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Merry Christmas!

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, “Won’t see another one”
And then he sang a song
“The Rare Old Mountain Dew”
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I’ve got a feeling
This year’s for me and you
So Happy Christmas
I love you, baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They’ve got cars big as bars
They’ve got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It’s no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas Day

You’re a bum
You’re a punk
You’re an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God its our last

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas Day

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas Day

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Random News…

I meant to type up something much longer, but time doesn’t permit so…. LET’S DO SOME NEWS:

Steve Flaig is from Michigan. He knew he was adopted. His adoptive parents even helped him search for his birth mother. Little did anyone know that he worked with his birth mother at a Lowe’s home improvement store in Michigan! It seems that Christine Tallady started working at the store a few months after Steve began his search. The adoption agency somehow spelled Tallady’s name wrong, but Steve had a sudden flash of inspiration and used the spelling of the woman at his store and… bingo! Read all about it here.

You knew it was coming… a company called Renova is marketing “designer toilet paper”! It comes in a variety of colors – black, red, orange and green – and the company says that the paper has a “voluptuous texture. Colors for an outstanding style. A warm mystery in every single olfactive moment. Soft and glamorous…A paper full of pleasure.”

And lastly, a clueless grocery store thinks their boneless, sliced ham is “delicious for Chanukah”!

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Shane McGowan is BEAUTIFUL!

You remember Shane McGowan, right? Lead singer of The Pogues… sings that “Fairytale of New York” tune which is quite popular this time of year… one of Kate Moss’ good friends? You know – THAT guy? We always knew he was a drunk and not very attractive to begin with, but MY GOD has this man gone downhill or what?

Shane McGowan

And what’s with his teeth?

Shane McGowan’s Teeth

Shiver.

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THAT’S Proper English!

Israel’s Ministry of the Interior recently released a bunch of passports with “Ministry of the Intrerior” stamped on the front of them. The ministry wanted to alert Israelis of the error, so it placed an ad in the Jerusalem Post, an English-language newspaper. The ad read (in part):

“Due to a technical error in some of the Ministry’s stampsthe document you received may have been stampedwith an flawed stamp.”

Awesome!

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Changing Colors

What’s with all the news stories about people changing colors lately? First, there was this story about Lee Thomas, an entertainment reporter for Detroit’s Fox affiliate. He was born a black man, but due to a disease called vitiligo – the same disease that Michael Jackson reportedly has – he’s slowly turning white:

vitiligo

Lee’s story is “newsworthy” because he recently decided to stop applying a thick layer of makeup every day and go au naturale on TV. Which makes sense, when you see how much makeup they have to use on the poor guy. Be sure to check out the slide show at the link above to see Lee’s transition from “black guy” to “half and half”.

Then there’s this story about a man named Paul Karason. Apparently Paul either read something in a nutty “holistic medicine” magazine or saw an infomercial or something, but the fact is, he’s been drinking colloidal silver – silver dissolved in water via an electrical current – for the past 14 years. And it’s turned him blue:

Colloidal Silver

Apparently, some think that colloidal silver will cure anything that ails you. But apparently it turns you blue. Let the Papa Smurf jokes begin!

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Bittorrent as an Appliance

In the computing world, an “appliance” is a computer that is “dedicated to a single task, and has limited configuration ability”. If you have a router in your home, you have an appliance. If you work for a medium to large-size company, they might have an “anti-spam appliance”: a computer that sits between the Internet and your email server, removing spam. Although appliances are usually dedicated to a single task, what really makes a “computer” an “appliance” is the limited interface. Although your home router is basically a small computer, you cannot click a couple of things and turn it into a file server, or play Solitaire on it.

With the rise of software virtualization, people have started referring to some virtual machines as “appliances”. Although this isn’t, strictly speaking, accurate – most virtual machines run a traditional desktop operating system instead of one dedicated to the task at hand – they can be appliances in the “dedicated to a single task” meaning. In this article, I’ll show you how to create a “Bittorrent appliance”.

But first… why have a “Bittorrent appliance” in the first place? Well, there are several reasons why you might want to run Bittorrent as an appliance:

Compatibility: Many Bittorrent applications don’t work at all in Windows Vista, and many don’t work nearly as well in Vista as they did in XP. By creating an XP-based virtual machine, you can use Vista and still enjoy all of the BT programs that work better in Windows XP. Also, if you have a computer that dual-boots between XP and Vista, you can use the appliance in either OS with minimal disruption. If you’re in XP but need to reboot into Vista and have several downloads going, simply shut down the appliance, reboot into Vista, then restart the appliance! You’ll be back where you left off in seconds!

Portability: The appliance can be installed on (or easily moved to) a portable USB hard drive. So if you have a friend with a crazy fast Internet connection, you can shut down the appliance on your computer, remove the USB drive from your system, drive to your friend’s house, connect the USB drive to his computer, and restart your downloads immediately. Or let’s say you have a desktop computer in your college dorm room, and want to take your downloads home with you to Mom & Dad’s house. Just shut down the appliance, remove the USB drive and hook it up to the desktop PC at your folk’s house – and you’re instantly back where you were at school!

Security: I know that someone’s going to jump on me for this, but I don’t care! Let’s pretend that you’re a heavy downloader. One day you get a letter in the mail from a law firm that states that you’re being sued by the music industry. By having all of your downloading apps on a virtual machine, you’ll necessarily have no downloading apps on your physical machine. If your hard drive were to be seized in a lawsuit, forensics investigators wouldn’t find any evidence of downloading on your computer… because there aren’t any “illicit” programs on your computer!

Continue reading “Bittorrent as an Appliance”

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Macho Business Donkey Wrestler

“The original title of this book was ‘Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer’ but I see now that it’s… ‘Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler’… you know what it is… I had the book translated in to Japanese then back in again into English. ‘Macho Business Donkey Wrestler’… well there you go… it’s got kind of a ring to it don’t it? Anyway, I wanted to read from chapter three… which is the story of my first rise to financial prominence… I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street… many days no business come to my hut… my hut… but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo… dung… Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans… and pants to match. The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey.”

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R.I.P. Kirsty!

British singer Kirsty MacColl died seven years ago today. Some say she died in a tragic accident; others say that she was murdered. Read the section on her death at Wikipedia and decide for yourself.

In any case, the world lost an incredible talent that day. MacColl’s hits included the rockabilly romp “There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis”, the 60s inspired “They Don’t Know” (made popular in the U.S by Tracey Ullman’s cover), her enchanting cover of Billy Bragg’s “A New England”, and, of course, her single “Fairytale of New York” with The Pogues – which has topped VH-1 UK’s “Greatest Christmas Song” chart three years in a row. The song also came in at number 1 in The Hits “The Nations Favourite Christmas Song” countdown in the UK, number 11 in Channel 4’s “100 Greatest Christmas Moments”, Number 27 on VH-1 UK’s “Greatest Songs Never To Make Number One”, number 23 on VH-1 UK’s “Greatest Lyrics” list, Number 83 in Q Magazines “100 Greatest Ever Songs”, and number 84 on BBC Radio 2’s “Top 100 Greatest Songs of All Time” poll.

You are missed, Kirsty!

Kirsty MacColl

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No Christmas CD This Year

I first laid eyes on a CD burner waaayyyy back in 1996. At the time, even a lowly 2x burner cost around $499, so I couldn’t afford my own. Thankfully, my ex-girlfriend’s mother had one, and she let me borrow it whenever I wanted.

That year I made my first “Christmas CD”. As you might guess, it was a CD full of Christmas music. But not just any Christmas music – it was “cool” Christmas music from bands like The Ramones, Cocteau Twins, Sting, XTC, Captain Sensible, and other New Wave\Punk\80s artists I love.

As time went on, I downloaded more and more of these tracks, and the “Christmas CD” became an annual tradition. Last year, I even put together a “jimcofer.com 10th Annual Christmas Compilation”, but with one twist – I didn’t put it on CD. So many people have iPods and other portable players these days that putting out a CD image for people to download seemed much more complicated that just mixing it all together into one huge MP3 file. That way people could burn it to CD if they wanted, or just dump it to an iPod… or whatever they wanted to do, really.

I’m sad to report that there will be no CD\MP3 compilation at all this year. Why? Mainly because I haven’t found any “new” Christmas songs I like. I’ve completely tapped the store of 80s\New Wave Christmas songs. If there’s a Christmas song by an 80s performer that I don’t have… well, I’d be shocked. And although I’ve looked in to songs by 90s\2000-era performers, I’m just not feeling them. These songs seem… well, “sacreligious” isn’t perhaps the best word for it. But they seem to have a “let’s see how screwed up we can make this song!” vibe to them. It’s like they’re not taking it seriously. And that leaves “traditional” Christmas songs by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby… which are fine, but it’s just not me.

Maybe next year I’ll find some new material. Or maybe I’ll feel inspired enough to choose from the same 126 songs I’ve been using for the past 10 years. Or maybe not. This year, at least, the Christmas CD just isn’t going to happen. My apologies!