Is That All There Is?

Most Humans are afraid of death - the one certainty - and it's one of those taboo subjects which few are willing or able discuss. So religions and spiritual philosophies have been invented to provide (among other things) succour in the face of death.

Believers are (generally) convinced that after death they will continue to exist in some sort of eternal paradise forever, with their deceased loved-ones and friends. But only if they've been good. Of course, if they've been bad...

And yet, most true believers are still afraid of death and want to prolong it at all costs. Why? After all, it'll be wonderful, won't it? I know that Humans, like all animal species, have evolved a strong survival instinct, but wouldn't you want to get to paradise as soon as possible (leaving aside Islamic nutters and the like)?

When I was a believer, I was constantly worrying that I wouldn't have done enough to "pass the entrance exam to Heaven"; so I can only assume it's the same for others.

Now that I no longer believe, that burden has been lifted and I can actually look forward to eternal oblivion. I find more comfort in that than I ever did in the other stuff.

If that's all there is, then let's break out the booze and have a ball.

Ultra Analog VA-1

Back in 1981 I bought my first synth, a Yamaha CS-5 (inspired as I was by the likes of Gary Numan, OMD, Depeche Mode, etc.). Later I also bought a Roland MC-202, BOSS DR-55 Dr. Rhythm and Roland TR-606 Drumatix. They can all be heard on Complex Fusion. I sold all my gear in 1985 after I bought a flat and money was a bit tight (and so was space).

These days I use a microKORG XL, Logic Express and the wonderful Ultra Analog VA-1:

The Conception of a Concept Album

Habitable Zone will be the first (and probably only) album under my latest musical persona, Habitable Zone. It's also turning out to be something of a concept album. Consider the track listing:

1. Habitable Zone
2. Venus
3. Earth
4. The Moon
5. Mars
6. Phobos
7. Deimos
8. Ceres

Each track will also be composed, recorded and released via YouTube in the order shown.

After the successful release of the title track on Monday, I am pleased to present Venus:

Habitable Zone

During the last few weeks of 2009 I finished my last album Finale and compiled Disorganisation: The Best of Complete Confusion 1999-2009. After nearly thirty years of "music" making, I felt I'd got as far as I was ever going to get (which wasn't very far) and didn't have any more inspiration or motivation to continue.

Nevertheless, at the same time, I did start working on a new track, but was only able to get so far with it before running out of steam. During the intervening couple of years I tried to get further, failing miserably.

Last week I gave it another go and was able to finally complete it, give it a title and at the same time discover my new musical persona: "Habitable Zone". Whether or not this leads to anything more remains to be seen, but at least I finally finished that damn tune.

We are all dying

Life is a terminal illness. Think about it. From the moment of conception, there is only one certainty; it could happen within days, months or years, but it will happen.

And then what? Remember that time before you were conceived? No, I thought not. Darkness, nothingness. Oblivion. Forever.

And yet parts of you will still continue to exist. Forever. Your constituent atoms and molecules will simply be recycled into parts of something else; blades of grass, trees, insects, worms, birds, humans. There is no way of knowing. And a few billion years hence, when what was our solar system gets recycled, those parts of you could be part of another sun, another planet...another life form. And so on. Enjoy.

Not Another URL Shortener?

Well, yes. Last year I set one up in conjunction with my self-hosted WordPress blog, but with that blog's demise and migration to Blogger I decided to ditch the shortener. I started using bitly in conjunction with Twitterfeed and then remembered that bitly allows you to use a custom domain. Enter 4n9.me.uk.

4n9.me.uk is more appropriate and shorter than truncat.es and although I originally considered 4n9.me, it's more expensive and it's also much easier and cheaper to opt-out of whois with UK domains.

The Double Standards of the Left

This whole Dennis Skinner dinosaur nonsense just serves to highlight the double standards of those on the left. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it's perfectly fine to denigrate Lady Thatcher and look forward to her death so you can have a good party, but a relatively innocuous comment about Dennis Skinner by the Prime Minister is met with typical faux indignation.

In any case, Dennis Skinner is perfectly capable of dishing it out - just check his Wikipedia entry - so I'm sure he's capable of taking it and doesn't need any help from a bunch of humourless whiners.

No, it's just typical double standards - they seek offence where none is intended. Grow up.

Facebook is taking over the Internet

Once upon a time Facebook was a place where you could go to hook up with friends (old and new) and share stuff with them. Increasingly, however, businesses are using it as a place to advertise and even sell their products and services. For example, TV ads used to finish with the advertiser's web site address; increasingly it's "find us on Facebook".

Consider this: the anti-piracy bill(s) eventually gets passed, in one form or another, and drives most people into the controlled, sterile, walled garden that is Facebook; the rest of the Internet becomes a lawless wilderness, frequented by hackers, criminals and terrorists (and those of us who refuse to conform to Mark Zuckerberg's vision).

In Praise of Mac OS 9

Mac OS 9 was my first real introduction to the Macintosh OS; it was installed on the iMac DVSE I bought in late 1999. Before that the only experience of Mac OS that I'd had was dabbling on some of the Macs that the molecular biologists used at work.

Although it was somewhat crash-prone (depending on which extensions were installed), I definitely preferred Mac OS 9 to Windows 95 which was on the last PC I owned.

Searching for a Windows Alternative

In recent years, despite having committed myself to Mac OS X and the Apple ecosystem, I have whiled away many hours playing with other operating systems. I really wanted to see what alternatives there were to Microsoft Windows, in the unlikely event that Apple and Mac OS X were to disappear off the face of the earth.

Anyway, although I blogged about my experiences, most of those posts have been deleted as I moved the blog, trying different blogging platforms. But I have most of the screenshots and have created an album of them for you to peruse, dear reader, should you feel so inclined.

Blinded by Self-Righteousness

The way I see it, Socialists and those of the Left are so blinded by their own self-righteousness that they believe themselves to be better than everyone else. Anyone who doesn't share their view is an evil scumbag.

They bang on about fairness and equality without appearing to understand human nature: there is hierarchy in nature and humans are just another animal species. There is no such thing as equality; all that can be done is to treat people fairly and give them equal opportunities to be the best they can. Imposing equality is the path to totalitarianism.

In a way, Socialists are like religious fundamentalists, so it's appropriate to use a Biblical allusion: they see the splinter in their neighbour's eye, but can't see the plank in their own.

Take the plank out of your own eye first and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your neighbour's eye (Matthew 7:1-5).

On Blogging

I started blogging in September 2003, when Apple was giving away the blogging tool iBlog so that .Mac members could use their iDisk to host a blog. Over the years the blog changed as I experimented with different blogging software and platforms and I tended to delete the old blogs as I moved on. I sometimes regretted doing that, but many of the posts were so banal and cringe-makingly awful, that it was probably for the best (I would often post items for the sake of it rather than if I thought I had something worthwhile to say). But I have kept archives of them all.

Not surprisingly, the blogs have not been particularly successful in terms of readership - especially in recent years - but the most successful period was in August 2004 during the Olympics when I posted a few pictures of the swimmer Amanda Beard (I was fascinated by her amazing teeth, among other things) and women's volleyball. That coupled with another post which featured the word "nude" was picked up by the search engines, such that people searching for "nude pictures of Amanda Beard" found my blog. At one point I was getting a visitor each second.

After my recent problems with a self-hosted WordPress blog and its successful migration to Blogger, I decided to look back at the archived stuff with a view to incorporating some of the less banal content into the current blog; and that's what I've done. I have also added a few posts retrospectively - I'm not sure if it's the "done" thing, but there were one or two events that I wish I'd written up at the time.

I didn't consider the original Amanda Beard/women's volleyball post worthy of resurrecting, but here I've included one of the pictures I used.

Bugger Off Scotland

If that's what you really want. Personally, I think Scotland should remain a part of the (not so) United Kingdom (I'm not so sure about Northern Ireland these days, but that's a different issue) and I have liked all the Scottish people I have ever met (I think). But if you want a referendum, it should be In or Out and it should be now - no pussyfooting around. But of course Alex Salmond is playing his political games.

So you want the oil? OK, then you can take on the liabilities created by the Scottish-based banks (HBOS and RBS - Alex Salmond was quite happy to support Fred Goodwin in his bid for ABN Amro).

You don't want the nuclear submarine bases? OK, you can sort out your own defence arrangements. And your own currency. The list goes on. Don't expect any more financial support from the rest of us - you would be on your own. You don't want us, we don't want you.

On the other hand, the Labour Party would lose about 40 seats in the House of Commons, so it wouldn't be all bad.

Read more...

Image credit

Here we go again

This must be the last time; it had better be. So my web host finally gets my site back up so I can access the WordPress dashboard of my beautifully and lovingly crafted blog…but guess what? I can no longer post to the blog using the WordPress for iOS app. In order to get my web site visible the support people had removed the very code from the .htaccess file that was required for the app to work! Go figure.

So I decided that was it. Enough of this self-hosted crap, regularly updating plugins, themes and WordPress itself; it's just too much effort for an occasional blogger. So where next?

I was done with Tumblr last year and TypePad the year before, Posterous has morphed into something called spaces and I don't know what the hell it is any more; I don't want to pay, so that leaves WordPress.com or Blogger.

I exported my self-hosted blog to a WordPress XML file and imported it into my WordPress.com site with a view to carrying on with WordPress. I really like WordPress, but there are a lot of restrictions when they host a (free) blog (no domain mapping, custom plugins, custom themes, use of JavaScript in widgets, etc.). In the end I chose Blogger.

I've used Blogger before and it's quite flexible (though not always very pretty to look at), I can map my domain, use JavaScript in widgets, post to it using the Blogger iPhone app, etc., etc.

In order to import into Blogger I had to convert my WordPress XML file to a recognisable format using this tool. The only other thing is that Blogger doesn't natively support sending to Twitter when a new post has been published…enter TwitterFeed.

And I can also return to using MarsEdit.

I deserve a drink (except that my liver is still complaining about the weekend excesses).