The Null Device
2002/2/17
It's a twisted world we live in when you get spam for an online horse auction and your first thought is one of relief that it's not another ad for a bestiality porn site.
A few days ago, Meg posted an entry to her blog asking people for their lists of classic albums. So here's mine (with a few liberties taken):
- This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears Beautiful in a heartfelt, introspective sort of way, with songs like Song to the Siren and Another Day, not to mention the various evocative instrumentals.
- Slowdive, Souvlaki (or perhaps Just For a Day, or Pygmalion.. aw, sod it, everything Slowdive ever recorded.)
- Dead Can Dance, Within the Realm of a Dying Sun. A work of transcendent, enrapturing beauty; the last track, "Persephone (the gathering of flowers)", just says so much to me about the human condition and the fleeting intensity of life, all without words in any known language.
- The Paradise Motel, Left Over Life To Kill and Some Deaths Take Forever. The former being their first Australian EP, not the UK rerelease album; the latter being the remix EP for it, which is much more original and groundbreaking that anything described as a "remix EP" has any right to be.
- And a few classics: New Order, Power, Corruption & Lies, The Cure, Faith and Disintegration, Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, Radiohead, OK Computer (with honourable mentions to Kid A and Amnesiac), Massive Attack, Mezzanine, and one or two random Depeche Mode albums between Some Great Reward and Violator inclusive.
Any comments?
An interesting piece about MacOS X's internals, from a Reg reporter at BSDCon.
(MacOS X is a curious blend of elegance (Cocoa and Interface Builder, and the rendering model) and awkwardness (mostly to do with how MacOS was grafted onto NeXTSTEP/UNIX; the fact that the two layers of the system have different character formats and concepts of timezones, for example, and that devices such as sound are not represented in the POSIX layer (without linking to Carbon libraries, which is cheating), and the fact that Classic applications run essentially with root privilege, bypassing UNIX file protections entirely, makes it look a bit like P.T. Barnum's Fijian Mermaid in places. And then there's the still immature UI. But other than that, it's a nice OS.)
Scare meme of the day: Getting too much sleep can shorten your life. A study has shown that people who sleep for eight or more hours a day tend to have a higher mortality rate than those who sleep six or seven hours. (via Reenhead)