This blog feeds Google with links and words to promote my up and coming bands. Maybe my silly little creations will, at some time, get a push from it too. The point I’m trying to get at is this. What you are reading (if at all you are) is optimised for programs over humans. The grammar isn’t particularly good and the copy is a little dry. However, it’s fun to write and I hope some day in the distant future, real people could enjoy reading it. You never know, enough practice and I might get good at it.

Anyway, on to the geeking. I’ve been messing with my hosting service trying to get WordPress fixed. For various technical reasons I couldn’t update it. So it all went stale. It’s okay now though, it’s all been fixed.

I decided to upgrade my blog to the latest version of WordPress. I’ve also altered the theme again. The one as of this date is called Boxes. Because it’s got boxes in it. Get it? It’s based on my original draft for this blog, just a bit different. It’s also built entirely using CSS3. No images this time. Get me eh?

I’ve also installed a program called Disqus. It’s a threaded commenting system that is really good. Readers can log in using credentials from other web-sites like Facebook or Twitter and post to articles using those details. Disqus is also a service that tracks your comments and replies from all the blogs a reader has contributed to, and notifies them when they’ve received a reply. It also tracks opinion of your feedback, with “Like” and “Dislike” buttons. Neat huh?

Looking ahead

If I can maintain enough self-interest I’ll polish this theme up some more. The problem is my tastes keep changing. (There will be a post on that.) I’ve effectively started thinking about my next theme, even though this one isn’t yet completed.

What I’m about to write gets written by me all the time. I’m aware of this and I’ll keep echoing the same sentiments. I’m looking for a brand. I can’t keep calling me, the blog, my services etc, all madness Jack. It doesn’t mean anything! It originates from before I had Internet access. I was very young, and I dreamt of running a website called madness-at-jack dot com. Yes, I didn’t know the difference between a URL and an email address. I used to write websites in MS Word. One day I got around to writing the raw HTML. It was a good day.

The trend has just kept going, and it’s time for a destruction and a fresh start. I need something catchy, cool and anal. Like all bloggers on the Internet have. I need a strong brand. I have the ability to create it, design it, promote it; just not the imagination to make it original. Also it needs distance from the personal nature it currently has. It’s too mardy at the moment. (OMG you noticed!!?!)

If anyone has any tips to setting up an Internet brand, please let me know. For now though, do admire my cleaned up blog and nice new theme.

Attribution
Photo “The View” by Ludovic Bertron

A few weeks back now I wrote a rather cynical entry on why Apple should be hated. I received a few messages from supporters of Apple, and offended some friends with my views. This entry is an attempt to sort it all out, alright?

I do not “hate” Apple. That post was a cynical joke. I think Steve Jobs and John Gruber are both awesome at their jobs. I also think Hitler was good at his job too. I don’t and have never claimed to know them personally so why would anyone take my comments about them seriously?

I’m very jealous that I don’t own Apple products, honestly. Apple products are beautiful and great. They’re good looking and as sturdy as a tank. The reasons I don’t buy into them are simple. The pricing isn’t acceptable. I’m not a paying 25 pounds for a fucking plug adapter. I’m not paying a hundred pounds for a laptop battery. This isn’t on. I’m also not a fan on the politics. Everything is marketed as being exclusive. The software locks you in. I could go on.

I also want to point out this. I care about real-life things a lot more. Like leaves and road markings. I love moaning and that’s what I’m doing. In a jokey way. Sarcasm and fun-poking are two of my favourite pastimes (and no, the latter isn’t a weird metaphore.)

Apologies if I’ve upset anyone. And yes. I’m an Android fan. I’m not a blind Android “fan boy”. There are hundreds of aspects of it that I openly despise. I just haven’t got around to those posts yet. Rest assure, I will do. I’ll be hating on that green teddy-robot thing.

Thanks for reading folks. Stay cool.

Stupid non-related musical hooks from my childhood aside, what did I think of the film?

Well we went to watch it at a late screening. If you have trouble keeping concentration, I cannot reccommend doing this in the slightest. By the end of the film, you’re plugged into the story at a rediculous depth. It took me an entire sleep to snap back to reality. It’s like a really strong drug.

So what happens? Well a load of unknown actors and actresses are engadged in an action-packed team-work based fight to complete a job so the main charater can go back home to his kids. Why can’t he get to his kids from the start? Because he’s wanted by every force in America, obviously. And some rich guy they do a job for can solve this. Obviously.

I hope I haven’t given too much away. It’s like the Matrix but far less geeky. And it’s not as long. I’m pretty sure they can’t make a sequal for this either, so if you’ve got a spare few hours you should see it. I can’t reccommend it enough. Just please, make sure you’re not stupid tired or having mental issues at the time, or it will mess you up.

So what have I been up to? Firstly I’ve been on holiday with my family. Where did I go? Wales. Saundersfoot, near Tenby in south Pembrokeshire, to be precise. Here’s a photo, click it to make it bigger.

This photo pretty much sums up every day of that fortnight. Well, that and about a hundred hours of gaming on my phone, something I’ll refuse to indulge in whilst at home, normally.

So apart from getting drunk in Welsh taverns, what else have I done? I’ve been recording and mixing down demo recordings for post-rock band Former Miss Czechoslovakia, for who I also play lead guitar and sing lead vocals for, a very odd mix I know.

I also got a car, but because of ridiculous circumstances, I haven’t been able to drive it to work in the seven days that I’ve had it for. It’s currently sitting in a garage, while hopefully mechanics are working ten to the dozen fixing the steering and the boot-cap (the what?) so I can take it to another garage tonight and then they can give it a full service and a cam-belt change. I kind of know what that bit means.

So for the mean time I’m catching the trains and buses, listening to really bad music while I’m on them and trying to find time to get these bloody mixes down.

For now I’ll leave you with a link to a rather intriguing tweet of mine.

EDITORS NOTE: Please read this post before referring me to a shrink.

It made me retch. I’m not even sure why I do it. It’s like checking your bank-balance after getting wrecked in town the night before (something I also did today).

What am I talking about? John Gruber. He’s a blogger apparently, which doesn’t shine him in the best light. I’m a blogger after all, but I can barely string a sentence together. So I see him more as a journalist/writer, because it makes him sound more like a writer. What I really want to say is, he’s good at writing, and he writes a blog.

He writes for his blog called Daring Fireball, which is mainly about Apple products. Anyone who knows me will know where this is going now.

He’s a self-confessed Apple zealot. I’m sure he get’s off most nights by stroking Apple logos and preying to a picture of Steve Jobs. He really loves it.

The other day he wrote a piece on the new iPhone, and how it has re-defined perfection, again. It reads like an up-market soft-core porn film. He is expressing his arousal with every word.

Now. I’ve recently signed up for a HTC Desire phone. No-one is hiding the fact that it’s an iPhone clone. On few occasions, I’ve even called it an iPhone when showing it to others. I then go home, find a razor, and add another slit to my wrists.

It’s amazing, but it’s fundamentally different. The concept is similar. You have a huge narrow screen and you touch it with your fingers to navigate through screens using menus and icons. It’s a simple idea. The difference is the approach. The software is open to all manufacturers to use and modify. Users can add their own applications to it. Of course, they’re not called applications anymore, because Steve Jobs has amended the OED and added a clause whereby if you use a mobile phone you have to call it an app. Because it’s trendy.

John Gruber is amazing at writing. The issue my stomach contents has is his absolute belief in all Apple products being beautiful and usable and without flaw. I’ll give him the first two, but there’s a shit-load wrong with that company. It’s attitude towards being exclusive sucks. I’m not sure if Steve Jobs has a complex because it’s products lack the market-share acquired by Microsoft based machines, or if he feels that Macs are unsung because kids want to use MSN on their laptops or they consider it broken, or if he was bullied as a child for being so water-tourtureingly irritating, or whatever. It hurts me, because it’s a belief that hates diversity. It lives in a world where everything has an Apple logo embedded. It’s like the Aryan race in electronics form. A hundred years from now we’ll be teaching kids about a holocaust where everything Microsoft or Linux or Android or unlucky enough to not be pre-fixed with the lowercase-letter “i” got obliterated because it wasn’t good enough, because it dared to be different.

Every time I hear about Apple suing companies for daring to stand up to the hype, or Steve Jobs bragging about an innovation that’s been doing the rounds for the best part of a decade but it wasn’t relevant then because it didn’t have an Apple sticker on it, or see someone on the train telling me how their existence beats mine because they have an iBag or an iSock, my stomach goes again. I just know with a chilling certainty that in a few years I’ll have to conform and be affiliated with the rest of them whilst pledging my allegiance to Mr Jobs or be stripped and gassed to death, then my body ejected into space with all the porn and Adobe Flash software boxes where we all belong.

So yes. Apple have amazing products. They’re beautiful and flawless if you don’t care about doing things the same way that Jobs preaches. I understand. I’m just scared. Plus I have a compulsion to spend my money on alcohol and take-aways, so at the end of the month when the next new “iPhone 6.5G LS mkIII” comes out I can’t afford to fork out another grand to pay to the Apple-tax man. A crime that will surely be punishable by instant decapitation this time next year.

So John, as much as you dis-prove every little point that people try to make against your deity, and do it so well, I hate you. I don’t care if you’re right. When I wake up in the morning, my HTC Desire, a piece of unique electronic/plastic hybrid that is truly mine, that I customised, where I chose how it works or which hand I can hold it in, gives me so much joy and happiness. You give me so much pain and hate by rubbing in my face how wrong I should be. You give me so much pain and hate, that I had to compose a pie-chart to vent it all out.

If a hadn’t already written a million words I’d continue to explain every point. But I can’t. For now, I’ve ran out of hate.

And to make things clear, I copied that idea from this wicked cool website. If I was Apple, I would call it an iChart and patent it and then sue that guy instead. And he would sue me back and the world would be full of hate.

Disclaimer: Not everyone with an iFinger or iHairbrush is a twat. Some folks that use them are genuinely nice and have human feelings that don’t represent the Borg collective mind. My girlfriend has an iLaptop, and she’s very nice .

My brothers machine is for mindless entertainment. There’s one in the garage that I use to record and mix demos for bands that I’m in. Sometimes I’ll build web-sites if I’ve got any personal work on, be it for cash or my own perverted projects. This machine only get’s updated once a year though, because I won’t use it during winter. There isn’t any heating in the garage and I live in England.

Here’s a little fact, I’ve named them after Pokémon. Not just because I’m sad or I have a compulsion to name inanimate objects, but because they need to be referenced as separate machines when I’m setting the network up. Okay, I’ll admit, it’s a pure geek indulgence. Please don’t judge me.

My brother’s machine took all of five-minutes to install, followed by about a month to configure. Without the exaggeration, that’s about 3 hours to install and two-days of back-and-forth headless-ness to get it to work the way I like it to be.

The garage machine was a different kettle of fish. On my brothers machine I install a desktop version of Ubuntu, because it’s a desktop computer. On the other one, a version called Ubuntu Studio, for reasons I won’t patronise you with. For a start my DVD disc didn’t work, so I tried to install the desktop version and upgrade. Stupidest decision ever. It took about a week of messing around for me to give up (I’m not even joking here). I’ll put a brief geek synopsis under the graphic explaining why.

I burnt another copy and it installed fine. I say fine, it wasn’t what I expected, because it was supposed to install a “real-time” version of Linux, not a “generic” version. Why do I need it to be real-time? Because I’m recording audio, and this has to happen first and fast when the computer does it’s thing. The machine isn’t allowed to mess around prioritising YouTube videos or Chris Moyles’ whining from Radio 1 on the BBC iPlayer. It needs to be focused on capturing and recording all the audio I pump into it without jittering and jolting, all because someone sent me a message on Facebook for example. So to sumarise, Linux generic: good for being kept entertained by The Sims; Linux real-time: good for recording without Facebook notification alerts ruining a take.

There’s a messy reason why the latest Lucid Lynx version of Ubuntu Studio doesn’t come in real-time. I’m not really sure what it is, but it’s something to with the release schedule of Ubuntu being out of sync with the guys that make the real-time kernel. Okay, this post has claimed too many geek points now…

So… I’ve spent a lot of time staring at a blue screen with a progress bar on it. Because it takes so long, I have to do things to keep me alive, like move away and eat and drink occasionally, and sometimes sleep. Occasionally I pop back to check on the progress. To call it tedious is being very kind. Words can’t express the joy when it all ends.

So onto the geek list. I encountered a lot of problems. There are always niggles and the like that I can easily live without fixing. The issues were problematic. They either got side-stepped or conquered.

1. I couldn’t upgrade the repos off of the DVD when I wanted to update Ubuntu with the ubuntustudio-desktop package. It wouldn’t happen. I ended up reluctantly downloading gigabytes of data I already had because it wanted to use the Internet.
2. The drivers did work (I’m using nVidia). The monitor didn’t. I assume this is a problem with the drivers or the kernel. Windows was kind enough to lend be a raw EDID file, and I pointed X.org at that instead, thanks to the help of this Ubuntu Forums thread. Worked nicely.
3. I still have to use Windows NDIS drivers and a tedious unnecessary tutorial demonstrating how to get my Broadcom wireless card working under the NDIS-wrapper. The tutorial is very good. Without it I don’t think I’d have ever gotten online with Ubuntu.
4. Once I’d downloaded and installed ubuntustudio-desktop, ubuntustudio-audio and linux-rt I couldn’t get any of my audio applications, like Ardour and JACK, working. They crashed the entire desktop. It was infuriating.
5. After wiping and starting again with another disc of Ubuntu Studio, I bricked it by trying to install the RT kernel. So I had to do it AGAIN!

I’m now left with Ubuntu Studio Lucid Lynx, without a real-time kernel, quite bare and not configured because I haven’t had enough counseling to take another shot at it. I’ve read around about low-latency kernels and the like with the latest version of Linux that apparently work. I may give these a go. But when I see things like “incompatible with nVidia” or “compile from source” I start cutting my wrists with razor blades.

Well, I’ve spent all my money this month and all my close friends are away on holiday. I need this machine working because I’ve got some demos to finish for a band. All I have to do now is take a deep breath, start again and get on with it. Okay, here goes…

I’ve already scared one member of the house-hold by shouting and clutching at a pillow with more vigour than I’ve ever know. I’ve gotten over-emotional at a silly episode of Doctor Who, and shouted at a politician on a rolling news channel.

So how long’s it been? 11 hours. Not even a day.

Why am I giving up? I’m skint. Also I need to sort my life out a bit, and I guess cutting out the crap is a kind-of start to it all. Wahoo. I’m also getting a car and don’t want to crash it because I was too busy rolling one at the junction. (I can still remember the points in the roads and journeys where I used to light up.)

Couple months back I did a fortnight before crashing on a really sticky night out. I smoked because I was in town I was drunk and looking for highs. I didn’t pick-up the fags during my hangover the next day like I thought I would- I got over it and carried on without them. But then something happened and I marched to the nearest shop for 20 Embassy number 1s. And I was back to my ten-to-fifteen a day.

I stayed indoors last week for the Sunday and the bank holiday. I was playing on my new phone and it did such a good job of distracting me I didn’t need to smoke. But then I had to get the bus really early the next day and the absence of nicotine from my system made the physical pain distracting. I had too much work on to loose concentration.

But now I’ve not got much work on because I done it all. I was quitting this morning, and there was a point where I was really happy I hadn’t gone out for a smoke at all, and then, something happened.

These “something happened” moments suck, but they’re not related to my smoking (except they only seem to happen when I’m trying to quit) and I figured I need to get over them. Shit will happen in life, and a cigarette seems so insignificant. So I’m going to learn to take news like a real person, and talk when things are upsetting instead. Also, the less I try and quit the less these catastrophic events will happen. I’m sure of it!

So why am I blogging this? Why is this being broadcast? Why have I dramatically changed my grammar?

BECAUSE I’M GOING FUCKING CRAZY!

Or I’m just being a bit of a wuss…

The White Noise Festival is an event organised by the guys at Maybeshewill and the Firebug. It features some simply awesome bands with a mix of post-rocky and musically unusual performances. It’s surely Leicester’s music forte.

Like I’ve already said, the highlight for me were Herra. I’ve been following this band since they we’re in college, and their brief split last year broke my heart.

You have to check them out- Here’s a link to their MySpace. I truly recommend you turn up to one of their shows, because my shit copy-writing skills can’t do such an epic performance justice.

There were other very worthy bands playing too, but these guys scratch my musical back just the way I like it.

So there’s a few aims here. Firstly, to communicate events I want to share with the public. Honestly, this doesn’t cover a lot at the moment. Not because I don’t get out much, but because I’d rather not share! Or because I’m too lazy to write the stuff up. Secondly it’s for when I want to rant, assist or review. Say how I do things and share my opinions with the aim of helping others to make their own minds up, be it music or web-sites or something else vaguely interesting. But also it’s an SEO blog. This relates to search engines. Putting more content on my blog makes it rank higher because it attracts more people from a variety of fields. Simple!

As I can see at the minute there are a few issues making the above effective. I don’t have many followers! Now I’m getting a fair few hits from the Ubuntu comunity (where I participate occasionly) and a few folks from Facebooks and King Brick, but not much interaction. I can tell this blog gets looked at from the statistics.

But that isn’t one of my main aims! I wan’t an archive of my outings, put reviews up for a few geeks and musicians but mainly so I can reference them. I’m quite a self-centred person

The SEO bit is working well. My only issue is having it on the King Brick domain. That means King Brick ranks in Google for things like Linux and Firefox.

What’s the plan Batman?

Potentially get a new domain. That requires effort and money so I probably won’t bother. Plus the band is the main thing I want to big up! Talking about geeking and web-design doesn’t relate at-all to my band, but it’s one of my fortes so I want it to! I want to set up a personal brand for my music and digital musings. It’s something to do right?

One way to counter all this is to split the categories up into almost seperate blogs. At the minute stuff bleeds into each other too much. So one article will explain about a wicked band I saw, the next about JSON and AJAX management and the next about how much I like the weather today.

So I’ll re-brand, re-skin and re-organise. That’s the plan!

Ubuntu is heading for a milestone. In April they will release the latest version of their Operating System called Lucid Lynx. Every 6 months Ubuntu release a new version but this one will be a Long Term Support release, a version that is released every 2 years and supported for 3 years. This might not sound a long time (especially if you’re using the 9-year-old Windows XP) but in this modern world of the Internet and technology- it seems forever!

So what’s changed?

Well the thing that’s got e everyone in a fuss is the re-branding. Ubuntu previously sported a very friendly look, using “very large, almost Comic sans MS” font as I once described it. Now it’s moved on, and even the OS theme has been given a reboot.

When I first saw this screen-shot I described it as “overall looks like vomit”, but after installing the theme, turning the fonts down to 8px and using it for a few weeks, I love it. It’s beautiful.

The title-bar buttons being on the other side doesn’t bother me- I think I’ve gone to click on the right-hand side by accident three times in total so I’ve no idea what all the geeks out there are fussing about. I love the use of monochrome icons and the purple is certainly a lot better than the dullness of the brown previously used. If I could change anything about the new theme it would be the sprites used for the scroll-bars (I think they look a bit amateur-ish) and the buttons I think are too dark.

All in all- congratulations to the Ubuntu team. Looking good

Links
Brand – Ubuntu Wiki
LTS – Ubuntu Wiki
Ubuntu Branding revealed – Ubuntu forums
Inital Ubuntu forums poll