Stevie Wonder is playing his first gig in Tokyo and the place is absolutely packed to the rafters. In a bid to break the ice with his new audience he asks if anyone would like him to play a request. A little old Japanese man jumps out of his seat in the first row and shouts at the top of his voice "Play a Jazz chord ! Play a jazz chord !".
Amazed that this guy knows about the jazz influences in Stevie's varied career, the blind impresario starts to play an E minor scale and then goes into a difficult jazz melody for about 10 minutes. When he finishes the whole place goes wild.
The little old man jumps up again and shouts "No, no, play a Jazz chord, play a Jazz chord". A bit pissed off by this, Stevie, being the professional that he is,dives straight into a jazz improvisation with his band around the B flat minor chord and really tears the place apart....
The crowd goes wild with this impromptu show of his technical expertise. The little old man jumps up again. "No, no. Play a Jazz chord, play a jazz chord". Well and truly pissed off that this little guy doesn't seem to appreciate his playing ability. Stevie says to him from the stage "OK smart ass. You get up here and do it!"
The little old man climbs up onto the stage, takes hold of the mike and starts to sing .....
" A jazz chord to say I ruv you..."

No blogs for a little while because we're in Tahiti .... :o)

This one player or two player flash game is irritatingly addictive. Zebedee Numchuck in Major Mooning. :o)

Google is (still) by far the best search engine although I have my front page set to www.yagoohoogle.com as yahoo is probably second and I like to compare. There is a new engine, Brainboost, which supposedly beats google when answering questions. I have only tried it a couple of times and it worked perfectly (although I doubt that I couldn't have found the answer through google in any case. An explanation of Brainboost follows:

Brainboost is a revolutionary answer engine. Brainboost uses Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques to go the extra mile, by actually answering questions, in plain English.

Here's an explanation showing the difference between Brainboost and Google:

Google - User types in : 'why is mars red.'
Google retrieves all pages containing words 'mars' and 'red.'
Search results are sorted by the number of links each one of them got from other pages.
Typically, a user would then click on the first search result, read through the document and hope to find an answer.
If an answer is not found within the first search result, the user needs to repeat this process with the next search result, sometimes having to read many web pages to finally get at the answer.

Brainboost - User types in : 'why is mars red.'
Brainboost translates the query into multiple queries that will raise the probability of finding the answer to the question.
Brainboost retrieves search engine results.
Brainboost retrieves top several hundred pages and reads them.
Brainboost finds answer, in this case: 'Mars is red because of the iron in the soil.'

Just watch this clip of Pat Robertson (Founder and Chairman of The Christian Broadcasting Network), taken during the ad break of one of his interviews on the Larry King show. It explains so much about how the religious right, the right wing and prepackaged media enablers works, where questions exist only as the prelude to an unrelated monologue and "balance" means acceptable bias.
Of course, folks like Pat are just doing God's work, none of this is politically motivated, oh no sir. Except that here is a video showing people being barred from attending church services because they are democrats and for not supporting George W. Bush, the Iraq war and the anti-gay agenda. Barred from Church - friggin dumb mid Americans - these people claim to be Christians, claim to read the Bible and claim to believe in Jesus - so when Jesus said "Render unto Ceasere what is Ceasere's, render unto God what is God's" - was that not a little hint that politics and religion should be seperate? I could continue to rant about this for ages so I'll stop before I write something I regret.

The fastest text messenger isn't some teenage punk, but a 93-year-old. He managed to not only transmit the entire chosen message verbatim (avoiding the shortened txt and slang versions of words) but he did it entirely in morse code. Granted, the old man has 80+ years of experience but still, shame on the 13 year old who couldn't beat him sending the following message ... "Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing"

The register reports:

The US movie industry has made good its promise to name Brits Kevin Reid and Ian Hawthorne in its legal action against the users of their bds-palace.co.uk website, which links to BitTorrent-hosted content. The site's owners claim they were told they might have to pay $150m in damages if they fail to settle. Settlement would cost them a mere $7m.

Unfortunately for the movie industry, US law does not extend as far as the UK and even if Reid and Hawthorne decide to ignore the summons, there's little that they can do about it. I liked this comment from Matthew J Oppenheim , a partner with the Washington DC law firm responsible.

If your Prime Minister can be persuaded to back our country in the Gulf War, then there is no doubting that American law could prevail in the UK

Ha ha ha - as Reid says

Fortunately, our courts tend to be a little less in awe of our transatlantic cousins than our glorious leader does.

Absolutely !!!

get a free Flickr account here to store/share your photos.

Did the ref save Chelsea from a much bigger loss by not sending off Cech and instead letting Garcia play advantage and maybe score? ... who cares ... what a game ... thought that Mourinho was a better man than to be so sore in defeat. The better team lost, whine, whine,whine, shouldn't have been a goal, whine, whine, whine .... this is apt

Addictive flash racing game :o)

This is so funny. This is the actual output from an IRC forum where someone who claims to be a hacker tries to break into another person's machine. He asks for the persons ip address - gets told it is 127.0.0.1 (the loopback address) and TWICE crashes his own computer before asking the 'victim' to disable his firewall which he thinks is bouncing the attacks back towards him. He finally tries to delete files from the remote machine and smugly reports as the G: drive, then the F: drive and the D: drive get removed. He actually manages to report that 30% of the C: drive has been deleted before he disappears, having wiped clean his own machine. D'oh !! Muppet !!

Thanks to RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center physicians and scientists, artist Lee Mingwei became the first human man to successfully become pregnant.
As Mr. Lee Mingwei says: A lot of people have cast this endeavor as something terribly monstrous, a startling example of how science and medicine have simply gone too far. From my perspective, however, I am simply bringing a child into this world. There is nothing more natural and beautiful on this earth than that. This is something that I've always wanted to do.
Visit his web site to view live EKG, ultrasound, and other vitals as well as detailed information about this revolutionary procedure.

Before the weekend, Opera's CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner boldy proclaimed at a company meeting that if download numbers of Opera 8 reached 1 million within four days he would swim from Norway to the USA [press release]. Opera's communications department could not resist the temptation, and made his statement public. As any respectable CEO and gentlemen, Mr. Tetzchner stands by his word.

Remember Tiger Woods' remarkable shot on the back 9 at Augusta? It was a Masters moment that will forever linger in memory: the chip scooted up the slope, braked, turned right and crawled down the slope towards the hole. Then, for two agonising seconds, it hung on the edge before finally disappearing into the cup.
Jeff Stone, a physics PH.D. student at the University of Kenton wrote a thesis on Woods' unbelievable shot. His theory, in brief, postulates there is no physical evidence supporting the myth that his shot went in without assistance.
On his site, he shows many sub-theories.

Now that Pope Rat has got himself one of those bulletproof, bubble pope-mobiles, he's got no use for his old Volkswagon Golf so is selling it on e-bay.

This site takes the Catholic thinking about transubstantiation, the belief that when you take communion, the bread and wine transform physically into the flesh and blood of Christ and has made several assumptions to work out how large Jesus was (assuming that his body and blood are just about to run out) ... all estimates suggest that he was enormously huge

Quotes:
Perhaps Jesus, like Wolverine, has amazing regenerative powers (in which case, it's surprising it took him three days to return from the dead. But maybe he was just taking a little time-out.)

If, when you eat the wafer, it transforms into the flesh of Christ, then it's not the actual wafer you're eating, is it? it wouldn't matter what was in the wafer
So why the heck do they make gluten free communion wafers for people with allergies?

This begs the question: does transubstatiated flesh run the full digestive course?
If yes, there is a huge amount of literally holy shit out there!

For people who take communion in my church (Methodist), the ritual is merely symbolic cannibalism. For Catholics, though, it's actual cannibalism. Cool.

Excellent little flash animation

A star on Hollywood's "Walk of Fame" was recently presented to Ryan Seacrest !!!
(he's the commentator on American Idol by the way) It turns out that stars are now purchased by fan Clubs, no need to be voted by the Oscar commitee - just need a load of 12 year olds who like the flecks in your hair and Bobs your mother's brother. Fantastic!!

A list of people whose name makes a complete sentence.
Like:

Tom Waits
Jeremy Irons
Julian Sands
Russell Banks
Britney Spears
Shelley Winters
Jeff Bridges
Wesley Snipes

and then there's always Mark Spitz and Sally Fields. I don't think Marge Proops counts (although it should) :o)

A fan film now available to download - 45 minutes long. It looks good but I haven't downloaded it yet.

It's time to dramatically change the site I think! Travelsaround is gonna split in two - the normal 'random guff' blog page for me to post a lot more techie stuff & geeky internet security info and then a secure bit where family can have access to post whatever messages and links and photos they want. Cheryl can then post messages herself instead of me doing the work :o)
Now, I have to work out how to do this ....

I'd never really noticed how much Harrison Ford uses the intimidating power of "the finger" in his movies ...dude makes a powerful point ! :o)

There's a serious problem in your bathroom that you're not even aware of. After your bath or shower, you might be drying your face with the same part of the towel that dried your butt the day before. Or worse yet, it might have dried someone else's butt! The ingenious Butt-Face Towel brings sanitary sanity back into your bathroom.
(Cheri again)

Anyone else who is addicted to Scott Adams brilliant daily "Dilbert" cartoon strip may have noticed that the drawings look slightly differently recently. Mr Adams is still drawing them but has had to draw with his left hand recently due to him losing the use of his right hand for drawing - he's been suffering from focal dystonia. He explains on his site here.

The Irish search engine
another from Cheri