Alfies Army

I'll never be a dad, and I know that because I'm baffled by all this.  For those that don't know who this is, its a little scouse kid with a congenital genetic degenerative brain disorder that sadly died.  The parents were arguing in court for him to be taken to the Vatican City for treatment but Alder Hey have rightly slammed it and in the end they backed down and took him home for his final hours.  There is some heated debate about a cure being denied on the NHS, and this includes the first weapon of the utter twat, death threats to specific nurses and surgeons.

Fun fact whatever care the Vatican would be prepared to offer, it would have only been palliative care, the same he received in the UK. In fact due to his condition and degeneration I hoped he would have made it to his second birthday, but of course he died.

Even worse, it seems the fat hand of thick Americans have waded in, with none of the nuance or understanding of the situation, blaming the NHS and some clumsily barbed gun control bollocks too ...  its a shit show all round.

I didn't take an interest first up, but then someone I knew posted some tweets about this (especially his fuck witted army protesting) and it got me hooked.  I saw a run down on his condition in a thread by a paediatrician posted up but as Twitter is a cunt to search properly there is an excellent laymans terms explanation from the Liverpool Echo.  My take is really one of devils advocate here, I'm not remotely religious and think the Hospital Alder Hey have done the right thing here.  My heart goes out to the parents in all this and that I hope they'll never forget him and remember him with fondness.

The other reason, I'm not a dad is that it reminds me of the sketch smart pipes from Jam.  Ooh you're so hot.

 

Disaster Report.

Thanks to some stuff and nonsense in the week I lost my PC to a massive crash the kind where you have to unplug because ctrl alt del doesn't work.  Thanks to that, it corrupted my hard drive so the only thing I could do was boot up in linux and see what could be salvaged.  Thanks to a partial back up, I didn't lose much just videos, documents and a music folder I haven't added to in ages, most  will be on back ups on removable drives from when I did it a few months ago.

The upshot is that I now have a new PC, a nice I7 laptop from Asus (incidentally does anyone else pronounce it ace us instead of ah Zeus) and a nice Numark Recording turntable from Maplin.
(you can skip the next two paragraphs if you want to know how to set that up my impressions).

PC is a laptop (which is new for me) and currently has a few custom additions by myself namely an external keyboard and mouse because a touch pad is an awful fucking contraption, leaving you cramped up like a zombie hunched over the screen.  Also added a external USB hub so it doesn't clog up what USB ports I have left and of course banished most of Windows 10 with Classic Shell and unpinned Cortana from the start bar.  The only thing left to do is to comb through the back shell bits and turn off all the ads and tracking bollocks though if you use free software you'll be used to that in some degree or other.

Relegated the old rig upstairs and put Linux Mint Sarah on it which was easy enough (ironically my cousin was called Sarah and yeah she was easy enough too ;). It looks fucking lush and sort of apes win 10 in its interface, finally added a network adaptor to the USB hub upstairs and added the address of my new VM  super hub. Result all devices are playing ball, which is a novelty for me as it was an absolute bastard to add the old PC to.

The Numark is the Numark TT USB turntable (on offer for £100) a lightweight plastic deck with a few pro parts and pieces.  It came with a link for EZ tape and vinyl recovery software for Vista and XP, but I've snubbed this for my legit Goldwave and Audacity combo that has stood the test of time for me.

Watch out when unboxing as there are several parts hidden in the polystyrene that are easy to over look, such as the stylus head and counterweight.  These are easily added and once the stylus cover is removed and weight calibrated you are all set up to go.  This is currently running from the separate system through the RCA ports at the back and the switch to line in. So far I cannot vouch for the USB connectivity but I'm happy with everything else.

Like Depeche Mode says, its important to "get the balance" right.  You must screw the counterweight in until you get it to balance perfectly and when its set right you're all set to go.
So far I've tried it out with UB40 in dub and its been good (though a brand new stylus helps) just need a few other things to add and I'll be set.

Pro's are: easy to set up and quite lightweight.  +/-8 slider for true DJ speed control.

Minuses: Plastic finish makes it look quite ugly.  Can be fiddly for those not used to a pro set up.
Easily over looked parts in packaging (seriously we found the counterweight when throwing away the polystyrene).

419 Scam Letter

Here is a odd thing we received in the mail during the week, and its probably the first one of these I've seen written rather than as a E Mail.
I'll print it in full here with certain bits amended to protect my privacy, you'll also get an inkling of what type of letter this is and the level of English this guy has.

從桌上的泰徳陳*6

xu4494@yahoo.com

Dear Potential Scammee*.

My name is Heng Xu, I am a** contacting you in relations to the late Kobe Bryant***, I worked for  him as his private investment manager, and in the few years prior to his death invested substantially in various opportunities.

After a few years of profit making, he instruted that all the money be collected together into a single bank account, and I arranged with a specialist bank here in China to secure the money in a single account, shortly after he died* I assumed his relatives has since made claims, only to get a phone call from the bank a few weeks ago that Charles funds remains unclaimed, and the money would go to the Government if nobody claims it.

The bank used international people finders**** to locate any relative of Charles but they failed to locate any, hence I have taken the initiative to make enquires myself, in the process I have been provided your details, I propose that we don't allow this money go to the Government and work together to legally secure this money in full compliance with the laws of China.

Kindly write back to me on the estate of late Mr. Bryant, kindly keep this communication confidential due to its sensitivity***** as we do not want this inheritance to fall into the wrong hands,

Heng Xu.

* Did call me by my real name but I thought this would be much more funnier as I clocked what the bastard was up to.

** I am a contacting. The first grammar slip up.  People who write these sort of letters do not have English as a first language (though judging by the state of peoples English around here neither do we English anymore).  .

*** Not my relatives real name, he was never a basketball star, and he definitely scraped the info off  Facebook as its the only place I've shared this info (a photo my cousin asked for), and the biggest flag for me, as the person in question died in WW2. Reread the letter with that info in mind and it becomes much more obvious he is a spammy cunt of the highest magnitude.

**** International People Finders. Just googled and these sorts of people do exist but surely is this something a legitimate bank would do. Not sure what the laws are in China for tracking down a young guy who died fighting the Hun in WW2, and never ever went to China especially to do business.

***** Yeah like you would keep quiet about this, potential money coming in you would shout from the rooftops, unless you were a total imbecile and they wanted to keep you quiet.  In stark contrast I cashed in an ISA this year and the letter they sent was much more professional, more business
like and actually had a proper address not some random Chinese and a fucking Hotmail account.

****** Don't know if the address is live or not as I'm not going to reply, if anyone wants to send unsolicited pictures of dogs or spam through sock puppet accounts the address is xu4494 at yahoo dot com with dot and at replaced with actual punctuation.  More worrying I never got a hit off the Chinese when I googled it. I did type this in via a combination of sljfaqs. kanji look up site and cojaks hanzi site and posted the result in  Firefox's search bar but never got a single hit that matched them all.

Anyway the short answer is this, if you ever get a letter in the post that sounds too good to be true, it is. If it sounds like any of these letters, its fake..

Beach Boys.

A heads up for those of you who like this sort of thing before I start on the main topic, but Q magazine has an 8 page interview with Aphex Twin. Its rather nice and covers an awful lot of ground, it also counters out the fact that the rest of the magazine is utter shite.

Beach Boys for BBC.

Something horrible appeared in the week on BBC and its not Linda's rape to the cat and budgie theme on Eastenders, (Listen here and then listen in the background as Deano comes out of the door its faint but its there) but the horror of a big budget BBC trailer for an old Beach Boys song.

I don't know if you've seen it live on the BBC or just the viral video on Youtube and other places but really is staggeringly awful.  Its a cover of the old Beach Boys song God Only Knows, by a shed load of artists including Pharrell Get Lucky Williams, Lorde as Sephiroth and Brian Wilson himself being menaced by a tiger whilst playing the piano, and One Direction, One Fucking Direction.

For me the pivotal moment, where it all turned to shit came when Emeli Sande started singing, that's when I really decided that this could fuck right off, and it duly increased when Gilles Peterson started to DJ with gold discs (should have got the Scratch Perverts in) and there is Paloma Faith and her leftish mug floating about in a hot air balloon.  And because its the BBC there is no end in sight from this being used in every ad break either in its entirety or in truncated forms, such as Florence from Florence and the Machine poncing about the undergrowth or Sam Sparro singing wistfully in a bedsit.

After all that you'll need something to take the edge off of the whole thing and I suggest you either catch up on IPlayer (or more likely torrent the whole episodes) of the Horizon cat watch 2014 special, a 3 part look at cat behaviour with Liz Bonin.  No really, even though the net is awash with cat clips, this is a full on scientific look complete with moggy cam and a breath taking X ray sequence in which you can see just how agile a cat is when landing on its feet.

Set in Brighton and at a farm location it is a collaboration of 100 cats and their owners detailing their lives and covers, communication, territorial disputes and how behaviours are taught from parent to kitten.  Its a good watch especially if you are a massive cat fan like me.

Another thing that isn't really appreciated here and I've always maintained it, is that certain behaviours scale up, so things that your humble domestic tibbet on your lap does to the massive tiger or lion out on the plains and forests is totally the same. Also it gives me the chance to show odd hunting behaviour like in this clip of Saphie taking on a toy rat, from episode 2, which is the nearest thing to a full on headrush a cat can get.

This is a box a Virtualbox.

Wrapped up and ready to go. Hello readers this is a short musing on virtualbox and Linux in general, its possibly not that helpful but its been keeping me interested for the past few days. 

We've been wanting to explore some old hard disks and as part of a recent Maplins binge have got ourselves a Hard disk / card reader all in one job.  Most of what I have isn't really readable and as I found out dead.  What I did find out reading around that booting some form of Linux could make those drives with missing letters readable.  To be honest I still haven't gotten them read as you will see but so far I'm not all that struck with virtualbox.

If you want to do what I did you'll need the following:

A USB flash drive (mine was 8GB we wanted to put PS2 isos onto it of course that never came to fruition)
A linux live USB creation program.
Some sort of Linus image see top.
Some sort of Linux Image.

And follow the straightforward instructions on the Linux live USB creator.

For our test program and first foray into Linux we trialled 2 tiny linuxes as our target Machine, an old XP beast liberated from work years back would struggle with current popular builds such as Fedora and Ubuntu (incidentally could some distro guys actually come up with Linus Linux or Ubunton with the face of Emma Bunton as desktop wallpaper just to satisfy my stupid sense of humour). 

First up as everthing seemed to be going well we had our download verified (we used Puppy Linux and DSL) and installed.  Our key was created and loaded, we found out we had a portable version of Virtualbox
and our Linux ran from this environment.  So far so good, we decide to boot up our virtual Puppy and see how it goes, except we get to a start up screen that goes nowhere and does nothing.  I'm no good at programming and command line stuff yeah I know Linux is all that even with its windows veneer over it, its still command line at heart.  So we try another distro Damn Small which is smaller than Puppy and thankfully has none of the issues either as we successfully boot it into its GUI and then discover Virtualboxes other dickish thing getting a mouse pointer to work.  If you've ever used WinUAE emulator its a bit like that there is a hotkey to trigger mouse capture (or in WinUAEs case to switch screens) except it captures fuck all and does nothing.  We decide to do the decent thing and burn it to a CD via IMGburn and switch priority at the bootscreen to see it in action.

Our main thoughts on DamnSmall is that it reminds me of Workbench 3.5 not the old school 4 colour Amiga OS, but something from 1998 with all the hacks added to make it 32 colours or so.  PC owners of an age may recall Windows 98 instead (only a lot greyer).  Its rather nice and the mouse works in the live CD just like a boss, I still didn't get my drives to work or be read so will have to read up on that via on line with my current PC.

They had a lot of stuff to look at including Firefox and a few file manager stuffs as well as a cute version of Tetris that looked like it was an exile from Workbench or Win95 and wasn't half bad.  After some tinkering and that we decided to close down and remove the CD. 

We may download Virtualbox proper and try out something more modern like Mint  or obscure such as AROS (which I remember from Amiga Format way back in 98).

Horrible answers to difficult questions.

Instead of the usual round up of stuff.  We have a variety of statements to ask (directed at noone in particular).
They are often unpalatable questions mainly about religion but one is cultural and regards demographics in my local area. We'll split them over a couple of posts so you don't get bogged down.

 I hope you don't take offence but in case your all fired up to take offence, take a look at this video first and then come back with an open mind.

Question 1.
If Stephen Lawrence lived and died in the same circumstances today, due to demographics, he would be more likely to die in black on black related crime than as a result of a racist attack.

There is a current, ongoing court case, based on new DNA evidence found through new sequencing techniques, which means that this is headline news again.  I can't point fingers or accuse but what  I will say is this, in true CSI style we will let the evidence decide if they are guilty or not and leave it to the lawyers to bicker over whether its legitimate transfer evidence or contaminated in storage. 

For those uninitiated with the incident, the original crime took place in Well Hall in 1993, and was a totally unprovoked racially motivated crime.  Stephen was stabbed twice with a 12" knife, and despite there being several eyewitnesses, the case collapsed and the main suspects were acquitted.  The Daily Mail calling the main suspects murderers and threatened them to sue for defamation.  There is a plaque set in the ground to commemorate where he eventually collapsed and died. It is under video surveillance and woe betide anyone who messes with it.

Fast forward 18 years and a lot has changed.  For once the BNP isn't as strong as it was here, thanks mainly to the closure of the BNPs bookshop in Upper Wickham Lane.  I've blogged about this before, but mainly it wasn't a landmark to the right for local folk, just a squalid little house with blue shutters that took up space that could be used for regular housing or retail.  I'm not sure how or indeed why it was closed in the end, I have memories of seeing a news report that it was structually unsound and had to close, but that could be just a bad memory.  Anyway in the prevailing 18 years our demographics have changed completely. 

When I was little, there was precious few non white people here, and those that were were almost exclusively asians.  There was a largeish community of  Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis something that wouldn't change to about mid 2000's, and only a few folk from the Afro Caribbean community.  To be honest, Stephen Lawrences murder wasn't the only racially motivated killing in our area.  There was also Rolan Adams* and Rohit Duggall, but these have been largely forgotten about and are never mentioned, ever.

In about 2004 - 2005 we started seeing more Africans appear along with Eastern Europeans.  Lewisham always used to be the place where there was a large Afro Caribbean stronghold and over time they moved into the surrounding suburbs especially Thamesmead and Plumstead.  We also, due to this change in demographics, got a lot more black on black crime, with a few kids murdered in gang related crime.  There are probably still some racists here, you'll never totally eradicate that sort of mindset, but they are definitely less of them around.  As an example, most of the places I new as a kid including the Coronet Cinema in Woolwich, are now Evangelist churches, which shows how much the population has changed over time.

So in short, due to population changes, Stephen Lawrence would, if he was a teenager today, be more at risk from black on black violence than racist attacks.

Everyone talk about... Pop music.

All I ever hear nowadays on the radio R+B.  I'll rephrase that, all I ever hear is hateful 'music' put out by screaming histrionic women and mongoloid rappers.  Thats radio that is and if you sincerely want anything that touches the lower reaches of 200bpm or makes weird sounds then tough, they don't do it.  There's enough interest in rock to keep Radio 2 in buisness for years to come, and I'll be honest its ideal to work too as it makes no demands on its user being the aural equivalent of grey wallpaper.   They can even surprise you by putting out say a live set by an out of sorts Incognito.  {Which makes you wonder what the Brand New Heavies are up to these days... Apparently nothing.}

No the worst thing is this, if you're young, all the programming you have is heavily skewed to Rap and R+B with maybe some Grime or token dance thrown in for good measure.  I'm  approaching my mid thirties and largely put up with this shit the first time round and you know what it sucked then and it sucks now.  Stations like Capital or KISS and many more rely on  playlists to generate songs for broadcast, and in Capitals case rinse and repeat every track so the same 3-4 tracks come up again and again.  No wonder I called it Capital punishment. 

Kiss of course used to be entirely acceptable back in the day, when all they had to lose what their licence when raided by the DTI, however they lost pretty much all that made them unique back in the mid to late 90's with the migration of Solid Steel to BBC London, {Steve Jackson I think} and Colin Favers techno show to the bin of history.  They still run specialist music but only for insomniacs, apparently real dance is to be ghettoised forever into the wee small hours never to engage or interest anyone.

Back in the day they had house with Alex P and Brandon Block (with their Rule Brittania cover jingle.)
A pretty decent show on Sunday where they played underground hits and asked folk to name a mystery song, which was nearly always some kind of 80's soul.  Though one time it was Nexy Lantons You too.  Sadly though it didn't last and by the time speed garage came out Kiss was entirely shit from start to finish, the last time it rocked was Princess Diana died, and they suspended all regular programming for largely house and techno.

The motto if you listen to the mainstream, don't complain when that supply is poisoned forever and ever.