Wednesday, May 28, 2008

bill henson photo


This is a photo of my mother taken about 1924. The whole family has always admired this and I have it hanging framed in my hallway for all to see. I've loved it ever since I was a little kid.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

plug & play 4 faggots

The other day I bought an external USB hard drive enclosure that will do both IDE and SATA. Only $45 at my local computer shop. Looks pretty spiffy with shiny black case and blue led light.

Anyway I needed to find out more info than was on the bit of paper that came with it. So I googled "Ritmo Quiro External 3.5 Hard Drive enclosure".

One of the pages gave me this:
Ritmo QUIRO 3.5" IDE/SATA USB 2.0 ENCLOSURE
CE-3586
* Compatible with both USB 2.0 and USB 1.1

* 2 colour indicator
* Screwless, easy to install
* Plug & Play 4 faggots
* Stylish Aluminium cover and stand
* Support Win98/98se/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/VISTA, MAC OS 8.6/9 and above.

Plug & Play 4 faggots?

Sheesh go easy - even Linux has plug & play these days.

Some one should grab the /. nerd who wrote that web page by his security lanyard and have a quiet word in his shell like.

Friday, May 23, 2008

happy birthday bob


Tomorrow Bob Dylan will turn 67. Thanks for all the goodtimes Bob. And thanks for giving all smalltown youths a chance to dream. Not only of being yourself but becoming somebody else as well and impacting on almost the whole known world.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

33 1/3

Forgotten I ordered them. They arrived last night from Amazon.

Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life)"Patricia R. Schroeder; Hardcover

Swordfishtrombones (33 1/3) David Smay

Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (33 1/3)Carl Wilson

The whole 33 1/3 series is marvellous and at around aus$10 a throw I'll be chucking at least one in all future Amazon orders as well as reading their blog.

I immediately stuck my nose into the Celine Dion book and despite being less than halfway through I already have my money's worth. Carl Wilson explores his own music snobbery, the meaning of cool, notions of low brow, high brow and non ironic middle brow and kitsch, in an effort to understand the appeal of his fellow Canadian Dion.

Those defenders of the faith in music blogging Flop Eared Amanda and Shaun "Leather Pants and Vest" Cronin had already given me the good oil but it was walking around Beijing last month and hearing that Titanic song everywhere and then a 4 day sell out concert in Beijing at the same time that propelled me to jump onto Amazon and swipe the plastic.

I'm already learning what I already know again about my tastes and I'm feeling more and more comfortable about my love of sentimentality in songs from Frank and Elvis through to smaltzy Irish pub ballads from The Fureys. (At this point I'm still snobby enough to reject Daniel O'Donnell).

A quote from Carl Wilson: To the extent we agree that coolness and lack of same are enormously influential-and that coolness is a social category, not a natural attribute (with the possible exception of Keith Richards)-we are all Bourdieuvians.