Starship Titanic Fix

I recently purchased Starship Titanic for the PC and came across something of a problem. In Windows XP, the video parts of it did not play back. Instead there was just a black area on the screen which was, frankly, unhelpful. Anyway, after a bit of seaching we came across this chap's blog which contained a fix for it. Basically, one of the Service Pack 2 Dlls stops the game playing back it's avi files. the fix is to download the Service pack 1 iccvid.dll and put it in your Starship Titanic directory - the one with ST.EXE in it. And wonder of wonders, the game runs fine! You can download the file from Lofland's Blog, or I've hosted a copy of it here, just in case.

Three cheers for Lofland! Hip Hip...

Numbness

So this morning I was roused from the cosy depths of my bed by the postman rapping on the door. Struggling downstairs (fortunately remembering to put on my dressing hown as I did so, I opened the door to be presented with a small package and a request for a signature.

The postman handed me a form and a pen. Which I promptly dropped. I had, you see, been sleeping on my arm and it was completely and utterly numb from the elbow down. I had exactly no control over my fingers and therefore couldn't grip a bloody thing.

So, bending down to try and pick up the form and the pen, we quickly established that feeling had not returned to my arm and the poor postman not only had to pick up the stuff for me, but then had to wait while I gave my arm a good shake until the feeling returned and I was able to scrawl my name on the form.

It would have been embarrasing, only I was half asleep.

Sportsmanship

Not a football post... honest.Our french friends have impressed us once again with their handling of a tense situation!

Ryan Giggs' late winner for Manchester United almost sparked a walk-out from
angry Lille players at the climax of a controversial Champions League clash.
Giggs curled in a quick free-kick after 83 minutes while Lille were still
assembling their defensive wall. Lille players, furious that an earlier header
by Peter Odemwingie had been ruled out, walked off the pitch as the last 16
first leg clash boiled over. They eventually returned, and United held on for a
crucial victory.

That's right. The french team said "If you don't let us win, then you can't play with our ball!"This was the same match where this happened:

But the main talking point of a drab first 45 minutes were the worrying scenes
involving United's supporters, with too many appearing to be packed in lower
tier of the away section. Dozens of United supporters were concerned, and French
police appeared to respond to a genuine security problem by firing off tear gas.

They'd obviously run out of white flags...

Girls in swimsuits are dumber then girls in jumpers...

Apparently.In this otherwise serious article about the 'sexualisation' of girls in the media, I came across this paragraph:

School performance can also suffer. In one experiment cited, college-aged women
were asked to try on and evaluate either a swim suit or a sweater. While they
waited for 10 minutes while wearing the garment, they completed a math test."The
results revealed that young women in swimsuits performed significantly worse ...
than those wearing sweaters."

Who came up with a genius idea like that?"I'd like to apply for a government grant to sit in a big room with a bunch of 18 year old girls in bikinis. Eh? Why? Oh, er because I want to see their... er, see if they perform differently in a mental acuity test to er... girls in jumpers. Yes. That's it."

A moment's silence, please, for Dr Adler, who died last week. Who the hell is that, I hear you ask. Well, I'll tell you. He was the (co) inventor of the TV Remote and..er some other TV stuff!

Best known as the "Father of the TV Remote Control," Dr. Robert Adler is
responsible for a large number of significant scientific contributions to the
electronics industry, including landmark inventions in the field of consumer
products and in sophisticated specialized communications equipment. He holds
more than 180 patents......Dr. Adler developed Zenith's Space Command®
ultrasonic remote control for TV sets, the first practical wireless TV remote,
which Zenith introduced in 1956......Among Dr. Adler's earlier work is the
gated-beam tube which... greatly simplified the sound system in television
receivers, markedly improving reception by screening out certain types of sound
interference while lowering the cost of the sound channel...a synchronizing
circuit which permitted demonstrably greater stability in fringe areas of
television reception....The electron beam parametric amplifier, developed in
1958 by Dr. Adler jointly with Dr. Glen Wade...used by radio astronomers in the
U.S. as well as abroad, and by the U.S. Air Force for long-range missile
detection...instrumental in the 1966 public demonstration...of an experimental
television display using ultrasonic deflection and modulation of a laser beam to
produce a wall-size TV picture without a cathode ray tube...

He was a busy boy, eh? And he had about a zillion awards, too.

The Movie Review To End All Movie Reviews

Heh heh heh. Now I reckon '300' is gonna be the best movie of the year and now, having read this review of it, I just wanna see it even more. This is the coolest review I've ever seen of a movie. It tells you everything you need to know!

I just saw a movie that’ll give your eyes boners, make your balls scream and
make you poop DVD copies of THE TRANSPORTER. It’s called 300. I don’t know what
the title has to do with the movie, but they could’ve called it KITTENS MAKING
CANDLES and it’d still rule.It’s about these 300 Greek dudes who stomp the
sugar-coated shit out of like a million other dudes. I have a feeling that a lot
of high school sports coaches are going to show this film to their teams before
they play. Also, gay dudes and divorced women are going to use screen captures
for computer wallpaper.The movie takes place about a million years ago, and it’s
sort of like a prequel to SIN CITY. Except way less guns and cars but twice as
much skull splitting. If you watch this movie and go into a Taco Bell, and say
to the cashier, “I need some extra sauce packets” guess what? You’re getting
twenty sauce packets because your face will punch him in the brain.I can’t spoil
the plot because THANK GOD THERE ISN’T ONE. Just ass kicking that kicks ass
that, while said ass is getting kicked, is kicking yet more ass that’s hitting
someone’s balls with a hammer made of ice but the ice is frozen whiskey.TWO COOL
THINGS ABOUT THE MOVIE AND ONE THING I DIDN’T LIKE:COOL THING ONE:HEAVY METAL
DURING BATTLE SCENESWho gives a shit if the music isn’t historically correct?
LORD OF THE RINGS could’ve used some Journey. This movie has that chu-CHUNG kind
of metal that you hear in your head when your shift supervisor at Wetzel’s
Pretzel is telling you that you’ll have to stay for clean up and you wish you
had a sock filled with quarters in your hand.COOL THING TWO:FOES, MINI-BOSSES
AND A BIG BOSSBasically, the Greek dudes are fighting these Persian dudes, but
the director, who must have a dick made of three machine guns, does it all like
a video game. The Greeks fight every death metal video from the last ten years.
There’s wave after wave of giants, freaks, ninjas, mutants, wizards, and a
hunchback who looks like he’s got Rosie O’Donnell on his back. Would I have been
happy if Dom DeLuise from HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART I had shown up? Maybe, but
this movie more than makes up for that glaring oversight.NOT SO GOOD THING:DUDE
NUDITY (“DUDE-ITY”)These are Greek times, when there were a lot of naked women
around. And there are some naked women in this film, but almost every naked
woman scene has a muscular dude giving the screen an ass picnic. Dude-ity is
something directors put in their movies so people will think they’re serious, I
guess, and not just throwing in naked hotties. Any directors reading this – IT’S
OKAY TO JUST THROW IN NAKED HOTTIES. Can’t someone make a movie about naked
Amazons and call it PAUSE BUTTON?My final analysis is 300 the most ass-ruling
movie I’ve seen this year, and will probably be the King of 2007 unless someone
makes a movie where a pair of sentient boobs fights a werewolf.

I get the impression that he liked it a bit.And, yes. He should probably re-read his first couple of paragraphs...

Ladies, come smell my armpits!

Because apparently, it's gonna turn you on!

WASHINGTON - For women, apparently there’s nothing like the smell of a man’s
sweat.Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley said women who
sniffed a chemical found in male sweat experienced elevated levels of an
important hormone, along with higher sexual arousal, faster heart rate and other
effects.They said the study, published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience,
represents the first direct evidence that people secrete a scent that influences
the hormones of the opposite sex.The study focused on androstadienone,
considered a male chemical signal. Previous research had established that a
whiff of it affected women’s mood, sexual and physiological arousal and brain
activation. Its impact on hormones was less clear.A derivative of testosterone,
it is found in male sweat as well as in saliva and semen. It smells somewhat
musky.“It really tells us that a lot of things can be triggered by smelling
sweat,” Claire Wyart, who led the study, said in an interview Wednesday.The
researchers measured levels of the hormone cortisol in the saliva of 48 female
undergraduates at Berkeley, average age of about 21, after the women took 20
sniffs from a jar of androstadienone. Cortisol is secreted by the body to help
maintain proper arousal and sense of well-being, respond to stress and other
functions.Cortisol levels in the women who smelled androstadienone shot up
within roughly 15 minutes and stayed elevated for up to an hour. Consistent with
previous research, the women also reported improved mood, higher sexual arousal,
and had increased blood pressure, heart rate and breathing.

The first meal...

Whilst in the supermarket last night, I found myself having a conversation about the first meal I ever cooked for a girlfriend. I concluded that this would have been beans and burgers on toast when I was about 16 or 17 (about '92). Now we're not talking about beans and beefburgers... we're talking about the tins of beans and burgers you get from Tesco and heat in the microwave. Mmmm. Didn't burn the toast, either! I bet she was really impressed.

No more red...

I was just browsing the Royal Mail website (as you do) and came across the following copyright statement at the bottom of this page:

Royal Mail, the Royal Mail Cruciform, the colour red and SmartStamp are all
registered trademarks of Royal Mail Group plc.The colour red is
copyrighted?

Sleepwalking, anyone?

I am reliably informed that during the night I climbed out of bed, stood at the foot of it and announced that I was concerned about the 'things' at the end of the bed.

On being told that it really wasn't a problem (apparently I took some convincing), I returned to bed and fell asleep immediately.I have no memory of this incident, so choose to believe that it never happened.

Move along. there's nothing to see here... except the 'things' at the end of the bed. I'm quite worried about them!

All new levels of grimness...

So, I thought we had problems in my old office with the phantom sh1tter who would alternately leave giant logs or pebbledashing unflushed in the gents. Well, after 2 grim incidents in the last week at this new office, those problems kinda pale in comparison. If you are eating your lunch, or just have a generally delicate disposition please do not read on!

Grim incident #1
On entering a cubicle in the gents loos, I was confronted with the sight of a large screwed up wad of toilet paper on the toilet seat. With sh1t on! So... having wiped his @rse, Mr Grim Sh1tter chucked his toilet paper in the general direction of the loo, missed and then went ahed and flushed anyway. I'm sorry, there's no way it was accidental. It was ON THE LOO SEAT! Just below the flush handle!Pretty nasty, huh. Well, grim incident #2 is arguably worse.

Grim incident #2
We have these special bins for our used plastic cups dotted around the office. They have a hole in the centre for any excess liqued and a series of holes around the outside in which you drop the empty cups.One of my colleagues just came back from the coffee machine looking rather... unsettled. It seems that someone felt a little poorly and used a plastic cup to catch his or her vomit. Not a dumb idea, you might think. The dumbness (Stead, your crossbow is almost certainly required here!) comes when our resident Chunder Monkey decides that the best way to deal with his or her little cup of sick is to pour it into (and around) the centre section of the cup bin and drop the cup itself into the cup holes.

I'm not coming in today...

Now, this might be a totally unjustified rant, so please just let me know If I should just shut up.

My boss didn't come into work yesterday. The reason that he didn't come into work can be boiled down to a very simple reason: He didn't want to drive a Nissan Micra.

The story goes something like this: The Boss was driving along in his shiny, shiny Merc when he was rearended by a bus. Nothing too serious - in fact the only damage was cosmetic. So about a week later, a man from the garage was due to pick up his car to have bent bits straightened and broken bits mended. In exchange for his slighly mangled Merc, he was to receive a courtesy car for a couple of days.

The problem with this arrangement was that when the courtesy car arrived... it was a Nissan Micra.

"I'm not driving a Nissan Micra," said the Boss.

"I'm sorry sir, that's all we've got," said the Man From The Garage.

"Well I'm not driving it," said the Boss. "Take it away!"

And they did. Which left the Boss with no courtesy car with which to drive to work. So what all this boils down to is that my Boss is too much of a Mecedes snob to drive a little japanese car for day.The question I put to you, the jury, for your consideration is this: Was he right to skive on this basis?And also... would you drive a Nissan Micra?