Music news:

[Big Noise ]
At the 2001 Progressive Rock Summit in Montreux, talks aimed at strategically limiting the length of bass guitar solos broke down after delegates were unable to agree a maximum number of hours. Chris Squire of Yes pushed for an upper bound of six hours, but Geddy Lee of Rush countered that if the limit were reduced to four hours, "that would give me more space for an arpeggio".

Elsewhere at the summit, the songwriters subcommittee made a controversial call for "shorter, more accessible" album tracks. Keith Emerson launched the initiative with a new piece entitled The Atomic History Of The Universe In D Minor, which clocked in at under 50 minutes. The performance was well received, although critics complained that the hip-hop/polka crossover in part 39, "The Dance Of The Neutrinos", was unorthodox.

At a special evening ceremony, Radiohead, Mansun and Elbow were indicted into the Progressive Rock Hall Of Fame, despite vigorous protests from representatives of the bands.

The summit continues today and, as is traditional, concludes with a gong crescendo and fireworks when all members of the audience are finally asleep.

Once again,

[Big Words ]
the point is missed. In all the fuss over Timothy McVeigh's execution, complete with vengeful relatives and bleeding heart humanitarians and not least, Dubya's typically gormless ramblings, the American public appear to have overlooked the fact that their army is staffed with thousands of McVeighs, all ready to shoulder the responsibility of "collateral damage" to women and children. But then I guess they're only told to bomb other countries.

Dragon attacks Sharon Stone's husband

[Big Deal ]
Dragon attacks Sharon Stone's husband
When's it out? Is it certificate 18?

Message

[Big Words ]
to the people who like to declaim the Bible loudly in the middle of public places: you can yell as loud as you like, but you'll never drown out ...

I give up.

[Big Job ]
I've reverted to kernel 2.2.19 on my Red Hat Linux 7.1 installation. Now at least my CD-RW drive works again. 7.1 has not been a seemless upgrade. Truth be told, I was quite happy with 6.2 - deliriously happy in retrospect, or at least I must have been delirious to upgrade. The sorry saga is explained at more length in Red Hat's bug tracker.

I only upgraded to 7.1 to get a decently packaged version of KDE 2.1. Ah, KDE - there's another long and regrettable tale. The actual code itself might be reasonably stable (or might not...), but the KDE team's own RPMs leave something to be desired. The latest build (2.1.1) not only had all the same problems as 2.1 (debugging enabled, XDM config overwritten, etc.), they also managed to build the sound handler without any sound drivers! Silence is golden, but in this case it was broken by loud cursing.

And this is where the oft-aired complaint about the lack of commercial support for free software really comes home. Because even if proprietary vendors are bloody useless at fixing their bugs, at least you have the small satisfaction of ringing up their employees and swearing profusely at their idiocy. It seems a tad churlish and ungrateful to do the same thing to volunteers donating their own time to work on software you downloaded for free. But it is frustrating.

But let's be fair: at work, I've been trying to monitor some proprietary bespoke NT software by making null TCP connections to its network port. Turns out that after a dozen of these connects, it crashes. Is it fixed yet? Ha, will it ever be??

More election news:

[Big Words ]
William Hague has called the last government "the most arrogant, aggressive and intimidatory in modern history". Presumably, he defines "modern" as "since 1997". Otherwise they'd have some stiff competition from the previous governments.

This Nepal crisis:

[Big Words ]
I blame the parents. They just give the kids anything they want these days: Sony Playstations, cars, Kalashnikov AK-47 machine guns... I mean, you expect it of American high school students, but not privileged members of royalty. Ungrateful little buggers.

Still, if I were the queen, I'd be locking the gun cabinet and making sure Charles doesn't have a key.