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Monday, May 31, 2010

How they became Everything but the Girl

From the Wikipedia page:

They formed a duo and adopted their name 'Everything but the Girl' from the slogan of well-known Hull shop, Turners' Furniture, on Beverly Road. The store had originally built a window sign that read, "for your bedroom needs, we sell everything but the girl," the last part of which was later added to the shop's main signage.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

cell phone recordings of concerts posted to youtube

Why do you bother? You stood 500 feet from the stage and didn't bring a microphone so the quality of the audio and video is horrible. Eventually your shitty footage leaks into sites like blip.fm, further polluting the www.

Please stop posting that crap. Yes, it proves you were at the show and have a really sexy phone but the content you uploaded is absolutely unwatchable.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

dumb default behaviour

The so-called convenience of being able to right click on a file and choose, "write to disk" has at least one huge failing: iso image files. They end up being written as a discrete file onto the CDR or DVD. This result is useless, and not what most users would be hoping for.

Why the hell would anyone want a DVD with a Spaceballs.iso file on it? Their DVD player won't be able to play it. The entire reason for the ISO9660 file system is to facilitate writing a file system to a removable disk. When you are done writing an ISO9660 image to a disk, you're supposed to be able to mount the thing, access the files it contains or even boot to it. Most users would never think to mount an ISO9660 file as a file. Windows XP can't mount an iso image without the help of a third party utility.

I ask you, why can't the OS be smart enough to see that it's being asked to burn an ISO image and then intelligently NOT stuff it into another ISO image for writing? Seems pretty obvious to me.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx fail

I have given the Lynx release a chance to prove itself on my old R40 Thinkpad and I have to say it has failed. It's slower than the previous Ubuntu. The wireless applet is more clumsy. Pulseaudio is even more deeply integrated and processor intensive.
This P4 2.2 GHz machine idles with a system load just south of 1. It feels less responsive than it used to. Perhaps I'll try a clean reinstall to a fresh ext4 file system. Perhaps I'll use a netbook distro. This was an "in situ" upgrade to Lynx. Too bad IDE SSDs are so rare and expensive.

Update: 20100528. I tried doing a clean install of Lynx. The super-fancy installer was unable to run! I checked the md5sum on the installer's iso image and it was correct. The Thinkpad now runs Fedora 13, who's installer ran flawlessly from the same cdrw media. (It wasn't a bad cdrw that cause the Lynx fail.)

Get your shit together, Ubuntu. You used to produce a good distribution.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Noisy Victorians

I rent a space in a big Victorian house in a beautiful neighborhood where homes routinely sell for upwards of 800K and I can't wait to move away. The level of noise here is amazing. It starts in the morning well before 8:00 AM. Just down the street, a construction crew has been tearing down a brick and concrete elementary school which was built in 1971. They have been breaking up the concrete with a massive, crane-mounted jack hammer for weeks and they insist upon starting at quarter to eight in the AM. I guess I'm glad I can't feel the vibrations.

This is on top of the constant assault of road repair, neighbors replacing roofs, adding decks and porches. The landscaper crews also like to arrive early and they bring riding mowers the size of small cars. Don't forget the leaf blowers! It's like the Marines taking a beach head.

A few weeks ago some fucktard neighbor spent the better part of two days tilling an entire back yard (several thousand sq. feet) with one of those tiny Mantis tillers. I'm a fan of Mantis tillers in general mainly because most suburban gardeners will never need anything more powerful and the Mantis doesn't dig too deep. Then again, most gardeners who buy a Mantis use it a few times and then it rusts for 10 years in the cellar. The Mantis does sound like a small chainsaw though so running one all day Saturday and Sunday is more than any neighbor would want to hear.

Today the same neighbor has a landscaper working who has some kind of disorder. He may be deaf or have Tourette's syndrome but he's grunting and moaning like an animal caught in a leg trap.Yikes.

I wish I could turn my ears off and on at will. I'd save money on silicon ear plugs which either fall out or cause pressure, forcing earwax to be pushed up into the ear canal. Ouch.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Kurt Cobain's Top Fifty

38. Half Japanese - We Are They Who Ache With Amorous Love
Kurt saids: "I like to listen to Jad Fair and Half Japanese with headphones on, walking around shopping malls - in the heart of the American culture. I just think that, if people could hear this music right now, they'd melt, they wouldn't know what to do, they'd start bouncing off the walls and hyperventilating. So I turn up the music really loud and pretend it's blasting through the speakers in the mall."

Monday, May 17, 2010

Acts 9:5

And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest:
it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Film: Harry Brown

Michael Caine may not be at the top of his game anymore but he didn't need to be for this one.

This film is an updated Death Wish filmed in the same town Caine grew up in. The film has a severe case of the ultraviolets. There's plenty of gore and gun play.

There's a riot in the film and all I could think was, why aren't the cops shooting rubber bullets?
I guess that would lead to further escalation but what the hell. The gangstas are setting fire to the housing project and throwing Molotov cocktails. Too late to read them the Riot Act; fix bayonets and charge!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289406/

Friday, May 14, 2010

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Suburbia, 1983

Watching Suburbia from 1983. I guess this is the Suburbia the Pet Shop Boys were talking about. Feral dogs are a theme in the movie. The movie is about a bunch of punkers who live in an abandoned neighborhood in CA. Makes me think of those empty developments in Florida that are right now crumbling and being enveloped in vegetation.

Legion movie

I thought Legion would be as good as thrillers like Constantine. For some reason the trailers I saw made it seem cool but except for a few scenes, this movie sucked. I'd give it three point two dongs.

Net neutrality astroturfers


You would expect the corporate weasels working against net neutrality to look like these guys.

The above is a slide from a Power Point presentation that leaked out.
thinkprogress.org gets credit for calling our attention to the doc.


Sunday, May 9, 2010

Repo Man Still Owns

"See them? Look at 'em. Ordinary Fuckin' people, I hate 'em."

-- Bud, Repo Man 

Great Repo Man fansite 

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Monday, May 3, 2010

Summer here.

Spring started in early March this year. March in Boston used to be one solid, month-long block of winter. Typically we'd get lots of snow and sleet.
For March 2010 we had endless rainstorms with high winds. It was the warmest March on record. April was also pretty mild. So far May has been summer weather. It was in the eighties yesterday and the sun was strong. Today it's overcast and with temps in the mid seventies and 81% humidity. It rained a little last night.
None of this is truly blogworthy but what the heck.