this girl drives a tank

The people over at oddmusic.com have compliled a list of some really cool, offbeat, and just flat out weird musical instruments. Such as the Harpsichord made of over 100,000 LEGO's, or the Pikasso, a guitar with four necks, two sound holes, and forty-two strings.

Most of the instruments have a small mp3 file you can listen to also.

PopMatters.com has a list of the top 100 songs since 1977 Why 1977? Well it says on the site: "The best songs since Johnny Rotten roared" As far as I can tell, Johnny Rotten declared pop music dead around that time? Im not sure, also, the list has some dubious entries, but thats expected I guess. What sets it apart from other "lists" I believe, is that each entry gets a pretty decent write up as to why it is included, for example #10 is a Smith's song, "How Soon is Now"

As the brain trust for Manchester mopesters the Smiths, Steven Patrick Morrissey and Johnny Marr wrote a lot of great singles and, admit it, quite a bit of wank (Four words: "Death at One's Elbow"). But when it comes to finding the definitive moment in their tragically brief career, few will look past the splendorous six minutes and 43 seconds that is "How Soon Is Now?" And it can all be boiled down to one thing: That Riff. Like "Kashmir", "I Can't Get No Satisfaction", "A Hard Day's Night", or "Layla", the chugging, chorus-laden guitar riff that opens "How Soon Is Now?" is an instantly recognizable, indisputable classic. What makes the song all the more astounding is that seven seconds after That Riff, there is The Other Riff, where Marr lets rip with a bit that sounds like a police car rushing by, accounting for the Doppler Effect and everything. And then there's Morrissey's lyrics, whose melody works in complete odds with the song yet complements it perfectly: "I am the son and the heir, of a shyness that is criminally vulgar / And the son and the heir of nothing in particular". It's a typical Morrissey moment -- he's awkward, broke and worthless -- but when the chorus comes, he steps up with the first ounce of nerve he's ever shown and righteously declares, "I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does". An unlikely rallying cry, yes, but it is in such moments that music history is written. For six and a half minutes, at least, the meek do indeed inherit the earth. -- David Medsker

How can you argue with that? ;-) anyhow here is the list Oh, if you happen to be a Smith's fan or your just curious, here is How Soon is Now.

I started a new book this week, John Fante's Ask The Dusk. This book was first published in 1939, and details the life of "Arturo Bandini", Fante's alter ego, a struggling young writer finding himself in Los Angeles in the 1930's.

Charles Bukowski says in the preface:

" Yes, Fante had a mighty effect upon me. Not long after reading these books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her,Don't call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini! "

Very much like Bukowski, Fante has a simple, rolling style, there is nothing "hard" to read about his books, and the reader can sit back with a smile, without the burden of "heavy thinking" required in so much of the literature produced in that time. Unlike Bukowski, his world isnt quite as seedy & drunken, but for me as equally entertaining. Here is a little snippet:

In the street the little Japanese kids were having a big football game. One of them was a pretty good passer. I turned my back to the sea and watched the game. "Watch the sea," Camilla said. "You're supposed to admire beautiful things, you writer." "He throws a beautiful pass," I said.

Anyway, if you are ever in the need of read that places no demands on you, but will leave you smiling for days, then Fante is the author you should look for. Amazon search results

I am officially back to work at my old job as of this Tuesday coming up, I guess with the uncertianty around perhaps having to move again,along with my part time job on shakey ground, I just feel I need something somewhat steady in the meantime. It's really not that bad of a job, with two exceptions, It can be stressfull at times, which we all could do with out, and I am no fan of "office clothes" , I mean, why should I have to dress all "professional" looking just to sit at a desk and be unconfortable? I am not asking to wear sweatpants and a t-shirt, but somewhere in between theres got to be a comfy middleground. Its the same for guy's too I suppose, I'd hate to have to wear that silly neck-tie, what exactly is the purpose of the neck-tie anyhow? Anyways...back to the 9-5 rat race for me ;-)

Bz pet peeve: I'd like to set the "time" in bz to "sunny" and have it never change, I have trouble seeing the other tanks if its like "dusk" or whatever and it takes me ages to find the perfect setting, why cant this setting stick, so the next time I play, its perfect for me again?

Once again some more cool software solves a problem for me, Xmms-shell is little command line tool you run along side xmmms, you can then control the player from any terminal. This is useful if say you have multiple workspaces, and dont want to change desktops to forward a song in the playlist, or your player is on another computer you can ssh in from anywhere. For me though, I can now play bz, with my playlist loaded, login from my laptop (I have a laptop on my desk next to my Desktop PC) and while I am playing very quickly adjust the volume, skip to the next, previous, load another playlist etc..without leaving the game.

I suppose you could argue, why not put only good songs in a playlist instead of that crappy music you listen to??

Well, firstly, I dont listen to crappy music, thats your department. And secondly, I find in a match, I might suddenly need some extra volume to get that flag home, or perhaps skip to the next song which is a tad more aggressive, increasing my adrenaline which helps me kill you.

finally though, I think its a geeky way to play my music, and thats a good thing right?

I am still no closer to knowing if I will continue to live and work where I am now. My roomates are thinking of buying a house, which would leave me the option of staying here and finding another roomate, or possibly living with them. I could even get a place alone again, but that would be more expensive and require a job making at least what I did in my old office job, which by the way is still there if I want, I talked to my old boss and it wouldnt be a problem, its just that it feels like a step back to me if I do that. Good old life eh? Nothing is ever certian I guess, at least not in area's such as work...Both my parents had the same job for like 30 years! Do people do that anymore?! for me, in my short life, Ive learned only one truth:

Chocolate=Happiness

Oh, Quol has his website set up now, it will be a sort of info site for his servers and a place for mapmakers to test their new maps. I think what would be neat is if you design a map, you could have an account at his site, upload your map, and then have a page that you could add shot counts flags, and all that stuff, and start a test server with your new map for like a half hour game. Anyway's the site is here.

Also, bz related, last week DMP's duration ladder showed CraXy Mouse logging in 60 hours and 44 minutes of bzflag!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my, I used to feel guilty about the time I spent playing, not anymore :-)

I have always thought that the lyrics in music are as important as the music itself. The sad part really is many great songs seem to have lyrics added as an afterthought, perhaps it is too hard to write both good music and good poetry in one fell swoop. But if you look at most succesfull artists, the lyrics of their songs, if not poetic, get the message accross effectively. Sometimes you find a guy like Jeff Buckley who can do both, and with such grace it leaves me all goose-bumpy just listening to him.

Here is two of my favorites....note that although Hallelujah is performed by Jeff Buckley, it was written by Leonard Cohen, another great "writer/musician" Give these a listen too if you havent already..

Hallelujah

Lover, You Should've Come Over

Next time, I will link up a couple of songs that I dance around to when I'm vacuming the living room ;-)

Just a quick note on comments...at the moment we have disabled the comment "counter". This is the little (1) or (3) or whatever you see on most blog sites. The reason is that counting severely slows the site down, page loads are incredibly slow and that really outweighs any benifit of having comments in the first place. It has something to do with the counter having to read every comment file before loading the page. Personally I'd like the comments to be viewable on the main page so that you could comment quickly. It looks like our tireless nanoblogger author is already working on a solution to this. Take a look at his setup

I generally accept change in life quite readily, It part of life right? But today I learned not only might I need a new job, but also a new home, this isnt thrilling news for me and I spent most of today sulking, calling my freinds and trying to weasal some sympathy. What bothers me is I have been here only 6 months, the location couldnt be better, not only for shopping and stuff but nightlife and freinds too, so its all up in the air right now and "up in the air" isnt how I like to live.

I have set up a nice little perl stats package for irc channels, it basically uses log files collected from a channel bot or client and then presents a nifty set of statistics in html format. Most of the info is quite useless but fun now and again to look at. All i have to do is use screen and irssi with logging enabled, i park a client in #bzflag, and then run the script as often as I via cron to update the channel stats. Once its set up it is pretty much hands off. You can have a look at the page here.

The software itself is called Pisg and you can get that here.

We spent the day painting the computer room/office, I dont normally like doing that kind of stuff but you do get to wear the old ripped jeans and make a big mess, it looks pretty good actually, even though I consider it cramped. (7 computers between 3 people) I'd guess though that most real geeks have at least 7 computers each! So we're not that bad yet. :-)

Sometimes the web just makes me mad, I was thinking about all this kazza stuff in the post-napster era, the RIAA and all of that, so, it sort of a mess. I thought maybe it is time to purchase a subscription and download whatever I like each month, a quick google turns up a ton of sites in cluding this one:

I couldn't belive it! What is the logic behind this? We don't like Mac or Linux? Artists Against FreeBSD? MSRIAA? Sadly I have no clue WHY I need Windows and IE, as they wont even bother to tell me, just go away, we dont want your money I guess.

Then after all this SCO vs Linux stuff I went to www.infoworld.com to read up on the latest and was presented with a flash ad nestled almost entirely within the article. The screen shot show's sprint, but this morning it was for Sun Microsystems.

I understand the need to advertise, but this is a bit much, have your friend hold a magizine next to your television, then put on a dvd movie and try to read the magazine. I don't think a static picture is effective as an Ad if it is intrusive, let alone a flash movie. Can someone please show me a link to a useful and informative implementation of Flash?

Sadly my roomate caved in and is back using Windows. I looked at his PC recently,He has somehow managed to install most of his software into my doucuments and while looking for a music demo he made, I noticed almost all of his files are saved as Untitled1, Untitled2 etc, etc, all stored of course in NewFolder12

It's ok if I rant sometimes isn't it?

Ive been playing around with a new look for this site for a while now, although there was nothing really wrong with the old design, in fact it was very nice, it just was a bit too "girly and cute" for me, if thats possible, secondly, I tend to like things clean and streamlined, which is why for example I use fluxbox as a window manager, so hoplefully the site looks neater now, thirdly, it's my site and I can do what I like ;-)

The picture is from an ice fishing trip with Dad and Bro, I hated the entire day, frozen and bored, but Dad thought it was great that I "took an intrest" The sky was big, dark and angry looking, exactly how I felt at the time. You can see the original pic here.

Also thanks to JeffM we have comments, so click the little linky to post some feedback if your in the mood.

The comment pages need tweaking to make them the same style as the main page, thats a project for another day. Also I might even lose all the links, maybe make them dropdown or something. I suppose I should add an "about me" section, but that again can wait.

Its a shame the newbie bashing still happens, especially after the issue being raised in the forum recently, last night I played for a little and joined just in time to see a newbie with a -30ish score being told by one of the top 10 players in the league, that basically he didnt have a clue, the newb then left. I suppose I shouldnt let it bother me, the newb probably didnt care, who knows. Its just that I cant remember ever getting yelled at for simply being new to the game. On a nicer note, Virtual Darkness is improving and he/she is alway so nice to talk to. I need a callsign shortcut though, when he/she joins I dont like saying "hey VD" so its been Virtual so far untill I come up with a better one.

Lou Diamond didnt dissapoint... the movie ends (remember he was an oil driller) with Lou hanging by his arms off a steel grate, legs dangling in the water, calling to the shark, above him in the boats bridge, his buddy has started up the huge oil drill, as the shark leaps up into the air to eat Lou, they relase the drill, Lou jumps outta the way and the drill plunges down the sharks throat, killing him! classic.

I'm sorry if your a LDP fan, but the shark was the best actor in that movie.

Chestal sent me a link to this little online Quiz Some of the questions are very interesting and others can be quite difficult to answer, it is about 60 questions long and will give you some overall idea if your Liberal/Conservative/Left/Right/Extremist whatever. As a bonus there are some sex questions at the end ;-)

Here are my scores: Economic Left/Right: -5.75, Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.31 which basicaly makes me a left-wing libertarian, sorta like Ghandi but without the flip-flops.

On Tv tonight, 8pm a nice little made-for-tv movie with Lou diamond Phillips called Red Water, Its showing on TBS Superstation, so there is little doubt as to its credibility...here's the plot

In Red Water, Phillips and Swanson play a divorced couple who find themselves working together as they search for a natural gas source in a Louisiana river. Their plans are derailed, however, when their boat is hijacked by a pair of criminals (Coolio and Unforgiven's Jaimz Woolvett) searching for stolen money dropped in the river. Making recovery of the money even more difficult is the arrival of a carnivorous shark bent on attacking anything that enters the water.

Red Water premieres Sunday, August 17, at 8pm 7c/p on TBS Superstation.

Lou, you rock my world.

First..Happy Birthday to Jolly!!! I havent seen her all week, but I hope to today, If not, here is a virtual smooch :*

So, no lights, no electricity from 4pm yesterday untill I'd guess 2am this morning..a minor inconvenience really when you think about it. The biggest worry is "how long will it be out" If we had all known only for that evening then it wouldnt have been so bad...but of course people were telling me "they say its going to be for 2-3 weeks" and of course I always belive that kind of stuff and went into "oh my god" mode.

I ended up reading most of the early evening and then we went to a freinds house and there was this huge street party going on all night! Everybody generally agreed that they would use the "my alarm clock didn't go off" excuse to miss work the next day.

The Americans now say it was the power company in Canada at fault, and of course our power company says the US was to blame. I'm going to blame the Americans on this one. when in doubt....blame the USA.

I should add three more actors to my good list, coincidently they all appeared in on of my all time favorite, weird, offbeat, stunnig and delicious movies, Paul Anderson's Magnolia

Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H Macey and Julianne Moore. Even Tom Cruise played his role well in that movie and suprised me. Some interesting secrets about Magnolia can be found on the writers website

Yesterday I bummped into my ultra-hip irc-girlie-pal Bunny!!!!!! I hadn't been hanging out in #hurd-bunny lately but intend to a little more.

     I feel that if I am going to list actors that I dislike, I should at least meantion some of the ones that I do like....and there are plenty...too many to list really but some of my personal favorites are, in no particular order..:

• Matthew Broderick
• Gary Oldman
• Benicio Del Toro (I love this guy!!)
• Laura Linney
• Kevin Spacey
• Molly Parker
• Steve Buscemi
• John Tutturo
• Jeff Bridges
• Holly Hunter
• Robert DeNiro
• Chris Penn
• Jennifer Jason Leigh
• Christopher Walken

This is of course by no means complete, It is just a sprinkling of my fave's.

I dont mind watching "blockbuster-eye-candy" movies with the "beautiful ones" inthem, like Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts....but really, Id take Benicio over Brad any day, in both acting ability and "hunky-factor" This probably puts me in the minority but what can I say? ;-)

"On The Bubble" actors I consider the ones that have made awesome movies in the past but seem to make increasingly lame movies as they go on...Kevin Costner for example...I did like Dances With Wolves and he was awesome in Untouchables and JFK, but its hard to toss him on the crappy list despite some of his recent efforts...Kiefer Sutherland also falls into this category.

I am working on finding a way for you the dear reader to add comments..this does not look possible without PHP or cgi or something like that...the search continues...

Not alot to add today...I was talking to a couple of BZ'ers lately about the problem with this rash of childish behaviour and stupid arguments that seem to plague the game lately..Its been suggested to run private servers, sort of invite only, but you could set up a page to list it, so that players would know "freinds" were online..

On the surface I like this idea.. It might however only fragment the game and theres always the possibility of some "non" invited player finding out about "hidden" games and flipping out. I dunno, I just wish it was like when I first started CTF, everyone was nice and the casual games on ducati were intense but with such a friendly atmosphere.

Oh...nobody told me that scp could also copy files FROM a remote server to your local machine!! This is very cool, I was always under the impression it was to copy from A to B. Wonders never cease with my little Penguin freind.

I found a pretty good blog book add-on and with much help from JeffM managed to get this thing to work, I currently show only the books I am reading at this time, I really dont know if you'd like to see a list of all the books I have read, or even If I'd like to show you that list :-)

Anyway...it will stay in the side bar for now...and you can click on the little All Consuming link to learn more.

     My computers were off most of the week for a couple of reasons. This absence from all things online wasnt planned but did prove to me that there is life beyond the internet :-) So, I can tell you first hand, there is hope for you yet!

Upon returning I wade through spam, silly joke emails, real emails and more spam and of course the bzbb forum. The "suicide" thread I did find interesting to read. It puzzles me that exploiting a "loophole" in the game could be veiwed as "cheap" or "lame" especially when considering the fact that this "loophole" is at best, marginally successful. Also this thread has pretty much summed up my feelings on the state of the game lately. I still see silly bickering and have for the most part learned to ignore it all and not get involved. Playing with an alias and silencing everyone isnt the solution though. All that does is make for productive but lonely game.

Here are a couple of links of just flat out odd stuff...........

This site is by two guys that find people on the street and try to blend in by making themselves look similar...

Here is a freaky eyball site.

This site matches you to web pages based on how your feeling. Great for moody people like me ;-)

And finally Peter Pan's homepage I really dont know what to think on this one, is this a joke? or is this guy for real? Email me if you know whats up with this guy.

Added some new actors to the list, courtesy of JeffM. (I haven't seen Revenge of the nerds, but I will take your word for it.)

    Last week the Stones and AC/DC invaded Toronto, next week the Borg will arrive. Do you remember Steve Mann? He developed the wearable computer and will be in Toronto Aug 14 for some sort of freaky demonstration complete with a French cyberspace philosopher and a virtual reality artist.

And if thats not enough for ya, on Aug 15, REGEN will be coming. In case youve forgotten, REGEN is Regenerative Brainwave Music. This actually looks intersting Perhaps not enough for me to attend,but you never know ;-)

"REGEN3 will present the latest developments in EEG brainwave music research, by presenting an ensemble comprised of Toronto jazz musicians playing music which is driven and altered by the brainwaves of the audience. Audience members can become part of an advanced mass EEG system which uses audience brainwaves to control both the music and lighting environment: a truly 'smart' building. Join us and see what happens when the mood of the environment is "regenerated" by the collective consciousness of the attendees."

You can learn more here

Ok...heres a joke to finish up:

Two muffins are sitting in the oven the fist muffin looks over at the other one and says "man its hot in here" The second muffin says "Whoah! a talking muffin!"

hehe..

I decided to download the development version of The Gimp today after noticing it was in Debian's package list. Im by no means a grapic artist, in fact I am horrible at it, but when I do need some sort of image editor its the Gimp that I use.

The first obvious improvement is to the user interface which I often hear people complain about. Most dialog boxes can be attached below the main toolbox in a tabbed layout. This is really handy and improvement I think over the floating window layout of previous versions. You can see a list of new features and more info here.

We lost a match today against the Evil Zee Brothers :-) tea|tree really played well and was hard to beat. Oh well..next time...

Oh yeah, my eight-ball game is really shaping up! Having a pool table downstairs is kinda cool. Im reminded of rico shots in bz when I play pool :)

    My roomate decides he wants to try Linux, he's never used it, not even for five minutes..mostly he uses the computer for music. He does alot of stuff with loop editors, wave editors and soft-synths..using Acid Pro,CuBase and Soundforge and various other programs. So he sees some of the linix audio software that is now available, and asks me to install linux for him. What I didnt realize at the out set is that most distro's will use OSS as a default audio enviroment. For the things he intends to do, ALSA is what he needs. From fooling around with vmware, I happened to have a copy of RH 9, I installed that for him...this didnt take long and everything went ok, I decided even though I knew little about RH, it would be easy for him to use..problem was, he kept asking me to do things that I knew how to do in Debian, but had to go look up to figure out how to do them in RH. This got tiresome and followed by some rpm dependancy errors, I decided to install Debian. Now the fun part. Everyting installs fine, but the there are no alsa modules for the kernel I installed....then I find out about Agnula A special distro in RH or Debian flavor's with a custom kernel and all the Alsa goodies, so because of my miserable track record compiling kernels, I decided to reinstall using Agnula. Again, all was good, it installs pretty much like any debian distro. I was all happy, one last task, install the Nvidia drivers and he'd be all set. Well, the nvidia drivers require the Kernel sources...this distro has a custom kernel and you guessed it, I cant get the sources for it! I googled and asked on IRC but got no where. I noticed a SuSE logo on the Alsa website, apparently SuSE have backed this project from day one, so I used to use SuSE and still have 8.0 here, I installed this tonight and all is good again, He has an Alsa enabled distro, one that I'm familiar with, and he has the nvidia drivers installed. What bothers me is that I'm incapable of compiling a kernel, I know how to do it, but every time I do it I miss the option to enable DHCP, and get no networking. This is depressing....so im stuffing my self with chocolates to compensate. The big thing with Alsa is that you can use a program called Jack to connect any Jack aware program to another. So basically, you download a drum machine and download a synth, hook them up to Jack and the output of both can be then fed into something like Ardour It all pretty cool actually, but all stuff I never knew existed, and had to learn about.

I hope he he sticks with Linux as the audio software available now is really good quality, and I belive the 2.5 kernel will support Alsa so things will be much simpler in the future. I am tired of thinking! Im going to blow up some tanks.............