Tangled up in Blogs

29 May 2003
How do you get the wrapper off?

13:23 From the 'so weird it must be true' department. Thanks Charles.

29 May 2003
Ministry of Silly Walks

13:18 Do you walk like a terrorist? This reminds me of that Kenny Everett skit - ' . . . anyone with a funny walk. . .'

29 May 2003
Get gaming!

13:13 It's official - video games are good for you.

As video-game playing has become a ubiquitous activity in today's society, it is worth considering its potential consequences on perceptual and motor skills.

And things like Medal of Honor [sic] are better than Tetris. No mention of flight sims, though, bah.

By forcing players to simultaneously juggle a number of varied tasks (detect new enemies, track existing enemies and avoid getting hurt, among others), action-video-game playing pushes the limits of three rather different aspects of visual attention. It leads to detectable effects on new tasks and at untrained locations after only 10 days of training. Therefore, although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing.

29 May 2003
Shiny landers

13:09 Four days to go . . . Mars, here we come! There's also an article in Nature about the Mars Missions.

28 May 2003
Ultra digest

11:09 Run, don't walk to Book a Minute and spend lots of time catching up on literature.

21 May 2003
Nasa luvs OS X

20:40 Charles draws my attention to the free - and ruddy brilliant - advertising that Apple is getting from NASA, of all places. I want I want I want. I particularly like the lines about 'integrates nicely' and 'competitively priced' in the GIF.

21 May 2003
Baby poo

09:15 Crazy Canadians. Who let them out of the box?

20 May 2003
Destruct testing

08:55 So, after five years, I discover just how much juice 49 minutes of talking takes out of my mobile. Three bars. Thanks Nige.

17 May 2003
Legomac

11:28 Daniele - Mac guru, sometime philosophy lecturer and all round Good Bloke - has a Lego Mac for sale on eBay. It even made the Beeb.

17 May 2003
Even more feedback

11:25 Tris writes, with reference to my wibble below:

Have no fear with iTunes taking over Europe (at least not for a good while).
The difference between here and the US is the music industry. Whist EMI hold most of the US record deals, here things are very different with countless smaller independents becoming more prevalent in all genres other than shitty teenie pop and UK boing boing Garage/D&B.

Here's to diversity, quality music output and the need to buy expensive speaker wire to pick up those intricate little details in the wee small frequencies (even if they're mighty hard to hear).

17 May 2003
Peeow!

11:22 Let's hear it for always-on cable broadband! All right, it's 'only' 150k, but what a difference it makes.

15 May 2003
Eyeballs

12:50 From the Begging to be .sigged department, Peter Corlett in the Monastery:

There's also Ginster's pasties and pies, which appear to be the UK equivalent of the sheep's eyeballs that are offered to foreigners to see if they'll eat them out of politeness.

15 May 2003
Niemoller

12:46 From the I should have known that department - Martin Niemoller.

15 May 2003
Take that

12:40 It's good to see that the art of the insult is not a lost one (courtesy of Andy Dingley in uk.net.web.authoring):

>Some other sites of theirs are not much better, imho, see....
>http://www.tbwa.com and check out the site requirements, can you read
>them?!!!

Is this abomination your responsibility ? I hope so, because it's giving me this desperate urge to be rudely abusive to someone, and I'm too lazy to search for the real culprits.

What's TBWA ? Twatty bollocks wanker agency ? It's even uglier and more pointless than www.showstudio.com , this week's previous contender for neo-Nathanist pointy-bearded designerwank.

They don't really get this Interweb thingy, do they ? I haven't seen crap like this since I worked (briefly, thank Bob) for Circle.com.

02 May 2003
More feedback

13:20 John says to me, I don't want to sound like I'm shilling for them, or anything, but:

I think the eMusic service addresses at least some of your MP3 issues -- they use a variable bit rate encoding, so the quality is (at least theoretically) much better, and they let you download whole albums worth of stuff at a go. Plus it's a flat monthly rate rather than a per-song ding, so you can chance most of the album sucking (assuming, that is, that your bandwidth is free-ish, which for most of us in the States, it is).

The eMusic thing just seems to make a lot more sense to me; I don't get the Apple thing at all. <shrug>

I'll 'fess up here and admit that I was wrong - Apple's service is AAC, not MP3. Which is allegedly better, but it's still going to throw something out. I guess the customer will decide, in the long run.

01 May 2003
Feedback!

14:29 Charles writes:

I am extremely tempted to instruct my solicitors to start proceedings against you for stealing my thoughts time and time again.

That said, I suspect Apple's service, which is unique in not being subscription based, will be the model for the future for a significant chunk of the music distribution industry. You say that many albums tell a story, and you're right, but even more are just industry fabricated junk, with one or two good (or catchy - not necessarily the same thing) songs on them to let them get into the charts. The virtual abolishment of singles has been forcing people to buy more expensive albums with lots of junk they don't want. I've got albums like that, and I would have loved to opportunity to buy a single instead. That's what I see Apple's service as - the 45rpm single (which also didn't always sound that great) for the new century.

I won't take issue with any of what Charles says - but I will note that most popular music is crap anyway . . . I have also bought albums for that one track, but have later found that the rest of the album has 'grown' on me. And I'm glad that I did buy the entire album in those cases. Buying just a single means I would have missed out. (I'm too young to have bought many 45s - did people who bought 45s then go and buy the whole 33? More data, please.) But, are we in danger of losing such gems as The Wall forever? Will a collection of three minute records ever mean as much to me, be as evocative as that one album (Reckless and 1985)?

01 May 2003
Never mind the quality . . .

13:45 . . . feel the width.

The music service from Apple wasn't entirely unexpected I guess. And some have seen an opportunity (for them as a consumer, primarily) for artists to now concentrate on quality music and forget about the album 'filler' tracks. But the whole thing is beginning to worry me. You see, MP3s are - of necessity - low quality. Yes, for most music you can get reasonably good compression and not lose a great deal, at least if you're only going to play it on your iPod or in the car or whatever, and can live with a 4MB chunk of data for a 3 minute record. But hang on . . . suppose for a minute that this takes off in a big way, and artists start producing only MP3s. Track by track - for you to listen and buy what you want. Sounds great?

No. sounds ghastly. Not only will we lose the whole sense of an album, the stories that many albums tell, the ability to track the development of an artist and the emotional attachment to a piece of art in time and space, but (bear with me) suppose artists figure that if they're going to lose all the high-frequency sounds anyway, they may as well cut corners with composition, recording and production?

I might be over-paranoid here, but isn't this symptomatic of our culture? This whole 'good enough' philosophy? 'It works - why fix it?'

Think I'm overstating the case? MacDonalds. Starbucks. Generic (and not-so-generic) PCs. I prefer real beefburgers, real coffee from real coffee shops, and Macs. I'll rip a CD to listen to at work or while I'm playing games; but for quality of life, Don't Compress.