Volume 51
31 Jan 2004
RIP RIkki Fulton
Hmm, there is a fourth book of the Steve Aylett Accomplice series that has just come out. Do I buy it in the trade paperback size or do I wait a year until it comes out in the same size as all the others I have and is cheaper?
30 Jan 2004
Hmm, wireless access in the meeting at St. Andrews.
29 Jan 2004
I'm off to St. Andrews (via Dundee) today as I'm talking at an LTSN meeting tomorrow.
The Apostrolypse - see Q8, but also study all the others carefully if you are an apostrophe abuser.
Hmm, playing around with Orkut (thanks for the invites). Seems much the same as all the other systems. Of course I'm in all of those too, and never really use them, but you have to be in them don't you.
I just got spam with the subject "Your Amazon order #78.... has Shipped" - I bet those get opened quite a lot.
28 Jan 2004
"You are suspected of plunder 2100 $ from account Webmoney! It is necessary for you to contact employee FBI USA who has affairs with representation Webmoney in USA. We have the decision of a problem and further the decision of a problem in regional court. The complaint has acted from ID 828245830532." How stupid do you have to be to fall for this?
Ah ha, A whois reveals that phonebashing.com is owned by Virgin. So it's a viral marketing ploy (thanks for that, Paul)
27 Jan 2004
There seems to be a lot of virused email around this morning.
26 Jan 2004
Oooh, the weather is sweeping across the Town Moor towards me. There was a brief rainbow and now just murk.
Hmm, so Orkut has grown very quickly (before going offline) - and nobody has invited me yet. *sigh* J-List? K-List?
Hmm, that was a bit shambolic - some footballer I've never heard seems to have dropped dead on the pitch somewhere and I suspect that this has caused all kinds of chaos at Radio 5.
25 Jan 2004
I've been ranting about professional Scotsmen elsewhere, here's an example. Burns would have really hated all this (other than that it would have been a good excuse for a piss up and all the Butns groupies there would have been. I have no idea where this bizarre conflation of highlanders (kilts, bagpipes) and lowlanders (Burns) came from. Probably Walter Scott.
Catch me on Radio 5 Live tonight at around 23:35, wearing my spam expert hat.
Ah, thank you Chris, it's "Kenan and Kel" How do you get the pronunciation of Keenan from Kenan What sort of name is Kenan anyway? And Kel? They look like something from a bad SF novel. And Kel is not dead, though thankfully the show seems to be.
Do read the claims to fame on the Hank Thompson front page (it misses out the one that he introduced drums to the Opry) - how can you be the first to do something along with someone else? Makes no sense at all, unless of course the first recording of the seventh decade was a duet between him and Frank Sinatra which sounds a smidgeon unlikely.
Apropros even less, I was listening to a cheap "Best of Western Swing" CD I bought and noticed that on one track Hank Thompson sounds exactly like Zap Brannigan. (Because the CD is cheap it doesn't ahve any of the "classic" tunes on it, which is great because almost all the tracks were new to me. There is 1950 Bob Wills track which is just Rock and Roll with fiddles - I suppose it would be classified as Hillbilly Boogie by the purists)
Apropos of nothing, my son said that one of Kenenan and Kell had been killed in a car crash. Amazingly, if you search for Keenan and Kell you get almost no hits - I assume I am spelling it incorrectly.
I didn't realise that Helmut Newton was 83.
24 Jan 2004
Listening to Geoff Purvis - excellent stuff, highly recommended if you like that Northumbrian dance band sound. The person who put this particular track listing together clearly hadn't listened to the record and had no understanding of the concept of sets of tunes.
23 Jan 2004
Damn that was good. I bet they had fun recording it too. That's what I need - Jerry Douglas and Ricky Skaggs and co. popping in for a wee session. 'twould be most refreshing.
Hmm, /. says that Orkut sent out 12000 invites. I wonder how you got on to that A-list? I also wonder what the geographical spread is like.
Watching Transatlantic sessions on BBC 4 at the moment. I hadn't realised this was on : Ali Bain, Jerry Douglas etc. etc. Wonderful stuff.
What a good idea, and so obvious when you think about it. (But that is the hallmark of a good idea)
Oh, and also notice that only young people are members of Orkut judging by the pictures. They are even less likely to have a wide circle of friends having not had the time to develop it!
So how do you get started on Orkut? You can't join unless invited. It has to start somewhere and the number of invitations might just peter out. Invite me if you are a member though, or else I'll start feeling left out and unloved...
The wonder of it all - nice pictures, but more than a tad trite. I suspect for most people for most of the questions, the answer is "NO". I have no idea why this is supposed to be motivating. i was waitign for a big explosion or something.
22 Jan 2004
21 Jan 2004
Damn, there's another one that I've done before. Old age setting in and I'm repeating myself. I'll have to get that checking code hacked up.
Anal Magic with Kenny G playlists Huh? (There is a performance of Satie's Vexations buried in here somewhere I think)
A lovely little piece in the Guardian today about a performance of Satie's vexations. Particularly good is what happened when Django Bates was playing. Read it.
Musicplasma - a visual music search, a bit like the visual thesaurus. I tried it with Bob Wills and it gave good answers. Definitely one to play with.
Hmm, I've done that one before. I really need to fix up my log tool so that it checks and then confirms that I really want to add the entry. Half the code is there but I haven't had the chance to finish it.
Nice one Coke - you go to their new music download site, click on the "enter" button (why??) and a flash intro appears (why?) - you see the "Skip Intro" button so you click on that and it takes you straight back to the "click to enter" page. One wonders how much they forked out to have a site as bad as this built!
20 Jan 2004
Windy Millenium Remix 2000 - not very good though. In fact it's awful - done by someone who just doesn't get it methinks. (Which is not to claim I could do any better!!)
The Association Admiration Aggregation - with audio and stuff. I'm not sure I've ever heard any of their other songs!
Which reminds me (or preminds me since this all runs the worng way) of a story in the Guardian the other day about Round the Horne. Marty Feldman used to be on the script team and had left. A new series was starting and he sent them a telegram that read "If you have talent you don't need luck" and then signed it "good luck, Marty".
Here's a tab for Windy. It's about time somebody did a remix version or a bootleg of it. After all the Boogie Pimps remix of Somebody to Love is really rather good though the stupid parachuting babies video is not good. If I had the equipment, the time and the talent I would do it.
There is a nice instrumental version (steel guitar of course) of "Windy" on at the moment. I suspect that it is not in the least bit cool to like that particular tune but I have always had a soft spot for it, particularly the original version. And the steel guitarness probably has far more uncoolness than anything else.
Several people asked about google /ie mode. If you go to my designated homepage and use the search box you'll see how it works. Basically it's the normal search page but with a lot less extraneous crap on it.
Just adjusted the handling of the If-Modified-Since request header so that might fix some of the cacheing problems that people are still having. Dru? Savas? (I've also added handling for the If-Unmodified-Since header, but I bet I've got it wrong - so if you ever see a 412 response do let me know)
I keep reading these articles that talk about google ads and how successful they are, but I never see them! Doesn't everyone use /ie mode when they search to cut out all the crap? How bizarre.
Casket Furniture - which leads you to Casket Plans "My father and I had built my grandmother her final resting place ourselves. It was extremely meaningful to have been able to take part in the process and it helped both my father and I feel the closure that we needed." I think this is a splendid idea if you are not going to get cremated or put under a tree.
19 Jan 2004
Yes! I got to level 7 on curveball.
Joshua Motohasi endorese Bulls Eye Bars (nice Dobro pic on the page - must polish mine : I was playing in the living room the other night with just a light over my shoulder and the resonator makes weird, skull-like reflections on the ceiling. I should try and grab a photo)
I take it back, Steel Radio does have track info on the stream - I had the windows in an odd configuration so didn't see it. Currently some great playing by Joshua Motohashi.
Some wonderful random spam this AM : "estuarine bootstrapping foldout" for instance
18 Jan 2004
Good news everyone, I've fixed an annoying CSS bug I sometimes had in the thanks lines. Annoying to me anyway.
Damn it, my iBook battery keeps suddenly losing charge. I swopped in my spare as it hadn't been used for a long time and whilst it seems to hold more charge to start with, it does this drop off thing. Especially if you try to play music. (I'm listening to steel radio - nice verion of FMB at the moment, just fast enough, ooooh a mandolin solo, I don't think I've heard anyone do FMB on the mandolin, ahhh, now the steel - lovely. I wish there was some way of finding out who the bands were on this station. Mmmm: Scruggs pegs in the banjo solo too. This is fantastic, who the hell is it?!?!?!?)
I followed Sarah's link to the Bloggies. These are people who talk about an "amount of entries" rather than a "number of entries"! They do not understand the concept of countability! How can they run an award?? I bet they worry about getting "less entries" this year too! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggh.
17 Jan 2004
Where do people find those "found photos" - I never see photos lying in the street or in bins or anywhere.
Hmmm, I thought this was last year - I certainly remember hearing about the karaoke dominatrix.
16 Jan 2004
Good news everyone, I've been watching Futurama all night.
Hmmm, I had the expiry time wrong on the latest volume so if you've been having to force a reload to see the new page, this should be OK now (and kudos for using a browser that actually obeys the protocol correctly). Of course if you're having to force a reload you wont see this message.
What horrible weather. Last night it took me over an hour to get home because it suddenly snowed a lot and then by 10 o'clock it was all melting. Now it is raining unpleasantly.
15 Jan 2004
Hmm, I have a 45% chance of winning a bloggie. Whatever that is. Shouldn't it be a Blogscar, though perhaps that is what people who don't win get or something.
If I were in St. Louis this weekend I'd go and see the "world's largest operatoing steam train" (via willsthrills
Good grief have you ever heard anything so ridiculous. The end of this will be that nobody travels in, out or around the USA which will just have the most horrendous economic effects (apart from motels and stuff since everyone will start long haul driving again!)
I mentioned the Handlebars (Blue Trash, Mountain Metal, Hillbilly Grunge) a couple of years ago and I just got some email from Kosta who plays bass. So I'm mnetioning them again! Kosta also plays in Full Boost Blues
14 Jan 2004
Went to the Turner Late Seascapes exhibition today - if you get the chance go, if only to see the newly restored "Rockets and Blue Lights (close at hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water" In the flesh (so to speak) it looks nothing like the reproductions and is absolutely astonishing. Wonderful.
At least I am now more sober than I was earlier on!
Bizarre, I haven;t been able to get to catless all day from here and then it just starts up.
13 Jan 2004
From Daring Fireball : "PC pundits pound their heads against the wall, asking why, if Apple only sells a small percentage of computers, the company receives such a disproportionate amount of media attention. The answer is simply that they’re selling the best computers, to the most interesting people. Maybe it is only two percent of the total PC market, but it’s the most interesting two percent"
Oh, in case you hadn't sussed they have WiFi in the place I'm staying in Manchester. Gadzooks, you don't escape my drivelling that easily!
RIP Jeff Nuttall - Bomb Culture (which appears to be, shockingly, out of print) was an important book. I must admit to being surprised to find that he was 70 - I imagined him as closer to my age.
Off to Manchester to talk about role based access control, so possibly no updates for a couple of days.
OK, you'll all have seen it, but I really have to link to the logarithmic map of the universe
Amazing!!!!!!
12 Jan 2004
sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO - that was the longest one I could find in google. It's just sooooooo big! And there are sooooooooo many other sites with slightly shorter ones.
A very quick overview of one method of making a reticulated headdress - oops, I've done that one before. I'm starting to repeat myself.
All the weird word spam reads like poetry this morning. How odd.
More Spam poetry :anabaptist armadillo - darius blasphemous cockeye hanoi
indubitable pelvic grew clomp epithet
racket eternal admire nitpick levitate combine conclude
Spam poetry : betsey paraphrase - infinitesimal passerby bibliography halvah inclose catechism dispelled inflow
curious
finland deuterium brandeis samson
bituminous feedback neon asparagine genie fifty pivotal mirfak aloha eyepiece
Leo (see previously) has a page on pronoun antecedent agreement, but it doesn't say anything about the current awful use of "myself" instead of me or I.
11 Jan 2004
Aaargh the earlier spam gem was not spam! It was in my spam box so I assumed it was a serendipitous subject, in fact it turns out to have been a message referring me to here!
Oh, and can anyone explain to me the presence of chain saws on an advanced experimental base on Mars? I can see them planning it now "Oh, we'd better pack some chainsaws just in case something goes terribly wrong and monsters from another dimension need some weapons, because there isn't any wood around here so they be useful for anything else" And why do guns run out of bullets but chainsaws not run out of petrol? (Or maybe they do now)
Watch the Doom 3 trailer and note the soldier with the helmet that reads ARSE (I suspect it says MARSEXPEDITION or something, but you mostly see ARSE)
Heavens "A painting celebrating the greatness of God and the greatness of His love for us." "Heavens" is exactly what I said when I saw this.
Spam Gem : "corresponding cobweb connecting points" ***NOT spam - see above.
I wonder if I ought to make an RDF feed fro my reading list. If everyone who had reading lists did that then it would be easy to keep track of what was going on. Maybe I need to start a new site for recording reading lists just like people record weblogs. Quite happy to do it if anyone thinks its worthwhile. I am always on the look out for good things to read and bad things to avoid.
10 Jan 2004
I added a geo tags header, but I'm not sure that it's correct since the page isn't really about a specific location. I may remove it.
Need to add the GeoURL box.
9 Jan 2004
What's with all these anal retentives with their clean desks? I just flipped through a few of the desk shots and there wasn't one that was even a tenth as chaotic as mine!
Spam gem : "satanic tollhouse beatnik epigraph" sounds like a good title for a weblog.
Does anyone have an up to date list of all the sites that accept weblog pings? I can't find one, and I keep finding sites that accept update pings...
8 Jan 2004
I have to half inch this link to Tokyo and Osaka at night that was on SM - fabulous. The incandescent lighting is so much nicer than the sodium that we have.
(I know the previous item is ambiguous - the excellent refers to PB, though the website is OK too)
hmmmm - and they really believe that people were giving honest answers? YouGov takes itself rather too seriously (and it does some really stupid polls too!!)
The Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation "Research conducted revealed eating Pepperidge Farm Garlic bread increased positive family interaction"
Spam subject of the day: "Dense aldebaran circumferential chutney". Yum
NBOR website "The first software that lets you operate a computer the way you think will soon debut" Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. So it's an operating system or a desktop? Replace all your proven, specialist tools with one universal tool? (sorry, universal tool tm seems to be a trademark). I think I'm going to have to rant! This may be a perfectly fine piece of software (if over priced, but most software is of course) - some of what it claims to be trying to achieve is indeed sound.
No Boundaries or Rules - what is it about the words "intuitive user interface" that makes my heart sink? Oh, it gets worse, the article features the words "only a few clicks and drags of a mouse" another sure sign of yet another piece of software that will vanish without trace. (Yes, I am perfectly prepared to admit that I was wrong when it turns out to be a huge success and to revolutionise the whole content creation industry)
7 Jan 2004
Listening to a fantastic 4 CD set of Frankie Gavin material. If you like his work then this is a must have - there is a fantastic version of the Spey in Spate which is a standout.
Aveda appear to make a product called "hand relief for men". It appears to be expensive too. I wonder if there is an executive version?
RIP Joan Aiken
Welcome to Arkham - campus crusade for cthulhu (horrid cheesy MIDI, but it's intentional (I think))
I could do with a bluegrass station that didn't play anything that was less than (say) 120 bpm - not keen on the mournful, old rugged cross kind of stuff.
Damn, the connection to bluegrasscountry just went down right in the middle of the Foggy Mountain Breakdown - it was like the big hook coming onto the stage!
I finally got a proper tone bar, which is nice. In fact it's one of those things that you really want to carry around with you as it is so well engineered. (It's a Gary Swalloes design - see yesterday...)
Listening to bluegrasscountry.org today - at the momement someone is doing a super slowed down version of Cripple Creek. Not sure which band, but Bill Emerson on banjo which is always good.
Spam subject : "Action bicycle brainstorm" Do these people have Arts Council sponsorship?
Some of these weightloss tips are just bizarre - calisthenics during the commercials", "Just 10 minutes of cross-country skiing or snowshoeing in Central Park burns more than 100 calories", "Have a salad before lunch" - what? a salad is lunch for goodness sake!! Of course, do all of them and get negative weight!
6 Jan 2004
Oh, and look at Switched-on-country which perpetuates the error of pronouncing Mr Moog's name in a bovine way rather than in a grass cutting way.
Some album covers - some very fine ones indeed: I especially like the Science of Mysticism from Rosicrucian Recordings
I just got spam with the subject "disastrous hypocycloid englander"
I just did the political compass test again and I am glad to see that I am still way to the left of ken Livingston and Tony Benn.
Note that Mother Mary doesn't seem to know that it should be a "number of earthquakes" not an "amount of earthquakes" since they are countable. Interesting explanation of the cause of earthquakes though. Oh, and if you can find it in you to wade through to the end of all this crap, you'll find that it is copyright one Kim Michaels, not the BVM!
Ask the Real Jesus - how do we know that it is the real Jesus though and not some pretend Jesus?
5 Jan 2004
The university of Sex (adult content...well...OK, really childish content that you probably don't want to have to explain to someone who doesn't get the jokes)
The speed issue may now be fixed (or at least avoided)
YAST
Habanero - strange flash. No idea what it means of course. Go to the main page and check out all the other weird flash adverts for their other products.
4 Jan 2004
3 Jan 2004
2 Jan 2004
To Edinburgh and back to see my Dad on his birthday.
1 Jan 2004
Hmm, time to throw the teenagers out the house and go to bed....
Happy New Year!!!