Author: geoff

Just keep taking the lithium… (but the right kind, please)

It turns out that both of the batteries (primary and spare) for my PowerBook are covered by Apple’s Battery Exchange Program. Let’s see how quickly they can get me replacements. The only question is… until they do, should I run the machine with or without a battery installed?
[UPDATE] According to the email I just received from Apple confirming my order, the answer to the first question is “four to six weeks…” maybe. Which settles the second question: I can’t go without instant-on-from-sleep for a month.
[UPDATE] There are reports on various mailing lists and websites of people having problems with the Battery Exchange Program web site. My own experience was certainly confusing. I entered the serial numbers of my PowerBook and both batteries, and clicked Continue. All three serial numbers were rejected. I clicked Back in my browser, double-checked that I’d correctly (a) written the numbers down and (b) typed them in. Then, without changing anything, I clicked Continue again. This time all three numbers were accepted.
If at first you don’t succeed…..

Lack of imagination

I hesitate to post this question, because I’m not sure it’s in my interest for things to change, but anyway….

Why is it that 99% of the blogspam comments that hit this blog begin with the words “Nice site”? Surely the spammers realize that such predictability just plays into the hands of the spam detection engines like Akismet. OK, I realize that the most likely explanation is that everyone is using the same spambot, and the “Nice site” is boilerplate which they can’t change. But it’s still pretty dumb….

(We’re talking a lot of spam here – Akismet has caught 7,130 spam coments since I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2 in March.)

Unabashed nostalgia

For some reason, the comments on yesterday’s piece about Procol Harum triggered a paroxysm of nostalgia. I decided to put together an iTunes playlist of my favourite 45s from my last year at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. That would be September 1967 to June 1968. The charts are online at Everyhit.com which made it easy. Most of the tracks that I wanted were either in my iTunes collection already* or available from the iTunes Music Store. The only real frustrations were that I couldn’t find anything by the Herd or the Honeybus. (No, you won’t have heard of either group.)
The result – 21 tracks – fits nicely on a CD-R. Here’s the playlist. It wasn’t a bad year, was it? Of course I had to slide over such chart-topping marvels as Richard Harris’s “Macarthur Park” and Pigmeat Markham’s “Here Come De Judge”!

  1. Flowers In The Rain / The Move 2:25
  2. Homburg / Procol Harum 3:56
  3. San Franciscan Nights / Eric Burdon & The Animals 3:24
  4. Kites / Simon Dupree And The Big Sound 3:50
  5. Hello, Goodbye / The Beatles 3:29
  6. The Mighty Quinn / Manfred Mann 2:53
  7. Nights in White Satin / The Moody Blues 4:26
  8. Pictures of Matchstick Men / Status Quo 3:11
  9. Green Tambourine / The Lemon Pipers 2:27
  10. (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay / Otis Redding 2:39
  11. Lady Madonna / The Beatles 2:18
  12. Lazy Sunday / The Small Faces 3:06
  13. Mony Mony / Tommy James & The Shondells 2:53
  14. This Wheel’s On Fire / Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity 3:31
  15. Lovin’ Things / Marmalade 3:10
  16. Baby Come Back / The Equals 2:30
  17. Hurdy Gurdy Man / Donovan 3:18
  18. Jumpin’ Jack Flash / The Rolling Stones 3:43
  19. Fire! / Crazy World Of Arthur Brown 2:59
  20. Mrs. Robinson / Simon & Garfunkel 4:04
  21. On The Road Again / Canned Heat 3:26

(And why did I include “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers? Am I just a sucker for phasing**? I actually have a soft spot for them: they produced what I consider to be one of the finest rock-raga hybrids ever, a 9 minute 10 second opus entitled “Through With You”.)
—
* Often as part of a compilation CD. I don’t think I’d actually buy anything by the Marmalade these days (Although I did back in 1968.)
** Actually I am. You’ll notice that quite a few of these songs use, or abuse, what was undoubtedly the sound effect du jour. Check out “This Wheel’s On Fire”, for instance.

Quick music plug: Procol Harum "Live at the Union Chapel"

A few days ago I bought the DVD+CD release of Live at the Union Chapel, recorded by Procol Harum in December, 2003. I listened repeatedly to the CD in my car (and on my iPod), but it wasn’t until tonight that I sat down to watch the whole 139 minute concert video.
Brilliant. Just wonderful.
Gary Brooker’s voice sounds just the way it did back in 1966, and Matthew Fisher’s Hammond organ playing is as magical as ever. As Gary described in the “bonus interview”, the programme tends to be 40% new material (promoting the latest album), 40% of the songs that they have to play, and 20% of whatever takes his fancy. Highlights for me were “Shine On Brightly”, “An Old English Dream”, “Wall Street Blues”, “A Salty Dog” (boy, that one takes me back!), “Whiskey Train” with a stunning drum solo (remember those?), and “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” with the rarely-performed third verse.
Emphatically recommended.
(I only saw them once in concert – High Wycombe Town Hall, 1969, I think. What a strange venue that was! It’s been over 3 years since they last played in the USA….)

Busy weekend

In brief:

  • Saturday: Getting stuff for the apartment: 5 hours at IKEA (most items to be delivered on Tuesday), 2 hours at Macy’s, 1 hour at Office Depot.
  • Sunday: Recovering from the above: playing Civ3, exploring more of Seattle, and getting my Amazon laptop to play with my WiFi.

Five quotations

There’s a new blog-meme floating around: I’ve seen it at Good Math, Bad Math and Pharyngula among others. The idea is to create an account on The Quotations Page and go through adding quotations to your page until you have five quotations which capture the essence of YOU. Here are mine:

  1. The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)
  2. Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. John Archibald Wheeler, American J. of Physics, 1978, 46, 323
  3. Ignorance is not innocence but sin. Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
  4. If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996)
  5. A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5×11 inch paper cannot be understood. Mark Ardis

In progress

My first blog post from inside Amazon, on my corporate laptop (HP/WinXP/Firefox). Curiously the WordPress UI looks quite different on FireFox; I imagine there are some features which don’t work correctly on Safari. Oh, well.

The most important things that I learned yesterday:

  • 90.3 KEXP
  • FX for beer
  • Lots of faces from the Distributed Systems Engineering all-hands, to which I now have to attach names
  • Remedy (internal tool) is the answer to 90% of questions. The other 10% are the really important ones.

    Must-read links: