In alternative news, Anette Olzon and Pain together is awesome:

And, a pretty cool tale of aliens-drank-my-milk-whilst-I-was-sleeping-and-parked-their-ship-in-the-backyard :

The only thing I ever wanted, the only thing I ever needed
Is my own way – I gotta have it all

I don’t want your opinion, I don’t need your ideas
….

FrozByte posted a link to some really neat chip songs the other day. (Red Light is still my favorite)

In a fit of nostalgia, I was trawling my .mod collection and came across some really good old school chip songs.

1.) Global Trash 3 v2, by Jesper Kyd. 4 channel, 8 bit.

This is from the seminal Amiga demo called “Hardwired”

We used the same tune in “The Joint Hackers'”  first attempt at .demo as well. I think Wayne replaced some of the samples.

It’s quite clear from the raw talent in this simple track, as to why Jesper has become quite successful.

2.) KernKraft 400 by Zombie Nation

The video is awesomely terribly kitch, and the action in the song only starts at 0:48.

But this song was an instant floor killer. It also became the stadium song in the USA for many a football match. Check out http://www.kernkraft-400.zombie-nation.com/ for some of the many remixes.

Note, that in typical house techno style you will need serious bass to enjoy the chip generated sine waves.

This song is probably one of the few reasons why I would resort to tappetness, and apply an aftermarket sound system to my Mercedes.

A very scary privacy fact :

But it was only an early mile marker in Sweeney’s career; in 2000, she showed that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified using only three bits of information: ZIP code, birthdate, and sex.

Latanya Sweeney’s (hard to find) draft research on the topic, seems to indicate 87% identifiable, however, Philippe Goll, revisted her study and was only able to reproduce 61-63% hit rate.

This is still a rather spectacular hit rate in my opinion.

I always thought data mining was boring.

This rings so true…

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

Over the months, I’ve blogged about Vodacom’s complete inability to develop a seemingly reliable web based system, and for quite a  few months now I’ve been surprised that I’m able to print my monthly statements online without hassle.

Thus, I guess I could be forgive to think that maybe they had sorted their shit out, or hired someone with a clue…

Today, when registering my son’s phone on their website of course, I get the following.

Is it possible for their website to do anything but serve gif's ?

I was actually quite surprised that I got the error so late in the process. I mean, I had actually already pressed the submit ONCE before reaching this error! This means that some code ran successfully on their server PRIOR to this message, which is actually AMAZING!

Muppets…