BlandSongs LocalRadio Day3

Another treat today, had to wait until the end again to hear the band and title, Boyzone with No Matter What. My lack of recognition means I'm either a) too young to be the target audience, b) too old to be the target audience, or c) just not very familiar with any of this music.

This is the sort of song that will almost certainly have had one of those guest appearances on the lottery show. The 10 minute show with no audience but for the stick-thin woman presenter and the other two more normal sized women that are the independent adjudicators, not forgetting the disembodied voice chap. Am I taking this too seriously?

Written by Jim Steinman, a man famed for writing either extraordinarily bland and hugely overblown songs, or extraordinarily camp and hugely overblown faux-rock songs. Bat out of Hell sits firmly in the latter category, enjoyable, ridiculous and only needing to be heard once every 4.5 years.

Day3
6.38AM
LocalRadio
BlandSong
Boyzone - No Matter What

BlandSongs LocalRadio Day2

Early days, no repeats yet but another classic LocalRadio Bland, Mike and the Mechanics. Where members originating from other more, and less, successful bands gather together, er, for some reason.

Never mind the eponymous bloke from Genesis there's Paul Young, no not that one, but the one from 1970's Manc' band Sad Cafe. The 'Caf', as I don't remember them ever being called, were played an awful lot on Piccadilly Radio, while they didn't play so many other Manc' bands such as the fantastically great Buzzcocks.

I must have heard this before but had no memory of it at all and so listened through to the end (cripes!) to hear the title.

Day2
6.40AM
LocalRadio
BlandSong
Mike and the Mechanics - Over My Shoulder

BlandSongs LocalRadio Day1

Brushes off some blog dust. Coughs. Carries on.

Turned on a radio this morning that had been left tuned to local radio. It could equally have been T'Pau with China in your Hand or one of the thousands of versions of Wind Beneath My Wings, but on this occasion they were playing Chicago with If You Leave Me Now.

Right, I thought, here's a pointless study I could do. Given the constraints of the breakfast show play-list on local radio how long will it be before the same songs start coming round again, and indeed how long before it's China in your Hand or Wind Beneath my Wings.

I'm well placed to make such a judgement about how bland this music is as I'm an international superstar, I've played Worksop, twice, put that in your pipe so called Mick Jagger. Ah, just had word from my legal team and apparently he is called Mick Jagger, fancy that.

Anyway, until I forget to do this, here's number 1:

Day1
6.40AM
LocalRadio
BlandSong
Chicago - If You Leave Me Now

Graffiti art 2

It appears that a day after my previous graffiti blog last Sunday that a nascent Mondrian, in the early stages of development as an abstract artist, has overwritten graffiti on the same wall. And in a hat-tipping reference to the self referential nature of the previous graffiti they have written 'wet paint' on the pavement. Clever stuff.

Clearly it wasn't an effort to make the wall look better as they didn't paint over the peeling or dirty areas. Perhaps this is a reference to the nature of art, art highlighting the difference between our context of reality and that of the perfection of geometric designs, a juxtaposition directly related by its appearance on the imperfect façade.

Although it would have been better if they'd used a decent straight-edge.

The Amazon Kindle

Some pictures of the Amazon Kindle.

Electronic ink, very easy and pleasant to read. Being used to touch screens meant repeatedly trying to select and scroll through the pages with futile finger-sliding attempts.

The keys are hard to press cleanly, navigation through and selection of the text feels odd using the joystick.

There's a cumbersome multi-step process to retrieve annotations to save elsewhere as it isn't possible to pull them directly from the device, and annotations will be lost if Amazon wipes-out your book collection. There's a limit to the amount of annotation (Amazon calls them clippings) available on some books controlled by DRM, it's not possible to check what this limit is other than by hitting it.

It's thinner than I expected at about a centimetre, and it looks better than the advertising and review pictures portray it.

It needs a wave of the Apple design-team magic-wand but a viable alternative to carrying a bookcase with you on to a train.

Graffiti art

I keep walking past this giant chap on the way to work, it took some time to work its way through my early-morning lack of consciousness but eventually, over this last week, it sunk in enough for me to take a photo.

It looks too neatly structured to be a free-form spray work, not sure if stencil or masking was used. Is the text to the left to do with the picture, it looks too amateurish, like the tag behind his backside? But the text has been written by the chap himself, the paint brush in his hand answers the question, although the tag would still be by someone else. Above the tag there is what looks like a signature in the more stylised form of the picture itself. It's on this wall on a main road.



Here's another one that's around the University campus, this appears to be a stencil although the spectacle frame over the right eye might suggest otherwise.



I don't think these examples are detrimental to the environment, I'll keep a look out for others, if I'm awake.

Thunderbird, and another thing my old fruit

This week, Wednesday 24 March 2010 at 13:30 to be precise, opening mail messages in Thunderbird started to take an age. I say an age but in seconds it was about 7 each time, which in computing terms is aeons, and in human terms is pretty slow for an email.

Given that I get 900+ emails a week that's at least one hour and forty five minutes of work time I would spend waiting for emails to open. Ok I make extensive use of filters, not all mail needs to be read, and with some mail I only need to know the mail has been sent and have a quick scan of the subject to see whether an error has occurred. But even so there are still plenty of mails that need a cursory glance at the contents before they are sent to dev null, the bit bucket, etc. - insert your favourite euphemism for the content-crematorium (data-cremator?) here.

I exhausted good old Google pretty quickly and ended up chewing the fat with a few colleagues, this went off topic on to Microsoft conspiracy theories that would have stretched to breaking the credulity of someone with a rubber credulity gland galvanised by Mr Dunlop himself. I made my excuses and left, although it's a positive thing in the IT world to have some sort of face to face interaction with colleagues, open, honest and frank discussions without a digital interface, there is always the danger of catching a cold.

Back to the matter, a few head scratches later I remembered that other bane of our lives, the virus scanner. Disabling a few components of the interactive scan brought things back to life. The issue had been clouded by an upgrade of Thunderbird from 3.0.2 to 3.0.3 at around the same time the problem appeared, I'd rolled back to older versions which made no difference, faffed about with profiles, gone through the entire Mozillazine troubleshooting process.

Details:
McAfee Virusscan 8.7.0i with sp2.
Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0.3 and earlier versions.
Disable the "Access Protection" task under VirusScan Console, message opening time becomes a more acceptable one second or so.

The moral of this story:
Don't forget to point the finger of blame at your daily-updating, anti-virus software, probably written by programmers not quite good enough to get a job as a games designer (is that a little harsh?).

Apologies, this has been so terribly, terribly dull, I'll get back to my G&T.