I've had the new Arctic Monkeys album on advanced order from Amazon from about 45 seconds after I heard that there was to be a new album. Maybe if I improve my typing speed, I'll get it faster next time ...
It eventually came in the post, and I put it on while I did some painfully detailed documentation work for my most recent client. Anyone who knows me from work knows that documentation and Stan just don't get on. I blame what I call sarcastically my "legendary attention to detail".
Next thing I knew it was over, and not a single track had registered with me.
The next day I drove to Bradford and played the album again in the car. Same deal - not a track struck a chord or was in any way memorable.
It's perfectly possible that I'm malfunctioning. But I doubt it. I still believe that "Whatever People Say..." is the best album of the century so far, and that "A Certain Romance" is the best track of the century so far. So I haven't lost my taste for the Arctic Monkey's music.
Maybe I was expecting too much - but maybe they've lost it. Maybe it's similar to the situation with "The Streets", where he became embarassingly rubbish when he made the big time. Great when singing about being poor and not getting girls - woeful when he started singing about being a pop star.
The Arctic Monkeys' energy came from the pursuit of Fags, Shags 'n' Kebabs in working-class Sheffield. I hope they find another muse from somewhere, because even though I believe these are among the most talented people in the world right now, I am not going to be pre-ordering the third album when that time comes.
btw. I hear that they are likely to have just about every track from the album in teh top twenty this week, thanks to downloads being counted. I certainly applaud the demise of the idea of choosing the "single from the album". Some pencil-necked record exec would traditionally choose this and there are so many famous cases of them getting it badly wrong.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
So much data, so little time
The truth is out there. But it's lost in the static.
Terabytes of information every day and somewhere in there is the pattern that will create a new drug, predict financial markets or catch fraudsters. Terabytes of information. Er ...excuse me .. wazzat ??
A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes is a thousand megabytes is a thousand kilobytes is a thousand bytes and the byte is the unit of storage equivalent to a word.
So imagine a terabyte is like a thousand billion words.
A kilo-word is a short story, a mega-word is a set of encyclopedias, a giga-word is a library, a tera-word is all the libraries in Europe.
So when you hear 10 terabytes, visualise someone trying to search all the words in all the books in all the libraries in the world and youre getting a taste of the scale of the problem.
In fact youre only getting a taste of the scale of the problem circa 1980 when the first terabyte Data Warehouses were built to run programs that took days to mine the data in their mainframes.
Now in the internet age, we're beginning to look into the realm of peta-bytes - thousands of terabytes. And the users of Data Warehouses dont want to wait days anymore, they want the answer in real-time.
Search engines need to know what searches are popular, which links are being clicked, how long people are waiting for an answer before clicking elsewhere in disgust.
Financial markets are vast, but within the chaos are patterns. Imagine reading those patterns a second ahead of your competitor.
Retail companies need to know which lines are moving and which are stagnating, which offer is bringing in business and which are a waste of time.
Drug companies generate insane amounts of data from clinical trials : spot the pattern, or else a harmful drug is released or the next-big thing is poured down the sink.
In most modern industries the right answer at the right time can be worth billions, supplying the wherewithal to find that right answer has become the fastest-growing sector of the IT industry.
The world of data warehousing today is an almost religious clash of design philosphies: ETL versus ELT, Inmon versus Kimball, Appliance versus Big Database. All the usual blue-chip computing giants versus a crowd of crazy start-ups like you thought had all died in the Dot-Bomb bubble in 2001.
The truth is out there but it'll cost you.
Terabytes of information every day and somewhere in there is the pattern that will create a new drug, predict financial markets or catch fraudsters. Terabytes of information. Er ...excuse me .. wazzat ??
A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes is a thousand megabytes is a thousand kilobytes is a thousand bytes and the byte is the unit of storage equivalent to a word.
So imagine a terabyte is like a thousand billion words.
A kilo-word is a short story, a mega-word is a set of encyclopedias, a giga-word is a library, a tera-word is all the libraries in Europe.
So when you hear 10 terabytes, visualise someone trying to search all the words in all the books in all the libraries in the world and youre getting a taste of the scale of the problem.
In fact youre only getting a taste of the scale of the problem circa 1980 when the first terabyte Data Warehouses were built to run programs that took days to mine the data in their mainframes.
Now in the internet age, we're beginning to look into the realm of peta-bytes - thousands of terabytes. And the users of Data Warehouses dont want to wait days anymore, they want the answer in real-time.
Search engines need to know what searches are popular, which links are being clicked, how long people are waiting for an answer before clicking elsewhere in disgust.
Financial markets are vast, but within the chaos are patterns. Imagine reading those patterns a second ahead of your competitor.
Retail companies need to know which lines are moving and which are stagnating, which offer is bringing in business and which are a waste of time.
Drug companies generate insane amounts of data from clinical trials : spot the pattern, or else a harmful drug is released or the next-big thing is poured down the sink.
In most modern industries the right answer at the right time can be worth billions, supplying the wherewithal to find that right answer has become the fastest-growing sector of the IT industry.
The world of data warehousing today is an almost religious clash of design philosphies: ETL versus ELT, Inmon versus Kimball, Appliance versus Big Database. All the usual blue-chip computing giants versus a crowd of crazy start-ups like you thought had all died in the Dot-Bomb bubble in 2001.
The truth is out there but it'll cost you.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
SATS DECENDS UPON YOU!
My dear Stanetta has dragged herself from under a pile of SATs revision to put her blogging shoes on. Not surprising her main gripe is SATs.
I'm a fan of measuring that which can be measured. Knowing where a child is in their educational development I'm sure is very useful. However, these tests are being used to measure the schools and the teachers. I have even heard that the results are used to stream children in their secondary schools and in some fee-paying schools the results or predicted results are used to screen applicants.
And so, instead of being an objective measurement, SATs have become a pressurised event that children prepare for and dread upto a year in advance.
My biggest complaint is that the barrage of mock tests and revision periods take 11 year-olds away from wider learning. And they don't have the energy left to blog as often as I would like them to.
I'm reminded of the "Observer Effect". The act of testing children's education affects children's education.
By the way, "The Observer effect" is not to be confused with the tendency for Sunday newspapers to spawn more and more supplements with less and less interest and value.
I'm a fan of measuring that which can be measured. Knowing where a child is in their educational development I'm sure is very useful. However, these tests are being used to measure the schools and the teachers. I have even heard that the results are used to stream children in their secondary schools and in some fee-paying schools the results or predicted results are used to screen applicants.
And so, instead of being an objective measurement, SATs have become a pressurised event that children prepare for and dread upto a year in advance.
My biggest complaint is that the barrage of mock tests and revision periods take 11 year-olds away from wider learning. And they don't have the energy left to blog as often as I would like them to.
I'm reminded of the "Observer Effect". The act of testing children's education affects children's education.
By the way, "The Observer effect" is not to be confused with the tendency for Sunday newspapers to spawn more and more supplements with less and less interest and value.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
In praise of second-hand music
I'm going through a phase of buying most of my music from charity shops. The downside is that CD cases are pretty bashed about, the choice is limited and the repertoire is not bang up-to-date. If you think about it, someone doesn't want the CD enough to give it a few cubic centimetres of house-room, so how good could it be ?
On the upside, they are £2.50 each and the money goes to good causes. I read them onto itunes for my ipod, toss the case and put the actual CD with a few hundred others in my car to relieve tedium on long journeys.
For example, yesterday I drove to Yorkshire and back for a bit of business, which is not a long journey by my standards. I made the following discoveries :-
(1) Dido doesn't need Eminem or Faithless to make a nice noise
(2) Alanis Morrissette is not bland, easy-listening - I think she's due a reappraisal.
(3) Do not play Fairground Attraction on tricky drives - you will sing so loud you will not be able to hear your Satnav and miss your turn-off (true story).
All these came from a single trip to the Oxfam shop, along with Coldplay's "X&Y", which is likely to be rubbish, because I can't believe I could have picked 4 out of 4 good ones for a tenner.
I haven't given up on new music, but while I'm waiting on Amazon sourcing a copy of The Arctic Monkeys' latest for me, I'm enjoying catching up on some albums that have passed me by over the years. You have to be a John Peel to listen to everything and fully appreciate it the week it comes out. Some people don't even try to keep up and miss whole decades of music, to the extent that they are still listening to the same 80s electro-pop they loved at Uni (you know who you are!).
btw I heard The Arctic Monkeys' version of Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" on the radio, which was truly exceptional. I may not have the patience to wait for the Amy Winehouse album to come to a charity-shop near me either.
On the upside, they are £2.50 each and the money goes to good causes. I read them onto itunes for my ipod, toss the case and put the actual CD with a few hundred others in my car to relieve tedium on long journeys.
For example, yesterday I drove to Yorkshire and back for a bit of business, which is not a long journey by my standards. I made the following discoveries :-
(1) Dido doesn't need Eminem or Faithless to make a nice noise
(2) Alanis Morrissette is not bland, easy-listening - I think she's due a reappraisal.
(3) Do not play Fairground Attraction on tricky drives - you will sing so loud you will not be able to hear your Satnav and miss your turn-off (true story).
All these came from a single trip to the Oxfam shop, along with Coldplay's "X&Y", which is likely to be rubbish, because I can't believe I could have picked 4 out of 4 good ones for a tenner.
I haven't given up on new music, but while I'm waiting on Amazon sourcing a copy of The Arctic Monkeys' latest for me, I'm enjoying catching up on some albums that have passed me by over the years. You have to be a John Peel to listen to everything and fully appreciate it the week it comes out. Some people don't even try to keep up and miss whole decades of music, to the extent that they are still listening to the same 80s electro-pop they loved at Uni (you know who you are!).
btw I heard The Arctic Monkeys' version of Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" on the radio, which was truly exceptional. I may not have the patience to wait for the Amy Winehouse album to come to a charity-shop near me either.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Darfur II
Last week I looked down on Darfur from Google Earth. Today I saw some remarkable pictures of the real effect of those blackened specks.
The first good news in a long while is that the UN has been invited in. It's only 3,000 troops - which is less than half the existing African Union deployment - but it shows the international community seems to be taking this war seriously. Or at least shows they've noticed it at all.
In fact "war" is hardly the word. It reminds me strongly of the tyranny of Sadaam Hussein in gassing the Kurds. Or ... no, stoppit.
I'm very aware of Godwin's law : which states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." and that overuse of the Nazi/Hitler comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.
But to me the only thing that's stopping the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed from being a 21st century version, is a lack of modern weaponry.
We in the West built the Iraqi war-machine as an antidote to fundamentalist Iran, and the weaponry was used to a shameful degree against a minority of Iraqis.
I'm sure it's more by luck than by judgement that the Sudanese weren't equally endowed.
The first good news in a long while is that the UN has been invited in. It's only 3,000 troops - which is less than half the existing African Union deployment - but it shows the international community seems to be taking this war seriously. Or at least shows they've noticed it at all.
In fact "war" is hardly the word. It reminds me strongly of the tyranny of Sadaam Hussein in gassing the Kurds. Or ... no, stoppit.
I'm very aware of Godwin's law : which states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." and that overuse of the Nazi/Hitler comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.
But to me the only thing that's stopping the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed from being a 21st century version, is a lack of modern weaponry.
We in the West built the Iraqi war-machine as an antidote to fundamentalist Iran, and the weaponry was used to a shameful degree against a minority of Iraqis.
I'm sure it's more by luck than by judgement that the Sudanese weren't equally endowed.
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