Month: April 2002

Musical role

Music is a big part of my life. For motivation, comtemplation or just background noise, it’s never far away. I’m currently listening to some Zero 7 as I type.

Walk into a shop and get piped music, car radio’s blare as they drive past, a personal stereo annoys on the train. Has the role of music been diminished? Is it now just noise with no real meaning? Angsty rock will always have a place with teenagers, and whilst it seems a tad self indulgent now, it has a valid place in my collection. I can assign roles and emotions to my music, uplifting, energising, angry, rebellious. Is Protest Music Dead?

April 17, 2002

Presidential Idiot

Unvarnished Bush?

“We view the transcripts as a historical record of the presidency”

Hmmm not sure if this is such a big deal, but I would like to see it implemented into Life 3.2: Function 13.1.2: The ability to revise the content of uttered remarks.

Function must be implemented, and must reset both the utterer and the listeners respective memories.

Could be handy, don’t ya think?

April 17, 2002

Happy Blogday

hydragenic is 3 months old (really? is that all? You sure??)

I’m desperately trying to remember the first few blogs I read, I think Zeldman kicked it off a couple of years B.B. (before blogs) but I’m not sure. The one lesson I’ve learned in the past 3 months is that content is everything. A certain site appeared and is now a daily visit, a must-read. Long may it continue!

April 17, 2002

Just plain wrong

Smiths Top Beatles.

Ahhh ANOTHER reason I don’t read NME. Or is this just their way of drumming up some coverage.. Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of the Smiths stuff, but “most important rock group of the last 50 years?” I really don’t think so…

April 16, 2002

Pirate

Global music sales drop but the UK CD market beats global slump. Why?

I also caught this on the news this morning, the reporter reasoned that us people in the UK (and France) still want the social kudos that goes with ‘owning’ the latest album. This is backed by figures which show the sales of singles dropping, whilst downloads of digital copies rise. £3.99 for a CD single or a couple of minutes to download the MP3?

However I think they missed something, and I’m not sure if anyone else has followed this line of thought further (ok, someone will have but bear with). If you are an average downloader of MP3’s you will, by now, have a fairly large collection of illegal tracks. If you add ripped music to the equation, then you are quickly into double figures of Gigabytes worth of music.

If you are an average PC user, how many times have you lost everything when a PC died, presuming you’ve used computers for, say 4-5 years.

And that’s why I buy CDs. Security.

April 16, 2002

Good forum

Dirty Laundry on the Web

“So here’s how it works. A company opens a forum. People post messages of every sort, from the supportive to the stupid to the righteously indignant. Employees respond in their own voices. Readers of the forum see in the answers not just words but a real sense that the employees care and that the company is confident enough in what it stands for to allow employees to say what they want. As a result, the company’s social commitment avoids sounding like every other company’s trendy mouthings. Shell’s lack of control over the forum is precisely equivalent to the depth of its real commitment. It’s that simple.”

April 16, 2002