Watch out for your head!

Seen at Central, outside one of their toilets, much to my amusement. I can be so very childish.

Spongmonkeys 2

I vaguely recall talking to someone about the Spongmonkeys recently (I'd actually blogged about them before, but didn't really remember their name or the specifics of it all) and I find myself still amused by them, somehow.

Even more amusing to me, however, is this Star Wars version I found on YouTube.

Leap Day

Today is the 29th February. I have a friend who was born in 1972, who insists that today he will turn 9. It's not an argument worth having.... But the 29th February gives us each an opportunity to think back, and to think ahead.

So let me ask you, where were you four years ago on the 29th Feb? More importantly, who were you? What were the decisions and challenges facing your life? When you looked in the mirror, how did you feel about who you saw? What were your hopes, and your fears? Where were you in making sense of God and faith?

I received this email from the University Chaplaincy. I think it was supposed to spark off some insightful introspective exercise, but since I was still doing BMT back on 29 Feb 2004, I suspect the predominant thought would have been "KNN, how come got leap year during my service time, now have to serve one extra day..."

Amaizing

You know your vision's not that great when you look at the word "Computer" and see "Cornputer".

That, or maybe you're really hungry.

AH GOOD THE SEA

This bit of chalk graffiti, found along Retreat Lane (a little alley somewhere between the university and the city centre), has long fascinated me. It is totally ungrammatical, but boldly asserts that - well, AH GOOD THE SEA.

I've often wondered what it meant. Adding to the curiosity was the fact that it's been there all three years of my university life - and even before, according to the seniors! Surely there must be some deep meaningful story behind this mysterious phrase that causes people (students?) to restore it, year after year?

A Google search turned out a couple of sites, but all of them were specifically talking about the very same graffiti. ah-good-the-sea.com seemed to offer some hope at explaining this with the claim that it 'was the working title for the Sponge Bob Square Pants movie', but that turned out to be false. Apparently it used to (obviously, deliberately and hilariously erroneously) claim that it was 'the first line of Moby Dick'.

So apparently nobody really knows the origin and meaning of the phrase.

Perhaps it'll be interesting to add to the scrawl, maybe add to in using other languages. Some suggestions generated by Google Translate include...

啊深大海
あぁ、海の深い
Ah profundo del mar

But somehow, they all seem to lack the hypnotic catchiness of the original English form.

McDiploma

If only I'd been born a little later, I wouldn't have needed to go to JC for A-levels, I could have gone to McDonald's instead.

And as if the previous post didn't contain enough Lego goodness, here's a competition asking people to build Star Wars vehicles in the steampunk style, using Lego (again via I. Z. Reloaded). Most of the stuff there is amazing. This one here is perhaps not quite as cool as the others, but I thought it was pretty funny...


Imperial London Shuttle, based on the Imperial Lambda-class shuttle

Cool Lego clips

So I noticed yesterday that Google's logo was Lego-fied. Turns out it was Lego's 50th anniversary. In the spirit of all things lego, here are some cool clips from YouTube!

(This video list is a partial mirror of the one at I. Z. Reloaded, I just wanted a condensed version on my own blog haha.)

So here're my top picks from his list.

1. Lego Les Miserables. Really funny and impressive, especially if you've watched the musical.

2. Lego Dark Knight trailer. If you've watched the original trailer, you should be pretty amazed how well it translates to Lego.

3. Lego Bumblebee, a custom-built transformable version of Bumblebee from the Transformers movie. Cool stuff.

4. Lego Millennium Falcon, showing (accelerated) the painstaking steps involved in constructing one of those huge-ass Lego Star Wars toys. Makes me wish I'd bought one too - the ones from the original trilogy are out of production now and insanely expensive.

And if you're not exactly the video-watching sort, The Brick Testament (biblical stories enacted in Lego scenes) never fails to entertain (me, anyway).

日本の形 (The Japanese Tradition)

So it all started with Yiwen sending me the link to this video on how to use hashi (chopsticks). I thought it was really funny so I searched for more in the series (apparently there're quite a number, although I've only found a few that are subbed).

Since I'm in Japan and all it seems only fitting that I watch (and blog) about this, though watching them all has effectively killed about an hour of my life. Haha.

They all start relatively seriously (I actually thought it was a real documentary at first), but get progressively ridiculous and funny. Watch them if you have time - they're really quite a hoot!

This is a list of episodes and links to the few subbed versions I've found online, hopefully I'll be able to see them all one day ([J] links to the unsubbed versions I've found, you can try watching if you're bored or if you actually understand Japanese).

The Japanese Tradition 「日本の形」
Hashi 「箸」
Origami 「折り紙」
[J] Obon-Yasumi 「お盆休み」
[J] Natsu Yasumi 「夏休み」
[J] Onigiri 「おにぎり」
[J] Ocha 「お茶」
Shazai 「謝罪」
Utage 「宴」
[J] Tejime 「手締め」
[J] Dogeza 「土下座」
Sushi「鮨」
[1][2][3][4] Kosai「交際」

lost in york, bizarro edition

So I was checking out Google Translate (as part of my procrastination bid, of course) and tried seeing what my blog looks like in Chinese.

It's quite funny. It's a bit mind-staggering seeing my whole site (more or less) in Chinese, and I must say that the translation quality is pretty good, with a few hilarious mistakes though.

And York is translated as New York. How delightful to see the city you live in is not on Google's radar. I wonder if they have the translation for Singapore?

In memory, Clippy

My psychology of design seminar today touched on affect and annoying things in technology design, and in the textbook chapter Clippy was mentioned. In case you don't remember, Clippy was that annoying paperclip helper that's enabled by default in the older versions of Office.



As it turned out, although he was intended to help, Clippy generally annoyed more people than he ended up helping (which is how he earned his way into the textbook, I think). And in reading Wikipedia, I found out that Microsoft had designed a series of short videos as part of an ad campaign, publicising Clippy's removal (by default, anyway) from Office XP (watch them! they're funny!).

Clippy Gets Clipped
Clippy Goes Undercover
Clippy Faces Facts

I particularly like how in the last video, there's a short scene with a little computer mouse running behind the wall of the paperclip residence.

So where is Clippy today? Well I also found out from Wikipedia that he's still around, as a Windows Dancer for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (whatever that means). Apparently the white sheet occasionally slips, revealing the thin curve of steel underneath.

Boo Who?
General dance style: Spooky Groove

An avid dancer and amateur contortionist, “Boo Who?” or “Boo” as his friends call him, graduated cum laude from Contoso University in 1994 with a degree in the performing arts. Driven by dreams of fame, upon graduation “Boo” did a short stint of dinner theater in Boca Raton, Florida where he participated in a showtunes revue. It was after a harrowing incident involving a fork that Boo followed his classmates, entering the Information Technology industry where he served as Chief Technology Officer for Fitch & Mather. It was during that time that he formed a rock band and moved to Seattle, only to miss the grunge movement by two days. Disheartened, Boo returned once again to the familiar IT industry working for a short while for a Redmond, WA based software company, where he continued to work until being retired in 2001.

Since then, Boo has been hanging out on the LA mime circuit, practicing his dancing, acting, and singing in the hopes of becoming a “triple threat” on a future reality-based talent show. In his spare time, Boo picks up extra money as a part-time model for children's Halloween costumes.

Hilarious! Microsoft has certainly earned itself many many cool points, in my book. Gosh. Who'd have thought?

Whatever will we do without the scientific method?

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study

A sign from up north

(Mirroring http://community.livejournal.com/sg_ljers/1260911.html)

Top Left: No Smoking, No Dogs Allowed, No Littering, Please watch the gap

Bottom Right: No Chewing Gum Allowed, No Eating or Drinking, Beware of Pickpockets, and... Please feel free to jump onto the LRT track.

Funny conditions

Just saw a couple of psychology-related comics, here are three I rather liked. They all have something to do with conditioning, two are about Pavlov's dogs, they're probably funnier if you actually know the background I suppose.

Spider-Pig

I caught the Simpsons Movie yesterday. It's really pretty good - I thought it set itself up very well, but then realised that (being a movie) it had to advance the plot, so it was slightly less enjoyable while advancing the plot, but overall a really fun show!

I find myself hooked to the 'Spider-Pig' song that Homer sang in the movie, here's the Spider-Pig trailer that contains some parts of it.



Go watch the movie already!

Makanbit

Essentially I was bored and created a homage to Kevin earlier, based on the Facebook Pets application.

Would you like to feed the Makanbit?

Moneyfaces

Louis:
well, most coin faces aren't really the prettiest
or notes, for that matter
if i were the guy printing the money in venezuela, for example, i'll be printing ms venezuela universe on the notes
but alas i am not

Cuifen:
yeah!!

Louis:
(hey for all i know, they do)

Cuifen:
why don't they?
beauty queens are an important venezuelan export
they have beauty queen schools there

Seriously. Who actually likes seeing Yusof Ishak on the current Singaporean notes? The old ship series, and the bird series before that, were so much more aesthetically pleasing (to me).

I suspect they chose ol' Yusof simply because we don't produce supermodels of note. Alas!

The Eeyore incident

Wow. I haven't been blogging for some time. It's been a nice Easter break, with no work to be completed, a good balance of travelling and slacking, although it's all coming to an end now.

Perhaps the end-of-holiday spirit is what fuelled the madness today, or perhaps (more likely) it was the stress from studying, for the third-years. The story begins with the Disney Eeyore cake, which Ailin received from her housemate Michelle for her birthday.



We decided to eat it today, but soon discovered that the icing on the cake (including Eeyore) didn't taste particularly good.



So we kinda peeled it off and put it aside in a pile.
(Yes we had ice cream too. It was a good meal.)



Kevin then had a thought. It involved melting the icing, because the icing seemed quite preservativeful (it was hard and plasticky, unlike the icing on fresh cake). The rest later expanded it into a plot involving creating a molten icing pool to drown Eeyore in.


I've already been broken into pieces and partially eaten, and now you want to melt me?

There isn't really much of a story left to tell, save for a melted gooey mess and a lot of giggles, so I'll just leave the two videos to illustrate the rest of it.


The actual boiling process.


Aftermath of Eeyore boiling.

I can't believe we actually did this =P

The Evolution of Homer

Watched this as part of the starting sequence on The Simpsons yesterday. It's funny! =P

Sockets are forever...

More procrastinating. I chanced upon this on the World of Warcraft page, and I think it's pretty funny.

I can almost imagine some gaming couple finding this, uhhh... romantic? I guess. =P

Black Sheep - The Violence of the Lambs

On a vast New Zealand sheep station, a reckless genetic engineering experiment goes horribly wrong, turning sheep into bloodthirsty killers.

This must be the most hilarious trailer I've ever seen. Seriously. I started laughing even before I watched it, just after I read the synopsis at the Apple trailer site.

Baaaaa.