From drinkcold.com: Desktop:

Perhaps a handy program could be invented which automatically deleted your desktop contents every 14 days or something.

Start » Settings » Control Panel » Display » Desktop tab » Customize Desktop button. Down the bottom you can set it to “clean up” your desktop every 60 days. Not quite the same as deleting everything, and seeing as it’s part of Windows it probably doesn’t work anything like you’d expect it to, but hey, it’s a suggestion :)

Dudes and dudettes, it’s competition time here at Ludicrous HQ. The story goes that I have 2 hard drives in my PC which used to be called XP and Data, because one had Windows XP installed on it and the other was just for data. Now, however, they both have XP installed on them and the names have been rendered useless.

The Competition:

Name my 2 hard drives. The names must be something original and interesting, not something predictable and boring like Bill and Ben or Phil and Grant.

The Prize:

A signed printout of lud.icro.us, a used envelope with your own name and address written on it (the former probably being contained inside the latter), and a podcast in your honour. There is no runner-up prize.

How to Enter:

Post your entries by commenting on this post! Don’t forget to put a valid email address else I won’t be able to contact you to send you your wonderful prizes. Each person may submit three entries (ie. three lots of two names). Closing date is Tuesday 8th November at 11:59:58.5 PM and I’ll pick a winner shortly thereafter.

There are some good looking films coming out soon (and out already). Even though my bank balance doesn’t agree with me at the moment, I must get to the cinema to see all of these!

• Night Watch (trailer)
• The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (trailer)
• Domino (trailer)
• Saw 2 (trailer)
• The Constant Gardener (trailer)
• The Exorcism of Emily Rose (trailer)

Of course, one film I won’t be seeing is Cheaper by the Dozen 2. The BBC snippet here pretty much sums it up: “Steve Martin continues his slide into mediocrity with an entirely unnecessary sequel to his 2004 kid-stuffed film”. As an added bonus, the website address displayed at the end of the trailer is wrong and takes you to a generic search engine/directory listing site instead.

Here is some of what went on during my most recent trip to Newcastle-Upon-Bulman, and in usual Bon fashion I’m posting it three days after it actually happened.

Within hours of arriving I swallowed half a maggot. Helen bought Rey a small bottle of Tequila for his birthday which contained a real maggot, which apparently acts as a hallucinogenic when swallowed with the tequila. Seeing as Rey wasn’t manly enough to do the whole maggot, he choppped it in half and we done half each while Helen filmed it.

Rey & Bon do Maggot Shots » 2.4 mb MPEG Video

Then we ate Subway and went out and, as he mentioned, Rey found sixty quid on the floor after Jason walked straight past it. Rey then treated us all to loads more lemonade even though it was his own birthday, and Jason attempted to (and very almost did) down a bottle of Corona…

Jason Downing a Corona » 1.6 mb MPEG Video

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is definitely worth watching. Nando’s chicken owns. Rey’s little brother is cool. So is drinking curdled Bailey’s, vodka, and Smirnoff Ice through a straw. Being hit by a car isn’t*. Apple iBooks are indeed lush but the keyboard layout does my head in. Also, Rey is the first person in the world to own a some official lud.icro.us merchandise.

* Technically not part of BonBourn I.

Seeing as Rey hasn’t posted this, here it is. While walking down the street en route to Nando’s…

Reyhan: “Helen, do you like AJAX?”
Helen: “No, I prefer gravy.”

This blog post is revolutionary for 2 reasons.

• It’s the first time I’ve blogged from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
• It’s the first time I’ve blogged on an Apple iBook

It feels good, yo.

Ludicrous, Incorporated is closed for business until Tuesday 25th October. Please leave a message after the tone and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.

An update to my previous post:

• Start work at 06:45 or shortly before - completed!
• Finish work at 14:15 or shortly after - completed!
• Go shopping for a new hoodie - completed but failed to buy one :(
• Get a haircut (”A number 4 please, my good man!”) - failed!
• Pick up my new K&N air filter for the Vectra - completed!
• Select CDs for the journey to Rey’s on Saturday - failed!
• Go to Kayleigh’s birthday bash - completed!

Things I shall do tomorrow (not necessarily in this order):

• Start work at 06:45 or shortly before
• Finish work at 14:15 or shortly after
• Go shopping for a new hoodie
• Get a haircut (”A number 4 please, my good man!”)
• Pick up my new K&N air filter for the Vectra
• Select CDs for the journey to Rey’s on Saturday
• Go to Kayleigh’s birthday bash

I linked to this video back in January on JB.com, but it’s really funny and I was talking to Justin about it today and he said he hadn’t seen it so I thought I’d link to it again! It’s called Hello? Fuck!. The video on the page is a 5.3 MB Quicktime MOV.

I’ve just been looking at my referrer stats for lud.icro.us. Turns out I’m pretty popular on MSN Search, especially with adult content related searches. Veteran readers will know that this was also the case for my old blog on JohnBlackbourn.com. I often had visits from people looking for free Elisha Cuthbert porn, girl next door videos, and, most worrying of all, gallons of horse cum.

I’m currently the seventh highest result for “free videos girl on girl porn without registering”, and oh how the poor person who searched for that must have been disappointed after they clicked on the link to my site. They certainly wouldn’t have found any videos of girl on girl porn.

An even better one, however, is that I’m the fourth highest result for “porn star industries”. Like I said in the title of this post, ’tis a proud day for Ludicrous!

I just awarded my next door neighbour 10,000 bonus points for coming and ridding my room of the biggest spider I’ve seen in my whole life (with the exception of those in the zoo). Well done to next-door-neighbour John!

…And then my host shut down without warning. Again.
I’ll have it all running again soon, please bare with me.

Mac ain’t having much luck with his hosts. Just like before.

Rey’s been podcasting. They’re mostly crap yet somehow uncrap at the same time. My fave.

Did you know you can turn an ordinary pair of headphones into a microphone simply by plugging them into the microphone port of whatever you want to record into? My brother (no not you, the other one) told me this when I was about 7. Try it. You get pretty crap sound quality but if it’s a life or death situtation (like maybe someone’s challenged you to a podcasting battle while standing at the bus stop, this happens to Rey all the time apparently), then I guess it could save your life. Or at least your credibility.

I was thinking of doing a podcast but I’m limited by several factors.

1. My voice tends to sound high pitched whenever my voice is recorded.
2. I don’t currently have a mic[rophone] and I don’t want to use the above mentioned method as it does sound terribly crap.
3. Even if I did use the above mentioned method, it’s quite late and I don’t want to wake the father up and have him come into my room and see my talking into my headphones.
4. I don’t have the Odeo Create function, so I’d have to record and edit and host the podcast using my own method.

I may buy a cheap mic[rophone] tomorrow and give it a whirl, see what happens. I got myself some pretty slick audio editing software off the world wide interweb a while back*, so this will be a good excuse for me to put it to use. Stand by for lo-fi indie tracks between discussions of my favourite Firefox extensions. Stand by for trance tracks between discussions of lo-fi indie tracks. Stand by for Boncasting™.

* Thanks to the wonderful world of open source, this was done 100% legally. As always.

Propaganda = cool.

pirateyam says:
  domains are like women
pirateyam says:
  theres plenty of fit ones
pirateyam says:
  but only a few you want to commit to

I’d like to hear Helen’s reaction to that :)

I’ve started buying CDs again, for a few reasons. Mainly because I refuse to pay the disgusting prices charged for legal music downloads - an album from iTunes UK will cost you £7.99. What do you get for your 8 quid? Technically, you get nothing. You get data. And it’s compressed data at that, so you get inferior sound quality. If you took ten quid into an HMV store tomorrow you’d be able to buy one of the very same albums, and you’d actually get a CD in a case plus the accompanying insert to hold in your hands and cherish for years to come.

When I decide that a record is worthy of purchase, I want to get my money’s worth, and recently I’ve discovered quite a bit of stuff that is worthy of purchase. That’s why I will never ever buy a legal download and I will buy CDs even if it costs me 150% of the price (although I rarely buy CDs that are over a tenner, as you just need to wait until they turn up in a sale somewhere).

I can’t imagine what happens when you need to reinstall Windows XP (chosen purely as an example) and you want to keep hold of your music download collection. You can’t just whack all your tracks onto your iPod to keep them safe, because you’ll find that you can’t get them off it and back onto your PC again thanks to the wonder that is DRM.

This is quite interesting, although I don’t agree with all of what is said on the site.

The majority of CDs I’ve bought recently haven’t been anywhere near a corporate scum record label, and therefore won’t be found on iTunes. CDBaby.com is my new favourite online music store. They only sell CDs by independent musicians, and you can listen (via streaming MP3) to up to 2 minutes of each track from the CDs available on the site. For example, the latest CD I bought from there is You’ve Got Cousins by Meryll. You can listen to 2 minutes of every single track on the CD (except for Classy as it’s only 1:40 long), completely freely, without registering or joining or paying or anything. To top it all, it only cost me $10 (less than £6) and Meryll will have directly received at least $6 (over 50%!) from the sale, which is at least $4 more than if it was sold through a major record label.

Now, obviously there was a reason that for a period of about 12 months leading up to Summer 2005 I only bought 3 CDs. That reason was called WinMX, but, alas, the RIAA have decided that the P2P system which WinMX uses is encouraging illegal music sharing and have forced WinMX, among others, to close down by means of a cease and desist order. Shame.

Oh well, onto the next filesharing app.

Excuse me, very few of you will understand the next line.

Bon owns the code, yo

I might explain this at a later date, but I just had to get that off my chest :D

The crew of a fishing boat blocked emergency radio frequencies for hours as they watched an erotic film.

The crew of the Blyth-based Oceania accidentally left their radio switched to the emergency channel on Thursday as they were off the North East coast.

They then settled down to watch the film Crash on a TV which was next to the radio - not realising it was being broadcast over a 30-mile radius.

Click the picture to read the whole BBC News story.

I am drinking a glass of water.