Happy Blogday to me!

And so I come to my 100th post. I was going to make this a bit of a discussion on new music delivery models (namely Spotify) and my thoughts on them, but I've decided that can be post no 101 or even a bit futher on.

No, today we are talking lists, specifically, the kinds of list that tell you you should have read/listened to/done, or whatever, the various things contained therein. Of course, these things are largely pointless because they generally involve lists made up by journos or pundits all of whom, have some sort of agenda and so they are far too abitrary, but I have done one or two of late and thought I'd share them with you.

So, first up, a list of 100 books that apparently everyone should read according so some spurious BBC News article.

Title	Author	Have I?
Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	No
The Lord of the Rings	JRR Tolkien	Yes
Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte	No
Harry Potter series	JK Rowling	No
To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	No
The Bible		No
Wuthering Heights	Emily Bronte	No
Nineteen Eighty Four	George Orwell	Yes
His Dark Materials	Philip Pullman	No
Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	No
Little Women	Louisa M Alcott	No
Tess of the D’Urbervilles	Thomas Hardy	No
Catch 22	Joseph Heller	Intend
Complete Works	William Shakespeare	Partial1
Rebecca	Daphne Du Maurier	No
The Hobbit	JRR Tolkien	Yes
Birdsong	Sebastian Faulks	No
Catcher in the Rye	JD Salinger	Intend
The Time Traveller’s Wife	Audrey Niffenegger	No
Middlemarch	George Eliott	No
Gone With The Wind	Margaret Mitchell	No
The Great Gatsby	F Scott Fitzgerald	No
Bleak House	Charles Dickens	No
War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	No
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy	Douglas Adams	No
Brideshead Revisited	Evelyn Waugh	No
Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoyevsky	No
Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	Intend
Alice in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	Yes
The Wind in the Willows	Kenneth Grahame	Yes
Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	No
David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	No
Chronicles of Narnia	CS Lewis	No
Emma	Jane Austen	No
Persuasion	Jane Austen	No
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe	CS Lewis	Yes
The Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini	No
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin	Louis De Bernieres	No
Memoirs of a Geisha	Arthur Golden	No
Winnie the Pooh	AA Milne	Yes
Animal Farm	George Orwell	Intend
The Da Vinci Code	Dan Brown	No
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	No
A Prayer for Owen Meaney	John Irving	No
The Woman in White	Wilkie Collins	No
Anne of Green Gables	LM Montgomery	No
Far From The Madding Crowd	Thomas Hardy	No
The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	Intend
Lord of the Flies	William Golding	Yes
Atonement	Ian McEwan	No
Life of Pi	Yann Martel	Partial2
Dune	Frank Herbert	Yes
Cold Comfort Farm	Stella Gibbons	No
Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen	No
A Suitable Boy	Vikram Seth	No
The Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafon	No
A Tale Of Two Cities	Charles Dickens	No
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	Intend
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time	Mark Haddon	No
Love In The Time Of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	No
Of Mice and Men	John Steinbeck	Yes
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	No
The Secret History	Donna Tartt	No
The Lovely Bones	Alice Sebold	No
Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	No
On The Road	Jack Kerouac	No
Jude the Obscure	Thomas Hardy	No
Bridget Jones’s Diary	Helen Fielding	No
Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie	No
Moby Dick	Herman Melville	No
Oliver Twist	Charles Dickens	No
Dracula	Bram Stoker	No
The Secret Garden	Frances Hodgson Burnett	No
Notes From A Small Island	Bill Bryson	Yes
Ulysses	James Joyce	Intend
The Bell Jar	Sylvia Plath	No
Swallows and Amazons	Arthur Ransome	Yes
Germinal	Emile Zola	No
Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackeray	No
Possession	AS Byatt	No
A Christmas Carol	Charles Dickens	No
Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	No
The Color Purple	Alice Walker	No
The Remains of the Day	Kazuo Ishiguro	No
Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	No
A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry	No
Charlotte’s Web	EB White	No
The Five People You Meet In Heaven	Mitch Albom	No
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle	No
The Faraway Tree Collection	Enid Blyton	No
Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	No
The Little Prince	Antoine De Saint-Exupery	No
The Wasp Factory	Iain Banks	Intend
Watership Down	Richard Adams	No
A Confederacy of Dunces	John Kennedy Toole	No
A Town Like Alice	Nevil Shute	Intend
The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas	No
Hamlet	William Shakespeare	Yes
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	Roald Dahl	Yes
Les Miserables	Victor Hugo	No

1 - Read some plays and sonnets at school but by no means the whole lot. I doubt many people have truly done so or have the patience to put up with the overly-wordy prose.
2 - I started to read it but gave up because, frankly, it was shit.


So, thats the books taken care of. Next was a list on The Guardian website regarding 1000 (yes, one thousand!) songs you should hear before you die, or somesuch. And since it's my blog, I am going to list every last one of the buggers in the next post.

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Scrubbing up nicely

I've just started to watch the eighth (and probably last) season of Scrubs. I started watching this by accident way back 7 or 8 years ago when I caught an episode on a cable channel and thought it was just about the funniest off-beat comedy in recent times (it also helps that it has an eclectic and often rather good soundtrack). The characters are all very good and well acted, the scripts are good and consistently funny, but for me the absolute shining beacon of the program is one of the lead stars, Sarah Chalke (note that this link points to wikipedia as her official site, or what appears to be her official site, seems to have been hacked by some butt monkey bigging up Palestinian suicide bombers).

Most people will probably know her as Becky, the eldest child in Roseanne. But ever since the start of Scrubs she has been extremely foxy and now, 8 years on she is more stunning than ever. I'm not given to fawning over celebs like some star-struck loser but in her case, I make an exception. A lot of people say they have a 'list' - the ten (or five or whatever) essentially unobtainable celebrities who they would be allowed a pass for in a relationship (usually jokingly I'm sure because no matter who the celebrity I can't imagine your partner being overly keen on you bumping uglies with them). Anyhoo, my list consists of just one person and it's her - she really is awesome. Very elegant, classy, classically beautiful and always seems very genuine and down to earth.

Probably turn out to be totally wrong about that and she's actually an evil, Machiavellian crazy woman, but since I'm never going to meet her (much less date her) I will carefully ignore that possibility. So, the point of this post? Well, there isn't one. I just fancied saying how much I fancy the behind off Ms Chalke. And it's my blog so ner.

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You know whta?

I'm wrecked. Totally wrecked. I'm also still single but things are moving on. Would be happier if I wasn't single but what the hell - life is pretty reasonable. Happy Easter!! In a totally secular way, obviously.

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Old friends

I was just browsing eMusic to grab this months allowance of music when I happened upon the new album from Telefon Tel Aviv (Immolate Yourself on BPitch Control / Finetunes, 2009), a Chicago based ambient outfit. I've come across them before on the strength of one tune that was on a down tempo mix album and I tried to get it on vinyl but the record company (a small indie label) said there was a limited run of about 1000 copies and they were all gone (although the guy did have a look around their office for me which I thought was rather nice of him).

Anyway, this album might be their last as it seems on of the band members died, but the thing that came to mind was listening to the song that put me onto them in the first place - Sound in a dark Room. I found it on YouTube (where else?) and thought I'd share it with you, my readers. My advice: turn up the speakers or headphones (and if you only have laptop speakers then I strongly recommend headphones otherwise you just won't get the full effect of this), turn down the lights and bliss out for a few minutes.

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Love/hate

In my day job, I am a software developer working primarily in Microsoft languages and a Database Administrator dealing with Microsoft databases, and I like their stuff on the whole, it's good, it works and it's good to use on the whole. Tonight I had a job to do which involved ensuring that we had a continuously updated copy of our main database on another server which would live in another building so that should the unthinkable happen and our offices be destroyed, we had a working copy of the system elsewhere.

I practised and planned this carefully but of course I still had endless problems, as you tend to do with these things, but got to the end and the last little setting which would mean that the system would run as fast as possible. All of a sudden, I get an error message. Eh? What the hell is going on? This didn't happen on my test system.

I looked into it and it turns out that Microsoft decided, in their wisdom, that in the edition of the database server we're using, this feature isn't supported. You have to get the super duper expensive one for that. Now I should explain that MS like editions - think Windows XP or Vista, there are endless variants such as x64, Home, Home Premium, Professional and what not. They do this with most things and you tend to get more stuff with the pricier editions as you would expect. We are using the second from top edition of this database server and each server requires two licenses (it is based on the number of processors) and at nearly £5000 per license and two servers, that’s not an insignificant amount of cash (although granted, we get charity pricing but the principle still applies).

The next version up is over £20000 per processor (£80000+ total). For just one extra thing in my case. It's not that my version doesn't support what I want to do, it does, just not one of the modes of operation of said feature which is just outright idiotic. Have the feature or don't have the feature, fine, but don't bloody well cripple it. Nowhere did I find this mentioned in my reference texts by the way, including the official course manual from MS themselves that I got from doing the administration course on this product. You have to read a white paper for that. Well gee thanks MS, you shower of bastards. You have just ruined my night (I will have to do all this work again at a similarly late time of night because it’s the only time I can get the business to agree to server downtime).

Oh well, nothing to be done now, so bed time and just look forward to the weekend.

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