I watched the new South Park episode last night. It was hilarious: A Virgin Mary statue was bleeding, off its ass. People deemed it a “miracle”. And then, the new Pope came to have a closer look and upon closer observation he said that it is NOT a miracle, because the blood was coming from the statue’s vagina and not off its ass. He said: “a chick bleeding out her vagina is no miracle. Chicks bleed out their vaginas all the time” (no matter if that was actually a statue :)).

South Park rules!

I am a sucker for conspiracy theories, but people who believe in the Bermuda Triangle and the multiverse stuff, are just naive. The Flight 19 dissapeared because their flight leader got lost and they decided to land on sea after using all their fuel. There is no mystery there.

My JBQ posted his “Four…”, and here are mine:

FOUR JOBS YOU’VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE

Cook assistant

Software tester

Web Developer

Usability, UI designer

FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER

Lord of the Rings

Equilibrium

Star Wars

X-Men

FOUR CITIES YOU’VE LIVED IN

Louros/Preveza, Greece

Braunschweig, Germany

Guildford, UK

San Francisco, CA (suburbs)

FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH

Star Trek: The Next Generation

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

Firefly

The 10th Kingdom

FOUR PLACES YOU’VE BEEN ON VACATION

Nancy, France

Salt Lake City, UT

Lake Tahoe/Reno, NV

Las Vegas, NV

FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY

OSNews

C|Net News.com

Slashdot

CNN.com

FOUR OF YOUR FAVOURITE FOODS

Greek Easter roasted lamb

Chocolate

Indian Lamb biryani

Chinese Char Siu

FOUR PLACES YOU’D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW

Home in Greece

Home in Greece

Home in Greece

Home in Greece

I am preparing a few more original articles for TuxTops.com and OSNews.com. I will be reviewing the Neuros Recorder II in conjuction to the SONY PSP from the multimedia/browsing point of view and least from the gaming side (for OSNews) and an mp3 player (for TuxTops).

Tomorrow I am having a meeting in Cupertino with a Nokia manager and some of their core Symbian OS engineers. That’s going to be interesting, can’t wait.

“A suit was filed Tuesday in the United States on behalf of a German man who alleges he was kidnapped and tortured by U.S. agents for five months in 2004. The suit charges the man was mistakenly suspected of being an associate of the 9/11 hijackers. […] According to The Associated Press, Masri seeks damages of up to $75,000.”

WHAT? Only 75,000 US dollars for falsely imprisoned and beaten by CIA for 5 whole months? I would ask for 75 million! And a public apology!

This is really sad. The official star trek site, startrek.com, is to shut down at the end of the month. That site has been the heart and soul of the whole franchise since 1996, a lot of info/media are to be found there that are hosted no where else. This is truly the end of the era for Star Trek. If that site goes down, don’t expect a new incarnation of Star Trek. People will forget it, eventually. Sad.

And so I posted the Bittorrent app on GnomeFiles today as it is using GTK+ for its GUI (and so it has a place on GnomeFiles.org’s application listing). I personally do not use bittorrent, but because I am a perfect-maniac I must always provide a good looking icon for each application entry and a screenshot. And so I deliberately installed bittorrent on my linux laptop just to get hold of its icon and grab a screenshot (and I did the same for one more GTK app I also posted today).

To create a good screenshot, I had to find a torrent so I can show Bittorrent in action. Oh, the luck! Bittorrent’s Linux GUI comes with a “search” field. And so I searched for the FIRST thing that popped up in my mind: “Madonna”.

And Bittorrent.com’s *OWN* search engine returned the… “MrAndMrsSmith” movie as a result instead as a divx AVI file. And so I clicked it, just so I can get the damn screenshot. And I took the screenshot (with the avi being still at 0% of download rate). After I had the screenshot I wanted, I stopped the Bittorrent client and I uninstalled it from my Linux laptop.

I uploaded the shot on the gnomefiles server and linked it from the Bittorrent entry there. And then the Linux fanatics would come over to the forum and shout at me “oh my God, how could you post such a shot? This download is illegal, it will make Bittorrent look bad! Blah-blah, take it down, blah-blah”.

Well, morons, if you think that bittorrent is mostly used to download distros you are in *TOTAL DENIAL*. The most popular usage of any of these P2P apps *is* piracy, you like it or not. And if a screenshot serves as a testament and marketing of what an application is good or popular at, that was the perfect screenshot right there.

Anyways, I did take down that screenshot, but I didn’t want to power up my Linux laptop again as it takes over a minute to boot (suspend-to-RAM doesn’t work on my laptop with Linux). So I installed Bittorrent on my Windows machine and got a new shot from there, downloading Fedora this time (which again, of course, I stopped it immediately after I got the shot I needed, I don’t use either Fedora or Bittorrent under normal circumstances).

But it’s just fun to see the Linux fanatics shit their pants over Bittorrent. They were so pissed off that the original screenshot would not represent the legal usage of Bittorrent that they went balistic on my forum. It’s PATHETIC seeing them hiding behind their own index finger. That .avi torrent was a result of *bittorent.com’s own search engine* and they have the face to tell *me* that my original screenshot was not representing correctly the app?

Why do they even feel that I would be “sympathetic” to their cause to show Bittorrent under a “better light” to RIAA’s eyes? I don’t understand why they would expect this of me. I am not on their side. In fact, I am not on the side of any P2P application (or RIAA’s for that matter), I don’t give a monkey about “the war” between RIAA and P2P (yawn).

I just downloaded and tried Skype 2.0.0-beta with video-camera support. This new Skype version is really-really nice. The UI makes much more sense now and the video-cam and audio support is more than excellent. Good job Skype!

The only negative thing is that now that it’s becoming truly dominant (4+ million users connected at any given time), it’s the only protocol not based on SIP. All other major VoIP players are using SIP or modified SIP implementations, making Skype difficult to play well with the others in the future or to create an alternative UI for it. It’s totally proprietary, moreso than the rest.

Well, here’s the thing. Apple’s Apperture Pro application *sucks*. It’s a real fact. Professional photographers hate it, it just doesn’t do the things it’s supposed to do correctly, or at all, for the 500 bucks it costs.

Now, why do I have to hear the old song of “osnews is anti-apple” and that “eugenia is not professional” by stating the obvious?

Why do these Apple aplogists can’t –for once– understand that this particular application is just BAD? Why do they have to drug me or osnews down and say that there is “an agenda”? (What fucking agenda you morons? It’s a simple thing: Apperture SUCKS). Put that in your skull. Until curves are present and RAW pictures are handled correctly, Apperture is as much as a Pro raster application as much as this is a full cellphone.

And if that was not enough, we have to have Kelly McNeil from osViews.com to reply anonymously (we have his IPs on file) and tell us that he is a “professional photographer and a recent Mac switcher”. How pathetic. Now the Apple fanatics have to lie so they can make a point!

People who play slots are down-right idiots. They should be striped from their right to vote on national elections.

I mean, think about it. There are games where you can use your skills a bit (e.g. poker) rather than base your earnings only on pure luck. When playing slots you give NO input to the machine. You don’t “play”. You simply hit a damn button over and over again and let the machine decide for you. Slots is the WORST form of gambling. It is a game for people who can’t think on their own.

Idiotic to the max.