freedom, etc.

Here is me funneling their noise through my bodily systems and into my iPhone. On the widget below you can listen, download it, comment it, all that stuff. This is off the latest album All Creatures Will Make Merry.

The other great thing about blasting out Meursault tunes is that I can sing in my own accent without it sounding weird! Bonus (happy now Dad?). This one is dedicated to Brian and Emily who kept poking me to post more stuff.

Technical stuff: got it on the third take. It’s DADGAD tuning with capo on 3rd; check out the videos online to figure it out. The iPhone 4 seems to have put a few clicks in there that Garageband can’t get rid of (low-tech, hell yes). I’d think about adding some overdub to the ahhhs at the end but I’m keeping these recordings as unfucked-with as possible.

]]> http://aaronbell.org/journal/2010/07/wherein-i-sing-a-scottish-song/feed/ 9 http://aaronbell.org/journal/2010/06/films-from-far-lands-2010/ http://aaronbell.org/journal/2010/06/films-from-far-lands-2010/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:12:48 +0000 air http://aaronbell.org/journal/?p=1773 I posted about the NYAFF this time last year, and that entry is still on the front page! Oh facebook and twitter, how you have robbed personal blogs of material.

Here’s the festival trailer for 2010 (best enjoyed full-screen, right-click and Watch on YouTube):

This year I’m committed to:

• Yatterman, 25th June. Takashi Miike doing weird comic-book stuff. I may have a ‘doctor’s appointment’ to make this screening.
• IP Man 2, 25th June. Big-budget kung fu epic, the opening film.
• IP Man, 26th June. This was a huge hit apparently.
• Storm Warriors, 27th June. Completely over the top, stylised manga action.
• Pink Power, 2nd July. Yes, this is basically porn.
• Short film programmes 2nd and 3rd July. They reckon the production values are high on these wee films.
• Symbol, 4th July. Proper madness, hopefully like Funky Forest from 2006.
• Ancient Dogoo Girl, 4th July. Story: hero discovers clay figurine and unleashes girl-demon with magic boobs. Yes, totally insane.
• Hanging Garden, 6th July. Bit of class here.
• Electric Button, 7th July. Looks titillating.
• Castaway on the Moon, 7th July. Nice premise, dude is stranded on an island in the middle of a city.
• King of Thorn, 11th July. Anime! Aliens!
• Nightmare Detective 2, 14th July. Ah, dream-based psychological horror.
• Memories of Matsuko, 15th July. Happy musical action to finish off.

Come join me in the madness!

A hat, yesterday

Now and again I mess around recording stuff with Voice Memos on the iPhone. Since I managed to get through three minutes of a Veils tune without any major fluffs, here it is in all its low-fi glory. You should be able to play using the widget here. If the play button doesn’t appear below, you probably need to view this post on TF as intended, or just get the mp3. Listen out for the plectrum-hitting-table noise at the end, it’s a highlight.

To hear the proper unmangled version, get Sun Gangs. Old suedefaced Bernard Butler worked on this one, the opening track.

Also this is probably a good opportunity to plug Stu’s band Kontakte, who employ more advanced recording techniques : )

First impressions

I’ve used an iPhone for a couple of years now, so that gives you a certain perspective. The icons and such look very familiar. The first thing that hits you is: holy shit there is just a ridiculous amount of screen space. In reality it’s a modest 1024 by 768, but after using a phone it’s pretty striking. I think how you react to this device depends on what you compare it to: is it a big phone, or a small computer?

Although you have this expanse of screen, the icons and buttons are still iPhone-sized. They feel dwarfed, relatively speaking; you have to aim carefully with your fingers.

Typing

An iPad, yesterday

At first typing is definitely weird. The reason: no tactile feedback. It is not possible to touch-type on a glass screen. This means you have to look at the keyboard most of the time, which is unnatural; the letters are appearing somewhere up there in hopefully the correct order.

After some time you get used to it, eyes flicking back and forth. I completely rely on landscape mode though (bigger keys to hit). The little keyboard clicks are indispensable.

Last bit of weirdness: an iPad forces you to cut your fingernails really short! Long-nailed typists just receive a series of clacky noises and nothing happens.

The good stuff

Things with big sweepy gestures are lovely. Google Maps is a whole new experience; it genuinely feels futuristic. You are holding a high-res atlas that comes to life in your hands; looking down, you sweep the world below you around, grinning like a retarded god.

The feel of the iBook is great. There’s a wee gimmick where you can grab the page and wave it around instead of just reading the fucking thing. The popup dictionary is beautifully styled and charming.

Random stuff:

• IMDB is outstanding, very polished.
• Frotz uses all the space! Lovely.
• Evernote have made a decent effort but there’s no A-Z index of your notebooks.
• Netflix is magical: all your Instant Play films appear on the device, just like that.
• Wikipanion is good for WPing.
• Epicurious is great, swipe-able food and cocktail recipes.
• There are few ‘native’ Twitter apps yet (just Twitterific so far). The best Facebook interface is just using the website in Safari.
• Oddly enough, games that use virtual joysticks play much better! Critical Wave, Mini Squadron.

The baws

So first up, you want to install stuff. Unfortunately, AppStore is slow as balls. Navigation is worse than the iPhone version; you can’t just look at free stuff, for example. You have to drag down two columns, slowly loading ten items at a time, going slowly cross-eyed. If you choose to install something, back to the start you go! Awful.

The iPad does run your existing iPhone apps, but by default they appear in a highly comical phone-sized window. You have the option to scale up the display by two, brute force. There is pixelation.

If you already have a lot of iPhone apps, prepare to be disappointed. Apps fall into these categories:

1. Already updated to support iPad. Give that developer a banana! You install it, it works on the new screen size. Beautiful. Only a few developers are this responsible.
2. Never going to be updated. If you want to run this, it’s going to look shit forever. For some apps this doesn’t really matter. Example: Guitar Toolkit is still great at tuning guitars.
3. There’s an updated version, but they’ll make you pay for it. Even though you already bought it for iPhone. Also, for the privilege of running a tweaked iPad version, you are given the opportunity to pay TWICE AS MUCH. Pay again for Civilisation? At double the price? To get a buggy version that crashes? FUCK YOU, Firaxis games. FUCK. YOU.

Typing badness: for people who care about stupid things like punctuation, the keyboard is shit. Apple evidently assumed nobody really needs apostrophes and hid them on the secondary keyboard. You end up relying on the spellcheck to insert the symbols into words like can’t and you’re, which it will do some of the time but not always. Maddening.

Not much joy for Google Reader users; no dedicated interface. You can bring up the ‘desktop’ version (using the wee link at screen bottom) but it’s rubbish.

Oh look there’s no silence button! I hope you remembered to turn the sound down before going to bed! You have to set your Notification and Sound options carefully to avoid midnight pings and bleeps.

Lastly and damningly, Safari is shite. That is: the only available iPad browser in a web-centric world, is shite. Expectations of productivity are high, but in practice you spend way too much time awkwardly switching between email and browser. Hopefully the new OS 4 should help here.

The worst part is that tabbed browsing is a cruel joke:

1. There’s no background loading. ‘Open in new page’ means waiting two seconds for the fancy animations to play out, then having a nice white blankness thrust into your puss until the new stuff is loaded. ‘New tab’ really means, ‘load this bit for me to read later, but don’t fuck with my flow.’ This is the exact opposite. Terrible.
2. Inactive tabs are not kept in memory. When you switch to a previously loaded tab, it forces a reload from scratch. Even though you loaded it completely a few seconds ago. Awful. Clearly the iPad developers do not spend time surfing dirty pictures on 4chan.

And finally

If you ever considered buying (or actually bought) a netbook, the iPad fills that niche pretty well. Typing is not perfect, but definitely good enough.

Should you get one? Well, it’s early days and there are few killer apps (or indeed, many apps at all). I wouldn’t feel stupid for holding off for a month or six, to let the marketplace fill out. But if like me you’re always on the interbing and are keen to spend less time perched before your desktop, go for it.

form B-12/alpha, please

They operate an exceptionally closed scheme. Trying to talk to a human at one of these places is nigh-impossible without making some kind of offering; usually pumping them with cash for access to your details. Your details basically consists of a number, but they dress it up with exotic branding nonsense along the lines of the CreditPeep 5000 CashSpunker Plus. I’ve spent a month or so pissing around with arch-cockhandles Experian, and convincing them that some other guy with a similar name is not me, and can they please take all his nefarious dealings off my record, thank you very much.

Long story short, that’s now done. If you need to deal with credit bureaus, I can offer some effective voodoo.

Just when I thought all the form-fiddling was done, Amex call to say they’re not 100% convinced of my identity, and could I please fuck off down to the Social Security building and get a note proving my social security number. Well of course, nothing would give me greater pleasure.

If you’re thinking dealing with the Social Security (SS for short – YOU SEE?) would be a patience-mangling, Kafkaesque nightmare, you’d be totally correct and would in fact win a biscuit.

The downtown building squats massive and intimidating. It has FEDERAL BUILDING spackled all over it and cops everywhere. There are 15 entrances and only one is the right one for you, and you have to know what the department name is, exactly and without using synonyms or cheating. You have to negotiate with guards who speak only rudimentary dolphin. Once I found the right entrance I gained 2,300 experience points.

Once in the door you are welcomed with a warm and friendly metal detector scan and body-furtling.

There are 50 floors. Your correct floor is listed in Greek using a 6-point font on a tea-tray stapled to the wall behind a pillar in the lobby.

Once you find the right room, things look more familiar – clerks behind bulletproof glass, people waiting. You dither slightly trying to figure out the waiting system, before a security guard with a table of forms waves you over. He appears to be first-generation Namibian and has only the vaguest idea of what is going on around him. He delivers his opener with all the twinkling intelligence of a poached egg:

IN WHAT BOAR YOU LEAVE?

Sorry?

IN WHAT BOAR… YOU LEAVE?

[Long pause while my brain executes intense pattern matching algorithm]
Are you asking me… where I live?

YES

Ah, Manhattan.

PRESS 1 ON MACHINE

A ticket! Result.
Next, a long wait; expected. Then, called to the desk! I have rehearsed what I will say. The lady is short and first-generation Chinese. I get the first word in:

Hello, so to be clear I already have a social security card [brandish my card] – I’m just looking for -

YOU NEED APPLICATION FORM!

Whoa.
Sorry, for what?

YOU NEED APPLICATION FORM!

But I already have a card, here -

YOU NEED FORM! TALK TO GUARD!

I need a form to speak to you?
[There is a pause]
[People in the waiting room have gone quiet, amused by the exchange and my desperately clear enunciation]
[Clerk looks for the fifth time at the card I am holding against the glass, and in the cold lonely void a lightbulb illuminates]

AH YOU HAVE NUMBER! YOU NEED LETTER!

Normally you go up to clerks on the assumption they know more than you do, cap in hand. I instead walked out full of dismayed sympathy, but relief at accomplishing the mission.

The frustration in dealing with these muppets reminded me of the constant satirising unleashed by Douglas Adams on this topic, both in his books and also in the 80s text adventure game Bureaucracy. Actually the AI in that game surpassed most of the humanoids I dealt with this week.

P.S. the post title is from the Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out classic, here preserved on your intertrout.

P.P.S. So I don’t forget, my social security number is [WPRESS exception in db.getHandle() - too many connections]

If a new post tickles you, or particularly if you find something old that deserves more attention, hit the Vote button to bump up the magic number.

Over time I’ll add better ways to get at the top voted entries – for now there’s a rough list on the sidebar. Happy voting.

UPDATE: I ended up blowing this away after the sidebar was taking ages to load – terrible bit of SQL. Happy googling!

Pull on your Java pants, take a sip of coffee and hit the ‘read more’ link to see what Times Square looked like last weekend, standing proudly atop the crimson stair. It should scroll lefty/right and a wee bit up/down too.






Sorry, your Java is buggered!

the lost art

It’s on the joy of damage and it’s called dear sis. On Firefox it’s pretty clear what to do; with IE (ugh) or Safari or Chrome you have to be more curious.

I do think there’s a metric ton you can do with words on screen that’s impossible on paper. For the most part it’s unexploited.