Posts from May 2011

During the Great Punk Scare in the late 1970s, this was one of my favie songs by the Adverts. Musically it was garage punk. But the lyrics weren't the usual Sod the Queen type.

Imagine waking up in hospital (as the Brits would say) and realizng that you are looking through a mass murderer's eyes. The mind boggles. That's what this song is about.

I chose to post this live version because the lyrics are captioned.

My U.S. passport is going to expire next month. In New York State, you can get an Enhanced Driver's License (EDL) that serves as proof of Citizenship for the U.S./Canadian border so you don't need a passport. So I figured what the hell, I'll get an EDL.

Yesterday, the Lovely Lettuce (@leetee) and I went to the Erie Auto Bureau on George Urban. And believe it or not, it was a damn skippy time!!

We were in and out of there in under 20 minutes.

It was very organised. The "maze" that made me feel like I was a cow being led to the slaughter was gone.

People were issued numbers and could sit until their numbers were called. My number was called before I could sit down.

The clerks were pleasant, professional and efficient. It was a huge contrast to the horrific nightmare that was the DMV in lower Manhattan in the 1980s. (At the time, there were people would hire themselves out to wait in line for you and call/page you when it was almost your turn. It was worse than it sounds. 'nuff said.)

Good work, Kathy Hochul. I hear that she's running for something and I don't want anyone to think that this is some sort of political endorsement. For all I know, I may hate her politics but she made my time at the Auto Bureau damn skippy.

This is the error message that I get when I try to upload an ogg file using drag and drop. Also, I don't think that ogg is recognised file type for the "upload files" button method.

Miss Piggy and "Fuck the Pain Away"!!! The teaches of Peaches, indeed.

Another one from Czelaw Mozil.

"You and I, we'll be a pair"

A reminder about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

"But you have no weapons, no defenses, no plan!"

"Yeah. And doesn't that scare you to death?"

'nuff said.

Gaba Kulka is also a member of an Iron Maiden cover band called Baaba Kulka (she is the Kulka and guitarist Bartek Weber is the Baaba). They just released a new album a week or so ago. This is one of the songs from it.

I first came across Gaba (Gabriela) Kulka because she has performed with Czeslaw Mozil (Czesław Śpiewa). As you might expect of someone who has performed with Czeslaw, this is not a faithful punk rock cover of the Clash song. In fact, I would venture the opinion that her vocal stylings here owe more to Kate Bush than they do to Joe Strummer.

Well, I installed Fedora 14 from the live cd a couple of days ago and real life got in the way. So I didn't really get a chance to play with it until today.

In terms of hardware, everything just works. But I expected that.

The default install creates a persistent home partition in a LVM partition scheme (that includes /boot). The installer did not recognise the Ubuntu partition. I had the option to edit the grub config that anaconda came up with but I decided not to. I reckoned I could always fart around with it later.

Ubuntu uses grub2 and Fedora still uses grub so adding Ubuntu to Fedora's boot menu wasn't as obvious as it could have been. I actually had to read some grub2 documentation. Egads!

The Fedora 14 splash and wallpaper image sucks. I think I vaguely remember @paul complaining about it at some point. It's not a big deal because it is easy to change.

So far, so good. I'm planning installing planet ccrma which is the Fedora equivalent of Ubuntu Studio when time and tide let me.

I already like it better than Ubuntu 10.10

Poland is a weird place. Artists think that they can sing in French and still be loved in Poland. Even more curiousier Mademoiselle Karen is actually Danish with a French boyfriend. Her Polish connection is Czeslaw (The-Right-One).html from Czesław Śpiewa.

I thought about translating this from French but I don't want to piss off the the Quebecois. I know, I'm weird like that. Any old way, I like this song but I suspect that understanding French might be helpful..