shadowphiar's journal

My favourite albums of 2009

2010-01-04T13:53:25Z

It's around this time of the year that the DPRP runs a readers' poll about the previous year of music. I thought I would make a record of my answers so I can see how well my opinions match the final results when then come out in March (or so), and in the meantime perhaps some readers may find it interesting...

Top Albums of 2009

10. No Line On The Horizon (U2)
9. Focal Point (Paul Cusick)
8. Force Of Gravity (Sylvan)
7. Realm Of Shadows (Knight Area)
6. Anno Domini High Definition (Riverside)
5. Frequency (IQ)
4. The Whirlwind (Transatlantic)
3. Ostara (The Wishing Tree)
2. Amor Vincit Omnia (Pure Reason Revolution)
1. The Incident (Porcupine Tree)

Biggest Disappointment in 2009

The Uprising (Muse)

I was gutted when I first heard this album, and it hasn't grown on me since. Their previous album, Black Holes and Revelations, was in my opinion a masterpiece - but with this effort Muse have taken their art a long way backwards, carrying all the excess and silly elements without any of the musical flair. What's worse is that it's being lauded as "the future of prog" by journalists who haven't actually listened to any prog in the last thirty years, who wouldn't know a time signature without a "4" in it if it stood up to bite them, and who think that it is the height of musical innovation to shove a bit of incongruous Chopin in the middle of an otherwise incredibly lightweight album. This is like prog for the televised karaoke generation; this is like prog trying to impress Simon Cowell. Ugh.

Music DVDs

Feed To Feed (Oceansize)
My Soul Sings (Delirious)
Frequency Special Edition Bonus DVD - Live in Zoetermeer 2007 (IQ)

Songs

Stronger Than Friction (IQ)
Victorious Cupid (Pure Reason Revolution)
Time Flies (Porcupine Tree)

Individual Performances

Guitar: Steven Wilson, Porcupine Tree, The Incident
Keyboard:Mark Westworth, IQ, Frequency
Vocal: Hannah Stobart, The Wishing Tree, Ostara
Drummer: Mike Portnoy, Transatlantic, The Whirlwind
Bass: Pete Trewavas, Transatlantic, The Whirlwind

Other

Artwork: Freequency (IQ)
Newcomer: Paul Cusick
Biggest Prog Happening: Financial problems of InsideOut/SuperballMusic labels, and them finding a backer in Century Media Records

shadowphiar @ 2009-08-15T01:02:00

2009-08-15T00:26:57Z

Transformers tomorrow! (Actually, today in fact since it's past midnight... I *really* must go to bed now). Quite excited, my front room is full of cardboard boxes which I really hope will fit into my car. But I haven't packed up my computers yet - ran out of time.

Was out this evening for a friend's stag night. Went 10 pin bowling - was very pleased with my first game of 120 (including a stonking 8-split -> spare) but in the second game I bowled a rather more humdrum 78. Was all in all a very good evening.

Don't match flammable honeycomb

2009-08-14T09:55:21Z

Quartz Light User Instruction

Brief Introduction

Quartz light is one of most popular use lights in the studio. Based on 3200K color temperature, this quartz light can offer a suitable continuous lighting for your shooting. The light system is improved time after time. The design has over-heat protection of circuit and auto-cooling function. The light is not only infinitely variable adjusting in power but also the angle of irradiation is large. Under the light's good protection, it has long service life. It can connect all kinds of accessories, like soft boxes. This quartz light will provide high-quality continuous lighting for TV video shooting, advertising photography, traditional film photography, digital photography and so on.

Operation

1. Insert two pins of light bulb into the front base of your quartz light. Make sure two supporting clamps are firmly holding the bulb. Don't touch the quartz made envelope with bare hands.
2. Turn on on/off switch. The built-in fan cooler will automatically turn on and blow air inside out.
3. Place the light accessories (ie. reflectors, soft boxes, barn doors etc.) in front of your quartz light.

Note

1. When assembling and disassembling the quartz light, don't touch the light with your hand directly as the sweat will damage the bulb and affect service life of quartz light.
2. Don't tough light cover in use so as to avoid burning. Don't move the light in use for avoiding the damage by shaking the light.
3. When you use it, you should turn on the fan set, and then adjust the brightness of quartz light. When you want to shut down the light, pIs. adjust the brightness to the least. After five minutes, you close down the fan set. When the light is used 10 to 20 minutes, you'd better adjust the brightness of light to the least and make the light to have a rest.
4. Don't match flammable honeycomb to the best of your abilities. If necessary, you may consider taking off the middle cloth inside soft box in order to avoid the danger.

rod to chow

2009-07-11T01:08:09Z

So, did anybody watch the Torchwood miniseries then?

It didn't entirely make sense (about par for Torchwood) and usual for RTD it was all solved at the end by letting the hero find the right button to push which destroys the enemies. (At least they didn't actually have the button installed in their base's control console, this time).

Oh and of course when Torchwood HQ gets destroyed (again... BTW I forgot to watch carefully enough - did Canary Wharf turn up in the London Docklands stock footage?) they manage to reboot themselves by installing "the torchwood software" from "the torchwood servers" which presumably are stored in some robust off-site data centre in Maidenhead which nobody thought about trying to hack into...

"Will you remember me in 1000 years?" asks Ianto - well, of course he will. Jack already has through 2000 years of his personal timeline in the events of the season 2 finale (clearly the writers have not considered previous events - the entire cast have completely forgotten about Tosh for example).

What I found most disappointing was that it was, essentially, a five hour exploration of a dilemma which they'd already done in the first season. They could probably have made a competent two and a half hour movie out of that plot, but this miniseries felt distinctly padded.

Not for the first time, I'm left not entirely certain why I bothered to watch it.

shadowphiar @ 2009-06-10T23:57:00

2009-06-10T23:00:29Z

Uh oh.

SPV are the parent company of record labels InsideOut and SuperBall, who between them publish about 80% of the music I'm buying these days...

Just For The Record

2009-05-10T22:04:57Z

Here's an interesting meme via hmmm_tea,

Pick a musical artist whose discography you know fairly well. Using only their song titles, try to answer these questions. Try not to repeat a song title.

Pick your artist: Marillion

Are you male or female: King
Describe yourself: The Uninvited Guest
How do you feel about yourself: Bitter Suite
Describe where you currently live: House
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Holidays in Eden
Your favorite form of transportation: Circular Ride
Your best friend is: Older Than Me
Your favorite color is: Quartz
What's the weather like: Afraid of Sunlight
Favorite time of the day: That Time of the Night
If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: The Other Half
What is life to you: This Train is My Life
What is the best advice you have to give: Don't Hurt Yourself
If you could change your name, what would it be: Thunder Fly
Your favorite food is: Sugar Mice (alternatively... Nothing Fills the Hole)
Thought for the day: The Last Century For Man
How I would like to die: Drilling Holes
My soul's present condition: Enlightened
The faults I can bear: Whatever is Wrong with You
My motto: Hope for the Future

Om nom nom...

2009-04-29T23:35:33Z

Oh dear. My pet vacuum cleaner managed to find a cotton reel:

I know what I mean

2009-04-16T18:17:46Z

rebifurcation
noun the act of bifurcating a second time, occurring some time after the bifurcated parts had been carefully joined together.

I used this in an email at work today, because I wanted to avoid the rebifurcation of some source code that had been branched off the trunk in our svn repository. I knew it wasn't a real word because of the squiggly red line, but everybody knew what I meant.

It wasn't until later, when someone pointed out that google returns only 22 unique pages for this search term (and 14 of those are in French), that I realized just how neologismy it was.

Oh hang on...

neologismy
adj. having the properties of a neologism.

[EDIT: typo]

Fun Fun Fun

2009-04-10T20:46:18Z

Well -- it was no worse than anything in season seven...

Another moon of Saturn

2009-03-31T00:04:22Z

Continued from http://shadowphiar.livejournal.com/61524.html...

It's working! It's working!
(well, mostly...)

Installing Leopard was surprisingly little trouble (once I had got the efi-x plugged in properly, which took a couple of attempts. Even with the little extension cable they give you, it's very fiddly to reach that corner of the motherboard, so at first it wasn't quite in far enough and didn't do anything).

The things I expected trouble with (e.g., system sleep, updating graphics drivers etc.) have been no problem at all. Instead, I get Time Machine falling over when selecting a local SATA hard disk as the backup volume, because "the built-in network interface could not be found". (Don't be silly, of course it can - it's working perfectly and I'm posting through it right now!). Allegedly this can be fixed buy buying a PCI network card... (or maybe a future efi-x firmware update) (or maybe it will only work on motherboards with two network connections -- it's a bit difficult to tell when your only official source of information is also filled with random people posting questions and unreliable opinions).

And then there's all the whole business with AHCI (new command protocol for SATA hard disks). One the efi-x forum there's very clear guidance that AHCI should be turned on in the BIOS after installation of the OS. What it doesn't say, is that doing so will prevent DVD burners from being seen! Aha - I think - there are two SATA controllers on this motherboard (southbridge has six channels, and a separate chip has other two) and they can have AHCI turned on and off separately. So I'll put one of them into legacy mode and run the DVD drive off that? No - because the separate SATA chip doesn't work with efi-x.

This must be some strange new usage of the words, "all features of these motherboards are supported", of which I was not previously aware.

It took a good deal of searching and browsing on their forum to discover that last bit of vital information! I've been unimpressed with efi-x's documentation and support in general. Anyway - in benchmarks I've been barely able to tell the difference between AHCI on or off, so I'm leaving it off in order to get the benefit of a functional DVD drive!

In short, it's been a bit of a faff (and that's not over yet). However, it was at least mostly quite interesting faff, and considering that to buy a machine from Apple with as high specifications as this would cost nearly a thousand pounds more than I paid - I consider it a few evenings well spent. While I like Apple hardware, the latest round of Apple desktop upgrades was insipid at best, and prices went up about 40% across the board. Perviously I've been willing to pay a premium for premium-quality kit. But not so much that it makes me feel like a chump for having done so.

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz

2009-03-28T03:48:40Z

I am posting this from a new computer what I have put together myself from components...

I'm quite relieved that it seems to be working, to be honest. As it's the first one I've done, I've paced it quite slowly and it's taken a few evenings to do - I would have finished yesterday, but I discovered one of the power leads from the PSU was about half an inch too short to reach the right place on the motherboard (unless I were to drill a hole through the middle of the graphics card) so that had to wait until after work today when a trip to Maplin supplied me with an extension cable.

Turning it on for the first time was very underwhelming... Nothing went bang, but it didn't exactly work either. It was randomly hanging in the middle of Kubuntu live-CD boot and sometimes even in the BIOS menus, which seemed extremely ominous. Fortunately Kubuntu provides a memcheck utility from the CD boot menu, so I ran that for a while and found a lot of memory errors.

After taking one module out, and testing one at a time in various slots (to rule out problems with the motherboard or cpu itself), I'm reasonably convinced that one of the DIMMs is bad... which is not unheard of, although it's the first time that I've had problems with anything from Crucial. The other one passes memcheck at 100% and seems to be behaving stably enough now. Fortunately I can keep using the computer with (a mere!) 2GB of RAM until a replacement arrives, which is an order of magnitude more convenient than sending back the cpu or the motherboard.

And so there you have it. Kubuntu is installed on one HD, with another ready and waiting for the inevitable fun and games which will ensue with efi-x and Leopard. But that is a job for tomorrow...

Incidentally, I'm a bit unimpressed that the case manufacture has described no less than three things which are to be done using "the special screws provided" - without ever making attempt to distinguish between the seven-or-so distinct types of screw which came in a little plastic bag in the case. Also, minus 5 points to Kubuntu, whose CD boot menu only talks to PS/2 keyboards, so I had to dig one out of the loft before I could drive it...

The Mark Experience

2009-02-27T22:57:49Z

Next weekend (on the 7th and 8th of March, at 7:30 and 8:00pm respectively), I will be taking part in the Mark Experience, a 90-minute dramatic presentation of the life of Jesus based on Mark's gospel.

Of course, this means that I'm currently trying to learn it, but that's not quite as daunting as it sounds (the dialogue will be semi-improvised rather than word-for-word scripted, and to help us learn the sequence of events we have an excellent study guide written by Andrew Page from Above Bar in Southampton, who will also be directing). I hope you'll agree this sounds fresh and exciting (and in not a small way, scary - especially since we haven't had any rehearsals yet, although you'll be glad to hear that we are planning to have some before the performances...) and if you can make it it would be great to see you there.

It's at Emmanuel United Reformed Church, opposite Pembroke College, near the Fitz museum. Entry is free - there are no tickets, so you'll need to come early to get a good seat! (Actually, there will be a small block of seats reserved for friends/family of the actors, so if you let me know beforehand I'll try to ensure you're counted in.)

Get a look at that Atom.

2009-02-10T16:06:45Z

Intel CFO, on selling to smartphone vendors:

"We would love dearly to win one of the big guys, that really is the smartphone game, it really is a concentrated set of suppliers. We're lurking behind every bush and showing them our product line."

Bwah? That really is a very strange image. I'm not sure I'd be inclined to buy Intel if one of their execs jumped out at me from behind a bush and flung open their coat to show off the ...err... "product line". At best it sounds like they're selling fake Rolex watches, and at worst...

Perspective

2009-02-05T10:05:59Z

England's worst snow for eighteen years, some say.

But no, surely this must be England's best snow for eighteen years, non?

Lyrics explained

2009-01-19T16:21:11Z

Roxanne doesn't have to put on a red light because she's got a glow-in-the-dark towel.

Why prog rock?

2009-01-12T01:43:54Z

A few weeks ago, somebody asked me why I enjoy listening to prog rock music. I found it slightly difficult to formulate an answer - how would you express reasons for liking or disliking particular genres of any artistic field? Oddly, it seems most of the aspects I can think of that I most appreciate about prog music, actually tend to be the same things which cause many other people to have an antipathy to it! It is variously described as "difficult", "showy", or "complex" and "time-consuming". Now if you'll allow me four minutes of your time, I'd like to use this song as an example for the discussion to follow:

Toys (on YouTube)

It's by Frost* (who I've mentioned before) and comes from their new album released late last year. It sounds very different from their first release Milliontown, for many reasons - not least that writer/producer Jem Godfrey consciously and deliberately wanted to do something different instead of repeating the style of his earlier record. I think of it less as a second album, than as the debut of a band who have reinvented themselves as a sort-of proggier version of Muse.

Anyway, the track. At first glance it appears too short to be prog - but prog's reputation for twenty minute epics is perhaps a little overstated! Many prog bands have indeed recorded some very long pieces but that is by no means the entire content of their repertoire.

Are the lyrics prog? Well I don't really understand what half of them are about, so that's probably a yes. Incidentally, the video - which is unofficial, made by a fan and publicised on the band's forum - contains a lot of in-jokes and references, some to the previous work of Frost or events on Jem's blog, but also some more directly to the lyrics of the song (which are a lot of fun, albeit embarrassingly literal on occasion... nonetheless I tip my hat to the sublime sequence around 2:10 of car, pet, hides, the gilt E, duster, weigh)

Did you notice the time signature of the song in the video? If you didn't pay attention it might have appeared very simple; in fact it shifts from 4/4 to 7/8, but does so so often and so easily that you hardly notice that it's happening - that is, until you try joining in or (heaven forbid) dancing to it. Some people think the best songs have three chords, and could be sung round a camp fire with an acoustic guitar. Maybe that is "good" on some scale but simplicity isn't something that I'm inspired by. We are complex creatures and I prefer complex music, with lots of unexpected chord changes, time signature changes, and all the rest. Most of my favourite bass lines are the ones that I can't play myself (though through practice they are becoming reduced in number) - I want to listen to musicians that I can aspire to, rather than the stuff hitting the top 40 singles charts which I could have recorded myself. **

So is that, at the end of the day, why I listen to noisy music with weird chords, incomprehensible lyrics with a beat you can hardly follow, let alone dance to? It comes down to a personal preference. I like the weird chords. I like being unable to predict where the music will flow (at least, until I've heard it a couple of times). That's not to say I don't appreciate different styles - certainly for example, the songs that I play in church need to be relatively pedestrian and predictable *** because we expect a musically-untrained congregation of 300 people to join in and sing along; if they can't follow the tune then the song is a failure. Occasionally I feel guilty for not listening to more Christian music, but most of it (whilst not being bad per se) just isn't in the style that I personally most enjoy listening to.

* The asterisk is part of their name, and is not a reference to this footnote...

** NB recorded, not written. I'd love to learn the skill to write, but at the moment I'm yet to come up with an original sequence that still seemed like a good idea after more than eight bars or so. Mind you, I'll bet that's probably true for most of the top 40 "artists" as well.

*** I shall never make a good preacher, since I was unable to find a third appropriate adjective beginning with the same letter.

Christian spam

2008-12-01T12:00:12Z

A few weeks ago I got an email containing a cute (if slightly trite, to be honest) illustration about how much Jesus loves us. All fair enough, until I found at the end of the message it said something along the lines of, "Now forward this message to everybody in your address book. If you don't, then you're obviously ashamed of the work Jesus has done for you, and he too will be ashamed of you on that day of judgment".

Now I don't know about you, but to me that seems like blackmail. It's cynical, emotionally damaging and, in short, entirely contrary to the teaching it's supposed to be propagating (not to mention the implication of salvation by works).

I was reminded of this again, a few days ago, when someone sent a message to one of my church's (unofficial) mailing lists. This mail was slightly less manipulative, but one of those "voice your support for this issue by adding your name to the list and posting it to everybody" things. Sent by a chain of people, with all good intentions I'm sure, but without considering how forwarding this email could possibly help, or whether the issue in it actually existed.

It was the same one mentioned at the beginning of this article, which I found with a cursory google search trying to determine of the email was true or not:

http://emergingpastor.com/2008/06/27/IHateChristianSpam.aspx

An interesting article which I may have to start quoting it to people.

A fine line between genius and utter stupidity

2008-11-27T23:39:07Z

I don't know whether Alistair Darling realises this or not, but by changing the VAT rate in the middle of a quarter with only a week of notice, he's given a much needed boost to the IT consultancy industry. They now have a unique opportunity to charge sky-high fees to every company in the country who are struggling to update their systems in time for the change, who clearly have a need to remain legal, charge the correct new VAT rate, and yet not annoy the customer with silly prices like £1369.23.

That surely must be his intention, because I frankly can't see any other benefit. Are people really going to go off and spend lots of money just because they suddenly get a 2.1% discount? Where "lots of money" is defined as more than it cost businesses to implement the change in the first place?

"You know, I wasn't going to buy this CD for £12.99, but now it only costs £12.71 I will rush out and make it my very own. That 28p change makes all the difference, for with it I can buy half a loaf of bread to feed my family" or something.

Maybe Gordon Brown can follow up by changing the daylight savings rules, or something. This scheme should be suited to keeping NTP vendors in business...

Receptionist, or soul-sucking demon?

2008-11-19T09:40:11Z

Cause or effect? Is it the job of being a receptionist which turns normal people into inflexible, petty, narrow-minded drones; or are inflexible, petty, narrow-minded drones attracted to the job of being a receptionist?

This particular receptionist appears to be actively trying to keep me away from my doctor. The short of it is, last week my left leg suddenly turned pink and my doctor put me on various creams and a course of antibiotics. One week later the antibiotics are finished and the leg is not noticeably improved, which means either:

a) antibiotics were the wrong thing, and I need something else prescribed

b) antibiotics were the right thing, and I need some more of them (and that if I stop now, I could be contributing to a resistant strain)

But can I see the doctor? I phoned yesterday afternoon, and couldn't make an appointment until the following Monday (6 days away). But if I phone up at 8:30am, I can make an emergency appointment to see him on the day.

Yeah, the more ill you are, the more specific a time in the morning you have to ring up? That makes no sense at all... but whatever. I got up and this morning spent twenty minutes hitting the redial button. At 8:52 I got through: "no appointments until Monday, but if you phone up tomorrow at 8:30am..." and all that.

So I've made the Monday appointment. I'll probably phone up tomorrow as well and see if I can jump the queue. Is that cheating?

EPIC MECH FAIL

2008-09-30T22:31:44Z

The sight of an AA man working on my car with a hammer, crowbar, and hacksaw, is one that I would be very glad never to repeat.

Allow me to explain.

As I mentioned in a post last night, the front of my exhaust pipe had become detached from the silencer. It was shifted sideways by about half an inch, so I secured it with gaffer tape and made plans to take it to be repaired properly in the morning.

It didn't make it.

Roar, roar, roar. The loud engine noise, which had appeared only last night and tipped me off to there being a problem in the first place, continued as it had done before. But then:

clink, clink, BANG!!!. What the ...?! Pulled into the kerb. A whiff of smoke rises from my gear lever, which I notice has suddenly rotated by 90 degrees.

Gear levers aren't meant to do that.

It turns out that the front end of the exhaust pipe had worked completely loose, and despite having no vertical play last night had fallen to the road, caught itself on the first irregularity it found and pushed the back end of the pipe upwards through the car with sufficient force to push the gear lever out of the floor and embed itself in the chassis. There's some irony in the exhaust pipe destroying a car, en route to Kwik Fit.

The AA man had to attack the exhaust pipe first with a hammer, then with a crowbar, and finally with a hacksaw, to get the car into a state where it could be towed without dragging metal across the road.

In hindsight I perhaps shouldn't have driven it at all this morning, and got a callout instead. That said, my level of AA membership wouldn't have covered them coming to my house - it would have added at least £100 to the price of exhaust repair. Looking at the removed section of pipe, the pipe itself seems to have been fine but the front of the silencer had sheared off, so I'm going to guess that replacing that would already have been on the margin of being uneconomical for a 1999 Fiesta. Ah well. I wasn't really expecting to take it through 2009's MOT anyway, so I just have to hasten my replacement plan rather than this being a completely unprepared expense.

Timing.

2008-09-29T20:19:02Z

Gah! Why don't things ever happen one at a time?

The exhaust pipe has just broken.

Normally I'd just drop it to a garage on my way into work, but tomorrow I have a dentist appointment quite early in the morning.

This on the day before the end of quarter, when at work I'm expected to be releasing a new beta of my product...

Stopped by the police...

2008-09-14T00:24:12Z

... for doing 30 in a 30 zone, as far as I can tell!

So I was driving back to Haslingfield from Ely, on the A10 (single carriageway, national speed limit - and very quiet at just after midnight). I didn't have an eagle eye on watching my speed, but my satnav hadn't gone "dong!" so I know I wasn't faster than 67 mph - but I was probably up at 65 or so (actual speed. I have a fairly good idea what the actual speed is for a given indicated speed in my car). A pair of headlights comes up behind me, and starts following quite close. I kept up that kind of speed until we reached a set of traffic lights and stopped - whereupon there was enough light me to see that the car behind me was a police car.

Oops. Am I going to get a talking to for breaking 60mph? If I drive more slowly after the lights turn green, would that be taken as admission that I was going too fast beforehand? So I decided to go at 63mph, and continued on that basis for the next couple of miles. All the while, knowing that there was a police car dead behind me watching every move (did that affect my driving style and make me appear nervous? Maybe.)

Following that there's a (temporary?) 30mph zone before you get to the A14 roundabout, so I slowed for that. And there I am, trundling along at 30mph on the A10 with nothing in sight apart from the police car (actually really rather close) behind me, and he puts on his blue flashing lights and indicates to the left.

So I stop - briefly I hoped that he just wanted me to get out of the way so he could reach the A14 more quickly, but that was not the case: he stopped as well. I wound the window down, expecting to get a stern talking to for going to fast. Actually he didn't even mention that - in fact the conversation was a bit surreal.

He said I had touched the brake a lot (I don't know if he meant just in the process of slowing down from 60 to 30). And reading between the lines of other comments a little, it might be that so few people bother to obey that particular speed limit, that anyone who does slow down to 30 must be doing it because they have a really good reason to avoid being stopped by the police. Like I was carrying a body in the boot, or something.

Anyway, he checked my name, address and tyres and tax disc - and let me go without even bothering to serve a producer.

When I set off again, I discovered my legs were shaking with nerves and adrenaline - I nearly stalled it (and I wondered if the flashing lights would go on again, but they didn't), in fact he hadn't moved off by the time I was out of sight. Fortunately, this also meant I didn't have to feel like I was being watched on my way around the A10/A14/Milton roundabout (whose lane structure I find to be a right royal pain at the very best of times - but that's a rant for another day).

Just on the offchance anybody uses PowerPoint

2008-09-09T20:27:10Z

In PowerPoint, I would like to:

have a slide containing a bunch of objects
wait for a mouse click, and start an animation on one of those objects
as soon as the animation finishes, automatically go to the next slide

Sort of like a transition effect, I suppose. I'm stuck in step 3. The only ways I can see to advance the slide are to select "Automatically after 0:00" which has the wrong effect, as it doesn't both waiting for a mouse click before starting the animation in step 2 - or else to click again manually at the end of the animation.

Surely it is possible to automate this? It doesn't exactly seem like rocket science.

shadowphiar @ 2008-09-07T00:38:00

2008-09-06T23:51:01Z

I've just discovered that when I put REM's album "Accelerate" into my music library, for some reason iTunes has omitted the last three-ish seconds of the final track. It gets to the point where Stipe is screaming "You cannot resist, You cannot resis..." and the rest of the band chanting away "I'm gonna DJ, I'm gonna D..." and stops abruptly with the music at an absolute climax. I thought it was a very clever bookend to the album.

For one reason and another I had the CD out just now, and for the first time heard the actual ending, in which the guitar plays another chord and someone says "Yeah". I prefer the accidentally edited version, and I'm keeping it...

Following a conversation elsewhere...

2008-08-15T18:42:46Z

I was a normal procedural programmer once.

I thought I was strong. I thought I could be a light user of c++ classes. They're just c structs with accessor methods, right?

But when I started writing bigger programs, I saw the advantages of writing interface classes - the separation of implementation from definition! The modularity! The scalability! And I was hooked, and I could never go back again.

The problem is, once you go down that path, you can't keep things simple any more because the language isn't up to it. If you start using things like base classes, you will necessarily need to start using more complicated things like virtual destructors otherwise you end up with memory handling bugs. And so it continues.

See, c++ is really a drug. All it took was one non-POD type (I didn't even inhale) and it started me along an inevitable road to the harder classes. I mean, you need to use more and more of it to get the effect, but by the time you're writing pure abstract virtual const pointer template interface methods, you just lose sight of what the rest of the world considers normal.

My name is Andrew, and I'm a c++ user.