Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

google web decellerator

I saved 8.4 minutes in the last couple of days with the google web accelerator. I got lots of nice hetfy underlines where I could go places for a fraction of a second less than I usually go even though I may have never been there before. I also got a rather nifty accelerator widget in my system tray which vroooms the dial all the way to the right when I loads a web page.

8.4 minutes. that’s pretty good. 8.4 minutes of my life back.

well it would be, if google dreg disseminator hadn’t then proceeded to hang my system every time I tried to reboot it in an endless cycle of ‘trying to start it so I can try and stop it’ which involves multiple head fractures against walls and a keyboard now bereft of keys since when I hoofed it against the wall in manic frustration. in the end I realized the only sensible option is to boot into safe mode and uninstall google head dismemberer which is impossible because you can’t run the installer (to uninstall) in safe mode but wait, I expect its just actually added a startup menu item oh god there it is.

so 8.4 minutes saved. 1.1 hours wasted. you owe me a keyboard.

crashing down to google earth

whew. thank goodness I removed that google pleb geronimator. now I can get on with stuff. just check to see if the computer comes on again this morning aaand…yes, ok. looks good. I realized I haven’t virus checked since 1974, so I do that and everything’s ok. ooh. might just quickly geotag that photo of half a range rover outside a medieval town house. lets get google earth running.

hmm. its a bit slow. um, I’ll just wait a couple of seconds to see if it wakes up a bit. ooh. that’s not supposed to happen, why’s my screen gone blank? oh, hang on, its back again. no, hang on, its gone, oh, no, there it is. oh

as the smashing pumpkins suddenly begin stuttering over the last line of 1979 and the fan goes bonkers I realize that not all is well in just-as-I-thought-it-was-alright computerland and in an unceremonious instant, everything stops and there is that half a second in between you hoping it hasn’t rebooted and the boot screen appearing where you hope it hasn’t just rebooted itself and taken all your InDesign docs with it but of course it has.

yes yes I know its probably not actually google web accellerator or google earth themselves that are forcing my hair from my skull in fist-sized clumps as I try and just get a computer to keep running but its them that are the big boys pushing, on threat of massive chinese burns, the little boys out in front of me to string a string across the 2 lamp posts I’m about to electronically cycle through. can you say uninstall?

very frinteresting

as I wallow in the quagmire of superfunextramentalwall posts which are mainly videos of cats falling off bird cages but without harry hill in the background and a million invitations to install applications that tell me how many people think I’m hot when it doesn’t take much for me to know that I’m clearly not, occasionally there is something more interesting to do instead when you are supposed to be doing a presentation on data architecture (me) resolving aesthetic analysis differences from art brains and squashing them into hardbacks (neil) seemingly everything else (christophe). right now that would be the intellectual online its a knockout that is frints which as any self-respecting (contradiction) editor/subeditor will know is the sublime art of pun mashup entities as mirth hooks to articles which probably are not as exciting as the ingeniously crafted teaser would have you believe unless of course its peppered liberally with frint seasoning throughout..

many are the flavours of frints that proposally intricate their way unto the brainways of our daily lives suffice that we all know one when we see one but few few of us can write one when we need one which isn’t often if you’re preparing a design specification for a synchronized feedback system whereupon twould be rather unseemly and postly pointless but were you to be trying to make a story re: miserable pork prices seem that much more tasty then a descent into the world of wordcraft is entirely apropos such that the plight of suffolk farmers at the hands of the insatiable profits of Tesco might lead thusly: Pork Snatching. not even a very good example but that’s because I’m not very good at it but there are lots of bored editors out there who are very good at it and who happen to have all coagulated into the facebook group frints. thus spake latest choice frintmongers in various categories:

Drive-in Horror: Lexus Chainsaw Massacre
Slightly Disappointing Achievements: Nobel Peas Prize
Bored Games: Shrug Ha’penny
Household Names: Forrest Wickerchair

actually that last one was mine. its all very british empirical in nature. radio 4 is clearly playing at all times.

flickr emptiness

portal 1
portal 1 by Tim Caynes

its the old mother hubbard of this modern age and now my boneless social dog is tripping out the kitchen door and closing the door behind him. all my friends I’ve never met are getting their coats and slinking off to somewhere more interesting instead where there’s fluffy cats and african landscapes and close-ups of moist roses.

this morning I went to the flickr cupboard and the cupboard was bare, not a single post-processed gem of a disused toilet or a murder of emos gathered outside the forum or a perspective-shifted alignment of the steps up to a car park or even a car park. not since june 2005 has there not been something straining to get itself published to the sound of one hand clapping and an uncomfortable silence at the community bar. there is always a stock of recently cropped aligned layered filtered adjusted shifted merged actioned photos gathered neatly filtered by modified date in the adobe bridge folder called’ flickr’. even if there isn’t, there’s 200 subfolders of a folder called ‘sony w1’ each with 200 photos in there that are just dying to be fiddled about with in an ironic post-film post-apocalypse post-lomo post-this-letter-for-me kind of way.

but not today. I’ve posted everything. everything I haven’t posted isn’t worth posting. I haven’t taken any pictures recently that aren’t david bowie’s head on my shoulders or flowers at funerals. it’s flickr emptiness. whaaaaa.

actually, I’ve been too busy to go out and take pictures. I’ve been spending all my time blogging developing product category design frameworks and even though the sun is shining right through the office window and onto my monitor so that I can’t even read what I’m typing which explains a lot I can’t get out to make the best of it. I’ll go out tomorrow. take a picture of my feet or something. I’ll probably run out of anything to say before then at which point I’ll be completely social media bereft. mind you, there’ll alway be someone cycling past on the pavement to give me something to blart about. oi! you! get on the road! you’ve got a whole bloody cycle lane!

dead cars

I now have 2 parked on the road outside. 1 requires a cam belt so I’m pushing it into a wheelie bin and hoping they recycle it and the other, which doesn’t belong to me, was trying to get me to the office in camberley today and failed to overtake a p reg ford escort on the A11 as an orange warning light the shape of a car with an enormous spanner on it lit up which must have like a 1000 watt led behind it because at that point all the 13 year old turbo power disappeared and the man in the 325 behind me had to wait for 2 miles as me and the ford escort fronted each other out on the dual carriageway waiting for a mild downward incline to get us to 60 miles an hour so that one of us could either undertake or overtake the other one.

in the end, the ford escort won by a narrow undertake and I crawled round a roundabout outside thetford and then drove back home where I sit typing this before I pick up the phone to talk to the garage about how much its going to cost me to repair 2 cars that nobody wants.

NME boredom

while I was at the NME tour in the Least Commended Room at the UEA the other night it occurred to me that I was a bit bored which I thought I might be but ended up going anyway and in a lull between the lulls of lacklustre new music I took some notes on my mobile phone. I mean. I took notes on my mobile phone. I might have well been in a conference call about product categorization and taking down things like “specifications” and “stakeholders” or “communication plans” but no in fact what I was decanting from my half-asleep brain unto a memory stick spake of the following experience:

Cribalikes, jonglers> strokes maximo 25 year cycle

I know what it means but I was so unmoved by the whole event that I can’t be bothered to expand suffice to say that being on jo whileys playlist do not make certain it might worth trouble be but who I you seemed to like it well at least the cribs the rest was rubbish but reminded me of a night in a hall somewhere watching jamie’s brother’s band in 1981 which was quite exciting but of course I hadn’t paid 15 quid or something and I also made a cover version of things keep on switching off no sorry summer days they were the golden dawn teenage alistair crowleyites or maybe just en homage to an ercol dining table nostalgia yes for a decent night out is that too much empty spaces on the dance floor lets have a fight instead nice hair

nearly cracked DRM

I mean, I’m not dvd tim, I’ve not cracked blu-ray or something, I’ve just nearly got to a point where I can arrange and rate all my music, download and purchase new tracks and transfer to multiple devices without having multiple versions of the same tracks or multiple lists or players or software or hardware or cables. I’m not entirely stupid but its taken me at least 4 years to understand why I can’t just have 1 track over here and put it over there but I’m getting close.

currently and for the past few years I’ve managed 10000+ music tracks with windows media player omg I should be shot or something because it does 3 things I want to do without breaking everytime I ask it to do it: 1. rip my cds, 2. rate and arrange the tracks, 3. transfer them to a portable device. 1 and 2 are probably no-brainers but actually the rating mechanism in WMP suits me just fine, as do the auto playlists, as do the manual playlists and sure there are other players out there which do both equally as well but you know I don’t care, because WMP is still there when I start windows and its remembered everything I did when I closed windows you can recommend something else but I’ve got bananas in my ears I can’t hear you blah blah blah. its number 3 that f**ks everything up.

I’ve always opted for sony portable audio hardware, every since the very first blue plastic walkman I had and then onto the magnificent DC2 ‘professional’ walkman in brushed metal with bass boost dolby b/c and metal gear solid quartz locked disc drive bits inside and through a growing collection of flash memory players. I buy sony because they sound like I want things to sound. but there is were the problem has been. if any of you have tried strangling yourself with a headphone cord rather that try to upload audio to a sony walkman with the lamentable sonicstage then you’ll know what I mean. first create an entire duplicate of your music collection in a stupid proprietary (but excellent compression quality) format, losing all your ratings and lists in the process, and then laboriously drag and drop stuff around watching as the sync list is updated and read from the device every time you breath in (see iTunes), and watch as the 2 instances of music libraries try to talk to each other, deleting each other in the process. this is much the same as my experience with iTunes. I also have an iPod shuffle, as does my daughter, which I bought to see what they are like and so most fridays are consumed with rebuilding an iTunes database because iTunes touched the tags on the source file when I made a playlist or something and now refuses to believe itself when it can see files in its library but they’re newer than the last time it looked so no you can’t transfer them and anyway whats with the ridiculous ordering and sorting in iTunes it makes no sense I actually want some order not designed chaos and the shuffle just sounds nasty anyway whatever you plug into it.

but I’ve not even got to DRM yet. notwithstanding the fact that I have to manage my own ripped cds with 3 types of file management, 3 formats of data and three separate libraries to use 2 different portable devices on 1 computer, I thought that I might just start buying tracks individually instead of whole cds. makes sense. I don’t the wombats, but I like moving to new york so I’ll have that thanks. but no. up to a couple of months ago, it was still sonicstage for the walkman, itunes for the ipod and windows media player for the computer. so, if I buy something via WMP, I probably won’t be able to add it to the itunes database and converting it to sony format for sonicstage will probably burn down my office or something (actually, it just won’t be authorized). what about if I buy in itunes? at least it’ll go on the ipod, shite as it is. but it’ll never get near the walkman and I’ll never get to rate it in WMP and send it back to itunes. I could buy stuff via the sony connect store, because it the walkman that I use all the time. I just won’t rate it and add it to playlists in WMP. no, dammit, I want to do that. I want to buy stuff somewhere that I can rate in WMP, add to the itunes database and transfer as often as I like to the walkman. not too much to ask, surely.

at christmas I got a lovely black 8GB sony NWZ-A818 network walkman. no change there then, I always get walkmans. however, only now have sony ditched the stupidly bad connect store and made all the latest walkmans compatible with (or the other way around) mp3 files, which mean you can use something like, say, windows media player to transfer tracks directly. you can also transfer those playlists you’ve spent 4 years building, including those auto playlists built from the ratings you’ve been giving over the last four years. you see that I’m getting somewhere now. but what about itunes? I don’t care about itunes anymore. I’ve always hated it, and so the ipods will just have to survive on tracks in the database before 2008. I might occasionally update it, but not if its going to touch all my files again and make the recently added playlist 10000 items long. so, can I start buying stuff? um, I think so. via window media player online services? HAHAHAHAHAAAHAAHAAAAAA.

no, the answer, right now, is napster. if I buy tracks, I want them to appear in my library in WMP so I can do all that stuff I like to do and then transfer directly to the walkman. that’s easy. I just set up a folder separate from my existing music folder and have WMP monitor it so that virtually, everything is in the same place. ok. lets get some tracks then. ooh, I like that british sea power track canvey island. I can download that straight away in napster. look, there it is in WMP. update the file info to get some nice artwork. there. 4 stars. add it to the indie list. ooh, and the gym list. whatever. so I can just transfer it now, right? I downloaded the full track, so I think I must have bought it – its paypal, so I’m never quite sure if I’ve bought things or not. hang on, what’s that annoying blue icon now. dammit! don’t have sync rights? what do you mean I don’t have sync rights? I just got everything how I WANTED IT . BOOHOOOHOHOOOOOO!

turns out I signed up for the regular napster service which lets me download as much stuff as a like and listen to it as much as I like, but stops short of allowing me to transfer it to a portable device – I have to actually buy it at the point. basically, napster wants me to use it as my music player instead of window media player and will, for a small fee, allow me to download everything, arrange tracks into playlists, provide recommendations and ‘stations’ and generally do most of what I rather like doing in windows media player. but it won’t do it all. it won’t let me rate stuff. so it can swivel.

so close then, but not quite lighting the fat havana. still, all I have to do is actually use napster to buy the few tracks I want and then rate and arrange the tracks however I like and upload them to the walkman, whereupon I can fiddle about with the equalizer while crossing the road and get run over by a bus.

anonymous yes

its only a small matter of time before one of these becomes one of those and unless you’re up there and you’re not misrepresenting it then you’ll choose to open one over there but it’ll be something about monetizing blogwork in the philippines like what it were what you heard on the radio. that’s not to say it isn’t all worthwhile but I heard a man down the pub talking about dual income and you’d not advertise your prescriptions in the java cafe so get unto blogger and customize yourself into a corner

you have 30 minutes to decide who you are and then a year to not give it away. you won’t resist cross-marketing it though, so choose your relatives and stop watching so much television but that’s where she did it but you’ll never write a screenplay look there’s the washing up.

you might expect this kind of thing over there, but that’s why it worked in the first place you can’t be three different people and not occasionally be the same one at the same time it just depends which radio button you selected.

I will never understand explore

sleeveface 2
sleeveface 2 by Tim Caynes

following the insanity of the last couple of days worth of flickr stats that are possible when you line up the creases on your shirt with david bowie’s head there is the inevitable drop from the flickr explore page and a return to pictures of car parks and old ladies shopping in norwich that really nobody cares about except other people in norwich taking pictures of car parks and the occasional old lady. my experience has always been that real photographers always catch up with you in the end so even though you might have the temerity to be the most popular photo on flickr for a couple of hours with a picture of yourself as someone else take in your hallway with a cheap compact camera during a screen break when you’re supposed to be putting a project plan together, eventually, real photographers with enormous digital single lens reflex cameras will flood you with professional shots of cats and bridges, or if you’re lucky, a cat on a bridge. or a dog. in a sunset. or something.

I know there is some algorithm going on there somewhere, but I still can’t work out how you can go from the top to the bottom to off the list entirely in the space of about a day I know I could just add a photo to every photo pool out there and get every rating group and comment and fave group to do what they do and add comments and faves even though it might just be a pinhole camera photo of a traffic cone at night and it would still be stupidly ‘popular’ and it would receive a disproportionally huge amount of diamond, top rated, sword of damocles, platinum pic, super fave etc awards with animated gifs going off all over it but what if you just a take a picture that you like and add it to 1 group, albeit a stupidly visible group, and then you get 125 favorites overnight? what point am I making? I don’t know. I’m just saying I don’t get it but why is that different from anything else cats will take over the world.

amen to that

couldn’t think of a better title although I’ve had 3 weeks to come up with something so it seems appropriate that actually someone else should provide the inspiration when I can’t quite put my finger on it thanks. my dad died.

everything was carefully crafted in the end and none such a production would have done finer gathered in the woodlands to say goodbye just as was planned as there was a long painful time to plan it doesn’t take you slowly. cancer. there was a peculiar grace in which the last breaths of life came from his body and he slept painlessly for the first time in many months and that weight of life lifted from his shoulders just a strange soft shuddering in his veins which I had never seen before shall never see again we just said goodbye. I quietly delivered the last messages I had carried through corridors upon corridors just as the light was fading but barely spoken so that I don’t know that I even heard myself speak and then we were gone just as was he.

there’s no joke in the last paragraph

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