January 2007 Archives

[Moozik: Killing Joke - The Wait]

It would appear I've been living in a cave as I hadn't heard a peep about the granting of casino licenses back home. It starts with a "supercasino" in Manchester and they say no further casinos until 2010. Still, it seems an awful lot of licenses were handed out regardless.

Tessa Jowell today insisted that "Las Vegas is not coming to Great Britain" as Manchester beat rival cities to host Britain's first ever supercasino.

The culture secretary promised there would be "no further casinos until proper evaluation over time has been made of the social and economic effects" of gambling. She suggested this would not be before autumn 2010.

In today's announcement, large casino licences were granted to Great Yarmouth, Kingston-upon-Hull, Leeds, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Newham, Solihull and Southampton.

Smaller casino licences were granted to Bath and North East Somerset, Dumfries and Galloway, East Lindsey, Luton, Scarborough, Swansea, Torbay and Wolverhampton.

Manchester gets UK's first supercasino

[Moozik: The Cure - The Walk]

Well lets be honest, my car really hasn't done 694,978 miles. No, the odometer has been stuck there since I got my car jump started a couple of months ago. I finally decided to get that fixed today and have just spent the past few hours at the dealer while they replaced a BCM chip. Lovely.

What I found amusing is that because the chip shorted, there was no accurate count of the mileage. The bloke came out and said "we reset the mileage to 67,500 miles - does that sound about right?". So I had a bit of a grin and said "sure". I think it's about 3 or 4 thousand miles short - but I'm not going to complain ;-)

[Moozik: Mesh - Hurt]

While watching Heroes last night, NBC issued an Amber Alert. Now while a tad annoying because of missing potentially important dialogue, I do understand why they do it. What surprised me about the whole thing is that they cut off the Amber Alert message as soon as they went to commercials. They literally cut the message off mid sentence which I thought was odd and just assumed the alert had ended. Oh no.

No. Instead, NBC ran the commercials in their entirety and then started the alert back up as soon as they went back to Heroes. To be honest I was really quite annoyed. The alert was deemed important enough to interrupt a prime-time TV show yet not important enough to interrupt their precious revenue stream. Excuses such as "well we wanted to make sure the message reached the widest audience" are, quite frankly, bollocks as you could run the alert during the actual show *and* in the commercials if you wanted to reach the widest audience.

I don't know if NBC are the only network that does this. I know a couple of '24' fans (airs the same time as Heroes) so I'll have to ask them if Fox did the same thing last night.

Update 01/31/2007: We spent a bunch of time discussing this at work today and while Fox did indeed have the Amber Alert, they did not break for commercials so can't really say if the whole 'protecting the revenue stream' is limited to NBC ;-)

[Moozik: The Smiths - Real Around The Fountain]

Two shows that I happen to quite like are Curb Your Enthusiasm and Extras. Quite nice then that Ricky meeting Larry can be found on YouTube.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

[Moozik: Alien Sex Fiend - Haunted House]

Some days I really don't know what I'd do without CNN. Their little scrolly ticker thingy at the bottom of the screen can be a life saver. Really. Witness today's moment of Zen:

Today is January 29th, the 29th day of the year.

You think?

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's words of wisdom, hopefully it's something like "Today is Tuesday, the day before Wednesday".

Now I realize that having the Julian Date might be helpful later on in the year. Knowing that April 16th is also the 106th day of the year might be handy (ok, yes I looked it up). But if it's still January, I think I can probably work out from the date how many days into the year we are.

[Moozik: Fixmer/McCarthy - I Run]

You remember how close the Presidential election was in 2004. Course you do. And Ohio was the key state in the race as you will recall.

CLEVELAND — Two election workers were convicted Wednesday of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio's most populous county.

Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. They also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.

Prosecutors accused Maiden and Dreamer of secretly reviewing preselected ballots before a public recount on Dec. 16, 2004. They worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said.

Election staff convicted in recount rig

[Moozik: Rosetta Stone - Deeper]

After watching Roger Federer beat Andy Roddick so convincingly in the semi-final of the Australian Open, I really think we're watching history in the making. I've been a Tennis fan for as long as I can possibly remember. As a kid I grew up watching Ivan Lendl dominate throughout the eighties and then later Pete Sampras dominate throughout the nineties. Both were contenders for greatest players of all time.

And then came a man named Roger.

Watching him play today gave a sense that we're witnessing something special. That we're right in the middle of watching the man that will undoubtedly be looked upon as the greatest player of all time when all is said and done. If he wins the title on Sunday he'll still be 4 shy of Sampras in the Grand Slam title count but there can be little doubt that at 25, he still has plenty of time to accomplish that feat. A feat that Sampras himself has said is inevitable.

[Moozik: Orbital - Acid Pants]

Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen Rapture. A really good episode to start season 3.5 off. Baltar back on the Galactica with CapricaSix, D'Anna finally seeing the final five Cylons, the termination of the Three line of Cylons, and I totally didn't see Helo shooting Sharon coming.

That shooting did leave me a little confused though. How exactly was Sharon supposed to be able to stop the other Cylons from accessing her data after she downloaded? I'd have to go back and watch pretty much every episode since we learned of the ressurection ship but I thought that once a "dead" Cylon downloaded, every other Cylon of the same model had the same memories. I dunno maybe I've totally misunderstood the level of the Cylon inter-connectivity or maybe she password protected her brain. Or something. Hopefully we'll find out how they pulled that off later on in the season.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one shouting at the screen, "well, who did she see?" when D'Anna was on screen. Twice in fact. Once when Baltar was holding her before she died and then again when she was terminated in the in the data-streamy-fluid bath thingy. Now we'll never know.

And I did get a kick out of the fact that six has gone from a baby neck snapper to snapper of necks of potential baby neck snappers. Or something.

[Moozik: OMD - Pretending To See The Future]

I have to use Microsoft Word for various work and University related documents. Unfortunately as much as I'd like to think openoffice's writer or Abiword are ready for prime time, they're not *quite* there yet. When everyone around you is using MS Word you notice little subtle formatting differences and quirks that are a deal breaker. Still the open source replacements are not far behind so I like to think that one day I can use one of them 100% of the time. But I digress, back to the point of this blog post.

I stumbled across an interesting problem today. For a University assignment, my professor wanted a copy in Rich Text Format (.rtf). The document in question contained a number of photos that I had taken and I had already saved it as a .doc file. The filesize of the document was already quite a hefty 409KB. After saving as a .rtf file the filesize ballooned to 11MB. Surely that can't be right. After trying the operation a couple more times I concluded that it was in fact right.

The answer as to why that happened and what to do about it can be found here

According to an article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, "if an EMF, a PNG, a GIF, or a JPEG graphic is inserted into a Word document, when the document is saved, two copies of the graphic are saved in the document. Graphics are saved in the applicable EMF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG format and are also converted to WMF (Windows Metafile) format."

To resolve the problem, you can specify a registry setting that keeps Word from saving two copies of the image.

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Office > Version > Word > Options. Create a new StringValue called ExportPictureWithMetafile and set it to 0. Et voila. Problem solved, saving as .rtf file now results in a much more manageable 604KB. Still a beast but better than 11MB. I'll take it.

[Moozik: Revolting Cocks - In The Neck]

Looks like things are improving on the ol' TV horizon. Last night saw the return of Battlestar Galactica, tonight is the return of Heroes, and ABC are now running teaser trailers for the upcoming new Lost episodes that start on February 7th.

[Moozik: Wumpscut - Flucht]

There are two car commercials on TV at the moment that get a reaction from me whenever I see them.

The first is a rather amusing set of commercials staring Peter Stormare for Volkswagen. Time to unpimp zee auto. Ahem.

The second is a commercial for the new Ford Edge. In complete contrast to the VW commercial, I found this so completely annoying that I do not ever ever want to buy a car from Ford ever. It shows a car driving along the edge of a building. Edge - geddit? Those ad guys eh, always cracking a funny. Anyhoo, what is so annoying about the commercial is that there's a legal disclaimer running along the bottom stating "...car cannot actually drive along the edge of a building...".

You think?

Only in the land where it appears you can sue anyone for any reason would there be a need to run such a ridiculous legal disclaimer. Not entirely Ford's fault obviously but they're the company sporting the disclaimer so they get the brunt of my annoyance ;-)

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

I've spent the better part of the day trying to get Apache 2.2.4 with mod_perl 2.0.3 compiled & installed on Solaris 2.9. After banging my head against the wall trying configure options and then solving a plethora of linking issues I finally had a big grin when the following appeared in Apache's error_log:

Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 configured -- resuming normal operations

Yay.

That "yay" lasted approx 10 minutes or so until I installed an app we run on Apache 1.x with mod_perl 1.x. It runs noticeably slower on the 2.x codebase. Bugger. After scouring the docs for porting mod_perl 1.x apps to mod_perl 2.x I must admit I'm left scratching my head. It should run just as fast - everything appears to be configured correctly. So WTF?

So today has been one of those frustrating => rewarding => frustrating days at work. The headache that is situated right behind my eyes at the moment is a sign that it's time to stop work and start the weekend ;-)

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Suffer Well (live)]

There should be a rule stating that once you get older, any movie that you remember enjoying as a youngster is completely off limits. Just let it be. You've got the memory of it being an absolute classic so leave it at that. You'll only spoil it by watching it again and realizing that the movie is quite arsey really.

This week that devastating (grin) realization came at the expense of The Karate Kid. Lets just say after 22 years the movie doesn't hold up all that well. What can I tell you, as an 11 year old, I so wanted to be able to do that bloody crane kickey thingy. Lets be honest, who didn't? Ahem.

So I hereby declare the following movies to be completely off limits never to be watched again: The Goonies, The Lost Boys, The Black Hole, and last but not least Ghostbusters.

You know, just in case ;-)

[Moozik: Pop Will Eat Itself - Wise Up Sucker]

So my iPod's disk has been spinning all afternoon and the unit itself refuses to power off. Hopefully a reset via the power cord when I get home does the trick as going a day without music just doesn't bear thinking about ;-)

You don't have to re-read that last sentence to get an idea of exactly how sad it sounded. What can I tell you, music is my life ;-)

Update: So iPod Death Imminent was perhaps a little over dramatic. A reset did indeed do the trick.

[Moozik: The Cure - Icing Sugar]

As I was watching CNN last night I happened to glance down at their scrolling ticker to learn that the final episodes of the final season of The Sopranos will air April 8th. To be honest I wonder if I even want to watch them. Having a 10 month break in the middle of the final season has turned out to be, lets be honest, a bit of a crap idea.

The fact that there was no cliffhanger certainly didn't help. HBO were starting to lose me at the beginning of the season and now after leaving it this long to air those final episodes I think they actually have. Other Sopranos fans that I've spoken to are just as unenthusiastic as I am. Shame really as for a while there it was the best thing on TV. Now, not so much.

[Moozik: PJ Harvey - Rid Of Me]

In the February print edition of Electronic Gaming Monthly while discussing the characters in Burger King's craptacular 'Pocketbike Racer' Xbox 360 game:

I have a question. When it's your job to create bikers, and your idea is Biker - a biker named "Biker" - do you get fired?

[Moozik: Deadsy - Health and Theory]

With about 42 hours of game time completed so far I think I'm in a position to say that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is probably the best game I've ever played. Games that I've previously considered 'the best game I've ever played' include God Of War and Resident Evil 4 but Twilight Princess edges those games out.

[Moozik: The Jesus and Mary Chain - Blues From A Gun]

So with all the recent talk of David Beckham's move to the US I happened to actually read a couple of the articles in their entirety instead of skimming over the details. Turns out the Manager of the LA Galaxy is Alexi Lalas. I was not aware of that.

I had one of those woah, wait a minute moments. I met Alexi years ago (circa 1994 ish I think) at the airport in Venice. He was playing for Padova in those days. We got chatting while standing in a baggage check-in queue from hell. Really nice bloke with a bloody good sense of humour as I recall.

[Moozik: New Order - Paradise]

Hardcore music fans such as, er, myself tend to get all rather annoyed when we see new retrospective collections from artists we know and love. After all, I've already got all the songs on their original albums and the well at least it's nice to have all the songs in one place argument no longer makes any sense because I can just make a playlist of the the same songs and be done with it.

There are exceptions of course but collections and best-of's tend to signal the end of times for any band as their record company tries to milk those last precious dollars from a group that either has split up or is on the verge of doing so. One of those exceptions just happens to be my fave band of all time. Depeche Mode.

Over the course of their career, Depeche Mode have released "People Are People" [0] in 1984, "The Singles 81-85" [1] in 1985, a repackaged "The Singles 81-85" in 1998, and "The Singles 86-98' also in 1998. Over the 13 year span beginning in 1991 and ending in 2004 Mute Records also released the complete CD singles as 6 box sets. So any fan worth their salt already has all the album tracks, the singles, the remixes, and the b-sides.

So fast forward to today and what do we see? Another best of. This time "The Best Of, Volume 1". But there's more. Over at the iTunes Music Store you can purchase all 644 tracks of The Complete Depeche Mode billed as the definitive digital box set [2] that is exclusively on iTunes [3].

So I'm a little unsure as to the exact target audience for these new collections. Hardcore fans already have these songs so have no need to buy them again. Casual listeners might be enticed but may already have the other collections so have no need to buy them again. New listeners who never bought a DM song before perhaps? Hmm, yeah maybe for "The Best Of Volume 1" but not the 644 track collection.

The decision to release these new collections baffles me to be honest. Maybe DM are going for the record of "band that is still actively recording with most best-of's, compiliations, and box sets". Yeah, maybe that's it ;-)

[0] US only compilation.
[1] Renamed "Catching up with..." in the US.
[2] Typically a box set requires, you know, a box but I'll let this one go ;-)
[3] Pet peeve of mine. They mean "The iTunes Music Store" which is something completely different than iTunes.

[Moozik: Ladytron - Sugar]

The owners of LA Galaxy have denied that money or celebrity lifestyle are the reasons behind David Beckham's decision to move to the US.

[Moozik: Wumpscut - Crucified]

If you know Perl, you go read now.

[Moozik: Bauhaus - Dark Entries]

So how good does that new iPhone look anyway? I'll tell you - bloody good. Can't wait to actually see one up close when they launch in June.

Something tells me that I think I'm going to want one ;-)

[Moozik: The Clash - Clash City Rockers]

Hands up those of you that think the words Morrissey and Eurovision Song Contest shouldn't ever be in the same sentence. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Morrissey has hinted his services may be on offer for the next Eurovision song contest, should the organisers be so kind as to ask.

The former Smiths singer said he was "horrified" by the United Kingdom's latest poor result in the competition. Rapper Daz Sampson could only manage a paltry 19th out of 24 countries in the most recent contest, which took place in Athens in May.

As a result of said trauma, Morrissey has been left troubled, with one issue in particular on his mind: "There is one question that I keep on asking: 'why didn't they ask me?' That question keeps going round my head."

Morrissey in Eurovision song contest talks

[Moozik: Deadsy - Phantasmagore]

Because I've been living in a cave for the last 23 years, I've never actually read a single book in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. Well, that all changes today as I'm starting The Colour Of Magic to see what all the fuss is about. The bloke has only sold something like 40 million books worldwide so I'm feeling quite left out that I've no idea who Rincewind is as yet ;-)

[Moozik: Interpol - PDA]

I really really should get around to writing something about the movies I've recently watched, you know, a little closer to when I actually watched them. Then I *might* have something better than half a sentence something to the effect of "yeah, I liked this one". Well, one can only hope.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Yes I'm one of the two people on the planet that hadn't seen this movie yet. As mentioned just about everywhere Johnny Depp totally makes this movie. Very funny actually and if you're the other person on the planet who hasn't seen it yet, go to it. But why is the rum gone?

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest. Johnny Depp again makes this movie. Not as good as the first one though and I was a little disappointed to be honest. Seemed to go on for *ages* and any movie that has me looking at the clock hasn't really grabbed my full attention. Still funny in places and worth a watch. Why is the rum always gone? Oh that's why.

An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore's global warming documentary. As good a documentary as a bloke on stage showing slides can get. Was a little surprised at the cut scenes of the somewhat sour-grapes "I was robbed of the 2000 election". Don't get me wrong, I think he *was* robbed but thought this was an odd place to air those grievances. Still, he drives home an important message and everyone should watch this.

The Wicker Man. Oh my god did that suck. Quite honestly one of the worst films I've ever been stupid enough to sit through. Ridiculous plot, terrible acting. Avoid like the plague. Dear Nicholas Cage, did you actually read the script before signing the contract to star in this?

The Omen. I was a big fan of the original and seeing as remakes are generally awful (I'm looking at you The Fog) I was a little apprehensive about this to be honest. I was quite pleasantly surprised. I actually thought they did a very good job. Having watched the original something like 400 times there were obviously no plot surprises but I still enjoyed it.

[Moozik: Wumpscut - Time Ticks Away]

Wake me up when it's 2008 kthanksbye.

WASHINGTON - President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

New postal law lets Bush peek through your mail

[Moozik: Clan Of Xymox - Stranger]

While I liked Jason Statham in Lock, Stock..., Snatch, and even The Italian Job, I'm not really that sure he'd make a good Doctor Who.

Jason Statham has reportedly been offered the title role in the next series of Doctor Who.

The Crank star is allegedly being lined up as the 11th Doctor in the hit BBC show amid rumours current Time Lord David Tennant is quitting the role.

A TV source tells The People, "It will be Doctor Who meets gangland. He will do a lot more thinking with his fists and will be a sure-fire winner with the ladies.

"Doctor Who is still seen as a bit geeky but Jason will add sex appeal and give the character a more dangerous edge."

Statham to be new Doctor Who?

Hmm, not exactly my first thoughts when imagining the good Doctor. Still, might be interesting to see how he takes on Zee Daleks.

[Moozik: Interpol - PDA]

I have a substantial amount of mp3s. Shocking I know. As I've ripped more albums over the years I've used various encoders and to say that the volume levels are not uniform would be the understatement of the year. Enter MP3Gain.

Tired of reaching for your volume knob every time your mp3 player changes to a new song? MP3Gain analyzes and adjusts mp3 files so that they have the same volume.

MP3Gain does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear. Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.

[Moozik: KMFDM - Anarchy]

I've just realized that the YouTube clips I added to a couple of recent posts mysteriously vanish when reading my feeds with an online aggregator such as Bloglines or Google Reader. Rather odd. I initially thought my feeds were somehow borked as it's not the first time breakage has ensued around these parts.

Hmm, well I haven't changed the default Atom & RSS templates shipped with Movable Type and the posts show up correctly when the feeds are viewed in RSSOwl. Hmm indeed. So, more research required obviously. Perhaps this is a known issue but it's late and I'm far too tired to poke around teh intarwebs anymore tonight looking at FAQs, Atom/RSS specs, and support forums.

Update: Well I did actually contact Bloglines and got a generic response that I assume they send out to anyone who contacts them so I'm still no further forward really.

We are now aware of the situation you have reported and our technical team is working towards resolving this issue as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

[Moozik: The Smiths - Well I Wonder]

I'm only about five hours into Twilight Princess and already I'm totally hooked. The graphics are stunning, the music very atmospheric, and the gameplay is amazing. I've been a Zelda fan for years starting with A Link To The Past on the SNES and was so looking forward to this game. The wait has been oh so worth it.

Oh yes this is why I play games.

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Only When I Lose Myself]

Depeche Mode's Big Ones interview. Quite amusing if you're a DM fan, and er, even if you're not. I mean how good is an interview that has "Last time you said 'quick everybody hide, Michael Stipe is coming'" as a question?