i am sparticus: Words

Ted Asks About Anti-Freeze

Ted asks:
can you freeze anti-freeze?

His Dark Materials Lacks God

According to the BBC the films of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials books will be stripped of all reference to God. If you haven't read the books then I'm not going to say anything other than go read them. If you have read the books you'll realise how stupid that is. I have no particularly clever comment to say on this, but I feel I should register my protest with it to the world in general.

How Record Stores Should Be Better

I wrote earlier about how at some point I really needed to explain to the world what was wrong with the way record stores ordered their cds. I've thought about this, and realised the only reason I want the ordering system changed is because I'm lazy and want to not have to move between three different genre racks to not find the CD I want (The Get Up Kids? Emo section, which was in the rack by Punk/Pop/New Wave until everyone got sick of their non-stop whining. If you really want them they're in a box out back crying like little wusses because nobody loves them). It'd be easier for me if every single CD was put into one big alphabetically organised display, but that might annoy the person who likes to spend time hunting down the latest 'ParaOeuns of Odin' release (Viking Metal section, which is three sections over from the Hip-Hop/Jazz cross over section). I'd also like it if someone could put all the fiction books in alphabetical order by author in the library. Am I the only one who finds it annoying to have to go between fantasy, adventure, sci-fi and then back to fantasy again to find the book I want? (and if the same librarians could also put up a big sign saying 'Hey Moron! The books are categorised under last name. I repeat LAST NAME!' that'd be great). Given time and effort I might be able to work out a system that combined the best elements of everything but as no-one's listening who'll be able to implement this system it seems like a lot of wasted effort and for someone who's lazy and has already spent the best part of ten minutes writing this I may as well not bother. Though I know come Saturday when I go record shopping I'll be annoyed when I can't find any Wilco (Americana lo-fi section, which can be found by tapping three times on the Billy-Joe poster, closing your eyes and then putting your hand through the divide between Acid House and Baroque).

Charlie and The Music Store

There's a typical independent music store in Ipswich, it's grubby, is run by three guys who see it less as a job and more as place they can hang out and get paid for doing it and it has an anally precise and slightly perverse organisational system for the CDs (Pavement? That'll be under 'American 90's indie-rock' which can be found underneath the Death and Thrash (but not Speed) Metal rack in a box marked 'Yahtzee!' (At some point I need to tell the world how shops should organize there CDs, but that's for another time and place)). So its a wonderful place to buy music especially when you find the entire At The Drive-In catalogue for £8.99 each.

So in the five minutes between taking In/Casino/Out by aforesaid band to the counter and being actually served by one of the staff I get the opportunity to over hear this conversation:
Staff Guy Yeah, apparently he mentioned that he buys his CD's from here in some teeny mag
Friend Guy Damn, that must be good for business.
Staff Guy *snorts* Nah, just get a bunch of kids pointing at the shop now and again. Sometimes the come in, stand around for a bit, and then leave.
Friend Guy Still, that's not so bad I suppose
Staff Guy What's worse is the letters though
Friend Guy The letters?
Staff Guy Yeah every week we get two or three letters saying stuff like 'if you could please pass on my details to him next time he comes in then I'd be eternally grateful, I know we're supposed to be together. Tell Charlie I still love him even though he caused Busted to split!' They're all crazy.

The sad thing is I'm actually going to go in there more knowing that there is the off chance I might run into him.

Like Happy Shopper

If you've been hanging around here a while you might remember the days that iamsparticus.com (or .co.uk as it then was) had a guestbook. This guestbook was the source of endless fun, mostly because my old school didn't ever block my website and people doing computing never seemed to actually do anything in computing other than browse the internet.

The other day, I found the much corrupted old database for the guestbook and in a fit of activity coded some php to make it readlable. I few hours of fiddling and it's ready to be put up online.

If you didn't go to school with me, or write anything in the guestbook you may think 'why should I care?'. I'd answer that by saying 'Don't!', but if you do have a spare few minutes and want to be vaguely amused, here are the best bits.

• Helen asks for advice for her garage loving sister.
• Stoobs sets off the whole 'why aren't we invisible thing'.
• Stoobs makes a damn funny comment.
• Anonymous starts off the whole 'Was it right to ring up Carolyn pretending to be a school inspector and tell her she was going to get chucked out of school?'
• Pixxe starts to get upset about his card being turned into garden furniture.

I apologise for the large size of the file (300 odd kb's) but what can you do?

Matthew's Birthday Message

I'm absent minded, so I apologise cousin Matthew for forgetting your 18th. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Now please get your website working before you use up all your teenage angst. As an upstanding Christian, you won't be able to regret all the getting drunk and having sex, and not being able to regret something about your 18th year alive is a serious social error. Therefore, BLOG EVERYTHING. Later, when you're famous you'll regret it every bit as much as the celebrities whose ex-girfriends are selling the sun the stories about the time in sixth form when they got caught drinking white lighting under the bridge by the police and were so scared they wet themselves. So that's my advice; document those last heady days of angst while you can.

Capstone and The Sun

I was listening to Capstone last night, and I was thinking, you know, not all Christian Worship bands are that bad really. No really.

And while I was thinking this I thought "I should write about that on my website". And then I thought, that's not much of an update. So then I thought "I know I'll add something to it, I'll add my favourite quote ever to the entry, the one I've been meaning to crowbar into an entry some how for ages though I've never got around to it".

Around the time of the 2001 eclipse Radio 1 were interviewing people off the street and asking if they knew the risks of looking into the sun without wearing safety goggles. One guy said "yeah, but it's not that bad really is it? I mean I often look at the sun, just to, you know, make sure it's still there". IF THAT'S NOT FUNNY I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS.

On a related note, if the sun did instantly disappear then the second we saw it disappear the earth would fly off on a tangent to it's orbit of the sun. This is because gravity travels at the same speed as the speed of light (sort of). I feel it should be a matter of priority to invest in a system that lets us know when the sun is going to disappear, that way we all know when it's really really important not to look up.

The Great Poll Vote Thing

Completely-rewritten, back-from-the-grave, all-singing-all-dancing, poll vote script! You know how this works and even if you don't you can probably figure it out.

Warning: main(/home/iascom/below/poll-vote/sug-include.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/iamspart/public_html/archives/2005/01/index.php on line 259

Warning: main(/home/iascom/below/poll-vote/sug-include.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/iamspart/public_html/archives/2005/01/index.php on line 259

Warning: main() [function.include]: Failed opening '/home/iascom/below/poll-vote/sug-include.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/iamspart/public_html/archives/2005/01/index.php on line 259

Any bugs, drop them in the comments.

Reasons I Am As Giddy As A Kite Today

• New series of ER on tv starting tonight! New series! Oh joyous day!
• Macworld! Before this week is out exciting Mac news all over the place! Hooray!
• Someone's agreed to lend me the Dumdums album!
  (8) "When the world is against you, I will protect you, darling we'll be an army of two."
• Idlewild are touring in March/April!
• I Purchased my Biffy Clyro ticket today. Shout-a-long-tastic! (If you think Biffy Clyro sounds like an awful name, then go purchase 27. Then go buy The Vertigo Of Bliss and listen to it non-stop till you realise you will never hear anything better.)
• I'm doing a church service in a prison on Sunday. If that isn't giddy inducing I don't know what is.

It's not much but it makes me happy. Today just keeps on getting better! Mondays should always be this fun!

A photo extravaganza

Well after my last post failed to set alight the world of trackback spam fighting I decided to go back to something I've a much better tradition of succeeding in, namely adding speech bubbles to photographs. Ladies and Gentlemen...

The Burberry Sale

Personally, I think this is absolutely hilarious. A more witty comment on the current state of British culture I have never seen. Cafferine however, who was with me at the time of captioning, thought it was the least funniest thing she had ever experienced in her entire life. I tell you this because I believe in free speech and that everyone is allowed an opinion. Also because it gives me a reason to show the internet this wonderful photo of Cafferine.

Finally, in an exciting photo trilogy, here is a picture of a scribble a drew the other day while explaining something to someone. If you can guess what it is I'll cut it out, stick a stamp on it and post it to you!

Here's a clue, I was explaining it to a young person, and I don't have to do any sex ed. lessons as part of my job.

TrackBack Spam Possibly Solved

Ages ago I mentioned about trackback spam and now it seems to have surfaced. The good news is that trackbacks are easier to kill than regular comment spam. You see, all real trackbacks have to come from a real website. You can fake a trackback, but then it won't come from the same place as the url's involved (or it'd be real one). It'll either come from a non-existant website or it'll come from an unrelated one, ones just picked to serve as dummies.
Hold that thought, as you consider this. All urls and html should be stripped out of a trackback pings excerpt by default. As far as I'm aware most blog software does this automatically or can be made to do it automatically. The only url (which is the whole point of the excercise, getting your url on their site) the spammer then has left to use is the one in the url part of the trackback spec.
Bring that thought back to the first thought. If you compared the ip the trackback was coming from with the ip of the url given in the trackback ping and they don't match you've got spam^*! If they do match then it's very unlikely to be spam, as that'd mean the spammers are running trackback pingers off the spammer's spam site's websites which is very unlikely.

I can see no problems with this, however someone else probably can, so feel free to correct me.

Footnotes

* Okay, so Blogger and Typepad may ping from one centralised system which would have a different ip, but I'm sure if it was needed Blogger and Sixapart could install pingers from each seperate ip.

An Army Of Two

As everyone who reads this regularly knows, I'm down with the cool music. My rock sensibilites are untouchable and I have the records to prove it. You dear reader however, almost certainly have rubbish taste in music. You'd be embarrassed about some of the records you owned if you only knew how awful they were. I know some of you have albums that would instantly destroy all your credibilty if people knew about them. The problem is though how do you know which ones are great and which ones aren't, after all you have no taste so how can you choose?
Don't worry though, because I'm such a nice guy and willing to share my good taste with you here is a bit of advice; get rid of that Dumdums album you own. It's most definately not on the list of rock-tastic bands and it's not like you've listened to it in the last three years.
If you're getting rid of it though, you couldn't give it to me? Only I'm interested in it for... uh... research purposes. Yeah. That's the one.

When Changing Servers

There are a few things that you should remember to do when changing over websites. One of them is remembering that your rank on Google is nothing special and that it's not the end of the world that searching for Mark Walley now returns some guy who started working at some technology company TWO YEARS AGO. Remember, it's not something to be bitter about, it doesn't really matter.

The other thing is remembering to change the default ftp account of your ftp program so that when you login to delete all the files from your old web server you don't delete all the files from your new one.

iamsparticus.com

.com! .com! .com! Today's reason for acting like a giggly teenager who's just met one of blazing squad's more obscure members is iamsparticus.co.uk is now a .com! a .com! just feel the way that sounds in your mouth DOT COM!

Unfortunately, and this is the reason I feel like a girl who still has 17 autographs left to get from one band, this means I'm no longer in the right place on google. This saddens me, but then I remember .COM and I'm happy again. So update your bookmarks, site links and address books! Everything's .com! And hey, if enough people start referencing my .com as opposed to my .co.uk I'm sure google will see me as it once did and I'll feel like a girl who's just met one of blazing squad's less obscure members, like... umm... Charlie from Busted!

Top Twenty Five Albums Ever

Sometimes, top fives aren't enough y'know? So I figure I'll try and put down, on paper, what my top twenty−five albums of all time are ever right now. I know the last bit seems to make little sense, but deciding my top twenty−five albums of now will change tomorrow, and deciding my top twenty−five albums of all time is impossible as today's bias creeps in. So these are the top twenty−five albums ever as seen by me.

1. The Bends — Radiohead: I shouldn't really have to explain why this album is the greatest album in the world ever, but as it's number one, it deserves some writing it about. It's fantastic. The guitars, the voice, the musical talent. Any arguments about how second albums are always rubbish can be ended by citing this one album. It's brilliant. If you do not own it then you are more than an idiot.
2. New Adventures In Hi−fi — R.E.M.: Whenever I announce that this album appears so highly in my favourite albums ever I get odd looks. People raise their eyebrows and go 'ahhh, interesting choice'. It's not an interesting choice. It's an obvious choice, because it's a fantastic record.
3. This Is Where I Stand — Easyworld: This album was only released a few years ago. Until a few months ago I'd say that this album gives me more hope for new music than anything else. Then they went and split up. However, the album still kicks all your asses.
4. See This Through And Leave — The Cooper Temple Clause: The day I bought this album I went to see them live. The gig was the best gig of my life, and so I'd like to say that this album is rubbish,but because the gig was that great it twisted my perception of this album so far that it now resides in my top five. However, that'd be a lie to try and impress on you how good that gig actually was. The album is awesome, and has the distinct merit of having the best side one, track one in the context of opening an album ever.
5. The Vertigo Of Bliss — Biffy Clyro: I'm not sure whether I should put this album this high, being that I only bought a few months ago. However I'm reckoning that in five years time it's still going to sound more rock and roll than anything else. So it's going in.
6. Relationship Of Command — At The Drive—In: I think it's at this point I'm allowed to stop wholly concentrating on the good points and start bringing up the negative points of an album. This album is too short.
7. Ok Computer — Radiohead: I'm not sure how I can explain this album, so I won't. It does have Karma Police and Paranoid Android on it though, which are the two greatest songs ever written. I'm not sure how it only manages to come in at 7, but such is rock music I suppose.
8. Glo — Delirious?: People often slag off Christian music. I think this album is written just for them. It's almost as if it's as overtly Christian as possible just to really slap it in the face of those who doubt that actually songs about God are much better than those about Satan. Heathens.
9. Kid A — Radiohead: Three Radiohead albums inside your top ten? But why?Because they're that good okay? And yes I realise this is the crazy pretentious album, but I couldn't really care.
10. Definitely Maybe — Oasis: The greatest classic straight rock album ever. Probably the first ever album I purchased too. Get me.
11. Tom McRae — Tom McRae: You know how people rabbit on about how great Damien Rice is? I'm not going to diss him, but everything he does, Tom McRae does better. And darker.
12. Hope Is Important — Idlewild: Of all the albums released ever, this is the one I most want to steal the name of. Hope is important, as is this album.
13. Pinkerton — Weezer: Take the below description, and add in an extra "really", you get the idea.
14. Weezer (The Blue Album) — Weezer: Take the words "melodic", "guitar−pop", "not really emo" "really really good" and put them in some form of sentence.
15. Captain — Idlewild: Technically a mini−lbum, but who really cares about technicalities?
16. Infinity Land — Biffy Clyro: I really really like the first thirteen tracks of this thirteen track album. Plus, best shout along song since the 'killing in the name of'.
17. Is This It — The Strokes: You know, I probably shouldn't rank this album so highly as it undermines my underground coolness. However, I will rank it highly because it's good. So there.
18. United By Fate — Rival Schools: More supposed Emo. It can't be though,because everyone knows emo sucks.
19. Blackened Sky — Biffy Clyro: I really really like the first three tracks. The other ones are quite good too.
20. Kill The Last Romantic — Easyworld: It's got this chiasmatic thing going on that's really quite awesome. Respect.
21. 100 Broken Windows — Idlewild
22. The Colour And The Shape — Foo Fighters
23. Yesterday Went Too Soon — Feeder
24. Bring It On — Gomez
25. A Grand Don't Come For Free — The Streets

I'm wrong aren't I? So tell me so.

New Years Eve

I think it's fair to say that tonight was not as nearly as bad as it should have been. By all rights it should have been an awful let down, but instead it was really rather fun. I won't go into details because you dear reader are probably very tired, or hungover, and you definately can't give a stuff. However, I do have to give big up shout outs (nuff respect inna area) to Mrs. Pixxe (that'll be his Mum, not his Wife) for giving lifts home. I know that I, Seb and Cafferine are all very grateful.

Happy 2005 Everyone!

And now, bed.