Seventies
Currently Listening To: Janie Runaway from the album "Two Against Nature" by Steely Dan
"9 songs about dysfunctional freaks, losers, loners, perverts, hookers, substance abusers - hey, must be the new Steely Dan album! "
Dunno how the hell that one slipped through the net! Both my father and I had no idea about it. In fact he still has no idea by virtue of his being asleep. However after a quick visit to steelydan.com to find out "what those dudes had been up to," I discovered there was a new album called Everything Must Go. This quite clearly must be bought because Steely Dan are just cool.
I mean these guys produce music today which is indistinguishable from the stuff they were doing in the 70's. They literally took a 20 year haitus before releasing Two Against Nature and still put out an album which sounded identical to their old stuff! In fact if you mix up the playlists you can't tell when what was written or produced.
For those of you who don't know who Steely Dan are, they are a group formed by two individuals; Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who pretty much pioneered Fusion Jazz. They have this incredible way of making music where they'll hire like 5 session musicians for each channel of a track and then pick and choose the one they like out of the vast catalogue of riffs, rides and hooks to put on the track. Some tracks have like 3 drummers in different bits :)
Anyhow.. At least I know what the album will sound like (every other Steely Dan release) and combined with Sugar Ray's new album I could really do with the cash to do some buyin' :D I will be paid £60 on monday, of which £40 is already spent on a new keyboard and the rest shall be hoarded away to pay off some more debt (mmmm.. Student Debt :D)
Newtonia
Kev was just on iChat talking about the eBook reader of his dreams. He described a piece of hardware which folded out to A5 with USB interface and PDF/TXT functionality.
eBooks are really cool and when I have a large Text story to read I like to slam it into Paperback (and application to make Newton readable eBooks) instead of just using the Newton Notepad to read it. Whilst I was in Italy I was reading Conrad's book on Denning, my Newton Messagepad 2100 and lamenting the fact that the only thing the Newton was missing was a hardware button to scroll up/down the pages.
Then I remembered that I had heard of a cool application for the newton which translated taps on the internal microphone (just tapping the little mic pit with your finger) into commands of the "page up/page down" variety. I installed it and lo and behold the little bugger worked with the Paperbook eBook format! So I now declare my Newt a pretty spiffy eBook reader among other things :D
In other news Hong Kong national Football team held Real Madrid to a 4-2 loss. Given that the squad were thrashed 6-0 by Liverpool I think HKFC deserve a round of congratulations having avoided a total raping at the hands of the team who look like the 'FIFA Allstars' squad common on the old "FIFA 9x" console football games.
Oh and I've managed to get Kev interested in Swatch Internet Time (Beats). The principle behind it is that the day is divided into 1000 beats instead of 1440 minutes and that @980 in Sweden is also @980 in America, China and India. There is only one timezone and its a system designed to allow better net-meetings and such. I really dug the idea and used it for ages but it was difficult to get others to use it. Now I'm back on it because its just so in touch with the whole Blogging dynamic.
Anyhow that is why there is now @XXX at the bottom of my blog in my Java time applet. That means its "Beat XXX" and its the same everywhere else in the world. Most swatch watches now come with the Internet Time on them as well as the normal time so I might look into buying one in the alternate reality where I have money :D
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at August 10, 2003 01:09 AM