Armed and dangerous

bFM just did an interview with MC Frontalot, a nerdcore rapper from (obviously) Cambridge, MA. Nerdcore involves rapping about geek stuff like Star Wars and text mode adventure games.



What's worrying about this is that we all know that many actual rappers and hip-hop identities are in fact middle class computer geeks from nice suburbs (or indeed public school educated sons of bishops). Is the converse true? Is MC Frontalot in fact a genuine crack smokin', machine gun totin' gangsta? I so hope so!

Kiwiburn '07

Last weekend I participated in Kiwiburn '07.



Things you don't get at Kiwiburn (unlike standard festivals):
1. Idiot drunken high skool kids
2. Lines to get in and have your car/body frisked
3. VIP areas
4. The annoying "band of the summer" that plays at every festival
5. Sleep

Things you definitely get at Kiwiburn:
1. Unbelievably cool friendly people
2. Your own spanking paddle
3. Theme camps with people giving out Absinthe shots
4. Me cranking out the bangin choon's - with fire poi dancers keeping up at 140bpm
5. Me playing trancy stuff with a guy toasting along (thank you Reno!)
6. Swimming in the lake
7. Burning the man
8. Tearing down the temple and throwing it on the flames
9. Shininess
10. Sheep

I'm so going next year - I want to have a floating theme camp on the lake. If I can possibly manage it, I'm going to Nevada in August as well!

Polled out

The Dominion Post is whinging that people skewed their "poll" on John Key's popularity. Allegedly people in Parliamentary Service offices have been multiple voting.

Well boo hoo! Simple answer - stop running unscientific self-selecting polls that are designed to achieve the result the paper is trying to push (not to mention make money from those dumb enough to text vote).

The voting system on Stuff is trivially easy to hack - all you have to do is block the cookie it sends when you vote - you can then watch the votes crank up indefinitely.

Have a look at their current poll on "Has Daniel Radcliffe made the right career move by starring in a raunchy new stage play?" Look at all the votes!

You can do this too - all you need is this little Linux script:

#!/bin/bash
i="0"
while [ $i -lt 1000 ]
do
wget http://www.stuff.co.nz/view-poll-results.html?section_id=1860&poll_id=14455&option_id=22228
i=$[$i+1]
done

Take a copy - drive pseudo-polling out of New Zealand!