Want to be on the tv and aren’t hot enough to be popular on youtube? Maybe Big Brother is the answer - get on down to the RDS RIGHT NOW - they started at midday. Anyone got any photos/news of the mad biscuits down there? Let us know.

All shiny dandy new RTE.IE: Big Brother Auditions come to Dublin.

And other random cat internet shit. Not particularly new, no.

Talking about Vista and more. Bill Gates on The Daily Show @ DevilDucky.

RTE.ie has had a full redesign. About time they got rid of the clunky piece of shit, but I need to click around a bit before I decide what I think about the new one. What do you think?

Every year I try to anaesthetize myself from the cloying sentimentality of Valentine’s Day with this little drawing, which can be printed out and used to cover offensive Valentine’s Day cards. I have also come up some alternative names for Valentine’s Day but Hallmark and the like have been reluctant to take them up, I don’t know why.

· Plastic Shite Day
· Emotional Blackmail Day
· Sap-Fest
· Breeder Bonanza
· Fucker Festival
· Restaurant Exclusion day
· Let’s Just Be Friends Day
· Rejection Day
· Err, Emm I sent that Card as a Joke Day.
· Getting hit repeatedly with a Plank Day
· Crying alone in your own filth Day

The most important drum-break thus far.

This six-second sample from 1969 alone is responsible for the entire musical genre - ‘jungle’, and arguably stakes a place as about as important to hip-hop as James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ break.

Visually stark (boring), this informative video traces the use of the break and its incredible importance in terms of recent musical history (from NWA through jungle, to Squarepusher and investigating copyright implications - even sighting a company providing commercially available sample CDs aimed at advertisement industry, and hence, claiming the sample as its own property) and implications of its recontextualisation in cultural and commercial terms.

Six-seconds of one b-side, responsible for an entire cultural movement, The Amen Break:

The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has shut down after an electrical failure, Nasa has said.

Astronomers are calling the malfunction of the Advanced Camera for Surveys a “great loss” as it has taken the clearest pictures yet of the Universe.

US space agency engineers said only one-third of the camera’s functions were likely to be restored.

Bummer, it took some great photo’s. hurry up and spend a few billion on fixing it NASA Full Story the beeb.

If all the hype, marketing or just the very existance of Valentines Day makes you feel ill, or if you feel enough dislike for someone, take a look at Dead Roses.

Yes, you guessed it, they will send out a box or bouquet of dead roses to whoever you wish. Lovely.

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

Pretty animations & fun random quotes from accross the interblag. Animations ran quite slow on my machine…

wefeelfine.org.

Via.

Edit: In making this post, I feel like a missed an opportunity to contribute, so there you go, wefeelfine.org.

Dublin City looks likely to be blanketed with free wireless internet access in the tradition of cities like San Francisco if a proposed plan by Dublin City Council gets the go-ahead.

According to reports this morning, Dublin City Council has put out a tender for consultants to offer advice regarding technological, regulatory and financial issues if such a service was deployed.

It is estimated that building a citywide network of Wi-Fi hotspots would cost the city of Dublin between €12m and €20m.

Story.

How to sign up to the google tv beta.

It worked for me. And an update for all you foolish naysayers:

More at the infinite solutions youtube page.

The mother of all tangerine dodging simulations; Tangerine Panic. The tangerine entry at wikipedia.

Tangerine.ie is the first result on google for tangerine. They are a video post-production company based in Dublin.

This now concludes this mornings tangerine coverage.

real commercial from 80s that sells synthetic (fake) cocaine

The ad is fake.

Remember the Late Late Show nutter, Paul Stokes? A judge today found him unfit to stand trial because, basically, he’s nuts. Stokes apparently attempted some kind of hunger strike at the central mental hospital in Dundrum, and claims he was force-fed (by injection).

1997 live perofrmance in Tokyo:

squarepusher.net. Thanks Krynn.

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve? A psychologist says he has discovered the answer.

BBC article click.

It’s a video of someone getting hurt: But we know he’s ok, and it’s a story we followed closely on TCAL, so it’s only fair to give it a proper conclusion. If the embed dies, just do a search for Richard Hammond crash on video.google.com or youtube.

Yes it is. Web site for European Data Protection Day.

A 2003 Eurobarometer survey on the protection of privacy in the European Union showed that 70% of European citizens feel they know little about what is done in their country to protect their personal data.

However, data protection issues are central in citizens’ lives: at work, in their relations with public authorities, in the health field, when they travel or surf the internet. The right to data protection is also the prerequisite for the exercise of other fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech or conscience.

Therefore, in 2007, for the first time, the Council of Europe will be celebrating a Data Protection Day on 28 January. This will be the occasion for European citizens to become more aware of personal data protection and of what their rights and responsibilities are in that regard.

Loads of interesting stuff at that site. To coincide with the day, Digital Rights Ireland have a piece up; 5 ways to protect your privacy.

Games lasting 4 seconds. 4 Second Frenzy.

You may need to consult the tutorial.

Twentieth Century Fox has subpoenaed YouTube to discover who uploaded four episodes of the popular TV show 24 before they aired on television. Four episodes which served as the season premiere of the show ended up on YouTube, uploaded by a user only known as “ECOtotal,” according to the subpoena from Jane Sunderland, vice president of content protection for Twentieth Century Fox. The subpoena was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Jan. 18 via Fox’s parent company, News Corporation.

The episodes finally aired on live TV January 14 and 15, 2007.

The 24 Season 6 pre-air containing four episodes was uploaded to newsgroups on January 7, 2007 — a full day before ECOtotal uploaded it to YouTube. The first BitTorrent tracker spotted Season 6 on January 8, 2007.

So the guy who downloaded the episodes off a tracker and uploaded to youtube is going to get nailed, rather than the originators of the pirate.
Full story.