So anyway, Lisa played me Pendulum’s new album in the car at lunch time and when it got around to ‘9000 Miles’: call it love at first listen. Ch00n!

I didn’t even know Pendulum had a new album out.. I don’t really follow like.. stuff that happens in popular culture or music. Music comes to me when it comes to me, not when it’s released. I don’t listen to the radio or watch TV. I have no idea what albums are out at the moment.

When I found out Pendulum had a new album out I was apprehensive.. it could go either way. I didn’t wanna be disappointed. Hold your colour was a work of genuis. It’s always 50/50 whether an artist will be able to successfully follow up on their first album. Well let me say this.. Pendulum just laid 4 aces on the table.

For me 9000 Miles makes the album.. it is a sheer work of drum and bass genius. My only regret with that tune is that they don’t drop the pounding drum and bass groove until half way through the track. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of remixes though.

Let’s go through the tracks from the beginning..

1. ‘Showdown’ drops the addictive move-your-body dnb riffs within 40 seconds of the start of the CD. Beautiful, that’s what we want! Get you moving as soon as possible.

2. ‘Different’ just doesn’t quite have enough dancability to me, it does have some cool metal licks that remind me a little of Alice Cooper though. Good track, but not one of my favourites.

3. ‘Propane Nightmares’ starts with a brass solo and some vocals – almost sounds like it’s going to be a boring generic rock track. Then at about 1 minute the dirty drum and bass kicks in. This track is a great fusion between nice easy dance-able rock music and stomping drum and bass. Sounds like it’s got a chord sample from Dune – Million Miles from Home too. Yummy, Dancey rock, Stomping DnB and Happy Hardcore! Bring it on! This track is a classic. Again, my only problem really is that the drop comes too late. Fuck all that intro bullshit, drop the beat as soon as possible! Then drop it again, and again, and again. Make me shiver with with joy each time you drop that beat like you did in Hold Your Colour!

4. ‘Visions’ intro begins with some retro vocoded vocals, goes a bit Beastie Boys for a fraction of a second, then there’s hints of salsa. Actually this tune is a bit generic to be honest. Some people have called this album ‘dated’. I wouldn’t say that.. Pendulum is clearly cutting edge. This track is almost a dud, but then about a minute and a half in this beautiful synth starts with some nice chords and makes it all okay. There’s a nice little guitar solo at about 3 minutes too. It’s not exactly a stomper though. Good, but nothing to write home about.

5. ‘Midnight Runner’ starts off with a little reminder of the Jazz dnb craze of a few years ago. Then goes a bit psychedelic. The bass line to get you moving kicks in pretty early but you have to wait a couple of minutes before you get a real grimey beat to thrash around to. And when it comes, it’s actually a bit of a disappointment. Then yet again it’s saved by a brilliant synth lead – reminds me of the x-files or twilight zone or something. Such a simple little riff, but it saves the whole track from turning into a generic dnb filler track. There’s a nice vacuum cleaner style bass line at the end but it’s nothing new. Good dancey tune – certainly doesn’t interrupt your flow, but it doesn’t give you little chills of musical ecstasy either.

6. ‘The other side’ got an almost classical sounding intro – I think it might be ripped from some classical track actually. Wastes no time in dropping the beat though with some added psytrance style squelches! nice! The little bit before the vocals kick in reminds me of some dark warehouse rave I may have been to. Then the vocals, and rock riffs! Interesting fusion. There’s even hints of Oasis in there, but instead of a stupid whiney chorus, you get a sorta half-dnb break down. It’s interesting. I think this one’s going to grow on me. This track to me is what pop music should be. The only criticism I have is that the vocoder sounds a bit like one of those cheap guitar pedals you used to get in the 70s. Come on guys, we’ve got VST vocoders that sounds absolutely amazing and you’re using a �50 guitar pedal?!

7. ‘Mutiny’ Starts off like some bloody crap rock track from some stupid rock band whose music should be long dead and buried. Then it all goes a bit poppy. Too many power chords. Too Generic. Too much Mickey-Mousing. This is my least favourite track on the album.

8. ‘9000 Miles’ This track is a work of pure genuis. This track takes the album from ‘good’, to ‘absolutely fucking amazing’. My only gripe is that the music doesn’t even start until a minute and a half into it. It’s got some nice spanish style classical guitar riffs and some bongos to hint at what’s about to come… the drop. And fucking hell does it make you wait for the drop. ‘Good things come to those who wait’. The drop doesn’t come until 2.30! And again it’s a bit of a disappointing drop. It’s not until 3 minutes into the track that the killer synth comes in. 3 minutes into this track and lead synth starts. For me, that’s musical ecstasy right there. This track is made by the lead synth. Again it’s a fairly simple melody but it’s just brilliance. I love this track, really I do. The only thing I don’t like is that it makes you wait too long for it. Fucking use that synth as the intro, then drop the beat, then do a synth solo, then drop the beat even fucking harder, then just play that synth for 10 minutes! Fuck yeah! I’m sure there’ll be loads of remixes of this track. I’m waiting for the prog house mix.

9. ‘Granite’ doesn’t hesitate to throw you a thumpin’ dnb groove. Yes! Thank you, just what we need after 9000 miles. Pity about the lyrics though. Just shut up and give us a killer lead synth instead. There is actually a killer synth in this track – again playing a really simple but catchy melody. It’s spoiled a bit by the vocals though. Pendulum’s vocals are best when they’re either heavily vocoded or just not there.

10. ‘The Tempest’ Starts off like a fucking kiddie’s nursery rhyme. It’s all a bit too power chordy and lyrical for me. Fuck this shit give us some pounding bass for fuck’s sake!

Conclusion: Overall the album isn’t perfect. You wait way too long for the drop, and when it comes it’s often a little disappointing. Then shortly after the drop comes an amazing synth line that saves it all. Compare to Infected Mushroom who’re great at drops and there’s a big difference.

Infected Mushroom spend about a minute building you up to a brilliant drop, then spend most of the rest of the track building you up to an even more amazing drop and then you just gush with orgasmic pleasure all over the dancefloor.

In ‘In Silico’ you wait ages for the drop, then it comes and you’re a little disappointed, then finally an amazing synth comes with a few more little drops after that. The saving grace is the lead synth which just makes the whole track drip with orgasmic pleasure. Take a lesson from Infected Mushroom – build up to a drop for about a minute, then throw in that amazing synth right at the first drop, then build it up for one final orgasmic thrill towards the end of the track and just keep replaying variations on the synth line until the end.

Also, I don’t like the way Pendulum are heading towards a pop-rock style. Fucking give me stomping drum’n'bass fucksake. That’s what was so amazing about the first album. You couldn’t listen to it without dancing. That’s what I love about 9000 Miles, you just can’t help but move your body! Yes, bring me reworkings of generic rock riffs with dnb dance sexyness on top, but don’t forget to add the stompin’ dnb! And don’t forget, when you drop the beat, I wanna come all over your face with pleasure!

There are too many power chords on this album, and Mickey-mousing. Let’s just explain I mean by that.. Power chords are really simple, raw sounding chords that contain only the root and the 5th. They’re great for getting a powerful sound but there’s no depth to them. It doesn’t take me long to lose interest in tracks composed entirely of power chords. ‘Mickey-mousing’ is a term I use for whenever one part follows another too closely. Basically it’s a term I got from film studies – when the music follows the action really closely (ie, Mickey Mouse climbs up something and there’s a piano roll up the keyboard). Pendulum do this a lot in ‘In Silico’ – often the bass, the lead synth and the chords will be playing almost exactly the same notes. This is a common technique in popular music to get a catchy, simple sound. Yes, catchy good, but whatever happened to counterpoint?!

Having said that, In Silico is still a worthy contender for my top 10 albums of all time. Mainly because of ‘9000 Miles’ though.

Fucking hell I love this track. ‘9000 Miles’ has just become my favourite track of all time in the space of about 8 hours, in fact… it became my favourite track of all time immediately first time I heard it in Lisa’s car. I can’t wait until I hear it on a dancefloor. I hope I’m suitably full of drugs at the time so that I can appreciate it properly. To be honest I don’t think it matters.. I could be stone cold sober and still tear up the dancefloor to this track.

So, I bought a high-spec laptop.

I get so frustrated because my work PC is 200mhz slower than my home PC, and my work PC doesn’t have RAID 10. I think it’s the RAID 10 that makes the major difference. My home PC is blindingly fast, in fact, it’s ridiculously, obsessively fast. I get frustrated very quickly. I have the fastest computer in the company and it still frustrates me. I pity the fools who have Celerons!

Luke actually timed it once and it took me less than a second (700ms) to become annoyed and start swearing at the computer while waiting for it to do something. As far as I’m concerned, the limiting factor should be the speed of my brain, not the speed of my PC. If something goes dead for more than 3 seconds I’m liable to give it the three-fingered-salute. That’s 3 seconds I could’ve spent doing something worthwhile like reading Slashdot!

Anyway, I got the highest spec laptop which I could justify to myself. That equals a pretty fucking fast laptop (read: runs like blazing hell for about 80 minutes before the battery dies). My laptop is actually higher spec than any of the desktops at work, including mine.

I have an EeePC too, should I need something a little less extravagant. I love ‘eep’, really I do. It’s a really cute little machine, a marvel of modern technology. Unfortunately I find the 800×640 screen on the original EeePC just a little too small to work comfortably on. I plan to purchase one of the new EeePCs with a slightly bigger screen (but exactly the same size unit as the original) as I think I might actually use it then. (Eep hasn’t ventured out of its bag for about 2 weeks).

Anyway, as Wifi has inexplicably stopped working on my desktop and I can’t be bothered to figure out why; my desktop has become my playing-music-and-assassin’s-creed-machine. That’s literally all I’ve used it for in a couple of weeks. Seems like a waste, but Assassin’s Creed runs beautifully on it – it doesn’t even break a sweat. Crysis runs smoothly at 1280×1024 with all settings maxed too, yum yum! Bring me more hungry games to eat my GPU cycles with please! I wanna see the beads of sweat on the dirty arabs before I slit their throats!

Anyway, because my desktop is not net connected, that’s left the Vista laptop as my primary machine.

Originally I was planning on keeping Vista until I’d done some screenshots for DC, and then replacing it with XP. In my typical lazy fashion, I never got around to doing all the screenshots. Now Vista’s been on here long enough that I’ve installed all of the software that I need and started collecting downloaded content. In other words, I’ve ‘moved in’ to Vista. I never intended for this to happen.

To start with, I hated Vista. Why have Microsoft moved things just for the sake of it? For example, what was wrong with the ‘up’ button in explorer? I don’t mind the new way of doing it, but couldn’t we keep the ‘up’ button as well? There’s a few examples of them changing things just for the sake of change and in most cases they’ve actually made it worse.

And ‘Aero’, what exactly is that again? Transparent windows that blur what’s behind them? Er.. why exactly is that now the most CPU intensive process on my box? I look at the transparent blurry windows and the way I would imagine that being implemented is that you have a separate framebuffer containing a blurred version of each layer, and a mask which tells the graphics card where to apply the blurred version – this can quite easily be implemented in hardware using the stencil buffer. This is basic graphics technology that’s been around something like 10 years. Sure, the idea of applying it to a GUI is fairly new, but why exactly does this simple graphical operation slow my computer to a crawl?!

Also, Compiz (which runs smoothly and beautifully on the 600mhz EeePC) achieves much more complex effects like wobbly windows and the desktop cube. If Compiz can do this on a 600mhz box, why does Vista make my ridiculously over-specced laptop slow just to do a little bit of blurry transparency?! Sure, it looks fairly nice, but is this really worth 25% of my clock cycles?!

Anyway, the point I was getting to is that I’m actually starting to quite like Vista. It’s definitely growing on me.

A lot of Microsoft’s problems with new OSs are actually down to the hardware manafacturers – more specifically, their drivers.

This is illustrated perfectly by my laptop. It’s an Asus laptop (I bought Asus because I was so impressed by the EeePC), that means it comes with ASUS-customized versions of all the drivers. In particular, it comes with an ASUS version of the nVidia drivers for the graphics chipset (yes, I have a fucking good nVidia graphics chip in my lappy).

For the first few weeks I used Vista I got very annoyed because it would crash and become slow for no obvious reason. Then I realised that it would often crash when going in and out of fullscreen. Furthremore, it wouldn’t just hang or crash in the typical sense.. the screen just goes blank for a minute or so, then Vista realises and reloads the graphics driver with a message along the lines of “Your graphics driver crashed and Vista restarted it”. Yes, my graphics driver crashed and I did not have to reboot. This is progress!

I don’t fully understand the Windows kernel architecture – not to the same degree I understand Linux and FreeBSD having written kernel patches myself, but it seems to me that Microsoft have done the equivalent of moving all drivers into userspace. A bold move! Truly a good idea.

So the problems I’ve been having with Vista are down to my graphics driver. Perfmon says so. Brilliant! Seriously, this is a killer feature for me.

Many people may say that Vista’s instability is due to driver issues. They don’t fully understand the complexity of the driver issues though. It’s not just a case that nVidia’s Vista drivers are fucked. Sure, they were fucked when Vista first came out, but the new drivers are fine. The problem? The laptop is locked into using ASUS’s modified version of the nVidia drivers. Have ASUS released a driver update? No, they have not. I’m still using the same drivers nVidia originally released for Vista’s launch! There’s new drivers available on nVidia’s website but Vista will not let me install them because ASUS have locked me into only installing their drivers! Yes, there is a workaround, but I what’s the average pleb to do?

The ability to recover from driver crashes and know which driver has caused the crash is a huge step forwards. I reckon a lot of problems people have with XP are down to dodgy drivers, but they’re almost impossible to diagnose because there’s hundreds of drivers loaded on every machine, how are you supposed to tell which one has crashed your computer? Why not just blame it on the OS?

I was describing Vista as the new Windows ME – a stopgap solution until Microsoft could release a proper product.

That’s not the case though – Microsoft have made some major changes to the kernel in Vista and I think they’re for the better. The problems people are having with Vista is that because drivers are not backwards compatible with XP, new drivers are required, and because of the way PCs are built it’s taking a while for the stable versions of the drivers to filter down so that all Vista machines are stable. It’s a necessary change and the problems aren’t Microsoft’s fault. The problems with this laptop are down to ASUS being lazy and not updating their drivers. Completely outside of Microsoft’s control.

But why should ASUS bother to spend time and money updating their drivers, when they know that any stability problems people suffer, they’ll blame on Vista, not on ASUS’s drivers. It’s simple economics, why spend money on something that brings you no benefit?

In other words, yes, Vista won’t last long because soon it will be replaced by Windows 7 which will essentially be Vista SP2 (although fucked if they’ll call it Vista after all the bad press). But Vista definitely is not the new Windows ME. ME was a stopgap based on the 98 kernel until they could get the NT kernel working properly.

Vista’s different… Vista represents the introduction of a major change to the kernel architecture. If anything, Vista is the new Windows 2000. It won’t be long before it’s replaced with the new XP, but it’s an important step in the evolution of Windows.

You can sure as hell bet that Windows 7 won’t change the driver API, so you’ll be able to use Vista drivers with 7 and vice-versa. Windows 7 won’t suffer from Vista’s bad reputation, because by the time Windows 7 is released, stable versions of all drivers will already be available for it. All we’ll really be looking at is a new skin on Vista, but it’ll be billed as a return to form from Microsoft – people will say: “finally they have released an OS that compares to XP”. Remember, XP was just a new skin and some performance tweaks to Windows 2000.

It’s an interesting thing.. I used to be pretty anti-microsoft.. like the best of the opensource crowd. But the more I use Microsoft software, the more I develop a respect for them.

Visual Studio is amazing software. Really, no other IDE comes close. I can’t fault Visual Studio on anything and I spend about 50% of my working day in Visual Studio. I’m pretty fond of C#, but what I really love is doing C++ in Visual Studio. Everything about it is just fucking ace. The debugger is amazing. I honestly can’t think of a single problem that I have with it. Well done Microsoft, good stuff. Visual Studio is genuinely my favourite piece of software.

I’m not saying their APIs are perfect, or even close (although .NET is growing on me). As a piece of software though, I love VS – I’d do all my programming in it if I could. If you don’t have to touch Microsoft’s APIs, it’s perfect. I really enjoy using it to do my cross-platform OpenGL game in C++. No Windows code involved. Lovely!

SQL Server is pretty damn good too. MySQL isn’t even a competitor. Triggers, stored procedures and proper role-based authorizations are experimental features in MySQL. MySQL is a database for script kiddies. SQL Server competes with the likes of Oracle, and I have to say.. it does a bloody good job. MySQL isn’t even in the same league. Foreign key constraints not supported on the default table type? You’re taking the piss right?

After using a proper database, MySQL feels woefully inadequate to me.

Office is actually shitty software, but you know what? Nothing else even comes close. Open Office is a fucking joke.

I sound like a Microsoft fanboi, and I’m really not. I still choose opensource wherever possible. My work PC runs Kubuntu exclusively, Eep runs Linux too, it will run XP, but it’d be awful – Kubuntu+compiz is beautiful on Eep. We’re using Joomla for content management at work at the moment and I run several FreeBSD+Apache+PHP+MySQL servers. FreeBSD is my OS of choice for servers. Apache is clearly the best web server and PHP is my favourite of the script kiddie languages.

Having said that.. excluding Microsoft as an option on religious grounds is just fucking stupid. Why use inferior software when the best is available? I’m a pragmatic person; I pick the best option for the situation – sometimes that’s opensource, sometimes it’s not.

It’s the same reason I don’t call myself an “atheist” anymore. To believe that there cannot be a god is just as irrational as believing that there definitely is one. I’m an agnostic. Faith is a nasty thing, and to me, atheism is a faith like any other. Forget your religion and open yourself to the possibility that your opinion may be wrong.

Salif Keita – Yeke Yeke (Hardfloor Dance Mix)

Pendulum! FUCK YEAH!

I love Trance.

Right now I am addicted big style to Tiesto’s trance version of Adaigo for Strings. I’m also overplaying Gabriel & Dresden – Tracking Treasure Down and Glenn Morrison – Contact. Still loving Infected Mushroom of course, and loads of others.

Give me a stomping 4-to-the-floor beat, a deep warbling bass line from a 303 and and some nice soaring padz and I’m happy for hours. Almost as good as sex.

I love the urgent drive of psytrance bass lines, I love the soaring synths in euphoric trance, I love the punch of an 808 kick, I love the cheesey chord progressions in stuff like ATB and DJ Sammy. I love Infected Mushroom’s signature synth squelches.

Top ten favourite albums of all time in no particular order:

Infected Mushroom – Converting Vegetarians
Pendulum – Hold Your Colour
Pink Floyd – Dark Side of The Moon
Beth Orton – Central Reservation
Leftfield – Leftism
Fila Brazillia – A Touch of Cloth
Oasis – Definitely Maybe
Astrix – Artcore
Massive Attack – Protection
Roni Size – New Forms

Most of those have consistently been on my top 10 for quite a long time. I think the only recent additions are Pendulum, Infected Mushroom and Astrix. If I do this list again in a year, I wonder what will get bumped off the list to make way for new things?

Fuck yes! Andain – Beautiful Things (Gabriel & Dresden Mix) ..and on the 8th day god said “let there be trance!” and so it was.

I was watching a Panorama on the SAT tests earlier. I mostly hate panorama because to me it often smacks of these American style Mothers-against-something groups. However on this occasion I happened to agree with them.

I remember being convinced by the teachers that the tests were very important. It wasn’t made clear to us that the results we got on the SAT tests have absolutely no impact on our future education or career prospects.

Because the school will be judged on its SAT performance, the teachers are under immense pressure to improve results, and they pass that pressure on to the children, knowingly or not. What the teachers should have said is “these tests are immensely important for us, but basically mean nothing to you”. That is not what they said, they just said “these tests are immensely important”.

It’s not fair to expect 7 year olds to do tests, of any kind, ever. I don’t even remember my first SAT – I couldn’t even be certain if I actually took it. I do remember the one we were supposed to take at the age of 10 though – I remember all of the fun/creative/interesting stuff getting put on hold and us just concentrating on repeatedly doing short simple questions in the style of the test. I remember this being tedious.

My tutor made a fatal mistake – in order to enthuse everyone about our SATs he promised that in the time between the tests we’d get to do PE exclusively.

2 weeks of alternating between doing boring tests and PE? Yeah, that was basically my idea of hell.

I took it all off sick. Did it do me any harm to miss these massively important tests? No.

I really hate the education system in this country. To the extent that I wouldn’t be happy enrolling any child of mine.

I don’t like the way discipline is managed, I don’t like the amount of homework that’s given out, I don’t like the way retards are mixed in with normal students so that they ruin all the lessons, I don’t like the way the Science that’s taught is all wrong (especially Physics and Chemistry). Jesus people, if you don’t think the kids will get it; don’t teach them it. Don’t teach them something that’s wrong instead! I don’t like the fact that they think it’s okay to put security cameras up in our school. I don’t like the way they think it’s okay to put army recruitment leaflets in school libraries. I don’t like the way they hound the parents of anyone who is struggling.

I hate it all, and I wouldn’t want a child of mine to go through it. Surely there must be a country in the world that does it better than this?

I think if a teacher can spend 1 lesson doing an interesting experiment and as a result of that one member of the class develops a passion for science, that’s worth a thousand lessons doing exercises from a text book – because nobody develops any kind of passion from that.

School trips should be regular and subsidised.

School is only a valuable experience if it inspires you.

Training kids to pass tests is not education.

Both over, and under-achievers should be catered to equally well. No more every-child-is-the-same approach. Every child is not the same, some are naturally gifted and will become bored and frustrated if they are not challenged. Others will struggle and require extra help just to keep up.

STOP PUTTING FUCKING RETARDS IN OUR CLASSROOMS.

God it really fucks me off that they put a proper retard in our class. Fuck knows what was actually wrong with him but he clearly wasn’t right in the head. Some form of pretty severe autism I’d say at a guess.

Fine – I get the point that it’s better for these children if they can be around normal people rather than being stuck in a special school with a load of other retards.

The point is – Ryan being in our class did nobody any good. People would ruthlessly bully him because he was an easy target. He couldn’t have been happy – he had literally 0 friends. If he was happy it was only because his brain was not working properly, his life was awful – I felt awful just watching it.

And it certainly didn’t help us having him in our class. The teachers would constantly have to interrupt their flow of thought to tell Ryan to stop eating his eraser, or his crayons or whatever. Ryan ruined many lessons for me, he simply shouldn’t have been there. It wasn’t his fault, and I feel sorry for him – but putting him in a mainstream class, particularly in what is a fairly rough school was a ridiculous decision.

This is not very politically correct, but I’ve experienced it first hand and I really do not see what good it does to put mentally retarded children into mainstream schools. If you can explain to me how being physically and emotionally tortured by hundreds of children on a daily basis helps these people “integrate” then I’d love to hear it.

And if you’re going to say to me “well the solution is to stamp out bullying”. Then fuck you for being so naive.

Bullying is normal. We need to stop wrapping our children in fucking bubble wrap. Why do you think everyone’s got alergies and phobias and syndromes and disorders? Why do you think we have anorexia and self-harm? Because we don’t know how to deal with the real fucking world anymore. We’re so fucking detached from it while we’re growing up that when we finally are exposed to it, we shrivel up and die.

Get a grip for fuck’s sake. The world is a dirty, scary, painful place, stop trying to pretend that’s not the case, and instead think of ways to introduce kids to it gradually rather than all at once on the day they leave school.