Nevertheless I managed to bag a cheap copy of “All You Need is Kill” which is a pretty slim book at only 230 pages so it made a nice change from some of the epics I’ve been wading through lately. I’m not sure if short novels are more common in Japanese fiction, I’d quite like them to make a come back here but it seems that the average consumer judges a book firstly by how thick it is rather than what it contains and so the doorstop epic reigns supreme especially in the SF&F field.

The book tells the story of Keiji Kiriya a new recruit in the war against the alien ‘Mimic’ invasion of earth with all the battle-suited action you might expect from the land of Anime. Keiji however is stuck in a loop that sees him fighting the same battle over and over, dying differently each time depending on the actions he takes through that loop.  Much of the book focuses on Keiji and Rita Vrataski, also called the Full Metal Bitch, a kick-ass female warrior in a bright red battle suit or ‘jacket’ who might just be able to help Keiji escape from the loop.

It’s a bit hard to describe much more of the plot without major spoilers but I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought the ideas were tied up pretty neatly at the end. You can’t help but notice the gaming influence, and the whole thing reminds me of some weird retelling of Groundhog Day set in the Halo universe.

Plenty of action, decent ending and a quick read…I want more.

Should be great if slightly damp.

Probably the cutest animated robot I’ve seen since Wall-e.

It’s back on, probably disappear any minute. Oh and we’ll probably flood soon and get snowed in.

As if the snow wasn’t enough, the heavens decided to open and drop a giant sized bucket load of rain on us, which has come close to flooding the place. Never seen the river quite so high and I didn’t get a very good nights sleep worrying about our lack of sandbags!

Oh and to top it all off we had some seriously long power cuts, so had some fun with candles and a very cold house. Gas is great for heating if you have electricity to push the hot water around!

Although I spent an enjoyable hour reading H.P. Lovecraft by candlelight with a storm whipping up outside. The combination of candlelight and rain on the windows is a pretty good backdrop for some tales of ichor and old ones.

1. You need to be using firefox + windows.
2. Install the greasemonkey addon.
3. Install the Divx Web Player.
4. Install my Easyview script.
5. Browse Easynews and watch videos.

IMPORTANT NOTES

• Only use the secure web interface…https://secure.members.easynews.com. I haven’t bothered with the normal one as this does have to pass a username and password in the URL and I think this gets stripped out for https and passed as encrypted. The NORMAL HTTP INTERFACE WILL NOT WORK.
• The script will ask you for your username and password the first time. This is stored in firefox for use by this script. If you get it wrong you can access it through the “about:config” page by filtering for “grease”. This obviously isn’t secure unlses it is your own PC so that’s up to you.
• Use the full screen button! I haven’t checked size of video so aspect ratios could be wierd until you go full screen.

Why do I keep hearing variations on that vacuous statement, even from people I thought were rather more rational.

Political correctness where it even exists is basically a way of stopping bigoted twunts (and those old people who don’t mean to…bless ‘em) from calling people names. It hasn’t “gone mad” and in fact if you scratch the surface of most of the stories you’ll probably just find a hole in your copy of the Daily Mail which seems to spend most of it’s time thinking up new things to be afraid of.

“Baa Baa Black Sheep has been changed to Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep”
Really? Did they update the big book of official nursery rhymes? I sang it recently with my daughter and nothing appeared to happen. We sang it at her playgroup and no PC Brigade crack squad stormed the building.
Go on, you still believe the story about the EU and bananas as well don’t you? It’s great when some story makes you feel ok about your xenophobia isn’t it? Go on shout something about foreigners you know you want to!

“They’ve banned christmas havn’t they”
Well “they” are doing a shit job at banning it whoever “they” are. You can’t get away from the bloody thing at the tail end of the year. Honestly people can stand in the highstreet with shops full of sparkly crap, lights on every lamp post and hateful christmas muzak being pumped out in every supermarket claiming that offended foreigners have somehow affected their mundane excuse for a christmas. I recommend beating them with their own gargantuan turkey whilst screaming “Is this christmassy enough for you!”

“This is a christian country”
This one usually has nothing to do with political correctness and is generally followed by some inarticulate rant about muslims or just vaguely brown looking people. Firstly this is not a christian country it is by and large a secular one which just has an odd cultural love affair with it’s christian past. This is evidenced by the people usually making the above statement who generally don’t look like the sort to be drinking tea with the local vicar. Funny how people suddenly find religion if it means they can shout about foreigners.

Aaargggh it’s annoying, anyway here’s Stewart Lee making more sense than me:

I’m not sure what strange thread I was following which led me to the free ebook “emergency nursing unscrewed” over at impactednurse.com but I’m quite glad I ended up there as it’s an interesting read.

The site is published by Ian Miller “a registered nurse with nearly 23 years experience working in the Emergency Department of a major teaching hospital in Canberra Australia.” and appears to be a very well written and possibly useful (if you are a nurse) resource.
However it is the book that led me there and whilst I am not a nurse and have no intentions of becoming one, on browsing I found myself reading huge chunks of it. It really is an interesting, often very funny, and quite grossly graphic insight into the world of the emergency department nurse.

If you’ve ever wondered…

• How to insert a catheter

Local takes around 3 minutes to work properly, although that is a long time to be discussing the latest sports results with a bloke whilst holding his penis in your hand.

• How to remove a penis caught in a zip

Call the police, call the rescue helicopter, call the priest.

• how to handle the smell of poo

You all know the scenario; you roll your semi-conscious patient over only to discover a steaming lumpy broth of diarrhoea that, thanks to the physics of capillary action, has oozed and squittered its way into every fold and fossa betwixt and between

…and many more delightful subjects, then this is the book for you.

Also available are two other ebooks:
how to be a nurse

Want to know how to survive burnout?
How about…how to survive one shift in the emergency department?
Is your workday getting a little bland and cynical?
Do you feel you need to add a little depth to your nursing practice?
Need to improve your listening skills?

No problem. Join me as we get a little vertical, engage in some reflective introspection, reach out and…… hit the big red button.

And the quite brilliant list of advice…

• Try not to sneeze when wearing a protective face shield.
• Never bend down to pick up your pen when the patient is vomiting into a kidney dish.
• Always give the patient a call-bell, even when they have an itchy buzer finger.
• When returning from a toilet break always always check to make sure you do not have a tail of toilet paper hanging out the back of your pants.
  Wash your hands. Often. And properly.
• Be gentle with your colleagues.
• Always handle a dead body with respect.
• Air goes in and out. Blood goes round and round. All the rest is obfuscation.
• Never underestimate the amount of faeces that can be concealed in a pair of old y-fronts.
• Listen until it hurts.
• Watch for burn-out. Watch for rust-out.
• Best not to fall asleep at the desk and dribble all over your patient notes.
• Remember: Best practice. Remember: Worst case scenario.
• Guard your testicles from static electricity when making a bed on a dry day. (If you don’t have testicles, guard the testicles of those around you.)
• The voice of experience sometimes gets drowned out by the din of expedience.
• There is no such thing as this will only take a moment.
• If you tell your patient “Ill be right back”, make it so.
• Chocolate is brown. Faeces are brown. It’s confusing, I know. But try to pay attention.

the back passage

Compiled into one easy-to-read compendium. True stories from the emergency department gathered into one soggy lump for no other reason than to lift your spirit.

here for your edification is a short list of items I have personally helped retrieve from the collective back passages of a large cross section of society:

• A sundry of vibrators in various colours shapes and novelty themes.
• A large frozen chicken roll.
• A table leg wrapped in newspaper and cling-wrap.
• A pencil.
• A steel tube.
• A perfume bottle.
• And of course the all popular varieties of elongated vegetable.

I’m sure they will be very useful for anyone wishing to follow a nursing career, and for the rest of us they offer a glimpse of life working in a hospital, plus a few laughs and gross outs.

They have all been release under a Creative Commons license so go and read them.

Check out some more of this guys art too.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Temple of Doom

The Last Crusade

Previously it has only been possible to play various radio streams or ’suggestion’ type radio in a similar vein to Pandora, you couldn’t choose a particular track or album and play it. Now this is possible however with a limit of 3 plays per track.

This is a great move for the service which will allow users to try before they buy, or if they want sign up for the full subscription service when it becomes available for unlimited play.

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

I’ve been looking at much simpler, minimalist designs as I’m a little tired of the typical ‘blog’ look that I achieve using most wordpess themes and I don’t have time to create my own theme at the moment.

I’ve settled on using a Tumblelog design for the moment, in particular the very nicely created TumbleJack theme. I like the simplity of being able to post a quote or an image without any title or text but this theme can also be used more tradtitionally with post titles, categories and comments.

So I’m not turning this into a Tumblelog but hopefully some sort of hybrid with an emphasis on the (probably very random) content rather than the design.

Commenting is still possible via each post’s permalink page, accessible through the little icons which appear when hovering over each post

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

-Anthony Burgess

]]> http://www.weateallthepies.com/2007/03/27/cheeky-monkey-2/feed/ 0 http://www.weateallthepies.com/2006/12/11/heavy-metal-and-soft-play/ http://www.weateallthepies.com/2006/12/11/heavy-metal-and-soft-play/#comments Mon, 11 Dec 2006 22:49:31 +0000 Jay http://www.weateallthepies.com/2006/12/11/heavy-metal-and-soft-play/ Sophie has a new found interest in music and dancing and as a dad I now see it as my duty to inflict my music tastes upon her. This is only fair as Claire has been trying the same for some time and is convinced she will be a pop queen and not like ‘that wierd stuff you listen to’.

Well she seems quite fond of some of my favourite Jazz albums but it was quite funny when I turned on Kerrang TV and she absolutely loved some of the tunes. Partiuclar faves for dancing seem to be Metallica (Enter Sandman) and System of a Down (Chop Suey) so maybe heavy metal is genetic as a friend recently suggested…down the pub…after a few pints.

Faced the wind and rain today and went out on the bike which Sophie always enjoys, she has stopped fussing over the helmet too which makes life easier. We cycled to a fairly local new soft play centre to meet up with a few friends. It was tiring with the ride, carrying and playing but was worth it and damn good exercise for me so I should go more often.

She is finally asleep after a bit of a wide awake evening so I’m off to shoot things with big guns.

Jay

Actually it went off pretty well, it was just a shame that I only managed to speak to everyone in very small bursts whilst running around trying to make sure everyone was happy and most importantly making sure Sophie was having fun.

After only a short time she had mastered the art of unwrapping and was even sometimes interested in the contents.

The best thing is we have lots of new toys to play with :O)

Jay

Was easy enough to sort out but feel a bit stupid as I’ve been updating a copy of the site that was scheduled for demolition….and it’s gone…

Anyway back and hopefully I can carry on dumping my brain onto the internet.

Cheers

Jay