New TV

I just got a nice shiny new TV; 26" Sharp LCD. Very impressed so far, no dead pixels (was sure there'd be at least a couple); everything works as it should although the interface is a bit duff. Normal TV looks a bit weird, but after much fiddling managed to get my XBOX to output Progressive Scan signals and that looks lush.

Thing is, the PAL XBOXs are capable of it and the PAL games have it in, but to enable it you have to run the Enigmah Videmode Switch code to convert the dashboard to NTSC, only then do you get the HDTV options in the frontend. All seems a bit silly that you have to do a dodgy hack to enable something which is there all along.

Anyway, have to say Halo 2 looks very nice in 16:9 480p, and Soul Calibur and Amped 2 both run at 720p which is pretty good. All I need now is the relevant cables for my PS2 and a new NTSC cube in order to experience all round Progressive Scan gaming.

Geldof complains about eBay Live8 ticket sales

Today, Bob Geldof described sales of Live8 tickets on eBay as "a disgrace". Sorry Bob, but you've only got yourself to blame, if you're going to give tickets away in a text lottery for £1.50 when people are willing to pay £100+ then maybe you shouldn't be in charge of raising money for charity.

The text lottery raised £3,000,000 about £40 for each of the 75,000 tickets which were sold. Considering the line up I would have thought the tickets would be worth more than that, and since they are selling on eBay for over £100 I would have thought right. At £100 a pop Geldof would have raised £7,500,000 which when you take the costs of organising the concert off is a 4 times increase in revenue.

Accusing the touts of making money on the back of a charity is all well and good but whether they go or someone else goes and they pocket £100 doesn't change the actual amount of money made. The tickets have been sold at their ridiculous low price now, the damage has been done, unless all those with tickets/that want tickets follow Wilkie's patent pending money raising method.

If you want a ticket, work out how much it is worth to you; find someone with a ticket and tell them your price. They must then either donate the difference to the charity and keep their ticket or you donate your money to charity and get their ticket. Of course any money they have already donated is offset against your price.

Since the point of the concert is to raise as much money as possible, I can't see any justification for holding onto a ticket if you are not willing to donate it's value yourself.

Alternatively there's plan B; scrap the concert and give the £1.5 million which would have been spent to charity, no-one can complain since £1.5 million to charity is much better than seeing your favourite bands play live.

New low

OK, I think I've sunk to a new low. I'm sad to report I actually sat through the entire 80 minutes of drivel that is the film Swimfan in order to notch up another review bringing me one step closer to my goal of watching 200 films in the year.

It gets worse because I actually paid £2.99 in order to subject myself to this. Apologies go ut to Neil who was dragged into the whole horrible mess with me.

UK Religious Hatred Law: How not to report it.

I happened to glance at the front page of the Telegraph today (article: here - registration/Bug Me Not required). There in large letters across the front of their paper is the headline "Now you face jail for being nasty to Satanists", maybe I'm just over sensitive but to me that suggests it is everyone's right to be nasty to Satanists for no reason other than their religious beliefs. Replace the word Satanist in that sentence with Christians/Muslims/Sikhs and publish that headline on the front of a "Quality" newspaper and there would be a serious problem.

The first paragraph in the article goes on to make the situation even worse "Extremist religious groups that advocate child abuse will be given protection under a Bill published by the Government yesterday". While not explicitly linking Satanism to child abuse in the context of the article the implication is clearly there. From further down the page... "Satanists, pagans and atheists would be protected."... again there is a heavy implication here that the religious beliefs of pagans and Atheists as well as Satanists do not deserve respect or protection in the UK which I had always assumed was a reasonably secular society.

I find it highly insulting that Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor of the Telegraph could imply a relationship between every Satanist and Child abuse. While I'm sure there are individuals out there who call themselves Satanists and use this as an excuse to commit acts of unspeakable evil; there are also those Satanists who follow teachings such as those of Anton LaVey. Having actually read some of LaVey's teachings (Presumably unlike Mr. Rozenburg), nowhere have I read any endorsement of Child Abuse or murder. In fact the 9th "Satanic Rule of the Earth" is quoted as "9. Do not harm little children".

Even more insulting is the implication that as an Atheist the Telegraph believes that people should be able to incite hatred against me; for that's what we're talking about here. The law isn't against speaking out against another person's religious belief, it's about "inciting religious hatred". Is it right for someone to stand on the streets telling people I'm evil because of my lack of faith and that I should be hated? From what I've read I can only assume that the Telegraph think so.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of the new law, in fact I feel it's completely pointless. It should be illegal to incite hatred for another person based on any reason; we don't need specific laws protecting incitement of racial or religious hatred. Inciting hatred against someone because you don't like their style of dress or haircut is as bad as for any reason yet there aren't specific laws against this. Yet another example of a specific law brought in when sensible, common sense enforcement of a more general law would suffice.

I can only assume that the Telegraph's biggest bugbear is that when this law comes into affect they won't be able to bad mouth Atheists, Satanists and Pagans in large writing across the front page of their paper.

Japanese Death Metal Madness

As I found out prior to my trip to Tokyo, there seems to be a reasonably large underground metal scene there, but whereas every unsigned UK band I know gets a nice webpage done by someone in the band or an arty friend and buys a decent domain name, in the Japanese Death metal scene sites with animated gifs of skulls which look pieced together like some kind of geocities gone wrong seem to be the norm.

The good thing is they always have links to about 30 or 40 other bands in the scene, so you can spend hours marvelling at how fucking metal they are then go and check out their mates' sites. I've turned this into a kind of game where I search for mp3s as very few bands ever have them on their site; the other part of the game is that if you're lucky you can find some amazing metal terminology which I feel Western metal bands should make more use of.

Take the band Gigaton for example, I've never heard their music but I attempted to buy their Album for this reason: They don't describe their music as "Death metal" or "Thrash metal", no they're much more metal than that. Having fused Death and Thrash into the "Death Thrash Metal" genre they when on to play it faster creating "High Speed Death Thrash" which they discovered was for pussies, thus came "Ultra High Speed Death Thrash" which leads to a fucking ULTRA HIGH SPEED DEATH THRASH ATTACK!!

How fucking awesome is that? While in the West we're listening to bands who are just Thrash or just Death, in Japan they've got an Ultra High Speed Death Thrash Attack going down. Now that's the shit I want to listen to. The best thing is, they sell T-Shirts which have that written across the back, I want one!!

Gigaton's links page has like 50 links to other Japanese bands far too metal for their own good, such as the excellent Bold Fat Missile (mp3 available on their site) and Fastkill (Relentless Thrashing Devastation from Japan!). Any one of these 50 links will link to at least another 10 new bands, you can spend hours just reading their websites and being in awe of their metalness.

Next time I'm in Tokyo, I'm soooo gonna check out some of these bands and bring back many CDs... Until then \m/ (x x) \m/ rock on Japan!

Audioscrobbler Addiction

After finally subscribing to Audioscrobbler last week, it's taken over my entire life in so far as listening to music goes. I'm always checking that tracks I've played have been counted correctly and if something's mistagged and doesn't get counted I feel like I wasted 5 minutes of my life listening to that track. I've got it set up at both home and work and I'm even pausing tracks if I leave the room in-case it adds a track I've not actually listened to.

Then there's the whole voyuerism thing, I can find out what all my friends are listening to, and what music complete strangers listen to and there's so many stats I'll never get bored.

Hmm, obsessive compulsive what?

Tale of iPod woe

Well, my iPod did something new today, I think 6 months of verbal abuse and being forced to work with non-Apple sanctioned software has taken its toll on the little bugger and it finally rebelled. The rebellion started with a fairly normal refusing to mount and crashing windows; then we had a game of I'm mounted but ml_ipod doesn't recognise me and neither does iTunes; this escalated into crashing iTunes everytime I plugged it in.

At this point the little shite pulled it's grand finale, deleting all my music from it's library leaving it uncapable of the one thing it has been reasonably good at up in till now - playing music when away from a computer. To make matters worse, it then refused to connect to my PC leaving me with a nice Apple branded paper weight.

After a little struggling, I forced it into running in disk mode, and gave him a thorough formatting and a stern talking to. I've uninstalled ml_ipod (a task in itself, my final solution being manually deleting the dll's from Winamp's plugin directory) and resorted to using only iTunes in the hope that this time some TLC in the software department will keep it running smoothly. I've got no problems to report in the 4 hours since I started this, but it's a tricky little bastard so only time will tell.

Bloody Cyclists!

I was reminded of something which regularly pisses me off, but today it has driven me to venting my opinions on the matter on my blog. It's 5:50, I'm on my way home from work and it's pissing down with rain, so understandably getting home ASAP is top of my agenda, but as I'm cycling along I come across the world's slowest cyclist.

Now this in itself isn't too bad, I know not everyone is as fit as me and can't sustain a steady 10mph on a flat surface but it gets beyond a joke when I'm freewheeling and catch him up, is he pedalling with the brakes on or something? With no room to pass I follow him for like 5 minutes trundling along, braking to let him get ahead then freewheeling to catch him up.

That is until we get to a red light when he sails straight through.... I mean, he's not in enough hurry to actually pedal but there is enough urgency to break the highway code rather than waiting the 30 secs for the lights to change. It pisses me off even more when 15 seconds after the lights go to green I've caught up with him again!

The only type of cyclist worse is people like him who deliberatley move in front of you at lights in order to get a 5 second head start, then trundle off at a walking pace leaving me silenty cursing them.

....rant over...