Argh!

It seems that while I survived Christmas, my laptop wasn't quite so lucky. Following the trip to my parents' it wouldn't turn on properly. Briefly there was hope, as I got into Windows and got online. Then, just as all seemed to be going normally, it crashed completely and wouldn't even load up in Safe Mode. A few turn-ons later and I can't even get as far as selecting Safe Mode, since it refuses to turn on for more than about 2 seconds.

Curses.

Another victim of Christmas rail travel.

Still, on the positive side, I have a new laptop. Also, most of my stuff was backed up, and many of my more recent documents and files will either be attached to e-mails (on webmail accounts), on my MP3 player, or in some rough form in my notebook (the old-fashioned paper kind). Some things might be more difficult to recover, however; I guess I'll find out more about that later today [sigh].

Anyway, there was a point to this post: namely, that I now have the ideal opportunity - and the motivation - to start investigating backing up more of my stuff online, and perhaps getting into the whole cloud computing thing - anything to make any subsequent hardware failures easier to deal with. In other words, for better or worse, expect a few posts along those lines in the coming weeks. And probably at least one more entitled 'Argh!': when I fire the new laptop up for the first time I shall finally be entering Vista territory...

Oh joy.

Listless

The Best of the Festive Season Lists list will have to wait a few days, I think. And not just because of the usual post-Christmas listlessness (or 2009, as some people are already calling it); mostly, I just haven't spent all that much time online this Christmas. However, a few things did catch my eye over the last few days, so here are a few links to be going on with:

The Dark Roasted Blend blog has an excellent collection of Christmas oddness; including this family who sawed holes in floors, celing and roof to accommodate a giant Christmas tree (actually, they didn't but that was the effect they seemed to be looking to achieve).

The world's largest floating Christmas tree (BBC footage here). And who knew there'd even been others?

This one, perhaps, isn't especially Christmassy, but then again, who of us hasn't received Lego for Christmas at one time or another? So here's the Gizmodo photographic timeline of nearly every Lego minifig ever made. Amazing fact: there are now more of them than us...

The Guardian's resident pipe-smoker, Jack Schofield, has this snippet about Amazon's sales figures this Christmas. And no wonder they did so well: the handiness of the usual Amazon bargains at this time of year is one thing, of course, but if you're going home for Christmas on public transport, shopping online has another advantage over the high street: believe me, getting everything delivered directly to your destination lightens your luggage no end :)

(A slightly belated) Merry Christmas from Radix, and a Happy 2009!

Well, everyone else is at it

Ah, yes, it's that time of the year again - list time. The shopping list, the Christmas card list, the Amazon Wish List, the walking unsteadily home from yet another Christmas party list, and of course the sundry and various lists that, year after year, never fail to pad out almost every publication you care to think of (online or otherwise) until the end of January.

The first list that caught my eye this year was the Guardian's Top 100 Websites. Instantly, I thought, "Aha! There's an easy blogpost - a Top 10 of the websites/web-apps I use/visit most often. Brilliant." Unluckily for me, they were all included. Sigh.

Still, a few didn't feature, so all is not lost :)

In no particular order (well, after the first one anyway)...

- Number 1 on my list of favourite sites this year has to be Spotify. I wrote about it on here not long ago, and I've had my gripes with it (albums becoming unavailable for no given reason), but one or two missing albums have returned, it still works smoothly, and despite the aforementioned disappearances the catalogue of available music has definitely and noticeably grown even over the last couple of months. What might make it of particular interest to music geeks, as well, and which I didn't mention in my review, will be the number of singles - and therefore B-sides and obscure tracks - available on there. Of other interest might be that I have two spare invites, again - anyone?

- Miro made the world of YouTube a whole lot more navigable for me, and made saving anything worth (offline) repeat viewing a doddle (if a sometimes slightly glitchy doddle). More of a browser than something online itself, of course, but still, it's pretty handy.

- Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's movie reviews podcast is unmissable. Never mind whether you're a movie buff (I'm not), or even whether you share Kermode's unlikely fondness for both The Exorcist and High School Musical 3 (I don't), the bickering and ranting is always a joy to listen to. For the more book inclined, the Book Panel podcast from Simon Mayo's Thursday show is excellent too.

- I can't say that Kayak will get you the cheapest plane fares available, because I have no idea whether that's remotely true; but whenever I've had to fly it's certainly got me cheaper ones than I've been able to find for myself.

- Garfield Minus Garfield. An unexpected formula for bleak hilarity.

- Another blog: Bent Objects. In which wire limbs and other things are inventively added to everyday objects. Sometimes funny, sometimes artistic, and sometimes just a bit baffling (occasionally there's an American reference that I just don't get, I think); but definitely worth a look.

- Should you have an interest in all things publishing Book Trade News is an excellent source of, erm, what it says really. There's a daily e-mail to subscribe to, too.

- These are some of the most alarmingly beautiful photos you'll see this year. There was an exhibition in this blog's home town for a few days this summer - it really should go national.

Anyway, those are some of my suggestions. For more online exploring check out the comments here - you'll find any number of funny/interesting/useful/publicity-seeking sites that the Guardian missed from its 100.

NEXT TIME: A list of online lists, probably.

The last unicorn

This post isn't going to be a review of Chinese Democracy - or to give it its full title, Chinese Democracy (sponsored by Pro Tools). I have my opinions on the thing - something along the lines of "even though it is the sound of one man's ego galloping out of all control, there's still something oddly exhilirating about all that galloping... Possibly the most expensive comedy album ever made" - but this isn't a music blog.

Nor is it a meta-music blog, so this isn't exactly going to be a review of Chuck Klosterman's review of Chinese Democracy either; though, for the record, his opening line, "Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn", may very well be the best thing anyone's ever said in a music review. But his review does make a claim that's of direct interest to a web 2.0/internet/technology/whatever-blog like this one, namely:

Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we'll ever contemplate in this context—it's the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file.

And that's what I want to focus on.

Personally, I hope this claim doesn't quite prove true, since some artists (though perhaps not Axl Rose, it turns out) have a depth and breadth and originality to their vision that's better explored over the course of a collection of songs; in some cases, even the physical packaging the music comes in can add to the experience. Not to mention that a number of labels - Fonal, 4AD, Leaf, and many other independents - as part of their own vision, routinely produce CDs and vinyl that are beautiful and distinctive purely as objects. And perhaps for those reasons physical formats will hang on in there for some while longer - certainly as I try to reduce my annoyingly space-hogging CD collection the CDs fitting the aforementioned criteria are the ones that will remain.

But, as that last sentence also demonstrates, I can't deny that Chuck Klosterman has a point. He might be slightly premature in making it, and I can see music continuing to be delivered in some kind of physical format for as long as that physicality continues to add something; but still, when so many CDs now offer little more than an MP3 does why would you bother with that extra bit of clutter?

Chinese Democracy, though, as Klosterman says, is almost certainly immune to that concern: to Guns 'n' Roses fans it will matter as an object, out of nostalgia as much as anything; fans will want to place it alongside the CDs and vinyl they've treasured since the 80s and 90s - how aesthetically satisfying the album actually is as an object I have no idea, but for those reasons it really doesn't need to be. But if the albums of other bands, ones who aren't going to be given $14million and 14 enigmatic years to build anticipation, are going to matter as a sonic totality, it's increasingly going to take more than simply releasing them as a physical totality.

While some musicians don't create too much more than a bunch of singles and filler anyway, so downloads are probably their more natural outlet, for the rest with perhaps more to say, or a whole range of interesting ways in which to say it, and particularly for those who have yet to emerge and will thus have no existing reputation to trade and persuade on, the future looks to be a challenging place - at least, if they want to be able to have some say in how their work is experienced. Perhaps some kind of physical format will be involved - the CD as a luxury item, the package being an artwork in itself? the Buddha Machine? - but certainly it will be interesting to find out how they'll achieve it.

And perhaps they won't even want to...

Lives will be ruined, I tell you...

When I wrote a post about The Pirate's Dilemma back in March it seems I didn't quite think through the full awful implications of the book's central thesis.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still broadly in agreement that faced with present levels of piracy the content industry's most expedient and potentially profitable response certainly does seem to be competition, rather than trying to sue every pirate out of existence. In fact, as far as I can see, this attitude is increasingly becoming the mainstream - and it's precisely this which has me concerned, the ominously increasing availability of entirely legal free content [shudders].

Already there's free content all over the internet, of course, and there has been for ages. Some of it (broadly) legal - YouTube, Project Gutenberg, MySpace, for instance - and some of it not so much - TV Links, The Pirate Bay, the original Napster. But these all came with drawbacks - risk, clunkiness, restrictions, age of content, complete illegality, long download times, ratio of fame-hungry teenagers lip-synching to pop music in their bedrooms to actual entertainment. If there was something you wanted to see/read/listen to you had to make an effort to do so, you had to weigh up whether the risks/inconvenience were worth the bother, filter the quality from the dreck.

My point?

With so many services now either already available, or on the not-so-distant horizon, all designed to make catching and finding the content you want to see or hear not only legal but also free and easy - the iPlayer, 4oD, ITV on demand, actual proper movies hitting YouTube in the near future, Project Kangaroo, Hulu, the list goes on - what, I ask, and this is the crux of my objections, are we of weak wills supposed to do, eh? Has anyone thought about that? No.

The dark, inescapable void of procrastination this is all about to open up in so many lives (or, OK, possibly just mine) doesn't even bear thinking about... 

There used to be so many disincentives, sigh. So many... [shakes head nostalgically]

(Yes, I know, I'll just have to be more self-disciplined, probably. But still, it's bloody annoying - when I got rid of my telly I really didn't expect it to spend the next few years slowly and relentlessly stalking me, like the zombie it so often used to turn me into, all the way to the bloody internet. Harrumph).

IN CHEERIER NEWS: Europeana, the European digital library, museum, and archive was launched yesterday... and is now offline until mid-December, having received far too much interest to cope with (10 million hits per hour).

How great is that?

Not only that I get a reprieve from losing myself in yet another free site for at least another few weeks, but that quite so many people were interested in a project like that. Brilliant :)

Write or Die

Don't worry, that wasn't an ultimatum, just the name of a new internet widgety thing that someone called Doctor Wicked* has helpfully created for those of us among the writing professions who seem to be eternally governed by Newton's lesser known Third-and-a-bit Law: "For every action there is an equal and opposite procrastination."

Click on the link above and you'll be taken to somewhere that will force you to write - through negative reinforcement. Essentially, if you stop writing for a pre-set (or random) amount of time, regrettable things happen (though not death; unless you happen to be terminally allergic to babies crying, fairly-slowly-flashing colours, your words disappearing one-by-one, etc.). Want to stop the regrettable things? Write. Couldn't be simpler.

Of course, I can't guarantee that with your heart racing and your mind going, "Eek! Think of something! Quick!", that you'll write anything that won't need endless editing - my trial 10-minute session yielded only some old nonsense about hippos and hoppos meeting on the African savannah and giving birth to rap - but the experience was oddly compelling. And, hey, a page of something to edit is better than nothing (though I'll probably leave the hippos and hoppos to their own devices - samplers, and record decks, probably).

I'll certainly be giving it another go.

But, erm, perhaps I won't start on the 'Evil' setting next time...

WARNING: the option to copy to clipboard when you navigate away from the page didn't seem to work for me (using Firefox 3), so if you do use this for something you don't want to lose, probably best to copy it manually before clicking 'Done'.

*may not be an actual doctor, or wicked. Treat all advice accordingly.

Times past?

Before posting this YouTube video I should probably have written something about the internet as a publicity tool for new filmmakers, or something like that - you know, just to tie it in with this blog's general theme of Web 2.0/marketing/technology/etc...

But to be honest it's been done before and really I just wanted to post a funny video. So here's a superbly observed little 'mockumentary' I happened to see at the Cornwall Film Festival yesterday (watch in full-screen, or you'll miss something at around 8:44):

A HARD DAY'S KNIGHT



More details of the director, Ashley Wing, plus another longer movie, can be found here.

@->--

While searching for the above I found something else by the same director. It's short and touching, and, despite the contrast, as I happened to find it today, Remembrance Day, it seemed fitting to post this too:

POPPIES