Blog Marco

As the web expands with ever more content and information everyday, more and more people are getting addicted to the internet. The majority of US adults feel that they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the web. A survey asked 1,011 American adults how long they would feel OK without going on the web, to which 15 per cent said a just a day or less, 21 per cent said a couple of days and another 19 per cent said a few days. Only a fifth of those who took part in an online survey conducted by advertising agency JWT between September 7 and 11 said they could go for a week. "People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behaviour. They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family." The found the use of mobile phones and the internet were becoming more and more an essential part of life with 48 per cent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without internet access. More than a quarter of respondents - or 28 per cent - admitted spending less time socialising face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online. It also found that 20 per cent said they spend less time having sex because they are online. We're turning into a world of Internet Addicts.

Part 1 of a series about the world of forex trading as introduced by Hot Bikini Girl! In this video we learn the answers to the questions: 1) What is Forex Trading? and 2) How Does Forex Trading Work? The video is brought to you by MyForexCashBack.com - Get money back on your forex trading. Enjoy!

Michael Jordan's Top 10 best dunks of all time. Michael Jordan the legend. Enjoy as Jordan fakes, runs, jumps to dunk the basketball into the basket.

Totally random bu watch someone getting arrested and tasered. A student from the University of Florida was tasered and arrested after asking a series of questions from visiting politician, Senator John Kerry. Andrew Meyer, 21, asked the Democrat senator why he did not contest the 2004 presidential election, which he lost to President Bush, and why there had been no moves to impeach Mr Bush. Minutes after Meyer started speaking, he was pushed aside by the police, floored to the ground and tasered as seen on the video of the event. Meyer was charged with resisting an officer and disturbing the peace, according to Alachua County jail records. A University of Florida student is tasered and arrested after causing a disturbance at a town hall forum, which featured Senator John Kerry, at the UF Auditorium on Sept. 17, 2007. No bond had been set. Meyer was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday morning, a jail official said. Orlando said university police would conduct an internal investigation on the incident. "The police department does have a standard procedure for when they use force, including when they use a Taser," Orlando said.

If you live in the great ol' USA you may want to buy Entertainment Weekly. They have a free flash drive in their current September Issue of their magazine. They have a new marketing ploy of attaching a USB drive to the magazine advertising CBS and Cadillac when you insert it into your computer. Formatting the drive gives you 120MB. I assume the flash drives cost pennies to make and that someday soon we will be flooded with them like we used to be flooded with AOL CDs.

Women can lose their hair. Of course, you say - that's natural. But what if women are actually speeding up the process and actually contributing to the cause? When girls and young women use ceramic hair curlers especially when they overuse these devices they are actually burning their scalps and maybe causing irreparable and permanent hair damage. The newest trend in current fashion is this "ironed" hair look. There has been medical research showing that hospital emergency departments have had an increase in women coming in with severe burns from the hair irons, which can reach up to 200 degrees. Ceramic hair straighteners have become increasingly popular in recent years, with top-end brands, such as GHD, costing up to $300. in the Emergency Medicine Journal.

Gmail has released a collaborative video of people passing the envelope around the world, doing various activities. Nothing funny, just an interesting video to watch. Yet another time waster.

There's a civil construction boom in Sydney at the moment - a few years ago the M7 was opened, and more recently the Lane Cove Tunnel was opened. There are plans for another rail link in Sydney. The NSW Government is to consider an east-west underground railway dubbed the Anzac Line, and a radical plan for a western Sydney fast train. Officials from the Ministry of Transport, led by the acting director of public transport planning, Rod Staples, are expected to set out a vastly different picture of the city's transport future. Mr Staples's plan advocates an east-west underground metro-style line using single-deck carriages and running between Malabar and West Ryde, under Anzac Parade and Victoria Road. It would ease congestion along Victoria Road, with stations at the University of NSW, Moore Park, Drummoyne, Gladesville and Ryde, all expected to attract large numbers of commuters. Public transport travel time from Drummoyne and Maroubra into the city would be cut by one-third. There are plans to be unveiled of privately-funded fast rail service between Penrith and the city. Backed by private investors, the Western FastRail trains would travel at up to 160kmh through 26-kilometre tunnels between Parramatta and Wynyard, and cut travel times between Penrith and the city to less than 30 minutes.

There could be a disturbing law precedent that could be set for Australian website owners, especially those from an online community. 2Clix is suing a popular Australian website Whirlpool which has around 180,000 users, over comments published on their message board. The owner of the website, Simon Wright is being sued for "injurious falsehood", and asking for $150,000 in damages and an injunction requiring Whirlpool to remove forum threads highly critical of 2Clix's accounting software. Dale Clapperton, chairman of the online users lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said 2Clix was using the law to silence its critics. He said if Wright lost "it might mean the end of criticising companies' products and services online", as "any company will be able to demand that people's criticisms of them be deleted off websites, and if they don't comply they'll sue". Amanda Stickley, a senior law lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, said if 2Clix won there would be severe consequences for website operators as they would have to be "very vigilant in checking material on the website and remove anything that could cause injury to someone's business reputation". In a statement of claim filed with the Supreme Court of Queensland, 2Clix said the comments, published in two threads between between late last year and July this year, led it to sustain "a severe downturn in monthly sales". But Stickley said it would be very difficult for 2Clix to successfully sue Wright for injurious falsehood over comments made by Whirlpool users. It would have to prove the statements were false, that they were made in malice, that 2Clix actually suffered damage in the form of monetary loss and, critically, that Wright had intended to cause 2Clix monetary loss by allowing the material to remain on the website. "I don't think you could actually prove that for a web operator, that they personally intended the damage because of their malicious intention, especially when it's posted by a third party that they've got no relationship to," Stickley said. But Whirlpool isn't taking any chances, asking its users in a statement published on the website to "refrain from doing anything that might expose Simon to contempt of court such as making statements that prejudge the outcome of the case".

Freedon of Speech Rules! We consumers have the right to complain. All the best to Simon and Whirlpool and don't let them set this precedent.

We are the lucky ones. I've just read a news story from China about this story of a kid going to uni. It's a special story that moved me when I read it. From poverty to succeeding in university, have a read:

LAST week was the start of the Chinese academic year. Thousands of poor peasant children have triumphed over the world's most competitive high school system and taken their places at university. It can be a proud and bewildering experience. For a young man in Liaoning province called Sun Dapeng, it is time for an annual visit to his father's grave. Dapeng's father left this note three years ago before swallowing a can of pesticide: "My son, when you read this letter I will no longer be in this world, because I cannot provide for your education. Please accept my death as my apology." Dapeng's mother had died when he was young. His father was a landless peasant who slaved his guts out to earn five or 10 yuan on a good day, nothing on a bad one, hauling heavy loads despite a lapsed disc in his lumbar spine. His father had covered the school fees and protected Dapeng from manual work so he could concentrate completely on his study. But when Dapeng was offered a place at a teaching college the first year tuition fee was 5308 yuan ($851) - 100 times the old man's life savings of 52 yuan. This year the national censors have ensured there is no coverage of the student and parent suicides that greet the start of every academic year.

In Liaoning province, Sun Dapeng has just returned from his father's grave. He has just graduated from university with a teaching degree and a major in geography. Last week he started teaching at a privately owned primary school. It is hard work - he has to prepare and teach 24 lesson every week - but he earns between 700 and 800 yuan a month.

It is enough for him to soon repay the 6000 yuan student loan he eventually received from the local city government and the money he borrowed from his sister. His sister was cleaning chicken yards at the time for 200 yuan a month. Visiting his father's grave, Dapeng whispered "ku jing gan lai" (the suffering is over, I promise a better future). But the suffering will never be over. "If I had not gone to university my father would not have killed himself," he says quietly. "He was the perfect father."

We are lucky.

Did you know you can call a toll free number from the internet to a physical phone through the internet using skype? I haven't needed to use this until now (I think this ability has been present since 2005)... I had to call up a company in USA from Australia to enquire about an eBay auction. You can simply dial freecall phone numbers to France, Poland, UK and USA. These number rangers are supported:
* France: +33 800, +33 805, +33 809
* Poland: +48 800
* UK: +44 500, +44 800, +44 808
* USA: +1 800, +1 866, +1 877, +1 888
And this is how you can use this skype freecall system using skypeOut (you don't need to buy credits): In Skype, just enter the number in international format in the Address Bar (start with +1 for USA, +44 for UK etc) and hit the big green button. Couldn’t be easier! You can also add the numbers to your contact list and call them “pizza”, “video rentals” or wherever else you’re calling. The free calls are effective immediately and supported on all platforms where the Skype client is available. Oh and if you need to select a choice from a menu just go to the dial tab and click on the numbers you need to press. Something free... practical and a source for amusement when your bored.

I previously posted a funny feature length video by Mark Leung... here are more of his work.

MARK LEUNG'S CRAZY COMPUTER BUG

Absinthe: Tokyo Drift - Mark Leung

Jerk It Out - Mark Leung
A music video about grandparents, Santa Claus, arcade-style fighting, figure skating, a huge chicken, a guy on fire and girls in ballet class. Better than iPod commercial. Watch or die.

Mark Leung's Unlucky Day

I can't believe it. I've actually sat and watched some Youtube video for 40 minutes?! And its no commercial production, its all original, home grown indie film sort of stuff... I was randomly browsing for parodies in the comedy section of YouTube when I found this fitting tribute to a lot of RPG's in the past as well as some current issues (!). I hope you find this geeky parody comedy as funny as I did... And yes, its worth watching the whole video all the way through! Props to Mark Leung. I'll be posting his other videos in a few clicks.

Here's the blurb of this geeky parody comedy:

Once upon a time, when Earth was still a beautiful place, an evil force came to turn all living things into Vegetarians.

Three students from suburban Massachusetts would step up against this catastrophe... to end Vegetarian Supremacy.

Mark, Jesús, Maria and their foes would make amazing personal discoveries as the two forces clash.

And so began the ultimate saga about friendship, heritage, sex and explosions.

Penn Masala presents The Facebook Skit, a parody of Enrique Iglesias' song Hero. I guess this song is dedicated to all you Facebook stalkers and secret admirers out there... go poke someone today!

Check out this business! It's a Lawn Mowing company specialising in bikini clad girls mowing lawns. It's all happening in Memphis, Tennessee - that's right - in the middle of USA's conservative bible belt. An interesting business idea - but its nothing new. Just take something boring and throw in any sexy ladies and a bit of controversy and you have yourself an interesting business idea as well as media coverage (since they have the chance to show a little skin and boost their ratings). Another example of this business model is in Chile. Chileans are usually conservative Catholic, but there cafe's served by girls wearing lingerie it is all the rage. An all male version for the Chilean women however, failed. And in the US you've got all those bikini car washes and then you've got Hooters - the "family friendly" restaurant.