Sunday, April 29, 2007

Beaten to it

Well, it would seem that the Reactable as seen in my last post is available for purchase (although I still have no idea how much it is). And who else would you expect to be using one but short Icelandic mentalist Björk, who used one in conjunction with a lot of other expensive goodies during her set at Coachella.

Fans of the enigmatic Icelander will be pleased to know that she has a new album out in May this year. Her official site can be found here.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Music made fun

Now, I like to play the guitar a bit. I played piano and drums when I was a kid and I fancy myself as a bit of a DJ. All of which make me want this multi-user synth very, very much. I'd have to save for a bit though as I reckon it'd be a bit pricey. Perhaps I could sell some interal organs or something?

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Iffy layout

You will have to excuse me if this page appears a bit odd looking for a bit. As a recent convert to Opera (the browser, not the musical stylings of Wagner, Puccini et al), I realised it was high time I actually got off my arse and fixed the stylesheet for this site so that it actually worked in browsers other than IE. It's almost there but there are one or two little gremlins that need to be ruthlessly hunted down and taken out the back to be beaten to death. Normal service will resume shortly.

Alan Johnston

Still no word on the fate of BBC journo Alan Johnston. Help add to the pressure on parties who have influence in the region and sign the petition calling for his release. No hostage in this area has been held for so long or with this little information. Such acts only serve to harm the Palestinian cause, a fact not lost on the vast majority of Palestinians, who have been extremely vocal and pro-active in expressing their displeasure and disgust at this kidnapping. The very least we can do is add to that growing chorus of dismay.

By all account Johnston is a well thought of jounalist by the Palestinians themselves as well as his BBC colleagues and collegaues in other news agencies around the world. I hope you will spare a thought for his family. I certainly will.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Making your own luck

Is it possible do you think? Making your own luck? In the last few days I think this has happened to me twice. Firstly, for some days I had the strange feeling that a bird was going to launch a turd at me from on high. This hasn't happened to me for years and somehow I felt as if I'd been dodging it for so long it was bound to happen; law of averages maybe. Anyway, for several days I was wary of birds flying overhead, especially pigeons, of which there are plenty round here, and sea gulls when I went for a day trip to the beach on Easter Saturday.

I don't like seagulls. They have mad, staring red eyes and are bloody vicious when the mood takes them. It was a seagull that launched a sloppy one at me last time, all over a new (and much prized) T shirt while on holiday in Devon with a mate. The mention of this incident still cracks up my mate as we had just been fishing off the rocks and I was wearing clumpy steel toe capped boots. The sight of me chasing after the offending gull, swearing blue murder and trying to boot it's bloody head off was too much for him (I'd like to apologise to anyone who was around at the time with kids as my language was exceptionally unsavoury. Pretty unlikely they'll be reading this but it's the thought that counts).

On Easter Sunday I decided that since it was a nice day I would take my book (Diaries 1969-1979 - The Python Years by Michael Palin, if you're interested) and go and find a quiet spot in the botanical gardens for a bit of a read in the sun. This I duly did and come 5 o'clock or so, I decided to wander home through the rest of the park. I'd almost left the park when all of a sudden I feel a thud on my shoulder. Yes, that's right, some scabrous bloody pigeon parked it's van load on my T shirt. I guess it could have been worse as a few inches to the right it would have been on my head and I was able to clean off the worst of it in some nearby public conveniences (which were absolutely foul, by the way. BANES council you should be ashamed to have such filthy facilities serving a huge kids play area and park). Luckily, given the proximity of large numbers of kids, I stopped myself from swearing too loudly, although a small boy nearby did look my way when I uttered a very rude word under my breath, or so I thought: I had my headphones in at the time so it may have been louder than intended.

Anyway, example number two was regarding my back. I occasionally get muscle spasm in my back which can last from a few hours to a few days and it is absolutely crippling. All you can do is take pain killers and stretch a bit. I hadn't had an attack for well over a year and I had recently got the ominous feeling that I was overdue for a bout and sure enough, this morning I felt the familiar tightening across the back muscles just above the kidneys. Sometimes it is so bad that you can barely breathe when in the middle of a spasm but I have been stamping on it with a mixture of ibuprofen and codeine.

So, there you have it: two occurrences in two days. Coincidence or is it really the case that you make your own luck and by thinking these things would happen they did happen? As a scientist, the answer to me is clearly that it's just the way it goes, and as an eternal pessimist in some ways I always expect the worst and so I am rarely disappointed (but often happily pleased when something turns out better than expected. Better than being an optimist and always being disappointed I've always felt). Still, it doesn't change the fact that one is annoying and the other is sodding painful!

Listening to: Grant Lee Buffalo - Fuzzy

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Unbelievable...

Speaks for itself really...

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

New game, old issues

this week, I have been mostly playing...Command and Conquer 3 from EA Games. Whilst its a good game, in true EA style after only 5 days of being on general release there have already been three patches one of which is to fix the patch updater.

However, this is not the most annoying aspect, oh no. This comes from actually installing the patches because once you do, then it can stuff the odious copy protection system (SecuRom) so that when you try and start the game you get an error message: A required security module could not be activated. This program cannot be executed (5024). Well, ladies and gents, it seems that the patch does something which makes SecuRom not work with even more systems than normal (it has a habit of arbitrarily not working with some devices anyway and interestingly it is made by none other than DRM uber-weenies Sony, who have a less than sterling track record with this kind of stuff - they ended up in court).

So what's the problem? Well, it seems that the common link in all this (and my own empiric observations support this) is that if you run SysInternals Process Explorer (a much more feature rich replacement for Windows task manager which is now owned and distributed by Microsoft themselves) BEFORE you try and start the game, then this causes SucuRom to fail and thus the game to fail. The only solution is to reboot your system.

Yes, that's right, EA have managed to stop a huge number of legitimate gamers who have paid hard earned cash for their fully legal copy of the game from playing if they use a perfectly legal and freely available piece of software from the biggest software house in the world before firing up the game. Genius.

Talk about alienating your customers...

Monday, April 02, 2007

Vanity

A while ago I started to wonder if anyone was reading my blog. Not that I'd have stopped if they weren't, but you can't help getting curious to know if anyone is reading your rants/drivel/philosophical musings so I've been tracking some basic info using Statcounter and to be honest, I'm amazed at the restuls. Now I'm hardly going to win awards for the amount of traffic on the site and I know I have a couple of regular reader who are friends of mine, one of whom is based in Hong Kong, but I have had a truly global readership so far.

Granted most of the hits are probably random (i.e. I've been lucky enough to be on the Blogger front page somewhere or linked from another blog as the 'Next Blog' link or something) but it's kinda cool to think that people in all these places might actually get a giggle out of my stuff. OK, so without people leaving comments it's hard to tell but assuming that people are reading your stuff is the basic and essential vanity of the blogger. For some reason I seem to be popular in China (probably getting crawled by the state firewalls and blacklisted as an evil capitalist!) and I can't help thinking the Peruvian, Polish and Kuwaiti hits were accidental ones but it does make the map look more impressive. All I need now is Russia, the subcontinent, the Antipodes and, the creme de la creme, Antarctica (although this might be a bit ambitious).

Oh well you never know. Africa would be good too although I suspect most people in Africa have better things to do than read the ramblings of a middle class 30-something from the UK so fair do's on that one really.

By the way, don't panic - the stats I collect are private and do not identify you. I'm only interested in seeing if I get hits, how many and where from. Believe me, working in IT you tend to be far more mindful of online privacy than most and I don't much like my data being collected so I make damn sure I can't get anyone else's.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Quality programming...

I'm half watching the BBC's Castaway at the moment and there's a new arrival on the island - a cow. It arrived overnight so when one girl went out of the hut early for some reason she was the first to see it in the field. The cow moos at her and she rushes back into the hut with a look of consternation on her face. She wakes a couple of the other inhabitants and tells them: "You know down at the bottom of the hill...there's a horse!".

How the fuck can you not know the difference between a cow (which has just mooed at you) and a horse? They are, for the most part, the most imbecilic, vacuous pillocks I have seen outside of a Channel 4 production. Give me strength...

I know that face...

For a while now it's been bugging me that the girl from the Bradford and Bingley advert looks very familiar. Yesterday I twigged - she's a Spong Monkey!