Paperjam

For decades, students of psychology have strived to produce subtle yet exacting tests to pinpoint the nature of an individual’s personality. You can’t even get a temping job doing data entry without doing some deeply cunning multiple choice test asking you if in your spare time do you prefer to:
a) Spend time with your family
b) Socialise with friends/play sports
c) Enjoy your own company with a book/some music
d) Self harm, smoke crack and torture kittens

Well, the likes of Belbin and Myers-Briggs have all struggled in vain as far as I can tell, because today I was sent an e-mail containing a link to the most accurate personality evaluation tool that I can imagine the human mind will ever assemble. I refer to the “Which Sports Car Are You??” multiple choice quiz.

This frighteningly sophisticated psychological tool (now in its refined second version) uses a deceptively small number of seemingly vacuous yes/no questions to determine the precise nature of your “inner vehicle”. Honestly it is like someone shining a spotlight into your soul.

In the interests of science I submitted to the test and got the following results:

Anyone who knows me will tell you that this is a devastatingly accurate assessment (as long as you stop reading after the first eight words). But to be fair I have been hanging round in a desert at dusk a lot lately, right near a stylish rocky outcrop. It just feels right.

Costing many tens of thousands of pounds, and involving a host of managers, project managers, sundry other arseholes, pleb developer types and a coterie of self-serving, self-obsessed, pig-ignorant users across a desert-like couple of years...oh sorry, wrong project.

This is the new version of paper-jam and it cost about 10p to implement, but it has taken me about two months. Dearie me. Those of you watching in black and white/Internet Explorer - it probably looks a bit weird, we will sort it out. (**cough**install firefox.)

Try and pretend like you care while I give you the technical details: it's based on the lovely PHP CodeIgniter framework, which would have made things quicker, but I'm such a thickie.

It also uses the wonderful Akismet spam blocking system to cut down on the torrent of shit comment spam we've been getting recently.

According to their website, 93% of all comments are spam. If you can think of a reason why we shouldn't drive metal drainpipes into these spamming wankers anuses and pour a mixture of hot oil, chilli powder, and the food-processed remains of their own mothers into them, let us know.

(photo from williamallthing's flickr stream)

From probably still the funniest site on the internet, The Onion, comes these daily short, sharp bursts of twisted humour. Admittedly the "Brought to you by..." adverts at the end are a total drag but you can't really complain when little newsflashes such as "Mel Gibson Launches Rockets Into Israel" and "Prison Tattoo Artist Says It's A Swastika Or Nothing" can be yours for free.

You can get them straight from The Onion web site or alternatively you can subscribe to it for nada from iTunes.

Additionally I suggest scouring the internet for the clip that they did some years ago entitled "The President's Historic Announcement".

It was a very dark moment for me when my imac broke a few weeks back, and not just because it was the only light source at the time in my sad-looking room. First came denial - there were ultimately fruitless trawls through the techy backwaters of the online mac community looking for a miracle cure.

Next there was anger as the realisation that my hard drive had committed digital hari-kiri dawned, leaving me with a very expensive box that lit up and flashed a beautifully designed question mark at me but did fuck all else.

Finally came acceptance that I had completely lost everything and might as well take the computer in to the mac shop in the Bull Ring to get sorted. Their experts got onto it straight away, as you can see from the image the "Tobemeister" ascertained that the HD was indeed "Fuct" and they put a new one in, while managing to conform to every popular stereotype about IT support types. No complaints from me mind.

There is a reasonable happy end to the story as (despite Apple's evil DRM related attempts to prevent it) there is a way to rescue the many gigs of music off your ipod and get it back onto your mac. It is called iPodRip and it is worth its virtual weight in virtual gold, you can get it here.

...for this, the most worthless error type message of all time. Hang on I'll just pop over to LA so I can watch that Morrissey video.

Wankers.

Have you yearned for a screen saver with the badly-kerned words "paper" and "jam" spinning slowly around, while the wonder of RSS lets you know what is going on around here at the same time.

You have? That's handy. Download the file below and put it in your Screensavers folder (you can find it in the Library), you can then turn it on through the screensaver settings.

Of course this all only works if you have OS X and are connected to the internet in some way, but hey aren't we all?

The file is here, don't worry it is only about 8k

This is the amazing new fourth or fifth design of the paper-jam website. I've lost count now, it's ridiculous. No animals were harmed in the making of this new site, but there was plenty of swearing, believe me.

One thing that was causing particular cursage was updating the structure of the database on the live server without trashing all the data that was there already... the answer was mysqldiff, which works out the structural difference between two databases. I used it to generate the update SQL script; it needed a bit of editing afterwards, but nothing serious.

Hooray for Stephan Skusa who wrote mysqldiff, there'll be a donation winging it's way over to him once my credit card has recovered from the sticky brown mess it's currently in.