Lady goes cuckoo for nuggets

A woman in Ohio seemed to go mental when she couldn’t get chicken nuggets from a fast-food outlet. She proceeds to get out of her vehicle, open the service window, and try to attack the outet’s serving person. It’s like a scaled-down real-life enactment of the movie Falling Down, where the chap has much the same argument. Except that was a movie, and this was real life. The security video shows that, after not getting her satisfaction over the nuggets, the crazy lady then proceeds to go back to her car, get some kind of object, and smash the window.

But, I think, the truely genius part of the whole video, is that, right near the end, the next car just rolls up to the service window. You have to wonder what happened next…

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Hidden Empire – Book review

Hidden Empire was written by Kevin J Anderson and is part of a reasonably lengthy set of seven novels. This book and the saga as a whole have received mixed reviews on Amazon, with complaints ranging from the criticality of the science through to the length of the chapters. So, what did I make of book one?
The chapter length suited me. The book does have short chapters (typically around 8 pages each), which leads to a lot of chapters in a book of this length, but I found that that suited me, because sometimes I cannot make time for a long reading session, so this was actually very flexible. (And meant that I didn’t have to force a break like I have in other books recently). The chapters move between the characters in the novel, so if you’re not a fan of switching perspective this may not be for you.
The science? Well, the finer detail is, for sure, a bit lacking. You might want to look elsewhere if you’re a sci-fi reader who enjoys the technical specifics. We don’t really (at least in this book) have any detailed exploration of the technologies that come up. Hydrogen mining and the associated use for a high-speed space fuel is fairly key to the story, but it’s not really explained, it’s just “there”.
Character development is average. Some characters are focused on more than others. Some characters are made up only to blip out of existance, which is interesting, but a bit frustrating.
So reading all of that you might think that I hated the book. Well, no. I actually quite enjoyed it in the end. I found that the character development improved in the latter stages of the book, and as the threads pulled together the meandering storyline achieved a certain cohesion. It takes a certain effort to get to the last half of the book, but on the whole it’s worth it.
The grand reveal of the powerful enemy race in this space opera also comes fairly near to the end of the novel. I would have liked to have seen them introduced properly a bit earlier, so that we could see more development, but I think it was done this way to lead in to book two.
I think I would give this book a 6 out of 10. There are definite areas where things could have been better, but on balance it is a good yarn, with some humour thrown in to keep you going.

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Media Temple hit again?

Numerous media temple (and so far only media temple) users are reporting in the WordPress forums of their sites being hacked. The symptom appears to be a redirection script being injected, with a source referencing a domain oeaou.com.

Some cleanup steps can be found in the thread here as well as the traditional codex what to do in the event of hacking help page.

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WordPress 3.0.1 released

For those that run WordPress and ignore everything on the admin pages, version 3.0.1 is out. This was a bug-fix release, but the best thing to do is to update now and stay current. For those of you on pre-3.0 versions, this brings even more stability so you’re even less likely to see any post-upgrade issues. Just make sure your themes and plugins are compatible, and upgrade them first if necessary.

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Smith to quit as Who

I missed these earlier… Various reports suggest that Matt Smith is planing to leave the Dr Who role after the next season, to move into Hollywood.

The rumours have been dismissed by co-star Karen Gillan, who reckons that Smith is not going anywhere.

I hope that the rumours are unfounded, as I’ve enjoyed the partnership of Smith and Gillan in the last series and I think there is a lot left in them, too. It would be another short-lived Doctor, too, from that side of things.

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