Posts by Rich Lock
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to HORansome,
As one of my teacher teachers told me, teaching is the profession where everyone has an opinion as to how it’s done because everyone has been to school and is thus an expert. Or, at the very least, thinks they are.
I've been in hospital, too. Perhaps next time I could perform my own necessary life-saving surgery while under general anaesthesia.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Peter Darlington,
We don’t have enough Skrillex on the PAS music pages.
Not bad. For Skrillex.
Knife Party and Excision FTW.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Peter Johnston,
And re the whole Neil Young thing – amazed he can hear anything after four decades of Crazy Horse…
Probably thinks the high-pitched nasal whining noise in his ears is just his own voice.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to bob daktari,
all this talk of sound stuff is why the public tune out of giving a crap about audio quality…. they just wanna hear the music, cue off the shelf consumer friendly (i anyone) devices that have taken off and them that haven’t
There's a scene in the film '24 hour party people' where Tony Wilson and one of the bands (Joy Division I think) are in a car, listening to their single on the car stereo to get an idea of what it will sound like to the average punter. I mentioned this in conversation to a friend who works producing software for high-end mixing desks for recording studios, and he told me that recording studios do much the same thing - they'll have a set of fairly low-end speakers and gear set up in parallel with all the fancy stuff, to make sure that their mix actually comes out alright on average gear.
The moral of the story is to write better songs with better hooks. I've been in situations where I've heard tunes played over high-end gear that sound fucking amazing, but not so much when you actually get them on your home set-up. All mouth, no trousers.
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to BenWilson,
Is that like Google’s way of saying “learn to use a search engine, Granddad!”
Well, the last time I did it, it was 'how do I fill in a paying-in slip?'. Which would be embarrassing, but over the course of ten years in NZ, I don't think I ever paid for anything by cheque, or was ever paid by cheque. Because, y'know, The Internet. So when we moved back to the UK, there was a whole set of archaic skills I had to re-learn when people started paying me by posting (!) these odd-looking, vaguely familiar banky-type pieces of paper to me.
NZ bank websites are also an oasis of well-thought-out design functionality and user-friendliness compared to some of their UK equivalents. 'You mean it's possible to get all the text on one screen AND readable at the same time? AND the sidebar menu buttons make sense?!' AND I can log on without having to carry around a separate wireless transmitter for my bank card?!'
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to BenWilson,
Can anyone else here claim an active 18 year old email address?
One 15-year old and one 13-year old Hotmail address, still in use. Plus two Gmail accounts, and a domain/server-based 'proper' address. I'd have killed off the older ones, but given how easy it is these day to route them all through a single desktop-based e-mail program, it doesn't seem worth it.
It's the mullet of communication. All business in the front, long at the back when it's time to par-tay.
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to izogi,
the big point-of-difference with Ask Jeeves being that it let people type in questions, instead of search terms.
That's how it was sold, but it quickly became a standing joke, because even if it 'knew' the answer to a particular question (and usually it didn't), it wasn't 'intelligent' enough to deal with the variations in syntax, grammar, spelling, etc of the same question asked in a variety of slightly different ways, and would end up offering something hilariously wrongly left-field in response.
Nowadays, I do sometimes search by typing complete or semi complete questions into Google, and more often than not, the first results are 'ask.com'.
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There's a related article here on studying trolling behaviour. Conclusion: some people are just dicks, so internet rule #1 doesn't work.
Not quite directly relevant for pile-ons and group behaviour, but interesting/relevant nonetheless.
Anyway, I'll be forming an angry mob once I've found out where these bastard Dark Tetrads live, so we can march over there and sort them out. Bring your own pitchfork or other agricultural implement.
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Ah, ok. Yes, fair point.
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Field Theory: Drinking & Insomnia & the…, in reply to Sacha,
Curling maybe. Bobsled is a bit too hairy.
Although curling is the type of sport that would appear in the sort of dream I have when I eat too much cheese before bed: 'it was really weird darling. These people were torturing a roomba by throwing it down an ice rink and then making sure it couldn't do it's job by sweeping everything out of it's path'.