Hope everything on your holiday is going well so far. for kelly and i it was good, for others, such as dave and geoff, it hasn’t been all that great. holidays are so rough for some, and so great for others. just keep yer chins up, and remember that life is its own reward. the journey is the thing.

i put up a gallery! it is powered by Gallery, a PHP gallery system which is feature packed and easy to use. All of the old thelocust galleries have been moved over. check it out.

a giant squid at the corvette museum, one of my favorite pics. i showed this to mr. coffeemonk, a colleague, to which he replied (verbatim, i might add):

(01:35:08) BenCorvus: so there was a giant squid at the corvette museum >
(01:35:21) BenCorvus: no reason, really

(01:37:46) MrCoffeemonk: well, you know that some corvettes were painted “squid red” right?
(01:37:48) MrCoffeemonk: hehe.
(01:38:06) MrCoffeemonk: and that those particular models were said to lea
ve “squid marks”
(01:38:23) BenCorvus: do you feel “wrong” for that one?

(01:38:28) BenCorvus: because you should.
(01:38:34) MrCoffeemonk: hehe.
(01:38:36) MrCoffeemonk: oh yeah.
(01:39:03) MrCoffeemonk: it’s such a sad thing that a lot of my humor depe
nds on things like that.

So, I was reading through The Onion’s href=”http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3745/bonusfeature1_3745.html”>Best Albums of 2001 today, and I came upon a
mention of the unreleased Wilco album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, which they noted borrowed
from the CONET Project, which was started by uber-indie label href=”http://www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~irdial”>irdial.

So, what is the CONET Project, you ask? It’s an encyclopedic
collection of recordings of shortwave href=”http://home.freeuk.com/spook007/”>number stations. Number stations? Yes, these are uber-secret shortwave
transmitting stations that broadcast people speaking numbers in a pattern that are assumed to be highly-highly encrypted
message (they have NEVER been broken).

Anyway, these are all VERY creepy, as you could imagine people reading off lists of numbers coming crackling through the ether
would probably be! Well, irdial has a very open publishing policy, and i managed to get all of their recordings, all four
discs, in mp3 from a mirror. I also yanked their 80-page booklet that went along
with it, that is VERY informative, and if you want to know more about number stations, I suggest read it.

disc 1
disc 2
disc 3

disc 4

CONET project booklet [pdf]

Just some links today. First up, I’ve been checking out transcode, a Linux video stream processing utility. ‘Whassat?’ you say. Essentially, it takes video streams, including DVDs and can do a number of operations to them. For example, it can take a DVD and compress it onto one CD using DivX, an extremely tasty video codec.
It’s a good piece of software, tho’ novices will have to do some reading as there are a gazillion command line options.

Oh, and I released another development version of MPy3 — go download v2.1-pre2! (It’s got joystick control now!)

Saw The Butterfingers Angel, Mary & Joseph, Herod the Nut, and the Slaughter of Twelve Hit Carols in a Pear Tree last night at the Bunbury Theatre.
It was tre excellent!
The whole cast was really well.. um, cast! Friend of friends Nick (who has no homepage, hence no link), played the Butterfingers Angel, something that he only had a week or two (or less) to get ready for, as the actor who was going to portray him decided to be a slacker. Welp, he missed the ROCKET TO STARDOM! Lemme tell ya.

Nick was excellent, and only backed by an excellent cast. The show was funny, but not bawdy. “Bill Cosby” sorta funny, ya know? Anywho, it runs through the 16th of December, and word is is that Nick is actually getting paid for this one! (w00t!)