The Incredible Expanding Macbook Battery(s), Part 3

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the laptop -- here's Part 3. (Part one and part two are here.) This is my replacement Macbook battery, which, like its predecessor, expanded like popcorn, and was left sitting about to do its thing.

Yeah, I'm aware that it's probably stupid to leave a damaged lithium ion battery laying about your house. I don't care, though, largely because I left it laying about as a result of being phenomenally careless and forgetful. It's my experiment, you can just observe the (harmless, evidently) results.

I didn't buy a third one. I bought an iMac instead.

The Incredible Expanding Macbook Battery, Part 2

If you're following the story (here's Part 1), I had a Macbook battery that expanded like one of those dinosaurs you put in water that, uh, expand. If you're curious -- and I know you are -- this is what happens to the expanding cell after about a year.

It's completely expanded to about eight times its original thickness. Should I have kept it? Probably not. Do I have any regrets? Not really.

It's gone now, though.

Imagine the damage this would have done to a laptop that was, say, in storage. I guess this is why they tell you to remove the batteries if you're sticking it in the cupboard for a while. I suppose they couldn't bring themselves to complete the instruction with "..otherwise it'll bloat like a Looney Tunes character, destroying your expensive technology".

Just to clarify the ludicrousness of this failing battery issues -- this is a $150 battery. It's not a double-A.

Sigh.

Here's part three.

The Incredible Expanding Macbook Battery

So, there I was, using my Macbook. I noticed it was rocking about a bit, like there was a small coin or something underneath it -- nothing unusual, as my desk is often messy and stuff creeps under things all the time. I fish around under there, but there's nothing there. I carry on, but it still rocks around on something. I switch the Macbook off, and flip it over, only to find that the edge of the battery is sticking up a bit.

I did a bit of googling, and discovered that this is not only "normal", but it's something so normal Apple refuses to acknowledge or compensate its existence. Macbook batteries just do this. Every so often they just shrug and go "Y'know what, screw this cruel world. I'm going to expand like a piece of popcorn and I might just take this laptop with me."

As the cell in the battery expands, it pushes on the nearby components of the computer. In the case of my particular model of Macbook, the first victims are the Airport cart and RAM, followed by everything else.

I popped the battery out and shoved it in a drawer, ordering another one from Apple's online store, as there was clearly no way of claiming the thing under any kind of warranty or insurance.

New battery arrived. All good. More to come. Stay tuned.

Here's part two, and part three.

Why "Comedy Slapdown" is balls.

Comedy Slapdown is a new production from Australia’s Comedy Channel, the channel that’s brought you such other quality productions as basically nothing. With the possible exception of Hahn Ice Headliners, which started and finished about a decade ago and is largely responsible for the fame of Rove McManus, the bald guy from The New Inventors and the host of The Einstein Factor. So, Comedy Slapdown is balls. It’s balls because it’s a rip-off of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, one of my favourite television shows of all time. It’s balls because it takes a formula that’s so insanely simple that it cannot possibly fail, and screws around with it until it fails so miserably the failboat won’t even sail past to rescue it.

Allow me to summarise the selling points of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and discuss how Comedy Slapdown destroys them.

1. The points don’t matter.

Both Drew Carey and Clive Anderson made great humour of the fact that the “points” awarded to “contestants” on WLIIA are essentially just a plot device to move the show along. It’s not a competition, the focus is entirely on the improvised humour. Comedy Slapdown takes this to new extremes by providing a panel of judges (all comedians) who score each round in a fairly serious fashion, which is utterly pointless and wastes time that could be better spent, gee, I don’t know, being funny.

2. Half an hour is all you need.

An entire hour of forced improv interspersed with unamusing scoring sequences and game titles trying so very hard not to infringe on WLIIA’s game titles is tedious. Half an hour of quality comedy was not.

3. You don’t need ten comedians, five is just peachy.

Comedy Slapdown has a cast of ten plus. Three contestants per team, one host, three judging panelists and a guest star of some kind. This is a lot of people to get to know, and this process is made even more difficult by the tendency of most of them to be about as amusing as a damp sock. A great deal of the joviality in Whose Line Is It Anyway? stemmed from running jokes between the contestants, with a cast of five, this kind of humour can flourish happily. With ten, the chances of running jokes developing and actually being amusing drops phenomenally.

4. Don’t camp it up.

Is there really a need to set the program in an arena and stage everything as if it’s a battle? Surely just a stage would have sufficed. Again, this seems to me to be a method of avoiding instant recognition of the production as a WLIIA knock-off, but I think that was inevitable, so why bother?

I’m annoyed. A while ago, I suggested that an Australian version of Whose Line Is It Anyway would be a good idea, and I still believe it would be. The comedians would need to be cleverly chosen, and the formula religiously followed. Comedy Slapdown is a poor, poor substitute so far, and I hold little hope for it improving.

But hey, anything’s possible.

Bill Bryson: What the hell?

I’ve just finished reading Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue”, a reasonably amusing edutainment book exploring the history, complexity and potential future of the English language. All in all, it’s a suitably entertaining read, but I find it’s somewhat flawed by the small issue that factually, it’s probably wildly innacurate. I base this assumption on the various passages devoted to the Australian dialect of the English language, most of which are fundamentally, well, wrong. While I’d like nothing less than to simply reproduce these passages verbatim for your own edification, I have a moral aversion to plagiarism, and shall instead address the various “examples” of Australian speech/grammar/spelling, and then we’ll discuss whether or not anyone ever actually uses them.

Another temptation I shall avoid is the urge to address Mr. Bryson’s quoting from “Lets Talk Strine”, a comedic parody of a book written in 1965 by this bloke, and not representing anything realistic whatsoever about the way anyone did, does, or likely ever will speak.

Anyhow, the actual examples that annoy me:

“Tucker”. This word means “food”. It’s commonly used as part of the term “bush tucker”, and by Australia’s version of rednecks. It’s very quickly disappearing from the language. (And good riddance, say I.)

“Slygrogging.” I have never ever heard this word spoken, nor have I read it prior to seeing it in this book. Apparently (and somewhat evidently, I admit), it defines the act of sneaking out to have a drink. Where I come from, we call that “sneaking out to have a drink”.

“Nong.” A nong is an idiot. No one has used this word since 1987.

“Don’t come the raw prawn with me.” Oh, god. How I both love and loathe this phrase. This alleged common element of Australian parlance, along with various others (”technicolour yawn” for vomit, as cited in this very book is another) survive thrivingly on tea towels and in useless Australian language phrase books. No one ever says them.

Furthermore, the next paragraph in the book proposes a few additional facts that are entirely debatable:

“In Australia, people eat cookies, not biscuits.” No, we don’t. We eat biscuits. Americans eat cookies. If you want to be thoroughly pedantic, we eat cookies when we buy them from Subway.

“They spell many words the American way - labor rather than labour, for instance.” To hell we do. If I’d have spelled the word “labor” in school, I’d have been sorely reprimanded for it, and rightly so. The Australian Labor Party is a vestige of some idiot’s idea of modernising the image of the political party (well, as modernised as it could get in 1912), and is the only time we spell the word without the “u”. As a rule, we follow British spelling conventions, not American conventions. No “-ize” endings, no “-or” endings. And no nukular.

It’s inconsistencies like these that make me doubt the other “facts” presented in the book, particularly when I’m unable to verify them myself and am forced to take them at face value.

I also dislike the easy-to-digest approach when it’s used to present incorrect information, because, frankly, people are more likely to remember rubbish when it’s presented in an amusing format.

I’ve had my whinge. You can all go home now.

Why Colin and Justin slightly annoy me.

Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan. They’re Scottish, they’re gay, and they do a spectacular job of decorating people’s homes. Usually, ostensibly, without their permission. But they annoy me, slightly. Together, they’ve made numerous TV shows about bad design ideas, how to decorate your home so people will buy it, and so on. Today, I’m focusing on two of their shows. One is a British series called “How Not To Decorate”, the second is a newer Canadian series called “Home Heist”.

The former of these series’ consisted of Colin and Justin appearing at someone’s poorly designed, badly executed and generally ugly home, and proceeding to renovate the Christ out of it until it resembled something awesome. This does not annoy me in any way.

The latter series is much of the same, with the part about the house being badly designed and ugly being substituted for the house being basically an average house, much like the one you’re sitting in now. This annoys me.

It annoys me because of the format of the show. The “plot”, as it were, of each episode is as follows.

Colin and Justin “break in” to the victim’s home. They mock everything within. Stealing a couple of artifacts, usually an ugly arm chair and a component of the poor person’s collection of dolls or beer bottles or something, they ambush the person at some point in their day-to-day activities. Usurping their house keys, Colin and Justin now begin re-inventing the home.

Along the way, they force the home owners to wear t-shirts with demeaning phrases on them, which I acknowledge is all in good fun. They also “teach” the home owners three lessons regarding parts of home decoration that they’ve decided the home owners suck at. Which, in many cases, is fair enough.

I’m also happy to acknowledge that the end result of all of this is that the home owners get a brand new, professionally designed interior over four rooms for nothing. I’m not oblivious to this.

The part that really jostles my coconuts is the way Mr. McAllister and Mr. Ryan mock people’s homes. I grant that in some cases, bad design prevails. In the vast majority of cases, though, it’s very clear that a lack of money has prevailed. For example, the family who’s baby daughter’s bedroom was also the laundry, complete with dryer. Same for the family who’s child’s room contained a fully fitted kitchen, minus stove. It’s not a case of someone deciding this would be a fantastic design move, it’s more a case of the home owners could not afford an alternative solution. It gets my goat when people are insulted for things that clearly aren’t their own choices or their own fault.

As I said before, I didn’t have a problem with the first show. It was British, the humour was more prevalent, and nine times out of ten, the homes actually were total home design disasters. For example, the house that had one room with alternating pink and black walls covered with fluourescent hand-prints. Yes, please, mock that. Don’t mock someone’s choice not to re-paint their home from the original beige, nor someone’s decision to keep hand-me-down furniture, nor someone’s decision not to store their crap away.

Oh, yeah. People’s crap. I take umbrage at this part, too.

Sure, yes, design-wise, having your belongings in your house is a horrible idea. It makes everything look messy. However, we don’t all live in IKEA catalogues, and it just so happens that we all own shit. And most of us want to see it. Not two items of it. Not just the items that match colours. I don’t consider it materialistic to want to own things that remind you of your life, and I don’t consider it bad design to want to display them, in any number.

I actually wonder how the people who own the homes Colin and Justin renovate manage once C and J have left and they’re left with the dilemma of re-assimilating their own belongings back into the (admittedly very nice) design they’ve been presented with.

The British version had a follow-up segment at the end of each episode showing how the home owners had adapted the final design to work for them. Canadian one doesn’t.

Anyway. I’ve ranted about two gay guys renovating houses for far longer than I really wanted to. I like the show, but it irritates me for the above reasons.

Hoorah.

How not to review video games.

I’ve been reading a lot of reviews for Super Nintendo games, recently. Mostly because I have an annoying desire to force myself to like playing RPGs, and it’s not working very well. I hate leveling characters up. I hate fighting in role-playing games. I want to beat you up, not do math. Anyway. Having read many reviews, I’ve come up with some pointers for anyone who plans to write their own and doesn’t want to come off sounding like a mentally retarded eleven-year-old.

1. Don’t pad your review out with twelve paragraphs about the game’s story. If you can’t summarise the plot of a video game in one paragraph, that’s a strike against the game, and you shouldn’t be dwelling on it. Or even worse, you shouldn’t be counting on it to increase your word count.

2. Don’t list things. It’s great that the game has thirty different weapons in it, but please don’t tell me about all of them individually.

3. Do not use any of the following phrases:

“Why are you still reading this review and not buying/playing the game?” “Buy it! Buy it! Buy it!” “BEST GAME EVAR” 4. Learn to spell.

5. Please actually play the game you’re reviewing before you review it. If I had a dollar for every review I’ve read that focused on the first two levels of a game and nothing past that, I’d be wealthy. If you can’t play it past level two, tell us why. Don’t try to make up a review about parts of the game you haven’t seen.

6. Same thing goes for your screenshots. Don’t just include the title screen and the first level. Show us you played the game. Comment on the screenshots. Sell what you’re trying to tell us.

If you can take those six pieces of advice, maybe the internet will become a less embarassing place.

Also, upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. It seems pretty.

Beautifully designed creatures.

Humans. Not much thought went into our design. (In fact, no thought went into our design. We were not designed. We evolved from earlier life forms through natural selection. But I'm sure you knew that.) I wrote this update in my head at about 3AM this morning, and in due process of sleeping, I've forgotten pretty much all of the funny bits. So I shall attempt to salvage something of it. Humans. Pathetic creatures. Allow me to explore this.

Teeth. Teeth are designed with chewing in mind. They're designed to crush, kill, destroy things so as they might easily be contended with by the remainder of the digestive tract. Teeth are unaccustomed to the company of sugar, which makes their steely exterior whither and squeal, before disappearing like a young bride's petticoat on her wedding night. Which is probably purely accidental. The sugar aversion, not the disappearing undergarments. I mean, how could the alleged "Creator Of Everything" ever have figured that EVERY FUCKING SINGLE THING WE EAT CONTAINS SOME FORM OF SUGAR?

And furthermore, just to add COSMIC INSULT to injury, our teeth are the only parts of our frail bodies that have no capacity for self-repair whatsoever (citation needed). Get a cavity in one of your teeth and all it can do is become a larger, more ferocious cavity. Until it cavitates your entire head, and you become a walking ugly wound. With bits of broccoli in.

So yes. Poorly designed, these munchers are. Particularly as, evolutionarily, they - as in all animals - are built with the forethought that the beings who's heads they're wedged in will eventually develop dentistry, lest they struggle through their meagre existances IN ETERNAL AGONY because they ate one too many licorice straps when they were eleven.

Bollocks on the outside. I mean, COME ON.

Fingernails, toenails. Oh, the vicious legacy our nails share. Once they were to glisten on sharpened edge as they served as violent talons of destruction on the very fingertips of a primordial human ancestor as he stabbed and clawed his way through the flesh of a mammoth. Or a dormouse. Or whatever took his prehistoric fancy.

Now, they're little more than an irritation. Puny, pathetic things we must keep trim lest we be accused of being girly. Weak, pathetic shards of crap designed to split, shred and fall away when not constantly moisturised and kept in pristine condition. Also numbering among the single most succeptible body parts for aiding paper cuts and other minor but exceedingly painful injuries.

I mean, hangnails? The "Creator of Everything" clearly skipped breakfast before focusing his attention to the hands of the human being. Tsk, tsk.

Bollocks. On the OUTSIDE. I'm just gonna milk this one for all it's worth.

Lack of body hair. Truly the weakest species on the great planet of Earth would have to be the only one thereon that must MANUFACTURE its own protection from the elements.

I'm not saying I'd like to see human beings develop an uncontrollable rash of fur -- my taste in women shrieks that should that be the case, stocks in Gilette will suddenly skyrocket -- but surely it was more than a caveman slipping the skin of a murdered yak over himself that triggered every follicle on the human form to flop off into the tundra.

Still, it broaches another subject I daren't start unnannounced:

Pubic hair. ..why do we even have the stuff? It's awkward, it promotes odours (yay, now I can be fed even more inappropriate advertisements!), it gets caught in things (..er..like zippers. And undergarments. And oo-er what were YOU thinking?) and it's just generally icky. I shall digress speedily before I start chanting playground rhymes and giggling.

Nose hair. For some reason, when every other strand of fur decided to make a mass exodus to some place less maloderous, General Nostril Follicle and his band of swarthy followers stood their ground and remained fast at their posts. To this day, they remain in hiding, only to appear and silently ambush their intended victims on or around his 60th birthday, at which point human physiology suddenly decides to kick in a few extra hormones and present its owner with a pristine bush of bristling nose blossoms. "What," wonders the human, "is to become of me that only great clods of nose hair can save me from?"

And now a few courteous replies, specifically to the likes of Dan, Rev, and Nicki:

Bollocks on the outside. IN A SMALL SACHEL.

Ear hair. Along with odd nasal foliage around the age of senility, the human body also decides to kick a few hormones into the aural cavities and covers the innards of the ear with a pelty layer of totally superfluous fur. Nothing can explain the need for this, although it's possibly conducive to loss of hearing in the elderly. They're not deaf, their ears are full of hair.

Eyebrows. Eyebrows are useful. They do actually keep things like sweat from draining straight down the slope of our elegant non-neanderthalish foreheads and into our eyesockets. However, as Rev points out, there really is no need for eyebrows with dimensions bordering on elderly ear-hair sizes. I mean, Eugene Levy is not normal, man.

Menstruation. Surely there could have been easier ways to dispose of the unused lining of the uterus. Just think, if The Creator Of Everything had invented the zip-lock bag before he whipped up the uterus, maybe it could have just plopped out at an appropriate moment pre-sealed inside a small plastic pouch.

Thanks to all and sundry who have contributed to this little article, such as it is. Thank you to the reader, also, for perusing it as a piece of comedy and not a serious document on the plausibility of the existence of a creator. Just sayin'.

Shopping advice

This is for the benefit of anyone who's ever used a supermarket. Friendly advice, even, inspired by the behaviour of an entire extended family operating in some kind of evil alliance at checkout number six this evening. WHEN YOU REACH THE CHECKOUT, STOP SHOPPING.

The usual strategy when shopping for groceries is to enter the store, obtain either a trolley (cart) or a basket, put stuff you want in it, then proceed to a checkout and pay for it.

The family I encountered this evening had a different tack. FAMILY MEMBER ONE, who I shall call MRS. SHOPPERNAZI proceeded immediately to checkout six with her innocuous two items of purchase, trailed haphazardly behind by her small herd of children, brothers, sisters, grandparents and other bewildered brainwashees. I step into line. Gosh! thought I! A short queue! I can leave the supermarket in blistering time!

Nein.

Mrs. Shoppernazi then proceeds to COMPLETELY OCCUPY the checkout, while her HORDES OF MINIONS are scurried about the place collecting foodstuffs she requests and depositing them on the conveyor. All the while I'm stood back a good six paces behind the checkout to allow room for the fucking armies to mass in and out of the space between the checkout and the barrier thing that's designed to provide room for only one person-width to leave the store through that thoroughfare.

Which leaves me in the awkward position of NOT LOOKING LIKE I'M ACTUALLY IN LINE. So while Mrs. Shoppernazi is waging war on the supermarket with her evil squadron of MiniShoppernazis, I'm fending off a border assault from assorted scalliwags who've concluded that since I'm stood back a distance from the checkout, I'm not really waiting to be served.

AND, the great wonderous being that Mrs. Shoppernazi gloriously presumes to be somehow manages to only purchase items that have no shelf price, which forms a third onslaught of troops on the checkout as various store officials pander back and forth relaying prices for the absurd shit this woman apparently cannot live without.

If her teller card hadn't worked, I'd have killed her.

Finding true love --

-- with the by-line, "Give Up Now". Last night, I was thinking about the popular ideal (or once popular idea, it seems to have gone the way of the dodo of late) that each person has but one true love, and the amazing probability mechanics inherant thereto.

The most basic equasion is thus: The world has a population of 6.3 billion people. Therefore, you've got a: one in 6.3 billion

..chance of meeting your true love.

This figure assumes the most arrogant assumption possible: That your true love exists. Y'know, we could really screw with the arithmetic and include the possibility of life on other planets, or interspecies love. I hear some people go for that kind of thing.

Might as well give up now, eh? Nah, let's be optimistic. Let's throw a few probability curveballs:

Gender.

For the sake of argument, we'll assume you're looking for someone of the opposite gender. Heck, considering roughly half the population is of either gender, we can safely say that you can pursue people of your own gender and have the same odds. If you're bisexual, you can skip the rest of today's lesson and quit looking entirely.

Our odds are now: one in 3.15 billion

Obviously, this figure omits hermaphrodites and people born with ambiguous genitalia. Sting, for example. It also doesn't take into account the celibate, the sexually inert, the post-menopausal, etc.

Age.

We'll assume you're looking for someone within your own age group, or within an age group you see preferrable. In the roughest maths ever, lets divide the population by eight to come up with eight 10-year age blocks, thus:

Our odds are now: one in 394 million

This barbarically assumes everyone lives precisely 80 years, and drops off the twig on their 81st birthday. It also assumes no one dies prior to that. It also assumes you're not a pedophile, in which case you're probably not looking for your true love anyway, which makes the argument moot. And disgusting.

Location, and chances of meeting.

Say you meet 20 new people every day. I'll define "meet" as "make eye contact with, and be able to recognise at a later time". This could be walking down the street, in a supermarket, etc. Leaving aside the issue of forgetting who you've met, and forgetting about the existance or non-existance of love at first sight, we're left with the following mess of mathematics:

20 people per day, for

365 days, for

80 years, or

584,000 people.

Divided into our previous total, gives us a necessary:

674 LIFETIMES required to lay our eyes on all of the potential candidates.

Obviously, as touched on in the next paragraph, you're not likely to meet your true love if she lives in Siberia and you're in Sydney. Additionally, there's the NASA-equivalent math involved in calculating your chances of meeting if they too are looking for you at the same time, and the possibility that they're not looking at all. Maybe they're a hermit.

Which brings me to another issue: What are you doing right now? Go ahead, triple the figure we just came up with. Sitting at a computer will not find you love. Despite what the banner ads tell you.

Furthermore, this equasion doesn't take into account the fact you'd need to cross continents and literally visit every corner of the planet (all the while still accomplishing your 'glimpse 20 people every day' goal) in order to even stand a chance. This is mostly because all of this is statistical crap and I couldn't be buggered researching the populations for all of the continents and applying the required math. It's too late at night.

The whole thing gets even more complicated once you take into account that in order for the whole ordeal to be worthwhile, not only do you need to find your one true love, but they need to find theirs -- in you. At which point the odds go from infinitesimal to astronomically infinitesimal, and you should concede that you've got no hope and go home and wank or something.

Anyhow, happy loving.