A huge sack of my AHX and HivelyTracker tunes feature in a Ukscene Allstars production put out a few days ago - a 200kb musicdisk for Windows, coded by Vampire^TZT. Music is by KEiTO^Alcatraz and me, and KEiTO did the artwork.

Fairly old news, this, but I've been busy... I'm quite honoured to have been asked by ALiEN of Bitfellas to contribute some music to the massive and seminal artpack/musicdisk work that is Bitjam. This is one of those prods that's simply a unique experience - a perfect arrangement of intuitive, imaginative and creative GUI design which, despite being a work of art in itself, presents all sorts of diverse output from across the demoscene spectrum. An .iso image of the CD is available for download, and I believe you can get the DVD-case sized inlay for printoff at home, although I was lucky enough to get a very professionally-produced copy from rc55 at Sundown, by special arrangement with the Bitfellas lads. My music plays a relatively small part in this huge collective endeavour, but I'm well chuffed that it's on there:)

Actually, no. I haven't the energy. I'm using Firefox almost exclusively now, though in contemporary browser politics, that's much like a middle-class teenager proclaiming himself to be an 'anarchist', in that it's functionally meaningless, it's beneficial only in the sense that it'll be a formative experience of which he'll one day grow out, it keeps him off the streets and, most importantly, it makes a very select few people think he's cool. Parallels with fledgling and naive lifestyle ideals continue when you consider the vast potential for an idea like Firefox - user-contributed extensions, fast dev-cycle, etc. - but the brutal truth is that a fraction of society know about it or are vaguely interested in abandoning their current lifestyle in favour of it. I'll be having to test my sites in Internet Explorer for a LONG time to come.

And what's wrong with Internet Explorer? Well we all know what's wrong with Internet Explorer and the list of complaints probably wouldn't even fit on the University's webserver, but like Mussolini's trains, it bloody well comes on time. I'm not worried about sounding like a pedant here, because a pedantic outlook is basically a requirement of anyone willing to waste time writing blog posts about browsers. I run a three-screen setup and when I'm in the midst of any serious work (or even when I'm just messing around aimlessly), I have browser windows flying around all over the place. Opening, closing; I'm not into tabbed browsing, mainly because I like to be able to put *this* stuff over *here* and so on... it facilitates the pretence of an efficient desktop. My laboured point is, though, that Firefox takes an age to fire up when it's loaded with the bare minimum of extensions - that is, maybe five seconds longer than the one second IE takes. That's seriously pedantic, but there you go - Firefox is a well-polished Gordian knot of javascript and junk. When a browser is central to how you work, those few seconds really start to throw you off your balance.

The aforementioned 'bare minimum' of extensions are just those required to make Firefox a usable browser: keyconfig (for keyboard shortcuts that aren't arse-backwards), Web Developer (obviously), Tab Killer (bring on the iconoclastic fury!), IE Tab (for testing pages in IE, although it's a bit buggy), Clone Window (to make CTRL+N useful), Wizz RSS News Reader, Screen Grab! (pretty handy, this one), FireFTP (an EXCELLENT FTP client - replaced FlashFXP entirely, although it seems it doesn't do scp/sftp, which might make it switfly useless:[ ), Firebug (nice site debugger) and, perhaps most importantly, the marvellous FEBE; a backup extension with the option of just dumping EVERY conceivable Firefox profile variable to a big file so I can throw it on all my other machines, just the way I like it.

What else is wrong? RAM/page usage! I'm astounded that Firefox has become such a disgustingly bloated RAM-hog in the past year or two, and I'm also astounded that it takes a none-too-obvious hack to go some way towards sorting it out. If you're scandalised by its approx. 30mb of usage on initial startup (even if you have a ninja machine - it's the principle of the thing!) then try this:

'about:config' in the address bar, then check to see if you have the value 'config.trim_on_minimize' by typing it in the Filter window. If you do, set it to true. You probably won't on a fresh install, in which case right-click to create a new Boolean value with the name 'config.trim_on_minimize' and set it to true. When you restart Firefox, you should find that minimising it once will drop the RAM load to about 5mb, which should persist.

I'm sure everyone's been using that trick for years now and I'm just remedial, as usual, but there you go. The Linux version of Firefox doesn't seem to suffer from this, but in many respects it's like using a different browser entirely. Of course, if Firefox is used only by a fraction of web-connected individuals worldwide, you can chop that figure down again for the number of people using Firefox on Linux.

So if it sounds like I'm only using Firefox begrudgingly, then that's probably true. I'd love to be able to use IBrowse, but while recent new features include Javascript(!), CSS is still a pipedream. The other good reason not to use it, of course, is that it's only a hop and a skip away from Mosaik and it'd make me feel like even more of a luddite than I apparently am.

I absolutely fixed it, with the help of Blokey. Why I was using ex for width, Christ only knows, but now I've figured it out in em and it all actually *works*. I finally have cross-browser compatibility! Although I haven't checked it in Safari yet... It's true that I have a profound believe that Safari and its few users around the world should fuck right off, yet it would annoy me to think that this fairly basic little site was less than 99% compliant across the board. It even works in fucking Lynx, for Christ's sake.

For God's sake. We've come so far and yet, of course, we haven't. CSS is still a load of fucking bollocks, and this column's width is about half what it should be in Firefox, compared to IE. It's doing my head in. Bizarrely, it seems to be a font issue - Courier New isn't behaving as it should, or rather Firefox is mucking up the spacing. Other fonts seem to make FF take the area to its maximum width, but I'm determined not to lose Courier New. There are so few nice fonts left in the world... Trebuchet MS is what I use for people who pay me, Tahoma's what I use for people who aren't paying me, Courier New is what I use for myself and FixedSys is just for...recreational use.

Anyway, I'm giving the fuck up on it now because it's 6.50am and I'm contemplating a nap. The first part of Angels in America was fantastic last night and I wound down by making a long and drawn-out lifestyle change from Outlook Express to Thunderbird. PGP signatures are fun! Here's my public key:

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I'm going to write, every day. I'm going to jettison paragraphs of overtly self-conscious prose into the ether so that I can at least artificially stimulate that part of me that needs to put down words from time to time. So that's pretty much like everyone else's blog, other than those kept by people whose banal lives momentarily capture the sluggish, Brownian interest of Wired or Guardian Weekend readers. They probably went on holiday to Iraq and then blogged with a revolutionary fervour for a few days, until the hits stopped coming. Or perhaps they engaged in legal action against their employer and wanted to discuss it under a mysterious nom de plume, after which - what? What happened next? No fucker knows, because nobody honestly gives a shit.

The average person's life works in a series of intricately parenthetical narrative arcs - or so it seems, until, deep in a sleepless night, they're hit with the depressing reality that these dsare concentric circles of narrative repetition. If it's this frustrating for a person to figure out their *own* existence, along the linear chronology to which we're apparently tied, why should anyone want to wholeheartedly subscribe to somebody else's?

'Bloggers' (I said it again, but don't worry - I made a sign of the cross) would argue that in practice, the constituent parts of their entire blog gestalt are essentially ephemeral and, in a community of 'bloggers', serve as a form of protracted conversation which encapsulates some (neurotic yet heavily censored) stream-of-consciousness writing and, of course, the 'web-logging' of their activities from which they've derived their horrible little Web1.5 vernacular.

It takes the wider human capacity for Not Really Caring to a captivating new level, in much the same way that the acceptance of a Myspace friend 'add' liberates millions from actually having to speak to the objectionable but remote schoolfriends who have painstakingly tracked them down. Engagement is absolutely not necessary. After all - if you leave a comment on somebody's page and they don't respond, well; it's rather silly to expect that they have quite so much time on their hands as you, isn't it? I mean it's slightly embarrassing that you spend so much time on Myspace, and it's perfectly normal that normal people should just set up a simple Myspace and return to it very rarely, if at all. Isn't it? Isn't it? Perhaps a transcention through such concerns can only come to those few generations who grew with the web and not into it. Or those who, y'know, have lives.

I've registered for a University blog account. And why not? Most of my blogging (dear Lord, I said it) is likely to involve either my fields of study or my Culture Lab work and besides - the University Blog Service is quite clearly a hearty open-source installation of b2evolution; the system I'm using right here, right now. It's actually not too bad. It's really difficult to mess it up and even has an idiot-proof GUI template editor for skinning up, as it were.

Today I failed to evolve. Again. I did manage to write some HVL tunes and even furnish my A1200 with a nice new set of path assigns. If I can just learn to create a symbolic link (ln -s) between forward progress and reverse progress, then I'll be able to convince myself that none of my efforts are in vain! To explain - I need to kick myself in the compositional and performative arse before New York so that I can get off the plane, set up my keyboard and make sex in people's ears. I suspect if I tried it right now, it'd be like trying to pick a lock with an anchovie whereas in a few months' time, after lots of preparation, I'll be gouging road tunnels through the alps.

I have to relinquish my ABSOLUTELY CRIPPLING 'oldskool' values because only about ten people in the WORLD give a shit about them. I say crippling because this goes beyond mere elitism or socio-technocratic stratification: my neurotic concepts of authenticity (which seem laughable when I'm not sat in front of something that runs at 14mhz) pretty much prevent me from doing anything that would benefit me (or anyone else) artistically.

I'm a prize-winning demoscene musician with years of experience and yet I've never used somebody else's sample. Never. Not once. This isn't me showing off my moral high horse - demoscene tracking absolutely embraces the credited or requested appropriation of other artists' samples, mainly because it's so easy to lift a sample you like from somebody else's mod. This area is even less troublesome than the sampling issue in the encoded music scene (by which I mean everything that's recorded but non-tracked and non-free) because lifting the sample will rarely mean lifting any of the original artist's creative intent - melody, rhythmn, structure, etc. lie in the hex code and not in the sample.

So the self-harm comes when I decide that "well, y'know, if I'm a serious tracker then I should be doing everything from scratch." What. The. Fuck. So, then, I create my miniscule, 12-byte chip samples in a text editor, using ASCII values to signify minimum and maximum sample-volume levels so that I can construct a square wave. I write, WRITE, for God's sake, a VST synth plugin to generate longer samples, import them to my tracker then mix them down to new chords. I even fucking draw drum sample waveforms and noise every single time, where common sense would have had me giving up and doing what every fucker else does - nicking them. They all sound identical in the end, anyway, if we're talking about five-minute pieces of music with filesizes in the 10kb neighbourhood.

So. This means low productivity; that's obvious. What it also means, though, is that when it seeps into other areas of my work, I become surrounded by brick walls. I can't use the same four bars of percussion more than once. I hesitate to repeat melodies. I can't use a preset. I'd LOVE to be able to use a preset once in a while. This isn't just the pursuit of originality; this is the abject fear of being caught out by someone who can't possibly exist outside of my imagination and who (I'm slowly realising) must be a personification of all my self-doubt. Hooray.

I spent my WHOLE Saturday trying different 2.5" IDE drives in my A600. I mean we're not talking about hamfisted 'throw 'em against the wall and see what sticks' techniques here: seven 2.5" drives is an impressive collection, despite the fact that some of them feature highly questionable geometry, and I went to painstaking lengths to empirically diagnose the problem.

Sparing you the *really* gruesome detail, it got to the point where I was mounting these things in a fucking AROS installation (in VMWare!) to get them picked up, boot-sector-rewritten, >4Gb partitioned, etc, but the A600 (3.1 ROMs and Workbench 3.1) still wasn't finding them.

I'm not just some kind of masochist - I was up against the clock to get a HD install of Workbench on this A600 so I could use it as one of the machines I intended to do an Amiga DJ set off in Crawcrook a few hours later. The A600's never had a HD in it, despite having IDE headers - Commodore designed this lovely, compact motherboard but released the non-HD A600's with a ROM set that couldn't handle it...so 3.1 ROMs, in 2006, were reasonably pricey to come across.

Anyway. The gig was cancelled but, having started, I wasn't inclined to give up. Until I realised the IDE pin headers numbered 39 rather than the usual 44. Of COURSE they'd snapped off. I had eliminated every other fucking possibility over the course of eight fevered hours. Five pins are now rattling around the motherboard, probably finding new homes in which they can cause mysterious surface-resistor shorts in the future. I've got a new motherboard in the post because I'm determined not to consign my beloved A600, my FIRST COMPUTER, tenderly cared for since I was eight years old, to redundancy.

In case you're not familiar, the A600 was yet another disastrous milestone on Commodore's amiable and catastrophic ramble through the home computer industry of the 90's. It was the wrong machine with the wrong specifications in the wrong place at the wrong time. As you can see, though, it's neat, compact (lacking the A500/A1200's numpad) and as perhaps its only saving grace, features a PCMCIA slot which can be stuffed with high-capacity CompactFlash cards for file transfer and network cards for...well, I dunno, porn. Whatever 'the kids' are using the interweb for these days.

In switching rooms, I found it necessary to gather up my various notepads, sketchpads, diaries and (bizarrely) account books so as to consign them neatly to a shelf, but to leave them reasonably within reach. Maybe a dozen in total, offering the most delightful thicknesses and textures of paper, all bound in ingeniously creative fashions.

They're all absolutely empty. Virgin-snow white; unblemished from cover to cover. This is my first blog post in ages. I love crafting websites from time to time and I'm usually fairly sure they'll remain sparse and bereft of the brain-rotting minutae for which they're essentially designed. Is this a good thing? I'm almost certain it is.

I know who visits this site and I like that we can all conduct ourselves with a knowing taciturnity that renders the minute-by-minute bullshit of the 'blogosphere' (or whatever ghastly buzzname the weblogging community has assumed since the pestilent masses discovered the web) unnecessary. I'm sure that if I had a higher opinion of my own meticulously recorded daily rituals, I'd be quite depressed that the only comments made on here are by the few spambots I haven't yet guarded against.

Eighteen (18) hours, with breaks for dinner and a trip to Ryton, were spent getting my new '060 working. A florid narration of my adventures is sure to follow soon, but suffice to say that the experience involved sadness, happiness, property damage and a strong smell of burning.

I ordered an expensive toy today. This venerable yet vastly cool accelerator card will go in my A1200 and give me 68060/50Mhz (pretty much as fast as it gets for 64k without overclocking) and 240Mhz PPC, along with a high-speed SCSI interface (which I probably won't use) and anywhere up to a wholly daft 256Mb RAM! The PPC chip means that if I can possibly get hold of a copy of Amiga OS4, I can try out xeron's forthcoming Hively Tracker and the general beastliness of this card means I should be able to enjoy the likes of TBL's recent 060/non-3D demos as they were meant to be.

The whole Amiga situation is a bit ridiculous at the moment, for those who are interested. I don't have a great deal of ideological investiture in it myself, but I can feel the pain of people who crave what's been promised for so long - a release-ready distribution of Amiga OS4 and the dedicated hardware to run it on, such as the PPC based AmigaOne or PegasOS systems. Well, PegasOS is sort of available, but it's all for stupid money and when it comes down to it, I haven't the stamina to spend up to a grand on something that'd have its arse kicked up and down the street by the average PC desktop of six years ago. No - for me, the point is to wallow in the self-indulgence offered by firing up a tricked-out 'classic' Amiga; an A1200 still in its desktop case.

Bizarrely enough, I've heard mutterings of Sony's PS3, with its vaguely PPC-orientated chip design, being a possible hardware platform for OS4/MorphOS in the future. Apparently someone's got a PPC-based Linux distribution booting, and even Sony's development websites talk about bootloader programming for people to try. Now there's a whole tricky business that largely passes me by regarding OS4's translation-layer capabilities (or lack thereof) for using the 68k hardware in a PPC-classic (like mine) to run old games and applications. Maybe this is something that emulation would solve...imagine having your Amiga games archive accessible and playable on a PS3 via a reasonably thin non-Sony OS! Exciting stuff, but definitely stuff for other people to worry about. I'll just do my usual trick of reappearing in a few years to see what's been done.

Anyway, this card's going to be the donkey's nipples. The problem is...I'll now have to think seriously about getting an internal scandoubler/flickerfixer to make the most of it. They're like fucking hen's teeth and there's basically no bartering to be done. Everyone knows they're worth around £100 and everyone knows they'll always find someone else to buy it off them - usually within hours.

Now getting hold of OS4...that's going to be the tricky bit. In fact, I'm almost certain I've got no chance, but I'm going to speak to some people in the know and see what I can rustle up. The God's honest truth is that I really only want to try OS4 so I can run Hively Tracker which, going by xeron's interview with scarab in JurassicPack 16 a while ago, could become my absolutely ultimate tracker... Significant stuff. Fuckin', multichannel AHX, multiple effects columns, skinnable interface, open-source playback routines, this'll be the fucking shit! Anyway... To bed.

This week involved recovering from sickness, the acquittal of diverse responsibilities and the expenditure of a surprising amount of time playing games.

I so rarely have time to play games these days and given that most of them seem to be shit, I don't often find myself in the mood anyway. Despite that, during some rougher periods of congestion I saddled up Dawn of War: Winter Assault and made brave sacrifices of the Emperor's infantry in the face of the brutal onslaught of Chaos. Imperial arbitration duly dispensed, I then got around to Jet Set Radio (which I'd meant to play years ago but hadn't mustered the time) and found it to be fucking mint. My Dreamcast's in the loft and is possibly knackered, so once the ISO had made its way to my hard disk, I went to http://www.chanka.org and tried out Chankast. I've waited years for a formidable Dreamcast emulator and here it is - as long as your PC specs are up to the job, it can dispense fullscreen VGA emulation, offer comprehensive VMU emulation and even map controls from my converted USB Xbox controller! There's a mostly useless wireframe graphics mode which turns any game into a shit version of Rez and there are a couple of built-in speed hacks, apparently with Capcom games in mind. All good, then. Like I say, Jet Set Radio is the fucking nuts and I have an extremely cheap copy of JSR Future for the Xbox on order, just because. By the way, I'm blundering through the Japanese version because that's what happened to be well-seeded, but it seems that the US version, Jet 'Grind' Radio, has a load of the trickier bits cut out. Bollocks to that. Oh, it also has a few popular songs shoehorned in: Rob Zombie - Dragula et al, because if it worked for The Matrix then surely it'll work for our bowlderised Japanese import!!!11

What else... Ah yes - I discovered a pretty good session at Egypt Cottage near the Quayside on Thursday nights. Mainly Irish traditional music (in fitting with my own cultural bias) and with a regular host of strong, good players many of whom are on, or have graduated from, the Folk and Traditional Music Degree at Newcastle. I admit I always had my reservations about what sort of people the degree might attract...but it seems to be consistently bringing in the best young musicians in the country and plopping them all in the middle of Newcastle. So a session like this, surely, can't go wrong. Of particular note is an old friend of mine, Shona Kipling, an outstanding accordion player, who has just released an album with Damien O'Kane (another Folk degree graduate). Listen to some tunes here - http://www.myspace.com/shonakiplinganddamienokane .

Oh - the diverse responsibilities to which I alluded merely concerned my various jobs and the doing of them. The school I work for wants an email account for each pupil, which will require a dedicated mail server at considerable expense (£500ish per year) and a considerable setup and maintenance effort...so while finding a solution is easy, finding a sustainable solution might be trickier.

Edit
Shit - I remember why I entitled this post Engagement Stances now: four of our friends are getting married. Not in a polygamous way, but more two separate couples at two separate times. Caroline and Rich, who probably aren't known to anyone who reads this blog and don't read it themselves, and Christina and Barry, who probably aren't known to anyone who reads this blog and don't read it themselves! Both couples have mentioned it in my presence, so I suppose that constitutes an invitation that they can't back out of - YESSSS! Neither seem to require the services of my ceilidh band, which is reasonable, although I can always do with an extra £55 cash in hand :( Still, Christina and Bazzzzz's may be in Malaysia and I can't see the 11th Hour Ceilidh Band traveling that far. Caroline will most likely elist the glamtastic rock-spinnings of everyone's favourite Duff, so that we can all enjoy ourselves in that little bit more hardcore a fashion.

I still have a cold. I think it's a cold. It's sufficiently debilitating that many people would call it 'flu (or 'flu'), but most people don't really know what that is. If you make an appearance in public less than a week after saying you had the 'flu, then you merely had a bad cold and you're a big soft jessie.

I think I'm getting better at colds, though. Confining them to modules or stages of malady is the solution. At the moment I'm in a stalemate of sorts - or perhaps a war of tickly-cough attrition.

Anyway, I'm determined that today (Wednesday) is the last day I'll devote to recovery and so I'll soon be able to get on with all of that despair and uncertainty that I've been neglecting of late. Perhaps I should make resolutions! Yes - that's it! I'll promote my Lightbomb music. That'll be a productive endeavour. I keep procrastinating and I'm not sure why - it's easy, even fun, to promote my syphus stuff but perhaps that's because my opinion of it in its creative context is higher than my opinion of Lightbomb... Dangerous waters, here, so I'll stop.

I suspect that mediocrity is a self-infliction; a subjective and very personal disease. I certainly hope so, because I feel like that's an idea I could cling to for comfort.

To perceive mediocrity in art is to adopt a very arrogant view of what you imagine to be a single plane of aptitude and achievement, upon which which every artist is represented as a Cartesian coordinate, with cruelly broad axes helping to plot their failure to achive something necessarily out of reach. Some people think in terms of multiple planes, depending on which fleeting memes have their attention at the moment and the more forgiving and liberal a person becomes in allowing more axes onto their increasingly crowded squiggle-graph, the less they are perceived by their peers as having brash, clear-cut, confident opinions on the diverse artistic product with which they're saturated. For such opinions are what make people pay attention; what sell magazines and what necessitate the intellectual catastrophe embodied by 100,000 people starting up new and futile blogs each day.

Perhaps science is about keeping you breathing, while art is about giving you something to talk about while you do. That crude postulation may appear primitive and ill-informed - and it most certainly is! It seems to suggest both the lowest expectations we could have of these two caelestial bodies in the intellectual firmament and the very highest, for to grant ourselves the casual will power to occupy ourselves between birth and death is surely a binary, yes/no distinction between humans and...simply living things. Or not. I mean I talk about binary distinctions as if I'm gleeful at having discovered something so invitingly simple and incontrovertible that I can actually use it to argue my point...whereas the exponentially vast parentheses that surround any such distinctions and also encompass the infinite tracts of what we don't (and will never) know remind me that I should go back to doing what I do best. Wallowing in the bliss of ignorance.

Mediocrity? Nothing more than my repeated failure to achieve somebody else's artistic apogee. Surely a success by my own standards...

All went well. This is a pretext for trying an image upload. Here's a picture of me stirring it up, livestyle. Or whatever.
Take particular note of 68k-architecture machines, tiny teevees, real-life instrumentation and an unfortunate haircut. This is the kind of high-quality experience my audience-members can expect to enjoy when they lay down their multiple pounds.
We had a great time, anyway, with Jon, Skinny and Oz doing their thrilling and diverse sets followed by my all-over-the-place schizophrenic dual-artistic-personality routine which culminated in an improvised jam where I got the others to come back onstage and spazz it up over an interminably looped 10-second Amiga mod.

I hate blogs. This one's particularly shit, I've discovered. I'm going to leave it on here.