January 2005 Archives

I got a DVD in the mail today from Amazon UK - Mike Oldfield's Elements, a collection of music videos from his Virgin era. They're all from the 70s and 80s, using state-of-the-art effects, so of course they're pretty dated...

The 70s vids have CSO all over them. Someone made the clever decision to use yellow CSO during the Tubular Bells performance, and unfortunately the front of one of Mike's guitars was yellow, leading to Invisible Guitar Syndrome.

Some of the 80s vids use computer graphics which are about screen-saver standard these days (seriously, if it wasn't for the live action, I'd swear I'd seen one running on a PC somewhere...)

Almost as fun as the special effects was watching Mike's hairstyle change through the years from his long-haired hippy phase to 80s styles including (at one point) a mullet. Class.

Now, a DVD of his later Warner Music output would be quite nice too...

Tomorrow is Back To Work Day. This means:

1. Attempting to overcome the insomnia I've developed by sleeping in the last two weeks.
2. Mailing a pile of stuff which I've finished watching back to Jeff (Mainly Star Trek DVDs).
3. Taking my computer in to the shop to get fixed.
   and:
4. Oh, yeah, getting back into doing work.

Still, here's to having a job to go to. :)

You've no doubt already heard that Six Apart, creators of Movable Type, which is used to make this here weblog, have bought LiveJournal.

One of the best parts of this is that LiveJournal will fairly shortly (and finally) get the long awaited trackback support (which I believe it needs to be taken more seriously in the blogging community at large). It's only fair that Movable Type gets some LiveJournal features in return, of course, and I think it's obvious what the first such feature should be... :)

Via Aardvark:

Aunty Spam's Net Patrol reports: A little birdie with insider knowledge has confirmed that Verizon is blocking all international IP space from RIPE, APNIC, and more, and is only unblocking specific domains, based on their IP address, when complaints are made and escalated.

If that's true, then it seems Verizon has stumbled on an interesting solution to the spam problem, though probably not a sustainable one over the long term, due to the amount of complaints they'll get (though they may well be blocking the complaints as well!).

I inadvertantly discovered that BlogShares has some interesting HTML on their site. In the "Junior Sponsors" box, right below "BlogShares Gear" there's a row of 1 pixel, white links to porn sites.

Course there's a comment in the source to remove it after the 20th, so if you're reading this later than the 20th of January, they are probably gone...

I've been watching a lot of Star Trek (the original series) recently. Once you know James Doohan is intentionally keeping his right hand out of shot so you can't see (or rather fail to see) his missing finger, it becomes intensely distracting. My eyes are drawn to following his right wrist around just trying to catch a glimpse of his hand.

Or maybe I'm just weird.

I'm currently partway through season 2. Great series, but then I haven't yet watched such clankers as Spock's Brain or And the Children Shall Lead yet...

Every time my computer resets when I have FireFox open, FireFox completely wipes its history. This is only a minor inconvenience to be sure, but still an annoyance.

I can only guess that FireFox keeps the history file open while it's running, and the computer resetting therefore corrupts the file. If so, that's a bit of a sloppy way to do it.

I went to see a movie today. Before it started (and before the manditory 15 minutes of advertising they make us sit through beforehand) there was piped chillout music.

The song playing when we sat down was a minimalistic piece consisting of a steady beat, with samples of (1) an adult male saying "orange", (2) some small children laughing, and (3) a female voice, possibly computer synthesized, counting upwards. Morgan pronounced it the most irritating song ever.

Of course, good luck googling for it with those lyrics. It's not driving me nuts trying to find out the name and artist. It could have been a compilation album they were playing - the next song was Moby's "Porcelain", but that's still not really a lot of help...

Once again, I got a popup window while surfing on BlogExplosion. The "Block popup windows" option in FireFox is also being disabled by the same javascript that launches the popup window.

I have reported the problem to BlogExplosion. Of course, when you go back to the same blog, the popup doesn't come up again, making it difficult to trace. I have some suspicions as to what's causing it...

I've added the domain from whence it came to my hosts file to attempt to block it

Here's hoping the 21st century improves from now on!