Category Archives: Messaged from the Outhouse

Avoiding the Itunes shuffle bias

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At this present time I have 4276 tracks in my Itunes collection. I carry these around on various portable item (ipad/ipod/Archos) but for some reason the shuffle function on my ipad/ipod/macbook only seem to serve the same 10 percent songs, so I have started to listen to my collection from A to Z. This is incredibly liberating and I have rediscovered the majority of the tracks that I had completely forgotten about (I completely forgot about my Miles Davis collection). It also tends to serve a very varied program, and keeps my afternoons at work much more interesting.

The only thing I want to know whether Apple benefits from pushing only a handful of songs. Do I smell a conspiracy?

 

 

 

 

Oh Americans, how lucky you are.

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And so it has started again. The best show on earth has started to rumble into gear again, swallowing thousands of journalists, creating millions of pages of print, thousands of hours of TV and keeping the nuttiest bloggers on earth in business (and, of course, giving Rupert Murdoch the chance to poison another 59 million minds by ramping up Fox News coverage and spreading his “neutral and unbiased” opininions over 5 continents). Yes, it’s the American Presidential elections, and this year could be an especially brillant one. If we’re really, really lucky, some of the nuttiest right-wingers ever could turf it out among themselves, turning the whole process of the Republican primaries into one giant freak show that is likely to be more entertaining than anything that Aaron Sorkin has ever dreamed of writing.

The prospect of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann slugging it out on a stage while Mitt Romney looks on grinning is just too exciting to contemplate, and I envy the nation that has the pleasure of witnessing this thoroughly entertaining process every 4 years. Here in the UK the best we can hope for is one aspiring Labour/Conservative/Liberal candidate calling the other one ‘spent’.

So I raise my glass to you, the happy citizens of the U.S. and especially to Sarah, Michelle and Newt and with baited breath shout

“Bring it on!”

Ask the manager…

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And so it came to pass that the managers from that top, world class, out of this world network operator National Express East Anglia had a ‘meet the manager’ event on platform 10a in London Stratford. Looks like nobody really had the time to meet them, as everybody was busy phoning their family that their train was cancelled/late/delayed.

I still wonder why the brought the poor policeman.

Stranger, if you want a wild night out in Basildon…

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..that doesn’t involve drunken fighting between underaged girls in the so aptly named ‘Festival Park’, you better get ready for an evening with psychic mediums, 4th rate comedians or 3rd rate tenors.

Well, at least according to the Billboard the council is proudly displaying.

The Playstation has to leave. Why?

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So this is it (shoobab): my Playstation 3 finally has to go. We spend 3 stormy years together, but in the end her flaws where just too obvious, so she will leave the household through the front door via ebay, head (or sisaxis controller) held high.

When Sony announced the original specs for the PS3, I literally drooled: the mixture of capable graphics hardware with the cell processor, coupled with bluetooth, wifi and a blu ray player sounded just too good. So when I finally bought her in February 2008 due to a sudden bout of long distance relationship induced blues, I was incredibly excited to have her in the house. I was envisioning nights of coding and surfing on the fastest Linux ever, thanks to the remarkable architecture, amazing graphics and superb cell processor, but of course all my dreams were crushed due to Sony’s decision to limit 3rd party OS’s access to the hardware and my inability to work the Sisaxis controller. So all games I played I immediately failed due to my extreme clumsiness (or the fact that when I learned gaming, we had something called ‘joysticks’, ‘mice’ and ‘keyboards’. I still game (to the chagrin of the best girlfriend ever), but these days it’s a Windows 7 based gargantuan rig (Macs aren’t for gaming. They are for working), and so the PS3 ended up to be the most electricity demanding BlueRay player ever. Each time another episode of Boston Legal was watched, another three nuclear power stations in France had to put another log on the fire and the lights in my little village in Mid Essex started to flicker.

The last insult really was Sony’s appalling behaviour towards their fan community by locking down the juggernaut further and further and in the end even going to war with their most devoted hardware hackers. This, and its inability to play multi region DVD’s (there are ca 100 unwatched DVD’s from New Zealand in my living room, begging to be freed) finally pushed it onto ebay.

So, if you can actually use a Sixaxis controller, don’t mind the French to work their nuclear power stations overtime and have no use for DVDs outside region 2 and love Sony’s hold on your product, buy her here.

But please be nice to her.

Sniff.