I used it before and for some reason didn’t take to it. When I bought my Powerbook I got a copy free. Now I’m using to make process diagrams and I’m wondering how I ever made sitemaps or anything else without it. Omni are a cool company. OmniWeb is a touch useless and may well die now Safari’s about, but everything else of there’s is pretty cool. I’ve got OmniOutliner as well which looks useful. However, I’m already using the almost identical functionality in NetNewsWire so I’m not sure how much use Outliner will get. NNW is not free though and I’m not sure I’ll buy it. I’ve given up using it to track BBC News and the Guardian and stuff, too distracting. I now use it to monitor the sites that update fairly infrequently but that I like to keep tabs on. Sites like Kuro5hin and Zeldman’s Daily Report. I’d love to use it to track the blogs of my friends, but none of them have RSS power. Honestly. ;-)

Not only can I position tracks in the Cubase style. You can also position sounds at some ridiculous resolution. I have no idea how close they are, suffice to say that when I positioned 8 beats in row it sounded more like a fart than a bassline. That’s what I call Squarepusher accuracy. I can now compose really complicated breakbeats and melodies and, more importantly, tweak them on the fly.

I just discovered how to use the arranger view in Live! Woo. Now I can actually build up some meaningful compositions!

I bought ben2.com for my work. Explaining how to spell A-F-T-N-N.org over the phone to clients was getting dull. Plus, I did feel a bit bad for putting commercial stuff into the .org domain. No biggie, just I’d prefer not to. Now I don’t have to.

Now I have to pry the work and the non-work parts of this site apart. Expect most of the about section to move to ben2.

I downloaded NetNewsWire last night to check it out. It’s an RSS browser for OS X. It’s pretty good. I’ve had trouble with being too addicted to the news before though and I don’t see this helping that at all! There’s just much better things to do than spend ages trying to keep up with the ever shifting world of facts. I don’t advocate being out of touch, I just think balance is important. Recently my news needs are kind of handled for me. Louise works as a journalist and either mentions or posts anything interesting to Hype. The same with other people. Like taking drugs through a dog, I use other people as bullshit filters.

Still, it got me looking at RSS. Its traditional RDF variation is a fairly dense grammar. Easy to do but heavy. Then I looked at Zeldman’s file, which is dead simple (view source to see the XML). It works just as well with NNW. It lacks time values, but then so do most of the RDF feeds.

So, the upshot is, I spent half an hour hacking and now my site has an RSS feed. Woo! Click it to your left.

Things got slightly silly today. We had a joke who’s the most middle class person competition on Hype, which was good fun until suddenly it turned very passionate and serious. I especially argued various dubious points. Why are people so ready to debate the class issue? As a group the people on Hypothetical are all pretty similar. All firmly middle-class, all supporting themselves, none too rich, none too poor. Yet, even we had much to protect. Why?

Then this evening Newsnight started a discussion between Tom, Louise and I about reading amongst kids that got really overblown. I argued that reading is not a cure-all solution for intelligence. Louise and Tom were slightly disbelieving. I stand by my point. Whilst books are an important part of learning, they are not an education panacea. Many children, including myself between about 12 and 18, read very few books indeed and “come out fine”. They get their knowledge from other sources. Newsnight confirmed this. The sample of boys they’d found to illustrate low reading rates were all doing fine at school. Too often reading is considered a bellwhether of learnedness and often I’ve felt stupid because I haven’t read as many books as my peers.

In the discussion, confusion and anger set in because I didn’t admit that books are obviously a fantastic source of information. Now I’ve “seen the light” I happily buy and read many books. I still only read around once a week though. I personally think that kids should read, but I also believe they probably shouldn’t hang out on street corners. The fact of the matter is that they do and most of them turn out fine. If my kids didn’t read I would encourage them to, but I wouldn’t punish them if they didn’t.

We resumed Dinner and a Movie night at Superflat. Whereby we invite Charlie over and cook food and, um, watch a film. Last night we were going to watch Amores Perros but it didn’t happen in the end. Instead Charlies gave me pointers on managing my portfolio (now almost completely sold) and we watched a bit of James Bond.

Dinner was good though. We started with some soda bread that Louise bought at the farmer’s market yesterday, it had the most ludicrously crunchy crust. For second course Louise had fish cakes also from the market. I cooked a Soy beef stir fry with egg noodles for Tom, Charlie and I. I actually managed to marinade the beef overnight which was nice, it was very tendy and very salty by the time we ate it. The stir fry ended up a bit of a mish mash again. I think that basically our hob is not hot enough to fry things quickly enough. Oh well. For desert Louise made meringues. They were lovely. They were fantastically sweet. We had them with whipped cream and raspberries. I killed the cream a bit by over-whipping it, but it was OK.

Ah yes, Jungle Chaos at the ICA. After meetings, food and buying Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi on DVD, Louise and I went to the second live night of the Cybersonica festival, featuring DJ Rupture, The Bug and Kid 606.

We missed Rupture sadly, though some guys I was chatting to said he was good. The Bug was quite ragga actually. A little unexpected, but quite nice. 606 was mash up. He played the expected crazy set with quite a long gabba interlude and some serious jungle mash up midway through. It was a little bit spoilt by his playing a crap downbeat number for the last track and then just running off stage when his set ended. All in all, OK, it was nice to get out definitely.

This morning we were woken up by the arrival of the new Harry Potter for Louise and Hacking the Xbox for me. Woo, books! I finished Blondie24 last night, so the timing couldn’t be better. Sadly, Rich blew the ending of Harry Potter on Hype, breaking our usual spoiler decorum. Louise is very pissed off about it in addition she didn’t sleep after the post arrived and is currently catching up.

Hacking the Xbox was self-published by it’s author Andrew “Bunnie” Huang because his signed publisher, Wiley, got cold feet, worried by Microsoft’s might and the provisions of the DMCA. It contains a long chapter written by Lee Tien on the implications of the controversial DMCA. It has a lot of information about the science of reverse engineering and learning the tools and skills you’ll need to apply that information in a hardware context, specifically the Xbox here (“Thinking Inside The Box”). It also has a series of interviews with master hackers. It looks great and I’m really looking forward to reading it. It’s not all Xbox centric, but at some point I hope to ply one out of the hands of one of my box-owning friends. I’m prepared to wait until it’s outdated though.

I thought I hated them enough. I’m now getting about 4 or 5 spam messages a day. Not too bad, I know, but it pisses me off enough. However, today I got a bunch of mailer daemon bounce messages from AOL because some bastard had used my address as the from and reply-to addresses on their Viagra spam.

Aaarrgghh! Everybody hates you! You are the worst, even worse than video games cheats! Please simply take you entire supply of Viagra yourself and explode your penis!

Yesterday Microsoft announced that there would be no more versions of Internet Explorer on the Mac. They actually said that people should use Safari instead. In the discussion of this point on various sites (Tantek, Zeldman) I learned that MS had previously mentioned that there wouldn’t be anymore standalone releases of IE/PC either, that it would all be part of the OS only from now on. Microsoft is effectively leaving the browser market.

But hang on, Microsoft owns the browser market, with over 90% share. So they’re leaving it for dead (ish). There will be no advancement in functionality on the desktops of 90% of the world’s web users until 2005, it seems, when Longhorn is released. By which point the W3C will probably have shed their earthy bounds and evolved into a race of super-beings and we’ll all be living on Mars.

What are we standards-loving hippy web devs to do between now and then? I hate IE 6. I have done for a while now. It’s 18 months old and due for replacement and now I’m being told that I’ve got to put up with the same useless browser engine for the next two years! It’s sad that nobody will upgrade. I guess people will migrate from IE/Mac to Safari pretty solidly, but that’s little consolation against the static edifice that is IE/PC usage. I can’t even get Louise to upgrade, let alone Joe Punter! If 90% of web users suddenly decided to upgrade from IE to Firebird, I would literally cry. Mainly because it’s so unfeasibly unlikely.

The worst thing is the idea that nothing will happen between now and 2005. Nothing at all, in two years, in the internet business. It’s an Ice Age.

Yours, Frustrated of Fulham.

Should have blogged this yesterday. Lazy blogger gain no audience. Anyway, the Furtherfield networking party on Saturday was good fun and very interesting.

The music side was a bit of a failure really. I didn’t take any headphones and the gallery didn’t have any, so, despite having lugged a crapload of vinyl all the way there (and later all the way back), I didn’t do any mixing. Doh! Bad DJ, no twinkie. The MP3’s went well, unsurprisingly, but there was actually a lot more content than I had expected and so I didn’t play very much music at all.

The other side of things, the art side, organised by everybody else, went well and was very interesting. There were several talks about projects people were working on, many of which looked interesting. They responded to each other as well, addressing the question of who’s an artist a couple of times and building into a discussion about net art as an area at the end of the last talk. I found this discussion particularly interesting. Several of the speakers and organisers talked a bit about how they’d started and the processes of their work.

I felt like a bit of an outsider some of the time. I was the only non-artist that I met. Everybody else’s work had some kind of meaning whereas mine is just technological faffing. More than that, the work that I appreciated I appreciated on a fairly shallow visual or auditory level, without any real feeling for the underlying importance. A lot of people talked about the coming together of artists and technologists but it seemed to me that it was much easier for an artist to start using technology than a technologist to start producing art. I wonder where it all starts for an artist. Many of the people there, particularly Tom Corby of Corby and Bailey seemed to have had a very long and deep association with the art world that I could never hope to replicate. This informed their work greatly.

It was a fairly fascinating event and I met some interesting people and held conversations in which I was completely out of my depth. I learnt quite a lot about the art community and I merrily drank a fair amount of booze. I’m very grateful to Marc and Ruth for letting me come along and I look forward to retreading the connections I created and attending more events.

I’ve put up the photos I took whilst in Norwich a couple of weeks ago. Took me far too long. However, I give you Baby Grace’s Christening and The Beginning Of The Summer At Thickthorn.

Sorry for the lack of real title. This is going to be a two-parter.

Part 1

I still can’t quite get used to the size of Margaret the Powerbook. I guess I did stare at Diane the iBook all day everyday for almost two years. I booted Diane up to copy some stuff today and felt slightly more at home, though not as cool. The screen on the Powerbook is fantastic. It’s brighter and the colours are more vibrant. It’s also noticeably clearer. It’s is a lovely piece of engineering. Each curve and corner perfect. I’m enjoying the keyboard as well, it’s slightly sturdier than the iBook one.

Part 2

I went to Hoxton yesterday. Hoxton is part of the Old Street/Shoreditch/Hackney area that just oozes cool. Old Street itself is a bit nasty, but dip off the main road and suddenly every other building is a gallery or a media company or something cool. It’s run down, there’s a lot of graffiti, but the graffiti is really cool and the run downness just gives it a lived in feel rather than a broken one. I did go to that area for two interviews, Lateral and Lshift, and I would still happily work there.

I went there to meet the people of furtherfield.org. They’re holding a party on Saturday at the Deluxe Arts gallery on Hoxton Square. It’s a networking thing for anyone vaguely creative. That makes it sound a bit marketing-horror, but the furtherfield people are cool and it’s just a little get together really. It’s nice and low tech, with a table for exhibiting stuff if you want to. I’m going to be in charge of the music, because I asked to be :-). I’m going to play some MP3s, mess around with Live and then smack some decks up with some bleeping electro for a bit. All in I’ll be making nasty sounds for about eight hours. I’ll also be curating the PA. If other people want to make sounds, I’ll hook them up. It should be fun, but I’m a bit nervous. I’m slightly worried about looking like a bit of an amateur next to some really hardcore sound artist dudes. I’ll maybe learn a thing or two. Mainly I’m feeling really good about the fact that my first gig in London and for ages is such a cool one. It’s miles cooler than anything else I’ve done.

I’m also looking forward to the networking part of it. The guys at furtherfield mentioned funding for projects and I said I would definitely be interested in providing know how to projects if there was money to be had. They mentioned phones, which is something that I’d like to explore, particularly network apps and stuff making use of photo messaging.

I need ones that go to 11…

Woo hoo! It arrived finally. First impressions:

• It’s actually surprisingly light for it’s size
• The screen is huge
• It’s very quick
• The titanium feels really quite nice, very tactile
• It’s a bit noisier
• The keyboard is mostly the same, but my fingers are nervous
• OS X is much happier on a 1Ghz G4 than a 500Mhz G3
• Much happier
• It’s very pretty
• Hard disk space! Woo hoo!
• Setting everything up is going to take time and I have work to do

And much, much more…

It was the first time I’d cooked a stew. It ended up cooking for 3 hours in the end, by far the longest cooking thing I’ve ever done. It went really thick in the last half hour and was much better for it, I’m sure. The beef was delicious. A slightly different taste from the steak and mince I’ve bought before. Ooh, that reminds me, there’s a pound and a half of mince in the freezer as well. God bless those organic rearing vertical farmers.

Stuff’s been going on, I just haven’t been blogging.

I spent 35 hours on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday writing a specification. It came to 30+ pages. At one point it had me totally curled up with stress. Louise gave me Bach’s Rescue Remedy, which managed to unknot me enough so that I could finish.

The Powerbook was nearly delivered on Thursday, but they couldn’t get in. The removal of the sticky may have been to blame. Grrr. I could have gone and got it yesterday morning, but nobody answered the phone and I didn’t know the address. It will come tomorrow. Joy.

Instead, Louise and I went to a farmer’s market in a car park in Notting Hill. It was pretty cool. All the food looked great and everybody was really friendly. We bought a bunch of stuff, including goose eggs, which were immense. I bought some braising steak, which I’m currently stewing. Man, it smells fantastic. I bought some black radishes which are going in as well. There’s also some potatoes, carrots, shallots and some of the Thyme I’ve been growing in there.

I’ve chilled a lot this weekend. I really wanted to kick back. I’ve got to do some work now, but that’s OK. I read the last issue of Wired which contains some really interesting stuff about concepts of space: network space, dump space, blog space, sex space, 30 spaces in total.

Also, Louise and I went to Kensington today and looked at furniture in a wonderfully couply way (2 years and counting :-). I saw a cool soft cube for £30 that I could sit on the balcony on. Also, desk bits in Habitat. I’m thinking of building a desk out of some leg bits and a chunk of glass. I want to move into the front room because at the moment I sit in a hall with no windows, whilst the sun shines in the next room. Plus I sit in a different room from my speakers. Ack! Anyway, a plan is germinating.

Oh yeah, last night I saw Seven for the first time! Sorry everyone. I won’t do a review, ‘cos everybody’s seen it. Suffice to say I really enjoyed it.

I live in a gated courtyard and the communicator thing from the gate to our flat is broken. I was expecting a delivery so I put a sticky next to the gate with my phone number on it so that the delivery guy could ring me and get in. Somebody removed it! Why? What on earth for? I would have removed it afterwards. Now I might have missed my package. It was my laptop, which I really really want. I just can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing. Not even kids out to annoy me would do that, it’s too subtly devious for them. Ack!

Ha ha ha ha hahahaaah ahah ahahahaaah ahahahhahaaa!!

The following code:

<html><form><input type BeGone></form></html>

Is enough to crash IE! Even 6! Ha ha!

Go here in IE/PC to find out.

Well, what to say? You know already. You’ve seen it in Attack of the Clones and in the Two Towers. Sequels, more to the point, second-of-trilogy films, are a disappointment.

The Matrix exploded on to the screen. There was a buzz for ages and amongst people who don’t go for buzz easily. It raised the SFX bar (though not as much as Joel Silver likes to think) and it combined a neat plot idea and a neat film-making innovation nicely. Reloaded didn’t. Like so many sequels before it, it barely nudged it’s head over the bar. It’s a lot better than Towers though, which was downright dull.

Of course the fights were really good. However, the much touted burly brawl demonstrated how far CGI has yet to go, particularly in animation. The first film worked wonderfully because they stretched live action to the limit. They haven’t been able to improve on that and CGI can’t yet offer them the level of realism such that I can’t spot it and tut. It proved a flexible tool and they worked it real good, but it was obvious and still clunky.

There were some neat plot twists and I am interested to see where it goes from here. Much more so than the other two trilogies. Reloaded expanded the world far beyond what I had expected although remained inside the boundaries set for them by the Animé they’re aping. However, there were some very slow parts, where the plot was doled out hamfistedly. There were also some downright cringeworthy bits. Most notably, the scenes in Zion really should have been left on the virtual cutting room floor.

Overall I’m tempted to put this film down to people with one good idea trying to flog it one time too many (two times too many — Revolutions), but it was slightly better than that. If they’d managed to keep the pace a bit more constant, livened up and decheesed the plot and made the fight scenes fit in a bit more smoothly, it could have been incredible.

Another Jake Gylenhaal performance and another really good one, fantastic facial expressions. I really liked this film because it asked questions about time and reality and all that stuff we’re used to but not in a science fiction way, but through Donnie’s psychological troubles.

Wonderfully, there was almost no ending at all. My flatmate Tom saw similarities between it and Jacob’s Ladder, but I’m not sure of the value of that comparison. Still, I thought it was really cool.

I thought this was nice. Jennifer Aniston, Jake Gylenhaal and John C Reilly were all really excellent. The plot didn’t go as deep as it could have done and it tied up a little neatly for me, but the key thing was that it was believable. It’s so rare to find people with believable flaws. People who, in the words of Charlie Kaufman, don’t learn life lessons through adversity, but carry on as they always were. Aniston’s character Justine has a brush with a different life, every step of the way it looks like she might not be able to return to her marriage as it was before, but in the end she pulls it together like nothing had ever happened.