Month: June 2003

And this will be my last post here for a couple of days. I’m off to spend some time getting acquainted with the mud.

Excellent.

I don’t have much to say today, but I couldn’t resist blogging these two:

The draft George Bush 2004 election campaign website that was accidentally published early makes for interesting viewing. I also found Mindy’s editorial on women rather amusing. As Slate says, it “reads like radical feminist poetry”. They’ve obviously never heard of loreum ipsum.

On the other hand, New Zealand’s TV3 gets to the point by accidentally using the following caption during a news bulletin:

George W. Bush
Professional Fascist

Apparently they will be “thoroughly investigating the mislabelled graphic”.

I’m very disappointed to discover that the rumour that has been doing the rounds that Powergen picked a dodgy URL for their Italian division, www.powergenitalia.com, is a hoax (although I’m pleased to see that “who represents?”, “a web site for looking up information about which agents, managers, and publicists represent various actors”, does indeed use the URL whorepresents.com).

Ah. It’s the little things that keep me amused…

I almost forgot. Did I mention the rugby?

Why am I only surrounded by aussies when we lose to them…?

UPDATE: Oh, and the tennis. Not been a good week for the aussies, really, has it? Where’s Andrew when you need him…

Over the last few days, in the run up to Glasto, my life seems to have turned into one of those logic puzzles where you are trying to get a number of items over a river in a small boat, but you have to keep crossing the river with various combinations of the items because you can’t take them all at once or leave certain combinations alone together. If I remember rightly, it’s usually a fox, a chicken and some grain, and you can’t leave the fox with the chicken, or the chicken with the grain, as one item ends up getting eaten in each case. Of course, none of this explains why you don’t just buy a bigger boat. Presumably you have to cross this river on a regular basis, I mean what sort of farmer are you?

Anyway, instead of a bizarre cargo of singular animals (again, what kind of farmer is this?), the logic problem that is my life involves a selection of tents and changes of clothes located either at my house or Sal’s house, which I have to get to my office (ludicrously located on the opposite side of London) via the northern line rush hour commute, during which I can only transport a limited number of items in case I get eaten by some banker with an attitude problem.

Today I brought in a change of clothes so that I can leave for Bristol straight from work on Wednesday evening, without having to take my suit to the festival. Tomorrow I’m going to be bringing to work the 2 tents that I stupidly offered to put up when I get there on behalf of the Thursday night late arrivals (the fools who decided to drive to the festival and can’t get any more time off work).

On Wednesday I’ll just have a rucksack (and a third tent) with me, but then in the evening I’ll have to get it all to Paddington [shudders].

Still, it’ll be worth it. I can’t wait…

I’ve been rather busy this week, and haven’t found time to write much here. So here are some random thoughts.

– We’re still the web’s number 1 search result for “brain surgeon’s salary” (although, somewhat disappointingly, we’ve dropped down to third in the results for “creative writing magazine“)

– I still can’t pass a bookshop without buying something. Oops, and something else.

– Tim Yeo is still an idiot (you’ll probably be wanting to read this for some background).

– Apparently we can’t use “google” as a verb anymore. I look forward to my cease and desist letter arriving in the post.

– According to this article: “a third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.” Pretty scary stuff, but I prefer these statistics. I think my favourite is the one that says:

“12% of those polled believe the success of actor David Hasselhoff, star of Baywatch, is due at least in part, to ‘dealings with the devil’.”

– Oh, and some crazy US senator made a statement this week to the effect that copyright holders should have the right to automatically destroy the computers of people downloading pirate software or music. Turns out his website was using some unlicensed code for a JavaScript menu system. Hmm. love the smell of hypocrisy in the afternoon.

Should be another cracking weekend. Apart from the absolutely gorgeous weather (at least today, although Chris Smith promised us it would last the weekend), there’s lots going on:

There’s Claire’s birthday drinks tonight, for a start, which should be fun. Also, my big sister’s up for the weekend, and along with Sally we’re off to see Sexual Perversity In Chicago on Saturday night, with Minnie Driver, Matthew Perry and, best of all, the voice of Apu, Moe, Dr Nick, Chief Wiggum and Comic Book Guy, Hank Azaria (“there’s no emoticon for what I’m feeling…!”)

Oh and all weekend they are showing open air films on Clapham Common, sadly I’ll miss the first two, but apparently it’s Die Another Day on Sunday night (beers and a barbie on the Common, anyone?) Conveniently, we won’t have far to go home when it’s finished. Which is lucky, as, according to today’s Metro, in a brilliant piece of joined-up thinking, Sunday’s film (the climax of the “Totally London” month promoting tourism and tourist attractions in London) will finish after the last tube has left each of the three Clapham tube stations. (They’re only expecting 15,000 people, so that’s perfectly sensible, of course).

And one more thing: congratulations are in order for Rhys, who found out he has passed his exams yesterday (I was informed by generic mass text message) and is now a proper Doctor. Excellent.

My copy of Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief finally arrived the other day. It’s the very funky limited edition fold-out roadmap version, and although I was impressed by the packaging (I’m a sucker for a marketing gimmick, no matter how impractical it might be – and this one is not going to sit well in my CD rack), I was rather disappointed to read the message on the back: “This disc contains Copy Control technology”.

Now, I have a lot of CDs, and it is not always possible to be in the same place as my collection. To rectify this situation, a year or so ago, I bought myself an MP3 player with room for just under 5,000 songs. This meant I could copy the bulk of my collection onto the MP3 player and take it with me wherever I go. I routinely copy new CDs onto it as I buy them. Incidentally, this isn’t actually a breach of copyright, as the rules of “fair use” entitle you to make copies of music you have purchased for your own personal use, in the same way that you can legitemately copy CDs onto cassette to listen to in the car.

But I digress.

This is the second CD I have bought recently that has claimed to be copy protected. The sleeve to Blur’s Think Tank also claimed that the CD contained copy protection, but there was no evidence of it on the disc I had, and I have happily been listening to it on my MP3 player ever since. The Radiohead CD looked a bit more serious, however, as there is a big “Copy Controlled” logo on the back and on the CD itself, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway and see what happens…

I don’t agree with this kind of stuff, partly because the record company are trying to dictate to their customers what they should do with the products they have purchased, and partly because, in this case it rather seems like they are Closing the Door After The Horse Has Bolted (hmm, sounds rather like the title of a Radiohead track…), given that this album was widely bootlegged before it even reached the shelves.

Mainly, however, my problem with Copy Control or whatever is that it usually doesn’t work, or makes the CDs unplayable on certain CD players and PCs. The early attempts that the record companies made could be defeated with a careful stroke of felt-tip pen, or a bit of tape, and here, for your benefit, is my personal guide to defeating the copy protection on Hail To The Thief:

1) Insert the CD into the CD-ROM drive.
2) A window pops up that says: “Some files need to be installed before you can listen to this CD. Do you want to install the files?”.
3) This is the tricky bit: Instead of clicking “OK”, click “Cancel”.
3) You can now listen to, and/or copy the CD as normal.

I present to you my social life, reviewed:

The Wannadies, The Underworld, Camden, Thursday 5th June

Stop me if I’ve mentioned this before, but I love The Wannadies – they’re just so happy for a start. Seeing them live is like watching summer standing on stage for an hour playing chirpy three-minute power guitar pop. I’d seen them before, twice, but both those times they were promoting what I consider to be their worst album (their final offering for BMG, Yeah). This time, however, the majority of the set came from their new (in this country at least) album, Before & After. I’ve been listening to this for a couple of weeks now and it is just fantastic. They also played some of my favourite stuff from 1996’s unfairly underrated Bagsy Me.

Suport was from a band called Siamese. Good, in an instantly-forgot-what-they-sounded-like-as-soon-as-they-stopped-playing kind of way. The lead singer looks a bit like an English Bjork, the guitarist looks like one of the guys out of Soulwax, and the other guitarist looked like Julian Cassablancas’ less successful younger brother.

The Underworld’s a great venue as well, principally due to its (lack of) size. Unbearably hot though; I was sweating like a crazy man after only two songs.

(An Evening With) The Counting Crows, Royal Albert Hall, Friday 6th June

Seeing a gig at the RAH is an altogether different experience. I’d never been in there before, and have to say that it is a fantastic building. Shame you can’t take your drinks in with you (although slightly more understandable, given the surroundings, than the implementation of that same rule at the oversized shed that is the Wembley Arena), as I was gagging for a beer from about halfway through the acoustic set. I wasn’t the only one, judging by the unholy scrum at the bar during the interval (note to organisers: perhaps it might be an idea to employ more than 2 bar staff during the 30 minute interval when 500 or so people from the gen. admission part of the venue are going to descend on the bar). And the Counting Crows were alright, in a vaguely MOR LA country rock kind of way. They even covered Madonna’s Borderline (straight out of the Travis/Baby One More Time book of rock/pop crossovers). They did two sets – one acoustic and one electric. Things started to lag a bit during the acoustic one (I mean you just can’t look cool playing an accordian, no matter how many times you climb on the monitor and gurn like the rock-god guitar soloist you clearly wish you were). Everything got a bit more lively after the break though, and 3 hours worth of music has to be good value for money.

The Earth From The Air (outside the Natural History Museum)

Wandered back to South Kensington on Saturday afternoon to see the fascinating exhibition of aerial photography outside the Natural History Museum: “The Earth From The Air“. Nothing I can say here can really do it justice. If you’re in London anytime soon, go and see for yourself.

The Road To Perdition

Polished off the weekend by finally getting round to watching Sam Mendes’ The Road To Perdition. I didn’t really enjoy it that much (it’s certainly not a patch on American Beauty) and I was also slightly disappointed to discover that the title was from the Good Will Hunting school of works-on-two-levels literalism (Perdition is the name of the place they are driving to).

As I’ve explained before, I have my reasons for posting stuff on here. Mostly, I treat it as a brief break from work (I’m sure there’s some kind of inverse correlation between the quality of my posts and how hard I’m working/how busy I am), an opportunity to try (and mostly fail, I suppose) to be funny, and an excuse to write something more interesting than technical documentation. Yes, believe it or not, that is possible. When you’ve spent the last 4 hours trawling through 3 different sets of conflicting review comments on a document you wrote 2 weeks ago and can’t really remember, trying to work out what to change and what to ignore, anything is more interesting. The writing might not be top notch, but it’s healthier than going out for a ciggie.

Anyway, I don’t really think about the fact that there’s anyone out there reading this. I mean, I know there is a select group of regular readers – you know who you are – but I don’t really think about you (believe it or not, that’s a plural “you” as well, although it’s still probably under double figures) when deciding what to write. It’s more a case of, if you like it/find it interesting/want to come back and keep reading, then great. If you don’t, I don’t care. Go away and read rob’s weblog instead.

Where was I? Oh yes, getting to the point. Today I had two separate sets of comments on this post. Pete, quite rightly, points out that Ticketmaster are providing a good service and that I shouldn’t complain. He’s probably right – I wasn’t really moaning though, I just thought it was amusing that they were prepared to phone everyone up, after they had already been in touch by other means. I also wanted to point out that it’s a 5,000 capacity venue. They’re only contacting the person who bought the tickets, but it’s still a couple of thousand phone calls.

On the other hand, Rob wrote to comment on the band I’m seeing. Yes, ok, I’m seeing the counting crows, I admit it. I also admit that I deliberately didn’t mention the band earlier in a vain bid to maintain some kind of credibility (did I say I didn’t think about anyone who might be reading this? oh, yeah, well I reserve the right to be inconsistent and hypocritical as well then…)

Yeah, ok, so maybe they aren’t the coolest band in the world, but having dragged Sally to enough gigs by bands I wanted to see, I think it’s only fair to go to one she wants to see (well two if you count Something For Kate. Oops. There’s that inconsistency again). To make up for it, I’m dragging her to see The Wannadies tomorrow night, and I have no qualms whatsoever about admitting to that (even if I’m the only person in the UK who still likes them). Their new-ish album, Before & After is excellent.