The Finest Blog Post Ever. In The World.

This post is the finest, most innovative and most artistic blog post you will ever see. I have filled it with marvelous intricacies and words I have personally laid out in a manner you will never again be able to find.

Future generations will come upon these words and will be flabbergasted at the fabulous ideas found within. You will find yourself quoting from it and wowing your friends and family at parties and other gatherings. I fully expect politicians to reference it in Parliament and for religions to find new life in the thoughts contained within.

The British Library and The Library of Congress will rush to save it and will insist that it be transmitted to alien worlds to show them what we of Earth can create. Future prophets will descend from mountains on high with these words chiseled into stone tablets and will proclaim them to the masses.

And you, the internet, can read them here first. Good for you.

In other news, as a result of SOPA as my personal protest I did not blog yesterday. It also appears that I have protested New Year, Boxing Day, Christmas Day and Christmas Eve. I also angrily protested the whole month of November and December by not blogging. October needed action too. I am such an angry and cross person.

A Society With Arms

Image by ToastyKen via Flickr

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life”
– Robert A Heinlein

On the way to work the other morning, the first half of that quote popped into my head and I had thoughts on it’s use and further thoughts on why it it doesn’t fit. And, because I’m nice, I decided to share them with you.

So, the quote is used by The Polite Society, an organisation that aims to teach people to use firearms in real life situations.  The firearms are, in all cases, concealed carry. The idea behind both the quote and the Society is that if everyone was both armed and prepared to fight to the death in various situations, that the world would be a better place. A high ideal and, at first blush, seemingly realistic. However, this assumes that firstly absolutely everyone is armed and willing to fight to the death and secondly that in this very aggressive atmosphere that everyone would react appropriately and not start shooting at the slightest provocation.

Edict Number 465

From this day on, you shall know me as El Presidente.

Almost makes you think “hmm, topical”, doesn’t it?

Hunting for Answers

Image via Wikipedia

Among the most elusive of all interview subjects, big game hunters must rank in the top 5.  Once, this was a popular past time for the rich, with the ever thinning population of most animals it has now become something of a rarity.  Many former hunters have become wardens, to ensure that enough of the pairs breed sufficiently to not die out.  Who knows, maybe future generations again will be able to hunt these creatures again for sport.

Through painstaking research and meetings in darkened rooms, in lonely huts and, once, in a 1970’s roller disco themed restaurant I had managed to make contact with one of the few remaining big game hunters.  Hunting is now limited to preserves that have a quota: these quotas are carefully balanced to provide funds for the preserve, a regular and controlled thinning of the herds and, of course, sport for the hunter.  Less scrupulous people, however, will take their sport where they can find it.

And On The Third Day

Image via Wikipedia

It wasn’t until the third day of the attack that we realised we were even under attack. For the first two days we all saw the Perseid meteor shower through our telescopes and marveled at the beauty of the light show. And then they landed. They were huge, tentacled creatures with mandibles: razor sharp and fearsome. We fled our homes and our roots, becoming nomads in our bid to survive. Revelations did not prepare us for this.

Various Twitter Clients

Image via CrunchBase

I have a Twitter address.  But I really disliked having to either open a new tab to view comments and replies or having to keep returning to the site to see what’s going on.  And I won’t be going into the various merits or demerits of Twitter as a site or function.  There are plenty of sites that are happy to do that for me.  So, being the kind of guy I am, I went hunting for a Twitter client so I didn’t have to use the browser.

There are a number of clients out there, so there’s no shortage whatsoever.  Unfortunately, most are written for Mac or for Windows and I run Linux.  So using my brain I went hunting on the web for a client that I could run.  I was running Spaz, but it became unhappy when I upgraded my distro and started running KDE4 – it just sits in the system tray and won’t actually do anything useful.  More on that later.

So, after the jump, I’ll run down the ones I tested and the one I’m on now.  Incidentally, some of my results are skewed by the fact that I believe KDE to be messing me around – some apps run once and then never again.  I am well aware that this is not the fault of the app itself, so I will not refer to the running (or otherwise) nature of the app.  Also, big thanks to the nice people at Adobe.  Many of the apps tested run on Adobe AIR (get it here).  If you remember Klik, Adobe Air is kinda like that but easier to use.  The BBC iPlayer Desktop app runs through AIR which allows it to be cross-platform.  Jump coming up now…