Naxxfish

The band. I’m talking about the band called Black Kids. I saw them last night at UCCA (University College of Creative Arts at Canterbury), and they are pretty darned good. I’m no music journalist, so I won’t try and write a review of the gig, but I will say this. Dispite the set being a bit rough and ready in places, I enjoyed the music. There was lots of energy, and they had great stage presence. I’d definitely see them again, and I like their EP (available for free from their site, blackkidsmusic.com, as long as you sign your life away up to their mailing list).

I took a short clip from their set:

Also I put some photos on flickr:

The Three Little Pigs are apparently offensive according to the government.  This isn’t the first time this has happened,  despite the fact that

No complaints had been made about the pigs appearing in the Kirklees Primary Music Festival event.

I think that the only solution is the outright public denial that pigs exist.  Instead they should be replaced by “Nondescript Farmyard Animals” or NFA’s, to ensure their presence does not offend people.  Whilst we’re at it, lets clean up a few more nursery rhymes.

Original:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Non-offensive Edition:

Humpty Dumpty, aged 18 or more, sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the territorial leader’s horses and all the territorial leader’s men and women
Couldn’t perform surgery to Humpty to aid his recovery.

Original:

Hickory Dickory Dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down (or “and down he run”, or “down the mouse ran”)
Hickory Dickory Dock

Non offensive:

 Fissery Nissery Knock
The small rodent ran up the clock
The clock chimed a non-specific hour
The mouse ran down
Fissery Nissery Knock

Original:

Five little speckled frogs

Sat on a speckled log

Eating some most delicious grubs.

One jumped into the pool

Where it was nice and cool

Then there were four green speckled frogs

Non offensive:

Five little frogs

Sat on a dead piece of tree

Eating some most delicious frog food.

One jumped into the body of water

Where it was nice and cool

Then there were four frogs.

 

Original

Hot cross buns,

Hot cross buns,

one ha’ penny,

two ha’ penny,

hot cross buns.

If you have no daughters,

give them to your sons,

one ha’ penny,

two ha’ penny,

Hot Cross Buns

Non offensive:

Hot buns,

Hot buns,

one currency unit,

two currency units

hot buns.

Give them to your descendants,

Regardless of their gender, 

one currency unit,

two currency units

Hot Buns

Ever get bored in the supermarket? I have the solution:

Items that cost 42p get you 5 points. Items that cost 43p or 41p get you 1 point. Your mission is to accumulate exactly 42 points.

Ready steady go.

VPN for the Win

Hillariously, if you geolocate my IP from me posting in my uni room, you’ll come to the conclusion I’m in Amsterdam.  Ahh, I love routing

The Queen likes Wii

According to The People, Wii console-owner Prince William is finding it difficult to use the Wii as the Queen is apparently “hooked” on using his machine.

The Queen is already said to be something of a technical whizz, with reports that she owns a BlackBerry, an iPod and a number of mobile phones.

Possibly one of the most hilarious things I’ve heard recently!   I’m glad our queen’s a bit of a geek

Anyone who uses Upcoming.org and would like to integrate it with an application made PHP5, I have a class for you!

Upcoming.org API Wrapper

It’s the product of a couple of days work, thinking that there has to be a better way of using the Upcoming.org API through PHP5. It uses magic methods for the API calls – meaning that implementing a new API method is as simple as inserting a single line into the class. It has caching support.

The only part that’s missing is the whole authentication token/frobbing thing … since I didn’t need to use that for the project I was working on I concentrated on getting the main API calling framework of it working. If anyone fancies hacking it to work in a sensible way, feel free. I’d appreciate if you sent me your work, too

Oh, oh, the headlinese.

Basically, my old host kicked me off for not paying. Which is fair enough I guess. Luckily I backed up this blog beforehand in WordPress XML format – however I lost the theme I’ve been using for donkey’s years. But, meh, I really don’t have the time to write my own theme and this one does all the nice things that modern themes do.

Oh, and if you’re reading this through something that’s not my blog, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. So look at my blog and see.

New toys!!! Notice the flickr badge widget and the last.fm widget. I’ve got last.fm set up to scrobble my new iPod classic as well as my normal music player. And my upcoming.org feed (well, upcoming.yahoo.com but that’s not terribly catchy) so you can stalk me with very high efficiency.

So there. Lets hope that I bother to update stuff more.