Nothingness

Posted on Monday, 31. May 2010 by hmvh

Olivetti

Before anyone accuses this blogger of stagnation, thundering silence or an utter lack of activity, let it be said that we have been keeping ourselves rather occupied.

With loose tasks, mostly… lots and lots of loose items that need to get done before the next project can begin.

To wit, a few loose thoughts and ramblings: Received a few more tapes. Have started buying records again. Ubuntu 10.04 is a rather usable and mature package. IBM Thinkpads are solid and robust laptops. iHate iTunes. FreeNAS is an avenue worth exploring. I’ve learnt who my friends are. Max Normal / Waddy Jones / die Antwoord intrigues me to no end. Mark Zuckerberg did grow up to be a twat. Didn’t make it to SIGINT 2010. The new Star Trek movie was enjoyable. Donnie Darko was better on second viewing. And there are still some 100 South African record labels unaccounted for and unprofiled on sicDogs.

So there!

Photo credit: hmvh.net

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Current status

Posted on Tuesday, 13. April 2010 by hmvh

Progress update: South African discogs label research progress = 148 objects remaining.

This is pretty much what our tweets consisted of during the last few months: status updates of the current round of research and rummage through previously- and recently-added record labels in the discogs database, and pre-search of those that may be included sometime in the future.

Months of this insanity involving late hours trying to piece together the origins of an existing label or the forensics to determine the time and cause of demise of a label that’s disappeared off the radar can drive a person nuts. Conversely, it’s the controversial Google Book Search that’s turned out to be an invaluable tool for hunting down facts on companies that existed during the dark days of apartheid, BC.

Surprisingly, people have been rather forthcoming when confronted with straight requests for info; many, in fact, are truly thrilled to discover that there’s someone who still cares and is interested, and that’s always positive.

But sorry, no entertaining “fan mail summary” for 2009 either, no nasty emails, no complaints by disgruntled oggers, nobody wants to “touch me on my studio”.

And before we lose our minds completely, we’ll momentarily reroute power to other tasks and interests since we still have to deal with this bunch of artefacts:

Colourful Cassettes

So much to achieve, such little resources.

Photo credit: hmvh.net

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Day of the cherubs

Posted on Sunday, 14. February 2010 by hmvh

So, today is that other hallmark day named after a certain Saint Valentine, a Roman priest who got arrested, stoned and then had his head separated from his body for the crime of marrying (heaven forbid!) Christian couples.

Charming.

And what is it then that we should give our dear loved ones? One of these perhaps?

Paladone Blowjob Kit

Next up on the event calender we have that annual four-day weekend where we will all gather to celebrate a botched execution by painting eggs and pretending they were hidden in our gardens by a chocolate bunny rabbit.

What? Were you expecting little hearts and roses and cuddly teddy bears?

Fuck, no!

We’ve got a gender-specific role to play and a bad reputation to maintain.

Gender Poll

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Words, words, words

Posted on Saturday, 2. January 2010 by hmvh

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture made up of words must be worth much more.

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

In that case, here are my Twitter’s and this blog’s RSS feeds, and a dump of this blog’s current page’s text presented as word clouds.

Word cloud of Twitter's RSS feed

Word cloud of blog RSS feed

Word cloud of current text on blog

Well, since a new year is upon us and stacks of new and updated post-it notes adorn the office as reminders of things to do and projects to complete you’ll have to excuse us — this world needs to get taken over.

“More matter with less art.”

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The end of the decade is nigh

Posted on Thursday, 31. December 2009 by hmvh

While we’re rounding up what’s left of the current decade, allow us to reveal some statistics of nonsense within the vast hmvh network of shenaniganisms.

For starters, few folks like them rednecks no more. Very little visitors as of late… maybe Averell should sign up on the Facebooks instead?

So awkward it's cool!

Then it’s turned out that the most popular blog posting by far is the the pseudo-humouresque, quasi-investigative, and semi-critical-of-life-online essay called “The story of Moshzilla” which this year became a point of reference on “Know Your Meme” and, for a brief period, even was the authoritative source for a since-deleted Wikipedia article (we had nothing to do with either of it).

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Xmas 2009

Posted on Friday, 25. December 2009 by hmvh

Christmas Babes

C.H.R.I.S.T.M.A.S. = “Customers Helping Retailers Increase Sales Through Myths And Superstition”.

Photo credits: Original Photographer

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Rewind: 2009

Posted on Tuesday, 15. December 2009 by hmvh

December is traditionally the time when we sum up and recall the events and highlights of the year that almost was.

Through their annual Zeitgeist report, those evil people from Google have revealed that “Facebook” was 2009’s top “search query” — which basically confirms my suspicions that people have become too lazy to type “facebook.com” into an address field or plain too dumb to bookmark the site.

Other top searches included “hotmail”, “youtube”, “gmail”, “yahoo” (a touch of irony there), “ebay”, “myspace”, “bebo” and “google”.

Yes, you saw right: google!

Come on, seriously: Why the fuck would anyone google for “Google”?

“Spotify” takes top honours in Sweden (where, at least, it’s available), and South African mobile operator MTN ranked high amongst Nigerians (as did “aero” and “opera”, unlike in other countries). “Nasza klasa” (a Polish social networking service) scored unusually high points in European countries that are not Poland, as did the “Schweinegrippe” H1N1 outside of Mexico. Perennial chart-topper Michael Jackson notches up another posthumous award by grabbing the number-one spot on my personal favourite category, “Death of the Year”, beating out last year’s “deleb” Heath Ledger.

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Stretching the tape collection

Posted on Tuesday, 27. October 2009 by hmvh

Naturally, the question that’s always asked is, “what are you going to do with all those tapes? What do you want them for?”

Valid indeed, and usually met by the default answer of “Some kind of museum.”

“I’ll keep you posted. Now shut up and gimme those tapes. Oh, and any CDs or laptops you don’t want anymore either? Thanks, I’ll take those, too!”

And yes, people have been eager to give me their old tapes — most keen, in fact. Were it not for the little detail that I’m not particularly interested in it right now, this aspect of generosity could almost be part of a study in the human psyche itself.

I know I’ll regret this present state of ignorance in years to come.

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