lundi 30 juin 2003

Streaming radio, steaming consciousness I've been listening to some pretty strange, archived sounds out of Massachusetts. Somebody told me at the weekend they considered the Boston area another world from the rest of the United States. Pressed to explain, since I'd imagine that the US includes many more or less united places, my friend said: "Just different, sometimes bizarre... "Like being in a kind of England that isn't at all English any more." That didn't get anybody far. Now I'm invited to: "Walk down a dark alleyway, now -- remain naked, tracing the electromagnetic ley lines of your body with magenta nail gloss before having basted self with that moldy stink'in kefir in the back of the fridge, and go out and beat Bill Gates to the airport, mimicking a rival technology inventor (such as Mike Doyle at Eolas), and skip through the early streets talking to animals telepathically! ...well, go on...and get that megaphone digitalized just in case..." with this to boot: "you're the policeman, you work it out..." Maybe I don't need to know anything about Gary Geiserman, but sitting in my "inspect" folder has been an iTunes radio streaming playlist downloaded some days ago. It's a pity I can't remember where I found it and have lost that bit of browsing history. There's a whole load of archived shows, dating from 1995 to last month, where those quotes came from at New Metaphysics, which is apparently a site you can't always log on to easily. Elsewhere, no policeman, I learned at least this much. "Out of frustration I just called WZBC. The guy's name was Gary Geiserman. And his show was called The New Metaphysics. It was great. Unfortunately he was just fired a few weeks ago. For swearing or profanity on the air, according to the DJ I talked to. She said 'we want to push the limits but he just went too far'," someone wrote on the 'Joe Frank mailing list' (yeah, the what?) in November last year. The first stream I came on dates from February 1999, is tedious in parts, but in others a remarkable musical-vocal-movietrack-DJ collage by somebody who sounds as if he's been stoned forever. A wee bit of it's in German and there's even a kind of storyline. I begin to understand that poll about Americans and aliens I mentioned a while back in a "truth is out there" post. Good mildly brain-teasing listening for a rainy, convalescent-mood day like this, Gary's now sometimes at Stream475, while I've found iTunes -- the alternative being Real Player -- quite happy with equally offbeat, sometimes oldie places like Mountain Radio (ex-Café Eclectic). If I'm going to be stuck around the flat or not far away for much longer, I'll be doing more searching at Live365, as well as catching up on my CDs... The only other G.G. link I found worth pursuing led me to 'gullboy: New Sound reviews', mostly maintained by another generation from mine, but a good place (the G.G. reference was in an piece on 'Never Mind the Bootlegs, Here's Sex with Nid and Sancy'. I'll skip that, thanks...) zzz On new metaphysics, if I didn't always leave getting back into it until so late in the day, you'd get a quicker review of 'Mappa Mundi', my current read. I can't resist an extract: "...She made a face at him that said Ta-DA! and waved her hands in the air. Dan paused, forgetting the funny story about Bill and the security system, and looked at the gobbledegook that had suddenly cluttered the screen in the terse, efficient Courier font that meant he couldn't read anything properly without putting his lenses in. 'Stages One and Two?' He wished he listened to more of what she said. It would make life so much simpler. 'Physical Event Map and Mental Event Map,' Natalie grinned like a maniac and waited for him to get it. He waited. She said, 'You know, it means we've stuck together the real world of physical events like chemistry and electricity and the non-physical world of mental life. It's the big kahuna. The foundation for a genuine working theory of consciousness. Dan, for fuck's sake! The Holy Grail, man!' Her voice had risen on the last phrases as he'd kept his face straight and now he could grin too. 'Gotcha.' He nodded wisely." But he hasn't ... neither has Natalie, a research scientist, and nor have we. Yet. That's from pp. 141-1 and not a spoiler, but I bookmarked it. The semi-classic thriller part of Justina Robson's near-future tale about medical nanotechnology doesn't really begin until 'Map' starts on p. 63 ... or maybe 'Compass Rose' just a few pages before that. Natalie rarely swears, but she is on to something. So are other people, and agencies with ruthless ideas in mind. Robson's writing styles switch gear with ease, depending on which country she's got you in, and she doesn't go easy on the metaphysical front. I'm hooked. One of those novels you want to finish fast and also don't. As if the prospect of a "working theory of consciousness" wasn't enough, 'kuro5hin' has yet to post part III of an ambitious and well-written 'Introduction to the Theory of Relativity'. Don't rush it just for me. 11:10:08 PM  link   your views? [] A blog entry about the blog! Oh dear... Ok, this is it. So I hope all three and a half of you like it! I wanted a place easier to navigate, for the second half of the year. Especially now that I've realised that I'm catering to 3 ½ very different tastes, interests and occasional requests. A printing problem in some browsers persists. iCab still can't quite render the pages properly, which is either me or something destined to change when the full-featured final version comes out. I owe thanks to Dave Raggett at W3C, the World Wide Web consortium, for his beginner's HTML markup guide, which many of us must keep bookmarked. The Webmonkey people offer a useful HTML Cheatsheet, while Doctor HTML drives me to despair with an online single-page analysis my pages never completely pass! I prefer the less cruel W3C version. I also appreciate the HTML and web page design site put together by Kevin O'Connor. Ever to hand is the 'Bible' from O'Reilly, not quite the latest edition, but found at an unbelievable price at Gibert Joseph (Flash site) on the Boulevard St Michel, the best place for computer books in Paris, including ones in English. People in town should know that they often have "second-hand" bargains which are virtually new. You also tend to get better service there than at the better known Gibert Jeune. I prefer having such guides between soft covers, but O'Reilly's Safari online bookshelf deal is an interesting one if you want access to a great deal of excellent technical material. Post-midnight tweaking won me a "congratulations" from W3C on valid CSS. People can check their cascading style sheet online with the validator. zzz The new look started here, with Bryan's CandidBlue theme: The Moveable Type look of Bell's January offering pleased somebody lacking the skill yet for that, though I keep tabs on how MT's coming on. This is where you tell me you preferred the look this place had until yesterday afternoon! It's a slight pity I no kept trace of the blog's initial appearance on the Net, but even the second incarnation was becoming technically thorny. There's more to this than just a change of colours. Maybe I was the only person to see n° 2 as intended, using Omniweb, which could cope with a Times New Roman font set up badly for other browsers (hence a pictorial detail, running the 4.5b1 beta). What I didn't want from Bryan's templates were too much grey, topic of a pre-war pro-UN outburst in March. I couldn't do without some yellow alongside the blue dominants. Since the templates don't come with item titles switched "on", it took me a while just to figure that little touch out. Titles matter, since my mind's now hopelessly opposed to trying to classify entries by category. Even if used here, there would be rather a lot of them! Apart from obvious differences, some aimed at making this place more "user-friendly" (since I can scarcely believe it now runs to two sizeable books), I've decided, when it comes to sharing, to stop sitting on the fence and opt for a Creative Commons licence, removing the standard © mention. The Creative Commons concept is appealing and workable in jurisdictions outside the United States. The change mainly means that should you find anything useful in this log, feel free to take it unless it already belongs to somebody else, but please give credit as well. Anyway, that's enough writing about me writing, bane of all bloggers! Back to normal business after this. Ah, the HTML. Apart from a glitch of mine I might have fixed in line 4, no others appear until line 340, says the W3C. Then there are more than 100. Which means that Bryan's tweaked home and other page templates are fine. All the mistakes are my own. And yesterday I thought I was learning! Maybe I did. But, ouf! no more major make-up jobs for a good while to come. 2:02:16 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.