">My Big World Of Crap

I’ve just been watching Battlestar Galactica, with all its Cylons, the machines that evolved into human form.  It seems that we are closer to that fictional universe than you might think.  Meet Roxxxy the rootable robot – a sex robot which was introduced at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas this week, a life-size robotic girlfriend complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin.

According to her inventor:

“She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean,”

“She’s a companion. She has a personality. She hears you. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep. We are trying to replicate a personality of a person.”

Roxxxy stands five feet, seven inches tall, weighs 120 pounds, and has C cup breasts.  She has an articulated skeleton that can move like a person but cannot walk or independently move its limbs.  Robotic movement is built into “the three inputs” and a mechanical heart that powers a liquid cooling system. (what exactly are those 3 inputs …. DVD drive, USB port, memory card slot?)  She comes with five personalities. Wild Wendy is outgoing and adventurous, while Frigid Farrah is reserved and shy.  There is a also a young, naive personality along with a Mature Martha and S & M Susan.

So we’ve got it covered, from those whose tastes go from the “barely 16” to MILF’s.  At the end of the day though, its basically an inflatable dolly that can move its arms and legs a bit and talk.   Users are still freaks – although at $US7-9k, fairly wealthy freaks.

Does this appeal to you?

If you’d like to own your own Roxxxy, go to this site.  And women, don’t feel left out – apparently they’re working on a male robot called Rocky.

Myself, I’d prefer a Number Six.

A new iPhone application lets you see restaurants and cafes in New South Wales that have been fined for breaches of food safety standards.

The application, FoodWatch NSW, brings the Food Authority’s name-and-shame list to your fingertips by using the iPhone’s GPS to show you a list of restaurants near your location that have been added to the list. 

The application is free from the Apple iPhone app store.

I can see enhancements that could already be made – for example, just add all McDonalds, KFC, Hungry Jacks, Dominos and the like, to give people a more complete list of bad food to avoid.

You have a baby.  Its crying.  How do you quieten it down?

Shake the crap out of it, right.

Thats what some brainiac thought would make a fun game for people to play on their iphones and ipods.  Called Baby Shaker, people who downloaded and played the game said the player had to shake the phone vigorously to stop the crying sound. The game ends when red crosses appear on the baby’s eyes, signifying that it has died.

After a number of complaints, Apple took the game off its download site.

The game was uploaded to the App Store by a company called Sikalosoft. The company’s website was hosted on the free Google Sites web platform and has since been taken down.

Looks like a barrel of laughs, doesn’t it?  You just have to wonder what sort of sicko even thinks something like this would be fun.

Something that really shits me is people’s employers getting all touchy about what the employees have to say on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  In some cases employees have been sacked, or at least threatened with disciplinary action.

The NSW Department of Corrective Services is threatening to sack prison officers over posts they made to a Facebook group criticising the State Government’s plans to privatise prisons.  A prison officer, who did not wish to be named for fear of retribution, said about seven officers received letters from Deputy Commissioner Gerry Schipp advising them that they were under investigation for contravening department policies and the Public Sector Employment and Management Act.  The officers were accused of breaking Corrective Services policies relating to "public comment", of "bullying and/or harassing" employees and of making "offensive and/or disparaging" comments about senior employees.

Private chatter which was previously limited to settings like the pub is moving online and increasingly being used against employees, because there is a record of what they have been saying, unlike pub or water cooler gossip which stays only in people’s own memories – in the case of pub gossip, maybe impaired memories?

Public Service Association spokesman Stewart Little said he had never heard of anything like this happening anywhere in the public sector. He called it an unnecessary invasion into people’s private lives.

"It just seems extraordinary to me that a department would go to such lengths as to monitor a chat room on the internet,"

"We’re in a modern age now where people will communicate using things like Facebook and their mobile phones … are we going to monitor what’s said in clubs and bars and other social settings?"

There’s also recently been the case of Leslie Nassar, a Telstra employee, disciplined for his twittering activities recently, as Fake Stephen Conroy.

I reckon these employers need to harden the fuck up, not sook about criticism they might get from employees on social networks and just get on with minding their own business.  Unless the employees are divulging commercial secrets, the employer has no business with their out of work time social networking – if they are defaming individuals, then those individuals, not the company, are the right people to take action for the defamation.

I hate spam, its fucking annoying.  But, to give some credit where its due, I did find this one amusing.

The use of the 8 and 0 is particularly creative.

Leading mobile phone manufacturers announced on Tuesday they had agreed to produce a standardised charger for the industry. 

Hoo-bloody-ray …then we won’t have umpteen chargers sitting around the house/office but never being able to find the one that fits your phone.

The standard shape to be adopted by 17 manufacturers including Nokia, Motorola and Samsung is to be mini USB. The target is that the majority of mobile phones shipped by 2012 will support this new interface.

Lets also try for car kits for phones, power packs for laptops, and I’m sure there are lots of other things where standardisation would be most useful.

A former student at a high school in Florida is suing her school over disciplinary action taken against her for “cyberbullying”.  Katherine Evans, who recently graduated from Pembroke Pines Charter High School north of Miami, Florida is suing principal Peter Bayer for suspending her after she posted negative comments about her English teacher.  Ms Evans created the Facebook group "Ms Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever met!" in November 2007.  The three students who joined only did so to praise Ms Phelps and criticise Ms Evans, after which she took down the page.  But the school learnt of it, and suspended her for 3 days for cyberbullying and disruptive behaviour.

To her credit, she is not doing the usual thing and suing for damages, but to have the suspension removed from her academic record.

While I am usually very cynical about frivolous lawsuits, I actually have a lot of sympathy for this one.  Assuming that what she said on Facebook was not abusive or defamatory, she’s entitled to an opinion, and its not the school’s business to censor it.

In other Facebook fun, here’s another example, following in the footsteps of Kyle Doyle, of how not to use it. 

A group of 5 diners ate and drank their way through a nice meal with lots of wine, at Melbourne’s Seagrass restaurant.  After ordering dessert, they slipped out for a “smoke” and didn’t return, leaving an unpaid bill of $520.  However, the restaurant owner remembered that when the group had arrived one of them had asked about one of his waitresses, who wasn’t working that night.  That waitress gave him a name, and then the owner thought of Facebook, and looked it up, finding a nice happy photo of him and his girlfriend, who was also part of the group of five.  His Facebook profile also identified his employer, which happened to be a nearby restaurant. 

The owner of Seagrass confronted the owner of the other restaurant, where the guy and his girlfriend worked, who promised to deal with it.  Within a short time, the guy’s employer, arrived at Seagrass with his bill evading employee, who paid the $520 bill plus a ‘”generous” tip.    Later he called to say that the man and his girlfriend had been dismissed.

Just desserts, I’d say!

Nice try, but fail!

A woman in America discovered a photo of her husband attached to an email sent to another woman on his iphone.

The content of the photo, in the wife’s words:

“It was a close-up shot of him pleasuring himself taken at the exact moment of maximum pleasure … It’s such a good shot that one must wonder if he actually practiced it a few times before getting it right,”

Pure gold!!!

When she confronted her husband, he admitted taking the photo, but denied sending it to anyone.

“He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent.”

Not trusting him on this, correctly it is obvious, she went onto Apple’s discussion board to find out whether this excuse was plausible.  Most responses stated that the bug her husband claimed was not possible, although a couple of posts did support his claims.

In the end, she thanked the board for their help, noting that “let’s just say that my atty is working on the divorce complaint.”.  She did not post her husband’s photo on the web – she should if you ask me, to embarrass the shit out of him.

I just love the description of the photo …. imagine the co-ordination required to take such a picture.  As she says, its got to have taken quite a bit of practice.  In terms of wankery, its right up there with the efforts of the guy in the Northern Territory who filmed himself masturbating while driving along the highway at 150 km/h.

In my letterbox today I found a letter telling me I’d won 785,510 euros in a Spanish lottery.  All I have to do to claim my winnings is send my bank account details and an authorisation for General Security Company SA to act on my behalf in processing the transfer of the winnings to my account.

Woot!!!!  Need to fill in the form tonight and get the money asap.  What can I get myself with 785,510 euros?

So not only are my email and blog spammed – I’m now getting it via snail mail.

Message to spammers – GET FUCKED!!!!!!

I just don’t believe it.  Pornography is not the most popular thing searched for on the internet.

This is according to Google’s new search analysis tool, Insights.  More Australians use the web to find games than adult content.  The top Australian search terms so far this year are: "games", "youtube", "myspace", "ebay", "google", "facebook", "weather", "hotmail", "yahoo" and "real estate".

The tool allows you to narrow down search statistics by country, region, city, etc, by date range and by areas of interest, such as travel or sports.  For example, web searches including the terms "art" and "politics" are popular in the Northern Territory and Tasmania – but only "politics" is of interest in the ACT, where those for "art" trail every other region.  Google searches for "news" are most popular in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, while those for "shoes" usually come from Victoria (Kelley must have been googling plenty).

Some other interesting things to note:

• Queenslanders and New South Welshmen are the pornhounds of Australia - searches for "porn" are most popular in Queensland and New South Wales and least popular in Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
• "news" is a more popular search term than "porn" only in the ACT, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
• Facebook is currently searched-for more often in the ACT and NT, while MySpace dominates everywhere else.
• Australia is leading the world for searches on "purple monkey dishwasher"

Must go and check up on that last one.

Is this the biggest BSOD ever?

It occurred during the Olympics opening ceremony last Friday night. One of the computers used to project images onto the roof of the stadium blue screened, and the moment was captured for all to see.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows XP, blue screen of death, BSOD, Olympics, Beijing

I got a new toy today. One of these.