Alfreido's Blog

I blame you, iTunes!

Here I was, searching through the dance albums on iTunes when, whilst looking at another album (which incidentally also sucked), iTunes gleefully alerted me that listeners had also bought 24 Carat Gold by a German dance band called Scooter. I quickly Wikipedia’d the band and had a look at their discography. Funnily enough, I came across Ramp (The Logical Song), a song I used to enjoy listening to on the radio during my high school days (although the high-pitched voice grinded my insides like a sandpaper sandwich). I though I would give them a chance and proceeded to buy the album.

Boy, did I make a mistake or what?

I don’t know if it’s just what the Germans are into… repeticious, loud and overbearing music that automatically send you into a frenzy of finding the first object to rip your ears off with. Hell, Rammstein sound like they are trying to scream out a huge hairball caught in their throats in nearly 90% of the songs they have released. So maybe Scooter are just following proper German procedures when developing a record. But Scooter bring to the table a whole set of new annoyances as well.

You see, a typical Scooter includes the folllowing traits:

• Crowd cheering loops played in the background, to convince the listener that a lot of other people listen to this shit.
• H.P. Baxxter’s vocals have reverb effects applied to it to give the feeling that the performance is live (however, in some songs, the reverb is so crap it sounds like they were recording the vocals in a bathroom)
• A pitch-shifted voice sings the chorus. I didn’t know that Alvin and the Chipmunks were part of this band?
• The band uses any one of the following words and phrases (or a variant of it) almost exclusively during their songs:
  - Pump it up
  - Make some noise
  - Peace and unity
  - Faster
  - Harder
  Ironically, they could use both the phrases “Hit your face” and “Peace and Unity” together in the same song. Classy.
• The same bass drum and synth played throughout an entire album. Incidentally, it doesn’t sound like they change the tempo much.

There are some songs that stand out as the penultimate of mediocrity in Scooter’s repitoire (I will admit, there were 2 or 3 songs I did enjoy, but out of 20 or 30 singles that Scooter have released, that’s hardly a great batting average). The Age of Love is almost a proverbial turkey slap to the face of James Cameron (some would argue he deserves it, though) and shows that using a sample of the theme from The Terminator is not going to make your song better. Rebel Yell lives up to the stereotype that techno remixes just don’t work, especially when sourcing from rock music. Nessaja has an irritating chorus that you can barely understand, and the beat is sub-standard with pathetic synth. And H.P. Baxxter has the audacity to call this tripe drum and bass. Clearly he has no idea what constitutes a drum and bass song because It certainly doesn’t involve squeeky choruses and repetitous rubbish.

I’m honest, if I ever catch someone listening to this crap, I’ll turn their speakers/headphones off, I don’t care if I get smashed because of it.

In Silico, by Australian drum-and-bass group Pendulum, is a strong example of diversity and how it can sometimes be more harmful rather the helpful. Touted as a collision between the smashing riffs of hard rock and the pounding beats of drum and bass, it’s unfortunate to say that this album will more than likely please neither crowd, with a sound too soft and melodic to satisfy the hard rock crowd, and not enough bass, a tempo too slow and a generic, commercial sound which will more than likely disappoint the drum and bass fans. I’m a real big fan of Pendulum, they are one my favourite bands, but I just cannot seem to connect and enjoy this album on the same level as Hold your Colour, Pendulum’s previous album which was released in 2006.
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Hail the fucking lord, that’s all I have to say.

Seriously, I am really loving my MacBook Pro at the moment. If you need to know, I have the 2.4ghz Intel Core-Duo version, with a 256mb 8600m GT, and it is seriously a slick, speedy piece of hardware with few faults. The only faults I could pick up were the lack of a double-buttom touchpad to emulate the left and right clicks of a normal mouse. Seriously, Apple, well done your OS is simple enough to use with only one mouse button. But for those actually living in the 21st century, we prefer to have the 2-button salute to do all the things the left click doesn’t do. Holding ‘Control’ and using the click button doesn’t cut it. I also noticed the laptop does get quite hot, negating the ‘lap’ in laptop. But those are the only things I can think of.

Regarding Mac OS X, I’m finding it more and more to be my OS of choice. I just love the form factor of the OS itself, it definitely looks more sleek and sexy than Windows XP, and arguably Windows Vista. I was one of the few who liked the look of Windows Vista, even if it runs like a dog with his feet stapled to the floor. It is also very awesome that Mac programs are installed by these single .dmg files as opposed to the clusterfuck that is the Windows program installers. To its credit though, Windows has a lot more programs available to it, something I found quite daunting to begin with, but I have gradually found Mac counterparts.

Speaking of Windows, I do have it installed in Boot Camp, to satisfy my mobile gaming needs. I installed World in Conflict, and have actually found with some tweaking, I can play the game on 1440×900 (the default resolution of the Apple MacBook Pro 15″ screens) at a very playable frame rate, and it looks very mint. I have been playing LAN games with my brothers and have had some good sessions on it. I don’t know if Apple intended it but these laptops could easily become a good gaming laptop. They have a lot of untapped power under the hood.

Overall, it’s a very awesome laptop, I’m loving it immensly. Go and get yourself one if you can afford it.

I switched over to Linux at work recently, mostly due to our servers running on Linux and the opportunity of directly interfacing with the servers made my job a hell of a lot easier. No longer being able to use my trusty Macromedia Dreamweaver to do my work, I had to try out a couple of different PHP development solutions until I found the one that was right for me and could keep up with me.

And the winner is… VIM.

After playing around with software which promised the world, some which didn’t deliver, I grew to like the hidden simplicity of VIM. The development team leader at my work urged me to work with VIM, as it was the most simple and yet most powerful system to develop PHP with, and after so many functional but flawed pieces of PHP software, I’m inclined to agree with him. Here’s a couple of different PHP development solutions I tested in my search for a PHP editor and the pros and cons of each that I found. It should be noted that in each time, I fell back to VIM to complete my work when the PHP software was fighting with me to keep me from doing my work. Read more »

Apparently, these days, you can never enjoy a movie that was based on a best-selling book, according those “wise” people who call themselves movie reviewers. You have people like Roger Ebert (pictured right), who probably don’t do anything else but watch movies judging by his figure, saying that YOU, the innocent movie goer who might be scarred for life for watching BAD MOVIEZZ, shouldn’t watch certain movies because they don’t follow the books close enough.

Please, do the world a huge favour and shut those excrementitious orifaces that you people call your mouths.

What has sparked this anger, I hear you ask? Probably the can of Bundaberg Rum sitting right next to me. Oh… and the fact that I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix on the weekend. I must say, although I wasn’t as thoroughly impressed with it as I was with Goblet of Fire, I still enjoyed it immensly. Being the inquisitve person I am though, I logged onto Rotten Tomatoes to see what everyone else said about it. Sure enough, plenty of people were whinging about the movie. It doesn’t follow the book. They cut side-stories. J K Rowling is my hero. It’s the kind of dribble that makes you just shudder at the thought that these people represent our best interests with movies. I have read the book, ableit quickly, but the point is, whilst the movie deviates from the book in some cases, none of the magic (excuse the pun) is lost. Hell, I prefer the streamlined approach of the movie, as some of the details of the book weren’t needed. And by the way… J K Rowling liked the movie. The author of the book liked the movie. That’s saying something.

So, my closing comment is… If you haven’t seen the new Harry Potter movie, go and see it.

Image: A psychically confused Harry Potter from Order of the Phoenix.

I recently went out and bought a new headset, something fancy and with some decent noise-cancellation because the amount of noise in my house rivals that of a plane taking off. I happened to notice that Austin Computers was having a sale for the Zalman 5.1 headsets and I thought, why not, I’ve never had surround sound headphones before, let’s give them a try.

After having an extensive test for them for a couple of days, I’ve been left with one word: Meh.
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Hope everyone had a good Christmas. I got meself some nice shirts, a couple of new games for the Wii, a load of cash and a striptease mug. When hot water is inside the mug, the clothes on the ladies in this picture on the side of the mug go blank, and then… yeah.

Well, I won’t tell you how, but I have managed to get the new Windows, Windows Vista, on my computer, and I shall give you my first impressions. Basically, it jumped at me as Windows XP in an eye-popping but expensive costume. It looks good, but really doesn’t offer too much more over the previous Windows version, and next to nothing over what other OS’s such as Apple OS X and Linux already provide.

It runs fairly well, not much of a speed increase over Windows XP, but that possibly could be because I didn’t wipe my hard drives when I installed this, I just installed it onto my second hard drive so I could still boot into Windows XP if I have to. All my stuff is still there.

I haven’t as yet tested any games on it, but I’ll give it a go after writing this blog, so you’ll have to wait for another entry before I talk about them.

Well let’s see, new features… the new gadgets system seems to be Microsoft’s monolopizing answer to Yahoo Gadgets which was becoming quite popular at one stage. At least it’s open for other developers to work on. The new Media Centre is fairly streamlined and sexy, giving a central place to listen to your media which is good, although I’ll still probably prefer using playlists for Windows Media Player and Winamp and the like.

I’ll post more later when I think about it, but I say wait until developers start forcing you to upgrade to Vista before actually buying Vista.

Have a good new years, don’t get too smashed.