Welcome to the World Wide Weird

I knew I’d have to go to the trouble of getting out the spare tyre and replacing the worn one when I could no longer drown out the thub-thub-thub noise it was making by turning up the stereo. I have the stereo up loud enough as it is, so even I had to admit that it was time to say hello once again to Spike the Spare.

Spike hasn’t seen the light of day since he was relegated from the position of driver’s side rear at the last rego inspection. Now he was probably happy at the thought of being promoted to passenger side front and was no doubt looking forward to me completing the job at hand. I’m not exactly certain how long my no longer perfectly round tyre and I have been together, but prudence and an already too high insurance excess meant it was time to get cracking.

When it comes to car tools, I have everything I need. I have a hammer. I knew on this occasion I’d also need a wheel brace and a jack. Now for any uninitiated readers let me first say that there are 2 kinds of wheel braces. There’s the good old Aussie standard, V6, V7, V8 whatever wheel brace, and then there is the other kind for crap foreign imports. I use the other kind. As for the jack there isn’t much to tell you about there. The one that came with the car is good enough for the job as long as you remember which way to turn the handle. “Left to loosen” is the motto, and if you are like me you may want to scratch this onto the jack so you never forget. I did.

First step, loosen the wheel nuts. Houston we have a problem!

Casting my mind back a couple of months I recall that when I last got my replacement tyre I decided to try Bastard Tyre Co. For a reasonable price I got my needed tyre and didn’t think it unusual at the time that ratchet-gun guy (R.G.G.) spent 15 minutes putting the wheel nuts on. Too late I realise he had set the torque setting on his ratchet-gun to extreme. R.G.G. couldn’t have done a better job of tightening the wheel nuts if he’d welded them in place. After 10 minutes of trying to loosen them with only my brute strength (a.k.a. not much) I knew I had my work cut out for me.

I knew I needed some leverage, I needed something to use as a lever. I also knew that a hammer was a kind of a lever, so I used that. Sadly, the only way that was going to be effective was if I could use the hammer on R.G.G. and he wasn’t available.

Now I’m not a car-head but I like the sound of the ratchet-gun, I think it’s really cool. In fact more things should come with that sound effect. Imagine how cool an electric toothbrush would be if it made that sound. I have no problem with tools or even a ratchet-gun. I do however have a problem with R.G.G. and I would like to meet him again to tell him just how happy I am at his work. In fact I may even have a little something for him; like this, and this, and this.

Jumping to the end of my story, and in the blink of a just a few hours (as well as a few skinned knuckles) you’ll all be thrilled to hear that Spike the Spare is now proudly positioned passenger side front. Of course Spike is only a temporary measure, I’m very soon going to need a new spare tyre; the no longer round tyre is bound for the great tyre pile in the sky. This time I’ll avoid Bastard Tyre Co and instead try Thieving Shyster Tyre and Sons. Of course I’ll brag at how easy it was to undo the wheel nuts last time and dare their R.G.G. to do better.

I’ve seen it but I STILL don’t believe it. Here’s the drill, you go on holiday, say for example Waitomo in New Zealand, and you take some photos. Now you could take any run of the mill camera, wait till you get home and send the film off for processing. Old hat!

Or, you can take a digital camera, wait until you get home and simply download the pictures to your computer. Still Old hat!

If only there was a way you could have the photos ready for you as you leave. Well now you can!! By using their PigeonPix service all you need to is attach your camera’s memory stick to the pigeon, it flies (hopefully) straight back to base and, as you are leaving the park, the attendant hands your photos and memory stick to you. (thank you to A.K. for bringing this to my attention).

I know what you are thinking. If the pigeon gets eaten before it gets home your memory stick is going to be a tad difficult to track down. The answer of course is for Sony to develop an arsenic flavoured memory stick (don’t lick it by accident hear!) so if the little birdie does get waylaid somewhere, look for a dead predator in the middle of a stack of pigeon feathers

Surely Micro$oft can use this method to deliver XP updates. A couple of minutes a day removing mini DVDs from a pigeon so that your O/S can stay up-to-date beats mega dial-up downloads.

Yes I know 3 posts are more than enough for one day, but I couldn’t allow this to go without comment.

From the ABC news services at 16:15 today AEST, a story explaining how John Howard doesn’t see the future purchase by Australia of long range cruise missiles will be seen as a threat by our neighbours up north. Though the missiles have a range of 400 kms, as they can be fired from F/A-18s they have an effective range much, much further. Launched from within Australian territorial boundaries these missiles can easily reach Indonesia.

Downer explains “We’re at peace and have a happy relationship with all of our northern neighbours.”

Izzatso? Well just 1 hour and 39 minutes later at 17:54, The Australian newspaper reports that Indonesia are far from unconcerned. The question Indonesia wants answered is “against whom such an offensive capability is [being] directed”.

Good question. Tell us again what a great statesman you are Johnny because I’ve seem to have forgotten.

38 Lobsters in 12 minutes? Gee the places I go I’m lucky to catch the eye of the drink waiter once an hour.

One has to feel sorry for George W Bush. Okay, you’re right, one doesn’t have to feel sorry at all. Instead one must mock and pour scorn on Dubbah at every opportunity so who am I to spoil the party? It’s not bad enough that the Senate Investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib finds “institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels” (are you reading this Mr Rumsfeld?). Not bad enough that his campaign chief was caught in the middle of a very dirty Anti-Kerry group. Not bad enough that Iraq ain’t getting better and oil ain’t getting cheaper (much).

Now, a wonderful read on counterpunch looks at Dubbah’s personal moral fiber and finds it has as much texture as wet crapper paper. Cheer up George, thing’s could be worse, as I’m sure they soon will be.

Locally our own L.O.P. (Little Oz President) Johhny Howard isn’t having things all his way either. In fact he’s more than a little miffed that he continually gets the blame when human waste product and air movement device come together almost daily. I don’t quite understand it myself, but he is the head honcho and the buck does stop with him, yet his strategy of continually blaming others (from his upcoming autobiography “It’s Not My Fault“) is not wowing the media, pollsters, lobby groups or voters .

Of course it would be a nice change just for once to hear him say “Okay, you got me, my shirt was up, my pants were down, and I have no excuse”. Now if L.O.P. was Billy Gates you’d be hearing him tell us that “XP Service Pack 2 is not my fault”

And on that, most IT Professionals (IT amateurs too) are already telling us that Micro$oft better start thinking about patching the patch. The well respected UK IT site ‘The Register’ are calling it a security crater. Micro$oft themselves have already posted a document outlining 200 (you heard me) applications that will clash (not may, and by clash we mean after SP2 the apps will no longer work) with XP SP2. Bad bloody luck if you’re running a business and that business happens to depend (read critical) on one of those 200 applications.

If you’re like me and you’re sick of being continually “reminded” about the SP2 download available, then there is welcome news that you can disable the automatic delivery of SP2 . Last time I looked there wasn’t an option you can check to make Daddy Warbucks give us our money’s worth for Win any version you care to mention.

Lastly, in the why didn’t I think of this before but why the hell bother section, Icerocket.com have announced a search engine available by email. Yep, all you have to do is send a blank e-mail with your search term in the subject line and within seconds you will receive a response with the results you need. Of course if I send an email searching for “how can I make my penis bigger” I’m going to have problems sorting the search responses from my daily spam.

Greetings and hello form all of us (okay me) from the World Wide Weird.

First up let me say that life is one of those things where crap happens. We can’t do aything about crap happening, the crapee or even the crapper. What we can do, and what seperates us from the rest of the animal world is that we can learn from previous crap and keep it from crapping on us again.

So it is with much pleasure and merriment that I foresee much crap just over the horizon for all U.S. citizens (alive and dead) looking forward to casting their votes this November. Quicker than you can say “what again???????” the following article shows that the heapo crapola so popular in Miami circa 2001 may well be back for another scintillating season.

Please try to keep your “I told you so’s” to yourself. This stuff is mighty serious to most Yankee Dandy Doodles.