Author: Rory

LA county has banned the use of the terms Master and Slave to refer to hard drive arrangements, on the grounds that it’s offensive to black people (sorry, "African Americans"; even though half of them aren’t even decended from Africans, at least no more than the rest of us). Well I guess if you’re prone to that type of offence then Greeks, Babylonians, Persians, all Europeans (it was essentially all feudal at some point) and pretty much everyone from any major civilisation from the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates until, unfortunately, still today should be offended that some small minded bigot in a California beurocrazy thinks that the suffering of many millions of slaves from all over the world throughout history somehow pales in relation to the relatively brief enslavement of a small number of West Africans.

Political Correctness seems to be utterly hated by anyone I’ve spoken to. How has it survived and spread like a rash over the (otherwise) civilised world? Who’s idea was it to refer to the physically handicapped as ‘Life-Abled’? And who was responsible for that person not being immediately shot, for crimes against the English language? What in the blue Hell is offensive about caling someone ‘black’? Or ‘handicapped’? Or ‘too far up their own ass to see the light of day’?

Let’s play a game. It’s called guess who’s performing the song you’re listening to. It’s a somewhat widely recognised phenomenon that, in the same way that cassettes in a car turn into Freddie Mercury compilations, any classical mp3s on a file-sharing network will be attributed to Mozart. This doesn’t necessarilly cause any real grief, for a number of reasons. If I’m searching for classical music – and I don’t mean to imply that this is a frequent occurance – and I know what it’s called, then I’m fairly sure to know who composed it. If not I can find out easily. In any case it’s simple to assume that the only other credited composer is the true creator.

However, a generalisation of this phenomenon to popular music causes much more difficulty. I just did a search for "cover" on KaZaA, and downloaded pretty much every song I’d heard of, and every song from an artist I’d heard of. Except that many (most) are mis-attributed with no direct means of discovering the true performer. Some aren’t attributed at all ("punk cover").

Some I know. The one claiming to be a Guns ‘n’ Roses version of Stairway to Heaven is actually Pink Floyd and Led Zeplin. If the ‘Radiohead’ versions of Sunday Bloody Sunday and Video Killed the Radio Star ever finish, I’ll be able to tell if it’s actually them (I suspect not for VKtRS).

The rest – minus those that are immediately deleted – will languish on my hard disk in the folder of the damned, ‘Unknown Artist’. I think I had a point. But it’s late. So I’ll file this under ‘Unknown Rant’.

No, not McDonald’s. I’m very recently one of Eircom’s predicted 100,000 broadband users. There’s something to be said about downloading the MTV Movie Awards Matrix: Reloaded parody at… pretty high speed while my brother is on the phone beside me. That something is "Tee Hee".

As a small but greatly appreciated bonus, my first venture online with DSL greeted me with an email from CD-wow:

We just thought you would like to know that we have successfully negotiated a better price with our suppliers in relation to the Region 2 – The Lord Of The Rings: Two Towers: Extended Edition (4 Disc Set) title from £25.99 to an amazingly low £22.99!

We realise that you have paid the full £25.99 so as a goodwill gesture we are passing this saving directly to you!

So I get a £3 voucher because I paid about €10 less than I paid for the first Lord of the Rings instead of paying the €15 less that it is now. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Stephen has found his way back onto the web after a long – in 00’s terms – absence. Although my readership is quite possibly a subset of his at this stage I’m still inclined to echo his advice to vote for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the BBCs Big Read. I visited the voting page with the intention of voting for Time’s book of the twentieth century, The Lord of the Rings, but the Guide grabbed my vote away at the last second. I must say I feel better for it.

Annoyingly, the BBC seems to be under the impression that no-one outside of the UK can read. I told them I was from the South East. They didn’t ask of where.

If you’re curious for any detail of the soon – but not soon enough – to be released Final Fantasy X-2, or if you just can’t tell the difference between real women and computer generated ones, you may like to check out the guide to Final Fantasy X-2 costumes. The flash interface is intriguing. If I had any time I’d try to replicate it in XHTML, CSS and javascript. But I don’t, so I won’t.

Djinn appears to have managed to throw up a content manager in a matter of days since getting his netsoc to support PHP and mySQL. With comments! It’s a little… rough, but I’m assured the details will be ironed out soon. I’ll be happy as soon as he stops displaying commenters’ email addresses.

In the spirit of not doing any of the work myself, here’s the best possible review of The Matrix: Revolutions.

Note to self: if you ever design a mechwarrier suit, make sure to include some kind of protection for the pilot rather than making him sit on the front like a hood ornament on a tank.

It took years of painful and blinding research. Many of the researchers went mad. But it’s all been worth it. Behold! The only legitimate use for the <blink> tag!

I have a folder in my bookmarks called ‘todo’, for articles that I’ve found and not yet read (for lack of time or other reasons) or for items that I want to link to but haven’t the time to write about. You would think, then, that this would feature fairly early in my list of things to read whenever I log on. Unfortunately I seem to be cursed to forget about it, and the folder is filling up. In a half-hearted attempt to start emptying it out, I give you the Jargon file on FUD, where Eric Raymond kicks SCO squarely in the nuts. Justice is sweet.

If you can bring yourself to forgive me for writing this without a relevant title or any degree of thought, I’d appreciate it. I have to run to a lecture, but I wanted to point you at this short and sweet article on A List Apart that anyone with a website should read. Admittedly I say that about just about every ALA article, but this time I really mean it.