No, you are not mistaken, the voice for this band is Juliette Lewis herself, a pretty known actress that usually interprets beautifully screwed up characters. No wonder her music is similar :) But when I first heard of the band I didn't even bother to listen to them. Not another acting celebrity trying to sing! But when I found out the vocal on Prodigy's Spitfire and Hot Ride songs was Juliette Lewis, I changed my mind. And I am glad I did. Here is the weird and nicely sung Hot Kiss.



Licks:
MySpace page for Juliette & the Licks
Wikipedia entry
Juliette & the Licks fan site

Don't go all "Oh no, not another Beowulf remake!" on me. This is a book that was written in 1971 by John Gardner, presenting the story of Beowulf through the eyes of Grendel. But it is not really the same story, just uses it as a scaffold for the philosophical ideas that he wanted to expose.


Structured into 12 chapters - each for a year in Grendel's life, each for a description of a philosophical current, each for an astrological sign - the book is not an easy one to understand, albeit pretty short. The language is modern and the wording is clear, but the underlying ideas need time and brain power to process, so don't read it in short bursts when you feel bored. Give it what it needs.

In the book, Grendel is not an animal monster, a thing with no thinking, quite the opposite. He is intelligent, articulate, philosophical, all these qualities being given to him at birth, not as a merit to anyone. He is hopelessly depressed and malevolent. He sees life and existence as meaningless, all the Universe a hollow illusion, a thing set to hurt him, set him apart, mock him. It is really easy to identify with him and to feel his feelings, while in the same time despise what he does and why he does it. Grendel is the part of us which we hate and which hates itself.

Enough, though, the book has bad parts as well. The occasional poem lyrics are meaningless in this book. The ending is confused and confusing. I would have liked a clearer ending, that's for sure. And also, it is hard to understand the book without at least knowing the Beowulf story and researching a bit from the Wikipedia article to find out what are the philosophical references hidden in each chapter. But then again, it was never a simple book, and the research (even if I haven't found time to do it) is worth it.

There was an animation film made in Australia in 1981 and featuring Peter Ustinov called Grendel Grendel Grendel which was based on the book, although I haven't been able to get my hands on it. It was partly musical as well, as expected in such a period, ugh!

If you are interested in finding out more about the meanings in the book and discussing about it, here is a link: The Grendel Board.

A while ago there was this site called Pandora (similar to lastFM, but better) that tried to match songs based on their internal structure not user preference. By choosing which songs you liked or you didn't like it would guess your preferences and try to play only songs you would listen to.

Apparently Winamp has a little known (or blogged) addin that does this. It is called the Nullsoft Playlist Generator and comes bundled with WinAmp. This is how you use it:

1. Open Winamp and go to Media Library
2. Create a playlist (or more) and add all your songs there
3. Right click on the playlist and select Send To: Add to Local Media
4. Go to Options, Preferences, Plug-ins, Media Library and click on Nullsoft Playlist Generator
5. Click on Configure selected plug-in, select your options and click Scan. I recommend the background scanning option.
6. After the scan is complete (or during it) you can right click on any song and select "Play similar song to..." and you will listen to songs that this software thinks are similar

That's it. The analysis is pretty superficial, but still better than nothing. It is perfect when you have gigs of songs and you don't want to browse forever, selecting which one you want or you don't want.

I am obsessed by this song, I am just listening to it again and again, typing at hyperspeed while I am doing it (I wish I would type meaningful things, too :) ). The video itself is from Smack My Bitch Up, but YouTube again blocked a cool clip so I had to take another from some other place. I couldn't find the original video for the song. (One that wasn't a fan made anime clip :-|)

Update: even worse, all video platforms other than Youtube have been sued out of existence and even on YouTube the only versions of this song you find are live concerts. It's amazing: a beloved video of a famous song just vanished off the Internet... If you find it somewhere, please let me know. Meanwhile, this is a remix version...



Usage: Pump up the volume and get in front of a keyboard on monday morning. :)

Long time since I posted a song on the blog. This is one old, but good song AND video. Rarely you find a truly good combination of sound and presentation nowadays. Quoting from the Wikipedia article for this song: Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke wrote the song about a narcissistic friend of his, which on closer inspection is showcased by the imagery in the lyrics - a parallel to earlier My Iron Lung EP track "Lewis [Mistreated]". He also says that it was somewhat of a competition between him and Jonny Greenwood to see who could fit the most chords into a song. "Just" is especially notable for Greenwood's guitar solo, which showcases some of his first uses of the Digitech Whammy Pedal. The guitar work in the song has been seen as an homage to post-punk band Magazine, one of Radiohead's key influences at the time.



The video reminds me of an old sci-fi story I've read about a word that, when heard by a person, would transform them into a purple jelly cone, including the one saying it. When someone finally understood and accepted the reality of it, it all turned into a race to stop a deaf person going to a radio station and speaking the word. He was immune, you see. Anyway, enjoy.

Well, imagine a lonely boy, without a family, learning magic in a special school and who's archenemy is a powerful yet evil wizard. He is always accompanied by his friends, a boy and a girl. The evil wizard likes snakes and manages to kill the headmaster of the magic school. No, it's not Harry Potter, it's Naruto!

It's like the Japanese liked Harry Potter, but thought they can do one better. They're not exactly magicians, but ninjas; Naruto Uzumaki, the main character, is a mix of both Harry and Ron, while boy number two, Sasuke Uchiha, is more like a small Snape. With a bit of a stretch, one could take the Naruto story and rip it off in a prequel to Harry Potter, with the parents as the characters :)

Anyway, long story short: the anime is children oriented, with all kind of soapy feelings, camaraderie and friendships, no gore, little blood, a bit of death, but "censored" where violence or tension is concerned. If you ignore the ridiculous simplicity of the characters, the story is pretty captivating and the "ninja science" fun. It more than makes up in quantity what it misses in quality. The first anime, Naruto, is concerned with the childhood of the characters and spans 220 episodes, while the ongoing Naruto: Shippūden with the adolescence and it is close to 50 episodes so far. There are 20 minutes episodes, if you count the 1.5 minutes presentation in, but don't worry, the fights last well into fourth episodes >:). Also, there are currently 4 Naruto movies: 3 for the first series and 1 for Shippūden.

Basically, if you cross Inuyasha with Harry Potter you get Naruto. I guess that any media industry, once it reaches a level of maturity, makes compromises in order to satisfy the greater audience. What Hollywood did for the US, the anime companies are doing for Japan, but in the end, the result is the same: dumbed down versions of what it could be.

Fortunately, animes are often based on manga publications and you can read Naruto well over the story arch in the anime, freely online.

Links:
Naruto Wikipedia
Naruto Manga Online
Naruto meets Harry Potter video

In my own quest to find interesting books that would help me understand my place as a software developer I've stumbled upon Dreaming in Code, something I knew nothing about other than it featured the word "code" in the title. It had to be good!

In the end the book surpassed my expectations by describing software from a totally different point of view than the programming books I am used to. Dreaming in Code is not a technical book. It can be read by software developers and bored housewives alike. It features a kind and professional tone and the three years of documenting the book can only help put the whole story in perspective.

The storyline is simple: a software visionary decides to start a new project, one that would be open source, innovative and revolutionary and also a replacement for slumbering Outlook and Exchange type of software. Scott Rosenberg documents the development process, trying to figure out the answer to the decades long question: why is software hard? What starts very ambitious, with no financial or time contraints, ends up taking more than three years to get to a reasonable 0.6 release, time when the book ends. The project is still ongoing. They make a lot of mistakes and change their design a lot, but they keep at it, trying to learn from errors and adapt to a constantly changing world.

For me that is both a source of inspiration and concern. If Americans with a long history of software spend millions of dollars and years to create a software that might just as well not work, what chance do I stand trying to figure out the same questions? On the other hand the spirit of the team is inspirational, they look like a bunch of heroes battling the boring and pointless world of software development I am used to. And of course, there is the little smugness "Hey, I would have done this better. Give a million dollars to a Romanian and he will build you anything within a month". The problem, of course, is when you try to hire two Romanians! :)

Anyway, I loved this book. It ended before it had any chance of getting boring, it detailed the quest of the developers while in the same time putting everything in the context of great software thinkers and innovators and explaining the origin and motivation behind the most common and taken for granted technologies and IT ideas. It is a must read for devs, IT managers and even people that try to understand programmers, like their wives.

Here are some links:
Official book site
Scott Rosenberg's own blog
The official site of the Chandler software project

Now this is one cool song. If the quality would have been just a little bit better... Anyway, I have been searching the entire videosphere looking for something even remotely similar. Bjork is weird, but usually restrained in her singing. In this video she shows the power in that tiny Icelandic body. Still searching... Skin sounds great as always, but I feel she can't really keep up :)



You might want to see this video as well. High quality and a collection of weird instruments, but not my favourite way of remixing a song.

Another game in the Vampire universe, this time everything is happening in the present, with a lowly human being Embraced out of a sudden by a rebelious vampire. The outcome is that your "sire" is killed and you are left alone to discover what a vampire really is.



Now, at the start of the game I thought to myself "Redemption was way better". It's true, Bloodlines is trully 3D, but you have 1 character only. It does employ a lot of elements from first person shooters, but the only thing the main character seems to be able to do is take orders from everybody. But then the story really became interesting. The annoying lack of free will remained a thorn in my side for the rest of the game, but with each quest I had to finish there appeared more ways to solve problems, more and more innovative quests (not just go, kill, exit like in Redemption).

What I found really cool is the little quiz you get to answer in the beginning of the game. The answers to it determine the vampire "clan" you belong to and they give you some special abilities accordingly. It guessed me right, too. I got to be Gangrel and killed almost all enemies with axe or sword, even if they had Steyr AUG :). That means that they had a way of ending any situation according to the chosen clan, which is very cool indeed as programming goes. Also, the 3D characters are really well defined. Chicks are sexy, movements are natural and facial expressions are almost realistic!

As with Redemption, the story is really well defined and together at the start of the game then it goes faster and faster as the end approaches. I didn't like that. Also, when you are close to the end and you want to escape a collapsing cave using an inflatable boat the game crashes to Windows desktop. What you need to do, actually what you need to do from the start of the game is go download the patch and install it. Here is the link. Also, the minimum requirements are 512MB of memory, but you will find yourself unable to control your character from time to time, and in this case you must tweak the game a little. It will provide a modest help, the only real solution I found is to save the game when this happends and then some memory gets freed or whatever. You can also try all kinds of console commands provided you start the game with the -console command line option.

My conclusion: another great game probably plagued by deadline management. They were planning even a multiplayer option in the game, but they scratched it. The ending also allowed for at least a dozen continuations, but they didn't pursue this. Bottom line: if you liked Redemption, but you thought it wasn't "killy" enough or you wanted to be more FPS like, you will love this one.

I wondered about this book, since it had Hamilton's later style combined with a nearly marginal subject. Also, Misspent Youth has the title Magic Memories on my PDA. But the bottom line is that this is the story of the beginning of the rejuvenation technology, heavily featured in the Pandora/Void universe, but with other details that link it to Night's Dawn. However, if you completely ignore this science fiction limbo status and the few social issues that Peter F. Hamilton raises in the book, the story is no more than a soap!

I mean you have it all: young upper class people interchanging partners like they're researching combinatorics, puppy romance broken by experienced charmer, broken homes, even parent and son on opposite political sides. For someone that has read the more monumental scifi from the writer, this is like a break from the science fiction of it and towards a more personal point of view. For someone else, it may feel simply mediocre.

My conclusion: even if the book is well written, it is plagued by a the lack of a proper subject, the positive outcome of every single thing (remember Fallen Dragon? I said I can't possibly relate with the passive philosophy of the main character there, same here) and the quick, undetalied ending that one can observe also in the Commonwealth Saga.

Update: Damn YouTube and their lawsuits! I had to change the song with another live performance, but it isn't that good. Well, the quality of the video is better, but not so emotional.

This is a song that I find myself liking while listening to my music in the background. It's a pretty difficult feat, since I usually type away and don't really pay attention to what I listen. I am putting the live show from Spain, because I think that the official video for this song is crap. Enjoy!

Something happened to Peter F. Hamilton between the second and third volumes of the Greg Mandel trilogy. He turned from a good average writing style to a great one. The Nano Flower is almost at the same level as Pandora's Star and births Hamilton's detailed universe. No wonder there was no fourth novel in the series, it would only drag the writer down.

The book has everything I came to expect from Peter F. Hamilton: hard sci-fi, detailed socio-political context, aliens, the party of braves, the sociopathic villains, a reference to Lord of the Rings... I do believe that Tolkien inspired Hamilton to write, but now it has become the chink in the writing armour, Achilles' heal. I've read a few great Hamilton books, but each had the basic layout of a battle between good and evil, groups of people uniting under improbable ideals to defeat an all too dark a villain. The qualities that attracted so many people to Lord of the Rings, for example, like camaraderie, honor, desire to help others, are not so attractive to me anymore. They are basic, very unlikely to truly define a character. I would very much want to see a Hamilton gray book. Maybe the new Void Trilogy will fulfil my wish (if I don't die of waiting for it to appear), although the vengeance driven character that remains pure and good at heart described in the first volume doesn't give me a lot of hope.

Anyway, even if I do seem to concentrate on what I don't like or what I would change in the writing of this great book maker, my appreciation for him is way higher than any possible defect in his writing. So, if you don't totally dislike sci-fi, go to a book store and buy Peter F. Hamilton books.

I was looking for songs by David Bowie, one of my favourite singers, but I wanted to find something different than the brilliant Under Pressure which he performed together with Freddie Mercury and which is my "subway song" :) And I found another "coproduction", this time he teamed up with Nine Inch Nails, another band that I enjoy (Perfect Drug is their best song, I think, although I may interpret it more personally than others).



The funny thing is that I remembered to post a Bowie song when I heard a quote from Criminal Minds, a series I am watching:
Garcia: [To Reid and Morgan] When I was in the ambulance I could hear the song 'Heroes' playing in my head. I kept flashing in and out of consciousness and I remember thinking, 'Wait. Is David Bowie really God?'

I was bent on writing an article about tea. You see, tea :) is a word often used instead of "infusion", but the definition of the word says it is specifically an infusion of Camellia sinensis, or the tea plant. I drink tea a lot, although I prefer to alternate the different tastes as much as possible.

But the tea and coffee plants are far from being the only ones used for energizing drinks. In the Theaceae family alone there are a few species that are traditionally used for infusions.

Then there is the mate, from Yerba Mate, a species of the Holly (Ilex) family. 
Other members of the Ilex family are used for traditional drinks.

The Roiboos infusion is an African tea made from a plant that is part of the legume family! I've tried it and I didn't enjoy it much.

How about a little Coca to boost the spirit? The "Coca tea" or "mate de coca" is a traditional drink in the Andes.

You can try Bubble tea made from Tapioca, the processed root of the Cassava plant.

All these links are giving me headaches, but there is more! The stuff above is just the tip of the iceberg, or the most famous plant infusions that are known as tea, because there are all the other plant infusions that are covered by the more generic term "Herbal tea". On that particular page you can find over 60 herbal infusions not made from the tea plant, including mate.

Please follow the plethora of links as I can assure you you will find a lot of interesting things there. This also got me thinking of the way the markets are functioning right now. I drank about every possible tea I could commercially find without looking too deep and I've only experienced tea and mate infusions. How about all the others? When will I be able to drink tapioca tea or coca tea? The plant itself is not illegal! Perhaps deeper digging in the commercial part of the Internet will help me find sources for some of the drinks above. Also, if I only had the time, I would try to learn about herbalism.

Eh, enough of this. Now I must add the images to the post and hopefully someone will read it.

Here is the video for Adrenaline:



Pleymo is a French band, friends of Enhancer and Aqme, two other French bands that I enjoy listening to. Check them out:
French Wikipedia page
English Wikipedia page
Pleymo official site
Myspace page