Monthly Archives for May 2005
Crazy Frog
I don’t know what’s worse: That the French voted massively against the proposed European constitutional treaty (mostly to sanction local politicians who have superbly ignored previous local election results), or this.
In case the link goes cold, here is the content:
TweetLONDON (AP) – A cell-phone ring tone appeared set to top the British singles chart Sunday, outselling the new single by the band Coldplay by nearly four to one, a music retailer said.
“Crazy Frog Axel F,” a ring tone based on the sound of a revving Swedish mo-ped, is the first tune being used on mobile phones to cross into mainstream music charts, said Gennaro Castaldo, a spokesman for HMV, the British music retailing chain.
Coldplay had hoped to go straight to No. 1 on this Sunday’s British singles chart with its new song, “Speed of Sound.” But by Saturday, it appeared that the ring tone – which is available for digital download and as a compact disc single – would prevail, said Castaldo.
The ring tone was expected to replace the Oasis tune “Lyla” as the No. 1 hit on the list released Sunday by the Official UK Charts Co. The weekly singles chart, which has been released since 1952, is based on the sales of 5,600 retail shops across Britain.
While “Crazy Frog” and other ring tones do not appear to be much of a hit among adults, so many youngsters are personalizing the sound of their cell phones that such digital music could change world music markets.
“Music purists might not be too happy at the prospect of the “Crazy Frog” outselling Coldplay, but it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise when you consider its huge novelty appeal and the massive amount of exposure it is currently getting,” said Castaldo.
The ring tone is based on a song that was recorded in Sweden nearly a decade ago by 17-year-old Daniel Malmedahl, using the high pitched revving of a two-stroke motorcycle, The International Herald Tribune reported Saturday.
Unusual Cards
How could I NOT point to a site that presents some Unusual Cards by a certain Francesca Berrini, and which has a section named Days of the Dinosaurs and another one named Land of the Giant Food?!
TweetSurprise follow-up
A while back, I wrote about “surprise” in music. How most people prefer their music to be nice and predictable rather than nice and unpredictable. I was discussing this with my significant other who is an artist, and her question wasn’t if this was the case, but why? Her take on why surprised me. She said it maybe boiled down to narcissism. That when confronted with strange and different art, on some subconscious level, people feel ordinary and dull, whereas ordinary and dull music and art makes people feel special and celebrated, or at the very least adequate, because their unsurprising ordinariness is squarely in tune with what glamorous “artists” are producing. Of course, one could then argue that the few who enjoy original and surprising art revel in the narcissistic pleasure of belonging to a special sophisticated elite.
In the end, and as I said in the previous post, as far as I’m concerned, it is a moot point, because I can’t help liking what I like and composing the way I do. Whether because of subconscious super-narcissism or lack of musical technique, I can never quite manage to create a “typical something”, no matter how hard I sometimes try.
It does comfort me in the feeling I’ve had all my life that what I compose can/will never be popular.
TweetBenjamin Knobil / Compagnie nonante-trois
My brother, Benjamin Knobil, is a theater director and actor. You might remember that we recently collaborated on La pêche à la baleine.
In a moment of weakness, I suggested he and his theater company should be on the Web, and that I could help him achieve that lofty goal.
Well, he sent me a TON of material, and after much coding and design work, the result can be seen here.
It is still a work in progress, but there was enough material to bring the site on line. For the geeks out there, this is the first site I’ve done with a layout that is 100% controlled by style sheets. Not a table to be found.
So go visit the site, and more importantly, go see his shows if you are in the right corner of meatspace.
TweetSystem Crash Follow-up
Well, DiskWarrior kinda sorta worked! What it does is
- examine the content of your disk (which takes a LONG time),
- build a new directory based on what it has found,
- mount a fake disk on your desktop to let you examine what the fixed disk will look like,
- and then, you decide to commit the changes to disk or not.
I presume TechTool does the same thing, except that it just told me that my “fixed disk” would contain 30 Gig (instead of 100+ so I said, er, no).
I told DiskWarrior to go ahead and replace the damaged directory with the rebuilt directory, because it sure seemed like most of my documents and apps were going to be saved.
Not surprisingly, my fixed disk wouldn’t boot. So I booted on my Apple Installation DVD and did a simple “update” installation, hoping that the damaged or missing system files would be replaced.
And then…my hard disk booted-up fine, right into my familiar personalized computing environment. PHEW!
After exploring a bit, it turns out that
- 5 applications were corrupt and wouldn’t launch and had to be reinstalled.
- Virtual PC behaved as if it had just been installed and asked for a serial number. No biggie.
- ALL of my Safari bookmarks are gone. A bummer !
- One of my little-used email mailboxes was read-only.
Considering that last night, I was 99% sure I was going to have to wipe my disk and start from scratch, this felt like a pretty good tradeoff to me! 5 bad apps out of dozens ain’t too shabby. I’m assuming there are more damaged files lurking around, but after several hours of mucking about, I haven’t bumped into one yet.
DiskWarrior has a good reputation, and I can see why.
Now, what I should probably do, is what Apple calls an “Archive and Install” which builds you a fresh new system, and then imports existing user files. I will do it, when I have less of a headache, because it involves reinstalling a lot of applications and drivers from scratch, and it won’t do any good to any damaged user-data that might still lay undiscovered…
Signing off…
TweetSystem crash
Yesterday, I decided I’d install Apple’s newest version of Mac OS X “Tiger” on an external drive for testing. So I boot on the Tiger DVD, and while I’m there, I decide to run “DiskUtility” on the internal drive of the iMac G5. A little preventive maintenance never hurts, right?
Apple’s Disk Utiilty found a problem it tried to fix but then suddenly quit. After which, my iMac wouldn’t boot any longer… GREAT!
Norton choked trying to fix the drive and probably damaged it some more. TechTool Pro then spent 2 hours trying to recover the disk structure, but could only recognize a third of the content on the disk.
As we speak, DiskWarrior is having a go at it… If it fails, I’m good for a complete reinstall of my System. 98% of my data is on external drives so no big worries there, although I will have lost 3 months of mail, which I should have backed-up but didn’t…
I hate computers !
TweetIE Win & WordPress
I’m writing this on a crappy Compaq laptop running Windows 98 (and that is as loud as a hair-dryer). In a typical bit of Web-narcissism, I connected to my site, and then to sknoblog, only to discover that sknoblog is quite broken under MS Internet Explorer 5.5! The header is screwed-up, and the sidebar with all the links is aligned with the bottom of the page instead of the top. Also, the WordPress login page is screwed-up. I’m not going to loose any sleep over this, though when I get home, I’ll check-out sknoblog on my Windows 2000 Virtual PC, just too see if more recent versions of Explorer are more standards-compliant (although this is obviously a CSS-support issue).
All I can say to my PC-readership, is that you should be running FireFox anyway, what with Tabs, RSS compatibility, pop-up blocking, standards-compliance, and CSS support. I am always amazed at what ususpecting PC-users have to put up with. I hate it for example when I forget to type full URLs on PC’s with IE only to land on MSN Search (I’m used to Safari on the Mac that will add the “www” and / or the “.com” for you if it can’t find a site at the litteral address).
Oh well, enough torture. Logging-off and see you when I’m back on a civilized machine ;)
TweetAwww…
When I post a link to a new song on “sknoblog”, I’m loathe to post anything else for a while cuz I don’t want to bury the post in “less-important” junk. So following last month’s posting frenzy, I’m cutting down to keep The Playground of the Baby Giants prominently featured on “sknoblog”. So if you’re bored, why don’t you download and listen to The Playground of the Baby Giants instead of reading my insipid prose? ;)
TweetThe Playground of the Baby Giants
Finally, here it is (after a silly setback): The Playground of the Baby Giants is open to the general public! Lines forming now. No pushing and shoving please.
25/09/06 Update: Now with a tiny Radio Vince player!
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