I remember house before it was techno

I remember house before it was techno
I remember house before it had an afro
I remember house before it was deep
I remember house before it was hard
I remember house when house had tempos
I remember house before mpc 60’s
I remember house before house had loops
I remember house before the whole world knew
“Do You Remember House” – Blaze


The last pinguin to drink coffee

Kevin Cornell is an illustrator from Philadelphia and has published his BearSkinRug sketchbook #1 on the web.


Japanese lesson in Rock ‘n Roll

Japanese Rock 'n Roll (Prodikeys)
Nothing like an enthusiastic engineer to sell a home entertainment keyboard.
A commercial for the Creative ‘Prodikeys’ product (music and ‘normal’ keyboard in one) features an archetypical Japanese sales guy teaching us how to play rock ‘n roll drums on a MIDI keyboard. This is not the best way to play drums, and he adequately proves this point.


Blogs and Wikis: how about a bliki?

Wikipedia.org is awesome. Who would have thought that building a knowledge system based on voluntary contributions from just about anyone who wants to, would work?


Top Ten Smelly Celebrities

A friend told me about an off-the-record list of celebrities with unpleasant body odor, where Brad Pitt supposedly featured as #3. Some Googling later, I found out Brad has moved up to #1! Here is the list as compiled in May 2004 by Mikael Jagerbrand:


My online charmap of HTML character entities

Geeky as hell, but I need it quite often, and what better place to put it but here: the list of 250+ HTML character entities.
Handy if you would want to write σ = ¾ • ∑ ƒ(χ²) – or your name like “πετερ“


Moiano teaches Soulschool

Soulschool
Just bought a surprisingly good debut album: “Soulschool” by Moiano. It’s a Belgian band started by Peter Lesage, who has played the keyboards for Gabriel Rios, Flip Kowlier, Krewcial. He’s now got a band of talented musicians around him.


Imperial time units: here come the nunes

I caught an episode of Top Gear the other day. The rather excellent Jeremy Clarkson was talking about ‘driving very economically’ with a big Audi and mentioned all kinds of mpg (miles per gallon) measurements. For me, as I have lived in the metric system for all my life, conversion from ‘mpg‘ to ‘l/100km’ (liter/100 km) proved to be non-trivial. Some research revealed the following stunning data:


Swastikas drawn on woman in Paris attack

Update Aug 2004: the whole story seems to have been made up by the girl. I’ve deleted my initial reaction, that was honest, but now quite irrelevant.


Doctorow: DRM is evil

Some stuff you just know without being able to express it adequately. I hate badly designed copy-protection schemes, but I couldn’t find the right arguments to make my case without being ‘against’ artist. And then someone better informed comes along and sums it all up in a well-thought and clear presentation. That’s what happened with this speech on DRM (Digital Rights Management) by Cory Doctorow at Microsoft Research.