Democratise Me!

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding the latest Open Source video player, Democracy, and though I’ve only started using it today, it looks fantastically good. I used to think that the VLC media player was a pretty decent open-source media player that practically plays every video format (and it still is decent, considering it costs nothing and is waaaay better than the bloated Windows Media Player).

Democracy, which is coded by Participatory Culture Foundation, a renegade nonprofit code shop, incorporates that ability to play Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID–which really encompasses most media formats on the web–but what makes it awesome is its built-in RSS feed aggregator, lets you download in the background through BitTorrent, and there’s a query box that searches for YouTube videos. Wired Magazine is already building up the hype by calling it the future of Net Video. I’ll leave that judgment up to you, but it sure as hell looks good.

Try it. It’s free for download here.

Presenting: Rehab Britney

The first story I dugg this morning was this fluffy little piece on the new Britney Spears doll. Hey, what can I say–I love celebrity trash like this once in a while. That, and anything involving Scarlett Johansson in a bikini. Besides, who would’ve imagined that 5 years ago something like this would’ve come up? I guess this comes to show how the nature of celebrity is changing; worshipping them was sooooo Spice Girls era. Oh, and just so you can get to know more dirt on BS, here’s a little news that says she was into threesomes (the good kind–two girls).

Right. That’s enough celebrity news for now. I feel dumber already.

Don’t you wish your teacher was as cool as this?

It all started out last week, when I came across this picture that made me laugh out loud:

And digging out for more silly test result pictures, I came across more pictures which made me think of how cool some teachers can be. If I ever pulled any of this nonsense during my A-Levels Maths class, I’d have my nipples pinched till they were purple. Not that my nipples serve any function, but still, I’d like to keep them. If I had to sacrifice my nipples, it’s going to be something more than just pulling off stunts like this that I found on Flickr

The closest I came to a teacher as cool as the one below was my Bio teacher in A-Levels, Mrs. Ong, who drew rabbits being killed by Elmer Fudd on the whiteboard.

And goodness knows how many countless times I wanted to do this during my Chemistry and Square Inequalities classes: