Pink Floyd — Comfortably Numb

The first solo is awe-inspiring. The second is good, but it's more cliché rock solo. The first is a masterpiece; from that first transcendent, soaring note through a stellar space of revelry and through to the final dying phrase as the second verse slowly draws into focus.

There are two guitar solos in this song and I prefer the first one.

There. I've said it.

Clarkson vs. Government

Jeremy Clarkson's recent verbal attack on the leader of our government, Gordon Brown, was amusing.

Now he did call Gordon Brown a 'one-eyed Scottish idiot', (YouTube video) and each of those statements taken individually is pure Clarkson territory and — in his typical context — rather funny. However, Jeremy's latest soundbite has been seen as being a bit above and beyond the grounds of taste and decency.

I did notice one thing, though, and it was this: Clarkson apologised for " [making] a remark about the Prime Minister's personal appearance".

Clarkson did also call the PM a liar. At least he implied this in a way which left very little room for alternative.

So, he's apologised for the labels Scottish and one-eyed, but idiot and liar have gotten clean off.

Good. At least free speech is still alive and well, even if freedom of opinion seems to have taken a battering.

We're kind of on dangerous ground here. Here's a man, admittedly a man with access to a larger television audience than most of the rest of us, stating his opinion about something. Now, broadcasting codes aside, he spoke freely.

In order to justify a position which ostracizes Jonathon Ross and praises Jeremy Clarkson, I must make important the distinction between someone freely stating his controversial opinion and someone openly and carelessly aggravating a person (or, even worse, being allowed the same) by dragging their privacy and their dignity irreverently into the limelight.

These are very different cases. I watched the Clarkson incident unfold with a great deal of interest.

If we are to cling to the last threads of "democracy" in this country, we must realise that in cases such as this it is our government's job to defend, using the full extent of the law of this land, the right of people — yes, even Jeremy Clarkson — to freely speak their mind.

The Economy doesn't appear to be working. Please try later...

I think this sums things up quite well.

Electronic Arts in Common Sense Shocker!

"...people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale."

So says Mariam Sughayer, of Electronic Arts' corporate communications.

Now, the implications of this statement are quite far-reaching. The obsession of the recording industries in pointing out that they are losing millions in revenue due to 'illegal' music downloading is lost when the facts are taken into account.

Here's a fact: To lose millions, you first have to make millions, then lose them.

Such a business model — built on imaginary losses — is a logical and mathematical mess. The world's economy is in the shape it is because it is in the hands of minds like this.

As far as the global economy goes, a little Darwinism is all that's needed, if the governments will allow that to happen.

But Electronic Arts' message is a sensible one, and one which many businesses could do with taking on board. They're taking the wider view, which is concentrate on what you do best.

Make good golf games.

The RIAA

And what they're up to.

This guy is starting to take a little heat from the RIAA.

Support him. Visit his site:

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com

Do your bit to ensure the future freedom of people who actually want people to hear what they've got to say.

Spread the word.

Time...

...is merely a function of the complexity of the universe.

Chrome update

Two things, here.

Chroming my way around reddit, I noticed This is the coolest animated gif you will ever see in your life.

So I clicked the link. It took me to a bare page with an — actually, quite good — hand-drawn animation as a .gif file.

After a few seconds, though, I noticed something was up. The animation started to slow down. From the 40-ish fps it kicked off at, the rate dropped to around 15 fps and even lower.

I opened the same page in IE and FF. Animation ran full speed for the duration.

Hmm. Not so good for Chrome.

Secondly — and this has been a pet hate of mine with tabbed browsing all along — the link at the start of this post was obviously copied from reddit. First, I copied the text into my post, then, after highlighting the text I'd just pasted, clicked the 'link' icon at the top of blogger's text form. A dialog appeared, and I clicked to go back to the reddit tab to then grab the URL. Except the dialog had locked the blogger tab and I couldn't switch.

Close the dialog, switch tabs, copy the URL, switch tabs again, click the link icon again, paste the URL.

Details, people...

Chrome

First impressions of Google's new browser, "Chrome", are pretty good.

Things I like:

• Tab management.
• Clean look, like Firefox, but easier on the eye.
• Quick page loads.
• Add a new tab to get thumbnails of recently viewed pages.
• 'Incognito' mode.
• Less user interface, more web page.

Things I don't like:

• Double clicking the tab bar 'restores down' the window.
• Dropping text links onto the tab bar does nothing (FF will open the text link in a new tab).
• Opening the Options dialog has always caused Chrome to crash. (My work machine, XP 64 bit).
• No home button.

Allow me to elaborate.

Tab management is very neat. Like IE and FF, tabs can be rearranged so that relevant tabs can be grouped together. As well as the underlying functionality of this working very well, visually the process is well represented, the tabs gliding and snapping smoothly into place.

This clean visual style is carried throughout the rest of the browser window. The navigation controls are simple to understand, although the lack of a home button is a mild annoyance. Moving the tabs above Chrome's Omnibar (that's Google for address bar) is a stunningly simple design, representing the idea that each tab has its own address and properties, something which is true even 'under the hood', as a tab can be dragged away from its native window into an entirely new window instance, complete with history and other properties. Compare Chrome's presentation of tabs to IE's and even FF's tab and address bar layout, this is a revelation and visually more representational.

Pages load (or, probably more accurately, are parsed and displayed) noticeably quicker. On my local work's intranet I could almost hear an audible 'snap' as pages appeared.

A better implementation of IE's thumbnail view is revealed on opening a new blank tab. Rather than a blank page, you get a bunch of thumbnails, your recently visited sites. Also, a neat bookmarks section is displayed to the right below a Google search box which will trawl your history.

A new browser would be incomplete without some kind of 'secret browsing' mode. Both IE and FF have recently introduced features which Chrome calls its 'Incognito' mode. Right clicking a link and selecting 'Open link in incognito window' opens the linked page in a separate browser window with a darker shaded border and an icon top left, like a cliché of a Private Detective dude, complete with hat, high collar and shades. Pages viewed in this window won't store your history or temporary files like cookies and whatnot, a plus for those concerned about online privacy.

The lack of a menu bar and status bar (by default. Other browsers do allow you to turn these off) means that, 'out of the box', this browser steals the least screen real estate from your web site. At the bottom of the window, the web page ends, and your Windows task bar starts within a pixel or two. However, hovering over a link or loading a page brings up a semi-transparent status bar which promptly disappears when no longer needed. Neat.

Another neat feature is that, if you happen to click a link which takes you to a series of pages, you won't have to click back through all of the pages before you finally reach the page which referred you to the series. Right-clicking on the back button brings up a familiar history but at the bottom of the list of pages you've just clicked through (a photo gallery, for instance) you'll see the page which referred you to the site, maybe 15 or 20 clicks ago. Smart.

Some people may whinge about the absence of RSS functionality, but the major downer for me, besides a few personal annoyances, is that I could not access any of the options on a Windows XP 64 bit installation. The application bailed messily and without warning whenever I tried to access this most important of features. To that end, I have absolutely no idea how customisable Chrome may be and it is the one thing that I have to say has genuinely spoiled my first experience of this otherwise easy to use and nice looking browser.

Having said that, it's a beta, people. It's not really officially launched as a working browser. We've been publicly invited to Google's unveiling of a new piece of software. They've lifted the cover on their creation and said, 'Everyone, excuse us, and, you know, don't take this too seriously, but look at what we did!'

And I have to say I'm looking forward to the finished product.

Get it here.

Repairing the Rhodes

Acquiring a Rhodes piano (not mine, but I desperately wanted it to work to record) gave me the opportunity recently to do something I've kind of had on my mind for a few years now.

I wanted to fix it. The last time I seriously used it, I had to be tactical about the chord inversions I used to lay down the grooves, as some of the keys didn't sound.

This is no way to play a musical instrument, of course, and so I was driven to find out what the problem was and work out how to fix it.

I knew that the mechanism itself was fine, because lifting the lid revealed hammers which were mobile and smooth, hitting the tines squarely and firmly. So, the problem had to be either with the tines (the metal rods which vibrate when struck by the hammers and whose motion is converted into an acoustic signal by pickups) or with the pickups themselves.

Moving a tine assembly to a note which did not work revealed that the tine didn't work in this position, thereby proving that the pickup was to blame and not the tine.

Fitting them was a little tricky, but I now have a Rhodes with the main part of the scale perfectly intact. There are a few keys which still don't work but I never really heard the top octave or so of a Rhodes being skilfully played before, so I've left them alone. I have spare pickups if I ever decide to use these notes.

Of course, this is just one part of the process of getting everything sorted out properly. Pickups in place, I now wanted to 'voice' it, this being the process of getting the notes to sound the way I wanted them to.

You may know the closing bars of Donald Fagen's 'New Frontier' from his 1981 album 'Nightfly'. If you haven't heard it, buy it. It is some of the best produced and played Rhodes piano I've ever heard.

Next on the agenda, new hammer tips for the whole range of keys. I think this is the way to go for that consistent sound as some of the keys sound loads better and it's not down to pickups.

I'm working (gradually) on a music website, but that might be even further away than a well-tuned Rhodes.

But watch this space..!

America King of the Hill in Beijing

The Americans have been doing really well in the Olympics. At the time of writing, they're top of the medal table.

Yes, that's right. Have a look here. They are top of the league. Well above China. Despite picking up more bronze medals than any other country, that is.

Now I don't want to demean the efforts of any Bronze winning athletes out there but if an athlete is honest with themselves, they will know that such medals aren't really what winning is all about. It's a nice gesture and it is something to be proud of, worthy of the hard work they must undoubtedly have put in.

However, promoting an image of their country based on people who came second or third is evidently and historically irreconcilable with Fox's s representation of the greatest nation on earth. In the real medal table, of course, China reigns supreme with America and England coming in second and third.

But America being second will not do, so long as there is some way for Fox to fix the tables to make it appear otherwise.

So, it falls to Fox to manipulate the facts to suit their delusions of national grandeur. I'm sure that intelligent Americans will only cynically acknowledge Fox's attempts to represent their country this way and realise that it would be better to count only the actual wins, while of course praising the efforts of the rest of the field.

If Fox were to be honest with themselves and dared to apply this mentality truthfully, boldly and with no exceptions, would they count America as a winner if they picked up a silver in the war on terror?

Why is Wikipedia not automated?

That might sound odd.

But I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to have Wikipedia spider itself with a view to turning more words in its articles blue. If someone puts a page up about a given subject, say the Waterloo Monument, would it not make sense to have Wikipedia—in its spare time, when it's not serving articles—to linkify articles that have the words 'Waterloo Monument' in them.

I think it's a good thing of course to have it human-edited, because machines don't yet have the common sense that seems to avoid the George W. Bushes of this world. But give it time.

In fact, would having a self-modifying database such as Wikipedia be maybe the first step towards a computer intelligence? If Wikipedia is supposed to be a neutral repository, there should be no cases of corporate competition or litigation. Most of the pages I've read have [citation needed] or [This section does not meet Wikipedia's guidelines for neutrality] and other such human generated directives.

Surely, if these directives are followed (and there is no reason why they shouldn't be. The world is editing it, after all) would it make sense to leave the editing to the humans and the linking to Wikipedia's future algorithms?

Our Intelligent Evolution

I read an article in the Science section of US News' website which briefly mentioned the trend of people choosing the genetic makeup of their children and I wondered about what this meant from an evolutionary point of view.

It seems to me that if we are allowed to 'choose' the genetic makeup of our children, we are simply evolving to take advantage of the environment we find ourselves in and as a result evolution will once again prove its point through our continued success as a species.

Clarke/Kubrick's 'Man-ape' in '2001: A Space Odyssey' discovered how to use a bone as a tool which he then used to conquer everything that was denied the choice by some extraterrestrial force, a force which obviously judged the Man-apes to be intelligent enough to make such a creative leap.

Evolution in the pure sense, of course, is not guided in this manner but I hope you can allow me that simple illustration in the same way that I gratefully allow the suspension of my disbelief whenever I watch that movie.

I believe that we are now at a similar evolutionary crossroads, only this time our tools are not bones and the rewards are not mere survival.

Now our tools are the genetic understanding of our species through technology; the rewards, to explosively take our species to the next level both genetically and technologically.

Mistakes will be made and critics and sceptics will use these mistakes to promote their own ideals but true progress never 'uses the mistakes of others'; true progress is pure and entirely self-supporting and -propagating.

So, when I read that some people believe that "the [evolutionary] makeover isn't big enough or fast enough", and that they are taking matters into their own hands by choosing the genetic makeup of their children, I see evolution still at work. The parent's decisions are based on intelligence and—because parents will likely choose intelligence, creativity or some other similar trait—this intelligence or creativity will be passed on through their decisions to their children who will be even better equipped to take advantage of this—and their own future—environment than were their parents.

Of course, evolution always has a cost but we must look forward to the benefits when these costs manifest themselves. Evolution plays the longest game and it will always win because that is its stable state, to persist, without prejudice.

the.new.boom

ICANN, the organisation responsible for administering top level domain names and coming up with new top level domains (your .coms, .uks, .orgs etc) has pushed the web towards the next step in its evolution.

Since the dawn of the web, domain names have been restricted in that they always had to 'resolve' with a particular suffix. They always had to 'look' the same as everyone else's suffix, .com. Other top level domains (or TLDs for short, the name given to this last part of a domain name) became available; .gov, .edu, .mil and so on but you were still restricted to a selection of arcane abbreviations with which to finish off your domain.

This has just changed. ICANN has just announced that from May next year, you should be able to register pretty much anything you want.

How about www.pizzas.newcastle or www.pubs.scotland for starters? Besides this almost novelty value, expect a whole new web business model as registrars gear themselves up for reselling these domains to the likes of you and I.

I have to say it would be quite cool to have ozosbits.blog or biking.lakedistrict. Or even blog.ozosbits and lakedistrict.biking, for that matter.

Such an impact will these new domains have, I think that we are heading for a much needed rush, a boom in the web the like of which we haven't seen since the 90s when it first literally took the world by storm.

Of course, these new names won't come cheap. Having your very own version of a .com or .uk will cost you in the region of $100,000. So, by the time they are implemented that should be no more than the price of a tank of petrol...

I have some news you may find disturbing...

Ceiling cat doesn't exist!

It's true!

Srsly!

Ceiling cat is a myth they tell you at kitty school to get you to do work. It's not all bad news, though. To turn your back on ceiling cat is to also turn your back on basement cat.

This raises some problems.

How does a cat know right from wrong? What becomes of morality? Is there a purpose to existence?

I believe the answers to these questions are within the self.

Be the journey.

Reciprocation is a choice.

Be excellent to each other...

Then vs. Than

Consider:

"I am taller then you"
vs.
"I am taller than you"

Only one of these sentences is grammatically correct. In case anyone reads this page and decides that the top sentence is the correct one, I'll state it here:

THE TOP SENTENCE IS WRONG.
THE BOTTOM SENTENCE IS CORRECT.

Friends

Even though I've seen most episodes at least three times, I still have to watch it when it's on.

Why? Why is this so?

It's like 25 minutes of audiovisual heroin.

Why are these people so watchable? I wish they were still releasing new ones.

The Illusion of Democracy

If we wanted to change the world, would voting for the next President/Prime Minister/Premier be the way to do it?

I don't think so and I'll tell you why.

All the parties and opposition parties may well have different rationalisations for their policies but the final chapter in the book of politics will be written by the winner, from a position of great power and great wealth, and its title will be 'How to keep the gravy train running without the populace finding out about it.'

It seems that whoever you place in power by exercising your 'democratic right' to vote, they all basically do the same thing.

Remove your finances and freedom, almost imperceptibly, one bit at a time.

It's easy to be cynical, I know, but politics (and not the sham that is the American Presidential Race) does interest me and—a bit like a room with a living person, a dead person and a smoking gun—it's difficult to look at the situation without forming an opinion of it.

While I'm sure that politicians do have a very difficult job, it seems to me that their time must be spent at least as much suppressing the opposition as tending to the health of their societies.

I think Douglas Adams hit a nail (one of many) on the head with his philosophers vs Deep Thought argument. Imagine Deep Thought as democracy to its 'practitioners' and I'll share a moment of this wonderful monologue with you:

"Everyone's going to have their own theories about what answer I'm eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?"

This monologue could apply to a number of institutions. Here, Deep Thought was placating the philosophers, but he could have been speaking to a priest, an economist, a football manager or even a politician.

The illusion is that, no matter who we vote for, they will end up doing everything they can to sustain 'democracy' because it's keeping them rich and the rest of us ignorant.

Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?

I don't really know the answer to that one and I'll diet for a month if Morgan Spurlock ever finds out.

Entertaining it may well be and I might give it a look. I watched Supersize Me and (other than the movie seemingly owing its existence to an argument with his wife about his non-vegetarian diet) it was quite entertaining. I have no doubt that the hunt for bin Laden will be equally entertaining but I feel sure that he would garner more credibility with a Supersize Me 2.

I don't believe the hype of the news and take most of everything I hear with a large pinch of salt. The situation in the middle east is undoubtedly complicated and tense but news reports of action there are beginning to look like movie trailers.

That said, does anyone in this world seriously believe that the American Government are going to give money to the man to cross borders into dangerous territory or that hostile middle eastern regions will grant this enemy of their cause access to their homeland, with the singular purpose of finding out where the man at the centre of it all — Osama bin Laden, probably the most wanted man in the western hemisphere — lives and then just wrapping production and going home without a single shred of evidence or intelligence?

Maybe it's a double bluff.

But I doubt it.

Promotion through Fear

How would you feel if Tesco's started marketing mobile phones by inducing fear into you of what may happen to you if you don't happen to own one?

I think it would be well below par for such an organisation.

Irresponsible. Outrageous. Damaging. Frowned upon. Arguably even downright unethical.

Any such advertising campaign would ensure a downturn in their sales, I'm sure, and deservedly so. No company should ever believe that marketing of that standard is something that — as a society — we should accept.

But don't forget to pay your TV licence.

Or else...

HDR Images

Scotland Sky
Originally uploaded by motophiliac

Getting there on the HDR front. I did write a short while ago about HDR images the easy way with Photoshop and layers. It seems that there is actually an easier way with something called Photomatix but I prefer to do things the complicated, tweakable way.

This is my first blog post from flickr so it may look a little different.