2001/12/31
31/12, ~-9 hours: It will soon be 2002; 2001 will be over; like the years before it, no longer the present, but consigned to the fading, receding past. So here is the obligatory :
High points: For me, getting my remix on the FourPlay Digital Manipulations CD, and played on Radio National, was one notable high point. Getting a PowerBook with MacOS X at work was also pretty doovy. Other than that, can't really say much.
Low points: Too many. There were the obvious ones; the terrorist attacks, with the subsequent reversion of the corporate-consumerist world to an authoritarian siege mentality, the reelection of the Liberals (see above), and Microsoft getting all but off the hook thanks to having bought a friendly administration. Other than all that, a few others stand out: the sudden and premature death of Charlotte Coleman (who? never mind) came as quite a blow (I was depressed for a week or so), and the news that the Punters Club is closing early next year (and with it, Brunswick St. moves closer to being a mere shopping centre for suburbanites seeking purchased "bohemian" experiences and/or a hangout for moneyed, soulless yuppie pinks like St Kilda or Beacon Cove or somesuch) has also put a pall on things. And the usual personal things.
Major events: changing jobs (at the start of the year), moving out of a shared house to a 1br flat (again), various personal entanglements, and that kitten I got for Xmas (which, incidentally, I'm thinking of naming Fantod, because of its boisterous temperament).
Minor events: working, seeing bands/movies/shows, learning the guitar (I'm still not brilliant at it though), making a demo CD-R (as Gurnin Spacecase) and sending it out to various places, writing various spoken-word pieces and reading them out, not joining in NaNoWriMo (maybe next year, or maybe not), and the usual things.
Best films seen in 2001: Angels of the Universe, He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, Late Night Shopping, Amélie, Run Lola Run (on DVD). I haven't yet seen Lord of the Rings 1, though from what I've heard, it'd probably be on this list had I done so.
Best live shows seen: a lot of shows were good, though the ones that stand out are: Harmon Leon and Otis Lee Crenshaw's respective shows at the Comedy Festival, Henry Rollins' evening of rant, Swirl at the Espy, Prop, at any of their Melbourne gigs (though if pressed to name one, I'd probably name the one at Pony), the production of Anorak of Fire at the Fringe Festival, FourPlay at Revolver and Down Town Brown at the Evelyn (the show with the giant robot)
Top musical finds:
- The Field Mice, Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way
- New Buffalo, About Last Night
- Sir
- Lush, Split
- a lot of Slowdive demos on N*pst*r (may it rest in peace)
- Spearmint
Best books read:
- Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal and/or The Sky Road (top-notch speculative fiction, with culture and society as well as science)
- John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure (because of the sheer twisted delight of the way it unfolds through the narrator's over-erudite yet subtly deranged commentary; warms the cockles of one's black little heart, it does)
- the four Harry Potter books so far (a bit obvious, but they are good)
- Neal Stephenson, The Big U (well worth a read if you like his stuff)
- Naomi Klein, No Logo (a good overview of the brand-dominated world)
With honourable mentions going to Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair, Neil Gaiman, American Gods, Nick Hornby, How To Be Good, K.W. Jeter, Noir, Craig Mathieson, The Sell-In, Chuck Palahniuk, Choke, Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, Nury Vittachi, The Feng Shui Detective, Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies.
Tackling the gangsta-homie problem: Under plans unveiled by Victoria's conservative opposition, teenagers convicted of graffiti-related offences will be ineligible for driving licenses until they are 20; the usual age is 18. This could be expanded into making drivers licences a badge of good citizenship, as they are in parts of the US. Not surprisingly, civil liberties groups have branded the plan as draconian. Anyway, from this it looks as if the next state election campaign can't be too far off.
Oops! You know those copy-protected CDs Universal are putting out? Well, a number of DVD-ROM drives can read them just fine. Which probably makes the drives illegal circumvention devices under the DMCA; wonder if Universal have the clout to force manufacturers to cripple their drives in accordance with their dog-in-the-manger copy-prevention schemes.
Was Flight 93 shot down, with the story of heroic passengers manufactured to boost the sheeple's morale? The authorities' reluctance to release cockpit tapes certainly raises some suspicions. (via onepointzero)
The Church of Euthanasia (which is like a cross between VHEMT, the Church of the SubGenius and something Jim Goad or someone could have come up with) has a new video out. Titled I Like To Watch, it splices footage of the WTC attack with pornography and sports coverage, over an electronic soundtrack, all to make a statement:
"I found it very beautiful." He continues: "I don't believe that I'm the only person in the world who derived sexual gratification from watching two of America's tallest buildings destroyed, but I do believe that I'm one of the few people with the courage to admit this in public. As an artist, I have an obligation to capture my feelings as accurately as possible. What I'm feeling may make me a monster, but I don't believe I'm alone in being a monster."
The bizarre story of Sexchart, which started as an ASCII chart of erotic liaisons in the "Internet scene" in 1997 (back when the words "Internet scene" had more meaning), and snowballed from there. Which is proof that geeks aren't as asexual as some believe, or at least that when they get some bootywhang they're compelled to obsessively chart it in ASCII line-art.
The chart may be found here. Interestingly enough, I actually know a few of these people from years back. (Though not in the Biblical sense, mind you; that would probably have involved long-distance air travel.)
2001/12/30
From the Grauniad, 50 things we'll be glad to see the back of in 2002:
1 Fear of flying no longer simply meaning the fear you're about to die because of turbulence or the flaps making that awful schmeeee all-gone-wrong sound, as if that wasn't enough, but now encompassing the fear you're about to die because you're too close to the vortex from the plane in front, or some suicidal madman's about to fly you into the sea, or some thin-lipped fanatic's about to fly you into a major city landmark, or the bastard in front wants to blow off his own feet.
21 Pompous pronouncements which bear little examination. 'The world has changed forever.' No it hasn't. 'This has nothing to do with Islam.' Yes it does. 'Faith can defeat evil.' Actually, faith is part of the problem. 'I'm a fighter, not a quitter.' Bye bye now.
34 High-Rise Terminals: those ludicrous cod-Aussie upward inflections at the end of each sentence? Know what I mean? Want to stop it now, mate?
41 Corporations using images of mohicanned rebellious counter-cultural anti-materialists, to sell things.
46 Members of bands having precisely one personality trait each.
A BeOS power user describes his experiences with MacOS X, what advantages it has, and where it still drops the ball compared to BeOS. Interesting (if rather long). (Thanks, A.)
One year after breaking the CPRM story, the Reg takes a look at copy prevention mechanisms on PCs, and things are looking ominous.
The BBC has a piece on Pete Waterman, who has shaped manufactured throwaway pop music for some decades.
According to media curmudgeon Julie Burchill, two figures dominated 2001: Osama Bin Laden and Kylie Minogue.
I just found the nature of an annoying bug in licq: it gets the byteorder wrong on UINs on some incoming messages, which results in messages appearing to come from nonexistent users. (I.e., a message from user 0x1234567 would appear to come from 0x67452301.) So, if you get messages from nonexistent users and want to find out who sent them, just convert the UIN into hex and byte-swap it. Or wait for a fix.
2001/12/29
In the US, a group of black college groups was considering a boycott of cable channel BET (Black Entertainment Television). The group's grievance is that BET overemphasises materialism, with designer-label clothing and luxury cars being presented as a measure of worth and status (a phenomenon referred to as "bling-bling" in the hip-hop lexicon).
Looks like captured Taliban/Al-Qaeda POWs (those who weren't massacred on capture, that is) will be kept at the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba, itself a curiosity of geopolitics and history.
An interview with Katie Sierra, the 15-year-old anarchist suspended from her West Virginia school for wearing a T-shirt bearing an anti-war message.
2001/12/28
Soon, batteries may be made of used coffee grounds; researchers at Sony have discovered a way of using the waste grounds as raw materials for battery manufacturing. This will help to reuse waste, and also cut the manufacturing cost of batteries by up to 10%.
Today I picked up two CDs: the most recent one from Trembling Blue Stars (which is getting better than his previous ones, with nods to The Cure and The Smiths in evidence and some interesting electronic textures (though his drum loops still sound a bit Phil Collins in places); however, it's not quite up to the Field Mice's standard IMHO), and the new Silver Mt. Zion (which comes with a rant about the state of the world, and isn't quite as overbearingly morose as the first one; not that that's a bad thing).
Surprise, surprise: You know that company that, for a sum of money (insignificant compared to immortality) will name a star after you, your loved one, your dog or whatever? Well, what they don't tell you is that nobody else recognises those names; in other words, astronomers will not start referring to gaseous interstellar objects as "Joey Bloggs" or "Fluffy the Wonderhamster" or whatever just because you were gullible enough to part with US$48. Still, the scam has taken in many po'buckers, and some high-flyers including Nicole Kidman. (Who'd have thought she'd be gullible enough to buy into such hairbrained schemes?)
2001/12/27
Obituary: Actor Sir Nigel Hawthorne has passed away, after a battle with cancer. Hawthorne was known for playing civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby in the classic of political comedy Yes, Minister, and also starred in The Madness of King George. He was 72.
Good stuff: The BBC are experimenting with streaming programmes in the Ogg Vorbis format, an open-source, completely free format available on virtually all platforms (and not encumbered by licensing agreements, patents or other proprietarian evils); what's more, the Ogg developers have taken a stand against the copy-prevention trend. The BBC appear to be the first major broadcaster to use this format. Use it (and if you do, write in to let them know you do) before Bill Gates has a word with Tony Blair and it gets squashed by a directive from on high. (As happened with non-Microsoft systems in most parts of Britain's government.)
2001/12/26
Before Cool Britannia, Working Title and Gwyneth Paltrow's English accent, there was Merchant Ivory, renowned for their costume dramas. Purveyors of quality cinema, or the Stock Aitken Waterman of pretty, lightweight film?
Via FmH, an interesting paper which attempts to prove that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are "omnipotent" in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; they are "omniscient" in the sense that they can see everything that happens. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions imposed upon them by the more powerful gods living at deeper levels.
(So there is a God and ve is a simulation hacker? Not exactly a reassuring theogony that we're living in what may be a computer toy. "As flies to wanton boys we are to the Gods".)
We can, however, conclude that one naïve transhumanist dogma is false: The probability that you or your descendants will ever run an ancestor-simulation is negligible, unless you are now living in such a simulation.
I've got a bit of a dilemma. I have just been given a kitten by several family members. A high-maintenance, pedigree kitten, with special dietary requirements and a tendency to not leave one alone. With it around, I'm unable to do anything (as when it's not trying to climb onto my lap, it's going where it shouldn't). (I even found it hard to sleep last night, as it insisted on waking me before 8am.) Locking it outside the room doesn't work, as it complains in pained tones. (As you probably would too, were you in its situation.) That is, if it doesn't bolt through the door before you get a chance to close it.
I didn't ask for a cat (let alone such a high-maintenance cat), and don't quite feel up to keeping it. However, since a lot of people put a lot of effort into getting it, giving it away would be hard. Therein lies my dilemma.
2001/12/25
Iceland is set to replace fossil fuels with hydrogen, by installing fuel cells on vehicles (starting with the Reykjavik bus fleet, and continuing on to its fishing trawlers). This will not only reduce Iceland's greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, but also (it is planned) make the state independent of foreign imports for its energy.
Homeless in America? Dress up as Jesus. You'll get more sympathy, or at least, some heart-warming human-interest puff pieces written about you. (via rotten.com)
Convicted cyberkleptomaniac and h4x0r-d00d poster boy Kevin Mitnick is likely to lose his amateur radio license. He has held the license for some 25 years, and it has come up for routine renewal, with the FCC bureaucracy making noises about pulling it because of Mitnick's unredeemably corrupt character. Mitnick has not been accused of actually committing any crimes involving amateur radio, but licenses, it seems, double as a badge of good citizenship. However, the FCC declined to pull his license when it came up for renewal two years earlier.
I just got my Christmas presents from most of my immediate family, and they
amounted to two items: a dressing gown, and (from various people together) a
kitten and various related paraphernalia. It's currently lying on my lap,
for the moment having given up on attacking the keyboard or trying to climb on
the desk (which is off-limits).
As yet I don't have a name for him; had it been a female cat, I'd probably have named it Olympia, after the song by Lush. However, I've no idea what to name this little rascal.
(And yes, the pronoun thing is a bit confusing. I'm a bit hesitant to refer to cats as "he" or "she", as that would seem a bit anthropomorphic (I know that cats are male and female, but they're also asocial solitary predators (at least in the wild), and thus don't have the sexual division of labour, as it were, to differ much. I love cats, but I don't categorise them as people (or mentally story information about their sex), so I usually find myself referring to them as "it". However, giving a female name to a male cat (or vice versa) would just seem wrong.)
(He's a Burmese, in case you're wondering.)
Biologists in Singapore are working on fish which change colour when exposed to pollutants, or changes in temperature. This could lend itself to new advances in novelty thermometers.
Singapore Government-owned Australian ISP Optus deliberately throttles traffic on file-sharing ports, such as the old Napster ports and Carracho.
2001/12/24
An interesting (if somewhat old) interview with Ken MacLeod where he talks about his books and the political/social systems speculated on therein:
I think a lot of people who are libertarians now are just libertarians because the stock market is going up, frankly. As long as the market is booming, they'll be pro-market. If there was another depression or something like that, they'd probably change their tune pretty damn quick.
(from the archives of a mailing list, from about a year ago.)
Making the best of a bad thing: Convicted perjurer, former Tory deputy chairman and best-selling pulp novelist Lord Jeffrey Archer is able to use his stay in prison as a unique opportunity for research. Archer says that prison has taught him more about drugs than life outside ever did. He has also been using his spare time in writing, but given his history, I doubt we can expect the next Ballad of Reading Gaol to emerge.
Ann "Kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" Coulter has another screed out, and in it she wants to invade France for breeding anti-American sentiment, funding the Palestinian Authority and refusing to extradite terrorist suspects:
Having exhausted itself in a spirited fight with the Nazis in the last war, France cannot work up the energy to oppose terrorism. For decades now, France has nurtured, coddled and funded Islamic terrorists. (Moreover, the Great Satan is getting a little sick of our McDonald's franchises being attacked on behalf of notoriously inefficient French dairy farmers.)
This summer, Paris made Mumia Abu-Jamal an honorary citizen of Paris. In America's cowboy, bloodlust, rush-to-judgment approach to the death penalty, this convicted Philadelphia cop-killer has been sitting on death row -- and giving radio interviews and college commencement addresses -- for 20 years. Since "Mumia" sounds like a Muslim terrorist, Parisians can use the same bumper stickers for the war.
2001/12/23
Not only can computers beat humans at chess, but now they can compose funnier jokes than human comedians. The Singularity can't be too far off.
Recently, a 15-year-old boy, dying of cancer, asked for his last wish: to have sex with a woman, once, before he died.
"But ethics and morals aside, in children dying over a long period of time, there is often a condition we call 'skin hunger'." This happens when a child, seriously ill and in and out of hospital and receiving medical treatment over a long period, yearns for non-clinical contact because "mostly when people touch them, it's to do something unpleasant, something that might hurt".
"Absolutely. It is absolutely part of therapy," said the psychologist, "Because it was what he wanted. People talk about a trip to Disneyland being therapeutic what's the difference? It was what he wanted."
The boy's wish was granted, and a week later, he lost his battle with cancer.
No word on whether the government will launch an investigation or bring charges against the parties involved, though I wouldn't put it past them.
Update: Some months ago, a disabled woman sued the organisers of a "swingers'" party for discrimination because nobody would have sex with her. The organisers countered that she was asked to leave because of her "aggressive and unpleasant" behaviour (and someone mentioned poor personal hygiene as well). Now the plaintiff has lost the case; however, the judge ruled that a ruling of discrimination could not be upheld as the venue was an illegal brothel:
He said the activities would affront the public conscience and "even in the modern age would be regarded as against good morals" and therefore discrimination laws should not apply.
Now, granted, the image of flabby, rich, baby-boomer types running around naked and engaging in spontaneous group sex is rather disturbing to contemplate, but to say that activities between consenting adults in private "affront the public conscience" seems rather puritanical.
2001/12/22
DRM, SSSCA and beyond: a piece on the content industry's war on general-purpose computers.
Perhaps the most likely scenario is this: at some near-future date -- perhaps as early as 2010 -- individuals may no longer be able to do the kinds of things they routinely do with their digital tools in 2001. They may no longer be able, for example, to move music or video files around easily from one of their computers to another (even if the other is just a few feet away in the same house), or to personal digital assistants. Their music collections, reduced to MP3s, may be moveable to a limited extent unless their digital hardware doesn't allow it. The digital videos they shot in 1999 may be unplayable on their desktop and laptop computers -- or even on other devices -- in 2009.
I recently picked up a copy of Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal; so far, it's excellent, no less so than The Sky Road. MacLeod is becoming one of my favourite speculative fiction authors, alongside Greg Egan (partly because of his lucid speculations on society and politics, and partly because he writes actual characters you can empathise it, and not the cyberpunk mercenary-ninja-hacker/butt-kicking-chick clichés; not to mention his use of humour). Full review when I've read it.
A fascinating article about the history of political jokes in democracy and authoritarianism, from British caricatures to Eastern European gallows humour to the fine line of officially sanctioned humour and humour as propaganda.
Put simply, it is governments whose very reason for existence is to impose a grand ideological vision on humanity which provide fertile manure for subversive jokes.
The lineage of some authoritarian jokes stretches back far farther than the benighted twentieth century. One of the most popular jabs at the stupidity and dangerous arbitrariness of officialdom may have first been told by Arabs in the tenth century. The basic Arab version describes camels who run away because an idiotic new law is pressing mules into service. By the 1920s and 1930s, expanding on a Jewish joke of the tsarist years, the Soviet version described a group of rabbits who make a run for the Russian-Polish border. Applying for admission, the rabbits cry, "The Party has given orders to arrest every camel in the Soviet Union!" "But you are not camels," replies the Polish border guard. "Well, you try telling that to the Party," say the rabbits. Later versions were popular throughout Eastern Europe.
From a distance, it is easy to say that Russians recognized communism's ultimate absurdity and so laughed at it to "liberate" themselves before its "inevitable" collapse. But it may be more realistic to argue that, despite their recognition that communism was murderously absurd, Russians quietly cracked jokes just to endure it. Authoritarian jokes are not tiny revolutions; they are temporary pain relievers serving as a substitute for being allowed to participate in real politics.
(via Reenhead)
2001/12/21
The US Government is looking at the possibility of using mind-control nanotechnology against terrorism.
Yonas said he has talked with military officials developing mind-control nanotechnologies that would give war leaders a choice to "either blow up that building, or do something to the people inside, so the people inside lose the desire to continue with combat."
(That opens up a lot of possibilities. If you can use it to defend national security, you can use it for economic security. Make anti-corporate protesters into contently apathetic McWorld consumers, break down those pesky third-world peasants' resistance to buying Monsanto seeds and so on. (Just think: if Shell had this in the 90s, they wouldn't have had to have those Ogoni massacred; they could have just love-bombed them into compliance.) Or even use it on a broader population, making everybody more docile and more inclined to spend even more of their money on shiny crap, to the exclusion of everything else. I believe K. W. Jeter had a similar idea; he called it the "turd on a wire", one step better than the corporate-capitalist holy grail of the "turd in a can".) (ta, Mitch!)
2001/12/20
I had a dream this morning just prior to waking. In it, I ordered a CD single/EP from a semi-obscure independent band from somewhere around Norway or Iceland. (Their name, which escapes me, started with 'C' and they were of an atmospheric/post-rock/shoegazer style. Their artwork used colourised photographs/textures in vivid oranges and blues, with neat typography overlaid.) The CD came with a mail-order catalogue; in it there were various albums/EPs they had out and T-shirts, as well as a new single named "Lily's Song" or something similar. There was also an album of that title, due to come out in 2009, so it must have been a preview. A page of their catalogue also offered a single from The Cure (titled "regret"), for some reason. (Perhaps this dream took place in the future?)
Tech journalist cracks Universal's CD protection, or rather discovers that its effectiveness is somewhat less than universal. Oh, and the Windows-based player on the disc required to play it on a Windows PC is apparently spyware. And they wonder why no-one trusts the recording racket. (via Techdirt)
The New McCarthyism: Dept. of Defense agents visit New York art gallery over an Adbusters "Corporate American flag" billboard they were displaying. (via onepointzero)
Tonight I went to see Theatre In Decay's Xmas In Decay show. It was middling; it had its highs (the Idiot Magnet performance, in which they did some old God's Little Accidents songs, and Lawrence Leung's demonstration of card-sharking tricks, excerpted from his show Sucker), and some moments of pointless self-indulgence.
(Some fragments of overheard conversation from the crowd: "blah blah blah role-playing blah blah blah blah Mortisha's[1] blah blah blah new-romantic blah blah".
[1] a well-known clothier catering to the sp00ky kids; (US readers: think Hot Topic, only without the mall franchises, and with really-expensive vampyre gowns and such.)
Here comes the DVD version of the Bin Laden "smoking-gun" tape, with more features and never-seen-before extra footage.
"There's only one place bin Laden could have gotten such advanced postproduction technology, and that's Iraq," said former CIA Director James Woolsey. "This is all the evidence we need to level Baghdad."
2001/12/19
s,San Francisco,St Kilda/Byron Bay,g: The Onion: San Francisco is my favourite market. (Beware of the evil text-obscuring Flash ads though.)
And here come Australia's draconian new "anti-terrorist" laws; not quite as Orwellian as Bush/Ashcroft's power-grab, but still a worry, especially surveillance powers. And life sentences for supporting terrorist groups could be a concern, depending on how the government defines "terrorist". (Greenpeace? Sinn Fein? Anti-capitalist protest groups?)
The legislation is expected to breeze through Parliament, with Labor pledging to support it (and having an after-the-fact inquiry into it), and the Greens and Democrats powerless against it (which, granted, is why the Democrats are so unexpedient to oppose it.)
I splashed out on a minor CD-buying spree today, picking up:
- Trashmonk, Mona Lisa Overdrive
- Belle & Sebastian, I'm Waking Up To Us EP (because I've had the brass bit from I Love My Car playing in my head)
- Radiohead, I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings (the live version of Like Spinning Plates is beautiful)
- and Hood's highly experimental attempt to merge coldwave and house music, predictably titled Cold House
There are probably still some 2001 titles I'll want to get before the year is over (so they get a chance to make my "records of 2001" list if they so merit it); these probably include the new ones from A Silver Mt. Zion, Departure Lounge, Her Space Holiday and Trembling Blue Stars.
I found out yesterday that the landlord is coming to inspect my flat this Friday afternoon. Which means that I have to remove the posters from the walls (or put them on nails in landlord-friendly frames), make sure that the cables I buried under the carpets don't show, and generally make sure that the place looks presentable. It's probably a good thing that I don't have a cat at the moment.
Bizarre: Commuters on a train in Finland got a shock when the train's television screens began showing graphic videos of animals being slaughtered. The video tape turned out to have been the conductor's home video, which was accidentally shown to passengers. What happened to the conductor is not mentioned. (via onepointzero)
2001/12/18
Trainspotting: Melbourne's Spencer Street railway station, the city's main hub for rural and interstate trains, will be renamed to Southern Cross Station. Not quite as craven as renaming Museum to Melbourne Central (which is misleading, as it is not a central rail interchange, but was renamed as such because the owners of the Melbourne Central shopping centre bribed the government to do so), but still with a whiff of branding. Oh well; at least it's not "SouthernCross" or "Southcross(tm)" or some made-up word ending in "-nt".
Though I believe that when the station was originally built, in the 19th century, it was simply known as Melbourne. Perhaps reverting to its original name would have been more appropriate.
A somewhat over-the-top Marxist critique of Harry Potter, and the elitist ideologies allegedly embodied in the Potter universe. Or are they reading way too much into it?
They are not culturally productive in their hidden fastnesses. Their games, culture, artifacts, and practices are cribbed from the larger muggle culture - suitably modified, of course, to reflect their peculiar abilities. In short, culturally speaking, they are parasites. One suspects that they are economic parasites as well, leaching off the muggle world. One would expect them to be - they have the slaveholding mentality - but there is not enough evidence in the extant narratives from which to make a judgement.
Reasons to switch to Linux:
Al Qaeda terrorists
infiltrate Microsoft, plant trojan horses in Windows XP. Or so says
arrested terrorist suspect Mohammad Afroze Abdul Razzak, who has also detailed
plans to destroy the Houses of Parliament in London and Rialto Towers in
Melbourne, among other targets.
A Microsoft spokesman has poured scorn on the allegations, saying that their
source code is strictly monitored to make sure that there is no malicious code
that they didn't plan themselves.
(Then again, what's to say he isn't fnord an Al Qaeda terrorist agent?)
Via Meg, this list of untranslatably nuance-laden words in other languages, some of which would make useful English loanwords:
- plunderbund (Dutch) Alliance that exploits the public (sounds all too familiar; witness Microsoft, the copyright cartels, Bush's oilmen buddies, &c)
- bricoleur (French) Construction by random messing around (actually, shouldn't that be `bricolage', with a `bricoleur' being one who participates in it?)
- Ohrwurm (German) Tune that spreads through population. (Literally "earworm", I believe)
- Papierkrieg (German) Deliberate complicated paperwork for a complaint
- davka (Hebrew) Universe is conspiring against me
- hari kuyo (Japanese) Shrine for broken sewing needles
The Recording Racket: The Universal Music Group, the world's largest recording corporation, announced some months ago that by mid-2002 all their CDs would be copy-inhibited. And now they're releasing their first copy-inhibited CD. Bad news: it won't play on Macintoshes, DVD players, game consoles, or even some CD players. Not-so-bad news: the CD is the movie soundtrack spinoff "Fast & Furious -- More Music".
A detailed Newsweek piece giving the background on Marin County Talib John Walker Lindh, and the charges he is likely to face. (Predicted outcome: death penalty, commuted by Presidential decree after his conversion to a suitably severe yet all-American form of fundamentalist Christianity.)
The New McCarthyism (2): Two progressive activists in the US were questioned by police and postal inspectors after going to a post office and requesting postage stamps without an American flag.
The New McCarthyism: Anti-corporate critic Michael Moore's publisher has pulled his latest book on the grounds that it is "offensive". The publisher, the notoriously pro-authoritarian Murdoch empire's HarperCollins group, has also claimed that Moore was "intellectually dishonest" not to state that Bush had been doing "a good job" over the past few months. The existing print run will be destroyed.
2001/12/17
The Chaser has an amusing poll: "Where will the kid who plays Harry Potter be in 5 years time?"
Silicon Valley, an area with a high concentration of engineers, hackers and technical specialists, is seeing a dramatic increase in diagnoses of autism and Asperger's Syndrome. This suggests that the colloquial links between the conditions and technical pursuits may in fact be provable; and that in sufficient concentrations, those who may otherwise have been prevented from breeding by not getting mainstream society will find similar mates -- and their children may be more severely affected.
Says Bryna Siegel, author of The World of the Autistic Child and director of the PDD clinic at UCSF, "In another historical time, these men would have become monks, developing new ink for early printing presses. Suddenly they're making $150,000 a year with stock options. They're reproducing at a much higher rate."
"Autism gets to fundamental issues of how we view talents and disabilities," he says. "The flip side of dyslexia is enhanced abilities in math and architecture. There may be an aspect of this going on with autism and assortative mating in places like Silicon Valley. In the parents, who carry a few of the genes, they're a good thing. In the kids, who carry too many, it's very bad."
For all we know, the first tools on earth might have been developed by a loner sitting at the back of the cave, chipping at thousands of rocks to find the one that made the sharpest spear, while the neurotypicals chattered away in the firelight. Perhaps certain arcane systems of logic, mathematics, music, and stories - particularly remote and fantastic ones - have been passed down from phenotype to phenotype, in parallel with the DNA that helped shape minds which would know exactly what to do with these strange and elegant creations.
(via Slashdot)
Some memes just keep going:
Seen on a mX dispenser (that's the free murdoch full of celebrity stories,
consensus-reality-reinforcing propaganda and other pinkness and horror) in
Museum Melbourne Central station:
White House-designated terrorist group Greenpeace have stormed Australia's only nuclear reactor, overwhelming the "high-security" facility with alarming ease.
"My first thought was 'bin Laden, terrorist attacks in Australia'," he told reporters. "And then I saw the Greenpeace (sign) and I thought 'oh that makes sense'."
A study at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota has found that prayer makes no difference to patients' recovery rates; at least, if the patients don't know about it. Half of the 799 heart disease patients in the study were prayed for without their knowledge, and the other half were not, and researchers found no difference between the two groups' recovery rates.
(Of course, if the patients knew they were being prayed for, it might be different. And it's interesting to speculate on what the result would be if half of the patients were told they were being prayed for, but in fact, none (or all) were.)
2001/12/16
Speculation on whether a video tape found in Afghanistan, showing what looks like Osama Bin Laden confessing his part in the WTC attack, is authentic or a fake (as some in the Islamic world suspect).
Mr Broughton said that while it would be relatively easy to fake a Bin Laden video, to fool the top experts was much more difficult. "There are perhaps 20 people in America who would be good enough to fool everybody. To find someone that good and make sure they kept quiet would probably be pretty difficult."
(Compare and contrast with this Tech. Review article on how video footage can be digitally faked.)
The US Government has dropped charges against Dmitry Sklyarov, the "DMCA Martyr" arrested for writing a code-breaking program in Russia that is illegal in the US, in return for his testimony for the prosecution of his employer. So Sklyarov gets to go home, and (with any luck), the case may still end with the DMCA being struck down.
A man has committed suicide by detonating explosives strapped to his body near Lara railway station (on the Melbourne-Geelong railway line).
2001/12/14
While the Recording Racket works on ways to sell you "secure" downloads that you can only do what they want you to with, unsigned bands are finding their own ways to make money online, whilst retaining their independence and their copyrights.
"I don't have an answer for why this happened," said Quirk. "If it was that people just wanted the record that second it would be one thing, but the fact that people are donating more than they need to must mean there is something else going on. Now Jay and I own this record forever because the people who are going to buy the album have kept us from giving away our rights."
Troops in Afghanistan have a new threat to worry about: kamikaze camels. Sounds like something out of an old Jeff Minter computer game, doesn't it?
More upcoming gig news: Slowcore/post-rock outfit Low are coming to Melbourne in February; they'll be playing on the 7th and 8th at the Corner Hotel (which, after the closure of the Punters Club, looks set to become the premier band venue in Melbourne). This should be worth seeing.
The Bush administration has confirmed that the US will withdraw from the anti-ballistic-missile treaty. Are they a rogue state yet?
Tonight I went to the Corner Hotel to see Scottish punk-pop combo Life Without Buildings, supported by New Buffalo and Ninetynine. I actually went mostly for the support acts, and wasn't disappointed.
First up, New Buffalo played a short set on the side stage; the lineup consisted of Sally Russell on vocals and keyboards (and occasionally guitar), backed up by a drummer and bass player. Unlike the show at Revolver, this time the sound guy got the mix right, and it sounded quite good.
Then Ninetynine came on the main stage and put in a characteristically frenetic performance. The members kept swapping instruments (two xylophones, a stack of Casiotone synths, guitar, bass and drums), and doing it with a lot of energy and a sense of humour. The drummer, in particular, stole the show, pounding at the drums frantically and generally jumping about like a maniac. (He's the guy with the vaguely Robert Smith-esque hairdo.)
Then New Buffalo played another set, which was also good, except for the two airheads behind me loudly catching up on the latest gossip, oblivious to the fact that there was a show on. (I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate, it's idiots who talk loudly at band venues. If you want to catch up on the latest social chitchat, do so outside.)
Finally, LWB came on; at this stage, I was quite far from the stage, and could barely see them (the venue was packed, mostly with fresh-faced indie kids). They played an energetic show, with singer Sally Tompkins (a cute ickle punkette) bouncing around and singing/shouting her stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Not bad, though it only got really tight towards the very end, and all their songs sound rather the same.
Tomorrow night, I'm going to see Prop at Revolver; and on Saturday night I may be going to see Down Town Brown at the Dan O'Connell. (Hmmm; I should really set up an upcoming-events page of some sort to list all this stuff.)
2001/12/13
This looks interesting: WinTel, a MacOS X program which can run PC OSes under MacOS X. They're selling it for US$30. Judging from the screenshot on their site, it appears to be just Bochs, an open-source PC emulator, with some more user-friendly packaging.
14 quotes; some are from Senator Joseph McCarthy at the time of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, and some are from current US Attorney-General John Ashcroft. Can you tell which ones are which? (via onepointzero)
Proof that terrorist whackos come from all stripes: The FBI has arrested the chairman of the Jewish Defence League, the militant Jewish nationalist group founded by the late Meir Kahane, over plans to blow up a mosque in Los Angeles and the office of a congressman of Arab descent. According to an informant, the attacks were planned as a "wake-up call" for Arabs. (Presumably Arabs being kicked off flights for their suspicious names and skin colour and randomly assaulted by all-American rednecks (along with turban-wearing Sikhs) wasn't enough of a wake-up call.)
I also picked up the new Set Fire To Flames CD, sings reign rebuilder. and it's quite lovely, in a A Silver Mount Zion-meets-early-Black Tape For A Blue Girl kind of way. Some tracks seem a bit pointless, but others (such as the haunting steal compass/drive north/disappear) more than make up for it; and the booklet is quite good too, consisting of a disjointed collection of vaguely disturbed pictures, similar in concept to Radiohead's Amnesiac book. The whole effort seems to echo the stark, desolate Canadian winter in tone, though it has its moments of warmth, and is not soul-crushingly bleak. (I'll probably write up a proper review for RAN)
USENET... hmmm, yes, I remember that: Google has just put online a USENET archive going back to 1981. This contains many posts of historical significance, such as Linus Torvalds announcing his pet project, and an excited discussion, from 1982, about a doovy new gadget called the Commodore 64.
Which of course means that all the silly juvenile rubbish that one posted to the Net is now available for all the world to see what a bozo one was.
No, I won't link to all the daft shit I posted to USENET; you can find it easily enough (hint: look in alt.religion.kibology). Suffice it to say that I was a snotty smartarse with no life to speak of outside of USENET. (In my defence, I lived in an outer suburb an hour away from where anything of interest happened.) Whereas now I'm a smartarse with a weblog, who lives in the inner city, sees bands and pontificates on obscure records. (Which doesn't make me cool, incidentally; just a record-collecting geek. There's a reason why it's compared to trainspotting, you know.) But at least now my friends are people I've actually met...
However, two posts of historical note from the archives: the post where I proposed the creation of alt.discordia (I was "Lee Harvey Oswald Smith"), shortly after having read Illuminatus! and decided that I was a Discordian. (Which I still am, when I feel like it.) And here is my first-ever USENET post. Oh yes, and the thing about my being the most evil person on the Net in 1994 is true. Quake before my godlike mojo, foolish meat-beings.
US authorities are interrogating John Walker Lindh, the captured Taliban fighter from Northern California, and he has started singing like a bird, saying that there will be a massive biological attack on America this Sunday and so on. Mind you, it's not known how much of that is genuine intelligence, and how much is Dr. Hine E. Craque using his natural gift for spinning a line of bullshit.
2001/12/12
Bad news. I just read in local street paper Beat's indie column that independent UK record label Nude Records has gone into liquidation. They were home to a number of bands including Gloss, Suede and Black Box Recorder, who are working on a new album.
I just picked up a copy of a CD titled Popshopping. It's a compilation of music from German TV commercials between 1960 and 1975; it's surprisingly groovy, in a retro/lounge background music kind of way. (I heard that there is also a remix album based on it. I wonder what it sounds like; I imagine glitchy laptop beats mixed with retro-kitschy commercial lounge-jazz loops.)
I went to the Empress this evening to see some musicians play, and the music was very good indeed. First up, a chap named Richard Andrew did a set, playing guitar and singing some nice minor-key numbers (of which I caught the last 2, noticing that he used an unusual tuning for one). Then Seth Rees played, doing a set of vaguely shoegazey ambient guitar pieces, and entrancing the audience. (The pieces are hard to describe in words, but one of them was vaguely reminiscent of that interlude on Swirl's The Last Unicorn). (A word of advice: Seth Rees is well worth seeing live.) Finally, Jesse Jackson Shepherd from Sir went on, and played some rather melancholy songs (on piano, with quietish, understated vocals; the overall effect is something that would sit nicely next to A Silver Mt. Zion or Departure Lounge or somesuch).
A piece about the rise of DJs from humble record-spinners to the rock stars of the new millennium:
So pervasive has club culture become that toy maker Mattel has given Barbie a new boyfriend called DJ Blaine, who dresses in baggy shorts, a retro shirt, necklace and sunnies. He comes with headphone accessories.
2001/12/11
Dissatisfied with the UK Labour Party's policy on war in Afghanistan, a Labour MP has defected to the Liberal Democrats. The party, formed in the merger of the Liberals and Social Democrats some time ago, is also home to some pro-European defectors from the Conservative Party. Which would probably make it analogous to the Australian Democrats (though perhaps not as sloganistically trendy or yoof-oriented).
It has emerged that John Walker Lindh, the young Northern Californian Taliban fighter captured in Afghanistan, was a prolific Usenet poster, frequenting groups such as rec.music.hip-hop, and using pseudonyms including "Prof.J", "Dr. Hine E. Craque" and "Mr. Muhajid", before deciding to run away and join the Taliban. Thanks to Google, there is a history of his posts, dissing wack rhymes, buying and selling CDs and musical instruments (mostly drum machines/samplers, though he was looking for a talkbox at one stage), and apparently getting into Islam through hip-hop music. (via Techdirt)
Hmmm... My indie cred has almost doubled over the past 14 or so months; it was 24% last October, and now is 40-42% (depending on how you count). The fact that I lived in a sharehouse of Top-40-listening normals for a while probably pushed me on the path to indie-snobbery, and the black-rimmed glasses and writing RAN reviews did the rest. I still don't own any Belle & Sebastian or regularly wear sweaters (or jumpers, even), or hang out with stereotyped "indie kids" though. (The indie fundamentalists sound every bit as annoying as goths, even if superficially less daft.)
2001/12/10
Amélie: charming feel-good fantasy movie or insidious racist propaganda piece? And some responses on Metafilter. (via Lukelog)
In the future, guitars will have Ethernet connections:
"As soon as you plug the guitar in to the Ethernet port or whatever instrument it is, it'll come up 'Nate's guitar,'" Yaekel said. "Just like in Ethernet, when you plug into an Ethernet hub, you're going to see your computer's name on the network. The same works for the guitar, except you won't have to set up any drivers or anything like that. You plug it in, and the mix position knows exactly where you are. It knows your effects, and it knows your sound."
An interesting piece about capital punishment in America, and in particular, the effect it has on executioners:
Often the state takes pains to obscure the executioners' identities from themselves. Some schemes position placebo executioners next to real ones, none of whom knows who's injecting saline solution and who's injecting pancuronium bromide, or who's pulling dummy levers for the gas chamber or electric chair. Even more elaborate is the commissioning of software to randomize the choice of which lever actually starts the mechanism. Some states mandate that the requisition must be done in such a way that the programmers don't know they are writing code that will launch, say, a gas chamber as opposed to a watering system, lending new significance to the term "vaporware."
Excerpts from the secret writings of the Columbine mass murderer Eric Harris, a mass of hate-filled, nihilistic ravings that reads very much like Nine Inch Nails lyrics. I suppose that's the path one takes if one's filled with adolescent hate and not inclined towards making industrial music.
Meanwhile, the article points out that the killers used the words "natural selection" a lot. One can see the argument now: "It's teaching evolution in schools, that's what's turning our kids into homicidal goths."
Surprise, surprise: Asylum seekers in the detention centres, including young children, are developing a violent hatred of Australia and all things Australian. Which could come back to haunt Australia when the children come of age. In decades to come, we may see Australia become a South African-style society, with the privileged hiding in heavily armed gated communities to escape the rage of the have-nots, and the latter having no mercy for anybody of the same cultural background as their oppressors.
Cuba recently hosted a tribute to John Lennon, commemorating the 21st anniversary of his death. The Communist government of Cuba has hailed the dead Beatle as a fellow revolutionary; and thus worthy of being celebrated. (The fact that he's safely dead probably also helps.) This is a far cry from the 1960s, when Beatles recordings were banned as a decadent imperialist influence, and were passed around secretly as samizdat and listened to behind closed doors by an underground of fans.
Linguistic profiling: An investigation in the US has revealed that landlords discriminate against callers who sound "black" on the telephone. Investigators from a nonprofit housing agency found that "black"-sounding callers' messages are often not returned at all, whereas "white"-sounding callers' calls are typically returned within hours. A study at Stanford University has shown that most Americans can identify the race of a caller with great accuracy, sometimes merely by the sound of how they say "hello".
Via onepointzero, a comprehensive page on the other underground railway of London Below; I am, of course, referring to the London Post Office Railway, along which automated electric trains ride along narrow-gauge tracks, carrying mail between sorting stations.
Great eccentrics: A piece on neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. The author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, among other books, the acutely shy Sacks lives a reclusive life in New York, preferring his solitude to the company of others. He has recently written a memoir, which should be an interesting read.
2001/12/9
Who was Jack the Ripper? Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell believes it was renowned English painter Walter Sickert, and even bought and cut up one of his paintings in an attempt to prove it. Meanwhile this chap thinks that Lewis Carroll was the infamous killer.
2001/12/8
I went to the cinema to see a preview screening of Amélie, the latest film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (the co-director of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, the latter of which is perhaps my favourite film of all time). It is the story of a shy, introverted young woman who is somewhat of a dreamer; I won't say much more as not to give too much away. It is indeed excellent; the visuals are very vivid and fantastic (as one would expect from Jeunet), and the film is full of quirky characters and great moments (and equally great asides), with some echoes of Jeunet's previous films showing through. Audrey Tautou is great as the lead, playing the part with verve, charm and warmth. I also recognised a number of actors from Jeunet's previous films in Amélie (for one, the guy who played the clones in TCoLC makes an appearance as the tape-recorder-wielding nutcase ex-boyfriend of one of Amélie's coworkers).
Unlike the earlier films, though, it is not set in a dark fairy-tale world, but in modern-day Paris, and it's more of a feel-good film. (One could even call it *cough* a romantic comedy *cough*, though it certainly doesn't follow the Hollywood/Working Title formula. Nora Ephron this ain't.)
Anyway, Amélie is very highly recommended. (If you're in Melbourne, it's showing at the Nova and Kino, and apparently goes on wider release on Boxing Day.)
2001/12/7
Conclusive evidence has emerged for the first time that the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was conducted with the blessing of the United States. Hardly surprising, given Fretilin's leftist leanings, and the fear that East Timor may have become a Soviet military base.
I picked up Sing-Sing's The Joy Of Sing-Sing today; so far it has failed to grab me. Perhaps it's an example of a Second-Band Effect, in which a successful artist's second band falls short of their initial project (some other cases: Violet Indiana, Mojave 3, Trembling Blue Stars). Though the jury is still out.
An interesting article about the rise and fall of Festival, Australia's oldest surviving recording company (taken from the Good Weekend, with some additions, and only up for a fortnight or so):
"[Murdoch] would take it as [charges for] advertising that we didn't get, when The Australian needed money. We'd be charged management fees and end-of-year adjustments. If you had a million dollars, they'd take $900,000; if you had $10 million, they'd take $9 million."
And the Letters to the Editor column has a tirade from FMR chairman Roger Grierson, claiming anti-Murdoch bias in the article, and ending with the accusation that journalists promote piracy and things like Napster. (thanks, Cos)
2001/12/6
Via Lukelog, some pages on Polari, a secret underground language used by London's gay community in less tolerant days: (1, 2, 3). Polari (sometimes spelled Palare) is believed to have originated from the lingua franca used by mediæval sailors and/or the slang used by carnival showmen, and contains elements from Italian, Yiddish, Romany and Shelta (the language of the Irish Travellers). It's the language in Morrissey's Piccadilly Palare (of course), and appears to be related to the argot used in an allegedly obscene verse, said to date from the time of the Crimean War, and quoted by Neil Gaiman in one of the Sandman books:
Nanty dinarly, the omee of the khazi,
said due bionc peroney, manjaree on the cross.
We'll all have to scarper the latty in the morning,
before the bona omee of the khazi shakes his doss.
Gleanings from this week's street press:
- The Cure's new single Cut Here is about the late Billy MacKenzie, of Fiction labelmates The Associates.
- New Order will be doing a live show in Melbourne (at the Metro on the 30th of January, I believe) apart from their appearance at Big Day Out; which is good if you want to see them, but don't want to pay $90 or so for a 1/2-hour set and a bunch of alternateen skate-metal bands.
A new band I'll have to check out: Sing-Sing; (a) one half of them is Emma from Lush, and (b) they've worked with Mark Van Hoen (Locust), who's apparently quite interesting.
Polls show that most Americans prefer to be kept in dark, fed bullshit as far as the Afghan conflict goes anyway:
Leslie Bennetts, writing in the current edition of Vanity Fair, says that "Americans like a simple storyline that makes it easy to decide who the good guys are and who the bad guys are and the byzantine tangle of international politics, Islamic fundamentalism and American foreign policy is making many citizens unused to grappling with such headache-inducing complexities want to throw up their hands." Bennetts suggests that "American newspapers and television companies have reduced their foreign coverage by 70 to 80% during the last 15 to 20 years in response to corporate demands for profits."
2001/12/5
Some good news: Remember that scary Internet-censorship bill the NSW parliament was debating, well, thanks to the EFA, with some help from the Greens and Democrats, it has been diverted to a committee for further examination.
Media watch: The Onion: "Ringo Next"; the Chaser: Yoko Ono slams Beatle death as derivative.
I just got the Neil Halstead remix EP, with two tracks off his forthcoming album and three vaguely electronic remixes. The original tracks have a sort of early-1970s AM-radio country/easy-listening feel with quiet vocals and finger-picked acoustic guitars, complemented by some analogue synths and strings. It's a little reminiscent of Air's Ce Matin La, albeit without the Gallic hipster irony, or indeed the brass.
Another report from last weekend's Walk For Capitalism rally, this time from the one in New York, the epicentre of global capitalism. This one did a little better than the New Zealand rally, attracting 60 people. (Granted, a few of these were leftist infiltrators with placards reading "Privatise the Public Library" and "Profits Before People" -- an irony lost on the hard-core Randroids who made up the rest of the rally). (thanks, Seth.)
Some good news from the front: Our boys have killed the wife and daughters of Bin Laden's deputy, in an air raid. God Bless America!
2001/12/4
Bruce sterling has a very lucid essay touching on a lot of things, from cypherpunk utopianism to the power of Microsoft and the copyright industry to terrorism and counter-terrorism: Geeks and Spooks
So where are these imaginary earthshaking geek outlaws who laugh in derision at mere government? Well, they do exist, and they're in Redmond. The big time in modern outlaw geekdom is definitely Microsoft. The Justice Department can round up all the Al Qaeda guys they can wiretap, but when they went to round up Redmond, they went home limping and sobbing, and without a job. That is a geek fait accompli, it's a true geek lock-in. In 2001, Microsoft has got its semi-legal code in every box that matters. They make those brown-shoe IBM monopolists of the 1950s look like model public citizens.
The future of cyber anarchy is cyberfeudalism. It's Politics 301. We had a lot of booming cyberanarchy in the USA for 20 years, and now we are looking at several years of stagnant feudal nothingness. I would guess about maybe one Presidential administration worth of nothing. About one Presidential Administration, and maybe a severe economic setback's worth of nothing. Then people are gonna start wondering why nothing important is happening any more in computer technology, and when they look at that technology, all they are going to see is Microsoft. Because that is all there is.
I'm just declaring that rule by spooks does not work because of civics. Spooks have no checks and balances. You don't get to sue them. They're never held accountable. They're not elected. They don't worry about return on investment and they don't answer to the stockholders. They don't even have to bury their own mistakes; they usually get the diplomats to do that for them. Do you think they're any smarter now than they were during Iran Contra? Or any less reckless?
So that's what "Ginger/IT" is: a gyroscope-equipped electric personal scooter named the Segway. The inventor hopes the Segway to replace automobiles as a convenient, efficient means of urban personal transport.
It looks like the Greens didn't win a Victorian Senate seat after all; they came close, but the Democrats held on. Oh well, there's always next election; unless, of course, it was a once-off protest vote and the inner-city trendy-left chattering classes end up flocking back back to the comfortable, familiar apron strings of the Democrats.
2001/12/3
This Sunday was the Walk for Capitalism, a mass protest in defense of the global capitalist economic system against the dreadlocked menace who wish to rob us of our Big Macs and Nikes and herd us into Soviet-style collective farms. Well, not exactly a mass protest; in Auckland, only 25 people showed up. The protesters recited quotes from Ayn Rand and "tied blue ribbons to Starbucks cafes as a gesture of thanks"; thanks for what, for the mediocre coffee?
The Greens have won a second Senate seat, with their NSW candidate, Kerry Nettle (who, at 27, is one of the youngest senators ever, if not the youngest, and who's also one of Peter's friends, putting her in my second degree) taking a seat from the Democrats (the former Party of Yoof). I believe that the Greens also stand a chance of picking up seats in other states, among them Victoria. Bravo, I say.
Academics and analysts in the US are talking about bringing back the draft to fight the War On Terrorism. Conscripts, the argument goes, would be needed to patrol airports and such (something reservists cannot do, having full-time jobs); not to mention the eventuality of a massive invasion of Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Cuba or any other evil enemy state. So far, the White House is ruling out the draft. (via Orwell Today, which you should probably add to your reading list)
Does anybody know of a good way of copying Macintosh disk partitions under MacOS 9? (Entire partitions, including desktop folders and other things, and not just the files that are in them.) I recently upgraded my Linux box's hard disk to 40Gb, and want to put the old 10Gb disk in my studio Mac, replacing its old 4Gb disk. However, since it's an oldish Mac, it can't have more than 2 IDE devices, which means that I have to move everything over from the old disk to the new one. (The plan of action involves: a) replacing the CD-ROM with the new disk; b) copying everything over so that it boots and works properly, and c) replacing the old disk with the new disk and putting the CD-ROM back where it was.)
2001/12/2
Were I a James Bond villain, I would be Ernst Stavro Blofeld. (Probably because of the fluffy white cat.) (via Meg)
A word of advice: if you're looking for a digital camera, do not buy an Ixla DualCam 640 (or Pretec DC-520, as I believe they're called); well, not if you're looking for one which will work reliably for more than a month or two. This camera has some severe flaws which come out after a month or so of use; the camera starts experiencing memory corruption, which can lead to pictures being truncated at best, and at worst, the camera deciding that it needs to reformat its memory when switched on. Or even more frustratingly, crashing when trying to read a specific image from its memory; which is very annoying, as it makes it possible to see some images but not to download them, because of the way the proprietary software works. (I did mention that it's entirely proprietary, and that you're at the mercies of a (shall I say slightly whimsical) TWAIN driver that runs only on Windows 9.x and MacOS classic, didn't I?)
I had the same problem with the previous camera, which I got replaced a few months ago, and now this one's doing it.
Eccentrics of note: James Vipond is probably best known for his tireless crusade for non-sexual nudity þrough Poser graphics. His "nude Christian superheroes" page is no more (presumably it was too much for þe fragile sensibilities of some people out þere, or the legal departments of his hosts), but he now has a new page; and he has turned his attention to a classic pet project dear to numerous eccentrics and crackpots, among þem George Bernard Shaw and Noah Webster; namely, English spelling reform. (via Psychoceramics)
(And what he has to say actually makes sense; to be honest, the sooner we have one character representing the 'th' sound (which has no relation to the two letters in its name), the better, and the þ character would not only be backwards-compatible with Old English (and Icelandic), but also pretty cool. Bring it on, I say.)
The world's smallest TCP/IP stack; compiles into 4K of 8-bit code, and runs on a Commodore 64 or a microcontroller as found in keyboards; and it comes with a miniature HTTP server too. (via NtK)
This is not the Onion: The mayor of the town of Inglis, Florida, has drafted an edict officially banishing Satan from the town, and placed it in four posts, inscribed Repent, Request and Resist, on the outskirts of the town. Mayor Carolyn Risher, who was motivated to this action by seeing evidence of Satanic influence, such as drunk driving, child abuse and teenagers dressing in "goth" costume (undoubtedly whilst reading those darn Harry Potter books too), denies discriminating against religions, saying that the edict is all-encompassing -- well, for anyone who believes in Jesus Christ anyway. (via rotten.com)
After being ordered to shut down its copyright-violating operations, KaZaA has claimed that it is unable to do so, because it is decentralised. Which is not true, as they do have some kind of central authentication system to keep reverse-engineered open-source clients off and keep people seeing their ads and using their Windows spyware, keeping them profitable. You can't have it both ways...
2001/12/1
I just finished reading Craig Matheson's The Sell-In, a book about the mainstreaming of alternative music in Australia during the 1990s (which was recommended to me by a number of people, one of them being Graham). It's quite interesting, not to mention sobering.
(It was also funny seeing someone I spoke with (briefly) on ICQ a few years back mentioned as one of the players. Though not really surprising.)
Anyway, if you want a copy, PolyEster should have it, or be able to get it.
A court has shut down ex-P2P file-sharing service KaZaA. Hands up everyone who was expecting this to happen.
Obituary: Musician and film producer George Harrison has died, after a battle with cancer. He was involved in the production of Monty Python's Life of Brian, among other films, and was a member of the Travelling Wilburys, and before that, was in another band who were quite popular in the 1960s.
So I downloaded the separate tracks of Curve's Unreadable Communication, and started playing around with doing a remix. At some stage I managed to find a copy of the album, too, which is helpful. First I started playing with the files (just dragging them to tracks in Cubase, adding plugins and such), and at one stage did the old cliché of speeding up the drum loop for a jungle effect.
But then Gurnin Spacecase came out to play (I must have neglected to take my medication again or somesuch), and he has a most singular approach to remixing. (See the hidden track on the FourPlay remix compilation for more information.) So now I've got part of a remix which starts like Regurgitator doing girl-group R&B and mutates into something like a lost Bjórk/NIN collaboration. ("Trent you are cute and nice, would you like to make moosic together and maybe cuddle aftar?")
Not sure if I'll send that to Curve, or even finish it.