Everything being nice and sweet on the intro front, until the bass drum comes in. Good grief – I never realised it was this HUGE. If my office had mice, spiders or other creepy-crawlies, I’m pretty sure they’re gone now. 8 minutes to kill all known germs dead. Experiment IV, anyone?
I don’t want to sound like someone who spouts endlessly about civil liberties, because in my country (that’s my own personal one, come the revolution, not the UK), things would be very different. But, Andrew Rowe has just been convicted for “having instructions on using a mortar, and secret code on a piece of paper”.
It’s surely a dim time in the UK where having information can be considered a criminal offence. I’d best throw out all my cryptology books.
Wow! That’s what I thought about, oh, four weeks ago when I first heard this song. I’ve thought ‘Wow!’ about a song many times, but only twice not known why I thought so.
Special is the ‘pop’ song from Mew’s new album And The Glass Handed Kites. It’s a concept album – more one 60 minute song, than a set of 14 individual songs. They take the helium, bliss-pop from My Bloody Valentine, scrunch it through the more experimental diversions of Radiohead, then pump it up with Scandinavian floatiness.
And you can buy the album on iTunes now. It’s released on proper CD next week.
The BBC reported today that “More than £2m has already been raised towards a £750m National Lottery target to help fund the 2012 Olympics in London, it has been announced.”
The campaign was launched on 28 July with the ‘Go For Gold’ scratch card.
That’s 7 weeks for £2 million.
Put it another way: by the time of the 2012 Olympics, um, £104 million.
Let’s hope the other £646 million of lottery money comes from somewhere else then.
This was almost going to my track of the day ages ago, and frequently so, but it never got around to being so. But today, it did. Well done!
Mimi is the name of my Mac mini that holds all my music. For a couple of days I’ve been wanting to create a smart playlist that can mimic my own personal radio station.
Yesterday I started off my creating some smart playlists that held music just added to my library, music I’d listened to recently (but not too recently), music I like and music I’ve not listened to for sometime. All the while ensuring that streams, DJ mixes, podcasts and very short tracks are ignored.
Then I came up against two problems.
The first is that shared libraries don’t contribute to the play count / recently played date. I use shared music extensively since Mimi holds all my music, but I have another Mac that I like to listen to music on. Fortunately, there’s the Shared Music Monitor script that runs in the background updating this information.
The second problem is that there are a lot of smart playlists. Each of these needs to be refreshed in order for the ultimate ‘radio’ playlist to be refreshed. After all, I don’t want to be listening to the same stuff every day. So I wrote my own iTunes AppleScript which deletes all of the tracks on each of the specific smart playlists – thereby forcing them to be recreated – and I have a nice ‘radio’ playlist which can be updated each day or when I want to.
Something that’s been bothering some Basecamp users is that it doesn’t support bars in its Milestone calendar. That is, you cannot see a start and end date of an activity, or discover that on a particular day some activity should be happening.
Since ‘doing my own thing’, I’ve realised that Gantt charts are pretty much useless for this information. Why? Well, it doesn’t matter what should be on-going on a particular day. You’re either dealing with an ongoing project – in which case you have discrete Next Actions (if you’re using GTD), or there is something which must happen Today, so you have a milestone for Today, or there is something which can be done today, which you keep on a list someplace else and you deal with it as your time and situation allows.
I’ve often considered posting the above musings to the Basecamp forums to back up the ‘less is more’ philosophy, but decided against it, because, for me it’s so damn obvious. And in any case what’s really important about a bar?
I’ll tell you: it’s where it starts and it’s where it ends. Not what happens in the middle.
My friend and business partner Mark has just used Basecamp to mark his holiday. He’s got two dates as milestones: the first day of the holiday and the last day. Nothing else. Because it doesn’t matter to me or him to know that someplace in the middle he’s still on holiday.
Posted on SvN today:
”..Nobody knows what they really want before they get it”.
Perhaps this is why I like buying something more than having it (although the more I use something the more I like it). There’s a whole world of expectation surrounding every single thing that you’ve not experienced, then when you’ve ‘been there’, or you’ve ‘done that’, there or that is not that interesting anymore.
Perhaps this is why some clients keep asking for more things rather than being satisfied with the functionality they have, or indeed, in the case of Basecamp, some people demand zillions of new features.
The iPod doesn’t have an FM radio, nor video playback, nor extensive PDA features. But that doesn’t stop people demanding these features. But, hey, it’s a music player. That’s all it does. People don’t complain that their washing machine doesn’t have a radio.
Actually, that would be a great idea – kitchen ‘white goods’ with built-in hi-fi. Obviously not in a washing machine. A fridge would be good. Or a microwave.
Cinerama:
I tasted the ocean
When I kissed her fingers
copyright ©2006 and so on, ninthspace.org, except quotations, lyrics and some images which are the rights of their respective holders