Via pesky33.

The Music Intelligence Quiz

Your final score was 132/180

Mix-Tape Master (109-144 points)

You are a music evangelist: the person in your network of friends who always has the coolest new song, the one whose iPod gets picked to DJ every party. You understand the art of the segue, how the key to the best mix-tape isn’t just the songs you pick, but how they interlock with each other. You also know who the up-and-coming acts are and are quick to recognise where their influences lie and whether they will make it big. You work hard at the pursuit of this knowledge, scouring music blogs, magazines and record stores. Most importantly, you are generous with your passion – and your friends should be very, very grateful. Still, it’s always good to get new inspiration for your latest mix

Or… I’m just good at trivia.

Very True Mood: mellow

This blog now has a theme tune courtesy of Brother Typewriter of the Burning Lodge.

Very True Things is a tribute to my friend Steve’s blog of the same name. The idea was to have a 16-note sequence running throughout the whole song and then play different stuff against that - which sort of worked, I think. Actually it was more to do with the fact that I couldn’t be bothered to write any more complex sequence in Moog Modular V. I am VLT - Very Lazy Thing.)

Thank you Howie, I think…

Just watched the first episode of Ashes to Ashes. Fun, in a slightly different way to Life on Mars and not sure whether it’s quite as good.

The fact that it doesn’t just replicate the previous serious but is taking the climax of that as a starting point is refreshing; it means that this time around the historical inaccuracies can be more openly incorporated into the storyline and played with. This may nominally be 1981 but it’s really an amalgam of all of Alex’s memories, accurate or otherwise, of the 1980s in general. For example, whilst I wouldn’t rule out the yuppie banker drug dealer he does seem to belong to a slightly later part of the decade, and more concretely - all those posters for Prince Charming? It was released six months after this episode was set.

And Gene Hunt is back.

Very True Mood: contemplative

Via miss_newham

1. Go to the Wikipedia home page and click random article. That is your band’s name.
2. Click random article again; that is your album name.
3. Click random article 15 more times; those are the tracks on your album.

My band is called Administrative Template and our album is List of QI episodes.

• Zoe Newman
• La Parra de las Vegas
• Steroid Maximus
• List of schools in Wales
• Your Possible Pasts
• USS Boston (1799)
• Canton of Excideuil
• Follow Me
• De Tomaso Mangusta
• Dimissorial Letters
• Jennifer Jayne
• Maintal
• Hermann Haken
• Thameslink (train operating company)
• Parc Abbey Bible

Very True Mood: confused

Saw The Lord of the Rings musical courtesy of work and the producers. It’s not really fair to call it a musical as it barely contains more songs than the books do, though the fight scenes are superbly choreographed to music. The producers prefer the term ’spectacle’ and it fits that label very well. The design element is superb - Black Riders, Ents, Shelob, the Balrog are all achieved on stage in innovative but effective ways that you probably wouldn’t imagine. The use of crutches and prosthetics to distinguish the orcs may not be very politically correct but it does convey the twisted and deformed nature of their creation.

It’s quite long but still has to compress the story somewhat. The first act follows the first book reasonably closely (no Tom Bombardil, though he does get namechecked at the end, no Barrow Wights, no Glorfindel, and the Nazgul attacks on the Prancing Pony and Weathertop are combined), but after the interval things start to diverge rather more. I was starting to get suspicious when Boromir kept on talking about “The Kingdom of Men” rather than Gondor and it turned out that they had indeed combined Rohan and Gondor - and hence Theoden and Denethor, and Helm’s Deep and Pelennor Fields. Whilst this moved the plot along quite quickly it removed some of the subtlety from the story and a lot of “fan favourite” characters and scenes - no Eomer, no Eowyn, no Faramir, no Palantír, no Wormtongue, no Paths of the Dead, no Witch King. On the plus side they do, briefly, include the Scouring of the Shire.

The performances ranged from the very good to the very camp but even Malcolm Storry as an excellent Gandalf suffers somewhat in comparison with Ian McKellan in the films. In fact the hardest thing to keep in mind when reviewing or just watching the stage version is that it’s an independent adaptation of the book not the film. It aims for a very different feel - more mythic, more rooted in fairy tales, rather than the “realistic” fantasy of the films. In this sense it’s perhaps a little truer to the spirit of Tolkein even if it taks much bigger liberties with his story.

So I’ve managed to have two weeks off work and not make a single blog post. Okay I was out of the country and off the www for three days but still, it’s shocking.

Have I turned into one of those bloggers who only posts to talk about how they’re not posting? Oh dear.

Things I’d like to write

• A collection of the things I discovered during the site redesign project - mostly new (to me) IE bugs and Ajax gotchas and XSLT moans. This is started and every so often I open up the draft and a stare at it a bit.
• The tutorial on HTML tables in the CSS age that I mentioned mumble months back.
• All about my holidays - Lettice and I have managed long weekends in Dublin, Dover (don’t mock, the castle is amazing) and Amsterdam (see below) this summer but I’ve hardly said a word about what we got up to.
• My continuing investigation of social networking sites. I’ve reviewed Bebo and Friendster and have Orkut, Yahoo 360 and probably a few others to come. (I’m not doing MySpace and FaceBook beacuse I was already members there and it wouldn’t be a like-for-like comparison). Also something about Rapleaf/Upscoop.
• Um ….
• … the rest of this list…

Some quickies

The world cup starts today. Wales don’t really stand a chance. Fingers crossed that they don’t fuck up the group matches and finish second behind Australia. Then it’s England or more likely South Africa and that’s probably that.

I’m not sure about the new White Stripes album.

I fixed the broken shower. This makes me feel all manly and capable and productive.

Amsterdam has a ridiculous number of shoe shops - be aware of this fact if you plan to take your wife or girlfriend there. Also, as everyone speaks English there are a number of English language bookshops and even the Dutch ones have English sections, and apart from Waterstones (which presumably is supplied and priced like a UK branch) the prices are good.

Speaking of books, I attended the launch for Stuffed and Starved by my old university mate Raj.

A war between an authoritarian government and a set of independent planets. The central government wins. Our heroes were amongst the fighters on the independent side. Meanwhile a remote planet is devastated by a chemical that causes the population to become wildly violent. Not actually a summary of the background to Serenity but actually the background to the old roleplaying game Living Steel that I picked up from eBay recently.

Oh, I’m flogging some stuff on eBay. Only Star Wars miniatures at the moment but I hope to list a few books and vids plus some other miniatures over the weekend.

Very True Mood: pensive

I saw this Build Your Own Stonehenge kit in the shop yesterday. A miniature Stonehenge. How Spinal Tap is that?

And on Amazon: “20 used & new available” … does anyone want a second hand Stonehenge?

ObWargames: Not sure of the scale but I suppose it would work quite well with 6mm or smaller figures. Or with a 28mm rock band…

Very True Mood: amused

linniekin tagged me to tell you my top 10 songs of all time. Here goes, complete with very naughty links for a few of them.

1. And I Think Of You - E Penso A Te - Tanita Tikaram
   Slightly odd that from my favouritre singer songwriter I pick a song she didn’t write herself.
2. Antmusic - Adam & The Ants
3. Born Depressed - Drill Queen
   Playing this Thursday, I may try to be there depending on this and that.
4. Ever Fallen In Love? - Buzzcocks
5. Londinium - Catatonia
   Considering my current job, this is a slightly subversive choice, especially when played with Storm The Palace.
6. Mis-Shapes - Pulp
7. Misterioso - Thelonious Monk
8. My Baby Loves A Bunch Of Authors - Moxy Früvous
9. Seed Song - Cerys Matthews
   Yes, it’s twee but it’s my favourite song of last year.
10. Tweeter and the Monkey Man - The Traveling Wilburys
    A top ten consisting entirely of Wilburys tracks was a serious possibility.

Post a comment with “top ten” or “top five” and I’ll give you a subject to base your list around.

Very True Mood: chipper

My iPod’s dead. And guess what? It’s about fourteen months old and so just out of warranty. Fucking typical.

[Update] - For the curious, here’s what’s wrong.

• The screen faintly displays the diagnostic tests menu but the backlight is off
• It doesn’t respond to any of the controls
• When connecting it to the computer, it isn’t detected by either iTunes or even Windows. So I can’t try a reinstall.
• When plugging it into the wall charger the display doesn’t change to indicate that any charging is taking place

I didn’t have time before work this morning to do any further tests, but it doesn’t look good.

Very True Mood: angry

On Saturday I bought a song from iTunes by Drill Queen, one of whose members I know in real life.

On Monday a package from Amazon arrived for me, I didn’t remember ordering anything but thought that I might have done when I set up work as a delivery address (Amazon’s courier company is totally incapable of delivering to home). Today I checked the delivery note and discovered that someone else had bought it for me off my wishlist.

I didn’t recognise the name and so checked my Gmail archive to see if it was anyone who had ever spoken to me. It was, a little while ago he had sent me this e-mail:

Hi there, you responded to one of my messages on Usenet, full details here.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets/msg/…

I was wondering if you could please remove it from Google’s archives (you can do this by creating a Google Groups Account, looging in, finding the message and pressing remove).

I’m just not keen on having that URL on the Internet now that it’s used for something different.

Thank in advance,

Used for something different means not used for an escort site anymore. (I’d answered a technical question about the site coding not anything related to the content.) Anyway, today I sent back the message

Bribery worked.

Nice to know that after all these years of giving free advice on Usenet I’m finally getting some reward.

Very True Mood: pensive