Normally, I think any attempt

[Big Job ]
Normally, I think any attempt to deliver true "multimedia" (trans.: stuff that doesn't require the ability to read and we know is therefore more attractive to the unwashed masses) on the net sucks donkey parts, but this preview of U2's forthcoming single, "Beautiful Day", is the first Realplayer example to impress me. Clear sound, thumping bass, no pops, clicks or dropouts...

Unfortunately, I suspect this has rather more to do with my employer's recently installed ADSL line than any sudden remarkable improvement in the technology of online music. Still, the song isn't bad, especially for a Monday morning.

freedom

[Big Words ]
Egotism appears to be firmly back in fashion within rock music. Whereas once it was sufficient in interviews to burble something along the lines of:

"We're not bothered about being `the best' or selling the most records. We just do what we do and if people like it, fine."

Now one has to go for the throat and make it absolutely clear how knee-tremblingly awesome you are:

"Actually, I do think we're a fucking good band. Knee-tremblingly awesome, in fact. Yep, the best band in the whole damn world. Bathe my feet in scented oils, mortal!"

Or:

"Den is such a good songwriter, he really is the best. I don't think there's anyone to touch him really. I do violently assault anyone who says otherwise because, honestly, those people know shit."

...Which is usually from the drummer - just the kind of authoritative, independent opinion you were seeking.

Recent Q interviews with the likes of Travis and Coldplay seem (from memory - because they were waaay to dull to read properly even once) to bear this out. Travis in particular have a bad case of the thin air at their current rarified heights depriving their brains of oxygen and their critical judgement of reality. An acoustic ditty that bears a passing similarity to an actual tune, rerecorded enough times to fill an album, does not constitute an immortal body of great art. Arse, maybe.

Perhaps it's a uniquely Scottish disease; in the current issue, Marti Pellow - who attempted a Dave Gahan-style heroin makeover but failed to impart the same necrophiliac Modal glamour to the terminally drippy Wet Wet Wet - says:

"The world is a better place with me in it."

...without stopping to ask my opinion or anyone else's.

The crucial difference with egotism this time round is that apparently it's now a democratic and equalitarian attribute that anyone can claim; justification is strictly optional.

---

Truth in advertising:

• "- you can't say no to our new autumn collection" goes the tagline of the latest desperate attempt by M&S to win back any customers who still have all their own teeth. How exactly does "freedom" correlate with being unable to refuse? Did they mis-spell "fascism"?
• According to Popbitch, Sam Fox's publicist says of her forthcoming album:

  "The music is similar to the band Garbage"

  Delete two words from the above quote to uncover the likely truth.

Egotism appears to be firmly

[Big Noise ]
Egotism appears to be firmly back in fashion within rock music. Whereas once it was sufficient in interviews to burble something along the lines of:

"We're not bothered about being `the best' or selling the most records. We just do what we do and if people like it, fine."

Now one has to go for the throat and make it absolutely clear how knee-tremblingly awesome you are:

"Actually, I do think we're a fucking good band. Knee-tremblingly awesome, in fact. Yep, the best band in the whole damn world. Bathe my feet in scented oils, mortal!"

Or:

"Den is such a good songwriter, he really is the best. I don't think there's anyone to touch him really. I do violently assault anyone who says otherwise because, honestly, those people know shit."

...Which is usually from the drummer - just the kind of authoritative, independent opinion you were seeking.

Recent Q interviews with the likes of Travis and Coldplay seem (from memory - because they were waaay to dull to read properly even once) to bear this out. Travis in particular have a bad case of the thin air at their current rarified heights depriving their brains of oxygen and their critical judgement of reality. An acoustic ditty that bears a passing similarity to an actual tune, rerecorded enough times to fill an album, does not constitute an immortal body of great art. Arse, maybe.

Perhaps it's a uniquely Scottish disease; in the current issue, Marti Pellow - who attempted a Dave Gahan-style heroin makeover but failed to impart the same necrophiliac Modal glamour to the terminally drippy Wet Wet Wet - says:

"The world is a better place with me in it."

...without stopping to ask my opinion or anyone else's.

The crucial difference with egotism this time round is that apparently it's now a democratic and equalitarian attribute that anyone can claim; justification is strictly optional.

---

Truth in advertising:

• "freedom - you can't say no to our new autumn collection" goes the tagline of the latest desperate attempt by M&S to win back any customers who still have all their own teeth. How exactly does "freedom" correlate with being unable to refuse? Did they mis-spell "fascism"?
• According to Popbitch, Sam Fox's publicist says of her forthcoming album:

  "The music is similar to the band Garbage"

  Delete two words from the above quote to uncover the likely truth.

Fallout

[Big Words ]
Slashdot smartarses, dontcha hate 'em? Always ready to reply to Ask Slashdot queries with something like:

"Don't be so pathetic and useless, Linux is designed to be hacked to do what you want! A High Availability solution is easy: just use ifconfig to move the IP, then install your app on a shared disk (which is trivial to set up in Linux). You could add some basic heartbeating to monitor the active server if you want extra reassurance, perhaps using SCSI target mode across the disk link. You would only need a few scripts and a brand new disk driver - simple!"

Where the hell are these people on the Linux-HA list then?! So bloody clever, it seems, at dashing off all the vital enterprise features missing from it at present, such as volume managers, HA, hot swap hardware drivers and journalling filesystems. The fact that most of this stuff only exists, if at all, as experimental, prototype or pseudo- code, surely indicates that we must currently have a bunch of complete bozos working on them. Honestly, can't they even write a new set of drivers in a day?? (Well, someone probably did but Linus changed the API the day after.)

There appear to be a staggering number of individuals on the Linux scene, whom I have come to identify as "probable bullshitters", ever willing to casually mention some fearfully complicated, bleeding edge project that they're currently engaged upon. It does their descriptive powers credit that they are able to make these tasks sound so awesomely godlike, but perhaps not so much their real skills when all they are doing, once you strip away the jargon, make a few informed guesses and - occasionally - have insider knowledge, is installing a standard application and performing a little reconfiguration that is only slightly outside the box.

E.g.:
"I've pioneered a new technique in media data extraction via a powerful backend algorithmic sorting mechanism. It was tough but thankfully I am blessed with the powers of a minor divinity. No no, don't kneel. Just bow your heads slightly and I will anoint thee."
Means:
"I've hooked my MP3 player up to an Oracle database, using an open source util."

And if they have managed to achieve something on their own, you can bet that another tool easily locatable via Freshmeat will do the same thing much more elegantly and can be set up in half the time. But then I guess the gods Create rather than Reuse, don't they?

---

from the fuel "crisis":

"It is not the very poor and it is not the very rich. It is the people in the middle who feel aggrieved - just the sort of people we need to appeal to." - Unnamed government minister

Normally, the people in the middle only exist to be squeezed by those on either side until they die of asphyxiation. After all, the "middle of the road" is where you most often find the sad, pink and white remains of dumb animals. But here in the UK, the mediocre, fair-to-middlin' mass holds sway! The mob must be appeased! Sacrifice more principles to the mob!

It's surprising that the film Gladiator did not lead to the revival of the Roman arenas here, particularly after the remains of a female gladiator found in London indicated that such places used to exist. I'm sure William Hague could make it the central plank of another "Back to the good old days" policy.

Slashdot smartarses, dontcha hate 'em?

[Big Job ]
Slashdot smartarses, dontcha hate 'em? Always ready to reply to Ask Slashdot queries with something like:

"Don't be so pathetic and useless, Linux is designed to be hacked to do what you want! A High Availability solution is easy: just use ifconfig to move the IP, then install your app on a shared disk (which is trivial to set up in Linux). You could add some basic heartbeating to monitor the active server if you want extra reassurance, perhaps using SCSI target mode across the disk link. You would only need a few scripts and a brand new disk driver - simple!"

Where the hell are these people on the Linux-HA list then?! So bloody clever, it seems, at dashing off all the vital enterprise features missing from it at present, such as volume managers, HA, hot swap hardware drivers and journalling filesystems. The fact that most of this stuff only exists, if at all, as experimental, prototype or pseudo- code, surely indicates that we must currently have a bunch of complete bozos working on them. Honestly, can't they even write a new set of drivers in a day?? (Well, someone probably did but Linus changed the API the day after.)

There appear to be a staggering number of individuals on the Linux scene, whom I have come to identify as "probable bullshitters", ever willing to casually mention some fearfully complicated, bleeding edge project that they're currently engaged upon. It does their descriptive powers credit that they are able to make these tasks sound so awesomely godlike, but perhaps not so much their real skills when all they are doing, once you strip away the jargon, make a few informed guesses and - occasionally - have insider knowledge, is installing a standard application and performing a little reconfiguration that is only slightly outside the box.

E.g.:
"I've pioneered a new technique in media data extraction via a powerful backend algorithmic sorting mechanism. It was tough but thankfully I am blessed with the powers of a minor divinity. No no, don't kneel. Just bow your heads slightly and I will anoint thee."
Means:
"I've hooked my MP3 player up to an Oracle database, using an open source util."

And if they have managed to achieve something on their own, you can bet that another tool easily locatable via Freshmeat will do the same thing much more elegantly and can be set up in half the time. But then I guess the gods Create rather than Reuse, don't they?

---

Fallout from the fuel "crisis":

"It is not the very poor and it is not the very rich. It is the people in the middle who feel aggrieved - just the sort of people we need to appeal to." - Unnamed government minister

Normally, the people in the middle only exist to be squeezed by those on either side until they die of asphyxiation. After all, the "middle of the road" is where you most often find the sad, pink and white remains of dumb animals. But here in the UK, the mediocre, fair-to-middlin' mass holds sway! The mob must be appeased! Sacrifice more principles to the mob!

It's surprising that the film Gladiator did not lead to the revival of the Roman arenas here, particularly after the remains of a female gladiator found in London indicated that such places used to exist. I'm sure William Hague could make it the central plank of another "Back to the good old days" policy.

Big Bubbles takes a hardline

[Big Words ]
Big Bubbles takes a hardline view on those participating in the current UK fuel "crisis" (Mondeo Man couldn't fill up and drive to a sales meeting in Bradford! Crisis, crisis! Oh save him, save him! The humanity! etc). With petrol duties and tax so high, we can see only drastic action necessary to tackle the problem:

TAX 'EM 'TIL THEY BLEED!!

And then...

TAX 'EM SOME MORE!

Fuel tax, road tolls, tyre tax, wiper tax, little fluffy dice tax, "my other car's completely unnecessary" tax, VED, VAT & Volvo tax, opening-the-car-door tax, Sunday driver tax, too fucking lazy to walk tax, driving at 40 in a 30mph zone tax, driving at all tax, tax, tax, TAX!

Pull those whinging hauliers from their cabs and tickle their feet mercilessly with fine hairs ripped from the chests of angry Welsh farmers! Put tin tacks under the wheels of taxi drivers and more tin tacks on their seats and then say, "How d'you like them TACKS, then?"! Slaughter the cud-chewing cattle who every day pour through the sliding doors of Frankley Services on the M5 in search of a burger and a Twix, their polluting injection engines gently cooling and leaking oil on to the tarmac outside! Twix tax! Drag the oil barons out of their grim refineries and BURN THEM AT THE STAKE with their own barrels! And finally, bend Mr Blair over on live TV and radish him without mercy for failing to promote taxation as the essential green policy it so rightly should be. And yes, this is one point we do want to hammer home.

Finally, the Daily Mail offices will be fumigated with exhaust emissions and encased in tarmac. We think their writers enjoy that sort of thing. But we know we will.