Recently in Music Category

Watching an AMV with the backing tune from The Fray, called How to Save a Life, it reminds me that I have an awful lot of Anime to watch at the moment, as well as an awful lot of books, as well as an awful lot of other things to do.
Limited interest, really

The remake of 'The Producers' is practically the entire original movie - word for word, with some extra musical numbers. I mean they didn't even try with this one. You would hope that they could at least try, but Matthew Broderick's acting in this was cardboard to the point of annoyance, not a touch on the original Gene Wilder one (simply without compare). Nathan Lane was a bit better, but didn't have the right level of desparation that Zero Mostel brought to the original one. Let's just leave Uma Thurman's role out all together, and Will Ferrell deserves to be clobbered for this one. Seriously, stick to the properly low-brow comedy like 'the ballad of ricky bobby'.

I listen to Velvet Acid Christ a bit. It gets me in the mood for programming. I recently had the latest album gifted to me. What can I say, I really like it.
Then there was a quote towards the end of the love track.

Kill one man, you're a murderer. Kill a million, a king. Kill them all, a god.
-- Drake (Dominic Purcell; Blade Trinity)

Of course, I got sucked into another of those internet memes, and ended up filling in the 'What tarot card are you' and got....

You are The Lovers

Motive, power, and action, arising from Inspiration and Impulse.

The Lovers represents intuition and inspiration. Very often a choice needs to be made.

Originally, this card was called just LOVE. And that's actually more apt than "Lovers." Love follows in this sequence of growth and maturity. And, coming after the Emperor, who is about control, it is a radical change in perspective. LOVE is a force that makes you choose and decide for reasons you often can't understand; it makes you surrender control to a higher power. And that is what this card is all about. Finding something or someone who is so much a part of yourself, so perfectly attuned to you and you to them, that you cannot, dare not resist. This card indicates that the you have or will come across a person, career, challenge or thing that you will fall in love with. You will know instinctively that you must have this, even if it means diverging from your chosen path. No matter the difficulties, without it you will never be complete.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I'm listening to Joanna Newsom's album Ys. It sounds like an all english version of Bjork. And dammit but if she isn't addictive.

It's the Star Wars Christmas album. A friend asked me to get it for her as some form of present. I'm just about to experience it for myself. The review from i-mockery may be the the definitive explanation of this really terrible piece of tripe. For indeed, I have got to the start of the first track and my heart is hurting from the sheer horrific intensity of it.
I saw the Bond movie and believe me, getting tortured like he was is probably preferable to listening to the frelling album. Well at least I can console myself with having the entirety of farscape to see over the holidays.

I've been fighting with my development environment. At least the music of the band 'The Postal Service' hasn't sent me insane. It feels like a combination of 80's arcade game music with 80's pop music - but it's the good kind of synth-classic, fast; non-new romantic kinda-dance, kinda-fun, but still with a core of old-style 'I like this, I enjoy this, "I'm not tired of this" feel.
The Postal Service - them be good and fun.
If you like a synth-dance-80's this is what the pet shop boys should be if they kept up with life then you will like the postal service.

There's a little message in the middle of Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, from a man in Greece about dynamically adding ID3 tags to the file just prior to downloading. I just remembered that Version 2 id3 tags are put at the beginning of the file. All you need to know is how long the tag is, add it to the content-length for the download and the feed the tag out before the file. Adam's idea of the golden ticket is doable without too much processor overhead.
Theoretically, you can embed ID tags into mp3 files once they are out of frame. The property of the tag is that it appears as junk for non-supporting applications. Embedding audio bumpers at the start and finish is trivial (you may need to eat a v1.1 tag at the end of the file).
Other trivial pieces of information I discovered today - WiFi is a pun-term of HiFi, and doesn't stand for Wireless Fidelity, it was simply the name that the ad execs came up with when asked (as 802.11 doesn't have a ring to it). [via The old new thing]

Anyone, anyone?

I decided I needed some more music today so I went out and bought the Sigur Rós album Takk... and the Tori Amos album The Beekeeper. The Sigur Rós album was purchased because I heard the track 'Glósóli', Tori Amos, quite simply because I have no choice in the matter.
This coming weekend I'm in London. A bit of interviewing and a few drinks with the big sister (followed by the usual life advice).
I wanted to browse the iTunes library XML file. The problem is that Dreamweaver crashes before it loads the file; consuming > 600Mb before falling over. GoLive has churned up about 1.5gb of VMEM usage and is still scanning the document - after about 30 minutes. I haven't the patience to see what the microsoft development environmnent does, but as you can guess, none of them are optimized towards large file editing (about 30mb doc).

Fintan, this one is for you... Everything sounds like Coldplay Now. By a band called Mitch Benn and the Distractions.

This is a bit of a music/video otherwise problem that seems to not have been sorted out. The problem is that when I've got a long piece of either music or video there is no facility for bookmarking where I am within the file. iTunes has support within files that are either Podcasts or Audiobooks, but outside of that you're S.O.L.

Index of /memoirs This is a sliced up copy of my grandfather's memoirs of the Irish war of Independence, and the irish Civil War. They were transferred from reel-to-reel tape to standard audio tape, and from there to the PC, where I normalized the audio (I may have missed some tracks), and then split the sound into files relating to the specific stories.

Jesus loves you more if you can drive is the song, the driven is the band.