Sleepypete's Pillow

You know me,

I can never stay away from music posts for too long. (He says chuckling away to himself)

It’s been almost 2 months now since the Macbook Air arrived (time flies doesn’t it ?) and how much of the library have I managed to get through ? Hmm. I’ve managed to listen to all but 1 of the A albums in that library so far … Wow. That’s either a lot of A albums or lots of random tracks piled in there in between.

Ok. It’s a bit of both actually. I started being a bit more systematic in what I choose to play through, mostly because I like listening to albums as albums. Some like most of the earlier Kate Bush albums are made like that. They tell a story as they go through, they carry a mood through the album (Madonna’s are like that). If it’s Cardigans or All About Eve, there’s amazing track after amazing track (listener preferences may differ – lol).

And there just happens to be a lot of A albums in the library (37 not counting the odd tracks).

That’s actually far too many to mention them all. What’s my highlights ?

Alisha’s Attic have 2 entries. There’s their first album (Alisha Rules The World) which established them as something rather different. 2 sisters with complementary and a little voices. Attitude. A touch of the weird. Huge dollops of Cool coming in for free. There’s a reason I went by the pseudonym Alisha’s Addict for a while.

(And it did feel a little strange when we had an Aleesha turn up at work one day to join the team – we’ll miss her input when she moves on, smart girl).

The second Alisha’s Attic is their Attic Vaults 1 album. AA didn’t last very long, just 3 albums before they packed it in. They didn’t get the recognition they deserved. Classy artists tend to get left behind while manufactured GirlBand and Boyband garbage gets the attention. The Attic Vaults album was going to be the first of a few which had their unreleased stuff but sadly only one came out. A pity because most Alisha’s Attic B sides are far superior to the average output of your Boyband and Girlband trash.

(I’m leaving the youtube links out of this one – although I’d love to link you Wonderful U or On The B Side. Very happy songs).

Lily Allen’s making a comeback (we hope) ! She gets in here with her first album Alright Now. If AA had attitude, Lily Allen/Cooper has even more. It’s fun to listen to as well, although … swear words … makes you choosy about where you play it – lol – silly people getting offended.

Oldest one – All About Eve’s self titled debut. What can I say. They had the gorgeous Julianne Regan as lead, who in her glamour-goth style with long dark hair and the voice of a siren had me utterly entranced. No one at school could compare (yep – long time ago, last century even) although Miss Rachel came close. It’s 20 years old but it’s still one of my favourite albums.

Gloria Estefan is in here too with Anything For You. It’s a good album and Gloria Estefan is possibly even more gorgeous than Julianne Regan but … I dunno. The songs were more consistently better from All About Eve.

There’s the usual staples of most people’s libraries in here too. There’s the essentials like Lenny Kravitz Are You Gonna Go My Way, Guns n Roses with Appetite For Destruction and R.E.M. with Automatic For The People. However, I prefer listening to the female voice. Male vocals don’t grab my attention in the same way (there’s a reason why the Bitchin’ Betty warnings in aircraft are in a female voice, we’re wired to respond to it on an instinctive level).

What’s different ? What won’t you recognise ? What’ll be new for you ?

Lene Marlin is another singer who I’ve followed for years. She’s Norwegian, singing in English with that Scandinavian accent. They’re mostly ballads although she’ll go for the boppy, rocky songs too. Her voice is another amazing voice. Well worth a listen. I’m looking forward to when the rest of her albums come up in the queue, it’s just been Another Day so far.

Talking about the angels … Craziequeen introduced me to Mindy Gledhill with the Anchor album. If you’re feeling down, listen to this or her newer album Pocketful of Poetry. I wasn’t going to link anything but … I dare ya. Listen to this one (Crazy Love) and try to avoid smiling.

This is getting near Wall of Text territory so … more in there, which are decent but not true favourites :

Tori Amos – Abnormally Attracted To Sin
Tori Amos (again!) – American Doll Posse
Abba’s third hits album
Kate Bush with Aerial – her last “good” album
Smash Mouth – All Star Greatest Hits (they gave some music to Shrek)
Paramore with All We Know Is Falling (decent debut album and they’ve improved since)
Mark Knopfler and Emmy Lou Harris – All The Roadrunning
(been tempted to try an Emmy Lou Harris album – dunno why I haven’t yet)
Arctic Monkeys – AM (recommended)
Everything But The Girl – Amplified Heart (much better than Baby… which is trash)
Clannad with Anam
Pink Floyd with Animals (Weird, has lines about sheep rising up and fighting dogs by learning karate)
Rita Coolidge – Anytime Anywhere – this lady knew how to sing
Mansun – Attack of the Grey Lantern – these guys made a lot of great music

And I’ve not even mentioned the soundtracks … Ok. Only one. There was a Beatles tribute film that came out a few years ago called Across The Universe. Unlike the abomination which was the Mamma Mia film, the actors and actresses in Across The Universe could sing and sing extremely well.

I’ll close off with a highlight – “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play ?” If you haven’t seen Across The Universe, I’d highly recommend it. Oh and here’s another link, just Because.

PS The world remembered a Titan today. RIP Nelson Mandela, we won’t see someone as great as you for some time.

….and it's not only the newspapers that do it. The Government should be protecting its people from unwarranted intrusion into their lives – not enabling and sanctioning it!

Actually that's another group that I didn't mention above – the newspapers who will spy on us for the juicy stuff because they think they can get away with it …

Oh, I think that there's a world of difference using legitimate spying to protect us from the bad guys out there and spying on everyone on the off chance that something juicy might turn up at some point – which is far from legitimate. I would love to hear a coherent explanation from someone in power how spying on *me* makes me safer from terrorism!

We seem to be living in an ever increasingly overt world of surveillance these days …

Everybody is watching everybody else but most of all, they’re watching us.

It’s scary isn’t it ? If you believe the hype and scaremongering, there’s computers out there going through everything we send, store or comment on over the internet looking for … I dunno what. Lots of stuff. There’s even spying happening on the data that wings its way between all those places where The Cloud and its data centres live.

We have the NSA and GCHQ getting caught doing their job (looking for terrorists) and we have other assorted people trying to get as much information as they can about us so they can sell us either advertising or actual products.

(And yes, I’m betting that this post will be one of those that gets a “Hey ! Buy My Stuff ! Read My Review !” – yep, they do capitalise like that – that you don’t see because I delete and report them as the spam that they are).

They’re all at it. The only difference between them is how honest they are about it and how they can justify it. While I can agree with the security people (heard of a bomb go off in the UK lately ? no, didn’t think so) spying on us, it’s a whole different story with the gang of 8 that’s bleating at the moment.

Here’s a Register story about it (link). The alliance of 8 includes :

AOL – don’t know much about them
Apple – who have just enabled spyware on iPhones that bleats an advert if you go past something in the shop
Facebook – trust these guys with your info ? hell no !
Google – see Facebook. And they’re not honest about the Googlebot.com that will be spying on this blog without admitting to it on the Google hit counter. Or the Next-Blog button which I disabled a while ago, which still apparently works.
LinkedIn – assume they’re looking for advertising
Microsoft – Kinect + always on. Nuff said, although there’s much more from Microsh$ft.
Twitter – I avoid this like the plague. Cos it is. A plague of illiterate offensive idiots that is.
Yahoo – see Google.

Oh and most of the above don’t pay their taxes like the rest of us. I’m kinda surprised Amazon haven’t made it a gang of 9.

(I appear to be working my way into a rant – muahahahaha)

Yes. State sponsored surveillance is a Bad Thing in our modern liberal world. So are bombs and terrorists and people who get away with fraud that breaks banks and wrecks the lives of thousands. It’s a Bad Thing but the alternative is much worse.

You can’t justify surveillance in the name of advertising or commercialism like that. I can guarantee that everything I’ve posted online is stored and analysed by people like Amazon so they can target their ads and attempt to sell me stuff.

The offensive thing is that both groups are spying on everyone. They’re doing it as part of their core business, however one group is honest about it whereas the other group says “Hey ! No fair !” when they’re not allowed to have their own way. It just happens that the group that’s bleating is the group that owns the news.

Do you get the feeling I hate advertising and everything associated with it ?

The answer is to limit your online exposure. This blog is written under a pseudonym and there’s only one post here that says directly what I work on. The sitemeter counter is private because it would give clues for who I work for. I don’t declare who I work for on Facebook, although it’s guessable.

Be careful what you put online, it may be incredibly difficult to remove it when it hits the internet.

And …. a shift to the left !

I’ve been struggling over the past few days. Part of that is being desperate for the Xmas break (I’m shattered and running on fumes). Most of it is putting a hole in my tongue … Think of a big tongue ulcer. And then think it’s bigger than that.

Ouch !

I didn’t eat much over the weekend, which isn’t as bad as it sounds because I’ve put enough weight back on that I can miss a few meals and get away with it. Not for long though. It’s improving now though. I’ve been ok with eating again, although it’s been very difficult to talk at work today. Hopefully it’ll be easier tomorrow.

On the other hand … skin’s improving ! Despite me “helping” it …

I think it has to count as one of those secret guilty pleasures …

Not much Minecraft either on the Hannah and Kim channels. Avoid Totalbiscuit though, he has a habit of making me buy games I never play.

Been watching some of Hannah's yogcasts. Hilarious! She might just have a new fan…..

There’s a few interesting developments in the space world at the moment.

Waitaminute – are those two words (space and world) that should be used together seeing as one is ground and the other is void ?

I’ve been watching the news reports on the Indian space probe lately. There’s two probes going to Mars at the moment, one from India, one from the USA. The Indian one made its people nervous because one of its several “Trans-Mars Injection” burns didn’t go to plan.

I’ve written things about Kerbal Space program before (and I feel I have unfinished business with that game but it’s far more amusing to watch the Scott Manley videos). It’s simplified at the moment but it’s still an incredibly good rocketry and orbital physics simulator. Definitely one where you have to think a bit with the navigation.

Anyway – it teaches you all sorts of things, me being one of those people who learns best by doing. It teaches things like :

Why the Indian probe needed several burns to get to Mars
Why it would split up the burns
Why they send probes to other planets at certain times/dates
Why it didn’t really matter if it missed one

Firstly – the certain times and dates … Everything in space has a path that it goes through. Everything around it influences that path, which makes everything go in slightly wonky ellipses. It’s why we have tides, because the gravity of the moon pulls the water towards the moon. It takes time too for the planets to go around their orbits. You wouldn’t want to launch your probe when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun. Or maybe you would …

Things up there happen slowly. If you pointed a rocket towards Mars and hit the Go button, it would miss because in the time taken for it to get there, Mars will have moved around the sky quite significantly. Instead, you aim it towards where Mars will be when you think it’ll get there and you factor in how much its path will be curved by the gravity of everything else up there.

There’s a phenomenon called the Oberth Effect, which says that if you fire the rocket in orbit, it’ll most affect the opposite side of the orbit. Hold up. 2 important terms : Periapse – closest approach, Apoapsis – furthest approach. Oberth means that to escape orbit, it’s best to fire the rocket at Periapse because that’s the best way of increasing that Apoapsis. And once the rocket is going fast enough, it achieves “Escape Velocity” and will be on its way to Mars.

So why split up the burns, why not go American Style and just do one ? Well – the American one had what all American transport has (lol – I’d love a V8 monster), a whopping big engine, while the Indian one was a bit more modest.

So the Indian one couldn’t get all of the acceleration it needed out of the way in the short times it had at Periapse. It doesn’t matter that it splits them up, as long as it can do it enough times to get to Mars while it still had fuel to get there.

I think that’s enough orbital mechanics for now don’t you ?

Yep. Brain. Fizzing. Cooking. Exploding.

Especially when you think of the insane calculations that go on to get the most efficient course to go. They’ll factor in every bit of gravity they can to get their rocket in the right place at the right time, without bumping into any planets. If they’re really clever, they’ll make it fly by lots of different planets. Probes like Cassini-Huygens visited 3 planets (Earth, Venus, Jupiter) before reaching its final destination (Saturn) and when it got to Saturn, it checked out 9 moons. Most of that is set up by the rockets that fling it out there and the math to do it is absolutely insane. Kerbal Space Program is much simpler and orbital maneouvres in that tend to be rather more brute force.

One last bit – why do they bother being so efficient ? Cos it lets them squeeze as many instruments on to the probe as possible. More instruments means more weight, means more fuel needed to get them to the destination.

Ok – that’s definitely enough for the nerdy stuff for tonight.

I was going to say something about gaming too. I have that unfinished business with Kerbal Space Programme, where I’d like to make rockets that check out the other planets. My main gaming time at the moment is with that old staple (9 years old … cor) World of Warcraft. I’m playing on Silvermoon with ally characters. I’m missing the guys and the Hot Swedish Girls of the awesome Draenor guild but I’m enjoying playing through the story as an ally for the first time.

I have to say, since I started playing WoW it’s got considerably easier. I thought I’d check this out by sending my character into Outland (where the first expansion is set) completely naked. Ok. Not completely, I let her keep the tabard for modesty. Did I have a problem ? Only with the pet battle. I don’t think it’ll be as easy when I get to the second expansion but a lot of the challenge has been removed from the game. And that’s a big shame. Challenge makes it fun and the challenge as the game used to be was never too much.

I’ve been very tired lately though. I started playing on Monday evening and lasted a couple of quests before giving up due to tiredness. At the moment, I’m enjoying watching (actually listening) the Yogscast annual Xmas livestreams. I won’t be watching all of those (their output varies, they have awesome people and annoying people) but I thought last night’s with Hannah, Simon and Kim-Mandrew was hilarious. The videos by Hannah and Kim tend to be pretty special.

Thoroughly enjoyed that. It’s gamers enjoying games and bringing you with them when they do. Quite restful too, except when they’re playing horror games and unexpected sounds happen.

Right – over to the livestream 🙂 But … random piccy !

Definitely.

Yeah – it didn't really feel that long after they got the prologue out of the way.

Thought the 2 1/2 hours flew by. To be honest I never really noticed the time passing.