This is quite possibly the most pointless item posted to this blog to date (all right, competition is tough there), but I’m so ecstatic I can’t contain it (yea, I have no life):
Safari apparently received a minor update in the last OS X package (the ones that gets downloaded and installed quasi-silently through the Update manager), and they have finally fixed the “Undo bug”!
Here is a geeky post that, for once, might be pertinent to more than two or three readers. Read on if:
It think there is no need to be an übergeek to satisfy all three points above.
So the problem is about backups. Backups are a beautiful and easy thing, in theory. In practice, nobody, but the more anal retentive among us and those paid to do it, will ever go through the pain of manually backing up their data on more than episodic occasions. And since Murphy’s Law applies more than ever here, you can be sure your next server failure will happen the day before your next backup.
You know, for all my left-wing political hysteria and the incredible amount of time I spend complaining about the state of democracy in the world, I am not much of a conspiracy theorist. I do not believe in that big evil masterplan to keep us all under control.
If anything, I am a strong proponent of the old “Never attribute to malice, what can easily be explained by stupidity” adage… Greed and stupidity, to be exact. And certainly many overt collusions between groups of scary individuals with similar interests. But no international cabal to hide the truth about alien abductions and the enslavement of poorer nations.
Just. plain. stupidity.
Yet, some times I can’t help but wonder. Especially when I wake up, have a look at the triumvirat that now presides over the United States of Earth, and realize they all play for the same team…
See, it all started with our beloved Consul, Supreme Commander of the Armies, followed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to be finally joined in their fight for the Greater Good by none other than the Grand Inquisitor of Our Holy Mother Church himself. That sure is quite a powerful trio we got here…
Something for your ears at the bottom »
Good evening.
Do not attempt to adjust your radio, there is nothing wrong.
We have taken control as to bring you this special show.
We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.Welcome to station W. E. F. U. N. K., better known as We-Funk,
Or deeper still, the Mothership Connection.
Home of the extraterrestrial brothers,
Dealers of funky music.
P-Funk, uncut funk, The Bomb.Parliament Funkadelic – P-Funk
Welcome to Station K.D.R.D… better known as…
Well, at the moment, it’s not known as anything. for a reason: I just made it up.
The concept is quite simple, really.
I have tons of these small tracks, pseudo-remixes, work-in-progress and all around occasional hour spent screwing around on decks with good ole music on wax. Every once in a while, I go through the length of packaging one hour of these into a nice and somewhat clean format for the enjoyment of the masses. Sometimes I even go one step shorter and only release a half-assed half-hour long mix with aforementioned musical goofing around.
All these mixes are available for your aural pleasure on the Dr Dave’s Insanely Cool Mixes Collection Page.
But this somewhat formal release scheme was still not cutting it. Three main reasons:
Which means that, to an overwhelming majority, times where I get on the decks and toy around with either records or computers, yield sub-par results in terms of overall mixing quality. What with the constant drinking and abusing substance while playing (OK, not this month, but I have still many ways to take my attention off whatever I’m supposed to mix). Even the Mini Mix collection requires a bit of effort, and I am a lazy person.
Hence the need for an even cheaper/easier way to share some cool tunes without inflicting unfair damages to your eardrums nor spend every waking minutes doing so.
Let me explain… These mixes I upload most definitely have an audience. They are downloaded, and listened to, by cool people, the world over. some of these people even send me nice notes or thank you gifts, which is really a testament to how awesome this Intarweb thingie is. But a live audience, it ain’t.
If you’ve ever done any sort of art or music live, then you know, otherwise, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine: with the right mindset, there is a sort of pressure that drives you to expand on your usual practices and break the mold. Play/act/do whatever you would be doing in a studio, in a way that you would never have thought of doing before. The live audience is a major catalyst there.
I hardly ever play clubs these days, and for the most part, I’m quite fine with this. But I do miss the crazy-spur-of-the-moment wild experimentations with vinyl, keyboards, sequencer, chopsticks (yea, I really did it once) and anything an adrenalin-fueled brain can summon.
The semi-answer to all these problems being…
KDRD: Dr Dave’s Very Own MP3 Radio Station
I recently explained my decision to start packaging and distributing my own version of WordPress in order to make my life simpler, as to the distribution of Spam Karma 2.
Simultaneously, I had to deal with an outbreak of issues (or more exactly vocalizations on these issues: it’s unlikely the issues have been any more common than before. They were just given more attention on these pages) with Spam Karma 1.
I have taken the time to write a very detailed response to cover all aspects of the False Positives problem, and provide anybody coming to me with a comment denied by Spam Karma, with the Why?, How? and What Now? of their problem. The bottom line being that, while I’m sincerely sorry about these, I am not responsible in the slightest for the use people make of this program (especially considering how easy it is to screw up the install when you hold yourself too smart to read the docs) and even less so now that there is an upgrade available.
But I care, and think I have proven it in the past, to whoever bothered contacting me without resorting to death threats immediately.
There is, however, one way to make me not care about your problem… It goes a little bit like this:
As I just lengthily explained, I have very little love for corporate hierarchies and all the folklore that goes with it. Ironically, the ostensibly “free” world of major Open-Source development never fails to irk me in the exact same way…
I have my theories about that, and they mostly have to do with the fact that Open-Source is full of the very same people, who, for one reason or another, might not have made it at the top of the corporate ladder in the traditional world, but are fiercely decided to enjoy the exact same privilege in their own version thereof. Less money, therefore a void to fill, usually by inflating the ego until it touches on all sides. These are all theories… But I do not care to expand on them right this second, if only to add very quickly that Open-Source Software is also filled with an overwhelming majority of selfless, dedicated, bright people, who, in the end, bring the balance way into the positive.
Yet, I do have my beef with many OSS practices in general, and practitioners in particular, but because I have yet to find the recipe for immortality (and just in case you are looking for it too, I can tell you so far that neither baths in young virgin’s blood, nor daily consumption of half a gallon of gin, work), I do my best to spend as little time as humanly possible on such crap. Sure I yammer. a lot. but I am also quite good at packing my marbles and moving to another side of the playground without sulking too much, whenever I really can’t take my little playmates’ bullshit any more…
Of my years as a code whore for miscellaneous software joints, I really haven’t kept much at all…
Except, that is, a bottomless contempt and seething hatred toward all that ressemble corporations or corporate culture in all its incarnations. I really hated corporate life. And to be fair, the feeling was shared: most of my bosses hated my guts, more or less silently, and the ones that didn’t, usually shared my hatred of higher ranked execs. HR zombies probably spent entire afternoons mentally rehashing every details of my pink slips, PR bunnies’ smiles would freeze to a near-breaking point whenever their bullshitting activities required any sort of interaction or input from my person.
Never, though, was I ever mean to workmates or people reporting under me: they usually didn’t mind my behaviour in the slightest, enjoyed the show and placed bets, if anything… But anybody with a vested interest in keeping the corporate status quo certainly lost many layers of enamel to teeth-gritting, during my stint in some of these companies…
Breaking with that old personal habit of favouring vices over addiction, I decided today that it was high time to resume heavy drug use for a while. And since methamphetamine is so damn expensive round here, I naturally turned to the second best option: Caffeine.
The deal is: I never drink coffee. Or hardly ever. Save for the odd cup or two when meeting people in a coffeeshop (and that’s only because the local Starbucks employees still refuses to this day to serve me Mojitos, even when I am ready to bring my own bottle of Rum). But coffee in the morning (i.e.: before 8pm) is a rarity.
Because of my complete non-addiction to caffeine, and since I still have my old hardcore coffee drinker habits, dosage-wise, those rare instances where I fix myself a cup usually result in uncontrollable twitching and borderline dizziness for most of the day.
From our stating-the-blindingly-obvious department:
You might have noticed this website has just undergone a complete face-lifting…
For the sake of argument, we’ll say it’s not completely finished… But mostly, it is.
It should look good, or acceptable, on every browsers. If it doesn’t, please let me know. But as usual I can only stress how much better it’s likely to look on real browsers (not Microsoft’s twisted version thereof).
I still need to brush up the menu content at the top of this page (organize, add some more items, update my bookmark list etc), but everything else is now in place. And all modesty aside, I dare say it kicks major ass.
Let me use this occasion to invite longtime RSS reader to pay a quick visit to the online version… While I won’t be stopping to provide full-content RSS any time soon, there are in fact many other incentives to checking the page itself that are not visible in the RSS feed.
For your benefits (and the benefit of other less sharp readers who might have missed hidden jewels of this corporate behemoth of entertainment we run here), let me list a few:
or “Welcome to My weekend, my life.com”
If reading the semi-coherent recollection of a drunken stranger’s week-end is not part of your Monday schedule, feel free to just gawk at photographic evidences, conveniently gathered here and there, including the perfunctory tits shot, courtesy of our dear Tracey…
In a scene telling of the spirit of this week-end, yours truly and three of his drunken groupies were seen yesterday night, fiercely decided to rock out the last train out of Harajuku, the same way they’d been rocking out Yoyogi park all afternoon: with lots of drunken debauchery and deep house beats blaring on a portable sound system.
If that’s not yet doing it for you, picture, if you will: the whitest, skinniest guy this side of Brooklyn, manning the most improbable Japanese ghetto blaster ever seen on the Tokyo metro, while the ladies managed to send the poor few salarymen present into abyss of despair: if even the ever-reliable subservient Japanese female could be spotted pole-dancing in a subway car, who was to tell what would be next. But the most awesome part was definitely the widespread toe-tapping around the car: people seemed to, in fact, kinda like it.
Party announcement at the bottom »
How do you do when you completely and unabashedly forgot an ex’s birthday? With no valid excuse whatsoever, if only a very busy day and a genetic inability to remember dates correctly (I swear I thought it was tomorrow). And don’t tell me suck it up, apologize and get a nice gift: she’s quite the vindicative type too. After all, she made sure to wait until the following morning at 8am to inform me that I was officially an arsehole… you know, just making sure I had no wiggle room for white lies…
Which brings me to the problem of my day so far: what to do…
Which you probably do not give a rat’s ass about. And truthfully, who am I to blame you.
But let’s not ruin the mood. I guess we’ll just have to double the usual morning tequila sunrise and consider our quota for public humiliations and shameful exposures fulfilled for the whole month. And that’s always a good thing: you don’t really want to stock up on past dues for these kind of quota.
Cue mandatory sakura blossom speech.
Everybody will have, by now, noticed that the sakura blossom is upon us. At least I know I have. But I would have little excuse, seeing how every other street in my neighbourhood instantly turned a rosy white color and I no longer see my breath upon waking up (which means either one of two things: my new toothpaste is working much better than the previous one. Or it’s getting warmer). That, and also half the trains on the Yamanote have been busy giving day-by-day updates about the state of the sakura front (unlike, say, some people who could have at least hinted that there was an important upcoming date, last time we talked).
There are basically two schools of hanamist:
Some will defend the inscrutable beauty and zen symbolism of the spectacle, and take comfort in their ephemeral regularity, seemingly changeless, yet each time unique. Those people, particularly the gaijin among them, will tend to grow copious amount of facial hair and put on traditional samurai armors to charge at locomotives on their horse, thus ensuring an edifying finale where they can get a last dying glimpse at the sakuras down below, before heading out for the land of their ancestors.
It is usually pointless to pay any attention to whatever offensive comment Shintaro Ishihara manage to spew with regularity, seeing how he makes little secret of his goal to alienate about every single non-Japanese human being on the planet. The fact that he is the Governor of the greater Tokyo area makes it all the more pathetic.
His last display of xenophobic moronism, though, did manage to make me laugh in disbelief quite a bit.
Started playing around with a new layout for this blog.
Not the final version by any mean…
I had to separate the redesign in two phases. This is only the first phase: structural changes.
Second phase (actual theme change) will come later, when I’ll be done with the coding and can concentrate on finding inspiration (I cannot code on mushrooms: just doesn’t work).
Like most people here, I have an ambivalent love relationship with Japanese ATMs.
I mean, who doesn’t love their ubiquitous salaryman-foodstamp dispensers: after all, they are lovable, sexy and incredibly serviceable.
Until night falls, that is. At which point they suddenly emerge clad in leather, whip you into submission, make you bend over and ram your every orifice, strictly foregoing the use of any lubricant.
Which, come to think of it, does remind me of a few ex’…
Ahem. Anyway.
Japanese ATMs are sometimes very convenient. For example, despite living in an über-residential neighbourhoods where most of the locals are either dead or not too far, and banks an unheard-of commodity, I only have to walk a hundred feet from my door to the closest ATM-equipped combini.
I cannot possibly be the only one to have noticed that the girl basically has one. single. pose.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she has potential to make it into every college fratboy top ten shaggable. when she gets the coke-induced twitching under control.
But the fact this ridiculously cheap 20 degrees left, 30 degrees down, naughty-girl-with-malicious-eye-and-mischievous-smile is what nowadays passes for a paragon of charm, or even plain basic sex-appeal, is a sad testament to that pathetic MTV culture we live in.
And the fact I just took the time to write this, an even sadder testament to the very low level of productivity of my afternoon.
