Secret gig

Me and Beck went to a 'secret' Jarvis gig at Concorde II yesterday, a warmup for the tour proper which starts next week. The venue isn't really used to your actual proper band (it's Fatboy Slim's home venue) and it shows: the seven strong band are crowded on the stage, the lighting rig fails (they play the first song in darkness then put a static spot on Jarvis and up the stage lighting, the basic blue and red bulbs on the the stage rig) and the monitors weren't particularly well positioned according to JC who claimed they only worked at knee height (and did most of one song at that level to prove it). The bass was a bit jagged maybe but overall it was not too bad a sound for a venue with debatable acoustics (and maybe PA) and at least good and fucking loud (more swearing later) with the bass drum battering the stomach, bass guitar hammering my aching knees, plenty of noisy guitar. What a gig ought to be, especially the first gig of the new millenium.. ahem.

They open with 'Fat Children' from the new album which is released next Monday: superb. Wasted on this audience, I'm sorry to say, who hardly seem to move. This is the first time JC has played live in years, he's nervous and rambly between songs, but he picks up and soon the animated arm-dancing and twitching is back: he picks up a guitar for a song or two, charisma starts sparking: we're at the back, there still doesn't seem to be much dancing going on though: one factor is age, Beck won the "audience average age" game with 32, but also seemingly the Concorde have fucked up again and put a big gap between the performer and his audience. Plus the band play no Pulp and that's what the audience would love to hear.. Jarvis repeatedly apologises for the unfamiliarity of the material, at one point likening it to looking in a fridge for 45 minutes: afterwards you get the feeling that it was bright, but unappealing. At least that's the way I remember what he said.

The new material is actually very good, I will be buying the album when it comes out next week, in the meantime there's jarvspace. After a while the band started to sound a bit 'samey', perhaps they could try to introduce more dynamics into the set, but maybe that wasn't practical in the Concorde II as it's a bit primitive. Of course there are dynamics in in the songs, Mr Cocker's signature is the high quality of his songwriting, and he takes the time to explain what some of the songs refer to: 'Big Julie Rules The World' is a mashup of a book and an early-developing girl from Loughborough (home of Ladybird books, you'll be fascinated to discover). 'Disney Time' was partially inspired by Dumbo's mum.

They play the songs from the Jarvis album, a B side (Jarvis satirically mocks the term B side, prefers 'differently abled song') called One Man Show, and a song he wrote for Lee Someone called Big Stuff. 'From A to I' is superb, it's about evil being everywhere 'from Auschwitz to Ipswitch' and seeing evil when you look inside yourself.

Then they go off, come back on and do 'C*nts are Running The World' which apparently is the hidden song on the album.. fun for when the vicar comes round 30 minutes after you've been listening. Actually, it's a stormer and available from iTunes. Jarvis is conversational, affectionate, grateful: the audience is slightly perhaps withholding of their favours, unamused by the unfamiliarity, but applause is generally warm and generous. The odd chant of "Jar - Vis" goes up, someone shouts for 'Common People', ironically maybe, though introducing Candida Doyle from Pulp for one song heightened the audiences' hopes of hearing a favourite song: you never know, however unlikely you know it to be.

Our thanks to Carl for the tip-off for the tickets, nice to meet his new wife Gretchen too.

Me with hair and a dress

My sister Jane sent me this picture a while ago - it's my maternal grandmother Sarah, Auntie Belle and Uncle Dick taken in 1913 or so.

Edit: Mum sent me a picture of me in a dress! (all the babies wore them then)

Hating Jimmy Carr

We have an rule with no exceptions in our house: any TV program fronted by (or prominently featuring) Jimmy Carr is switched over immediately. Try it, you'll like it..

Having said that, the only thing that's on that I currently like is series 6 of The Sopranos: once this final series is over (next year) I've only got ER left and that's been going downhill a bit maybe, or plateaued perhaps to be polite. Everything else is dead or gone - I won't watch The Simpsons on TV unless I am absolutely guaranteed nothing past series 8 will sully my eyes. I won't watch new ones anymore at all. I wish they had sacked them all when they threatened to strike for more pay (Fox advertised for soundalikes) and not made the later series. It's the worst example of cultural dilution in my lifetime: they took what was human and decent and honest and made it into a self=parodic freakshow. Homer isn't a father now, he's a monster: my own 'Jump The Shark' moment was when he was lying on the kitchen floor smashing beer bottles in an ep called something like '3 gays and a condo': that just wasn't the man i'd seen before who always tried to do the best for his family albeit in his own hopeless way. And I felt this before I had children in case you think that's a factor.

Anyway, Homer never goes to work (they make meta-jokes about it) and Bart and Lisa never go to school (not properly). They haven't written a properly-structured episode for five years or more, just "The Simpsons are Going To Japan/Brazil/Mars/England" or whatever crazy escapade they have this week. Marge doesn't care for Maggie, who never falls over any more, have you noticed?

It's sometimes possible to tell from the opening credits if it's a new ep never seen before (avoid at all costs) or one made years ago which you've seen a thousand times (you will still get something new from it if you watch it closely, and still enjoy it if you don't)

Incidentally, 'Happy Days' was considered part of the counter-culture when it was first shown: 'The Fonz' wore a leather jacket and rode a motorbike, perhaps the definitive images of rebellion to adults when I was an adolescent. Now it looks like the softest of cashmere conformity.

Oh, and I'm going to buy Resident Evil 4 from eBay so I might not be back for a while... never played RE before, sounds like fun. (Edit: too difficult!)

To the tune of "Stop the Pigeon"

Tap the trackpad, Tap the trackpad, Tap the trackpad, Tap the trackpad .. many thanks to robh, I have enabled this and it's great! He says it is a pain on his Powerbook but on this iBook it works gloriously. I used to use gestures in Firefox but I never made the connection, anyway I need to >tap<

Edit: robh has also encouraged mt to use scrolling gestures, double-tap on the trackpad over the scrollbar button then drag it down. I've got it to work (in a motor sense) , but it only really seems useful whent the scrollbar button is big (ie the text is small) as otherwise you run out of room.

Apres le deluge

In our 10-foot-square garden we have a 100+ year old pear tree. The upper reaches are infested with spiders, the garden was dug up last year for the conservatory, but this year it has been spectacularly and massively fecund. Huge quantities of blossom (I was shovelling it off the path) and consequently a major crop of pears.

Back before the West Pier was burnt down (by the thugs and criminals who own and run the other pier) it was home to a gazillion starlings - they really did used to blacken the skies, swirling in massive crowds. One of the things a few hundred did was to descend on our tree, and in the course of a week eat every single fruit (prefectly eaten cores would waft gently to the ground) tweeting to each other as they ate. It was a grand spectacle.

Now though the pears fall when overripe and they splat on whatever they hit. I was up cleaning the conservatory the other week cleaning handfuls of rotten pears out the gutters again. I have an improvised compost heap which I dumped them all on, though it hasn't been working at full capacity because there haven't been any grass cuttings this year (because the grass shrivelled up without water). Needs cutting now though, and all the pears have fallen now. Leaves next, cycle of life continues. We lie on the conservatory floor watching..

When a rotten pear splatted on the concrete or the glass or fell and rotted on the grass we called it a "chocolate pear". Certainly they were brown..

New look Windows

The Vista RC1 builds (finally got 5536 going) have new mouse cursors, including a throbber-like replacement for the 'hourglass' cursor - say hello to the Spinning Radioactive Doughnut Of Death: this image doesn't spin for obvious reasons.

Feet of clay

Glasgow isnae Brighton, but I was disappointed to hear of the firemen who refused to attend gay pride. Brighton's Gay Pride parade passes the end of our street every year, and up in the front are the Police. In order to avoid isolating gay and lesbian coppers they all march. Makes me fucking proud. The firemen could learn a trick from that, the big bufties.

BAD Vista

I got one of the pre-RC1 builds of Vista (5536) as I have lost interest in it somewhat and a new build always sparks interest for a while.

I always seem to be running operating systems on inadequate hardware: Windows 95 on a laptop with 2MB of RAM, OS X 10.4 on my beloved G3 ibook (384MB RAM), Windows 2003 Server on a 1Ghz P3 with 512 MB.. and several builds of Vista in a virtual machine with 334 MB. As I have mentioned before (bloody dell) I can't have more than 512 MB in my PC without a new motherboard, which so isn't going to happen.

Anyway, this is the result. Vista RC1 requires 512 MB of RAM to install..



Notice that it's the Vista installation that requires 512 MB of RAM.

Edit: I thought I'd give it a go at work. I wasn't expecting an MS-DOS error from Longhorn Server.. to be fair this is a result of Virtual PC failing to handle the DVD, using Microsoft's Virtual CD program to mount the ISO works every time.

Spam scouts

If you have a blog and you are fighting the good fight against comment spammers, look out for bland and seemingly innocuous "nice site, thank you" comments from people with distinctive names you don't recognise: they could be spam scouts, where if this one innocent comment gets through then thousands more follow chock full of the usual links. A quick google (sorry Google) for the name or comment text will usually tell one way or the other: check if the same user always leaves the same comment.

Edit: here's the guy - Jeorge Lukasing

Brave bold Sir Robin

Went to see Robin in hospital today - he had an operation yesterday to stitch his heel together with meccano.. his tibia and fibula split it when he landed heavily after vaulting an obstacle two weeks ago today (the kind of event that introduces you to the Twilight Zone of youth: you can still see it, but it isn't there any more.)

He's bearing up - Robin is tough - but he's going to be laid up for a while.

Uri Grossman

"I once thought of teaching my son a private language, isolating him from the speaking world on purpose, lying to him from the moment of his birth so he would believe only in the language I gave him. And it would be a compassionate language. What I mean is, I wanted to take him by the hand and name everything he saw with words that would save him from the inevitable heartaches so that he wouldn't be able to comprehend the existence of, for instance, war. Or that people kill, or that this red here is blood. It's a kind of used-up idea, I know, but I love to imagine him crossing through life with an innocent trusting smile - the first truly enlightened child"

David Grossman

Uri Grossman was killed last Saturday by a anti-tank missile in southern Lebanon. [Source]

Fanboys and bombboys

More on Schneier (from his blog, the man can sure take a joke! (Edit: note that most of these jokes are cryptographic))
Edit: this is my favourite!

Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the life and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.

Vote for this fact

Anyway I found a bbc page detailing the court dates of the failed 21 July 2005 bombers, which are next month and seem long overdue. If they are guilty (and it sure looks that way but I believe the meaning of prejudice is 'pre-judgement') then send the bastards down. That will go a long way towards alleviating the unreality of the war against terrrrism and the scepticism of folks like me who see a straight-line correlation between "greater goverment and police powers needed" and "an increased terrrrist threat"

Hopefully we will see expedited prosecutions with regard to the latest threat, but frankly holding your breath looks high-risk enough..

PS - I highly recommend this post.

PPS - that post links to a University page regarding the use of 'Piranha solutions" (3:1 Sulphuric Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide, please read the instructions carefully :-) which contains this (possibly ironic?) gem:

3. As a reminder, open-toed shoes are not allowed when working in the lab and bare legs must be covered by wearing a full size bunny suit.

Piranha SOP

Shiv

A collection of prison shivs - deadly weapons manufactured inside jail from everyday ingredients.

terrrists

I was thinking about the rule where mothers had to taste their baby milk before being allowed to take it onto a plane.

Let's assume the baby milk is in fact liquid explosive. There are two possibilities (50-50 as my wife likes to call it):

a) The mother knows the bottle contains explosive: she's not going to be bothered about swallowing a bit, she's going to die soon anyway, along with the baby she's carrying. I hesitate after Rwanda and Beslan to say that a terrrist mother would never use a baby to do that, but I know it would be extremely rare.

b) The mother doesn't know the bottle contains explosives, she's going to get an awful shock.

There was an incident (referenced by Bruce Schneier discussing passenger profiling) where a boyfriend planted a bomb in his pregnant girlfriend's bag, but bombing your own baby or your child's baby? Human depravity could sink no lower. Even rarer. Plus someone has to on the plane to activate the explosive.

Great publicity though!

Anyway, couldn't this have been handled along with the other security questions?
Q) Has your luggage been out of your sight at all?
A) Well, it's been in the attic..

Q) Has anyone mixed any baby-milk for you today?
A) I can emphatically say they haven't.

I did note that the final allowance was a laptop bag and an iPod: handy for the executives whose inflated fares are the backbone of air travel, but shit for a mother with young children who hardly ever travels but needs to take a large bag of nappies, spare clothes, wipes, books, toys etc

Basic Internet terminology

From Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 120687:

World Wide Web

A hypertext facility that essentially ties the Internet's many resources into a searchable web. If a certain word or phrase is highlighted on your screen, clicking it takes you to another site, file, or definition linked to that word.

The article also defines Archie, Veronica, Jughead, HGopher - all deader than dodos - and lists examples of browsers as Cello and Mosaic.

Awkward squad

Browsers are grumpy, gnomic beasts. None more than IE6 though: do you think I should be alarmed or relieved about this?

Moving purple dots

My new boss Tina sent me a bunch of optical illusions, this was the best one I hadn't seen before:

"Concentrate on the cross in the middle, after a while you will notice that this moving purple dot will turn green!

Look at the cross a bit longer and you‘ll notice that all dots except the green one will disappear."

ps - blogger image upload converts GIFs to PNGs seemingly which is why the image has been static for 24 hours

pps - if it isn't working and you've had a few drinks, try closing one eye ;-)

Capitalism at work

I hate capitalism with all my heart but this is so beautifully realised - make sure you drag the slider back and forth, how cool is that (ideally set the 'zoom' to 'max' - even the terminology is boss..)

If you find sliders soooo web 1.1 then just drag the chart dude..

Boing

Read this if you've got an iPod or you know someone who has. If you find copyright issues of interest, that is. Or you've bought music from iTunes and you'd rather not throw it away.

Lern yoursefl compooter sience

Robin The Bear laughs at me but I have become increasingly interested in the history of computing and computers and computer science itself. I've been reading an extensive history of Mac OS (that page links to a 3MB 100+ page PDF) and now I'm bookmarking 'bootstrapping a simple compiler from nothing' because it looks like learning fun.

I wonder what would have happened if I had chosen computer science over sociology when choosing my degree subject in 1983. Maybe I would have got rich in the dot-con but I would have shown the exact same lack of enthusiasm for reading computer science textbooks as I did for sociology textbooks, and maybe the same disinclination to pursue it afterwards. There's nothing like studying a subject to put you off it - like maths, which I considered as a degree subject for about minus 2 seconds despite it being my best subject at school.

The annoying thing about sociology was years of people saying "oh, you want to be a social worker then?" - yes, they both contain (a homonym of) the word "social". No, I don't plan to. As a long-time Social Services employee I can tell you that a sociology degree would not in any way provide any training towards a career in social work, and you need a CQSW anyway.

My outrageous niece Chloe - who has just scored a first from Ehdenburrer - got it right. Classics! Brilliant. Unless you collapse into academia there isn't the remotest possibility of a relevant job. And she got to go to Iran, lucky lucky.