Beefy's Corner - The Off-Topic Chat Thread

Short people are people too

 

wait the formatting in my signature is fine???

 

Oh, so the mods get to keep their luxuries and only us normal folks get hit by the cuts! Revolution!

 

How can the site continue without my beautiful picture of Mike keeping morale up and dissenters in line? At least Laura is still over there warming Beefy's with her smile.

 

I'm on my first PS2. 11 years, still going strong.

 

Don't worry. Everyone's gay for Khal Drogo.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/15/batkid-san-francisco_n_4283772.html

 

one of the big ones?

 

Mine certainly is. I was thinking about opening it up and modding it. For example, there's a huge space inside for a hard disk and I've got spares of those. That would speed up games a bit.

 

Really weird coming across that post out of context.

 

Hee-hee, very good.

On another subject entirely, I see that scientists have established that the oldest living animal is an Icelandic Clam, called Ming. In finding out the age they accidentally killed it. Well done scientists. A for effort, and E for accident, which is an unusual way of spelling. When reading the article, the words of Gandalf came to mind [not for the first time, because it's a truism], that... he, who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.

http://descrier.co.uk/science/2013/...y-kill-worlds-oldest-animal-507-year-old-clam

 

Named after the Ming dynasty, during which it was born. Shiiiiit.

 

Which, if you prefer your history from an English perspective, makes it born during the last few years of Henry VII's reign. Or 15 years after Henry VIII was born, if you prefer.

From an Icelandic perspective, here's an extract [yes, cut and pasted]

ICELAND 1500-1800

During the 16th century Iceland, like the rest of Europe, was rocked by the reformation. Denmark became Protestant in the 1530s and in 1539 the Danish king ordered his men to confiscate the church's land in Iceland. The bishops of Iceland resisted and in 1541 the Danish king sent an expedition to enforce conformity. Skalholt was given a new bishop but the bishop of Holar, a man named Jon Aranson continued to resist. He was a powerful chieftain as well as a bishop and he had soldiers to fight for him. He also had two sons, by his concubine, who supported him. In 1548 Aranson was declared an outlaw. His soldiers then captured the Protestant bishop of Skalholt. However in 1550 he was defeated. Aranson and his two sons were executed.

Afterwards the people of Iceland gradually accepted Protestantism and in 1584 the Bible was translated into Icelandic.

However during the 17th century the Icelanders suffered hardship. In 1602 the king made all trade with Iceland a monopoly of certain merchants in Copenhagen, Malmo and Elsinore. In 1619 the monopoly was made a joint stock company. The monopoly meant the Icelanders were forced to sell goods to the company at low prices and buy supplies from them at high prices. As a result the Icelandic economy suffered severely.

Furthermore in 1661 the Danish king made himself an absolute monarch. In 1662 the Icelanders were forced to submit to him. The Althing continued to meet but had no real power. It was reduced to being a court.

Worse in 1707-09 Iceland suffered an outbreak of smallpox which killed a large part of the population.

In the mid 18th century a man named Skuli Magnusson was made an official called a fogd. He tried to improve the economy by bringing in farmers from Denmark and Norway. He also introduced better fishing vessels. He also created a woollen industry in Reykjavik with German weavers. Finally in 1787 the monopoly was ended.

However in 1783 the fallout from volcanic eruptions caused devastation in Iceland. By 1786 the population of Iceland was only 38,000. Finally in 1800 the Althing closed. A new law court replaced it. It sat in Reykjavik which at that time was a little community of 300 people.



And after that little lot, Ming was a mere 300 years old..!

 

Would it be worth it?

 

Probably not, but it might be an interesting exercise, and would give me the excuse of looking inside a PS2, which I've never bothered to do. What I have done is popped a keyboard and mouse onto the PS2 and used it as a computer. That was years ago and I can't remember how good or bad it was, only that I remember doing it.

I suppose I could look up on the net and see what sort of mods might be worth pursuing. Today, I have a Dual Hi-fi turntable to repair and a friend's HDD/DVD recorder, where the DVD tray gets stuck. So, I think I'll do those instead.

 

Interesting. I always wanted to have a mega charged Amiga1200 that could run all modern PC games, but I never actually had the time, inclination or know-how. It'd be worth it just to be using Workbench instead of Windows.

 

Anybody else watching England v The All Blacks?....really exciting first half, England are a bit unlucky to be losing 16-20.

 

Yep. Poor start but England ramping it up with the momentum at the end of the half.

 

This All Blacks team is the best I've ever seen.

 

Never been a fan of Dr Who, but this was quite entertaining: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01lhhv4/Doctor_Who_Mini_Episode_The_Night_of_the_Doctor/

Always thought the Beeb missed an opportunity with Paul McGann as the Doctor, when they did just one film with him in the role. One just about forgets that Withnail is not going to be in the nearest pub.

Saying that, Withnail would make a good companion.