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Play hard, work..?
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| This is my log for the web, so I don't plan to apologise for noting a recipe found somewhere else in the Inters. But it's a recipe for Muesli. What has he done? Sadly it is a sure sign of time creeping up that I'd wind up creeping aged before it inters me.
But Madduck's posted an interesting fruit-and-nut muesli in the same week that I'm painfully made aware of Bill Granger/Tom Waterton's recipe for oat Muesli in Bill's Open Kitchen. Just in case I actually wind up making either of thes recipes.
Take care.
K3n. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| I saw someone write "bicurious about OSX" and just want to note the phrase.
(On a personal note, I have a system with SSE3 extensions and could probably force an OSX86 install, but really am not bothered.)
Take care.
K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I'm writing up, and so bloody glad for a Document Processor that makes my my document look beautiful, makes equation-writing a joy, and which looks after all of my document references. That last bit's extra sweet (dude!), as I get to be part of the finalisation process of The Girlfriend's Thesis 2.0 -- Corrected Edition, which will involve persuading Microsoft Word to get her page numbers right. It's not too bad, just tedious.
But LaTeX does it for free. On Page 114 (at the moment, who cares where it ends up?), I use the following to refer to an equation on Page 45 (for now):
Equation \ref{eqn:engbeamcurv} (see Page \pageref{eqn:engbeamcurv})
That's just another bit of procrastination out of the way for the day. Thanks for listening.
Take care.
K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| The CA has it best: And the son of man, hatched from a chocolate egg which dropped serendipitously on to the lap of the Madonna as the easter bunny hopped by.
That's the authoritative word of supermarket Somerfield, from a questionnaire they put out to publicise their two-for-one deals on religious ignorance. See the article at the BBC.
Chocolate face-mouthed,
K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Aren't Snow Patrol on Soul Survivor records? | | Subject: | Love your enemies? | | Time: | 12:45 pm |
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| Because I've elected not to do politics or religion here (do you remember post #2?), I'll put the link to an article in today's Grauniad as a memo-to-self so that I can sound intelligent and smug in polite company. It's Max Hastings on the War-on-Terror's 'single Muslim opposition to Western freedom'. I'm looking forward to mumbling something about the religious convictions of both George and Tony not reaching far enough to Jesus Christ's saying along the lines of 'love your enemies'. I also look forward to the hypocritical high ground of criticism ("well, of course they've got it wong...") without need to actually do anything to make things better. Fortehwin!
take care.
love k3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Today, we have the sarcastic kind people at ukresistance.co.uk for answering a question I hadn't thought to ask: Whatever happened to Andy Crane?
Their diligent searching yielded these results.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Today's update from our TechDesk. Have you guys fixed the printers yet?
K3n Brockman here, from the techdesk. I've been fiddling around with the disks on my new notebook computer (it's nice enough, I'm not going to show my conceit for having a 15.4" wide-screen, Turion64 processor, 1GB RAM and a Mobility Radeon X700 graphics device). I got an external USB disk to back everything up on, and wanted to add a Linux or two the notebook to play with, so had planned to copy the disk to external storage, mount the external image and copy ever single file and directory back over. However, a quick googling found me GParted, which has a 25MB LiveCD and can handle most filesystems you'd want to throw at it. Its resized my NTFS partition down from 70GB to 35, and did it beautifuly, calmly quietly and nicely. I love it.
But, having finished the resizing the partition, the front-end program crashed with a segmentation fault. That scared me like having a great lover ditch you by text message. After such abuse, I'm in thrall to the program, and highly recommend their LiveCD to your arsenal of computer recovery tools.
Edit: Obvious spelling fixes and edits for clarity. But the big thing: one of the temps found that GParted is on the far-more-stable and nicely-pretty Ubuntu 5.10 Live disk, which is a 643 MiB disk image, instead of 25, but it hasn't crashed out at all. Which is much more reassuring.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Finally, something blog-worthy. (I say this as an aside: we had an internet activist and fearsome blogger stay at Castle Firewood this last weekend who is an Anglophile American -- or possibly just 'not xenophobic' -- who received the beans on toast* I had prepared with the line "this is almost blog-worthy". I didn't know whether that was high praise or an indication of the worst of blogging. I decided later that the marvels of Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce atop Malted Farmhouse Wholemeal Bread with Olive Oil Margerine, to those alienated from the key ingredient of Baked Beans, are justifiably blog-worthy and I was being a snob to suggest that blogging is anything other than a serious thing.)
And to tonight's main story: Microsoft have announced a DVD that you can play only once and then throw away. This silliness won't end. It's intended as a means to stop people copying movies and sharing them but is actually a desperate attempt for an old distribution method to cling on in a new market.
You know about podcasting, right? It's the thing where people record audio to their computers and let other people download it when they wish and listen to it when they wish. I see it like Wireless Radio broadcasts before Television caught on. Eventually we'll have a system where you don't watch TV when it's broadcast but when you want, and shows have release dates and times so that people can watch them when they're newly available. So broadcast television has a new mechanism. Why not movies too? The internet will eventually come to our homes and offices in a way that we can pick a movie and watch it soon after, possibly just once, possibly to keep.
So why create wasteful land-fill with play-once disks? And what happens to the anti-piracy measures when someone extracts the movie to a standard re-writable disk? It strikes me of a complete step in the wrong direction... ...and we haven't talked of the 'fair use' provision of copyright law that means it's okay to tape a CD you own so you can listen to it in the car or elsewhere. These new disks will probably have some encryption on them so that only registered players can access the movie, and the U.S.A. has a law that says that sides-stepping any encryption is a felony; what of the fair use of watching the movie in two stages, not in one sitting?
The original edition of this entry didn't include acknowledgements of the death knell of the plans: that another company has already tried to do this before. A U.S. company, Circuit City, sold disks called DIVX which allowed people to play the disk freely for the first 48 hours in a special player which telephoned an account system for subsequent plays of the disk. Early adopters disliked the format and protested the film studios against their use of it.
This new product may provide a better film experience, but at greater cost to the environment and with unnecessary inconvenience to the user. The silliness of trying to stop digital transfers of files will continue, but the paradigm (of halting something that digital computers excel at) is wrong: the horse has bolted the stable.
*: I had difficulty typing the name of the dish as my fingers wanted to indicate that the bread products were replaced with a Chinese faith practice: Beans on Taoist. I'm sure that there's a joke in there somewhere.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Apparently the hard drive is the new bling. I've got to say: "darling, it's not". Not when you've got appalling instrumentation behind even worse Shatner-territory spoken-word-not-singing-or-rap, nor when your company's suppling the flash RAM behind the new iPod nano -- of the same scale as the 8GiB mentioned in this terrible piece of flash advertising.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Having been back at work for only one day after a mammoth cleaning session (a four-day bender on Bleach and Cif and using our new bong-like cyclonic vacuum cleaner -- I'm not floppycore) in my new flat, I realised that I didn't blog about my new headphones yesterday. (It's odd that I have a new flat, cleaned, quiet, nearly homely and I'm more concerned about telling you that my work life has stepped forward leaps and bounds because of the music I can listen to...)
I listen to music while working in the office to block out background noise and to have some nice music playing. I got myself a reasonably decent pair of over-the-ear cans (Sennheiser Evolution HD2200's, which I can't find on Sennheiser's website but can find in shops). However, last Summer's heat made them uncomfortable to wear because they stopped my elephantine ears doing their thing and cooling me. So I looked around for something in-ear and sound-blocking...
Things like the Etymotic Research ER4 or ER6 appealed (althought the prices did not) and Shure E3/E4/E5's (with similar concerns about price -- thanks to Froogle for price searches). I eventually found Sony's MDR-EX71 in-ear thingies, which I had seen a fellow researcheriser using. Having found a pair of them in Argos for a redusced price than the Sony site, I bough them. The office is now silent and I have little need to worry about overheating in the office. I shall be careful to make sure that I don't give myself ear infections with dirty inserts...
I heavily recommend them to you. Where can you get in-ear headphones with a frequency response of 6-23,000 Hz and and supposed 100 dB sensitivity, with highly impressive bass and good high-pitch detail for as little as thirty quid. And, yes, they're wasted on the on-board sound system of my work computer.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Newsmap, a large flash news aggregator that colours stuff according to its topic and gives it space according to its popularity (I think).
Everyhit.com, the home of a database listing for every UK Top 40 single released.
I'd say something meaningful about the E3 preview of the PlayStation 3 (BBC article)) but it gets messy quickly.
The response of the people who saw the demos say that the quality is amazing and the consensus indicatees that it looks to provider prettier gaming than the XBox 360 (which was previewed in a special U.S. MTV show last Thursday). While it would be nice to own a hi-definition games machine plugged into a nice large television, I hardly ever play games, don't think its DVD or Blu-ray Disk (Sony's High-detail update to the DVD format) playback can justify a place for it in my home cinema line-up (which so far contains my PC and small med-fi sound unit), should I ever get to have one.
What also needs to be commented on is the Digital Rights stuff that will appear in the PS3 unit: Sony owning a set of studios and also the hardware you use to watch their movies will mean that there will be difficulties associated with moving a Blu-ray Disk copy of a movie you have purchased to a different format -- which is presently allowed by the Fair Use terms of UK and USA copyright licenses -- which I am not keen to force on myself by owning such a device.
I will also need to write up a more-complete listing of this Digital Rights Management thing when I have decided whether or not I believe that information is inherently free. Gossip, when we chatter about things and tell each other stories, kind of swings against my previous inclination to say that information is something we can buy and sell.
If we allow information to be bought and sold, then we allow people to sell us music and movies with restrictions set on what we're allowed to do with the movie. However, you can't stop people talking about music and movies, because people do talk, and this spoken sharing of information cannot be licensed and controlled without serious restrictions to inherent freedoms.
But these limitations on freedom of expression are what the democratic process (and some of the -- albeit selective -- use of the U.S.A. Constitution to describe what freedom should look life*) should stand against, and so there's some merit to the claim that the whole gamut of the information we use should be free. That's extreme, so the middle ground we seek (and I'm going on about copyright in particular here) will have to allow investors to recoup their money with some profits, after the artists involved in music have had a fair proportion of the profits from their work, with the whole thing being free-to-the-good-of-humanity after a reasonable period of time. Is information free? I haven't yet decided.
*: another can of worms. The United States of America is the largest world power and the only people at the moment who are willing to justify armed intervention to provide regime change. This notion, in itself, is quite conditional: there have to be motivations from its leadership, its industry and among enough of its populous to make these things happen, and these interventions will depend on who gets the ear of the president. Consider Sudan and Iraq: one gets the USA 'bringing freedom', the other is left to sort out its internal genocide problems. As the largest power, their highest intentions will be coloured by their understanding of freedom, which is bound to their constitution, when they refer to it. So international terms of freedom are kind-of tied to the American constitution.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This may be a bit abrupt and potentially shocking, but that's just part of this story...
Last night I was more than a bit fed up last night. One of the "something just isn't right" kind of fed ups that can't easily be fixed by a hot cup of something(1) or an evening of rubbish internet(2). Dinner was due to be prepared, and I had planned to eat, read and then join the regular Thursday night's football playing.
That was not to be. Whether it was my mind making me aware that I needed milk for the morning or what, I do not know, but soon I was heading out of the door toward my preferred curry house to get take-away and to stop by the convenience store for some beers to properly enjoy the evening. It was going to be a 'not coping' evenings, switching off and relaxing.
What if I make a tit of myself? I don't care, there's noone around and I'm not coping now. What if I make a huge mess of my house? I don't care, I'm not coping right now. What if World War Three kicks off? I don't care, I'm not coping right now. What if I wake in the morning with an apocalytic hangover? I don't care I'm not coping right now. I probably won't cope then either.
(In case you feel like there's a reason for this, let me be clear: I need a holiday. I've had a couple of long weekends since January, but haven't taken a good chunk to be away. The holiday's coming, and I look forward to doing very little. Just resting up. That will be good.)
So, we're all set for a good evening off, the curry's sitting on the plate in the lounge, telly's on and I'm considering grabbing a DVD from the shelf to watch. The beer's not quite at the right temperature and the people in the curry house were kind enough to give me a pappadum as well as my standard garlic naan. The front door begins to make noise and one of my housemates returns.
This was going to be a private party. But hey, I'd share it. I went and grabbed my copy of The Life of Brian and threw it in the player, and we very much enjoyed that.
(1) I think that's the reference to the female thing of a good chat over a cuppa, which usually comes with hugs, etc. The male version is the piss being taken out of you in the pub...
(2) I'm often astounded at my ability for recalling useless data about the technology that powers the computers we're using. I can spend hours just reading commentary on this stuff. Often it passes the time, often it frustrates me that I'm not doing something cooler, like reading a good book or playing my guitar.
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Update:
I went shopping this afternoon, to deal with some things that needed my attention in town, and found myself in a second day of 'not coping' attitude. I'm concerned: really, 'not coping' means not giving a flying monkey's rat's anatomically precise model of the derivation of a donkey crossed with a horse. Something might be going wrong if I'm wandering the streets day-to-day not caring.
--
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| Not that fresh the news here, just a revisit for personal reminders. I think I will tell you all to go and find the great Robert Rodriguez and kiss him full on his lips for his wonderful movies. I got a box of El Mariachi, Desperado and Once Upon A Time In Mexico which I am greatly enjoying. El Mariachi is particulalry wonderful. (it's all good until I recall he's the director of all three Spy Kids movies. So change that kissage for a polite thankyou for the three I mentioned and From Dusk 'Til Dawn.)
- the cure - the cure
- beastie boys - to the five boroughs
- graham coxon - happiness in magazines
- the strokes - room on fire
- simon and garfunkel - bridge over troubled water
- beach boys - surfin safari / surfin' usa / little deuce coupe / the beach boys today / summer days (and summer nights!) / smiley smile
- rem - up / reveal
- u2 - october
- manic street preachers - generation terrorists / know your enemy
- queens of the stone age - queens of the stone age / rated r / songs for the deaf
- ocean colour scene - moseley shoals
- oasis - (what's the story) morning glory
- basement jaxx - remedy
- beatles - hey jude (which I have never seen in the shops)
The movies may include:
fight club / the usual suspects / the pianist / the shawshank redemption / l.a. confidential / heat / collateral / the thomas crown affair (original for preference) / mystery men / big fish / twelve monkeys / secretary / before sunrise (nv) / before sunset (nv) / any given sunday / i [heart] huckabees / sideways ...
with work by the following lauded directors/producers:
Kevin Smith {clerks (nv) / mallrats (nv) / chasing amy (nv) / dogma / jersey girl}
Quentin Tarantino {kill bill vol. 1 / kill bill vol. 2 (not viewed) / pulp fiction / reservoir dogs}
Coen Brothers {barton fink (nv) / the hudsucker proxy (nv) / fargo (nv) / o brother where art thou / the man who wasn't there (nv) / the ladykillers (either version, original nv)}
nv -- not viewed
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Radiohead - Thinking About You | | Subject: | I'm a creep. | | Time: | 06:45 pm | | Current Mood: | ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif) jubilant |
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| I wonder if
- my life is going down the drain...
- the universe is coming unglued...
- or I'm just a wierd monkey...
...when I sit on my bed reading the music recommendations from today's paper while listening to an album I had but sold and recently repurchased...
...to find myself nearly in tears for having the record back. And being able to listen to it again. Bloody marvellous. (I may need to find a career doing this sort of thing -- not crying over a 1993 album by a small band from Oxford -- to pay the bills, because it's too easy to build up large bills in the purchasing of the music.)
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| From the for-my-own-reference section:
A random take on the much-quoted Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back:
Baby got Book. Cheap rip-offs abound in the bad-christian-music circles. This has appreciable features of parody but is still a tacky novelty song.
BTW, it may require a big internet connection. Or two -- it's quite a fat page.
Take care.
love Ken. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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Play hard, work..?
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k3ninho's journal![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/sad.gif){kind=small}
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