Another one got through.
1,358 Caught / 17 Missed / 0 False Positives (98.8% accuracy)
LeekSpin
I’m now addicted to a new flash video/song: LEEKSPIN DOT COM (from Decathanerd). The song is mesmerizing and has a light joyous hint to it. I’ve set up a mirror in my gallery.
Click to start the animation or view it in the gallery.
The character you see spinning the leek is a female character from Bleach (the anime) named Orihime. She’s a bit of a klutz, but pretty cute:
After searching online for awhile, it turns out this song is called Ievan Polkka. This version was performed by Loituma in 1995. Both Wikipedia entries were started after this flash animation started spreading around (5/8/2006 and 4/27/2006 respectively). From Wikipedia:
The song is sung in Savo, the eastern dialect of the Finnish language, making it even more comical for Finns.
The intermezzo, which was used in the Flash movie, is just phonetically inspired gibberish with some Finnish words in it. It is not the part of the original song by Eino Kettunen, but rather is introduced by Loituma.
—This song is best known from an a cappella performance by the Finnish quartet Loituma, first released in their album “Loituma” in 1995, re-released in album “Things of Beauty” in 1998.
The song, popular in Finland but previously unknown to the rest of the world, became better-known on the Internet since April/May 2006 because of a Flash cartoon.
—
A flash animation including this song has gained popularity on the internet. The cartoon consists of a 4-frame animation of an anime character twirling a leek to a 26-second loop from the song. Like many other such cartoons, it is set to loop continuously. Due to the infinity, the nonsensical sound of the singing, the simple energizing melody, the girl’s cheerful facial expression and the absurdity of spinning a leek the cartoon is considered very funny and has been spread by quite a number of people. Within a few days, tens of thousands of pages directed to the possible origin or had the file uploaded on their own webspace.
The “leekspin girl” is the BLEACH character Orihime Inoue, she spins the leek because she is telling her friend what she is planning to cook (usually something weird).
For the cartoon the second half of the fifth stanza (four lines) and the complete sixth stanza (eight lines) have been used; apparently they have no meaning and are therefore not included in the official lyrics. This is overlooked in most cases by the users who post the lyrics, often causing confusion.
It was originally made by an anonymous user of the image board 4chan and posted on the site’s flash board.
By now there are multiple videos and remixes of the song which have been inspired by the flash cartoon.
You can get the song in Loituma’s Things of Beauty album. You can listen to a preview of Ievan Polkka/Ieva’s Polka at Amazon.com.
Here you can view a video of Loituma Live (from Decathanerd) performing Ievan Polkka (Ieva’s Polka). An awesome thing about this group is they perform as a capella which always has this cool aspect to it. Here’s a mirror in case the original ever goes down.
Pandora Techno Recommendations
So through Pandora, I found some new songs that I really like:
Within Temptation – Jillian (I’d Give My Heart)
You can find this track on their The Silent Force album. You can watch them perform live in this video. The music has some ghostly/scary feeling to it, mixed with some electronica and of course the necessary high pitch female voice that makes all techno/trance songs better. I would say their style is pretty similar to Evanescence. You can hear a better quality version of it by watching this compilation with scenes from Serenity.
Reflekt – Need to Feel Loved
Another techno-y song with heavy beats and a high pitch female singer. You can watch their music video here. You can find this song in their Need to Feel Loved album.
Lyrics (from Only Lyrics): (Show)
Lasgo – Alone
Lasgo – Something
There’s 2 songs that were played by Lasgo that I liked. You can watch the music video of Alone or music video of Something. You can also listen to a preview of Alone or a preview of Something. You can find both tracks in her Some Things album. If those weren’t proper nouns, the few sentense I just type made no sense.
Akismet Spam Detector
7 somehow slipped by today. The current score:
1,030 Caught / 16 Missed / 0 False Positives (98.5% accuracy)
UnWired Buyer
So I first heard of this on AnandTech, but finally got around to do this today. It takes less than ~30 minutes to do everything and everyone’s confirming that they’re getting the money.
Initially the reward was only $10, but they’ve bumped it to $20 recently.
So what is UnWired Buyer. It’s actually a pretty neat service, and they’ll probably charge to use it pretty soon. If you’ve ever done auctions, you’ll know what sniping is. Ever bid on an auction and at the very last second, someone comes in and outbids you and takes the win? Well, that’s called sniping. I used WinningBid Pro! for my snipings before, but they’ve stopped supporting the software and eBay changed its bidding mechanism. What UB (UnWired Buyer) is is a sniping service. You add auctions to your eBay watchlist, UB downloads that list and you can set a max bid on it and it’ll bid at the last possible second.
There’s also the call option which is neat. You provide your cell phone number and when the auction is ending within 3 minutes, you get a phone call which prompts you to enter a PIN you’ve set up earlier and then you get real time status as the end of the auction nears. You can hit # to bid the minimum bid, or hit in numbers to set a max bid.
There’s also the SMS text messaging option. I haven’t tried that, but seems like you’ll get a text message reminders regarding auctions on your watchlist.
There is one ceveat. You need to provide your eBay username and password. If you don’t trust this service, don’t bother doing this deal. If you’re worried, you always have the option of changing your eBay password after this (which is what I’m probably going to do).
So how do you get your $20? It’s pretty simple. Sign up for this service (see Referral Bonus below before you do) and you’ll be prompted to enter a PIN, a email address, and your eBay username and password. PIN is just a 4 digit number you can easily remember. You must enter a valid PayPal email address (this is where they’ll send the $20 bonus). What I did was created a new krunk4ever.com address and linked that to my personal PayPal account and probably will remove I receive my $20 bonus.
In order to qualify for the $20 signup bonus, you must follow these rules:
- To qualify for the $20 signup bonus, the user must register for UnWired Buyer and use the service to bid on an auction using their phone within 30 days. The $20 signup bonus is for new users only.
- New users MUST USE UNWIRED BUYER TO BID ON AN AUCTION WITHIN 30 DAYS from date of signup. This promotional offer cannot be transferred or forwarded.
- TO QUALIFY, USERS MUST HAVE AN EBAY FEEDBACK SCORE OF 10 OR MORE (or the user must have been a registered eBay user for over 12 months).
- The $20 Signup Bonus is limited to one (1) per valid eBay account.
- The $20 Signup Bonus is valid only to legal residents of the US and Canada.
- UnWired Buyer employees and their families are not eligible.
- UnWired Buyer reserves the right to request additional information regarding the claim and the right to confirm conformance to eBay user regulations. Any misrepresentation or fraudulent information disqualifies the bonus.
- UnWired Buyer, Inc. reserves the right to change or modify this offer at any time.
In other words, you’ll have a 30 day time frame to complete this offer. To complete this offer, you’ll need to do the following:
- Add an item to your eBay watchlist.
- Update your UB watchlist and make sure your item shows up. (Don’t bother setting a max price)
- Make sure the Call Me checkbox is checked
- When UB calls you, enter your PIN and make a bid (hit # to enter maximum bid)
If you have nothing you want to bid on at the current moment, here’s what I ended up doing. Do a search for ebook. Cap the maximum price to $1 and search only auctions ending within the hour. You can find one that’s interesting enough or find one that’s ending the earliest, but there are TONS of ebooks that only cost $0.01 with FREE shipping. If you do win the auction, your final total is only 1 penny and you’ll earn $20 (+ $2.50 referral fee if you let me refer you).
Add that ebook auction to your watchlist and wait for the call. I chose one that ended in 15 minutes to give myself time to prepare. Make sure the item shows up in UB’s watchlist and when the auction is about to end, you’ll get a phone call. You’ll be prompted to enter you pin. They’ll ask what you’d like to do. I believe hitting ‘1’ is to bid and # is to make the minimum bid. They’ll constantly update you on the current bid amount and if you’re the highest bidder. You can really hang up at this point since you’ll get the $20 bonus no matter what. The rule was to bid and not to win. If someone else wins, it’s better for you, because now you don’t even have to pay that penny.
I’ll update you when I get my bonus. I’ve already got my email confirmation that I’ll be receiving my $20 bonus in 1-2 days (about 5 minutes after I made the bid). People claim they’ve gotten their $20 bonus within hours, but we’ll see.
* REFERRAL BONUS *
So if you let me refer you, I get a referral bonus of $5. However, I’m willing to split it 50/50 with anyone who wants me to refer them. I’ll just PayPal the $2.50 when I get the money. They don’t have a generic link for me to post, so I’ll have to send you a email directly through their system. If you want a referral email, just email me or IM me or leave a comment on this page with a short message and make sure the email you use (which is hidden) is the email you want me to send the referral. This email address also has to be the email address you register with and also has to be linked to your PayPal account. I just added a new email to my PayPal account for this and will probably remove it when I get my bonus (don’t see why PayPal needs to know about my UB email address anymore or vice versa).
* UPDATE *
I made my bid ~10pm last night. I got my $20 bonus at 7am this morning. Pretty good turn around time. Took less than 9 hours to get my bonus money.
Blingo!
I won again at Blingo. I think too many people are joining now. I’ve won 3x (including one from my referral) in the 1st 3 months I’ve joined. This being my 4th prize and it’s 5 months since my last prize. Of course I opted for the iTunes GC again. I also haven’t finished using my previous GCs.
If you want to join, you can always join under me:
http://www.blingo.com/friends?ref=mJPoj3FWEXEXyRw4zuTj6eOUlJQ
I’ve noticed they’ve made the CAPTCHA verification text longer, probably one of the longest ones I’ve seen:
SkypeOut for FREE
Skype is a little program for making free calls within the US and Canada to all phones until the end of the year. Skype to Skype calls anywhere in the world are also free. It’s easy to download and use, and works with most computers. (from MsticAzn)
That’s right, till 12/31/2006, you can make any calls from your PC through Skype to any phone number in the U.S. and Canada for FREE.
There’s really nothing more to say about that, well besides some idiot was trying to convince me that Windows Live Messenger was better because it made FREE calls to any other Windows Live Messenger user and it ONLY costs 2¢ a minute for any outgoing call within the USA (maybe Canada too) through a contract with Verizon. Then when they realized their mistake, they tried to convince me Skype was out to get me and trick me because they’re taking a hit for every outgoing call. He even pointed out the following clause from Skype’s TOS:
Free Calls in the US and Canada: Until December 31st 2006, Skype is offering free SkypeOut calls from the US and Canada to US and Canadian mobile and landline telephone numbers. In return for offering this, Skype asks that You use the product sensibly and don’t abuse the free offer. Skype reminds You that it does not allow You to resell SkypeOut and that if Skype does see systematic or intentional misuse, it reserves the right to terminate your access to your Account immediately in accordance with clause 12.3 below.
He also brought up the fact they’re trying to tie me in and it’d be difficult to import and export contacts, etc. I don’t know what type of weed this guy was smoking, but I want some of it (maybe not). I was going to respond to his email, but others came and pointed out flaws in his logic.
Also to note, SkypeIn only costs €30 for 12 months. That’s about US$39 or $3.25/mo. What SkypeIn is that you can purchase a local (or even a non-local number) and anyone calls that number would reach you through Skype. Someone in the MS thread noted they purchased a number in Hong Kong so his friends and relative in Hong Kong could make local calls to him, which was interesting. If you want to try out the service first before locking in on a 1yr contract, they have a 3 month plan for €10 (~US$13 or $4.33/mo) which isn’t bad considering I was paying Verizon $25/mo when I had it.
The only bad part about Skype is that it doesn’t use the normal SIP protocols, so phone adapters like the Linksys PAP2 don’t work with it and you’ll need to purchase Skype-Ready products.
Someone on /. also pointed out SIPphone which is actually a bit cheaper than Skype ($12.00 for 3 months, or $35.00 for 12 months), but their area codes are a lot more limited. Then again, I don’t really know what area codes Skype is offering, but I would’ve expected more than this.
The last service I’d like to introduce is IPKall, the one I’ve been using and awesome for any folks living around the Seattle area. This service is provided for free and anyone (even those not living in or around Seattle or even in the USA) can use it. The area codes they provide are 206, 253, 360, and 425 and when you combine this with FWD or MutualPhone, you basically get completely free incoming calls. I’m not too sure about MutualPhone since I personally haven’t used it, but it actually looks like you can make outgoing calls for a small fee. FWD only allows incoming calls and outgoing calls to other SIP users. What IPKall does is connect a real phone number to a SIP number and FWD provides that SIP number that IPKall can forward to. It’s pretty neat and you get free voice mail too where if you don’t pick up the phone after 60 seconds (configurable), it’ll forward the caller to a answering machine and they’ll automatically email you the message he/she left to your email box. If you check out their forums, there’s also a bunch of other SIP providers you can use and other neat tricks you can do.
So I only make outgoing calls with my cellphone and have a real phone for people to reach me. This saves me $25 x 12 = $300 a year.
UM Patriots
UM Patriots (from ChewyDenise)
UM = University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI
I was going to post this in Random Craps, but I thought it just reached the good enough point for it’s own blog post.
Do check out their 3 project videos. I posted the PacMac one awhile back. I believe the comment on that video was that it was stress reliever during finals time. The Superman one that have was funny too, but I’m not too sure about the ninja one. For some reason they looked more like terrorists from Counter Strike than ninjas.
Babelfish is now Yahoo?
I’ve used Babelfish to help me translate many things. When I’m trying to read an article in a foreign language or register for a forum that’s not in English, I’ve always used Babelfish to help. Despite it’s many errors, I usually can get the overall jist of things. Even for languages that I do know or know a bit of (i.e. Chinese, Japanes, Spanish), if I don’t want to spend time trying to decipher it, I usually translate it into English and read it as that.
I’ve always used Babelfish from Altavista: http://babelfish.altavista.com/
However, it seems that Yahoo! has purchased Babelfish: http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
From an Ars Technica article, Skype offers fee-based live translation service:
The process is also a bit cumbersome, and I don’t think it’s a good forum for phone sex or planning illegal activities, no matter how confidential Language Line says the translation process is. And you’d have to be financially suicidal in order to translate a Tagalog news site by reading it to a interpreter on the phone and having it read back to you, all at three bucks a minute. Babelfish still has a place.
The fish has moved, though. After babelfish.altavista.com, babelfish.altavista.ditgital.com, and whatever the URL was when Babelfish belonged to Overture, it’s time to get used to babelfish.yahoo.com. The old links still work, but it’s a fair bet that the Yahoo version will see more future development.
Babelfish was awesome, but has been overdue for a revamp and improvement for quite some time. Hopefully Yahoo! would be able to make it better.
Google does also have it’s own translator: Google Translate. I personally haven’t used it much. It’s layout is pretty basic and the languages are a bit more limited than Babelfish, but I’d like to see it improve too. An annoying thing is that http://translate.google.com/ doesn’t work, and you have to go to http://www.google.com/translate/ http://www.google.com/translate [turns out you can’t have the ending / or else it won’t work].
Referring back to the article above, the new service that Skype is providing is actually pretty neat, but quite pricy at $2.99/min. I mean, that’s $180/hr. I’d like to make that kind of money translating for people. Haha.
RSS Syndication
For those who read my blog through RSS Feeds/Syndication and are getting this annoying picture:
please let me know and I’ll add your blog reading domain to my list of non-blocking servers.