This is the view from the banks of the Lea (or Lee) by the Olympic Park:
Let’s take a closer look at that attractive fence:
Lovely, eh?
I hope they take it all away and make it nice and open, but I suspect they won’t, at least until after the Games.
I’ve not really had many dealings with the Huffington Post, but I thought I’d drop a comment on this piece about a cover versions album of Nirvana’s Nevermind. The writer, Michael Vazquez, describes himself as being ‘part of the generation that just-missed Punk’, and goes on to say he’s 45.
Thing is, I’m just a year older, and I didn’t miss it. I lived right through it. Not, it’s true, at its bleeding, safety-pin-punctured heart1. But still, I was aware of it, was introduced to the music by friends, listened to Peelie. Formed bands, for god’s sake, which is what it was really all about.
I can only conclude that Vazquez was a late developer.
Anyway, my point wasn’t about that, it was about commenting at the Huffington Post. You have to be registered to comment; fair enough, that probably keeps the spam down a bit. There are a number of login options, as is common nowadays: Twitter, Facebook, a dropdown for others.
I tried the dropdown and chose to use my Google account. A popup pops up, saying, ‘This site wants to know your email address and your contacts.’ Email address, fair enough, that’s normal for registering at most places. But my Google contacts? I think not.
I cancelled, tried Twitter. ‘This site wants to see your contacts, add contacts, post tweets…’ Get, as we say in my part of the world, tae fuck!
Oddly, it asked less of Facebook; but I can’t be bothered going back to check exactly what.
In the end, not wanting to be thwarted, I registered with them by giving them a username and my email address, in the old-school way. Obviously I unchecked the ‘Please spam me’ box.
Is this normal behaviour nowadays? Certainly seems odd to me.
eMusic got back to me. As I said, I emailed them to complain about the disappearance of re-downloading.
Randall, from eMusic Customer Support, said:
It would be great if we could offer the privilege of re-downloading music for free to our members, but the truth of the matter is that our agreements with our labels prohibit us from doing so
which is not surprising. But why the recent change?
while we have not had the tracking systems in place to enforce it before, we do now.
I see. He went on to say:
we believe it is the best policy for everyone involved because ultimately it benefits the artists that we all love.
I’m not convinced. It is in the sense that, if I want to get the albums I lost, I’ll have to buy them again, so the artists get paid again. But I’d be surprised if many artists really want to get paid more because of something that could be seen as ripping off their fans.
Though I suppose the comparison would be that if I had broken or lost a CD (or scratched a record, for us old types) I wouldn’t get it replaced for free.
But digital files, being so ephemeral, just feel like they belong in a different category.
OK, everyone knows about Emusic, right? Good site for downloading mainly independent stuff. You often find that you can only get recent stuff by bands and artists who used to be on major labels and have been dropped (or have split up and reformed).
Anyway, I am 98.763% convinced that they used to let you re-download tracks that you had downloaded before. So imagine my dismay, when taking, I thought, the final few steps in recovering from my recent disk replacement. Just download the recent Emusic tracks that I hadn’t backed up, right?
Oh, no. Not any more. Re-downloading is only for failed downloads.
I’ve emailed them about it, but I’m not expecting much. Not happy, Emusic. Not happy.
It occurs to me that software companies, like the one I work for, are probably considered part of the ‘service sector’, in the kind of statistics that you hear on the news from time to time. Like most such companies, we do provide services. But at our core, we make and sell things — computer programs. The fact that the things are delivered by FTP rather than DHL does not make them any less things.
In short, we should be considered as part of the ‘manufacturing sector’; or at least as some sort of hybrid. The national statistics are therefore skewed, and the UK probably has a far larger manufacturing sector than we are generally told.
(Incidentally, I seem to have posted a version of this at http://peg.gd/16Y, which just lets you do it, with no ‘About’ or any information. Interesting.)
I spelled Raoul Moat’s name wrongly in my last post. Now corrected.
I have to say that my sympathy for Moat was increased by reading an interview with his brother in The Guardian. A sad family story, there’s no doubt. But even Angus, the brother, condemns the Facebook page (which has now been removed by its creator).
Sympathy, yes; but he’s still not a hero, or a “legend”. Charlie Brooker talks sense on the matter, as you might expect.
When I sent this tweet:
Floral tributes for murderer just because he camped out for a while, apparently. Very strange.
Martin McCallion
devilgate
I was thinking about the literal, physical flowers that some misguided people had laid on the river bank where Raoul Moat died. Misguided, or possibly, grieving family members. Just because someone is a murderer, it doesn’t mean that no-one grieves for their death.
But now, it seems, things have gone beyond that. Facebook tribute pages celebrating Moat’s life, and especially his last few days in hiding from the police.
Go on the run, camp out for a bit, become a kind of hero: all very well (though I can’t say I’d recommend it as a career path) if the crime were minor, or victimless.
But this guy murdered a man, and shot two other people. One of them has been left blind. The other is still in hospital.
This guy wasn’t some Robin Hood figure. He was in no way a good guy. He was a grade ‘A’ bampot, a fuckpig of the first water. And I’m disgusted that anyone could think of celebrating his acts.
This is how we end the first decade of the twenty-first century, then: with Jools on the telly, and a netbook on my lap. A fitting conclusion, I suppose, as the start of it was similarly low-key (I had a small kid at the time, and have two much bigger ones now); and I’ve spent much of the decade with a computer close at hand.
By some bizarre twist of fate, though, I seem to be out of whisky. I sit in shame at such a state of affairs. One or other form of whiskey will just have to do, though.
Happy New Year, everyone.
So, I’ve got an iPhone. I walked into the O2 shop near work the other day, and came out half an hour later with an 8 GB phone and a £30-a-month contract.
The device itself is a thing of beauty, in both hardware and software terms.
iTunes, however, is an ugly piece of dingbat’s kidneys.
Don’t get me wrong: it does its thing well, from playing music, through purchases, to synchronisation. But my god, it looks ugly.
And nor do I like the way it presents the music it knows about; but then, I’ve never seen an application that does that very well.
As to typing with the on-screen keyboard, well, it’s actually not that bad; it’s never going to. Be fast, bit there are some smart optimisations, like automatically switching back from the symbol keyboard to the letter one when you hit space after a comma, or immediately after you type an apostrophe.
And I almost cry with happiness every time I see the transition from one app to another.
ETA: As you can see from the typoes above, I wrote that on the shiny device. I’ll leave them in for posterity.
These are exciting times in Hackney. Not only has my son just started secondary school today (where did those eleven years go?) but it seems that we are getting a new bookshop near the top of our road.
This is big news indeed. Our little corner of Lower Clapton is characterised more by chicken-based fast-food joints and kebab shops. A children’s bookshop opened on nearby Chatsworth Road a year or two ago (my daughter was their first customer). There was a brief, exciting moment last year when something that looked like a bookshop opened up on Lower Clapton Road, but it turned out to be a religious booksop, specialising the the Christian field.
But today I went up to get my hair cut, and I noticed a new sign up: Pages of Hackney. A new bookshop on the Lower Clapton Road, opening on Saturday 13th September. Excellent news.
Not so good is that Saf’s Barbers is “closed until further notice”. I hope everything’s all right. I still have shaggy hair, which never looks good when it’s receding.