Friday, April 18, 2008

WordPress Sucks

Ok, so maybe that’s a slightly inflammatory headline, using the WordPress engine to create a website that’s being hosted by a third party is fine, but using the free WordPress blogging system sucks big time.

Experienced WordPress users, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but to customise your blog, you have to PAY???!!!

If you would like the ability to save your changes and make your design visible to the public, please purchase the Custom CSS Upgrade.

What the?

In addition to all of the free features of WordPress.com, we offer a few options for paid upgrades for enhanced functionality. Credits cost $1 each. The buttons below will bring you to a Paypal page where they can be purchased. We do not offer refunds on credits or products purchased on WordPress.com.

Oh, so to change the colour of my headings, its gonna cost me US$15 a year?

I think I’ll stick with Blogger.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Cool

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Help, I Need Babysitter...

My wife is away in Christchurch and our usual babysitter doesn't do Wednesdays... anyone free to look after three perfect little angels on the 23rd of April?

UPDATE: I've found a babysitter, all I need now is someone to go with - I mean it would be terrible to waste the spare pass....

UPDATE 2: I'm taking a lucky girl on a date with me... I wonder who it could be...

Monday, April 07, 2008

NZ man 'used hedgehog as weapon'

This just in from BBC world....

A man in New Zealand has been charged with using a hedgehog as a weapon, the New Zealand Herald has reported.

Police said William Singalargh, 27, had hurled the hedgehog about 5m (16ft) at a 15-year-old boy.

"It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks," said Senior Sgt Bruce Jenkins, in the North Island town of Whakatane.

It was unclear whether the hedgehog was still alive when it was thrown, though it was dead when collected as evidence.

The police spokesman said the suspect was arrested "for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog."

Mr Singalargh is due to appear in court on 17 April. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.

Witness

Thousands of stills taken of Khmer Rouge victims at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison collectively document the systematic torture and killing of an estimated 1.7 million men, women and children. Looking into these victims’ eyes by examining the morbid, meticulous portraits taken before each and every one was murdered, is probably the most direct connection we will ever have to Cambodia’s mass killings between 1975 and 1979.

The head photographer behind these portraits, Nhem Ein, says he shot each individual within hearing range of the prison’s torture chambers. The victims were sometimes delivered by the truckload. One by one, he removed their blindfolds and posed them for the camera, forbidden to speak with them or answer their questions about why they had been rounded up or what was about to happen to them.

Today, hundreds of Nhem Ein’s photographs line the walls of the former torture house, which is now the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide. The majority of these portraits have since been lost or destroyed, as have the identities of many who were photographed, but about 6,000 of the remaining negatives are held in the museum.

And although the collection is incomplete, the photos captured details of Pol Pot’s victims – the full lips of a young girl, the sloping shoulders of a thin boy, the fearful, wide-eyed stare of an old man – that add up to some of the most terrifying evidence this world has ever seen.

At the close of many American news programs, we regularly witness some of the most poignant moments provided by television today: the ongoing Honor Roll, which flashes slowly through an unornamented display of portraits showing US soldiers who have fallen in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“And here, in silence, are 18 more,” we hear the news anchor solemnly announce.

The fresh, mostly young, mostly proud faces of men and women who’ve lost their lives march silently into our homes. Some appear upright and in uniform while others are shown in smiling snapshots. Names, ages and hometowns are consistently noted.

And yet these portraits only document one side of the story. The other side – the faces of Iraq’s dead – remains invisible. We see images of chaos and bloodshed but very few portraits of fallen Iraqis. We see grainy mug shots of terrorists on the news but no posed stills of the shopkeeper killed by a car bomb or the mother who fell under an errant American missile.

Imagine if every week a televised roll call memorialized Iraq’s civilian casualties with individual portraits. If this were possible, we would witness, in full, the staggering human costs of Iraq’s occupation on a personal level. The politics of history dictate who is remembered and who is not, and most countries prefer to honor only their own dead. Perhaps, if we were confronted with those we’ve killed, face-by-face, we could better question the notion of “us and them” and address the abstraction of death that skews our understanding of war.

Caroline E. Winter // adbusters

Inflated Blog Values


My blog is worth $5,645,847.40.
How much is your blog worth?

Lego vs Reality


I'm not sure which is more disturbing, Eddie Adams' iconic Vietnam photo or Mike Stimpson's lego version with the iconic lego smiles.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

LinkWithin