April 2008 Archives
[Moozik: Siouxsie & The Banshees - Not Forgotten]
New house, new start. Moved in yesterday. My dogs seem to be doing remarkably well for being thrust into somewhere new. Bless 'em. The first night in a new place is always entertaining. You hear something in the middle of the night and you're all "...what the fuck was that?...". Kind of exciting though.
I was at Best Buy tonight buying a washing machine and tumble dryer. Do you have any idea how sad it is when they ask you for your address for delivery and you give them the deer in the headlights look. I totally winged it and told the girl I'd have to ring her back once I got home in case I'd fluffed the address. She did a kind of laugh-yet-think-I-suck-so-try-not-to-roll-eyes maneuver. It was most impressive. The maneuver I mean.
[Moozik: L'âme Immortelle - Lake Of Tears]
I'd really like to see that video. You know, the one you don't want me to see.
Not available in my territory? Such teasers the BBC, "sure you may be an Englishman who likes to get his home news from us but you left our shores didn't you, and anyway if you lived in a proper country you'd see the video, but you don't, so you can't, na-na-na-na-na".
[Moozik: Dave Gahan - Love Will Leave (Kap10kurt Remix)]
Ugh. I have my iPod plugged into my winders laptop and I can't even play the songs I've already paid for. Remind me how DRM is a good idea again.
[Moozik: Editors - An End Has A Start]
So, apparently, they enforce speed limits here in the US. Cheek of old nick these Americans. There I was happily going 21 mph over the speed limit and a motorcycle cop had the nerve to pull me over. It's like he didn't have anything better to do or something.
Ugh. My own fault obviously. Luckily the cop was in a good mood and only marked the ticket as a civil penalty. Which means no points on my license if I go to defensive driving school. "School" in this case means a four hour class on a Saturday of my choice wherein I learn how much I suck and should slow the fuck down drive in a safer manner.
[Moozik: Clan Of Xymox - Equal Ways]
One of the more entertaining blogs I read is that of JWZ. Two recent posts of his that are worth a quick mention.
First up, the creepy remix of an ABC News interview with the polygamist mothers. Watch it and see if you're not humming "it's our ranch, and it's our home" hours later.
Then it would appear I'm not alone in my confusion about Twitter. I must admit, number 4 made me nod my head. Finally, someone has said something.
4. Those of you who post daily dumps of your twitter messages: fucking knock that shit off. It's annoying.Mr Fitzpatrick and his daily tweets springs immediately to mind.
I'm sure this is a dilemma that a lot of bloggers face at one point or another in their lives. Do you blog significant life changes? Do you blog those life changes involving relationships? Do you blog those life changes when the possibility exists that those impacted by the life change will see what you wrote? How public do you want the information to be?
All good questions indeed. Not to be intentionally vague but a chapter in my life is coming to an end and a new one is beginning. Painful upheaval for all involved. The other day I decided to take a breather from online life for a bit while the dust settles. Now I think I'll just press on. Everyone has different ways of dealing with things and continuing posting random crap here will continue.
So then, onward and upward.
And so it begins...
Taking a break. Will resume all manner of useless bollocks soon.
[Moozik: Jakalope - Nothing Nowhere]
My little camera that could can only handle so much. Still, I love it, and overall I'm quite happy with the macro shots.
From time to time I still glance at the Rebel XTI so I'll maybe see what birthday surprises I can conjure up for myself this November ;-)
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Flickr developer site. APIs, public SVN repo, dev blog, forums.
[Moozik: Clan Of Xymox - Stumble And Fall]
When listening to music I usually leave iTunes or my iPod on shuffle so I cycle through a good many songs from a variety of artists. This week though I've been trying to play entire albums from start to finish. I think artists would probably say that's the way they are intended to be played anyway.
It's made a refreshing change and reminded me of my vinyl days where we didn't have this fancy shuffle business ;-) I think as and when I get to it, but probably on Friday's I'll post a brief writeup of those albums in my collection that are my favorites.
[Moozik: Psyche - Snow Garden]
So yeah, yesterday was all teambuilding, all the time. And you know what? It wasn't actually that bad. I was pleasantly, pleasantly shocked. The BBQ in the park was a good laugh. In fact the only thing missing was beer. Why wasn't there beer?
[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Black Celebration]
I finally got around to watching last week's Bill Maher show last night. It was certainly one of his better weeks and by that I mean he actually had a good panel. The panel can certainly make or break an episode. Jason Alexander had me in stitches and even Bill himself seemed to be having a good time.
I also enjoyed the interview Maher did with Richard Dawkins. I've read Dawkins' The God Delusion and while I found the book extremely hard work, I thought it was good overall. What I didn't realize is that Dawkins also has quite a good sense of humor as well. He made me laugh on more than one occasion last night especially when discussing Francis Collins and how a supposedly smart man can believe in a talking snake from the Bible. I think I'm going to go out and buy some of his other books as well.
[Moozik: She Wants Revenge - Replacement]
You know how you realize that your cellphone is not really very charged at all and on its last legs. Panic obviously. That's almost like not even bringing it with you. The horror. Got my charger at work? Of course not. That would be far too easy. Hmm, wait, I've got the USB cable, I'll just plug it into my laptop. That should work right? Of course not. Not even recognized and certainly not charging.
Ugh. Now it's try to find the correct USB driver on the internet game. That's always fun. Try Motorola's site. That was a total suckfest and I gave up. Googled for it and found the driver on some obscure "hack my razr" site. Sounds very trustworthy. Get it installed though and plug the phone back in.
Success. Charging away. But having to go digging for drivers? In 2008? Come on.
[Moozik: Rosetta Stone - Friends & Executioners]
Birthday Massacre goodness. On May 6th the Looking Glass EP is released. Then on May 21st, they're at the Marquee Theater in Tempe supporting Mindless Self Indulgence.
[Moozik: London After Midnight - Ice]
Today I'm like a flippin' zombie I swear. I've had enough caffeine to kill a large horse and I'm still in a perpetual go slow. The fact that I've had about five hours sleep over the last two days has probably got a lot to do with that. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and my mind just races. Ideas, thoughts, Perl code, songs, did I leave the front door wide open? You know, that kind of thing.
Finally received confirmation of the location of my training class this morning. Saying "oh, it's in New York" could not possibly be any more vague so at last I was able to book hotel/flight. The class is being held right in the middle of Manhattan and the hotel a 2 minute walk down the street. Seems to be a perfect location really and I'm really looking forward to going. Hopefully the class itself doesn't turn out to be a big pile of poo.
And speaking of things I'm really looking forward to, ahem, tomorrow is teambuilding day at work. Should be contrived fun. Should be ;-)
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Early work on an Ajax comments plugin for Movable Type.
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Rather nice Lego interpretations of classic photos.
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Timesink warning ;-) View interesting photos from Flickr. Good stuff indeed. Makes me realize how creative some people can be. Loving it.
[Moozik: The Cure - The Same Deep Water As You]
Kottke's doing it so why not. Of the 76,832 songs I've listened to since I started scrobbling my plays to last.fm, my top five thus far are:
• The Birthday Massacre - Horror Show (110 plays)
• Japan - Quiet Life (90 plays)
• Depeche Mode - Precious (87 plays)
• Hocico - Tales From The Third World (79 plays)
• The Birthday Massacre - Happy Birthday (79 plays)
last.fm is far more reliable for this kind of thing because I've switched between Banshee & iTunes a couple of times over the years so local play counts are way off.
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"Adidas can prevent other companies using two stripes on the shoulders of their shirts, even though Adidas branding has three stripes." So, one company can own the right to stripes on clothing now?
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Poll of 109 historians found that 96 percent of respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies with 98 percent labeling it a “failure.” Shocker!
[Moozik: Seabound - Contact (Live 2007)]
Last year I mentioned that I was a little less than impressed with the second season of Heroes. The new characters were just annoying and there really wasn't enough focus on the characters everyone cared about from the first season.
The writers, apparently, heard the complaints from fans and were going to do something about it. I didn't expect that would mean adding more characters for the new season though.
Season three of Heroes will introduce two new characters, because the show isn't overcrowded enough already: Joy, who's in her early twenties and good at getting herself into, and out of, trouble. And Senator Robert Malden, a "political straight shooter" in his fifties.
Well, I can only hope they do a better job this time.
[Moozik: Mesh - Fallen]
These days I've become quite the early riser. Very unlike me actually as I've never been much of the morning person and would prefer to put off getting out of bed for as long as is humanly possible. Up at 5:15am, take dogs out, breakfast, shower, sync iPod and in the car by 6:20 ish.
Driving east into the center of Phoenix at this time in the morning means that the Sun is at the exact correct angle to promote promising amounts of blindness and confusion. If you've ever been to Phoenix you know the streets are in a grid pattern so there are no windy roads with which to escape the sun. Oh no, that would be far too easy. So this makes the drive awfully entertaining really as you know there are traffic lights up ahead but haven't the bloody foggiest what color the lights are.
[Moozik: Zombie Girl - Bonesniffer]
After going back and forth fifty times, yes you'll be going, no you won't, wait - yes you will, no the whole project is off, it would appear I am going to be in New York for a week in May for a training class. I've always wanted to go to New York so this was very good news today.
Still, it does mean the Duran Duran concert is a no go. But I think I'd rather be paid to go to New York to be honest.
[Moozik: Jakalope - House Of Trepidation]
There are some movies that once watched, cannot be watched again. Well, ok, that's not true, you can watch them again but once you know the end, the reveal, the twist, it's very hard to watch them again.
Never has this been more true than of The Prestige. I watched it for the second time last night and while it's a really good movie, something was lost for me. And it's a shame really and now I'm wishing that I'd gone a few more years before watching it. Perhaps then I might have forgotten the multiple twists at the end.
I also have the exact same problem watching The Sixth Sense and to be honest, I don't think I've ever watched that again. Some would argue that you can't really watch any of Shyamalan's movies twice because of knowing the twist. I've only found that true of The Sixth Sense though.
I do love movies with big 'well fuck me' twists in them. That's why I love Shymalan's movies and that's why I love The Prestige. If you haven't seen it, you should. It's good.
[Moozik: Seabound - Scorch The Ground (Live In Berlin 2007)]
Every Sunday I look forward to jwz's latest mix tape. He has a similar music taste so it's half remembrance and half discovery. "oh yeah, I haven't heard this one in ages" vs "hey, this is pretty good".
Well, that's being generous because some of it is utter wank. But for the most part, good stuff indeed. And if jwz is not your cup o' tea, fear not for there are plenty of others creating mix tapes at muxtape. And if you like what you hear you could probably figure out a way to ensure the songs end up in your music library. jwz explains...
We're also prohibited from "encouraging" users to users to copy the music, and we are required to "disable copying by users if in possession of technology capable of doing so."
This means that, for example, if there existed tools out in the world that made it trivial for you to download any streaming audio webcast anywhere, I wouldn't be allowed to tell you what those tools were. If they existed. And I'm not saying that they do.
[Moozik: London After Midnight - Let Me Break You]
One thing I've noticed in my time living here in the US is the popularity of High School Sports. Specifically American Football. High School Football is even shown on local TV on Friday nights over here. Players and coaches are interviewed, fans get their faces on TV. It's a whole thing.
That is so different from when I played School Sports in the UK. See, we didn't even have the nice seats for spectators in my Rugby playing days. Oh no, if you wanted to watch us play Rugby, you walked down to the muddy field and stood there for 80 minutes. If you were lucky, the ground was hard because of the frost but then you had the pleasure of freezing your rear end off.
Ah, good times. American High School kids in warm climates, don't know how lucky they've got it. Nothing beats getting tackled after a good frost I tell you. I swear getting tackled on concrete couldn't feel any worse.
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"The study into dialect and perceived intelligence found that people who said nothing at all were regarded as more intelligent than those with a Brummie accent." Ouch.
[Moozik: Gary Numan - On Broadway (Live)]
In Illinois, you walk, you talk, you get fined.
According to an article on WBBM Radio's Web site, White wants the state to pass a law prohibiting people from walking across the street while using a cell phone. A bill along those lines has already been introduced in the Illinois House.
White told WBBM he still wants the state to pass restrictions on drivers using cell phones, but he also wants a ban on texting or talking on the street in the state's larger cities.
State Rep. Ken Dunkin introduced House Bill 4520 on Jan. 17, which would make it a petty offense for a person crossing any street in the state to use a cell phone at the same time. If the bill is passed, a person caught could be fined up to $25. The bill is currently in committee.
So presumably you won't be allowed to talk to the person walking beside you either. If you're going to ban talking on the phone, surely it only makes sense to ban all talking no? Silence on the streets I say!
It's a good thing government is here to help us in our daily lives isn't it? Good grief.
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Others have tried their hand at talk-shows and not done so well - I'm looking at *you* John McEnroe. Still, might be worth a watch. Do I even get the Sundance channel though?
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A Livejournal site of vintage photographs. Pages and pages of mostly uncredited old photos.
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"I'm providing a solution for a customer and they couldn't care less if it's written in Perl or in ferret's blood daubed across the freshly painted wall of the server room, just as long as it works." - Andy Wardley
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Log4MT is a Movable Type wrapper plugin around Log4perl.
[Moozik: Siouxsie & The Banshees - The Rapture]
Matthew Dent has won the competition to redesign the coins used in the UK. I quite like the 20p and 50p.
[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Shame (Live 1984)]
Don't forget kids, the new season of Battlestar Galactica starts this Friday.
You're welcome.
[Moozik: The Smiths - Sheila Take A Bow]
There was the loudest house music coming from the wide open windows and front door of this house. The bloke living there was totally wasted at 11:45am and he was dancing around his front room rather amusingly. He then came out onto his front lawn and continued. I didn't know if he'd punch me in the face if I took a photo of him so thought better of it. He kept shouting "it's rockafella house" and "amen" at the top of his voice then continued dancing.
Loved by his neighbours, obviously ;-)
[Moozik: The Birthday Massacre - Horror Show]
Was it just me or was yesterday all rather lame in the prank department? I dunno, maybe I'm not as gullible as I was in years past ;-)