“Sending an unencrypted e-mail… is like posting a letter without an envelope” – Euro-MPs recommend that we encrypt our emails after they discover that a mysterious spy network called Echelon may be intercepting our mails and reading them. I suggest that instead of encryption, simply place the words ‘Hello Echelon’ somewhere in your mails.
“Gotta make sure you’re elected… ” – The Stereo MPs – very pythonesque. [via notsosoft]
So Rik informs me, mememachine.net is experiencing technical difficulties with the hosting service and will return very soon.
Whilst watching To Roccoco Rot play live on Friday night, I was reminded greatly of German electropop pioneers Kraftwerk. Mind you, they are from Berlin, so that probably explains it. Sufficient to say that they were astounding and I would have been happy enough if the night’s music had finished at the end of their set, but no… after To Rococco Rot, we were treated to quite possibly the most awesome set of music Newcastle has ever seen [ok… so that may be a bit of an overstatement]. Two musicians Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor – aka The Chicago Underground Duo – came on stage late because they’d just had a ten hour drive up from London. After the brilliance of To Rococco Rot, no-one quite expected the quality of the music they were about to see performed. Armed with a Moog synth, an array of effects widgets, a trumpet, a vibraphone and a set of drums, the duo played music that was so good it was just plain silly. I’m not really a musician myself [I try to play guitar like Nick Drake but fail on all levels], but I appreciate good musicianship when I see it and the drummer – Chad Taylor – was just incredible. The good news is that if you are reading this before 2300hrs [GMT] on Sunday, then you just have time to watch a live stream of their gig in Leeds shown live on the BBC website… catch it if you can.
“Pearl Harbor is just another step toward the Disneyfication of our collective memories, trying unsuccessfully to prey upon a resurgence of patriotism. – filmcritic.com.
An interesting thread about a new interface by David Gelernter “in which every information asset in your life [is] treated like an email.” He discusses the way in which he uses Eudora [a mail client particularly close to the heart of mac users] to store notes and other chunks of information. I’ve started using Eudora to write blog entries which I then paste into the Blogger form. If I haven’t got time to complete the entry, I know that Eudora saves it in it’s outbox so I can easily open it back it up and edit it again. It shows that interfaces intended for a certain purpose can serve as useful tools to aid other processes. Interesting stuff.
“In the interest of safety, all Cross Channel Ferry crews will be made to wear flares.” – The Monster Raving Loony Party manifesto. Surely a vote winner.
The video for Pyramid Song, Radiohead’s new single [requires Realplayer]
LeafCompilation is an introduction to the Leaf record label and is well worth a listen.
Matt Jones writes about his brief meeting with Douglas Adams. Not only do I share the same name as Matt [obviously], but I also share the same sentiments about Douglas Adams as well. He was an atheist, a forward thinker, an individual. If more people in the world thought like Adams did, the world would be a better place to live in.
There are some Quicktimes of the new Coen brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There available here, here and here [mac users may want to ‘alt-click’ to download them using the download manager]. Yet more quality links from Stu, cheers mate.
This is slightly old news now, but this is absolute genius.
I couldn’t quite believe what I saw when I switched over to Newsnight on BBC2 and saw Mr Prescott involved in a nasty brawl. It was like schoolyard fight, hardly the kind of situation I would have thought a politician would get themselves into. That said, this is John Prescott we’re talking about here and apparently it is well known that he has a very short fuse. I know he shouldn’t really have thrown the first punch, but I ask you this: if someone threw an egg at your face at point blank range, would you walk by unruffled, like it never happened… or would you retaliate in some way? I think Mr Prescott temporarily forgot he was a politician and therefore a figure very much in the public eye… silly bloke.
Actionscript fries my brain. I thought I could get away with it, but now it looks as though I’m going to have to learn it. It would make sense really, I suppose the possession of core programming skills is quite essential in what I do. I’ve always tried to avoid programming because I don’t think my brain is quite up to it. Ask me to work out maths, algebra or logic and my brain goes all sluggish…like all the greymatter has been removed and has been replaced by a large soft ball of wool. I can’t even add two double-figure numbers together without having to really think about it first. Of course, computers make life easy for our brains – we store chunks of information; phone numbers, email addresses and other text in our computers memory instead of our own, so our brains never get exercised properly. Our brains are like couch potatoes, absorbing information and letting something else do the hard work while it relaxes with it’s feet up… ‘Hey brain… would you like another Pringle?’.
I’ve been suffering from a general lack of inspiration just recently. I usually make time to post here, but I haven’t felt compelled to over the last few days. I’m sure my lack of motivation will pass and things will be back to normal though. ::. The icab browser is a fast and efficient alternative to IE5.1/OSX. It doesn’t have full CSS support yet, but it will do I’m sure.
New media overload. Now rebooting.
Today, I’m greatly shocked to learn about the death of Douglas Adams. I want to write about his books, his amazing ideas about the future of digital media, and what he did to popularise science, but I can’t… I’m lost for words.
This last week has seen the fewest postings to this site since I started it 7 months ago. I think it’s because summer has finally arrived here in the northeast and I have this strange compulsion to actually get off my computer and go outside and sit in the sunshine ::. Matmos’ album ‘A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure’ is certainly not for the faint hearted – most of the noises on it are recorded from plastic surgery operations in California. You can imagine it went down like a lead balloon when I played to my colleagues at work. But I like it, if only as an exercise in faultless sound recording – these guys can really make a liposuction machine sound catchy. ::. At the end of June, I’m giving a talk to a group of 60 sixth form students about the web / new media. As well as giving them the usual guff about how exciting it all is, I going to tell them that the best thing they can possibly do to get involved is to get their own site and keep it interesting.
OpenCola.com – I didn’t realise that making your own cola is so life threatening. [via Haddock] ::. The AI~log project is on hold while I sort out the design… should be there soon.
A small percentage of my bank holiday weekend was spent at The Green Festival – a very small version of Glastonbury in a park in the city centre of Newcastle [yes, that small]. It’s great because as you sit in the middle of a clump of trees listening to some nice folky music, you can pretend you’re at some kind of festival in the middle of the countryside [like er.. Glastonbury] which is all well and good until you look up and see St James’ Park towering above like something from the set of ‘Close Encounters…’.
The Peterson Bottle Organ – probably the coolest musical instrument in the world.
Parabounce – the Spacehopper of the 21st Century? [via stu]
When I was around the age of 11 or 12, I was a big fan of a children’s fiction author called Nicholas Fisk. He wrote books that were key in developing my interest in science, technology and in particular artificial intelligence. One particular book, ‘Robot Revolt’, is a story set in the near future where sentient humanoid devices are used as household servants. The book centres around a particular family who buy a top of the range ‘Mk III’ robot called Max. Max is the only one of his kind around; he is sleaker and more intelligent than every household robot on the street. However, things take a sinister turn when the robot population of the town – lead my Max – revolt against their masters. It’s very much novel about the Frankenstein complex, which is something Isaac Asimov tried to dispel in his robot novels [which I then went on to read]. In Asimov’s novel’s, humanoid robots live in harmony with humans under the three laws that govern them and they are given equal rights as members of society. The amazing thing is that Asimov was writing about this in the fifties, when there was a predominant fear of technology, especially technology which mimicks human beings. I’m surprised that Asimov’s name doesn’t appear more in the run up to the release of Spielberg’s A.I.. I know the short story was written by Brian Aldiss, but Asimov was working with the same themes much earlier and much more expansively.
I’m currently working on something new… more later.
Do you ever feel like jacking it all in and going off to live on some small island off the Shetland mainland [or somewhere similar];… to ditch the digitopia we now live in and live life simply and within your own means. Y’see, I’m a bit of an ‘armchair supporter’ of this anti-capitalist thing now happening in London and other parts of the world. I’m sick of being hearded around, being told what to buy and when to buy it; and worse, I’m sick of being gullible enough to be sucked in by it all. Ho hum.
