Face to Face

Chucky and an Asian cook are eyeing each other with suspicion... (Click for large)

Songsmith OMG WTF OLOL ROFL (Part 2 - The End)

Of course, the best usage of Microsoft Songsmith is to feed it isolated vocals of famous singers (and not singers):









This is the day the music died...

OMG WTF Songsmith?!

I'm putting this video here for two reasons:

1. The technology itself looks like it could be basis for something interesting (in this implementation, it's clear the chord progressions must become repetitive sooner rather than later).
2. This is another proof that Microsoft marketing department is absolutely batshit crazy and/or on drugs.

No, I Am Not Your Facebook Friend

A long time ago, I registered myself on several social sites (Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo etc...).

Recently, Facebook was "discovered" by Czech users which means that I am now getting about 30 Facebook notifications in e-mail daily, most of which look like this:

"Honza added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Honza in order for you to be friends on Facebook. To confirm this friend request, follow the link below."

When I go to facebook.com, often I have no idea who that person is. Sometimes I know that person but - and this is the important bit - this doesn't mean the person is my friend.

Facebook seems to imply that knowing someone automatically means I am friends with him. That's certainly not true. There are dozens of people I know, I don't hate them, I don't think they are stupid, I'd even lend them money under some specific circumstances, but that doesn't mean they are my friends. If this feature was called "My contacts", I'd have no problems with it.

There are also people who I am friends with "virtually", over the net. Of course, I have no way of knowing that "Honza" is in fact "L33THax0RG0D@Haxx.net" who I am communicating with daily over Jabber.

Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the fact that becoming friends with someone automatically makes me part of bizarre activities:

The thing on the right is a small part of what I see every day on Facebook (incidentally, these people are my real friends). I'd probably like to know details about why Robert Rameš loves me, because I always thought he was hetero, but when I click on "Click here", I must "Allow this application to access all your private data" and only after that I am allowed to see the whole truth (I quote):

"Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'FacebookRestClientException' with message 'Notifications are disabled for this application.' in /home/www/ilyfb.leadhoster.com/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php:2403 Stack trace: #0 /home/www/ilyfb.leadhoster.com/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php(969): FacebookRestClient->call_method ('facebook.notifi...', Array) #1 /home/www/ilyfb.leadhoster.com/index.php(10): FacebookRestClient->notifications_send(Array, '/home/www/ilyfb.leadhoster.com/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php on line 2403"

Tragic love, indeed.

When I want to know what the hell is this "I love you" application, the only working link leads to Facebook discussion page with "I love you" and "This is spam" messages, all from people I don't know.

Facebook is fast becoming the new MySpace, with people "adding", "tagging", "making friends" and "subscribing to apps" only in order to have some sense of achievement from the fact that they have the most firends/apps/feeds. Soon, all of this will be automated a everyone will become everyone's friend automatically, without having to ever visit Internet. And there will be worldwide peace.

Certainly there are interesting apps and interesting uses of Facebook. Unfortunately, they are being buried under enormous heaps of digital waste and thinly veiled spam. I hope I won't have to completely delete my profile (as I did on MySpace) but meanwhile, I am disabling all my Facebook e-mail notifications. Because my friends know how to contact me and make me part of their activities.

New Year Is Here. Have A Giga Pudding!

Very Merry Christmas from Henrietta and Merna

Sorry about my previous post (PF 2009) which might be disturbing for some viewers. To make amends, here is heartfelt Christian song, much needed in these difficult times:



Also: Special bonus from their father.

Bow Down, Heathens!

High-Tech Solution For Low-Tech Problem (Part 2)

This was my first use of Google Sketchup. Pity it doesn't run natively under Linux...



A little explanation if you care for it: The dogs are sleeping with us in the bed since God knows when. The bed is over 60 cm high but Chucky is capable of jumping on it from the ground and Albert had a little wooden box next to the bed and he used that as a springboard.

So the problem was not getting to the bed but I was worried that jumping down from the bed can be harmful to their backs (especially for rather heavy Albert with rather short legs).

Of course, the hardest part now is to teach them to use the stairs and not just jump down from the bed...

P.S: I did not construct the stairs, of course. I just gave the blueprints to the carpenter and afterwards glued the pieces of our old bathroom mat (with penguins!) to the surfaces.

High-Tech Solution For Low-Tech Problem

Because od the nature of our lives, Jitushka often wakes up to go to work/school shortly after I go to sleep. This complicates any potential start-of-the day communication, especially concerning the dogs. It's not easy to let the other person know when our dogs were last fed/walked.

I solved this problem like a man. Like a geeky nerdy man, that is. I made a special CGI web application to track the dogs.



Because we both have www-enabled mobile phones, we now just use a private URL on my webserver where we can see when the dogs were last fed and walked and we can both set these times to "now" or to some predefined times in the past ("30 minutes ago", "1 hour ago" etc.). And we can see the info and set it from any place with network coverage.

I pity the people who had to solve this problem 10 years ago. They were screwed and had to resort to uncool paper and pen.

TODO: Automatic sending of alarm SMS when the dogs are not walked for 10 hours or more!

Cooking By The Book

This video is a work of genius. Every second is brillantly done, it's catchy and it's so wrong on so many levels.

Remember, if there was no Internet, we'd probably never see this.



For those not "in the know": This is a mashup of two completely unrelated videos.

For those "in the know": This is the stuff Pedobear's dreams are made of.