The last of the independents.

You know, probably this chap about my age from Malta who used to frequent Audiogalaxy.com forums a lot (during the summer of 2002), made a lot of sense to me. Irrespective of the fact he liked Roger Waters and Syd Barrett so fuckin much, I might have still liked him if he was a Bizkit and was able to justify his opinion as well as he did when it came to anything concerning Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. It’s funny I cant remember his screenname anymore tho…

The best of his forum debate was in the Guns n’ Roses forum… wherein he got into an all out war with a so-called Floydian, who thought (like many) David Gilmour is the Pink. Not a hot topic anymore for me to fight against, cuz I don’t care — none the less had been one from December 2001 till August 2002 when I ended up putting my foot in the mouth over fighting with Umma on the subject for a month, on a series of emails, only to find out later she thinks David was full of shit, but wouldn’t agree with me initially cuz of my attitude.

Anyway, somehow I remember this other person’s — who thought David was all-in-all — name was chahadi. He was funny he used to say P-U-L-S-E is like the best Floyd album. I think that’s the word that pissed of the other one.

Some people think Floydians are nuts… that they seem to get too serious about the music. Their rationale: “It’s only music!” Maybe for them but not for some of the rest. Floyd — that name in itself means so much, that it downright pisses you off if some of the others who don’t really know the band consider P-U-L-S-E (or Division Bell songs) is (are) like their best. Or they would pick certain songs like Comfortably Numb, Another Brick in the Wall Part II or Wish You Were Here and treat them as singles. I mean these things seem offencive to some in their hay days — maybe still does, just that they learn not to bother anymore.

Anyway, so the Malta guy’s point, which I always liked, was he insisted on the roots. (I believe if u don’t get the roots, u don’t get the music.) So when the 20-year-old Malta guy tried to teach 17-year-old chahadi of the roots of Floyd, and chahadi made a stupid pass at Syd Barrett, that got the Malta guy outta control, and it became an all out war.

But things move on… maybe the Malta guy doens’t fight no more either. But doesn’t mean it doesn’t irritate you anymore when people make stupid passes on the band. Eventho most of the times you do avoid getting involved cuz it’s not worth it, still you do get into it middle-of-no-where, when there’s absolute no point.

But, I do miss the Malta guy when I’m in the mood to talk about music. I generally pick up music from ppl who listen to similar music, and this Malta guy was a huge Radiohead and Indie music fan. And as you kno Radiohead did turn out pretty cool. So, basically I’m thankful to many of these people whom I met online long time back (a few are still around) for some of the music I got to kno cuz of them….

1. Malta guy for Radiohead, Sonic Youth and the Indie cult in general
2. Amber for Smashing Punpkins
3. Daryll, Silvi and Gorche for Iron Maiden
4. Daryll and Silvi for AC/DC
5. Liam for Rory Gallaghar (after 3 years I’m finally listening to Rory tonight)
6. Robin for Roger Waters and Jethro Tull
7. Cher for Jefferson Airplane, Rush, Janis Joplin and Black Sabbath
8. Sarah for Dream Theater
9. Saltwater Blues for the blues of B.B. King and a many others
10. Zen for helluva lot of others and more
11. Umma, well for being so opinionated
12… I kno there are a few more as well, cant think of the names tho.

Thanks all you guys! Adios!!

Testing Flock…

Well, working on flock Flock and seems it has a n inbuilt blogging tool that supports Blogger… So typed in my blog url and it did detect it and ask for me to enter my username and password… So this time checking if it goes thru from the Flock client and not Drivel.

She’s livin’ rockin’…

I was watching the Livin’ Rockin’ music video of the Sweet Little Sisters a while back. My friend Silvie looks so goddamn awesome in it that it’s quite rockin’ actually. If she looks cuter with those glasses on, she looks hotter without them. So whatever it it, you just can’t just beat her I guess.

Anyway, the song is a straight up rock n’ roll, and has a 16 bar guitar solo in between wherein Silvie picks up the first lead. Following is a snapshot I just took of her soloing…

It’s a pretty mean one I tell ya. She plays an 8 bar lead, and then Juan plays the next 8, wherein she switches to rhythm obviously. Following is the picture of both of em together in the video during the second lead…

Anyway, Silvie has long since quite the band, almost a year now, due to some personal reasons. She formed a new band with the drummer, Lupe, who also quit SLS shortly afterwards. But that didn’t work out aswell. As for now… I dunno what she has been up to. Haven’t seen her lately for a while.

But whatever the future holds… this video surely is a rocker. Adios!!

P.S. –> Silvie is from Spain! So, now you kno where did I pick up the word ‘adios’ from, that I keep sayin all the time. She taught me a few other words which I’ve since forgotten tho.

Can I play with madness?

Funniest thing I heard! Bal has bought a hi-end HP laptop with genuine Windoze XP SP2 or some crap! It gave, as soon as I booted it, a warning as Automatic Updates are not enabled or some shit like that.

Me: Why is this turned off?

Bal: Are ya crazy? I dont want to end up with a crashed laptop!

Me: What’s wrong with keeping ur system up to date with the latest security patches?

Bal: The updates are balls, it screws up ur system.

lol!! He surely knows what the hell he was talking about — being a long time Windoze user and a computer science major. But it still has ta be the funniest thing I’ve heard lately. Only with Windoze u can expect security patches to have negative effect on ur working environment?

Remember that guy who wrote the “MS Blaster Worm” inserted a few lines in between the code that said “Billy stop making money and fix your software!” I’m sure the guy who wrote it must have had a kick outta it! Imagine the M$ coders trying to hack the virus to find out how it works and find that between the lines. That outta be funny!! Eventho I was one of those Windoze users back then… and it really pissed me off how my PC would reboot as soon as I would connect to Internet. But I think that specific line was the motive behind the virus.

Anyway, listening to Iron Maiden’s Death on the Road. It’s a live album from 2004 or early 2005 I guess…. the guitars are all messed up… I dont think 3 lead guitars in a live show is a good idea… but as long as it’s Maiden… even the worst is probably better that many. I probably dont like 3 guitars cuz they all are so loud that Steve’s bass is barely audible.

I recently downloaded a Maiden bootleg album… it’s got the early Soundhouse Tape songs and some pretty cool live takes with Paul Di’Anno on vocals…. Now I like Paul better than Bruce for some crazy reasons of my own…. even tho Bruce is probably the most exciting frontman to check out live cuz he seems to get the crowd so involved with the music by constantly encouraging them. Still Paul was sort of like a world apart… that punky voice and attitude…

This guitar solo in this song called Dance of Death is like one of those classic violin pieces. Tho personally I think Dance of Death — as an album — is one of the worst Maiden albums ever.

Gotta go! Adios!!

Hotel Chelsea nights…

I’m in love with Ryan’s music ever since I heard his Heartbreaker. Oh My Sweet Carolina is perhaps still one of my favourite songs of all times. There’s something about the feeling in his voice and the music. As hard it is to describe what it’s like, to sum it up it’s the pain and the peace fused in a way that really excites you and makes u numb at the same time. So I’m listening to this album of Ryan’s called Love Is Hell.

I know there’s this other person who would have surely loved this guy, but I’m not too sure anymore. Lately he’s finally said he doesn’t get much time for the music, and also that there isn’t much left to talk about it… Which to say the least I find hard to swallow coming from someone who’s taught me so much. But whatever floats his boat. I don’t wanna pick on a fight about it!

Anyway goin’ back to the subject of Ryan and his music, this album has a cover of Wonderwall — the Oasis big hit — and I love this one so much as well. It’s like a whole new song. If you have ever heard the version of Shine On You Crazy Diamond on the David Gilmour In Concert DVD you’ll know what I’m talkin about!

Anyway, it’s been a while and I was lost! I’m so deprived of interesting general blogs to read that it’s not even funny anymore. So I was over at Zen’s and I wandered over to Gandalf’s and it seems he’s disappeared long ago. But he indeed left with the type of things he’d point out. I loved the way he’d pick out the best lines from a song like he does for White Stripe’s Little Room, things that mostly go away unnoticed. I wish people like him would come back from where ever they’ve disappeared. But the world (read blogdom) was never meant to be a place for people like him to stick around.

So I’m listening to Jeff Buckley’s Grace right now, whose music was introduced to me by Gandalf. He wrote some amazing reviews and followups on this guy. Now he also said Zen told him about Jeff to begin with. Zen is among the only three people I kno in the world who’ve probably heard it all. This person named Tubai Dada was the one who got me started with Indie and a lots of oldies music I always wanted to try. And yes there’s always Umma who’s like this right-on-ur-face-type, I-say-what-I-feel-like, person. Now these 3 have heard em all and they have awesome choices for whatever they listen to.

And I guess I’m gonna end it there! Adios!!

P.S. –> To Jo – My net wasn’t down, and I have way too many operating systems installed in my box for me to actually be stranded away from computer. I said I was rather bored at 3am (or whatever time it was) sitting in a Puja pandaal with my old school pal and his friend (from his MBA school) and had nothing much to talk about, but think about Coldplay songs.

The great gig in the sky…

This morning I went ahead and upgraded to amaroK 1.3.3. There were some dependency issues, so I went ahead and forced install (with ‘-f’ and ‘–nodeps’ options) all the packages. I think I should have rather added the source in the urpmi media and used the proper way to upgrade, instead of firing up the rpm commands. It just keeps crashing every now and then, and as it does open up the mail client to submit the bug-report to the dev team.

Now I’ve been clicking on send like a good person, but I’m sure amaroK devs would be quite annoyed with me, cuz the thing might be crashing just cuz I was lazy and installed in an improper manner. Now I have talked to the amaroK people in their IRC channel once… and like Jes Hall once said, they are real nice people. I went to complain how I cant still find rpms for PCLinuxOS and this guy instantly complied the needed rpms and uploaded it to a site just for me to download it. And that made me so happy! See how people are so much nicer when you get out of the Windoze domain?

I dunno why but I’ve gradually developed a disgust for people who insist on using Windoze, and think they are geek enough to appreciate it’s quality! lol!! I would say they are stupid enough to feel likewise. Yea! I’m such a geek that I can’t even live without my blue screens!

Drivel testing on Mandriva 2006 RC 2

Okie doke! Spell check is working! It automatically underlines the misspelled worlds… If I right click on the same then it gives me suggestions. This new version has the support for Blogger 2.0–which means now I can put in the “subject” of a post in Drivel itself (the missing flaw or feature previously stopped me to use it). And best of all it can handle html tag highlighting which comes in handy cuz I’m not really a WYSIWYG editor person.

So Ima post this now! And if it works out… well then no more would I ever have to log into the Blogger site ever.

Update Coola! And it worked like a charm! Please click here if you wanna know what the heck Drivel does. And well below is a screenshot of the log in screen (linking from the website)…

Man I didn’t kno people still use the fucked up ‘Bluecurve’ theme from Red Hat. It makes the windows look so ugly!

Can’t get out of what I’m into…

There’s a very cool review of one of my favourite operating systems for a while here. Umm, it’s a regular news article with no geek shit! And well… gives you a very good perspective about the project, that is Ubuntu. I’d like to quote the wonderful concluding paragraphs from the article…

And for now at least, idealism remains a powerful force within the project. When the early organizers were looking for a project name, Shuttleworth suggested Ubuntu.

“He said it’s this African word that means ‘I am because we are.’ It focuses on community. It’s all about sharing and consensus,” Waugh said. “Everyone in the room was just gobsmacked because it really expressed what we believed as free-software and open-source contributors.”

I am because we are! Fuck!! Eventho I’m more of a my own person, but I simply love this phrase.

Anyway, I’m listening to Tool for a while, and I really love them! I think they may be the best fucking metal band from the 90s. Dream Theater is good… but Tool is like this energy—gets u all charged up!

I’m also liking this Coldplay band. Pretty good tunes and words. And well you gotta love Liz Phair’s latest album… I got this bootleg (or advanced release) of her album called Somebody’s Miracle which will be released on October 6 or somethin like that! And guess what? Liz is like this really good looking (in a punky way with badass attitude) blonde, who actually writes things that are damn interesting. Whoever said blondes are bimbos is definitely wrong here.

This is the only other album of her I’ve got, the first one being Exile in Guyville (the debut) and I dunno the albums that were released in between, but she’s sobered up a lot. The sound has changed from that rebel Indie rock kinds to adult alternative sound of Lucinda Williams n’ people like em kinds, I guess.

Anyway, below I’m posting the album cover… as she looks damn hot in it!

Sorry it’s really late, so instead of surfing for the picture I just took a screenshot of the amaroK with the album cover in full size. Dont really feel like cropping the image… so u have the rest of the background as well.

Btw, in that picture, as u can see, I’m running the Mandriva Linux 2006 RC2. They aren’t releasing the final version, so I got pissed and downloaded the beta. I quite love it, tho it’s running a bit slower than usual, some shit I’m guessing is hogging up the memory! The desktop interface is Gnome 2.10.

So, anyway, adios!!