My Linux Background

Yes, I use linux and I could have a rant right now about how bad windows is or unity/gnome 3 (who can tell the difference really?) but instead I'm just gonna post up my desktop background. Enough said.

[click for full size] 

My Linux Background

Yes, I use linux and I could have a rant right now about how bad windows is or unity/gnome 3 (who can tell the difference really?) but instead I'm just gonna post up my desktop background. Enough said.

[click for full size] 

Trolling Reaches Newspapers

The daily trollegraph: are even newspapers now trolling? 

(ignore the picture) First I would like to make it clear that I am not angry or in particular disagreement with the article I'm about to post so I just thought this was note worthy. Secondly I don't usually like posting links to other article in my articles and expecting people to read them but I figured that I probably can't steal a whole telegraph article without someone complaining. So here's the link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/8789733/Who-wants-country-bumpkins-for-children.html

Sure you just read that article. Don't worry if you didn't it's fairly long and the writing style is rather obnoxious (still like to point out that I don't dislike this article 'cause trolling in a national news paper is kinda funny) but it's not exactly a fun read. Basically the article "argues" the case that 'raising your offspring in a rural idyll (that's paradise for all you non English majors) will put them at a disadvantage to their city counterparts' basically it's best to raise your kids in the city. If this article were and argument that would probably be a bad topic 'cause really few people care enough to move house for a potential advantage for there child (I sometimes even skip breakfast 'cause I can't be bothered to move (even when I have pain' au chocolats ) . But this (meaning that) article is not an argument.

Initially I thought this article was a rant because it starts of by giving scientific research (poorly done I must say) against his claim (and with a rather poor and sarcastic comeback he used against a friend ) However as the article continued (and improved on the sarcasm soooo much) it became obvious that his arguments were weak, poorly thought out and designed to insult people......trolling???

< description of trolling>

So what is trolling? Well, it's not an argument, it's not criticism and it's not intentionally insulting/libelous statements (that's flaming). Wikipedia defines trolling as: 

"In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. The noun troll may refer to the provocative message itself, as in: "That was an excellent troll you posted"".

And the correct definition is: "Trolling is trying to get a rise out of someone. Forcing them to respond to you, either through wise-crackery, posting incorrect information, asking blatantly stupid questions, or other foolishness." - Thanks urban dictionary. 

Essentially the best definition is the actual definition for trolling in the English dictionary (the fishing term). Troll definition "a fishing technique of slowly dragging a lure or baited hook from a moving boat". The term was  used in 1972 about trolling for planes and since the late 1980's people have been trolling for people on the internet using emotional bait.

But how can you check if the person is a troll? Well they might have an offensive or stupid user name like 'burnhomosexualls192', 'jesusucksbudda69', '14m4tr0113r' or 'belieberIsGreat. However you can simply check whether they've ever used 4chan

</description of trolling>

Anyway, after reading this article I looked at the author..... who edited country life...... and has lots of friends in the country....... and actually really likes the country. So why would he write something like this? Was he angry that he had brought his kids up in the city and now wished that he had brought them up in the country? Or maybe he was deliberately trying to provoke a reaction from both people in the country and people in the city (who he actually manages to insult as well). 

I think it's important to note that trolling has become so big (and so offensive) that in Britain people have now even been jailed for trolling. But when did this happen? Surely not in the same month that this article was published? 

Was that article meant to be a troll? Who can say. All I know was that it lead to some of the poshest troll food I have ever read in the comments bellow.

Ok guy's I figured I would be best to end articles with a joke (especially if there long and a bit depressing) so here goes (and don't complain it's bad at least you get a joke, I thought it was quite clever, And don't complain you've hears it before 'cause I really don't have time to make up jokes just for your pleasure):

A very shy guy goes into a bar and sees a beautiful woman sitting at 

the bar. After an hour of gathering up his courage he finally goes 

over to her and asks, tentatively, "Um, would you mind if I chatted 

with you for a while?"

To which she responds by yelling, at the top of her lungs, "No, I 

won't sleep with you tonight!"

Everyone in the bar is now staring at them. Naturally, the guy is 

hopelessly and completely embarrassed and he slinks back to his table. 

After a few minutes, the woman walks over to him and apologizes. She

smiles at him and whisphers to him, "I'm sorry if I embarrassed you. You see, I'm 

a graduate student in psychology and I'm studying how people respond 

to embarrassing situations."

To which he responds, at the top of his lungs, "Two hundred dollars?!!"

"You must be joking"     

  

Think that the article was trolling? Why not write a comment (you know you want to try trolling this page) . Maybe your a troll from 4chan who got lost? Then you could try writing a provoking comment too.

  　             

This blog is now obsoleat!

We moved, or rather I moved (I'm all on my own (and your at your computer, when you could be running a marathon, why aren't you running a marathon?) ) but it's not the end of the world, I just went over to wordpress to try and be more professional. You know wordpress, that slow loading, hard to customise, fairly rigid, rather annoying, slightly confusing, quite glitchy blogging site. Or at least that's my experience with it, so why am I moving? Answer: no idea, deal with it. The new blogs address is http://faxtsune.wordpress.com/       

Signs on toilet doors

Those of you who read my last post might be worried that I'm getting to serious or I'm putting to much writing in my posts. To counter that I've decided my next post should have very little writing and lots of pictures. For those of you waiting for the next faxusub, it is in the making but is no where near finished. Now ahead to the article...  

Recently I'v become concerned about the trend of putting signs on bathroom doors. Now I don't mean signs that say 'bathroom' that's understandable (however you may want to consider learning where your bathroom is for future reference), I mean signs like 'bio-hazard'. Now I really don't want to know if you have radio-active poo or some highly contagious disease passable sharing a toilet seat (or more likely a warped sense of humour (which frankly is more contagious and more dangerous than the afore mentioned conditions)) and to be honest I don't really care. The problem as I see it is if some people with no sense of humour start pinning warning signs to toilet doors willy-nilly we may run into a problem. To demonstrate my point I have selected several signs you would probably rather not see on the door to a toilet your just about to use:

(just like turkish loo's)

(I would hope not)

(how did they know?)

(no s**t)

(mainly for the imagery)

(where am I going to fish now?)

(always more relaxing)

(I hate it when that happens)

(really!!?)

('cause on a winters day sometimes you just need a hot drink)

(I can see a potential problem)

(only on a really bad day)

(I do not encourage the sniffing toilets to get high) 

                           (I wonder why they didn't say wet floor? is that water?)    

(if there going to surf in there they might as well sail)

(a sign I really do not want to see)

(At least now it's not a problem if you get stuck)

(now that's just dangerous, they'll get hit by the sailors)

Remember is you see any bad signs to put on toilet doors why not post a link to them in the comments? And now you understand the reasoning, please stop people putting signs on toilet doors. Thank you for your time 

  

                             

10 completely useless words in German you will never need to know!

Recently I've been getting annoyed at books or websites that claim to teach you useful phrases in another language. Firstly I've found that they don't give adequate explanations of the grammar used or give you a context in which to use the phrase or even give you a clear phonetic way of saying the phrase, so far from walking into the pub and ordering a beer you end up walking into a crematorium loudly announcing that your a gender confused octopus (much to the bemusement of all people drinking). The second problem I have with these so called handy phrase dictionaries is that a soon as you find a useful word, you forget it!!!! The phrase 'can I have a beer' just disappears from you mind as you stammer the only phrase you can remember at the time 'I-i-iii-'m a gender confused octopus'.

However I have a solution to this problem , In this post you will learn 10 utterly useless words (that I may have read in german harry potter) And with any luck you'll remember these for the rest of you life. So lets start:

1.PandaSklave = panda slave (You know all those traditional german panda slaves you need to hire while in germany)

2.Stein der Weisen = Philosopher's Stone (when haven't you needed this in conversation)

3.Feuerkelch =  Goblet of Fire (supposing your in germany and suddenly need to enter a triwizard tournament)

4.Ligusterweg = privet drive (what if you need to find the dursely's house and only have a german map of surrey on you)

5. merkwürdige = strange/odd (probably used for describing ones self)

6.bettelarm  = destitute (who hasn't been)

7.Besenstiel = broomstick (if an Icelandic volcano goes off stopping all the planes how are you going to get home?)

8. Halbblutprinz = half blood prince (ok, i'm stuck there)

9. heiligtümer = [sanctuaries? it translates from hallows so you get the meaning]

10.Berggeist  = mountain spirit (if you see a mountain spirit in germany how are you going to tell people about the important discovery

That's the 10, but as you may of guessed there's a bit more to this post. .PandaSklave breakes down into Panda and Sklave that's two new words learned! Stein means stone and Weisen means Magi (it can also mean 'to point' but I think that usage is uncommon). Feuer means fire and kelch means cup. The 'weg' at the end of Ligusterweg is like a prefix/suffix  meaning 'drive' or 'path' or 'away' like with weglaufen (to run away) or weggehen (to go away).  Merkwürdige comes from Merk comes from the verb merken which means to remember and würdige means worthy. Bettelarm literately means 'begging poor' I think bettelei means begging (the noun begging the verb is betteln) and arm means 'poor' hence Fettarm means low in fat. Besenstiel comes from besen meaning broom and stiel meaning stalk or handle. Halb means half, blut means blood and prinz means (you've guessed it) prince. Halbblut can even mean half-breed. The heil in  heiligtümer can mean saftey and salvation. And finally Berggeist splits into berg meaning mountain and geist means ghost or spirit.

Well there seems to be allot of salvageable material even in words you'll never use and these word can be combined more (you know you want a half breed fire panda). Also if any german speakers here, who happen to know what gender confused octopus is in german please leave a message in the comments, I'm sure it will be an indispensable phrase.     

      

The wonders of digital editing.

Since in my world we seem to be having a photography field day (ok, a post on photography.... ok a post on me getting a camera) I decided to do a quick demonstration of what can be achieved with a few minuets of spare time and some digital editing software. Start off with a simple image.

Then make the focal point glow and distort the edges of it: 

Then either sort out the rest of the colour or blur it:

Finally go crazy with some special effect: (oops alignment error)

Hopefully no one will notice the errors if the image looks cool because personally I can't be bothered to correct them.

Well today was fun two posts nearly no writing, I might have to write some long articles in the future but I wouldn't count on it, the world is interested in big pretty pictures. (and not having to write much is so convenient).

New camera!

Recently I decided to invest in a new camera (vga wasn't doing it for me any more). I had a budget of £50 and after a long decision process I decided to pick the fujifilm finepix z70 as it was small and apparently does most the work for you. But it would be up against me and I do for photography what windows does for computing [mental note: never insult windows online because the users are always irritated when online because of their slow computers]. This camera also opens up interesting new opportunities for video blogging in hd (so my adoring fans can finally see my face (but first I need to get rid of that creepy guy who keeps sending me messages, you know who you are mr creepy guy)). I decided (given my track record on reviewing things) that if I wrote a long review giving my honest opinion about the camera down to every last detail you wouldn't care (and be honest with yourself I was right). So instead I decided to set the camera on full automatic mode and take some amateur photographs. Then you can judge how good you think the camera is yourself (because if there's one thing I've learnt about cameras it's "specifications bare nearly no correlation to the picture you get in the end). Here are my raw photos: (click on them to view in full)

       
Hope you enjoyed the pics.

 P.S the creepy guy sending me messages is me...... sometimes I get lonely

Pokemon faxusub

Now I'm not some Pokemon fanboy but I recently decided to watch some old pokemon episodes (ahh nostalgic memories) in Japanese to see how much I could understand. As I watched the episode I added in the subtitles in english. Unfortunately I got bored and started making up stuff to amuse myself. If you want to see how I got on check here: http://vimeo.com/20338735
but I have to say my subbing was less than accurate 

Unsolved Problems

Often now I feel like there's nothing left to discover in the world and all our problems are being solved by scientists. Actually there's lots unsolved problems still out there and if you've spent a few lifetimes studying the subject, or have a sudden stroke of inspiration or choke on some milk and (against all probability) cough up the answer you could end up with allot of money. Here's a list of unsolved problems from different subjects with unsolved problems so you can choose what your interested in: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems)
but I thought today I would talk about the millennium prize problems.

Why do you want to know about the millennium  prize problems? Well, if you solve any of the 7 6 problems then you earn yourself 1 million dollars! And that's right, there not imposable to solve because one of them has already been solved!! The millennium prize problems were started in 2000 (obviously) because they were  considered the most important maths problems at the time. Since then only one of them has been solved and that was by a crazy Russian man who had to solve it in order to solve some other equation he was working on, he then refused the prize money.

If you still want to give solving these puzzles a go then you can check them out on your good old reliable friend      Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems But be warned just the problems are difficult to understand without a few hours study so if you try good luck, you'll need it.