Fuck n’ Run

There was a time when I used to dig soundtracks a lot. In fact the first of the albums that I ever bought were mostly soundtracks. I bought soundtracks, because I was really stupid musically. I didnt have any favourites. The soundtracks gave me the option to listen to lots of different musicians at one go. That in turn helped me to find out what I liked and what I didnt.

I used to buy albums by specific musicians as well. But I never really liked all of the songs. In fact I used to find that the ones on TV are the only ones worth it. I will strongly disagree to that now, but hey like I said I was stupid musically.

The best thing I learnt was the albums or songs that I hated the most to begin with — hated in the sense cuz I had wasted the money on it — are the the ones I fell in love with later on. The ones that I did like at first go, I got bored with em in a couple of weeks. That made me realise that good songs need time to get under your skin.

That made me start buying albums hoping I should absolutely be unimpressed listening to it the first few times. Now that does make things really dicey. Dicey in the sense what if I never liked the songs. What it I would never like the songs cuz they are absolute crap to begin with. On the other hand the songs that seemed just brilliant at the first listen made me really depressed. Cuz I knew that would be a crap song as I would realize pretty soon.

Anyway, the title of the post is weird you might think. But well there u go again. It’s a Liz Phair song. Listening to Liz is fun. I have this album called Exile in Guyville. The tone of most of the songs is like she’s someone who’s absolutely bored with everything around, and even singing or strumming the guitar. Probally thats why it’s so cool and refreshing.

Anyway Ima talk to ya laterer. Adios!!

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner…

“When you’re in a young band and your record company come to you, saying, ‘You need to soften up your sound, we need a single’, Steve’s the kind of guy you need to turn round to them and say, ‘Fuck off!’” – Janick Gers (lead guitars; joined ‘89/90)

“Black Sabbath had broken the ice in 1970 with their classic debut of the same name. Instantly becoming ‘the inventors of heavy metal’, the Sab’s built upon the distorted, heavy blues created from the likes of Led Zeppelin, and took it to a new, darker level. AC/DC and Motorhead would further support the cause (‘Heads aggressiveness actually going down a storm amongst the punks!)

“Though despite his love for these heavy metal bands, particularly and obviously Black Sabbath, Steve Harris’s musical influences revolved more around the likes of progressive and hard rock bands such as Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, Free and Golden Earring to name a couple.” – fanzine “Manden Fans“

“He is an idiosyncratic bass player. He picked up the bass and taught himself in such a way that nobody can really copy it. People say it’s like a lead guitar, but it’s not. It gives the band a basis and it moves around quite a lot, but it’s the tone that he has. He has a way of hearing things and a tone that isn’t normally associated with a bass, it’s more like a rhythm guitar. Him and Nicko (drummer) provide the pulse of Iron Maiden, the body of the band. You copy it at your peril, because the sound of Maiden is built around the way Steve plays bass and the only band that it would work in is Maiden.” – Janick Gers

Bass influences — Martin Turner (Wishbone Ash), Andy Fraser (Free), Chris Squire & John Entwistle (The Who)

Your time is gonna come.

Well, today thought of doing something new with my Mandriva. Well downloaded apt and it’s front end Synaptic, for software installation. Well what came as the software repository url with that was the Mandriva Cooker. Now as we all kno Cooker is the development branch for Mandriva. Whatever cooks well in cooker is later added to the stable official release. Cooker is not for the regular computer users like us, cuz once you go upgrading the system software as per Cooker, your operating system is gonna be fucked real bad. Well, so they say. But, hey I still wanted to check whats in the repository. So checked for the latest version of Firefox Browser. Well it upgraded the version 1.0.2 with 1.0.4 of the browser, and there u have its working flawlessly for the past one hour.

What’s next? amaroK???? Hell yuh!! The version 1.3 beta 2 was available, much to my delight. Clicked on it to install it. Somethin wrong happened, as after installation, it failed to load up the application after displaying the flash screen. Damn! Uninstalled and reinstalled thru Synaptic, same shit! But it was like I could taste the new version of my favorite music manager. So did a little bit of google to find a mandriva rpm package. Hell ya got it mate, found version 1.3beta 1 at RPM Pbone. Simple double click on the package after the download, and there u have it. Mandriva installed it, and now I have it running playing Led Zeppelin 1. Thanks to Blues for reminding me of Led Zeppelin, considering I havent been listening to them for such a long time, that I almost had forgotten such a band existed. So well…your time is gonna come… I guess…

Lyin’, cheatin’, hurtin, that’s all you seem to do.

Messin’ around with every guy in town,

Puttin’ me down for thinkin’ of someone new.

Always the same, playin’ your game,

Drive me insane, trouble is gonna come to you,

One of these days and it won’t be long,

You’ll look for me but baby, I’ll be gone.

This is all I gotta say to you woman:

Your Time Is Gonna Come

Your Time Is Gonna Come

Your Time Is Gonna Come

Your Time Is Gonna Come

Hmm, dont I love this song? Anyway, the best part I’m loving about the new amaroK is it’s inbuilt association to the WIKI site. So depending on the Song/Artist/Band you’re listening to it searches the WIKI for information on the same, and pulls up the band’s biography, if available. Pretty neat feature huh? Following is a screen shot for the same…

And, you were saying iTunes was the coolerst! Man you guys are missing a killer app, aren’t ya? Pls do click
here, to get a full 1028 by 768 resolution and take a look, c’mon don’t be shy now…

Anyway, guess I’ll be joining the print media, I cleared the entrance test or whatever they call it!! lol! Wonder what I’ll be doin there… Hmmm, tough one!

Well, anyway, just wanna say…

Adios!!!

Bummer in the summer…

I’m majorly bored and listening to a band called Love. They have this very 60s sounding rock music. Sort of like early Floyd with Syd in it. Well probably cuz Syd used to dig this band a lot. Anyway, Love has this very psychedelic sound to it, which is like the best part. Also, kinda similar to Jethro Tull, in certain ways.

I’ve heard a lot about this WYSIWYG web editor called NVU (read N-View, for New View). It’s another shoot off from the Mozilla/Netscape Communicator’s. Remember the thing in Mozilla (or Netscape) called Composer. Anyway I just downloaded the NVU editor for my Mandriva. The first stable version i.e. version 1.0 was released on June 28, 2005. I was just going thru the interface, and clicked on the Help documentation, and they have a quite well written documentation. Best part is, it’s covered by Mozilla Public License, implying it’s again an open source software.

Also the ports are available for Windoze as well as Mac OSX operating systems. So, there you have it, M$ now has to deal with another competitor for it’s product called Frontpage. Will certainly fiddle around with it, even tho am not that huge fan of WYSIWYG editors.

Anyway, as ya all kno amaroK is my media manager of choice. It has this feature where in it can append songs of similar nature to the playlist, so I always keep that mode on. While it was playing Love it actually appended quite a few songs to the playlist, the first one was Jethro Tull’s Mountain Me; then the second one was odd… Gang of 4’s I Found That Essence Rare, and now it’s playing Brian Eno’s The Big Ship. I’m telling you, with the kind of features this media player cum manager has, it could be the best fucking media player on the planet w.r.t. features.

BTW, for some days straight I’m on Mandriva’s KDE, and I’ quite getting used to it. KDE aint that bad actually, if properly customized. And Mandriva has managed to do it quite well.

That’s all folks! Adios!!

There are only 10 types of people in this world.

Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Bat out of hell…

So whats up doc? That’s what Buggs Bunny always asked the doc, didn’t he? There’s this guy at work who can totally do the voices of the different cartoon characters. Trust me, he’s pretty good at it! Now that I have made up my mind to leave this job, I kinda might miss some of these people and some of the moments. My team was actually great, and some of these new people from the new batch who started off with me for the same department.

Somehow, the Alt+Tab key sequence for my keyboard doesn’t work when I work in KDE in my Mandriva 2005 LE. Same goes for the Number pad. I can see the Num lock glowing, but still it doesn’t work. Oh well, what the hell? Anyway, Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) has a way of Turning off all the settings for the root user (Administrator user for you Windoze ppl), when u log into the graphical mode. Well then I always use the root user. So after I installed this about a month ago, I turned on all the features that I want, but still hasn’t found a get around to the Alt+Tab key sequence, and Num Lock. Well, I kno there is a way to do it somewhere, it’s just that I haven’t fiddled around enough. I mostly work on GNOME, and that too on my Ubuntu. It’s just that the other day I noticed that Mandriva refused to play the DVD cuz of the missing dvdcss library. So today I remembered to log into Mandriva and install it.

So I’m playing Meat Loaf’s VH1 story tellers. Last night Jo asked me somethin like what is the most expensive thing that I ever bought, which also kinda turned out to be useless for me. (You bet, Jo has a stock of silly questions, and she also thinks Thom Yorke has a softy voice. I kno, she needs a kick up her arse to properly behave… ) Well I generally don’t buy expensive things. But considering I got this DVD for lousy 600 bucks, and haven’t really ever played it, Meatloaf might be the thing that went ok with Jo’s ques. Anyway, so cuz I had to test my media player for Mandriva if it’s working or not, I thought of trying Meat Loaf.

Well, I’m not even watching it, but just listening to this guy’s music, I haven’t really heard enough before. He’s asking for some volunteers, and he got Jason and some Travis. Anyway, I gotta watch whats goin on there, and have a quick smoke. And probably rewind it a bit. BRB…

So… so, that was supposed to be a story (an act) between the Paradise by the Dashboard Part I and II. Now, these 2 people from the audience have to make out in fornt of this executive, on his desk. Jason was the executive, Travis and this girl were supposed to make out. And Travis was instructed not to touch the girl’s breast in the process, cuz they were acting and all. Anyway, Travis was lying on the desk, and the girl was sitting on top of Travis, and they were kissing n stuff, and on top of that he was not to touch her breasts. Pretty shitty, huh? And as soon as they reach the imaginary 3rd base, the girl had to say, ‘You gotta stop right there!’ So, double shitty there!! LMAO!!

Oh well anyway, so as I was saying I don’t really work on KDE, my desktop is always GNOME. The reason I dislike KDE, instead of however feature rich it might be, is cuz their desktop is quite messy with loads of apps always installed by default. But Mandriva does a nice job of streaming that down to whatever is necessary. Also the default KDE menu structure is very disorganized, Mandriva again does a good job in arranging them in a very professional way, just they way we GNOME users are used to. And on top I have the Mandriva Galaxy 2 theme for the window manager, and Exquisite for the icon theme. Looks pretty cool, gotta admit.

Well lemme giva you an intro of what I’m referring here. On the right you have a snapshot of my desktop. Oh yea, it’s Mandriva 2005 LE running KDE 3.3, with the window up front it Kate — which is KDE advanced text editor, then one behind that is RPM Drake — the Mandriva packege manager, then behind that you have Firefox Browser — for my web browsing needs, and the one behind that is a Konsole — the shell or the command line. Also, you may click on the picture if you really want to.

So anyway, lemme play around with the KDE for a while, while ya’ll take a hike.

Adios!