A couple of weeks back I launched goodSchist, a blog dedicated entirely to my interests in earth science. I decided I wanted to be part of the Accretionary Wedge – an earth science themed blog carnival. Rather than putting my posts here with all the other bullshit I post about, I thought that making a new site, with a layout I’ve been working on for ages (originally intended for another site I “run”), would be the way to do it.

I’ve got a podcast in the works (or, as I’m calling it, a podClast – just to stick with the geology puns). I’ve also got a few articles I’ve been working on for this site, getting closer to a state where I can post them on goodSchist.

So, if you’re interested in geology or science in general, take a look at goodSchist. It’s good shit.

Here’s some wicked-looking cushions that are shaped and textured like rocks. I’ll have some of these in a corner of my house. When I have enough money for a house. And enough to buy a few dozen of these cushions. Which I can’t imagine are cheap. In my opinion this would be the ultimate way for a geologist to relax.

Sourced from Boing Boing. The manufacturer is the French company Smarin Design.

This image makes me smile:

Not only has the Akismet plugin spared me from wading through the filth that is comment spam, but it has done so silently and to an affect I am wholly impressed by. There is another point I am impressed by, in that there have been 1035 spam comments and pingbacks posted to my blog over the last 15 days, which equates to approximately 69 a day. This manner of spamming is something I had not had a grasp of the magnitude of, so I would like to express my respect to the developers involved in Akismet, and my continuing derision to those who spam.

This very sad piece of news makes me a very sad panda. Comedy Central have demanded YouTube remove all Daily Show clips. Which is a bit of a bitch, since I don’t live in America, so the only version of the Daily Show I can reasonably expect to see legally is the lame International Version once a week on C4. C4 being the channel that is barely broadcast, more yelled from the top of a transmission tower located on the Moon, unless you have cable or satellite TV. Of which i have neither. Since I’m a poor student.

I mean, fair enough, it’s their content and they own the copyright. But it’s a daily news show of which you can’t buy DVDs. it’s not like they’d be losing much business, if any. But hey, if Comedy Central want to be a bunch of cunts, no worries. I’ll just have to “pirate” the show in another manner.

In the last few days I’ve had an upsurge in the amount of comment spam I get on yorrike.com. Today alone I had on the order of 100 spam-filled trackbacks and comments to wade through. So I did something about it.

I hate spam.

You’d think if I were to ask you;

Hey, bro, what the fuck crawled under your floor and died?

I’d be speaking with marvellous wit, tempting your mind’s eye with a poetic play of prose and that sexy deep voice of mine. But no. I’m speaking literally here. Something, I am guessing a rat, crawled under my floor boards and proceeded to shuffle off its tiny mortal coil, leaving behind a haunting odour which could only be eloquently described as “a mixture of jockstrap, compost pale and shit”.

That’s what my room smells like.

You’d imagine living on a floor directly above a butcher, I would have been positively accepting of the smell of decaying flesh. Alas, for all the nights of being awoken by the glittering sounds of knives being sharpened and meat hooks being hung, I have only grown accustomed to the smell of the meat-smoking facility “out back”. And as I sit here at 2am, following a previous night’s sleep totalling 3 hours, finishing a website that has to be done right now, I can only imagine how peaceful it would be to be snuggled up, listening to the rain fall gently outside as I laid rotting under the floorboards.

Over the past few months of using OS X, I’ve been in my old swing of using Firefox as my browser. Over the past few weeks, however, I’ve been getting anoyed with Firefox crawling along, taking ages to load pages, and generally preforming poorly.

So, since Opera make a free, ad-free version of their browser for OS X, and since I’ve had it insalled for the past few months owing to various web development, I’m going to give Opera a full “go” as it were.

I found a neat page of Firefox extension equivalents in Opera, and it turns out most of my needs are filled in Opera by default. There’s even a user stylesheet for hiding and selectively playing flash, which is a biggy for me, what with all the Youtubing I do. The only thing lacking is a true equivalent of the web developer extension, which is essential for my various tom-dickery in the web design and layout sphere. But to be honest, I don’t hate Firefox, so a flick back to it for any web development is no problem with me (especially with QuickSilver making launching so quick).

As for daily browsing, i welcome my faster, less bloated web browser to the forefront of my web experience, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

This is the music video for Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy”, and it’s the funniest and coolest thing I’ve seen in a very long time. I’ve been a Weird Al fan since I was about 8 years old, so it’s great to see he’s still kicking some wicked parodies and keeping up with the current culture of nerdcore and the internet.

I should probably pimp my YouTube favourites page at this point, since I keep a lot of videos I like in there, so if you’ve got a few hours to waste, have a browse through there.

In a similar vein as maps, Google has released Google Mars.

You can browse around Mars in elevation, infrared and visible light modes and see how our tiny neighbour and last of our solar system’s terrestrial planets, looks. Keep an eye out for roads, spaceports and scientific stations popping up over the next 1,000 years.

I’ve been wanting to reduce the complexity of Yorrike.com for a while now, firstly with the now redundant WP short archive month hack I posted about (below) and now with a totally new take on the colour and structural theme I’ve had running on this site for a while.

I’ll be making more changes and adding a few things here and there over the next day or two, but overall, this is it. Feedback would be appreciated : )