Blog Without An Important Name

I’d ordered some stuff from the US late last week, and it arrived today (faster than some headphones ordered within NZ about the same time, that still haven’t arrived – Post Haste seems unable to deliver anything at all ever). Here is the hoodie:

and here is the t-shirt:

For the uninitiated, these are both references to H.P. Lovecraft’s story At the Mountains of Madness.

For a while now, it’s been the thing to have computers associate ads with the content of the page they show up in. What computers can’t do so well yet is determine if a particular association is in bad taste or not. This inability leads to things like this:

When I was home over the weekend, I was working on helping my parents sort out the photos they took while they were in Europe. Doing this, I noticed that the date on the camera was out by a month. Being a stickler for correct metadata, I tried to figure out a way to fix this. This is the command line that I came up with. I’ve broken it into multiple lines here for clarity.

for f in *.jpg ; do
    NEWDATE=`exiftool -CreateDate $f |
        perl -pe 's/.*: 2006:([^:]+):/sprintf "2006:%02d:", ($1+1)/e'`;
    echo $f: $NEWDATE;
    exiftool -CreateDate="$NEWDATE" -DateTimeOriginal="$NEWDATE" $f;
done

This will modify the month field in the EXIF data of each file by increasing it by 1. It doesn’t handle wrap around or anything, I didn’t need to do that. The fanciest it gets is making sure there’s the correct number of zeros padding the number.

You don’t want to run this twice.

Well, I’m forced to admit now that the evidence is undeniable. It has become clear that the moon landings were faked by NASA. Why else do you think they wouldn’t be able to find those ‘missing’ tapes? More details on the fraud are here.

I went for a walk today, and found a couple of interesting looking aliens. The first being a small-person-sized (and unusually dark) “grey” [click for larger images]:

The other clearly demonstrates why they have arrived: they want to strip the Earth of its resources!
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This week just past was apparently elections for the Otago University Students Association. Typically with these kinds of things, there is campaign advertising stuff stuck around the place. Those of you who have seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite will understand this that I saw today:

Also chalked on the ground were things such as “Pedro is an option”.

I wonder who won…

Dunedin locals may be aware of the Tui ad on Albany St, on the side of Liquorland. It looks like it had been attacked by someone with a bit of wit. Here is what it said tonight:

The previous edit that I remember was turning “My new flatmate keeps giving me the eye” into “My new mate keeps giving me e”.

Update: as of Monday the 8th, it’s been painted over. Pity