Month: June 2006

Just got back from The Streets’ amazing gig at Webster Hall, the last of their US tour. After a slightly shakey start from Lady Sovereign, who was also great but was having issues with the PA, Mike took to the stage and immediately upped the vibe – with his fellow MC’s amazing vocal range and a tight backing band consisting of drums, bass and keyboards and all decked out in matching orange. Didn’t know they were supporting Holland…

From the very start of the gig Mike paced the stage with fierce energy, interrupting his own songs to chat with audience to discuss poker, get tips on training for the New York marathon or to share his bottles of vodka and rum with all. The old classics such as ‘Has it come to this’ were mixed in with the new classics from his latest album, such as ‘When You Wasn’t Famous’ – moving from hard dance beats (with the tightly pressed floor crowd being pushed to jump harder to show up the VIPs on the balcony) to the soulful renderings of ‘Never Went to Church’ – Skinner’s ballad dedicated to the death of his dad – after which he seemed to get tearful and disappeared off to the side of the stage for a moment. All the songs sounded amazing, and the banter between MCs and with the crowd seemed light hearted and playful, bringing smiles to everyone’s faces. The last finale ended up with Skinner stripping to skin and crowd surfing for a brief moment, before jumping back on stage and heading off – much to everyone’s disappointment after an amazing set.

I’ll be uploading the photos shortly – so keep checking this link out.

Addendum: Check out The Modern Age’s great review of the gig with lots of real info and much better pics. Next time I may have to sacrifice my 20D to the fray in the cause of better pics than my S70 can manage.

Playing around with GreaseMonkey, a plugin for the great Firefox browser, has been on my to do list for a while now, along with learning Rails and Ruby. Finally I found some time this weekend to put it to use on an annoying little work problem and I have to say it’s been very effective.

The problem was simple: Due to a random series of constraints I needed to delete approximately 1,500 items off a web page and deleting each count required loading a page, scrolling down a bit and then clicking the correct button – manually. Ug. After a quick test this process was taking about 10-15 seconds per deletion which obviously was a whole waste o’ time. So in steps GreaseMonkey, a few hours of coding later and bingo – a clever little application that automates pressing ‘delete’ 1,500 times for me. Ah, technology.

Now I won’t go into the obviousness of how stupid it was to need this solution in the first place, but suffice to say it works just like it says on the can. So thumbs up to GreaseMonkey! And while we’re on the subject Ruby on Rails is also turning out to be pretty darn smashing to my geek self.

For the sake of consistency (read ‘laziness’) the template at my interaction design blog ‘is useful’ has been updated to match the snazzy new orange/brown affair that’s happening here. At some point soon I will also be adding in the comments and trackback features that are on that second generation blog so stay tuned.

Rolling Stone has a great article on Pearl Jam and what they’re currently up to. Back in the day I was a big PJ fan, so it’s good to hear they’re back on top of things again after a few blacker years.

Also from the blog-o-sphere this morning – MetaFilter picked up this amazing ‘antique’ ascii art from the 40s. Funny how things that look like emoticons aren’t really as new as we thought. As more and more people dig out their old magazines and scan them in I reckon we’ll see a whole pile more of this sort of retro-invention coming to light.

This caught my eye at a junk place in Canada – a 1970s Dunkin Donuts logo on a nice heavy cup. Can’t seem to find out much about it on the Interweb so any info appreciated.

Back in 1972 many momentous events occurred – The UK joined the EU and never looked back, I was born and Atari released Pong. Those last two events are now highly intertwined, given how much time I spent in my youth cajoling my parents to buy an Atari VCS which led to my first computer, a Sinclair ZX81 and no small number of tantrums. Eventually I shut up and started playing with it, then coding on it and many other computers until finally the real world required me to get a job and, guess what, that was working with computers.

So for those of you who’s lives are not dissimilar go check out this great video that traces the evolution of computer games from Pong to now, via UK coding kids and Nintendo masterminds.

The New Yorker has a great article this week on how James Joyce’s grandson restricts what he classes as unfair usage of his family’s estate. Along the way the article covers the extension of the copyright laws to 20 years after author’s death (something that Disney pushed hard for) and how Lawrence Lessig, internet famous contributer to Creative Commons, is going to bat again to keep copyright sane.

Well the 2006 World Cup is now in full swing, and so far England is doing ok with a 1-0 win against Paraguay (albeit with a boring game) putting them up front in their group. Nice start guys! One thing that was a bit strange during the game is the shadow of the overhanging block in the stadium – for some reason there is a suspended square right above the open stadium, which throws shadows right onto the pitch. This is very noticeable on the TV, but apparently not so bad for the players. However FIFA has made the decision to close the stadium roof to prevent these shadows which sounds like a recipe for heat exhaustion disaster to me. Tens of thousands of over-excited football fans in a closed stadium… London tube anyone?

OK – time for the big announcement of the day… drum roll please! Da da da da da dah DAH!

Finally, after at least a few years of being annoyed about it, MattHobbs.com finally got let loose by it’s previous owner. So, being a geek ‘n all, I snapped it up. Yay! No more skulking around feeling embaressed that I live mostly in New York but have a .co.uk domain. No offence to the CoUk folks of course there, but it is a stupid TLD. There, I’ve said it.

Next step… global domination!

Well, tomorrow is 6/6/6 so fingers crossed no crazed religious types (of any denomination) decide to do anything silly. And by silly I don’t mean wear amusing hats and bounce around going ‘wibble’, although I’m fine with that in general.

* or the fear of the fear of the number 666 – thanks to the Beeb for that one.