A and Arse : the nineties music

John Niven talks about the high life of a major record label in the champagne charlie world of the
nineties music industry in this Times article - an interesting read for those of us who were lining the pockets of the record labels during this period.

Thank god for bittorrent, and do they really wonder why they're getting their cumuppence for years and years and years of fleecing us?

Viva la revolution!

Macworld a go-go!

Well, I guess it's a little geeky to get excited about the prospect of finding out what Steve Jobs and Apple have in store for 2008. Sod it, I'm a geek, I don't care.

It does just so happen that my boss is about to buy me a shiny new Mac laptop, so I will be watching/reading tomorrow's Keynote with quite some interest.

The new sub-notebook looks now to be a dead cert, whether or not it'll be called "MacBook Air" - I'm not convinced. Speculation over the name seems to be based on this photo someone managed to snatch of the Keynote backcloth...

...possibly alluding to the name for the much talked about sub-notebook, or perhaps a new wireless offering as the centerpiece of the keynote.

It remains to be seen just how sexy the "Air" is going to be (my guess, really very sexy) but as I'm not on the road that much, I don't think I'll be choosing it over a high end Macbook. But we will see, Apple has a habbit of wowing prospective buyers at these events. If the "Air" has gestural controls, and the MacBook range isn't touched, I might be tempted. After all, we all want to be the cool kid with the latest iToy, don't we?

So we wait to see - I have to wait til the tail end of the day tomorrow as I'm here in the UK, but a fine end to the day I hope it will be, and with a bit of luck on wednesday, I'll have that wonderful feeling of going to the Apple store with my bosses credit card!

MacRumors has all the gossip ahead of the keynote, and www.macrumors.com/mwsf/ has all the latest news from the expo.

mclovin12four

What the hell is mclovin12four? It's showing up in google trends.
Some seem to claim it's an aimbot (see here , although I thought that was a way for cheating at first person shooters), and others that it's a promo for Superbad, but thats been out for ages now.

Apologies if you've found this by googling and were hoping for an answer (although, bizarrely, google has only 10 results for this - are they filtering it?)

Please do come back here and let me know if you find out what it is!

Led Zeppelin reunion - People get older, but the song remains the same!

Led Zeppelin tonight played their reunion gig at the O2 Arena after nearly 20 years.
John Bonhams son Jason was on Drums and the reports are that it was amazing, and that boy they can still rock the joint.

Channel 4, in their infinite wisdom have the excellent 1973 madison Square Garden gig on now & I'm sitting here watching just wishing I could have got a ticket for tonight :(

The set list at the O2 arena in London was as follows...

'Good Times Bad Times'
'Ramble On'
'Black Dog'
'In My Time Of Dying'
'For Your Life'
'Trampled Under Foot'
'Nobody's Fault But Mine'
'No Quarter'
'Since I've Been Loving You'
'Dazed And Confused'
'Stairway To Heaven'
'The Song Remains The Same'
'Misty Mountain Hop'
'Kashmir'

encore...
'Whole Lotta Love'
'Rock And Roll'

Search Page Larry to marry!

It seems there'll be a glass of cheap plonk or two being consumed on Necker island (owned by Best Man, Richard Branson) this weekend as Google Co-Founder, Larry Page, marries his girlfriend of just 1 year, Lucy Southworth.

Here's a picture of the happy couple, and hasn't he done well! (although he does look as if he's sneaked into the back of this shot, unbeknown to her!)


Tell me, Lucy Southworth, what first attracted you to joint 5th richest man in America, Larry Page? I jest of course, I'm sure they're very much in love and I wish them every happiness (I'm sure larry will be breathing a sigh of relief now he has my blessing).

Page and Branson have become good buddies in the last couple of years incidentally, enjoying booze fuelled evenings rolling around in their underwear on huge piles of money.

Oh, to be a quitter

Stopping smoking is tough.
Prohibition just makes the urge stronger

I like this article by Clive James.

...and I'm lighting one up in my memory right now :)

Maps

I saw Peter, Bjorn and John at the Forum last week. They were OK - they seemed to relax more once they'd played Young Folks and a third of the audience left (some people!). Bizarrely, most of the crowd preferred to chat amongst themselves than listen to the bands.


Anyway, supporting them were the wonderful creation of Northampton's James Chapman - Maps, and for me it was they who justified the cost of my ticket.

I'd heard bits and pieces of them before without thinking too much, but seeing them live was enveloping from the moment they strolled onto the stage and burst into their first song with a rightly held confidence. The sound was fairly shit at the forum, but this didn't seem to matter - somehow the energy in the performace and hypnotism of the tunes made you not even notice after a short time.

We can create is their album, and you can hear them on the hype machine too.

National Novel Writing Month

They say everyone has a book in them. I've never been too sure if that's actually true, but thought I'd attempt to get mine out in national novel writing month, which starts tomorrow.

The idea is that you start writing tomorrow, write an average of 1667 words each day in November and have a 50k word novel at the end of the month! Lovely stuff. The emphasis is on quantity, not quality, and theres to be no editing til December.

It doesn't matter if it's disjointed, nonsensical in places or is just plain arse. The idea is simply to get people writing. I for one am going to give it a bash, if you fancy joining me, head on over to NaNoWriMo.org and sign up.

JOIN ME!

How to compress and decompress tar and gzip files

How to untar a file

A lot of Linux/Unix files you find yourself working with will be compressed using tar and/or gzip. These are files with extensions like .tar and .tar.gz.

Extracting

For.tgz, tar.gz, or tar.z extension use this command:

tar -zxvf {filename}

Eg: tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz

This will extract the file for you in the directory you are currently in. Using the above command will save you from having to redirect the output for gzip or anything else (because the z option automatically decompresses the file for you), otherwise without the z argument, you would have to do the extraction for the gzip first, then do a tar -xvf for the tar archive.

Archiving

To create a gzipped .tar file, use the following command...

tar -cf {filename}

...to create filename.tar
Eg: tar -cf filename

- Then -

gzip {filename.tar}

...to create filename.tar.gz

It's amazing what you can do with a few boxes

OK, This is incredible. This dude, Chris Gilmour makes things out of cardboard - like the car above. How the f*ck? More Here at his site...