I remember vividly what a delight it was to drive home january 2007: not only is driving home from work per se a delight, but at that time Comet McNaught was lighting up the southern sky, and the twilight over North Otago made it an especially beautiful experience.
This amazing picture was shot by the extremely talented Tony Travaglia (a nice gallery of his pictures is here), member of the RASNZ and all around good guy.
Don’t anybody tell me that astronmy is boring.
I have just acquired two tickets for one of the most exciting events this year (if you’re over forty): three of my perennial favourites of electronic music are doing a short tour of the UK, celebrating not only their timeless music, but also their hometown, Sheffield. ABC, Heaven 17 and the Human League are certainly not the purveryors of groundbreaking electronica that they once used to be (although THL has had more successful comebacks than you can shake a stick at and ABC just released a new album -“Traffic
Penthouse and Pavement
My love for ABC has been thoroughly documented over the years. No other album has ever fascinated me as much as The Lexicon of Love
Last, but not least another chameleon of electronic music. Just like ABC, the Human League have reinvented their sound again and again. From sparse electronica to stadium rock (with ‘The Lebanon’ on Hysteria
So, the big unknown will be Heaven 17. Will Glen Gregory and his mates be able to live up to the same standards as the other Sheffieldians?
Actually, I don’t care. They could play the singles of these acts back to back on abig ghettoblaster and I’d be jumping up and own the isles.
It’s going to be a good night.
As my lifestyle is rather mobile at present, my main computing tasks are being performed by my Macbook, but recently I inherited an old beige Box from work together with a nifty flat screen LCD monitor that has a nice small footprint. so before throwing it away, I thought I give it a try. After cleaning it and having a rummage around it turns out to be a ca 6 year old KM2M Combo-L Motherboard from MSI, powered by a 1.4 ghz AMD Duron. I upgraded it to 1.2 GB ram and added an oldish Geforce FX 5700 that I still carried around with me, but still, for 2008 the whhole thing is a bit of a stinker.
Next my thoughts turned to the Operating System: it was supposed to have a dual role, on the one hand enabling me to finally finish Morrowind, so I bought the last legit copy of Windows XP my local mum and pop retailer had left (“funny that”, he said. “We have never sold so many copies of XP as in the last 6 months.”) and prepared the one half of the harddisk to be my gaming ‘rig’. Albeit a rather ancient one, but for Morrowind it works beautifully, and as its completely off the net with all connections disabled, it’s probably the safest XP machine in the neighbourhood. But it also should be hooked up to net, print and do some decent wordprocessing so a more secure option was necessary.
“Use what you know”, so a Debian derivate it needed to be. I previously ran Ubuntu on my last ‘real’ gaming rig, but that was an enormous, up to date thing with quad core cpu and a bloody expensive new GPU, so I was hesitant to try it on this machine with specs from 2003. Nevertheless I am happy to say that Hardy Heron is performing well. Better than I thought, actually.
To check how the dear old Duron was coping with an OS from 2008 and the new breed of ajaxified websites with their rich content and online streaming I had three desktop windows open: Window one ran the resource hogging Open Office, window 2 had Evolution in all its glory, while Window 3 was filled with Firefox running the BBC’s iplayer, showing me the installment of that weird archaeology show ‘Bonekickers’. The 5 year old beige box performed absolutely flawless. No hickup with the playback on the iplayer, even though the machine connected to the internet via a Asus usb plug-in wifi thingie (that was instantly picked up by Ubuntu and hooked up without any problems to my WPA-2 network). LastFM is playing nicely, printing works out of the box, and my non DRM’d songs on my itunes collection are picked up as well.
I would put the value of this machine at, what, 20? 30? pounds?
Don’t fall for the hype of always buying the latest multicore machines. The only reason I would ever buy a new, ‘pushing the envelope’, PC again is if I wanted to play the latest games on Vista. But as I have a Playstation3 and would rather eat my coffeecup before running Vista I’ll stay with my beige box for now.
Now, I would never, ever try to compete with Russel Davies’s Eggbaconchipsandbeans, but for once in my life I wanted to at least try to emulate the amazing experiences he must have when he sneaks into a new cafe, camera at the ready, poised to picture another perfect plate of food. So, when I had a morning to spend in Ilford (the less exciting East of London’s East End) I found this little gem of a cafe and, wielding my trusty TX1, entered the premises and uttered for the first time the eternal words:
Can I have Eggsbaconchipsandbeans please?
And it worked. After 5 minutes (in which I wanted to write numerous letters to the Daily Mail, as this was the only paper that was lying around) this arrived in front of me (with two enormous slices of fresh buttered bread and a smile)
Now this looks as good as most of Russel’s cafes. The cup of coffee was lovely and fresh, the smiles genuine and the price fair. The beans were desperately clinging to the edge of the plate, not to be pushed into the abyss by the generosity of the cook. The chips were lovely and not too dark, while the bacon made an almost teutonic statement of hegemonical prowess draped over a a third of the porcellain, and only the egg retained a modicum of modesty.
They had more lovely stuff on their menu:
I am now a part of the gobal brotherhood. I will worship in the altar of the greasy spoon as often as my ever expanding waistband will allow me. But I will defintely return to this, my first place of epiphany.
Thanks, Russel.
Noah’s Ark,
10 Chapel Rd
Ilford, IG1 2AG
Messaged from the Outhouse 