thecages

I am totally obsessed with the video for Crosses (mentioned earlier).
But not the high resolution version(13,473KB) - the low res one(824KB).
The sound compression adds a strange phaser effect which renders the song extra terrestrial. Get it now.

When I first heard System of a Down I really liked them - really.
I still like their riffs and the tempo at which they play - fast; and Science on Toxicity is a killer tune.

But last nite I saw the video for a single from Mesmerize (which I listened to briefly before having to run away lest I vomit in my shoes) named Lonely Day.
The tune is fine and the video quite good, but the lyrics, *sigh*, the lyrics. Fucking appalling.
Purposefully grammatically incorrect (offensively so), infantile and featuring THE WORST last stanza of any song that I've ever heard. Horror.

Such a lonely day
And its mine
The most loneliest day of my life

Such a lonely day
Should be banned
It's a day that I can't stand

The most loneliest day of my life
The most loneliest day of my life

Such a lonely day
Shouldn't exist
It's a day that I'll never miss
Such a lonely day
And its mine
The most loneliest day of my life

And if you go, I wanna go with you
And if you die, I wanna die with you

Take your hand and walk away

The most loneliest day of my life
The most loneliest day of my life
The most loneliest day of my life
Life

Such a lonely day
And its mine
It's a day that I'm glad I survived

Also, a while ago I succeeded in messing up Windows badly.
I was under the impression that somehow Task Manager had died and so I used what was left of it to kill Explorer (which seems to be a good catch all solution to anything going wrong on the desktop). I landed up in a terrible state.

Now I find out that this behaviour is a feature!
It turns out that Task Manager can run in 'Tiny Footprint Mode'.

To see this wonder of MS design in action, simply double click Task Manager where the (beautifully drawn) arrow shows.



The window will collapse to this:



Double clicking the border again will revert it back to normal mode.

Now I can see how this can be useful if you want to monitor a process for a long time and don't want Task Manager to take up too much screen real estate.
But for any poor fool (like myself) that doesn't know about this feature and who accidentally ends up going there.
And who then decides to try to fix the situation by killing explorer (which then sometimes does not start up again) the outcome will be a total UI meltdown even though the underlying OS is still fine.
And to add insult to injury there is a last cute little kicker - if you reboot Windows with Task Manager in Tiny Footprint Mode (hoping to restore it) it will conveniently stay in Tiny Footprint mode. Nice!

Some music worth checking out.

The guy who introduced me to this described it as Norah Jones on acid - apt.
He also opined that not listening to Frank Black beyond the Pixies constitutes several mortal sins.
It is gorgeous and while I'm not into counting sins I think that Norah Jones-Hoffman would agree.



This has to be one of the most beautiful songs I've heard all year - and one of the saddest things I've seen on TV in just about as long.
Jose Gonzalez is a Swedish solo guitarist (12 string acoustic) and vocalist of Argentinian descent.
As one does when promoting a music career he agreed to play on Top of the Pops (directly after some noisy pop nobody). He was all but ignored by the clueless audience pining for Pete Doherty.
The presenters, equally clueless, nodded solemnly when the song ended. fuck em'.



Crap name but All Sparks (and accompanying video) is a killer.
I totally get the criticism about channeling Ian Curtis though.




And something that I've not heard but am told is the shit is The Arcade Fire which has had the critics salivating. I've never seen Pitchforkmedia give a 9+ rating (except for Kanye West's Late Registration).

[1] No the image here isn't the cover of Honeycomb - but it looks much nicer and has Francis B. looking particularly ruff.

Now's the time to apply for your Brannas Inspekteur license[1]!




[1] I suspect that if you send this form to the PO Box given at the end of the form, you may very well actually get one of these.

hehe - Brazilians are funny. They have an unfailing belief in their ability to make anything work - _anything_
They[1] claim to have invented volleyball, petrol-from-coal (uhm, Sasol?) and... bananas.

check this courtesy of skyline-technologies.com

A lesson for those who choose to see good engineering as an optional extra

Petrobras built the P36 Production Rig (Biggest in the world) as cheaply as they could by neglecting traditional engineering methods & standards.

The attached photographs, taken a few weeks ago, show the result !
The wisdom of buzzword engineering takes a tragic turn for the worse
-literally.

A press release from Petrobras last year.Quote ...

"Petrobras has established new global benchmarks for the generation of exceptional shareholder wealth through an aggressive and innovative programme of cost cutting on its P36 production facility.
Conventional constraints have been successfully challenged and replaced with new paradigms appropriate to the globalised corporate market place.

Through an integrated network of facilitated workshops, the project has successfully rejected the established constricting and negative influences of prescriptive engineering, onerous quality requirements, and outdated concepts of inspection and client control.

Elimination of these unnecessary straitjackets has empowered the project's suppliers and contractors to propose highly economical solutions, with the win-win bonus of enhanced profitability margins for themselves.

The P36 platform shows the shape of things to come in the unregulated Global market economy of the 21st Century."

End quote

Brazil also claim(officially, we read it in an in-flight magazine) to have the mot land dedicated to organic farming in the world - because the have re-classified the entire Amazon forest as land used for organic farming.
I love Brazil! Optimism is good.


[1] When I say they here I mean Anita's one host dad from Londrina.

I've been reading Digg for a few weeks now and it has steadily been working its way up through my aggregator page (it's up there with my gmail inbox and Techdirt).
Digg is tech/geeky but seems more balanced than slashdot and a little more serious than reddit.

This morning it has a link to some amazing photography from http://www.missouriskies.org/


But let's not get carried away, Digg has already made enemies (as, ironically enough, reddit reports).



Also, Tool are releasing their long-awaited follow-up to Lateralus on the 2nd of May and has already leaked to the p2p worlds.


I'm not sure if I really care. I was really blown away by Salival and it did change my mind about metal(and rock in general). If not for Tool I would never have taken AC/DC seriously and life not having heard Bad Boy Boogie just wouldn't be the same[1].
But somehow - it's - just - not - where - I'm - at right now[2].

[1] I've had a vague notion to track how one piece of music leads me onto another, like breadcrumbs. Lateralus to Bad Boy Boogie would look something like this:

Tool (Lateralus)
|-> Tool (Salival)
 |-> System of a Down (Toxicity)
   |-> The Narrow (Travellers)
     |-> AC/DC (Stiff Upper Lip)
       |-> AC/DC (Let There Be Rock)

[2] Where I _am_ at is I'd Like That by XTC

Robbie Williams on Thursday nite at the Greenpoint Stadium (friend of a friend selling one ticket).
Very good show, very professional.
The sound was good, the band pumping, the entertainer suitably entertaining with plenty of laddish scruffiness and inter-song banter[1].
But somehow I didn't connect emotionally with either the music or the singer.
The problem is that, as the lyrics to Come Undone make clear, he's 'so self-aware'.
Yes, sure self-awareness[2], self reference, post modernism 101, blah blah.
But isn't that the purity we look for in music - for it to have come from somewhere unexpected?
And when they proceeded to slaughter There She Goes[3] I couldn't help feeling that while Lee Mavers certainly was aware of what he was doing[4]; when he first banged out those chords and the bizarre falsetto that it came from somewhere beyond what he could have intended.

With RW everything, every little jig and mug and bounce, is intentional.
Still, he deserves the money.



What I did connect with emotionally was the Two Oceans Half Marathon (or as someone pointed out - the No Oceans).
Whoo-he! fantastic race. fantastic course. ~10 000 people proceeding up along main road Wynberg as the last streetlights go out. I can't wait for next year.

My time wasn't great - 1:35:something - I was hoping for 1:32:something.
I was too conservative on the first 12kms.
But I'm now sure that I can get under 90 minutes and am going to try to do one more race before deepest winter to get there.



[1] I was impressed by his use of profanity, especially the c-word. That certainly didn't make it onto the Knebworth DVD.
[2] Something that I'm still trying to shake is how self-aware I feel about these posts. It sucks - I'm aware that I'm aware and that I'm trying to not be aware of it and how much it worries me. whatever.
[3] One of two covers in the evening - the other being an excellent re-animation of Back For Good
[4] Authentic 60's dust on authentic 60's mixing desks? come on.

So I've managed to score a ticket(at the original price) to Robbie Williams - it's a long story and though I know that there are going to be bits that will suck (Ah'm lovin' angels instead - yuck) I just want to hear what it sounds like when 45000 people scream at someone else.
Robbiiiiieeee, Robbiiieeeee!

Fuck yeah.

I've been following with some interest the development of Darknet technologies over the last year or so.
It's good to know that geeks are already thinking of ways of building free and secure networks on top of the internet.

At some point I'd like to set up a WASTE network just to know that I (and a few
accomplices) own a little piece of the on-line everything where we can do as we please.

I suppose it's is also strongly tied to The Crying of Lot 49 - which is still one of my favourite books of all time[1].

Also, autumn has now truly arrived in Cape Town, the leaves are turning and many days are wafted along by a warm, mild breeze. And naturally (unstoppably) it is getting darker earlier - we're headed for June 22.


[1] The Crying of Lot 49 is in many ways a futurist's prophecy and kicks ass.
It deals in part with an underground network of geeks and revolutionaries who actively work to build an independent infrastructure on top of (underneath?) the state/corporate-controlled.
Written in 1965 it also describes two unheard of concepts that have in recent years (late-70's/80's/90's) become a reality.

:: Electronic Music ::
Much of the book's underground action takes place in a bar named The Scope (oscilloscope) which enforces a strict policy on only playing electronic music - music made entirely by circuitry rather than analogue instruments[2].

:: The W.A.S.T.E. Underground mail system ::
Central to the book is a secret mail system that has developed as a remnant from a pony express-type outfit of the 18th century.
We're only now starting to see this in the form of darknets.
Waste (above) is named for it[4].


[2] Quoted from the book:

A sudden chorus of whoops and yibbles burst from a kind of juke box at the far end of the room. Everybody quit talking. The bartender tiptoed back, with the drinks.

"What's happening?" Oedipa whispered.

"That's by Stockhausen," the hip graybeard informed her, "the early crowd tends to dig your Radio Cologne sound. Later on we really swing. We're the only bar in the area, you know, has a strictly electronic music policy. Come on around Saturdays, starting midnight we have your Sinewave Session, that's a live get-together, fellas come in just to jam from all over the state, San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Diego"

"Live?" Metzger said, "electronic music, live?"

"They put it on the tape, here, live, fella. We got a whole back room full of your audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact mikes, everything man. That's for if you didn't bring your ax, see, but you got the feeling and you want to swing with the rest of the cats, there's always something available."



[3] From wikipedia:

After being defeated by Thurn und Taxis in the 1700s, the Tristero organization goes underground and continues to exist, with its mailboxes in the least suspected places, often appearing under their slogan W.A.S.T.E., an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire, and also a smart way of hiding their post-boxes disguised as regular waste-bins.

[4] Another triviality to buzz your mind is that Radiohead named their fan-club W.A.S.T.E.
Check out the booklet of any Radiohead CD.

I've now clearly hit the uninformed optimism phase of my stay at S1.

In today's training (reely aimed at operators and therefore quite, uhm, simple[1]) we looked at Postilion Postcard which is a very cool thing.
The technology is solid and fast - not like J2EE kinda-fast, really fast.

Postcard runs in a Java VM together with the Postilion core (named Transaction Manager) and together they consume aruond 11MB of memory and will (on a standard desktop PC) process in the region of 60 transactions a second[2].

Compare this to the SAP J2EE app. server which wants around 2GB of memory to slosh around in. Of course the workload is different, but still...

[1] it includes a section on checking free disk space :P
[2] amazing how much you gain by working with pure binary protocols and highly optimised algorithms rather than something nasty like XML[3]
[3] which, I must admit, I still think is the best tool for what it's meant to do

So here's my new office, I share with a guy named Otto (not in picture), the workstation is a proper PC (no Celeron, enough RAM) and there's a network access point for my notebook.
The plant is a little on the weedy side (needs some attention) and the whiteboard looks like it hasn't been cleaned in years.
In short a typical IT office - I could be comfortable here.

Also, I believe it or not, wonder of wonders - I have my own phone again! No more sharing with four other people[1]. frickin' hell.


[1] And while we're at it, you'll notice that the office has (hot damn!) a window! Amazing what you learn to live without.

Before seeing this film I was somewhat conflicted about it - unsure of which way it would go. Mainly because it pushes the notion of 'asking questions about contemporary society'.
After seeing it I'm not conflicted anymore.

   What
       utter
           nonsense^H^H^H^H^H^H crap.

I was going to write a long rant about why V for Neo-in-a-fancy-dress-mask is just wrong on so many levels, but have actually decided that it's not even worth it.
I'm glad it's crap, I'm glad it is an insult to the complexities of contemporary reality.
It sucks and deserves to.

The only person who I feel for in this whole business is Alan Moore.
Especially because the end credits include:

       Based on the Graphic Novel
           drawn by David Lloyd