A Man and his Penguin

FUCKING BRILLIANT.

Okay, so you want more than just a fanboi review? Well, tough luck!

I won’t go into the storyline, as it sounds incredibly complicated and boring when read; but trust me, it doesn’t get in the way of the music. This film is packed with 60s-style R&B that makes you want to get up and dance. This is coming from someone who usually hates anything R&B-sounding, and tomorrow I’m going to go and buy the soundtrack!

One of the reasons why I’m buying the soundtrack is because the speakers in the cinema were terrible. Very low quality. Which is a shame, because fantastic music like this needs to be played so you can hear every note, every voice, every beat!

Yes, I hear you say. But how was Amanda? She was very nice. Her character didn’t really do much sadly, but she did have some funny moments in a generally-funny film. You actually only see her in two outfits; the one that I Gimped an Ubuntu logo onto :-)   And a stunning green number at the end of the movie that made my mouth water. Angelica tells me it was actually made from the character’s curtains, which I think I read elsewhere.

And yes, Amanda sings! But it’s only a few lines. And (I might be wrong but) it sounded like she had a bit of help from her singing coach, Mr Autotune. Still, it’s something we haven’t seen Amanda do before. And it’s painfully obvious that she doesn’t dance; oh well, the girl has comic timing and can act. Still, it does raise the question of why she was cast in a musical with SO MUCH music, when she barely sings and doesn’t dance. Interesting question. I guess I’ll have to wait for the DVD release and all the special features.

Of course, being an Amanda loonie (or a "Penelope", there’s an in-joke for you other loonies!), I couldn’t bear to see her kissing some other guy and singing about "Now I’ve tasted chocolate, I’m never going back"!

But yeah, DON’T buy the soundtrack album from iTunes. Buy it from a CD store. I’m not even talking about this in relation to DRM - I’m talking in terms of sound quality! You’ll thank me for it later, I promise you. You will be infected with this music. I’m actually seriously considering buying a surround sound system or at least a good stereo from work, for the purpose of playing the soundtrack on.

If you’re thinking about seeing this film, don’t think. GO AND SEE IT. I had thought that I’d be disappointed, well, I certainly wasn’t (well, I was disappointed that Amanda seems to have fallen for some other guy, but I’m sure I’m still in the running).

That is all. Damn, have to do a podcast tomorrow, guess I’ll be going into the city to buy the CD a bit later on in the day!

I feel somewhat guilty. After hearing that Vanessa Hodgens (from High School Musical) had some private nude pics leaked to the internet, I just had to go and take a look.

It’s clear that these are VERY personal pictures, intended only for the eyes of her boyfriend. And now I’ve looked at them. Paedophiles have looked at her nudity. 13 year old boys have probably seen what she never intended for them to see. I feel like I’ve invaded her privacy, and that I’ve made her predicament worse.

But here’s the really bad part. I’ve got these pictures on my computer, and I feel guilty about that, but I keep on looking. Those are very hot pictures. I’ve actually taken such a close look that I noticed that she has a TDK stereo (one with NXT speakers) hanging up on her wall. We’ve got one at work.

So yeah, I have very mixed feelings.

And there’s this guy who my boss knows, who comes into work and asks to use our fax to fax documents to Vietnam. Tanja says that he goes to Asia every so often to have sex. The documents he wanted faxed today were an application to bring somebody into Australia. Very creepy.

And now I think I’m starting on a new search for a girlfriend; the girl who I have been talking to the last couple of weeks has just said some things about me that I really don’t appreciate.

I feel somewhat guilty. After hearing that Vanessa Hodgens (from High School Musical) had some private nude pics leaked to the internet, I just had to go and take a look.

It’s clear that these are VERY personal pictures, intended only for the eyes of her boyfriend. And now I’ve looked at them. Paedophiles have looked at her nudity. 13 year old boys have probably seen what she never intended for them to see. I feel like I’ve invaded her privacy, and that I’ve made her predicament worse.

But here’s the really bad part. I’ve got these pictures on my computer, and I feel guilty about that, but I keep on looking. Those are very hot pictures. I’ve actually taken such a close look that I noticed that she has a TDK stereo (one with NXT speakers) hanging up on her wall. We’ve got one at work.

So yeah, I have very mixed feelings.

And there’s this guy who my boss knows, who comes into work and asks to use our fax to fax documents to Vietnam. Tanja says that he goes to Asia every so often to have sex. The documents he wanted faxed today were an application to bring somebody into Australia. Very creepy.

And now I think I’m starting on a new search for a girlfriend; the girl who I have been talking to the last couple of weeks has just said some things about me that I really don’t appreciate.

I just got the latest version of Exaile - it really has a lot of Amarok features in it now.

But it’s still got a bug that has plagued it since its early days. An album/artist combination of "Various - Various" will invariably pull down the "High School Musical" cover from Amazon. Funny.

On that subject actually, I think the main reason why High School Musical has been such a big hit is because watching it is the only way you can listen to actual new POP music!

If "Pretty" is a feature, and Ubuntu is orange; then I’ve found a feature-packed new theme for Ubuntu.

It’s called "White?!". This is an *orange* GTK/Metacity theme (not Ubuntu’s caramel style) which looks clean, pretty, and industrial. It’s lovely in many different ways - open up a menu and move your mouse over one of the items, or fire up Totem and gaze at the faux compositing on the slider.

The same author has done a couple of other nice themes along the same sort of lines: HRM and OrangeLINstaBlackPlastic. They beat the shit out of the Vista and OS X clone themes.

Check it out at gnome-look.org.

If "Pretty" is a feature, and Ubuntu is orange; then I’ve found a feature-packed new theme for Ubuntu.

It’s called "White?!". This is an *orange* GTK/Metacity theme (not Ubuntu’s caramel style) which looks clean, pretty, and industrial. It’s lovely in many different ways - open up a menu and move your mouse over one of the items, or fire up Totem and gaze at the faux compositing on the slider.

The same author has done a couple of other nice themes along the same sort of lines: HRM and OrangeLINstaBlackPlastic. They beat the shit out of the Vista and OS X clone themes.

Check it out at gnome-look.org.

Someone on Cnet’s Mac forum asked if dual-booting Windows and Mac OS can result in Windows viruses moving to the Mac side. I replied and said that there were no viruses in the wild that could do that, but that it is technically possible and even "easy".

How would it work?

1. User running Windows contracts a virus. This virus contains a payload, which is itself but as a Macintosh executable or a shell script. The virus also contains an HFS+ filesystem driver.

2. The virus, having access to the admin account or even "SYSTEM", loads its HFS+ driver into the Windows kernel, scans for Macintosh partitions, and finds them. It then inserts its payload into /etc/rc.local (or some other part of the Mac OS’s startup system, yes I’m aware that it doesn’t use init).

3. When the user boots into the Mac OS, the Macintosh automatically starts up the Mac version of the virus, with root privileges.

4. Congratulations, your shiny new Mac has been completely and utterly compromised.

Do you run a dual-boot Linux and Windows system? Or a dual-boot Linux and Mac system? Don’t look so smug - Windows, Mac OS and Linux are perfectly capable of bypassing eachother’s access controls. Sure, I don’t think anyone will write a virus that targets Linux and Mac dual-booters :-)  But it’s all possible, and it’s something you should probably be aware of.

Keep your insecure Windows / Mac OS installations OFF the internet. That’s right, whenever possible you should NOT let them recieve a single packet from a remote location.

I found a cool site called Ez-Tracks, which gives you free music; even big-name songs are there legally for free. There are two catches:

1. You have to wade through heaps of ads, and the site probably spams you mercilessly (I used a fake address; I hope the owner of "stuffit@hotmail.com" isn’t too annoyed at me!)

2. More importantly, the songs are not with the original artists.

Yep, they’re covers, which are very faithful to the originals. Sometimes, they actually find some singers who sound like the original singers. Very impressive. Some of them are a bit lame, like the one of Seal’s "Kiss From A Rose", but some are excellent like the one of the Spice Girls’ "Weekend Love".

While doing this, I downloaded the Mel C track "Independence Day". This was one of the better covers. While listening to this track, I realised a truth about today’s pop music. I used to give Avril Lavigne credit for being the first pop singer to pretend to be a rocker. I now know that this isn’t true: In fact, Mel C was doing it years and years ago.

So I’ll give Mel C credit for being a wily, history-rewriting bitch who was also years ahead of her time

As part of my ongoing quest to do away with Windows forever, I attempted to find a hard disk MP3 player that I can use on Linux. This quest quickly became depressing; it’s down to the iPods (I’m not a zuspar, thank you very much!) and the Creative Zen which I can’t get through work.

So I decided to look for big Flash-based players - I mean, my 20 gig player is less than half full, so 8 gigs should be plenty really. I narrowed it down to an iRiver (not sure if we can still get them), and a Sony which looked excellent. Until I realised that you could only put videos on there with drag and drop; music still had to be loaded through Sony’s proprietary software. Damn. Why are there seemingly no 8 gig players that use UMS (USB Mass Storage) without a database?

Maybe I have to get an iPod and be a zuspar like the rest of ‘em.

NOW PLAYING: "Let Love Lead The Way" by Countdown (covering the Spice Girls song)

P.S. Spice Girls fans will know what I mean when I say "Viva Forever" to a prominent musician who died this week.

We talked about if celebrities started mentioning Ubuntu; Sal asked for the name of a celebrity, and I replied "Amanda Bynes". Sal said that Ubuntu would get a whole heap of new converts if Amanda Bynes showed up at a movie premiere wearing an Ubuntu T-shirt.

Excuse my bad Gimpjob; this was a quick-and-dirty image edit. And bear in mind that Amanda Bynes does not necessarily endorse Ubuntu 

I have placed dibbs on the first wireless iPod virus: "Zuspar". As soon as a virus that takes advantage of the wireless features of the new iPod is written and discovered, it shall be called "Zuspar" as I have already reserved naming rights in advance.

If it’s not given this name, I will lobby the anti-virus corporations!