• Tuesday, May 31st, 2005
A little while back Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame released an editable version of their latest single, “The Hand That Feeds” from “With Teeth” in Garageband format. I downloaded it at the time but only had an older version of Garageband and couldn’t be bothered going through the hassle of converting the file. So anyway, recently when I upgraded to MacOS 10.4, I also upgraded iLife as well giving me the latest version of Garageband. Tonight I decided I’d have a bit of a play around. I’d messed around a little in Garageband before so I had a vague idea of how to use it but it seems there’s quite a few new features since I last spent any time with it. I ended up doing my own mix. Nothing that deviates too much from the original, it was mostly subtle changes like making the guitars a little more raw, slight tweaks to the bassline and adding some background vocals here or there. The biggest change was that I extended the instrumental section just before the end adding about another minute on to the play time of the track. No way am I going to claim this is some professional mix but I was rather pleased with the results. I definitely think I’ll have to play around quite a bit more and maybe try creating some original stuff of my own.
Speaking of The Hand that Feeds remixes, someone did a mash up with Ray Parker Jr’s classic Ghostbusters song of yesteryear called “The Ghost That Feeds” and like some other mash-ups I’ve heard, it’s surprisingly good. You’d never mistake it for a commercial track but it’s not like that really means anything special these days.
• Thursday, May 26th, 2005
I’ve been feeling rather happy lately. Don’t really know why although I suspect some of it has just come from me forcing myself to feel more positiviely about life and to be more realistic about people. I mean I don’t believe that anyone around me is going out of their way to hurt me or is inherently a bad person. They all have their own problems and are just doing their best to find their own way in life. I just wish that some would take a little more care not to step on people (including me) on the way. I know I’m not perfect by any means but I try very hard to be genuine with people and go out of my way to avoid hurting people but I guess I can’t expect that of others.
I ran into a Kurt today and had lunch with him. Had a cool time despite crappy short lunch breaks at work. At one point he mentioned reading my blog and it may have been my imagination but I got the impression with the way he said it that it freaked him out a little or something. For a second there it was like, “Oh, super awkard! Did he think I was taking verbal potshots at him when I was ranting a while back or something?”. The truth couldn’t really be further from the truth. Kurt, if you are reading this, I’ve always found you very genuine and I appreciate the times you’ve gone out of your way to say hi, especially when I was laid up with my broken leg. I guess it may not have seemed like much to you but it did mean a lot to me. I actually did refer to you and other guys in one of those rant posts but in the category of “a number of decent guys who are good with their girlfriends and don’t need to put anyone down to feel like a man”. For what it’s worth you have my respect.
Despite my initial impressions of the new Nine Inch Nails album “With Teeth” that I mentioned recently, I have found it is growing on me even more. Usually when I listen to an album it’s the music that hits me first and without that, lyrics will not save it for me. I did like the music on this album but it didn’t grab me as quickly as others in the past and I feel it’s only recently the lyrics have started to sink in too. I’m definitely enjoying it more than I was. I do wish that I had the Japanese version with the extra three tracks though. I’m tempted to just import it and sell off my local copy.
I’ve been listening to Gwen Stefani’s new album “Love.Angel.Music.Baby”. It is interesting, I will give it that. I feel the lyrics are best described as “slutty”, “cliched” and full of “kiddy shock value”. A number of the songs are just too “typical RnB” for me. Despite all that, there’s some great basslines and catchy pop up there with the best. I especially liked the references to her No Doubt days in the opening of the first track “What You Waiting For”. Some of the background samples are really unusual and add a lot to the music. There’s also no denying Gwen can sing, I found myself being surprised by her range in a number of places in the album. As you can probably tell, this isn’t entirely my kind of thing but for the kind of album it’s trying to be, I feel it hits the mark. I just wish Gwen would devote her vocal talents to a little more than teeny bopper RnB because she really has some talent. Listening to this made me go dig out my copy of No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom”…it really makes me feel old now because it seems like only yesterday I bought that album and yet it’s here I sit looking at the back with it’s 1995 issue date mocking me. 10 years… crazy.
I’ll probably write something on the new album “Demon Days” by the Gorillaz soon. Still collecting my thoughts on that one.
• Tuesday, May 24th, 2005
Every year there’s a rumor about Apple switching to Intel processors. This year’s rumor seems to be getting believed a little more than usual because it comes from the Wall Street Journal. They talk about the switch as if it is a cunning business manouver with the same compexity as a a motherboard manufacturer switching to a different brand of capacitor (There’s a joke there if you are aware of the Taiwanese capacitor debacle).
Now I have no idea what Apple is planning for the future but I have no doubt whatsoever that they have at least some resources dedicated to ensuring the Darwin kernel at the heart of MacOS X keeps running on Intel CPUs. Do I expect them to switch? Not at all, but it does make good business sense to keep options open.
I could go on a big rant debunking all the claptrap that is being said about this issue but really it’s just pointless. All anyone needs to do is look at the facts. Firstly, the PowerPC CPU family does not appear to be significantly hindered in performance compared to the competition, if anything it seems to have some significant advantages. Benchmarks don’t say a lot but looking at some real world tests makes it clear that the PowerPC G5 is no slouch and if Apple should be switching to any other supplier, it should be AMD, not Intel. The big thing to notice is that Ghz ratings mean little. On graphics tests Macs tend to lag behind more but this is really a operating system driver/3D API issue and changing CPU family will not help that in any way. There is also the fact that a single PowerPC processor costs less than a single Intel processor so all else being equal, a comparable dual processor Intel Xeon system is going to cost more than a current Dual PowerPC Powermac.
The other big thing to consider is that all existing MacOS X software is compiled for PowerPC processors. Now changing CPU families has been done before, Apple themselves transitioned to the PowerPC architechture from Motorola’s 68000 architechture a number of years ago but actually doing it is no small feat. For years MacOS shipped with a highly optimised 68000 software emulator and much time and effort was spent ensuring it was as painless for end users as possible. That said, the early PowerPC 601 CPUs were significantly faster than the 68040 used in high end Macs at the time. This is not the case today. Even cutting Intel some significant slack, a 4Ghz Pentium 4 is clearly not going to be much faster than a 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 and the overhead of software emulation even if the emulator was very well written, would make existing MacOS software run like it does on a much slower PowerPC G4. One other thing many do not know is that the early PowerPC CPUs had instuctions dedicated to making 68000 emulation easier and faster (such as little endian loads and stores) and the PowerPC had more registers, more cache and really…just more everything. The Pentium 4 in comparison with the PowerPC has less registers, smaller and slower caches, and has no efficient instructions for handling big endian structures.
Lastly, another simple fact is that Intel makes a lot of chips. They don’t just make CPUs, they make many other chips including USB controllers (USB is an Intel technology), PCI and PCI-Express bus masters (Also Intel technologies), Network controllers, graphics GPUs and many others too. Apple could easily be buying chips for any number of purposes. PCI-Express controllers would make a lot of sense since the Powermac line is really begging to get left behind by not supporting this bus. There is also the possibility that they may be buying CPUs for devices other than computers. I know that the early airport base stations used an embedded 486 variant as their controller. My point here is that it makes sense for Apple to talk to Intel about chips and even CPUs but that doesn’t mean we’ll see dual Xeon Powermacs any time soon.
Like I said, I have no idea what Apple is doing and have no inside knowledge but the idea of switching to Intel CPUs just doesn’t make sense. This is especially obvious when you think that all of the next generation of games consoles are PowerPC based. The level of R&D currently being spent on the PowerPC architechture is immense. Add to this the fact that Intel is being owned on their own turf by AMD and it’s clear that any thoughts of switching to Intel are just ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the MacOS on Intel rumors….but not quite. That topic is beneath even arguing these days.
Today has been a strange day. I put in some overtime hours at work yesterday as a pre-emptive strike on looming deadlines so today was the only real day off I was going to get until next weekend. I largely did nothing, chatting, games, forum posting, buying stuff for others on auction sites. Somehow though, here I am at 10pm with a strange sense of accomplishment. I can’t really explain it but at least I feel I got a good rest. I’ll need it going into another week of work tomorrow.
The looming war
XBox 360
We’re starting to hear about the next generation of games consoles. So far information has come out in relation to Microsoft’s XBox 360 and Nintendo’s Revolution consoles. Both are built around IBM’s PowerPC CPUs and ATI’s graphics hardware but this doesn’t really tell us a lot.
I don’t think it would surprise anyone who knows me that I am generally anti-Microsoft but the reasons why might. I’m not going to go into it all here and now (Maybe I’ll write a Microsoft history article sometime) but all I need to say right now is that I do as little as I can to support them and do not send money their direction if I can help it. My feelings towards Intel are only a little better. When the original XBox was released it was clearly a regular Windows PC but without the compatibility. Microsoft made with an Intel CPU…clearly not a device I’d really want to support. Technically though, the XBox was really not as great as everyone seemed to believe but despite that, armchair geeks everywhere with vague knowledge of GHz and the term “polygons per second” led to the general perception of it’s superiority we have today. Once again, I’m not going to go into this here and now but I’m sure you can see the distain I treat such uninformed comments with. Who am I to look down on this? Well, nobody really…I don’t claim to know everything about such things, but my university degree was in computer hardware and I did study chip design and modern CPU architectures so I do at least have some understanding of such things which is more than the vast majority of people commenting on them. (I really think kids should be forced to study Socrates at school). In practise, XBox games have shown a high degree of technical competancy and that cannot be denied. Most who have seen the poster child Nintendo Gamcube games would argue that console is technically superior but the difference is small enough to be largely discounted. Sony’s PS2 despite all it’s hardware promise just seems to have been too damn hard to develop for and it shows. Of course anyone who says PS2 was not the console to own this generation is smoking crack. 
Nintendo Revolution
I believe people that know me feel I boycotted the XBox purely out of bias. I do understand how they may think this but it isn’t really the case. I can say with 100% honesty that the games just never attracted me. For a long time all that interested me on the Xbox was Dead or Alive 3 and I probably would have bought Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball as well. I genuinely didn’t like games like Halo, Project Gotham, Oddworld, Fable, Sudeki and Ninja Gaiden. I did play them but just like many big name games on other platforms, I knew I’d be bored of them in five minutes. The fact of the matter is that some of the most recent games have appealled (Jade Empire comes to mind) but this is too little too late for me.
What I’m getting at here though is that I am going to be looking at the next generation of consoles with an open mind. Yes, the XBox 360 already has a black mark in my mind due to being made by Microsoft but that isn’t enough to stop me going for it if it has a great games library. Do I expect this to happen though?…not really. I still don’t think Microsoft gets the traditional console gamer yet. A friend of mine always used to say that Microsoft always takes three attempts to get anything right. If that holds true, then I guess we should all watch out for the XBox 720.
• Saturday, May 14th, 2005
I had heard recently that there was some news of Grandia 3 being made. Ever since playing the original Grandia a number of years ago now, I’ve been a fan of the series. In fact, many references on this site can even be attributed to Grandia 2. So, anyway I had a look and found there’s a preview movie and a website already up and running (Interesting how Square-Enix are publishing it). I’m going to be keeping quite an eye on this one myself. I hope it turns out well
Musical diversions
In the last day or so I’ve been listening to mostly classical and instrumental music. I wondered if it would be a bit more uplifting than what I typically listen to and maybe help keep me in better spirits. After listening to quite a lot today, I feel it is, but by no means all of it. I do have a reasonable amount of classical and instrumental music (somewhere over 500 songs according to a rough check on my iPod) but even some of the most famous classical pieces paint rather dreary pictures which is not really what the general consensus on classical music implies. Some pieces though really do hit the right spot though and can’t help but put you in a good mood. It has as well made me realise how similar some modern instrumental music is to traditional classical music.
Ah well, guess I should head off to bed, I’m working Saturday too for the first time in ages. Ah well, more cash for savings or the soon-to-be-inevitable phone upgrade.
• Thursday, May 12th, 2005
Played with the Motorola’s V3 Razr phone today. My thoughts? It’s a V600/V550 that’s a few mm thinner (13.9mm vs 22mm). The software feels totally identical. Considering the V550 sells for NZ$449 and the V3 Razr sells for NZ$999, that’s about NZ$67.90 for each missing millimeter.
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Will I be buying one? No way. Considering I only care about making calls and texting people, the deciding factor on what phone to buy is size alone. Despite being very thin, the Razr is still fat and long. I don’t believe it has to be that long either, I seriously doubt there’s anything under that keypad and the keypad itself is wasting space as it is.
I’m not intending to buy a phone anyway, my V525 seems a lot better running the latest V600 firmware. Currently I’m hoping the battery holds out till July or so when Vodafone brings out their 3G network and I’ll look at what is available then.
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I was thinking a while back of talking about the new Nine Inch Nails album “With Teeth”. It’s taken me a while to get to grips with it. That can be a bit of a problem on a iPod when skipping and shuffling are so easy. I actually found myself skipping over a number of the tracks when they’d pop up in the random playlists and was starting to think I just didn’t like the album that much. Today though I felt I had heard them enough and I should play the album in order and set some ratings in the iPod’s 5 star rating system. Now I’m not going to talk about individual tracks here since that’s entirely pointless and pure opinion. At the end of it all though, I realised I do like the album, but some of the tracks just feel a bit mediocre or even downright annoying to me. On the plus side, the album feels less cluttered than some of the earlier albums and there is a feel of consistency which is always nice. Some of the lyrics seems a little juvenile to me (“I just made you up to hurt myself”, WTF?) but overall I’d say they’re pretty good and in places really are the kind that can only come from Trent. Not as dark as earlier works, but hey, things are probably going a bit better for him these days and more power to him I say.
Really when it comes down to it, the music is what matters to me. He could be babbling about anything and I wouldn’t particularly care if the songs are musical masterpieces although in this case there’s no denying the lyrics are the heart of the album. Musically some of the tracks are very melodic and this is typically the stuff I like best. The atmospheric tracks do it for me too. There are a few though that just sound tedious to me. I am rather open when it comes to unusual sounds being utilised in a musical track but if those sounds are grating, I’m just not interested.
Honestly, I still think I need to give it some more time. To sum up how I feel so far, it’s a rather average album with spots of brilliance.
• Wednesday, May 11th, 2005
Things really have not been going well lately. Despite what the previous couple of posts may indicate, I have been holding up reasonably well in spite of it all and have probably been taking out my frustations in posts here rather than letting them bleed into my day to day life. No sign of it ending yet though and tonight has been yet another case in point. My cellphone (a Motorola V525) has been playing up. For a while it’s seemed a little buggy managing my text messages but some of them have sentimental value to me so I’ve taken care not to delete them which means that I’ve constantly got about 70-80 messages on the thing and it doesn’t really seem to like it. Adding to that, the battery has started playing up a bit. Sometimes I only seem to get a day or so of use out of it (some Startac dejavu for me). The last day or two it’s been really bad so I really think I need a new one but I did wonder if there was anything more I could do.
So, anyway, I don’t really want to buy a new phone right now. I decided to try and give my current one a kick in the guts and flash it to the latest firmware and flex. I backed up everything important (or so I thought) and flashed away. Most of the text messages dissappeared but testing my backup, they call came back in smoothly. It does seem to be an improvement, the phone is even faster than before. Here’s where things get really annoying though. I opened the phone book and it was blank. “No problem” I thought to myself, “I’ll just refresh it from iSync”. I did that and the phonebook was still blank. I then had a look in iSync and it had all the names from my contact list but no phone numbers!!!!! HOW STUPID IS THAT!!!!! What is the point of synchronising your phone if it won’t read the phone numbers!?!?!?!?!?!? So, anyway, “This is still not a problem” I thought to myself…”I’ll just synchronise my Pocket PC and transfer the contacts across”. It was then I found out that the sync software I have used is not compatible with MacOS 10.4. What is even worse, is that they plan to charge US$19 for a version that does once they have finished writing it.
As you can probably imagine, at this point I was getting seriously irritated but I did my best to be positive. “I guess I’ll just have to do it by synchronising my PocketPC on my Windows box and transfer the contacts across over the network” I thought to myself with will power induced optimism. I plugged it in and started fiddling with the options. Of course, it would not synchronise with the default Windows address book…I had to install Outlook (In fairness, a copy of Outlook did come with my PocketPC but I had not installed it). So anyway, after the pain of installing Outlook I synchronised my contacts. It managed to pull in about 10% of my contacts sucessfully. I tried to find out why but reasons were totally unfathomable. At this point I wasn’t being choosy, I decided I’d pull the few I had got across for now. I looked through the menus in Outlook for options to export contacts. Much to my surprise, it wouldn’t export to anything sensible like vCard. The best it could do was CSV or Tab separated text. I tried those but to no avail…The MacOS address book software only understands a few standard formats and text files in it’s own format (Although it will export and import to all the ones it supports include vCard). At this point I started searching the net for a way to mass dump vCards from Outlook. I found one, downloaded it and installed it. I fired up Outlook and I had a new option in the menus, “Export contacts to vCards”. I thought “Yes!!! This is what I want!!”. I selected the option and then selected all the contacts and hit “Ok”. It was then a dialog appeared telling me that I would have to buy the software to export more than 5 contacts. I didn’t see anywhere on the site saying this was shareware. Now I don’t mind paying for useful software but I have to ask…MICROSOFT…WHY THE HELL IS THIS NOT DEFAULT BUILT IN FUNCTIONALITY TO OUTLOOK!!! In disgust I hit the “Ok” button and imagined myself exporting the 10% of my contacts I’d managed to pull in 5 vCard batches. Of course even that was too good to be true there was yet another final insult. The bulk vCard export software couldn’t even do one vCard. It brought up a progress bar and stopped dead. No progress, no vCards, no nothing.
At this point I just gave up and started entering contacts manually. Come on you software companies out there…surely it can’t be that hard to make sync software that actually works.
A few glimmers of hope did come out of all this is. My phone does seem to be working a little better. If the battery holds out a little longer I might be able to hold of buying a new phone for a while. I also now have a backup of my text messages that I know works and I’m very happy to have that. On the downside though, I think I’m coming down with a cold…Gah!!!
I’m feeling rather depressed again. 
Not so much anything specific, more just every fucking thing in my life. I have no idea what to do. Part of me just wants to leave and never come back here. There’s just so little value in anything I have, or do, or the rut I have somehow found myself in. It’s not that I don’t feel I’m making progress in my life, I am, it’s just so damn slow and I feel like I’m trapped on these rails. I can’t help but wonder though if when I finally reach some of the goals I’ve set that I won’t even be happy when I get there. I realise too that there’s no point dwelling on the past but I can’t help but wish I’d made a few decisions differently over the years. Sure, who knows if things would have turned out any better but it’s doubtful to me that they could have turned out worse. I am so lacking in confidence now and just feel so insignificant. I’m not expecting anyone to read this, there’s been no comments here for ages and honestly I’m okay with that. I never started this blog for other people. I’ve not told people about it and have actively discouraged people from reading it when they found out I had one. The original idea was that by writing down some thoughts and events it would help me better understand myself and the world around me and I think it’s been a good thing.
Just as I was writing this a friend sent me a virtual hug in AIM…she had no particular reason to do so and would have had little idea how I was currently feeling. It’s funny how sometimes a little kindness can come at just the right time…I have no idea how this post would have ended otherwise…
• Thursday, May 05th, 2005
Sometimes I wish I didn’t let other people’s problems get to me so much. Why is it that some women have such sucky taste in men? I mean they find some dweeb that treats them bad, treats their friends bad and has to make himself feel like a man by putting her and/or everyone else down and yet they seem to see something in them. These guys are also usually posessive freaks. To me guys (little boys?) like that are total losers who would run a mile at any sign of a real confrontation and will never respect her. They aren’t tough, they aren’t deep and they aren’t going to change no matter how you interact with them. Women have always seemed to be attracted to pricks like these guys so I guess it’s too much to expect anything to change. It’s just so frustrating that they can’t see through these guys when they’re as transparent as fucking glass. I wish I could say I’m being specific and this is a small problem but it’s all too common. I’m just glad I know a number of decent guys who are good with their girlfriends and don’t need to put anyone down to feel like a man. You guys stop me from losing my faith in mankind. Thanks
