Haunting Thunder

I found a fun wiki that has a ton of information about common tropes used in TV and other media.

To give flavor hers what they say about the five man band a common set up for shows main characters.

Five Man Band

The Five Man Band is a group of characters whose members fall into standard heroic archetypes which all complement one another.

The group traditionally includes:

• The Hero - (lead singer) - the leader of the group; can be clean-cut and upstanding, bold and charismatic, serious and driven, or some combination of the three.
• The Lancer - (lead guitarist) - the second-in-command, usually a contrast to The Hero. If the Hero is clean-cut, the Lancer is a grizzled Anti Hero; if the Hero is the driven and straight-laced type, the Lancer is more relaxed and level-headed. In a comedy situation the lancer is often The Straight Man or a Deadpan Snarker
• The Big Guy - (bassist or drummer) - the strongman of the team, often dumb. Or mute.
• The Smart Guy - (keyboardist) - the weak, but intelligent or clever member, often annoying or for comic relief, a Trickster Archetype, a buddy of the Big Guy.
• The Chick - (tambourine, vocal effects) - the token female who has been incorporated into the core group. If there’s a royal in the band, it’s usually her: see Princess Allura (Voltron), and Princess Leia Organa (Star Wars). The Chick will sometimes have special powers, presumably, to “even the field” a little. In single-sex groups, The Chick will be the most ditzy, childish, and/or naive member of the group.

Interesting they Quote Ianto from Torchwood as an example of the “Chick” Hours of browsing fun even though it does have a lot of Anime examples - and some of the written SF stuff is a little light ( no mention of SRD or Gravity’s Rainbow for example) if I ever get time I will expand the CP section.

Whilst browsing vallywag i found this Just saw this very funny version of the Pussycat Dolls Don’tcha track.

http://www.geekentertainment.tv/2007/07/18/dontcha-wish-your-cell-phone-was-hot-like-me/

Vallywag is its usual bitchy self:

“captures the most essential point about the iPhone: It turns its owners into monsters, imbuing them with a false sense of their own importance and sex appeal. The spectacle of geeks attempting to rap and perform dance hip-hop moves perfectly captures the inflated sense of self the iPhone lends. “

Bet Apples PR have steam coming out of their ears but is a very good viral marketing video.

I saw a post on slashdot about that a swiss company that is setting up a site to auction cracks and security exploits.

Quite how cracked brained the iduviduals are behind the scheme are i dont know offering a marketplace for hacks is an insane idea. AS i said on slash dot.

Offer money for doing bad things and people will do bad things

1. its an open invitation for extortion both by insiders and outsiders
2. it will increase the number of hacks and not lead to an improvement in security as the idiots behind this think - don’t they know any thing about human nature for fraks sake.
3. various organizations with three-letter acronyms are going get a little intense about this.
4. I can see a big company buying a crack and inviting there mates from the FBI,DSG along for the ride when they hand over the dosh.

I was reminded of the Monty Python sketch where some gormless mobsters tried to shake down the British Army down.

I think WabiSabiLabi needs to get back on the special needs bus - to borrow a line from Johathon Ross.

WordPress have a facebook application that allows posts on wordpress.com blogs to appear on your facebook profile.

So this is just a test really to see if it works - I am using windows livewriter to post this and am likeing it more and more i did a couple of posts at work to day on some of our clients blogs and am more and more impressed.

I noticed on the wordpress.com news section that Microsoft have a new tool windows live writer  that allows ofline preparation of posts - This looks really nice as a lot of our clients have problems cutting and pasting from office or another word processing program to the wordpress editor to create blog posts. Unfortunately word and other programs styles can clash with a wordpress theme and you get some weird effects that destroy the look and feel of the Blog (word 97 is particularly bad in this respect).

The windows live writer tool looks like it could be a useful tool to avoid some of the problems cutting and pasting has with wordpress.

You can also add images in a more intuitive way  than the basic wordpress

The drop shadow effect is nice too

You can also add tables

A table	which
is very useful for lay out	purposes
	and flowing text next to pictures like this. with having to use view source

You can also add maps this is a map of where I live

very Nice and you can ad tags for services like technorati

I don’t often mention my clients directly but one of my clients (Legal services Uk)  are up for the National Business Awards for Scotland they are on the shortlist for Scottish AXA Small to Medium Sized Business of the Year Award category- as mentioned here.

What they do is advise and help people  on wills and will writing, from the basic to the more complex did you know that a simple change to the way a will is setup can double a couples IHT allowance - a non trivial saving to your heirs in case the worst happening.

A Brazilian judge has ruled in favor of YouTube,  in the case involving Brazilian model Daniella Cicarelli and a sex video. Cicarelli and her boyfriend, Tato Malzoni, had sued YouTube after a video of the couple having sex on a public beach in Brazil appeared on the site.

I wrote about this before when a Brazilian court tried to shutdown Youtube