:: Turning gold to chrome

Posh hotel lounge one day and and run-down rock club the next. Had fun at both places though.

Also, african food is now a new favourite!

Silence. It’s underrated.

If all response you get from your co-workers is an occasional grunt or strained half-smile, you ought to consider keeping your trap shut.

In the interest of your own safety, if nothing else. After all, there is not much that cannot be achieved with determination and duct tape.

Thank you John C. Koss for the invention of headphones! Reducing office related violence since 1958.

Joined boyfriend for some after work gathering at his work. Surpisingly nice actually. Chatted with a couple of different people about superficial things. Maybe I’m finally getting the hang of this social smalltalk thing. On the other hand, it could just have been the wine. Mhm, wine.

Met up with M afterwards and had a lovely talk over unhealthy amounts of tea. Feeling quite dehydrated today. M and me going out for coffee on our own is a new thing, even though we’ve been friends for years. Strange how that works sometimes.

Another night of broken sleep. Kitty #2 meowing constantly. Sometime during the middle of the night (my sleep deprived brain couldn’t be bothered to look at the clock) I went up to try to persuade her to let me have my beauty sleep.

Turns out, kitty #1 had fled to the top of the kitchen cabinet and kitty #2 was feeling lonely. Some petting. Gave her a boost up to the cupboard to join him and everyone was happy – well, maybe not everyone, I’m quite sure kitty #1 gave me The Look but I wasn’t awake enough to appreciate it.

Having a 40-hour-job, five days a week, nine to five (or in my case, seven to four) makes being spontaneous or just in general having an interesting life somewhat hard. Or maybe it’s just me and I’m too lazy to put the effort in it.

Everyone wants to have an interesting life. Fascinating, scandelously and effortlessly fun – something other people envy you for. It’s the reason we watch movies and read books. Mind you, this is probably the mid-life crisis talking (I love being able to say that, you can practically blame anything on it!), but if you had the chance for a completely different life, just for a day, wouldn’t you take it?

Requirements: A personality switch, a time turner and a change of scenery.

Home again, after a very successful WGT!

Actually, I have been home for a week now, but I’ve been a bit stressed so I haven’t had the time to post anything. But it was great nonetheless!

Drank punch in the sun, watched concerts and went shopping during the day and clubbing at night. All in the company of good friends. Perfect way to spend your days really. A pity that we now have to wait an entire year for the next festival.

Managed to see the following bands:
Paniklift – nondescript electro. Not bad in itself but boring. Don’t remember much actually, although that could be due heavy pre-parting as it was day 1 of WGT and everyone got a bit carried away.
Combichrist – great concert as always. Have seen them too often to get overly excited but their concerts are always fun.
Sarah Noxx – not that impressed, unfortunately. The music is okay (I’m not a huge fan, but I like some songs), but the sound system wasn’t working well which kind of spoiled the experience.
Project Pitchfork – surprisingly good concert! Surprising not because I don’t like the music (the older material is very nice, the newer stuff I haven’t listened to much), but because I didn’t think they’d have as much energy live as they did.
Yelworc – Horrible. Seriously. Avoid at all costs.
Feindflug – Again, a surprisingly good concert. I love their music but I’m somewhat skeptical to listening to them at clubs/concerts. The theme of most of their songs (3rd world war, execution, etc) is not something to dance around to. Not for me at least. But they respected that and weren’t too overly enthusiastic on stage.
VNV Nation – Good concert, mainly due to the audience. I love their older songs but the newer stuff all sounds the same to me. Big disappointment: they did not play Electronaut or Structure, which I’d been hoping for.
Aesthetic Perfection – Nice to see finally see live! Great music, ok-performance.
Icon of Coil – Great music, sound performance. Fun to see live.
Sonar – Good music, need to listen a bit more to them I think.
Scandy – Not that impressed but might be better on an album. Felt more like a dj-set than a concert, but the music was good.

Bands I would have loved to see but missed:
Patenbrigade: Wolff – Played before Sonar and Scandic at the same tiny venue. We were a bit late to the concert and didn’t make it past the long queue in time.
ASP – There were simply too many things playing simultaneously, so unfortunately I couldn’t make it to their gig.

Try as I might to avoid any front-end code (though WPF or Windows Forms are less horrible by far than traditional web interfaces), I just know it will catch up with me. This snippet is something I really could have used last year when I was working with a WPF application.

#region $PROPNAME$ Property

public $PROPTYPE$ $PROPNAME$
{
    get { return ($PROPTYPE$) GetValue($PROPNAME$Property); }
    set { SetValue($PROPNAME$Property,value); }
}

public static readonly DependencyProperty $PROPNAME$Property = DependencyProperty.Register("$PROPNAME$", typeof($PROPTYPE$), typeof($DECLARING_TYPE$), new PropertyMetadata($DEF_VALUE$, On$PROPNAME$Changed));

private static void On$PROPNAME$Changed(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
{
    $DECLARING_TYPE$ $DECLARING_TYPE_var$ = d as $DECLARING_TYPE$;
    $END$
}

#endregion

[via Roy Osherove]

On a side-note, while trying to work out how to best format the snippet to look halfway good on a blog, I found this very useful site that does just that. With just a small adjustment to get wrapping to work in all browsers, it is good to go and simple to use.

According to what might or might not have been a rumour circulating back in February, Last.fm handed over listening data to the RIAA. (Now, I assume that we can all imagine why the RIAA would be interested in obtaining data concerning albums that have yet to be published.)

I didn’t think much of it at the time. Last.fm of course denied the whole thing and as always with these kinds of accusations it was kind of hard to know who was telling the truth. Yesterday, I received a link from a friend to a new article which now claims to know a bit more about what actually happened.

I suggest you read the two original articles if you haven’t already and make up your own mind.

I’ve been using Last.fm since 2005 and I’ve always rather liked the service. But if the article has the truth of it, I don’t know if I feel comfortable staying. Not that I have anything to hide, but hey, who wants a company who is giving out personal data to others? It’s the principle of the thing..

Two alternatives were mentioned in the comment threads, JamWee which is still on beta with invites scheduled to be send out sometime in June and Libre.fm which is still in alpha but can import your entire Last.fm history and promises to focus on privacy.

I’ve signed up for JamWee and will give it a try as soon as they launch. Libre.fm also looks interesting, so I’ll probably give that a try as well. Not that I’ve decided to abandon Last.fm (yet) but maybe it’s time to have a look around what other options there are out there.

I’ll let you know what I think of both JamWee and Libre.fm as soon as I’ve gotten around to testing them!

An animation that attempts to illustrate the concepts presented in chapter one of the book “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” by Rob Bryanton. Fascinating, if brain-twisting.

I wonder if I dare to try and read the book. I am tempted but my brain might just overheat and explode.

The USA is one of two only countries not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which among other commitments to protecting persons under the age of 18, forbids life sentences without parole. The other country is Somalia.

The numbers

• 2,225: Inmates serving life without parole for crimes committed as minors
• 42: States that allow life without parole for minors
• 14: States that have no minimum age for life sentences
• 73: Documented cases of minors serving life without parole for crimes committed as 13-, 14-year-olds
• 44: States that passed laws between 1992 and 1997 making it easier try minors as adults

According to a Human Rights Watch publication from 2008,

..the United States is alone in the world in applying this harsh sentence to juveniles, that an estimated 59 percent of youth who receive the sentence had no prior adjudications or convictions, and that there are currently nearly 2,500 offenders who are serving life without parole for crimes committed while they were a juvenile. Additionally, data reveal that there are stark racial disparities in the imposition of the sentence, with black youth serving life without parole at a per capita rate that is 10 times the rate of white youth.

Of course, then there is Guantanamo:

The detainees were brought to Guantanamo between the ages of 15 and 17, and have now been in detention there for more than six years. [hrw]

Each of these five individuals has been held in US custody for over six years, but has been denied basic juvenile justice protections or special consideration because of their potential status as former child soldiers. [hrw]

Makes you think.

[Articles: Colorlines, Spiegel, Human Rights Watch 1 2 3, msnbc, cnn]