Near demachi yanagi

… There is a young guy applying strokes to an oil painting while frenetically dancing to tribal trance music…

Japan: the country where trains being one minute late on the usual schedule warrants posting advance notices all over the station…

Cary Grant: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.

Eva Marie Saint: What makes you think you have to conceal it?

Cary Grant: She might find the idea objectionable.

Eva Marie Saint: Then again, she might not.
North by Northwest

It’s 4:30pm on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am sitting at my balcony in my underwear, sipping on a gin & tonic, putting together some very repetitive music on my laptop while waiting for the lab’s computers to spit out some results.

I am also holding a high-pressure water gun, carefully aimed at the neighbourhood pigeons, patiently waiting for them to get within range.

What?

Oh, me too: I used to have a real job, wearing ties and fine Italian suits every day, working some place where people would say things like “synergy”, “milestone” and “ballpark estimate”, while planning the next meeting on their Palm Pilot… You bet I did.

But you go ahead: judge me.

Facebook had three things going for it, a couple years back, around the time I finally caved in and signed up:

1) A fairly decent interface. A newsfeed that was actually designed to intelligently filter stuff of interest to you while hiding the the rest automagically (instead of requiring you to constantly click through endless moronic application notifications, courtesy of your bored-friends-at-work).

2) Everybody was/is on Facebook. Even those kids you used to share your milk with, back in first grade… Facebook is the ultimate “where are they now” tool… If somebody born within your lifetime is not on Facebook, chances are they are either dead or building pipe bombs in a secluded cabin somewhere deep into the woods. All you need is a full name and/or school attendance year.

3) Advanced privacy features meant that people used their real names (a necessity to make point #2 worth anything), while allegedly keeping private stuff away from your boss/exes/crazy Google stalkers etc.

Here we are now, a couple years later and point #1 has died a long and painful death at the hands of a dozen asinine “interface redesigns” plagiarising any other Web 2.0 service with an ounce of popularity, all the while bringing server cost down (yes: turned out, all those great intelligent filtering tools were so intelligent they did not scale at all… oops).

Point #2 is more valid than ever: it is only a matter of time before even dead people have their Facebook page (never mind: they already do). But let’s be honest: once you’ve looked up all your friends from kindergarten and realised you did not share much beside reminisced fondness for crayon drawing and shared hatred of afternoon nap time, once you’ve made sure the asshole bully from Junior High is now assistant manager at Taco Bell and once you’ve found out that secret High School crush Susie now has three kids, two dogs and a suburban house, and is (according to her status) feeling bloated after that huge KFC meal they just all had at the mall… Once you have satisfied that bit of morbid curiosity about every single living soul you have ever interacted with during your life… You just want to go back to hanging out with people you actually chose to be friends with, preferably at an age where your common interests involved more than making watercolour handprints and trying not to pee your pants in public.

(more…)

A small electro-ish mix, put together over the weekend, while playing with my brand new scs.3m digital mixer (an absolutely brilliant little tool)… Still getting used to the new controller: definitely room for improvement there, but I haven’t recorded or posted anything in ages, so here goes…

Goodbye Horses:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[download link]

As usual, all previous mixes are still there. If you like the style of this mix, you might also like this one. If you don’t: sod off there are a lot of other styles on the mix page.

Perfect timing

Pros and cons of attempting to survive on maximum recommended dosage of Japanese cold medicine on a workday:

Pros: Finally answering the old nagging question of whether Vapnik–Chervonenkis dimension makes more sense on mushrooms (or any satisfyingly close approximation thereof).

Cons: The answer is: no, it definitely doesn’t.

Because Golden Week is no reason to slack off, this week program is centered around: 2 hours biking, 6 hours clubbing and 4 hours banging at a keyboard in some vague hope of finding a cancer cure by accident¹. Daily.

Day 2 (and counting) of that regimen and, beside symptoms of mild sleep deprivation, everything seems good.

1. hey! it worked for Fleming. I say it’s worth a shot. [↩]