lolwtf?

You can see sketches and a bit of the process on my website.

UPDATE:
There have been many requests to use this image on other websites, so I’ve decided to release it under a Creative Commons license. You are free to reuse the image on your own website as long as credit is given and linked back to RobotJohnny.com.

For prints, contact me directly.”>

IE6 denial message for Momentile.com
Uploaded to Flickr by John Martz.

Go home, IE6!

So I attended, but not to play, but to spend time hacking on some stuff I wanted to.

Pity there was no internet access.
So instead, I started playing some tunes from my laptop.  I have a very esoteric music collection, so I started playing some music on my headphones.

But then I thought that hey, I know one of the guys here liked some tracks that I gave him a while back, so I hooked up some speakers that were laying around and, I started out playing music that was more accessible to people — Jose Gonzales, Beastie Boys, Flash Harry.  At first I just had it on shuffle, but then I took a bit more proactive approach and started using iTunes Party Shuffle feature, with a couple of tenets in my head, keep it funky, keep it relaxed and high energy, and mix it up with both familiar and weird.

So I started mixing in a bit more of the stranger tunes I had — 8bit chiptunes and OC Remix tracks! I knew this music would be weird at first, so I kept mixing in more popular music, like DJ Shadow, The Clash, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Gorillaz and some old school house that everyone knows.

One of the young guys there said something about me having a more awesome collection than him… and I felt pretty good about that — I have always thought my collection, while awesome for me, would be completely random for a lot of others.

A lot of the kids were nodding their heads to the tracks that they had only heard for the first time, and one or two were singing along with some of the geeky choruses on occasion too.  I think I got the feeling that they liked what I was playing.

So as the night progressed, I started to get even more esoteric than just 8bit beats and video game remix tracks. I cracked out some Jonathan Coulton, a whole lot of Nerdcore: ytcracker, MC Frontalot, MC Hawking, 1337 g33k b34t, Ultraklystron, some random YTMND Soundtrack tracks (I got a good response to Kassius’ Poland Tool Kit o_O; ), and even some Group X.  I was still throwing a lot of pop in: Groove Armada, Blur, The White Stripes.

The night wound up as I had to leave in a rush, so I played one last track: Hit the Road Jack by Ray Charles.

I got quite a bit of great feedback throughout the night, and even some laughs!  I didn’t get much else done but putting a rudimentary playlist together and enjoying the crowd-of-7 responce while they played Starcraft.
I’ve managed to rescue the ephemerial nature of the list of tracks I played from the Recently Played smart-list iTunes keeps and have saved it as a playlist, and made it available as a PDF for your personal perusal: KBC Lan Party Playlist.

Space Man Candy Sticks, Redesigned… UGH.
Uploaded to Flickr by Glutnix.

Carousel, the new owners of the kiwiana-status brand “Space Man Candy Sticks” have ruined an iconic New Zealand brand by redesigning the packaging. WTF were they thinking!?

Especially because they put a ginga in the deep vacuum of space without him first putting on his helmet.

When I switched host, I needed to update that site’s record of who is handling the domain name. Friday night, I logged into the domain registrar and found the page which lets me update the nameservers. I am told this is called updating the zone file.

When I do this, it is supposed to propagate the changes through the all of the DNS servers around the world within the space of 24 hours. That’s how it works. Problem solved.

Not with this domain name. Monday morning rolled around, and still the domain name was pointing at the old host’s servers.

This is weird, because whois.net and samspade.org are reporting the dns records correctly.

So I get in contact with the registrar who handles the domain name. The lady on the other end of my web-based IM session told me it’s probably Telecom’s fault, as this kind of thing isn’t surprising, and on request provides me with phone numbers to Telecom.

After 15 minutes on hold (because of the power cuts in Auckland recently) I get through to a guy in Complex Technical Support (yes, that’s what the department is called at Telecom/Xtra), and I explain to him my problem, and stubbornly refuses to believe that their systems are as bad as I have been informed — I asked that he flush their dns cache for me, but he refused. After frustrating attempts to get him to see what I was seeing, I took his name down and department in case I needed to stick it to him.

So I talk to my System Administrator here at Natcoll, and he introduces me to a tool called dig which will let me see what different DNS servers are saying about domain names. After checking a few low level DNS servers, such as Paradise and Xtra, we checked the A-level DNS servers — and the first B level DNS server I checked was mis-reporting too! No wonder we’re having these problems.

So, after trying to raise an IM session with the registrar, I tracked down their phone number and called them for real. I got a helpful soul who said aha, no, what I was told by the other staff member is incorrect. Turns out that they are not a .com registrar themselves, but have to go through a US company to register .com domains on behalf of their customers, and it would seem that the propagation of the zone file changes I requested had failed, and they would need to request them to happen by telephone.

So all’s well that ends well. I’ve called Complex Tech Support back and asked that a message be left for the employee I spoke with, telling him that he was right, and I was fed bad information from my registrar and I wanted to apologise.

Hopefully the site will be up tomorrow morning! I guess we’ll see, eh?

I especially like the simple Firefox Extension. It adds a little ‘open notebook’ to the browser’s status bar, which when clicked pops up a little in-page pop-up where you can type text or capture selected text from the current page. Very nice!

I did find one pretty neat feature that the Google Notebook help pages doesn’t mention. Right click the button in the status bar, and you’ll find an Enable ‘Note This’ button option. Enabling this doesn’t seem to do much straight away, and in fact, it took me a while to figure it out. But when it’s enabled, try selecting some text, and a little [+] button will appear at the end of your selection — click it to add your selection to your currently selected notebook! Neato

So uses for Google Notebook? I could find it useful for keeping a list of things I want to post about, a shopping list, inspirational quotes, or maybe even for some GTD loving. What will you be doing with your Google Notebook?

there was a guy walking down the street and he went to the bathroom. he did his business then left for the movies. he bought some popcorn and then he sat down to watch the movie. but there was no movie. it was taking the banana too feelings it had never assumed before. games exploded from the mouth of the ghananise gorilla, while the bassoon played on the piano. my fingernails melted into blobs of golden chocolate. i took my green pepper and used it for a device to prevent hemmeroids in siamese gulls. the squeeze gun then put on a jersey and danced the gigalo. the guy drank a tall glass of tar and profusely vomited onto the floor of the patisserie. the mona lisa took her glasses off and ate the bottle from the water cooler. the colour aqua and the colour red made out. my bananas never stopped. a tv show character never blew a green goal. my wallet was full of bmws. people congregated around an intray. i believe you have my exploding duck’s complete collection of 1930s architectural dives. my head melted into a million shards of atomic cafes. propaganda of the green manilla folder made me a grand total of eighty five cents. a bowel of fruit was collected from the masses and lo, there was no aubergines that were yellow. a matte stapler attacked a child while they were swimming in the jungle’s largest pool of custard-flavoured tar babies while the jello men were sunbathing in the moonlight. my pillow of keymashed kumara licked off it’s eyebrows which were coated in a yellow substance which would shatter under pressure from either david hasslehoff or that guy who does the joy of painting. a loud number coloured blue explained in morbose detail the mating rituals of an enlarged jumbovision with a blue orangutang. my nipples flew out of george costanza and they took out fps doug, boom forehead shot. lol roffle lol i take it back it was really chuck norris. then a pair of macrovision encrypted sunglasses dropped out of the treasure chest and were crushed by the planet golufulava. my parents took out the trash and used a machete to renovate the viper. a snake coaxed out of me my secret location to my snozberry m&ms. my headphones transformed into warren bady. a haircut took my power supply and used it to get a real job, whilst my exploding duck unexploded. it was viewtiful. joe made shortbread and laughed at it’s lack of blueberry muffins. cakes i like the most, except for daniel. moses exploded and left behind a collection of little puce ducks. the ducks were made of marzipan. i ran to the store to buy some icing and i freed morgan freeman from the narration of some 3d game, maybe half-life 2. then prince albert emerged from his tupperware and i mixed us up a storm with my thumbprints on a lp record made from fudge. we danced but it wasn’t the best. i decided that we should take the exploding munters and use them for table tennis. i later regretted that i used a passionfruit to scrape the kiwi birds from under my nostrils. my wrists were relaxed from all the grabbing of explainitory signage i discovered in my armpits. my brain frazzled and decided that was long enough.

Here’s Glutbook, my 12″ iBook mac laptop sporting some new cult-of-mac jamming adhesives!

• Technorati sticker, obtained at WE05 Sydney (thanks Tantek!)
• “OBEY with caution – Blind Acceptance can be hazardous”, bought years ago in an Obey sticker pack I only just remembered I had
• Rad Rad Robotank from Strong Bad Email #139: Portrait, custom printed for NZD$15 at a sign printer here in Wellington called Asign. Supplied a EPS and it was printed and laser cut ready for sticking on in less than half a day! Awesome!

I know some mac-zealots (namely Kodiak) are gonna hate me for doing it. But that was part of the fun

I haven’t gone far from Central Station in Sydney, but the fast food in Australia is of par standard. It’s nothing special, but it’s certainly edible. The food at the conference is great.

I uploaded the best photos I had from the conference onto Flickr last night via Telstra wifi from the comfort of my 6-share. My favorite has got to be Tantek and Eric Meyer staring each other down

There was an emergency evacuation yesterday. Apparently it’s the first almost-live podcast recording of a building evacuation! One of the guys from the conference was telling me he got a hilarious pic of Eric Meyer crouching outside the venue with his laptop out on his knees trying to get on Wifi! [photo]– can’t wait to see that on Flickr! Check out all the we05 photos on Flickr

All the talks yesterday were awesome. I especially liked Jeffrey Veen’s presentation on usability, Kelly Goto’s presentation on workflow in the agency, and Douglas Bowman’s visionary presentation reminding us that it’s only been 10 years and our art will most definetely look completly different in 10 years.

I’m really looking forward to the AJAX session, as well as Cameron Adams’ Javascript & DOM session. Tantek’s microformats session should be very interesting too.

I’m off to meet Found Agency today too. Probably around lunch time. We’ll see.

My name is Brett Taylor. I’m a 24yo male from Wellington, New Zealand. I’m proud to be a geek.

I started reading your web comic Kevin and Kell on Monday 5th September after repeated recommendations from several sites around the internet. I finished reading it all last night (Monday 12th). I had never read any Kevin and Kell before that Monday.

I’m writing to tell you about how Kevin and Kell has changed my life. You see, I really shouldn’t have been reading this comic in the first place; I’m recovering from an addiction to pornography — my favorite stuff was the furry stuff, and anything furry-related (like Kevin and Kell) is a potential danger zone for me.

But I kept reading. I read all ten years of your comic in a week, taking up all my spare time. But I started getting depressed. I guess I grew kind of jealous of how the characters of Domain came together when they faced problems time and time again, and how they grew closer together, overcoming adversity as a team. For some reason, I really identified with Lindesfarne early on. At the time, I couldn’t work out why.

On Friday night, a friend of mine gave me some ribbing about how I should ask this girl that I had told him I fancied, like he normally does. Usually I can shrug his pestering off, but this time it stuck. And it hurt. The depression got worse. But I kept reading, longing to know more about the world of Kevin and Kell.

On Sunday night, at my church, after the evening service, I broke into tears, confused at what was going on inside of me. The pain that resulted inside of me from reading the comic that was full of happiness and joy was tearing me apart.

Pain is a good thing. It tells us that something is wrong and we need to take action to fix it.

Thankfully, a friend came over and looked after me. I thank God that she did. Over the course of what seemed like an eternity, I came to realise that while I am caring and loving to others, I do so without realising that there is a wall around my heart, making it difficult for others to care for me. I was lonely. I knew I was lonely, but I didn’t even know that it was this wall around me, but I now I know it’s there.

I guess that’s why I identified with Lindesfarne so much. She grew up with her quills as a wall that made it hard for others to get close to her without getting hurt. But somehow she made it through, even gaining a life-long companion. I long so much for family, friendships and relationships similar to the ones portrayed in your comic in my own life.

Is what I long for attainable? I know K&K is fiction, but I know that within the story of Domain there is truth for the whole human world, and that some of that truth is obtainable for my own life. I know the road in front of me is long — I have to figure out how to let people into my heart, and not scare them away. Am I scared? I’m scared out of my wits. I don’t know what I’m gonna have to do. I’m afraid of rejection; of putting my heart on the line, only to have it thrown back in my face.

But I guess I’m writing you to say Thank You. When I think about the world of K&K and Lindesfarne, I’m sad, but now I know what’s wrong with me, I’m going to do what needs to be done to let people into my life. I know that eventually goodness will come out of this. I know that the sadness will eventually pass and I will feel some of the joy that Lindesfarne must feel when she thinks of her friends and family.

Thanks Bill. Thanks for contributing towards this revelation in my life. I will continue to read every day. Please pray for me that I will be able to take down my walls and let those who are closest to me into my heart. If you don’t reply, that’s okay; you’re probably a busy man.

God Bless.

A huge fan,

Brett Taylor

Public Address have put together a handy little tax break calculator! You enter your salary, and punch in the percentages of tax you want to pay, and it tells you how much money per week you’ll be scoring. w00t! NZD$202 extra a week

However, it goes forward to explain how much money it’ll need to recoup from giving the tax break to the nation. For me it was NZD$3,935 Millionbut luckily it goes on to offer suggestions of things it could get rid of, you know, to keep the government running smoothly. You know, the controversial things, like hip-hop tours, woman’s affairs, artist’s dole.

For example: Getting rid of the Wananga O Aotearoa? Sure, but what about all the students? — they’ll still be interested in tertiary education — onto student loans they go…
Largest 1-year funding the Wananga ever recieved: $239 Million
Cost of a third of ex-Wananga students going elsewhere: $220 Million
Net Money Recovered: NZD$19 Million.
Still to Recover: NZD$3,916 Million.

Ooo big savings. NOT.

Seriously, I think I can safely assume that National is unable to give a significant tax break. As the fellows at Public Address said:

There’s a word for that, and it’s nothing so prim as “baloney.”

For the record, I’m happy with how I’m being taxed. Maybe the rich should be taxed more, and the poor taxed less. What do you think?