… needs to sit down on his butt.

No, really. Taking each and every possible chance to work on your public image by any means necessary (to be read as: any social services, that are at hand should be exploied to their limits) is in fact shallow and obvious. Are you some kind of a show puppet? If you are not, you might consider a bit different approach, because dropping popularity proves this one is not working quite well for you.

I myself hardly give a shit about you, your political beliefs and general mumble jumble you are known for. But problem for me is, it is getting nearly impossible to ignore you, because you seem to pop everywhere I turn. Be it on TV, on the general media or even on YouTube. We all know media is king and your advisors know it even better, but this is starting to cause slight pain in the ass.

Do I give a fuck about you eating chicken wings with some redneck deep down south? No, sir. Do I give a fuck about you playing basketball with your pets in the White House backyard? No, sir. Do I give a shit about you trying to be “the different” president? Hell no, sir.

I don’t need pathetic speeches, political crap and “America equals world” statements. And I certainly don’t need you to be in my house, my office or everywhere I go 24/7. And I put my balls on it, I’m not the only one.

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Remember that little book of mine I was talking about sometime ago? Good news is it’s being printed as I type and it’s premiere will most probably be on February 2nd. Also known as “the hookers and pimps day” in Bulgaria lol.

In the meantime I decided to do something quite unusual. Unusual because I dropped 3D and video production more than 10 years ago and went web. Nevertheless, I decided to make a video. An EVE video. An epic EVE video. Took me 40 days and most of the time was spent “shooting” scenes. Post production itself took about 15 hours or so. Final result is satisfactory for something I haven’t done for a very long time. But nothing is perfect and I almost fainted when I saw a very annoying glitch right in the beginning. It’s caused by simple overlooking and even that it won’t be obvious to the majority of watchers, it’s still inadmissable – planet scene fade is just a second shorter and that causes slight bump when next scene kicks in. Problem is one can’t just replace video on YouTube. And I’m not changing it now, when its popularity surprisingly exploded.

I will be doing more videos in my free time (unless someone hires me to do it for money) when I take enough new good scenes, so watch my YouTube channel. Also watch my Vimeo channel, where all YouTube videos will be doubled. Why is that? Simply – because there are “legal” issues on YouTube.

Aight, enough talking, where is teh video?! Oh well, here it is. I chose not to embed it, so you can watch it in it’s full resolution.

Clicky to watchy mah spaceships pew pew video

“Anyway thanks for introducing me to Kasabian, I’ve got their most recent album (after watching this vid) and it’s genius. Cheers.”

Now, dear YouTube… I know copyrights are a bitch. And I know you’ve been persuaded by publishers to enforce certain fail actions (such as muting a video). But check this out. Do you (all) really believe I am going to license a specific track just to put it in my just-for-fun video, when I do actually own a legal copy of the same album? This is ridiculous! Especially when you take into consideration the simple fact this video (and all other videos sporting a music track) does indeed boost sales! Check out quote in the blue square. That’s a real person, not bullshit I pull out of my ass. So, there you go – 13 bucks down your pocket. And I put my balls on this – he’s not the only one. Welcome to the new millennium btw, seems like your are still stuck in the early 90’s. Well, maybe it’s about time to move the fuck on and adopt a brand new paradigm?

p.s. Sony, dudes, your Vegas Pro is amazing! Even that I won’t be paying nearly 600 quid for shits and giggles anytime soon…

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What the exploit does, is alter your posts, adding random hidden containers, including links to various sites.

As far as I understand it, it tries to trick Pagerank and help SEO-ing those sites. Containers are randomly generated and placed at random spots within post content. Most commonly you will find them at the bottom, but also amid lists, paragraphs and everything else. They generally look like this:

<p style="display:none"><a href="http://lavamp3.com/buy_mp3_album1609846/N-P-G-/Gold-nigga.html">N.P.G. Gold nigga download</a></p>

<div style="display:none"><a href="http://johnquiggin.com?sweat">sweat.mp3</a></div>

<p style="display:none"><a href="http://lavamp3.com/buy_mp3_album2430365/Rex-Stout/Nw-46-A-Family-Affair.html">buy Nw 46 - A Family Affair mp3 album</a></p>

But it does not only affect post contents, it does alter post dates, which results in posts being rearranged and some of them being scheduled for publishing in the next weeks or month. And that’s how you will know you’ve been hit. As soon as you see your front page posts shuffled, you should know you are pwned.

But that’s not the worst part yet. You will soon find out the inevitable – you need to go through all your posts and clean up injected code by hand. Unless, of course, you can come up with some ingenious tool, that does it for you. I’ve got totally frustrated having to clean like 40 posts, so I can’t even imagine the amount of fury one will develop if they need to go through a couple hundred. Don’t even want to think thousand or more. But, hey, there is good news too – at least it seems it does not affect drafts.

So what should you do? First of all – see if you have got a recent database backup. Depending on the number of your posts restoring it may save you hours or days. Even at the cost of few recent posts and comments lost, it’s still worth it.

1. Change your MySQL database password to something brute-force resistant – use special characters, capital letters and numbers and make it at least 8 characters long. Do it now!
2. Change your admin password to something equally complex just in case.
3. If there are scheduled posts, reset them to draft so they won’t get published in the meantime.
4. If you don’t have a recent database backup, either dump your database and find an automated way to clean up every segment containing display:none (I think Dreamweaver’s advanced search and replace abilities might be used for that task, but haven’t tried it), or start cleaning it yourself post by post.
5. Once you clean the mess up make sure to check on shuffled post dates. Unfortunately, you can’t revert to original dates, so you will have to improvise here.

Good luck.

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But it seems Rose City and Poco Systems forgot to agree on implementing a core feature. You just can’t import your Courier boxes in Poco. I would have laughed if it wasn’t ridiculous.

Anyway, I’ve downloaded the trial version and will give it a spin. Post will be updated on-the-fly.

Update 1: When cyrillic e-mail is sent by UTF incapable client (such as Courier), there are encoding problems in notification pane and tabs, while it displays correctly in view pane. When sent by Poco, the same email would display correctly in notification pane and tabs, but incorrectly in view pane.

Update 2: There are also problems with rich-text interpretation. About 80% of HTML emails I receive are shown simply as plain text, including HTML syntax. That makes it impossible to read the content. And so far, I haven’t found a way to switch to a plain text display or something that will strip HTML code. The only solution is to view it in browser, which is not an option for a busy daily routine.

Conclusion: It is an improvement over Courier, yes, but not what one would expect for their money.

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First thing that crosses my mind when someone says Blaupunkt is piece of chunk.

But what was my surprise when I took a look at the new product line. I was astounded by the global design switch, that finally makes their stuff get 21st century looks. Their most impressive move however, is they finally did something they should have done years ago – made use of their most distinguished feature. The blue point. It’s your name and logo, after all. What were you thinking all these years?

Kudos on the gutsy decision. You may even win me as a client.

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… was interesting. Lots of exhibitors, lots of innovations, lots of visitors. Good there was huge space dedicated to interior doors, most of which awesome, and some of exhibitors’ stands made my jaw drop. There was also area dedicated to fireplaces, which is something quite interesting, especially when it comes to design and function. 4 hours were enough to browse all areas of interest. Half of the whole expo, to be precise.

Since it was my first time in Italy, I did not like Italian attitude, at all and at times it made me feel I want to smack some faces. Cops that approached me while I was taking pictures of a hanging Windows 2000 based subway ticket machine were quite arrogant. Looks like their vocabulary lacks phrases like “sir” or “please”. It felt pretty much like home. They made me delete the pictures and wrote down my ID details. Terrorists probably don’t flash around DSLR’s for you to notice and play your “tough-italian” farce, stupid cunts!

If you happen to be in Milan, you can skip visiting Duomo di Milano, where the security is equally arrogant and besides being a really big church, there is nothing too impressive (I mean it’s not much different than St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vien, for example), but don’t forget to get the taste of genuine pizza. While I kind of prefer Canadian style, nothing can compare to the original.

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Only in Lenovo’s sick imagination. Real life is not so forgiving or generous to the common geek, let alone when he’s trying to chase chicks proudly speaking of his 10-kilos-2-headed-laptop. If it should be a laptop you will be impressing chicks with (what’s wrong with you, mate?!), at least let me give you a clue.

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But let me put it this way – would you sacrifice your private life? Would you turn yourself into a billboard? I guess many would.

Our guy Jason here decided to do just that. I even saw an opinion on StumbleUpon, saying it was a cool, funny, and clever business model. FFS, give me a break! A model almost so clever, cool, and funny, as selling the rights to name and use your child on ebay and nearly as clever, cool, and funny, as selling pixels at $1 each to imbecilles who did not realise it just can’t last!

Well, okay, it might be fun for Jason, because he is the one to get the money, but certainly won’t be that fun for you in the end.

Things people do for money always make me go hmm. But things people pay money for always make me think about the world we live in and what went wrong with it.

“Well it’s a pretty simple idea and I’m a pretty simple guy.”

Back on the “business model”, no one can say it better than Jason himself. Good luck, corporate America, using some simple dude as your face. It’s cheap enough, so you don’t need to go into details, right? Almost like shopping at IKEA – you just can’t say no, even if you know you will most likely get a pile of useless crap.

You found yourself a good day job replacement there, buddy. Put the money to a good cause, will ya? Because it might not work next year. But then again, you can just remove the “r” in “shirt” and get a brand new, clever, cool, and funny business model. Like wearing sausages or something.

p.s. no hard feelings, whatsoever.

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The last thing I would expect from AMD when spending a good few hundred on a 4870, is denied access to the download section. So instead of the official site, I had to get the latest drivers on… The Pirate Bay. Good job, AMD!

I felt way better with nVidia.

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And while I will still keep the old inspiration gallery for some time, I will not update it. And to make an even more drastic change, I won’t accept submissions anymore. But I will keep a brand new inspiration section within this journal instead!

Next, I will go through all the old entries, and move those of them who are still worthy here. The rest will be scrapped. Once I do that, I will remove the old gallery completely.

Don’t panic, it will take me a good few months, at least. In the meantime, stick around – you may find something useful.

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