Tag Archives: anger

Offline, online, offline, online

Posted on Wednesday, 11. November 2020 by hmvh

No sooner had the ink of the previous post dried did the blog go offline for a day — at least that’s what the alert message said. A day later it came back, and then it went down again for three days. That was in August. And that was just the beginning of my troubles. Continue reading →

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The death of recordable compact discs, part 4

Posted on Thursday, 16. February 2017 by hmvh

Once upon a time there was a co-worker. He complained bitterly about how much he hated adhesive labels applied onto CD-Rs. This was over a decade ago. The vast majority of my self-burnt music CD-Rs have become near unplayable. And here follows my most recent adventure: ripping those bastards. Continue reading →

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Everything is broken

Posted on Tuesday, 13. December 2016 by hmvh

It’s that time of the year again. Everything is broken. Nothing gets completed but everything got complicated. Continue reading →

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Fan mail

Posted on Sunday, 31. January 2016 by hmvh

Discogs is a cross-functional site. Actually, we’re just a bunch of music lovers who do our best to reflect verifiable details, neutral descriptions, and create readworthy profiles. Discussions usually stay civil but sometimes can get heated and lengthy. Not all fan mail is friendly, though. Sometimes things get ugly. Continue reading →

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Grimm TV

Posted on Tuesday, 30. September 2014 by hmvh

I’d like to tell you how fucked up German broadcast television is. Really, it’s an insult to viewers. There’s no continuity. Unless it’s some staged “reality show” or “docu-drama” featuring a local wanna-be starlet with big tits or a Promi washed-up celebrity we’ve never heard of, it’s impossible to follow any weekly TV series. Characters’ age, voices, hair styles and relationships change abruptly. The dead can reappear at any given moment. Continue reading →

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There can be only one

Posted on Friday, 25. November 2011 by hmvh

Yes, I remember the day following the 24th of November 1991 clearly. Radio played Queen tunes up and down, TV broadcast more than the usual fare of past videos and eulogies, and so-called experts crawled out of the woodworks to lament what a gifted performer was lost to a disease barely understood. Everyone suddenly outed themselves as fans, and sales of Greatest Hits II, which all too co-incidentally had been released barely a month prior to Freddie’s demise, soared. He is repeatedly polled as the greatest rock vocalist ever, and Queen’s set at Live Aid in 1985 is widely regarded as the greatest rock performance of all time. Continue reading →

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(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?

Posted on Saturday, 21. March 2009 by hmvh

So far we’re up to ten drives across eight PCs unable to read the discs, and I’m getting a little peeved. Both look perfectly OK… no scratches, degradation, fading, rot or anything visible to the human eye — and these are two discs stored in two different rooms, far away from sunlight or other radiation. Feared lost is a time capsule. Continue reading →

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Death of a recordable compact disc

Posted on Sunday, 8. March 2009 by hmvh

Accelerated-aging tests hadn’t gotten to the point that any printed reviews could be trusted, and so we all went and splashed out obscene sums of cash for a 2X burner (a whopping 300KB/s writing speed) and copied all our precious data over onto CD-Rs — media where only one thing was guaranteed: one blank disc out of a box of ten will become a coaster, regardless of brand or cost. Continue reading →

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