Category: Geekery

Make Mine Music

Too much musical information.

Well it’s that time of year again, the voting has opened for the Triple J Hottest 100. Naturally I’ve jumped straight in and voted for my favourite 10 songs of the last year and shall present them here for the ridicule of all – but before I do I have to comment on the website they’ve thrown together to take the votes.

I ain’t impressed.

OK, I’ll qualify that. Overall the site is good, but it has a couple of critical bugs that made my voting a bit of a trial.

(For the record I’m using Firefox version 3.6.13)

Firstly, they appear to be using AJAX to add songs to the shortlist. This is fine – except they appear to be using the same XMLHttpRequest object each time you click a song, rather than spawning a new one.

What this means is that if you click to select a song, then click on another song before the result of the first click has been returned, the first click is effectively cancelled, and only the second song is added to the list. So you need to click, wait, click, wait, and so on, which kind of defeats the purpose of using AJAX in the first place.

The second bug is on the submission form you go to once your songs have been selected. I use an extension called CookieSafe to control the cookies on my machine. This allows me to block or modify cookies on a site-by-site basis. On the Triple J site I allow cookies, but have them all rewritten to be session only (ie: they evaporate when I close the browser).

Voting for the hottest 100 appears to require a long term cookie to be set – which is fair enough, I guess they’re using it to stop people voting multiple times. If this cookie is tampered with (or blocked) the form won’t submit. Also fair enough. But – what does the form tell you if this situation occurs?

It tells you that you haven’t filled out all of the fields.

Even when you have.

That’s bad. Really bad. An inappropriate error message is worse than no error message at all. I’m net savvy enough to figure out what’s going on and adjust my cookie settings appropriately, but plenty of other people aren’t, and could easily get so frustrated that they’d give up on voting altogether.

So, the ABC’s web department seriously needs to raise their game.

But, on to the fun stuff. The songs.

Whittling down my list to just 10 songs was a real challenge this year, especially once I realised that I was forgetting a bunch of really good tracks. But I laboured mightily and ended up with the following list, which I present in no particular order (apart from alphabetically by artist).

(Note: Helen and Ali, a bunch of these songs are on a mix-cd that shall shortly be winging your ways, so if you want to be surprised, stop reading – or at least clicking “play”- from this point on :))

The Bedroom Philosopher – Northcote (So Hungover)

The puntastic tale of a pretentious Emo riding around on the number 86 tram. I particularly like the concept of Sad Sanderson performing at the Fitzroy Anti-Social Club.

Cee Lo Green – Fuck You!

I don’t mind profanity in a song, as long as it serves a purpose. In this case the purpose is to form an integral part of a seamless, catchy, funky, brilliant motown track consummately performed by Mr Green. This is my confident tip for the number one spot. Those who find the lyrics offensive may prefer this bowdlerised version performed by the cast of Glee and (for some reason) Gwyneth Paltrow.

Chiddy Bang – The Opposite of Adults

A remix/reworking of MGMT’s Kids. And what a remix/reworking. Just as good as the original, although wildly different.

Grinderman – Palaces Of Montezuma

Ah, Nick Cave! Scary, growly Nick Cave who can make a song about JFK’s spinal cord sound like a visitation from the heavens. OK, it’s not exclusively about JFK’s spinal cord, but believe me, it’s in there, and it’s romantic as all get out.

Gypsy and the Cat – Jona Vark

Gypsy and the Cat were discovered by Triple J Unearthed, and you can just imagine them sitting around giggling saying “we’ll call our song Jona Vark, and everyone will think it’s Joan of Arc, and get all confused! Hurrah”. Normally this kind of tomfoolery would condemn one to a life of complete obscurity, but Gypsy and the Cat seemed to have made it work.

Kate Nash – Do Wah Doo

A few years ago I listed one of Kate Nash’s songs as the worst of the year. Possibly she heard about it, because she’s now come up with a 50’s inspired track that I’m totally in love with. It sounds like something put together by Phil Spector before he went mad and started killing people. Fantastic.

Marina and the Diamonds – Shampain

How to describe Shampain. Like falling into the pit of hell accompanied by a herd of rabid synthesizers? Perhaps, except that it’s awesome.

Philadelphia Grand Jury – Save Our Town

Some good, old fashioned Aussie rock/pop, without which no Hottest 100 list would be complete. Put your money down people!

Sia – Bring Night

Catchy and astronomically accurate! If you travel in the direction of your shadow the sun will go down a little sooner.

Yeasayer – Ambling Alp

A song about boxers from the 1930s. Or something. Certainly they get mentioned in there. I don’t really know, or really care, because it’s energetic, catchy, fun and puts the boot into fascists.

So that’s my ten. Here’s some others that only just missed out on making the cut…

So there we go. Roll on Australia Day!

Skype Must Die!

Doing some good for the world

Actually, Skype is a pretty cool program, it’s just that bloody browser plugin that turns everything that even looks like a phone number into a puke-inducing, flag-bearing button that needs to be eliminated with prejudice as extreme as a very extreme thing having a particularly extreme day.

Until that noble goal is achieved, this might be useful. I’ve chopped the horrible beast that is the plugin apart and come up with the following code to undo some of the evil it perpetrates on innocent web pages. Simply drop this CSS code into your page, and (theoretically) Skype will crawl away, weeping, leaving your innocent number strings unmolested.

/* kill skype plugin */
html body  span.skype_pnh_container {display:none !important;}
html body  span.skype_pnh_print_container {display:inline !important;}

Please note that this is code that seems to work for me, and for the version of the plugin on my computer. It may not work for you, or with whatever version you’re plagued with. Also, I’m not a bloody tech support desk, so if you can’t get this code working, or aren’t sure where to put it – well, it’s tough biscuits for you sailor!

Back to work…

Waylaid by Art

Cartographical exploits

Spent far too much time over the weekend doing the first bit of art (for a certain value of ‘art’) I’ve done in ages. A hand drawn map of London.

The idea (you can’t just draw something, you need to have an idea behind it for it to be real ‘art’) was to replicate half pages from the A-Z (the London street directory par exellence) by hand and then paste them all together. As each panel would be drawn without referencing the others the end result would be a fragmented, patchwork view of the city – kind of an exquisite corpse map – with roads, rivers and rail-lines fractured or just coming to dead stops. Close up it’s a mess, but zoomed out it’s still recognisably London.

(I suppose I could come up with some art-wank about it representing the tourist’s view of the city as a collection of disconnected enclaves surrounding tube stations, but that’s just a little too pretentious, even for me :))

The end result can be viewed here. Well, sort of the end result as after I scanned it I added another panel to the lower left. But you get the basic idea.

I was inspired to create the map by Londonist’s hand drawn map exhibition.  I’ve submitted it – guess we’ll see if they like it.

Trololololojan

Trololololololololololol

Spent the last two days battling to free my work computer from the grips of a number of really nasty viruses that managed to slip in via a compromised website I visited looking for the lyrics of Eduard Khil’s trolololo song. I think it’s all clean now, I’m running a final scan in the background to make sure.

Not fun. Mr Khil has a lot to answer for 😉

Pun Unintentional

Talk about ideas that suck

So, they’re apparently making a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.

Hmmm, didn’t they already do that? And it sucked?

(While we’re on the subject of awful Vampire movies, I meant to say a while back that I didn’t think there was any way to make the Twilight movies worse, but that the makers of Vampires Suck seemed to have somehow managed it.)

Renaissance of the Geek Underclass

The special extended edition.

Well, I’ve at least accomplished something sort of worthwhile with my week off, a complete rebuild of the Tales of the Geek Underclass. The old site was so badly laid out as to be almost completely unreadable, so I’ve revised it into something that doesn’t make me want to puke. I’ve also started work on revising the content, since some of the writing is as almost as embarrassing as the layout. I may even get some more tales written – stay tuned!

Went to the Dentist on Friday. They said that I might as well not bothered coming, my teeth are in such good shape. They couldn’t even find anything worth cleaning, although they did a clean anyway since I was there. Good to know at least one part of my body seems to work 🙂

The midnight screening of Harry Potter was fun. There were a good number of people in costumes, and the movie was reasonably enjoyable. I’ve always had a problem with the Harry Potter movies in that on the one hand I know the books so well that I immediately notice all the bits they miss out and change, but on the other hand can mentally fill them back in, making the movie seem more complete than it actually is, so I’m an awful judge of whether a given HP movie is any good or not. But overall I had a good time, so that’s what counts.

(Why didn’t they have to say “I didn’t kill you” at Grimauld Place? Why didn’t Harry liberate Mad-Eye’s eye? Why didn’t Voldemort turn up at Godric’s Hollow? Why didn’t they put in more Tonks? Why don’t they ever put in more Tonks? I’ll shut up now :))

Back to work tomorrow. Bah.

Later: The link to the Tales was pointing to a file on my desktop. How does someone do that after 10 years as a web developer? I has an embarrassment! (it’s fixed now).

Back to the Drawing Board

The Week of the Wyrm!

I’m having a particularly busy week, which is kind of strange since I’ve actually taken it off from work.

On Saturday it was up to Fabes’ place to catch up with Matt, who’s recently (and briefly) returned from the mysterious country of the Helvetians (Switzerland to those whose classical education is lacking). We hung around, played some Munchkin and ran through a highly derivative dungeon hack adventure I’ve been mulling over for a while. Everyone seemed to have a good time, with the possible exception of Ryan who went out on his bike to get food and subsequently got lost. We actually sent out a search party to look for him (he had his phone switched off), which returned in under two minutes since he’d actually recovered his bearings and was only a few streets away.

Then on Monday I went and got my tax for the last two years done. I have to admit I’m usually fairly slack with tax. I justify this by noting that I always receive a pretty big tax return, so if I’m late getting it in the Government is at an advantage, since they’re earning interest on money that’s rightfully mine (I somehow doubt they’d see it that way though). In fact while I was getting my papers together for my accountant (I like saying “my accountant”, it makes me feel all grown up despite the fact that the only time I have anything to do with them is when I get my tax done) I discovered a letter from the tax department asking where the hell my tax was and threatening fines and jail time. But it’s all sorted now so I’m good. I hope.

Then last night I went and saw Carrie Fisher’s show Wishful Drinking with Justin, who was the only one of my mates interested in going. I could write up a lengthy review but I’d basically just be repeating what every other review has said, which is it’s an absolute riot (did you know that George Lucas founded ILM solely so they could change his facial expressions? True!).

(By which of course I mean not true :))

While waiting for Justin to arrive I ran into Katie, who was also attending the show (before anyone invokes the previous paragraph to infer that I don’t consider Katie a mate, I would like to point out that I pretty much consider her a sister). She was hoping to get Ms Fisher to sign some of her books, but unfortunately it’s not something that she generally does, having been hounded by hordes of lonely Leia fanboys for decades (believe me, there were a bunch of them hanging around the stage door). This didn’t stop Katie shouting out “Please sign my book!” at the start of the performance, which seemed to throw Ms Fisher off for a few seconds – which is an achievement at least 😀

After the show we (that is to say Justin, Katie and Myself) adjourned to the Subiaco Hotel for dinner, which we finished up at about midnight.

To continue the trend tonight I’m going to a midnight screening of The Deathly Hallows Part One with Paula and her friend Bec. Then on Friday I’ve got a dentist’s appointment. I’m probably also going to have to fit in a trip to the doctor’s to get some prescriptions refilled. I tell you it’s all go go go at the Wyrmcave!

There was also a rather interesting development last night. While waiting for the show to start Katie introduced me to a couple of friends of hers who were also attending. I instantly recognised one of them as the redhead on the train who I’ve been crushing on for ages.

Subsequent conversation revealed that she’s a big geek, we’re around the same age, she’s an artist (always a plus) and that in addition to knowing Katie she also knows my brother. Sounds good no? Well the conversation also revealed that she’s in a committed relationship with the other of Katie’s friends attending, who also happens to be a girl.

Bah! 😀

Oh well, back to the old drawing board 🙂

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