The BigLig Thinks

... what else? "Boy" by Marcella Detroit, and "Drought Song" by Carlos Guitarlos. Go to the links in my previous post, and buy everything you can find.

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I just got burned on the internet! Some cheap-asses called "letssingit.com" have, on their site, biographies of various pop artists, which they get through careful research, or by ripping off wikipedia entries, whichever is easiest. How do I know? I inadvertently found their write-up for Marcella Detroit, which I was able to identify as a rip-off of the wikipedia article on her, due to the fact that I bloody well wrote most of it.
Bastards.
But I can live with there being bastards in the world, because I once stood about 10 feet from Ms. Detroit as she sang "Stay", and they didn't.
Just when I thought it couldn't get any more beautiful, Carlos Guitarlos, who we had all assumed was having a breather at the back of the stage, played half a dozen perfect notes on his electric guitar.

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...Warren Ellis' Superburst Mixtapes, collections of free music he's found that he thinks are interesting. Much easier now I can podcast them in iTunes.

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Google Earth is just the most amazingly fun piece of software I've seen in a long time.

But I want it on my phone, so keep at it Google, keep at it.

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Firstly, Google Maps effortlessly finds me the location of my appointment for this afternoon.
And now they have a new portal site at www.google.com/ig that is clean and simple enough to replace my usual default home page.
Not to mention the dozen Google searches I do each day. Oh, and they own this site too.
I see now why a part of the Slashdot crowd are beginning to think that Google is so useful they must be malevolent. Not that I mean to imply that Linux teaches us that good things are less useful than evil things, oh no.

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..."Back From The Dead" by the shock and awe that is Spinal Tap. You can get it here. I am sufficently convinced that it is legal. Anyway, you know what they say: "Give Me Resurrection ... Or Give Me Death!"

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I love it because it makes finding out an obscure fact worth the effort.

I was just giving my standard explanation on what bandwidth is, and what latency is. I do this by using a piece of road as an analogy. And, thanks to google, I was able to refer to a specific road near where the victim of my explanation lives. (Which is in another continent).

My analogy, if you're interested, goes like this:

Bandwidth and latency are the two things that measure how “big” or "good" an network connection is.

The best way to think of them is to picture a stretch of road. Two things determine how “big” that stretch of road is – how long does it take any particular car to travel that section (which in network terms we call latency), and how many cars go over that section in an hour (which we call bandwidth).

If the city want to improve a road, latency is hard to change – they could maybe improve a junction so the cars go through it faster (in network terms, upgrading a router), or build a new bridge to shorten the route (rerouting), but it won’t help much.

Bandwidth is a bit easier to improve – you can add an extra lane. Another way that the city could improve things for some people (at the expense of others) is to add a carpool or bus lane - in network terms this is called QOS or traffic shaping.

Bandwidth and latency are sort of linked. As traffic increases, you fill up the road. Once the road is full (and how long this takes depends on the bandwidth), then the cars slow down, and so the latency goes up.

It's important to notice that latency is all that the users notice – you don’t care how many cars an hour go through a road, you care about how long it takes you to get to your destination.

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..."Let Me Show You The A-Team (Spaced Mix)", made by DJ Crash out of a combination of "Let me Show U" by Camisra (which was itself remixed By Tall Paul), the theme from "The A-Team" by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter, and dialogue from Spaced. It's not available on vinyl, mostly because you'd need a 40" single to fit the title on.
You can get it at http://www.dreadrox.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk, although I've no idea how legal it is. I rather suspect it isn't, as it isn't on the Spaced soundtrack.
So, don't click on that link. At all. Ever. In fact, unplug your internet connection right this minute.

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I was reminded today, by a Slashdot post, of the great pain that really old First Person Shooter players, such as myself, all had to go through.
I refer, of course, to the time while playing Quake when we realised that while the keyboard worked just about well enough for Doom, it wasn't enough for Quake, and we had to ... change to the mouse.
I had intended this post to describe what that experince of relearning muscle memory was like, but words fail me. The horror! The horror!
This is, in fact (as opposed to fiction), why I do not own an Xbox. In principle I agree with the idea of a dedicated game console, but I refuse to play any FPS where I do not have a mouse.

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... "Elegy for Doctor No. 9" by Mark Leneker.
You can get it here.

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Flyer snapped in Montreal, Quebec, on a Tintin themed notice board of all things.
My French is beyond rusty, but I read it as "I am surprised that there are so many drugs here. I have noticed that the police only eat in Italian or Greek restauraunts, the same as the pushers. Ben Laden, 1995."

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One of the things that make Geeks unique is that we pick our own names.

We have the names our parents gave us, of course, but on the internet – in chat rooms, on-line games and so on – we get to choose what to call ourselves.

Actors, I suppose, often change their name, but they do not usually get to decide what they want – they have to take something their studio or agent thinks will sell.

Michael Caine famously had only a moment to pick his, while standing outside a cinema showing “The Caine Mutiny”. The internet tells me – this is of course what the internet is actually for - that the other Best Picture Oscar nominees that year were “On The Waterfront”, “The Country Girl”, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”, and “Three Coins in the Fountain” - so I guess he was lucky.

My own name is BigLig, which meets the key criteria for an internet name; easy to type, and unique. Uniqueness is good, because when you register for a new service you want to be sure your name has not been taken already. I am BigLig pretty much everywhere, except, unfortunately, on Slashdot - the spiritual home of geeks - where BigLig is already taken, so I have to be BigLig2. And, appropriately, here on blogger.com, although I have a sneaking suspicion that it must be me who registered BigLig as well, and I have just forgotten the password.

Other geeks choose their names from science fiction, names from movies, names from books, names of cult figures. Names that only make sense when you say them out loud, names that are bad puns, names that are really bad puns (the best sort).

My favourites? Names, like mine, that do not mean anything to anyone - except the person who chose them.

The problem with the name that your parents gave to you is that they did not really know much about you at the time. Like choosing a wedding present for an distant acquaintance, you usually end up with either something bland or entirely unsuitable.

Thinking about it though, one other group get to choose their names – transsexuals, who, on changing their gender, usually have to choose a new name that suits. That seems appropriate, somehow. Especially since the name my parents had chosen for me before I was born was Jacqueline. They had to think fast when I unexpectedly turned out to be a boy.

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• I think content is where it is at.
• I think I should find out what "it" is.
• I think "it" is almost certainly on the internet somewhere. But then again so is everything. And 80% of everything is crap. At best.
• I think I'm going to have to do something about this template. And those shoes. And that coat - geeeeez!
• I think I should find whoever has 'biglig' as their username, and either marry them, or set fire to them. One of those.
  
• I think I like bullet points too much.
  

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