I hate Grabba Grabba Tape.
Their last album, “KURT KOBAYA Y G.R.O.X. MAN ODIA NIRVANA”, released in 2006, was freaking incredible. Distilling all of the energy and frenzy (synth-)punk has ever had into a two member band, one on keyboards, one on drums, both singing on vocoder (and only on vocoder). They are quite simply amazing. They long topped my last.fm charts, and only partially because their tracks are so short (their 11 (13 with intro & outro) album clocked in around 17 minutes).  Their record label posted an update last April, saying they had completed recording their new album “LOS 8 TROVADORES DEL GOLDEN AXE” and that it would be released as soon as the band decided which label to sign a contract with, and that was the last it was heard of, until a new post last month saying that the album would be released approximately the same time as the end of the world. I’m tired of waiting and I’ve damned near worn out their old album. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I think this video speaks for itself:

I’ve long wanted to see them in concert, but must admit that desire is tempered by the disappointed review someone gave their live show on last.fm.  Not that the show wasn’t good, but that travelling 3 hours to see a 15 minute show was disappointing.  That it would take me 4 or 5x that to see them in any of the places I’ve seen them have shows so far does give me pause.

I found my old Sega Genesis in a box while cleaning this afternoon. You’ll be surprised to learn that it doesn’t work, but what is more surprising is how long it did work after I removed it from its case, spray painted it black, and nailed it to my wall. I’m not really sure what specifically caused it to stop working after a couple of years in that state. I had tried to do the same thing to my SNES, but the case was terrifically more difficult to open and it died in the process. Some things will be harder to discard than others. And while this is worthless now, its current state makes it hard to come up with a spectacular way to destroy it further.

This song was the second song in the DJ set I did in February. If nothing else went well that night, playing it loud in the middle of this town in which I live, a town which I hate, was enough to make it worthwhile.

I more and more wonder just how many of the issues I’m having with my life would be solved by living in a place that doesn’t suck.

I haven’t written much this week because I spent all of the last 3 day weekend + an additional day that I took off at the last minute fixing my infrastructure so I was able to edit and post the second in the object series. I ended up thinking I maybe should’ve just bought a mac rather than saving $1400 building my own. I’m going to install Snow Leopard on it soon and see how many of its residual issues that takes care of, I may still buy a real mac yet.

I had intended on posting the recording of my DJ set, but I think I lost it while trying to get my crap working this weekend =/

Full screen & HD are recommended.

ALL DAY LONG

Hit the green arrow to see what it feels like to be a mouse (or me, today), courtesy of my new camera. More object series soon!

I have been a fan of Natalie “Tusia” Beridze since I first heard her album Annulé several years ago.
Her latest release, “Pending” draws more from Annulé than it does her subsequent works, Size and Tears and The Other (both of which are a bit inconsistent but outstanding at their best).  I was less engaged with it originally than I expected to be, but once I got past my irrational hopes that it would contain more frantic piano pieces in the vein of Size and Tears’ CD1 (songs which I’ve had on repeat in my car for several months (a bad idea because they make it even harder for me to drive like a reasonable person)), it has grown on me to the point where it’s been on near constant repeat for the past month.  Tracks “Don’t Know Why”, “Good Night Tokyo” and “Legotek” are especially excellent.

Also recommended are her releases under the Nate Fisher pseudonym, which range from (less recommended) club tracks to  impressively complicated and hard techno (highly recommended) on such releases as donoteatonlsd.  These tracks are often attributed to Thomas Brinkmann as several of them were released on his max.ernst label, and were attributed only to T.B., but it should be obvious that it was always her, especially considering the stylistic similarities in her later releases (especially her upcoming -or maybe already released but impossible to find- release “dunno”) and her obvious vocals on some of the tracks.  My interpretation is that use of the Nate Fisher name was sort of a Wendy/Walter Carlos thing to get her music fairly judged in the still male-oriented world of dance music.  If that’s true, hopefully her apparent abandonment of the name means she’s more confident of being taken as seriously as she should be.

I’m glad she’s moved away from using just TBA as a moniker, as hopefully now I’ll be able figure out where she’s playing to see her live at some point (sorting through lists like this is fairly much impossible), but can we settle on a name?  I’ll likely continue renaming her tracks so they all are collected together in last.fm, but it seems that this release, her upcoming EP, and her soon-to-be released album on Monika are all under slightly different permutations.  I understand its useful to use slightly different names when releasing music in slightly different genres, but the effort does get a bit tiring sometimes.  Maybe a website to make these things easier to track down isn’t too much to ask for?  I’m guessing the tracks on her Myspace page are from her upcoming release on Monika as they weren’t on this last one?  I really don’t mean to complain too much, as her music is good enough that the time investment is worthwhile…

Fuck New Year’s Resolutions.

Just because a new year has started, an arbitrary date has incremented, and you are forced to momentarily pay attention to the fact that your life is quickly circling the drain, you are going to pretend to yourself that you care enough about things that if you really cared about you’d have done already?

Really?

Fuck New Year’s Resolutions and fuck you for having them.

I had purchased a 2TB enclosure to do offsite backups with at the beginning of last year, but kept putting off purchasing the new backup system to go with it, as the drives in my computers were largely full (my storage needs had reached the point that the solutions were $$$$).  As is the rule, exactly a week before I was to finally purchase said solution (I had been waiting for Black Friday hard drive prices), the enclosure died, taking everything I’d done that year with it (although I did have most of the creative things I’d done in more than one place).  If anyone should know better, I should know better, I managed the backups for a large-ish hospital for years, but I was cocky enough to think that things would keep working until I got the new solution in place.  Take this as a warning.  If you know better, you know better and need to back your stuff up.  If you don’t know better:

IF YOU DON’T HAVE YOUR IMPORTANT DATA IN MORE THAN ONE PLACE IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE ITS INEVITABLE LOSS.  IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF IF YOU WILL LOSE IT, BUT ONLY A QUESTION OF WHEN.

While some of the fancier enclosures run a version of linux, this particular enclosure, and many of the ones like it that contain two hard drives just use a JMicron (or similar) chipset to treat both of the drives as one drive, writing the first part of the partition on one of them and the last half on the second.  This is called spanning or, occasionally, BIG mode.  My first thought had been that mine had died because one of the two drives was dead, so was surprised when I ran dd_rescue (apparently the version with the _ is supposed to be better than the one without it) from the System Restore Linux live-cd and it managed to copy off images of both drives without any errors (although it did take a bit of effort to figure out that I had to boot with the restore64 option in order to mount volumes more than 2tb in space with ntfs-3g to be able to mount a volume large enough to dump the images to).  The difficult part was what to do with those images.  My initial attempts of copying the files together and then mounting them failed miserably.  ntfsck ran for 150+ hours before I cancelled it.  chkdsk under Windows also bombed spectacularly on this image (I used Mount Image Pro to mount the dd images under Windows as drives).  I eventually was going to give up and try to just get what I could from the images, and was going to try to do that with Active@ File Recovery.  When I loaded that program I was pleasantly surprised to see a RAID button, that allowed me to select drives and say they were spanned and what order they were initially in.  After that I was able to tell it to copy out all of the old data, and even though that took forever, it did so successfully.  It did have errors copying one trash MP3 I was embarrassed to even own, I don’t know if that was at the junction point or if the file system was somehow broken where it was, but everything else copied out gloriously.

The hardest point of the process was that I couldn’t find any resources of anyone who had successfully done anything like this, so here you go.

Additionally, I freaking love my DroboPro.  I splurged on it because of the angst from my enclosure dying.

edit: Apparently I spoke a bit soon, as Active@ File Recovery doubles as an undelete program, some of the files that had at times existed in more than one place on the drive were messed up when copied off. Booooo. I still don’t know of anything else that would’ve worked. Putting the drives in an enclosure from a different chipset maker certainly is not a solution.

I have never really managed role models or heroes that I’ve wanted to emulate.  The closest I’ve come is wanting to emulate specific aspects of other people, most notably the more noble or interesting parts of my friends.  What I do manage to do however, is to collect people that I most definitely do not want to be like, especially those who I can see myself becoming if I’m not careful.

Among the most notable of these is Valerie Solanas. Especially as what little she did release was great (especially her SCUM Manifesto), her life and actions are tragic.  Her shooting of Andy Warhol was bad enough, that it effectively stopped both of them from releasing anything worthwhile again, essentially a murder-suicide in which no one died, is awful.

Things I try to learn from Valerie:

1) I shall acknowledge and respect the potential dangers of creative endeavors to my sanity
2) I will think big, because I may only get one shot at things
3) I will resist the appeal of shock for shock’s sake
4) Keep many copies of things
5) Be careful in business

I am unlikely to ever shoot anyone (though it is awfully fun to think about it sometimes), but there have been times that I could imagine ending up dying in poverty on the streets having accomplished something important and nothing at all.

This is video of her being escorted from court to jail.  If you look closely, at times you can tell that the weight of her circumstances has hit her.

Here’s an old desktop background of mine I made from screengrabs from this:

I figured it would be best to start off with a sacrifice, so we’ll begin with a lamb from an IKEA farm set.

I bought the set for the horse, so the rest of the animals were never really used except perhaps as cat toys, but this lamb did serve a short stint as the mascot for my ex-girlfriend’s dog when he was in super hero mode.

I’m not really a dog person.

HD is recommended (and is actually larger in resolution than the above player).