The Olympic Closing Ceremony of the Dead

There was a definite George Romero moment in the London handover segment of the Olympic closing ceremony, so I just had to mash it up with an actual zombie movie soundtrack:

Here’s a direct link to the video in case the player doesn’t work.

Update: I had uploaded the video onto YouTube, and was hosting it there. After only an hour, and about 60 people had seen the video, I received a nastygram:

NBC Universal (Sports) has claimed some or all visual content in your video The Closing Ceremony of the Dead. This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification programme.

Your video is no longer available because NBC Universal (Sports) has chosen to block it.

Oh yeah? What’s NBC Universal (Sports) got to do with anything? I got the video off the BBC. Fuck NBC Universal (Sports), and fuck YouTube. I’ll host it myself.

2008-08-24 18:33 UTC. Comments: 6.

Up-to-date ffmpeg on Ubuntu Hardy

The Ubuntu repositories will give you a crippled, antiquated version of ffmpeg. Here’s the latest in my occasional series of explanations of how to get a newer, better, more full-featured version. More…

2008-08-24 17:11 UTC. Comments: 2.

Everybody Samurai Sushi Geisha

There’s a great single from (I think) the early 1980s, by a Japanese band called 米米CLUB (Kome Kome Club). The track is ‘Funk Fujiyama’, and the lyrics and accompanying promo video take a humorous look at foreigner’s ideas about Japan (and at their attempts at speaking Japanese). I find it laugh-out-loud funny, and although some of the humour is lost if you don’t speak Japanese, the refrain is mostly comprehensible in English (the third line translates as Hello, Goodbye, How much does it cost?):

Everybody samurai sushi geisha
Beautiful Fujiyama Ha! Ha! Ha!
Konnichiwa sayonara kore ikura
Kamikaze harakiri Ha! Ha! Ha!

Here’s the video, courtesy of YouTube, the great cultural reliquary of our age: More…

2008-08-24 11:35 UTC. Comments: 1.

I am Spartacus

What I love about computerised systems is that they don’t care about what they process. Garbage in, garbage out. Hence, I give you Mr I Spartacus’s Tesco Clubcard: More…

2008-08-22 18:26 UTC. Comments: 3.

We apologise for any inconvenience

If you saw this when trying to download iPlayer programmes today:

There is no page for this programme. This probably means that the programme does not exist.

Then I’m sorry. The message was fairly accurate, though: the BBC moved the page. Thanks to a patch from Liam Bedford, though, I was able to release a fix in a very short time. More…

2008-07-30 21:54 UTC. Comments: 4.

Older entries can be found in the diary section.