Soft Cell remixed

Not guitar related, this post is more accordian-driven Stasi folk pop: our comrade in the Fens, Derek, has escaped the gulag for long enough to appear in a J2O advert.

I don’t know if this will ever turn up on the tellybox, but with a bit of luck it will go viral online.

And thinking about rathergood.com, there was a recent “What’s the best cover version EVAR” discussion on Radio6 one weekend, and Elbow’s cover of Amerie’s One Thing (a song much in favour with this author) was gushed all over by a presenter.  This is rubbish, their cover of Independent Woman kicks a whole lot of arse.

A new source of gas

So, there’s now a new source of gas in the house:

Because of which, updates might appear on this blog even more rarely than my usual less than prolific rate.  I’ll leave you with this thought about hearing development that occurred to Derek and I whilst we enjoyed beer and take-away curry in James’ honour.  Isn’t transposition weird?  That you can recognise the same melody even if it’s played a fourth or whatever away from where you’d usually hear it, yet obviously the individual notes are different.  As Derek said, a person who has perfect pitch won’t hear them as the same, yet the rest of us probably won’t notice the change.  Is it the same as seeing the same pattern in different colours?  Different frequencies of information (sound, light), yet the relative changes within the information are the same.  Is change more important than absolute values in perception?  To add to the confusion pitch is on a log scale, so doubling the frequency raises the note an octave.

In other news, I’m working on a whole new series of baby music collections called “Baby loves Bob”.  So far I’ve trialled Messrs Marley, Johnson and Cray with some success, though I’m thinking Bob Plant might be a bit of a shock to his tiny ears.

Cambridge 209

Recently I’ve been listening to Cambridge’s community radio station, Cambridge 209, during my daily commute.  I do this not through some act of local solidarity, but mainly because the Jukebox show doesn’t have a DJ, it just plays music.  No talking, no adverts and rarely any station idents, plus the most unpredictable playlist I have ever come across.  For example, this morning’s journey was accompanied by New Frontier (Donald Fagen), Jump (Pointer Sisters) and Whatever happened to? (Buzzcocks).  Occasionally you get seriously heavy rock followed by classical music.  It’s like a party with the worst DJ in the world, and frankly I love it.

I’d like to get involved, though I haven’t really got the time.  (I had an idea about getting Tom of Acuphuncture/The Beauty Room fame to bring his extensive vinyl collection along and do a jazz funk show that took music WAY too seriously.  Nice.)  I used to do a radio show with a friend at Uni; an hour of bickering, biscuit tasting and… well, I’d say beats, but at that time my music collection was dominated by Soundgarden, Metallica and Faith No More, so things were a bit more rock than they are today.  (Sadly there was no beer; they told us that drinking alcohol whilst in charge of a radio station is illegal, which seems unlikely but we never checked.)  Doing your own radio show is similar to the implicit narcissism of writing a weblog: you talk, and assume the world hung on your every word.  Or maybe that’s just me.  In reality the CUR transmitter had a range of a stone’s throw, so  the chance of anyone actually hearing us was pretty low, but it kept us amused regardless.

Thinking about the 209 station idents (and an advert for another show I caught), there’s just a slight lack of sheen that differentiates them from what you’d hear on Radio 1.  Maybe it’s some effect on the “professional” station’s sound samples – potentially 209 could slap a bit of delay and a load of compression on the voices to make them sound a bit more in your face – but it seems that when the Radio 1 DJs joke about the jingles costing a few thousand pounds each, that expenditure does make a marked difference.

Chrome EULA

Well well, google released a new browser.  I just downloaded and installed it and was blown away by the speed of the thing.  My Yahoo mail loaded so much faster than in my usual browser (Firefox 3.0.1), and general performance seems to be better than FF.  All good, until I was looking around online and spotted in the comments section of the Guardian article about Chrome that the Chrome EULA (of which I of course read point 1.1 then skipped the rest) includes this section:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Nice: anything I look at or post in Chrome belongs to google.  Looking around on the net I found another post about the Chrome EULA, which has several useful links, and is written by a lawyer who claims that this effectively rules out the browser’s use by a whole slew of people.  And even if Google says “Oh don’t worry about that,” should we worry about it?  If it’s not needed, don’t put it in the EULA.

Derek Zappa

Derek’s doing the whole Tache Back thing, his target style being “Frank Zappa Jr“.  That’s a classic ‘tache and monster soul chip thing Frank’s got going on.  Question is, is Derek’s chin a match for the poly-rhythmic prog rock prickliness that’ll be unleashed?  He needs your cash to help him (and cancer research) find out.

Acuphuncture: Big In China

Check this out:

1 gigabyte in two days!  And all from China.  I only found out about this because we got a warning from our hosts about going over our bandwidth limit; I think I’ll add some “Free Tibet” banners so we get banned by the Chinese government, these idiots are costing us money.

iJobby

Whilst in the gents today a guy with the nigh-on ubiquitous white ear phones of an iPod in his lugholes walked past me and headed into a cubicle. Now I’m all for personal soundscapes to enliven hum-drum daily activities, but a soundtrack for your dump? What’s on that playlist?

1. Eruption, by Van Halen.  (Double marks for “Brown sound” reference; maybe he’d had a vindaloo the previous night?)
2. Release the Pressure, by Leftfield
3. Push It, by Salt ‘n’ Pepper.  (Not enough fibre in his diet?)
4. Anything by Scouting for Girls (no scatological references, they just irritate the shit out of me)
5. …  ?

There must be others, but it’s time for me to log off.  Arf.

Steam prevents Vista sleep mode

My home machine runs Windows Vista.  I know, I must have been bad in a previous life or something.  I actually  have no real problem with MS’s fancy new OS; the user account control is very much like the same thing you get in Linux so that doesn’t really bother me, and since service pack 1 the speed of certain directory listing and file copying operations have improved significantly.  Perhaps the people that complain about Vista are doing a lot of real work on their machine, whereas the most complex thing my Vista box gets to do is run Team Fortress 2.

And therein lies the problem.

I’d noticed that Vista wouldn’t go into sleep mode via the time limit set in the screen saver page.  Vista’s problems with sleep are well documented on the web (just google for Vista insomnia and you’ll see), though the symptoms of this problem were subtly different, in that I could manually send the computer to sleep and it would happily stay there, and recover without a hitch.  After fruitlessly fiddling about with the various power settings suggested on pages I found via google, I started to wonder if it was any of the background applications that prevented the machine from entering the idle state, and hit the answer first time: if you exit Steam, sleep mode works fine.

So there you go: gamers, if your computer is having problems sleeping, try turning off Steam.

The Beautiful Light

Sounds like it could be a band, but actually The Beautiful Light is a friend’s photography website.  You might have seen one of Jane’s photos before because she snapped off a load of shots at our wedding,  one of which I uploaded to my flickr site.  If she can manage to make Casa look mean and moody, she can do anything.

For God’s sake, don’t join Facebook

It will eat your life. Seriously. I got an invitation from Alex Harris aaaages ago that I didn’t anything about (between this weblog and myspace I wondered just how much Web 2.0 I could take), then a couple of months after that a friend in New York added me… I caved in and joined. Now I’ve caught up with loads of old friends and random acquaintances that I’d lost touch with. I’m just saying, watch yourself, it might be more addictive than cocaine on a domino’s pizza.  That said, am I being a class snob by going more for facebook than myspace?  Is even having that thought a sign I should have my internet access taken away?  Probably.