Monthly Archives: March 2007

Sound words

3

Two nights ago I find that the mac won’t see my Creative Zen. A google later and I have installed XNJB which had me grinning at the monitor because of just how damn great it is.

A couple of hours ago I open iTunes (which I am/was checking out) and find it has duplicated lots of tracks. All by itself. Easy, find Duplicate Tracks and remove them to trash. Why to Trash? Why not – after all, it’s Apple’s code, it just has to be good right? … and then I find half the music is missing – it’s in the trash. Way to go there Apple! Go to trash and find that unlike Windows you can’t ‘Restore’. Oh no. Manual drap/drop back to where it came from. Think I’m ever going to do that again? Not a chance in hell. iTunes can keep the hell away from my music files. This is yet another reason why I hate iTunes. That and having to give credit card details if ALL you want to do is download an album cover. You need to open a whole new account JUST if you want to see artwork.

Songbird is it.

XNJB is really really good though.

To OEM or not?

3

This may appear dumb, but I don’t know.

I need to buy Windows XP. Amazon have XP Home SP2 OEM for £63 and they also have XP Home SP2 for £159. It doesn’t take a genius to work out my next question…… can I buy the OEM for use on the Mac ? If not, why not? I like the idea of a big saving and 63 quid isn’t so bad. A hundred more is.

(And if it’s OEM and intended for builders, can I do a reinstall on another machine?)

Blurred feet

3

The passage of time has dulled my appetite for the rowing machine (plus my technique is shot) so I’m spending lots more time on the x-trainer. Which is okay – I can watch TV. It was Diagnosis Murder the other day. Gripping stuff. Today though the gadget I plug the phones into was broken, the new music in the zen hadn’t transferred well so I had no distractions. Bad. Until this lad came in.
A genuine chav. Off-white long shorts, England top, burberry checked baseball cap, expression like a bulldog chewing a wasp. He wanders around the machines for a bit then perches on a bike. He then proceeds to sit upright and pedal with no obvious resistance. His feet were a positive blur. He is sat still, arms folded, looking at everything going on in the gym behind him (the bikes are at the front under the TV’s with the mirrors in front of them) and if you saw him from the waist up you would have no idea he was exercising. You know the Road Runner cartoon? Where the feet are a blur but everything else is clear and crisp? It was like that. Apart from the sweating. Naturally the guy is sweating. Nothing unusual in that. He finishes his ‘ride’, his feet appear and he wanders off around the machines again. Still sweating. He left some minutes later and despite the sweating and the heat he hadn’t even touched the baseball cap. It remained firmly in place. Chav and Proud.

(The thing with his feet whirring round.. I can’t be the only person who sees others on real bikes who are going along a flat road in 1st gear. Their feet are spinning like mad things while they barely move forward. There is no economy of energy there – none. Why do they do that? Can’t they find the gears? If they drive do they never leave 1st gear? How do they cope on hills? Weird.)

Buying books.

2

Bought:
De Niro: A Biography – John Baxter
Just needs to be read really..
Blood and Sand – Frank Gardner
I like his reports and articles so this should be good.
Hunter – E.Jean Carroll
I want to know more about the man behind so much.
The Revenge of Gaia – James Lovelock
I believe this more than most things.
Cell – Stephen King
First SK book I’ve read for years. Let’s see if he’s got that touch back which made The Stand one of the best books ever written.

I wanted a bio of Al Pacino but they only had the one paperback. All the images were clustered in the centre of the book and someone had opened the book wide, damaging the spine. So that’s a no-no. Books have to be perfect. It’s my job to wear my books in.

Make them take a test

6

6,891 CAUGHT USING PHONE AT WHEEL (the Daily Express do like their CAPITALS) (are they the british aol of the print world?) and the idiot drivers get a £60 fine and 3 penalty points. Well whoop-de-bloody-do. Don’t fine them. That’s pointless. Just take their license off them and tell them they can’t have it back until they have re-taken and passed the full driving test – that’s theory as well.
I don’t expect a single driver to agree but then every driver is safe – it’s the other clowns who are the unsafe ones isn’t it? Points and fines don’t matter. They might accrue but for plain idiocy they don’t work. Pull the driver over, tell them to get out and tell them to phone a friend to come get them because you just revoked their license with immediate effect. Do that to a few people and then things might be listened to. All or Nothing. There is no middle ground – not when people are killing others because they were on the damn phone.

Spam stats

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I was using dr Dave’s excellent Spam Karma 2 before I used Akismet and for varying reasons I have activated and deactivated it.
Today it passed a milestone for this blog:

Akismet has done pretty well too.

(except the 2 million bit. I added that in the db. Because it was there really….)

Rowan Williams. Inane.

Reply

A child kicks a football which flies into a neighbour’s greenhouse. The neighbour demands that the damage be paid for. “But” says the child, “How can any money I pay possibly repair the damage I did to that piece of glass? How can my money put it back together as it was? How can it compensate for the damage the falling glass did? How can it make your feelings of anger at me for doing that damage go away? In fact there may be no reason to even give you any money for the damage I did.”

The Church of England is considering whether it should pay reparations for its role in the slave trade ……. “While it sounds simple to say all right so we should pass on the reparation that was received [when the slaves were freed], exactly to whom?” “Exactly where does it go? And exactly how does it differ from the various ways in which we try to interact now with the effects of that in terms of aid and development and so forth?

The Church of England did what it did in the name of their god. No doubt they saw it as their mission to educate the slaves in The Way Of The Lord and in doing this “Anglicans needed to acknowledge that they belonged to an institution partly shaped “by terrible things that our forbears did“. And yet IF they give money I have not the slightest doubt it will be to ‘educate’ more people in The Way Of The Lord. So it moves from slavery to economic measures.
This is better?

Inane.