Feckoff.net

I saw this on boards.ie today.

JACKSONVILLE, FL — A homeless man named “Ja” is walking the streets with a new suped-up shopping cart filled with high-tech gadgets.

Click the link above for pictures and full article.

From The Register:

A couple of years ago we reported on the Jamaican mobile phone thief who got herself into a bit of a sticky situation in Negril when “a cellular phone which was stolen from a female shopper was found after it rang from within another shopper’s vagina”.

Yup, the criminal mastermind had “tamponed” the phone but a quick call to the number and her cover was blown. Cue a humiliating public extraction of said phone by furious owner who declared: “Mi nuh wan’ dat deh phone fi use again, mi would dash it weh.”

Quite so. You’d think that this cautionary tale would be enough to deter even the most desperate mobe-lifter, but they obviously don’t read Jamaica’s Western Mirror in Romania, because light-fingered Ruxandra Gardian has been snared by the same “let’s dial the number and see where she’s stashed it” ploy.

Gardian was fingered by a restaurant customer who said he saw her steal the phone from another diner, FemaleFirst reports. Police quizzed the 34-year-old without success and were about to let her go when some bright spark suggested they call the mobe.

“On dialling the number they heard a sound coming from under Gardian’s clothes and took her to police headquarters to be strip-searched,” the report continues. You know the rest. Suffice it to say that a shaken officer Aurel Popescu commented: “I’ve seen a lot in my time as a policeman but never anything like this.”

The phone’s owner has refused to take the device back, declaring it was “damaged beyond repair and he would be filing an insurance claim”. That should make entertaining reading and will doubtless reach the finals of the “Top Ten Mobile Phone Insurance Claims” awards for 2005.

In the meantime, we’d like to make a simple suggestion to would-be female mobe-snatchers who intend to make good their escape with a 3G device concealed in their reproductive tract: stick it on vibrate or turn the bloody thing off. ®

hahaha, brilliant!

Anyone using an RSS aggregator to view this site was probably getting errors due to some line breaks at the top of my RSS feed, which turned out to be caused by unneccessary line breaks in the Photopress plugin’s code. Should be fixed now.

Had a bit of downtime there, not sure for how long. This was due to the /tmp partition on the server on which this site is hosted being full, which in turn broke MySQL.

Today I had the pleasure of having to replace the driver side fog light bulb on my ‘00 Fiesta Zetec. I went to the local garage and purchased the requisite H1/55W bulb for the princely sum of €1.00. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ve replaced simple bulbs in cars and bikes before”.

Mistake.

Note the moisture build-up. Nice.

Ford cunningly made it ridiculously awkward and difficult to remove the fog lights on the Fiesta. I had to actually crawl under the car and faff about with some silly plastic clips, unplug the wiring (also ridiculously awkward due to silly plastic clips) and then push the light out from behind.
Once the light was out, I swapped in the new bulb and then had to do the whole shitty process in reverse. The whole job took me over half an hour!

I installed Ubuntu Linux last night on a spare 8GB partition on my main machine (Laptop is still running SuSE 9.2, thinking of reverting back to Windows on that though, because of the terrible battery life). Being used to Red Hat based distributions, I thought it was time for a change.
Anyways, installed Ubuntu - from a single CD, which is nice. Unfortunately the installer is a pretty basic text based affair, and the disk partitioning section might be quite confusing to those who haven’t done it before, especially if they have existing partitions that they don’t want to be damaged. I must commend SuSE’s installer in this area, they really couldn’t have made it easier.
Once Ubuntu was installed and updated via the Internet (I wouldn’t like to try this on a dialup connection), I was presented with a very pretty gnome login screen. The GUI is very slick and attractive, but unfortunately lacks a lot of the handy configuration tools that I’m used to from SuSE - for example, to change the default operating system in the GRUB bootloader back to Windows XP, I have to manually edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
The first thing I set about doing after installing Ubuntu was configuring it to mount my NTFS partitions automatically, so that I would have access to all my accumulated stuff from Windows. This was again a case of editing config files - a far cry from SuSE’s automatic mounting of NTFS partitions without any user intervention.
I then went to install a few of my favourite applications, such as xmms, mplayer and VLC. Videolan do not have any packages specifically for Ubuntu, but they do provide Debian packages, so I gave those a try. VLC runs OK and is displaying Xvid video alright, but seems to be lacking sound at the moment - giving this error in the terminal:
VLC media player 0.8.1 Janus
[00000269] mpeg_audio decoder: MPGA channels:2 samplerate:48000 bitrate:128
[00000272] oss audio output error: cannot open audio device (/dev/dsp)
Odd.
Anyways, moving on to mplayer - I installed that and the w32codecs and a few other bits and pieces via Synaptic, which is lovely. I prefer it to SuSE’s YaST package manager. Unfortnuately mplayer is not working! It just freezes when you start it and its process has to be killed to get rid of it.
On the upside, Xmms worked flawlessly. Ubuntu also comes with some common apps like OpenOffice, Evolution and Firefox. I’ll stick with it for a while and see if I can resolve the problems I’ve been having with the above multimedia apps.

IRMA (those lovely people who tried to shut down cheap music outlets like CDWOW) announced today that they are to prosecute 17 of Ireland’s most prolific illegal music sharers. You can read the full story about this here (ENN).
There’s a mention in that article about how lower prices on legal music download sites would help to curb the spread of illegal music sharing, but they left out one critical factor: Many people do not like using these services because of the DRM (digital rights management) crippled files they produce. Mycokemusic.com is one site mentioned in the article - Music downloaded from Mycokemusic comes in DRM-ridden WMA format.
I legally downloaded a Paddy Casey track from that site a few weeks ago, only to find that I could not transcode it to MP3 or AAC to play on my iPod (which does not support WMA) because of the poxy WMA DRM. To play it I had to go by the nasty analogue route, which really reduces audio quality.

I saw this on Overheard In Dublin, and it really made me laugh:

2 Dubs were next to me watching the Dublin-Kerry minor game in Croke Park in 2001. In front of us were two Kerry fans from the Gaeltacht who were talking to each in Irish. 5 minutes into the Senior game one of the Dubs taps one of the Gaelgóirs on the shoulder.

Dub: “Ye’re talking in Irish”
Gaelgóir: “Yeah”
Dub: “I thought ye’d switch to English for the Senior game?”

Classic!

–Hill 16 in Croke Park

Overheard by Joe
Thursday, 07th April 2005

I can’t believe this guy is serious, this is the cheesiest music video I’ve ever seen. Like the site says, the “artist” is Dennis Madalone, a former Star Trek stunt co-ordinator.

This should have been in the Team America soundtrack

“America we stand as one”

Update 11 April 2005: Thanks to Linky for posting this in comments on this post! Its well worth the download, QuickTime .mov format.

Check this out. Its a rant about ring tones, particularly the crazy fucking frog. Here’s a snippet on people with said ringtone:

Personally I consider them immature cunts. The next person that I hear with that ringtone is going to cleaning their own excrement out of the keypad after it has been retrieved the deepest recesses of their intestines.