August 2006 Archives
[Moozik: Green Day - Having A Blast]
If this post shows up I'm going to consider the upgrade to MT 3.32 a success.
[Moozik: Q Lazzarus - Goodbye Horses]
For the past 7 hours, we have had no downstairs Air Conditioning. Lovely. The nice repair bloke will be coming out tomorrow. AC in Arizona, in the summer? You, er, sort of need that.
Update: And there was much rejoicing as the cold wind blew through the house. Yes, I have AC again. This is a good thing.
[Moozik: Killing Joke - Labyrinth]
Oh yes, it was back to earth with a bang yesterday morning. A new semester of University has begun which means 8 weeks of fun. Ahem. Calculus III is the last Calculus class I have to take and thank goodness for that. Having to get up at 7:00am on a Saturday morning is not fun and then having to sit through 5 riveting hours of "Vectors In The Plane" and "Space Coordinates/Vectors In Space" is enough to make your brain explode :-)
As Nakisha and I walked out of class and down to our cars the first words out of her mouth were "well, good thing that wasn't the most complicated and confusing 5 hours of my life". What a lovely start to the new semester that was. Note to my Professor, when your students have been sitting in your class for the past 5 hours, don't say "oh good, we still have 3 minutes left, let's go over another proof". Let's not. Let's go home and have a beer instead.
[Moozik: Killing Joke - Mathematics Of Chaos]
For the past couple of weeks I've been using Hiveminder to manage my to-do list. I'm using it to manage my school, work, and personal to-do tasks and I must say, I really like it. Prior to Hiveminder, I managed my to-do list on post-it notes and let's be honest, that always turns out to a complete clusterfuck doesn't it?
Now, I won't say that Hiveminder makes me do anything on my to-do list, but at least I have a place that I can go to and have a gander at what I should be doing instead of having to remember what I've got written on those 45 post-it notes that could be scattered around at work and/or my car, and/or my laptop bag and/or my fridge :-)
[Moozik: Curve - Killer Baby]
Last night marked the new season of Real Time with Bill Maher. What a complete disappointment and if I could sum up the show in one word I would have to say: meh.
Spike Lee was meh. Seemed quite drunk and there were a couple embarrasing silences that made me cringe. Elvis Costello was meh but at least he didn't take the bait no matter how hard Bill tried to get him to dump on Americans. The panel was meh. Max Cleland seemed a little of out his element. Vali Nasr was, er, ok I guess. And as much as I gave Christopher Hitchens a pat on the back the other week for taking Mel Gibson to task, I have to say that you sir, are one arrogant arse who absolutely loves the sound of your own voice. Please never agree to be a guest. Actually Bill, never ask him to come back as a guest.
Well, at least Bill's New Rules were good right? Alas no. In a word, meh.
So all in all, not a great start to the season at all. Meh.
[Moozik: 1000 Homo DJs - Apathy]
Pluto, it would appear, is no longer a planet. Time to start buying the new editions of all those Astronomy books. See, it's all a conspiracy by the book publishers to make us buy new books. Damn them.
Astronomers have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.About 2,500 scientists meeting in Prague have adopted historic new guidelines that see the small, distant world demoted to a secondary category.
[Moozik: Kasabian - Processed Beats]
It's only after you've spent a few years away from Blighty that headlines such as these: Noel Edmonds returns to primetime on BBC1 get you thinking "hang on, they took Noel Edmunds off BBC1?". That bloke was an institution I tell you.
Yeah, in my youth I watched Swap Shop. So what? I'm not ashamed. Ahem.
[Moozik: Fixmer & Mccarthy - I Run]
I see Depeche Mode have released the making of the Suffer Well video. NICE.
[Moozik: Gene Loves Jezebel - Shaving My Neck]
One of the nice things about the upgrade to MT 3.31 is that I now have native tags. And, you know, everybody loves tags. So, do I go back and re-tag old entries? If I'd have previously used keywords, I could have used the mt-keywords2tags script to convert keywords to tags. But I didn't. So yes, it looks like I'm going to have to do it manually from scratch. Grrr.
[Moozik Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight Tonight]
If this test post shows up then the upgrade to Movable Type 3.31 appears to have gone smoothly.
[Moozik: Kraftwerk - The Hall Of Mirrors]
So it's been a little while since I've mentioned how my running is progressing. Well, as predicted back in May, the morning running did not last. Doesn't really matter when you attempt to run outside. It's Arizona. It's summer. It's hot. End of story.
So, to plan B then. The mighty treadmill. The good: I'm inside with air conditioning and the running area has some fairly decent shock absorbtion which, you know, is better for the ol' joints than concrete. The bad: I get to stare at a wall instead of observing the local surroundings. There's a golf course 1 minute from my house and I must admit I miss running past it when they have their water sprinklers on.
All in all, at least I'm still enthusiastic about it. I'm now up to running for about 45 minutes at a time and I've managed to lose 17 pounds so far which isn't too bad. I still have another 25 to go to meet my target weight of 190 pounds however. So, I'll keep at it and see what happens.
[Moozik: The Mission - Hands Across The Ocean]
A must watch clip from Keith Olbermann on the Nexus of Politics & Terror.
Keith runs down the timeline from 2002 until the latest UK plot regarding the politicization of terror. Remember when Tom Ridge explained how the administration signaled terror alerts that he didn’t think should have been used?
[Moozik: The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony]
Good thing Tony Blair rushed home to take charge instead of taking a leaf out of Dubya's vacation tactics book. Oh wait.
WITH Britain immersed in a terrorist crisis, MI5 warning of an imminent attack and airports still in chaos, the country might have reasonably expected a display of decisive and defiant leadership.But what it got was a display of Tony Blair's racy floral swimming trunks.
The Prime Minister yesterday sunned himself in his lurid swimwear on the catamaran Good Vibrations as, untroubled by momentous world events, he continued with his family holiday in the Caribbean.
[Moozik: New Order - Senses]
Satire, it's a wonderful thing. The Daily Show, another wonderful thing.
[Moozik: Sugar Ray - Personal Space Invader]
Not only are the hand baggage restrictions a monumental pain in the arse for passengers, all those shops that you visit after you've been through the security checkpoint must be bloody annoyed as well.
...all passengers boarding flights to the USA and all the items they are carrying, including those acquired after the central screening point, must be subjected to secondary search at the boarding gate. Any liquids discovered must be removed from the passenger.
It will be interesting to hear how much money they lose because people can't buy the majority of the things they sell. And now that you can't take anything on the plane anymore, how will you amuse yourself?
[Moozik: Morrissey - Alsation Cousin]
This year marks MTV's 25th anniversary. No mean feat to be sure. Anyone aged 28+ will note however that the MTV of today is a completely different beast than the MTV of yesteryear. MTV used to be the dogs bollocks and *the* place [0] to go to listen to and watch new music. I remember spending a considerable amount of my, ahem, free time while at school watching music videos. But it didn't stop when I left school and over the years I have amassed a quite large collection of old VHS tapes of videos [1] that sometimes throw on when I want a trip down memory lane.
Now, turn on MTV today. See any music videos? Not really. See a bunch of pointless reality TV type programmes? Oh yes. Viva La Bam? What is that all about? To be fair, MTV do actually play music videos but only at certain times of the day and only in very short spurts. Gone are the days where you can just "put MTV on" and listen to music whenever you feel like it. Shame really. Instead, now I turn on MTV and 9 out of 10 times greeted with an eyeball-rolling crapfest. I offer the following as evidence.
NEW YORK - The MTV2 network said it had not decided whether it will ever again air a cartoon criticized as offensive for depicting women being led around on leashes.It's also not certain whether the series, "Where My Dogs At?" will come back for a second season, spokesman Jeff Castaneda said Wednesday. Its first season ended during the last week of July.
One episode, aired in the early afternoon, featured an appearance by a cartoon Snoop Dogg accompanied by two women in neck collars and chains. MTV2 said the episode was a satire of an actual Snoop appearance where women were in collars and chains.
Where My Dogs At? Oh yes, MTV you're a class act alright.
[0] Well, except for Top of the Pops which I hear has now died a death. End of an era.
[1] Which I should convert to DVD at some point.
[Moozik: Moby - My Weakness]
Sometimes you are looking at the comments in some code you're working on and it makes the coffee come out of your nose.
#
# to build the scary legacy shell-out pipeline of doom
#
# $flavor_of_cat | $perl_filter $cus_no | sed -f $sed_script
#
# ...we first need to know what flavor of cat (ahem) to use,
# i.e cat or zcat (or tabby, siamese,
# <insert cat joke here>)
#
[Moozik: Public Image Ltd. - Death Disco]
Hmm the default Audioscrobber plugin for iTunes will not submit tracks that you've listened to on your iPod. Which is a little, you know, annoying. I hear that iScrobber and iSproggler do the trick. I'll off to play with them for a bit and will report success/failure accordingly :-)
[Moozik: Joy Division - Failures]
Because I live in a cave, I only just started playing with last.fm. Music is a major passion of mine and I'm also a bit of a statistics junkie. So for me, last.fm truly rocks. As you listen to songs, they are automatically uploaded to last.fm and from there you can view all kinds of stats on your music playing habits.
So anytime you're totally bored and find yourself wondering, "hmm, I wonder what Kev has listened to recently?" well wonder no more and have a peek at my last.fm profile.
[Moozik: Faithless - Not Enuff Love]
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Heath Ledger playing the younger Joker in the sequel to Batman Begins. Somehow I can't really see him pulling it off. I've been known to have been wrong before though. Time will tell.
[Moozik: Keane - Nothing In My Way]
I don't agree with a lot of what Christopher Hitchens has to say. In fact the times that I've seen him on TV (Bill Maher's show in particular) he's actually annoyed me. But, I must say that I did get a chuckle out of him taking Mel Gibson to task.
I also think that the difference between the blood-alcohol levels—and indeed the speed limits—that occasioned the booking are insufficient to explain the expletives (as Gibson has since claimed in a typically self-pitying and verbose statement put out by his publicist). One does not abruptly decide, between the first and second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after all.There's a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or "unaddressed" problem. His vulgar and nasty movies, which also feature this prejudice, are additionally replete with the cheapest caricatures of the English. Braveheart and The Patriot are two of the most laughable historical films ever made. (Englishmen don't form picket lines outside movie theaters when "stereotyped," but still.) He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect (a view that he justifies as "a pronouncement from the chair"). And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.