"Usually machine-written [spam] messages betray their
mechanical origins... Occasionally though a message will
arrive that eschews the usual tricks and fools you into
opening it with a clever or enticing subject line.
Congratulations, you've just been outsmarted by a
computer..."
- Mark Ward now getting email from Turing-capable AIs
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/3503465.stm
...Greetings Friend, I Am Mrs Miriam Wintermute, Widow Of
The Late Dr Ibrahim Neuromancer...
>> HARD NEWS <<
all in ToDo's
We have no idea how this happened, but it *does* appear to
be happening. After an engagingly shambolic West Coast debut,
ETCon catchup CONCON comes to the UK this Monday evening,
at the Dover Castle pub in Weymouth Mews, London W1. Unless
someone zips back from this weekend's CodeCon, it'll mostly
be a speedy Emerging Tech deconstruction (because you surely
haven't heard enough of that), with extra status reports
promised from Mr MySociety, Tom Steinberg, and perhaps some
late chocolate news from Dave. If ConCon US is anything to
go by, expect a radically decentralised event (ie, lots of
mic feedback and communistic re-investment of donations into
free bar snacks). Put your name down on the Wiki so we know
how many are coming - and if you were at Etech, or have some
geowankery, hardware-hackery, social-softwarey, mobile-
whackery thing you can explain in five minutes, stick your
name down as a speaker too. Oh, and if you can bring a
VGA/S-Video projector along, say that as well, otherwise
it's all going to be done with glove puppets.
http://wiki.oreillynet.com/etech/csp?ConConUK
- what could POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
We really should shut up about the BBC too, given that the
private sector seem to be finally employing new media geeks
again. One last go though. The people desperately trying to
work out what the BBC should do next are calling for members
of the public who are freakish interactive cut-and-paste
media-consumption aberrations. You know, you who play video
games, file-share, time-shift and/or self-publish, you
*weirdos*. It all involves a questionnaire, a London-based
chat session, and UKP50 for you. We could have saved them
the money and told them the replies they'd get from their
initial postings: the Barbelith forum folk conspiratorially
spotted it as a booby-trap to catch filesharers (the BBC is,
after all, the original home of "Room 101"), and the B3ta
community started ripping it to bits. And we'll do nothing
- but winge about how the questionnaire is in Word format.
http://www.tomski.com/archive/000592.html
- ignores less-fashionable threats to TV-viewing posed by
"renting videos", "visiting the cinema", "going for a walk"
>> ANTI-NEWS <<
berating the obvious
frankly arguable example of blatant BBC pro-Americanism:
http://www.ntk.net/2004/02/20/dohdads.gif ... with those accents,
hard to tell: http://www.ntk.net/2004/02/20/dohasth.gif ...
MSNBC a-haaaaa!: http://www.ntk.net/2004/02/20/doheast.gif
... must have been updating this page when Delia got busted
by the Food and Drug Administration, Martha-Stewart style:
http://www.deliaonline.com/premium/christmaswithdelia/ ...
something Nintendo should be telling us? (bottom right):
http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B0000A1OX0.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
... for one week only - return of spookily *appropriate*
banner ads: http://www.ntk.net/2004/02/20/dohasp.gif ,
http://www.ntk.net/2004/02/20/dohmiss.gif ... visible
integrity: http://www.ntk.net/2004/02/20/dohdotpro.gif ...
Aussie government approves little-known "Annie Lennox"
distro: http://www.ntk.net/2004/02/20/dohlen.gif ...
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
GOTOs considered non-harmful
"Have just read latest Wired", writes NTK's ever-vigilant
reader/enforcer, LLOYD WOOD. "Want to hear Minibosses vs MJ
Hibbett remixed by any DJ that JWZ has recently taken a
disliking to". Well, we can't promise the other two, but
Lloyd's former schoolmate MJ HIBBETT is currently embarking
on a tour of London and Scotland (starts 9pm, Thu 2004-02-
26, Hieronymous Bisch Bosch night, 12-Bar Club, 22-23
Denmark Place London WC2, UKP5) - and most likely also
unveiling his first ever "Hey Hey 16K" official t-shirt
merchandise. But there's more to the IT industry's very own
Billy Bragg than novelty techno-nostalgia anthems; Rolling
Stone Online described his latest album as "hilarious,
heartbreaking and chock-a-block with brass, twee girly
backing vocals and songs about pints", albeit in a column
that also provided such penetrating critical analysis as
"The Rapture? The *Crap*ture, more like!"
http://www.mjhibbett.net/gigs.htm
- mmm, popups *and* frames: http://www.12barclub.com/
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=18689
- still, they've got a point about "The Shield"
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/miniboss.html
- no mention of http://www.theadvantageband.com/ ?
http://www.rfh.org.uk/main/series/185.html
- circuit bending + soft-synths at RFH, from March 6th
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
More cheap hacks to counter-impress smug MacOS X owners.
Yes, Panther's "Preview" app is a super-fast PDF viewer that's
a lot snappier than Adobe "OMFG! A vector! How do I draw
that??!!" Acrobat. Close the gap of shame (and stop yourself
eating your own fist off waiting for Acrobat to start up) by
running ADOBE READER SPEED-UP, a eensy-weensy Windows
program that deletes a bunch of Adobe plugins that you don't
care about. Voila: spend your spare time reading your doc
rather than watching Adobe go "Loading dumb-ass marketing
rubbish/lousy DRM feature" for a thousand hours.
http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php
- also check out Sub7 Faker for those quiet evenings in
http://www.groovymother.com/archives/2004/02/19/acrobat_degumphe.html
- tip of the beanie to the ever lilac-scented Rod Begbie
>> MEMEPOOL <<
contains a source of http://snackspot.org/
real reason Barbie split up with that Windoze Luser Ken:
http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/barbieOS.htm ... re
"An English Inquistion" etc - don't give up the day job:
http://spruce.he.net/~paulmars/poem-index.html ... Usecrime
in progress: http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/mission.html
does "not exclude from our audience the poor, the blind,
the young, the aged" - then again, "Humane Environment"
header made up of individual letter GIFs, none with ALT
tags... "one of these not safe for work like the others"
#395-6: http://images.google.com/images?q=blue+sky ,
mario64 - proving the web isn't full of pictures of naked
women, though on the other hand: peasant, Katy Hill ... all
things considered, not the best filename for the main jpeg:
http://www.meenakshimission.org/cont.htm ... wot no "Purple
Bayes"?: http://www.biostat.umn.edu/~brad/cabaret.html ...
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
TV>> it's not every day we find ourselves agreeing with the
Radio Times, but the agreeable surrealism of HARRY HILL'S
TV BURP really does deserve a better slot than 11pm, Fri,
ITV (repeated midnight on Sat)... Sly Stallone weekend
takes in both the reassuringly downbeat COPLAND (11.30pm,
Sat, BBC1) and the mildly satirical DEMOLITION MAN (9pm,
Sun, C5)... BBC2 devotes Saturday night to relative unknown
Ross Noble with his stand-up show UNREALTIME (11.15pm, Sat,
BBC2) bracketed by repeats of his appearances on "Room 101"
and "Have I Got News For You"... as the BBC's Brendan
Fraser season goes from nuclear-bunker-family cultureshock
BLAST FROM THE PAST (10pm, Sun, BBC2) to a slightly more
homoerotic take on the 1950s in James Whale biopic GODS AND
MONSTERS (12.30am, Thu, BBC1)... C4's search for THE
ULTIMATE POP STAR (9pm, Sun, C4) seems unlikely to include
Jamie Cullum's apparently straight-faced Mike Flowers Pops-
style cover of Radiohead's "High And Dry" on THE SOUTH BANK
SHOW (11.05pm, Sun, ITV)... this week's CSI (9pm, Tue, C5)
appears to be the one set at a fictional Furry convention,
in a bid to antagonise both "furs" and "mundanes" in one
go: http://www.csiguide.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=190 ,
http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/bw/2003/1030worst.asp
... and new conman drama HUSTLE (9pm, Tue, BBC1) implies
that the makers of "Spooks" specialise in glamorising
actually quite dull professions - sending out "advance fee
fraud" emails, making bogus house calls to OAPs, etc - see
also THE STING (11.15pm, Wed, BBC1)...
FILM>> the casting of several "former child stars" seems to
be the funniest part of DICKIE ROBERTS: FORMER CHILD STAR
( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/dickie_roberts_former_child_star.html :
[Alyssa "Charmed" Milano] shows some cleavage and makes
what could be an innuendo-based comment about needing to
"see my Dickie")... Johnny Vegas, Gareth and Dawn from "The
Office", and Adrian "Working Lunch" Chiles don't even have
that going for them in Birmingham-based would-be farce SEX
LIVES OF THE POTATO MEN ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : Contains
very strong language and strong sex references)... and this
week's arthouse limited releases are all based around
terminal illness (for a change), albeit played for laughs
slightly more in shot-on-video indie comedy PIECES OF APRIL
( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/pieces_of_april.html :
We see [Katie Holmes] and [Derek Luke] snuggling in bed and
then a brief shot of [Holmes] in her panties; we see a
photo of a person hanging a spoon off their nose), compared
to LES INVASIONS BARBARES/ THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS (imdb:
cancer / fear-of-death / heroin / hospital / christianity /
father-son-reunion / political-commentary / depiction-of-
corrupt-society / last-reunion / lasting-friendship /
reflection-on-life / social-portrait / independent-film)...
BONERS: CORRECTIONS, CLARIFICATIONS, AND "INCORRECTLY
REGARDED AS GOOFS">> first off, our gratitude (as ever) to
all those who wrote to point out that 2004-02-06's "Google
Goof" http://www.google.com/search?q=singer+dongwriter ,
was almost certainly "a deliberate reference to Bill
Callaghan (Smog)'s 'Dongs of Sevotion' album </indie dork>"
(reader FORREST NORVELL, among many others) - the fact it
only showed up once really should have tipped us off.
There's no such excuse for us not having noticed that the
prior art for JWZ's "penis-shaped sound wave" [NTK 2004-01-
02/09] appeared in the 2001 "Brass Eye Special" (ADRIAN
FIRTH, et al) that we rather inadvisedly linked to that
other time, while TOBY CORKINDALE was inspired by our same
end-of-year quiz to ponder that we might (but "probably
won't") be interested to know that Mugwhump Jism "was a term
used in Bomb the Bass' track 'Bug Powder Dust'", seemingly
unaware that it all comes from Bill Burroughs' "The Naked
Lunch" http://www.cdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=87 in
the first place... on a more mathematical (and somewhat
less phallic) note, we hope DR PETER J. LOVE didn't tie up
too many mainframes at his Department of Mathematics, Tufts
University, Ma., to work out that "The moon didn't blow up
in Space: 1999 [NTK 2003-12-05], it just mysteriously
wandered out of its orbit. I know, because I got one of
those albums when I was six. Given that the moon's orbital
velocity is 0.64 miles per second, the events depicted in
the album (regularly encountering inhabited planets, etc)
are somewhat implausible. I know that because I have a D.
Phil in theoretical physics. You're still wrong, though" -
sounds like the "album" was a bit different to the TV show:
http://www.eyespider.freeserve.co.uk/space/one/ep01.html .
Still, we were more persuaded by his defence of the book
ending of "Contact" [NTK 2004-01-30] - as Peter points out,
"because the decimal expansion of Pi is infinite and non-
repeating, every possible message occurs in it, eventually.
So Jodi Foster would find all messages, but only after an
infinitely long search"...
>> SMALL PRINT <<
Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that
happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it
on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have
nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent.
Registered at the Post Office as
"more or less the stand-up comedian"
http://multiplicity.dk/archives/000610.html
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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