Sweet Cucumber

According to the newest Global Peace Index for 2008, Belgium ranks 15th (out of 140 countries).
Not too shabby, but not great either.
As expected, Iceland scores the pole position.

Other countries of interest:

Cambodia: 91. Kinda expected. Could’ve been worse, like… Thailand: 118

Surprisingly, Vietnam ranks 37th, right behind France. Vietnam is where I’ll go next, I think.

And here’s the ranking of my favourite country of the world, and the source of all misery in current history: the United States of America: 97. Yay.

Thirty-five days since I stopped smoking, and counting… wow, it’s been a trip.

I must say it has gone easier than I feared at first. Mind you, “easier” does not mean: easy. Going cold turkey from three packs a day to nothing in one day is not something to be er, coughed at.

But overall I’m managing reasonably well. The nicotine craving has lessened to an acceptable level now, and I guess the side effects I’m feeling are okay too. I gained about 4 Kg so far - which is also less than I thought - and my weight seems to stabilize around there, which is good. Still need to get rid of my overweight, but I’m working on that. Slowly.

I’m taking Vitamin C, Chromium, Calcium, Magnesium and Zinc as supplements, and I suspect that one of those is responsible for the dizzy spells. Those things generally don’t go well with me, but I reckon my body needs all the help it can get right now.

And I have a really cool bike now:

The Hawk Classic Hudson, with a Shimano 7-speed drivetrain, and original Brooks leather seat (and handles). Here’s the blurb from the website:

This is more that just a retro bike, it is a tribute to the design of the old street machines.
This is not a bike for everyone. This is a bike for individuals.
You will look at the design details in amazement, get excited about the modern technology and you will celebrate what it means to ride a bike.
Everybody who is on the road with this bike knows what it means to be the centre of attention.

That says a lot about me, I guess.

It drives very smoothly, and it feels great to move again (in contrast to, just sit). My ass hurts, though.

Thanks, R !

Apparently there is something called “The Red Bull Music Academy” (in Canada), and I have no idea about the what/where/when whatsoever… Nevertheless, I stumbled onto a recent interview they did with one of their lecturers, a certain Don Buchla.

It’s a very long interview, and it takes some knowledge (about this particular scene), patience, and some inside information to get the most out of this. But oh boy, is it good ! There’s an overabundance on little known facts and teeny morsels of information which I never heard or read before, so even that alone would make this article a worthwhile read, certainly because Don Buchla is a very media-shy person, almost a recluse.

The weird - and slightly disturbing - thing about this interview, is that the interviewer apparently has no idea what this actually is about, nor does he really know who Don Buchla is or what he stands for. Needless to say, this give for some tasty snippets, as Don tries his best to explain things in as much as a straightforward way as humanly possible (of course, Don isn’t really human, so…). It’s almost funny sometimes, but I cringed on a few passages in the interview.

As I said, it’s a very long interview, and Don meanders off on few occasions, but it’s a great read. Especially towards the end, where things get really interesting when Don starts talking about animal control (in music making).

If you’re into synthesis, this article is a diamond. If you’re not, and you have no idea what a Music Easel, Thunder or Lightning is, then just move on…

Put your propellerhead on, and start reading here…

There’s also a movie clip of the interview available, accessible through the links at the top of the page.

Here’s a short passage from the interview - about the SalMar construction - of which I’m certain there’s only four or five people whom know what this is about… I am one of them… hehe… :

It weighed several hundred pounds. I remember, I knew Sal very well, we played on a concert in Europe in which the SalMar construction was imported, all 400 pounds of it were. It was in Belgium and the Belgian concerts are financed by a consortium, which France has half of, but they cut off the funds. One government cut off the funds, so we didn’t have enough to ship anything back so he ended up having to pay for the shipping of this monster himself and it was a long time getting it back into this country.

Enjoy.

As you probably just noticed in utter astonishment and mild disbelief, Sweet Cucumber’s blog theme has been changed. Duh!

It’s completely designed by me, and it’s absolutely not inspired by anything whatsoever. Doh!

It’ll look slightly better when you have the Chicago font installed. You can find the Font Suitcase here (Mac only, Duh-Doh!).

There’s bound to be a few remaining kinks and bumps here and there. If you happen to stumble over anything looking odd or weird, lemmeknow. If you don’t like the look, dontlemmeknow.

Not tested on IE yet, but FireFox worked fine. IE-users, see anything strange ? Fire off in the comments…

A totally amazing series of photos of the preparation of the Discovery Shuttle. Very rarely seen by the general public…

To me, this is ehm, rocket science (pun nr.1). It goes way above my comprehension how on earth (pun nr.2) human beings are able to put together something like this [and make it actually work]. Not only the shuttle and the rockets and the tanks, but also the whole process around it; the Crawler, the assembly hall, the technology, the… everything.

Awesome.

Why oh why do people never listen to me, or believe me !?

Sometimes people say I’m crass, or rude, or I say unfounded things [to stir things up].

But really, I’m not, and I don’t.

- When I claim that doing sports is generally unhealthy, people laugh with/at me. Yet I am convinced that (most) sports are seriously overrated, and in many cases unhealthy for your body. Especially when it comes down to overdoing it, like most pro athletes do… It’s mostly about competition, ’cause that’s what most people like to prove: I’m bigger/better/faster than you. It’s not about the sportsmanship. At all. Pro athletes don’t necessarily live longer or better than non-athletes.
I say: a few simple walks now and then, and perhaps some recreational swimming, and fencing cuz it’s cool, is all our bodies need.

- More and more people swear by “bio” food. Which, if you think about it, is utter crap. Literally.
I say: a very smart marketing ploy, that’s what the bio industry is.

- Eating meat is bad for you.
I say: hmm, well, no. We need it. Humans are omnivores by nature. Our digestive system is made to erm, digest about anything. Not just friggin’ salads and smoochies and yoghurts… Eggs are nice too. And cheese.

- Everyone should drink a lot of water (implying not drinking anything else).
I say, no, I’ve been saying for the last 30 years or so: utter bull. As long as you have a healthy and reasonable intake of fluids - any fluid - your body just keeps on churning. Of course, I will not deny that drinking nothing but sodapops and/or liquors and stuff like that is more healthy than water, but drinking water is not going to make you healthier, or will give a nice shine to our skin, or whatever. You know what the biggest problem is with water ? There’s no sugar in it. No feeding. Just makes your mouth dry, and makes you go to the bathroom too often.

Don’t believe me ?

okay, here then: Lots of water ‘is little benefit’

- People say, computers and the internet are bad for you.
I say: ehhhmmm, yea, that’s true.

I was hard at work on my computer, when suddenly one of my certified diskettes had a failure. So now I have to reinstall GEM 1.0. Darn. I must have lost at least 360Kb of work !

Sometimes IT-technology can be a wonderful thing. Especially when it’s applied properly to a Mac.

As if I have nothing else to do — about 4 or 5 incoming design jobs, my music, my music app development, a bit of life itself, etc — I decided to hack into theme development for Wordpress. I simply need a better theme for this here blog, as slightly changed theme-from-other-devs won’t do it for me anymore. I’m too much of an anal retard for that.

Designing/hacking/changing WP themes is a seriously elaborate effort. These things are complicated, you know. Certainly when it’s someone else’s mess. I’ve been there before on several occasions, and most of the time I can manage. But now I want more and deeper and better, so my handwritten CSS skills (pretty good, if I may say so myself) will not cut it anymore. I need external help.

I’ve been playing with CSSEdit on a few occasions before, and I was always smitten with it. It’s wonderfully styled and adheres strictly to OS X GUI rules. It’s pretty much bug free, very easy to use, and extremely powerful. I could even compare it to Transmit (from Panic Software), one of the best apps for Mac, which speaks wonders about CSSEdit.
When I like an app, and its price-to-usage ratio is acceptable, I buy the app. Just like much anybody else, I used to have a fair share of warez (it’s all about $$$), but lately I’ve been reducing the use of pirated software to an absolute minimum. Most of the time the hassle is just not worth it, and for a design professional like myself having support and free upgrades and stuff pays itself back in hefty dividends. Furthermore, I want to keep my machine as “clean” as possible, since my livelihood depends on it…
So just now I took one more glance at MacRabbit’s website (the makers of CSSEdit, duh), and noticed something I didn’t see before: it’s a Belgian software company ! Located in Antwerp, no less… Needless to say that was the last straw, so I pulled out my PayPal card - so to speak, and proceeded with a monetary transaction. Payment and all that went as smooth as my ass (I’ve heard on several occasions that I have a baby-smooth ass, but other than that you have no business with neither my ass, nor other people’s thoughts about my ass). But I digress…

One of the most annoying problems with weblogging software theme development is that you can’t exactly do it “live”. WP runs off a database which is located on a server, so the edits and changes you make to the design cannot be reflected in real time… You need to first upload the pages to your server, load them in your browser, check, correct where necessary, upload again, etcetera ad nauseam. Not really a productive working environment, I dare to say.

If I could run Wordpress and the database locally, now that would be different.
Apache, PHP, MySQL and all that crap is already present by default in OS X, but it can get quite complicated to set it up properly and run it in a nice working environment.

So then I googled my way into heaven. “wordpress + run locally” instantly turned up “How to setup WordPress locally on your Mac” on Bleikamp’s blog. Yay.

Which then quickly produced a link to MAMP.

After downloading MAMP (as in, free!), I installed Apache, PhP, MySQL and godknowswhatelse in about 1.3 minutes flat. Installing WordPress and a new (test) database took me no more than 5 minutes. I now have a separate WP blog running, independently from Sweet Cucumber, locally on my Mac, ready to be hacked to smithereens. And the beauty is that MAMP doesn’t interfere at all with my standard Apache and OS X settings…

Sweet.