Thailand last year

I took this panorama last year thinking that one day I would find the software that could stitch it together. Turns out that Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 has something called PhotoMerge. Its pretty cool.

Cool Posters on the way to work this morning

Google

The be all and end all of internet searchery...

Its not you know. Have you noticed how so much of google is advertising? At the same time have you got this feeling that Google are slowly insidiously taking over the world? That's because they are. So they've got Google Earth – which is great – and Google Video/Youtube, and Gmail which isn't as good as Yahoo! Mail, but they're no better, they've got Flickr. They've got Blogger and Sketchup too. That Google desktop manager. I installed it on my work pc but I wouldn't put it on my home one. Its a security risk. It indexes your files to make it easier for you to find stuff, so far so what. But where does it put the index of your files? On a Google server that's where. I know its only an index but still, I wouldn't knowingly give my bank statements index to the world's biggest search engine to keep safe.

There are search engines called meta-crawlers. I don't what that means, I imagine that sand people live in them, or worse. Meta-Crawlers are dead clever. Instead of just looking on one search engine when you type something in, they look on all of them at once. There's metacrawler.com This searches Google, Yahoo!, MSNSearch and Ask. The problem is that it tends to throw up the top 10 most popular choices from each site at the same time, which means there are lots of identical results.

But there's a very old free program that I hadn't used since 2001 called Copernic Agent. Here it is. This searches 10 of the biggest search engines, except Google, then filters everything nicely for you.

As I do lots of research as part of work, I'm finding loads of stuff that just isn't on Google.

Very handy.

9/11 End of the Conspiracy

My work has been a little dull of late which means I’ve been spending more and more time perusing the internet. Of course being in a work environment means that I don’t have free reign, and so I have to stick to sites I regard as work safe – the Guardian and Wiki and so on. I also have to steer clear of video and pictures. Today there was an article regarding the every growing 9/11 Truth Movement, the BBC documentary demolishing it last Sunday night, and an internet film called Loose Change which has been viewed 4.7 million times on Google Video/Youtube.

Personally I think that the whole 9/11 conspiracy things is a load of bollocks. I accept that there are lots of weird coincidences and some proof which seems pretty convenient and that the US response at the time was frighteningly cack-handed. If you don’t know them, the main conspiracies are that:

1) The twin towers were brought down by a controlled explosion

2) WTC 7 (a 40 storey building that collapsed later in the day) was brought down by a controlled explosion

3) The Pentagon was not hit by a hijacked plane but by something else – a cruise missile.

4) United 93 was shot down.

5) 4000 Jews were told to not to go to work that day

6) and so on

I had a good look into this, and luckily being the cynic that I am I managed to extricate myself from the quagmire of supposition, misquotes and selective evidence before it completely drowned me. And why? Anyone with a brain knows that using the internet to self-diagnose a personal illness is madness. Similarly, the internet is the biggest game of Chinese Whispers ever. Yes there are reputable sites and reputable news sources, but in the same breath there are all the rantings of the insane and righteous and believers ad infinitum. To think that by using the internet of all things to glean any information for anything so un-cut and dried as 9/11… that’s how easy it is – I almost went on a rant there out of the blue on the random rantiness of the internet.

My point – it almost got lost there – my point is this:

1) Governments are completely inept at just about everything they do. We have the Civil Service and they are fucking useless. So any suggestion that Bush and Cheney and Co could organise something like that is madness.

2) There have been no whistle-blowers from a cast of thousands

Enough of my ranting, here’s the evidence:

Conspirators:

http://www.911truth.org/

http://www.loosechange911.com/

People with too much time on their hands

Against

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

Everybody else. Not the nutjobs.

A 9/11 Conspiracy Post from The Grauniad today

... The conspiracists seem to have an alarming amount of faith in their government. Considering their record at governing the US and Iraq to all intents its been one cock-up after another. And yet these inbreds apparently organised 9/11 and kept it secret all this time. Governments in general are absolutely hopeless at just about everything they do.

As for 9/11: So What? So George Bush organised 9/11(do you realise how stupid that sounds)? Or was it the Military-industrial complex? Did it have something to do with JFK's murder, the Mafia and Roswell? Maybe Anna-Nicole Smith found out the truth and was murdered!

But come on, we all know that the BBC documentary was paid for by Halliburton and Mi5 wrote the script. It too was a conspiracy, a conspiracy to cover-up the other conspiracy to expose the cover-up of the first conspiracy, or was there a conspiracy before that?

Finally, were the Embassy Bombings and the USS Cole blown up as part of a conspiracy by the neo-cons to get Clinton out after Newt Gingrich failed? And were the Madrid and London bombings instigated by the CIA to prove that Al-Qaeda really do exist? Or they were just copycat killings right?

Theological Action Man

http://www.jesuschristsuperstore.net/

My favourite

Get your kids Godly here:

http://www.jesuschristsuperstore.net/

Church of Freak-Out

I was sent a particularly amusing link today:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/customer-reviews/0840700555/ref=cm_cr

which goes quite nicely with this tale of rags to riches:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kerry-Katona-Young-Survival-Celebrity/dp/0091913896/sr=1-1/qid=1170864808/ref=sr_1_1/203-0631913-0794330?ie=UTF8&s=books

but can never be topped by this masterpiece:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Very-Best-David-Hasselhoff/dp/B00005Q8UG/ref=pd_rhf_p_4/203-0631913-0794330

and it got me thinking about religion. Kerry Katona knows all about that. She's the new domestic Messiah when it comes to Iceland. Hasselhoff is a God and the Bible is a poor man's Jeffrey Archer book.

No, the real joy is to be found here:

http://www.scientology.org/

Its not that its teeth-grindingly skin crawlingly weird, and that its so obviously a fully freaked out church of the rich and cultish. Its when I see things like this that I start to get worried. I aim one day to reach Level "40.0 Serenity of Beingness". Once I have attained this state, Tom Cruise will no longer irritate me.

What I really want to learn is what this is and how does it work?