Author: Peter

I’m so tired

For quite a while I’ve read a blog by a certain prominent member of the Mozilla Foundation. As well as discussing Mozilla development it covers several other topics that are of interest to me, including things like space exploration. In the past six months, however, I’ve found that the posts about Mozilla have all fallen into two categories: arrogant, churlish cheerleading (with snide comments about other browsers) and spreading FUD (with a lot more mean-spiritedness). Both are getting really tiresome, and it’s sad to see a high-signal blog self-destruct in an extended series of almost content-free posts. I don’t have a lot of use for propaganda at the best of times, and the degeneration of this individual’s site makes me want to do nothing more than switch to something managed by people with a lot less zombified glaze over their eyes.

Perhaps I’ll just drop the site from my aggregator and see if my attitude changes. I do like using and developing (as much as I can, anyway) for Firefox and Thunderbird, I just can’t stand the noise any longer.

Baton? We don’ need no steenkin’ baton!

Total volume of music files on my computer
Which one? 6.2GB/1248 files on the Mac (and hence my iPod and my Myth box via NFS); 1.3GB/329 files on my workstation; 34GB/5068 files on my other Linux box, for a total of 41.5GB/6645 files. Of those, about 40 are in Ogg Vorbis format.
The last CD I bought
Comic Strip by Serge Gainsbourg
Song playing right now
Physically, none. Singing in my head, Lukey (live) by Great Big Sea.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or mean a lot to me

Only five? Wow, this is tough:

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton

In alphabetical order:

500 articles, 5000 fans

Image showing unread post counts in my weblog subscription list

As I alluded to earlier, this evening I’m catching up on the more than 500 weblog posts that have gone unread in my aggregator. Not all are totally unseen—there are probably forty that I’ve marked unread because I want to follow up on them for one reason or another—but I’m still way, way behind.

Since it’s become a music night, though, I’ll highlight the blog that’s got the most articles flagged for future reference: scottandrew.com: lo-fi acoustic pop superhero! Scott’s always interesting and entertaining, and he makes good music too; count me among his 5000 Fans. (Go read that article too, particularly if you want to help out your favourite musicians.)

Battle-ready

I took some comfort in the knowledge that an artist I greatly admired [Joni Mitchell] thought it worthwhile to do battle with an era of shrill sonic choices that I would characterize as the aural equivalent of being trapped in a Chinese restaurant that boasts of added MSG.

Ah, isn’t it good

While reading through the huge backlog of weblog posts in my aggregator I came across the 80-odd entries I’d left unread in Wil Wheaton’s weblog. (For those following along at home, that’s all the way back to October 2004 and part one of Viva Las Vegas.) Wil likes to use lyrics as post titles, and the eponymous song of December’s first post jumped right into my head when I read it: fixing a hole. Even though that’s three hours ago now, the song’s still fresh in my brain, and I don’t mind a bit.

It will hardly be unexpected to learn that I’m a Beatles fan. Strangely, though, I don’t own a single one of their records, which also explains the dearth of Fab Four in my MP3/Vorbis collection. (I still can’t decide if the resulting lack of Apple Records content on my Apple iPod is ironic or not.) What I do have, though, is a lot of covers of and homages to their songs, including George Martin’s celebritized In My Life, Eric Idle’s great mockumentary The Rutles (in: All You Need Is Cash) (and its inferior sequel The Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch) and Peter Sellers’ readings of A Hard Day’s Night, Can’t Buy Me Love, Help! and all four versions of She Loves You, to say nothing of the references in songs like Lenni Jabour’s Closet. This winter I also had the pleasure of seeing a note for note, cut for cut version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in Windsor, which had the added bonus of featuring one Alex McMaster playing cello. A Day in the Life live? Wild.

Which all leads to Tim Bray’s recent disturbing sentiment:

Which Sixties band is more important: the Beatles, Cream, or Black Sabbath? The answer: Black Sabbath. Go anywhere and visit the rock & roll bars or scan the FM dial, and you’ll hear a lot of music that sounds like Sabbath. There’s nobody working these days that sounds much like Cream or the Beatles.

It’s sad but true, and it’s why I try to seek out and support great, unique musicians: Lenni, Allison, Brenda, Bruce Cockburn, David Byrne, Dayna, Emm (who, ironically, has covered Crazy Train), John, everyone else mentioned here, and all the others who don’t get the exposure and attention they deserve.

I have a bad feeling about this

Perhaps I’ve forgotten just how bad Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2 were, but for my money Revenge of the Sith is the worst of them all. Wooden acting, incredibly terrible dialog (even for a Star Wars movie), inexplicable plot events (it’s impossible to refer to them as developments)… they’re all there, in spades. For me, one line sums the whole second trilogy up: How does this keep on happening? We’re smarter than this!

Weird 304s

WordPress seems to be returning 304 Not Modified for my feeds even when it should be sending the content. Weird.

It seems to have something to do with not having posted for several days. It’s not really WordPress bug 1275, since after creating this post the feeds work again, but that’s the closest I’ve found so far. (And by the way, requiring cookies just to do searches sucks.)