May 2005 Archives
Jonathan Hollin passed me the musical baton so, er, here goes.
Total Volume of Music On My Computer: 11.42GB
The Last CD I Bought: New Order - Waiting For The Sirens' Call
Song Playing Right Now: Kasabian - Club Foot
Five Songs I Listen To A Lot:
- KMFDM - Juke Joint Jezebel
- Killing Joke - Love Like Blood
- The Smiths - Panic
- The Cure - One Hundred Years
- Depeche Mode - Shame
Right, now it appears I'm supposed to pass the baton on...
Five People To Whom I'm Passing the Baton:
[Moozik: The Jam - Eton Rifles]
Some movies are good. Some movies are bad. Some movies are utter arse. With that in mind, I give you two movies that fall into the arse category.
First up Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Not one of best projects Richard Curtis has been associated with. I think I keep watching anything with his name on it because I loved Blackadder so much. This movie certainly marks the point where I no longer automatically choose something because of Richard Curtis. In fact, now that I think about it, what has he been associated with post Blackadder that I've liked? Hmm, I suppose I did like Love Actually but that's about it.
Next up National Treasure. "Oh my god did that suck" were the first words out of my mouth when the ending credits started rolling. Words cannot describe just how bad this film is. It's almost laughably bad. The basic premise behind the story is ok and I love a Dan Brown-ish Knights Templar story as much as the next bloke. It was just so badly executed and extremely disappointing.
[Moozik: The Specials - Ghost Town]
Having a peek through someone else's CD collection can be great fun. Whenever I'm at someone's house, I love having a nose through their music as you can find all kinds of gems that you probably forgot even existed. So being back in England for 10 days gave me ample opportunity to rummage through both my Dad's and Brother in Law's collections. The Who and Queen were two gems from my Dad's collection. And I think picked out about half of my Brother in Law's CDs :-)
Needless to say, my Sister's iPod (and mine for that matter) have a little less free space :-)
[Moozik: The Specials - Too Much Too Young]
Because of my recent trip to England, I got to experience exactly how bloody annoying that Crazy Frog really is. Most mornings Sally and I would turn on the TV while we got ready. I kid you not, the Crazy Frog advert came on every single bloody time they broke for advertisements. Sometimes they showed it twice.
How can so many English people be so stupid? Who is buying this utter shite?
It probably never occurred to Coldplay that they might be bested in the UK charts by a mobile phone ringtone on their route to fame and chart success.And yet today the group's new single Speed of Sound sits at No 2 in the charts, eclipsed by the Crazy Frog, the ringtone which has delighted half of the nation while leaving the other half profoundly irritated.
[Moozik: Funker Vogt - Date Of Expiration]
Well. And then there were three. Should be interesting to see how this works out.
Two members of the Cure have exited the veteran U.K. rock act, which has long featured a revolving door of musicians backing up leader Robert Smith. Keyboardist Roger O'Donnell announced his departure today (May 27) on his official Web site, while a fan site dedicated to guitarist Perry Bamonte conveyed the same news about his fate."As of Tuesday this week I am no longer a member of the Cure," O'Donnell wrote. "It was sad to find out after nearly 20 years the way I did but then I should have expected no less or more."
Elaborating to Billboard.com today, O'Donnell reveals that he was informed by Smith that he is transforming the Cure into a three-piece, backed only by bassist Simon Gallup and drummer Jason Cooper. "There's not really much you can say when you are the fifth member," he says, adding that he found out about the Cure's upcoming live dates via a fan Web site.
[Moozik: Joy Division - Dead Souls]
So yeah, I've officially bailed on Katamari Damacy. Loads of people loved it. I didn't. Not my cup of tea at all. So while feeling a little lost this morning (don't you hate those post vacation blues?) I traded it in at the EBgames shop near my house.
Now I'm playing a new version of an old fave of mine from my SNES days. Mario Kart: Double Dash. I love me some kart racing and this game rocketh :-)
[Moozik: The Lightning Seeds - Sense]
I see that some sense of sanity has prevailed while I was out of the country.
MARIETTA, Ga. - Workers in Cobb County have begun removing controversial evolution disclaimer stickers from science textbooks to comply with a judge’s order.By the end of the day Monday, several thousand stickers, which said evolution was a theory and not a fact, had been scraped off. The school district had put 34,452 stickers on textbooks across the county.
Six parents sued to remove the stickers saying the disclaimers violated the principle of the separation of church and state. A federal judge in January agreed and ordered the stickers removed.
...we're back.
Back from a really nice 10 days in England that is :-)
Had an excellent time and it went by far too quickly. Pubs were frequented. Beer was consumed. Coastal caravans were slept in. Mercedes rental cars were driven. Photographs were snapped. Real sport was watched. Marmite was purchased. Jaffa cakes were munched on.
The best thing was getting to see my family again. My parents came to the US last year but it had been three years since I last went back to England and hadn't seen my sister in all that time. Mental note to self - don't let another three years go by without visiting blighty.
Hugging at airports when you arrive is wonderful. Hugging at airports when you leave is bloody awful :-)
Right then. Everything is packed, the iPods are fully charged and all the tiny little things that I needed to do today have been done. Woohoo. So tomorrow Sally and I fly to Chicago and then across the pond to England.
You turn your back for a second and he's nicking your ice cream. You turn your back for another second and he's nicking a bandana.
Some cats are never satisfied :-)
Why do users (and I'm looking at *you* Outlook) insist on sending HTML emails? I mean, what exactly is the point? You're just sending text right? So why wrap HTML around it? I constantly refuse to get assimilated into the corporate HTML email continuum.
I'm not sure how much longer I can hold out as it's clearly a losing battle. For example, when I click 'reply' in Thunderbird to an email that someone sent in HTML, Thunderbird tries its best to format the message correctly. Except it doesn't quite look right - actually it looks like arse. So I have to send it as HTML anyway to preserve the formatting. Sigh.
It used to be that the geeks in the office (sysadmins, programmers) would send text email and the non-geeks would send their HTML email. As the weeks go by I see less and less text-only email. It's a worrying trend :-)
And then there are those individuals who send out elaborately formatted HTML with center alignment and different size fonts and colors and...
...please make it stop.
So this is all very interesting.
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.Now look at this handy little graph of Dubya's approval ratings and when those terror alerts were issued.Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.
More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "
Oh, and er, there hasn't been a single terror alert since Bush won the last election.
Coincidence?
I must admint, I found myself nodding in agreement on more than one of the points raised in this article. Let's hope Lucas delivers. I'm so looking forward to Revenge of the Sith. I know I shouldn't be but I can't help it.
Not all "Star Wars" questions must be answered.But some issues have lingered all along, unaddressed questions that a viewer has every right to have answered without buying a library full of novelizations and reference guides. These aren't really plot holes; they're themes that need closure.
Sally and I were woken up this morning by a rather odd vibrating/hammering noise. All rather bleary eyed we looked at each other and said at the exact same time "what the fuck is that noise?".
We got up to make sure it wasn't one of our cell phones or my pager that had been left on vibrate mode. No, that wasn't it. We could really hear it the loudest when we stood on the upstairs landing. In fact it sounded like it was coming from inside the wall. Then it stopped and it didn't happen again so we went back to sleep.
So when the alarm finally went off this morning we decided that these are the likeliest explanations:
(1) We experienced a mass hallucination and really didn't hear anything.
(2) Our house is haunted.
(3) A woodpecker was in the inside wall of our house.
(4) One of the water pipes was vibrating.
Me? My money is on my house being haunted.
Actually it was probably a pipe vibrating as I can't imagine what else would cause that. Of course that doesn't explain why it started vibrating in the first place because there was no water running and why did it suddenly stop and not happen again.
Weird I tell ya.
Don't get me wrong, I love my cats. I do. Except for when they start destroying my laptop. I got my laptop out last night to rip a couple of CDs and made the mistake of not shutting the lid. I stepped away for about 2 minutes and when I went back, I noticed that the 'O' key was missing. I looked around and saw two of the little buggers playing table football with the bloody key from the keyboard. They were having a great time the little shits.
So yeah, I did buy Katamari Damacy this weekend. I dunno, I played it for about 45 minutes or so and to tell you the truth, I wasn't all that impressed. It seems I must be the only one on the planet who hasn't raved about the game.
Maybe my initial lack of enthusiasm is because it's so completely different than the last game I was playing. God of War was *so* good that any game I play after it is going to have some big shoes to fill. I dunno maybe Katamari Damacy grows on you (no pun intended) and you have to play it for a while before the addiction sets in.
Time will tell.
I just completed God of War. Fantastic game. I must admit that I was a little surprised that the total playing time was under 11 hours. When other games provide far longer gameplay, you've got to create something *very* special to ensure I feel that my $50 dollars was well spent. And I *do* feel that my dollars were well spent because I enjoyed the game so much.
A couple of the video game magazines that I read are whispering 'game of the year' in the same sentence as 'God of War'. I'm not sure that they're wrong. A lot of the games you play give you little reason to ever pick them up again once you've completed them. Now that I've unlocked "God Mode" and the "Challenge Of The Gods", I do actually want to play it some more.
And there I was thinking I was going to buy Katamari Damacy this weekend. I think that might have to wait :-)
Are Americans so jaded about the deceptions perpetrated by our own government to lead us into war in Iraq that we are no longer interested in fresh and damning evidence of those lies? Or are the editors and producers who oversee the American news industry simply too timid to report that proof on the evening broadcasts and front pages?There is a "smoking memo" that confirms the worst assumptions about the Bush administration's Iraq policy, but although that memo generated huge pre-election headlines in Britain, its existence has hardly been mentioned here.
[Moozik: The Smiths - That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore]
Tristan Louis has a interesting piece on why Google built their web accelerator.
Now let's move forward. What if you could get information as to what pages are new and what pages are changes by just observing where people are surfing? This is the space that the accelerator occupies. Sitting neatly between your web browser and the Google architecture is a mini proxy that keeps checking if it can find a way to give you pages at a faster rate from the Google index than it does from the actual existing site. Along the way, Google finds out what pages are missing from its index (and gets a chance to add them) and what pages in its index are not up to date.Imagine a million people downloading the Google Web Accelerator and all of a sudden, you have an infrastructure that finds out about a lot of pages very quickly.
Microsoft and Yahoo! are already in competition with Google in the search space. In order to maintain its leadership, Google needs to not only provide an index that is larger than its competitors but also more up to date. With this accelerator, they can do that and only one of its competitor can ever hope to match the feature: Microsoft.
[Moozik: The Human League - Things That Dreams Are Made Of]
Random Wednesday thoughts.
(1) The Randi Rhoades Show rocks. I "tune in" every day on my way home from work (thanks to KXXT which broadcasts on 1010 AM in the Phoenix metro area).
(2) Dare by The Human League is a bloody good album.
(3) Dill pickle chips (er, that's crisps for the non-merkans) are really quite nice.
- But they're not as good as Walkers Crisps. To be honest, I'm a bit partial to their Salt and Vinegar crisps.
- And in 11 days I'll actually be back in blighty sampling those very same crisps in person. Along with Marmite, Weetabix, and Ambrosia Rice Pudding. Yum.
(4) The two hours I just spent playing God Of War should probably have been spent cramming for my Human Ecology exam on Friday.
[Moozik: Madness - Baggy Trousers]
You know, I'm soooo used to the email notifications Movable Type sends you when someone posts a comment that I automatically expect Flickr to be able to do the same. I've searched my Flickr config settings high and low and I'll be damned if I can find the magic setting.
So, this means I'll prolly have to hack a quick Perl script to scrape my recent comments so that I don't go a week without replying to a comment. Whoa, easy tiger, as I was farting around with Flickr not two seconds ago, I noticed that you can subscribe to a RSS feed of recent comments.
Right. My work here is done :-)
So yeah, I'd heard about the Gmail Web Clips a couple of weeks ago. Tonight I had a peek at my spam and wouldn't you know it, Google has a sense of humour[0].
[0] Now, whether it's intentional because, after all, it *is* the spam dump or whether it's just the same algorithm doing its job I'll never know :-)
The June issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly arrived yesterday. They have an eight page in depth preview of the new Legend of Zelda game.
It looks stunning.
I knew there was a reason I was keeping the Gamecube around :-)