Last night Caroline and I went down to some all day punk show in town, and I took a bunch of photos.
So, basicly, I’m testing Flickr’s compatibility with Blogger (*Gets excited*) - so please do drop by my Flickr account.
Archive for January, 2006
New York DJ/Producer Mark Ronson has covered Radiohead’s mid 90’s power-chord anthem, “Just“, with a mix of classic dub, trumpets and hip-hop beats - featuring Phantom Planet’s (you know, the ones who did the themetune to the “OC”) Alex Greenwald.
It’s like something Cake would do if they had the balls.
You can check it out at Mark Ronson’s MySpace page.
Update: You can now watch the video here, at 7Digital.com
Tags: Radiohead, Mark Ronson, Music.
I remember thinking that the NME (That’s “New Musical Express” - I don’t know how popular it is around the world…) was an authority on modern music. It was the late 90’s when I first started reading it - I could read about generally good music in Q (Radiohead, The Manic Street Preachers), old bands in Mojo (Pink Floyd, Dylan) and young hip indie bands in NME (Belle & Sebastian, Bis, and some bands that now work in Virgin Megastore).
Maybe it’s because I was young, or maybe it’s because they were better back then, but I really thought that people who wrote for the music press were really cool, and I generally trusted their opinion on music (and listened out for the bands on Steve Lamacq or John Peel’s week night radio shows).
Over the last few years, however, I have grown up and I’m now about the same age as the average NME journo, and I’m buying the same records, and drinking in the same types of bars and dressing the same as them - and I see a little bit of NME in every indie kid at every indie concert - and I know that they all think they know about music, but they all really like the Arctic Monkeys.
And the Arctic Monkeys are the reason for me writing this (They just came on Radio One, too…) - I have nothing against them. I bought that single, and I think they are just a bunch of guys doing something different that has really caught on, and good for them. I might even have a listen to my brother’s album later.
But I went onto the NME’s website today, and they have the top ten of their top hundred British records of all time, as chosen by the NME. This is how they shape up:
1. The Stone Roses ‘The Stone Roses’
2. The Smiths ‘The Queen Is Dead’
3. Oasis ‘Definitely Maybe’
4. Sex Pistols ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’
5. Arctic Monkeys ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’
6. Blur ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’
7. Pulp ‘Different Class’
8. The Clash ‘London Calling’
9. The Beatles ‘Revolver’
10. The Libertines ‘Up The Bracket’
Yes, a fair enough top ten. No “Dark Side Of The Moon”, no “Ok Computer”, no “Unknown Pleasures” - But “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” is at #5. WTF?! This is an album that has been out, what, a week? Granted, it is the fastest selling debut album in the UK ever, or something, but I fail to see how it can make it anywhere into the top 100, yet. I think an album has to stand “the test of time”.
Ok, they are all pretty good records, and I own all of them, besides “Revolver” and the Arctic Monkeys one. But I have no idea how the NME manage to get to these decisions. “London Calling” is a far better and far more important album than “Never Mind The Bollocks”, Blur had several albums that were, in my opinion, far better than “Modern Life Is Rubbish” (my choice would have been “The Great Escape”, or “Blur”). And the Stone Roses?
Maybe I should compile my own top ten?
I’ll comment on Q’s new Top 100 Albums Of All Time as soon as I get around to it.
Tags: NME, Music, Arctic Monkeys.
I can hardly contain the excitement!
I heard something about this a while ago on boingboing, and I have only just heard the songs. Devo 2.0 is a project from the warped minds of Devo and Disney, where some kids cover classic tracks by the 70’s/80’s electronic pop band.
I thought, you know, “this is going to be horrible”, and that was a fair assumption, but most of the songs I have heard are really well recorded and produced, and reasonably faithfull reproductions of the originals - only with a kinda snotty teenage Gene Simmons’ “Rock School” vibe (Did anyone see that?).
Listening to the tracks (without the vocals) it makes me wonder whether it’s simply new vocals layed over the original recordings (With the exception of “Through Being Cool” - which has this strange reverse synth…) - but I can’t fault them for that. It’s testamant to the fact that Mark Mothersbaugh wrote some fantastic, timeless, pop songs - and so long as I don’t hear teenage girls on the bus with “Whip It” ring tones then I think it’s the best thing to happen to pop music in the last ten years.
You can hear Devo 2.0’s versions of such classics as “Through Being Cool”, “Freedom Of Choice”, “That’s Good” and, er, “Boy You Want”, as well as others, at disney.go.com.
PS. Whilst I’m on the subject of Devo, you can now get the official Devo action figure set, complete with yellow boiler suit, five young looking interchangable heads and an energy dome. They are $11.99 and you can get them here.
I have been into web design for the last five years. It started when I thought that making websites was a really skilled job that would wow people into thinking I was super-smart. I came home from school one day and went straight to Notepad and started learning and coding HTML. Later that week I had created “Suckamoon”, a no defunct website that for some reason all the cool kids in my town decided to frequent. In fact, there were a lot of “…moon”’s on my MSN list at the time - it became some sort of cult.
Anyway, that’s where I began. I would make websites for local bands (I became “Sam, that guy who makes websites”) and I got my GNVQ in IT and went to college. There I did a National Diploma in Web Development (amongst other core subjects, such as networking, hardware, human-computer interaction, programming, systems analysis, etc). I was taught C/C++, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Flash, HTML and CSS. By this point I had decided where I was going with my education, and possible career, and that was more to do with the World Wide Web, so I began to look into other technologies such as PHP, SQL, ASP, XML, XHTML, and so on.
So, once I had finished and qualified from college I enrolled specifically on a web design course, Edge Hill’s BSc (Hons) Web System development to get that bit of paper that tells prospective employers that I can do what I say I can do. Yet the first year didn’t teach me anything. I was taught Microsoft’s Visual Basic .NET, and I could help but think “I know what I need to know from .NET, and I have no intention of developing software, and if I was to do so I wouldn’t use this software…” - needless to say, I haven’t touched it since May.
That was just an introductory year, and the marks don’t count, and I covered some old ground, and learned a thing or two about Data Flow Diagrams. But now I’m in my second year, and the fact that I am leaving education (more than likely) in 18 months is even more worrying - I look at what I have to learn, and what I will know when I come out, and it doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I should come out of university with a pretty good understanding of the Internet, networks, Microsoft Access /SQL databases, HTML/CSS/XML/ASP based websites, Macromedia Flash, e-commerce, Windows/Unix based operating systems, usability, interaction design, business organisation and the visual basic programming language. Yet this isn’t half of what I need to know.
It’s pretty apparent to anyone with any idea about the Internet that it is built on one thing. Open Source. The majority of web servers, and therfore websites, run on Unix based operating systems, and run Apache, and under Apache they run two things: PHP and mySQL, which renders my years priming for the Microsoft .NET way useless.
Well, I realised this a few years ago, so I took it upon myself to learn the basis of both of these technologies, but my limited knowledge doesn’t get me far (“Jack of all trades, master of none…”) so this year I am pushing what I can learn to a new depth. But there is a lot to learn.
I figure a logical step would be to stop learning everything I don’t really need to learn: that’s software programming languages, and those specialist languages used for plug-ins and extentions. The I guess I’m not going to read any more about things I am already pretty good at: CSS, navigation, design, security, usability, etc. But the list of subjects I am going to study is pretty mamoth: XML, AJAX, relational databases, PHP, SQL, etc. A book a week. A book a week…
And I always say that the best way to learn is by doing, so expect a lot of websites.
For a few years (2001 - 2004) I used Linux almost exclusivly. My main reason for having a computer has always been the same: to browse the Internet, to develop websites, and to write essays - that’s how it was then, and that’s how it is now. All my friends got more pocket money and handouts than I did, and therefor better computers, and I was stuck with what I could afford: a Pentium III.
I understood that Linux was more stable and performed better on slower computers so I made the switch (Redhad 8.0, btw). Then for the next however many months the concept of buying a new computer didn’t seem important. Gnome would run smoothly, I could mount all of my devices (hard drives, CD-R’s, digital cameras, printers), my desktop looked the business, and I became really comfortable with the differences between that and Windows. After a few months I began to pick up Bash, and ended up doing almost everything with the command line (including IRC, file management, text editing, and even web browsing). Then the inevitable happened.
I had an urge to play Quake III Arena, so I built this really nice computer and installed Windows XP, and seldom touched my Linux partition (which, due to lack of disk space, got formatted to NTFS). I got bored of this, then had a new bedroom built in the top of the house, and lost all my bits of computer in the chaos (Including a 17″ monitor, my P3, a SCSI equipt IBM server and a shoebox full of hard drives). The computer, being the only “gamable” PC in the house soon attracted interest from my younger brother, and then my even younger brothers - and subsequently disks started to fail, virii mysteriously appeared, and I gave up re-installing Windows 2000.
I went out and bought my Thinkpad, and I love it. There is no point trying to game on it, so no one has bothered asking for an account on it. But, as many of you will know, Thinkpads are shipped with Windows XP installed, with not even a recovery CD, and 8Gb of the 40Gb hard drive is take up by a recovery partition. Given that I don’t have a spare copy of Windows XP (one that I haven’t already got installed on one machine), a spare laptop hard disk, or the balls to re-partition it, the chances of me installing Linux on this are very slim.
But I develop a lot of PHP, and I need Apache running (along with mod_php and mySQL, either on my machine, or on my network), and it doesn’t work too well on the laptop you are working at. And now, as I have just taken on a large project for my mother, I am doing it a lot.
So I find myself where I was 3 years ago. Looking to install Linux on some cheap hardware. Scouring eBay for parts. Next week I should have my Linux server sat next to my Windows laptop. I’m saving space for a Mac.
My favourite band and soon to be yours, The Something Something Explosion have done a simply fantastic cover of Dizzee Rascal’s “Fix Up, Look Sharp” - with a kind of Scouse whiteboy twang.
The SSE consists of Dave Worthington (Precum, Greenfly, S.A.D) and Albert “Fatal Bert” Davies (Hefalump), two of the most tallented musicians this nation has to offer. I think I’ll let their biography speak for itself.
“The incredible virtuoso duo Albert Davies and David Worthington have overcome any religious and racial prejudice too come together and compose what could most possibly be the next landmark in contemporary music. The two musicians live in the secret capital of rock music, Ormskirk, and speak out loud and proud about the issues a young Jewish boy and an outcast Hispanic face in these BNP stained years. This epic rock duo have been compared to acts such as Rage against the machine, Mystic Spiral, Dr. Dre, Pantera, The later works of the Smashing Pumpkins and The Vines, although it is quite obvious that they have transcended these some what conventional acts.”
You can check out “Fix Up, Look Sharp” and other classics at their myspace profile.
Yes, everyone must have heard about this now. Alex Tew, that student who made a website, selling each pixel off as advertising space, and making himself over $1,000,000.
As he sells his last thousand pixels (going for £21,600 on eBay) I find myself increadibly jealous. But I say “well played!” to Mr Tew.
And “Oh dear!” to the people behind the copycat sites. Pinkmilliondollars.com (I’m not even going to link it…) has been set up by 22 year old Rupa Kanabar in an attempt to cash in on Tew’s stroke of g’nus, aimed at the “Pink Dollar“.
She clearly fails to see the one-time novelty of such an idea. The original site, milliondollarhomepage.com, worked because of a) it was an original idea and subsequently b) because it got lots of media coverage. Kanabar and other’s clones don’t quite have the same effect. It’s been done, it worked the first time, and I very much doubt it will work again.
Though best of luck to her, and I hope I have to eat my words one day. Wouldn’t we all like to be a little better off?
Thanks to The Register.
I went to my computer after the final episode of Lost last night to see that my blog stats had rocketed. I was baffled, until I looked at my referals, and most of which were from Slashdot.
Earlier that day I came across this custom iBook tablet some company called ThePlaceForItAll.com had put on eBay (now vanished, apparently) - so I sent a link over to the guys at /., who posted it. And you can read it here.
Also, since I uploaded “Untitled Document” to my server some 70 people have downloaded it (as of 4am this morning) - although I suspect most of them are being directed to it by Garry himself.
It’s nice to know that people are watching.
I think a minute’s silence should be observed here.
( )
Yes, that’s right, Nikon’s 2006 press release has confirmed the inevitable: they will be concentrating on their digital line. Being a fan of both film and Nikon this saddens me deeply.
Thankfully, we still have 40 years worth of working Nikon 35mm SLR’s - they have perfected the craft, and there are plenty knocking around. My advice: eBay an FM2 before people up their prices.
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