speak to them and it just makes the conversation window even bigger.

I’ve still patched my version with APatch as well, because it does a bunch of other useful stuff like removing ads and useless crap I don’t want to use. You can download my APatch settings if you want; I’ve done all the hard work of deciding what’s necessary and what’s not and of course the way I use software is the best so you’ll definitely want to use my settings.

First the moron toothbrush companies with too much cash brought out the crazy toothbrushes with whirling electric heads, vibrating dental floss holders and fading wear indicators. Now the mens’ shaving razor market has gone berserk. Look at this crap:

It used to be that two blades provided the smoothest, closest shave. Then it was three and then four blades, then the razor went red and had “turbo” in its name.

But now there’s a MOTOR in the razor, and it also gets a three-tiered name:

• A name that is shared with a prestige German sportscar that’s on my list of would-owns
  
• The word power - everyone likes power
  
• The word “Nitro”, a type of high octane fuel used in dragsters and remote-controlled cars (lol not so tough now)

Three names…now that’s tough. What’s also tough is that it’s black with glowing bits and it has a motor! It’s in the handle. You push the button to turn it on. Listen to that again:

Push the button. Turn it on.

Then what? Well who knows? Your lady might go crazy when you push her button and turn her on but the TV ad just doesn’t say what’s next. The magazine ad doesn’t say. But it definitely has a “tiny motor in the handle”. All that I can imagine is that you go about your business while the pointless motor does nothing. Sounds like my old RX7 actually.

And you know what else? The car used in the ads is a Toyota Supra.  Wouldn’t it make sense, if you’re going to use a car to demonstrate the awesoma poewr of your razor with a tiny motor in the handle wouldn’t you use the one that your razor seems to be named after?  Yes the BMW M3.  What an awesome co-branding deal they could have made; buy two M3 razors and get a free BMW M3!  That’s a saving of $139,980!  What a deal.

I hate this razor so much I almost want to buy it just to piss people off with the story.

Reckon Sol and Ziggy are morons? Try your hand at being a monopoly telco with Nokia’s Network Tycoon Flash game. Messing with plan prices, voice and SMS rates and marketing budgets, you also get to scatter your cell towers around the town.

Hello gln,

We hope you enjoyed playing Network Tycoon, from Nokia. Here is your report and certification of completion. Your final score is 21 168 582 LN$. You’re invited to play again, any time you like.

Nokia
http://www.nokia.com/letsnetwork

Final Report

Not bad! Here are your results:

Subscribers 154 930 ARPU 131 LN$/User   OPEX 45 200 000 LN$   Marketing 20 000 000 LN$   Efficiency boosters 0 LN$   EBITDA -24 853 083 LN$   Network assets 0 LN$   Profit or loss -24 853 083 LN$   FINAL SCORE 21 168 582 LN$

Have you built enough coverage in the metropolitan area? Are you sure you have invested enough in marketing? Do you have enough personnel to support your business?

Tonight I was disappointed to find that I wasn’t the first person to know about Wikimapia.  It’s a collaboratively edited Google Maps mashup that lets you record places of interest with a description and tags.  It’s the coolest thing ever.

You can watch the video of Ash turkey-slapping Camilla at 4:30am.

My take?  Sure, it’s inappropriate behaviour but the way it’s been reported hardly represents what took place.  It was all in fun and Camilla wasn’t too horrified to stay in the boys’ bed after the big event.  She even exclaimed “I’ve just been turkey slapped!” to the rest of the housemates in the room.  Lots of hoo-ha for no reason if you ask me.

Wowsers, go back to your bland suburban existence please.

Yesterday I arranged my desktop icons like this while I was on the phone. I reckon ‘Auto-Arrange’ should do this for you automatically.