I've been considering the fashion implications of wearing protective masks since I learned that dust storms will "certainly" become a regular occurence in wake of the impending climate change apocolypse.

The standard white masks might save you from breathing harmful dust or contracting deadly airbourne diseases, but what's the point of surviving unfathomable catastrophe if it means you can't get a date? Even this lady's sensual eyebrows and stylish hairnet won't save her from a lonely Friday night, re-watching The West Wing on DVD and eating defrosted chicken over the sink.



I decided to check if there were any existing designs that spruced up the standard masks and to my surprise found only a few examples, the best being this one which appears to be some kind of modified men's sporting accessory:



Fortunately I have come up with the perfect solution: the Red Defias Mask. It's sleek, mysterious, can be worn over regular masks, and being BOP people around you will instantly recognise your prowess in slaying countless members of the Defias Brotherhood. Here's an artist's impression of what the Defias Mask would look like IRL:



Of course once the mask finds its way into mainstream circles, the gates of the fashion world will open to other forms of MMORPG-inspired clothing:

I'm breaking hiatus to write about something I heard about listening to Hack on the way home from work today. One of the segments was about a product soon to be released in Australia which lets parents monitor what their kids are doing on their mobiles.

The company providing this "service" is called My Mobile Watchdog. Their Australian website is under construction but I assume they're reselling the American product of the same name. The monitoring is achieved via some nefarious software that runs only on a "special phone". The SMS/MMS messages and e-mails of kids unlucky enough to be given one of these phones get forwarded to their parents, who also receive notifications when a phone call is made or a website is visited. They don't seem to keep audio recordings of phone calls but I'm not 100% sure.

I think this is a pretty bad idea. In fact, this idea makes me so angry I feel like doing something awful, like failing to come to a complete halt at a stop sign or being a jerk to somebody who probably didn't deserve it. That somebody might actually buy one of these things and not realise the act of utter fuckwittery they're perpetrating makes me want to bang my head against a coffee table repeatedly until I pass out, unless of course it hurt a lot the first time in which case I'd probably stop.

What pisses me off most is the way the company tries to pretend what they're doing isn't wrong or ethically bankrupt because the kids involved have to agree to a disclaimer (from their FAQ):

Will my child know that My Mobile Watchdog is on their phone?
Yes. My Mobile Watchdog is not spyware and they will know that their phone is being protected.

How will they know?
A message appears on the phone about every 24 hours or whenever the phone is turned on. It lets them know that My Mobile Watchdog is monitoring and protecting their phone. They push any button to agree and continue phone use.

I guess the argument here is that the child consents so therefore it's okay! Guess what arseholes, that's the exact same excuse used by some of the predators you claim to protect against, ironic much? As an aside I like the way they assert that it isn't spyware because it announces itself, I'm pretty sure that's actually not how it works :)

Also, I am not an informed consent expert (feel free to pipe up if you are) but I suspect that in many cases people who accepted a prompt saying "My Mobile Watchdog is monitoring and protecting your phone" would not in fact understand from this that their calls and texts were being monitored by a third party. Even if the notice were worded so that they did understand, I'm not sure that all children (or even adults) are capable of fully comprehending the implications of being eavesdropped upon 24/7 based solely on the contents of a popup window.

I'm about equal parts annoyed and amused by this banner on MMW's homepage:



About the only thing I like about it is that the salacious image they chose actually makes sexting look like fun, which of course it is, unless you're 17-and-a-half and live in some extreme conservative state in the US where you can be sent to the big house for sharing saucy pictures of yourself with someone.

Does anyone really think this phone would be a serious impediment to anyone, let alone a tech-savvy teenager? I can imagine the conversation now:

"Sext me nudie pics plz!"
"I can't, my parents monitor my MMSes!"
"Drats, foiled again! If only there were some other way to transmit pornographic images electronically!"

Anyway I'm tired and this has turned into somewhat of a fringe lunatic rant, but in summary I think this idea is stupid!

Watching CNN, take a sip every time particular inauguration-related keywords are mentioned. The list of keywords should be mostly pretty low traffic, with the exception of "Barack Obama" which is a three-second scull. "Leader of the free world is a full-glass scull, and "President Barack Hussein Obama" clears the table. Beware sentences such as "Barack Obama and Michelle Obama are having coffee with President Bush and Laura Bush before he is inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States.

1. ...MDB did a Portishead cover?
2. ...it's actually not bad, either.

I thought this was pretty amazing - water ice on Mars (via /., of course).

I guess what's remarkable isn't so much the presence of water but rather how it behaves - after sitting in the sun for four days the ice heats up and becomes a gas, without passing through liquid state (chemistry geeks call this 'sublimation').

As one poster in the Slashdot article points out, they first discovered the whole water and sublimation thing back in the '70s. But this time they have a cool animated GIF of the water submimat..ing, see!

Found while reading (ok, I'll admit, re-reading) a somewhat depressing interview with the creator of the Space Quest series:

"I don't believe there is a job out there that won't prove to be a disappointment to me since I've already had the best one in the world, regardless of how bad and how hard it was at times, and how many personal sacrifices I ended up making. And I'm not trying to generate any sympathy by saying this. Everything pales by comparison when you've done something that has proven to be enjoyable and gratifying to other people. When people write you from so many places on the earth to tell you they liked something you did, and that what you did took them away from their problems and/or toils in the real world and made them laugh, if for even a just a few minutes, well, it just doesn't get any better than that. Not one bit.

"I want fans to know this, and that I truly love them."

—Scott Murphy, guy from Andromeda

*Should* eating and drinking keep you from thinking?

GO!