Ready to go

October 28, 2007 by Leave a comment

I guess it was inevitable that I would follow up a post about slacking with a month-long silence, but my inactivity hasn’t been born of pure idleness. The amount of time I have to spend in front of a computer screen is limited, and for the last few weeks I’ve been concentrating on upgrading my machine to the Second Life specifications.

Putting in the hardware didn’t take too much time. I’m usually fairly relaxed about handling computer components, since my experience is that all the stuff you read about circuit boards being exquisitely sensitive to static is nonsense. Even so, I always feel a bit tense when I hit the power switch after messing around with the motherboard, and this time it seemed that my apprehension was justified, since the machine responded with nothing but the plaintive bleeps of the BIOS error signal.

I soon tracked down the problem though – incompatible memory. I had meant to buy PC133 DIMMs, but had made the mistake of having a few drinks before going on eBay, and carelessly bidding for PC100 modules instead. (I had noticed this about 1 second after hitting the “bid” button, leaving me hoping that someone would outbid me in the last few seconds, like they always do when it’s something that I want, but no luck). Once glance at the motherboard documentation would have told me that PC100 memory wasn’t going to work, but I was in too much of a hurry to bother with that.

Once I had the hardware sorted out I moved on to installing the new OS. I’ve been using the Mandrake/Mandriva distro ever since I started with Linux a few years ago, and have always found it straightforward and reliable, so I decided to go for their latest release. Mandriva, like most of the desktop-oriented distros nowadays, comes in a “live” version that runs from the CD, so I was able to confirm that it would work with my new hardware before I put anything on the hard drive. I’ve installed a few different Linux distros on various laptops and desktops now, and always found it much easier than installing Windows, though to be fair the last Microsoft product that I tried installing from scratch was Windows 98, so more recent versions might be better.

So, hardware sorted, OS installed, GUI (Gnome) configured, latest version of the Second Life Linux client downloaded – I’m all ready to go. I have a couple of hours spare, so I’m going to try it out right now – watch this space to see how I get on.

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Elevate me later

October 2, 2007 by Leave a comment

There was a brief period in the early 1990’s when I felt that I was just ahead of the curve, culture-wise. My habitual approach to life – a mix of unfocussed ambition, vague dissatisfaction and general underachievement – was given a label, and for a while it seemed as if I was where it was at. I was a slacker, part of what might have become a movement if it had got its act together. Once it was identified though, slacking started to become hard work. It wasn’t enough any more to spend your free time getting stoned, reading comic books and listening to Pavement records; you had to consciously cultivate some sort of lifestyle. Ultimately it all became commodified, just like every other strand of youth culture. There wasn’t much resistance to this process, which was inevitable I suppose, since the essence of slackerdom (for me anyhow) is that feeling that there is something wrong with your life, or the scene, or the government or something, but you can’t quite be bothered to find out exactly what it is, let alone do something about it. Or maybe that’s not it. Whatever.

Anyway, I was thinking about this while doing some half-hearted research into the whole social-networking phenomenon, and more specifically into Facebook. I knew that this wasn’t exactly bleeding-edge stuff, but I didn’t realise quite how lame and dated any post on the subject would look until I saw that even the Daily Telegraph had already printed dozens of articles about it.

I suppose I can take some comfort from the knowledge that this blog is proof that I haven’t sold out that underachieving slacker ethos.

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On the Game Grid

October 1, 2007 by Leave a comment

Flicking through the TV channels the other night I came across an airing of the sci-fi classic Tron. Watching it reminded me how immensely excited I had been when it first came out in 1982.

Back then I had a subscription to OMNI magazine, which had run a big feature on the movie ahead of its US release, making it look just about the coolest thing ever. In those days, before the studios got paranoid about piracy, there used to be a much longer gap between a film’s premiere in the States and its worldwide distribution than is customary now, so by the time Tron finally hit my hometown I was in a state of advanced anticipation. I queued to get a ticket for the opening night, lured by the promise of a heavily-hyped laser show, playing in lieu of a supporting feature, which duly blew my mind, despite consisting in its entirety of nothing more spectacular than a small green dot tracing out simple geometric patterns.

With all this build-up the film itself was at risk of being a major anticlimax, but it lived up to all my expectations. The clean lines and blocky aesthetic of the virtual world looked exactly like I imagined the inside of a computer would appear, and the real-life sequences that book-ended the story were quite appealing too. A world where a guy could be popular by virtue of knowing how to operate a computer seemed, to my teenage mind, to be a pretty neat place to live. True enough the hero, Kevin Flynn, had seen his attractive blonde girlfriend leave him due to his obsession with video games, but he didn’t seem too perturbed by this (probably because he looked like a young Jeff Bridges) and anyway she had dumped him for an even bigger nerd, which was a reassuringly life-affirming message at that point in my social development.

(Interestingly, having played my teenage role-model in Tron, Jeff Bridges went on to portray my adult ideal in The Big Lebowski, but that’s another story).

I’ve seen Tron a few times on the small screen since then, and I think that it still stands up fairly well. The angular virtual landscape, which makes a virtue of its artificiality, appeals to me more than the faux-reality of modern online worlds. The plot, an archetypal heroic quest, is presented with brutal efficiency, compressing into 96 minutes a story arc that The Lord of the Rings stretched out over three interminable instalments. And it teaches an important life-lesson – if you’re engaged in an epic struggle with a malevolently sentient computer, take care not to sit at a desk right in front of a huge matter-disintegrating laser controlled by said computer.

This blog is in grave danger of turning into an Abe Simpson-style nostalgia-fest, but just in time I have received a large package from Amazon containing my new graphics card, which, assuming I can get it working, will finally let me get into Second Life, and get this project back on-topic.

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Attack of the Mutant Space Zombies

September 19, 2007 by Leave a comment

I was quite alarmed when I read this story from Peru today. A meteorite falls to earth and hundreds fall ill; how long before the alien virus (for that is what it surely is) starts turning people into crazed mutant zombies? Sure, Peru seems like a long way away, but this kind of infection tends to have an unpredictable incubation period, so there are probably already symptomless carriers spreading the contagion. We’ll see cases in Lima, then fleeing tourists will take it to North America, and from there it will go global.

Like most municipalities, my home town is woefully unprepared for mass zombie attack. I can only hope that, faced with a rising tide of the undead, the authorities will relax our strict gun-control laws, and issue firearms to surviving citizens. Based on extensive experience of playing Doom and Resident Evil, I would favour a pump-action shotgun, though I guess a good 9mm pistol would do, so long as it had a 25-shot magazine, since zombies can usually take a few bullets before they go down. The whole situation is likely to be fairly chaotic, so I think I could depend on finding plenty of ammunition just lying around.

I’m probably more prepared for this sort of emergency than most people, having suffered from zombie-phobia since childhood. As phobias go, it’s quite a good one to have, since it doesn’t really impact much on my day-to-day life, and an extreme aversion to animated corpses is likely to be quite adaptive once the damned start wandering the earth, feasting on the flesh of the living.

I can trace my fear of zombies back to my first viewing of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, when I was in my early teens. I’ve seen the film several times since then, and while I can appreciate Romero’s sly critique of consumer culture, my visceral reaction is still “Arrrgh!! – Zombies!!”.

My condition seems to be getting worse as the years go by. I haven’t been able to see any of the more recent zombie flicks, like 28 Days After or Shaun of the Dead, and I’ve had to give up playing zombie-themed video games. Even writing this post will probably give me nightmares.

Why do I find zombies so scary? The idea that friends and neighbours could shed their veneer of civilisation and try to kill and eat me must tap into some sort of subconscious paranoia. There’s definitely a sexual subtext too – a fear that libidinal energy might overwhelm the ego and allow the unrestrained id to act out its destructive impulses. (I’ll blame that on watching Cronenberg’s Rabid at an impressionable age). Then there’s the pitiless and relentless nature of the undead, which surely echoes the creeping reality of human mortality. Or maybe it’s just because the putrefied complexions of the living dead look really unattractive.

Anyway, I’m going to go out to the shopping mall tomorrow, to check out how easy it would be to block all the entrances with big lorries. I might look into learning how to fly a helicopter too…

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Technical Update

September 12, 2007 by Leave a comment

Upgrading my computer is turning out to be a bit more complicated than I had anticipated. I’d thought that it would just be a case of ordering a new graphics card and slotting it in, but I hadn’t reckoned with the fact that technology has moved on a bit since the last time I took an interest in the inner workings of my machine.

Things are made more difficult by the fact that I have only a hazy idea of what is inside the case at the moment. I bought the machine, without any documentation, at a bankruptcy auction about four years ago, and, apart from putting in a new hard drive a while back, I haven’t had any reason to open it up.

The last time I was in the market for expansion cards, they came in two flavours, PCI and ISA, which lets you know that it wasn’t yesterday. I had heard about the introduction of AGP, and I guessed that my current motherboard probably had such a slot, since it was modern enough to support a P4 chip. A little web searching helped me track down the specifications of the board to confirm this. (Tip: to find out more about your motherboard, make a note of the BIOS version listed in the setup menu, type it into Google, and you should end up with a link to the documentation for the board). To further complicate things I discovered that there are several different types of AGP slot, but luckily I managed to find this page, which reassured me that my board should be able to take any new card that I bought.

The card also has to meet the Second Life minimum requirements, with enough to spare to ensure that I don’t have to do all this again when they upgrade their system, not to mention working with Linux, preferably out of the box.

Eventually I narrowed it down to the nVidia GeForce 7 Series. I chose nVidia over ATI because the nVidia Linux drivers seem to be a bit more stable. (Purists would say that the drivers aren’t truly open-source, because nVidia don’t release the source code, but I’m willing to compromise to get this project off the ground). I would have gone for a cutting-edge 8 Series card, were it not for the fact that they seem to only come in PCIE format, AGP having evidently passed the date of its planned obsolescence. Most 7 Series cards are PCIE too, but I managed to track down the Inno3D 7600GS which comes in an AGP version.

I’ve gone into all this in rather obsessive depth, partly to explain why I haven’t managed to get my act together sooner, but also because the experience has made me reflect on how the way I use a computer has changed over the years.

Like many boys of my generation, in the UK at least, my introduction to computing came through the ZX Spectrum, back in the 1980’s. (I did have an Atari 2600 before that, but I don’t think that counts as a proper computer). I used to spend hours labouriously typing in programs written in Z80 machine code, which even at the time was pretty arcane. I created some neat stuff, including an Asteroids knock-off which, in my opinion anyway, was as good as the commercially-available games of the era. I might have gone on to a great career in the industry, if I hadn’t gone off to University and been distracted by drink, drugs, music, politics and girls.

Medical students today seem to spend most of their time sitting in front of computers, but back when I was at medical school “Information Technology” meant the telephone. I did have a couple of friends from the science faculty, who would sometimes talk about a wonderful thing called the “internet”, but nobody paid much attention to them.

It wasn’t until a few years after I graduated that I got myself a PC. I did a bit of programming, subscribed to a couple of magazines to keep up with technical developments and regularly dismantled the machine and rebuilt it with new components.

Then, around the mid-90’s, I acquired a 14.4 modem and discovered the internet, which at that time was just starting to become a mass phenomenon. I was soon enjoying Usenet groups and the first primitive web pages. I remember when I upgraded to a 33.6 modem (a US Robotics Sportster which cost me £200 – I dug it out of the cupboard a few weeks ago when my broadband connection broke down, and it still works) and was completely amazed at the speed. I taught myself HTML (in those days AJAX was something you cleaned the bath with) and put a few pages up on Geocities.

As time passed I lost interest in the computer in itself, and increasingly saw it just as a box that I used to access the net. Eventually I gave up trying to create any online content, web pages or even newsgroup posts, and settled into being a passive consumer of information. This blog is the first time in ages that I’ve tried to reverse the process, and I have to admit that I’m finding it hard going, since every time I sit down with the intention of composing a post I tend to be distracted by essentially aimless browsing. (I have a bad Wikipedia habit, as you’ll know if you’ve followed any of the links from this post).

Anyway, I’ve ordered the graphics card from Amazon, and I should have it by the start of next month. While I’ve got the case open I’m going to put in some more memory, a bigger hard drive and a DVD-RW drive, and I’m also planning to install the latest version of the Mandriva Linux distro. Once I’ve got all that up and running I should be able to install the Second Life client, and finally get down to business.

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This ain’t the Mudd Club

September 10, 2007 by Leave a comment

The first record I ever bought was the 7″ single version of “Heart of Glass“, back in 1979. This came to mind today when I read that Hilly Kristal, owner of CBGB’s in New York, had died, just a year after the club was forced to close as the neighbourhood around it gentrified. CBGB’s hosted early gigs by Blondie, and several other bands that I grew up with, like Television, Talking Heads and the Ramones, so the news of Hilly’s death produced the depressing realisation that a time that I had lived through was being consigned to the history books.

I visited CBGB’s a few times in the early 90’s, though by then the club’s glory days were long past, and the bands I saw were completely forgettable. At least the Bowery was still authentically scuzzy, and observing the street life was quite entertaining. I remember being tremendously impressed by the general grittiness of New York the first few times I visited – it was exactly how I had imagined it would be from watching Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. I hear that the city has been cleaned up a bit in the last few years, which I guess is good news for New Yorkers, if disappointing for Scorsese-loving tourists.

The last time I was in New York was 1992, for the CMJ. I saw some great gigs during the course of that event, notably The Flaming Lips and The Jesus and Mary Chain, both on the same bill at the Roseland Ballroom, and enjoyed some interesting social interaction with the local music crowd.

Now CBGB’s is gone, Joey, Johnny and Dee-Dee are dead, and the time when I would jet across the Atlantic to go to a music festival is nothing more than a fading memory. I keep meaning to go to SXSW or Burning Man, but at some point in the last decade my life became too complicated to do things impulsively, and I’m no good at planning ahead, so I don’t think it will be happening any time soon.

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Jerome update

August 28, 2007 by Leave a comment

Jerome hadn’t posted in his blog for a couple of weeks, causing me some concern, since if it turned out he had died my light-hearted comments about his health were going to look in rather poor taste. However he’s back now, and looking fairly fit in the photo he’s posted. No word on his scan results or job search though. Doesn’t he know that people are worrying about him?

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I fear to watch, yet I cannot turn away

August 22, 2007 by Leave a comment

Actually I take back what I said about the X-Factor. Having watched the first show of the new series, I have reverted to the view that they expect us to laugh at the hopeless losers, especially when they burst into tears during the post-rejection interview. To be fair to the producers they do leaven the cruelty with some sentimentality, by featuring stories like that of the girl who only entered the competition to realise her late father’s dying wish. Luckily she had a good singing voice, and the judges were spared the embarrassment of having to crush her dream at the first audition. No doubt they’re saving that poignant moment for a future episode.

It makes for morbidly fascinating viewing for a while, though it is best enjoyed in small doses. I always end up wondering why people are willing to subject themselves to humiliation on national TV (and worldwide via YouTube), when a moment’s reflection would tell them that their chances of success were close to zero.

Is reality TV culture blunting our collective discernment and self-awareness, or merely giving a platform to people who are already suffering from delusions of talent? A clue that the latter is the case comes from the observation that winning a TV talent show is far from a guarantee of lasting fame. Most of the acts that have emerged have been briefly tolerated by the public before slipping back into the limbo of Z-list celebrity. (For some the backlash comes with frightening speed – Steve Brookstein, winner of the first series of X-Factor, was reportedly booed off the stage at his first concert. People weren’t just indifferent, they actually paid money to go to his show and give him abuse). To me this suggests that the audience for these shows is tuning in to see the drama of success and failure (especially failure), rather than to appreciate the artistry of the performers. The alternative – that the likes of Shayne Ward really do represent the musical taste of the UK population – is too horrible to contemplate.

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My friend Jerome

August 13, 2007 by Leave a comment

Having jokingly linked to Jerome’s Unemployment Blog yesterday, I now find myself worrying about the poor guy. Not only is he out of work, but he’s sick too. Luckily he seems to have health insurance. His doctor sent him for a CT scan, which made me think that Jerome must be really ill, until I remembered that in the US the structure of the health care system encourages lots of expensive investigations, whether they’re needed or not. Here in the UK, with our socialised medicine, we only order scans for people who we think might actually have something seriously wrong with them.

Anyway, Jerome’s scan was clear (apart from some slight abnormality which he is going to get an MRI scan for – and Americans wonder why their health insurance is so expensive) so his doctor thinks he probably has a gastric motility problem. Obviously it’s difficult to diagnose things over the internet, but I would have guessed that from his original description of the symptoms, thus saving thousands of dollars, not to mention all the radiation he will have got from the CT scan. I would probably have ordered the ultrasound to exclude gallstones though.

I feel like I really know Jerome now, to the extent that I feel able to second-guess his doctor about what might be wrong with him. This despite the fact that he or she is presumably a reputable professional who will have carefully examined Jerome and considered all the relevant data before coming up with a rational plan of investigation, whereas all I have to go on is some scraps of information and my ill-informed prejudices about American health care (which I got from watching ER and Nip/Tuck). Completely absurd of course, but like I said before, the internet is great at producing the illusion of intimacy. I don’t know if Jerome will find my interest in his health a bit creepy, though I would hazard a guess that yes, he just might. That’s what happens if you put details of your personal life on the web for all to see though.

And, Jerome, if you’re reading, listen to what your doctor says, not what some stranger on the internet tells you.

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Some encouragement

August 12, 2007 by 5 Comments

There is some evidence that I am not the only reader of this blog – it gets a few views from people referred by Google, though most of them seem to be searching for something else. I also got a supportive comment from the writer of the blog Surface Earth (have a look, and see if you can figure out what it’s about), but he or she came across this page by accident too. My Technorati authority rating remains stuck at 1, with a ranking of 3,915,745.

Luckily, like most bloggers, I don’t need much encouragement to keep sharing my thoughts with the world. The main problem is finding time to sit down in front of the computer long enough to complete a worthwhile post. It would be a lot easier if I was unemployed.

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