>Sure beats Weight Watchers..

Posted on 9 February, 2009 by jb

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>Rigor mortis in turdis…

Posted on 7 February, 2009 by jb

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Or:

Gravity ate my hard drive.

It wasn’t from a great height and I don’t think it even hit the ground, but the rapid deceleration

a) buggered the drive spindle
b) severely stuffed the surface of the disk
c) probably shagged some sectors
d) undoubtedly bollocked the file structure

€2000 to fix (or rather try to retrieve what’s retrievable.)

No big deal.

Just 180GB of hand-chosen music.

So we start from scratch.

Hans-Willi from across the road – good lad that he is – kicked off with “For what it’s worth“, iLinkPod helped me drag back 4GB from the iPod and I think I’ve still got an iTunes library (2006 vintage) on a mothballed PC.

So the digitised Mix’n’Match tapes might be OK, the Stop you in your tracks² certainly aren’t.

Ditto (i.e certainly aren’t) podcasts, Peel stuff, video clips that I saved from an untimely “Removed due to terms of use violation” death, radio recordings, the entire Billboard Top 100 from 1957 to 1976, Jefito’s “Friday Mixtapes” dating back to 2006. And so much more.

And the worst thing is that I KNOW what’s gone up to mp3 heaven, because my old iTunes library shows me everything.

But with an exclamation mark next to it that says”Sorry, can’t find THIS track. Or THAT one, either”

It does tend to get one thinking (a rare occurence these days) and focuses the mind somewhat and I’ve finally realised that I’d probably be quite happy if I only had Joe Walsh, (Lowell George-era) Little Feat and David Lindley on the Mac.


All the rest is pretty much nice to have.


Especially when you see a clip like this:





It’s got it all – , the Alvin-Lee-School-of-Facial-Expressions grimaces, the raw passion of doing a song that you’ve only recently written (just look at the polished, almost-studio-album-perfect version just 5 years later with his new band), all of Pete Townsend’s moves (apart from the windmilling) and then – at 2:47 – one of those magic moments:


Joe’s got the reverb on, he’s squeezing impossible sounds out his guitar, the guy turns to his bird and goes something like “Ohwowthatwasjustamazingdidyouseethat?” and the bird gives him this blankly disdainful look and pointedly wipes the side of her mouth, as if to get rid of the bad taste.


Been there, done that and I’ll bet you a hard drive full of music that they’re no longer an item…..

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>Cool stuff

Posted on 4 February, 2009 by jb

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>There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies…..

Posted on 3 February, 2009 by jb

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… and statistics..

These people must be so tragically thick.

This is an advertisement in the Economist – educated, influential and affluent readership (apart from me that is – I just look at the pictures) – and definitely not the sort of place where you can get away with waffly thinking, let alone blatant attempts at data manipulation and plain lies.

Abengo, a Spanish biofuels conglomerate, asks the question

“Should biofuels also be blamed for the economic crisis?”

and proceeds to truncate (and use utterly inappropriate) scales, suggesting a causality between the 100% increase in European biofuel production and the halving of cereal prices.

It doesn’t really matter where you stand on this issue (I tend to be against massive deforestation, causing hunger in poor countries and the logic of pumping 30% more energy into a process that you get out, but that’s just me…), but this argumentation is specious to the extent of being propoganda.

Let’s get this into perspective.

The world production of biofuel in 2008 was 60 billion litres.

An extra 1 billion litres in Europe (diverting 300,000 hectares from food production, if anyone’s interested…) won’t make a blind bit of difference to the price of cereals.

Speculation in grain future
s is what whacked the price up.

Stocks were no good, the oil market was too volatile, where do we put our money?

Other commodities.

Like cereals.

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>The day the music died…

Posted on 2 February, 2009 by jb

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Bit of a problem.

My 250GB external drive fell off the desk the other day.

In fact, EVERYTHING fell off the desk – Mac mini, USB and Firewire hub and 2 other drives.

I managed to grab the monitor…

Variations in the geode, as far as I can work out.

Everything works fine. Except for one drive.

It just goes “beep, beep, beep, beep” and then stops trying to boot.

It had about 180GB of music on it.

That’s around 35,000 tracks which isn’t really a big deal, but there’s a whole bunch of really good stuff from bloggy friends plus all the Mix’n’Match tapes and old vinyl that I’ve digitised. Podcasts. Videoclips from YouTube.

Got the forensic folk assessing the retrievability at the mo and it poses the obvious question: Just how much is this stuff worth?

They’ve given me a bandwidth of €600-€2500

For what it’s worth.

Queue for a song – Buffalo Springfield, 1967 off the eponymous album.

I’d play it for you.

If I had any music left…..

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True stories – Ron Wood

Posted on 2 February, 2009 by jb

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Ron Wood’s in his dressing room with whichever band it was at the time – Jeff Beck Group, Faces, Stones (where he’s still “The new boy”..).

Manager pops his head around the corner and says “Oi, Ronnie. The police are here. Bloody hell…”

Frantic activity. All the good stuff disappears down the dunny and in walk…..

..Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland.

Here’s “Sure the one you need” off Ronnie’s first solo album with Keef helping out.

Sounds like the Faces after a blood transfusion…

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>Not that I understand it…

Posted on 1 February, 2009 by jb

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1 Legendre’s constant
2 “An infinite number of mathematicians…”
3 A Unicode character as a HTML entity
4 Modular arithmetic
5 The Golden Mean reworked a little
6 Three Factorial (3*2*1)
7 6.99999.. Though a different number than 7, still equals 7
8 Graphical representation of Binary code
9 An example of a base-4 number
10 A Binomial Coefficient
11 An example of Hexadecimal encoding
12 The cube root is the inverse of 12^3

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>Um, I don’t get it….

Posted on 31 January, 2009 by jb

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>You’d pull a face too…….

Posted on 26 January, 2009 by jb

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. .if someone had just cut off your bollocks….

Which is what you do to a bullock to turn it into an ox.

Castrate it.

The Year of the Ox in the Chinese calendar kicks off today and – while we’re on the subject of cutting off appendages – here’s the best way of making oxtail stew, courtesy of Roald Dahl:

“Despite the fact that I am a very ordinary cook indeed, my oxtail stew, every time I make it, is greeted with exclamations of relish and sometimes even loud applause. By some fluke rather than by any real skill it always seems to come out right”

Dead easy.

Here’s what you do.

While you’re castrating your bull, chop off its tall as well.

Or buy an oxtail from your butcher. If you ask him nicely, he might even chop it up for you.

Allow 1 oxtail for 3 people.

Trim off any fat or gristle (Don’t bother browning them in fat before boiling – doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.)

Layer the bottom of a big saucepan with the oxtail segments, cover with water, season with salt and peeper, sling in some stock cubes and fresh bay leaves, sage, thyme and rosemary, bring to the boil and simmer for about 4 hours until the meat’s almost falling off the bone. Keep topped up with water.

Let it cool over night and next day de-fat the surface.

Boil some carrots and purée them. This is your thickener – no flour, no Mondamin, just puréed carrots

Bring the stew back to the boil,  sling in (chopped) whichever vegetables are seasonal – last week, it was leek, echalottes, parsnip, carrots, swede and celeriac – and simmer until they’re cooked

Just before serving, mix in the carrot purée.

Serve with dumplings, gnocci, polenta or crusty bread. Baguette or ciabatta are excellent.

Red wine is a must.

Have a bowl on the table for the bones

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>True stories – Customer Support

Posted on 25 January, 2009 by jb

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“Ridge Hall computer assistant; may I help you?”

“Yes, well, I’m having trouble with WordPerfect.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went away.”

“Went away?”

“They disappeared”.

“hmmm. So what does your screen look like now?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

 “It’s blank; it won’t accept anything when I type.”

 “Are you still in WordPerfect, or did you get out?”

“How do I tell?”

“Can you see the C:\ prompt on the screen?”

“What’s the sea-prompt?”

“Never mind. Can you move the cursor around on the screen?”

“There isn’t any cursor; I told you, it won’t accept anything I type.”

“Does your monitor have a power indicator?”

“What’s a monitor?”

“It’s the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it has a little light that tells you when it’s on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then look on the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it.  Can you see that?”

…..”Yes, I think so.”

“Great!  Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it’s plugged
into the wall.”

…..”Yes, it is.”

“When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back of it, not just one?”

“No.”

“Well, there are.  I need you to look back there again and find the other cable.”

…..”Okay, here it is.”

“Follow it for me, and tell me if it’s plugged securely into the back of your computer.”

“I can’t reach.”

“Uh Huh.  Well can you see if it is?”

“No.”

“Even if you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?”

“Oh, it’s not because I don’t have the right angle; it’s because it’s dark.”

“Dark?”

“Yes-the office light is off, and the only light I have is coming in from the window.”

“Well, turn on the office light then.”

“I can’t.”

“No?  Why not?”

“Because there’s a power outage.”

“A power…A power outage?  Aha!  Okay, we’ve got it licked  now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?”

“Well, yes, I keep them in the closet.”

“Good!  Go get them and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it.  Then take it back to the store you bought it from.”

“Really?  Is it that bad?”

“Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

“Well, all right then, I suppose.  What do I tell them?”

“Tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.”

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