December 2006 Archives

[Moozik: Controlled Fusion - Drugfall]

This year my music collection grew by 107 albums. I think I bought more albums this year than any other year I can remember. By far the majority are albums I've already owned at some point either on vinyl or mysteriously disappeared CDs that I hadn't ripped yet.

Three new albums released in 2006 that I particularly enjoyed this year and received heavy play:

The Birthday Massacre - Violet
Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
Morrissey - Ringleader of the Tormentors

The entire 2006 album list.

[Moozik: Switchblade Symphony - Doll House]

A couple of years ago I blogged about Grand Canyon National Park bowing to creationists who insist the Canyon was formed during Noah's flood. Seems we're really no further forward as we enter 2007.

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

"In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is 'no comment.'"

How old is the Grand Canyon? Park service won't say

Those pesky scientists and their ridiculous belief in geology.

Yes, my daily reminder that I went to sleep and woke up in the bizzaro world. Sigh.

[Moozik: The Sisterhood - Colours]

If you've ever had the misfortune to watch Ashton Kutcher on Punk'd you'll know he is probably the most annoying bloke on the planet. I must give Justin Timberlake a round of applause on his SNL piss take.

[Moozik: Siouxsie & The Banshees - Shadowtime]

Using the tried and true scientific research method of, you know, eavesdropping in a shop, it would appear that the Wii is far more popular than the PS3 thus far. While queuing to pay in my local EB Games just before Christmas I overheard two employees saying that surprisingly they were seeing *far* more interest in the Wii than the PS3. I spotted four (count 'em) PS3s on the shelf and no-one paying any interest in them whatsoever. By the time I got up to the counter to pay, three people had come into the shop to ask if they had any Wiis left. They didn't.

So maybe Nintendo are onto something here?

[Moozik: Revolting Cocks - In The Neck]

There's a rather popular concert venue in London called Wembley Arena. Easy to remember because it's (a) an Arena, and (b) in Wembley. So it's no stretch of the imagination that an Arena in somewhere like Glendale be named (wait for it) Glendale Arena.

Then it seems, like all things, the advertising dollar is introduced and simple arena names that make sense are but a second thought. Witness the transformation of Glendale Arena into Jobing.com Arena. Oh yes, just roles of the tongue that one doesn't it? And just when we finally get used to calling it by its ridiculous name, the bloody sponsor will change and we'll have to do it all over again and remember some other equally craptacular name.

When I first moved into the Phoenix area, downtown Phoenix had an Arena called America West Arena. Not as instantly recognizable as something like Phoenix Arena but ok, I'll go with it. Then the name changed to US Airways Center. Meaning that anytime someone said "oh they're playing at US Airways Center" the next inevitable comment was "where's that?".

Now I may not be in the target advertising demographic here but if I read 'US Airways Center' on a concert ticket or promo, or even go to an event in the arena - it doesn't make me want to fly on US Airways the next time I'm going somewhere. Price and date of travel will *always* come first regardless of the actual airline involved. So I'm wondering, for the millions of dollars it costs companies to sponsor arenas, do they really make it back in extra sales? It would be interesting to see how much extra revenue a company reports just because they are now sponsoring an arena in a particular city.

[Moozik: Ultravox - The Voice]

I seem to be making a habit of totally missing rather excellent TV shows when they originally air. I've just finished watching the first 11 episodes of Heroes and I'm totally hooked. Looks like we only have to wait until January 22nd for the new episodes to start. I can't wait although I'm not sure how I'm going to take to the whole having to wait a week between episodes thing. As I found when watching 2 1/2 seasons of Lost, watching so many episodes back to back spoils you something rotten. Waiting a week? Who wants to do that ;-)

[Moozik: The House Of Love - Shine On]

Always a friendly bloke to his fans then.

People come over when you're out and go, "Can I just get a quick picture with you?" "No." And then they say, "I bet you don't mind when I buy your albums." Of course I fucking don't, I love it. And I'll be thinking of you when I'm floating in my fucking swimming pool this afternoon. But I'm not signing your tube ticket.

I have been that sad "can I have your autograph" kid with the members of Depeche Mode when I saw them at a Nitzer Ebb gig many moons ago. They were a little bit more accommodating than our Noel though who still isn't quite done being Mr Nice Guy.

I'll just go, "What are you gonna do with that? Where are you gonna put it? Are you gonna put it on a plinth on the top of the television so when your mates come round you can go, 'Eh, get on this, seen him today in Waitrose, fucking geezer.' No, I'll tell you what you'll do with it. You'll sling it in a fucking drawer and you've wasted two minutes of your time, two minutes of my time, and I've bought some ice cream here and it's melting. Do us both a favour and fuck off."

How does it feel to be autograph hunted?

[Moozik: Curve - Alligators Getting Up]

I'd really like to know who thought it was a bloody great idea to get rid of the touch-tone selections when trying to call (insert random company name here) customer service numbers. Higher powers obviously decided "to check your account balance, press 1" was far too difficult for mere mortals to comprehend. So instead the system is, ahem, "improved" by having an annoying perky woman asking "tell me what you'd like" and you have to say why you called. I guarantee 99.9% of people say "I want to speak to someone you bastards".

I think my British accent confuses the poor American IVRs because I end up saying the same bloody thing about 4 times with that annoying perky woman saying "I'm sorry, I didn't recognize your answer". I find this bloody annoying when it happens to me but ever so amusing when it happens to others especially when you're in a crowd. In fact I do giggle when I hear someone say out loud seemingly at random after a period of silence "other menu" more than once as you know exactly what they're doing.

I think this is all a conspiracy to accommodate the look-at-me-aren't-I-important bluetooth headset crowd who think using your hands when making a phone call is so 2003. At least my Bank gets it right by allowing users to speak their answers or use their keypad.

Choice. Choice good. Me like.

[Moozik: The Stone Roses - I Wanna Be Adored]

On and off I've been known to watch the odd episode of Monk and for the most part find it really quite amusing. I'm not so sure I understand the theory behind USA's gimmick this week though.

MR. MONK AND THE LEPER. A missing millionaire suffering from leprosy comes out of hiding and hires Monk to recover some papers from his estate. Monk takes the job, and soon finds himself in the middle of a shadowy murder plot worthy of a classic Hollywood film noir. A special Black & White version premieres Friday, December 22 at 9/8C, with the normal Color version premiering right after at 10/9C.

I caught an ad for the episode last night and they are airing the black & white version first and then airing the color version right after it. We're supposed to decide (according to the ad) "...which one we like best...".

I want to make sure I've understood this correctly. It's the same episode back to back right? If I've already watched it, why would I want to watch it again right away? Wouldn't I already know whodunit? Could they have thought up a worse gimmick? Why not just show the episode in black & white and be done with it. Still a lame gimmick but not quite as bad as expecting us to watch the same episode back to back just because the re-run is in color.

[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - Who's Laughing Now?]

Last week's little car snafu meant a little trip down to the ol' body shop yesterday. It's going to cost $2800 to repair the damage and will be in the body shop for five days. So, in the meantime I'm driving a rental car - a Ford Focus. And it stinks.

Not in the this-is-a-terrible-car sense, more in the this-car-really-bloody-stinks sense. I'm not sure that I really want to know what the smell is actually. It's bad and covering the seats & carpets with Febreze did absolutely nothing. So I bought a strong stick-on air freshener to help cover up whatever that bloody smell is.

You know you're in a bad rental car when the first thing you want to do when getting out is wash your hands ;-)

[Moozik: The Cure - Plainsong]

Now, I know for a fact that year after year Tottenham don't really stand much of a chance of winning the Premiership. So for me, the Premiership race is down to one simple goal (ahem, no pun intended). Finishing above Arsenal in the table. And with our first away victory we're only two points behind them.

After all it's all rather embarrassing to finish lower in the table than a team with the word Arse in their name isn't it?

DELETING UR EMAIL

[Moozik: Nitzer Ebb - Lovesick]

So with last week's adventure with the flying boomerang-level-thingy all but a faint memory, the same stretch of freeway decided to play a nice joke on me again yesterday.

There I was sitting in traffic on my way to work when arsewipe-suv-well-dressed-bloke decided it would be a really good idea to use the backend of my car instead of his brakes in order to slow down. CRUNCH.

So we both got out of our cars to assess the damage. His car was fine (typical), mine - not so much. Drivable but the boot is a little mashed & won't open and I'll probably need a new bumper as well. I was obviously annoyed and was not thinking when he said "let's pull over to the side of the freeway and I'll give you my insurance info". And this is one of those "in hindsight" moments that I'll, ahem, fondly look back on.

I said "ok" and we drove over to the freeway exit. Then at the very possible last second, arsewipe-suv-well-dressed-bloke swerved back onto the freeway, hit the accelerator and was three lanes of traffic over in the space of about 5 seconds. Bastard. So it was obvious he either had no license, was just about to get license suspended, had no insurance, or was driving a stolen car.

Of course I didn't catch his license plate nor the exact model of the car which I'm sooo annoyed at myself about. I knew there wasn't much the Police could do as my description of "well, it was a grey SUV - a BMW I think" was obviously so vague as to be unusable and they didn't even want to take an official report.

So yeah, because I'm a trusting sort of bloke, it's going to cost me a small sum to pay the deductible on my insurance claim instead of arsewipe-suv-well-dressed-bloke's insurance company. But I'll tell you what, I won't ever be making that mistake again.

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Jazz Thieves]

This is one of those articles that just makes you shake your head and roll your eyes as you read it. I'd like someone to explain to me in a quick sentence or two why they think Laura Mallory is not a total nutjob.

ATLANTA - The Georgia Board of Education voted Thursday to uphold a local school board's decision to leave Harry Potter books on library shelves despite a mother's objections.

The board members voted without discussion to back the Gwinnett County school board's decision to deny Laura Mallory's request to remove the best-selling books.

Mallory, who has three children in elementary school, has worked for more than a year to ban the books from Gwinnett schools, claiming the popular fiction series is an attempt to indoctrinate children in witchcraft.

"It's mainstreaming witchcraft in a subtle and deceptive manner, in a children-friendly format," said Mallory, who is considering a legal challenge of the board's ruling. "The kind of stuff in these books — murder and greed and violence. Why do they have to read them in school?"

Ga. board: Harry Potter books can stay

[Moozik: Hot Chip - And I Was A Boy From School]

Sometimes I just have to smile when I can make a change to all 134 HTML templates in a directory with one command.

perl -pi.bak -e 's/foo/bar/' *.tmpl

NICE.

[Moozik: The Killers - The River Is Wild]

I haven't blogged about University in quite a while so seeing as this is the last week of school for 2006, I thought that this would be as good a time as any. This semester I'm taking two classes, World War II and User Interface Design. I'll write about the User Interface Design class later because today has been all History, all the time.

I took the day off work to take the two hour World War II final. We had to write two 1000 word essays from memory. No notes, no books, none of that helpful kind of stuff. No, instead we had to somehow soak in enough information to provide a "detailed and thorough analysis" of two of five possible questions.

I chose "Name three or more major factors that led to the success of Operation Overlord in June of 1944" and what appears to be a candidate for longest essay question ever "Explain how modern global, total war involving multiple nation-states in multiple theaters, strategic bombing campaigns, the Holocaust, and other major atrocities produced more than 57 million deaths in World War II".

Oh yes, good times. Well I think I did ok. I used all 2 hours and was still frantically typing my conclusion to the second essay when the exam police pounced. Can you say fried brain?

[Moozik: Front Line Assembly - Victim]

So yeah, I'm a little late to the Lost party as I appear to have been living in a cave while the first 2 and a half seasons have passed me by. Well thanks to my Sister, I'm now well and truly hooked.

I've been literally glued to the TV and it's been all Lost, all the time watching all 47 episodes from seasons one and two. The bonus disc in each season DVD box set has been really good too. The 'Fire + Water' behind-the-scenes was particularly good as we get to see exactly how long each episode takes to complete from beginning to end (24 days in case you're wondering).

So, it looks like I'm a little behind as abc have already aired the first six episodes of season three with a further sixteen episodes to air next February. Now, if only there was some way *cough* BitTorrent *cough* to obtain those episodes so I can get completely caught up ;-)

[Moozik: Yazoo - Happy People]

Should probably hang on to that wiimote, wiihaveaproblem.com.

[Moozik: Muse - City Of Delusion]

So yeah I've had a bit of a tinker with the site this morning and as such I expect there will be breakage and general suckery. Will fix as necessary of course :-)

[Moozik: Chris & Cosey - Take Control]

Dear Google Talk, please identify yourself when generating error messages. That is all.

[Moozik: Chris & Cosey - Sin]

If I didn't want to write code all day long, I think I'd like to have this bloke's job actually.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Don Bernstine travels the world visiting rock stars in their homes and backstage and spends tens of thousands of dollars of his employer's money buying guitars, concert costumes and other music memorabilia.

So, it's no surprise that the Hard Rock Cafe's memorabilia hunter says he'll give up his job when someone pries it from his "cold, dead fingers."

Bernstine's job for the past five years has been hunting down the instruments, clothes, lyrics and other music ephemera that adorn the Hard Rock's 124 cafes, seven hotel-casinos and stand-alone casino in 43 countries.

What a job - finding memorabilia for Hard Rock Cafes

[Moozik: Fixmer & Mccarthy - Through A Screen]

Couple of random Survivor thoughts. Wouldn't it have been better to, you know, keep Jonathan around. It *is* a popularity contest after all and facing him in the final two would be an ideal scenario no? So everyone knows that Yul has the "hidden" immunity necklace. Why don't they just all vote for him and force him to us it? Bingo, his advantage is now gone and everyone is on the same equal footing.

Yes I know watching Survivor is very sad. But I care not because I like it :-)

[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - Goneja]

Probably the one and only reason I was even considering buying a Wii was for the new Zelda game. Well in five days, the Gamecube version comes out and by all accounts it's almost identical to its Wii counterpart. Except there's no silly controller to use.

I'm so looking forward to blowing the dust of my Gamecube again.

[Moozik: Assemblage 23 - You Haven't Earned It]

If you are a contractor with tools in the back of your pickup truck please, I beg of you, ensure they are secured and won't fly out the back into oncoming traffic. Seems like common sense right? Well on my commute into work this morning I got to find out first hand that not everyone is blessed with common sense. There are some true geniuses driving on Phoenix freeways let me tell you.

So there I was enjoying my drive into work when a huge lorry about three car lengths in front of me in the next lane runs over someone's level. The lorry mangles the level in such a way that it now resembles a boomerang and then sends it flying in my direction. Picture the blood draining out of my face as I see this boomerang-level-thingy heading for my windscreen. Luckily it didn't have enough momentum and dropped down far enough to hit my front bumper instead. Made a luuuurvely noise as I'm sure you can imagine and I see the boomerang-level-thingy in my rear view mirror spinning on the ground waiting for some other poor soul to hit it. I got lucky with a scratch on the bumper instead of a punctured radiator or something worse.

I mean, really, how hard is it to make sure the stuff in the back of your truck is secure?

[Moozik: Yazoo - Nobody's Diary]

[Moozik: Tangerine Dream - Bois De Bologne]

That sound you hear is the sound of any street cred I had rapidly slipping away. Why? Because I'm just about to admit that I actually liked the first four Rocky movies. There, I said it. Even the Mr T one, even the Dolph Lundgren one. (Well, to be fair, I was a little younger in those days so perhaps if I re-watched Rocky III and Rocky IV today I'd be singing a different tune). Along with other Rocky fans, I watched the almost unwatchable Rocky V and it was perhaps one of the worst films I've ever had the mispleasure of sitting through.

Fast forward to 2006 and we have Rocky Balboa about to hit the big screen and I'm in two minds. Should I watch it, you know, for old times sake? For some sort of closure to the whole Rocky story? Or should I avoid it like the plague because my gonna-suck-predictometer is going off. Hmmm.

After "Rocky V" left Stallone feeling as if the movie series had hit the canvas, he loves the way the latest — and final — film allows some cinematic closure for the gritty Philly fighter.

Stallone said "Rocky Balboa" shows an older Rocky, who is reluctant to get back in the ring but ends up fighting just to compete, not necessarily to win. Old pal Paulie is back, but Rocky's been growing apart from his son. One crucial character doesn't return, though somehow she still gives The Italian Stallion the added inspiration to fight for the title one more time.

No Adrian!

Yo, Philly! Rocky still loves ya

[Moozik: The Jam - It's Too Bad]

Atrios making me nod my head this morning.

I'd like to believe that Bush is going to declare victory and go home, and I do believe that it is possible, but that isn't going to happen unless they can create some artificial benchmark by which we can actually declare victory. It'd be bullshit, and we'd all know it was bullshit, but in order to save the fragile ego of the worst president ever we'd all go along with the charade. Or something. But I don't see how that artificial benchmark can be created. We've turned all the damn corners there are to turn. At each magical step, especially the formation of the government, they could've declared victory and started coming home. But Bush couldn't let go of his pet war. Rove couldn't let go of his pet political issue (nice math, turd blossom). So on it went. Not only did they not declare victory and start coming home, they thought "stay the course" was such a winning issue that they didn't lay the groundwork for a future declaring victory moment.

There's no way out which preserves the fragile ego of the boy king, and therefore absent immense political leadership elsewhere I fear there is no way out until he has left office.

Not Going To Happen

[Moozik: New Order - State Of The Nation]

New Order's Substance is one of my all time fave albums. I've owned it on vinyl (ahem - showing age) and CD. I was thinking I was going to have to use the CDs as coasters and buy another copy because for the life of me, I couldn't get the CD to rip. Nothing would do it and I tried pretty much every ripper on the planet. Except one :-)

Enter, Exact Audio Copy. While not being the most user-friendly piece of software I've ever used (in fact, if it wasn't for this guide I'd be buggered), it is really powerful and handled my New Order CD like a true champ. For the first time since I've owned an iPod [0] I now have Substance wherever I go :-)

[0] I'm on my third, a current generation 80GB video and it's sweeter than a very sweet thing covered in honey.

[Moozik: Japan - Quiet Life]

JWZ made my morning.

I'm running version STFUFOAD