Posts by Peter Darlington
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identity of the phantom Wikipedia editor. It's not. He's the IT guy, okay?
As an IT guy, I can only agree.
On a vaguely related Telco note, Cunliffe has turned down Telecom's operational separation plan. That's good news for the rest of us as there was still far too much of the dark hand of Satan wrapped up in their proposal.
Finally, Hot Chip. They really are pretty good.
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Must be. I am a bit worried about letting my boy see dozens of pictures of a starved naked man getting crucified, though. I preferred their art when it was just pictures of wholesome motherly women holding cute little babies in whatever lovely looking anachronistic town the artist came from.
C'mon, if it wasn't for all that crucifixion art we wouldn't have heavy metal.
Ah, disregard...
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I wonder how many people actually care about wikipedia.
I use it pretty much daily as well. The concept is sound in that if multiple people care enough, entries will become more accurate, not less. Contentious subjects have to be managed but the idea isn't that Wikipedia is your only source of information on, say George Bush.
But to have an encyclopaedia with an excellent entry on The Black Ark Studio, a picture of the Mayhem album showing the vocalists shotgun suicide and Arsenal's Eduardo de Silva entry covering his horrific leg-break this last weekend is indisputably of value IMO. None of these would get a look-in or even be possible in a traditional encyclopaedia.
Personally I think most political parties, ministerial offices and government depts should have openly registered Wikipedia editors in this day and age.
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Doh! Link here
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And I know regular PA commenter Pete Darlington once practiced the dark arts of the bookshelf. I gather the new info-storage architecture in his house is a thing to behold ...
Jeez Russ, everyone on PA thought I was cool until you spilled the beans on that one!
Librarianship might be the best job in the world with the worst pay. It has the potential to be highly enjoyable, relevant and essential in this so called information age. Many research librarians are exceptional at finding information hidden away in the deepest recesses of medical, research and commercial databases. They can also excel at researching source quality to separate the wheat from the chaff. In public libraries, you have people who genuinely want to help with any kind of request from the public and will often go the extra mile to do this.
But it's also a job that's cursed with the idea of being a 'calling' rather than a profession and those following a more commercial orientation are viewed with vague suspicion.
I actually spoke at the LIANZA national conference last year (although my publicity seemed to get lost amongst a load of brouhaha about Paula Ryan) on the subject of moving from libraries to ICT because it's seen as a fairly rare event and this may be the key problem with Librarianship. In other professions, especially media/journalism but also teaching, ICT and others, there's a lot of cross pollination that creates diversity whereas librarians seem to struggle for a way to evolve outside of their world. Hence the silo mentality and a lack of radical thinking about how to work differently with content and access. Some in the library world have also been quick to jump on the Web 2.0 Haters bandwagon, whereas here in NZ I got the feeling at the Conference that they're only just starting to think about it.
However, I've been out of it for years (so to speak) so my views may not be 100% reliable.
And yes, our house is now storage heaven, mainly thanks to the enthusiastic amateur builder I live with, but the music area was my baby.There's a pic off the 3/4 build stage here. Extra shelving and the broadband connection have been completed since this was taken. All music is alphabetical ordered by artist and title, no crazy genre crap gets in the way.
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Often, I'm about feel and beats - so 'My Love', with that badass Timbaland production with all those juddering synths, and the falsetto verses, and the call-and-response - I mean, that's a lot of the things I'm going to love in a song, right there. And in fact I think you could trace a line right back to old-school Stax-level soul from 'My Love', if you're talking about 'authenticity'
I heart this post.
That is all.
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...when our top entertainment people, who work hard to get as much air time as possible get round to presenting their pre-packaged manufactured in a boardroom target market lowest common denominator pap they find that not only have they got nothing to say there really is nothing much they can say...
Well, I said it before on PA last year that "The greatest lyric ever, IMO, is 'A wop bop a loo bop, a wop bam boom'. That said everything you need to know about popular music and after that, we might as well have given up putting words in tunes and just used the voice as an extra instrument."
I include pop and rock and everything else under the heading popular music. Whenever anyone mentions that a musician has something to say I know it's not for me. I see no difference between Bob and Britney, apart from the ego investment of the folks who listen to them.
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ain't that the truth..the house revolution encapsulated the spirit of punk absolutely and to a degree the bedroom electronic thing still does
I remember going into a music shop on Haight St up near Golden Gate Park in the early 1990's. It was all house music. Shop was painted completely orange and the stock was all white label releases. Not a piece of cover art or a title in the place. You could only tell one release from another by a small sticker on each white cover.
It was like Mies van der Rohe had opened up a music store!
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Yep, I think I misstated that. Of course the kid with the iPod doesn't know the contractual intricacies of how it actually works, that the producer made a record and banged several session vocals on top with the acts voice mixed in there somewhere. Nor do they care, they just want to be entertained.
Yep, and I do too. One of things I really liked about early House was the idea of a generic band name recorded onto white label vinyl. It was totally punk, remove the poncey 'look at me' artist personality from the recording and just have the sound. Love that. If Madonna and Britney are as much an idea and a sound as a specific person with specific music skills, I'm cool with that.
In fact, it's preferable to the carefully cultivated singer-songwriter idea of the mega-talented muso. Just give us some good sounds to be going on with and get over yourselves. There's a lot of snobbery about pop music compared to the proper serious stuff (i.e. the same old 4 on the floor, hairy blokes with guitars crap).
And the amount of people I've turned on to reggae music because they immediately 'got' Rivers of Babylon by The Melodians makes me at least a little fond of Boney M for doing the ground work. They're way preferable to your U2's or even worse, Pearl Jam *spits* who did their best to wreck music for the a good decade or more.
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Here's my concern: apart from Scarlett, we've got the actress who plays Addison Montgomery, Nicole from the Pussycat Dolls, John Legend, and Will.I.Am? Poor showing, celebrities! (On the other hand, it's nice to see Aisha Tyler again.)
Heh, thanks for that Danielle. Apart from Scarlett I was wondering who the hell all those people were.
What? Couldn't Obama get Kanye or something?