I'd like to be a gallery, put you all inside my show

Those rancid little gnomes at Blogger just cannot leave well alone, can they?

This week's little "surprise"? - yesterday, the function for comments-upon-comments in a thread [aka "embedded", as it's described in the settings menu] stopped working, with the "reply" link greyed-out. Whatever this shit is, it's also hit the setting whereby the reader clicks a photo to embiggen and it opens in "LightBox" (a widget that lets you scroll through posted photos) - photos currently open in a new window/tab instead. Other navigation functions have also been affected. Sigh.

I digress...

This afternoon, Madam Arcati, Hils, John-John and I are off to the wilds of Hackney Wick, to visit the new David Bowie Centre at the V&A's "East Storehouse" - and that's a collection I am champing at the bit to see [despite already having already been overawed by the David Bowie Is... exhibition back in 2013] !

Something appropriate for the occasion is in order:

David Bowie - Andy Warhol

Like to take a cement* fix
Be a standing cinema
Dress my friends up just for show
See them as they really are
Put a peephole in my brain
Two New Pence to have a go
I'd like to be a gallery
Put you all inside my show

Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all

Andy walking, Andy tired
Andy take a little snooze
Tie him up when he's fast asleep
Send him on a pleasant cruise
When he wakes up on the sea
Be sure to think of me and you
He'll think about paint and he'll think about glue
What a jolly boring thing to do

Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all

Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all

Apparently Mr Warhol was not best pleased. I'm certain David lost no sleep over it.

[*I'm pretty sure that in his original lyrics, this word was not "cement" at all, but "semen"; sanitised for 1970s audiences, no doubt.]

Sorted

NOT him, but he'll do.

"Fortunately, I've just had my TV mended. I say mended - a shifty young man in plimsolls waggled my aerial and wolfed my Gipsy Creams, but that's the comprehensive system for you."

After years of unreliable signal strength from our cable/wifi, we'd finally had enough. So today, a very cute young engineer in a figure-hugging uniform arrived at Dolores Delargo Towers, to cheer me up in my convalescence and to finally - for £75, ker-ching - move the modem from the front room (where we never sit [it's mainly used as a spare bedroom], and don't have any computers, laptops nor a telly) to our living-room at the rear of the house.

That's cheered us up no end! [We did allow him to escape unmolested, in case you wondered...]

Meanwhile, this [from whence the opening quote originated, of course...]!

Patricia Routledge - Kitty 1

Incessant AI bullshit

Anyone with a job is likely to have witnessed managers gushing about AI then quietly ditching the idea. See where your employer is in the cycle of AI hype.

1. Insane enthusiasm
Every aspect of our lives will be transformed by AI and you’re going to be on the cutting edge, your boss assures you. This is based on seeing some moderately realistic pictures of kittens having a birthday party.

2. The first bold steps
You attend meetings about how AI will ‘supercharge’ your business. Enthusiasm is high, and you feel a bit Silicon Valley. You start taking an interest in AI generally and read articles by credulous journalists who don’t appear to realise Elon Musk is a pathological liar. There are undertones of being in a cult, but people forget cults give you a lovely sense of belonging. You love AI.

3. No one can think of anything for AI to actually do
It turns out AI doesn’t have any obvious uses for your company. Apparently a kitchen worktop supplier in Reading doesn’t need a real-time global translation service like Microsoft. Your boss responds by finding unnecessary projects for AI to do in a classic case of ‘technology looking for an application’. At least your clients will be getting video Christmas cards this year with Avatar-standard graphics.

4. Doubts creep in
Heretical thoughts begin. Are companies just pumping their share price with AI? Did anyone ever decide what AI was actually going to be for? Are tech bros full of shit? You note that Zuckerberg thinks we’re going to wear AI glasses bombarding us with trivia that wankers will just use to try to chat up women, eg. ‘Did you know we’re 365.55 million kilometres from Mars, Emma? Makes you think, eh?’

5. AI plans get downscaled
Eventually your company decides to use AI to process invoices a bit faster, so you won’t be conversing with Deep Thought every day or getting a cool robot buddy like K-2SO. It’s good that AI will be helping the company, but it’s a kick in the nuts when you thought Joi from Blade Runner 2049 would be waiting for you lovingly at your desk every morning.

6. You grow to hate AI
Your new AI tools have teething troubles, requiring endless tweaks and forcing you to redo things. Combined with incessant AI bullshit in the media you start to hate the whole thing. You long to work in a low-tech office of the 1950s where the only technology you’re expected to engage with is a pencil sharpener and it’s fine to have lurid yellow teeth from smoking.

7. AI is quietly dropped
Suddenly AI is never spoken of, like a deformed child in the basement, and your company gets on with doing things the way you’ve always done them, on Windows Vista. That’s not to say AI hasn’t profoundly affected your business; you’re still spending countless man hours asking ChatGPT ‘Write me funny jokes about cocks’ and making hilarious images of your colleague Gavin as a xenomorph.

The Daily Mash

Of course.

Testicle sandwich bath yum yum koala

The effect of AI on jobs is expected to be bad. But having said that, there are some professions we’d be happy to see gone forever. Such as these…

Management consultants
You’ve got admire the sheer brass neck of 22-year-old Anthropology graduates telling 50-somethings how they should be running businesses older than they are. But firms are already laying off consultants, probably because AI can tell you to sell more and cut costs. It’s well within AI’s abilities to handle strategy memos and financial analyses, and any client would rather deal with dull ChatGPT text than the smug face of a recent Oxbridge grad called Xander.

Radio DJs
A computer can surely generate inane anecdotes between songs and a less annoying voice than most DJs. Only an overtly evil AI like Skynet or the Allied Mastercomputer in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream would come up with something as nefarious as Chris Evans or Chris Moyles. So that’s DJs out of a job. Never mind, they can be repurposed as cannon fodder for the army. TV presenters will be allowed to remain, though, as some of them have tits and that cheers everyone up when there’s bad news.

Linguists
Revenge for being humiliated in year 9 German or French, plain and simple. Translators, interpreters and language tutors are some of the most at-risk jobs, with all of us now able to speak any language at the touch of a button. Not to mention the universal language of mockery as we laugh at those who were silly enough to master the past indicative. Okay, there’ll be no human filter if the AI is malfunctioning and you’re saying things like ‘Testicle sandwich bath yum yum koala’ but it’s the future and the tech bros are never wrong.

Poets
Many people hate poets, with all their emotions and dandelions and shit, and the tedium of doing the girly romantic ones at school. Even worse are people who think writing down their inane thoughts with no rhymes or structure is brilliant ‘free verse’. AI is going to have no problem replicating most of this stuff. If anything it’ll be a boom time for poetry. Poetry lovers – both of them – can probably get ChatGPT to knock up a million poems in the next five seconds.

Restaurant hosts
No longer will checking into a fancy restaurant involve being looked up and down by a 23-year-old in size 6 jeans who’s clearly never eaten any of the food being served in her pricey establishment. AI can let you check yourself into the restaurant, tell you what table to go to in advance and probably choose your meal for you. Although AI has no idea what food is and glitches badly sometimes, so you may find yourself asking if the chef can prepare a sheet of A4 paper on a bed of moss.

The Daily Mash

Of course.

Thought for the Day

Amen.

Let's get out of this life

Oh. My. Gawd!

Talk about "cream yer knickers time" - after all these years, for the first time two of my absolute fave bands of all time have teamed up to release a single, which premiered today! It is every bit as fabulous as I would have hoped:

Soft Cell & Pet Shop Boys - Purple Zone

I love it...

---

Speaking of musical passions, there is one "instrument" that has forever been behind the music I love (not least that of the artistes above), so let us have a bit of a celebration of...

...the Synthesizer! From its roots in such esoterica as the Theramin to today's minimal technology, and betwixt or between, it has become the basis for the huge variety of sounds that form much of today's music.

It is actually 65 years this year since the first programmable synth [the RCA Mark II] was installed - a "room-sized array of interconnected sound synthesis components", indeed. In 1957 it must have appeared like something from another planet...

Any excuse, really, for another little selection of music that owes its legacy to the early pioneers of musical technology:

Samaran - Paris Madness

The Cure - The Walk

The Knife - Heartbeats

Kylie Minogue vs The Human League - Slow-ly Being Boiled (Parralox Remix)

Trans-X - Living on Video

[See my previous post here for more "Synth-tastic" choons.]

Back to the office...

...it's a hi-tech business!

Hi-Tech

Back to the office again today...

Technology of tomorrow?

Well..?

Can it be done?!

Steampunk Synths

Miss Clara Rockmore, "Queen of the Theremin"

In these gloomy times, it's understandable that we take pleasure in nostalgia. Among the birthday celebrants this week is an exceptional man, way ahead of his time - Mr Leon Theremin, whose work on the study of radio waves in the early years of the 20th century [he was a scientist in the First World War, and was caught up in the revolution that enveloped his native Russia] paved the way for today's motion-detecting burglar alarms, television technology, and radio-controlled devices; he even invented a remote eavesdropping system, the most notorious of which (nicknamed "The Thing") was hidden in a grand carved wooden plaque of the Great Seal of the United States and remained undetected in the US Embassy in Moscow for seven years after the Second World War.

It is, of course, for his even more entertaining invention of a "hands-free" electronic musical instrument (named after him) that he is most famous. The Theremin, a direct precursor of Moog's synthesiser, was first demonstrated as early as 1920, was an instant success [not least in his performances alongside the lady in the picture above], and was put to great use in Hollywood movie scores (by the likes of Miklós Rózsa and Bernard Herrmann) - it even found its way into the pop charts in songs by The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.

By way of a celebration of the remarkable Mr Theremin, here's an old favourite here at Dolores Delargo Towers that demonstrates its use in a rather faboo way:

Orkestra Obsolete play Blue Monday using 1930s instruments

Leon Theremin (born Lev Sergeyevich Termen, 28th August 1896 – 3rd November 1993)

Update your home entertainment systems today!

Oh, the future is astonishing...

Modern communications

The World of High Technology

Stealing people's mail

Sometimes it does seem like technology conspires against us...

After all the debacle with the blackmailing thieves of Photobucket laying waste to our blogs - see here and here - a new problem recently raised its ugly head in the equally sinister world of Microsoft. On the weekend Madam Arcati found he had not received any emails at all since at least midweek, which we reported to the geeks at the place laughingly called "the Outlook.com help desk" (who basically repeat the usual mantra of "clear your cookies", "check your Junk Mail folder" etc, etc) - then today found he could not send any emails either. I got home, and found the latter had happened to me...

Then I read the news headlines:

"We've identified that a subset of infrastructure was unable to process requests as expected, which caused general service availability to drop unexpectedly" Apparently.

"We've redirected requests to alternate infrastructure to restore service, and we're monitoring the environment while connectivity recovers." Whatever that means.

"Additionally, we're investigating an issue in which users are unable to send email messages."

So we weren't being "victimised" after all. I need not have spent days fruitlessly tweaking the computer, the browser settings and all that...

Pah.

At least Blogger is still "up" so I can have a rant...

Thought for the day

I have been concentrating on setting this computer up for eight hours now.

Entering the modern world...

...well, almost.

Just bought a new computer, pre-installed with Windows 10. Since everyone says that is a load of crap to use, I've spent ages on the interwebs today searching out hints and tips on how to customise it to look like older versions of Windows.

You can take a queen out of the Steampunk age, but you can't take the Retro out of the queen...

Just Glue Some Gears On It and Call It Steampunk

Indeed.

Finland's greatest..?

Ah, technology.

Far be it for me to declare myself as any kind of "technophobe" (I can process data using the most complicated of databases, get to grips with the most esoteric of electronic gizmos, and work magic with online "solutions" that others find impossible to cope with) yet - as just today, the gnomes at Blogger/Google appear to have republished every one of my blogs since the end of May at the same time into the "Reading List" (that greets us whenever we first log in here), and I sigh at yet another "glitch", and I stare uncomprehending at the glazed breeze-block that passes for my "smart" phone (surely the biggest misnomer in history for something that does everything except process phone calls properly) - I cannot but feel joy at the prospect of the imminent revival of the Nokia brand into the mobile phone market...

Please! Let us return to the days when one could slip one's phone into a jeans pocket and comfortably move around without feeling like some medical device were attached to one's body. The days when phone calls and text messages were the only distractions - not F***book, Tw*tter, "Insta-groan" or the rest - with which people disrupted otherwise civilised conversations in public places; when chargers did not need to be carried around all the time; a time when the benighted "selfie" was something one did with a camera, and then only on holiday, and only when there was no convenient stranger around to embarrassedly ask to "capture that moment"...

I agree with Hannah Jane Parkinson, writing in The Guardian - "classic" Nokias were probably the greatest phones of all time.

And here's the magnificent Pete Shelley with an appropriate song - Telephone Operator:

Pete Shelley - Telephone Operator

Telephone operator
You're my aural stimulator
Telephone operator
Ne c'est pas la raison d'etre

Words to live by.

Stop - is this reality?

The world is awash with technology, most of it the size of a bar of soap these days - yet it is barely forty years since the first mobile phone call; thirty years since the first Apple Macintosh computer; twenty-eight years since Windows 3.1 (the first version in colour); twenty-five since GPS satellite technology, Sim City, Lotus Notes and the Nintendo Game Boy; and a mere twenty years since the official launch of the free "World Wide Web", with its (then only) browser Netscape.

Google is only sixteen years old, Blogger is fifteen, Wikipedia is thirteen, Amazon and Facebook are ten, eBay and YouTube are is nine, and Twitter is only eight...

To divert us from thinking about all this, let us embrace the far more comforting futurist visions of the fantabulosa Trans-X - with their only hit, from way back in the early 80's - it's Living On Video:

Trans-X - Living on Video

Give me light
Give me action
At the touch of a button.
Flying through hyper-space
In a computer interface.
Stop - living on video
Stop - integrated circuits.
Stop - sur un faisceau de lumieres
Stop - is this reality?

Travelling in a light beam
Laser rays and purple skies.
In a computer fairyland
It is a dream you bring to life.
Stop - living on video
Stop - integrated circuits

Living on video - sur un faisceau de lumieres
I see your glittering blue eyes
You look at me with a smile.
It's a computer fantasy
It is waiting for you and me.
Living - living on video
Living - living on video

Living - living on video
Living - living on video - stop

I adored this song then, and I adore it now - which is more than I can say about the pace of technological progress!

Hanging on the Telephone

A device not many of us could live without these days, the mobile phone is (remarkably) forty years old today!

From a "brick" that weighed more than two bags of sugar to today's interweb-savvy Tweet-monsters (the ruin of pub quizzes forever), it is impossible to think of an era before they were invented.

Back in 1973, we had the Common Market, the IRA, space-hoppers, Watergate, peace in Vietnam, The Ascent of Man, a forthcoming Royal Wedding (Anne), and Donny Osmond vs David Cassidy to concern ourselves about, after all...

More on TechRadar blog

An appropriate song, methinks...

A paean to Ramnit.A

Whoo-hoo! "Normal" service is resumed!

To celebrate this evening a bit of a victory - for tonight I managed (fingers crossed) to finally restore my PC after a couple of days of battling a very nasty virus indeed (its name is Win32/Ramnit.A) - I thought I'd play a rather appropriate little number:

Frank Sinatra - I've Got You Under My Skin

PS It would have been the 104th birthday of Mr Francis Albert Sinatra this week. I've Got You Under My Skin was perhaps the longest-serving of the great man's standards...

http://www.sinatra.com/