I guess, this is 2010′s first ‘Past The Bridge’ posting, and today’s band is ‘The Fall’.

There are two things I can tell you about The Fall. First, nobody knows them and second, the band’s music is extremely hard to categorize (Wikipedia). There’s no doubt in my mind that Mark E. Smith (the band’s leader and sole inspirational force) is still around and that he picked up new band members all along. After all, The Fall, that’s the band that has more ex-members than any band in popmusic’s history (50 or something?). The last thing I heard from the band was that during the 2006 US tour, 3 band members either got fired or left the stage in an incident that included a banana peeling thrown in Smith’s face. And if that’s not enough for you, Mark E. Smith’s antics are detailed and set to film in the movie ‘The Wonderful and Frightening world of Mark E. Smith’, which you can see in full glory on YouTube. Call him brilliant or mad; at least Smith has been consistent in his music, and that all along since the 70s.

Picking out the right song was quite a task too but here goes: the
traditional 30+ second sample of ‘Edinburgh Man’, a smooth nostalgic eulogy of the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. For a second, I was considering ‘Hostile’ from the ‘Light User Syndrome’ album, but, I couldn’t get it over me to put this right on this blog. ‘Edinburgh’, comes from the album ‘Shift-Work’.

I discovered ‘The Fall’ during my Roskilde 96 visit (previously) and I do remember that the show was delayed for the longest time (Roskilde organizers came up on stage to apologize multiple times). I can’t remember the particular reason, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some kind of argument between the members and Mark Smith. But the moment the show started, I was sold (and so were other festival-minders). Eccentric but excellent live performance. I do believe I shot pictures of the band, including a pretty close-up of Brix Smith.

So, generally, if you’re into post-punk music and don’t mind a ranting Mark E. Smith, The Fall’s music is excellent. Smith has a knack for writing biting rants and mumbling lyrics (I mean, he doesn’t sing) about current political and personal affairs , plus he always seems to find excellent session musicians. That is, until, he gets bored with them and shoves them aside. After all, ‘The Fall’, that is the wonderful and frightening world of Mark E. Smith. Since 1976.

One of Brooker’s ‘Screen wipe’ episodes reminded (a whole playlist on YouTube) of the many nuclear war shows (fiction and documentaries) that were shown in the Eighties in West European countries. Some of the shows I’ve mentioned here before. Most memorable was ‘The Day After’ and that only because it was shown in school to either scare us or scare our enemies. Remarkably, I don’t remember ever getting training in school about how to proceed during and after nuclear explosions but the most stinging reminder of the constant threat were the monthly (weekly?) noon test sirens.

Some events that seem to tip the balance to an all out war were the election of Ronald Reagan (relations between the west and the USSR started to cool down, the start of the rhetoric), the massive demonstrations against cruise missiles in West Europe and the arms race, with most notably, the ‘Star Wars program’.

I also remember the apparent sudden deaths of all these Russian leaders and the moment that Gorbachev was elected as the supreme USSR leader (Reykjavik summit). From then on, the Cold War slowly faded away to the background.

Thinking back, or rather, being reminded of those Eighties, brings up so many memories of events that heightened the threat level, that I wonder if we would have been prepared for an all-out war. Unlikely, I guess: and maybe as a young kid, it was probably a good idea not to think and worry about this.

Yesterday, we drove into town. The night before it had snowed and the roads were somewhat cleared, that is, depending where you were. Unsurprisingly, the closer we came to SJ, the better the roads. If only NB’s Department of Transportation used better paint for their road markings.

The main political topic in this province is the sale of NB Power to Hydro Quebec, which has been met with protests. At one time I was asked my (foreign) opinion about the sale: There are people who say a privatized net would spur lower prices or more competition. This is probably true for physical products, but for services, I highly doubt it.

I’m extremely fortunate for not having been seriously ill for ages or been prescribed medication for years. That said: My wife finally found a good family doctor apparently: that is, almost 2 years after moving to NB. I find the quality of health-care reasonably good over here: however, during our visits to walk-in clinics, I’ve not seen so many doctors with so many different opinions about my wife’s medication. If you can’t bring up a slight of compassion (for your patients), maybe you have picked the wrong profession.

I work in both environments: that is, whenever I think there’s a need for working in KDE or Gnome, I just logout and change session (I have both window managers installed). But that wouldn’t really answer the question, I guess.

Obviously, I really like KDE 4: it’s generally more streamlined than Gnome and while the new Plasma ‘paradigm’ was not really well received during launch, it has improved a lot. However, it’s still buggy, which is the reason, why I mostly login to Gnome. Gnome, is not without issues either: compared to KDE it’s visually less appealing and (from a user-perspective) less intuitive. At one time, I strictly logged into KDE because of Amarok: KDE’s music player is superior to the bunch of media players that come with Gnome.

So, for me the answer to the question ‘Gnome vs. KDE’ would be Gnome. We’ll see how the KDE team fares in the next (K)Ubuntu release.

Aghast. Is there no
notepad on my Ubuntu?
Wine to the rescue.

Obviously, a lot of people helped in getting Notepad to run under Wine.

There is nothing as glorious as opening up a terminal session on my spare Ubuntu laptop and log right into my server. That is, without downloading either Putty or a host of other MingW/Cygwin utilities on Windows. You guessed it: My main Windows computer is out of working order and until then, I’ll be working on my “Ubuntus b0xen”. No Steam games, no iPod Touch no nothing. Not that I miss iTunes.

There’s actually no real excuse for me not using this Ubuntu laptop more often: both Firefox and Chrome work like a charm and appear to be faster. I never really had problems using OpenOffice or VLC (remember this is a 512 MB Centrino laptop) nor did I ever run into heavy multi-tasking issues when programming. I noticed that ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10, MonoDevelop 2.0 was added as the default package, which is something I have not touched for ages (I run a development version of MonoDevelop).

This reminds me that my favourite photoeditor, RawTherapee has officially become open-source, and yes, it runs very well on this machine. I have to admit that it looks weird running it in 1024×768 resolution, but as long as it works and I can get my raw photos to work.

Earlier this week I found out that the French director Eric Rohmer (Wikipedia) died at the age of 89. Ebert has an elegant in memoriam: additional commentary at Metafilter.

My first introduction to Rohmer’s movies was (I think)‘Conte d’été’ (1996): The other movies in the Tales of the Season series followed soon after. What makes Rohmer’s movies likable are the long dialogues and the surprising twists his characters have and take: for example, in ‘Conte d’été’, the main character evolves from a shy guy into a full-blown womanizer. Rohmer’s take on relationships in all his movies is quite on the mark: that is, in real life, falling in love and dealing with mixed emotions about loved ones is a lot more complex than what Hollywood movies portray to us. Simplicity sells a lot, obviously, and that was not the business Rohmer was in.

With the death of Rohmer, humans have indeed lost one of the greater humanists in the movie industry.

I finished my first ‘Dragon Age’ (official site, Wikipedia) run earlier this weekend, so I thought a write-up was an excellent start of the year of 2010. You may have heard of ‘Dragon Age’, most likely because it received excellent reviews. Metacritic (currently) has it listed with an average of 91 (right here), where reviewers have lauded the game with so many good reviews that it makes you wonder. Let me quote Eurogamer UK, which is a review that will reveal my thoughts about the game:

In its desperation to infuse this setting with “maturity” – be it of the sober, political kind, or the game’s painfully clumsy gore and sex – BioWare has forgotten the key ingredient of any fantasy: the fantastical. Without it, you’re still left with a competent, often compelling, impressively detailed and immense RPG, but it’s one that casts no spell.

And that’s truly it: while extremely detailed (story-line wise), the game feels boxed. If you’ve played ‘Oblivion’ or ‘Fall Out 3′, you’ll find that ‘Dragon’s Age’ is extremely linear. Ferelden is not a place you wander or roam about, it’s a place where you move from A to Z.

It has it’s good sides though: If you like long elaborate storylines, you’ll enjoy ‘Dragon Age’. If you like elaborate interaction with your party-members (and Dog), ‘Dragon Age’ will probably satisfy you. If you love micromanaging your strategy, well, if you’re a programmer, the ‘Tactics’ screen offers a variety of commands to mop up enemies in no time. And since nobody in your party really dies, there’s no way you end this game unsuccessfully.

So, the game is highly immersive and entertaining, if you’d like. However, on my famous ‘Frustration level’, I’d give it a 7: Don’t be surprised if you need to do some parts over and again: battles can be unpredictable and repetitive at times making it less fun at some stages (the ‘brood mother’ battle for example). It’s highly re-playable though, which is a plus for this game and (obviously) that is something you don’t really see a lot in the current gaming world.

In 2010, nobody blogs anymore: Most likely the main reason for this are other distractions like the social networks Facebook and Twitter, where people can selectively ‘opt others out’ of their ‘personal friend lists’ and pump 148 characters messages out every second. Guilty as charged too, but having blogged for many years, there goes nothing above a three paragraph piece of text. So, what was 2009, again:

• Convendro: I’ve never liked WinFF and knowing that it’s just a front-end of the almighty ffmpeg (earlier on xsamplex), I thought it was time to write something myself. I eventually moved the code to Google Code, mainly because I couldn’t get myself to touch SourceForge again. I’ve seen people using my code as a reference for extracting data from ffmpeg’s (error) output. Interesting to see how that piece of code eventually spread over the Internets. It’s also interesting to find out how 3rd party software listing sites have been hosting the main installer. As a word of caution, the official means of distribution is via Google Code.
• At one time we were back in Truro, NS and it felt like returning to a place where time has stood still. Every time I returned to Deventer, The Netherlands, I had that same sort of feeling.
• I’d never thought I would get so attached to a dog. This is particularly significant knowing that as kids we never really had pets (as in cats or dogs). I’m pretty certain my dad didn’t mind dogs (and obviously, he seemed to have had his share of dogs when he was younger) but I guess, there was never room for pets in our parental ‘enclave’. Katy the Wunderdog died at age 18, which is an amazing age for a dog.
• Every time the identical other makes it over to Canada, it always appears to be time for putting everything on the back burner and do some recharging.

So, 2010, then. It will probably be like one of those other years (2007, 2008, whichever), with hopefully (and I say this every year) more programming to be done. Maybe less writing. Who knows.