Visited my new employer today, and it felt — homely, like a sort of homecoming… Sure, there are a lot of new names and routines to learn, but it’s all refreshing and welcome.

What was really good and what i appreciated immensely was how ready they were to have me roll in. My new computer and phone were waiting for me. The computer was pre-installed and -configured; the only thing i had to do was change my password. On the wall were a considerable number of post-it-notes with stuff for me to learn and assimilate, all ordered in chunks and with the name of the person who’d help with the induction.

And people from the left and the right were welcoming and more than once i heard that they’d appreciate somebody in the support to care for the people. So yeah, i will miss the people at eCraft but i’ll be right at home at Reaktor.

Tomorrow may be the last day i’ll be using Windows for work. As Windows is a minority OS at the company i’ll be joining, and i already use one of their two majority desktop operating systems, i decided to learn something new and get a Mac as a work computer.

I’ve used Macs in the Days of Old (remember when having an external floppy drive meant you didn’t have to juggle the OS disk and the other disk with your apps and docs that didn’t fit on the boot floppy?) and a tiny bit thereafter, but my OSX skillz are no-where near my Windows and Linux competences. So that’s why i’m diving into… well, BSD/Unix with a pretty coating

It’s going to be fun, but be prepared for a bunch of newbie posts with googly eyes when i stumble over the idiosyncracies of the Computer d’Pomme.

As you may know, i have a habit of chipping in here and there for things that seem important to me. My practice is that i’d rather drop a few euros in many hats — and hope that others do too — than feel bad either because i can’t pay a lot, or because i think my contribution won’t matter. If many offer a little, it will matter a lot.

One site i use almost daily is Wikipedia. Yesterday i looked up the page on the Japanese Katakana writing system so i could try and spell my kids’ names in Japanese [0].

Wikipedia run on contributions from individuals. They serve 470 million different users each month using 679 servers and a total of 95 staff. They run no ads. They’re funded by you. And me.

And if they’re not funded by you personally — or haven’t been for a while — maybe it’s time for that to change. Donate a few shillings today.

[0] supposedly ロニャ and リーヌス, but if you know better, please let me know!

The Dumb Customer

A few weeks back, Brittish progressive rock band Big Big Train hauled out a spammage that their record Far Skies Deep Time is available for our listening pleasure on Spotify.

Not having listened to BBT for a few whiles, i took the bait, and it was good. Especially the opening track Kingmaker was much to my liking. It’s like if Selling England were made in 2011 (but without the wigs and double neck guitars).

So i did what i often do when i like an independent prog band: i offer them some monetary support and as a token of my patronage, they send me a CD (which often lays forever unplayed on some shelf). In the case of Big Big Train, this is especially easy since an album from them costs between seven and eight quid sterling, which includes worldwide p&p.

It was only a few days later i did find that i’d already bought Far Skies from the band a year or so before.

Duh.

The Customer Service

When a thankyou message a few days later arrived from Greg of BBT, i replied that you are very welcome and in fact your record was so mind blindingly good that i’ve bought it twice. But thankfully i’d bought the special “MALS” edition including the track Kingmaker which was not on the original version. I didn’t expect a reply, but one i got.

Uh, says Greg, according to our records, you did in fact order the original version and it is already in the mail.

Well duh again. Stupid stupid me.

BBT have a very liberal approach to distributing their music. They understand that obscurity is the enemy for a small band so they have over 90 minutes of their music available for streaming or download on their site. For free. Nice deal. And when they re-issued their album The Difference Machine with an extra song, they told fans that had bought the original edition to email them for a link to that new song. For free.

Really, really nice deal.

So i asked Greg whether there was a download for Kingmaker.

Sorry, says Greg, but we’ll send you the Special Edition as well. Merry Christmas from Big Big Train.

Guys. You prog. Hard.

Share and enjoy 

Since i now have three copies of Far Skies, two of which are identical, i want to spread the joy. I’ll send my extra Far Skies to One Random Commenter to this blog posting, either on www.navelfluff.org or its mirror navelfluff.posterous.com. Comments on the social nets don’t count, so if you’re reading this on Facebook, come on over for a visit to the real deal. I’ll give you a few days or a week.

And even if you don’t win, you can listen to Big Big Train free and legally both on Spotify and on Last.FM. And hey, maybe spinning polycarbonate just ain’t your thing even if the music is.

Hats off to my colleague Pauliina and to Derek Sivers for the idea and the inspiration, and to Greg Spawton for being such a nice guy and who intrinsically just seems to grok what good customer service means.

I love technology. I love bits and bytes and blinkenleds. I love computer networking and digital photography. I love carrying a music and podcast pipeline in my pocket and any book i care to read in my bag (which i affectionally call my gay sling, just so you know). But i also love the acoustic.

We were at my daughter’s Advent celebration at her school today. The school has a rather ambivalent stance to technology (i was about to say luddite, or ignorant, or amish) and when i went to that same school in my times, it sometimes bothered me. I mean, it’s not like they *shun* technology, it’s more just that they don’t care. So back to the Advent celebration. This is one of the most scaled back and minimalistic events they have. Pupils from the first class are led through a spiral on stage made of pine branches and candles by an older pupil, dressed like a guardian angel but sans wings. Each carry a candle which they light in the middle of the spiral from a giant candle burning there. Then they carry on through the spiral guarded by their angel and place their candle outside the spiral. The first graders are escorted to and from the spiral by elder pupils. The band is playing slow advent tunes on violins, flutes, classic guitars.

It can either be seen as meditative or grossly boring. I managed to think that it was the former and that it was beautiful in its form.

But what was part of the beauty was the realness and acousticness of it all. The music was played on unamplified acoustic instruments. The lighting came from incandescent lights and candles. The spiral was of actual pine branches. It all felt very real and immediate and unadaultered by synthesis. Not even the occasional (and uncalled for) flashes from a camera could spoil the feeling for me. The only few bits of unrealness to accentuate how out of place they were to me were two LED lights used as reading lights for the text read in the beginning and the conductor’s sheet music.

It’s fascinating how the uniformness, monochromacity and perfection of an LED can be so wrong and the yellow, imperfect and soft light of a low-wattage incandescent light can be so right, how any electric instrument just would have been alien to the occasion and how even the out of tune, out of synch, low key school orchestra were just the right thing. It was the imperfection that was the beauty.

The global “Occupy” movement has been painted as a bunch of unwashed hippies without a cause. Or at least this is the picture told in the media.

I admit that i haven’t been really informed of what they are so upset about but i’m getting a clue.

The Occupants are the 99%. The Occupants are “we the people”.

The 99% are tired of the 1% who get the uncalled-for subsidiaries, the voice in the media, the financial and the political protection for what effectively is corruption. Tired of rights of the 1%.

The problem of course is that the 99% are not a centrally organized group. They’ve just organically appeared, so they don’t really have a common agenda or a spokesperson. It’s the sign of the times. It’s like the Arab Spring. Revolution-by-Twitter. It’s really strange if you think of it.

A lot of media belongs to the 1% that the Occupy movements are rallying against. I can understand why such media have the stance they do. You can help in sponsoring Avaaz to produce a global poll that hopefully will tell that there’s another view as well.

One of my favorite musicians, Fish, once wrote in a song

“…we the people have our backs to the wall,
do we the people then assume control…”

  — State of Mind (google it)

It all sounds very timely today…