Being Mr. Kenny

Sometime last week, my cat was sick. The whole thing was over within seconds: she came into the kitchen, sat down, made a rippling movement and brought up all her food like toothpaste coming out of a tube. It was almost graceful.

My mother then insisted on cleaning up this sick herself, much to my consternation, since the dog is always more than willing to eat anything my cat brings up without so much as a whisper of complaint.

Her refusal to let the dog clean up after the cat is even more puzzling when you consider the current state of affairs with the dog’s oestrus cycle. She is, at present, on heat, and it is not uncommon to find a little spot of blood on the floor as you walk around our house. Instead of cleaning these up herself, my mother chooses to point at them until Nelly finds them and does the job for her.

Now, I ask you: where is the reasoning there? How is one acceptable, but the other not? I say, if the dog is willing to clear up something you’d rather not, then more power to the dog. It’s the circle of life.

I’ve been listening to some of Matmos’s stuff since they worked on Björk’s fifth album, Vespertine.

I’m currently listening to Lift up your hat! which is from their album Quasi-objects. It’s made entirely from samples taken from the needle of a record player catching on the last track of an LP, and I find it extremely comforting for some reason. There are no annoying lyrics or crappy boring vocals to get in the way, it’s just calm and repetetive, made of completely gorgeous sounds.

Anyway, their latest album is called The Rose has Teeth, in the Mouth of a Beast, and you can hear the title track (actually it’s called Roses & Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein) over at www.matadorrecords.com/matmos/music.html and it’s genius. Download a few of their other tracks while you’re at it.

It’s based around a passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher:

‘A new-born child has no teeth.’ — ‘A goose has no teeth.’ — ‘A rose has no teeth.’ — This last at any rate — one would like to say — is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none. — And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose’s teeth have been? The goose has none in its jaw. And neither of course, has it any in its wings; but no one means that when he says it has no teeth. — Why, suppose one were to say: the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast. This would not be absurd, because one has no notion in advance where to look for teeth in a rose. ((Connection with ‘pain in someone else’s body.’))

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, eds. G.E.M. Anscome and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscome (N.Y.: Harper, 1969).

Also cited in places as: Philosophical Investigations. I don’t know which one is correct, though. What am I, a librarian?

I like it because they know how to make genius beats, and it shows such a wonderful sense of humour. Check out the goose noise!

I have to say, I’ve gone completely off music lately, I find it’s all just boring crap which dies in my ears, but Matmos’s stuff is fascinating. I’ve always loved sounds, just normal sounds like the humming of a fluorescent light-bulb or an electric fan, and they take these normal sounds and make something amazing out of them.

The music is all the more fascinating because I know it’s been made out of noises made by, for instance, a balloon or hair or a heartbeat. (Or even, in the case of Lipostudio, samples from actual liposuction surgery — you can download the mp3 from the link above).

So I say, hurrah for Matmos!

PS: one of the people saying “The Rose has Teeth, in the Mouth of a Beast” on the track is our very own beloved Björk!

My Mum was talking about a song that my Grandma apparently used to sing. She doesn’t remember all the lyrics, but she does remember that the song begins “Oko boko, hit him on the boko” before continuing with something about “slitty eyes”.

I’ll try to get the full version for a future post, unless it turns out to be horribly racist.

The song ends with the words, “I widdy wee”.

Update

We managed to find a few of the lyrics, except for one line. If anyone knows it, help would be much appreciated :)

Once there was a poor little man
His arms were long and his legs were small,
[ missing lyrics ]
And the poor little man couldn’t walk at all.

Chorus:

Oko boko, pat him on the boko
Roll him down the hill like a beecham’s pill.
Ido nora, nikky nakky nora,
Roko boko, I widdy wee.

Update

Found them online …

Also, Beecham’s pill were a laxative, so that’s interesting.

Now that I’ve been doing websites for a while, I’ve got a little bit of experience in using services provided by web hosting companies.

Firstly, if you’re just starting out, you need to know that there are two things you need to buy to get your own website: a domain name and hosting. A domain name is a name like “beingmrkenny.co.uk”, or “open-space.org.uk”, and is basically a shortcut to where your pages are hosted (i.e. the computer that actually stores your pages).

It’s a good idea to buy these from separate companies, since you can get save a lot of money doing it that way.

Hosting

In my opinion, when you’re buying hosting, there are six things you need to bear in mind:

1. Diskspace and bandwidth — Get the right amount of diskspace for your project. Bandwidth is the amount of data you transfer. So, if you have a 2MB video file, and it gets downloaded 20 times, the bandwidth used = 2MB × 20 = 40MB. The things that take up diskspace and bandwidth are large files like multimedia and photos. If you expect to have lots of those, and high traffic, go for more diskspace and bandwidth.

   To give you some sort of guide, my website uses 300 MB diskspace and 600 MB a month bandwidth, after nearly two years of being up and running.

2. PHP and MySQL — PHP is a server-side scripting language. That means that, instead of sending a plain HTML file, a page is put together on the server before it’s sent to the user, very useful if you need different a different page for different requests.

   MySQL is a type of database. If you want to have a blog, you’ll probably need at least one MySQL database. If you plan to have other things (like photo galleries or guestbooks) you might need one for each of these things, but check first.

3. CPanel — CPanel is a comprehensive, powerful control panel for configuring your website. It’s better than other control panels or admin areas I’ve come across, and now I find it indispensable.
4. AWStats — AWStats is a powerful statistics package for your website. It returns all sorts of information, including search phrases, browsers and their versions, duration and amount of visits, countries — and more. It’s a million times better than Webalizer, another stats package used by a lot of hosts.
5. Support — Good tech support is actually quite important, but unfortunately, the only way to check this before purchase is with existing customers who are often too hasty to praise. However, if the majority of the customers are happy, it’s probably OK.
6. Reliability — Downtime is a real pain and can result in search engine penalties if you’re down for long periods of time and frequently. You can check this by doing a search for customer reviews for a particular hosting company — there are quite a few review sites which are independent of hosts. Some hosts also provide a “service status” page which can show when and for how long there have been outages.

It’s often worth paying annually rather than monthly, since you can often save money that way.

Registering a domain

With hosting you need to look for quality. When you’re registering a domain name, however, there’s not a lot that can go wrong, so cheapest is best. When you register a domain, all you’re doing is saying “I want example.com and I want it to point to this hosting”. Since domain names are held with an independent organisation (in the UK it’s called Nominet) all the registrar needs to do it tell it what your domain is, and where it should point to, and that’s pretty much it.

If you’re charged more than about £3 a year for a .uk domain name, you’re being ripped off. Other domains (such as .com, .net) are more expensive, since these are global, not tied to a particular nation. (Also, buying a domain from a foreign country, like .fr, .es can also be more expensive if you’re not actually based in that country.)

Hosting companies/Domain registrars I have known

• Names.co.uk — do not bother with these people. They were the first company I used, and they provide poor hosting (no PHP, no MySQL, not much diskspace, poor admin area and stats) for the same price as other companies which provide much better service. Also, they charged me £19.99 for two years’ domain name registration, which is totally absurd. They are very definately overpriced for what they provide.
• Dataflame.co.uk — much, much better. The hosting packages they provide are excellent, and they are they provide the most reliable hosting I’ve ever used. There are also a variety of hosting plans to suit most needs.
• 34sp.com — great, budget-friendly host if you’re just starting out and want something basic. I run a small site with them, and I’ve had 2 instances where the site has been down (in the last 6 months) but it was rectified within a day. Good basic packages, very good tech support, but basic stats and control panel. Ideal for a low-power personal site.
• 1&1 — the cheapest .uk domains on the net at the moment (£1.99 a year, excl. VAT). The only company I use to register my domains.

Please note, the links above for DataFlame and 1&1 are my affiliate links (as in, I get paid if you sign up for hosting with them after clicking that link). That said, I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t think they were reliable, good hosts. BTW, while it shouldn’t be a criticial factor in your decision, a good affiliate scheme is something else to look out for in hosting. If enough people sign up through you, the affiliate scheme can pay your hosting fees!

I got a different answer this time around. I kinda liked the one I got last time.

I am Harold, from “Harold and Maude.” I’m a sensitive, but…weird…soul.

Which Random Cult Movie Character are you?

Hotmail users will just have received an email from MSN telling them all about Windows Live mail beta. In it they promise 2 GB of storage (less than Gmail, I hasten to add, which currently stands at 2.7 GB and is ever growing). The email states that “2 GB = 2,000,000,000 bytes”.

I know this to be false! Google Calculator tells me so: 2GB is actually 2,147,483,648 bytes.

I also don’t like the way you can’t forward mail to another address, or switch off these silly announcements oh wait, it turns out you can.

The end.

Today my mum knocked her glass of wine over my keyboard, monitor and graphics tablet. I mean seriously, and entire glass of wine!

So I went down into the kitchen to get some kitchen roll, where I met my sister who asked me what happened, and I said “Mum just got wine all over my computer, and I don’t mean the Windows emulator for Linux!”

It’s the way I tell ‘em!

Well, my sister laughed at least, which I thought was very gracious of her. I guess it was one of those “you have to be there” moments, but I did look pretty cool for about five seconds there, making geek jokes.

So yeah, took me a good two hours to clean up all the wine. I have an enormous keyboard that could quite happily soak up two full bottles of wine, so I really had to leave no screw unturned. I was actually really impressed at how it’s put together! Seriously, in the event of a nuclear holocaust there will be two things which survive: cockroaches and my keyboard. That thing is built! Microsoft makes good hardware!

Actually, on the whole, I was quite pleased with how calm I remained throughout the entire episode. I actually found the sight of my keyboard stained such that it looked like someone had sacrificed a goat over it quite funny, and it was actually quite fun opening it up to mess with its innards (the keyboard’s, not the goat’s).

I guess this is payback for the time I walked feta cheese into the carpet of the computer room in the Biology department of Sheffield Uni, or the time I spilt water all over one of the keyboards there, or the time I nearly wet myself when a girl did the exact same thing in the library (it was the expression on her face!), or the time I rearranged the letters of the keyboards at school so that they spelt out bad words.

Or the time (and this is the best one) I accidentally put a hamster inside my Dad’s computer, which then chewed up all the wires and killed the computer. The hamster somehow miraculously survived.