previously known as [cold][wet][durham], [dirty][grimy][london],[busy][shiny][toon],[frantic][crowded][south]
There seems to me to be something very fucked up about using private security firms once you invade another country. Mercinaries have always existed, so lets call them what they are. Somehow it is even worse when they are being offered immunity when they screw up, something that might well not be offered to a serving soldier. If your army can’t do everything you need once you invade, you shouldn’t be there, in my opinion.
You can’t help reading about somebody who builds their own helicopter from scrap, and be impressed. Most people in this country can’t explain how a car works, and wouldn’t even have a clue where to start.
I did have a post about how I didn’t hate Windows media Player quite as much as I did last week having used it for a little while and found some useful things, however….
As I was looking through some Unknown Artist files, I noticed some funny items in the Comments section of the mp3 tags. They look like hexadecimal numbers, here is one as an example: 00001A39 00001801 00007A8B 00008713 00030D57 00030D57 00008000 00008000 00009C85 0001ADC7
At first I wondered if these were something added for tracking mp3s through p2p networks, which would make sense. A company could add comments, and then share them, and then track their dissemination. I have some files which I’ve downloaded, so that was possible, but i checked a little further.
These numbers appear in the comments to each and every one of my mp3s! Include those I’ve ripped from CDs I own! Now I’m pretty sure cDex hasn’t added them (I’ll rip something this afternoon and see), and I have a few mp3s on my laptop that WMP has seen nothing of, so I imported one and…. the magic comment numbers appeared!
I suspect they might be a way for the internal WMP library tracks files, but surely they could be used for far more things, many of which are EVIL EVIL EVIL!
Every so often I will try to send an email from gmail and I get a pop up that says something like “It appears that you wanted to attach a mail to this mail” and gives me the OK/Cancel options.
I put this down to me accidentally clicking on attach but not specifying a file, but then this morning my paranoid mind got the better of me - what if somebody had really cunningly written something that ‘jacked Firefox and some how attached itself to you web based emails as an attachment? Could such a thing be possible - maybe, just maybe. , especially with tools such as GreaseMonkey around.
So I went of searching and it turns out to befar less exciting, it’s just Better Mail, a gmail plugin using GreaseMonkey which introduces some really nice functionality, one but of which is called “Attachment reminder”. It scans your email for words like “attach” and if they are there, reminds you to attach the file. Handy, but a little irritating if you don’t know about it!
Being away from my beloved ibook and synology cube for a few weeks, I have imported my entire music collecdtion into windows media player on a portal harddrive. I’d like a nice way to visualise the information about how many tracks by each artist I have.
WMP has one interesting feature (and many many wank ones), but listing songs by artist means that you get a nice easy to read list which says how many songs you have by a given artist. This throws up some interesting thigns about both my music collection and my mp3 tags.
Firstly - I have a shed load of tagging to do. 2166 songs by “unknown”
Secondly - mp3 tagging needs to find a new mechanism. ID3 tags don’t give you the flexibility needed, because I have 593 songs with Various as the artist. If you could “tag” mp3s with multiple artists, you could create album “clouds” and show collaborations in neater ways than “various” or the even worse “him, and such and such, and her” artist, which is normally followed by “Him and her” etc etc.
270 songs are labelled as “John Peel” whom has never recorded a song in his life as far as I know. ONly a certain number of these can be recordings of his radio program.
I have 168 tracks by Moby, whom I love dearly. I have 168 tracks by The Fall, who I occationally lisen to. This would seem unusually high.
I have 136 Eminem tracks. This is either a)wrong (please god) or b)because I nabbed someboddies entire music collection years ago when I had a harddrive crash and I’ve not edited them out (NB: WMP hangs when you try to delete tracks in this view, which is very annoying).
I have 114 A Guy Called Gerald tracks, which must e virtually his entire output thats avalable on CD. I own 28 Gun Bad Boy (a real copy! real!)
I have 101 songs by both Radiohead and Johny Cash. I don’t thing wither of them would mind the company they are keeping.
I have as many Cat Power tracks as Rolling Stones. I can’t explain this at all. I’ve loved the stones all of my life, and I only heard of Cat Power 2 years ago (maximum)
I have more Linkin Park songs that Massive Attack. This is wrong on many levels, though Metiora is still actually pretty good.
I have 80 tracks by blues legend John Mayall. I also have 80 audio tracks by insparational speaker Tony Robbins. I don’t think Mr Mayall would approve.
I have 72 tracks by Coldplay and only 68 by the Pixies.
I have one more track (64) by DJ Yoda who was very dissapointing live, than I do by Chris Murray, whom I would kill to see live.
I have only 56 Portishead tracks. I would have trought I had more, but aparently not.
I have 51 tracks who claim to be recorded by “Original Soundtrack”. More tagging required.
I have 44 tracks by The Decemberists, Green Day and Xen Cuts (poor tagging again!). I have 45 podcasts from radio4. I suspect The Decemberists would really like Radio4.
I have 40 tracks by Method Man. These can all be deleted.
I have 39 tracks by Bjork and Sufjan Stevens, they make for good company in my book, and a collaboration album would be great.
I have as many 10cc tracks, whom I have grown up listening to for many years, as I do tracks by The Bottle Rockets, whom I have only ever seen once, and never run across again.
32 tracks, I wonder what ever happened to My Virtiol, India Arie and who are Sevendust???
I have only 22 tracks by DJ Format and BT, both of whom I thing are geniuses (NB:should the word Genii exist. I believe so)
I have as many tracks by JOhn Egdell as I do The Fugees, Gorse, Ian Dury, Tracy Chapman and Teenage Fanclub. odd.
14 and 12 tracks seem to be the biggest groups. This would seem odd as both a little too large for a single album, and not quite enough for 2.
Do these announcments about cuts mean that the BBC is killing it’s Purple Cow? Surely things like backstage and all of the new programming are what make the BBC watchable unlike the lowest common denominator trash that ITV spout and the vile and vapid dross that channels like ABC spew forth with?
yes, it would appear that lighting a pipe and smoking it on set on Top Gear causes the health and safety Nazis to get their knickers in a twist again.
“Ash’s spokeswoman said smoking was “not appropriate for the BBC”.
“There are no exceptions,” she said, adding: “You cannot smoke in a public place. This isn’t covered by artistic integrity.” ”
What about a character in a film who smokes, and it is an integral part of their character as depicted in a book? Should the chararacter in the book not smoke. Maybe we should just pretend smoking does not exist and it’s just a myth, otherwise “the kids” will find out about it, and die.
Personally, I don’t smoke, but silly shit like this makes me want to start.
Flash Gordon (sic) fans dispair - it is no longer Gordon V’s Ming. Missed headlines there.
I received a comment on a post nearly four years old, and it stirred up such strong feelings its increadible. At the time I wrote it I could have been sick I was so upset, my heart torn out, and now I read it and realise I’ve not made some the mistakes again, so maybe it was a good thing to write it down at the time.
Aways visionaries in music (Kid A - idiocy that sounds perfect), Radiohead have released (or rahter are releasing - it’s on pre-order at the moment) their whole next album and you can pay what you like for the download. Lots of people have lots to say, and I find the idea that they are behind the times for this, maybe in the concept of a downloadable album, but not in the mpayment method surely?
Good luck to them, I paid £4, and it came to £4.45 once you included the card charge fee.
It would appear the music industry is just not thinking, listening or doing anything more than bitching a sueing to try and maintain a business model thats just got working anymore. They’re even contradicting themselves now, for example check out these gems, only lines apart.
“when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed”, a far point , if you want music you should be paying for it in some form, and for that payment you should recieve something that you can use in multiple places in my book (aka. DRM free, or some form of open DRM).
“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,” she said.”
NO NO NO - he bought that CD. He paid for it. You were not harmed in this process. If he rips it, and then does not distrobute it out to other people but just uses it for personal use in multiple places, you are not being harmed by this action!
Using this crazy logic, should I be expected to buy a different copy of each thing for the places I want to use it? I like music in my car, but it has a minidisc player (yes yes - I know, but I bought a car, not a stereo). Should I ignore the recordability of minidiscs and re-buy Nick Drakes back catalogue on mni-disc? Is it actually sold?
Should I re-buy all my Rolling Stones CDs on tape so I can play them in the kitchen when Im cooking? No, thats just plain stupid, much like this idiotic stance Sony BMG are taking.
Play fair, sell it for a fair price, in a fair format, so people will actually buy it and listen to it. Yes, people will probably distrobute it and other people might get it for free, but if you don’t stard doing this, you’re locked into an ever decreasing circle of lower sales, higher prices, more piracy, lower sales, continue until existing music industry is gone.
Personally, I like CDbaby’s mp3 downloads. A bit cheaper than the cd cost, open format, 90%+ of the money going to the artist, massive choice.
Why would I pay £15 for a cd only to be told I can only play it on my shelf bound stereo at home when I spend half my life onthe road. Idiots.
Congratulations to my wife (sic) for being voted “Cameraphone Photographer of the Year“
As cool as the items on Die Electric as I can’t help thinking that a)super ugly side scrolling site and b) surely making the prongs out of plastic would be a good idea as metal is far from dielectric.
Between my Outlook install for work, and my gmail account which aggregates the mail from about 4 or 5 pop3 addresses, I was drowning in a sea of email. I got about a thousand messages a day, of which a good 800 were spam, and of the remaining 200 I probably only had to deal with about 20 of them right now, instantly, when they arrived. Ignoring my gmail situation (which I dealt with separately), I have finally reached a state of inbox zen, and I’m working far more efficiently for it. There are some useful tips in several articles, but here is my journey.
When you’re working in a Microsoft environment, each application tends to demand to have your attention every time something happens. Each time an email arrives a little box slides into view in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, with a helpful first line of the email and the senders name. You can’t help clicking on it, it’s just instinct. I’ve tried to ignore them and if I’m really really busy it works, but most of the time I’ll stop what I’m doing and flick back to Outlook and see. AIM is the same - each time a contact logged in, up comes the status box and a little tinny sound is played to make sure I know something has happened. AIM aside (because I turned off all of the attention seeking little blighters), these constant interruptions reduce your productivity both explicitly (by dragging you away to another application) and implicitly (by breaking your concentration). After seeing the improvements in moving to word processor (one that is not a DTP package in all but name), I was determined to do something about the curse of email.
First think is first - sort out my 1500+ message inbox. In Outlook I created a set of folders. One for the current project. One for time and expense reports. One for training, holidays and other such company admin. One for Promo email from external companies. One for personal banter. I then groups all of my inbox by subject header (going on the idea that threads of emails are generally on one subject) and cleared down my inbox. There’s no magic bullet, you’ve just got to put your head down and plow through the backlog. It took a couple of hours whilst some scripts were running on one of the servers.
Thats the history sorted out, now to deal with the present. I went through my newly filled folders and created rules for the big bunches of mails along the lines of “If it’s from them, put it here”, “if it’s got this in the subject, put it here”. They don’t need to be fine detail, you can refine it later. I did run up against the problem whereby Exchange server limits the number of rules you can have (or our exchange servers do - possibly this is a customised rule). Now most of the mails I receive get filed automatically.
Now, instead of watching my inbox, I have Outlook defaulting to the Unread Items smart-list (I’m sure there is a M$ term for it, but the Apple smart-list is the only one that comes to mind), and have added the col um “folder” to the display, removing the size column (you’ll never sort this by size) and ordering by date received. As email arrive they are filed, and I can see they are new. Occasionally Outlook defaults back to the inbox which is a pain because you miss the new emails that has been squirreled away, but it happens less and less. Maybe it was just me in old habits clicking on inbox.
At the end of the working day I take 10 minutes to go through all the messages in my inbox that didn’t get auto-filtered, and file them into the correct category. I’d probably create a few more rules if I had the option.
The last three of things I did have made the biggest difference. First I switched off the automatic highlighting, and thus the little pop-up boxes in the bottom right of the screen have fucked off forever. Now I check back to my email when I’m finished doing something, gone are the interruptions.
I switched my email editor away from being Word (bloatware if ever there was one) and then switched by mail format from HTML to RTF. Ideally I’d go for plain-text, but as most people don’t switch the default font from system, my emails arrive virtually unreadable for more of the company. By not having Word fire up each and ever time I wrote an email, I don’t have the pauses, hangups and memory overhead that comes with Word. I also don’t get the highlighting of incorrect spelling, which I liked, so i turned on “force spell-check before sending”. It’s a small price.
Lastly I increased the amount of time between automatic updates. When Outlook hangs, even briefly, all of the other M$ Office applications hang also, and even the briefest flicker of hesitation causes me to alt-tab to see if my machine has hung. The majority of these brief hangups seemed to me to be when n outlook scurried off and checked the exchange server over our slightly dodgy network, and either had to wait to poll a response or suddenly had to drag a large attachment across. By increasing the time between send/receive sweeps to a full 5 minutes (from 30 seconds) these glitches have all but vanished. I don’t know if Outlook is doing some stuff in the background (I doubt it) or if the reduced frequency simply means reducing the frequency of glitches in proportion, but I barely notice them.
So now I have achieve inbox zen. My inbox is always zero at the end of the day. Email no longer gets under my skin and breaks my concentration. My other applications seem to run a little happier, and all it took was breaking “doing it the way it is always done”. Not everybody I work with likes the new regime, and I’ve had several phone calls along the lines of “but I emailed it to you 5 minutes ago!” and if it really is important, I can hit send and receive and in it pops. Normally it’s already there, and I have just been too busy to see it, and if it’s really really important, they’ll call me to demand an answer.
I will miss your voice on loose ends. I always enjoyed the strange mix of music, politics and comic sketches is something that only radio4 could broadcast, and you were the perfect person for it. May you rest in peace.
