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25th April 2003

Saw The Vagina Monologues at The Rep

23rd April 2003

Found this cool self organising music rating site thingie, which (rather bizarely) is written in Javascript! It runs like a (three-legged) dog in Opera, but is nice and speedy in Netscape 7.

For example, say you like Massive Attack, you look at this page: http://www.gnod.net/music/related/Massive+Attack.asp and you find suggested Art Of Noise, Boards Of Canada, Autechre, Pop Will Eat Itself etc.

I found this because a friend suggested that I'd like the Gotan Project: http://www.gnod.net/music/related/Gotan+Project.asp

The one thing I can't work out it how to search for artists within gnod - you can either hack the URLs, or try and navigate Gnod Space to find them!

So, are you more likely to die from an Influenza Pandemic or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome? Maybe it will be an Asteriod Impact? Either way, the UK is now classified as an SARS-affected area ( http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=2604787 )

Grub, the Seti@home-like search crawler that sounded like such a good idea isn't obeying the robot exclusion standard, and people are getting angry...

http://www.grub.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=124&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15&sid=2a889e789e15b38cd36c1bd8f2d86edc

Wikipedia Admin wrote: "For some weeks actually, grub-client has been rejected from the dynamic portion of my site with 403s for not obeying robots.txt and requesting too fast (every few seconds, sometimes). So it's not bogging down my database anymore, but it is still trying to crawl gajillions of pages which are explicitly banned by robots.txt. I did try to use the robots.txt yanker yesterday (and again today), so far with no results; of course, it was already not following what was in my robots.txt! Why should it start?

Here's fifteen minutes' worth of grub activity on my site. Tell me, is this right? Should it look like this? ..." there follows around 5 pages of (refused) pages requests by Grub.

Oh dear, I bet some people who were celebrating their massive publicity and downloads, are feeling decidedly different today!

19th April 2003

Viewed works by Anya Gallaccio at the Ikon Gallery. I wish I'd made it sooner to see this exhibition, because it has a very clear temporal theme, and really needs to be seen several times over the course of weeks to get the full impression. Why? Because many of the works change over time - fresh flowers set beneath perspex, slowly drying and rotting, real apples hung from a bronze (?) tree, a room painted in chocolate and filled with its smell. Other works included 1 tonne of sugar and glucose set into around 15 squat columns, chandeliers dripping wax onto the floor

Also on display was video and audio work by Kelly Mark, including the Glow House which was sited just across the road from my own abode. The Glow House is set on the corner of Wake Green Road and Anderton Park Road, Moseley. It has no curtains, and a slight whitewash on the windows. It is currently being rennovated. Inside every room was placed a television. At night they were all tuned to the same channel, and the house seemed to pulsate as the scenes changed, and the rooms glowed brighter and darked in synchrony. Each time I walked past the Glow House late at night, there was small crowds of (slightly drunk) people looking and pointing.

11th April 2003

Saw Modified Toy Orchestra at Patrick Kavanaghs

10th April 2003

Ate at the Shogun Sushi And Noodle Bar in the Mailbox, Birmingham.

8th April 2003

Saw Mike In Mono at the Medicine Bar

4th April 2003

Found an interesting russian war blog and discussion site - http://www.iraqwar.ru

Also found that http://english.aljazeera.net/ is back up - only with headlines, and no content though! If I a site under a large threat of hacking them I wouldn't advertise the content provision software I was using at the bottom of the page though! (they use software from http://www.ihorizons.com

The register ran an interesting article on The Second Superpower

1st April 2003

Watched the first episode of the Tomorrow People.

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