.flickr-photo { border: solid 1px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
Taken outside the office this morning, we just couldn’t resist. Find more funny om nom nom nom pictures here 🙂
Recently, a friend of ours, Simon, moved to Over, just North of Cambridge, UK. He was moving to a lovely property, with a nice garden and a pond.
Simon wasn’t so keen on the pond though. It’s not very child friendly, and with two young ones running around the garden, he thought it would be safer to get rid of it.
A few buckets and hours of sweating later, Simon lifted the pond lining to discover a laminated piece of paper sitting at the bottom of the gaping hole that once was the previous owner’s pond.
Go to Flickr for the larger image
Whoever created this, come forward. You’re weird and you’re funny. And you’re creeping the hell out of us! 😉
Thanks to those who linked in to this post:
Update: For those who don’t want to read the image, here’s the full text. I waited for someone else to type it up, since I couldn’t be bothered – I think they call that crowdsourcing? 😉
10th July 2003
To whom it may concern:
If you are reading this then I can only assume that you have removed the pond under which this note was buried.
Of course, as I am not around at the moment, I am not in a position to comment on why you may have chosen to remove the pond and, it is fair to say, that there could be any number of reasons for doing so. I will not try to list those potential reasons right now but there could be quite a lot of them. One of the more bizarre reasons could be that the removal of the pond was the direct result of a bite on the ankle from a Wildebeest, but I shall not speculate.
Anyways, I would like you to be aware that the digging of this pond and it’s subsequent filling with water and stocking with fish and aquatic plants took a considerable amount of personal effort. It’s not just the digging of the hole you know (although clearly that is a major part), but also the consideration that had to be given to the sitting of the pond, its shape and size, its location close to a convenient electrical supply, etc etc etc.
I have to admit that I am a bit miffed about all this. You have just destroyed (yes, I know its a strong word to use but there are principles involved here) something that took me a long time to do. If I came along and destroyed something that it had taken a long time for you to do then I think you would be a bit miffed as well, so just think on that.
Enough of this. Just get on with what it is you think you are doing, you snivelling pond destroyer.
Oh, and by the way, I hope your head falls off.
More funny stuff on That Canadian Girl:
Earlier today, I saw Jim Louderback, CEO at Revision3, tweeting that there had been an outage at Rev3 this weekend and he could now shed light on the issue. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed the downtime. I’ve got Diggnation, The Totally Rad Show and Web Drifter being drip-fed into my iPhone (via iTunes sync) and watch the shows when I’m on the train/tube looking for something to do. I’ve also got a total school-girl crush on Alex Albrecht, which makes the show all too easy to watch, but I digress…
I expected the downtime to be Twitteresque in its incapacity to deal with our adulation and traffic. However, Jim’s story shows the issue they faced this weekend was a whole more serious.
In a nutshell, Revision3 exploits the fantastic peer-to-peer system that is BitTorrent to distribute its shows. Rev3 hosts the tracker, but doesn’t have to take the weight of every single download. It makes technical sense – the Rev3 crowd are technologically up to date and love BitTorrent. It makes business sense – Jim doesn’t have to put quite so much of his revenue towards more servers just to cope with the peaks of traffic, he can count on the distributed network. And it fits right in with the attitude of the Rev3 shows, irreverently addicted and up to date to the latest technology.
Jim writes… “But someone, or some company, apparently took offense to Revision3 using Bittorrent to distribute its own slate of shows. Who could that be?
Along with where it’s bound, every internet packet has a return address. Often, particularly in cases like this, it’s forged – or spoofed. But interestingly enough, whoever was sending these SYN packets wasn’t shy. Far from it: it’s as if they wanted us to know who they were.
A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender.”
MediaDefender was the one hitting Revision3 servers with a Denial of Service attack. (Read Jim’s post for details on who MediaDefender is and what denial of service attacks are. I’ll skim over that bit.)
According to my eye witnesses, MediaDefender received a less-than-warm reception at South by SouthWest when Randy Saaf, CEO at MD, took part in a panel on “How Piracy Will Safe the Music Industry”, where the legitimacy of such a service was questioned by the audience and fellow panelists.
Revision3 is out there, showing off BitTorrent in a good light, using it for legal and completely legitimate purposes, and in comes MediaDefender, like a bull in a china shop, crushing their servers. It’s naive on Revision3’s part to fail to keep a closer eye on their trackers and letting MediaDefender inject their torrents unauthorised for such a long time, but it doesn’t justify MD’s backhanded and disgusting behaviour.
Jim chose his words carefully and expressed the issue very clearly – For this, I’m very grateful, as it exposes MD as a total fraud blindly attacking legal and illegal services.
It’s hard enough being at the cutting edge of any technology without needing twisted organisations like the RIAA, MPAA and Sony hiring online hitmen to destroy perfectly legitimate of technology! I’m not personally a very active BitTorrent user these days, but I’m livid about this.
I hope that Jim, the Revision3 crew and all other technophiles making legitimate use of geekery like BitTorrent see this as a rallying call and an opportunity to educate people. There’s too much good technology out there to let old technophobes in their ivory towers dictate where we can go with it.
Woke up this morning to discover I’ve been described as a SOB by a fellow blogger – a Successful and Outstanding Blogger. Liz Strauss regularly publishes her list, which I really enjoy readging, so it’s an honour to be added to it.
Thanks Liz, and most of all, thanks whoever you are faithful readers since 2004. 🙂
South by SouthWest, Future of Web Apps, Future of Mobile, Fuel Conference, Mobile World Congress… Yes, I love conferences and, most of all, I love meeting new people.
Coming up soon is Being-Digital, a conference organised by the Mashup* events crowd, and I’m going along with Bob Last, from Taptu, who’s going to be speaking alongside with some other great speakers and entrepreneurs.
Being cheeky as I am, I asked the organisers whether I could extend the invitation to attend the conference to the Taptu blog readers. I now hold one precious ticket, worth £325, and I can’t wait to give it out!
So take part in the competition to win the ticket by creating a video, showing off some pics or leaving a blog comment telling us about the most unputdownable gadget ever.
I’ve got a goooooooolden ticket, come and get it! And see you at Being-Digital on the 10th of June, right?
Hilarious dance moves for this Summer’s Britvic Drench campaign, produced by Clemmow Hornby Inge.
Summer has officially landed in the UK. Not a single cloud in the sky and scents of burnt barbecued meats wafting around. Oh and plenty of people also burnt to a crisp, based on my supermarket observations this morning.
Every BBQ must be accompanied by appropriate drinks. To me, that means a great big pitcher of cold, juicy sangria. After last weekend’s humongous BBQ/Garden warming party where pitchers of it were drunk faster than I could make it, I thought I should share my (not-so) secret recipe.
Ingredients:
For this recipe, don’t worry about using your best bottle of vintage red. A reasonable supermarket’s own brand red wine will do the job just fine. We tend to use Shiraz, since it’s less heavy than, say, a Merlot.
When getting lemons and limes, leave them out of the fridge the day you make sangria and roll them around under your palm before cutting the fruit. You’ll get much more juice out of them that way.
If you’re expecting to be on a marathon drinking session starting with a lunchtime BBQ, you might want to lighten up the recipe with more juices to avoid feeling woozy too early in the day. 😉
Alternative recipes:
White sangria:
Substitute red wine for white wine, use apricot brandy instead of cherry brandy for a lighter, tannin-free sangria.
Cava sangria:
Substitute red wine for a bottle of Cava or sparkling wine for a celebratory, bubbly sangria.
Bellini sangria:
Using red, white or sparkling wine, replace brandy with Archers peach schnapps and put in pieces of soft, juicy peaches instead of lemons and limes. This makes a less acidic, sweeter alternative to the classic sangria recipe.
Looking for more great summer cocktails? Check out Cocktail Happy for loads of great, easy drinks recipes!
A nice little ego boost, I’ve just discovered that my blog has been recognised by Wikio as influential enough to come up as #94 most influential tech blog in the UK scene.
While I’m not sure my blog really fits within the technology category at all times, I suppose it’s had a geeky slant in recent years, so I should come to terms with it, eat my own dog food and take pride into the ranking they’ve given me!
Last week, I suggested on The Blog Medic that finding out what were the top keywords leading readers to your blog could give some very interesting results. Some of us probably look at our stats daily (ahem, hourly?) but I’d be curious to see what your top 10 is, if you’re willing to share it!
Here’s my top 10 keywords list
Now I can’t believe I come up as the 4th result for “Canadian” in Google – when searching from a UK IP address, granted – but still!
So, go on, little Friday afternoon meme. What are your top 10 search terms?
that canadian girl 