Well, that was Christmas, during which I ate lots, went nice places and got some lovely presents. Today I bought myself an Ultrafex Pro (box with lights on) which hooks up to the new mixer I got from L (it's got 36 knobs to twiddle! Knobtastic!). So now I have to deal with odd concepts like unbalanced connections, sidechaining, psychodynamics and MATYCSASA (more acronyms than you can shake a stick at). First through the Black (er...silver) Box of Doom was Mr Watson's excellent Padded Bag which sounds like the noise Gort would make if he snored. Recognise that phased/filtered metallic drum loop though...

Next on the list is new soundcard and USB stuff for my new webcam. And finishing this Starmix.

While on the train back from London I idly picked up a newspaper and found myself agreeing with the letters about Iraq with a (non-literal) sort of detached nodding..until I found out it was the Daily Mail. Now if only the public were a bit less apathetic (including me), we could make Mr Blair look more of a dimwit than he already is. Mass destruction shmass destruction. I'll give it bloody jelly fish.

While listening to Cashier by Skanfrom (because I am incredibly cool without even trying) I noticed that for the second year running, my top 10 albums of the year barely included anything non-synthetic. I can't find any reason for this, unless it's down to ease of access to lots of free clicky clicky bleep click mp3s.

Yesterday I realised with only a small degree of horror (manifested by slight eyebrow-raise) that my recent over-the-hillness results in Godspeed You! Black Emperor featuring at the top of my 'music to do the washing-up to' list.

On top of this, Friday night saw L and I turning up to 70s fancy dress party (some attendees weren't even alive in the 70s) as punks, only to be told by idiots that punk 'wasn't in the 70s'. So I brandished my Robert Dyas bath chain at them until they started teetering on their platforms. I was most annoyed at the DJ not playing any punk...yet he somehow managed to play some early Beatles non-classics and that tune from Dirty Dancing (apparently it was meant to 'depict the 70s'). However, this disappointment was negated by 8-foot-tall Elvis farting then proclaiming 'Elvis has made everyone else leave the building'.

Meanwhile, back at school, I got an 'Achievement Award' for writing software which only I know doesn't work. It's got some nice buttons to press though. As another part of my directionless 'subvert-from-the-inside' pretence I won a box of tasty amaretto biscuits in the school raffle. So I ate them like a true rebel.

More partying tonight, to which we have to bring a national dish. Cold haggis and stovies from me then, and L has gone up Mr Cod to join the queue.

I wonder if Winona Ryder would have had half as much trouble if she'd gone into hessian specialists Saks and asked them if they could give her something to keep turnips in, instead of trying to hide all their stuff within her less-than-ample frame.

While reading the 'quest for world's funniest joke' book, I read that the 'what's brown and sticky' joke is apparently 2% funny. What about the other 98%?

Have had to abandon listening to El Ultimo de la Fila (forced upon my ears cos they remind L of Jerez) because of the arrival of Morr Music's wonderful 2-cd compilation of Slowdive covers, the other cd being some new tracks by the coverers (is that a word?). Why the BBC calls it 'experimental' I don't know. As far as I'm concerned, stuff like Oasis is experimental, their experiment being 'will the public buy this tired old arse any more?'. I think they're using Robbie Williams as a control variable.

Tonight is The Phantom Menace on ITV, which Mr bin Laden will be watching from his hotel room in Bournemouth and wondering if it really is about him. I haven't seen it (or Osama), but I'm expecting it to rival Fame Academy for total arse. Apparently the 'attendees' of Fame Academy are 'ludicrously gifted', by which standards Las Ketchup should be rivalling Benedict Spinoza for profundity and thought-provoking ideas.

At 'school' today I reduced 70% of our processes to a single button-click - marked 'Go' - which reminded me of minimalist Spectrum programs which consisted of:

10 RUN

then a slightly more destructive program which went:

10 NEW
20 GOTO 10

Anyway, certain elements of my management are convinced that all our processes can be automated within a single application, which I am pretending to write (if they looked at all my variable names they'd see how serious I am about it actually working), so obviously they haven't read about the compression-obsession bloke on Rinkworks' Computer Stupidities site:


A guy I worked for was kind of a penny pincher. One of his disk space saving techniques was to compress compressed compressions. He would use the product that compresses EXE files internally so they automatically expand when executed, then zip a whole bunch of files including those, then store the zip file on a DriveSpace compressed volume. I think his eventual goal was to get all his files down to 1 byte.