I’m hearing this referred to as “picturegate” or “cowangate”, but whatever I did today it seemed I was either getting emails or reading about this on the web. Apparently last night RTE officially apologised for reporting on the following:

Two unorthodox portraits — one in the National Gallery showing the Taoiseach on the toilet, and another in the Royal Hibernian Gallery showing him holding his Y-fronts — appeared mysteriously in Dublin among paintings of the country’s other famous citizens in more decorous poses.

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5971027.ece

All day long this just kept popping up over and over. With breaking news stories on the Irish Times regarding the police getting involved, the original RTE report going up on YouTube (followed by the apology), a whole barrage of noise on Twitter, and people calling out for everyone to make some noise and ensure this kind of bullshit bullying isn’t allowed continue.

Damien Mulley was enraged:

Last night part of the freedom of the press was murdered in front of our eyes, in prime time hours. We should be crying at that apology. Hope is quickly diminishing in Ireland and more of it went tonight. The country is going to hell in a handcart and now they’re attacking satire in a most brutal way. RTE News has been shut down. RTE cannot report news anymore without having to secondguess themselves and the reaction from Government press officers.

Twenty Major even more so:

Cowen and Fianna Fail had a meltdown though and rang RTE to complain. They demanded the story be removed from the RTE website, and it was. They demanded the clip of the news item be removed and it was. They demanded it be removed from the archives, and it was.

They also demanded an apology be made on air and it was. Pathetic stuff from RTE, truly spineless, but then this is the same organisation that allowed that wretched cunt Beverly Flynn to get away without paying back all the money she owed. No balls whatsoever.

FF’s action , however, was bullying, pure and simple.

The BBC are reporting that the man behind the act of art guerilla warfare could go to jail, and the story is getting coverage all over the place.

I’m personally thrilled to see so many people standing up and saying “fuck this”. Want to buy a naked Cowen caricature on a t-shirt? Are people profiteering, no, proceeds are going to the Rape Crisis Network. Some people are planning to run exhibitions of postcards featuring naked Cowen.

Naked Fat Cowen

Now it’s nearly 2am and despite being zonked and under far too big a work load, I couldn’t help but flex my supremely weak Photoshop muscles to have a go at a bit of a naked Cowen picture. It’s not very good, but it’s a bit of fun and the best I could come up with at this late hour – click the photo to enlarge!

Brian Cowen protects his bits to avoid embarrassment

For those interested, the original photo is by drivenbyboredom on Flickr.

What are ye waiting for?

So why not get off your fat arse and find a picture of a nice big wobbly person and attach Cowen’s head to it. He can’t come after everyone. Boogie boogie boogie.

Update – 1pm :: 26/03/09

Apparently the person mainly reponsible for making this complaint to RTÉ is Eoghan Ó Neachtain. If you feel like complaining about this directly you can reach him at the details below.

Telephone +353-1-619-4098 Fax +353-1-676-3302
Email Address press.office@taoiseach.gov.ie

Tiny iPod Shuffle

CrunchGear have reported that the new iPod Shuffle has an interesting twist to its headphones. Apparently there is a tiny chip inside the headphones which ensures that you cannot connect a normal pair of headphones to their new player. Nice move Apple.

What this essentially means is that you have to purchase Apple approved headphones to be able to listen to your iPod. Now, I couldn’t care less as this doesn’t affect me, but it just amazes me that companies carry on with this sort of proprietary system design. I feel the same way about laptop power supplies that use proprietary connectors to force users to purchase replacements from the manufacturer instead of having the option to sort out a replacement themselves.

CruchGear posted about this again the following day reporting that the special chip will be available on a license basis and other headphone manufacturers will be able to purchase the chips from Apple to put in their new Apple-compatible headphones.

Does this not rankle anyone?

As you might have guessed, I’m a bit of an audio aficionado. I like getting good quality sound and have spent a good bit on Sennheiser HD650 open-backed headphones. Would I be able to use them? No.

I do assume that someone will bring out a special headphone adapter, but once again you’re not just buying the device but being forced to buy accessories to use the device the way you want.

The answer, do a bit of research and buy something that doesn’t lock you in to:

1. Proprietary accessories
2. Proprietary software

Whilst my 4 year old iAudio player might feel a little clunky, I’ve been able to replace the battery for a tenner, I don’t have any software installed to have it interact with my computer (it just pops up as an external hard drive), and I’ve even replaced the firmware with a different operating system (RockBox). Finally, there are no restrictions on what file formats I can play, so if I want to use FLAC or OGG (open source audio compression codecs), I can.

Please take not I’m not just levelling my aim at Apple here. Sony are just as bad (I believe) with keeping things locked down, and even worse are Creative. Recently my younger brother’s old Zen player stopped working. On dismantling the device and plugging the 1.8″ hard drive into my desktop I found out that you can’t actually read the content off it as they use a proprietary file system. There in came a whole load of research and an eventual solution which required me to use a special python script, from a linux install, in order to copy the files off the hard drive. What a fucking crowd of assholes to go creating something inaccessible like that.

Time to plug the iPod Flea

Now that my little rant is over – time for some light relief.

I think considering the tiny-ness of the baffling iPod shuffle it’s time to role out this excellent video of the iPod Flea (and when I say baffling I mean I’m baffled as to why anyone would want a device on which you can’t pick what you want to play unless you create a playlist prior to using the device – otherwise it’s “play songs in order” or “play songs in random order”).

This video has been around a while, but seems all the more relevant now.

I think it’s been something that has been happening for a long time, but as soon as St. Patrick’s Day comes around everyone and their granny and their favourite rock band are declared to be Irish.

This morning I got an email newsletter from Joost, an online video service that’s been struggling to stay afloat amongst heavy competition from other online video providers.

Anyway, one thing caught my eye in their listing of a playlist of music of Irish artists, which reads as follows.

ERIN GO BRAGH! LISTEN TO THE PLAYLIST
We’ve compiled all your favorite artists from the Emerald Isle – U2, Snow Patrol, Morrissey, Def Leppard and more…Sláinte!

Now unless I’m wholesale mistaken Joost are so incredibly wrong with this list.

• Def Leppard – these guys are from Sheffield, England.
• Morrissey – born in Lancashire, England.
• Snow Patrol – whilst I think the band members are originally Northern Irish by nationality, the band was formed and grew out of Dundee in Scotland.
• U2 – Ok, everyone thinks of these guys as Irish, but they can fuck right off. They’ll take the tax breaks whilst they can here, but as soon as things go a bit bleaker they’re out of here quicker than you can say “Bono is a total cunt”. Also, I could be nitpicking but but Adam Clayton was born in Oxfordshire, UK and The Edge was born in East London to Welsh parents.

Ireland has some really fantastic music come out of it over the years, so come on Joost, do a tiny tiny bit of research before you go sending out something stupidly embarrassing like this. A two-second search on Wikipedia reveals a category on Irish Musical groups. You could have mentioned Thin Lizzy, The Pogues, The Dubliners, Planxty, The Divine Comedy, Therapy?, hell you could have said Brendan Shine and I’d have been happier.

I have started work in earnest on my next Ebauche release, something which has been far too long in coming. I’m hoping to raise the bar in this next release on my own capabilities with drum and rhythm creation. The plan is dense and complicated with a lot of focus on drums and some more drums.

In sketching out ideas for the first two tracks I instantly found myself becoming frustrated with Reason’s ReDrum interface and, in a moment of impulse last week, I decided to splash out €200 I don’t really have on Native Instrument’s Battery3.

It’s a pretty incredible drum sampler with the ability to create complex drum kits featuring multiple velocity layers, incredibly details editing, effects, modulation, looping etc on every single sample you load into it.

It just arrived today and hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have really gotten my teeth into making some wonderful new noises!

After many months of coming back to them, doing a little more, running away, and eventually coming back to them, we’ve finally finished off pages upon pages of legal speak with regard to the Pixelapes web hosting packages.

We’re really delighted with the way our hosting is going, and on the strength of things over the past year we’re planning some major upgrades to our service, including a brand new server to be added to the family.

It definitely seems that there is a need out there for well a well managed hosting service. Something we’re very well able to provide. I’m also thrilled to finally have all the proper documentation sorted, as this gives both us and our clients peace of mind in knowing that everything is properly set out.

Still, legal speak is a brain melter.

I was just put on to this fantastic film by George Méliès by Shirley from Stitch Films. I highly recommend watching the whole thing – it’s a really wonderful adventure and I can’t quite believe it was originally made in 1902.

Le Voyage dans la Lune

It’s a damn sight better than a lot of shit put out these days.

If you’d like to find out more, check out the Wikipedia article on George Méliès.

He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his films. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality with the cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the “Cinemagician.”

I’ve just started an occupational first-aid course run by the Irish Red Cross in Mullingar. The first day was a little bit overwhelming, but sitting at home and doing my “homework”, I’m realising that I have actually taken in a decent amount of information. I’m still feeling that my brain can’t take in that much more information at the moment, but I think it’s going to be a really good qualification to have (assuming I pass the exam that is).

Today we learnt a lot about assessing a situation, the proper procedure in a variety of situations, how to recognise different conditions, how to treat bleeding, burns, fractures and more.

It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a few years – ever since someone fell off a cliff up at Rathlin Island (foolish drunks and crumbly cliffs do not mix) I realised that I really should know the basics of what to do in a situation like that.

Anyway, back to my homework.

Huge huzzah for any improvement on WordPress plugin search – it’s always baffled me how it can be so random at times.

It was so bad that I ended up creating my own Google Custom Search, which I just use instead of the one on WordPress.org.

One of the biggest problems and most frequent complaints we’ve had with the WordPress.org Plugins Directory is the horrible, horrible search results.

via WordPress Blog

Great to see things going well so far for Pirate Bay

There has been high drama on the second day of the Pirate Bay trial. Due to serious shortcomings in the prosecution evidence, around 50% of the charges in the case are going to have to be withdrawn. The defense describes it as a ’sensation’, seeing half of the charges being dropped on the second day.

via 50% of Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped | TorrentFreak.

I’m facing a crash in Illustrator at the moment. I’m going to leave it for a little while to see if it gets its head together, but it’s not looking promising.

I know, I should remember to save things on a regular basis, and I’m usually pretty good at it, but any application in which you spend long amounts of time doing detailed work, whether it be something like Cubase (music production), or OpenOffice (word processing, spreadsheets etc) offers the option to automatically save your work to a temporary file which, after a catasrophic crash, allows you to recover the most recently auto-saved version.

Adobe Creative Suite is the leading collection of creative design tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, After Effects, Dreamweaver, and others.

As far as I’m aware, the only auto-save feature comes in either Dreamweaver or Contribute (not sure which), but none of the other applications offer it.

So please, Adobe, I’m sure I’m not the only one clamouring for this addition – bring auto-save to Creative Suite. Save us from tearing our hair out.