Year: 2006
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Terrorism begins at home
There was a report in the UK’s Guardian Online a couple of weeks ago about Anthony Garcia who is currently on trial in England for ‘conspiracy to cause explosions’ under the terrorism laws. One of the pieces of evidence against him was that he had attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan. But in his defence, Mr. Garcia explains that he only attended the camp for a couple of weeks, before checking himself out. And why did he leave early? Because he’d learnt all there was to know about blowing up innocent people? Or because he was disappointed to find… Read more
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Wow, I feel safer already!
Well, that’s another near-death experience narrowly avoided. Someone from PC Support just came round to my desk and started fiddling around the back of my PC. I asked him what he was doing, and he pointed out that he had been ‘disabling’ the voltage selector on the back of the PC. [For the uninitiated, most PCs these days have a voltage selector on the back that allows you to switch (with the aid of a starightened-out paperclip) between 110v (used in the U.S.) and 240v (used just about everywhere else in the World) – it means that the PC manufacturers… Read more
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The Best Free Compilation From My Youth…Ever! (Plus One)
Although I’m an iPod owner, and an avid iTunes user, until this morning I’d never downloaded a song from the Apple Music Store (or anywhere else for that matter). Call me old-school, but I like having the CDs.  I do have all of my CDs ripped to my iPod, and some I’ve never even heard straight off the plastic, but I still feel happier having the physical backup. A couple of days ago I read a buddy’s ‘blog entry describing how he’d recreated a vinyl-only compilation from yesteryear by purchasing the individual tracks online. Co-oncidentally, at the same time, my service… Read more
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Morrissey, Ancienne Belgique
I’m a huge Smiths fan. A British music journalist once said: “I feel sorry for any new band, because no matter how good they are, they’ll never be The Smiths”, and I think he was right. Unfortunately but the time I discovered The Smiths they had split. (During their heyday they were the sole preserve of the ‘cool kids’ at my school – of which I certainly wasn’t one…) Morrissey is the next best thing (Johnny Marr wasting his talent in Electronic – although his contribution to The The’s Mind Bomb was a highlight), and although he went through a weak… Read more
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Pukkelpoptastic!
Last weekend I went to the PukkelPop music festival here in Belgium. In part this was because a good buddy of mine (Peter) was going and insisted I’d have a great time, and in part because I wanted to convince myself – having recently passed the 40 mark – that I am not too old to go to festivals (or even gigs in general, despite the wife’s insistence that I’m past it and will just be an object of ridicule to the rest of the much younger audience who probably think I’m only there to chaperone my kids). That said, I did… Read more