Zack de la Rocha and DJ Shadow just released an anti-war song entitled “March of Death” from marchofdeath.com. This is the second war protest song from a major artist; the first was “In a World Gone Mad” by the Beastie Boys. The MP3 can be downloaded directly from the web site. The lyrics are also posted online.
It’s good to see DJ Shadow representing Mill Valley’s politics in his recordings.
The most hyped album of the year was released into stores yesterday. I managed to obtain an advance promo of the CD prior to the release date so I’ve been listening to the disc for about a week. Overall I think the CD is good but it is nowhere as good as Hybrid Theory. Linkin Park is clearly catering to the radio stations and MTV with this release, as seen in the lengths of the songs. No song is longer 3:33 and the thirteen tracks on the CD only account for a CD that has a total running time of 36:35. You can fit Meteora and Hybrid Theory on one 80 minute CD but Meteora is even shorter than Hybrid Theory.
In my opinion the strongest songs on the CD are “Somewhere I Belong,” “Lying from You,” and “Figure.09.” Except to see these on TRL sometime soon. It wouldn’t surprise me if “Don’t Stay” is the next single to be released but I don’t think it’s exceptional. It is a very radio friendly CD but I think it’s safe to say that Linkin Park is not suffering from sophomore slump on Meteora.
The album has received a lot of media attention for the amount of security placed on circulation prior to release. Rolling Stone reported in “Linkin Park Beat Bootleggers” that the twenty-four hour security kept the disc from being released early. That is partly true since the disc wasn’t released on the Internet months before release. However, Meteora did appear on the Internet about a week before the retail release, so technically Linkin Park didn’t beat the bootleggers as claimed by Rolling Stone.
According to Adobe, top of the line Dell PCs are better at performing operations in Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects than top of the line Macs. The Dell 3.06GHz system beat the Mac 1.25GHz dual processor system in all four tests: Video composite, flying logo, illustrative text, and virtual set. The article is already moving up the Daypop charts and I’m sure sparks are going to fly in the design community over this.
I didn’t read Mark Pilgrim’s weblog, Dive Into Mark, for a couple of days and I ended up missing the funniest story on his site in the past year. In “Confessions of a platypus creator” he admitted that Raging Platypus was his creation. Raging Platypus soared to the top of the Daypop Top 40 and that was because a bunch of Mark’s friends went trolling for links.
He then admitted on his site last week that he is Raging Platypus. I had absolutely no idea but I have to hand it to him for coining the term “bovitch.” Good work Mark! I too despise the Raging Cow fakeblog.
Wired News reported today that the virus originating from Hong Kong which has killed 50 people worldwide already may be related to coronavirus, the source of the common cold. This can be considered a good thing overall because it may be easier to develop treatment for the virus since the coronavirus is well studied.
However, in my opinion, this is also very unsettling because this is clearly a case in point where mutation of a virus in wide circulation can have catastrophic effects. Chicken soup is no longer as potent as it used to be. The virus has shut down a number of events in Hong Kong including a rugby tournament. Citizens have been seen walking in the streets with masks over their mouths and noses in an attempt to avoid catching the virus. In related news, 3M admitted that the masks sold to Hong Kong residents don’t even provide protection!
The strain is already here in America and currently affecting people close to where I live. The Marin Independent Journal also reported today that the SARS ailment is now here in Marin. It is being commonly referred to now as “super-pneumonia.”
Let’s hope we can find a solution for this outbreak soon because it is spreading very rapidly. In Singapore there are already 860 quarantine cases.
I noticed in my referrer logs for this week that twenty-five percent of my web traffic went to a bot called “LARBIN-EXPERIMENTAL efp@gmx.net Mozilla/4.0.” It indexed my web site in 1 second intervals which is very fast compared to Google, which peaks at 3 second intervals when its cluster of 10,000 servers doesn’t schedule the indexing well. The IP information for this potential Spambot is 66.230.140.66 (argon.oxeo.com) in case you want to block it. I highly suggest it and I’m going to report it to my hosting provider.
Men and Ben Trott of Six Apart posted a non-technical guide to Trackback, a feature of Movable Type for quite a while that enables web sites to interoperate. The guide is very easy to follow and even has a movie showing how you can trackback to other weblogs on your own journal using bookmarklets. If you are using Movable Type, Bloxsom, Nucleus, B2, or Radio, definitely check the guide out because it might clarify some issues you’re having.
Also, the guide explains “Content Aggregation,” the original reason for implementation of Trackback. By pinging another site with your weblog entry, you can remotely post onto it. Pretty cool stuff. My only concern with that is access permissions since anybody with the URL can post to the site, but I’m sure in future releases of Trackback this will be corrected.
The news media hyped up this year’s Oscars to be “downplayed” by the actors, with virtually no red carpet coverage, no over-the-top outfits, and lots of black. For the most part the Oscars did turn out to be less outrageous than usual but I have to say that I think I liked this year’s show more than when it is ultra-glam.
Steve Martin hosted and he did an excellent job. His jokes were funny throughout the night with my personal favorite directed toward the head of the Academy. Steve mentioned that this year cleavage is in, and then introduced the Academy president onto the stage. He had a number of good ones but my other favorite was when he listed some of the people in the audience who had slept with him and then later branded Jack Nicholson as a homosexual. Jack then licked his eyebrow.
The low point of the night definitely went to Michael Moore, who started out with a great acceptance speech and then blew it. He had a great beginning, where he mentioned how we live in a ficticious world and how documentary is a great art form. He had all of the other nominees up on the stage with him. Then he started ranting about Bush and members in the audience started booing him because Oscar speeches are supposed to be apolitical. Here’s the transcript:
Acceptance Speech
“Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I’d like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they’re here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.”
Michael Moore
I thought I was going to get most of the Oscar picks correct, but as usual the Academy managed to throw me a loop. Here’s a list of what I got right and what I got wrong. See how it compares with your own:
The official list of winners is online at oscar.com.
When I came home Friday for Spring Break, I picked up the April 2003 issue of Discover magazine and found an excellent feature on João Magueijo, who is currently pursuing research on VSL (varying speed of light). VSL challenges one of the foundations of Physics, namely that light travels at a constant speed of 299,792,458 m/s. According to João, during the formation of the universe light travelled faster than the current speed; it travelled almost infinitely fast.
At the same time, gravity and temperature travelled at a higher speed but the universe settled down and light “froze” at its current speed. João’s feature is entitled “At the Speed of Light: What if Einstein was wrong?,” and I highly recommend reading through it. Since I’m not a physicist, I have no idea whether or not this theory makes any sense but it is interesting to glance over.
ZDNet reported on March 21 that the next version of Microsoft Office will embed macros interspersed in XML files rather than just at the top like traditional DOC files. This is very bad for virus scanners because they scan just the part with the macro code and move onto the next file. If Microsoft keeps this current system in place, virus scanning of Office documents will take much longer because virus programs will have to scan through the entire document rather than just through the macro section.
Then again, people have to be actively virus scanning in the first place for this to be a problem and many computer users don’t bother installing anti-virus defense. Chances are Microsoft is going to fix this problem but it’s nice to know that the industry is quick to point out problems like these before Office comes out of beta.