that ring of confidence

iPhone last seen wearing black case

My iPhone was stolen from work today.  A pessimist would say that the loss of the phone is akin to losing about $700 right around the time that I'm having to co-fund a wedding with Lydia, her parents and mine.  An optimist would say that it was a perfect excuse to get a new iPhone 3GS with twice the memory.

It's a good thing I'm an optimist.

For now I'm back to using my iPod classic which is pictured here acting as my portable recording studio.  These days it's mostly used to record the interviews I do for The Georgia Straight's tech section [tgs].  I'll have another article appearing next week, which along with my GST check and a $100 gift card I won at work might help fund my iPhone upgrade.

Until Monday I probably won't be able to be reached by phone.  If you leave me a message I'll be able to check it and get back to you when I can.  Having no landline in my apartment it means that I'll be kind of cut off for the next little bit.

Review: Jarvis Cocker's Further Complications

Group/Artist: Jarvis Cocker
Album: Further Complications

Review: There was a time when it seemed, to me anyway, that Britpop just might save the world.  Well if not the world then it could give saving rock and roll a shot.  Kurt Cobain was gone, Pearl Jam were turning into hermits, Sloan had broken up and the sounds coming from Seattle Washington and Halifax Nova Scotia had seemed to have run their course.  Only the Smashing Pumpkins really remained and nobody was quite sure whether Billy Corgan's crazy talk of a thematic rock-opera double album that eventually became Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would be anything other than the madness it seemed to be.

Enter the Beatles-esque bluster of Oasis who first managed to break through in North America.  Radiohead followed, but there was a whole other wave of artists that made a break to cross the Atlantic but were shut out.  They made an impact on MuchMusic, the Canadian version of MTV, where I delighted in videos from acts like Mensware, Supergrass and Elastica.

It's possible you missed out on Pulp.  Fronted by the bespeckled Jarvis Cocker Pulp combined biting social commentary, dirty songs about sex and drugs along side catchy hooks and pop choruses that were just never quite mainstream enough to be the sort of thing that got played at my high school dances.  Pulp had been around in the United Kingdom forever, formed originally in 1978, but it was not until 1995 with Different Class that they got attention on either side of the Atlantic.  The best of Pulp's albums was probably the much darker This is Harcore, though Different Class is by far the one that lives in my iPhone the most.

Non-Pulp fans will most likely only know Jarvis Cocker from the media coverage of his mooning of the audiance during Michael Jackson's overblown performance of "Eathsong" at the 1996 BRIT Awards.  And while I have to assume that Cocker has a nice enough ass, that might not be enough information on whether or not you'd really like his solo album.

One of the reasons that Pulp never quite broke big in North America was that the band, and the album Different Class, was largely obsessed with the notions of class.  While class may remain a social issue in Britain it never had much traction over where where there are few to no hereditary roles that we are expected to fill.  On his solo album Further Complications Cocker largely abandons the subject of class, and instead focuses with an laser like intensity on Pulp's other great subject, sex.  Pulp's lyrics had always had a refreshingly subtle vulgarity to them, never quite comfortable with the big four letter words but clearly talking about the same things if with a British sense of discretion.

Here there's little to no discretion.  If you're not quite sure what a song titled "F**ckingsong" is about then Cocker makes it quite clear as he sings, "And every time you play it I will perform the best I can / Press repeat and there I am, and there I am, always glad to be your man / And this way, oh well there won't be any mess / As I assure you that there would be in the flesh."

What balanced out Pulp's obsession with sex was the ever present rage of being looked down upon for being working class.  "Common People" wasn't just about having sex with a rich girl, it was about having sex with a rich girl and then annoyed by her because she's so clueless about how life really is.  Here there's none of that, there's just sex, or the lack of sex and a need for sex, on every track.

Working with producer Steve Albini, who when he's not producing bands like Nirvana, the Pixies, Low, Cheap Trick and PJ Harvey fronts the band Shellac, Cocker finds a much harder rock sound than the dance floor tracks of Pulp's most popular tracks.  The result is a kind of continually intense rock sound that never quite fits with Cocker's clever word play and since the word play is not quite as clever as it has been in the past, new comers to Cocker might wonder what the fuss about Pulp was all about.  Those of us who have been hoping for a new Pulp album will probably feel let down by Further Complications.  It's not Pulp, and yet it's not entirely new enough to ever shake off the memories of Pulp.

This is worse than Panic at the Disco

Warning there is quite a bit of swearing in the clip below.  Watch it with headphones on if you're at work, or watch it at home.  It is however well worth watching if only to see the most frustrating game of Super Mario Brothers ever.  The levels that he's playing are clearly user created so it's some kind of ROM, a copy of the game played not on a Nintendo but on his computer.

Also is he trying to sound like Christopher Walken or is that just how he always sounds?

It Might Get Loud: trailer

This movie looks insanely good.

New Georgia Straight article: iPhone games

 M y latest article for The Georgia Straight is now up online [tgs] and on the newsstands in the Meatspace edition.  Of the articles I've written for the Straight so far this was probably the most difficult, in that it was by far the most tightly focused.  The idea of doing an article on local schools that taught iPhone development seemed like a good idea, but the fact that only BCIT seems to be doing any thing like that limited my potential subjects.

For my Twitter article [tgs] for example I had pretty much every Twitterer in Vancouver to draw upon for interviews.  With this one I had far less in the way of options, and while I think everyone I managed to interview did a great job and I'm grateful there was less variety in the type of people I spoke with.  In the end I talked with three software developers, one who had taken the iPhone course and another who had taught it, and an administrator from BCIT.  There's no real opposing view to the notion that the course taught by BCIT, and the potential program, is a good idea.

Not that I was expecting to find someone who was against the teaching of iPhone development, it's not exactly abortion training or any sort of hot topic like that.

Still I'm happy with the outcome, and the fact that it made the paper.  If you're in Vancouver be sure to pick up a copy this week at the newsstand.  If you're not then use the internet and check it out.

Picture taken by Stephen Hui for The Georgia Straight.

Introducing Blogging Bendis

A fter admitting that I really had no idea what to do with my blog yesterday [js], I am pleased to announce that while I might not have figured out what I'm going to be doing with this personal blog specifically I have started a new blog.  Yes, another new blog.  This one is called Blogging Bendis [bb] and though it's only been a day, I'm pretty pleased with it.

A few years ago I tried to start a comic blog called Being Geek, which I felt was a pretty good title.  The problem was writing about all comics was kind of overwhelming and with paid bloggers covering comics there was not much that I could do in my spare time that would be as good as those sites.  Not wanting to simply run a second-rate-one-man Newsarama [nsr], I eventually deleted it.

It was not until I was in Seattle sitting on my friend Jeff's couch that the idea for Blogging Bendis came to me.  I had driven across the border for the Emerald City Comic Convention which I've gone to the last four years, and I was skimming through Daringfireball [df] and found a transcript for the talk that Daringfireball creator John Grubber did with Merlin Mann about how to blog better [rc].  A lot of the ideas they talked about really stuck with me, but the one that eventually lead to Blogging Bendis was that niche blogging was important.  As Mann put it:

Like, you’ve got something that you care a lot about, and you’re obsessed about — it’s almost like an intellectual fetish. And then you’ve got something that’s your angle on that. And to me, the more you zero in on both of those things — get crazy specific about the thing… Don’t just, don’t have a blog about Star Wars; have a blog about Jawas. Or, like, this one Jawa that’s just in the scene for a minute. Like, it’s gonna be so much easier for you to dominate, first of all; you’re gonna become the go-to guy for that one Jawa, right?

And so as the current sub-title of Blogging Bendis reads, Bendis is my Jawa.

I've got a more in-depth rational over why I chose to blog about one comic creator and why I selected Brian Michael Bendis specifically at the other site [bb].  However the new blog is a chance for me to try a few things that I've been interested in doing for awhile, including running a blog with no comments.  I'm also spending more time on the visual look of the blog, and as you can see from the graphic included in this post here, I've been using software to touch up pictures and in some cases add reflections, shadows and depth to 2D pictures.

I've also finally set up the Canon printer/scanner/ fax that I got when I got my Macbook, so I'm doing a lot of scanning myself as opposed to needing to Google for comic art to go along with the posts.  All of which I am sure is too inside baseball for you.

As I've said I'm still not certain what to do with this site, but for now anyway I do have something that's interesting me.

About something that is tasteful

L ydia [iatl] and I were in Victoria for the weekend, attending the wedding of one of her high school friends.  We carpooled and shared accomidations with her roomate Sarah [ywth] who was also attending the wedding.  I'm not sure how Sarah, who did not attend the same high school as Lydia and Erin (her friend who got married) is friends with Erin.  The part of my brain that keeps up with Lydia's legions of friends and their social circles is currently taken up by the plot of The Da Vinci Code, and there's sadly no way I'm going to be able to expunge that from my brain.

I mean I watched the movie and then read half the book, as if I was expecting that to be better and both featured heavily death by peanut.  A classic work of fiction this was not.

As a consequence of not knowing anyone I mostly spent the wedding standing about with a bottle of pop in one hand and a vacant expression on my face.  Lydia calls this being unfriendly, though I call it just not knowing anyone and not being outgoing at the best of times.  Everyone seemed to know both Lydia and Sarah, and nearly everyone seemed to expect Lydia to blog about the food at the wedding.  Everyone complimented Sarah on her always funny Twitter [twt].  I wanted to point out that I had a Twitter account, and I also had a blog.  Of course my blog at that point was password protected and only I had the code.

There's a few reasons that the blog was password protected for a spell.  The most pressing one was that in my last post before the blog got shut down I had revealed the ending to The Da Vinci Code and lawyers for Doubleday and Sony Pictures must have hacked into my account to shut me down.

If I'm not allowed to give spoilers for a book that was first published in 2003, then I'm not sure if I want to keep blogging.  So this might be me saying, "Jeff out."

Take care of yourselves.

The next stage of poop

 

"Sweet, I'm sleepy. It feels like the real thing. The doctors are confident the pills always win." — Matthew Good, "Suburbia" extended live lyrics

I don't think it's any secret that the ol' blog here has become a little bit stagnant.  I keep announcing that I'm back and that this time it'll be different but at the end of the day it's still laying fallow.  Recent real life events have made it even less likely that I'll have any interest in posting here.  I've got a lot of places where I can write with constraints, and I don't really feel like this is the place for that.

I'm not blogging one way, I'm unlikely to blog another way.  It's all very difficult to tell what to do.  I've had better success writing about specific subjects and topics but that's never been really what I've been interested in doing here, I've got side blogs for that sort of stuff.  So that's really poop.

I'm tired, and I'm cranky and I have to be in Surrey at a ridiculous hour tomorrow morning.  The problem is, with the exception of Surrey, that's pretty much always the case.  The internet is already full of sleep deprived yahoos venting their spleens online and maybe now that everyone and their local Social Media Expert has a blog it's outgrown me.

The Podcast: eReaders

Download EReaders

Nathan and I managed to get together some more podcast material.  This stuff is all from last year, it's just been sitting on hard drives and mini-discs for months upon months.  Here is the first thing we're going to release, which ironically is the last thing that we've recorded.  There is more to come, hopefully shortly.

There are a few different ways you can get the podcast.  The first is just by downloading it from this page, which will work fine.  More elegant is to visit The Podcast's special page [tpc] or the most special of them all (and the most iPod/iPhone friendly) is by downloading our podcast feed in iTunes [tpf].  I'm working on getting it submitted to the iTunes music store, but for now those work.

And yes again there is more on the way, we won't wait until next August to publish episode three.

I'm On A Boat: video that's not safe for work

And when I saw it's not safe for work, I mean there's loads of swearing. Don't get fired on my account. Just go home, fire up your own computer and enjoy.