"Nothing but the rain"
I noticed this earlier in my cupboard while I was putting away some crockery. It remains from the days when I had an FM radio/cassette/CD player in the kitchen.
This tape is Mechanical Resonance by Tesla. It’s actually a pretty good album. I don’t have the heart to throw away any of my old cassettes, records or CDs. It’d be like throwing away books – wrong.
On a list of things you don’t want to read [first world problems] is:
Drive 2 on this device is at risk of failing, please replace.
I guess there are worse things that this such as:
Drive 2 has failed.
Both drives have failed.
But still, it was enough to make me worry a little. My data on the NAS is organised in Raid 1 configuration so that both drives are exact copies, just in case one of them fails.
I spent some time investigating new NAS drives and making sure that I have space to expand but I think that will have to wait a few years. I would like a three or four bay device with two 2TB drives to start. I would only use Raid 1, but this configuration could potentially give me 8TB of data storage. I currently have used about 0.5 TB on the current NAS and that is after two years of ownership so I shouldn’t worry too much about needing the space until my sons get older.
I ordered a Western Digital 1TB Red drive as the WD website said that it was a suitable HDD for the ix2 series of NAS. I had planned for the whole operation to take an hour but in reality it took about 10 minutes and that was with me taking my time. Really impressed with how simple it was to replaced the drive.
Here’s the NAS.
After removing the two screws on the base of the device I removed the old disk 2.
Unscrewed the old HDD from the plastic casing.
Screwed the new HDD into the casing.
Slid the new HDD and casing into the NAS enclosure and replaced the screws in the bottom of the device.
Placed NAS back in its place in the “tech corner” of the house and turned it on.
After a lot of drive reading and writing it was ready for log in access and the control panel said it was rebuilding data protection [most instructions I read had said I would have to authorise this action]. I will amend this once the data rebuild is complete.
This whole process was pretty simple and I’m impressed with Iomega for the drive and am feeling quite smug at the moment.
I find the water ice crystals on the roof of my car yesterday morning rather attractive.
This photograph isn’t a brilliant representation of what I saw, so, I shall try again to take a picture next time the car is covered in a beautiful blanket.
#nerd
I am considering re-adjusting my IMDB ratings. When I see a film I tend to give it a rating on IMDB [btw – I remember IMDB when it was a little web project at Cardiff University]. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that I need to change my scoring system for these films and I am actually considering using even numbers only.
I have been worrying about what the difference between a 5 or a 6 might be. Also, Restricting the scoring to just the even numbers will mean that I have to consider the film and try to be more realistic. If I currently give something a 6 or 7 what does that difference show? What would be the difference between a 3 or a 4? I just don’t know. The scale of 0 to 10 seems too big for these things [especially as I’m not taking the mean of lots of scores].
I also think there is a human tendency to give middle of the road scores when we think something is average or even below par. If you have seen Come Dine With Me, you will be aware [or will be after this] that when the contestants don’t really know how to score a meal or want average then they tend to plump for a 6 or 7. Their words describe an evening that is probably below par but their score is one that is not meant to offend [6 or 7] but is really rather damning. I want to call this the “Come Dine With Me Fallacy”, which would mean that sub-optimal experiences receive scores that are perceived as “average”, rather than risk offend or come across as a nasty [but realistic] person.
So, at some point in the near future I am going to adjust my IMDB ratings. I will only use the even numbers [thoughts: I need to check if I can score a zero].
Have returned: I can’t score a zero on IMDB. That is not good. So, the default scoring system means that even the poorest film ever made will receive one star. This causes some problems. But I shall try to get around that. So, my new system goes:
I shall update this or write a new communication once I have updated my scores using this crib sheet and let you know which films I struggled to pigeon-hole.
Addendum
I have just started looking at my IMDB ratings and have decided that I will use the above scoring system BUT please understand that I am now using the “Will I watch again?” criteria and this is a personal thing, very subjective. I am able to spot a “good critically acclaimed film” but think my ratings should reflect my intentions about the film and not what I think the wider world will think (1st March 2014).
Further Addenda
I have just realised that this means that any film I enjoyed but won’t intentionally watch again ends up being scored a “6”. Oh, the irony, given I complained about the “Come Dine With Me” fallacy earlier. But, in my favour, I have declared that my scoring system will be 2,4,6,8,10. This means that a score of 6 is the mean and median of the scoring values. When reading my film scores you need to understand my system which I have at least tried to communicate here.
Even More Addenda
These are my latest (updated) scores using the system explained above. I don’t care if you think otherwise about some of the ratings.
Human Target appears twice because I rated an individual episode as well as the whole series.
For practically all my life I have been a fan of heavy metal. See this communication about my descent into metal.
For me the 80s were filled with early flirtations with pop, from Madonna to Frankie Goes To Hollywood and then into Heavy Metal and Rock. I love Iron Maiden and AD/DC following on from Bon Jovi and Def Leppard in 1987. Come the very late 80s and early 90s I descend into thrash with Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax. I see these bands regularly along with new British metal bands such as Wolfsbane and The Almighty.
During university I don’t really expand my musical tastes a great deal. My major discovery (via Smith) is Senser and their cross-over political rock and rap. This sustains me for a few more years along with Alice In Chains.
My music buying diminishes as I start my career and I don’t really get into new bands for a few years. I don’t have a network of friends who can inform me of new things and I don’t live in London. I spend a number of years sustaining myself on the stuff I already own. I still see bands like Iron Maiden and Slayer when they come along, but nothing small or new.
In the early 2000s someone gives me her Rammstein CDs (Sara T) and I find the sound fascinating and new. It’s exciting. Along with seeing Slipknot perform on the TFI Friday television programme I have found something new. Something a little scary and something that seems dangerous. All the music I have grown up with seems rather tame in comparison to these new sounds. I played them over and over. Until around 2009 not much happened until Smith returned from abroad and he and I started attending gigs and concerts together again.
In 2009 I saw two bands. AC/DC at Wembley Stadium and I loved it. They were brilliant and I their music has brought me so much pleasure over the years [so much so that I wore out my musical cassette version of “If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It”]. The other band I saw that year was Rammstein. Their stage show is just absolutely brilliant. If you don’t believe me then just search YouTube for “Buch Dich”, it is quite brilliant, a little bit dangerous and something to cause moral outrage amongst the leading classes. The support band for Rammstein was Combichrist and that is when the trouble started.
After hearing Combichrist and being impressed with their sound I ordered a CD.
Today We Are All Demons
This music was exciting, different, morally dubious, scary and just damn brilliant. It made me want to dance (something I just don’t do). The big problem was that there were NO GUITARS and it was all SAMPLES and DRUM MACHINES. For someone who likes his music live and reproducible without machines this caused major issues. Why did I like this? Was I going insane? How can I like music with a complete lack of heavy guitars and bursting riffs? I was at the tip of the mountain staring down a great big slippery slope to the valley of “not real” music [as far as my metal head would tell you].
I bought more Combichrist stuff and started to look at their influences and associated acts. I bought more. Bands like:
Pretty much all of this is what I would now call EBM, Aggrotech or Hellektro. These names are good because it means I am back on the edge of society and seeking to be different with my music. When Metallica took the world by storm in 1992 or so I was done with them. Their sound had changed and I didn’t like it any more. The “edge” had gone. This new music I had found has an edge. It makes me feel uncomfortable [sometimes] and it is different.
I have tried to describe it to friends and I say:
It’s heavy metal without any guitars. The lyrics are nasty and the tunes are awesome.
or
It’s kinda dance music but without the nice lyrics and happy stuff.
I have leant this stuff to friends who like the same sort of metal as me and they don’t really get on with it. They apologised and handed back the USB stick. That’s fine by me because it means I can carry on feeling “on the edge” and liking the music. This stuff ain’t ever going to be mainstream. It sometimes sounds like it should be playing in a night club on a Saturday night but then I have no idea what sort of stuff these people would play. I’d love to be in a club and hear this stuff come on and the crowd just freak out because it hurts them.
I am struggling to come to terms with my new found musical taste. It irks me that I’ve gone for samples and drum machines. I’ve been to see these people play. I’ve liked their music. I’ve had a great time. Yet still the 18 year old me is somewhat miffed at this odd turn in my ear pleasures. As an extreme I have seen a “band” with three Apple Macs on stage and a few leads and then they danced around pressing the odd key here and there. I loved it. There’s a tiny part of me that isn’t sure it’s music but I like it anyway. Over time I’m sure I’ll heal this mental riff. Much like I’ve got used to being a university snob when at the age of 17 I hated that person!
If you want to try this stuff then have a look for the following tracks:
I am now listening to more industrial stuff. The following bands are on my current active list:
My metal taste buds are still there. I watched Mentallica last night. I went to Download last year. I’m going to see Therapy? and FFDP soon. However, this Hellektro is here to stay and just wonderfully stunning: suck on that 18 year old me!
I’ve lived in my house for nearly ten years. It’s an old house (built 1880) and a Victorian terrace. The back of the house overlooks fields and woods all the way to the paper mill at Aylesford. There’s always steam (or smoke – less pleasant but it’s probably steam because a lot of water is used in paper stuff) of some kind spewing from the mill.
Mostly the wind comes from the south to west in the South East of Great Britain. This means it travels freely over the open area at the back of my house and then strikes my house nearly front on.
In the map the long thin blue bit is a river (tidal section of the river) and the big blue bits are quarry lakes.
The wind hits the back of the house. This causes high local pressure while over the house the wind continues moving creating a low local pressure (Bernoulli Principle). Most of the gaps in my house are at the back of the building. This means that the wind flows through these gaps and exits through the largest hole in the house which is the chimney, which has a lower pressure at the top!
This situation caused draughts and noise even when there was a slight wind.
One day I got “Google happy” and just searched for a chimney balloon. I don’t know what prompted me to search for this, I may have searched for “chimney draughts” first and then found the chimney balloon. Who know? Google and Chrome but I’m not going to spend my time looking through my history.
I ordered a chimney balloon from Amazon. It’s a plastic bag that I inflated in the chimney pipe. It blocks the chimney. It stops the draughts. Simple. I’m impressed with what a simple solution it is.
The one draw back is that it has also made the dining room really quiet. I can no longer hear the outside world. This is very strange but something I’ll get used to. There were some serious winds recently and I only knew about them when I went into the bathroom (it is at the back of the house), the dining room was that quiet. Also, my feet no longer get really cold when I sit in the dining room as there is no draught (or rather minimal draught now).
If there isn’t an HTML instruction for
<RANT>
then there should be. It could only show the text when moved over by a mouse and then in bold and italics and flashing. Perhaps there could be a graphic of an exclamation mark over the text and so we have a choice whether to read it or not. I often rant and it’s often just to let off steam and have my thoughts validated by other people, but it’s not necessary. We should deal with things rationally and use good arguments to make a point. But, then again, we aren’t rational beings. Anyway, no offence, and just sayin’, you know?
</RANT>
w| acknowledgements to Penguin.
A Nice Little Film
These are the words I text Smith just after seeing this film. I really enjoyed it. If this film had a purpose then it showed man’s duty to protect culture and the importance that should be placed on it. It also showed camaraderie and dedication to a cause that is “just”.
You quickly forge the cast and the “big” scenes seem to just fit but I can see that they took a lot of work. The film had scenes from the Normandy Landings to Paris, the Battle Of The Bulge, St. Lo, etc. To get the “look” of the film right was a huge amount of work and probably un-noticed by most.
There were no overblown heroics and I had expected some time spent on “basic” training with the laughs thrown in but this was avoided too. As I said earlier:
A Nice Little Film
I now have some more places in Europe to visit. I have been to Bruges but I didn’t know that the statue of the Madonna and Child was there. Time to return I think. I will say one thing and I have to blame the culture of the 1980s: I was half expecting some of the cast to find or say they were searching for the “Fallen Madonna With The Big Boobies”. Such was the influence of ‘Allo ‘Allo on my childhood. Damn!
I did watch a trailer for this and I’m pretty sure that there were a few lines in the trailer that weren’t in the main film. That’s good. I hate seeing all the “big” bits of a film in a trailer and then the actual film fails to overcome my expectations. Comedies struggle with this, they put the funny lines in the trailer and then there’s nothing left for the main film. An exception to this was The Heat with Sandra Bullock. I didn’t see this at the cinema because it looked as though they had put all the funny bits in the trailer. I was wrong. This film had me laughing out loud ALL the way through. It was far better than the trailer.
Rant:
I really should try and avoid films the first few days that they are released. People in the cinema with loud sweet packets are REALLY ANNOYING. I nearly turned around and told these people to “fuck off”. Any food taken in to the cinema should be something that is quiet to eat or access. There is no need to take noisy packets of food into a cinema. It just shows what anti-social pricks you are. If you want to eat food while watching a film do it at home. You are probably too fat anyway and so shouldn’t be eating more food anyway.
End of rant.
For quite a while I have found iTunes to be thoroughly frustrating. It has issues with my music collection, randomly adds songs I’ve deleted and doesn’t like updating the artwork on my albums. iTunes also takes an age to synchronise my phone and when it does it fails to update artwork, copy playlists or new songs across to my phone. It seems to be a pretty bad and bloated piece of software. I don’t use iTunes to back up my phone and rely on the cloud for that, which I am thankful for as iTunes probably wouldn’t cope very well with it.
I searched the internet thingy and found a free piece of software called CopyTrans which has a suite of iPhone utilities. I was rather hesitant about using it as it could really mess things up. Would it work with iTunes and my phone and help me do the following:
I do still need iTunes but only to manage my playlists on the NAS drive as that is where my Sonos system reads the files. I guess I could use a completely different music manager but iTunes works well as long as I don’t connect my phone to the PC (which is kinda the point of the software).
I downloaded CopyTrans and started it up. The Manager part of the suite is free to use. I was quite wary of doing this. I love my music and have spent ages making sure I have the songs I want and the correct artwork. It’s quite a time investment.
“Connect Your Phone”
CopyTrans wanted my phone. I connected it and waited. CopyTrans read my database and a song list appeared on my computer. I tried to copy some new songs across to my phone.
IT WORKED
AND QUICKLY
I tried editing a playlist – easy. I even tried making sure my artwork was up-to-date (I had noticed two albums only had artwork on the first song), this was really easy and IT WORKED.
The online help files are really good. It all seems so easy.
CopyTrans you have made my life a lot easier and I am thankful. I hope millions read this and use your software, but unfortunately this website only gets ~270 hits a month. More people should use CopyTrans.
Confession – I have absolutely nothing to do with CopyTrans. I just think their software it worth a mention here.
I was sitting in the staff common room the other day and chatting to a female member of staff when another male member of staff came in.
Ian, I was at the ‘Stones match last night”
This was an interesting comment. Firstly it was directed at me and not me and the female in the room. It was also about football and the local team Maidstone United.
Now, I really don’t do association football. I just don’t find it interesting. I’m happy to go to a match and I have seen a few premiership teams play [Southampton, Everton, Tottenham and whomever Spurs were playing]. Watching the match live is an experience and one I enjoy but on the whole, football [or association football as I insist on calling it] just plain bores me. I really don’t understand watching it on television. I also don’t really follow it. I pick bits and pieces up from the radio in the morning and I have a working knowledge but not enough to have a major “bloke” conversation.
I do have a team: Tottenham Hotspur. I have this team for the simple reason that my father and other family members support them. That’s it. Geographically this is a good choice as I grew up in Essex but my ancestors are from the east end of London and so any of the north east London teams would be a good choice [except Arsenal, as much as I don’t care the ‘Spurs thing runs deep]. I keep an eye on the scores and results of ‘Spurs matches, that’s about it. I find it hard to get fanatical about the England team when they enter big competitions as it all seems rather jingoistic and I have issues with the English “identity” [more on that another time].
So, back to the conversation starter:
Ian, I was at the ‘Stones match last night”
This would have been better directed at the female in the room for all I cared. But I was now stuck in a quandary. Should I say:
Sorry, I don’t really do football. Could we talk about the NFL?
What I ended up doing, and in my head I could see the IT Crowd episode when they learn how to talk “football”, was say:
Oh, how was it? I heard they were doing well in the league.
This formed the basis for a conversation that I had no interest in completing or taking part but words were exchanged and as much as I wasn’t fussed I think the other person felt we had a meaningful exchange. I felt a little more “bloke”. Funny how it’s assumed that I must know about a particular topic because of my sex. Now, if everyone had read my twitter profile, that might help!