Xzibit plays the race card in Australia

I wouldn't have even known US rapper Xzibit was touring Australia if he hadn't caused a little stir by labelling the staff of one of the highest rated shows on Australian TV as racist. He was slated to appear on a show called "Rove Live", a "tonight" style show named after the host Rove McManus.

The main reason I wouldn't have know he was touring is the guy has zero profile in Australia. Only the most mainstream of US hiphop/rap acts get commercial coverage here. I know the guy hosts "Pimp my Ride" on MTV but I have no idea how his music is regarded or how much he actually sells in the US. He was pretty much guaranteed a hardcore of fans making his tour successful but the mainstream media was ignoring him as far as I could see (i.e. I saw no mention of him at all until his fracas with Rove).

Apparently the pre-arranged deal was that Xzibit would have a rap-off with king of bland, middle-of-the-road jazz guy Michael Buble. Wacky incongruous juxtaposition humour at work here. As an aside, I fucking hate Michael Buble. With Xzibit I'm neutral but that fucked-up, blanded out Sinatra wannabe Buble can burn in hell.

When it came time to do the performance it looks like Xzibit's ego came into play. A rapper with an oversized ego - who would've guessed. Why can't rappers be humble like, I dunno, bloggers. It seems Xzibit didn't want to perform the double act (he said the "shit was wack" on his MySpace blog) and wanted a solo spot. The Rove Live staff said this wasn't going to happen as (a) the music spot for the show was already lined up and (b) he wasn't interesting enough to the show's demographic.

It seems as far as the show was concerned, they were doing Xzibit a favour by giving him any time at all, not the other way around. Xzibit says a staffer phrased this along the lines of “you know we came a long way just having you on the program”. He took this as racist, as in "you're lucky we let black people on this white person's show," and stormed out. I think he was off the mark taking this as racism, the truth as far as Xzibit is concerned is far worse.

So far as Australia goes, Xzibit is pretty much a nobody. That's gotta hurt.

This practice of using the race card has, sadly, become a bit of a joke. There is no doubt that different people face prejudice every day in their lives but reflexively calling "racist" whenever a white person disagrees with a black person (for instance) helps nobody. Some people might conflate this with the situations faced by Michael "Kramer" Richards and Don Imus but they're light years apart.

I personally think both Richards and Imus are in a bit of a grey area (are they actively racist or just stupid?) but the Xzibit/Rove issue is only remotely related. Thinking about it from Xzibit's point of view (and pretending for a moment that he isn't an egotistical goon) I can see where being told "You're lucky we're even allowing you on" could feel like a racist slur. He's probably copped racism his whole life and faced being excluded repeatedly because of the colour of his skin. But viewing every impediment placed in your path as an example of racism doesn't help anyone.

It's like the old "you people" joke. I've seen it used in comedies dozens of times - a white person can't use the phrase "you people" around black people or it seems like they're making a racist reference to all black people rather than simply referring to the people in front of them whose race may or may not be an issue. Actually, the t-shirt I wear in the accompanying video might get me in trouble in ways I hadn't considered up until now.

When every impediment placed in a minority's path is labelled racist (or sexist or religiously intolerant) that undermines real instances of racism etc. People who aren't racist get sick of having to walk on eggshells and people who are racist blithely say "oh, they're just playing the race card again."

One thing worth pointing out that white folks often gloss over is that the playing field isn't level. The question is often put forward "Why are there exclusively black beauty pageants when you'd get crucified if your tried to run an exclusively white beauty pageant?" This question presupposes that the "open" beauty pageants don't implicitly (at least) value standards of beauty that work against non-white contestants. The historical records of winners at least make this a dubious proposition.

Second, there can be a significant positive boost to a community's self-esteem when they are able to celebrate the strengths of their own community by judging the best of their own rather than coming second to someone else. I think voluntary ghetto-isation is a losing proposition long term but segregated competitions can be a confidence builder and a stepping stone to truly open competition.

All of which is spoiled when a self-important rapper's ego can't deal with the fact that he really isn't very popular with a given demographic. This puts me in mind of a reality TV show I'd like to see: "World's Biggest Ego". It could feature ego-driven rappers, spoilt teen pop queens, aging rock pigs, elite sport stars and movie stars all competing to show they had the most distorted view of their own self-worth. It would be like a truly gruesome car wreck - so horrific, you couldn't look away.

A psychological experiment

I'm going to teach you something about the power of suggestion now. This is basically how hypnotism works, if you're open to suggestion a hypnotist can have a considerable influence on your behaviour. However, one doesn't have to be a professional hypnotist to see this in action.

Have you ever noticed how if someone yawns in front of you it often makes you want to yawn as well? This is a mild form of hypnotism even if it isn't intentional. Now, I've brought that example up intentionally and even thinking about yawning may be a powerful enough suggestion to make you yawn yourself.

But that isn't evil enough for me. I'm going to unleash one of the most powerful forms of suggestion. Very few people can resist this one: have you ever noticed if someone mentions headlice you have an almost uncontrollable urge to start scratching your head? When you have kids you're often on the lookout for headlice - if one kid at school gets them then all the kids end up with them.

No matter how many people tell you that headlice aren't a sign of being dirty you can't help thinking they're gross. Oh, and as soon as someone mentions headlice, most people can't help scratching their heads. How are you going with that? Trying to avoid that maddening itch on your scalp because you know there's nothing there?

Of course, the reason I bring this up is someone just mentioned headlice to me and now I can't stop scratching my fucking head. And damned if I'm suffering alone.

Cheeeez!

Life is full of little pleasures and small victories. I was very excited recently when I found a vey special product. I hadn't been able to find this since the last time I was in the states (which was far too long ago) so when I found it in a local supermarket, I took full advantage.

Cheeeeez!

http://www.livevideo.com/video/AngryAussie/5B245A33B2CD40848BC2F22C4CC6043D/cheeeeez-.aspx

Road Conversation #1 - MC NoseJizz

The conversation is started by Adrian twanging on his nose. I'll have to leave "twanging" to your imagination as there are no sound effects to go with this post. Essentially he was flicking his nose rhythmically while making a vaguely musical sound in accompaniment.

"That's really special. Just the thing to make the drive go faster."

"Why thank you, it's nice to be appreciated."

"I can't belive you aren't more widely appreciated for that. What the hell are you actually doing?"

"Well, I'm trying to clear some man juice that's lodged up there after a particularly spectacular blow."

"Sorry I missed that. The musical aspect is a nice addition"

"That part I have actually been appreciated for, it's been a major part of my career."

"Oh wow, were you MC NoseJizz back in the 90s?"

"That was one of my stage names, yes."

"I'm a big fan, I bought all of your CDs. And your signature range of tissues."

"It isn't about me, it's about you. It's always been about the fans."

"And the jizz."

"The fans and the jizz. Preferably the jizz on the fans. Nothing ever mad me as happy as when I was unloading a good spray onto some fans."

"It was always hard to get front row tickets for your shows."

"I prided myself on always going well beyond the front row. I couldn't sleep at night for worrying that there were fans who weren't wearing enough of my jizz on their faces."

"Is that why you would get the backing band to help?"

"They helped but it was never enough. That's why I franchised the MC NoseJizz concept, including the female MC NoseJizz."

"Sistah SoulJizz?"

"That was her. I had high hopes for Sistah SoulJizz but her heart was never really in it."

"She didn't care enough about the jizz?"

"She didn't realise how important the jizz was. It was all about the fame to her, I tried to explain to her that the jizz was bigger than any one person but she never really got it."

"Maybe it was because she was always reliant on you for the jizz."

"I think that was it, she never really valued the jizz, she thought she was better than the jizz."

"I'm sure that's why the public turned on her."

"Yep. One night she went on stage with her nose only half full of jizz. That was the beginning of the end."

"If only more people realised that, you'll never get anywhere with your nose only half full of jizz..."

Road trip!

I'm about to head out on a big road trip. About 800-900km with my friend Adrian to attend a retirement party for our favourite lecturer from the old college days. This is likely to be a fairly insane party weekend so you may not hear from me for a while. Then again, I'm taking my laptop and cameras so you may get some extremely crazy updates.

Two men, the open road and a head full of cold pills. Anything could happen...

Road trip!

http://www.livevideo.com/video/AngryAussie/4D114A26563744C184EC0782FDEF32D8/road-trip-.aspx

You're all a bunch of sick little monkeys!

So that's what it feels like to get the top post on reddit and front page of Digg in the same 24 hour period. Now that my genius has been recognised more widely I guess all that's left to be said is "What the hell took you people so long?" Seriously, the encouragement I've received from the responses to the diet pill post has been awesome.

My regular readers will know that I usually respond to all comments but the volume of responses to this post was more than a tad overwhelming (they keep popping up even as I write this). So rather than play favourites I decided not respond directly to any of the comments. I did read all the comments, however, including the comments on reddit and Digg.

I have to say, I'm more than mildly surprised at the lack of negativity in the comments as well. The number of people completely incapable of understanding a joke was reassuringly small. Even on Digg, which has an appalling reputation for stupidity and immaturity the comments were by and large intelligent. Or at least not hideously stupid.

I did notice two common memes running through the comments:

1. These pills would be great for a truly horrible practical joke
2. Surely this oily shit could be harnessed as biofuel

You're all a bunch of sick little monkeys! And I couldn't be more proud at having provided some fuel for thought. On the fuel front, I don't know Al Gore's email address but surely someone can contact him with the biofuel idea.

Actually, now I think about it, the way big Al bulked up recently and now seems to be losing weight he may be ahead of all of us. Expect an announcement from the Gore camp any day now that Al is planning to shit all over us. For our own good. I wish he would make that announcement actually, it isn't like he'd be the first politician to take a shit on us but at least he'd be the first to be honest about it.

Laugh? I nearly shit my pants!

Hi everyone. I normally reply to every comment but this tsunami of comments came in for my "Miracle diet pill" post while I was sleeping. You crazy northern hemisphere folk. Hopefully at least a few of you will stick around and read some of my other material. God knows there's enough of it to get through.

My alternative title for this post was "Pants-shittingly funny video." It was a close call. I went with the title above because I thought it would be better search engine bait. Remember that conversation we were having via comments about search engine terms CinnKitty? Within a week I'll be getting some major action from variations of "shit my pants". Oh yeah, some high class readership on the way to me.

Anyway, this is a video version of my earlier blog post that has proved so popular. I intended to do this video as soon as I wrote the post but its popularity sealed the deal. I often do video versions of my blog posts and in this case I definitely wanted to strike while the iron was hot.

I thought the post in question might be popular - after all, who doesn't laugh at poo jokes? This was actually one of the very few posts I have written where I was laughing as I wrote it. I suspect that was as much from the source material (the diet pill website) as it was from any jokes I was writing. I found it almost impossible to believe they could write such unintentionally funny material.

For a while I suspected that it was maybe only my sick mind that would find it so funny. But the popularity of the post has proved you're all a pack of sick little monkeys. SO maybe you like the moving pictures too:

Miracle diet pill! (with a teenty-tiny side effect)

http://www.livevideo.com/video/AngryAussie/4BD9B8C07E4D4785978039AA1EAAB194/miracle-diet-pill-with-a-te.aspx

Go ahead and subscribe - you know you want to!
http://www.youtube.com/angryaussie
http://www.livevideo.com/AngryAussie

A miracle diet pill with a teeny-tiny side effect

I found this news on Salon.com and felt compelled to throw my 2c in. There's a "new" over-the-counter drug available in the US that's apparently flying off the shelves. It's called alli and I use the term "new" loosely because it's apparently a lower strength version of a prescription-only drug (Xenical) that's been around for a while.

So what does this incredibly popular wonder drug do? Well, not to go all Bill Clinton on you, but it depends on what your definition of "do" is. You see, there's (1)what the drug company markets it as, (2)the medical description of what it does and (3)the biggest effect you're actually going to notice.

The drug company markets it as a weight loss pill. They say it will give "safe, effective weight loss". Because it's FDA approved it must be good. What could possibly go wrong?

A simplified medical description of the drug is that it's a fat blocker. It stops your body from absorbing some of the fat in your diet. It doesn't burn calories. But fat that would have otherwise been absorbed by your body... isn't. Because fat contains calories less calories will go into your body.

But here's the most important thing the drug does: it makes you shit oil. Worse, it makes you shit your pants. With oil. This is not the ravings of some fringe conspiracy group, this is what the company tells you itself on its website. Buy our drug if you want to lose weight. Oh, by the way, you'll end up shitting your pants.

Neat, huh? No wonder it's selling so well. That large sector of the public that enjoy having their pants filled with liquefied shit has been seriously unde-catered to up until now.

The drug company indulges in classic marketing bullshit that really pisses me off but they still fail to obscure the horror of what's going to happen to you if you take their drug. The first bit of marketing bullshit they spin that makes me want to smack them in the fucking head is the old "eat healthier and exercise more to get the full benefits".

Hello?!?!?! If you eat less fat and exercise you don't need their fucking pills. I'm sick of these sleazy companies pretending that they're promoting health. They're promoting bad habits and laziness. The subtext to the whole thing is "this drug lets you lose weight with NO exercise and NO change to your eating patterns". People who can eat healthier and exercise more aren't interested in this shit. But the company doesn't think it'll get away with an advertising slogan along the lines of "Fuck diet and exercise! Take these pills and shit your weight away!"

The second thing they do that pisses me off is deliberately using language designed to obscure the full horror of the effects of their drug. They can't even come clean and call them "side-effects", instead going with "treatment effects". Hell, maybe they're right, these aren't side effects. Side effects are incidental to the main effects. Shitting your pants is the main effect of this drug. It literally is the treatment effect.

Try as they might, their weasel words can't hide how horrible their drug actually is. Following are actual quotes from their website followed by Mr Angry's no bullshit translation.

Website Bullshit (WSBS): You may get:

• gas with oily spotting,
• loose stools
• more frequent stools that may be hard to control

No BS: The following things will happen to you:

• You will spray oil when you fart
• You will have diarrhoea
• You will be shitting constantly and you will lose control of your bowels to the point where you shit your pants

WSBS: The excess fat that passes out of your body is not harmful. In fact, you may recognize it as something that looks like the oil on top of a pizza.

No BS: Oh dear god. Pizza is one of my favourite foods and these evil fucks have done their best to turn me off it for life. It will be very hard to look at a pizza again without wondering if someone on this drug has taken a shit on it.

WSBS: Eating a low-fat diet lowers the chance of these bowel changes. (my emphasis)

No BS: Even if you do cut back on fat, you're still going to shit oil.

WSBS: ...pick a day to begin taking alli, such as a weekend day so you can stay close to home if you experience a treatment effect.

No BS: Do not go out in public after taking this drug. You are going to shit yourself. Stay close to a toilet.

WSBS: If you're getting ready to travel or attend a social event, hold off on starting with alli until the event is over.

No BS: Don't say you weren't warned. You are seriously going to shit yourself.

WSBS: You may not usually get gassy, but it's a possibility when you take alli. The bathroom is really the best place to go when that happens.

No BS: You're old life is over. Forget what you think you know about your body. You are going to fart uncontrollably. And there will be follow-through. This is not going to be something you want to share.

And my absolute favourite (which is to say, the part of the website that horrifies me most):

"You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work."

Oh. My. Fucking. God. They are so sure you are going to shit your pants they are saying you should accept the inevitable. There is no way to avoid this. So wear dark pants to hide the liquid shit stains. And bring a change of clothes. Because your first set are going to get impregnated with liquid shit.

To me, this is the ultimate evidence that western society is utterly fucked. You can tell people that taking a pill will make them shit their pants uncontrollably. And your pill will be an utterly out of control success.

There was also a link to a video where you could "watch alli in action". I assume this is a video showing people shitting their pants. I couldn't bring myself to look.

Competition time! Win fabulous cash and prizes!

OK, so I'm not actually giving away cash. And whether or not the prize is fabulous depends on how easily impressed you are. Inspired by Sandra, I've decided to have a contest for people to submit potential t-shirt slogans for Mr Angry.

I've been meaning for months to do new t-shirts but I keep failing to get around to it. When I say "I" am going to do it, that means getting my girlfriend to do the lettering. Because it would look like shit if I did it. Sandra actually suggested one months ago that I had been intending to make: "Do I look like I give a fuck?" Another I had been intending to make was "Shut the fuck up."

There are also a few more ideas I've already had shown in the attached videos. But here are the contest rules (subject to completely arbitrary changes at my whim) for people who don't want to watch the video:

1. Write a slogan that you think would make a good Mr Angry t-shirt
2. The winner will be chosen by me, guided mainly by popular acclaim but also maybe the one I like best won't be the one with most votes
3. Don't enter if you're going to get miffed if I don't pick your entry. That would make me sad.
4. The prize will be your very own one-of-a-kind hand lettered Mr Angry t-shirt with your winning logo/slogan. So make it something you'd want to wear or at least occasionally show people.
5. That's basically it unless I make up any more arbitrary rules.
6. The judge's decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into. Don't even think of trying to fuck with me over this.

Oh yeah, one more point, when making t-shirts for myself I basically chose the cheapest t-shirts I could find. I promise to actually use a good quality shirt for the prize. You can even nominate colour and style (within reason). So get to it!

http://www.livevideo.com/flvplayer/embed/ECE41720D0FF48CC888C4918BB7F9150ition" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" quality="high" WIDTH="445" HEIGHT="369" wmode="transparent">
Competition'>http://www.livevideo.com/video/embedLink/ECE41720D0FF48CC888C4918BB7F9150/244836/competition-time-fabulous-ca.aspx">Competition time! Fabulous cash and prizes to be won!

http://www.livevideo.com/video/AngryAussie/ECE41720D0FF48CC888C4918BB7F9150/competition-time-fabulous-ca.aspx

Is God an IT Consultant?

Having stirred a few creationists on YouTube lately, I got to thinking about the modern creationist's favourite weasel words, "intelligent design". Intelligent? You think? What part of disease, famine, war is intelligent?

All of which reminds me painfully of many IT consultants I've had to work with over the years. These people are employed because of their supposed expertise. They're paid a fortune. And they manage to fuck things up over and over.

OK, a brief disclaimer here. Technically, I'm an IT consultant. So if you're one and you were thinking of taking offence, don't bother. You're obviously one of the good ones. Like me.

The bad ones certainly act as though they think they're god. Just try questioning one of them. Righteous hellfire and brimstone is sure to follow. I'm starting to suspect this is where intelligent design proponents are coming from. Actually, they could probably get me on their side if they started pushing a "god as IT consultant" theory.

It would certainly explain a lot. If you ever got to question god on why so many aspects of creation are so utterly fucked up, the response would be along the lines of: "well, it was designed according to the spec. Technically, there's nothing wrong with my design, it's your implementation that's the problem."

This is pretty close to the explanation I was always given at catholic school. Everything good = god. Everything bad = satan and the wickedness of man. Which always struck me as a bit of a cop out. Fluffy bunnies, cute babies and beautiful sunsets are because god loves you. Horrible things like disease, genocide and really bad TV shows happen because you're wicked and you deserve it.

When it comes down to it, I have no problem with the concept of divinity or some sort of higher plane of existence in the afterlife. It's just that I think using this as an excuse to interfere with my life here and now is fucked up.

The idea that any sort of supreme being could possibly give a shit about whether or not they have my adoration and supplication makes no sense to me. The idea of inflicting eternal damnation on a lesser being is the product of vain human thinking, not the wisdom of a deity.

Judge me on whether or not my actions help people here and now, that I can deal with. Judge scientific thinking on its merits, don't ban it because it offends the magic guy in the sky nobody can see.

And if god really is an IT consultant, we should have read the fine print in the contract. Because there are a hell of a lot of bugs that still need fixing. Does anyone know the number of the help desk? I tried calling the pope but he called me a smartarse and hung up.

A quarter of a million doses of angry

I passed the 250,000 view mark this week. More than a quarter of a million times, my angry little voice has spurted out across cyberspace. Actually, I guess if you count my YouTube views it's more than a million times. That's good for a laugh.

Actually, on more than one occasion it has been a little freaky to consider. The number of times my blog has been found by people searching on the term "I want to kill myself" is more than a little disconcerting.

Still, I started this blog for catharsis as much as anything else and the nerve I seem to have touched with a large number of readers with my angry outbursts is gratifying. I knew I was angry but it's fun to see how many other people are angry too.

I'm planning to branch out from this blog. This blog will, of course, continue but I'm exploring a few other avenues. I'm going to republish some of my more serious work-oriented pieces on a site called thisisby.us that (theoretically) pays contributors who generate ad clicks. Also, I'm trying my luck on LiveVideo - YouTube is pissing me off so much I'm getting desperate for an alternative.

I think embedded LiveVideo looks better as well, see if you agree:

http://www.livevideo.com

Don't look behind you

You probably shouldn't watch this video if you're superstitious.

This is another product of my Doctor Who geekfest. One of the episodes has this classic horro movie moment when a guy (who is working on a space station that may or may not be in the process of being overtaken by the devil) starts hearing a voice in his head saying "don't look behind you."



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKeYHNTpgTA

This is what I do for fun. You wouldn't want to meet me in a dark alley.

Exterminate!

I've been geeking out with Doctor Who recently. I used to watch the original series all the time growing up. It was my favourite show without a doubt at the time but in retrospect it's incredibly cheesy. It went of the air in the 90s but they resurrected it (fans would say regenerated) a few years ago. The difference between the old and new series is comparable to the difference between the old and new Battlestar Galactica.

The new series is totally different to the original in style. When you watched the old series you got the feeling the BBC had hired a bunch of out of work stage actors on the cheap whereas the actors in the new series definitely know how to act for TV. Also, rather importantly, the budget is obviously massive by comparison and so production standards are commensurately higher.

It was kind of fun when watching the original series to pick out what piece of off-the-shelf crap they were using as a cheap prop/special effect. My favourite was probably when they tried to show a guy was morphing into a space slug by having bubble-wrap wrapped around his hand. It was spray painted green so you knew it was space-slug-morphing bubble wrap.

Anyway, the cable service here ran marathons of the first and second seasons of the new series over the weekend. More than 12 hours each day - geek heaven! Apparently the merchandising for Doctor Who in the UK is a bit over the top, there are Doctor Who products everywhere. Including the mug in this video, sent over from England for my girlfriend's little boy from his grandma.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVm6Jr6aY9Q

The sound samples built into that mug are of the coolest of all Doctor Who Monsters, the Daleks. The second coolest are the Cybermen. Both have been resurrected for the new series and Doctor Who geeks got their ultimate wet dream when the two were brought together at the conclusion of season two. For this Doctor Who geek, the ultimate moment came when the Daleks and Cybermen started trash talking each other.

The Cybermen suggested an alliance with the Daleks (which would have been bad news for our heroes) but the Daleks rejected the Cybermen as inferior. For a couple of emotionless robotic races they got pretty shitty with one another, having an exchange that went something like this:

Cyberman: Why not join forces? Our systems are compatible although your design is inelegant.

Dalek: Daleks have no concept of elegance.

Cyberman: That is obvious.

Dalek: We will exterminate you!

Cyberman: There are millions of us, how many are you?

Dalek: Four.

Cyberman: You will defeat us with only four Daleks?

Dalek: We would defeat you with one Dalek!

Pwned! Take that cyber-bitch!

Make a point, make it quick

This videos was a response to another YouTuber who was sick of over-long, pointless videos. The challenge was to make a video that was some form of social commentary and make it less than 90 seconds long. Here goes:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xi1q0OwXFQ

It's also the first video where you see my cool new backdrop in action.

What a disappointment

Further to my rant yesterday about YouTube's shortcomings, I have noticed there are two types of failings that seem to make people particularly angry.

One is the case that I mentioned yesterday, namely, when someone seems capable of great things but falls painfully short of the standards you expect of them. They may be achieving higher than 99% of the population but because you placed such high expectations on them (rightly or wrongly) you end up really disappointed with their failure to achieve.

A second one I've noticed is when you see yourself in someone else's failings. I know I do this myself and based on my observations, other people do it too. I'm not sure what it is but I definitely have a tendency to get more angry with someone when they're doing something that I know is one of my bad habits. The thought process goes something like this:

"That person really pisses me off...

"I do that as well...

"I hate being reminded of what a fuck-up I am...

"Man, fuck other people! Like I give a shit about what anyone else thinks...

"HEY DICKHEAD, WAKE THE FUCK UP TO YOURSELF"

Or maybe I'm the only one who's this neurotic. Does anyone else react this way?

Fuck YouTube! Seriously.

I have decided YouTube is like an amazingly gifted athlete who is utterly unable to empathise with other humans. This athlete is capable of doing things you didn't think were possible prior to their arrival on the scene. And they don't just do it, they make it look effortless. You feel carried along by them because they're on your team. You're amazed at what you can accomplish with their help.

But every now and then they take a big shit right in your face.

And this isn't a one time event. At regular intervals, they'll totally fuck you over and won't even respond when you ask "Why the fuck did you do that?!?!?!" They might have a good reason for doing it. After all, they operate on a higher plane than you. How are you to know whether or not what they are doing is for the greater good? Of course, they could tell you their reasons. You'd pay attention to them if they told you because you owe them so much.

But they don't say a fucking thing.

You have no way of knowing why they do these shitty things. So you assume it's because they don't fucking care. You're some sort of insignificant bug to them. So you're still grateful for the good that they do but each time you're treated like shit you get a little more resentful. It gets to the point where pretty much every time you mention them it's to say how fucked up they are. And you spend a LOT of time thinking of ways to survive without them.

YouTube's latest fuckups have been the same as their old fuckups. I mean literally the same. These problems have happened multiple times before when they've made "upgrades" and they'll doubtless happen again multiple times in the future. Gruntski pointed out to me the videos I'd embedded in this blog were doing weird things. This was due to "improvements" YouTube made to their embedded video player.

Completely fucking unannounced improvements, mind you. The addition of links to so-called "related videos" was obviously an attempt to get people to spend more time on YouTube and fair enough. But some fucking communication would have been nice. It's the complete lack of communication from YouTube that drives me stark, raving mad.

So along with these upgrades came a slew of site performance problems: uploaded videos were taking ages to be available for viewing (one of mine took more than 24 hours), video statistics (view counts etc.) were utterly fucked and the one that bugged me most of all was the link to new videos from creators you subscribe to that usually appears on the home page was missing altogether (it's back now).

The absurdity of YouTube's continuing public relations hari-kiri is that the whole fucking site is built around the concept of communication by video and they never do this! Why they choose to avoid this stunningly obvious method of communicating with users is completely beyond me. And like I said before, when someone makes absolutely no effort to communicate with you when they're treating you badly, it's only natural to assume that this is because they don't care about you.

I've had numerous invitations to join other video sharing sites like LiveVideo with the invitations always including flattery like "It's really shitty that you've never been featured on YouTube, I bet if you joined site X you'd be featured in no time!" It's tempting and possibly true. There are three main reasons why I haven't dumped YouTube so far:

1. Wordpress doesn't support the embedding of videos from all sites. I know it does support more than YouTube but it doesn't seem to support the ones I'm most likely to defect to (like Revver). Being able to post video to Wordpress is very important to me.

2. I'm incredibly lazy. I used to post to both YouTube and Revver but it didn't seem worth the effort. It would take more time than I'm willing to dedicate to develop a following on another site while maintaining my user base on YouTube. I probably shouldn't be so lazy but I am. Regardless of the disbelief of the haters, I do have a full time day job as well.

3. YouTube still has the biggest audience. By a massive margin. The carrot of that huge potential audience is a powerful thing. At least to shallow attention whores like me.

One more thing YouTube has in common with an elite sociopathic athlete is they don't seem to realise that no matter how total their dominance feels today, it's a fleeting thing. History shows over and over again how businesses that were top of their field end up being skewered by their competition. And the online world moves exponentially faster than the offline world. YouTube could easily forestall their competition for at least a couple of years simply by treating their users better.

It remains to be seen whether or not they will.

My ego is officially out of control

So I found this really cool site called Blockposters where you can upload any image, say how big you want it and they'll create a pdf file that spreads the image across that many A4 pages so you can print it out and put it together like a big mosaic. And it's all free!

So what image would I choose to print out on a massive scale? Hmmmm, I wonder...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f2BFnFKvTo

Something a little different

Here a change of pace for me on the video front - a dramatic piece. The script for this is actually from a one-act play I wrote about 20 years ago while I was at college. Just to show I'm no johnny-come-lately jumping on the environmentalism bandwagon, the theme of this piece was environmental degradation. I got brainwashed and jumped on the bandwagon years ago.

The play was called "This is the Sea". It's set in the future after environmental disaster has poisoned most of the world and reduced the world's population by about 95%. The character doing this monologue is an old man who has landed as a refugee in a country that turns out to be a police state. He's telling a young girl a story about what things were like when he was young.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE7tFGN3nkw

I might do another piece from this script at some point. All part of my quest to avoid boredom by trying something different.

A modest proposal

As I was being subjected to the usual cavalcade of idiots on the drive in to work this morning, I came up with a potential solution. I'm going to be writing up a formal proposal for this idea to submit to the federal government because it will require the creation of a new public holiday. This holiday will be known as "No Road Rules Day".

On No Road Rules Day there will, of course, be no road rules. There will also be no repercussions for any automotive transgressions committed on this day. Speed all your want. Cause all the multi-car pile-ups you like. Ignore traffic lights. There will be no rules.

There will also be no ambulances.

I'm going to present this proposal as a chance for all the anti-social hoons to get their aggressive tendencies out of their systems but it will actually be an opportunity to see Darwinism in action. Sensible people will spend the day safely indoors. Fuckwits will be out in huge numbers being even bigger fuckwits than normal. Many of them will inevitably die, resulting in a noticeable improvement in the gene pool.

At the end of the day, the wreckage and corpses will be scooped up by specially designed dump trucks. Normal people will wake to a new day with clean streets. And on the way to work, everyone will be thinking the same thing:

"Wow, traffic's way better than usual today."

Larry King is a crybaby

There's a bit of footage doing the rounds at the moment where Larry King, not realising he was being picked up by a live microphone, complains that Anderson Cooper is getting more time than him. You may have seen that video but you have to watch this version to find out what King was really saying.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIYLCV8s_to

What can I say? I'm very, very childish. It was the way he rubbed his eyes and the really ugly expression he has towards the end that gave me the idea.

Parking lot of the living brain dead

I had the strangest experience on the weekend while parking my car. The supermarket where I was parking makes you get a ticket when you park there. The first 90 minutes are free but after that you have to pay. I knew I was going to be longer than 90 minutes so I proceeded to put some money in the machine.

My money wouldn't go all the way in - it seemed obvious that someone had jammed a coin further in. My money was still theoretically recoverable as I could reach the edge of the coin but not easily so. Being a cheap bastard, I put some effort into getting the coin out.

I'd been trying for about thirty seconds when a guy comes up and informs me that the machine's broken. He has a repair dude type of uniform on so I assume he's been called to fix it. He tells me there's another ticket machine around the corner, I say fine but I want to get my money back first. He gets his screwdriver to work trying to lever out my dollar coin.

While this is happening a couple more people show up wanting a ticket. I turn and tell them the machine is broken and they'll have to use the one around the corner. They don't move. They're still standing behind me waiting. So I repeat:

"This ticket machine is broken. There's another one just over there, you'll have to use that one."

They don't respond at all. They don't go to the other ticket machine. They continue to stand there, slack jawed, with a glazed expression on their faces. I thought about this for a second. This was neither a difficult nor remotely abstract concept I was explaining. My explanation was very clear. Yet they were unable to comprehend. There was only one possible conclusion.

They were brain dead zombies. I was in the parking lot of the living dead.

I was torn. I could always test my zombie thesis by screaming in their faces "The fucking ticket machine is broken, will you fuck off and use the other one? You're creeping me out!" Or I could simply cut to chase and shoot them in the fucking head before the stupid zombie bastards starting trying to eat my fucking brain.

At this point the deadlock was broken when the technician got my dollar back. I had what I wanted - I figured he could take on the zombies without me. He had a pretty formidable looking tool belt.

Creationism is Bollocks!

I was in a bit of a mood to pick a fight via video this past week and when I read about the opening of the Creation "Museum" in Kentucky I decided to state the obvious. Namely that creationism is, well, utter bollocks. I'm not criticising religious belief in and of itself, I've met way too many intelligent religious people and way to many stupid atheists to take the Richard Dawkins path of belittling everyone who disagrees with me.

But creationism isn't about believing in god, creationism is about being fucking insane. By all means take the good bits of the bible (or the torah, or the koran, or the bhaghavad gita if that floats your boat) and use that as a guide for life but taking parables like the creation myth as literal truth? That way lies madness.

Look, by all means, people can have their own belief systems (I personally believe I must never give up eating chocolate because it's the only thing keeping me safe from evil trolls who are allergic to chocolate) but don't force your shit on other people. When these freaks (most notably in the USA) want to shut down science in favour of their delusions, that's when I call bullshit.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqVCcfD5Ry4

I used this rather nifty article from the Scientific American magazine as a reference for my arguments. You might like to use it when you're next confronted by a creationist nutbag.

Hot Nude YouTube video! With Pink Hair!

So here's my first official nude YouTube video. I decided to shoot this without my clothes on so I wouldn't get hair dye on them. I think I actually look sexier with my party gear on (the silky shirt was an op shop special at $8 - bargain!) but you be the judge.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD5ebj9Q54U

I think "copper" is a more accurate description of the colour than pink. I've decided I actually like this, it's supposed to last for a month or so and I might experiment with other colours after that. Maybe instead of a semi-permanent rinse through colour like this I might try some hardcore permanent red or even blue. Then I could spike my hair up for a manga look.

So I showed up to work today with pink hair...

Well, it might be more purple than pink. The bottle it came out of said the colour was orange but the way it has reacted with my hair gives it more of a pink/purple tinge today.

Some background: I decided to put some colour in my hair while getting ready for a party on Saturday night. My girlfriend was using this foamy stuff to put some orange colour into her hair and I wondered out loud what it would look like in my hair. She thought I was joking and that I wouldn't dare actually put any of it in my hair.

To which, of course, my reaction was: "You think?"

A few seconds later I was busy foaming this brown sludgy looking stuff through my hair. I decided to try and do my beard too which led to some interesting orange stains on my face. My hair's quite dark but I have a fair bit of grey so I thought I might get an interesting effect. Essentially, according to the instructions I have EXACTLY the sort of hair upon which the product should NOT be used.

I did make a video of the process which I'll get around to editing and posting later so you can judge the colour yourself. Suffice to say that all conversations at work today have followed a similar pattern:

"So..... you put some colour in your hair."

Presenting: Mr Angry Comix!

I decided to try something a little different and do a Mr Angry video in comic book form. I have an animated version on YouTube but I thought I'd put the full pages here for your viewing pleasure. If these are too small to see properly, follow the links through to my Flickr page.

The starting point for this story was another YouTuber, Nalts, who made a video where he pretended he had a team of writers and he abused them regularly. My team of writers saw that video and wanted to know why they were never given credit.

Page 1
Page 2



http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1065/525900028_900fa73869_b.jpg



http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1039/525900032_c5cae00f67_b.jpg

And here's the YouTube video:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPWmSJk3vo

The third person

I've noticed a disturbing trend at work lately with people referring to themselves in the third person when sending emails. It's usually when the message is to let you know where someone's going to be; something along the lines of:

"Bob will not be in the office tomorrow."

It's annoying enough when pretentious celebrities refer to themselves in the third person, I'm not putting up with this shit at work. There's more than one offender but Bob does it the most so I decided to go and sort him out. I figured if I made an example of him, the others would cease their transgressions lest my vengeance be visited upon them as well. I strode across to Bob's cubicle to address the situation with him thusly:

ME: Bob! What the fuck is your major malfunction?

Bob shrieked. I forgot what a nervous type he was.

ME: Calm down Bob, don't make me slap you already. Why the hell do you refer to yourself in the third person in emails?

BOB: What do you mean?

ME: Look at the email you sent earlier. It says "Bob won't be in tomorrow." Why doesn't it say "I won't be in tomorrow"?

BOB: I thought people wouldn't know who "I" was if that was all I put.

ME: Bob, take a look at the email. It has your name in the email address line. It has your name in the subject line. Then you signed off "regards, Bob." Then under that is your email signature that has your name again. How many fucking times do you fucking think we need to fucking see your fucking name before we fucking know who the fuck the fucking email is from?

BOB: (sweating visibly, looking for help from nearby people who are all studiously looking in other directions) Uhhhhhh...

ME: Stop it, OK? It's stupid. It's annoying. And you know I'll hit you if you annoy me enough.

BOB: Bu-bu-bu-but...

ME: No buts, Bob. If I have to smack you in the head to serve as an example to others, I'll do it. And you know I'll enjoy doing it as well, so don't test my patience. You're not going to refer to yourself in the third person ever again, are you Bob?

BOB: No, definitely not.

And so the issue was resolved. This is why, during job interviews, I like to refer to myself as "solutions oriented". It's a better sounding buzzword than "psychopathically hostile to idiot cow-orkers who deserve it."

Stupid Google Tricks Part 1

What should I be angry about today?


How Moderate Muslims Should Not Get Angry With Their Extremist Brothers
"Radical Islam has become an off-the-peg label that young Muslims can wear to rebel against their dads and wider British society. Like punks before them, they’ll grow up and grow out of it."

Why black folks should especially be angry regarding recent terrorist activity
"The series of Live 8 concerts have confirmed what many Africans and people of African decent have known for years: Our motherland is in dire need of help."

Why I'm angry today
"...most of these nutjobs are conservative or ultraconservative or suprafuckinginsaneconservative ... and I want as little "me" time with them as possible."

Whats made you angry/upset today...
"...that half my course is maths and i didn't even do it past gcse ... that i woke up at 3 and wasted the whole day ... that the only food i have left is an onion and some pasta"

MySpace Sued By Angry Parents
"If the parents wish to sue myspace then the local police should arrest the parents for reckless endangerment."

- - - -

I'm not alone!

The real inconvenient truth is that global warming deniers are lazy

Here's one for those with too much time on their hands. You can use up ten minutes of it watching this video. As I point out in this video, I recently did a piece going to town on Sheryl Crow for her stupid line about limiting people to using a single square of toilet paper. It was definitely a stupid thing to say and saying it was a joke doesn't make it any less stupid.

But there's being stupid in the name of getting attention and there's being an evil, malicious liar in the name of... well, who knows what. I have seen and heard so many things recently from global warming deniers that have made me so angry, I decided to cut loose on them.

I make a disclaimer in the video but I'll make it here as well for people who don't watch the video: having doubts regarding some of the claims made regarding climate change doesn't make you a liar. Healthy scepticism is an attitude I recommend people carry with them at all times. But the campaign against the reality of climate change is not driven by scepticism. The people behind these orchestrated campaigns are nothing less than self-interested liars.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGdxj-hOniY

Coincidentally, Scott Adams has just posted an interesting series of links on his Dilbert blog that cover both the pro and con arguments about climate change. Follow this link for the first part and check through his follow up posts for more. Feed your scepticism with a range of conflicting views. Then you'll at least have some food for rational thought.

Where's mine?

I had an interesting chat with my friend Adrian Calear last week. He's a director (he directed the shows for the comedians I featured during the recent Melbourne Comedy Festival - you can see the videos under the link at the top of this page) and he knows what he talking about. He's been in the performing/directing caper for longer than I've been in IT and he's seen the sorts of things that frustrate performers.

Remember last week when I was having a self-indulgent rant about not being as famous as I deserved to be (particularly on YouTube)? Adrian has seen this dozens of times and gone through it himself. essentially, it seems that it's quite common for a performer to think "hey, I'm better than that loser! Why is that bastard getting all the attention that is rightfully mine?"

It doesn't really matter if you're right - obsessing over other people like that does you no good. Not only will it eat you up, you'll probably miss when you actually have achieved something worth celebrating. Gotta look for the good times not obsess over the bad times.

So, in short, no more emo behaviour from me. For now. For anyone who was actually worried, I knew it was self indulgent crap at the time. I just felt like having a spray. I get like that sometimes.

The angry view of Wallstrip

Ever since the news of Wallstrip being bought by CBS came out I've been seeing a range of reactions. The more I saw negative and, frankly, jealous responses the more pissed off I became. And when I get pissed off I make videos.

Eye poppin' stuff!

In this uncertain world, there's on thing we can all agree on: it's always fun to stare in morbid fascination at someone with physical differences.

MR ANGRY HEALTH WARNING: You may not want to watch this video if you're eating. Especially if you're eating boiled eggs. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Laughter Therapy II - The Revenge

This video serves to purposes: finally getting me out of the crap mood I've been in all week and letting my daughter get some revenge she was after. If Hollywood won't stop churning out sequels, why shouldn't I follow suit?



The voice-over for the trailer would go like this:

She was subjected to laughter therapy against her will, now she's back for revenge. Laughter Therapy II - this time it's personal.

Cooking with Mr Angry

I'm thinking of making some cooking videos. Seriously. I like to do different things occasionally and it would be good to do something that might surprise people. I'm actually a pretty good cook and I reckon I could teach people a few simple recipes. With a Mr Angry twist, of course.

To give you an example of a Mr Angry twist I provide you this illustration of some stupid crap I have to put up with at work. I'm a big fan of the toasted sandwich (I think I may have mentioned that before.) I think the simple act of toasting a sandwich makes it taste much better. I'm one of those type who thinks it isn't a good toasted sandwich unless there's butter on the outside.

I say butter for ease of reference but I also mean that to include margarine and any other weird vegetable oil based spread (what the fuck is a stearate anyway?)

Putting the butter on the outside makes it taste better and it smells good while cooking as well. I'm always looking for ways to add a little extra taste and one thing I really like to add to the butter on the outside is powdered/grated parmesan cheese. This smells and tastes great and makes the outside go really crispy. Awesome.

Now, of course, the "smells and tastes great" is only my opinion and it's an opinion not shared by everybody. Using parmesan in the workplace may well generate complaints of a "horrible stink". Like I give a shit. Even stranger than people who don't like the smell are people who do like the smell but complain anyway because "it's making me hungry". Whatever, freako. When did I become your mother? Go eat something if you're so fucking hungry and leave me the fuck alone.

That's the sort of attitude I'd bring to a cooking show. When I'm cooking a meal you'd best be speaking up early if you're not fond of garlic, mushrooms and/or cheese because I tend to put shitloads of each of these into whatever I'm cooking. Even if it doesn't seem appropriate.

On many occasions I've brought food that I've made at home in to work and people have asked me for the recipe. So I tell them something like it has mushrooms and garlic... then they ask me what quantities are involved. How much garlic should I put in? I dunno, how much do you like? If I made some videos I could point the questioners in that direction when they ask, so they'd end up getting advice like this:

"OK, so put plenty of garlic in here. There's really no such thing as too much garlic. Some people will disagree and say they can't handle a lot of garlic. You know what? Fuck those people."

I am so fucking lazy

It may sound strange that a man who's maintained pretty much daily blog posting for over a year and made nigh on 350 videos in even less time proclaims himself to be lazy, but in many important ways that's what I am: lazy. Not least in ways that society finds useful, namely my job.

Sometimes I feel like they barely get 2 productive hours out of me in a day at work. I'm so easily distracted. I'm always reading things that are nothing to do with work, aimlessly web surfing or writing in this blog (although I usually limit blogging to my lunch hour). The bizarre thing is, nobody at my current job seems to share my low opinion of my productivity.

Most days I expect sometime to finally go "Hey, he's been fooling us! He doesn't do anything here, let's fire his lazy arse!" And yet each day I get treated with respect and congratulated on the quality of the work I actually manage to produce. The thing is, to my great surprise, I seem to have landed in almost the perfect role for me.

Not only do all my strengths work here, but they are strengths and experience that nobody else here has so even when I think I'm a lazy shit I'm actually making contributions that nobody else can. Far more often I've experienced workplaces where I was subjected to enourmous amounts of unwarranted negative behaviour from management so I frequently find it hard to believe I'm not always on the verge of receiving more of the same.

Today, my manager dragged me into a closed door meeting without warning to discuss some "important matters". I thought, this is it, I'm fucked. Somebody's been tracking my net usage and I'm about to get boned. Instead, I was asked to help with some important high-level management decisions. All that fun strategy stuff.

Weird.

I'm lazy in my life outside work too. I feel like there's some sort of hump I can't get over with both this blog and my video making. I've made more headway in terms of readership/ viewership than I ever thought I would but there are plenty of people getting way more attention. That wouldn't bother me so much apart from the fact that so many of them are shit. I mean I am really, really sick of people whose output is utterly fucked getting more attention than me.

Blogs that are pointless, badly written, unintelligent, not funny. Videos that are uninspired, poorly executed, show no talent or originality whatsoever. You know, 99.999% of the internet. It's all fucked and it's pissing me off.

I think my biggest problem is I'm no good at self promotion. I've done some basic self promotion which has gotten me this far but there's no doubt that the highest profile online personas (even the genuinely talented ones) got where they are because they're way better at marketing than I am.

My other problem is that I absolutely suck at time management. I essentially know they things I should be doing to self-promote but most of the time I can't be bothered doing them. I think I reached a low point with motivation on about Sunday when I noticed that I was rapidly approaching my one year anniversary on YouTube.

I've always been invigorated by reaching milestones with this blog but this particular milestone depressed me. The main difference between promoting this blog and promoting videos on YouTube is that promoting the blog is all down to me while the single biggest promotion tool on YouTube, being "featured", is totally beyond my control.

And when I considered that one year milestone all I could think was what other sucker has put in so much effort for so long without being featured even once? I like to think while my videos may not be timeless classics of art, they're pretty fucking good for one person working pretty much alone with zero budget. If every video featured by YouTube was better than mine I wouldn't feel bad, I'd simply work at getting better.

But when about 90% of the featured videos are utterly fucked I get a bit down. Some very, very good work is featured. Stuff that I don't reckon I have a hope of competing with comes up every now and then. But cute fucking animal videos? Worse still, badly shot, shitty sound, not even vaguely fucking interesting fucking animal videos? And it isn't even the swearing (which is what I kept telling myself for a while to make myself feel better). They featured videos with heaps of swearing - not often, but they've done it.

It's hard at this point to not feel like someone at YouTube has made a conscious decision to exclude me from being featured. I have no evidence whatsoever for this of course, just my bad mood. As my angry attitude is what guides me through most of my life decisions, it seems only right to apply it here as well.

Anyway, fuck YouTube. Or to be fair, YouTube already does more for me than I have any right to expect (free hosting, a platform with a potential reach that I couldn't hope to match without them) so I won't obsess about it too much. But seriously, fuck them anyway.

I don't expect anyone to pity me, I vent as self-therapy, not as a cry for help. Besides which, I've been clawing my way out of my bad mood since Sunday. The first positive came when I received my latest pay notification from The Fizz Newzz. Oh yeah, I thought, there have been some worthwhile developments in the last year. During the week I was finding it difficult to make videos because of my general mood, made worse when I noticed the average number of views for my videos had been going down.

I needed some external motivation so I set about doing something. I am meeting up with my friend who's a director tonight to talk about things in general and he's always a good source of motivation. Then I have to start working with other people more. I have a few ideas that require involvement from other people (sorry I haven't advanced our plans Gruntski but the collaboration we were discussing is definitely one I want to do) and I think simply being involved with other people will improve my mood.

And although I might sound rather negative in this post, I didn't start writing it until I actually started feeling better. One thing that considerably improved my mood was reading this article. I'm not sure what it is about the article in general, but it's certainly funny and well written. Quite a bit of thought behind it too. The only downside is what seems like an excessive amount of ads to me but, hey, they guy's gotta make a living. It might brighten your day up too.

Somebody's watching you

Here's a couple of pieces I originally did for The Fizz Newzz. They're thematically linked in that they both deal with surveillance - one at the personal level and one at the governmental/societal level.

This first one is my reaction to a news story on the "Hollywood Spy Shop". The range of surveillance equipment you can buy here astonishes me. I'm going to have to stop picking my nose - you never know when someone's videoing you.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp8iLzJ6jx0

This second one highlights just how creepy things have gotten in the UK. Apparently there are now over four million CCTV cameras in the UK and the rate of growth is increasing. Now the cops are even using radio controlled flying drones to spy on people. I know that people often respond by saying "if you're not doing anything wrong you don't have anything to fear," but how about if I haven't done anything wrong I deserve some privacy? Whatever happened to that idea?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiqdwRAqzA4

A good news story: You CAN make money blogging!

Someone who's given me quite a bit of support since not long after I started this blog has just made a huge score. Howard Lindzon and his team have just sold their video blog Wallstrip to CBS.

To me, this is the story of people who believed in the power of the video blogging medium, saw a niche and went for it. Of course, it helps to have the experience, contacts and wherewithal to get a project like this launched but none of that counts if you don't have the vision and the will to follow it through.

I've honestly been getting a little disheartened lately by things like the amount of attention paid to talentless fucks on YouTube. This is the sort of news that gives me heart. And the fact that some big name dickheads seem pissed off by Wallstrip's success makes it even better (read the comments in the post I linked to above on Howard's blog if you want to see what I mean.)

Oh and I got my latest payment from The Fizz Newzz too, so that cheered me up. Wallstrip got their millions but I got my $250. The gap is closing!

Just to round things out, here's the Wallstrip video where they celebrate the deal.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3q1zuXujr8

I have to admit, I found the setup where nobody at CBS knew who or what Wallstrip was really funny (and yes, presenter Lindsay really is on The Sopranos).

Whose bright idea was scheduling?

I'm in the middle of a two year project to roll out a project management software package in a large construction company. The first year was taken up with requirements gathering, writing specs, putting together a tender, sending the tender out to prospective software vendors, evaluating the responses, signing contracts with the successful vendor and setting the scope for the deployment. The second year is scheduled to be designing and configuring the software for the environment (5 months), prototyping and testing (3 months) followed by a pilot deployment with a controlled group of projects (3 months).

If that all goes well, the software get rolled out to the whole company over the following year. So this is a long, involved project with a list of unknowns so long that quite frankly it's terrifying and BEFORE THE WHOLE THING STARTED the person who signs the cheques wanted a detailed schedule showing how long it would take to complete the project.

Depending on which side fence you live, the request for an upfront schedule is either common sense or insanity. If you're on the business side and have to authorise the expenditure (in this case, millions of dollars which was an unprecedented IT expenditure for this company) you want to know what you will be getting and how long it will take to get.

If you're the sucker who has to deliver the project, setting a schedule seems crazy because there are far too many variables. There are the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns (which is not as crazy as Donald Rumsfeld made it sound - he just articulated it badly.) The known unknowns are the things you don't know the answer to but at least you know you have to figure out an answer. The unknown unknowns are the landmines that every IT worker knows are waiting for them on pretty much every project. You don't even know they're there but one day you step on one and you blow everything to hell.

The one saving grace of this project is that the software is not being developed in-house. An off the shelf piece of software is being configured to work according to the company's requirements. And it has to integrate with the existing core business applications. Oh, and we have to find a way to standardise the processes followed in a variety of inconsistent ways by the hundreds of employees in order to design the software configuration and deploy it successfully.

So a schedule for a project with so many variables is essentially a wild guess followed in blind faith, all the while wishing on a star, hoping that none of the thousand possible unforseen problems derail everything. Why does anyone thing this is a good idea?

Well, there's this little thing the business world like to call reality. You can call it political reality (you fall out of favour if you can't deliver to schedule), fiscal reality (businesses want to be able to quantify the return on their expenditure - ahead of time preferably) or comparative reality (a process line worker makes x widgets per day so why can't I measure how much development gets completed in a day?) Very few companies can liberate themselves from this view of reality (Google seems to be an exception if you believe what you read.)

So very few businesses will let you start a project without a schedule. As wrong as it may be, it's pretty important to accept it as our lot in life as IT workers. Here's a little tip: if you don't feel like accepting it as your lot in life, argue your case from the point of view of how the business will benefit from changing their views, not why it would be better for you. Don't waste time saying "that isn't how IT development works" - unless you argue the case from a cost/benefit perspective (again, benefits for the business, not you) you'll most likely come across as spoiled and/or totally disconnected from business "realities". There's a disturbing tendency for IT workers to be seen as spoiled and overpaid already so try not to make it worse.

A business can use a project schedule in one of two main ways: as a weapon with which to beat the project team if they fail to deliver to schedule or as a general roadmap. To those who treat divergence from a schedule as a failure which must be punished: you're going to get the team, the morale and the results you deserve (hint - they'll all be crap). But if you acknowledge that your schedule is a best guess at where the key signposts are, that you'll have to stop and ask for directions regularly and that you'll find the journey taking you in strange and unexpected directions before you reach your destination, then you stand a chance of success.

In my current role I'm lucky enough to be working in a business that treats the schedule as a rough guide rather than holy scripture. Twice, the management committee has actually responded to a progress report by saying "you're trying to do too much in this time period, give yourself the extra time you need to make sure you're doing it properly." When we report project delays they listen to our reasons and support the judgement calls we make. They will kick our butts if the budget blows out much more but with each change we give two alternatives: more time or reduced scope.

I get the feeling our work is actually valued by management. If I sound a little surprised by this it's because I've worked in a number of jobs over the years where the attitude of management to IT was more like "barely tolerated". Assuming my work is actually valued (and assuming management are wise to place said value in me) this is actually a very smart business decision. It all goes back to the type of cost/benefit analysis I was mentioning earlier in this post.

I get frequent calls from employment agencies hoping I'm looking for work. There is more contract work available than there are experience contractors to fill the roles at the moment. They have quoted me figures more than 1/3 higher than my current rate. So I could easily earn more but I would be taking a risk - the work might not be as interesting and the environment might not be as good. That's my cost/benefit analysis.

For management, the cost/benefit analysis goes like this: allowing the project to run beyond initial schedule estimates is an increased cost. But if I left (not just me of course), there would be a number of unpleasant costs. First, the project knowledge I have gained would walk out the door with me - there would be a significant time lag before any replacement gained a similar level of knowledge. Second, in the current tight job market it would take quite a while to find a replacement. Third, any replacement would either cost a lot more than me or have considerably less experience (maybe both).

So we're forced to have a schedule. But there's a reasonable attitude to changes in that schedule. Everyone seems sufficiently comfortable with the level of doublethink required to balance the contradictory notions of (a) we are following a schedule, and (b) that schedule could be rendered meaningless at any moment. It isn't perfect but it feels like the lesser of two evils.

YouTube trying to suck so hard that it's impossible to ignore

This is a rarity for me, writing on the same topic two days in a row. Rarer still, I feel the need to vent even more anger about YouTube. I'm compelled to preface it all by saying yet again that the free, easy hosting and distribution provided by YouTube means I owe them far more than they owe me and I'll probably keep using the service no matter how much they piss me off. But that doesn't mean that I'm not justified in being pissed off.

Like so many services that offer so much (it often works this way with people too) it's the little failings that make me really angry. The fact that the comment system is completely screwed and the ranking metrics are fatally flawed continues to piss me off. Based on the available evidence, these things don't matter at all to the people running YouTube and they have no interest in listening to whining little shits like me.

After all, it isn't as if all their shortcoming have reduced their user numbers significantly, I was mildly surprised to notice last night that I'm rapidly closing in on my one year anniversary on YouTube (first video posted June 9th 2006) and I've posted my 331st video. It's a bit spooky how close I am to averaging a video a day over that time period.

The latest thing they've done to piss me off is their heavy handed, inconsistent, unfair and totally opaque method of applying censorship. The latest victim is a user I've recently become friendly with, his user name is JustA11en. Side note - he's from the Southern US, he's conservative, we disagree on a range of topics but he's intelligent and I can respect him. Thank you god! I was getting so sick of right wing discourse online being dominated by hypocritical morons.

JustA11en decided to do a joke that I've done before, putting a suggestive image in the middle of a video so that's the thumbnail YouTube uses to represent your video. Lots of pornhounds get sucked in, you get lots of views and if you're as shallow as me you get lots of laughs. It worked amazingly well for Allen (the actual content of his video was some VERY funny stories about his mum) and I promised to do a response.

The only trouble is, his video was deleted without warning with "violation of terms of service" being cited. Now, there is absolutely nothing in his video that I can see that comes close to violating the YouTube ToS. All I can imagine is that a succession of frustrated pornhounds sent in bogus complaints saying it was obscene and some fuckwit at YouTube with an utter lack of brainpower took it down. He's yet to get a response to his many WTF?!!?! queries.

I did my response so it's probably only a matter until it gets taken down too (this has happened to me before as well but I suspect that was largely because I suggested it was conservative blowhard Michelle Malkin in the nude image). But I'm fairer to the pornhounds in this video - there's lots of fucking toward the end. Enjoy (for as long as it's possible).





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZWe8LwjmhA

YouTube provides variation in same old way of sucking to suck in a new way

I know if I really, really hated YouTube I should just stop using it but I've invested too much in it to give up now. I keep getting invitations from other video sharing sites to join them but I really can't be bothered at this point. I'll stick with YouTube for now but I wish they'd listen to their users more. I've seen hundred of videos saying please fix the commenting system and please stop people from gaming the system but I'm yet to see a public response from YouTube.

But they piss me off most of all when they keep making cosmetic changes to the site without fixing actual core problems. Worse still, it can be like their most recent cosmetic change that fucked something that was more or less working previously.

I logged in the other day to see this message saying all my videos had been blocked from rating and commenting. While I was trying to sort this out I saw the problem was intermittent which meant it was going to be impossible to fix. You can only fix a problem if it manifests in a consistent way.

Then I decided to send them a message to tell them about it seeing as how they seem completely unaware of when there are problems with their system. Only to discover that the fuckers had changed the reporting system to make it as hard as possible to report a fault. You have to sift through screen after screen of FAQs and "helpful tips" before you finally get a fucking link to send them a fucking message.

So along with the fault report I included a polite note saying how much this sucked. Seriously, I was quite polite about it. Although I did mention it sucked. And I even got a reply saying how they appreciated my input. Probably in exactly the same way I appreciated the problem in the first place.

I'm sure this is why the bastards never feature my videos. It can't be because my videos suck.

Dating and relationship success tips from Mr Angry

Long time readers of this blog will recognise the content of these videos. I actually wrote this material quite a while ago but had some fun this week making videos of it. This first video eases people into the idea of online dating by giving a few keys tips:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu8RDiqI7wE

As the first one was popular I went into more detail with this video:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bOO6griNwg

And to round things off, my all round tips for relationships success:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7XAc9U14WY

Mr Angry: solving the age-old conflict between the sexes.

You know what opinions are like?

My mind has been wandering a bit today as I consider what to write here. I was toying with the idea of why we actually do anything. From the mundane activity of going to jobs we don't really like to truly inexplicable things like why did millions of soldiers, sometimes tens of thousands in a single day, continue to march into slaughter during World War One? Sometimes I really can't understand why more people don't say "hey, this is bullshit, I'm not doing this any more."

The rather depressing answer I came up with is there is no shortage of evil bastards who are willing to seriously fuck you over if you dare to buck the system. So that was a short and depressing chain of thought.

Then I started thinking about how widely divergent people's opinions can be on topics that initially seem straightforward, like what is right and wrong. I'm a big believer in open mindedness and considering the other person's point of view but a simple fact about opinions that people often gloss over is that either you're insane or your opinion is right and everyone else's is wrong.

After all, what sane person would hold an opinion that they considered to be wrong? This is not the same as the evil practice that seems to underlie so much politics and public discourse, namely, people spouting views they don't actually believe in a cynical grab for power and influence. It's simply human nature; you hold your opinions for a reason and it's only natural to assume that a contrary opinion is wrong.

It can sometimes be hard to balance this perceived reality with behaving decently to other people (assuming behaving decently to other people is actually important to you). The best solution I've heard for this was in something I read recently written by Robert Sutton as an offshoot of his book "The No Asshole Rule". He suggest you argue as if you are right but listen as if you are wrong. In other words, support your view passionately but actually listen to the opposing view in case you discover something you didn't know.

That's as good a guide to life as I've seen in a while. Oh, and in case the title of this post doesn't make sense to you, it comes from a saying I've heard many times in my life. I particularly like the way my grandfather used to say it as he had his own twist at the end that I've never heard other people use:

"Opinions are like arseholes, everybody has one. And yours stinks."

What's your point?

Ever since I put up my post (and made a video) suggesting Sheryl Crow should shut the fuck up, I've been formulating what I want to say about climate change "skeptics". Skepticism is a good thing generally, being naturally skeptical will protect you more often than it will hurt you. Blind faith is far more likely to do you damage than healthy skepticism.

But I use the term "skeptic" loosely when describing climate change deniers because I strongly suspect that a significant majority of them aren't true skeptics - they simply don't care to know the truth about climate change. I'd also divide this "don't care" brigade into two groups - those who believe the prevailing scientific consensus about climate change is probably true but still don't care and those who don't believe but don't care to discover what the truth might be (as if there is a simple and all-encompassing truth on the topic).

Here's the cynical part of me talking (yes, I know, the cynical part of me is clearly at least 90% of me. Shut up. Do you like how I have conversations with you, dear reader, as I type? I'm clearly insane. Unless that's what you were thinking. That would make me psychic. Are you freaked out yet? Oh god, I'm getting off track.) The cynical part of me says the loudest voices speaking out against the scientific consensus of climate change are nothing more than paid shills for vested interests in governments and energy companies.

This scares me because the people running these companies aren't stupid. I think the majority of them realise serious problems are coming, it's incredibly unlikely that such a large body of scientific consensus would be utterly wrong (although it may well prove to be wrong in some important aspects.) It's just that... well, they don't give a fuck.

Either their thinking is literally "I'll be dead before the worst hits, so I don't give a fuck," or they assume we'll find some way to cope or some magical technological breakthrough will save the day (which may well happen) so they care more about their short term profits than they care about the prospect of long term damage.

To defend themselves, they use their positions of power to sow seeds of doubt. Sometimes they make points that are true in isolation. These points don't refute the concept of climate change but they pretend that they do. Sometimes they distort sort-of true statements to an absurd degree. Sometimes they tell outright lies. The thing I've noticed that all these approaches have in common is a tendency to focus on isolated aspects of the arguments supporting the notion of climate change without addressing the overall issue.

They pretend that by picking on these isolated issues they have refuted climate change in its entirety when they've done no such thing. They're not even close, in fact they're deliberately avoiding dealing with the larger issues. In my opinion, they do this because it isn't possible to successfully discredit the full body of scientific knowledge on climate change so they spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) in the minds of the public.

The concept of FUD will be familiar to people who work in the IT field. Microsoft are past masters at spreading FUD to undermining competitors although they're far from alone in the practice. When you can can't take an opponent head-on, chip away at the edges and hope people start to lose faith.

For me, one of the best ways to counter FUD is to ask the person spreading it: "What's your point?" And keep asking. If someone can't clearly explain to you why they're pushing a particular view it's usually a good sign they aren't being honest.

When someone says "there is dissent among scientists," ask: "What's your point? Are you saying because you can show there isn't 100% consensus that you have conclusive evidence that climate change is not a serious problem?" The argument here seems to be, as Stephen Colbert said, "Why can't the 5% of dissenters have 50% of the time?"

When someone says "there are other important problems that are killing people now, like malaria," say: "What's your point? Are you saying we must ignore climate change to deal with malaria? Because I'm not saying we have to ignore all other problems and focus solely on climate change. Why does it have to be an either/or proposition? Why can't we do both?"

When someone says "Al Gore wants us to give up our lifestyle because of global warming but he lives in a big house that uses lots of electricity," say: "What's your point? Are you saying if you discredit Al Gore (despite the fact that the story was mostly a beat-up that omitted important facts and was laced with outright lies) you have proven that climate change is not an issue? The worst you can do there is paint Al Gore as a hypocrite which does nothing to undermine the scientific consensus about climate change"

When someone says "if global warming is real, why is it so cold today?" say: "Shut the fuck up!" OK, you could say "What's your point? Are you saying that the sum total of scientific thought on the issue of climate change is that it will always be warmer everywhere? If so, you're a fucking moron. Shut the fuck up." But that would waste time. With some people it's much more efficient to go straight to shut the fuck up.

There's a lot more I plan to go into on this topic, particularly an exploration of some of the worst, most evil lies propagated by climate change deniers. The most dangerous position to take on either side of the argument is an absolute one that allows for no further discussion, hence my strategy of asking "What's your point?" The subject is not closed because someone makes some grand pronouncement that they think resolves the situation conclusively - the issue is far more complex than that.

There's no single cause of climate change and there's no one solution. There isn't even really a single thing called "global warming". You can't point at a specific thing and say "that's global warming" (an attitude spoofed hilariously on South Park). There isn't a convenient end point to discussions of climate change and I deeply distrust anyone who makes sweeping statements that suggests they are the holder of ultimate knowledge. It's important to at least listen to people when you disagree with their position.

But it's even more important to realise when they're talking shit. That's my point, what's yours?

Welcome to stressville - population: me!

It may not be immediately obvious to readers of this blog but I have a slight tendency towards obsessiveness (/sarcasm). It usually helps in my work because my job is essentially to solve problems so an obsessive nature helps when you have to pursue a particularly elusive solution. The trouble is, when I can't see what the solution is, or a clear path to a solution I have to fight down a rising urge to freak out.

My brain essentially divides itself into two halves: the freaking out part (oh my god! I don't know what the solution is this very second! I'm a fraud, they'll fire me for sure!) and the part that's trying to get me to calm the fuck down and be realistic (you'll get there in the end, nobody's saying you have to have a conclusive answer right now, just keep working on it.)

And it's all made a bit harder by the fact that I'm not particularly driven to do the work. It's engaging enough so far as work goes and I'm paid quite well so I'm not complaining but it isn't in my soul if you know what I mean. I don't bound out of bed every morning bursting with the excitement of another full day of business analysis.

The blogging and video making are far closer to what I actually want to do as opposed to what I need to do to earn money. It provides a good balance (work to earn money, other stuff to have fun and feel fulfilled) but I have been noticing of late that as work gets more stressful, blogging seems waaaaay more appealing. So I get distracted from work which ultimately leads to more stress which makes work less appealing which makes the internet more appealing and all that distraction is but a mouse click away.

Damn you internet!