Graff Jam
Self expression is good, especially in public, especially in a cruddy little town like this one. It's just I'm not always sure what's being expressed.
...apart maybe from the cruddiness of the town.
Cock Up
This is the text of a porn pop-up I just got.
I have a theory that the more people are involved in a business, the more likely obvious mistakes (cockups, [cough]) are to be missed. Possibly because everyone expects everyone else to have checked already.
I once worked for a newspaper which accidentally trivialised a story by publishing it with the headline "Three Man Beated". Dozens of journalists, half a dozen sub-editors, one editor, two proof-readers and 25 or so in the print room - and if any of them spotted it, the must have assumed someone else would fix it.
Either that, or no one cared. Which I can sympathise with. In the book of Kapitano, apathy is a lesser sin than incompetence.
Theology for the Masses
Life is a search, for two things. Someone worth listening to, and someone worth talking to.
If you ever find someone who's both, marry them instantly. In the meantime, there's the stimulating debate on youtube videos.
CodenameCrychck: Explain to me what the point of trying to disprove God's existence if you don't think he exists?
Kapitano: The point, obviously, is that people like you who believe in fairytales...sometimes act on their beliefs. Yes, some people who believe in a magic man in the sky who tells them women are the property of their husbands...will treat their wives as property.
CodenameCrychck: Okay, 1. I'm a Jesus Freak and proud to be one. And fyi, not all of us are radical christians. 2. God did not tell husbands to beat their wives, you're thinking of Islam. 3. I believe that people liek you who demand proof of God, are really looking for someone to explain christianity to them because they want the empty void in their soul to be filled with the love of God.
Kapitano: Ah, the christian insistence that atheists are unhappy - despite the evidence. And that christians are fulfilled - despite the evidence.
And the usual failure to read their own holy book, or know anything about other religions.
What else? Oh yes, the complete inability to respond to the point which was actually put to them.
CodenameCrychck: Just the knowledge that Jesus died for me is fufulling enough and his love is eternal for me.
All I am doing is simply stating that I feel God around me and that is suffiencent proof enough for me.
Kapitano: You feel it and you think that makes it true. But if anyone else feels a different god, it's not true - only your god is 'proven' by a feeling.
CodenameCrychck: You're acting on a "feeling" that there is no God.
Kapitano: No, I have these things called reason and research. They tend to destroy faith.
CodenameCrychck: I have the bible, the book written by God. That's all I need for proof.
Kapitano: Where in the bible does it say it was written by god?
And even if it does, so what? I'm telling you right now that *I'm* god, and you've got to believe me because I'm god, right?
The Q'uran *does* claim to have been written by god. So does the book of Joseph Smith. So you're a muslim and a mormon too? No? Why not?
CodenameCrychck: I didn't bother anyone with my belief.
Kapitano: What do you think you're doing right now?
CodenameCrychck: You must have a feeling of emptiness.
Kapitano: And yet I do not. So either the universe is wrong, or your a-priori assertions are wrong. See if you can work out which one is possble.
CodenameCrychck: You keep badgering me about how you believe there's no God.
Kapitano: You are the one badgering an atheist video. I and others are responding to you. Had you forgotten that?
CodenameCrychck: It's time to grow-up and realize everyone has different faiths and not let a christian get to you.
Kapitano: If you *really* believed it was okay for everyone to have different faiths, you wouldn't have been so incensed by the video showing some gaps in yours.
CodenameCrychck: What about all the other religions in the world?
Kapitano: I'm not confronted with a hindu, a bahai or a buddhist. I'm confronted with a christian. Therefore the religion to be disproven is christianity. When you are confronted with a satanist, do you tell them why they shouldn't be a jew?
CodenameCrychck: Satanists worship Satan. Judaism are jews. You're like 50, you should know that. You do have a faith it's called being a atheist.
Kapitano: What kinds of meat do vegetarians eat? What colour hair do bald people have? Which whiskey to teetotallers drink? What is the lifestyle of a corpse?
Atheism isn't faith in the non-existence of a god - it's not having a faith.
You have no problem understanding that a homeless person don't go home to an un-home. But you still can't grasp that some people don't have a religion.
CodenameCrychck: You have faith that when you sit in a chair it won't break.
Kapitano: You're confusing belief in the absence of absolute proof, with faith that goes against the evidence.
I can't prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but I have good (not perfect) reason for thinking it will. You have faith in the various contradictory prophecies of the bible, even though none of them have been fulfilled.
Jesus told a crowd the end of the world would come within many of their lifetimes. It didn't.
CodenameCrychck: Frankly y'all offer the same response. I can't see God, I don't hear God. I don't smell God. By that logic that is stating you don't believe in oxygen because you can't see,smell,or hear oxygen. Plus, it's a two-way street.
Kapitano: Ask someone to strangle you and see what happens. Then get someone to renounce god and watch how nothing happens. Notice the difference?
CodenameCrychck: Yeah, you bother me with your atheism and I "bother" you with christianity."
Kapitano: No, you bother me with your stupidity. Just like a muslim creationist bothers me with *his* stupidity. Or an atheist 911 conspiracy theorist.
Post an argument that isn't stupid and I'll stop being bothered.
CodenameCrychck: You do have a faith it's called being a atheist and having no faith.
Kapitano: I love it when cretins tie themselvesup in knots.
CodenameCrychck: You're like 50 and you think Satanism is the same thing as Judaism.
Kapitano: Good to see your arithmetic hasn't improved.
And neither have your reading skills. What I wrote was: "I'm confronted with a christian. Therefore the religion to be disproven is christianity. When you are confronted with a satanist, do you tell them why they shouldn't be a jew?"
CodenameCrychck: I am a straight A math student, a straight A english student. And anyway, how am I a failure? You're the moron that thinks Jews are satanists. Anyway, you're a dinosaur, get back to your nursing home with your tank of oxygen.
Kapitano: You've been to my profile page to leave a braindead insult, seen my age...and you *still* get it wrong.
Someone as stupid as you couldn't have evolved by chance. You must be unintelligently designed.
CodenameCrychck: You really need to quit acting like a teenager when you're obviously an oldman. Go suck a giraffe, you freak.
As us teenagers say: OMFG! That's so random. Whatever, STFUAD loser.
Hippuhoppu
Probably not one for the "Best of Kapitano Vol 3" collection, but here's a quick collaboration with rapper MC Who Izzy for Songfight.
MC Who Izzy & Kapitano - You are the Heartbeat of This Office for Sure (Yellow Magic Version)
At least, it would have been quick if the vocal hadn't needed every denoising trick I know, and the sequencer hadn't decided to get suddenly confused about sampling bitrates.
Anyway, it's a cheerful little rap about sexual harassment at the workplace, and on the plus side, my electronic Japanese shamisen and strings work pretty well..
MC Who Izzy & Kapitano - You are the Heartbeat of This Office for Sure (Yellow Magic Version)
At least, it would have been quick if the vocal hadn't needed every denoising trick I know, and the sequencer hadn't decided to get suddenly confused about sampling bitrates.
Anyway, it's a cheerful little rap about sexual harassment at the workplace, and on the plus side, my electronic Japanese shamisen and strings work pretty well..
You Loo Lay Shun
My latest SongFight effort:
Kapitano - Circle
There's some audio glitches in the vocals, but there was no time to re-record, so this is more a 'proof of concept' than a finished song.
Ah but proof of what concept? Well, here's the lyrics:
Verse 1:
udu mbu adu (muza zimba)
uwa ungi iba (mudu ngu)
ngu ndu uzi (hawa yami)
wadinga wa ma (buwamu mbu)
Chorus 1:
ba nu du (duma iha mi)
la ni (bimbi azu da)
ba hu lu (nili uwa hi)
lu hi (zihi gayu na)
Verse 2:
ala nda uza (dangu zimbi)
unda mba ngu (wawi nima)
ungi aha ugi (diwi wiyu)
wihanda mi zu (zabagu duwa)
Chorus 2:
zi du gu (zingu ilu ya)
ba ni (yangu azi gu)
hu gi da (giyu umu mi)
zi ngi (yandi mbu yu)
Vowels from (more or less) Arabic, Consonants and morphophonemics (rules about which sounds can follow each other) from (more or less) Swahili, and a little program to generate 'words' in a language which doesn't exist.
The way I see it, if you've got nothing to say, why have lyrics that say anything? It's much more interesting to play with sound than to write rhyming couplets that work better when you don't know the language.
Organ Donor
I used to think I was disorganised. Then I took to spending most of my life with academics and socialists. Both groups tend to be highly intelligent and committed, both are kind and generous people, and neither could organise raindrops to fall downwards.
If a socialist party tried make a cup of tea, they'd design a leaflet featuring a graphic of a raised fist to announce the event, reschedule it at least twice, and redesign the leaflet with three days to go because someone noticed a spelling mistake.
There'd be a deep philosophical debate about how water transforms into steam when it boils - in spite of the fact that no one in the room knows basic physics. Someone will insist on crowdsourcing the kettle, someone else will call the others reactionary bourgeois crypto-idealists because they put the milk in first...
And a small group will resign on principle because that's not how Lenin made tea in 1914.
Academics would draft a funding proposal, stare at a cup of warm water for a month, then hurriedly draw a graph, fudge the figures to make them fit a curve, and publish in the Journal of Applied Infusionomics - on why the kettle exploded.
I'm not joking about the philosophical debate, by the way. Engels, Trotsky and lesser figures like Ted Grant all used boiling water as a both a metaphor for social change and an example of something bourgeois ideology can't explain - and badly mangled their highschool thermodynamics.
Terms like convection and latent heat weren't even mentioned - which wouldn't be so bad if they didn't insist that they understood 'real' science better than the scientists.
Anyway, a week ago I got a call from a (non-socialist, actual scientist) academic, to the effect that they were being booted out of their flat, and needed short term accommodation - and did I know anyone who wanted a tennant?
So I found someone with a spare bedroom. The proposed date of moving changed three times, and the offered rent kept going down - and suddenly the bedroom wasn't spare anymore. Meanwhile my friend with the PhD had had offers from three family members to stay with them - which he turned down on the grounds that dear old Kapitano was fixing him up with something better. He told everyone Kapitano is good at fixing things.
I phoned around for an alternative - unfortunately my phone is full of socialists, who all want to do the right thing, but have something in their makeup which means they can't do it soon. Ah, the number of meetings I've sat through ponderously debating how to organise a, erm, rapid response to something.
So, four days before eviction, my friend took me and others out for an extremely nice (and embarrassingly expensive) meal, where I got to talk philosophy and politics with professors of fields I can barely spell. But as we were all drunk on expensive vodka, no one minded.
The tab was picked up by a very responsible fourteen year old boy, who'd been authorised by his father to entertain us on his (the father's) credit card. Somehow it made perfect sense at the time - though I hear the father is now being extremely frugal.
With three days to go, my friend said he could use some help packing...but first we could go out for a quiet drink, with optional hookah smoking and comparative religion discussion. About 1am the drink ended, and we were too tired to do any packing.
The same thing happened with two days to go, and I started to get the suspicion that maybe, just maybe, I had become the excuse for someone else's displacement activity. But I did get to do something useful, because he realised it would be a good idea, if he's moving all his stuff, to have some cardboard boxes to move it in.
So I scrounged some empty cardboard boxes from a friendly publican and a helpful shop owner. Forward planning is a useful skill, but not so useful as finding quick fixes when no one's done any forward planning.
With one day (actually nine hours) to go, we did all the packing. I'm not sure why one man needs thirty pairs of shoes (including a pair of rollerblades), four duvets and three large teddy bears...but I've got 50 teeshirts and every episode of Dr Who made since 1970, so I'm not going to judge.
There's the minor issue that the last-minute savior who said he'd provide accommodation isn't answering his phone, but as I haven't been called in a panic, that's presumably been sorted.
I did get something out of all this. Specifically, I got twenty pairs of castoff shoes, about ten kilograms of 'mixed spices', Two jars of 'Jordanian style coffee', a toasted-sandwich maker, some evil-smelling hair tonic (for my shaven head), a spare phone with a charger for a different phone...and quite a lot of green tea, which I'm about to try.
So this socialist is now going to make a cup of tea. Cheers.
Godwin was Wrong
Today I saw some nazis.
Some of them were boys in their late teens running away from anti-nazi protesters. The others were boys in their late teens being led away by police. Not so much brown shirts as brown trousers.
The EDL (English Defence League) had been planning for months to bus 15,000 into my home town, and march through it intimidating all the non-white people.
They kept changing their mind about the date and venue, but today managed 150, meeting in a park to listen to speeches about how muslims caused the recession, then march out of the park, around the corner and back into the park by the other entrance.
Meanwhile I was among 300 local anti-nazi protesters, in the pouring rain, holding a counter-rally in the town square the EDL had planned to march through.
It was a wide range of ages, nationalities and political persuasions, and I didn't know most of them. But we did have a clutch of hip young things who'd brought their own chants. I'm used to chants like:
Caller: Whose street?
Response: Our street!
Caller: Whose world?
Response: Our world!
etc.
...and...
Caller: Auschwitz?
Response: Never again!
Caller: Belsen?
Response: Never again!
Caller: Treblinka?
Response: Never again!
etc.
But they had a slew of new lyrics to old songs, like:
(To She'll be Coming Round the Mountain)
We are black, white and asian.
And we're jews.
(And we're gay)
We are black, white and asian.
And we're jews.
(And we're gay)
We are black, white and asian.
Black, white and asian.
Black, white and asian.
And we're jews.
(And we're gay)
There are many more of us than
There are you.
(Nazi scum) etc.
I got to practice this and some more vitriolic numbers whenever small knots of EDLers appeared and tried to charge into us. Some tried to swagger, most looked a bit lost and didn't resist as the police guided them back to the flock. One or two tried to fight the police - never a good idea.
We did this from midday for three hours - after which the EDL disappeared to watch a football match. There's a long tradition linking far right politics and soccer, and they'd obviously thought they could get higher attendance if the day trip included a soccer match. Perhaps they did.
I turned for home, passing an officer. Our eyes met briefly.
"That was relatively painless."
"Yeah, more or less."
Not the Next Generation
I has done a hip hop. Let me show you it.
Kapitano - Generation eXit
I did it for SongFight under the title "Ruthless Lately", though I think my title is better, so there. This is an alternative version I decided not to submit - which means dear readers, this is an exclusive mix just for you :-).
Here's the lyrics. Spot the Leonard Cohen reference.
Intro
The words mean nothing, just a
Way to fill the empty space, a
Way of marking time, like it
Needed marking anyway.
Fashion's what you do when you
Don't know what you want to be
Style's what they promise when you
Give them all your money.
Verse 1
The words mean nothing, just a
Way to fill an empty song, the
Space between the bass and the
Air with nothing going on.
Fashion's a disguise when you
Don't know who you want to seem
Style's what you buy that's why it's
Called the music industry
They can package everything
Anything you throw at them
Everything you hate about them
Sell it back to you again, your
Childhood in mp3, your
paranoid conspiracy, you
own sexuality, your
personal reality
Chorus
This is Generation eXit
Calling home
That was Generation eXit
Calling home
Verse 2
They used to tell me I was living truthless
I turn around and start to make it ruthless
Ideas mean nothing just a
Way to fill an empty head
Faker man is cooking books 'cos
Baker man is baking bread.
First we take Manhattan
Then we take a spin, used to
Love me as a loser now you're
Looking for a hotter sin
Any clever man won't understand
What's what if their
Happiness depends upon them
Not.
It doesn't matter what the answers are if
They can make the questions wrong, the
Lyrics mean nothing just a
Noise to fill an empty song
Gone Soft
I haven't been a computer programmer since the early 90s. But I still dabble occasionally, and now I've written an amazingly useful program - which you can download and use as much as you want.
My program...waggles the mouse pointer every few minutes. Possibly not the most called-for bit of software, but it solves a problem I've been having with Windows 7 - it goes into standby mode after a few hours, even when I've told it not to.
I've set it to make me a few hundred audiobooks with a text-to-speech reader, which means leaving it to run unattended for a few days while it ploughs through them. Sometimes it's really useful to have a spare laptop for doing things like that.
Anyway, when you run my little program it asks how many minutes to leave between wagglings, then proceeds to waggle forever - or until you press the 'Break' key to stop it. Hibernation, sleep mode, standby and screensavers are avoided, and the laptop does its work uninterrupted.
You can get my program here. Unfortunately you'll have to rename it from "MouseNudge.txt" to "MouseNudge.exe", because GoogleSites won't let me store .exe files.
There's also KeyNudge, which does exactly the same thing, but presses the entirely unused Right-Win key instead.
Happy waggling.
On Speed
Most people speak at 100-150 words per minute. And they read at 150-250wpm. If you're an experienced or professional reader, you can probably manage 400-500.
With a month's practice, you can get up to 1000 - the problem being that although you can comprehend text that fast, retaining it for more than a few seconds is difficult. It's as though your short term memory is a small shelf, and pushing a rapid stream of new things on one end pushes other things off the other end - before you have a chance to move them to the bigger shelf of longer term memory.
I can get my reading speed comfortably up to 800, with high comprehension and low retention, and I use it for proof-reading and finding specific information that skip-reading would likely miss.
There are techniques for going faster than 1000, and retaining what you've read by chunking it up into gestalts. But they're very difficult and I never had the patience to learn them.
All of which means...people speak painfully slowly. Really, talking is a terrible way to make spoken words. The geek who uploads a video CV communicates less in five minutes than his written CV does in thirty seconds - and it's annoying to 're-read'. The half-hour radio documentary gives you a handful of facts delivered at a snail's pace, padded with waffle and repetition.
So why not...listen to your radio at double the speed? Record the show, put it through some time-compression freeware - so the 'tempo' doubles but the pitch doesn't - and double your listening ability.
And that's what I'm doing. Today I listened to a biography of Joesph Grimaldi and the letters of Arthur Conan Doyle at double speed - coming to around twenty five minutes each. Seeing as the average human attention span is 20-30 minutes, I think that's a plus.
There are people who download a dozen podcasts a week, and by slightly hacking their iPods, get through them all with time to spare.
Next thing to try: Putting an ebook through a text-to-speech reader, doubling the speed and have my phone read to me at a speed that's comfortable to listen, but physically impossible to speak.
The above article, read by a not-quite-perfect mechanical voice, in one minute sixteen seconds:
On Speed.
I Wander....
Places I've stumbled upon recently:
Sometimes you'd like to leave a message - to yourself, the world, or a group who have the password. A message that'll last a week, a month, or however long you need. And available pretty much anywhere - online, in other words.
TinyPaste.com - halfway between blogging and email.
Wikipedia is sometimes wrong. Conservapedia is always wrong, about everything - including its own reason for existence. Uncyclopedia is deliberately wrong about everything, and wikiality sounds right...but only to morons.
The Less-Wrong Wiki knows how to be right.
If you like XKCD...you'll probably already read Abstruse Goose.
Daily Science Fiction short stories, to your inbox.
Good books are good. Bad books are everywhere. But only OddBooks are fun.
Auto
It's an automatic world.
A few months ago I set up a spare laptop to automatically record random frames of TV shows. I came up with some captions, which I used a keyboard scripting program to automatically resize and frame the pictures, and automatically put the captions underneath.
Now I'm going to use another script to automatically schedule each picture in turn, for blogger to, erm, automatically publish.
Sometimes there's nothing to do except spend hours figuring out how to give yourself slightly less to do. Some things at least you can't yet have your computer do for you....
Dumb, Da Dumb Dumb
Why are people such fuckwits?
Or, a better question: Why are people who really shouldn't be fuckwits...still fuckwits?
Last week I went to a job interview. The business owner is a self-made multi-millionaire who's spent a million of his own pounds in setting up a small college.
You might think a successful businessman would know better than to trust the first self-proclaimed management consultant who walks through the door and tells him he needs to employ several extra layers of management...before employing any staff who do the actual work.
Or that he'd think twice before rushing out to buy a hundred obsolete laptops on the word of a family member.
You might think he'd check that there are already dozens of places locally that offer courses in accountancy, IT and Business English - cheaper and with more resources than he can offer.
But no. If being in touch with reality helps you make a success in business, then being a success in business insulates you from reality.
I only hope the college runs long enough to pay me - before selling off all the expensive new equipment bought for its enormous empty classrooms.
I was one of six interviewees - one of two without PhDs, and the only one not applying for a managerial position.
Can you explain how a room of men with doctorates, who want to work for a place that plans to teach arabs and asians, can spout the same racist bullshit as the gutter press?
Apparently there are too many (whatever that means) foreigners (meaning non-caucasians) coming into "our" country to "steal" "our" jobs.
And they dilute (whatever that means) the true british culture (whatever that is) with their strange foreign ways (which is a Bad Thing for some reason).
How can someone spend years in other countries, learn the languages, and stay in education long enough to get a PhD...and come out of it spouting xenophobic isolationist horsecrap?
When I catch myself being stupid, I do something about it. I've no idea who I could have picked that habit up from, because no one else seems to do it.
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